http://www.goodreads.com/review/list_rss/22752 en-US Tue, 15 Jul 2008 01:21:49 -0700 60 http://www.goodreads.com/ 200 41 http://www.goodreads.com/images/layout/gr_logo.gif 27284806 Tue, 15 Jul 2008 01:21:49 -0700
The book does convey the remarkable dreariness and shabbiness of everyday Britain. What makes for the particular kind of British ugliness? Small buildings with flat roofs, sweaty concrete, trash, overly vivid colors, jarring side-by-side placement of incongruous architectural styles.

The presentation of the material is ambiguous--the subtitle of the book is "A Celebration of Real Life", but the photos make that nearly impossible. Though the appreciation of the banal has no lower limit, and I can almost imagine cultivating a Nietzschean transvaluation of aesthetic value where these scenes actually become pleasurable to look at. The book consists of short thematic introductions to different characteristics of British life, and then quotes submitted by visitors to the traveling "Caravan Gallery" that was the inspiration for the book. The quotes are roughly divided into responses to the prompts "What's great about Britain?" or "What's not so great about Britain?" Responses to the "What's great" question usually have some kind of unmissably ironic photographic illustration. For example, next to the response, "The green parts" to the question "What's great about Britain", there's a full-page picture of a green algae-covered bit of murky water on which float soccer balls, plastic bottles and other detritus.

One completely successful feature of this book is its resoluteness--it would be possible to prettify all of these ugly objects and scenes with some competent camera technique, but the photos have the aesthetic qualities of inept snapshots, which makes the subject matter the only thing you can think about. ]]>
author: Jan Williams
name: Nat
average rating: 3.00
book published: 2005
rating: 3
read at: 07/08
date added: 07/15/08
shelves:
review:
This is a collection of the "bas banal" (in contrast with the "haute banal"), a fascination with the shabby, the blighted, the irredeemably ugly: dogs in brown tracksuits, discount underwear being sold in open-air markets, people passed out face-down on the ground, people feeding armies of pigeons, closed gas stations, churches turned into discount stores, dead conifers, knocked over plastic chairs, off-brand fast food chicken, pornographic lawn ornaments, crude graffiti, unappetizing fish and chips, tanning salons, garbage in bodies of water, window displays of wigs and phone cards, old people line-dancing, and girls out on hen nights.

The book does convey the remarkable dreariness and shabbiness of everyday Britain. What makes for the particular kind of British ugliness? Small buildings with flat roofs, sweaty concrete, trash, overly vivid colors, jarring side-by-side placement of incongruous architectural styles.

The presentation of the material is ambiguous--the subtitle of the book is "A Celebration of Real Life", but the photos make that nearly impossible. Though the appreciation of the banal has no lower limit, and I can almost imagine cultivating a Nietzschean transvaluation of aesthetic value where these scenes actually become pleasurable to look at. The book consists of short thematic introductions to different characteristics of British life, and then quotes submitted by visitors to the traveling "Caravan Gallery" that was the inspiration for the book. The quotes are roughly divided into responses to the prompts "What's great about Britain?" or "What's not so great about Britain?" Responses to the "What's great" question usually have some kind of unmissably ironic photographic illustration. For example, next to the response, "The green parts" to the question "What's great about Britain", there's a full-page picture of a green algae-covered bit of murky water on which float soccer balls, plastic bottles and other detritus.

One completely successful feature of this book is its resoluteness--it would be possible to prettify all of these ugly objects and scenes with some competent camera technique, but the photos have the aesthetic qualities of inept snapshots, which makes the subject matter the only thing you can think about.
]]> 27285234 Mon, 14 Jul 2008 23:36:22 -0700
author: Martin Parr
name: Nat
average rating: 4.80
book published: 2004
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 07/14/08
shelves:
review:

]]> 27243643 Mon, 14 Jul 2008 22:28:02 -0700
Similarly, the kind of philosophizing Thompson engages in is deep, in that a casual read through doesn't touch the bottom of what's going on. There's also a sense (at least the sense I had in reading him) that what Thompson is doing is fecund, that it is just waiting to be applied to other areas of philosophy. For example, his discussion touches on issues of generic and dispositional statements that clearly apply to related discussions in philosophy of language.

The basic contention of the book is that there are distinctive logical forms involved in statements about animal life, about action, and about practices. A sentence like "The domestic house cat has four legs" might express any of the following propositions:

1. Some particular house cat currently has four legs. (Such a statement might be false if Tibbles the house cat has just suffered a terrible accident in which she lost a leg.)
2. Some particular house cat has, in virtue of being the kind of animal it is, four legs. (Such a statement would not be made false by Tibbles having suffered a terrible accident in which she lost a leg.)
3. A particular kind of animal, the domestic house cat, has four legs. (This statement is about a kind, not about a particular animal. And it says that that kind of animal has, in virtue of the kind of animal it is (it's "form") four legs. The existence of house cats with only three legs doesn't make this kind of statement false.)

The idea that there are distinct logical forms at work in those statements goes beyond the standard version of that view, which would try to find some ambiguity in one or more of the expressions that compose the sentence (though there will be ambiguities, in the definite description, for example). Instead, there is a different form of predication, a different "nexus" in those statements. That presents a deep challenge to standard semantic treatments of these phenomena, and points towards a novel approach to certain contextualist debates. ]]>
author: Michael Thompson
name: Nat
average rating: 4.00
book published: 2008
rating: 4
read at: 07/08
date added: 07/14/08
shelves:
review:
Thompson is a member of a group of contemporary philosophers (which includes Mark Wilson, Charles Travis, Stanley Cavell, and Jim Conant) with a distinctive, unorthodox, anti-philosophical-establishment literary style. Thompson's style flows around typical impediments to the movement of philosophical prose. Engagement with opposing views doesn't take the form of carefully listing presuppositions and conclusions, and then knocking down one or more of the former. Thompson's approach exhibits a kind of aerial point of view, which enables him to deal with potential opponents by locating them on his expanded map and then moving around them, without having to battle it out with them (though he scores points against a range of serious philosophers in passing).

Similarly, the kind of philosophizing Thompson engages in is deep, in that a casual read through doesn't touch the bottom of what's going on. There's also a sense (at least the sense I had in reading him) that what Thompson is doing is fecund, that it is just waiting to be applied to other areas of philosophy. For example, his discussion touches on issues of generic and dispositional statements that clearly apply to related discussions in philosophy of language.

The basic contention of the book is that there are distinctive logical forms involved in statements about animal life, about action, and about practices. A sentence like "The domestic house cat has four legs" might express any of the following propositions:

1. Some particular house cat currently has four legs. (Such a statement might be false if Tibbles the house cat has just suffered a terrible accident in which she lost a leg.)
2. Some particular house cat has, in virtue of being the kind of animal it is, four legs. (Such a statement would not be made false by Tibbles having suffered a terrible accident in which she lost a leg.)
3. A particular kind of animal, the domestic house cat, has four legs. (This statement is about a kind, not about a particular animal. And it says that that kind of animal has, in virtue of the kind of animal it is (it's "form") four legs. The existence of house cats with only three legs doesn't make this kind of statement false.)

The idea that there are distinct logical forms at work in those statements goes beyond the standard version of that view, which would try to find some ambiguity in one or more of the expressions that compose the sentence (though there will be ambiguities, in the definite description, for example). Instead, there is a different form of predication, a different "nexus" in those statements. That presents a deep challenge to standard semantic treatments of these phenomena, and points towards a novel approach to certain contextualist debates.
]]> 5488743 Tue, 01 Jul 2008 18:53:11 -0700
]]>
author: Steve Bogira
name: Nat
average rating: 3.97
book published: 2006
rating: 3
read at: 10/07
date added: 07/01/08
shelves:
review:
Lessons: the whole justice system is geared towards encouraging plea bargains. There has been unbelievable corruption in Chicago courts. It's hard to convince judges that prisoners are tortured by police. Drug cases flood the courts. Detectives often don't report evidence that suggests those they are investigating are innocent. The criminal legal system is a whirlwind of nastiness.


]]> 25437039 Thu, 26 Jun 2008 22:32:24 -0700 for. Pustejovsky says letters are for reading.

But maybe I send you letters with the understanding that you will burn them. Or maybe someone sends a letter covered in poison, where it's telos is to make someone ill. That kind of concern recurs whenever specific claims about the meaning of terms are made. Is the telos of a door "walk_through" (as it is put in the formalism of the theory)? When these meanings are composed, they produce different meanings for expressions like "open the door" and "open the letter", but the tendentiousness of the telos of "door" is reproduced in the composed phrase. So part of the meaning of "open the door" is that the door is opened so that it can be walked through. But in Oxford colleges, there are little doors, meant to be walked through, embedded in gigantic doors that when opened, allow cars to pass through. Does that mean that the meaning of "open the door" is different for the car-sized door? I'm not sure.

But the overall approach is fruitful and pretty exciting. It gives some substance to the idea that a lot of people have that when you start sticking words together, their meaning changes, but it does so while preserving compositionality. It also contains a very useful discussion of kinds of ambiguity and polysemy. ]]>
author: James Pustejovsky
name: Nat
average rating: 4.00
book published: 1998
rating: 4
read at: 06/08
date added: 06/26/08
shelves:
review:
This book is a refreshing taste of lexical semantics after a hot dry spell of orthodox truth-conditional semantics. And that's even when some of the claims about meaning in here seem a little off the mark. For example, each lexical entry (for a word like "letter"--the kind you send in the mail) is a complex, four-level structure that goes far beyond just the normal semantic type and selectional restrictions. In addition to semantic type, it includes event structure, qualia structure (which is where things like the semantic markers in Katz's theories appear), and some transformation rules. So, "letter" includes, in its qualia structure, among other things, a TELIC role that letters play. That is, the meaning of "letter" includes what letters are for. Pustejovsky says letters are for reading.

But maybe I send you letters with the understanding that you will burn them. Or maybe someone sends a letter covered in poison, where it's telos is to make someone ill. That kind of concern recurs whenever specific claims about the meaning of terms are made. Is the telos of a door "walk_through" (as it is put in the formalism of the theory)? When these meanings are composed, they produce different meanings for expressions like "open the door" and "open the letter", but the tendentiousness of the telos of "door" is reproduced in the composed phrase. So part of the meaning of "open the door" is that the door is opened so that it can be walked through. But in Oxford colleges, there are little doors, meant to be walked through, embedded in gigantic doors that when opened, allow cars to pass through. Does that mean that the meaning of "open the door" is different for the car-sized door? I'm not sure.

But the overall approach is fruitful and pretty exciting. It gives some substance to the idea that a lot of people have that when you start sticking words together, their meaning changes, but it does so while preserving compositionality. It also contains a very useful discussion of kinds of ambiguity and polysemy.
]]> 24002982 Mon, 16 Jun 2008 13:24:46 -0700
There is no attempt here to give a philosophical account of modern architecture--treating it as "becoming self-conscious" or being "concerned with the conditions of its own possibility" or anything like that. That means there is no attempt to understand modernism from the inside, which might come across as sheer obnoxiousness. But it will come across that way only if you're so in love with modernism that you can't stand to see it criticized. ]]>
author: Tom Wolfe
name: Nat
average rating: 3.63
book published: 1999
rating: 4
read at: 06/08
date added: 06/16/08
shelves:
review:
Wolfe likes exuberance. He doesn't like restraint and purity. So he criticizes early and mid-century modern architecture and applauds those who resisted the glass box in favor of expressive and exuberant designs--like Eero Saarinen. Wolfe's most interesting claim is that the motivation for architectural modernism was despair after the first world war and the desire to create a new society from scratch, since the old one had been destroyed. But that rationale made no sense in America, which was unscathed, and didn't need to be rebuilt from scratch.

There is no attempt here to give a philosophical account of modern architecture--treating it as "becoming self-conscious" or being "concerned with the conditions of its own possibility" or anything like that. That means there is no attempt to understand modernism from the inside, which might come across as sheer obnoxiousness. But it will come across that way only if you're so in love with modernism that you can't stand to see it criticized.
]]> 24567778 Sun, 15 Jun 2008 18:07:54 -0700
It consists of snippets of interviews with the beasties and co. spliced up and fairly cleverly intercut with one another. Most of the info is fortunately from the much more interesting early party years and the Paul's Boutique era. ]]>
author: Alan Light
name: Nat
average rating: 4.67
book published: 2006
rating: 4
read at: 06/08
date added: 06/15/08
shelves:
review:
This book flows like a mud slide.

It consists of snippets of interviews with the beasties and co. spliced up and fairly cleverly intercut with one another. Most of the info is fortunately from the much more interesting early party years and the Paul's Boutique era.
]]> 24002903 Sun, 08 Jun 2008 14:01:14 -0700
author: Hilla Becher
name: Nat
average rating: 3.00
book published: 1995
rating: 3
read at:
date added: 06/08/08
shelves:
review:
Not as exciting as the grain elevators or blast furnaces.
]]> 21240402 Thu, 08 May 2008 10:05:06 -0700
That's a fascinating idea, but I got bogged down in early chapters of the book where Hauser tries to distinguish different traditional models of moral thought: a Kantian model, a Humean model, and a Rawlsian model. ]]>
author: Marc Hauser
name: Nat
average rating: 2.43
book published: 2007
rating: 0
read at: 05/08
date added: 05/08/08
shelves: readpartof
review:
This book approaches the study of morality with the methodology of generative grammar. Moral knowledge appears to display the same systematic variation and continuity across individuals and cultures that is found in language, and develops, as language does, without explicit instruction. That suggests that moral knowledge is largely innate, with some general principles known by all human beings, and variation explained in terms of values of parameters set by differences in experience.

That's a fascinating idea, but I got bogged down in early chapters of the book where Hauser tries to distinguish different traditional models of moral thought: a Kantian model, a Humean model, and a Rawlsian model.
]]> 16005950 Wed, 23 Apr 2008 12:14:35 -0700 ]]>
author: Parag Khanna
name: Nat
average rating: 3.95
book published: 2008
rating: 5
read at: 04/08
date added: 04/23/08
shelves:
review:
My good friend Parag wrote this whirlwind study of geopolitics. No armchair theorist, he pontificates from the ground up, after traveling all over the place and talking to everyone he could find.

]]> 17589876 Mon, 31 Mar 2008 17:54:09 -0700 Goodbye to All That. Graves's account is comic and ironic, while Jünger's writing is almost completely dispassionate, even while describing his friends being torn to shreds by British artillery and sniper fire--an example of the so-called Neue Sachlichkeit applied to trench warfare. It's hard not to see the difference as an expression of a difference in national character between the English and Germans.

Jünger's absurdly good luck and fighting skill gets the same kind of cool, detached description as the variety of different kinds of soil he encounters in trenches across France and Belgium: trenches are dug out of chalk, gravel, mud, fossilized shellfish, clay and marl, depending on the region; Jünger is wounded fourteen times, "these being five bullets, two shell splinters, one shrapnel ball, four hand-grenade splinters and two bullet splinters" (p. 288). He repeatedly volunteers to crawl over to British and French trenches to engage in all kinds of mayhem--cutting wire, tossing grenades, trying to take prisoners. He leads one assault after another through curtains of artillery shells (both from the British and from his own batteries), machinegun and sniper fire, and all variety of trench mortars, rifle-grenades, and aerial bombardment. Over the course of the book, he is awarded increasingly impressive medals for bravery: the Iron Cross, 1st class; the Knight's Cross; and on the final page of the book, the Orden Pour Le Merite.

Jünger doesn't refrain from describing the full variety of injuries that soldiers suffer on the modern battlefield. The neck, eyes, forhead, hands, fingers and thighs seem to receive a disproportionate amount of attention from bullets and shrapnel.

There are a few moments of intentional levity, including a complex prank involving 17 hunchbacked residents of the Belgian town of Langemarck and a dispute over some inheritance, and the author being ejected, unharmed, from a runaway, stolen "glass coach" when it runs into a tree. There are also moments that are unintentionally amusing, as when Jünger describes nearly being shot by a careless friend playing around with his own revolver as "irritating".

The book isn't overwhelmingly gruesome. Nearly half of the book consists of Jünger describing everyday life in the trenches---what he is reading, the delights of an unexpectedly good meal, enjoying his pipe, watching the sun set over enemy lines, devising new ways of killing rats, and so on.

The one quasi-philosophical moment in the book is on page p.241: "The state, which relieves us of our responsibility, cannot take away our remorse". I wonder: is remorse without responsibility possible? ]]>
author: Ernst Jünger
name: Nat
average rating: 4.28
book published: 2004
rating: 5
read at: 03/08
date added: 03/31/08
shelves:
review:
Jünger's account of the brutal fighting on the western front in WWI makes an enlightening contrast with Robert Graves's Goodbye to All That. Graves's account is comic and ironic, while Jünger's writing is almost completely dispassionate, even while describing his friends being torn to shreds by British artillery and sniper fire--an example of the so-called Neue Sachlichkeit applied to trench warfare. It's hard not to see the difference as an expression of a difference in national character between the English and Germans.

Jünger's absurdly good luck and fighting skill gets the same kind of cool, detached description as the variety of different kinds of soil he encounters in trenches across France and Belgium: trenches are dug out of chalk, gravel, mud, fossilized shellfish, clay and marl, depending on the region; Jünger is wounded fourteen times, "these being five bullets, two shell splinters, one shrapnel ball, four hand-grenade splinters and two bullet splinters" (p. 288). He repeatedly volunteers to crawl over to British and French trenches to engage in all kinds of mayhem--cutting wire, tossing grenades, trying to take prisoners. He leads one assault after another through curtains of artillery shells (both from the British and from his own batteries), machinegun and sniper fire, and all variety of trench mortars, rifle-grenades, and aerial bombardment. Over the course of the book, he is awarded increasingly impressive medals for bravery: the Iron Cross, 1st class; the Knight's Cross; and on the final page of the book, the Orden Pour Le Merite.

Jünger doesn't refrain from describing the full variety of injuries that soldiers suffer on the modern battlefield. The neck, eyes, forhead, hands, fingers and thighs seem to receive a disproportionate amount of attention from bullets and shrapnel.

There are a few moments of intentional levity, including a complex prank involving 17 hunchbacked residents of the Belgian town of Langemarck and a dispute over some inheritance, and the author being ejected, unharmed, from a runaway, stolen "glass coach" when it runs into a tree. There are also moments that are unintentionally amusing, as when Jünger describes nearly being shot by a careless friend playing around with his own revolver as "irritating".

The book isn't overwhelmingly gruesome. Nearly half of the book consists of Jünger describing everyday life in the trenches---what he is reading, the delights of an unexpectedly good meal, enjoying his pipe, watching the sun set over enemy lines, devising new ways of killing rats, and so on.

The one quasi-philosophical moment in the book is on page p.241: "The state, which relieves us of our responsibility, cannot take away our remorse". I wonder: is remorse without responsibility possible?
]]> 18066640 Tue, 18 Mar 2008 21:08:44 -0700
Along the way you get informative sketches of major 20th century economists and game theorists and their theories.

I was most impressed by the explanation of why small scale rational decisions made by individuals can lead to large-scale problems like extreme racial and class segregation in cities. For discussion of this point, see chapter 5, which begins with Harford trying to decide where to live in Washington, DC, and being told by his minder at the World Bank not to live east of 16th street!

One statistic that stood out: each year a married woman delays having kids, her lifetime earnings go up 10% (chapter 3).

This book is further proof (as if more was needed) that having things explained is incredibly enjoyable, and incomparably better than the refusal to offer explanations in the face of what seems like overwhelming complexity. ]]>
author: Tim Harford
name: Nat
average rating: 3.73
book published: 2008
rating: 4
read at: 03/08
date added: 03/18/08
shelves:
review:
The explanatory ambition of this book is stunning--Harford offers rational actor explanations of changes in sexual activity, racial segregation in cities, professional poker, the number of people in parks at different times of day, the productivity of cities, the industrial revolution, colonization, and even why human beings eventually triumphed over neanderthals!

Along the way you get informative sketches of major 20th century economists and game theorists and their theories.

I was most impressed by the explanation of why small scale rational decisions made by individuals can lead to large-scale problems like extreme racial and class segregation in cities. For discussion of this point, see chapter 5, which begins with Harford trying to decide where to live in Washington, DC, and being told by his minder at the World Bank not to live east of 16th street!

One statistic that stood out: each year a married woman delays having kids, her lifetime earnings go up 10% (chapter 3).

This book is further proof (as if more was needed) that having things explained is incredibly enjoyable, and incomparably better than the refusal to offer explanations in the face of what seems like overwhelming complexity.
]]> 16220103 Tue, 04 Mar 2008 05:57:48 -0800
The flashbacks are solid descriptions of fighting in Vietnam, describing helicopter operations, clearing tunnels, calling in artillery on a village, and so on. The chase is half-heartedly fanciful, never really rising to Pynchonian weirdness. The platoon finds a trail of M&Ms in the jungle; they drive an Impala from Tehran to Izmir and get shot at by Iranian tanks, etc.

Berlin's worries aren't unusual: whether fighting the war is pointless, whether he can recognize evil when he sees it, and so on.

Michael Lynch recommends this in True to Life as a meditation on self-knowledge. ]]>
author: Tim O'Brien
name: Nat
average rating: 3.85
book published: 1978
rating: 3
read at: 03/08
date added: 03/04/08
shelves:
review:
The center of this story is Spec 4 Paul Berlin, an infantryman in Vietnam who is (unsurprisingly) ambivalent about the war and his role in it. There are three different intersecting timelines: the real elapsed time in the book seems to be one night that Berlin spends on watch in an observation post near the ocean. A large chunk of the book consists in flashbacks to the combat deaths of half a dozen or so of Berlin's platoon mates. The rest is Berlin imagining a cross-continental chase of Cacciato, who has deserted.

The flashbacks are solid descriptions of fighting in Vietnam, describing helicopter operations, clearing tunnels, calling in artillery on a village, and so on. The chase is half-heartedly fanciful, never really rising to Pynchonian weirdness. The platoon finds a trail of M&Ms in the jungle; they drive an Impala from Tehran to Izmir and get shot at by Iranian tanks, etc.

Berlin's worries aren't unusual: whether fighting the war is pointless, whether he can recognize evil when he sees it, and so on.

Michael Lynch recommends this in True to Life as a meditation on self-knowledge.
]]> 14010290 Thu, 21 Feb 2008 21:03:56 -0800
Also, there's a Bas van Fraassen essay on personal identity that talks about "The Nonexistent Knight". He claims that it makes sense to say that Agilulf (the nonexistent knight) is not a thing, but that he exists in virtue of his "manifestations" (his armor, his sword, his actions). Van Fraassen also talks about what he calls the "Gurdaloo problem" (Gurdaloo being the nonexistent knight's squire). Gurdaloo doesn't distinguish himself from the surrounding environment. The Gurdaloo problem is working out what distinguishes the self from the surrounding environment. ]]>
author: Italo Calvino
name: Nat
average rating: 3.94
book published: 1977
rating: 3
read at: 02/08
date added: 02/21/08
shelves:
review:
I read this because "The Cloven Viscount" was mentioned by the keynote speaker at a philosophy conference last year in relation to me and a certain friend of mine. He said that we reminded him of the cloven viscount of the story. I don't know what to make of that comparison--in the story, the bad half of the Viscount causes all kinds of unnecessary havoc. Maybe the speaker was making a point about the fact that we were being rowdy and disrespectful. I'm not sure.

Also, there's a Bas van Fraassen essay on personal identity that talks about "The Nonexistent Knight". He claims that it makes sense to say that Agilulf (the nonexistent knight) is not a thing, but that he exists in virtue of his "manifestations" (his armor, his sword, his actions). Van Fraassen also talks about what he calls the "Gurdaloo problem" (Gurdaloo being the nonexistent knight's squire). Gurdaloo doesn't distinguish himself from the surrounding environment. The Gurdaloo problem is working out what distinguishes the self from the surrounding environment.
]]> 14237238 Thu, 31 Jan 2008 20:58:49 -0800
author: Jerrold J Katz
name: Nat
average rating: 0.00
book published: 1972
rating: 0
read at: 02/08
date added: 01/31/08
shelves: readpartof
review:

]]> 13806748 Thu, 31 Jan 2008 20:58:20 -0800
There's a companion volume that deals with technical issues in Davidsonian semantics.


]]>
author: Ernest Lepore
name: Nat
average rating: 4.00
book published: 2007
rating: 4
read at: 01/08
date added: 01/31/08
shelves: readpartof
review:
This is a very good, comprehensive account of Davidson's approach to meaning and truth. I read the first half, which explains his use of Tarski's theory of truth as a theory of meaning for natural language. The second half is on radical translation and Davidson's triangulation business. The first half contains an intelligible explanation of how the different things Davidson says he's up to in different places fit together.

There's a companion volume that deals with technical issues in Davidsonian semantics.



]]> 13230826 Tue, 29 Jan 2008 19:44:23 -0800 Truth: A Guide, Michael Lynch's True to Life, and Ian Hacking's The Social Construction of What. Boghossian's contribution is the most austerely philosophical, focusing on raw argument rather than diagnosis or explaining the motivations for relativism or constructivism. That makes the book wonderfully short (you can easily read it on a flight from coast to coast) and the arguments punchy. But it also means that explanation of the title issue, the "fear of knowledge", gets confined to three page epilogue, and isn't very compelling. Why is relativism, even the most implausible, factual variety, so weirdly compelling? Boghossian says that relativism is the dominant outlook in all academic disciplines except philosophy, but I think it has a significant, if shadowy, following throughout philosophy. Radical contextualists in the philosophy of language adhere to some mildly concealed form of relativism about facts. According to Boghossian, the explanation for the appeal of relativism is mainly just confusion and belief in bad arguments. That hardly seems adequate.

I do like Boghossian's improved argument against relativism about truth. The traditional argument is that the relativist faces a dilemma: either the claim that the truth of all claims is relative to some point of view is itself relative to some point of view, or it's not. If it's not, then the relativist has an inconsistent view. If it is, then there's nothing to recommend the relativist's view over the view that not all claims are relative to some point of view. Boghossian's version of the argument generates a regress for the relativist who embraces the second horn, and then claims that the regress is vicious--no one could grasp the content of any claim if relativism were true. But I don't see why grasping the content of a claim requires grasping the content of the claim that the first claim is relative to some point of view. If the relativist insists that that's not required, then the regress doesn't mean that the truth of relativism makes it impossible to grasp the content of any claims. ]]>
author: Paul Boghossian
name: Nat
average rating: 4.00
book published: 2007
rating: 4
read at: 01/08
date added: 01/29/08
shelves:
review:
This books is part of the recent wave of anti-relativist, anti-constructivist, anti-pomo works by philosophers aimed at a general audience. Other examples of the genre include Simon Blackburn's Truth: A Guide, Michael Lynch's True to Life, and Ian Hacking's The Social Construction of What. Boghossian's contribution is the most austerely philosophical, focusing on raw argument rather than diagnosis or explaining the motivations for relativism or constructivism. That makes the book wonderfully short (you can easily read it on a flight from coast to coast) and the arguments punchy. But it also means that explanation of the title issue, the "fear of knowledge", gets confined to three page epilogue, and isn't very compelling. Why is relativism, even the most implausible, factual variety, so weirdly compelling? Boghossian says that relativism is the dominant outlook in all academic disciplines except philosophy, but I think it has a significant, if shadowy, following throughout philosophy. Radical contextualists in the philosophy of language adhere to some mildly concealed form of relativism about facts. According to Boghossian, the explanation for the appeal of relativism is mainly just confusion and belief in bad arguments. That hardly seems adequate.

I do like Boghossian's improved argument against relativism about truth. The traditional argument is that the relativist faces a dilemma: either the claim that the truth of all claims is relative to some point of view is itself relative to some point of view, or it's not. If it's not, then the relativist has an inconsistent view. If it is, then there's nothing to recommend the relativist's view over the view that not all claims are relative to some point of view. Boghossian's version of the argument generates a regress for the relativist who embraces the second horn, and then claims that the regress is vicious--no one could grasp the content of any claim if relativism were true. But I don't see why grasping the content of a claim requires grasping the content of the claim that the first claim is relative to some point of view. If the relativist insists that that's not required, then the regress doesn't mean that the truth of relativism makes it impossible to grasp the content of any claims.
]]> 11092158 Mon, 28 Jan 2008 16:08:17 -0800 here). I recommend watching that rather than reading the book, though the book is perfectly entertaining and enjoyable. Ronson comes across as more agreeable and objective on screen. In print he can read like a snarky jerk who thinks his interviewees are lunatics. Admittedly, the military intelligence guys he interviews are very odd. ]]>
author: Jon Ronson
name: Nat
average rating: 3.81
book published: 2006
rating: 3
read at: 12/07
date added: 01/28/08
shelves:
review:
There's a three part documentary that Ronson made available on google video. (The first segment is here). I recommend watching that rather than reading the book, though the book is perfectly entertaining and enjoyable. Ronson comes across as more agreeable and objective on screen. In print he can read like a snarky jerk who thinks his interviewees are lunatics. Admittedly, the military intelligence guys he interviews are very odd.
]]> 9690036 Thu, 27 Dec 2007 11:16:17 -0800
The contemporary view of blunders is that they're valuable evidence for linguistics and cognitive science. By studying the breakdown of cognitive operations, we can better understand their normal functioning. The author notes that Arnold Zwicky (a famous linguist and contributor to Language Log) teaches a class based on verbal mistakes, which sounds like a fantastic idea.

]]>
author: Michael Erard
name: Nat
average rating: 2.96
book published: 2007
rating: 3
read at: 12/07
date added: 12/27/07
shelves:
review:
This is a survey of different attitudes towards a variety of verbal blunders. Verbal blunders include hestitations, like "um" and "uh", starting sentences over (reconstructions), slips of the tongue (Freudian and otherwise), malapropisms ("a nice derangement of epitaphs"), and a variety of other ways of misspeaking. It begins with an account of Freud's approach to slips, and the reaction among his contemporaries. The best historical anecdote in the book is the account of gentlemen of Freud's era appropriating his interest in the psychological significance of verbal slips and tics and deliberately "psyching" everyone they met (doing off the cuff analyses of the significance of a hestitation or the fact that someone does something odd with their hands).

The contemporary view of blunders is that they're valuable evidence for linguistics and cognitive science. By studying the breakdown of cognitive operations, we can better understand their normal functioning. The author notes that Arnold Zwicky (a famous linguist and contributor to Language Log) teaches a class based on verbal mistakes, which sounds like a fantastic idea.


]]> 10724264 Wed, 19 Dec 2007 19:18:51 -0800
author: John MacArthur
name: Nat
average rating: 4.00
book published: 2007
rating: 4
read at: 01/08
date added: 12/19/07
shelves:
review:

]]> 9098816 Mon, 26 Nov 2007 20:11:37 -0800 Goodbye to All That. It begins with Graves's delivery of absurdity in deadpan style:

"Many of the patients at Osborne were neurasthenic and should have been in a special neurasthenic hospital. A.A. Milne was there, as a subaltern in the Royal Warwickshire Regiment, and in his least humorous vein. One Vernon Bartlett, of the Hampshire Regiment, decided with me that something new must be started. So we founded the 'Royal Albert Society', its pretended aim being to revive interest in the life and times of the Prince Consort. My regalia as president consisted of a Scottish dirk, Hessian boots, and and pair of side-whiskers. Official business might not proceed until the announcement had been duly made that 'The whiskers are on the table'. Membership was open only to officers who professed themselves students of the life and works of the Prince Consort; those who had been born in the province of Alberta in Canada; those who had resided for six months or longer by the banks of the Albert Nyanza; those who held the Albert Medal for saving life; or those who were linked with the Prince Consort's memory in any other signal way. This must have been the first of the now popular burlesques of Victorianism. The members were instructed to report at each meeting reminiscences collected from old palace-servants and Osborne cottagers, throwing light on the human side of the Consort's life. We had fifteen members and ate quantities of strawberries".

Then it gets even more absurd:

"On one occasion, a dozen officers came in to join the society, professing to have the necessary qualifications. One claimed to be the grandson of the man who had built the Albert Memorial; one had worked at the Albert Docks; and one actually did possess the Albert Medal for saving life; the others were all interested students. They submitted quietly at first to the ceremonies and business, but it was soon apparent that they had come to break up the society; they were, in fact, most of them drunk. They began giving indecent accounts of the Prince Consort's private life, alleging that they could substantiate them with photographic evidence. Bartlett and I got worried; it was not that sort of society. Therefore, as president, I rose and told in an improved version the story which had won the 1914 Aldershot for the filthiest story of the year. I linked it up with the Prince Consort by saying that he had heard it from the lips of John Brown, the famous Balmoral ghillie, in whose pawky humor Queen Victoria used to find such delight; and that, having prevented him from sleeping for three days and nights, it had been a contributory cause of his premature death. The interrupters threw up their hands, in shocked surrender, and walked out" (pp.253-254). ]]>
author: Robert Graves
name: Nat
average rating: 4.04
book published: 1929
rating: 5
read at: 11/07
date added: 11/26/07
shelves:
review:
What follows is my favorite passage from Goodbye to All That. It begins with Graves's delivery of absurdity in deadpan style:

"Many of the patients at Osborne were neurasthenic and should have been in a special neurasthenic hospital. A.A. Milne was there, as a subaltern in the Royal Warwickshire Regiment, and in his least humorous vein. One Vernon Bartlett, of the Hampshire Regiment, decided with me that something new must be started. So we founded the 'Royal Albert Society', its pretended aim being to revive interest in the life and times of the Prince Consort. My regalia as president consisted of a Scottish dirk, Hessian boots, and and pair of side-whiskers. Official business might not proceed until the announcement had been duly made that 'The whiskers are on the table'. Membership was open only to officers who professed themselves students of the life and works of the Prince Consort; those who had been born in the province of Alberta in Canada; those who had resided for six months or longer by the banks of the Albert Nyanza; those who held the Albert Medal for saving life; or those who were linked with the Prince Consort's memory in any other signal way. This must have been the first of the now popular burlesques of Victorianism. The members were instructed to report at each meeting reminiscences collected from old palace-servants and Osborne cottagers, throwing light on the human side of the Consort's life. We had fifteen members and ate quantities of strawberries".

Then it gets even more absurd:

"On one occasion, a dozen officers came in to join the society, professing to have the necessary qualifications. One claimed to be the grandson of the man who had built the Albert Memorial; one had worked at the Albert Docks; and one actually did possess the Albert Medal for saving life; the others were all interested students. They submitted quietly at first to the ceremonies and business, but it was soon apparent that they had come to break up the society; they were, in fact, most of them drunk. They began giving indecent accounts of the Prince Consort's private life, alleging that they could substantiate them with photographic evidence. Bartlett and I got worried; it was not that sort of society. Therefore, as president, I rose and told in an improved version the story which had won the 1914 Aldershot for the filthiest story of the year. I linked it up with the Prince Consort by saying that he had heard it from the lips of John Brown, the famous Balmoral ghillie, in whose pawky humor Queen Victoria used to find such delight; and that, having prevented him from sleeping for three days and nights, it had been a contributory cause of his premature death. The interrupters threw up their hands, in shocked surrender, and walked out" (pp.253-254).
]]> 9098598 Mon, 26 Nov 2007 13:36:38 -0800
Roughly, a "shadow" is a representation that represents a particular state of affairs in virtue of having a particular structure. A sentence is a representation with a particular (syntactic and semantic) structure. If a sentence is taken to represent the world as being a certain way in virtue of its structure, then it's a shadow. Travis thinks our thought isn't correctly described in terms of shadows because (1) a given representational structure (a sentence or sentence-like thing) can be used to represent the world as being many different ways, and (2) different representational structures can be used to represent the world as being the same way.

Examples of (1) are Travis's familiar occasion-sensitive cases, like: "The ink is blue" or "Pigs grunt", which say different things (have different truth conditions) when used on different occasions.

Examples of (2) are cases like the following: the sentences "Pigs grunt" and "Grunting is a form of porcine vocalization" can, in suitable circumstances, say the same thing. So can "George Orwell was a great essayist" and "Eric Blair was a great essayist", and "The leaves are green" and "The leaves are painted green".

The target of this attack is supposed to be someone like Fodor, who holds that thoughts are structured representations in the language of thought. It's much less obvious that Travis succeeds in getting Davidson (especially the Davidson of Nice Derangement) in his sights.

Unfortunately, Travis doesn't have much to say about the "indexicalist" response to his view, which is becoming more popular. ]]>
author: Charles Travis
name: Nat
average rating: 4.00
book published: 2001
rating: 4
read at: 11/07
date added: 11/26/07
shelves:
review:
This is Travis's most interesting book, because it stays away from Wittgenstein exegesis and concentrates on his criticism of others and the exposition of his own view.

Roughly, a "shadow" is a representation that represents a particular state of affairs in virtue of having a particular structure. A sentence is a representation with a particular (syntactic and semantic) structure. If a sentence is taken to represent the world as being a certain way in virtue of its structure, then it's a shadow. Travis thinks our thought isn't correctly described in terms of shadows because (1) a given representational structure (a sentence or sentence-like thing) can be used to represent the world as being many different ways, and (2) different representational structures can be used to represent the world as being the same way.

Examples of (1) are Travis's familiar occasion-sensitive cases, like: "The ink is blue" or "Pigs grunt", which say different things (have different truth conditions) when used on different occasions.

Examples of (2) are cases like the following: the sentences "Pigs grunt" and "Grunting is a form of porcine vocalization" can, in suitable circumstances, say the same thing. So can "George Orwell was a great essayist" and "Eric Blair was a great essayist", and "The leaves are green" and "The leaves are painted green".

The target of this attack is supposed to be someone like Fodor, who holds that thoughts are structured representations in the language of thought. It's much less obvious that Travis succeeds in getting Davidson (especially the Davidson of Nice Derangement) in his sights.

Unfortunately, Travis doesn't have much to say about the "indexicalist" response to his view, which is becoming more popular.
]]> 8673174 Sat, 10 Nov 2007 20:54:42 -0800
It is bleak and beautiful up until the last three pages or so. ]]>
author: Cormac McCarthy
name: Nat
average rating: 4.00
book published: 2006
rating: 4
read at: 11/07
date added: 11/10/07
shelves:
review:
Ideal November reading: a post-apocalyptic father-son adventure.

It is bleak and beautiful up until the last three pages or so.
]]> 8411515 Mon, 29 Oct 2007 18:44:53 -0700
author: Nigel Holmes
name: Nat
average rating: 3.62
book published: 2005
rating: 3
read at: 10/07
date added: 10/29/07
shelves:
review:
I learned how to defend myself by grabbing my assailant's hand and then punching him in the face and how to tie a scarf "European" style.
]]> 8121183 Sat, 27 Oct 2007 19:11:55 -0700
The book is a mix of history (the most interesting bits) and literary criticism (not as interesting). The most illuminating part is Sebald's sickening accounts of what happened to Germans during the bombing and his explanation of why the Allies continued the bombing campaign after it was clear that it had no significant military effect. In short, he claims that it was the sheer bureaucratic momentum of the Allied war machine that drove the continued bombing, even in the face of (some) political and popular criticism.

The first three chapters are lectures Sebald gave in Zurich, which cover the issue of the bombing of German cities and the absence of any representation of the bombing in German literary culture. The second half of the book consists of three long pieces of literary criticism of three German authors I was unfamiliar with. ]]>
author: W.G. Sebald
name: Nat
average rating: 3.89
book published: 0
rating: 3
read at: 10/07
date added: 10/27/07
shelves: readpartof
review:
Sebald investigates what he sees as a remarkable absence in German literature of any account of the devastating Allied bombing of German cities. He thinks the absence must be attributible to a collective repression of a traumatic experience. He investigates the few examples of postwar literature that describe the bombing of cities and finds only one or two examples that he thinks avoid cliche and obvious psychological coping mechanisms.

The book is a mix of history (the most interesting bits) and literary criticism (not as interesting). The most illuminating part is Sebald's sickening accounts of what happened to Germans during the bombing and his explanation of why the Allies continued the bombing campaign after it was clear that it had no significant military effect. In short, he claims that it was the sheer bureaucratic momentum of the Allied war machine that drove the continued bombing, even in the face of (some) political and popular criticism.

The first three chapters are lectures Sebald gave in Zurich, which cover the issue of the bombing of German cities and the absence of any representation of the bombing in German literary culture. The second half of the book consists of three long pieces of literary criticism of three German authors I was unfamiliar with.
]]> 8277395 Fri, 26 Oct 2007 09:43:08 -0700
author: Noam Chomsky
name: Nat
average rating: 4.00
book published: 1980
rating: 0
read at: 12/07
date added: 10/26/07
shelves: readpartof
review:

]]> 7484183 Thu, 25 Oct 2007 10:45:01 -0700
It becomes clear in the second half of the book that Travis's view is moved by a general view of representation and truth. In extremely abbreviated form, his view is that a representation is essentially general (even one containing a singular term) and the world is essentially particular. This raises the question of how something essentially particular could satisfy something essentially general. He argues against the Tractarian idea that the world has the same structure as the representation. He answers the question about the relation of world to representation with the idea of an understanding, which is what makes the particular bit of the world count as being represented. This, as far as I can tell, is a version of a worry about how our grasp of a rule could determine an infinite number of future applications (a worry raised, e.g. by Kripke and Wright). At each novel step, it is required that we apply the rule, in a way that requires certain human sensitivities.

That kind of view clearly sets off anti-realist alarm bells, and Travis spends a chapter of the book trying to defuse those kinds of worries.

There are parts of this book that are clearer than normal Travis-speak, but crucial parts are as opaque as ever. ]]>
author: Charles Travis
name: Nat
average rating: 3.00
book published: 2006
rating: 3
read at: 10/07
date added: 10/25/07
shelves:
review:
This is Travis's second book on Wittgenstein. He gives readings of Wittgenstein's treatment of names, family resemblance, rule-following, logic and truth. Travis throughout contrasts Wittgenstein's view of these notions with Frege's. Contemporary philosophers are supposed to hold views continuous with Frege's, so Wittgenstein's attacks on Frege are supposed to have contemporary relevance (Dummett, Fodor, and McDowell are mentioned by name as targets at various points in the book).

It becomes clear in the second half of the book that Travis's view is moved by a general view of representation and truth. In extremely abbreviated form, his view is that a representation is essentially general (even one containing a singular term) and the world is essentially particular. This raises the question of how something essentially particular could satisfy something essentially general. He argues against the Tractarian idea that the world has the same structure as the representation. He answers the question about the relation of world to representation with the idea of an understanding, which is what makes the particular bit of the world count as being represented. This, as far as I can tell, is a version of a worry about how our grasp of a rule could determine an infinite number of future applications (a worry raised, e.g. by Kripke and Wright). At each novel step, it is required that we apply the rule, in a way that requires certain human sensitivities.

That kind of view clearly sets off anti-realist alarm bells, and Travis spends a chapter of the book trying to defuse those kinds of worries.

There are parts of this book that are clearer than normal Travis-speak, but crucial parts are as opaque as ever.
]]> 8047747 Mon, 22 Oct 2007 16:35:27 -0700
Agent Zigzag is a suave British safecracker who gets imprisoned on the island of Jersey (one of the Channel islands) right before the Germans invade and take over the island. He tries to get out of prison by volunteering his services to the Germans, who ignore him at first. He and a friend are shipped to a high security prison in France, where the Germans finally take an interest in his abilities. He gets drawn into the German Abwehr (a branch of German intelligence that seems much friendlier than the Gestapo) where he gets trained as a radio and demolitions expert. He parachutes into Britain with the mission of destroying the de Haviland factory, which makes the twin-engined wooden Mosquito, which the Germans hate and fear. On landing, he immediately turns himself in to British counter-intelligence and begins a career as a double-agent. The rest of the story is equally awesome and absurd.

By the way, it sounds like working for the German Abwehr involved non-stop drinking. ]]>
author: Ben MacIntyre
name: Nat
average rating: 3.84
book published: 2007
rating: 4
read at: 10/07
date added: 10/22/07
shelves:
review:
Wy recommended this, and on the basis of his description ("it's about this MI5 spy during WWII who was a double agent for the brits and for the Abwehr in France. It's hilarious, sort of a Bertie Wooster via James Bond type of story based on some recently declassified stuff") I bought it ASAP. Melody and I read the final chapters together on the plane back from Arizona.

Agent Zigzag is a suave British safecracker who gets imprisoned on the island of Jersey (one of the Channel islands) right before the Germans invade and take over the island. He tries to get out of prison by volunteering his services to the Germans, who ignore him at first. He and a friend are shipped to a high security prison in France, where the Germans finally take an interest in his abilities. He gets drawn into the German Abwehr (a branch of German intelligence that seems much friendlier than the Gestapo) where he gets trained as a radio and demolitions expert. He parachutes into Britain with the mission of destroying the de Haviland factory, which makes the twin-engined wooden Mosquito, which the Germans hate and fear. On landing, he immediately turns himself in to British counter-intelligence and begins a career as a double-agent. The rest of the story is equally awesome and absurd.

By the way, it sounds like working for the German Abwehr involved non-stop drinking.
]]> 7636034 Fri, 12 Oct 2007 13:13:40 -0700
author: Rodney Huddleston
name: Nat
average rating: 2.38
book published: 2005
rating: 0
read at: 12/07
date added: 10/12/07
shelves: readpartof
review:

]]> 7233906 Wed, 03 Oct 2007 19:30:08 -0700 some correspondence between ordinary mental concepts and the concepts employed by folk psychology; if it turns out that on our best scientific understanding of the mind there is nothing that corresponds even roughly to belief, then we may have to give up on folk psychology.

I was interested in Stich's position because Chomsky cites it repeatedly, as an example of the kind of attitude that one ought to have about the relation between ordinary language and the language of science. It turns out that Stich has a kind of contextualist view about belief, according to which there is no "property" picked out by "believes that p", because what counts as belief is context-dependent, but there are true utterances of "S believes that p".

Interesting.]]>
author: Stephen P. Stich
name: Nat
average rating: 4.00
book published: 1983
rating: 4
read at: 10/07
date added: 10/03/07
shelves: readpartof
review:
I read the last couple of chapters in this today in the Library of Congress. Stich argues that ordinary, "folk psychological" concepts of belief, desire, etc. are pretty far removed from what goes by the name of "belief" and "desire" in cognitive science. He tentatively suggests that there can be a reconciliation of ordinary discourse about mental states and cognitive science, that the two are not in competition (in a kind of manifest image/scientific image relation to one another). He calls this a "Panglossian" view, and argues that it rests on some empirical assumptions that might very well turn out to be false (one of the assumptions is that there is some correspondence between ordinary mental concepts and the concepts employed by folk psychology; if it turns out that on our best scientific understanding of the mind there is nothing that corresponds even roughly to belief, then we may have to give up on folk psychology.

I was interested in Stich's position because Chomsky cites it repeatedly, as an example of the kind of attitude that one ought to have about the relation between ordinary language and the language of science. It turns out that Stich has a kind of contextualist view about belief, according to which there is no "property" picked out by "believes that p", because what counts as belief is context-dependent, but there are true utterances of "S believes that p".

Interesting.
]]> 2928173 Sun, 30 Sep 2007 21:54:28 -0700
author: Noam Chomsky
name: Nat
average rating: 4.50
book published: 2000
rating: 5
read at: 09/07
date added: 09/30/07
shelves:
review:
Chomsky takes almost all of philosophical common sense about language and mind by the neck and shakes the crap out of it. His primary target in the various essays collected here is methodological dualism: the idea that the empirical study of language and mind has to proceed by different methods than the empirical study of other topics. Along the way he attacks the idea of the explanatory value of public language and the idea that it is possible to formulate a coherent notion of body (or the physical) to play a role in the so-called mind-body problem. And Chomsky provides a range of examples that might serve as fodder for contextualists who want to argue that our grasp of ordinary language is thoroughly interest-relative. There is plenty to disagree with here, but it's exciting philosophy.
]]> 6375352 Wed, 19 Sep 2007 10:43:22 -0700