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Thinking tools for everyone
Sometimes my current philosophy course reminds me of my Oxford days, where a professor’s claim to fame would consist in investigating a niche subject, like “beekeeping in the 4th century A.D.” I am not being fair. I love my own “niche” subjects but I lose my patience when others do the same. Ahem. Still, I find most of Philosophia interesting, even if, as I have explained before, a philosopher needs a cow’s bell to signal his position, for lack of maps and structure.
Today, however, was an exception. It was about thought-experiments. Now don’t get me wrong: I wanted to know about this. Thought-experiments as a tool, or as some would say, as a method. But that was not what the lecture was about. It was about an ongoing controversy between scientists and philosophers. Whether philosophical thought-experiments are essentially different from scientific experiments. Because scientists feel that the term “experiment” belongs to science and not to philosophers. Because philosophers should leave empirical (read: scientific) work to scientists. The cartoon below says it all. It is from existential comics, a fantastic source if you want to see philosophers laughing at themselves.
To me, this controversy is much like the analytic/continental divide. It only looks like a debate, but underneath it is all about funding. The scientists get much more, whereas philosophy has to get by on crumbs. Follow the money, Husband would say. Grossly unfair and not very sensible in the long run. And yes, philosophers need to speak up and defend themselves. Yet by itself, such a consideration does not make a topic interesting.
There was an interesting part to this lecture, the historical focus: how well-known philosophers like Galileo or Locke used thought-experiments, not just to argue their point, but also to draw attention to controversies or confusions. If you are into these historical figures, it must be wonderful to find new layers to their text. Somewhat like re-reading your favourite author, say Murakami (my personal favourite) and discovering a new meaning. However, I have no interest in Galileo or Locke, so it was all a bit wasted on me. Which, in a way, is good news. At least now I know there are topics in Philosophia that I can live without.
So what are thought-experiments, you might ask? Well, this was also my question, and it was not answered. That is not quite true. The lecturer did not. My fellow students did not seem to understand my unease with the general claim that thought-experiments are the designated instruments of philosophy. The professor in charge of the Skills seminar understood my objection well enough though, even tried to explain it to the class, but I don’t think anyone really cared that much. Maybe they were tired. It was the end of a long day. Never mind.
So now we are amongst ourselves :-), what are thought-experiments? You may look it up on Wikipedia, but let’s give you some nice examples. Ever heard of Achilles and the tortoise racing each other and Achilles not winning?
Or this one, the trolley experiment in ethics, where you get to decide who dies how in order to save lots of other people.
Now have a look at this sketch. This is from the world of business and no philosopher would – at first glance – think to call this a thought-experiment. But it is. Have a look. You must watch it to the end. It is about integrity.
Or this one, inspired by George Orwell’s animal farm. We all know how it ends: some animals are more equal than others.
I suppose you get the idea, without me throwing more books, cartoons, plays, paintings, riddles, poems, simulation models, fairy tales etc at you.
So what do I think thought-experiments are? Well, apart from lots of complicated questions about how our thoughts work, I think they are a means to an end. For the use of philosophers and non-philosophers alike to clarify whatever needs clarifying. Just like “real” experiments, the only restriction being that thought-experiments do not take place in the real world but in our imagination. I think there are no essential differences between a mental model, a guided meditation, a play, a painting or a mathematical formula IFF (if and only if) they are being used for instructional purposes. It does not matter who you are trying to instruct. It may even be yourself.
A thought-experiment has succeeded when it has clarified whatever it meant to clarify. Full stop. It also means that a philosopher (or any other person imparting information to a less knowledgeable audience) should try his or her utmost to provide clear thought-experiments, models, explanations. Because that is an important purpose of Philosophia: to clarify. If it does not do that, it might as well not be there.
On this slightly belligerent note, I conclude this post. Next, I will tell you about how things are going in the research project on the language evolution. As so many times before during this ReMa, I am learning things that I did not know I had to learn. It is still very recent as today I had to ask my professor to help sort out my group, so I am still sorting out my own thoughts. Plus, I am tired. I worked very hard these past few weeks. Next post, I promise.
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Back to school
The start of the new school year. I loved that time when I was a child. Everything new: new teachers, books, notebooks and a fresh set of pens and pencils (you might remember I am a stationary fetishist, from this earlier post). This stayed with me: the nostalgia of the New Year starting in September. Even if it did not, for the past 30+ years, but now it does again. Such a pity I have gone all digital. I toyed with the idea of getting some pens and paper just for the fun of it, but in the end I did not: I have so much stationary already. I did buy myself a scanmarker air, for scanning bits of text from non-digital books. With student-discount. The Dutch love their discounts and I am no exception.
The academic year started with lots of information and introductions and meetings for new Research Master students. I had missed out on that info when I started back in January. I found that by now I was fully up to date, but still, it was nice to check and make sure I had missed nothing. I was reminded we all have to write a study plan which has to be officially approved before you can complete your thesis. Also, it was fun to see all the new students. I bet they were not half as nervous as I was when I started, but still, I could tell they were. And I was not! Amazing how I have changed in just 6 months. Remember me being shaky on my first day, afraid they were all going to laugh at me and worrying if my memory would hold up? Anyway, I know all of them will turn into confident graduates soon, coz I have already seen it happen.
As I explained in my previous post, I will do two seminars and one position-paper this semester. I have spent all summer doing the background for the background for my position-paper (which is on speech acts, common ground and intentionality). A large part of that background is “consciousness” and there are literally hundreds of different theories about what consciousness is and how it works. In my time at Oxford, Philosophy of mind was about Analytic Philosophy (is there any other kind:-)?) I talked about that in a previous post. At length, because the existence of continental philosophy had passed me by completely. Anyway, these days, Philosophy of Mind is all about consciousness, starting out with generic denial of Descartes mind-body theory (Descartes claimed that mind and body are essentially made out of different stuff). To be able to say anything about the deliberate use of language, particularly if understanding language is not about mind-reading or some such psychological notion, you need to be able to say what it means to express something deliberately. I think so, anyway. So I spent a lot of time sorting out these new theories. It is all on my wiki, have a look at the topic “consciousness”. if you like. The main taxonomy is in the pink bit; every line is a separate page. It is not finished by any means: I have now started to catalogue arguments which connect and separate theories. You might notice I sometimes copy in cartoons. This is to liven things up. It is dry stuff. So let’s be thankful for existential comics.
My seminars for this next half year are: the Skills course, which is compulsory, the first part (I did the second part before the summer). The other one is a seminar on the evolution of language. That will be great I think. I know most of the students there from previous seminars. We will look at communication in apes and other animals and see how that might translate to humans. The basis is a theory by my professor, which says that language is not about expressing ideas or mind-reading others, but about cooperation and getting others to cooperate. By the way, he seems to be in a good mood, much better than last semester. He has been publishing a lot, one paper after the other, and I think his new theory has reached a stage where it is becoming widely recognised. So all the academic work is new and shiny and interesting and very much “now”. Who needs the ancient Greek philosophers?
The Skills class is taught by the Dean of our department. It turns out he was also at Oxford, a few years after me. An amazing guy: he has so much energy, such a devoted teacher and interested in everything. The Dean reminds me a bit of myself before I got CFS. Energy wise. Academically there is no comparison, obviously. Because he is so dedicated, he uses every minute of the allotted lecture time. Gone are the days when we were given the last hour off. Which is hard on all of us, because this set of lectures runs late: from 15:30 to 19:15. Everybody is so tired at the end. Except for the Dean it seems 🙂 He even wants to know about me, where I work, why I am there, what I want to do. He keeps pushing me toward this new Security centre which the university now has. So I told him I had already written to the professor there but that he not replied to my email yet. (Which is understandable because in that letter I challenged a bit of not-so-sensible advice, on Open Source, which that professor he had given the Dutch Minister of Security). We will see what happens.
Anyway, the Skills class, like last time, is a mix of things I already know, things I don’t know and things I did not know existed. In the latter category: there is a Dutch protocol for the integrity of academic research. You can find it here. This protocol directly results from academic scandal, some professors inventing research data to fit their theories. Three prominent cases happened at the Social Sciences department at Tilburg University, and the whole academic world went pale and speechless. Because there was a general lack of assurance on this issue, this nation-wide protocol was set up. Attached to this protocol is a data management protocol, which I will have to look into if I want do empirical research – which I well might.
We have already been set a small paper in the Skills class. This time, I tried to use all the big and small insights I gleaned from the feedback from my own professor back in July. I felt happy with it and it got a “very nice essay” (no grades as yet). There was just one time where I did not speak my mind because I could not “prove” it – this was about two philosophers who would probably hate each other but I did not say so. I got a remark on this, why I had not said so. So next time I will write out my intuitions too, stating that they are intuitions, I suppose.
So, back on track. I have taken the whole of December off, so hopefully this will give me enough time to finish all the papers I have to write this semester. Already I am back in the flow. Lovin’ it! Husband is still driving me back and forth, which is a great time-saver. Plus, it is nice to have a partner-in- crime to talk to about all the things I learn and that happen. Sometimes I think his ears must ring with all my ravings. But he is unperturbed, as always. Also, he found himself a cosy little setup in the Hortus tea garden which apparently is full of female volunteers who love to give him tea. Dozens of them, he tells me with twinkling eyes. Adventurous times ahead!
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Embroidery
Yesterday I had my long awaited meeting with my supervising professor. You know, the grumpy one that I regard as mine. There were several things that needed discussing. Obviously my paper, which got a good but not an excellent grade; the past and the future. And some human stuff.
We had arranged to meet at a café at Utrecht Central Station rather than at the university. Husband travelled up there with me, the idea being that we would meet up later. At the station I ran into several colleagues. They were on their way to a team meeting which I should have attended too had I not been on study leave for the afternoon. I was glad I had not booked a meeting room at the Utrecht office: in my head, academic and work worlds don’t mix well. I had half an hour to spare though so enough time to get back into the academic spirit.
There was a bit of an awkward issue that I needed to discuss with him. I told you about it in previous posts: he and I are fine in a one-to-one meeting, but in a class setting where I have to take the floor, his feedback becomes rather too vicious for my taste. Particularly compared to the very careful way he handles the other students. I did not quite know how to bring this up. Fortunately, a chance opened up to address this issue right at the beginning, and it went fine. He apologised, saying that he had heard this about himself before. He had just been matching my directness which he found pleasant (as it livened up an otherwise rather unresponsive class). So I pointed out that I was just as vulnerable as the other students in academic matters; and we agreed; and that was that. Good. Relief.
My paper was next. I had reread it, and his review of it the night before, and I was glad I had left it for a while. I could now see that he had judged my paper on a different basis than I had intended the paper to be read. Which a priori means that I had not been clear. You see, it was a difficult topic, on collective speech acts, on which there is almost no research. The papers that I did review, I found to be of meagre quality. The problem was, that I had not said so explicitly. This because I felt I was not sufficiently knowledgeable on the subject to do a “deconstruction” of the work that these philosophers had done. So I had been a bit vague in my approach to compensate for not saying what I really thought. Which put the reader (the professor or anyone else) on the wrong foot. It was not so much that I should have a highly critical or argumentative stance, but rather, that there was no good story-line to my paper. That was mistake number 1.
The 2nd point was about my not being sufficiently critical. Now this is not something I hear very often! It took me a while to understand, but what I need to do, is to question every concept, approach, idea that I review and explain why I put it in the paper OR explain why I don’t question it. So my simple idea of reviewing papers and going along with the argument to see where we might end up, would have been fine, IF I had explained that was what I was doing. Which I had not. Because again I had been too shy.
The 3rd problem was that the paper was too big in scope. In retrospect, the professor said, scope-wise it would have been fit for a Master Thesis. This is because I left so many concepts and ideas to investigate. For practical reasons, I had simply accepted concepts without question, i.e. as given in literature. Had I done otherwise, my paper would have exploded, and it was only supposed to be 6000 words. So yes, I could see he was right, the scope I had chosen was much too ambitious to do well. It is either quantity or quality. There is also a style difference, I think. He works inside-out, and I work outside-in. Which means I have to read much more but that is not the worst of it. Here the difference between audiences comes alive. If I write something as a civil servant, I must avoid being too detailed for fear of losing my audience. The general consensus is that details can always be given later, in a separate paper, in a presentation, during a talk, whatever; but later. The same is not true for a philosophy paper. That paper has to be complete in itself; there is no “later”.
Problem nr. 4 took me a while. I have developed, in my working life, a habit of writing authoritatively. Because I am an authority on certain matters. Husband taught me how to do this. I cannot remember how many times I got my texts back with remarks like: you use too many words, explain too much, go into too much detail etc. Which is all very well when you are writing government or company policy, but is not a good idea when you are writing a philosophical article. A philosopher needs to explain and explain well. My professor spends a lot of time on doing just this, and it has also been a issue in the other seminars I attended, so I might have known. But I think there is more to it than that. Because Philosophia is not very well charted, a philosopher constantly needs to ring a bell, so that others may understand where he is. Think of a cow in an Alpine meadow 🙂 That means that as a philosopher, you must allow other philosophers to understand exactly what concepts you are using in what context and why. Otherwise they get lost. Or you do. Depending on your point of view.
So: a good philosopher knows the precise context in which she is putting forward her ideas (by the way, this is an example of “correct” writing, sometime during my absence from academia, they all started writing in terms of “she” rather than “he”). The problem of course is that I don’t. I am still an amateur. Which brings me to the research paper which I will be writing next term. Apparently this paper is not for a grade (it is pass or fall), but intended to allow to you prepare for the Master Thesis which has to written in the second half next year. This gives me a chance to consolidate my knowledge on a couple of topics which at the moment is only wafer-thin. The topic(s) will be: speech acts, collective acts and common ground. Right. I will enjoy getting my teeth into that. I promise you, my next paper will be like an embroidery: pretty, intricate, beautiful and state-of-the-art.
The professor and I, we parted on most amicable terms after nearly 3 hours. I was really pleased that I had been able to pick up some new insights. Also, the luxury of someone spending hours on you to improve your thinking! When does that ever happen in Real Life, I ask you?
Now came the task of finding Husband. In spite of our shared-location app, I failed. Seriously, I walked around Utrecht CS with Google Maps displayed on my phone, and kept going in circles, from one entrance to the other, up and down the escalators. After quarter of an hour, I had to call Husband and admit total failure. He had to come and get me. Yes, you may laugh. Of course, he should have foreseen this (I get disoriented very very easily), so we agreed it was really his fault. Off we went, back to the Utrecht canals to have a drink and something to eat at the waterside. Very pleasant. It was a bit like a celebration. We had a nice meal and 3 Belgium beers each. Alas, it turned out that we can no longer handle this the way we once did. Walking back from Apeldoorn station was slow; and somehow we could not keep our eyes open after 10:30. Very amusing. Nice memory though.
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Visuals
I often have to find ways to express ideas without words. Many people simply not like reading. This may be because they are already overloaded with information. Or because they simply prefer other ways of communication. Have fallen out of the habit of reading or were never much good at it (a surprising number of managers are dyslectic, in my experience). Or don’t want to be inundated with information about a topic that they do not understand/have no knowledge about/are not interested in.
One group is exempt from this very general statement: philosophers. They live, breathe, and dream text. Also, they have nothing other than text. No diagrams, no visuals, perhaps the odd cartoon, but that is about it. Books, papers, articles: text, text and text. But that won’t stop me trying to find ways to visualise philosophical issues as well. Meanwhile, I browse visuals just for the fun of it. Below are a couple. I don’t understand them all, but wow, are they pretty.
Promises, promises
Before I do, I promised to post my presentation for the Skills&Methods seminar, you know, the pièce de résistance that was one the main outputs of that seminar. I already posted the draft version of the article in another post. The presentation is quite different though. Don’t feel obliged to look at it, but if you do, make sure to look at in in presentation mode, so you don’t miss any of the animations and the little cyber-criminal quiz (where you have to point at little circles to make up the match; you will see. Use page-down to go from slide to slide, and click to see the animations within the slide. Anyway, here is the link. The file is 24 MB, so the best thing is to right-click the link and save it. If you are on a PC. Faster that way.
Intermezzo (the real reason for this post)
You probably thought that I am spending my “holidays” (only the day-time job) catching up on those wonderful philosophy books that I have been collecting. Well, so did I. But we were quite wrong. I just like collecting books. So what did I do? Except for sweltering in the heatwave like the rest of Europe? Well, I have been playing with my Wiki. You know, the one called concepts, which you can go to via the menu at the top of this blog). It is filling up quite nicely, but what I was playing with was not so much the content, but the construction. I have spent a great many hours getting this bit of machinery to work. So I thought, if I have to do that again, I will have forgotten it all, so I’d better write it down. And then I thought, that would be true of all the “tools” I use. From my citation system to my note taking routines to my internet sources or my WordPress tips, it adds up to quite a bit. Perhaps that is is true for many people. But Husband and I have just spent very pleasant evenings watching new episodes of Lewis that has just become available on our provider. We thought. Towards the end we confessed to each other that we had probably seen them before. Years ago. So better not to rely too much on the good old memory. I have created a another sub-site, next to concepts, called tools. Here I have started to share my notes about my bag of tricks. If you subscribe to this blog, you will not be notified because it is separate from this blog, which is probably just as well :-). Have a look, it is pretty (and very different from this one).
Back to the visuals. Below I included a few I liked. In the next weeks I will post a collection of good sources on the tool-blog, on this page.
Stray beauties
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1/4 down, 3/4 to go
I received my grades! You know I was worried about them, so you are going to find this amusing. The grades were fine. But once I got used to the idea of having passed, and having passed well, I started worrying about why I did not get higher grades. Which is really, really silly. Remember how I struggled to get in and keep up, the first couple of weeks especially but actually all the way through. I was so relieved that I could do it at all. So, laugh at me, I deserve it. Husband does it too. Let me give you the figures. Dutch grades go from 1 – 10. From 8 it is cum laude territory. I got:
- 8 for my paper on “Autopeiosis as a mechanism” for Philosophy of Mind;
- 7.5 for my paper on “Collective speech acts”, which is Philosophy of Language
- 8.5 for a collection of work (papers, presentation) for Methods & Skills.
Time to party. This is an 8 on average. Which is why this post has a very cheery picture. Apart from the grades, I now have a total of 30 EC, which means that I am 1/4 through the Research Master (which is 120 EC- normal Master courses are 60 EC). Considering I did this with only 1 day off work every 2 weeks, I am allowed to be a little proud of myself. And of my husband for bearing with me and my late night studying. Driving me back and forth to Nijmegen. Listening to my rambling. Proofreading my papers.
Yet I am not entirely satisfied. Yes, you may laugh, I said, didn’t I? On both the Philosophy of Mind and the Philosophy of Language paper I lost points for not being quite clear enough about my research question. Must improve that. Also, I did something revolutionary on the Phil-Mind paper which they did not quite understand because I had flown the idea in from informatics – and had not explained it sufficiently. Oh yes, and my own professor (you remember, the beloved grumpy one) decided to deduct marks for my writing being insufficiently clear whilst the other professors were raving about my writing and giving plus marks for same. Beauty in the eye of the beholder? Probably not. This is supposed to be academia.
I am seeing my professor at the beginning of August, so I have a chance to discuss it. I really want to get to the bottom of this. I know he is a logician at heart, so maybe he wants me to be much more precise – which will be difficult to achieve if the text also has to comprehensible. Never mind. I will find out what it is I have to learn.
On a lighter note: I had to change my glasses. I developed a chronic headache and sore eyes. First I thought that was because of all the studying, and then I had my eyes checked. It turns out I have a prism thingie – basically the brain not quite matching the two pictures from the left and right eye. So I have bought myself new bifocals, and also another one for computer work. What else does one have holiday money for? These glasses are really special – I can change the frame by changing the magnetic cover. So I now have glasses in many colours – green, turtle, red, purple and even bright pink! I have tried them out at the office. Swapped the frames midway through a meeting to change the atmosphere. It amuses my colleages. And myself. I change them at least 3 times a day. Have look at the manufacturer’s site if you want to see how it looks. Poor Husband. More new-fangled nonsense for him to put up with.
I am now more of less on holiday (well, working full time, but the evenings and weekends are temporarily my own). In September everything starts again. Probably I will be doing two seminars and a “state of the art” paper, again 30 EC. But first: party time. This 1/4 is behind me now. I may now regard myself as a proper student, having finally fulfilled my own prophesy at the tender age of 23 – that one day I would go back to university. Well, it has happened and it is great.
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Periodic table
The one thing I used to love about chemistry was its periodic table. It ticks all the boxes: clean, concise, clear, colourful and complete. I was not very good at chemistry – well, not the first time around, in my Dutch Grammar school. That was because I could not get my head around the idea that you have to learn the periodic table (and more besides) off by heart, in the same way
that you have to learn your tables of multiplication. Second time around, in my UK school, I quickly made up for old laziness and becamequite good at it. So good, that they suggested I’d take a fifth A-level. Suggested is too weak a word, in fact. They wept (almost) and raved (a bit ). But I declined. I knew there came a point in chemistry where things become too abstract to my liking (which is when I get frustrated and have to put many hours in working through examples).I would have loved one of the big mugs with the periodic system on it, but as you now understand, I
was not entitled (having dropped Chemistry after O level). Alas. So imagine my delight when I ran into the “periodic system of arguments” (see header image of this post). It has recentlybeen constructed by a guy called Wagemans (Dutch or Belgian I assume), partly in collaboration with the university of Dundee. You might wonder just how I came across this? Well, from my previous post you know I had been going crazy over finding the right approach to finding and storing information about philo sophical subjects. There are lots of aspects to this question, but one I did not (much) touch on, is which tool touse to map arguments. Now if you think I might bea bit crazy in my quest for knowledge, I amcertainly not the only one. There is a wonderful site where someone has been collecting and reviewing all mind-map software in the world. Here I came across OVA+ which is an ontology-based mapper for arguments.It is developed on top of an argument specification interface which these guys also developed. Specifications are useful because once everyone is using the same one, you can change tools without having to change your data. Like LibreOffice and Microsoft, because of acknowledged document interchange format specifications.generally I started to play around with this tool, but found out quickly that it uses a classification of arguments which I was not familiar with. And that is how I eventually ended up with Wageman’s periodic table for arguments. Which, I will say it again, I am in love with. I could never remember the long list of types of logical arguments and fallacies with wonderful Latin names like “ad hominem” or “a Minore ad Majorem” because there seemed to be no structure to them. This periodic table of arguments is the structure: clean, concise, clear, colourful and (hopefully) complete. I have done a rehash of the information and papers, with information and pictures mixed in from other sources. If you like, you can have a look on the concepts-side of my blog: click here for a direct link.
The general idea is this.
- Take any argument, and decide on what is
statement tobe proven , and what is the evidence; separate them out (write them in separate sentencesif necessary ). For instance: I am taking the washing inside because it it starting to rain. The statement “I am taking the washing inside” is what is tobe proven (x); the reason I do this, the premiss, is because it isstarting to rain (y ). - Next, decide on the subject and the predicates. Remember from school? The subject of the first sentence is “I”
, the predicate is “taking the washing in”. The subject of the second is “It” or “Rain”, the predicate is “starting to rain”. - Next decide if the subjects are the same. They are not. Decide if the predicates are the same. They are not.
- That means this
argument belongs to the gamma-quadrant (=lower left) of the periodictable, which is of the formq (the to-be-proven statement, that I am taking the washing inside) is true becauser (the premiss, that is isstarting to rain ) is true. - Now decide what
kind of statementsq andr actually are. The choices are:statement of fact(F), of policy(P= should, could, must) or of value (V).In this case , I would say thatq is a policy statement, as it is my policy not to want to get the washing wet; whereasr is a statement of fact. This gives the argument the right to the colour purple (each 2-letter combination of F, P and V) has its own colour. - Now we have a complete classification: this is a 2nd order subject argument with a fact and a policy, shortened as “2 sub FP”. It may be an argument from consistency (the only purple block in the lower left quadrant), but as Wagemans has not elaborated on that one yet, I cannot be sure (I have written to him about it but he is on holiday).
I am excited about this, because it works just like my old biology field guide of which I was inordinately fond as a child. I still miss it, but good old internet remembers it:
So, what have I learned? Well, there are people as mad as I am who spend their time constructing beautiful models out of chaos. Plus, I now have a method to recognise any argument and work out its internal structure, without having to resort to a long list of curious names which I cannot remember anyway. Great. One problem down, a million-minus-one-or-two to go.
- Take any argument, and decide on what is
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Come out, come out, where ever you are!
No, not you. Nor all the little children playing hide-and-seek (for their sakes, I wish them lots of shade). Nor do I refer to the song by a very young Frank Sinatra in 1994, an episode of the British TV series ‘Thriller’ aired on June 29th 1974, the orginal 1939 version of the Wizard of Oz featuring Judy Garland, or when Robert deNiro as Max Cady used these words in the movie Cape Fear(1991). Or any of the other 281 interesting entries on QuoDB which I have not checked yet. But you can see what the problem is, I suppose. I am at it again. The gathering of knowledge. Putting it all in a model. Having it for breakfast.
Felicitous holiday making
I have buried myself in the production of papers for my philosophy course for the past few weeks. Which is now finished! Everything has been checked, double checked, read by Husband, checked again – and handed in. Which is a weird feeling, suddenly having nothing to do. Well, other than the normal things. But no special brainfood. Husband and I had planned to take a short holiday to celebrate completion of the Grand 1/4 ReMa Philosophy – but the weather forecasts showed temperatures over 30, even over 35, so Husband asked: “did you take you free cancellation?” I get very grumpy when it is hot, you see. I had taken out free cancellation, so as we have air conditioning in the bedroom, which the holiday-home did not, I excercised the right to stay at home and swelter in peace. I have not made up my mind whether I am going to be working from home. Have done some calls and mail, but it might be nice to take the time off anyway. We will see.
I won’t be posting the finished papers as yet. Mainly because I am too nervous about them and want to wait for the results. I know, it is silly. I worked very hard at them and cannot imagine not getting a pass mark, but these philosophers are a funny lot. Remember my own grumpy-as-you-please professor complaining I had not distanced myself, in my draft paper, from some major debate which I had never heard of? As we say in Dutch, an accident may hiding in a small corner:
Actually, I finished my papers well in time, so I have been thinking since last week how to spend the holiday period
in a felicitous manner . Do you like the word felicitous? It is standard jargon in philosophy of language, meaning that whateveris said is linguistically appropriate. J. L. Austin invented it, sothat we can say of speech-acts if they make sense or not, rather than being true or false. Iam proposing that the holiday-act is likewise neither true not false, but maybe deemed felicitous if a) it is a break from work andb ) I enjoy it and c) takes a considerable amount of time so I would not normally have time to do it. Right? Right. Let’s turn to my holiday project.A nice little outline
I have been complaining on and off about how difficult it is to get a bird-eye view of ‘my’ area of philosophy, which is about language, mind, cognition and the evolution of our abilities in that area. So I thought I would do myself a nice little outline, starting with a text book by my philisophy-of-mind professor which should tell me what has happened in the last 30-odd years. The first chapter told me that there had been an paradigm-shift. Maybe you have heard of mind-body dualism, this idea that mind and mind and body are distinct and separate? That began with Descartes. Nobody believes that these days, or at least not officially. So the received view is that mind and body are not sepearate. That is as far as the agreement goes. Beyong that, there are many different opinions.
One of the hotly debated issues is currently about whether our thoughts are represented in our brain at a physcial level (representationalism). The picture below shows how that is supposed to work: when you see and egg, the image of the egg is represented in the brain. The opposing view, called embodied cognition, is that cogniton works in a totally different way, without representatons, but by shaping through the body and its interactions.
So there was me, happily charting the arguments against Descartes, when it suddenly occurred to me that my chart was not in fact about these philsosophers, or their theories, but really about statements which they did or did not agree on. You can see the problem below. I used the Rationale website to visualise the argument. The idea is that you collect argument for (green) and against red). The problem is the text inside the boxes. Sometimes that text represents a new theory, which is fine, but more often than not, these are statements. These statements will not stick to one line of argument or to one philosopher, but will pop up again and again as the building blocks of theories. In this case, I have modelled the arugment up to the point where two lines of arguments needed the same building block – which is something the rationale software cannot do, and I know from experience, messes up any mind map. Because mind-maps are not standardised. That is their beauty and greatest pitfall. So what to do?
There are actually two answers to that question. One is, if you do not know what to do, do nothing. Better to wait until you do know rather than forcing a situation out of frustration. The other answer is: find out! I am sure I need not worry about frustrating philosophers or philosophy (they are in the business of making problems for themselves), let’s try to find out. I have been grappling with the problem of systematizing knowledge all through my professional career-that-is-not-philosophy-but-information-technology, and I have never seen big solutions. However, I have seen a great many very expensive projects fail, so I will try not to do that. Looking afresh upon philosophy with my information-technology background, delivers the following insight: philsophy has not been modelled. At all. Everything is in books and papers. No indexes, no logical schemes, no roadmaps, no modelling tools – nothing at all. Just text. There is something called the Philospher’s Index which sounded very promising to my yearning ears. Unfortunately it is a bibliographical index. You can find any philsophical paper of interest there, and the editors have conveniently written an abstract and attached keywords for everyone of them. Nice, but not what I am looking for.
The “can” test
Time to engage in what Husband calls the “can” test. He claims that he has never met an IT person who passed it, apart from myself, but that must have been a fluke, because if I had thought about it, I would have given the wrong answer. Don’t tell Husband, it was only after the can-test that he proposed to me 🙂
Imagine you are somehow transported to another world. You are quite safe, but hungry. In front of you is a can of food (you know because there is a picture of stew or beans or whatever on the outside). How will you open the can? At this point all the IT people go off in search of a stone to hammer the can. But you are supposed to think: hey, this is a planet where they have cans, so therefore they will also have can openers. So you will go in search of a can opener or a person who has one. The test (I now know) derives from a old joke which was meant to mock economists, first mentioned in a book called “Economics as a Science” by Boulding. This is the joke:
A physicist, a chemist and an economist are stranded on a desert island and all they have to eat are cans of food. They’re discussing the best way to open them. The physicist says, let’s not overthink this – just bash them open with rocks! The chemist says, “No, we need to create a fire anyway and we can simply use the heat to cause the cans to burst open by themselves, and the food will already be cooked!” The economist thinks for a second and says, “First, let’s assume we have a can opener.”
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Assume_a_can_openerA stroll around the web – showed me that I was not alone in my queste for a can opener. I came across this fantastic website by a guy called Deniz Cem Önduygu who has charted the history of philosophy. I looked him up. He has an Masters in Visual art & communication. What a great profession! As for this effort: he calls it a “never-ending work in progress”. His major sources are “Bryan Magee’s The Story of Philosophy and Thomas Baldwin’s Contemporary Philosophy, but ideas of others and his own had been added. It is not complete, but only last year the site received a huge update. To give you a flavour of what he has done, look see, I have done you a selection with Wittgenstein. As you can see, a philosopher is associated with a set of statements; the green and the red lines go out to other philosophers meaning they agree or not. Every line can be followed. You can even put in search words. Enjoy it yourself, go over his site and play around. Be sure to switch off your VPN if you use one, because otherwise the graphics might not load.
Obviously this is much more than a nice little outline. The only drawback is, strangely enough, its contents: it is difficult to formulate a philosophical statement such that the original philosopher would agree with it. It is all about interpretation and understanding, and moreover, quite a few of them are dead now. The ones that live sometimes change their minds (as do the ones that have died, Wittgenstein for one). Still, if I knew how to do this, I would happily have tried my hand at creating my own version. Unfortutenatly the basic work is all done in excel and then professionally programmed (so the site says), so that is of no use to me. What is next?
The return of an old friend
If you want to create a representation of knowlegde that is not free-format, one way or another you end up at the semantic web. It is a web for data, and extension of the internet which can be processed by (mostly) machines. The semantic web has its own language, called Resource Description Framework (RDF). Basically, it is a data model, for which several syntaxes (serialisation formats) exist, such as N-triples, JSON-LD, Turtle, etc. On top of RDF other languages haven been built, such as OWL and RFDS. Now these names may seem just random collections of letters to you, and indeed, so they appeared to me. But some years ago I decided that the world really needed a good security taxonomy, so I dived right in.
To be precise, I dived into OWL, because this appeared to be the favourite language amongst semantic scholars. I installed the free OWL environment called Protege from Stanford University and worked my way through the “pizza example”. I came as far as a basic understanding how to construct an ontology (= a formal taxonomy written in OWL or another RDF based language) plus being to read one, but that was it. My problem was that to make a useful ontology you need to define many things in a specific technical or logical way. There was no gentle explanation beyond the pizza examples. I even posted a help-request on LinkedIn. Nothing. So in the end, after many many hours, I gave up. Too difficult for me. With friends like OWL you need no enemies, I thought.
Imagine my suprise at myself when I found myself back at the Protege tutorial, trying to set up a really simple ontology for what philosophers agree and disagree on, inspired by Deniz Cem Önduygu. I was not aiming for his wonderful red and green lines, but I was hoping to create something visual, say with bubbles. I did get a bit further this time. I succeeded in creating part of the ontology, but got stuck when I want to created relations between the various parts. The main thing was that now I understood that creating the ontology is only the first step. The next step is to put in the data, that is populate the ontology with philosophers, statements etc. And then, to create a program or some kind of view which allows you to use the insights which are part of the ontology. I imagined that I might succeed at step 1 and 2 if I spent another couple of days. But the last step was beyond me. I am not a programmer anymore. Or rather, the modern world no longer need an RPG-II programmer (not even a really good one) and I don’t know any modern programming languages. I suppose that learning Java or something like that just for this purpose would be a bit silly – once you stop using it, you forget it very quickly. So, yet again, I gave up. With a slightly better idea of what the problem is that I am trying to solve.
Another old friend
Before I returned to the field of security in my information-technology life,
I spent some years on methods and techniques for application development. Oneof the issues was software quality, how to set and monitor requirements. I shall not bore you with the details, but it turns out that software quality has several aspects which partly depend on each other, and work out differently in differently programming languages and environment. To grasp thenecessary characteristics, you need a differentkind of database, one which does not force you to know beforehand how many levelsof relations there will be between the top-level requirement and the bottom-level actions and measures. I learned this from a book by a researcher called Stefan Wagner. To accompany his book, he also developed a prototype, for which he used a graph database. This is a database where you store the relationship between data alongside the data themselves, as opposed to classic databases which have apredefined structure for storing data. With a graph database you can not onlymodel but also graphically present data. Exactly, in bubbles. Just what I like. Unfortunately we did not use graph databases at the office. The programmer on my who tried to get Wagner’s prototype to work on a private computer, got hopelessly lost, but refused to admit it,thereby destroying the project. I am stilla bit sad about that. Anyway, I can install whatever I like on my home computer, so Iwent ahead and got myself a community version of NEO4J. It turns out that you have to learn a query language called Cypher tobe able to do anything at all. It is said that it isnot difficult , but I really did not know where to start. I like to learn by example or trial-and-error.In this case , I did not even have a set of data toplay around with. There was no help tobe found anywhere. There are no manuals for straying philosophers with only a conceptual working knowledge of databases and query languages. So yet again, I gave up.At this point, Husband asked what the problem was. I had been swearing at my inability to understand something which herds of people were apparently very proficient at. He concluded that “it must be a different logic”. Hmm. Maybe. So I put NEO4J in with the other friend that I don’t need: Protege/Owl.Between me and my data
By this point it was dawning on me that I was trying to solve a problem with another problem and so on. Yet another opportunity for the “can” test I though, perhaps someone else is getting as frustrated as I am about the same thing. You guessed right. People are. I found this wonderful visualisation of my problem. You won’t understand it, and neither do I, but my experimenting has taught me all the words that I do not want to be involved with. Basically, what I want is to achieve bliss, i.e. what happens at the very bottom (my insights), by connecting to a data-source somewhere on the web (the very top layer), without all the hassle of the in-between stuff. Simple, eh?
Notice there is some kind of magic connection called SPARQL which seems to do all I need? It turns out that SPARQL is not just a query language but that there are lots of SPARQL “endpoints” which you can connect to if you want data. What endpoint? Well, how about the whole of wikipedia? Or streetlevel crimes in Wales? Art in Holland? It is a motley collection to be sure, but growing steadily. You can even get an extension on your browser so you can check if the website you are browsing is using a linked-data format which would allow it to become a SPARQL endpoint.
Below the surface: structure!
If you have made it up to this point, chapeau! I tried not to scare you off with difficult words and ideas, but basically this is the story of how I got lost and found in this tangle, so I know how you feel. What is so great about this new discovery (which ofcourse is not so new, people have been working on it for years and years), is that there is structure below the surface of the internet. Have a look at this wikipedia page, on Wittgenstein. After you have done so, look at the image below. It is the very same wikipedia page, but seen through the “eyes” of the linked-data browser, showing all the RDF entries. Every wikipedia page is structured like this, which is why you can query Wikipedia from the outside!
Getting there in the end
So where does this take me? Well, a very long way. I have found several places on the web which will allow me to do a layman’s SPARQL query. For instance this one, called Sparklis. I can just ask questions like this:
And it gives me a list of exactly 17 philsophers that have pragmatism as a main field of interest. Or anything else I want to know! I can export these data, or reuse the query in another program, which I have also been playing with, called Gephi, which will construct graphs for me. Yes, my bubbles. Finally I am getting to the kind of questions that I wanted to anser for my felicitous 🙂 holiday hobby project. I want to be able to tell how a philsopher was influenced by other philosophers, so I can decide on which common link to read up on. Or not. Saves quite some searching around, and the feeling of being able to see, in a virtual sense, the big picture, and draw conclusions from it, is great. I love it. Have a look at some examples what I have found so far. I will put them in with the concept side of my blog.
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The Emperor and the elephant
Today was the last seminar of term. Though I still have to write some papers, it felt as if
Certainly, things will be easier at the office now. I won’t have to switch meetings around, or catch up on work at awkward hours. At least not until September.The best thing was how wonderful this class was, compared to the very first one. Remember me being worried that someone would laugh at me? Granny going back to uni? Well, today was light years away from that worry. For the past few weeks we had been giving each other feedback on our oral and written work. I suppose that helped in getting to know each other a little better, especially for me who is only there during classes – I am a live-at-home student :
– )Anyway, today’s class was fun. I
found myself joking , commenting, being drawn into discussions – really being part of things. Very nice. Pity I will not see most of them again. Or maybe I will. You never know.Husband has been transporting me back and forth since Februari.
Plus having to put up with me studying in the evening. Every evening. But he seems undaunted and has put his time to fruitful use. So, on a sunday where I do not venture outside and hide behind my computer screen, he ventures into the Royal woods we live close to, and makes this wonderful little movie creations. Have look at this and be sure to turn up the sound!I really should to get back to my paper writing now, but I have also completed two, which I want to tell you about. One of them I will not include here, because it is very technical – the one about collective speech acts that my temporarily-not-so-beloved professor was being overly critical about in an earlier version. I am keeping my fingers crossed about that one.
The other one is on “language in cyberspace”, really, about why I am back at uni in the first place. The presentation went fine, and now the article was received well by my contempories and the skills-class professor. I am including it as an attachment, because if I publish the text here, my article won’t get through the plagarism check they do at the uni.
Click here if you want to read it. It is the only way you will find out why this post is called “the emperor and the elephant”. The article is aimed at an audience like you, so if you have any comments, let me know. It is still the draft version, I will be handing in the final version in a couple of weeks.
I just heard that the new time-tables will be up on the first of july, rather than the first of september. Which gives me lots of time to plan things out. Looking forward to next term. But first, finish this one .. I am buried up to my neck conceptualizing the “extended mind”. More about that in some other post.
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Ripples
Today was the last lecture day for two of my seminars. I had anticipated a feeling a loss, because I had been enjoying myself so much these past months. But it turned out differently.
At this stage, both seminars were focusing on the papers
we are meant to be writing in the next month. Because the philosophy oflanguage seminar required a huge abstract and the philosophy of mind seminar only asked us to do a five-minute presentation of our paper-to-be, I had put most of my effort into the philosophy of language paper. Something had to go, because for the skills seminar I had to do a big presentation this week. I thought I had made the right choice, but in retrospect, I am not so sure.This
is what happened. The big presentation which I had done a lot of work on, went fine. It was on “language and cyberspace” – in fact, about the connection between language andthe protection of cyberspace. I only received positive feedback; no critical remarks, not on the content and not on the presentation, which I think did not happen to anyone else. However, I went almost 5 minutes over the time-limit, so I willcertainly get penalised for that. Never mind. It will not be a bad mark.For the philosophy of mind seminar, I did a 5 minute presentation of the problem area that I wanted to investigate. I had checked with the professor beforehand if that was ok. However, it turned out that everyone else had put much more effort into their plan, so I felt a bit silly. Which was aggravated by the fact that I still not quite sure how to tackle the problem which I want to adress. Despite the research workshop I attended last week, which was great, but ended up saddling me with more questions than I had when I came in. Sniff.
So, all my cards on the philosophy of language paper. My chosen topic was collective speech acts. I had really worked hard on it, and because we were required to write a huge abstract (1500 words for a 5000 word paper), I wrote a full first version. My work was based on an article provided by my professor, plus some more recent work which I had found myself. I had also done some analysis myself, so it was part original. I had to present this work, as the last of the group, and initially it seemed to go well. The group liked it, felt that I was nearly finished, and liked the work I had done.
Enter my professor. He questioned the basic assumption, which is that groups, according to him, cannot have intentions, and certainly companies cannot. I was flabbergasted. This was the basic assumption of the article he had suggested himself. Also, I could not make head or tails of his statement that companies do not feel anything. Of course they do. They are groups of people. We agreed to differ and I will have to introduce a disclaimer in my essay that I take this “controversial” position, and sort out this issue at some later point. But I was disappointed. There was no feedback on the work I had done, just this going on and on about this one issue. It must have upset him in some way, he said afterward that he was agitated by my approach.
My ever supportive husband told me not to
be upset – because my professor has done this before, just to me. And yes, the group did not like it either, one or two started to defend me, which was brave of them. Husband also told me to take this somewhat-over-the-top criticality as a compliment. Which may be right, becausethe other students were given a much less critical treatment, even when their ideas seems sketchy or incomplete. Sigh. I suppose so.I am still wondering how to solve the philosophical problem, about collective intentions. It may well be that in fact the same problem is at the bottom of my philosophy of mind issue – which is how life develops from a single autopeiotic system, say, a cell, into a social entity through adaptivity. Because social entities eventually develop language. Not as individuals but as members of a group. So I have written to the philosophy-of-mind professors to ask them about group-intentions in herds, schools, and flocks.
Now it it time for a drink. A large one. With ripples.
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World of wonders
A moment of quiet between the mountains of Things To Do – you remember me complaining about this in my last and ultra brief post. I am more or less on schedule, and I am hoping to complete this half of the academic year by the third week of June, and then go off for a little holiday. Not too long, coz we get homesick (tell no one, it is a secret).
Some things have being changing, taking shape. To my surprise, I have
started to take part in university life. Not too much. I am a live-at-home student, cannot stay at the university beyond the lectures, because I also have a full-time job. But I find myself drawn into discussing issues with other students outside of the seminars. I have even asked to join the ReMa WhatsApp group. Mind you, this happened mostly at the initiative of the other students – they come up and talkto me, ask questions, show interest; offer suggestions; today one of them suggested doing a mutual review of our papers. It is. . yes, nice. Really nice.I have also become a little more courageous. I worked hard to understand what the seminars in Philosophy of Mind and in Philosophy of Language were about, exactly, and it has payed off. Gone are the awkward silences when I ask ‘my’ professor a question, because now we share some common ground, and I understand the issues much better. The second lecturer in the Philosophy of Mind seminar has picked up on my way of thinking. Often
So, time for a leap of faith. Recently, I have also written to other professors, at other universities. In one case, because I wanted to get my hands on a book that was very expensive and not in our university library (notice the “our”?). Would you believe it, after the official refusal, I received a electronic copy “for my personal use only” I proudly passed it on to ‘my’ professor (I am assuming he is included in the personal use stipulation) who was just a
tiny bit impressedI think, and more importantly, liked the book very much. And there is more of this new brave academic me. A colleague has recently done a PhD in a related topic (rule based language interpretation). I was interested to see if it touched on my interests. Her text contained a claim about the formal language system she uses being grounded in speech act theory which I knew to be wrong. So I asked the professor who has created this formal language system about it, as I assumed my colleague got thatparticular text from his department. I received a very nice email, stating that I was right, he will haveWow. Once I retire, in only 10 years :
– ) I can do this all the time. Get in touch with these incredibly knowledgeable people, ask questions, exchange ideas. The only thing I have to do, is become sufficiently knowledgeable about what the issues are and why. Today, ‘my’ professor said that he would happily pay 10 euro for a video of a great ape instructing another ape. You might not immediately see the significance of this (I did not a mere two months ago). The idea or actually the problem is that great apes can learn but they do not instruct, nor to they correct other apes. Which implies that normative behaviour, such as language (depending on which school of thought you are in), isexclusively human. Anyway, the professor said something about St Andrews, so tonight I tracked down the researcher who goes by the name Naked Primate on Twitter, and asked her. Super quick reply. Alas, I will not be earning 10 euro!You might wonder how my husband it taking all this mental expansion. Well, it turns out he has been trying to talk
to me about quite a lot of things. Remember, he is into these big books? These books are often on philosophical issues, but somehow I have not felt comfortable talking about philosophy until I went back to uni. Strange, eh? Particularly because a lot of these topics, about analytical philosophy, for instance, are exactly what I am dealing with now. Anyway, I am now trying to convince him to read some books for me, but I have a feeling he will stay firmly on his own track.What is next? Well, two things. Next week, there is a
day long seminar at which all of my professors are speaking plus some important ones from abroad. Originally that datewas reserved for team-building at the office, but was cancelled only days ago. So I can attend! This is the universe helping me, I think.This seminar is connected to what I intend to write my philosophy of mind paper on, 6000 words on the “enactive mind”. Remember the Lego in a previous post? That’s the one. The picture at the top of this post explains this theory well, better than I can at this moment. Have a look at the video on Vimeo, the first part. It shows how life develops, one step at the time. Mind you, it is an artistic translation selected for this purpose by a enactive mind researcher (in reality this video belongs to a Kung-fu-motion art project).The other event is that as part of my ReMa Skills class I have to do a presentation aimed at an educated public (i.e. not philosophers or high-level academics). Wish me luck. It is will be on “Cyberspace and philosophy of language”. Not a usual combination! I have constructed the narrative around the tale of the Emperor’s new clothes. I am hoping my colleagues at the office will allow me to try it out on them. Husband has already agreed to help too. I will tell you how it went in another post.