Terence Rajivan Edward

This paper addresses a question addressed by newspaper reviewer Rachel Aroesti but not originally raised by her: why are television comedy sketch shows hit-and-miss? I formulate the puzzle more precisely, specifying simplifying assumptions involved. I then examine each of the three solutions that she lists: that humour is subjective, that nobody has good enough ideas to have a series composed of all funny sketches, and that one puts unfunny sketches so that the critics find fault with those rather than finding other faults. I then propose my own solution: that audiences need a break after a good sketch. This paper is intended as an imitation of Helen Beebee, but I am not confident that she would address a topic which seems so ephemeral: here today and gone tomorrow.

Assume you have been diagnosed as paranoid, as a mental disorder. Furthermore, assume that you have been subject to a theft: someone has entered your home and removed certain items, e.g. a red notebook and a passport and a novel. There are no signs of break in, but you are not the only person with a key to your apartment: a sibling has one too. How do you deal with this situation rationally? Here is a simplified model. You have two options. Loudly say to the authorities, "I am a victim of THEFT!" But you have been diagnosed with paranoia and there is a significant chance that your statement will be used as further evidence of paranoia. You are now not on medication, but you may well be put on medication again. Alternatively, you OVERLOOK the theft. This protects you from being put on medication again, but you have to allow a significant injustice, rather than even encouraging the authorities to look into it. Of course, outside the simplified model, there is the third way: make an accusation of theft but take great care with the wording so as to avoid an accusation of paranoia: "I looked everywhere and could not find it and the best explanation for its absence would seem to be, um, er, theft. But I could be wrong of course." In practice, this is very stressful to pursue. EXPERIENCE 2023: in February or March 2023 I went looking for a mother's day card and there were none in a nearby shop. I asked. But there was one which said, "To my wife." I brought it to the counter and said this might work for someone, alluding to the Oedipus myths, and decided to buy it, pleased with my joke. I put it on a mattress next to mine, along with a strange card I found in a supermarket. They went missing in April 2023. I called the police. I did not change the lock when I moved in to this apartment in 2015, nor after the theft (strange behaviour for a paranoid person!). I asked the police whether an electronic bug can be sent under my door and remove items. This was later used as evidence for severe mental disorder, despite merely being a question: by a consultant psychiatrist in September 2023. My sister, who changed my lock while I was being treated in hospital (September to November 2023), reported a psychiatrist's view that the crucial fact is that I took action and called the police. My apartment was also said to be cluttered (with books) but it was decluttered and the cards were NEVER FOUND. In August of this year, old passports in an envelope marked "passports" and a red notepad were taken and other items. (I moved my new passport a day or two before from the envelope.) Given 2023, there is actually no incentive for me to report the crime, though I did. Once you have a paranoia diagnosis, given the aim of staying off medication and out of hospital, it is not rational to report various crimes: by a priori model or by experience.

One of the loudest criticisms of mainstream economics is this: economics has not changed sufficiently in light of its failure to predict the global financial crisis of 2008. (Hence we have, or had, the post-crash economic society.) Another criticism one often hears is that economics is overly influenced by a mathematical approach of knowledge: one which specifies axioms and deduces conclusions from them. But I believe the slow development of economics in response to challenges has much to do with the influence of experimental science. As I see economics, at this stage of my development (beyond a beginner probably, but not an expert outside of one or two areas perhaps: transitivity of preferences and maybe specialization), there is/are a small number of simple models, maybe 100 to 150, which economists strive to mathematically formulate. For any given simple model, they consider problems for it and seek to develop an improved version. For example, the simple invisible hand model assumes everyone has information about what is supplied and what is demanded, enabling those who seek employment to focus on somewhere where demand is. But more complex models allow for asymmetric information, such as pioneered by Joseph Stiglitz. But economists as scientists DO NOT just produce complex models which solve problems. What they do is try to produce a model which is different in one respect only from a previous model, in a way analogous to how an experimental scientist seeks to keep all the factors fixed except one, in order to test what the significance of the varying factor is. This potentially SLOWS DOWN successful model-building. A LEAPING ECONOMIST might solve a problem by conceiving a new and more complex version of a model which is different in several respects from the original. But as far as I can currently see from the economic literature (how to interpret this mysterious body to the rest of the world?), there is an incentive for economists to vary a previous model in one respect only and then tell readers the difference that this one variation makes: that is PROPER SCIENCE. The previous model may be the original simple model or a variation already introduced on it in the economic literature.

Imagine that you are a businessman and you set up a literary magazine. Your wife fancies herself a literary writer and she is indeed not bad. She features every week and she is consistent. Other writers can be published on one main condition: they surpass the weekly level of your wife. A most interesting social structure: your wife's role is to set the lower boundary of the magazine. Now what went wrong with the University of Manchester's project to break in to the elite universities. I usually identify what I call the B+ problem as the main problem. But the university management could more or less have stuck me in a comparable role, in the school of social sciences at least. ("Well beyond it actually.") To lecturers: "if you can do better than this near free individual for us, then you are in - otherwise someone else's turn." My impression of the management, or at least the school of social sciences management, is that their thinking is: "once staff or student public discontent goes beyond a certain point, your position is untenable and we have to get rid of you." Of course, it will build beyond that point if they are not doing well in this competition. In my opinion, the management lack the vision of the literary businessman described. "We are ethical, so we don't do that." Not believable. THE STAGE OF THE CONCEPT PLEASE! (Also the material above, applied to the UoM, suggests a reason for some not to specialize: to end up in this role.)

Some philosophers can really write for wider audiences. And philosophy sometimes seems to gather up simple things from other disciplines. In this contribution, I would like to present a simple law and economics model I conceived, taking economics to be the study of rational choice. Two lawyers are negotiating over something, e.g. how to distribute wealth in a divorce. Let's called them Smith and Jones. There is a set of positions available from 1 to 10. Each lawyer occupies a position, representing what they are demanding on behalf of their clients. But 1 does not mean less and 10 does not mean more here, or it does not for both parties. The closer a position is to 1 the more it is to lawyer Smith's advantage (and that of the client being represented). The closer a position is to 10 the more it is to lawyer Jones's advantage (and that of the client represented). There can be five rounds of negotiation: five meetings between the two lawyers. In each round apart from the fifth, there are the options of agreeing or moving to the next round. If there is no agreement in a given round (before the fifth round), then in the next round each lawyer has to move at least one closer to the position occupied by the rival lawyer in the previous round (if lawyer Smith's position is less than lawyer Jones's with such a move). For example, if lawyer Smith occupies position 2 and lawyer Jones occupies position 8 in round 2 and they don't agree, then in round 3 lawyer Smith must occupy position 3 at least and lawyer Jones must occupy position 7, if not less. Given this model, the rational thing for each lawyer to do is start off at an extreme, Smith at 1 and Jones at 10, move one closer to the rival lawyer's starting position in each subsequent round, and then in the fifth round they will be at 5 and 6. In that round, they will either agree or the dispute will go to court. (One can vary the model and have 1 to 11. Or the extremes are not clearly to the client's advantage, because they will seem unreasonable if they get that. Etc.)

In order to establish a Rawlsian liberal society, after giving each citizen a set of basic liberties, one must ensure the implementation of fair equality of opportunity. Fair equality of opportunity is more than a matter of if citizen A and citizen B are capable of doing an advertised job, then they both have a right to apply. Furthermore, if they are equally capable (as indicated by their qualifications?), then they should stand an equal chance of getting the job, while if one is less capable, then the likelihood of their getting the job should be less. I have been thinking about a problem for this kind of equality of opportunity for a while and I was prompted to further think about it after watching a pilot episode of the famous television series The Cosby Show, freely available online from Facebook. (I suspect: if Friends wants more prestige, they probably need episodes freely available for inspection too.) The Cosby family seem an academically high-achieving family, with the mother as a lawyer and the father as a doctor, and oriented towards producing further members of the professional middle class. ("That's disgusting.") Their solutions to the problems of life more or less assume a child who will get good grades in school, but one of their many children is not doing well: getting D grades, when A is the best. It must be a classic problem and exhaustively examined for centuries: what should a mostly clever family do with a stupid child (or in more politically correct terms, and probably more precise terms, what should an academically smart family do with a child struggling with school)? To my knowledge, the research into this issue is not published, but I suspect the consensus is this: whether socialist, liberal or conservative (etc.), the best solution for the family is to give up on merit-based systems (such as fair equality of opportunity). Get your child into a university above their level by reliable merit-assessment, etc. But how do you maintain fair equality of opportunity given this consensus? The implementation of a principle such as this requires citizens to be properly on-board, but even a family like the Cosby family will find that this is a bad idea. Of course, I have not explained why I think this is the consensus, but it seems a plausible explanation of various cases we see at university. Crucial problems for fair equality of opportunity may require people who have looked into the issue of "clever family-stupid child" (sorry) to share their research.

Miriam Ronzoni's 2007 paper ""Two Concepts of the Basic Structure, and Their Relevance to Global Justice" argues in favour of John Rawls's basic structure restriction: that principles of social justice apply only to the basic structure of society. She appears to take the basic social structure of society to be the legally coercive institutions and takes it as excluding the family. She addresses the problem of the social injustice to do with families by arguing that there is a conception of the basic social structure which allows one to address these without violating the basic structure restriction. She gives an example of a society T: "Let us assume, for instance, that in society T the main obstacle to equality of opportunity between men and women is a social rule, which considers socially unacceptable that women engage in public life... The social expectation for the good wife and mother is to be capable of being an entertaining and brilliant host, of organising and running intellectually stimulating dinner parties, and, most importantly, of adequately attending to the education of her children.... Women of society T do not need a better education, but rather a set of institutional devices to protect those of them who decide to go against what is socially expected of them, by making their choices more realistic, less costly, and less stigmatising. Model Y can accommodate this, but model X cannot." (By the way, I remember dinner parties with an intellectual hostess from 2007, but Ronzoni was not at Manchester until 2013 and probably I should reduce attention to suggestive evidence, 3(i) X, etc.) My main worry about this example is that the society described is very unlikely or even impossible given the assumption of a public education system. There cannot be a stable and widespread social rule for these highly educated women not to work (be employed, I should say), because it is a waste of the society's resources to educate them to this extent and for them to not work.

When did man first begin to speak? Surely not when he was first capable of uttering noises in accordance with rules? Man in his savage condition must have immediately felt the danger of this new technology, the word, and wondered for decades, for centuries even, whether his people are ready for it. Nevertheless, for so long history has been dominated by the man of words, comfortable with what all others regard as darkling magic: the ability to combine together the equipment of sense. Only the intellectual, observes Robert Nozick, has left enduring records and these records, surprise surprise, praise as the highest of roles the intellectual. But what would happen if the hunter suddenly put down his bow and arrow, or whatever gizmo has in our day taken their place, and began to write? What good would it do? For he would write like a hunter, after big game. In all but the strangest circumstances, one cannot sensibly expect an accurate record of anything from him. He writes as a man hiding in the bushes, waiting to ambush prey.

After giving all adult citizens a set of basic liberties, the next task for achieving a socially just liberal society, as envisaged by John Rawls, is to realize fair equality of opportunity. Fair equality of opportunity in a society is more than this: if citizens A and B are both capable of doing an advertised job, then both have a right to apply. A further requirement is this: if A and B are equally capable, then they stand an equal chance of getting the job, whereas if B is less capable, then B stands a lower chance. BUT Rawls's principles are only meant to apply to the basic structure of society: there is no obligation of social justice to ensure that institutions beyond this basic structure are just. What though is the basic structure? This is debated from G.A. Cohen to Miriam Ronzoni and also perhaps beyond the Oxford network. A simple thought for us is that it is the public sector of our UK society (or your Canadian or American society, etc.). But then fair equality of opportunity is no great help unless one is going to work in this sector, for example as a schoolteacher in the UK or an NHS doctor. Another interpretation is that it includes all institutions which are institutions by law, including private companies. But whether this is useful enough for you depends significantly on how influential associations outside the basic structure are in your society: e.g. student-run after school clubs for learning Russian or computer coding, etc, and clubs at elite universities. ("You cannot join our club; you are not our type.") Their influence is not something you know when choosing principles. Possibly such clubs and gift-exchange outside the basic structure can figure largely in the society one ends up in. This undermines Rawls’s vision severely. This concern about the basic structure restriction has probably occurred to quite a few in elite universities (and perhaps in relation to the first principle too). But it is not on the public written record. "Well done for finally putting it there"???

In multiple papers, Professor Veronique Munoz-Dardé has raised the problem of whether the family should be abolished, seeking to avoid a No answer. She writes, “The reason to abolish the family is… the fact that as long as the family exists individuals will have unequal life chances.” (1998a: 339) Within families, advantages are passed on to children, which some other children unfairly do not have. Posed this way, the problem seems to be one for left liberals, socialists, and left-wing anarchists. From reading her work, I do not yet have a clear grasp of Munoz-Dardé’s solution, but it is an important contribution to raise the problem. Some solutions have occurred to me, two of which were presented online in 2023. The first and second ones in this handout are not in the literature already though.

“This is a great man”: how quickly do these words fall from the mouths of those new to our higher culture. But are they not true? Not as these newcomers imagine them, for what is a great man to them but a man who, first, is great without aiming to be great to a people, a market, composed like all markets of the mediocre, and, secondly, who must be recognized as great for all. “Tall” says the Englishman, the English analytic philosopher pondering his predicates, is relative. A man may count as tall by the standards of one country and not by the standards of another. So it is with greatness. Even within a country this group and that group, this social class and that, vary in their standards, even amongst we lovers of higher culture. And the man recognized as great, I insist, is always a man who has found his people, figured out their standard, and acted in accordance with it: has realized their image of greatness, which may be no more than that of a Lisa Simpson type. But if it is as easy as all this, why are there so many failures at greatness, so many poor approximations? They are like so many failed businessman, and most amusing of all is he who finds this: he can reach a level of greatness above what this lower class count as great and so he does, but still falls below what this higher class count as great, and finds to his misfortune that there is no social class in his country, his continent even, to which he displays the image of greatness. If only he had the entire world as an audience, how his fortunes might improve. (The relativistic ideas in this Nietzsche imitation first appeared on my Instagram site, earlier today, without the Nietzschean style I assume.)

This paper considers a provincial university with a preference for fully-baked work. It considers the problem of what to do with a research work, or response to a research work, which introduces an off-the-radar idea (of value - I shall omit this qualification) without fully-baking it (e.g. clarifying concepts involved, providing examples, responding to objections). If it is a response to a research work, the idea is off-the-radar in that one cannot reasonably expect a reading group of competent academics to come up with it. Can one develop the idea, fully-bake to use the metaphor, without referring to the brief statement of it? That seems a referencing injustice. I consider proposals for not having this injustice, as well as the question of why be just in this matter. (This paper is another attempt to "parrot" Helen Beebee's paper style, I suppose; it is not a topic she has treated. Is there a limit on how many one can do and stay sane?)

This paper is another attempt at a Helen Beebee style essay, but this time in social anthropology. It is probably of interest to philosophers as well. It presents experiences of mine of aesthetics as an official course at the University of Manchester, followed by an analysis. I argue that the main lessons I take do not require the rich fieldwork of the social anthropologist. Anthropologists are expecting one question or some questions in the philosophy of music and the big question there is quite different.

A researcher A presents an objection in a one liner. A researcher B presents the objection more fully, providing a detailed case study. Does researcher B have to refer to researcher A? I use a brief objection by Maurice Mandelbaum to Thomas Kuhn to illustrate the question. I consider four answers, including the answer that this is never required of researcher B. At present I favour this answer: any of the objections that one expects a representative critic to present can be introduced without referring to an earlier source, whereas other objections (off-the-radar objections?), even if presented as mere one liners, have to be referred to. An appendix introduces current provincial practices in the University of Manchester. Other appendices are chat.

This paper responds to the television sitcom Friends, which was enormously popular in the late 1990s and continues to be quite popular even today, 2025. More specifically, I respond to the character Monica Geller. I try to offer a definition of a game for the sentence "In all games, Monica Geller is competitive." The definition I offer is distinct from a Wittgensteinian approach to the concept of a game and from Bernard Suits' definition. But I offer a second definition which is closer to Suits' definition. (The paper ends with material on Chandler and Monica's sexual relationship. No it doesn't actually. This paper is an attempt at Helen Beebee style, as I perceive it to be!)

This paper further discusses a paradox I have earlier identified: the paradox of entertainment wrestling. The paradox poses the question of why people continue to watch wrestling after they know that it is fake. I identify four solutions to this paradox, one of which is the Fodorian modularity solution already identified and one of which is a Nozickian solution. A left-liberal solution is also presented, drawing upon the work of John Rawls, and finally a Moorean solution is outlined, named after one of the founding fathers of analytic philosophy, namely G.E. Moore. Note: I depart from the standard structure of a philosophy essay/paper: of specifying a position and an order of discussion early on. (Another Helen Beebee-like essay, I think, though there are some silly remarks in parentheses. Feel free to ignore. Am I trapped in these kinds of essays/papers?) NOTE: this is the abstract, and you may need to download the PDF.

This paper contains a long piece concerning the dialogue above, a pre-introduction before the introduction, which may be of interest. The paper considers departures from the norms of accepted essay/paper writing within one's discipline. Are they a good idea or a bad idea? I engage in a dialogue with a Hulk Hogan-like figure on some experiments of mine - specifically writing on a topic set randomly and also trying to write on your own preferred topic - and I also examine how Marilyn Strathern writes, which is different from our philosophy conventions, it casually seems to me, but provides a way of putting all the stuff I want to say in without losing coherence. Angela Merk-- also figures. (This was an attempt at a paper in Helen Beebee's style, but seems a total failure at this.) An appendix contains some ritual chat. NOTE: this is the abstract above; you probably need to download the PDF.

This paper presents Adam Smith's account of the origins of money. It is famously rejected by historians and anthropologists. But it contains a useful warning against over-specialization and allows us to identify a value of premise-by-premise reconstructions: it can function as a kind of money. Speaking of traps, when I think of philosopher Saul Kripke on the surprise exam paradox and how I can become more like Kripke, I think it would lead to me falling into a trap. A first appendix concerns third or fourth rate books kept in a cull. A second appendix concerns a**holes by custom ("No talk of this being a Helen Beebee imitation today?") NOTE: you probably need to download this paper. Above is the abstract.

Timothy Williamson has a chapter of his 2020 book Philosophical Method which is entitled "Using other fields." One of the sections focuses on social anthropology, while other sections focus on other disciplines. Williamson presents his conception of social anthropology in the social anthropology section. In this paper, I latch on to his reference to asking questions as something an anthropologist does. I present two interpretations of what he has in mind in detail, unsure which of these interpretations is correct. I also present some experience of mine of asking questions, amongst local Mandarin speakers. This paper is really an attempt to imitate a certain philosopher, namely Helen Beebee (or Helen Beebee with my specialist knowledge).

This paper is a response to Timothy Williamson's description of what is covered by social anthropology. Amongst other things, he describes the social anthropologist as attending to the beliefs and values of a people studied. But why distinguish beliefs from values? In this paper, I present two accounts of the distinction in philosophy and apply these to social anthropology. I argue that there is a reason for why the social anthropologist can overlook the belief-value distinction. (This paper before the appendices is an attempted imitation, by the way. "Of whom?" Helen Beebee; Helen Beebee with my specialist knowledge.) NOTE: this is the abstract; you need to download the PDF probably.

This paper discusses what is called "the paradox of fiction." The name will seem presumptuous to some readers accustomed to philosophy, on the grounds that there are surely other paradoxes of fiction. I propose that its presumptuousness goes beyond this: the term presumes to refer to a distinctive paradox, but does it? As on a previous occasion, I propose that it can be assimilated to Moore's paradox, with much greater elaboration of the proposal here. Given my elaboration, is that the end of rational interest in the paradox of fiction? I propose that we can pretend it is distinctive. The putatively distinctive paradox is that we have emotional reactions to fictions even though we don't believe that fictions are real, so these reactions are irrational; but we read fiction for these reactions, so they are surely rational. A pretend solution I consider is that we unconsciously experience fictions as representing something real. (This paper, excluding appendices, is a failed imitation, though perhaps better than some other attempts. “Of the other philosopher it most resembles”? The original aim was Professor Helen Beebee.)

These days we all have to believe in an autistic spectrum, it seems. There are people who are mildly autistic and people who are much more so. I personally am not sure that there is quite such a spectrum. Speaking with local stand up comedians with autism - or who say that they have it (I confess I wonder: what is the legal cost on deception here and to what extent are these people at risk of legal enforcement?) - I find that the reasons they give for their conclusions are strange: "This sketch is really good, before trying to make it, and the reason why I think this is because..." It is as if they have got themselves functioning as comedians by a very unusual path. They might share the assessments of fellow comedians, enabling them to function as comedians, but how they got themselves into this position of sharing seems remarkable indeed. I just don't class these people with, for example, people who miss a hint that many others get. "My" conspiracy theory is that some autism diagnoses are for the purpose of achieving social justice in the family. Whether the theory is true or not, it is very useful for political philosophers to know. The requirements of social justice, various Rawlsians think, apply to the basic structure of society and this is a set of legally coercive institutions. Famously the family does not count, on this conception of what it consists of. But there are sometimes injustices within the family as well, or a certain family Tolstoyans, short of legal violations. ("The value of this abstract is much higher than many of your others, some of us now think, but we are not loyal to Russia"? "Don't say Tolstayans here," others think?) As I understand her, Professor Miriam Ronzoni proposes to address these but without counting the family as part of the basic structure. There are things you can do within the basic structure which address these problems. But that is going to open the way to unscientific diagnosis: for example, a doctor gives a child a diagnosis of autism, so that the parents and siblings stop bullying the child when they ignore certain hints, the child that is - the child is just accepted as they are in this respect. I have raised this issue before, but without explicitly connecting it to Ronzoni's proposal. Now I am remedying that oversight. (I guess she makes the connection herself, assuming she reads RELEVANT items I write. She does not have an account on this database, to my surprise at least. I have not checked all these recently but I believe: Valentini is on here, Brownlee is on here, Steiner is on here, List is on here, Porter Sinclair is on here, Quong is on here, the Polish political philosophy woman who was in Manchester and then Reading and is now in Oxford, who got first classes in philosophy, politics, and economics, is on here, Joel Smith is on here, I am on here still, Mark Reiff is on here, Joseph Raz was on here and perhaps counts as still being on here, Arif Ahmed is on here, Amia Srinivasan is on here, Carrie Jenkins, Jonathan Ichikawa, Sean Crawford, Liam Shields, Avia Pasternak... Am I being consistent below?) I ALSO want to make this new point. Assume there really is a spectrum. Some people on the spectrum, you don't diagnose for political reasons I guess: they help preserve liberty. Imagine a parent clicking her fingers and saying, "Come on kids," to get her kids to exit the house and go on a day trip together. Some people do this to adults, but by metaphorically clicking their fingers. ("Come on, Professor Miriam Ronzoni, get a PhilPapers account.” Click, click, click! I am joking, of course. It is not a big issue, just a convenient illustration for this audience. I have other projects.) People suspect that you are tyrannical: they send some people in your direction who don't notice the metaphorical clicking. (And who is more likely to end up not diagnosed for this purpose: to protect liberty locally? Is it white English people? Male or female? Click, click, click, come on psychiatrists, come on Doctor Swan, Doctor Klimat, Doctor Tintin, come on. Click, click, click! Let's get into the van and round these Englishmen up. Where is Hemingway? Come on Hemingway. Click, click. "Hey, this is a subtle and complex issue, and teaching you subtlety is quite a long project... I am on my way." See you tomorrow hopefully, Doctor Klimach.)