Terence Rajivan Edward

In recent decades, there has been interest in why artefacts were ignored in British social anthropology. Early on in his classic 1936 study We, The Tikopia, Raymond Firth tells that the (quite) isolated Tikopia tribe are increasingly using Western tools. They are keen for more of these tools, as well. But Firth tells us that he will not focus on tool use. Why not? He says that the Tikopia social structure is unaffected by the use of Western tools. For anyone versed in British anthropology, the argument is obvious: the proper object of study for a British social anthropologist is social structure and the Tikopia social structure is not affected by the use of Western tools. I wish to make an observation. Firth's argument is the opposite of what Marilyn Strathern attributes to British social anthropology. In her history, artefacts are mere illustrations of the proper object of study and there is no need to refer to them in the final fieldwork report. Firth, in contrast, draws attention to a cleavage between artefacts and the proper object of study: the tools are increasingly Western but the social structure is not. The Cambridge professor's history of anthropology is clever, fun to respond to, and memorable, but it is contradicted by the textual evidence provided by the thorough LSE monograph.

John Rawls thinks that we should only enter judgments made in some mental states into the reflective equilibrium procedure. (Don't worry if you don't know what this procedure is.) Hesitant judgments, judgments made while upset, judgments made while frightened, and more, are excluded (unless they are also made in the suitable state or states of mind). These other states of mind are not good for making judgments in general, Rawls thinks. Rawls would surely exclude judgments made while a bit drunk as well. But during anthropologist Jeanette Edwards' fieldwork in Bacup, she came across a coco-nutter ritual which spectators watch while under the influence of alcohol. I think it is a question for debate whether she should have been a bit drunk as well and then described the ritual. Some will say that that is better anthropology. She is then closer to grasping the native spectator's point of view.

A little bit of fun, if permitted. I can only find an abstract for Marilyn Strathern's paper "Virtual Society? Get Real!" The entire paper used to be available online as a PDF. Going by memory, it says that we today don't use the word "virtue" much. But it is used in philosophy, such as in virtue ethics. I was going to mock Strathern for having a defective feedback network and not doing an Internet search. Then I was planning to consider the defence that philosophers who use "virtue" are outside of the people referred to as "we". Then consider the counter that anthropologist Sharon Macdonald is married to a philosopher, as I was informed by kinship anthropologist Jeanette Edwards, so there are probably no grounds for excluding the philosophers. Then I was going to consider the defence that these anthropologists do not count as "we". Then I was going to say that, ideally, this should have been said ten years or more ago. (Also I was going to ponder how it took me so many papers to write what I regard as a decent paper responding to Jeanette Edwards, when I can now do so more or less when I want.) I must surely ruin someone else's fun now, in return.

Sebastian Gardner's paper "Splitting the Subject: An Overview of Sartre, Lacan and Derrida" is a kind of "nonsense" paper, or significant portions of it are. For example, Gardner writes, 'The orthodox way of "taking" Freud, in analytic philosophy of mind and in philosophy of science, is something like this: we argue over whether or not a concept of selfhood that has its basis in consciousness can be stretched to cover the unconscious as Freud describes it, and we attempt to see how much mentality can survive the loss of the property "potential object of consciousness." ' In philosophy of science, the orthodox way of taking Freud is actually this: we argue over whether or not Freudian psychoanalysis is a science or a pseudo-science, starting with Popper's proposal that scientific theories have to be falsifiable (i.e., if they are false, they can be proved to be false by a test) and psychoanalysis is not. "Everyone" knows this, across so many disciplines, maybe even you do.

Okay, Lacanian psychiatry does not rely on medication. It diagnoses you on the basis of language use and confines itself to linguistic interactions. But is it actually better to take medication than enter into these interactions? According to the Lacanian system, as I understand it, the hysterical person is disposed to frustrate the desires of others. But Lacan himself seems a hysteric according to this system. So why should we place as much trust in the writings of (Nazi-loving!) Lacan as a Lacanian psychiatrist does? (I would like to say that I do not think I suffer from the problem that philosopher John McDowell does. McDowell would presumably prefer to trade mainly with fellow virtuous agents. But his standard of a virtuous agent is extremely high. As I understand him, even a person who experiences certain temptations but outweighs them in their private decision-making process is not a virtuous person for McDowell. So I think McDowell's system leads to a problem of trade. How do I trade with those people, because are they good people? "Yes, you indicated this in your earlier dialogue on ethics versus specialization." I thought I would spell it out more clearly for some readers. I am not going to expand on it even further though, partly because the problem is now obvious!)

For any core liberal right, the Rawlsian tries to argue for that right, e.g. "We should have this right because individuals in the original position would agree to it." But as I observed in my paper, 'Rejecting the question "What is the right to freedom of speech derived from?" ' some rights are absences and, unless there is a special reason to think the absence mistaken, we don't need to argue for why there are these absences. I have a legal right to say, "When" if the legal system I am under does not contain laws restricting me from saying, "When" (leaving aside special contexts perhaps): the absence of such restrictive laws is sufficient for me to have the right. Why aren't there such restrictive laws? Well, why should there be? There is no reason to answer the former question unless the latter question is addressed, but the Rawlsian peculiarly goes ahead and answers it any way: there aren't, because individuals in the original position would reject a legal system featuring such laws. I don't know if this is a major criticism of Rawls, but I thought I would share it.

"Imagine" someone is making life difficult for you. You ask, "What's the problem?" They say, "I am not going to tell you but you can guess and if you guess correctly and change your behaviour accordingly, the source of stress will go away." You make a reasonable guess. They say, "That's not it." You make another reasonable guess. They say, "That's not it." This pattern goes on for a while. You begin to worry that every time you propose an answer to what the problem is, they move to another interpretation. "How to deal with such a person, or institution even?" Have a guess?! All societies or all but the most exotic must have some solution. I guess if a football club did this and the difficulty were large enough, one would look for a reason to relegate them.

While I was detained in North Manchester General Hospital, I was informed that an expert thought one of the papers I had recently uploaded is nonsense, namely "The difference principle and getting rid of economic experts". It argues that in some circumstances the difference principle requires that we get rid of economic experts and give the money saved to the worst off. I read it again and it makes sense to me. If there is an error in it, it needs to be explained. But I think I know why it has been called a nonsense paper. The expert thinks, "Academic papers depend on fair-minded expert peer review for approval. Who are you going to get as a fair-minded expert reviewer? Your best chance is to ask an economist. And the economist is going to feel threatened and play strategically with you rather than fairly, because you are putting his job at threat. You cannot get a peer reviewer, so it is outside the academic game, so it is nonsense."

Economist: why don't you specialize? McDowell: Specialize? What's that? Economist: you divide labour. You do one thing and someone else does another. For example, you do ethics and someone else does metaphysics. McDowell: I DO ethics but I also DO other stuff. Economist: why not specialize? McDowell: You have to rely on others. Are these others good people? Economist: What is a GOOD PERSON? McDowell: Don't worry about it. You were not cut out for goodness. Economist: What is your level in ECONOMICS? McDowell: I am better than any economist. Economist: why do you say THAT? McDowell: I am an advanced student of ETHICS and ETHICS is a higher discipline than economics and everything worthwhile of a lower level is absorbed.

John Rawls's monumental book A Theory of Justice has more than one hundred thousand citations, according to Google Scholar. I have about 15 to 20 citations, I suppose. But I think this difference is misleading and even sometimes wonder whether Rawls is truly global. Rawls is heavily promoted. I believe his citations spread outwards from a base, through a network of persons who know each other, through face to face contact: each member has had face to face contact with at least one other member (including lectures as face-to-face). "Engage with Rawls, he is important." "Okay." And so Rawls spreads. Early on Harvard researchers cited him, soon University of Oxford academics did, in this century Italian academics gave him a number of citations. When is Rawls cited on all continents? Probably it takes decades. If you include syllabuses, I have been cited on all continents already. The citations do not spread outward through a network. Interested strangers just read the material and cite it. (A speculation: in the nearest possible world in which Rawls does not benefit from a network promoting him, which is a world very remote from our own, he gets one citation: from me.)

In the 2018-19 academic year, the post-crash economic society made life difficult for everyone else in the University of Manchester school of social sciences, with their intense protests. The students wanted to discuss the foundations of mainstream economics and learn alternative approaches. Regarding the former, topic, I am not sure why the following was not said. "Most of you don't do pure economics. And we have courses in other discipline areas within the school which allow you to discuss this. You can discuss prisoner's dilemma in ethics essays. Is this a good approach? There is a rational actor model in words which you can discuss in political theory essays. You can discuss mainstream economics versus Bourdieu in sociology." Courses could probably have been added elsewhere to further meet the students demands (including the demand for alternative approaches), for example Adam Smith versus anthropologists on the origins of money. Why did the school management just not take this option, given resistance from economists to curriculum change? Occur: three possible reasons have occurred to me. (i) My preferred response didn't occur to them. (ii) It occurred to them in broad outline, but they simply don't know the school well enough to fill in the details. (iii) The management don't interpret the student protesters as I do, in terms of the surface appearance of their protest. ("Someone is unhappy about something, but it may well not be that the students are unhappy about the economics curriculum." What an earth could it be though?)

In 2015, Anna Alexandrova and Robert Northcott published a paper entitled "Prisoner's dilemma doesn't explain much". In it, they describe how prisoner's dilemma has been applied to thousands of topics but there is only one successful case, regarding an RNA virus. They aim to criticize prisoner's dilemma research, but today we might well regard this as a good return: all the effort was worth it for that success. I actually read the paper before the Covid pandemic and thought, "Wow, an RNA virus." I wonder whether Alexandrova and Northcott had that reaction as well, but decided to proceed with their planned paper against prisoner's dilemma research. (Psychiatrists: is there medication for that?!)

Sociologist: There's a kind of person whose perspective is this: once I know the rules of a game, I always win. It might not literally be a game. And he might not literally be a player. He is wealthy enough and he (or she) has people committed enough to master the game. To prevent such a person from gaining influence, you need to make success depend on factors that cannot be specified in rules. Then your field, or whatever it is, will operate as Bourdieu says. It will favour people who achieve a style that cannot be specified in rules. Me: Interesting. But I propose that you can tell this person all the rules of some games and once they know them, they will just say, "I am not playing."

Mrs. Gaskell: (i) A circle is the set of points at a distance R from a central point and (ii) R must be greater than zero. Me: why do you include requirement (ii) in your definition? Mrs. Gaskell: Because a mere point is not a circle. Me: it is a degenerate circle. Mrs. Gaskell: It is just not a circle and I don't accept degenerate characters in my home. Me: no mathematician today accepts your definition. Mrs. Gaskell: That is not an argument against my definition. That is just an appeal to follow the crowd. Me: your definition is inelegant. Mrs. Gaskell: I find my definition is elegant. I am being bullied into proceeding in a style that eludes all rule-specification. Me: at least one person thinks that elegance can be defined. Mrs. Gaskell: That is in metaphysics, not in geometry. Me: do you just move from field to field as if they were distinct games? "These are the rules of the novel game, and I am now an accomplished player of it. These are the rules of the epistolary game..." Mrs. Gaskell: this is not an objection.

In my earlier paper "Beyond micro-analysis of pastiche: Max Beerbohm's imitation of Joseph Conrad," I observed how various pastiches can be detected as "off target" without going into fine details (statistical analysis of patterns of word use and the like). Beerbohm's imitation is off target, because it is largely from the perspective of the native and Conrad is famously Eurocentric. For about a decade, I lived on a road where further down was the house of a 19th century writer and I now do some work there, after it has undergone a dazzling makeover. Yesterday a visitor said Victorian houses were cluttered and this house is not cluttered. I believe with scant knowledge of Victorian culture, one can similarly detect the style as "off target." "When did you personally come to this conclusion and how?" I won't answer this question, but you know how, if you write a lot, you can go a bit mad. I went fractionally mad in September 2023 and was medicated by the authorities for about a year. I am still quite slow and docile and accepting of surface appearances. (To illustrate, I went to my favourite Chinese restaurant yesterday. I ordered a fried rice dish which I prefer to be cooked with a bit of egg, though I don't eat the egg. I left the egg pieces on a side. When I finished eating, the waitress asked me if I would like to have the remaining egg packed in a box, to take with me. Under normal conditions, I would have made some remark, such as "Yes, and I'll give it to the restaurant next door." But I just slowly said, "No.")

A clever academic from the British system moves to the United States and makes proposals but these are not accepted. However, he is not told why. What is the problem? In this situation, it is understandable to reach for the sociologist Bourdieu. The Bourdieu explanation is "There is something stylistically off about the Brits ideas. They are just not our style: the style of the institution he has moved to. And you cannot specify in rules how to achieve this style. You have to just get it." Bourdieu provides an explanation, I shall concede, but there is at least one rival explanation. This is that the rules can be specified, but there are incentives against doing so. A filling in of detail: the fair-minded communication person/system which would provide this character with stylistic rules is under too much pressure to function. If they start stating the rules, some people become rude or they deliberately misinterpret the information, etc. Why would that be? More filling in: there are people who don't want the competition to increase by these rules becoming publicly available. I doubt Bourdieu scores a transparent victory, in this kind of context (whether fictional or real). A rival approach which commits itself to rules can go several rounds with Bourdieu and at best he scores a few narrow victories.

I believe something like the following happens. I write a 2 dimensional game with ladders in it. The main character can climb up ladders. An optimizer comes along and says, "I am a better coder than you. I can code that game with a much faster ladder climbing function." What I do next time is design a game with some broken ladders, like Donkey Kong. You can climb up a bit of the ladder and then get stuck. I do that because I have worked out that the optimizer cannot write a faster ladder climbing function than me when some of the ladders are broken. To do that, I have to be working outside the division of labour between coder and game designer.

Psychiatry and economics are not friends. ("Of course not, because friendship is between people and they are not people, they are disciplines." Be quiet.) The psychiatrist and team (whether professional or amateur) put pressure on you not to write "nonsense papers." But there is a sequence, like nonsense-nonsense-sense-nonsense-nonsense-sense, but more complicated. Interested readers need the nonsense papers to detect the sequence. I think economics, philosophy, and mathematics grasp this reason, but it needs to be explained to psychiatry. However, economics has a problem. It needs much more data to grasp the sequence, because of "deficiencies" in talent and background. So it is likely to suffer most from the pressure from psychiatry to not write "nonsense papers." So I think psychiatry and economics are not friends. "How many of these does the economist need?" asks the psychiatrist. Lots and lots more!

I had been on a WhatsApp group for comedians to engage in idle chat and post spam, and a person joined whose image produced a fear reaction in me. I showed the image to some people at a charity shop which I work at. A girl told me she had the same reaction. But others did not. I was puzzled by that. My working hypothesis is that the person in the image has a way of sending different signals to people from different class backgrounds. The person looked similar to a political theorist I am acquainted with and I showed people the image of this political theorist and it produced the same divide. Today I showed an image of the philosopher Ethan Williams to the comedian WhatsApp group. (He had uploaded a manuscript yesterday on PhilPapers.) I asked them for their reaction (with some comedic spice). This is a very liberal group. They will comment on each others sexual lives and those of strangers. The reaction was "crazy." A comedian with Aspergers syndrome implied that if I were drowning and Ethan Williams were and he could save only one, he would not save either. This is despite many conversations with him. There is an openly posh comedian whom I have seen perform a few times, but never seen her comment on the WhatsApp group. She challenged me to a bare knuckle fight. A comedian who earlier professed to hate me and to have blocked me called me up and told me to delete the post with the image of Ethan Williams or the FBI would be after me. Williams just looks like a statistician to me. My second best friend on the WhatsApp group had left a few days ago and I decided to leave as well.

Cartesian: he is going to say that John Rawls should be ranked higher than Milan Kundera because Rawls has a nobler character. What do you think of that? Me: I find it mildly amusing. Cartesian: what if he says that he has a clear and distinct of Rawls's character as nobler and God would not deceive him? Me: Does such a person have clear and distinct ideas? They pass logic. But when you give them a modus ponens argument with le secondaire, or whatever you call it, blank and ask them to fill it in, they cannot do it. Cartesian: what is the problem? Me: Mind is sleepy, I suppose. Cartesian: Tired? Me: Sleepy. Ne pas fatigue, dormir. Cartesian: how do they solve the problem of dream scepticism in the first meditation? Me: there various problems of dream scepticism there, no forget that, they use some other solution, a toxic one probably.

What is the level of John Rawls? There is a problem I have, which may be from my specific perspective. I have written a lot on John Rawls and Milan Kundera, and they seem to belong to the same class, especially they get past certain kinds of checks. If you raise a concern, you are more or less ignored by the many fans/admirers. "This definition doesn't work." Goes back to Kundera/Rawls. But here is the problem: Milan Kundera is not respected like Rawls is. If I were forced to get involved in ranking within a class, I would say Kundera is fractionally better. 1/100th better.

(This is a bit mad perhaps, but should I delete it?) A dialogue. Cartesian: that was not a hypothesis about the Sorbonne. You had a clear and distinct idea. God is not a deceiver. So that is the truth. Me: Are you insane? I know hardly anything about the Sorbonne. It's a hypothesis. Cartesian: I'm not insane. That is the proper scientific method of interpretation. Don't be a coward. Me: I'll be taken to hospital and given heavy drugs. These B-plussers would mess with the recipe for KFC. Cartesian: Pardon?

Do you remember the UCU report on the University of Manchester’s (now risible) project to break into the top 20 “soon”? It said that where we are (35), it is hard to even move one up the rankings. The next year the Sorbonne jumped four up. They were very close to us. That was strange. What is the Sorbonne’s perspective on Oxford and Harvard? This is my hypothesis. “If you care about the arts, you cannot play the ranking game well, because you have to make yourself transparent to outsiders with barely any experience of Western arts. Oxford and Harvard know this and are cowards for not dropping back in the rankings.”

While Nancy Rothwell was vice-chancellor, the University of Manchester climbed steadily up the Shanghai global rankings to 35. But there was widespread student discontent with Nancy Rothwell. Now the university languishes at 52. That gives rise to a paradox, which starts with these propositions. (A) The students are right to oppose Nancy Rothwell. (B) The university did much better in the global rankings when Rothwell was manager. (C) The best explanation for its earlier success is that Rothwell was a great manager.

Do philosophers need to be clever? Let us use a simplified model. There are two kinds of people: clever and stupid. The clever are few and the stupid are many. Philosophy is done only by clever people. Then one day someone wants to expand the discipline, so that stupid people can also contribute. They introduce training for stupid people and stupid philosophers arise. But now there are lots of philosophers. It is impossible to keep track of all the research in one’s specialism. So how does one write a philosophy paper? One tries to do something really clever and strange, which others are unlikely to do. That is the best way to avoid just reproducing the content of another paper. But to do that you need to be clever. So the age of stupidity ends and philosophers all have to be clever again.