Terence Rajivan Edward

Reflective equilibrium is a procedure most famously proposed by John Rawls. (It has its roots in the work of Nelson Goodman. "Who?") Here is a sketch of the procedure. What you do is you take your moral judgments about specific situations, such as that it is morally wrong to put a police officer's life at risk by sending them alone to the apartment of that bad person. Then you try to develop a set of general moral principles which entails these specific judgments. If a few of these judgments are not entailed, then there is the option of dropping them; otherwise you must revise your general principles. (Rawls is famous for his third way political system, which was probably an inspiration for the Clintons and Tony Blair. The people with greatest expertise in such systems, the Scandinavians, mainly focus on reflective equilibrium: everything else must go?) Now you are supposed to test whether you accept the general principles by considering specific moral judgements made in response to actual AND hypothetical scenarios: are they entailed? But as I have pointed out in my paper "Ought-implies-can, the original position, and reflective equilibrium" the addition of hypothetical scenarios makes it impossible to properly carry out reflective equilibrium and makes Rawls inconsistent. The scenarios are infinite. Here is a solution (which I don't personally recommend): focus on judgments made in response to actual situations only. Empirical reflective equilibrium, as I call it, has at least two benefits: it makes reflective equilibrium doable (or doable given some further restrictions) AND it makes Rawls consistent (or consistent given some further restrictions). "No, you cannot abandon it. Now you have to spend your whole life elaborating and defending ERE"? Why can't someone else do that and cite me? "It might not be safe for people of our class to write on. We tested luck egalitarianism carefully"? "Our reward system is designed to say: first proposed by um... E... and given its modern and rigorous formulation by Parfit II."

Toward Mother's Day 2023, I went to a nearby shop looking for a mother's day card. The till worker said, "We don't have any." I found a card which said, "For my wife," and I brought it to the counter and made a joke: this might work as a Mother's day card for someone! I decided to buy the card and I brought it home and put it on a mattress. My apartment at the time was really cluttered with books and rare periodicals. In early April 2023, I could not find the card. I found the balcony door left open. I called the police. I asked them, "What has happened to my card? Has someone got in here?" If the apartment is cluttered with books, the policeman will propose that it might be under one of the books - and he did. I asked the policeman if someone could send an electronic bug under my door and move an item, such as the card. The police reported me to Greater Manchester Mental Health, who did nothing - which was good. (By the way, there was cracked glass on my apartment floor as well and I made the policeman take off his shoes. He did not look comfortable there - my mind was a bit clouded from writing too much but I certainly noticed this. How could you send a policeman alone? I'm very nice though.) In September 2023, I was admitted to North Manchester General Hospital. In October 2023, the consultant psychiatrist referred to my question about the electronic bug as evidence of mental disorder. I said, "It was a hypothesis and I didn't accept it." He said, "Most people do not have hypotheses like that." Maybe his approach is the best. But I have two major worries. (a) From Popper, for the good of science, we should be able to frame any hypothesis we like. (b) What is an out-of-range hypothesis for a person is relative to what is customary for people of their background. It might be completely in-range for a young politician to ask about whether a bug can be sent under an apartment door. But this relativization to background is difficult. What if I have just been away from people of my class background for a long time?

When I read Poetic Justice: The Literary Imagination and Public Life, by Martha Nussbaum, I wonder where the references are to all the ordinary "workers" who address her themes: the hardworking but unsung Dickens and utilitarianism scholar, etc. (Even a contributor of the stature of Richard J. Arneson does not appear. I learnt about his contribution from Greenfield and Nilsson's "Gradgrind's Education: Using Dickens and Aristotle to Understand (and Replace) the Business Judgment Rule." Did Nussbaum read loads for her book and think, "Not good enough, not good enough, not good enough, not good enough, not good enough, not good enough, not good enough..."?) There are the classics, there is the anonymous student she marked, who gets a response, and then there is "me, Sen, Posner, and Becker - you've either got it or you don't!" Maybe that is a slight simplification, but who can resist it? Here I want to propose that Nussbaum's university is more rational than ours given a simple model - a Gradgrindian one ironically. According to this model, the value of all lecturers in a university is measured by citation. But lecturers who are not famous cannot get citations. Because if you are thinking to write about them, then it is rational to find someone famous who says the same thing (or something similar, that's not going to be in the model, is it?) and write about the famous figure: that gets you the econometric boost of STARPOWER. Consequently, the ordinary lecturer - unable to be valued - leaves. What you are left with is postgraduate teaching assistants and stellar figures of our time: Sen, Posner, Becker, Nussbaum etc. ("That's why we buy them up, Mary Beard.") Although I was regarded as a mad person, my teaching assistant focused job strategy was rational, given the model - yours is not! Why do I even refer to you? I am out of your league! It must be because I have learnt much from you, especially compared to what you have learnt from me! (HUMEAN: Hey, this is getting insane - the psychiatrist will get you. ME: You are the psychiatrist. I'll explain this later.)

In her book Poetic Justice: The Literary Imagination and Public Life, Martha C. Nussbaum writes, "Utilitarian rational-choice models are used for various purposes. Some of these purposes are explanatory/predictive: the economist claims, using the model, that if certain actions are chosen, certain results will follow. Other uses are normative: conduct that does not conform to the model is criticized as irrational or substandard for that reason, and the model is used to guide the selection of public policies." Now in my slightly strange paper "Why do economists make these strange assumptions?" I pointed out a third use: models featuring the strange assumptions of economists lead to interesting assertions about what people will do and these are worth testing - they lead to interesting hypotheses that would not occur to economists otherwise. (Yes, they are like rhyme schemes, in my philosophico-poetical system!) An economist can say this: "Martha C. Nussbaum, you are keen on imagination. But if I take ten imaginative but realistic writers and ask them what is going on in a certain situation, they may well say much the same thing. My model generates an interesting new hypothesis - it is the real imagination, the real fancy!"

The founding social anthropologist Bronislaw Malinowski believed that any stable society had to meet a set of needs, but different societies had different ways of doing so. Social anthropologists report these different ways. But what about unstable societies? Are there societies which bubble up and disappear? Malinowski would presumably say that these societies are not of interest to social anthropology or are of too low priority. His focus is, I believe, a discreet criticism of Frazer’s The Golden Bough, which sought to explain the origins of a peculiar rite of succession: to become the priest to the goddess Diana at Nemi, one had to be a runaway, enter the sacred grove, and break off a branch from a bough, which entitled one to a fight to the death with the current incumbent. Anyway, the Sabrina Carpenter incompetence paradox allows us to glimpse at an unstable society. If you prefer incompetent men (by normal standards), competent men leave and a collapse occurs.

Kenneth Arrow's 1973 response to Rawls is an attempt to be a spokesperson for most welfare economists. How well does he do? I am not sure, but I have heard a different perspective on Rawls's use of maximin decision making (from an economist who does not want to be named). Rawls considers various principles of justice. (Not "various" in the sense of two very different principles, if this even is a sense, but in the sense of quite a few proposals for what the principles of justice should be.) Rawls evaluates the options by maximin decision making: by considering what is the worst an individual can get given one principle and given another, and favouring when the worst one can get is less bad, e.g. under a utilitarian principle the worst is murder because everyone else is happy then versus under his liberty principle etc a set of individual rights and no friends and poverty by comfortable standards, so prefer the latter. But maximin seems risk averse: afraid to take risks. Rawls responds by arguing that anyone, whatever their level of risk aversion, should use maximin to evaluate principles of justice: the argument why, put simply, is because they affect your ability to carry out your whole life plan. The response I heard is that the economist does not get involved with arguing for maximin over rivals. That is just an interminable discussion! Instead they make a mathematical model and try it with different choice ranking rules. If you agree with the premises, you will agree with the conclusion, regardless of your political stance, etc. (I suspect this is not wholly true. I am wondering how the economist can offer certain pieces of advice without arguing in favour of a choice ranking rule.)

HUMEAN: I read your "Rejected Analysis paper: a moral problem of inductive reasoning" I am interested in your problem. It is a bit strange that you got rejected, but people make mistakes. Why don't you try again? ME: I would get so excited by such a paper and would think, "Everyone, or almost everyone, will love this," and would just put it in, so I am having trouble grasping the perspective of the review. What do they experience when they read the paper? What is the phenomenology of the reviewer? HUMEAN: I don't know, but you could just try again. There's blind review. ME: What if I try 10 times and each time, there is a rejection? HUMEAN: You won't reach this level ten times. This is purely hypothetical. ME: Let's consider it anyway. HUMEAN: Some bad magic is occurring? ME: I have another explanation. Do you know what a perverse historian is? They remove what "everyone" likes from their history. The Analysis reviewer has incorporated the perspective of the perverse historian into their review system. HUMEAN: Is this historian even real or did you just imagine them? ME: Go and read Macaulay's essay on Horace Walpole. I quote: "Who, then, were the first writers of England in the year 1753? Walpole has told us in a note. Our readers will probably guess that Hume, Fielding, Smollett, Richardson, Johnson, Warburton, Collins, Akenside, Gray, Dyer, Young, Warton, Mason, or some of those distinguished men, were in the list. Not one of them." HUMEAN: No Hume? ME: No!

In my "Why read post-colonial literature?" I have drawn attention to how it contains characters not in local English fiction (to my knowledge), characters whom it is useful to know about outside of former colonies: one encounters characters like this. In my "Why read short stories?" I have drawn attention to the possibility of characters in short fiction who are absent from novels. Here I would like to illustrate these points by reference to the story "Emden" by the unfashionable R.K. Narayan. Emden reminds me very much of Amartya Sen, given my standpoint. He is named the oldest man in the town, and is a man of some authority and prestige. He has worked high up in the government and has a large collection of important yellowing documents from his work, including ones relating to a controversy with the Secretary to the Government. His favourite column in the newspaper presents metaphysical arguments. He has "been through" a number of women: we are told, "He married several wives, seems to have worn them out one after another; that was in addition to countless sideshows, ha!" Sen: is he just Emden gone global? "You haven't but we have: seen a man like this before"?

When Kenneth Arrow responded to Rawls in 1973, he did not present himself as leading economist Arrow objecting to Rawls, though owing to STARPOWER it is difficult for readers not to perceive his paper in this way. Arrow says that he has a background in welfare economics and says that his objections are the result of clashes between Rawls and this background. Any economist who accepts this background, or almost any, is going to have these objections: Arrow is a more articulate spokesperson, I suppose, but a whole subfield will nod along. "What is the difference: the economist Arrow's response to Rawls and economist philosopher Amartya Sen's response?" Here is a more interesting question: how are they similar? Sen is famous for his capabilities approach, but his response is at least partly an extension of the general strategy of response chosen by Arrow. Sen points to a clash between welfare economics itself and Rawls. Sen objects to assessing justice systems by the distribution of primary goods: goods any rational person is presumed to want. It is fetishism, says Sen (failing to use capital letters foolishly). He writes, "For example, income and wealth are not valued under utilitarianism as physical units, but in terms of their capacity to create human happiness or to satisfy human desires. Even if utility is not thought to be the right focus for the person-good relationship, to have an entirely good oriented framework provides a peculiar way of judging advantage." Sen is a spokesperson as well: the very background of welfare economist tells him not to value a good in itself, but for what utility it gives. In theory, you can make this point with a minimal amount of economics. ("We have many postgrads who did economics courses? Why don't they make it?" Don't know. See my "Google AI and the macro analysis of pastiche." Anyway, why another day with Kristeva cat and no Nozick?)

I received a mental disorder diagnosis from North Manchester hospital in October 2023. In January 2024, I strangely wanted to work again at the university. I applied for some administration jobs: there are lots and they are all much the same in requirements. I improved my applications and around April 2024, I began to crack the system. Between April and July, I got three interviews: all in science faculties. I put my disability on the applications. (I doubt I have one, so of course I wouldn't do that now.) I also got many rejections despite using the same application and there being a compulsory interview scheme given my "disability." I am worried this system is simply not consistent. (1) If one faculty interviews because of the disability compulsory interview requirement, they all should. (2) One faculty interviews because of this. Therefore (by modus ponens): (3) they all should. I am not sure if premise (2) is true, but I suspect it is: my only admin experience is from being a TA. (I had three interviews early this year with businesses without any disability scheme though, and one last year. I don't apply continuously.) Some other interesting information. In my first interview, there was a test which I found very difficult. You had to order an intray fast. Also the test has an Excel component. I prepared for a whole week beforehand for the Excel part and got exercises to do from my friend. I scored well on the test and I think there should always be a test: if you don't have a lot of experience, doing well is a great boost and you can refer to the test elsewhere and it prompts you to do an Excel test on Indeed and you feel the process is fairer than just a chat. In future interviews, almost everyone said Excel skills are useful. In my second interview, I was asked, "How are you going to motivate yourself to do this job, because it is BORING?" My third interview was online. I don't have Internet at home, because its absence ensures that I read books, clean up, etc. I notified the panel but they had no solution for me. So I had to just go into a university building, "illegitimately."

In my "On lack of progress in economics," I introduced an example where I find an "error" in Kimberley Brownlee, then much the same error in the famous Martha Nussbaum, and then I decide to write a paper about the latter. Now I anticipate a philosopher saying, "We are a democratic egalitarian people and you could just have written it on Kimberley Brownlee and sent it to Analysis." Some insiders will just laugh at this. The philosopher might point to less famous figures who are responded to. What happens next in the debate? Let's simplify and overlook the option of referring to both Brownlee and Nussbaum. If I were powerful enough, I could get an econometrics person to do an analysis. There would be tables, there would be a variable called STARPOWER. It would very likely lead to the conclusion that there is an advantage for me in switching to Martha Nussbaum as my focus, a global and medium-term advantage even.. By the way, I was reading Nussbaum's book Poetic Justice: The Literary Imagination and Public Life once again. Of course she is opposed to Gradgrindian statistical analysis. But I started making a count of who (or whom, sorry) she refers to. The contemporary figures are all or almost all stellar characters of her level, such as Richard Posner, Garry Becker, and Amartya Sen. Where are all the slaves who address your themes, Miss Euripides? Nussbaum criticizes various people for being cliquey, like from school: the statistical analysis will unflatteringly suggest she is a kind of character from school.

Auntie is away. Shall we take out our philosophical dolls and restage old debates, but this time with the philosophers at their very best? (Do you even get this joke?) Timothy Williamson doll says this: "Continental philosophy is just a series of undemocratic cults. There is a cult around Derrida. There is a cult around Foucault. There is a cult around Lacan. You join one of these cults, then you abandon all critical thinking and accept what the obscure cult leader says, straining to make some sense of nonsense." Continental philosophy scholar says this: "No, analytic philosophy is cults. How come you make all these errors, pointed out by the excellent philosopher Terence Rajivan Edward. You are the leader of a cult. If you existed in a democratic egalitarian system, people would point out your elementary errors. There is the Williamson cult, the David Lewis cult (David Lewis trivia on pictures gets published in Analysis), the John Rawls cult, etc. Enjoy genuine equality - I doubt you were cut out for it though." ("Stop depicting play in our household!" Okay, why is Julia Kristeva a category on here and not Nozick?)

Inductive reasoning occurs when we examine a set of cases (a sample) and generalize on the basis of them. Hume's problem of inductive reasoning is legendary: inductive reasoning depends on an assumption of a regular world (future cases are like past cases etc.), the assumption is not self-evident and cannot be established by deduction nor (on pain of circularity) by inductive reasoning itself. (Note: Hume's problem is NOT best specified as: induction does not yield absolutely certain knowledge.) In the 20th century, Nelson Goodman added his new problem of inductive reasoning. Unwisely perhaps, I want to join the club. This is my moral problem of induction. A person is brought up in a very strict moral household and he learns to accept in his childhood numerous moral rules, 400 let us say. One day as an adult he lists the 400. He examines number 400 and finds that he rejects it. The next day he examines number 399 and finds that he rejects it. The third day he examines number 398 and finds that he rejects it. When he gets to about number 50, he infers, "Probably all moral rules are wrong." He decides to become an amoralist. If you are a really moral person, I presume you think this: "You should not be able to exit morality like this. You have to keep going, in case one of the remaining moral rules turns out to withstand examination." But how can you argue for this perspective, if you accept the legitimacy of inductive reasoning? (Can you believe they rejected this from Analysis? What goes on in the evaluator's mind when he reads this?)

"Why is there lack of progress in the social sciences compared to in the natural sciences?" It is a question that is asked. If we focus on economics, one problem is this: if I conceive a model which gives me an advantage in competitive situations, then I just act on the model rather than share it (because sharing it would reduce the advantage). "Can you give an example?" What a question! I will give an example which might not qualify as an economic model. (If it half-does, then give me credit.) Let's suppose that I am reading Kimberley Brownlee on a human right against social deprivation in The Philosophical Quarterly. She claims that the proposition "Human beings are social beings" is a conceptual truth. I wonder how, because if it is true in virtue of the very concepts involved (like "A bachelor is unmarried" is), then there would presumably not be disagreement about it: anyone who grasps the concepts involved would agree. But there is disagreement. Then I find that Martha Nussbaum makes a similar error about certain freedoms. She says that they are bad by definition but strangely also acknowledges that there is much disagreement about whether they are bad. Then I develop this "model." If you find an error in a less famous philosopher, then look for the same error in a much more famous philosopher and write about the latter. Why? Assuming standard aims, there is more reward in doing that. If you send your paper identifying an error off to the journal Analysis, then they will publish it. End of example: if this model occurs to you, then are you going to tell people it? (By the way, I got a paper of very long term interest rejected from Analysis. I can't believe I troubled myself to get a password and an Orchid ID!)

A lot of people are struck by the distribution of TERFs: trans-exclusionary radical feminists. There are many in some countries, such as Britain, and few in others. Why is that? Here I propose a philosophical explanation. Consider this distinction. Some truths are conceptual truths (or analytic truths). They are true in virtue of the very concepts involved (or the very words). They are true by definition, some people say. For example, "A bachelor is an unmarried man." For another example, "A triangle has three sides." Thus if you grasp the concepts involved - the word meanings - you can know the truth without doing any research. Other truths are not like this. Now there is a famous attack on this distinction, by W.V. Quine. "But the distinction seems to be the soundest common sense. Why would anyone reject it? There is obviously a difference between the truth that a bachelor is unmarried and the truth, assuming it is one, that bachelors are more likely to shop late at night." My explanation for TERF distribution is that when a field or institution largely accepts Quine's attack, then you do not get TERFs. The field just becomes too weird from the TERF point of view. A lot of named TERFs get degrees from the University of Oxford or pass through it, an institution where this attack is most resisted. My explanation interestingly predicts that cognitive science, which seems closer to common sense, is so influenced by Fodor, who is so influenced by Quine, that it does not and will not produce TERFs. Assuming TERFs are feminists, they are really worthy of the name "analytic feminists." (Probably the more elegant explanation is that TERFs do not arise where Quine's attack is influential because they want to maintain that it is an analytic truth that a woman is an adult human female.)

I was reading a chapter from Judith Butler's 2024 book Who's afraid of gender? It was entitled "TERFs and British matters of sex." I was reading it and the first TERF she names and deals with in any detail is Holly Lawford-Smith. Lawford-Smith is not British! Why is she focusing on an Australian TERF? (New Zealand-Australian, says Google.) Do we not have our own TERFs? Britain is famous for TERFs. I have not found the explanation yet for this focus. Perhaps Butler will say, "Lawford-Smith was in Britain." But what if her lived experience is that she is Australian? Is it not a crime from Butler's perspective to treat Lawford-Smith as British when her lived experience is that of being Australian, like misgendering someone given their feelings about what gender they are? Maybe I am taking the title too rigidly - it says "TERFs and British matters of sex", not "British TERFS and matters of sex" - but it sounds very much like she plans to focus on Britain and I would like some explanation for why an Australian is discussed in detail first, and also at the time when this discussion begins. "I know she is Australian but..." Butler goes into more detail about Lawford-Smith than about the best known and probably most influential British TERF philosopher, namely Kathleen Stock. (I in contrast have written plentifully on Stock.) I fear that someone will say, "Various people you respond to are good at getting rewards from universities and newspapers and beyond, but they are not good at the traditional school system, being good at which they would regard as a kind of slavery. They won't do well on a test of capital cities of the world; or sorting out questions into those which are purely interpretative, taken literally, and those which ask for evaluation as well; or filling in the second premise when left blank in a modus ponens argument; or using 'systematizing' in line with grammar." Well, if they are not good at school, how do they get so far? Don't you need to be good at school first?

How to understand the philosophical text (including the oral text, the lecture, etc.)? A significant amount of interpretation happens in the following way, I believe: the philosopher specifies a topic, one encounters a premise and then intuits what the philosopher is trying to argue about the topic. Given the premise, it is likely that the philosopher is making the argument one has intuited (or guessed). But the rhyming philosophical poet resists this technique of interpretation. The philosophical poet specifies the topic in the title, say, and introduces a premise into their poem. What will they do with their premise?If they were not a rhyming poet, you could make a reliable guess. But what if they are unable to achieve a rhyme by making an argument that confirms your guess? The demand to rhyme leads them to do something else with their premise, something that is hard for readers to anticipate. Strange arguments are much more likely in rhyming philosophical poetry. The rhyming philosophical poet is not a predictable character. (I am glad I made this point from my system first. See also my "Derrida, Marilyn Strathern, and honorary degrees," "How to read Davidson: an introduction for professionals" and "Presentation of my philosophico-poetical system, McDowellian!")

My philosophico-poetical system is a highly unlikely creation, given the tradition of philosophy I was educated in and the country I live in and a lot else probably. I would like to say that it is totally my own, but actually it has at its foundation Paul Valéry’s claim, “To write regular verses… destroys an infinite number of fine possibilities but at the same time it suggests a multitude of distant and unexpected thoughts.” From this, I infer an objection to Locke on language, an objection to specialization, an explanation of how the poet can escape his (or her etc.) time, and an argument for the translatability of true poetry. (I have added an appendix which specifies some extensions to my system: on the unpredictability of the philosophical poet, against Freudian interpretation of rhyming poetry, and on the value of univocalic poetry.)

Philosophy as a discipline is famous for its system-builders: they start from a few principles (or just one) and infer various conclusions on various topics, the principles and the conclusions forming a system. "Is this done in recent times: the twentieth century and onwards?" Yes. Now sometimes system-builders build their systems slowly over years. But why does this not happen: someone thinks, "I can see which principles you are relying on and I am going to build a bit of 'your system' first and it will be mine"? To illustrate, Donald Davidson used the premise that beliefs come as a whole (you cannot have one belief without having several rationally related ones) to argue for a variety of conclusions. He was just left to do this for decades, as far as I can see. Nobody thought to make a holist argument before Davidson gets there (except on delusions?). "Why should they?" One incentive is this: if Davidson is getting recognition for such arguments, you can get some recognition from producing one as well. Similarly, Rawls developed his system over years. Why did something like the following not happen: he presents his cake cutting maximin model at a seminar and someone else develops a similar model regarding something else? One reaction is to say, "This never happens." Another reaction is to say, "This would not happen to a Davidson or a Rawls, but it might well happen to someone else if they tried system-building." There is a kind of character - Kathleen Stock?! so sorry to join in the criticism - whom I suspect would be subservient if they met one of these distinguished figures, but are aggressive and highly defensive when they encounter certain others. (I don't think they are motivated by the desire to get recognition for research like yours. No idea what motivates them: a bizarre drive to maintain hierarchy?)

The economist Kenneth Arrow's "Some Ordinalist-Utilitarian Notes on Rawls's Theory of Justice by John Rawls" was published in May 1973 in The Journal of Philosophy. At one point, Arrow discusses the priority Rawls gives to his liberty principle. He tells us that the definitive argument for this priority is given late in Rawls's book. He quotes the argument, describes it as clearly empirical, and says, "the reader can decide for himself how much weight it will bear." Now the legal philosopher H.L.A. Hart's "Rawls on Liberty and Its Priority" was published in 1973: issue 3 of The University of Chicago Law Review, a Spring issue. It focuses heavily on the liberty principle, claiming it has not received the detailed attention it merits, and explains in some detail why Rawls's prioritization of it is inadequately argued for. What are we to make of this large contrast in approach to Rawls's argument for the priority of liberty? Before checking the dates, I supposed what happened was this: Hart read Arrow and thought, "I am going to go for exactly what you think is not worth going for." Despite the proximity in publication date, I find it a bit difficult to give up on this amusing supposition. Whether the supposition is true or not, Arrow should be careful of what he expects from the reader. Remember that The Journal of Philosophy is not chiefly for the empirically-minded. (Arrow himself complains early on in his article about the elementary errors about the economy made by philosophers, raising a question of consistency when he expects the reader to decide on the empirical matter. By the way, as I understand the world, such a complaint is likely to result in a much more erroneous figure as the philosopher whom economists must interact with.)

Forgive forgive, a terrible day, a day of father figures. As I understand it, Frege's puzzle is this. A=A is uninformative. A=B is informative. But how can we account for this informativeness if we maintain (as Mill did) that the contribution a name makes to the meaning of a sentence is determined solely by what it refers to? GIven that A and B mean the same thing, the information value should be the same as rightly saying, "A=A." Let's take Phosphorus (the morning star) and Hesperus (the evening star) as our example. Astronomers discovered that they are the same, i.e. Phosphorus is Hesperus. (Also it is not a star; it is the planet Venus. Venus, named after the goddess of beauty, was once thought to be a star.) Now imagine a pictorial writing language. The symbol for Phosphorus is a morning scene, with the "star." The symbol for Hesperus is an evening scene (with the "star"). We can maintain what Mill did. (We can be Millian-heirs, as they say.) The contribution of these symbols to the meaning of the identity sentence is determined solely by what they refer to. Now the same proposition can be expressed in different languages (at least for some propositions). For simplicity, the meaning of a sentence is the proposition expressed. But owing to the pictorial symbols used in this writing language, one can extract some information which is not within the proposition expressed. One thinks: the best explanation for these symbols in the sentence is that one and the same body - one and the same object of reference - has two very different appearances, the one conveyed by the morning scene symbol and the one conveyed by the evening scene symbol.

According to Thomas Kuhn, new natural scientists undergo a process of initiation where they learn to perceive the world differently. Does Kuhn’s claim or something analogous apply beyond natural science? I propose that Davidson has written his much-cited response to Kuhn as a test. What will philosophers latch onto, in this busy paper? Is there a training one undergoes where one learns to ignore some material and focus on other material? That is how it seemed to me at the University of Manchester. I propose at University College London the focus is elsewhere.

Donald Davidson argues against the claim that two radically different belief systems both cope with the data of experience. First, he asserts that "coping with the data" is another way of saying being true. Then he argues that we cannot make sense of two radically different belief systems both being true. Here I shall dispute the first part of his response. Let us simplify and say that there are five pieces of data. A belief system counts as coping with the data if there is only one challenging piece of data for it, or else if there are no challenges whatsoever. Why allow for one? Well, the standard we set for coping would be too high otherwise: all belief systems have some recalcitrant data. But then one cannot say that "coping with the data" is another way of saying being true. For all we know, extreme revisions are required to move from 4 out of 5 to 5 out of 5.

There is a distinction in psychiatry between legitimate and illegitimate paranoia. Illegitimate paranoia is unjustified. (You may have good evidence that your phone is hacked and then you are legitimately paranoid.) This definition makes use of the concept of justification. This a murky concept. You can try to clarify it. A well-known alternative approach (maybe not the best but by many lights the most beautiful) is to use Nozick's tracking conditions. These are Nozick's conditions for knowing a proposition: (1) the proposition believed is true; (2) the subject believes the proposition; (3) if the proposition were false, the subject would not believe it; and (4) if the proposition were true, the subject would believe it. The third and fourth conditions specify tracking conditions. Using (3), you can try this: illegitimate paranoia is "robust." Let's grant that the paranoid proposition is true (e.g. your phone has indeed been hacked). But even if the proposition were false, the subject would believe it.

I was in a dormitory in North Manchester General Hospital in October 2023, if dormitory be the right term. I had one bed and a curtain to cover my space. A man also in the dormitory had another bed. I had my light on late in the night. The light shines into his space. He told me to turn it off. I did not. He told me again. I did not. He could not sleep. How is Rawls going to resolve a dispute like this? There is my right to light (in this case artificial light) and the other's right to have sufficient darkness to sleep. We can adapt Rawls's original position thought experiment. There are two options. Right to light has priority or right to sufficient darkness for nighttime slumber has priority. You do not know what your preferences are. How are you going to make a decision between the options. "No, the Rawlsian is sure to find a way to prioritize the right to sufficient darkness to sleep." How? Is he going to assume that a human being prefers to sleep at night? He does not include a natural sleep pattern (!) amongst the primary goods which all individuals are assumed to want. "He can add it in this adapted version." Hart is right that Rawls cannot get results without appealing to a specific temperament. Robert Paul Wolff is right that Rawls has a bias towards the typically middle-aged. "If your light affects enough individuals in the dormitory, your right is overridden." That is utilitarianism! (By the way, there seems to be just too much going on in Rawls's thought experiment. You need to work with a simpler situation, like the hospital one. "We will come up with our own one and evade plagiarism rules and get back to you"? Am I illegitimately paranoid psychiatrists or does it happen? You would have know the field well and what happens between fields as well.)

Here is a question: "When Jacques Derrida was proposed for an honorary degree by the University of Cambridge, a scandal resulted. There were protests, a letter was sent to The Times. He was charged with writing unintelligibly. The anthropologist Marilyn Strathern is based in that university and has received several honorary degrees, such as from Harvard. But sometimes pages and pages of what she writes cannot be made sense of by intelligent and dedicated readers. Why the difference in reception? Is it merely because he is French?" I can think of another explanation, based on my experiences of reading Strathern. When she has something she thinks is very valuable for readers (or a wider readership), she signals it. In After Nature, she puts her facts of English kinship in italics. She effectively tells readers when to wake up! Also she does not make unusual use of her main premises, making it easy to reliably guess her argument. I have not read Property, Substance, and Effect carefully. I could not make much sense of the material I read. But it is clear she wishes to draw a contrast between an anthropologist fieldworker with a blank notebook who can write down all kinds of information (anything interesting), and a more structured inquiry with a set of questions and even specified possible answers. Unless you have autism or are from a very different background, you can work out an unsurprising use for this contrast: to argue that the anthropologist is better equipped to deal with societies which don't fit with one's preconceptions. "What I read about before doing fieldwork is theme B and I expected to pursue that here but the big issue here is theme A." (I guess my value for the psychiatrist is basically not over whether I have had hallucinations!) I presume Derrida's later texts are just not like Strathern's in having these two qualities: at least one is lacking. So even if Strathern has pages which few if any understand and so does Derrida, it is just very different.

I have already responded to the following quotation from Sebastian Gardner's paper "Splitting the Subject: An Overview of Sartre, Lacan and Derrida": '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." ' I have rejected his account of philosophy of science. Here I want to challenge his account of analytic philosophy of mind. Freud is taken in a variety of ways by a variety of analytic philosophers (I think). One philosopher focuses on one theme, another philosopher on another. For example, Stuart Hampshire engages with the view that in light of Freud on the nature of our minds, we should say that we are not free; Donald Davidson considers whether we can defend asserting that there are two mental systems in one person (more broadly, whether the mind is divisible); Ståle Gundersen (2023) considers what sort of mind-brain identity theory Freud is committed to. One might protest that Gundersen wrote after Gardner, but if Gardner is somehow right about his time and discussion of Freud's mind-brain identity theory is outside the orthodoxy of that time, it is such a fragile orthodoxy! Is it even worth describing as such or is it just a pattern of response?

There are two videos I have seen for this song. In the video which I have in mind (described as an official video reworked on Youtube), the Latino singer Gloria Estefan is invited home by a wholesome blonde white man (or boy). She refuses, saying that she wants to go for a walk. She then goes for a walk by herself in a shady part of the city (are you even allowed to do this?) and meets some "cat people." She takes an especial liking to a grey cat boy. He puts his arm around her. He seems dangerous, but she describes herself as feeling safe in her song, when he drives her home at night. The police whistle blows and all the cat people leave. Why does she say that he makes her feel safe? I think I know what is going on. Here is a subversive interpretation of the video which accounts for the strangeness. The white man appears to have left Gloria Estefan to walk alone, but he has actually then dressed up as the grey cat boy and got his friends to dress up as fellow cat people and encountered her in the alley. If the white man is not dangerous, then the grey cat boy and his friends are not dangerous. Gloria Estefan was looking for real danger, not this simulacrum.