Terence Rajivan Edward

What if you are tasked with writing or speaking on a topic and the sensible way to approach this topic accurately (or truthfully or so as to contribute to knowledge) is to produce a detailed scientific discourse and you cannot be bothered with doing so? What then? Or perhaps you can be bothered but you are under some obligation to entertain as well? Or your intellectual capacities make you unsuited to producing the scientific text: your attention to detail is poor, say? What then? One solution is to utter (and elaborate slightly upon) a simple thesis which is memorable and has some other value (e.g. it is fun to object to), even if it overlooks much. I find it difficult to avoid the conclusion that F.H. Bradley, Henri Bergson, and Max Beerbohm have done this. I consider Bergson to be the best of the lot, by a considerable distance.

This paper presents some counterexamples to Bergson’s thesis that we laugh when a human being behaves as if he (or she) were a simple machine. The first counterexample concerns laughing in anticipation of the amusing jokes and anecdotes that a man of a certain visage certainly knows. The second counterexample concerns laughing at the ability to overcome defensive behaviour in a foreign land: one merely laughs without actually doing the planned overcoming. The third counterexample concerns laughing at insensible projects that you will surely also attempt.

In a 1965 interview, the Russian-American aristocrat writer Vladimir Nabokov tells us that various renowned novelists are nothing but formidable mediocrities. But what is a formidable mediocrity, or what is a formidable mediocrity in the novel anyway? The concept is new to me and sounds paradoxical (and maybe even an offence to our taste for simple vocabulary): how can a mediocrity be formidable? I think of it as follows: a formidable mediocrity in the novel displays no more talent than your slightly above average short story writer at any literary club, but they produce volumes and volumes of this level of material in comparison to the occasional short story writer, and they do so from sheer hard work. Perhaps I would use this concept if I were a 19 year old looking in at various writers. But my experiences in philosophy suggest to me that there is a mistake in the naive theory of how this volume is achieved.

I.M. Lewis, of the London School of Economics, proposes that spirit possession provides women with a safe outlet to protest against status deprivation. Isabelle Nabokov, of Princeton, who specialized in the study of Tamil women, is puzzled by Lewis's attempt to prevent local modifications to his theory. She writes, "I am somewhat surprised that he appears to object to such area-specific refinements." I suppose an example of an area specific refinement is that amongst Tamil women in the Indian subcontinent possession occurs either to protest against status deprivation or for comedic ends. Nabokov is puzzled presumably because: why not encourage such refinements if they better explain the local data? It is easy for philosophers of science to address Nabokov's puzzle, however: there is a high value on a unified theory of spirit possession, which applies across societies. However, Nabokov's text suggests a reply to me: "modifications are acceptable in border zones, to which his theory was not clearly intended to apply." (Or maybe my personal experience does. Does this theory work better than what the psychiatrists used after my episode as Simone de Beauvoir? The anthropologists should have intervened: they didn't know or cultural relativism - this is how such episodes are treated here. I am of course not a woman.) This debate was in The Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute September 1998 issue.

Consider the following argument. (1) If the senses are sometimes unreliable, then I should never trust them. (2) The senses are sometimes unreliable. Therefore: (3) I should never trust them. You are sure to contemplate an objection against premise (1): total reliability is too demanding a requirement. Now consider a task different from evaluating this argument. Consider a task of finding a social science paradox. For example, a paradox concerning analytic philosophy's increasing dominance. You are struggling? Here is a method for finding such paradoxes. First, list a series of qualities of the thing, e.g. analytic philosophy values logic, analytic philosophy dominates in the English speaking world, etc. Second, look for any combinations of qualities on the list that are puzzling. Third, look for any quality that is puzzling in itself, e.g. its location. and try to specify another quality besides which it is puzzling. And then say: how can there be this combination? Fourth, take qualities which are not immediately puzzling and try to make puzzles out of them. For example, take analytic philosophy values logic. Add hardly anyone can do logic properly and yet analytic philosophy is increasing in dominance. ("The point at which I stop staring into space and develop a method all by myself is very late, maybe years from now, but someone in my team might well do that.")

"Stuart Hampshire has one, Tim Crane has one, and you have four, but four is not enough for you." Okay, here is another paradox of the rise of analytic philosophy to dominance, in university departments in the English speaking world (or elite ones). On the one hand, analytic philosophy's methods are defended as those most conducive to achieving knowledge, such as defining one's terms, clearly specifying one's argument, considering all plausible objections, the use of formal logic and more. On the other hand, its dominance is achieved under conditions in which there is lots of evidence that these methods do not lead to knowledge regarding what the answers are to the question addressed. More and more positions appear and each is argued for as plausible. For example, in Crane's specialism, consider the positions that have since the 90s been defended regarding what sensory perception consists in. No philosopher seriously interested in whether the methods lead to knowledge can insulate themselves from reasonable doubt about this matter. Maybe you got this paradox yourself! "I got some of it, but not both parts." I told how to do it though: look for two qualities which are seemingly incompatible. Surely few would "buy into" the methods and the discipline would not expand. "I am not optimistic about human motives, so I cannot think this naively."

I argue that Amerindian perspectivism poses a problem for Davidson on alternative conceptual schemes. Davidson thinks that what a sentence means is determined by what meaning a radical interpreter would attribute to it and that radical interpretation involves interpreting charitably: taking others to express beliefs which are largely true by our lights, whenever plausible. Thus others cannot have a radically different system of beliefs or concepts. Elsewhere Davidson argues that the non-human animals we are acquainted with do not have beliefs. But Amerindian perspectivism, a worldview described by some anthropologists who study South American tribes, says that each type of animal has its own intelligent perspective on the world, presumably composed of beliefs. How can a Davidsonian radical interpreter who shares Davidson’s beliefs about animals ever attribute such a worldview?

If you are on the territory of a certain nation, do you thereby consent to follow its laws? John Locke, as standardly interpreted, thinks that you do. You do not explicitly consent - you do not say, "I consent" or anything like that, but you tacitly consent, thinks Locke. But consider the reality of a nation's boundaries. Boundaries are sometimes drawn up with a disregard for where ethnic groups actually are. The boundaries of various African countries are famously straight to a striking extent. You cannot reasonably expect a person not to visit their cousin given these boundaries, even if they do not consent to the laws of the neighbouring nation their cousin suddenly finds themselves in. Is this even in the literature? I remember saying, "There is only one reading beyond the essential reading," and the lecturer said that he would provide a larger list. He did and I went through the list. Every essay on whether consent explains the authority of government says the same thing as well, to the extent that I (questionably) demanded an anarchism essay for more creative students.

An undergraduate who studies various humanities-faculty disciplines is likely to find the preoccupations of analytic philosophy to be strange and isolated. “We study Foucault in politics, we study Foucault in social anthropology, we study Foucault in literature, but in analytic philosophy we study what is a proposition and how can we informatively say that Hesperus is Phosphorus.” The paradox is that these isolated academics do not bond with other isolated disciplines in the humanities faculty, such as economics. “Surely the loners have to band together in this hostile world, but actually there is little bonding.” I present a quick solution and then three explanations of why there is little bonding, two of which are these: the analytic philosopher’s appetite for exploring “little holes” - positions that probably only a very careful and slow reasoner would detect - prevents bonding with other isolated projects; and the academics between these projects (e.g. political philosophers) are not able to channel information adequately, so leading figures don’t know enough about each other’s discipline. This paradox seems very similar to Tim Crane’s though. Anxious about this, I give one reason to think it is different though.

Today I read a paradox, which I believe was first conceived by Stuart Hampshire: Hume is influential in contemporary philosophy, but he does not meet the rules of contemporary British philosophy, which are oriented towards proof. Like a lawyer, one must check every sentence one writes for its truth and what objections may be raised against it, we are told. I try to formulate the paradox precisely and offer three proposal as to why Hume is influential, three attempted solutions to the paradox: various claims of his can be reformulated in precise and even provable terms; the rules are not insisted upon for cherished members of “our broad tradition”; the description of contemporary philosophy is mistaken. Strangely all three solutions offered seem correct to me!

A foreign author of some significance appears upon your shores. ("What shores?") What happens? There are sure to be imitations of him and indeed various foreign authors are much imitated. Sometimes it is difficult to avoid thinking that there is a question being posed: what is so special about this foreigner, for an ordinary skilled fellow such as myself can do that too? Often these imitations are largely forgotten with the passing of time. But what about in philosophy? Do people not think "I can do something like that too" and even pose the question? "It would be plagiarism," you might think. But you can do things broadly like a philosophy without strictly copying them and also the work would presumably be harder to marginalize, because of the contribution to knowledge. One might look at Hume's contributions and say, "Okay, Hume has a problem of inductive reasoning, but here is another problem of inductive reasoning. Okay, Hume has a type of inferential error he points out, inferring what we ought to do purely from what is, but here is another type of inferential error." In philosophy, we know people who have other problems of inductive reasoning but we do not know people who have really gone far with this kind of project. (I also have identified a type of inferential error now.) Surely such projects have been pursued before. But we don't know about them, or at least people who are not extreme experts don't know, or they are not part of our public knowledge. Why not? "Those who pursue them usually go mad, before they can get much further and the greatness of Hume dawns upon their social circle." "It is a typical reaction of patriotic people to an imported product, so we don't even try, but people sufficiently clever in another land may be directed towards better tasks." "The incentive to do it is too low: there is never going to be The Cambridge Companion to Faux Hume."

The much-loved British actress Prunella Scales died yesterday. This paper takes the form of a dialogue between myself and a foreign friend. The description of her most famous role does not sound promising: it seems a stock role, the gossip-loving sensible wife of a bumbling ambitious man. To resolve the puzzle of why her acting work is much appreciated, I make a comparison between Scales’ work and Terence Horgan and Mark Balaguer on the paradox of analysis. It is an obvious response they offer in outline, but superbly crafted. This is a casual perspective on Scales, not that of an expert! I hope it is not too soon: it is not meant to be critical.

Tim Crane reviewing a Marxist history of analytic philosophy writes, “the paradox is that the more analytic philosophy became dominant in the universities, the more it became removed from the concerns of the average person with philosophical interests.” It is like an examination. It is at least two actually: the first examination question is “What is the solution to this paradox?”; the second examination question is “Can you knock out the ‘the’: present a paradox so that it is merely a paradox, even given the whole context in which Crane writes?”! I am not sure. I shall present three other paradoxes in response, and one beforehand concerning a Joseph Conrad imitator.

A problem that was raised to me by various female lecturers more than a decade ago or longer is “Although there are plenty of women in my field, there are few women professors.” The explanation would seem to be sexism. But actually there is an alternative explanation (though from my own experience as a member of an under-represented group, I am not quite convinced by it). The explanation is that a number of academics, including women, subscribe to the ideology of specialization. They specialize heavily, limit the range of their reading consequently and tend to associate mainly with people they can talk to about their research. But at the level of professor (or a higher level these days), that turns out to be a problem: one is expected to address a wider range of audiences. This paper is written as an imitation of Milan Kundera, although it seems far less misogynist overall.

I respond to Tim Crane’s paradox of analytic philosophy’s success: “the paradox is that the more analytic philosophy became dominant in the universities, the more it became removed from the concerns of the average person with philosophical interests.” Is it actually paradox, because we have analytic political philosophy, analytic ethics, and applied ethics? I argue that the same or a similar paradox can be posed once these areas of research are drawn attention to. “What about all this other stuff?!” I also argue for distinguishing between the question of whether philosophers ought to address the concerns of the average person with philosophical interests and the question of how analytic philosophy could have expanded without doing so.

Some people introduce a new term for something and it proves popular and they become known as the introducer of that term. Other people introduce a new term for something and it proves popular but their name is not known. Is this not an issue of social justice? I raised this question of what credit we should give before, in an essay, and here I imagine someone’s producing a system of accreditation which addresses the question and aims at social justice. My poor essay will be a footnote at best. But maybe lonely people cannot motivate themselves to read the complicated system but lonely people can read my essay. I wonder whether a certain philosophical couple is irrational, a couple politely unnamed here, because one member seems suited to producing the system and the other member seems suited to writing for lonely people, but she sounds opposed to the task.

I wonder whether the introduction of the word “thick” was influenced by an essay by George Bernard Shaw, in which he presents a difficulty with conveying a new idea to some people: head solid like a billiard ball. But an objection to introducing a term for what he describes is that we already have the word “stupid.” The objection can be overcome by appealing to the value of the metaphor for anyone who experiences the difficulty. But if it was actually overcome like this, that seems an extremely foxy term introduction: shrewd, cunning. I would probably not bother myself, given the objection.

Since the Enlightenment, most famously in the writings of Adam Smith, we have been advised to specialize. And specialization is recommended within a field too. One “man” deals with metaphysics, another with the foundations of political constitutions, etc. But it is predictable that with the rise of essay writing machines (or software), that there will be human versus essay writing machine competitions, and it is a disadvantage for the human competitor to be specialized by our standards. Also fields in which specialization is strictly imposed, or whole universities, will shamefully have no competitor to put forward. Who will the University of Myopia’s person be?

This paper responds to an Instagram comedy sketch which strikes me as paradoxical. A girl asks another girl whether she studied for the exam later. The other says that she did not really study. After the exam, they are discussing their results. The girl who claimed to not really study got 99, whereas the girl who asked got only 10. I assume 100 is the highest possible score. But isn’t friendship between people of comparable intelligence? They are friends, friendship is between people of comparable intelligence, and their exam results are wildly divergent: how? I consider these solutions: an exception to the friendship generalization; they are not actually friends; and my favoured solution of course: the examination system has a problem.

The Internet provides a wealth of comedy videos for us to enjoy and a site called Instagram has an algorithm which presents me with many. But some of these videos, unlike my own, appear to be the product of a team effort (discounting whoever built my apartment as a member of my team, etc.). There are actors in the sketch and I suspect others are writers and people who do graphics for the video. But these others get no accreditation. But surely they want accreditation and some may even think it is an injustice that they are not accredited. Why do they do the work then? One explanation is that someone pays them and the money compensates for the lack of accreditation. Another explanation is that they cannot get creative jobs which give them accreditation, on reasonable terms anyway: you only get them if you are a part of a social network and they are not. A third explanation is that some of these comedy videos copy their main idea from other videos and a process of accreditation would require crediting the original source, which they don’t want to do. There are probably other explanations.

This document does my best to turn various papers and contributions of mine into one-liners (or two-liners, if the term is taken literally; there are a few three-liners too). Also there are some totally "underived" ones! Perhaps you ought to do this too, whatever the conventions you are accustomed to. SAMPLE. 1. Yes, some people can change the path they are on, but it takes two world wars for that to happen. 10. If you think anarchism is so bad, then when you have evidence the government is so bad you will probably dismiss it. 11. O Prophet, you are 9 out of 10 but you can be 8.5 out of 10 and the same people will receive your message; and you need to be 9.5 for anyone else to. (A response to Foucault on psychiatry.) 31.If you are trying to beat a lot of competition by having the bonus of a fine writing style, you probably need to add a little poem too.

PhilPapers, if you are at risk of deletion, it makes sense to do some not fully baked work. I have reduced some of my papers and other contributions to one line quotes. Also one of Helen Beebee's - well, my reaction to it anyway. A SAMPLE. 1. I know that someone is following me, but I have not seen them; it is simply rational for someone to; 2. A warning surely: the University of Manchester has books on Sri Lankan fiction but no books by the authors who wrote the fictions; 6. They say “Spare the rod, spoil the child,” but those who literally spare the rod usually have a metaphorical one; 8. The science of economics does not progress much because if you come up with a clever model, you keep it to yourself and make money with its predictions; 36. When you tell an atheist to accept an explanation because the alternative is an incredible fluke, they say, “A lot of things are incredible flukes, like that we exist.”

This paper responds to a remark I found in Tim Crane’s review of a Marxist history of analytic philosophy by Christoph Schuringa. The remark is by Frankfurt School theorist Max Horkheimer: logical positivism is “only a miserable rearguard action of the formalistic epistemology of liberalism, which also in this area turns into open servility to fascism.” In earlier years, I would have dismissed Horkheimer. But I have made a speculative proposal which converges with Horkheimer’s thinking. Even though it is a speculation, it probably makes more sense to people than Horkheimer. Even if the leading figures of analytic philosophy are liberal, they need people to teach for them and run departments, etc. I speculated that they face a choice between highly tactical liberals and racist xenophobic nationalists and prefer the latter, because these people maintain craft excellence or lapse only slightly from it. An R.K. Narayan short story, “Father’s Help,” although set in South India, presents the development of the tactical type.

I feel you don’t like this kind of stuff, PhilPapers Editors, and seemingly one of my friends does not, but some of my other friends do I suspect: they love it even! I present a paper which on the one hand shows considerable evidence of social intelligence. The author is able to realize why jokes cause offence and the various motives for telling jokes which potentially cause offence and even unconscious attitudes. On the other hand, taking the author’s writing at face value, he does not appear to understand that his abstract will trigger certain expectations and furthermore that the order of discussion he specifies, in combination with the abstract, will. Paradoxically, on the one hand he is able to mind read so well; on the other hand so poorly! My apologies to all concerned.

Analytic philosophers nowadays also write histories of their discipline, or some do, but do they do this as one might expect? Much as they sit around discussing some paradox, which they think involves a false conclusion but has premises we find attractive, so you might expect them to start with a mythical history and then explain what is wrong with it. Do they do this? I am not convinced they do. In this paper, I introduce a mythical history of analytic philosophy and journalism relations, in which this happened: era 1, analytic philosophers sought to distinguish themselves from journalists by having short papers requiring LITTLE RESEARCH, which presented clever responses to clever puzzles; era 2, analytic philosophers decided that certain topics could safely be treated more journalistically, because the newspapers do not cover such abstract topics. The paper is written as an imitation of modernist poet, essayist, and fiction writer Laura Riding. I use discussion of the is-ought gap to illustrate my mythical history, but end up unfortunately devaluing Professor Charles Pigden.

I recently wrote a paper in which I imagined having a conversation with a friend (or conversational partner), in which I cast doubt on a description of a government policy recommendation: it is described as scientific but the argument for it is based on a value and a controversial one furthermore. I imagined not knowing Hume and him/his sitting down and explaining his is-ought gap: that you cannot validly derive a conclusion about what you ought to do purely from factual statements. I imagined finding it interesting, but soon moving on to other points I wish to make, not recognizing its wider significance. Well, is that better than what you would do? Here I replace the conversational partner I imagined with a lady philosopher. Doing so led me to an is-ought gap counterexample. “Everything we do is determined by the initial state of the universe, so it is not true that we ought to keep our promises. We are only morally responsible agents if there is free will.”

Tom Stoppard, the most famous playwright of recent years within the British theatre scene, died yesterday. His work and responses to it give rise to a number of puzzles, for me, some of which I address here, though meaning no disrespect to the recently deceased. One is why his Czech birthplace is emphasized so much: he left the country before age two. Another is why The Cambridge Companion to Tom Stoppard was published in 2001? Surely the time for publishing such a work is after the author ceases output. I note the more influential Milan Kundera has no such thing to his name. I address these puzzles, but the puzzle I focus more on here is: why become a playwright? Writers, we stereotypically imagine, are sensitive, introverted characters, while a play is a production in which those involved are part of a big team. I consider three answers: Stoppard became interested in writing plays after being a journalist critic on theatre; his father was a major in the British army and writing plays is what duty to, or a felt duty to, some group required him to do - it is a militarylike project of dominating and defending a field; and being a playwright is a rational solution to the problem of wanting control over the artwork and wanting to share it with others, who will hopefully value it. To be realistic, the hope requires relinquishing control to such an extent, one might as well become a playwright, rather than novelist or poet or short story writer.

Tim Crane writes: "Anyone with the slightest familiarity with recent AI will know that AI machines are already smarter than us. AI machines have for some time been far better than humans at chess, they have beaten the world champion of Go, they are much better than most of us at remembering phone numbers, searching documents for information, finding the best route to your destination on public transport, and (of course) at mathematical calculations. They are computers, after all, and that’s what computers do — compute. But of course, this is not what people mean when they talk about the machines becoming smarter. They mean that an AI might become ‘smart’ in the way that we are smart, but perhaps to an even higher degree. It might be able to think, to reason, to make decisions, to be creative, inventive, witty, reasonable, sensitive to other creatures and… whatever else it is that we are talking about when we say that someone is smart or intelligent." I suspect it is quite to easy to write code which produces the effect of wit. A word processor has a dictionary which divides words into common and uncommon. Every other use of an uncommon word, it changes into another similar word in spelling or sound. Maybe this is enough to produce the effect of a witty editor up to mischief. "Oh gosh, that is a meaningful change."