The puzzle goes like this: young student actor Wiley Wiggins, star of the trippy, philosophical film Waking Life, walks into a bar. There he finds University of Texas Professor of Philosophy Louis Mackey, who muses on two kinds of human suffering: those that suffer from an “overabundance of life”, like…
We’ve recently raised a few issues regarding justifications for bigotry. What especially rankles some of us is the often-heard argument that people should do something a particular way (recently, the issue is preventing gay marriage) because that is the way that it has been done in the past.
What a ridiculous-sounding principle on which to base an argument! Ridiculous sounding, unless you are a lawyer arguing an important case. In courtrooms across this country, multitudes of lawyers lawyers stand up every day with straight faces and proceed to argue to judges that a case should be decided a particular way solely because a previous and similar case was handled that same way.
In law, this principle that judges should rely on precendent is given the obscure and mysterious-sounding label “stare decisis,” from the Latin, “stand by the thing decided.” [Stare decisis et non quieta movere, meaning “to stand by the decisions and not to disturb settled points”].
There is the great power in this heuristic. At least it’s an equal opportunity principle: Analogizing to old cases is a technique that can be used by crafty opportunists, as well as good-hearted seekers of justice.
Though we are tempted to scoff at this principle (of relying on precedent) when it is employed by bigots, we need to keep things in context. That very same principle is the heartbeat of justice. How strange, you might think, that such an amoral principle determines outcomes of important cases! That’s the way it is, however. I’ll …
In a recent conversation with a relative of mine who is a born-again Southern Baptist Christian, we got into a discussion about the afterlife. My relative insisted that "hell is a real place," while I pointed out that no one knows anything more about the afterlife than anyone else does. …
Quite often, our use of language is puzzling, indeed. For instance, we often walk up to each other asking, “How are you doing?” or “what’s happening?” when we would be annoyed if the person we addressed tried to answer our question. We spend a lot of time talking about the weather when it really doesn’t affect most of us. We crave to talk with our friends and co-workers about entertainment such as the performance of professional sports teams, as though our lives and moods should depend upon such things. And we love to gossip.
What is language for? Most people consider language merely as a means of preserving and communicating ideas. In “Magic Words: How Language Augments Human Computation,” Andy Clark set forth six additional ways in which we use language, each of these uses serving to “re-shape the computational spaces which confront intelligent agents.”
Clark discusses Lev Vygotsky, the Soviet psychologist of the 1930’s who “pioneered the idea that the use of public language had profound effects on cognitive development.” Vygotsky focused on the role of private language and scaffolded action in guiding behavior by focusing attention and controlling action. For instance, he found that children who are working on their own internalize the verbal directions previously given to them by responsible adults in order to guide complex tasks.
Clark makes a strong case that his “supra-communicative” account of language can transform, re-shape and simplify computational tasks that confront our biological brains in six ways. According to Clark, we …
In a past post, Grumpypilgrim asked : “Why do the two parties divide the issues the way they do, and who decided that the issues should be divided the way they are?”
I’ve often wondered that too. After all, you would think that the “pro life” Republicans would also be against capital punishment. You might think that a “conservative” Republican would be in favor of conservation, not squandering, of either the treasury or the environment. You would think that those supporting smaller, weaker starve-the-beast government would resist laws that harass gays. Asked in another way (regarding Democrats), what do gun control, generous welfare benefits, pro-union and pro-choice positions have in common?
George Lakoff asked these questions too. Writing of conservatives, he wondered:
. . . What does being against gun control have to do with being for tort reform? What makes sense of the linkage? I could not figure it out. I said to myself, These are strange people. Their collection of positions makes no sense. But then an embarrassing thought occurred to me. I have exactly the opposite positon on every issue. What do my positions have to do with one another?
(p. 5) Lakoff proposed a solution to these questions in his bestseller Don’t think of an elephant!: Know your values and frame the debate (2004). He concluded that our two different ways of understanding the nation come from two different understandings of family.
The conservatives model government off of a “strict father” model, where the government’s …