It's a good lecture: the German academy, Humboldt, Marcuse, Wissenschaften, Mill, the defense of academic freedom over freedom of speech; Leiter touches all the bases. And as always, he twists them to his preferences. 

Any defense of academia as an arbiter of truth is vitiated by indifference to genocide, as it's always been vitiated by academic, qua academic, responses to crises. But the pretensions of Modernism: positivist, radical, vanguardist, technocratic; elitism of one sort or another, has rendered academics of all stripes immune to irony. One way or another, they're all big children. 

 

[Michigan in the World features exhibitions of research conducted by undergraduate students about the history of the University of Michigan and its relationships beyond its borders.]

STATE OF MICHIGAN

OFFICE OF THE GOVERNOR 

LANSING, MICHIGAN 48903

GEORGE ROMNEY

GOVERNOR

August 9, 1965

Dear Dr. Kaufman:

Your article, "Teach-ins: A New Force for the Times", in NATION of June 21st has been called to my attention. I  admire you for the depth of your conviction that you have performed an essential service for democracy; but, I would have wished you to be more objective in your presentation. Your phrase, "But presumably in the world of Governors and auto executives, business is always business, and sacred11 , is a neat stereotype, but obviously removed from the facts of the case. It certainly does not describe accurately my response to your original teacher strike proposal.

My reaction, that of the legislature, and your colleagues, too, should have made it crystal clear that our concern was for the majority of students, faculty, and administration at the University who did not choose to participate in your demonstration. The strike would have forced a cancellation of classes, whether this was desired or not, to be made up later if schedules · could be rearranged. Certainly

you felt your cause to be important enough to warrant "a departure from work as usual". And you anticipated an audience of 700 from a student body of 30,000. Following your example, it would be necessary for the whole University to defer to any 2% of the University community which felt it had a cause important enough to bring the tight schedule to a standstill.

Mark Graber 

Harvard tried to keep out Jews and other unsuitable children of immigrants from Eastern and southern Europe by using intelligence tests. The persons who devised those tests assured the American elite that standardized examinations distinguished the natural intelligence of sturdy Anglo-Saxons from Jews and others whose inflated grades reflected obsessive studying. Alas, Jews and other immigrants figured out how to game the test. An admissions system based entirely on text scores and school grades would increase further the percentage of Jews and immigrant children at Harvard.

Diversity was the better solution to Harvard’s Jewish problem. Maybe Jews and other immigrant children were smart (“cunning“ and "shrewd” were other words found apt by many), but all they did was work and grade-grub. Protestant men were well-rounded leaders. You could go hiking in the woods or party with Protestants on weekends. Universities that were finishing schools for the elite wanted students who could appreciate the full richness of American society. The Protestant elite was convinced that all Jews did was study. How some managed to have children was a mystery to them. Evaluating the full person guaranteed classes made up predominantly of Protestants who would be political, economic, and social leaders and minimized the number of Jews who would do little more than become doctors, lawyers, engineers, and teachers....

When the Supreme Court of the United States first ruled on the constitutionality of race-conscious university admissions policies, four justices took the historical disadvantage route rather than Harvard’s road to diversity. The issue in Regents of the University of California v. Bakke (1978) was whether the medical school at the University of California, Davis could set aside sixteen seats for students of color. Justices William Brennan, Byron White, Thurgood Marshall, and Harry Blackmun found this policy constitutionally unproblematic. Brennan’s opinion observed that “whites as a class” were “not saddled with such disabilities or subjected to such a history of purposeful unequal treatment or relegated to such a position of political powerlessness as to command extraordinary protection from the majoritarian political process.” Relying on what in the United States is called “intermediate scrutiny,” a form of judicial review that resembles what the rest of the world describes as “proportionality,” Brennan asserted that the medical school “could conclude that the serious and persistent underrepresentation of minorities in medicine . . . is the result of handicaps under which minority applicants labor as a consequence of a background of deliberate, purposeful discrimination against minorities in education and in society generally, as well as in the medical profession.” White, Marshall, and Blackmun played variations on these themes in their opinions. None cared much for diversity.

Justice Lewis Powell, who provided the crucial fifth vote on a court of nine justices, proved a better Harvard man. His opinion rejected both of Brennan’s central arguments. Powell insisted that the Court apply the highest level of scrutiny, strict scrutiny, to all race classifications. In his view, because “the white majority is composed of various minority groups most of which can lay claim to a history of prior discrimination, . . . no principled basis” existed “for deciding which groups would merit heightened judicial scrutiny.” 

Diversity came to the rescue. Powell concluded that “a diverse student body” was a compelling interest given that “the nation’s future depends upon leaders trained through wide exposure to the ideas and mores of students as diverse as this Nation of many peoples.”

Good one

Justice Clarence Thomas noted that the University of Michigan Law School would enroll more students of color by being less selective and that the institution’s interest in being ranked in the top ten could not possibly be a compelling interest.

Every administrator dreams of working at a top tier school, for the same reason professors lord it over secondary school teachers, and the highest ranking are happy when they don't have to teach at all.

Leiter's arguments against "diversity blather" are founded in vulgar positivism: there's no reason for women to have a role in writing abortion policy.

repeat: There's no epistemological need to have blacks, or women, or homosexuals, or Palestinians, tell their own stories, or judge others' stories.

Lever: Roberts Memo Threatened To Challenge Ethics Rules

A decade before Chief Justice John Roberts rejected a Senate request this week to testify about corruption scandals engulfing the Supreme Court, he threatened to challenge a congressional effort to ensure the high court’s justices abide by federal corruption laws, according to documents reviewed by The Lever.

Now, instead of spearheading an investigation into Justice Clarence Thomas’ undisclosed luxury gifts and real estate transactions, Roberts is punting to a little-known panel of lower court judges whose identities are secret, according to a spokesperson for the judiciary.

Roberts’ posture spotlights a crisis in America’s system of checks and balances: If the legislative and executive branches refuse to assert oversight authority over the nation’s highest court, Supreme Court justices can continue to operate with complete impunity.

Business Insider: Jane Roberts, who is married to Chief Justice John Roberts, made $10.3 million in commissions from elite law firms, whistleblower documents show

Two years after John Roberts' confirmation as the Supreme Court's chief justice in 2005, his wife, Jane Sullivan Roberts, made a pivot. After a long and distinguished career as a lawyer, she refashioned herself as a legal recruiter, a matchmaker who pairs job-hunting lawyers up with corporations and firms.

Roberts told a friend that the change was motivated by a desire to avoid the appearance of conflicts of interest, given that her husband was now the highest-ranking judge in the country. "There are many paths to the good life," she said. "There are so many things to do if you're open to change and opportunity."

And life was indeed good for the Robertses, at least for the years 2007 to 2014. During that eight-year stretch, according to internal records from her employer, Jane Roberts generated a whopping $10.3 million in commissions, paid out by corporations and law firms for placing high-dollar lawyers with them.

That eye-popping figure comes from records in a whistleblower complaint filed by a disgruntled former colleague of Roberts, who says that as the spouse of the most powerful judge in the United States, the income she earns from law firms who practice before the Court should be subject to public scrutiny.

John Roberts is an institutionalist. He's with Leiter, but the institutions are different: the court, the church, the academy, Israel.

And Leiter again, in what he would consider an unrelated post

The sociology (or politics, if you prefer) of the discipline is, alas, far more relevant to explaining the content of what gets discussed than philosophers like to admit.

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funny

Can you imagine if a law was passed codifying the US as the nation state of white Protestant Anglos and then describing it as a "a law black and Jewish citizens  claim discriminates against minorities"?...

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Leiter

Zonszein "Israelis Are Trying to Save a Democracy That Never Existed"

Leiter's response links a post I mentioned before.

"Even in an apartheid state"

My (pseudonymous) reply was rejected.

Another win for sociology (or politics) over philosophy.

Rationalists rationalize.

I exchanged emails with an Israeli academic in the thick of the protests who when cornered said a binational state "would be a win for me". In public he still won't do it.

The occupation of land beyond 1967 borders is the issue only if you accept conquest and ethnocracy within the borders of 1947.

9. Slavery ended in part because these middle class elites realized that slavery – and the slaveholders it empowered - were a threat to their way of life. Hopefully more and more will realize that if Israel doesn’t end the occupation, the occupation will end Israel.

— Eli Cook (@Eli_B_Cook) March 28, 2023 

Israel managed to maintain the image of a model liberal democracy for 75 years, 56 of those as a military dictatorship occupying millions of Palestinians. In just three months, Netanyahu may have crushed all that./1

— Mairav Zonszein מרב זונשיין (@MairavZ) March 27, 2023

from Leiter. The funniest thing I've read all week. Mentioned before, but I'm adding the text.

Half the people living under Israeli law are living under occupation. Their existence is ignored in the proposal, but Palestinians in Israel are asked to imagine themselves behind a "veil of ignorance".

Rawls' fantasy is of a world before the Fall.

repeat. abandoning Jewish cosmopolitanism for Anglo-Protestant pedantry.

King was a Protestant, but his use of irony was not.

Shallow understanding from people of good will is more frustrating than absolute misunderstanding from people of ill will. Lukewarm acceptance is much more bewildering than outright rejection.

Alon Harel, Alon Klement: "Separating Substance from Procedure: How to Address the Israeli Constitutional Crisis" 

Many proposals to resolve the current Israeli constitutional crisis have been recently advanced. These include the President’s proposal, Friedman & Elbashan’s proposal, Stern’s Proposal, Barak Medina proposal, and many others’. These proposals, however, appear unlikely to bring about a compromise, not because their content cannot be accepted by the parties involved, but because they do not address their substantive concerns.

Both sides aim to reach a compromise that reflects and advances their ideological goals or constituent interests. In making decisions concerning decision-making mechanisms and the role of the Court, neither side considers whether these mechanisms are good or desirable from a long-term perspective, but only whether they will enable it to further its short-term goals It is therefore imperative to separate short-term interests related to urgent substantive issues from procedural decisions that shape decision-making mechanisms in order to find a solution.

We propose a framework that, if adopted, can provide a basis for a viable compromise. The framework we propose is based on a strict separation between the urgent substantive issues, such as the conscription of ultra-orthodox, the regulation of public transportation on Saturdays, Kosher laws, etc on the one hand, and determining the mechanisms for decision-making concerning constitutional questions on the other. While with respect to the substantive issues, the interests of the parties are distinct and are based on conflicting ideologies, with respect to the institutional mechanisms of decision-making, there may be greater overlap than seems at first sight. Hence, separating the negotiations about the substantive issues from those about the procedural issues is necessary if a compromise is to be realized.

One way to establish institutional mechanisms for decision-making is to do so behind what is often called in the literature “the veil of ignorance.” The term was coined by the political philosopher John Rawls in his important book A Theory of Justice. In his view, foundational decisions must be settled in a way that is not influenced by sectarian interests. The normative foundations of a state should ideally reflect the rules that we would have endorsed had we been ignorant with respect to our identity, our social class, our religion, or sexual orientation. These are all central components of our identity, but they cannot provide a basis for constitutional decisions.

Thus if I am a Catholic, I may be voting for a party that promotes Catholicism, but if I vote behind a veil of ignorance, I would not know whether, at the end of the day, I would be a Catholic, a Jew, or an atheist. Hence I may vote for a rule that would guarantee freedom of religion. Similarly, if a heterosexual who dislikes gay couples would vote behind the veil of ignorance, he may vote for gay marriage as he does not know whether, at the end of the day, he would turn out to be gay or not.

While Rawls applied this principle not only with respect to decisions concerning procedure and decision-making rules but also with respect to substantive decisions, we wish to apply this mechanism only to procedural decision-making mechanisms. The real world however, does not provide a veil of ignorance. In the real world, we vote while knowing our socio-economic

status, our religious beliefs, our sexual orientation, etc. How can we guarantee that our decisions concerning the decision-making mechanisms and the status of the Supreme Court do not take into consideration our short-term interests? We believe that while we cannot fully realize this idea, it is possible to make some progress in this direction.

Our proposal is that the different sectors in society, including ultra-orthodox, seculars, traditionalists and Palestinians will specify what their basic, most important interests are. One may presume that the ultra-orthodox will raise the issue of conscription, Kosher food, and additional issues that seems essential to them. The modern orthodox and the seculars would raise other issues. The parties to the negotiations will have to consider accepting such demands with the understanding that once they do so these issues will be removed from the agenda and therefore the decision-making process and the status of the Court may be determined in a way that would only take long term considerations into account.

After an agreement regarding the urgent substantive issues is reached (which we admit is not an easy task), these issues would be entrenched and not be subject to judicial review. Only then would the parties negotiate long-term procedural mechanisms for decision-making. Since the urgent substantive issues would not be affected by the procedural mechanisms, it would be easier to reach an agreement with respect to the procedure. Such negotiations would be easier when urgent substantive concerns are removed from the agenda. For example, it would be easier for the Ultra-Orthodox to agree to judicial review when they know that courts cannot interfere in the decision to exempt them from conscription. Removing the substantive questions from the agenda will facilitate an agreement with respect to the procedure.

The separation between substance and procedure can be done in different ways. It is possible to reach an agreement with respect to the substantive issues and then make determinations with respect to the procedural questions. Alternatively, different committees could simultaneously engage in negotiations concerning procedural and substantive issues.

To conclude, the constitutional crisis results from the fact that the parties to the conflict shape their proposals concerning the decision-making process in a way that is conducive to their short-term substantive interests. The solution should separate the two. Our proposal facilitates such a separation and therefore seems to us promising.

Leiter and David Enoch, then and now; and Alon Harel, then and now. 

Rationalists rationalize, until they can't anymore.

Railway porters and college professors, 1923 or 2023. One leads, the other follows, even against their will. We're getting there.

I posted the text of Harel's proposal above.

Leiter links to Beinart,  "...this hard-hitting opinion piece in the NYT"

On the surface, the battle between Mr. Netanyahu and his critics does indeed look familiar. In recent years, from Brazil to Hungary to India to the United States, anti-government protesters have accused authoritarian-minded populists of threatening liberal democracy. But look closer at Israel’s political drama and you notice something striking: The people most threatened by Mr. Netanyahu’s authoritarianism aren’t part of the movement against it.

The demonstrations include very few Palestinians. In fact, Palestinian politicians have criticized them for having, in the words of former Knesset member Sami Abu Shehadeh, “nothing to do with the main problem in the region — justice and equality for all the people living here.”

The reason is that the movement against Mr. Netanyahu is not like the pro-democracy opposition movements in Turkey, India or Brazil — or the movement against Trumpism in the United States. It’s not a movement for equal rights. It’s a movement to preserve the political system that existed before Mr. Netanyahu’s right-wing coalition took power, which was not, for Palestinians, a genuine liberal democracy in the first place. It’s a movement to save liberal democracy for Jews.

This is mostly true, but also a non-sequitur: even in an apartheid state, the loss of judicial independence can make the place worse, and especially when the courts are the only branch of government which sometimes defend the rights of the victims of apartheid-like policies.  All Israeli Jews and Arabs will be worse off if judicial independence is destroyed; the situation of the Palestinians in the occupied territories will be mostly unchanged (although I can't see how they would not eventually be worse off if the judiciary is fully subordinated to the right-wing coalition).

"This is mostly true, but also a non-sequitur..." There's not much to say. 

Serendipity, via Jäger. 

"Convergence on inflation and divergence on price control among post Keynesian pioneers: insights from Galbraith and Lerner"

Epistemologically their relationship to the market mechanism was fundamentally different, in particular because of an institutionalist anchoring for Galbraith and a neoclassical one for Lerner. This divergence was reinforced by Galbraith’s practical expertise—not only within the OPA but also the United States Strategic Bombing Survey and then the State Department—as well as his field know ledge—notably through his activity at Fortune magazine, whereas Lerner’s activities remained largely confined to academia. Normatively Lerner had an almost dogmatic fascination for the market price mechanism, in the name of the principle of consumer sovereignty which lay at the core of neoclassical welfare economics. 

Star Trek is a meditation on the just use of power. It doesn’t work if the writers resist the premise that awesome, hegemonic power can be wielded justly.

— Ian Millhiser (@imillhiser) February 27, 2023

repeats

Milheiser, Jan 11, 2023, responding to a question to anyone on twitter:

 "What's 100% a total scam but we still accept it in society?" 

"Judicial review"

Milheiser Dec 4 2022 [my highlighting]

The deranged Supreme Court case that threatens US democracy, explained
Moore v. Harper is a test of whether this Supreme Court can ever be trusted with power. 

...Any state constitutional provisions that protect the right to vote, that limit gerrymandering, or that otherwise constrain lawmakers’ ability to skew elections would cease to function. State governors would lose their ability to veto laws impacting federal elections. And state courts would lose their authority to strike down these laws.

He's deleted any reference to judicial review on his tl.

Liberals love benign authoritarianism. The argument is circular: it's benign when they love it.

Leiter would call it "Millian", modeled on the British empire as the British imagined it. Acknowledgment of "perspectivism" or "standpoint epistemology", is just "condescension from below". Taibbi's a putz, but that's another issue. 

Leiter: Mill and Marcuse: "Justifying Academic Freedom", and the rest of us including Palestinians should just shut up.

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I just remembered this. It's perfect: Leiter, Mill and Marcuse, Glenn Loury and John McWhorter. 

I've used it before.

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This belongs here too. 

Leiter links to Beinart. His response a model of defensive rationalization.

The reason is that the movement against Mr. Netanyahu is not like the pro-democracy opposition movements in Turkey, India or Brazil — or the movement against Trumpism in the United States. It’s not a movement for equal rights. It’s a movement to preserve the political system that existed before Mr. Netanyahu’s right-wing coalition took power, which was not, for Palestinians, a genuine liberal democracy in the first place. It’s a movement to save liberal democracy for Jews.

This is mostly true, but also a non-sequitur: even in an apartheid state, the loss of judicial independence can make the place worse, and especially when the courts are the only branch of government which sometimes defend the rights of the victims of apartheid-like policies....

Unexamined priors

Contradictions of technocracy again. Two more from Leiter, like last time, one after the other, but even closer together: 13 minutes. The last time it was 24.

The elite have no right to treat their peers like children...

The "diversity" mafia is insatiable

Three "diverse" scholars explain in Nature that at the current rate at which universities hire "diverse" candidates, "racial parity" (with the population at large) will not be achieved, therefore universities need to hire 3.5 times as many "diverse" candidates.  This would, of course, require a massive increase in discrimination against non-diverse candidates (beyond what already occurs, which as everyone knows is substantial), but that does not figure in the relevant conception of "equity." No explanation is given for why "racial parity" is the desideratum,* and of course there is no discussion of the class dynamics that are central to any serious explanation for the existing racial disparity in higher education. "Racial parity" is already an illegal criterion in hiring, and "diversity" will be unlawful within the year.  What will the insatiable proponents of "diversity" do then?  This is going to get ugly, I fear.

*One line of text asserts that, "Decades of work across policy and the social sciences have established the normative importance and empirical benefits of demographic parity in higher education."  The footnote has a couple of citations.  Authors who make claims like this are clearly counting on the fact that most readers do not actually examine the literature, which establishes nothing of the kind, and which certainly does not make the case for "racial parity." 

but policing the rabble is for our own good. 

The EU continues policing Google

They will now require Google to remove inaccurate information from search results. Google will not go out of business as a result, although opponents of such moves always invoke doomsday scenarios to scare off meaningful regulation in the U.S.

Leiter opposes enforced self-criticsm and denunciation rallies for his own. So do I. The piece in the CHE is a disaster on all sides.

Reparations to The Palestinians and The Native People of Liberia. Technocratic empiricism is an oxymoron. 

I repeat things because others do.

Leiter quotes a brief in the Harvard affirmative action case. 

Shortly after Grutter was decided, the defendant in that case confessed that he had pressed “the ‘diversity’ rationale” as a litigation strategy. Bollinger, A Comment on Grutter and Gratz v. Bollinger, 103 Colum. L. Rev. 1589, 1590-91 (2003). Bollinger bemoaned that he could not defend racial preferences as “a ‘remedy’ for past societal discrimination”—what everyone in higher education “really believed.” Id. Bollinger is hardly alone. Shortly before Grutter was decided, Harvard’s Randall Kennedy said, “Let’s be honest: Many who defend affirmative action for the sake of ‘diversity’ are actually motivated by … social justice.” Kennedy, Affirmative Reaction, Am. Prospect (Feb. 19, 2003), bit.ly/3EJc5To. They would defend racial preferences “even if social science demonstrated uncontrovertibly that diversity (or its absence) has no effect (or even a negative effect) on the learning environment.” Id. NYU’s Samuel Issacharoff likewise knows “‘[t]he commitment to diversity is not real,’” and Columbia’s Kent Greenawalt has “‘yet to find a professional academic who believes the primary motivation for preferential admission has been to promote diversity.’” Fitzpatrick, The Diversity Lie, 27 Harv. J.L. & Pub. Pol’y 385, 395-96 (2003). The list goes on. See id.; Schuck, Affirmative Action: Past, Present, and Future, 20 Yale L. & Pol’y Rev. 1, 34-36 (2002); Levinson, Diversity, 2 U. Pa. J. Const. L. 573, 601 (2000).

I've also argued previously that "diversity" is a weak and implausible rationale for affirmative action. 

Leiter: There's no epistemological need to have blacks, or women, or homosexuals, or Palestinians, tell their own stories, or judge others' stories. 

On affirmative action, constitutional or not—and contra Leiter, there's an argument to be made that strictly speaking it never was—times change.

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To be clear because I've said it before: affirmative action may have been unconstitutional, but it was necessary. 

Watching lawyers examining the 11th Circuit decision, picking apart Cannon's, is watching the picking part of form, in the same sense that lawyers praised the DOJ briefs as well crafted.

Leiter links to a 1977 article in the NYT about Kripke.

When Saul Kripke was 3 years old, he walked into the kitchen of his home in Omaha, Neb., and asked his mother if God is truly everywhere. Dorothy Kripke said yes, whereupon the child asked if this meant he had squeezed part of God out of the kitchen by corning in and taking up some of His space. “I Was startled that Saul already seemed to have an intuitive grasp of the notion that two objects cannot occupy the same space at the same time,” recalls Mrs. Kripke. “I found that a sharp question for a 3‐year old “

The Kripke parents soon discovered signs that their son was more than sharp. He was, in fact, possessed of an awesome gift. “It really began to dawn on me when Saul was in the fourth grade,” says his father, Rabbi Myer Kripke. “He came in one day with some numbers he had been playing with. He showed me two numbers. He had multiplied their sum by the difference between them, and he got the same answer as he did when he subtracted the square of the smaller one from the square of the larger one. He said that would be true of any two numbers. For a long time I didn't understand what he was saying, but then I realized that he was expressing something I knew from algebra: That (a + b)(a ‐ b) = a? ‐ b? I was excited but also a little frightened. He had no concept of algebra at that time, and he knew nothing of algebraic notation. He had just seen the idea. By the sixth or seventh grade he had gone through most of algebra that way.” Says Mrs. Kripke: “Saul once told me he would have invented algebra if it hadn't already been invented, because he came upon it naturally.”

Graeber used to tell this story, though I never knew the source, and David used to invent things so I never knew if it was true. But he simplified it, and improved it. But it was the father not the mother. "Daddy, where's God?" "Saul, God is everywhere". "If God is everywhere, why doesn't he displace something?" 

Kripke was a pure scholastic, a pure formalist. He would be at home and would lead in any debate about angels and pinheads: formal logic predicated on assumed foundations: angels or can openers  The question is the relation of his brilliance to historical importance. Form and representation are distinct and inseparable; that's where it gets tough.

David said that the history of Chinese scroll painting was the history of copies, because the originals were never valued and were lost, so that the art was always of the present. That was his fantasy. I'd call it a lie, but he was lying to himself.

Since Leiter is posting Chomsky again (and authorship has been confirmed) I'll post something I cited in the manuscript, the magilla etc. [pick one] that I thought I'd linked here but apparently hadn't[?]

From the graduate student blog at MIT, part of the admissions page in 2018. Gone but now at archive.org. The title should be enough to make my point (made years ago): it's 1950s rationalism, the equivalent of Chicago school economics, from the same origins and just as dated. 

Linguistics Is Basically Physics  Debunking myths about the study of linguistics.

[still up, moved here]

 “Would they hire you to talk to aliens?”

“That’s so funny I have a friend who studies French literature!”

“So what do you think of Chomsky’s political views?”

“Linguistics? At MIT? I didn’t know they had that. I thought they just did science and stuff.”

Thanks to the popularity of the movie Arrival, the world now has a pretty good idea of what us linguists do. You know… figuring out how to communicate with aliens, internalizing all of space and time, it’s all in the job description.

Okay not really. Like not even a little bit. We don’t even have a special affinity for linguini (I did not make this up).

It is not surprising that people don’t  know much about the study of linguistics. Few schools offer linguistics classes at an early stage of education, and the field itself is broad enough that even linguists don’t always know what their colleagues in other subfields do.

I’m used to getting pseudo-science questions about language pretty much wherever I go, and while I expect this from the general population, I was surprised find that people at MIT are often nearly as confused!

And while most of the responses I get from MIT people are that of polite interest or excitement, people still generally make the assumption that my field is somehow categorically unrelated to science and engineering.

(The less enthusiastic responses seem to convey doubt about whether non-science/engineering fields have a place here, but that is a topic for another day.)

My goal is to debunk some myths about what linguistics is and what it means to be a scientist. I’ll be talking specifically about theoretical linguistics (which we call generative linguistics) with a special focus on syntax (my subfield).

But there is a whole world of sociolinguistics that I encourage you to look into as well if you are interested.

Theoretical linguistics explained

In linguistics, we hypothesize that the human language faculty is a universal property of the human species that is built on common foundational principles.

The key here is that linguistics is not the study of a language or even many languages, but rather the study of language as a concept, which all the languages of the world are instances of.

In the way that we believe the laws of physics to be invariant across different physical environments, we believe the laws of language structure to be invariant across languages (though things may appear different in different physical and linguistic environments).

In line with this hypothesis, we propose abstract representations of language that can be transformed in a number of ways to yield the diverse structures that we see within and across languages. And to get at this underlying representation, we look at data from all languages to find patterns.

I studied physics as an undergraduate so I’m going to use some analogies from Newtonian mechanics to show you what I mean. In Newtonian mechanics we have a formal framework, i.e. calculus, which has different types of objects and operations, i.e. variables and derivatives, integrals, etc.

On top of the framework, we have model specific constraints on how to use the framework to describe actual phenomena. For example we have the notion of forces and acceleration, and Newton’s second law, which relates the two (F=ma). To model facts about language, we too have a framework and a model that constrains it.

Or in other words, we too propose the existence of objects, and operations that relate objects to each other and build structure, and we propose principles to constrain those operations.

The types of evidence that we use to create a syntactic model come from looking at necessary conditions for the formation of grammatical sentences.

When looking at the structure of a particular language, we ask native speakers of that language to give us what we call “grammaticality judgments”.

What we are interested in is what kinds of sentences their internalized system can produce/parse, and what kinds of things it can’t. We are not interested in the “rules” of the language that they learned in school, but rather what the fundamental system looks like naturally.

Example 1: John and I... 

repeats, Leiter, Quine, Bobbitt, and Dennis Patterson

I never said Quine was a postmodernist. What I did say was that analytic philosophy has moved into a new paradigm, which I identify as postmodern, and that Quine's thought represents a significant contribution to the development of this new mode of philosophizing.

Quine

Modern empiricism has been conditioned in large part by two dogmas. One is a belief in some fundamental cleavage between truths which are analytic, or grounded in meanings independently of matters of fact and truths which are synthetic, or grounded in fact. The other dogma is reductionism: the belief that each meaningful statement is equivalent to some logical construct upon terms which refer to immediate experience. Both dogmas, I shall argue, are ill founded. One effect of abandoning them is, as we shall see, a blurring of the supposed boundary between speculative metaphysics and natural science. Another effect is a shift toward pragmatism.

Quine's a postmodernist. "But I didn't mean to open that door!"  

Leiter links to Adolph Reed again.

repeats

Reed can't help but moralize; he still has fantasies of leading change. And he publishes on a webpage named after Robert Smithson that has Michael Fried on the editorial board. Smithson would be amused. I'm not.

I had an exchange with Fried a year or so ago, with no direct connection to this.  But I sent him another one last night.  I think he understands me now. Reed might as well.

I'll stop here for now, but I think it's time to go off on Leiter, Reed, Clement Greenberg and T.J. Clark, T.S. Eliot and Jeff Wall, Bourdieu and Flaubert.

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more. still working.

Fried, talking to Wall, calls this "one of the most brilliant essays in art criticism ever"

Jeff Wall, "'Marks of Indifference': Aspects of Photography in, or as, Conceptual Art"

This essay is a sketch, an attempt to study the ways that photography occupied Conceptual artists, the ways that photogra­phy decisively realized itself as a modernist art in the experiments of the 1960s and 1970s. Conceptual art played an important role in the transformation of the terms and conditions within which established photog­ raphy defined itself and its relationships with other arts, a transformation which established photography as an institutional­ized modernist form evolving explicitly through the dynamics of its auto-critique.

Photography's implication with modernist painting and sculpture was not, of course, developed in the 1960s; it was central to the work and discourse of the art of the 1920s. But, for the sixties generation, art­ photography remained too comfortably rooted in the pictorial traditions of modern art; it had an irritatingly serene, marginal existence, a way of holding itself at a dis­tance from the intellectual drama of avant­-gardism while claiming a prominent, even definitive place within it. The younger artists wanted to disturb that, to uproot and radicalize the medium, and they did so with the most sophisticated means they had in hand at the time, the auto-critique of art identified with the tradition of the avant­-garde. Their approach implied that photog­raphy had not yet become "avant-garde" in 1960 or 1965, despite the epithets being casually applied to it. It had not yet accom­plished the preliminary autodethronement, or deconstruction, which the other arts had established as fundamental to their devel­opment and their amour-propre.

Through that auto-critique, painting and sculpture had moved away from the prac­tice of depiction, which had historically been the foundation of their social and aesthetic value. Although we may no longer accept the claim that abstract art had gone "beyond" representation or depiction, it is certain that such develop­ments added something new to the corpus of possible artistic forms in Western culture. In the first half of the 1 960s, Minimalism was decisive in bringing back into sharp focus, for the first time since the 1930s, the general problem of how a work of art could validate itself as an object among all other objects in the world. Under the regime of depiction, that is, in the history of Western art before 1910, a work of art was an object whose validity as art was constituted by its being, or bearing, a depiction. In the process of developing alternative proposals for art "beyond" depiction, art had to reply to the suspicion that, without their depictive, or representa­tional function, art objects were art in name only, not in body, form, or function. I Art projected itself forward bearing only its glamorous traditional name, thereby enter­ ing a troubled phase of restless searching for an alternative ground of validity. This phase continues, and must continue.

Photography cannot find alternatives to depiction, as could the other fine arts. It is in the physical nature of the medium to depict things. In order to participate in the kind of reflexivity made mandatory for modernist art, photography can put into play only its own necessary condition of being a depiction-which-constitutes­ an-object.

In its attempts to make visible this condi­tion, Conceptual art hoped to reconnect the medium to the world in a new, fresh way, beyond the worn-out criteria for pho­tography as sheer picture-making. Several important directions emerged in this process. In this essay I will examine only two. The first involves the rethinking and "refunctioning" of reportage, the dominant type of art-photography as it existed at the beginning of the 1960s. The second is related to the first, and to a certain extent emerges from it. This is the issue of the de­ skilling and re-skilling of the artist in a con­ text defined by the culture industry, and made controversial by aspects of Pop art.

Wall 

Through that auto-critique, painting and sculpture had moved away from the prac­tice of depiction, which had historically been the foundation of their social and aesthetic value. 

Clement Greenberg

The essence of Modernism lies, as I see it, in the use of characteristic methods of a discipline to criticize the discipline itself, not in order to subvert it but in order to entrench it more firmly in its area of competence.

Bullshit in both cases. The question is why that bullshit came to be. 

repeats: T.J. Clark on Pollock and Flaubert. I'm adding highlights this time.

Farai un vers de dreit nien:
non er de mi ni d'autra gen,
non er d'amor ni de joven,
ni de ren au, 
qu'enans fo trobatz en durmen,
sus un chivau.

(I shall make a poem out of [about] nothing at all:/it will not speak of me or others,/of love or youth, or of anything else,/for it was composed while I was asleep/riding on horseback.)

William IX of Aquitaine

Once Upon a Time. When I first came across the lines by the duke of Aquitaine some years ago, naturally I imagined them in Jackson Pollock’s mouth. They put me in mind of modernism; or of one moment of modernism which I realized I had been trying (and failing) to get in focus ever since I had read Harmonium or looked at Le Bonheur de vivre. Two things were clarified. Not just that modern artists often turned away from the detail of the world in order to revel in the work of art's "essential gaudiness," but that the turning away was very often associated with a class attitude or style not unlike Duke William's, or, at least, an attempt to mimic that style - its coldness, brightness. lordliness, and nonchalance. Its "balance, largeness, precision, enlightenment, contempt for nature in all its particularity."' Its pessimism of strength.

You might expect such an effort at aristocratic world-weariness on the part of bourgeois and even petty-bourgeois artists, operating in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries not the eleventh and twelfth, to bear some strange fruit.

Largeness and lordliness, after all, were not likely to be these artists' forte. Take the novelist Gustave Flaubert, for (central) example, at the beginning of work on Madame Bovary in 1852: already chafing at the he bit of reference that seemed to come with the form he had chosen and dreaming of "a book a about nothing, a book dependent on nothing external, which would he held together by the internal strength of its style ... a book which would have almost no subject or at least where the subject would be almost invisible, if such a thing is possible.” What strikes me as truly strange in Flaubert's case is not so much the project he outlined for himself - though as an ambition for a novel rather than a sestina or a set of haiku it has its own pathos – as the distance between the book he imagined and the one he actually wrote. No book has ever been fuller than Madame Bovary of the everything external which is the bourgeois world. Fuller in its heart of hearts, I mean; fuller in its substance; in the weight it gives to words themselves. It is as if the more intense a bourgeois artist's wish to dispense with externals and visibilities, the stronger will be their hold an the work's pace, structure, and sense of its own objectivity. Or maybe we could say that what brings on the word "bourgeois" at all as a proper description of Madame Bovary is exactly the deadlock within it between a language so fine and cold that it hopes to annihilate the emotions it describes as it describes them, and an absolute subjugation to those emotions and the world of longing they conjure up. A deep sentimentality, not relieved but exacerbated by a further (ultimate) sentimentality about language – call it belief in the arbitrariness of the sign.

Clicking through the links you'll find the quotes below

Greenberg 

One and the same civilization produces simultaneously two such different things as a poem by T. S. Eliot and a Tin Pan Alley song, or a painting by Braque and a Saturday Evening Post cover. All four are on the order of culture, and ostensibly, parts of the same culture and products of the same society. 

T.S. Eliot:

Marie Lloyd was the greatest music-hall artist in England: she was also the most popular. And popularity in her case was not merely evidence of her accomplishment; it was something more than success. It is evidence of the extent to which she represented and expressed that part of the English nation which has perhaps the greatest vitality and interest.

Wall is, or was, tempted by the delusions Flaubert claimed for his art, and that Greenberg and Bourdieu valued, and that Fried still does. But watch him here. 

Look at the editorial board for Nonsite, almost all in literature and art history, and you can guess their interests. I won't quote Bourdieu—click the links. His arguments are laughable.

Wall didn't want to be a filmmaker; he wanted to make an art that fit into a category descending from painting—"Fine Art"—but he had a sense of what film could do and that painting could not, and photography, as it had been understood, was not enough. He found a way to resolve the conflict of his desires and his intelligence. That's not the same as resolving larger conflicts. Art doesn't do that.

"I want to do This!"

"Oh god, that's so stupid. It doesn't work anymore!"

Thesis/antithesis.

You can call that glib, but not if you take seriously both Flaubert's claims—what he felt he needed to claim—and the novels that resulted. 

The second post I wrote on his blog is transcribed from a note.

On my way home. On the train from Boston to Penn Station. Looking out the window thinking about Pissarro and Anarchism. Passing through a suburban industrial landscape Jeff Wall’s images of Vancouver come to mind, and I have a thought that I regret that now we are able to blame ourselves for everything. Our mistakes are now more deadly than God’s. We are becoming used to the bureaucratization of disaster. But those problems which fall into the category ‘what is to be done’ are the preoccupation of only a few, and if most people are no closer to controlling their own destiny, they are also no more interested in it than they ever were. It makes no difference to them if a few men put themselves in God’s place. Their passivity is their freedom. And that freedom will never be taken away.

Tell me a story

Leiter

Narratives that engage the emotions, not arguments, are more effective at producing charitable behavior

Interesting study, confirming what all Humeans and Nietzscheans already suspected. As Nietzsche quips (in Twilight of the Idols), "Nothing is easier to erase than a dialectical effect."

History is written by the winners. What does that tell you?

Leiter, Joseph Raz, and David Enoch, Chomsky, and Bernie Sanders, all rationalize the ethnic cleansing of Palestine in defense of a narrative. To that end, facts are forgotten. Leiter says academic freedom is more important than freedom of speech for the rest of us. 

Leiter opposes "diversity blather" because other people's storytelling undermines his own.

Eric Schwitzgebel et al: "Engaging charitable giving: The motivational force of narrative versus philosophical argument"

ABSTRACT

Are philosophical arguments as effective as narratives in influencing charitable giving and attitudes toward it? In four experiments, we exposed online research participants to either philosophical arguments in favor of charitable giving, a narrative about a child whose life was improved by charitable donations, both the narrative and the argument, or a control text (a passage from a middle school physics text or a description of charitable organizations). Participants then expressed their attitudes toward charitable giving and were either asked how much they would hypothetically donate if given $10 (Experiment 1) or told they had a 10% chance of winning $10 and given the opportunity to donate from their potential winnings (Experiments 2–4). Across the four experiments, participants in all of the narrative conditions and in some of the argument conditions tended to express more positive attitudes toward charitable giving and donated about $1 more on average than did participants in the control conditions. These effects appear to have been mediated by the “narrative transportation” scale, which suggests that appeals to donate can be effective if they engage participants’ emotions, imagery, and interest.

Rationalists discover empiricism and claim it as their own. And they reinvent the wheel.

Schwitzgebel, earlier this year. Still hilarious.

philosophers vs lawyers and historians, every fucking day.

2. The AFA letter, however, neglects the fact that some of the allegations concern not extramural speech, but speech and actions in the classroom; and some concern concern extramural speech on matters that impact the functioning of the school. In the former category is the fact that Professor Wax invited an infamous (and unabashed) racist, Jared Taylor, to speak in her class and have lunch with her students. It is dubious that the decision to host Mr. Taylor in her classroom can be defended on academic freedom grounds, as a professionally sound choice given academic standards in law teaching. It also has the potential to implicate violation of anti-discrimination norms, to which the law school is bound (although one would need more details to say for sure). In the latter category is Professor Wax's public disparagement of the academic competence of her Black students, which I have addressed before. Disciplinary action for both of these incidents would not violate principles of academic freedom (indeed, Wax has already been disciplined for the latter incident).

Jared Taylor is beyond the pale, but Charles Murray is in bounds.

It would be a good idea if some CRT, CLS, badass invited Murray or Taylor to speak and face a response. They'd decline of course. But law professors aren't really lawyers. If they were they'd get the fucking point.

The solution, protecting both academic freedom and schools from lawsuits is putting some people out to pasture.

A Federal judge has ruled that City College of New York may not punish a professor for writing that "on average, blacks are significantly less intelligent than whites."

The professor, Dr. Michael Levin, who is tenured in the philosophy department, had sued the college president and dean, charging violations of his civil and constitutional rights.

I don't give a shit about "safety".

A smart and sophisticated piece of academic leftish Eurotrash retweeted someone mocking this idiot. She has 7 times the followers he does, and deserves the ridicule, but if he called her a lesbian he'd be thrown off twitter. 

A year ago I sent a note detailing attacks on women to a writer who used to call herself a feminist and now calls herself a man. She'd have none of it.

Snide superiority and passivity go well with each other but not with politics as a vocation. That's a reference and a joke, but it's not one Weber ever got. Or if he did, the "big children in university chairs" do not. Politics is vulgar. A culture of management dumbs down the managers and the managed.

Walking out to pick up dinner on a summer night, I passed conversations in Bangla and Croatian, Spanish and Arabic. The first English was my own voice asking for a Reuben. A couple of years ago the man behind the counter—Turkish and Algerian, with family in Milan—gave me a list of the Jewish delis in Brooklyn that made a good one.  For a few minutes tonight it was like nothing had changed.

In 2005 a Bulgarian/Irish bartender asked me "Do you think the Manhattanites will take over? I hope not. I like the diversity." The same year a European gallery owner in Manhattan told me she'd stopped coming out. "Astoria is over. The Americans are moving in". The fact that the daughters of working class immigrants and old European money could happily share a common space, or that Yugoslav ballers could play in the projects, is not something American liberalism, or American propriety in any form, can comprehend. Astoria was the most organically cosmopolitan neighborhood in NY. The first to leave without being forced were the French. 

"Americans aren't social!" Still the best description.

I have lots of stories. I prefer the impersonal. If you're a hard drinking Muslim man and your parents are worried about your future, marry an Irish Catholic.

---

A follow-up because I wanted to tell stories.

We learn about the world by living in it

I misread something and went off in the wrong direction. Now I've gone off in a more appropriate one.

I still might need to tweak it.

---

Leiter links to this

Drawing and Thinking  We learn about a face by drawing it. What can that tell us about how we learn the truth by thinking?

How can one learn the truth by thinking? As one learns to see a face better if one draws it.

Ludwig Wittgenstein, Zettel §255

This remark, like many of Wittgenstein’s, seems to arise from self-examination. The answer he gives suggests that he is concerned with learning just by thinking, and indeed with the particular kind of learning just by thinking that happens in philosophy (as opposed to, say, mathematics). He seems to be asking how such learning is even possible. What are we to make of his answer?...

Learning the truth just by thinking, as one does in philosophy, is analogous to learning to see a face better by drawing it, in at least the sense that they require analogous attitudes of humility.

Rationalism and empiricism are opposed. The rationalist defense of empiricism is not empirical.   

Truth is theological, metaphysical garbage, or it's poetry: the record of a full moral commitment to a view of the world described in granular specificity. Facts are for arguing and argument is social; the result is a product of that social activity. Truth is asocial and anti-political.  Leiter will never accept that his defense of truth is just another form of moralism, and I'm as sick of moralism as he pretends to be. 

I've used one quote from John Mortimer for years, as part of my jihad of lawyers and orators, poets and side-show barkers, against pedants and philosophers—poets are all priests of their own sect, and every one's a sincere ironist. But my source was Mortimer's obit in the NY Times, and I've finally gotten around to finding the original. I'll add it to the sourcing in the manuscript. And the timing is perfect. 

From Clinging to the Wreckage, 1984  

The trial of Last Exit took place eight years after the acquittal of Lady Chatterley. It was the only obscenity case in which witnesses were produced who said that they had been depraved and corrupted, or in which we were given an opportunity of seeing what a depraved and corrupted person looked like. Sir Basil Blackwell, the Oxford bookseller, said that he had certainly been depraved by the book, but as he was in his eighties at the time the matter didn’t seem to be of great practical significance. The Reverend David Sheppard, who had been Captain of the English Cricket Team, also gave evidence to the effect that he had not, metaphorically speaking, held his bat so straight after reading Last Exit to Brooklyn, but as he went on to become Bishop of Liverpool the damage, whatever it was, doesn’t seem to have been serious. In spite of the industry of a number of literary and clerical witnesses, the book was found to be obscene in its trial at the Old Bailey and the publishers were fined £100. So it came about that John Calder asked me to argue the Last Exit case in the Court of Appeal.

We were lucky in our Court. It was presided over by Cyril Salmon, whose casual way with a gold watch and leisurely stroll up to a cross-examination had led me to envious imitation when I was starting at the bar. I found myself standing up at a point where the two great concerns of my life, writing and the law, met and almost failed to recognize each other. Indeed I was trying to explain to three courteous and distinguished Judges the fundamental difference between writers and lawyers, which produces the basic fallacy of all censorship laws. The writer is bound to explore all areas of human experience. The whole of life must be open to his voyage of discovery, he must sail as far as he can and his only duty is to come back with the truth as he sees it. There can’t be ‘no go’ areas in the world of art, and the writer who cuts short a line of work for fear of shocking some people or ‘giving offence’ is untrue to his calling. But lawyers are trained on ‘no go’ areas. They are accustomed to find truth concealed behind barriers marked ‘inadmissible evidence’. They cannot accept that it’s a writer’s duty to reveal all truths however unpalatable. I tried my best to explain this to the Court of Appeal in the Last Exit case and the Judges listened with great care and attention. The proposition which must be elementary to all students of literature came to their Lordships as an apparent surprise. They looked like three poets who had just been told that you may not call expert evidence on the point the Jury has to decide. 

An easier argument in the case was that the descriptions of homosexual prostitution and drug-taking in the book were so revolting that, far from turning anyone on to such practices, they would cause a sharp upswing in the marriage rate and the consumption of unadulterated ‘Old Holborn’ tobacco. The Judges were impressed by this argument which became known as the ‘Aversion Theory’ and withstood the test of a good many obscenity cases. The Court also ruled out the more usual meanings of the word ‘obscene’ which the trial Judge had given them. Publishing a book that was merely disgusting, or immoral, or erotic, or rude was clearly not a crime: it had to be blessed with the mysterious ‘tendency to deprave and corrupt’. In the end the Court allowed John Calder’s and Marion Boyars’ appeal and set aside the conviction. Last Exit became a best-seller for a “short while and I was led into a new department of law which I, in my more elevated moments, called arguments about free speech, but most of the friendly hacks in the robing-room call ‘dirty-book cases’.

I became more and more aware of the gulf that is fixed between the law and any sort of literature. One of the most difficult things to explain to Courts is that writers don’t necessarily approve of their characters’ behaviour. Because Shakespeare wrote Othello and Macbeth it doesn’t mean that he approved of wife murder and the stabbing of house guests. The putting-out of Gloucester’s eyes in King Lear is a deeply disturbing, shocking and horrific scene; but it tells a terrible truth about man’s inhumanity to man. The purpose of a play, Shakespeare said, is to hold a mirror up to nature: censorship laws would ensure that the mirror is a rose-coloured distortion.

Courts are very unclear about the effect of books on readers. Reading is done in a world of the imagination which has, it would appear, little direct result on the reader’s behaviour. I suppose the worst crime is murder and murder is nowhere written about more freely than in the works of Agatha Christie. If books had the effect claimed for them by the censors, every English country house would have a bloodstained butler in the library, dead with a knife between his shoulder blades. James Bond, licensed to kill, is read about and enjoyed by millions of inoffensive people who catch the train to the office every day and have never killed anyone with a karate chop or slept with a Chinese air hostess. It has been said that it is a strange anomaly of the censoring attitude that murder is against the law, but it is no crime to write about it. Sex is not against the law, but to write about it has often been held a criminal offence.

Doing these cases I began to find myself in a dangerous situation as an advocate. I came to believe in the truth of what I was saying. I was no longer entirely what my professional duties demanded, the old taxi on the rank waiting for the client to open the door and give his instruction, prepared to drive off in any direction, with the disbelief suspended. The attempts of the law to control the written word seemed to me dangerous and likely to put our Courts of Justice in a somewhat ridiculous light. I suppose that writers should, in a way, feel flattered by the censorship laws. They show a primitive fear and dread at the fearful magic of print. 

One of the difficulties of laws which tried to control books and habits of reading was that they assumed that our society was as one, as it no doubt was in 1868 when Lord Cockburn made his resonant pronouncement, and not a loose federation of groups with their own languages, customs, taboos, freedoms, courting habits and senses of morality. In England the moral values of a group of retired army officers and their wives frequenting a golf course in Worthing are not the same as those of a crowd of art students in a Kings Cross squat. What appears permissible in the Surrey commuter belt, among bright young advertising men and their wives, would be looked on with horror by the Puritan Pakistanis of Bradford. Of course all these groups must be subject to a basic strongly enforced criminal law; they must not be allowed to assault or pillage or rape or rob one another. But in such a society, tolerance demands that no one group may be allowed to impose its own moral views, however strongly held, upon another; still less should they be able to use the severe sanctions of the criminal law to do so. The law, it has always seemed to me, is at its best when it is enforcing practical remedies for specific crimes; it is at its worst when it tries to enforce the morality of one group in society upon another which may, for quite sincere and logical reasons, refuse to accept it. 

And it is significant that the attempted use of force is all one way. I did not wish to compel any member of the Festival of Light to sit through Oh, Calcutta! or read Gay News, although they do appear, no doubt from the highest motives and in the spirit of martyrdom, quite prepared to submit themselves to such works in the call of duty. No one, in the whole chequered history of censorship, has ever questioned anyone’s right not to read a book, to stay away from a play or not to visit a cinema. No one has ever suggested the compulsory sale of television sets without the button necessary to switch them off if you don’t like the picture.

"We were lucky in our Court. It was presided over by Cyril Salmon, whose casual way with a gold watch and leisurely stroll up to a cross-examination had led me to envious imitation when I was starting at the bar. I found myself standing up at a point where the two great concerns of my life, writing and the law, met and almost failed to recognize each other." 

Cyril Barnet Salmon, Baron Salmon 

by Walter Bird, 

bromide print, 1 December 1964, 8 1/8 in. x 6 1/8 in. (205 mm x 155 mm) image size.

Commissioned, 1964

 

Please find, attached, a copy of the image, which I am happy to supply to you with permission to use solely according to your licence, detailed at http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/3.0/

It is essential that you ensure images are captioned and credited as they are on the Gallery's own website (search/find each item by NPG number at http://www.npg.org.uk/collections/search/advanced-search.php).

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Rights and Images Department

National Portrait Gallery St Martin's Place London WC2H OHE

more fun with Horace Rumpole. 

"The Folk Theory of Well-Being" 

forthcoming in Oxford Studies in Experimental Philosophy, Volume 5 

John Bronsteen

Loyola University Chicago School of Law 

Brian Leiter

University of Chicago

Jonathan S. Masur

University of Chicago - Law School

Kevin Tobia

Georgetown University Law Center; Georgetown University - Department of Philosophy

Abstract

What constitutes a “good” life—not necessarily a morally good life, but a life that is good for the person who lived it? In response to this question of “well-being," philosophers have offered three significant answers: A good life is one in which a person can satisfy their desires (“Desire-Satisfaction” or “Preferentism”), one that includes certain good features (“Objectivism”), or one in which pleasurable states dominate or outweigh painful ones (“Hedonism”). To adjudicate among these competing theories, moral philosophers traditionally gather data from thought experiments and intuition. In this chapter, we supplement that traditional approach with a pair of experimental studies that examine whether the three theories reflect laypeople’s intuitions about well-being. The empirical studies yield two primary findings. First, they provide evidence for lay "well-being pluralism": laypeople treat desire satisfaction, positive objective conditions, and happiness as all constitutive of well-being. Second, the studies provide evidence of "hedonic dominance": laypeople evaluate an individual’s happiness as more important to an individual’s overall well-being than desire satisfaction or objective conditions.

Introduction... 

We thus set out here to make the first test of whether laypeople view well-being the way that many scholars in economics and philosophy seem to have assumed they do....

III. Experimental Studies...

B. Study 2...  

Jenny teaches ballet in a small studio in a small town. She usually spends her weekends going bowling with her friends.

Jenny is happy. She really enjoys teaching her ballet students, and she also has a lot of fun going bowling with her friends. She feels good when she wakes up in the morning and maintains that happy mood throughout the day until she goes to sleep at night. She often smiles and rarely frowns. She experiences positive emotions like joy and contentment most of the time; and she only rarely experiences negative emotions like sadness, anger, and irritability.

But Jenny doesn’t have what she wants. She always wanted to be a famous ballerina who lives in Paris and spends her weekends going to exclusive parties with other celebrities. That is still the life she would choose if she could choose anything.

Jenny is a famous ballerina who lives in Paris. She usually spends her weekends going to exclusive parties with other celebrities.

Jenny isn’t happy. She feels a lot of pressure to do her job well, and she doesn’t actually enjoy the work. She also feels pressure to impress her celebrity acquaintances so that she keeps getting invited to their parties. This prevents her from really ever enjoying her professional or her personal life. She feels bad when she wakes up in the morning and maintains that unhappy mood throughout the day until she goes to sleep at night. She rarely smiles and often frowns. She experiences negative emotions like sadness, anger, and irritability most of the time; and she only rarely experiences positive emotions like joy and contentment.

Incapable of reading even dime-store novels, let alone "great works of art", the recorded history of the opinions and beliefs of "laypeople" and "folk". But why would they?—since art is about aesthetics and philosophy is about truth. Knobe is credited by "scholars in economics and philosophy" with discovering what the folk and the vast majority of the educated elite would call a truism. 

"My students were all obsessed with sex. Not the idea of sex, or the meaning of sex, but sex!"

"I find this reduction of sexual orientation to genitalia – what’s more, genitalia from birth – puzzling."

"William Blake, I suggest, both embodies that antithesis and proclaims the imperfection of Bentham’s understanding of happiness."  J.H. Burns, first General Editor of the Collected Works of Bentham. 

The Smart and the Folk, and The President and Other Intellectuals, and The Triumph of the Fact 

Knobe and Calllard, autism and sociopathy. The Glimmer Twins were right.

And this goes back to the questions at the beginning of the previous post.

Pedantry is anti-political. Elite liberal opposition to politics ceded politics to the right, and that's why we're where we are.

Lev Golinkin, The Nation: Meet the Head of Biden’s New “Disinformation Governing Board”

Late last month, the Joe Biden administration publicly confirmed that a “Disinformation Governing Board” working group had been created within the Department of Homeland Security. The news prompted a flood of concern about the impact of such an Orwellian organ on America.

But there’s no need to engage in hypotheticals to understand the dangers. One has to only consider the past of Nina Jankowicz, the head of the new disinformation board.

Jankowicz’s experience as a disinformation warrior includes her work with StopFake, a US government-funded “anti-disinformation” organization founded in March 2014 and lauded as a model of how to combat Kremlin lies. Four years later, StopFake began aggressively whitewashing two Ukrainian neo-Nazi groups with a long track record of violence, including war crimes.

Today, StopFake is an official Facebook fact-checking partner, which gives it the power to censor news, while Jankowicz is America’s disinformation czar. 

Remember that Leiter and others defend academic freedom, and are against free speech for the rest of us.

These platforms are now responsible for shaping and allowing participation in our new digital and democratic culture, yet they have little direct accountability to their users. Future intervention, if any, must take into account how and why these platforms regulate online speech in order to strike a balance between preserving the democratizing forces of the internet and protecting the generative power of our New Governors.

They may or may not associate corporations with rightful "epistemic authority", but they damn sure associate themselves with it.

Facebook reversed its reversal of its Azov policy after the shooting in Buffalo.

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Now Golinkin tells me the policy's unchanged.  But Jancowicz is gone.

 

Tylor Lorenz, WaPo, "How the Biden administration let right-wing attacks derail its disinformation efforts"

“They try to define ppl by these single, decontextualized moments,” @etbrooking said. “In Nina’s case it’s a few comments out of thousands.. They fixate on these small instances & they define this villain. Then, they start building a mythology around them" https://t.co/rLi3FvUNMw

— Taylor Lorenz (@TaylorLorenz) May 18, 2022

Emerson T. Brooking (@etbrooking) is at the Atlantic Council, with Oleksiy Honcharuk.

On October 13, photographs started circulating across social media showing a man resembling Ukrainian Prime Minister Oleksiy Honcharuk on stage at the “Veterans Strong” concert event in Kyiv. This was, however, no ordinary concert — it was organized by a far-right figure accused of murder, and headlined by a neo-Nazi band.