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OK, actually, the Jays were tied for the 3rd-best home record, after the Twins and St. Louis.
Three rounds of crash bang boom this morning. Temperature's down about ten degrees from 24 hours ago. One of those nasty fall days that fool you into thinking you don't need a jacket, when you'll actually need a coat.
Don't you find it's kind of fishy how rarely the ages of the Mark Foley pages are mentioned? I find it's kind of fishy. I had to look it up last night, to confirm that the youngest one was 16. The age of consent in DC is 16. Reminds me of a "child prostitution ring" that was cracked up in Toronto a couple of years ago--turned out the girls were 17. Hey, not that there's nothing wrong with that--just not quite as wrong as a lot of people would like to let you imagine, eh?
But, oh, the hypocrisy, I know, I know. I have always hated the idea that it's worse to do wrong if you say it's wrong, and excusable to do wrong if you just don't care that it's wrong. But we were down that road a couple of months--seems so long--ago.
An article in the Star today about the physics Nobel said something like that the big bang idea is that the universe started as a singularity "in a vacuum of nothingness", which reminded me of something I'd been thinking some months or years ago (not many years; I used to think much more about this kind of thing many years ago): it doesn't, strictly speaking, make any sense to say that the singularity-universe is "in" anything; saying that it's "in a vacuum of nothingness" inevitably invokes the image of, well, a dot, surrounded by empty space (and here we are, floating in a tin can, behind, above, a little to the left of it)--which is a completely wrong image, but the trouble is, there's no right image. And the trouble isn't just with the singularity; the story goes that the universe expanded from a singularity, and is continuing to expand--but this kind of talk is completely incoherent: if something expands, it expands into, relative to, something else. Talk of expansion only makes sense inside the universe--but then, even saying inside is incoherent; it implies an outside.
So what occurred to me, a while ago, is that what is talked about as expansion actually only makes sense as differentiation. What characterizes the singularity-universe is not that it's infinitely small, but that it's absolutely homogeneous. In a way, in a sense, the universe is getting bigger--but it's only getting bigger relative to us (but then, also relative to every other particular thing); we are getting smaller, along with everything else in the universe, relative to the universe as a whole, because as the universe differentiates more and more, it fills up with more and more stuff; the more stuff there is, the smaller each bit of it is, relative to the whole. (I'm not sure this makes a whole lot of sense, either--but I doubt there's anything that can be said on this that makes a whole lot of sense.)
More truth and bad faith today. Mostly truth. Largely because Prado likes to say that truth--I mean, investigation into the nature of truth--is the business of philosophy, which just doesn't seem ... empirically accurate. So I looked around for the Truth section in the library today, and counted 48 books. (Not that there aren't more books on truth scattered around elsewhere (though not that there are, either), but still, the section on truth is, at most, a quarter the size of the adjacent sections on knowledge--as usually, truth theory is a component of epistemology, which has always confused me, and seems to me to confuse the issue. Philosophy needs a new word: aletheology.) Looked at a few of them. In one anthology I looked at, the main line of attack on correspondence is that correspondence is supposed to be between propositions and facts, but true propositions are identical to facts, so there can't be any correspondence between them. Which all seems cockeyed to me: there are all these supposed problems about the world, or states of affairs, or whatever, being the objects of correspondence, which disqualify that way of looking at it from the get-go, but those problems seem to me, like so much of the debate about the nature of truth seems to me, to confuse the question of the nature of truth with the problem of confirmation--like, if you can't confirm that a proposition (or whatever) corresponds with a state of affairs (or whatever), then truth can't be correspondence between propositions and states of affairs. (That way of reasoning seems to me like part of a general philosophical impulse to bash everything down until it's comprehensible through and through, like no way of understanding things could be acceptable unless every bit of it, and all its implications, were understable.)
Oh yeah, and also belief, because L. Jonathan Cohen died, and I read in his obit, posted on Brian Leiter's blog, that he had a book something to do with the difference between belief and acceptance, which seemed like just the kind of thing bad faith needs--it has always seemed to me that the bad faith debate was in terrible need of an analysis of belief (and that epistemology generally was in terrible need of a phenomenology of belief--what's it like to believe something?). So, Cohen's idea is, beliefs are dispositions to feel that something's true, which are formed more or less involuntarily, though you can more or less voluntarily suppress them, and they are more or less independent of what you accept as true. Which seems like a pretty good trick so far. (He has a discussion of legal reasoning which is pretty interesting: there's a problem whether juries ought to vote according to whether they believe the defendant is guilty, or whether they accept the conclusion that the defendant's guilty.)
Three rounds of crash bang boom this morning. Temperature's down about ten degrees from 24 hours ago. One of those nasty fall days that fool you into thinking you don't need a jacket, when you'll actually need a coat.
Don't you find it's kind of fishy how rarely the ages of the Mark Foley pages are mentioned? I find it's kind of fishy. I had to look it up last night, to confirm that the youngest one was 16. The age of consent in DC is 16. Reminds me of a "child prostitution ring" that was cracked up in Toronto a couple of years ago--turned out the girls were 17. Hey, not that there's nothing wrong with that--just not quite as wrong as a lot of people would like to let you imagine, eh?
But, oh, the hypocrisy, I know, I know. I have always hated the idea that it's worse to do wrong if you say it's wrong, and excusable to do wrong if you just don't care that it's wrong. But we were down that road a couple of months--seems so long--ago.
An article in the Star today about the physics Nobel said something like that the big bang idea is that the universe started as a singularity "in a vacuum of nothingness", which reminded me of something I'd been thinking some months or years ago (not many years; I used to think much more about this kind of thing many years ago): it doesn't, strictly speaking, make any sense to say that the singularity-universe is "in" anything; saying that it's "in a vacuum of nothingness" inevitably invokes the image of, well, a dot, surrounded by empty space (and here we are, floating in a tin can, behind, above, a little to the left of it)--which is a completely wrong image, but the trouble is, there's no right image. And the trouble isn't just with the singularity; the story goes that the universe expanded from a singularity, and is continuing to expand--but this kind of talk is completely incoherent: if something expands, it expands into, relative to, something else. Talk of expansion only makes sense inside the universe--but then, even saying inside is incoherent; it implies an outside.
So what occurred to me, a while ago, is that what is talked about as expansion actually only makes sense as differentiation. What characterizes the singularity-universe is not that it's infinitely small, but that it's absolutely homogeneous. In a way, in a sense, the universe is getting bigger--but it's only getting bigger relative to us (but then, also relative to every other particular thing); we are getting smaller, along with everything else in the universe, relative to the universe as a whole, because as the universe differentiates more and more, it fills up with more and more stuff; the more stuff there is, the smaller each bit of it is, relative to the whole. (I'm not sure this makes a whole lot of sense, either--but I doubt there's anything that can be said on this that makes a whole lot of sense.)
More truth and bad faith today. Mostly truth. Largely because Prado likes to say that truth--I mean, investigation into the nature of truth--is the business of philosophy, which just doesn't seem ... empirically accurate. So I looked around for the Truth section in the library today, and counted 48 books. (Not that there aren't more books on truth scattered around elsewhere (though not that there are, either), but still, the section on truth is, at most, a quarter the size of the adjacent sections on knowledge--as usually, truth theory is a component of epistemology, which has always confused me, and seems to me to confuse the issue. Philosophy needs a new word: aletheology.) Looked at a few of them. In one anthology I looked at, the main line of attack on correspondence is that correspondence is supposed to be between propositions and facts, but true propositions are identical to facts, so there can't be any correspondence between them. Which all seems cockeyed to me: there are all these supposed problems about the world, or states of affairs, or whatever, being the objects of correspondence, which disqualify that way of looking at it from the get-go, but those problems seem to me, like so much of the debate about the nature of truth seems to me, to confuse the question of the nature of truth with the problem of confirmation--like, if you can't confirm that a proposition (or whatever) corresponds with a state of affairs (or whatever), then truth can't be correspondence between propositions and states of affairs. (That way of reasoning seems to me like part of a general philosophical impulse to bash everything down until it's comprehensible through and through, like no way of understanding things could be acceptable unless every bit of it, and all its implications, were understable.)
Oh yeah, and also belief, because L. Jonathan Cohen died, and I read in his obit, posted on Brian Leiter's blog, that he had a book something to do with the difference between belief and acceptance, which seemed like just the kind of thing bad faith needs--it has always seemed to me that the bad faith debate was in terrible need of an analysis of belief (and that epistemology generally was in terrible need of a phenomenology of belief--what's it like to believe something?). So, Cohen's idea is, beliefs are dispositions to feel that something's true, which are formed more or less involuntarily, though you can more or less voluntarily suppress them, and they are more or less independent of what you accept as true. Which seems like a pretty good trick so far. (He has a discussion of legal reasoning which is pretty interesting: there's a problem whether juries ought to vote according to whether they believe the defendant is guilty, or whether they accept the conclusion that the defendant's guilty.)
