*Transcendental *Logic

ZIP LINE TOURS!  Wow…that sounds like…yup…I think that sounds like the most fun thing that the human race has possibly ever invented.  Stick this on my “must do before croaking” list!  (Note:  Will probably have to wait for adventurous child to grow big enough to accompany me, because rest of family is wussy.  ;)

Anyway.

Working on my paper today, rather desperately, in all the cracks the sporadic nature of my work-work is leaving today. 

It’s being an evil paper, truly truly evil.  Now, it’s well known to writing-types that sometimes the harder it is to tame the demon, the more impressive it is once you get it on a leash.  But there’s nothing that gives me vertigo worse than 20+ pages of craggy logical masonry that suddenly folds like a house of pink fuzzy cards.

Moreover, I hate it when I have to invent words — inventing terms is reserved for the Big Boys in philosophy, and nine times out of ten you can’t do it without looking stupid, as an amateur.  Plus, there’s such a good chance that there IS a word out there for what you want to say…in my case, though, I sure can’t find one.  Here, tell me if you know a word for this:

“The quality that makes one way of perceiving a thing more relevant than the others which are available…so that, for example, an object which can be perceived as a statue, a paperweight, a carved piece of wood, part of a former tree, and a collection of atoms, is more relevantly “a statue” when it is sitting in a museum.”

I’m thinking, tentatively, of calling that quality ontological relevance, mostly because the person (a nifty thinker named Judith Thompson) who talks about those different ways of understanding an object calls them ontological levels.  But I still have to check and make sure that makes sense, and that there isn’t an obvious other word for it, and that it doesn’t already mean something else, etc.

I hate inventing words.  I hate it when my fiction makes me do it, too — it’s too easy to knock the reader out of the story with a made-up word.  (Don’t get me wrong, some writers are great at it — I love William Gibson’s, personally — and others are good enough that being bad at it doesn’t hurt them much.  But again, I’m still too green to rely on my godlike skill to save me.) 

Though in fiction, usually I just try to find a word in another language that comes close, and change the spelling or pronunciation a bit if necessary.  I have a culture in my novel that values reputation so highly that it IS money in their homelands, so I warped the Chinese word guanxi into something a bit easier on Western eyes, and whammo.

Can’t really do that in philosophy.  *sigh*

Wish me luck!!

So, perusing the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy as I’m wont to, I come across this entry: 

Dialetheism

Now, you can quickly see from it what a dialethia is — in fact, if you like etymology and Greek, you can even tell without the article; di-alethia means two-way truth.  It’s essentially a sentence (logical sentence, specifically) that is true, and the negative of which is also true.

But I read all this, and understood it, and even got a ways further, before realizing that I was not reading an article on a theism which is both true, and the negative of which is true.  Somehow my brain got stuck on this idea even long after I read and processed the definition of “dialethia”, as if “dialetheism” must be the religious version of it.

Of course, now I’m in love with that idea, and totally depressed that I can’t name it dialetheism, that word already being taken and all.

Should I fold and just call it Dial-a-theism?

;)

Hey yo.  Sorry about the intermittent postings; things are markedly crazy here.  My house is being worked on (largely by me), we’re adding another person to the household mix (for awesome and exciting reasons), and the clock is ticking on the countdown to Starting Me Own Business.  (Once that’s happened, I can legitimately put spots on my daily schedule for "Minding Me Own Business", yeah?)

And, oh, lots of stuff.  I got my first commissions for chainmail work, so the picky little hobby has the added flavor of (minimal but actual) cash; and I’m trying to study up on math — not physics, which I like, but arithmetic and algebra, which I don’t — so that I don’t fail the test I need to take to get into grad school.  Oo, and I got my diploma…and before I had it a day, spilled a whole monsoon of coffee on it.  I was upset at first, but then I thought about it, and coffee-stains are so appropriate for a philosophy degree, especially this one.  So I’ve decided that it has character now.  (Anyway, my awesome husband washed it, and now you can barely tell.)

And while I’m on about fearlessly leaping into doctoral education and small business administration like they’re so many happy lukewarm mud-puddles, I’ve been sort of fearless about my sleep-schedule lately too. 

(This part is going behind a cut, because it contains conclusions that strongly depend on having done a polyphasic schedule for over two years now, and if you’re just starting out with, or contemplating, polyphasic sleep, this isn’t necessarily good information for you to have right now.  It’s also massively theoretical, being that I’m the only person I know about (besides Dr. Fuller) to do this this long — so if you do read further, please keep in mind that this is my experience and *only* mine.)

(But yeah, I’m getting pretty fast and loose with this…)

Read the rest of this entry »

This is what happens when I get any sort of free time or freed-up mental processing units…semi-sincere apologies in advance…!

Philosopher’s BoomDeYaDa

I love philosophy
I love analogies
I love the arguments
I love the fallacies

I love the whole world
And how it won’t make sense;
Boom-de-ya-da, boom-de-ya-da, boom-de-ya-da, boom-de-ya-da

I love the dead white guys
I love how far we’ve come
I love to wonder why
And where the world is from

I love philosophers
(Even at dinner parties!)
Boom-de-ya-da, boom-de-ya-da, boom-de-ya-da, boom-de-ya-da

I love the brains in vats
I love the prisoners
I love the swamp man
I love the twin Earth

I love the possible worlds
And all their paradoxes;
Boom-de-ya-da, boom-de-ya-da, boom-de-ya-da, boom-de-ya-da

I love the Ancient Greeks
I love the Rennaisance
I love the crazy priests
I love the crazy gods

I love the whole world
And all its explanations;
Boom-de-ya-da, boom-de-ya-da, boom-de-ya-da, boom-de-ya-da

I love the dualists
I love the Nietzscheans
I love apologists
I love the zombie nuts

I love the whole world
You’re all hilarious!
Boom-de-ya-da, boom-de-ya-da, boom-de-ya-da, boom-de-ya-da

Now that I have all this time to study things just because they’re fun, I’m really enjoying branching out in ways I wouldn’t have if I was still shooting in the academic duck-gallery.

Besides physics (I think I’ve mentioned that I’m up to my neck in physics lately — woohoo!), I’ve really been enjoying experimental philosophy, about which I get most of my information from this blog.  (Well, when I’m not getting it from the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, which is sort of The Place to learn about the ins-and-outs of a topic.  It’s also sort of like Wikipedia, in that you can get really, really lost in there!)

One of the reasons I’m liking EP so much is that it addresses questions about intuition that I’m simultaneously excited about and not really comfortable with.  As a borderline-Eastern philosopher and ersatz Taoist, I see the intuition at work in applied philosophy (and even in academic philosophy, where they don’t like to admit it), and I really want to have something to say about it as I progress as a philosopher. 

But as a practitioner of traditional martial arts, I’m also actively working to sharpen my intuition, and this has taught me that intuition itself is a bigger and deeper thing than most people have any inkling of.  So I’m wary of dissecting it in such a flippant manner, as if we know what it is we’re talking about.  (Sort of like the heebies I get when people try to "get logical" about spiritual truths.)

Here’s one of the better quotes I’ve run across on the EP blog about intuition, and why they feel it’s important to give it some heavy-duty thought:

"Do such intuitions somehow track a set of facts, independent of the individual philosopher’s mind, about what is really right, or about what personal identity really consists in? A story needs to be told.

That story will necessarily be an empirical story, a story about the psychology of intuition — and maybe, too, the sociology and anthropology and history and linguistics of intuition. For example, suppose it turns out that only highly educated English speakers share some particular intuition that is widely cited in analytic philosophy. That should cast some doubt — doubt that can perhaps be overcome with a further story — about the merit of that intuition. Or suppose that a certain intuition was to be found only among people for whom having that intuition would excuse them from serious moral culpability for actions performed earlier in their lives. That should should cast defeasible doubt on the intuition.

With the maturing of empirical sciences that can cast light on the sources of our intuitions, we philosophers can no longer justifiably ignore such genetic considerations in evaluating our arguments. We can no longer innocently take our intuitions about philosophical cases as simply given. We must recognize that psychology, sociology, anthropology, history, and linguistics can cast important light on the merits and especially demerits of particular philosophical arguments."

…I think he left out biology, spirituality, ecology, cosmology and lord knows what else that probably informs our intuitions…but I love where he’s going!