In Tel Aviv

"D" and I are in Tel Aviv right now. We've taken in some of the beach, some sun, and other things Israeli. Tomorrow we are off to Arad, we think, and then Ein Gedi. So far so good here in Israel.

My 'hood

I am back home now from a week-and-change in KY, and I took an hour to re-explore Brooklyn Heights. It is still as beautiful as ever. . . . more or less.

Almost every day since the beginning of the summer I noticed that somewhere on Montague Street there are annoying people, usually working in teams of two or more who want to stop you on the street and ask you to sign something, or more likely to contribute to some cause or other. I seem to recall last year when the Turkish restaurant had people on the street harassed people, I was very annoyed, same goes for the time the Jews for Jesus did it a year or two ago, and I think I am at that point now. It is either the Save the Children people, the ACLU, gay activists, DNC, Obamaheads, or some other do-gooder group that will not let me walk down the street unmolested. Is there some way to stop these people? Is this legal or are the police just too scared to enforce the law when it comes to the ACLU?

(Apparently this problem is at least 14 years old.)

Secondly, there are these hideous structures ruining the view from the southern part of the promenade. For months, these ugly scaffolds have been hanging around and I was wondering what they are going to be used for. Now I found out. They are used to pump water from the river in to the river.

There are four things I think worth considering here. First, the environmental impact on extracting metals from the ground, making steel, molding it to scaffolding, transporting it to Brooklyn and Govenors Island etc is non-negligible. In the grand scheme of things it isn't much, but it is something.

Secondly, It also takes electricity to run, and I don't know who is paying for that, but when office buildings are being asked to cut electrical use so that the grid doesn't go down during peak times, what can possibly justify the expenditure on this? Pumping hundreds of thousands of gallons of water upward takes lots of energy.

Third, the amount of tax-payer funded bureaucracy that went in to approving and planning this is also not negligible. It is not like someone filled out a form and it was approved and that was the whole government expense. I can't imagine how much this must have cost the taxpayers.

Finally, and I think most importantly, the things are useless and pointless. They are supposed to be "waterfalls" but really they look like construction sites without buildings after it rained, with torrents water falling off of them. Ugliest piece of "art" I've seen in a long time. And worse, the only way to really get a good view of them is to be standing in middle of the river. New York is not that desperate for attention or good art that we have to resort to this.

They attract people to the promenade to stare and take pictures of this crap, and that does little help but make parking that much harder around here (though I don't drive) and ups the demand (and hence price) for the restaurants and other stuff in the neighborhood (which I and most of the residents have little financial interest in). They are like tourists, but from here.

I can't wait for them to take down this junk.

KY

I am now leaving Kentucky where I spent the past week and change in charge of someone else's unit. It was a pretty good experience and I had a lot of fun.

I hope I never have to come to KY again.

I am exhausted.

Wilmington

Just got back from a friend's wedding in Wilmington, DE. There is nothing to do in that town. The wedding however was absolutely beautiful.

spelling issue

So here is something that I have been dealing with for a while, and I have to make a decision about, but I am torn. Any thoughts on this matter are appreciated.

Because of the way Yiddish phonology works, my last name is spelled with two ayyins in it (tzadi ayyin resh mem ayyin resh). My grandfather spells his name with two ayyins, as does one of his two sons. However, my generation is somewhat split. Some of us have dropped the ayyins in order to be in line with the Hebrew spelling (tzadi resh mem resh). The name, I believe, derives from a Yiddish word, so it makes sense to keep the Yiddish spelling. Though the Yiddish origins are a bit obscure. But I am not particularly fond of the Yiddish spelling, and when pronounced with ayyins as a Hebrew word, it sounds a bit bizarre. The word in Hebrew would be meaningless.


Keeping one ayyin as a compromise strikes me as a bit dumb, as it is the worst of both worlds.

I have no interest in actually changing the name, but I am torn over keeping or dropping the ayyins. Any thoughts?

. . . speaking of suing

Not sure how many of you remember the TV show "Sliders", but one scene has been coming to mind a lot lately. The crew lands in a world where some 91% of the population are lawyers and pretty much everyone sues everyone all the time. creepiness ensues.

Given our last post, we thought we had seen it all. But wait. . . middle aged Jewish guy sues thirty-something Asian girlfriend for dumping him. Given the fact that he did this, it is no wonder she left. He was nuts.

What is this world coming to? Obama, a lawyer, apparently believes that the function of the court is to make policy, and not enforce law. Maybe these people are hoping to find a left-wing recently dumped radical feminist judge who will award them money for being pathetic?

Why didn't I think of this

So a science studies professor freaks out at her students and calls them names because she is unable to convince them that her crazy ideas make sense. So she threatens to sue them.

This is just funny on so many levels. Clearly she is one of those freaks who really believes what she is talking about when she claims that the function of science and technology is to oppress women. She also believes that as an instructor her job is to talk at her students and not to them. She does not seem to believe that there are any standards for making a case, and if her students don't see what she takes to be obvious then they are "fascist demagogues". Clearly she is just nuts, and how she got to teach at Dartmouth is beyond me. And while I don't know that much about teaching, I know that if there is anyone whose job it is to be an adult in the class room - it's the instructor's. Priya Venkatesan has no such belief.

This is so bizarre.

Anyone heard of this John Stuart Mill fellow?

You would think if there was one publication in the world where the writers should be expected to have an inkling of what goes on in Academic life it would be in the Chronicle of Higher Education. Yet a political scientist there, a director of some center of research at Boston College displays the most complete ignorance of the point of his piece. His article laments the lack of attention that J. S. Mill gets among philosophers.

It is excusable to believe that no one reads Mill anymore. Perhaps he never took a philosophy class, or read a philosophy book. But had he done so, he would realize what a fool he is, as I would venture to say that the overwhelming number of ethics texts published struggle with Mill's ideas about utilitarianism and freedom. The overwhelming number of ethics courses and introductory philosophy courses devote some time to Mill's ideas on liberty, free speech, and utility. The majority of advanced texts and courses on Ethics devote time and space to Mill's ideas as well.

Of course the fact that ignorance is completely excusable does not justify his decision to write about it, or the Chronicle's decision to publish it. Did Alan Wolfe just not bother to ask a philosopher at Boston College if people still read Mill? There are plenty of people there who know Mill's work well.

I certainly hope that he does political science better than he does his public laments. I hear his next piece will talk about how classics don't read Homer, or perhaps how mathematicians no longer know geometry, or Protestants no longer pay attention to biblical texts. No wonder people think academics are out of touch.

In Canada

I am now in London, Ontario 3/5 of the way through a five day conference. Nice place to visit.

Review of Ladyman's Understanding Philosophy of Science

James Ladyman's Understanding Philosophy of Science is a pretty good beginning text in the philosophy of science. It is very well organized, and as straight forward as can be. There are two main sections. The first deals with the scientific method, the second deals with the question of realism.

The first section goes through the various stages in the philosophy, especially the question of induction, from the rather naive position of Francis Bacon through falsificationism and the theory of scientific revolutions.

The second section is about the question of realism, especially the problems created by underdetermination, explanation, and inference to the best explanation. There is a very good focus on van Fraassen and the nature of constructive empiricism.

This book is an excellent choice for a first introduction to the main questions in contemporary philosophy of science.

Review of Wesley Salmon's Four Decades of Scientific Explanation

Four Decades of Scientific Explanation Is an excellent overview of the history of scientific explanation as seen from the standpoint of one of its most significant contributors.

Since the late nineteenth century is is generally agreed that science provides explanations of the phenomena in the natural world. But exactly what does an explanation look like? What form does an explanation take? How do we recognize an explanation and distinguish it from pseudo-explanations and the like?

Salmon's history covers the discussion from Hempel to the state of the art in 1989 when the book was written. He covers all the major theories and all the major questions. The book is highly readable, and definitely a worthwhile investment for those who want to understand this corner of the philosophy of science.

Miami

Last weekend "D", "L", and "S" and I spent a few days in Miami. It was quite relaxing. I spent most of my time near the pool working. I think now I am suffering from nice weather withdrawal.

I am off playing soldier this weekend, and hopefully I will be able to get back to doing some serious work after that.

Purim

Wishing the world a happy Purim.

Thinkin 'bout prostitution

Today I play devil's advocate.

Elliot Spitzer has caused everyone on the planet to start thinking about prostitution. It seems too obvious that it is a victimless crime, and it boggles my mind why it is illegal at all. Clearly it is illegal because there is some taboo against it, and as enlightened as we are as a society, we have not overcome that.

One reason we consider it such a taboo is that prostitutes do something that no one likes, they show us the truth. We always punish those who show us the truth, because the truth is usually unpleasant. We like our illusions. We like believing that sex is romantic. It is something done by two people who are in love and want to give each other pleasure, and procreate and that sort of stuff.

But as anyone who has any familiarity with what we might call more "primitive" cultures knows, or as anyone who has ever paid for an engagement ring knows, or as any Marxist will insist: sex and marriage can usually be understood in much less romantic terms. Sex and marriage can be quite plausibly construed in financial terms.

Prostitution is in the unfortunate position of making it painfully obvious that sex is merely financial, or at least that sex can sometimes be construed as purely a financial matter, where sex is a service which is paid for as any other service would be. Keeping up the illusions of the romance of sex might be worth enforcing a ban on prostitution all by itself.

But although prostitution does not seem to harm or offend anyone, nor does it seem inherently immoral, there are still a few arguments that can be made for its banning.

Keep in mind that I do believe that it should be legalized. But for the sake of the argument I will put forth a few things to mull over. Consider the claim that prostitution, by being kept illegal, provides a benefit to third parties that outweigh the restriction to your rights to private sexual dealings between consenting adults.

I suppose that old-time conservatives might use this argument to argue that all sorts of deviant sex corrupt public morality, and as such provide a harm to third parties, but they are old-fashioned, and the burden rests on them to define public-morality in a non-question-begging way.

But here are the arguments:
First, because of the de facto nature of who and when we prosecute prostitution, society tends to prosecute (or in any case make a big deal out of prosecuting) only those people who would be seriously publicly embarrassed by such prosecution. That is a good thing, as it discourages people from becoming the kind of person who would seriously be embarrassed by such prosecution. For example, people who make themselves the targets or revenge by publicly embarrassing others with frivolous prosecutions. (i.e., if your hands are so dirty that you've screwed so many people, over little things, that they or their friends in turn are willing to prosecute you for sex, you really might deserve it.)

Second, it provides an enforcement mechanism for people who should not be frequenting prostitutes, not to frequent prostitutes. Married men, for example, are presumably contractually obligated (via their marriage contract) not to have sex with prostitutes. So the public prosecution of prostitution provides an enforcement mechanism for an otherwise unenforceable/unenforced breach of contract. That is, at least one type of infidelity becomes known to your spouse. A conviction of solicitation is not nearly as embarrassing if you are not married, and so the argument that it disproportionately punishes married people is quite the point. (Perhaps there is an argument that it should only be a crime for married people. Of course there is also an argument that married men need prostitutes the most, and there is thus a utilitarian argument for allowing them to violate their marriage contracts without repercussions.)

Thirdly, the ability to purchase sex cheaply (or for market value, anyway) makes it difficult for non-prostitute women who generally want to retain a monopoly on sex. That is, during a marriage, women can use the provision of sex, or more or less interesting sex as bargaining leverage in marital negotiations. Unmarried women want to reserve sex as an incentive for men to be in relationships with them.

The ability of non-prostitute majority to retain sex as leverage should outweigh the benefit to the few women who are attempting to put sex on the free-market. So the argument claims that it harms the set of female non-prostitutes.

Then again, one could argue that restaurants do the same thing, by making good food something that is commodified, and mothers and wives and girlfriends no longer have a monopoly. But there are too many disanalogies for this to be worth pursuing.

Again, I think that all the above arguments are not quite good, but I leave it as an exercise to the reader to find the problems.

Review of David Corfield's Toward a Philosophy of Real Mathematics

(Apology in advance. This may just be a hasty emotional outburst. I think I had a stronger negative reaction to the book then I should have. The author is clearly a very bright guy, and the book is better than I portray it. If you are interested in the philosophy of mathematics, read it.)

Imagine that you were Catholic, or at any rate well versed in Catholicism and Catholic teaching and practice. Now imagine you encountered a philosopher of religion. Would you have the following gripe?: Philosophers of religion don't seem to deal with what is really important to religious people. Philosophers deal with the existence of God, almost to the exclusion of lots of important philosophical problems.

So, because you don't get why the standard problems are oh-so-important you write a book. In it, you spend a chapter insisting that philosophers must look to the history of religion to understand the real problems of religion that bother its real practitioners. What problem faces practitioners? For example, you might say that looking at history, the Catholic mass started out in some language, I assume Greek (or not), and then turned to Latin, then to the vernacular, and now there is a proposal being floated to return to Latin. The history of why and how is long and complicated, and you bog chapter two down with scholarly minutiae of this history. This is a difficult and controversial question with many serious repercussions. Other religions had the same issues. Reform Judaism's split from orthodox Judaism involved the language of prayer, and Islam still is exclusively Arabic. So whatever western religion you are, chances are that the language issue is important. So why the heck do philosophers of religion act as if the only important questions are those about the nature of God, you ask repeatedly. There are serious arguments in favor of a Latin mass, you say. It is traditional, if was more fruitful in producing scholars, it forced congregants to focus on other parts of the religion, it retained an aura of mystery in the religion. . . Your book then picks on other problems that bother religious people, like food habits, concepts of purity, and the nature of fundamentalism. Each issue does contain some specks of philosophy, though few that would seriously interest most philosophers of religion. Naturally religious people like this approach, because sorting through the Ontological Argument is pretty foreign to their religion, but arguing over what language mass out to be said in is quite familiar to them. So you are hailed as a serious philosopher of religion who takes note of Real Religion, not the fake stuff studied by philosophers.

David Corfield performs a similar service for the philosophy of mathematics. He takes questions that are traditionally off the radar of philosophers of mathematics, and faults them for ignoring them. Then he elaborates on the history and nature of mathematics at great length and with serious depth, and attempts to show that there are real philosophical questions there. Are there? Yes. Am I just being conservative and scared of mathematics by thinking that those are not the important questions? I think not.

Corfield's book could be uncharitably described as warmed-over Lakatos. (I wouln't describe it as such, but I can see it.) I presume that Lakatos and his famous book Proofs and Refutations has more fans in mathematicians than in philosophers of mathematics, likely because the book is just one long mathematical problem, discussed from the perspective of the problem's history, and the history of the concepts contained in the objects of the problem. Lakatos makes some interesting philosophical points along the way: namely he tells us that our mathematical concepts change over time. But more on this in a moment.

But philosophers wonder where the important and interesting philosophy is. And that is the difference between him and traditional accounts of the philosophy of mathematics. His recent blog post about two cultures is thus odd. Besides for the fact that I do not know what philosophical problem is meant when he claims that his goal is to understand the rationality of mathematics through the history of its practice, and the fact that he caricatures traditional philosophy of mathematics by claiming that it is reducible to logicism, it misses the point. In reality it is just that there are different sets of questions that can be deemed philosophical. The ones that traditional philosophers think about are different from his, because they are not easily articulated as interesting philosophical problems, answering the traditional questions about epistemology, metaphysics, and methodology. Perhaps if they were articulated as such, they would appeal to more philosophers. As they are, they are phrased as long mathematics discussions, with some nod towards an ill defined philosophical problem.

Chapter one sets up the book and makes a case for looking at the history of mathematics as it has been practiced by real human mathematicians - with all the baggage that comes with it.

Chapter two gives us a lesson on automated theorem proves and suggests that they are so far only as good as the mathematicians that guide them, and that the real philosophical problems in mathematics ought to be what notation mathematicians need to use. You see, some notations are harder to work with and some are easier - hence the philosophical problem. Get it? Right.

Chapter three makes a philosophical problem out of thinking up conjectures. Can computers do it? Probably not so well.

Chapter four discusses the interesting problem of analogy in mathematics. Many branches in mathematics and many problems in mathematics display interesting analogies with other branches and parts of branches of mathematics. Sometimes it only gets interesting when the analogies fail to hold, sometimes a good analogy can make a whole branch of mathematics obsolete, as all of its questions get reduced to other questions.

Chapter five has an account of Bayesianism in mathematics. A Bayeseian approach as it is traditionally understood in the philosophy of science is there to try to solve the problem of induction. It does so by saying that the logic of science is not inductive in any straight forward way, but rather it is probabilistic. (This is a gross oversimplification.) This is clearly not a problem you will have in mathematics. So Corfield's Bayesianism is restricted to the nature of Bayesianism in mathematics given a subjectivist approach, that is measuring mathematicians' subjective assessments of the probabilities that a given theorem is true.

Chapter six gives a few case studies showing that theories of science often rely on their underlying theories of mathematics, or the outstanding mathematical problems, for their solutions. This is not overly newsworthy, though it is good to have a list of case studies and a nice analysis.

Chapter seven begins Corfield's discussion of Lakatos. He is generally critical, and addresses Fefferman's criticism, and also mentions Steiner's. In some sense he really does nitpick Lakatos to death. I say this as a compliment. Lakatos does make some real mistakes, and does not adequately or fairly represent the history of mathematics, even in the very restricted case he gives.

Chapter eight continues the critique of Lakatos, and this time focuses on the question of what the mathematical research program is. This looks a bit more familiar to philosophers of science. This follows the traditions of Kuhn, Popper, Lakatos, and Fayerabend in looking for the methodology behind scientific, and in this case mathematical research. Corfield claims, correctly, I think that Lakatos' view of the history of science cannot be simply carried over to the history of mathematics. The study of the methodology of mathematical research programs needs 1) some refinements, and 2) more nuance than has been given so far. This program is probably of some interest to philosophers of science and mathematics. The study started by Kuhn was very much in vogue for a bit, though philosophers of science have tended to loose interest in this in favor of the traditional problems in the philosophy of science. Kuhn and co were certainly more influential in the long run outside philosophy than they were in it.

Chapter nine is about the question of what lead to the acceptance of groupoids as an important field of study.

Chapter ten is perhaps the most disappointing. I say that because it shows the most promise and delivers the least. We are offered that tantalizing suggestion that higher-order algebra has something interesting to offer philosophers. What we are actually given is a description of roughly what higher-order algebra is, and thus suggestion that it is of a higher level of abstraction, and that some of the notation can be done in pictures. (Repeating some other philosophers who unconvincingly tried to show that pictures are philosophically interesting.) The idea of infinitesimals, sets, and modals held real promise as a field of philosophical research, and they panned out because people were able to show that there were questions that philosophers could ask and try to settle about them. I had hoped that we would at least see some real questions or suggestions about higher order category theory or algebra, but we did not. What is it about them that a philosopher might want to know about that is not there with all other branches of mathematics? That is the only thing I want to know. There is no satisfying answer given.

(As a criticism of the book, it is annoying that despite the existence of real criticism of some key ideas that he deals with, they do not appear in the book. For example, the notion of revolutions in mathematics is taken for granted, as is the legitimacy of Lakatos' idea in general. Joseph Dauben, a giant in the history of mathematics, whose essay must be well known to Corfield, famously disagreed with Crowe about the existence of revolutions in mathematics. There are also some very critical reviews of Lakatos' Proofs and Refutations in the literature that are well worth reading that Corfield ignores.)

To be honest, I do find many of the problems discussed in the book interesting, but I fail to see how many of them are philosophical. (I hope the author was not pulling one of those "let me show you a lot of math, therefore I must be right.) Many are really psychological or sociological. The problem with this is that there is a good reason why we do not see mathematics and science papers starting out "Well, first I thought X, then I realized that X was wrong, so I changed Y, and got a proof for Z. Then I had lunch and realized that I can get a proof for W if I only . . ." No one cares what got you to the theorem or the proof. Your personal history of conjectures, subjective probabilities, luncheons, conferences, and the clever insights you used to get you to the proof are not what makes up a philosophy of real mathematics. Real mathematics is what appears in mathematics journals. Everything else is part of a philosophy of real mathematicians. They are a fascinating bunch, but not necessarily a subject of philosophical reflection.

That being said, the structure of mathematical knowledge and discovery probably ought to be a part of the philosophy of mathematics. One wonders however how that could be done. Is there a logic that really describes the whole process for each case? I would doubt it, and perhaps that is what makes the problem so uninteresting - the fact that it is truly intractable.

Corfield may be doing mathematics from the inside, but he is doing philosophy from the outside. He misses the questions that are important to real philosophers. Chapter one approvingly quotes Diderot in an epigraph saying "To speak informatively about bakery you have got to have put your hands in the dough." By this token, Corfield hasn't said much about bakery, but rather he has given us a cookbook of recipes that people rarely use. Let me end with the following challenge to Corfield: Stephen Stich and Adam Morton write

Why is there so little philosophy of mathematics? . . .One explanation might be that mathematics is hard , and philosophy is hard, so the philosophy of mathematics might be doubly hard. . . . But it cannot be the whole story since very sharp and troubling points in the philosophy of mathematics can be made with elementary mathematical examples. One reason why a philosopher of mathematics needs to know some advanced mathematics is to call the bluff of others. Irrelevant by terrifyingly technical exposition is common in second rate work. . .

Corfield writes that

the prospective philosopher of mathematics quickly gathers that some arithmetic, logic, and a smattering of set theory is enough to allow her to ply her trade, and will take some convincing that investing the time in non-commutative geometry or higher-dimensional algebra is worthwhile. One of the main purposes of the book has been to argue against this.

I do not know who is right on this one. But if Corfield is, the burden of proof is still on him (or perhaps he would be magnanimous enough to show us even if it wasn't) to show that there are interesting enough philosophical problems that can only be solved if we are aware of the higher mathematics being done by groupoid theorists, and mathematicians who study higher-order algebras.
We see a few not-so-very-interesting problems, and a lot of fancy modern mathematics, but few clear convincing arguments that the two have met.