Life as an Extreme Sport

Category: Academics

Classes and coursework.

strange serendipities

Academics

I have been reading William S. Burroughs’ The Adding Machine, and finding, to my delight, small bursts of creativity flowing from his words. I picked up a journal this evening to pair with the book, to record and expand my thoughts on what I’m reading (instead of scribbling on the back of whatever receipt is handy).

In one of his essays, Burroughs talks about words being viruses, and how Korzybski’s book argues that words without referents are words that should be dropped from the language. It stuck with me, since I’ve been thinking a lot about semiotics lately, and how much of Locke’s Essay deals in a sign theory that seems closely mappable to Lacan’s. I sort of wondered how my empiricism prof would take me tossing Korzybski into the discussion next week (before dismissing it outright since that would drag the conversation even more off track than we normally get), idly debated looking to see if the store had the book Burroughs referred to, and moved along.

I had decided I wanted to inscribe Stephen Greenblatt’s comment about wonder in the beginning of my new journal, and rather than just walk into the other room and pull Marvelous Possessions off the bookshelf, I decided to see if I had the quote in my blog. A quick search on Greenblatt pulled up not the quote on wonder, but a discussion of Douglas Engelbart and Korzybski. How very strange and serendipitous the world can be.

bookstores are the mortal enemy

Academics, Pop Culture

…actually, I did pretty well. And this is probably the third or fourth time I’ve been in a bookstore the last few weeks and the first time I bought something, so that’s got to be worth something. Especially since I was technically at two bookstores. From the little local store, I picked up another journal to write in, as well as The Recovery of Wonder: The New Freedom and the Asceticism of Power by Kenneth L. Schmitz, who I’ve never heard of but is apparently a professor emeritus of philosophy and a fellow at Trinity College, University of Toronto, as well as a bunch of other academic affiliations. I picked this up largely because of the topic – I’m curious what a philosopher has to say about recapturing wonder and it’s importance in the world, as opposed to Greenblatt. (All hail Greenblatt and other CHID-related chanting.)

And speaking of CHID, Phillip would be so proud. The last time I was at Borders, mucking around for books on empiricism (which I didn’t find), I stumbled across a couple of Henri Bergson books. I grabbed them, held them longingly, and then put them back and have thought about them ever since. I actually specifically went back to Borders tonight to buy them, and picked up The Creative Mind: An Introduction to Metaphysics, which is actually his last book and more of an autobiography and explanation of choice, as well as Laughter: An Essay on the Meaning of the Comic, which on my copy has a much nicer cover! I justify this as being related to what I think I’m writing my dissertation on – Bergson looks at what laughter is and why people laugh, saying that laughter keeps us human. It should be very interesting paired with the reading I’ve been doing on the function of satire.

Mm, books.

Ayer, On Theism

2006 (NY), 2007, Academics, APHI 621 - Metaethics

So this Ayer piece is incredibly engaging – to the point that you be forgiven for thinking this was one of my CHID teaching documents, I have scribbled it so purple. (Fellow chiddies who took classes with me, or for that matter received graded papers from me, know precisely what I am talking about. “What do you mean, did I dip this in purple koolaid?…”)

So as Ayer goes through this chapter on the critique of ethics and theology, he says the following:

For it is characteristic of an agnostic to hold that the existence of a god is a possibility in which there is no good reason either to believe or disbelieve;… As for the agnostic, although he refrains from saying either that there is or that there is not a god, he does not deny that the question whether a transcendent god exists is a genuine question. He does not deny that the two sentences “There is a transcendent god” and “There is no transcendent god” express propositions one of which is actually true and the other false. All he says is that we have no means of telling which of them is true, and therefore ought not to commit ourselves to either. ((A.J. Ayer, “Criqitue of Ethics and Theology” in Language, Truth and Logic, New York: Dover Publications, Inc. 1952. pp 114-116))

For someone who reads as though he studied at Russell’s knees, and is quite obviously influenced by him in many areas, this strikes me as a shocking misunderstanding of what agnosticism is.

Russell was an agnostic – at least a modern agnostic who felt that the non-anthropomorphic God is one that cannot obviously be disproven. He said later on in specific clarification to the idea that he was an atheist that he doesn’t think that there is a conclusive argument bu which one can prove that there is no God. Now granted, he was speaking to philosophers, but in theory that is what we – or at least Ayer – are. Russell was also willing to postulate a superhuman intelligence, noting that it might appear to us to be more than it is simply because it is outside the bounds of what we can know (which neatly traces to the root words of agnosticism). Ayer, on the other hand, wants to stick to a binary ((and we all know how that concept makes me shudder)) concept of true/false, known/unknown.

Going back to Huxley, credited with coining the term agnosticism, we see that it lterally means without knowledge, that it is futile to attempt to know the reality corresponding not only to our religious beliefs, but our scientific and philosophic ideas.

The agnostic is not saying that we have no means of telling which sentence concerning faith is true and which is false, and therefore ought not to commit ourselves to either, as Ayer characterizes. The agnostic is saying that I don’t know, I can’t know, and futhermore, don’t care! Ayer characterizes the agnostic as waffling, when in reality the agnostic has shrugged and walked away from the entire debate as being one not worth pursuing, except over rounds of Guinness.

2007, Academics, APHI 621 - Metaethics, University at Albany

If anyone doubts the accuracy of this account of moral disputes, let him try to construct even an imaginary argument on a question of value which does not reduce itself to an argument about a question of logic or about an empirical matter of fact.
-A.J. Ayer, Language, Truth, and Logic

Ayer challenges us to attempt to construct an argument on a question of value that does not reduce down to either a question of logic or an empirical matter of fact — a comment that caught my attention precisely because of the continual use of “empirial” in this essay. Ayer places great stock in that which can be empirically confirmed, which seems to be rooted in Russell’s belief that it is not desirable to believe in a proposition when there’s no ground in believing its truth/factuality. But this reliance on the infallibility of empirical fact seems to be a flaw in Ayer’s philosophy.

The concept of empirical fact is flawed by the concept known as the observer’s paradox. At it’s most basic, this paradox says that the observation of an event, an experiment, of anything, is influenced by the presence of the observer. We bias what we see, and what we see is biased by us — the idea that there can be a control by observation has been critiqued for quite some time.

How we formulate knowledge, share it, and confirm it is certainly important — there wouldn’t be library shelves dedicated to it otherwise — but to say that the only thing that can be truly known is that which is empirically verifiable leaves itself open to critique from the area of philosophy that questions our ability to remove ourselves from the equation to allow for a truly neutral observation