So, How's The Writing Going?

Fans of the blog new and old will have been on something of an emotional rollercoaster over the last couple of months. On February 14 your favourite website burst back into the blogosphere with a renewed sense of purpose; I was going to write frequent posts even when I had nothing to say, exercising it like a long-neglected muscle until it became a powerful mouthpiece through which I could eventually put something valuable into the world.

The following week I posted about how I'd been eating at least one banana each day this year and documenting the journey on my second favourite microblogging site — I'm still keeping that up, by the way — and formed an intention to write a post each week. The following two Fridays brought posts about my various reading habits and the Kinks song Plastic Man. Things were going well.

Cracks began to show in week five, when my post was about how I'd got in over my head trying to write a post about Susan Stebbing and the second dogma of empiricism and wasn't going to be able to put up anything proper that day. The following week was also touch and go behind the scenes but I did manage to get one out about poetry. That's the most recent one, and it was twenty days ago. So, what happened?

The Distractions Of Ambition

The short answer is that I've been working on the Stebbing post. That needn't have been a problem: my plan was to keep at it while still putting out something else on Fridays, and then put the Stebbing one out in the week it was ready. But as you'll recall from the first post of the new era, the first step of the post was percolation, and you can't be percolating posts about poetry and bananas when you're distracted by something else. Or at least that's how it's turned out for me. And with no percolation, I've found myself tired and uninspired on Fridays, and of course it's so much easier to just put a little joke on Bluesky about how people will have to spend their Friday nights doing something else.

It isn't just the regular blogging that this Stebbing post has distracted me from. Remember I said I was reading a set theory textbook? Well I haven't opened that for weeks, and I'm wondering if I ever will. Perhaps I should just return it to the library and give up on the possibility of ever arguing for the indeterminacy of the continuum hypothesis based on Avicenna's notion of conceptual parts.

One big part of the distractions from the Stebbing post were that the second dogma part sent me down a bit of a Quine rabbit hole. (Or is it an undetached rabbit-part hole?) I still like Quine and find him interesting and enjoyable to read, and so after reading Two Dogmas to refresh my memory I ended up rereading the rest of From A Logical Point Of View as well, and some of the papers in Ontological Relativity, and it's all been very fascinating but any time spent reading and thinking about Quine is time not spent percolating frivolous blogposts about fruit or writing poems that scan perfectly and contain no interpretive secrets. And of course I've been reading things by and about Stebbing too, although it doesn't really feel like it's been that much.

The Stebbing Post

So anyway, what's this post about? What is this connection between Stebbing and the second dogma that I've been so keen to tell you all about? Well basically I read a paper of hers years ago called 'Logical Positivism and Analysis' from 1933, and was struck by the fact (if it is a fact) that one of the main positions she was critiquing was the second dogma of empiricism. But her response to it was entirely different from Quine's, which makes it all the more interesting, and so I thought I should write it up at some point.

Nonetheless, writing it up has proven difficult. I didn't think it'd be that difficult, because I first read the Stebbing paper years ago and had kind of integrated my thoughts on the topic into my general worldview, and so I ought to be able to be able to talk about it more or less off the cuff. I could reread the relevant texts so I can explain how what they say links up with what I'm saying, and that'd be that. But as can be the way with these things, rereading one thing leads to reading another, and you try to make sure you're interpreting things right and not missing out on mentioning important things that really ought to be mentioned, and things get away from you. Eventually you start wondering whether there's really anything important to say here at all. It can be fairly disspiriting at times, although parts of it can be exhilarating too.

Ultimately I think I can see myself falling prey to the kind of perfectionism that I talked about in the Field Of Dreams post. I don't expect the end product to be great in spite of the extra work I've put into it; this is history of philosophy after all and I don't really know what I'm doing. The basic ideas I want to get across are straightforward enough:

• 'Logical positivism and analysis' is a really interesting paper and is now available to read online, so if you're interested in that sort of thing, go and read it!
• Quine describes the second dogma of empiricism as 'reductionism: the belief that each meaningful statement is equivalent to some logical construct upon terms which refer to immediate experience' (1951/1961:20), and Stebbing is arguing against a very similar idea in her paper. Quine was thinking in large part about Carnap as his opponent, and so was Stebbing. And Quine was writing almost two decades later, so how about that.
• Stebbing and Quine both associate the dogma with the logical positivists/empiricists' verificationism, according to which the meaning of a sentence is or at least is determined by what would count as a verification that it was true. And they both thought the verificationists were onto something, in that experience is ultimately where the rubber hits the semantic road. They don't go worrying about how statements of the verification principle aren't themselves verifiable or anything like that. They just don't think meaningful statements all reduce to statements about immediate experience.
• Quine's response to the dogma, famously, was to adopt a kind of holism in which we don't think about the meanings (or for Quine, synonymy relations) and confirmation or otherwise of sentences in isolation, but instead think of sentences and the beliefs they express as standing in an interconnected web which responds to unexpected experiences by making modifications all over the place. But we should nonetheless be careful not to think of Quine as a semantic or confirmational holist, because Hilary Putnam says that's a mistake, and he should know. (Quine doesn't really believe in meanings or confirmation at all, you see.) Now, Stebbing's response is entirely different:
• Stebbing responds by introducing the notion of the indirect given. Just because belief about things remote from the given have to be based on beliefs about the given, doesn't mean they have to be based on beliefs about immediate experience, because being given need not mean being directly given the way immediate experience (and not much else) is.
• She isn't fully explicit in that paper about what she means by the indirect given ¹, but I like to think of it in these terms: directness is a causal matter, whereas givenness is a normative matter. Your belief that there is a tree through the window is at one end of a time-consuming causal chain with the tree at the other end and photons, eyes and visual cortices in the middle. But that doesn't mean it's inferred from beliefs about experience or anything else, because it isn't inferred: you need not and could not reconstruct the (in fact causal) process whereby the belief came about in order to justify it. It's just "oh look, there's a tree out there". The belief about the tree enters on the normative ground floor.
• Now, one fun thing to notice about Quine's and Stebbing's responses to the dogma are that the dogma has two parts and they pick different parts to attack. Quine attacks the reductionism part, and Stebbing attacks the to-experience part. Isn't that neat? I think it's neat. And it opens up the possibility that they're both right: Quine is right about beliefs being a web that responds to unexpected inputs all over, and Stebbing is right that the inputs aren't immediate experiences; they're everyday out-there propositions about trees and so on. And I actually think they are both right in this sense, although I wasn't planning to argue for that in the post.

The Rabbit Hole

The problem is that I don't feel like I can just write a post with the outline above and have done with it; I want to make sure it's right — I suspect some of the claims in the outline above aren't right — and I want to connect it up properly with the texts, and it sprawls. One thing I found when reading the Quine stuff — it's actually in 'Epistemology naturalized', which is much less obscure than most people's least obscure paper — was a reference to an exchange between Carnap and Neurath in 1932 where they talk about whether protocol sentences should be sentences about experience or sentences about physical things, or sentences about ourselves having experiences of physical things.

The papers were in German but have since been translated into English, which is good for me because I can't read German, and Carnap kind of gets talked out of the strong form of methodological solipsism which Stebbing was objecting to². This was in 1932, the year before Stebbing's paper came out; her paper was based on a talk she gave on March 22 1933. So it seems Carnap's methodological solipsism was raising eyebrows all round. The famously tolerant Carnap seems to think in his paper that there's more than one way to climb his methodological mountain, and he gives an alternative account of protocol sentences which he credits in large part to Karl Popper, in which protocol sentences are about physical things and can be basically any statement about them, and they can act as protocol sentences in one context but admit of further justification in other contexts. I think there's a lot in that, and it points away from the second dogma stuff in both the direction Stebbing took things and the direction Quine took them. And that was Carnap himself, already, in 1932. And Frederique Janssen-Lauret (2017) argues that Stebbing herself was also going in a holist direction that anticipates Quine and Susan Haack to an extent, although I haven't properly got around the textual evidence for that yet.

Neurath's paper is also of interest; it includes the famous bit about how we're like mariners trying to rebuild our boats on the open sea, but instead of the idea being just that you have to do it a bit at a time so the boat doesn't sink, it's also important to the image that you only have access to materials that are already on the boat. I wasn't aware of that angle. Neurath also argues in that paper that private languages are impossible. And if you're impressed to see someone doing that in 1932, Quine (1969a) reports that Dewey was dismissing the possibility of private languages way back in 1925. It's all fascinating of course, and I wanted to include it all, but it's just too much and I fear that if I don't let go of this mindset then you'll never hear about any of it, so I'm not really sure what the best thing to do with the project is.

I'm on holiday next week — that's also why this is coming out on a Thursday — but hopefully I'll see you the week after that!

Notes

[1] She does refer us to Stebbing (1929) for the sense in which perception is indirect, and basically the answer is fairly standard for people who think perception is indirect, in that it's mediated by a sensum. To be honest I was a little disappointed when I read this, but hope something more interesting can be made of the notion of the indirect given.

[2] There's a fun bit in Stebbing's paper where she's talking about the methodological solipsism of Carnap and whatever kind of solipsism Wittgenstein adopts in the Tractatus, where she says "The doctrines of both Carnap and Wittgenstein seem to me to suggest that Wittgenstein’s statement—’What solipsism means is quite correct, only it cannot be said’—is just the reverse of what they require. For, in my opinion, methodological solipsism ought to assert: ‘What solipsism means is ɴᴏᴛ correct, but only solipsism can be said’. I do not, however, suppose for a moment that either Carnap or Wittgenstein would regard my suggestion as other than absurd." (1933:74, her emphasis)

References

• Carnap, Rudolf 1932/1987: 'On protocol sentences', translated by ; Richard Creath and Richard Nollan, Noûs 21(4):457-470
• Dewey, John 1925/1958: Experience and Nature (La Salle, IL: Open Court)
• Janssen-Lauret, Frederique 2017: 'Susan Stebbing, Incomplete Symbols and Foundherentist Meta-Ontology', Journal for the History of Analytical Philosophy 5(2):6-17
• Neurath, Otto 1932/1959: 'Protocol sentences', translated by Frederic Schick, in A. J. Ayer (ed) Logical Positivism (New York: The Free Press):199–208
• Quine, W. V. A. 1951/1961: 'Two dogmas of empiricism'
• Quine, W. V. A. 1961: From a Logical Point of View, 2nd ed. (New York: Harper and Row)
• Quine, W. V. A. 1969a: 'Ontological Relativity', in Ontological Relativity and Other Essays (Columbia University Press): 26–68
• Quine, W. V. A. 1969b: 'Epistemology naturalized', in Ontological Relativity and Other Essays (Columbia University Press): 69-90
• Stebbing, L. Susan 1929: 'Realism and Modern Physics III', Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society, Supplementary Volumes , 1929, Vol. 9, Knowledge, Experience and Realism, pp. 146–161
• Stebbing, L. Susan 1933: 'Logical positivism and analysis', Proceedings of the British Academy 19:53–87

Confessions Of A Bad Poet

Like every non-serious person who grew up as a gifted kid, I secretly harbour hopes of achieving greatness through what I think of as a cheap shot. I might elaborate on what I mean by this another time, but one thing that would qualify is writing a widely and rightly beloved poem that shows up in anthologies all the time because it's such a stone cold banger. You'll be relieved to hear that this is not the only iron I have in the fire, but it is one of them. I should hasten to clarify that I do not expect any of the poems I've written so far to ever attain this status; the most likely candidate is probably 'My Hair Is Remarkably Long', which fans of the blog will already know and presumably love. One point in that poem's favour is that the balder I get the funnier it gets, which is incidentally a nice demonstration that the quality of a poem need not be fully intrinsic to it.

Immortality And Mortality

Achieving artistic immortality through a cheap shot is in many ways a numbers game, for a couple of reasons, of which only one is the obvious fact that one must typically cast many a sprat to catch a hake. The other reason is that in order to promote one's poetry one will ideally be legible as a poet, and this means putting out at least one slim volume of verse to supply a friendly environment for your banger to shine. The poems don't all have to be bangers, but people are much more receptive to a poem when they're in poetry-reading mode and it's surrounded by other poems than when it's sitting awkwardly in a rectangular space carved out of a magazine article.

So what I need is enough poetry to fill a slim volume. Let's suppose that'd be about fifty poems, counting long poems that take up multiple pages as more than one poem. I'm now forty years old, I have been writing my poems for about twenty years, and I have about ten poems that I consider successes, so at this rate I should be able to put out my slim volume when I'm 120. Actuarially speaking, I would do well to up my work rate a little.

Now you might be surprised to hear this if you're familiar with my poetry, but I actually find it very difficult indeed to write them unless inexplicably struck by inspiration. I don't know what prompts it or how to speed it up; I have just occasionally been struck by inspiration and written a poem I consider a success. I have also sometimes been struck by inspiration and written a poem I consider a failure, but there aren't very many of those either. I am painfully unprolific. In contrast to my blogging output, which I have been able to ramp up enormously over the last few weeks through an act of sheer will, I would have no idea how to make myself a more productive poet. I suppose I could commit to posting a poem every Tuesday come rain or shine, but nobody really wants to see that. So I fear that my projected slim volume may never appear, and any bangers I write will go wasted on the desert air.

Hits And Misses

As I said, I've written a handful of poems I consider successes, and a handful or two that I consider failures. 'My Hair Is Remarkably Long' is of course in the former category, but I'll show you another of the successes and one of the failures so you can get a sense of what my standards are.

First, the success. It is a double dactyl, information which is necessary to read it with the right meter and which helps explain some of the artistic choices. Years ago there was a brief and minor vogue for writing them about philosophy to which I made a couple of contributions, and I'm sorry to inform you that this is the better of the two.

Guggenheim Flügenheim
Leopold Löwenheim
Pondered the hierarchy
Cantor had sired

With Skolem's help he proved
Model-theoretically
Higher infinities
Are not required

I don't want to toot my own horn too much, but I'll say a little about why I consider the poem a success, because I think it illustrates some things about the ethos with which my poems are written. First and foremost, when read correctly it scans. Lots of poetry settles for not scanning properly, whereas I am quite keen for my poems to scan more or less perfectly (except in the case of one called 'Computer' in which the meter breaks down intentionally in the middle).

It also adheres strictly to the rules of the form I've written it in, at least as I understand them, which is important to me when I write one in a specific form. Beyond these things the success criteria become more nebulous, and it's not something I've reflected on a great deal. Perhaps part of it is that there are no secrets: you might have to google who Leopold Löwenheim is, but in principle I think the reader should be able to understand this poem just as well as I do without me having to explain anything further about it (assuming you recognize a double dactyl when you see one). It is, in an important sense, not personal. When asked what my favourite poem is, my longstanding answer is 'Recipe For A Salad' by Sydney Smith, and I think one could say the same about that. Irritatingly, however, this isn't actually the case for 'My Hair Is Remarkably Long', because to fully appreciate it you have to know what I look like. Oh well.

Now for the moment you've all been waiting for: the failure. This poem is a limerick about Goethe.

There once was a fellow named Goethe
A novelist, bard and Frankfurter
Man of science astute
And a statesman to boot
He was basically Norris McWhirter

This poem is a failure in my eyes, although I hold out some hope that with some judicious workshopping in multiple places it could become a success. So, what's wrong with it?

Attentive readers will have noticed that it meets all the success criteria I mentioned for the successful one. It is undeniably a limerick. (If you don't already know, I'm sorry to be the one to tell you that it really is normal for English people to pronounce "Goethe" to rhyme with "Frankfurter" and "Norris McWhirter".) When read correctly it scans perfectly. And while you might need to Google Norris McWhirter, you don't need me to tell you anything in order to understand the poem as well as I do. And yet, as I am sure you'll agree, it is deeply unsatisfying as a piece of art.

The problem as I see it is that it has holes in it: some of the words are essentially placeholders where a word that improved the poem could have been put but I couldn't think of one. "Fellow" is an example. That should be replaced by a more interesting word applying to Goethe. "Astute" is not great. "He was basically" is an abomination. When writing it I looked up whether I could put "The Westphalian Norris McWhirter", but unfortunately that's not where Westphalia is. Returning to it today I considered "The Enlightenment's Norris McWhirter", but I don't like that because drawing attention to the fact that Goethe was one among many polymaths of approximately his era rather detracts from the point of the poem. Maybe one day I'll come up with something, but today is not that day.

The poem was originally written as a reply to a tweet seeking recommendations for "a decent biography of Goethe that isn't 20'000 pages long"; it appears that the date (21 March 2018) was World Poetry Day, and so I replied with a poem. I thought it was funny, but as I recall the poster didn't like the tweet. I'm over it; as I say it's not a good poem. But when looking this up, I realized that today is March 21 too, so happy World Poetry Day, and see you next week!

No Post Today

I'd intended to write a post today about Susan Stebbing and the second dogma of empiricism, but through a combination of it being a more challenging topic and this Friday having more distractions than usual, it got to the point where I realized that wasn't going to be happening today, so you're getting this post instead.

Regular readers will recall that I'd hoped that by getting into a routine from writing frivolous posts I'd be able to send more substantial posts down the production line and produce them in a timely manner. On the other hand, I mentioned a couple of philosophy posts that I said I was proud of but wouldn't have been able to write quickly, and so I shouldn't really be surprised that the one I had planned for today has been taking a bit longer.

It is, without doubt, a setback, but I still hope to be able to have a post for you about Stebbing and reductionism in the next couple of weeks. I guess I'll keep working on it on off days and put it into the schedule when it's ready. But hopefully it won't get torpedoed by the kind of perfectionism that'd been keeping me from writing much in the past. What I will say is that I should be careful not to go into next Friday expecting to get it finished and then find myself unable to, so hopefully if you don't get that one you'll get something more interesting than this one. Or at least something longer.

I'm sure you're all as disappointed about this as I am, but I'm still new to regular blogging and still learning my limitations, and I won't let it get me down. I'm happy enough with how I've handled this setback. See you next week!

Field Of Dreams

Fans of the blog will have spent the last decade or so becoming increasingly dissatisfied about the infrequency with which I post on here, and so have I. It's not that I don't have the time, and every so often I am still struck by inspiration for a post which never makes it up here. Part of it is doubtless down to a lack of things to say, but I think a significant part of it is that the process of writing a post and putting it up here, from start to finish, is very time-consuming for me. I fantasize about posting here regularly; perhaps every Tuesday I would sit down for an hour or two and put something up. But of course I'm very far from that place at the moment, and realistically if I was to get to that place I'd need something in the way of a production line.

To this end, I thought it'd be good to write a post with the kind of production values I'm aspiring to, in the kind of time-frame I'm aspiring to, but without putting too much pressure on the content. This way I can try to get the basic mechanics down, and once I've got that in position, the hope is that in future I'll be able to let the banger content pour out me unobstructed by practicalities, much as one might on Bluesky (other microblogging sites are of course available), or in an IRL conversation. It may take a few such test posts to get there, but this is the first. Just so that nobody who likes reading this sort of thing gets their hopes up, I have no intention of putting them out weekly at this stage.

The Template

I'm writing this on an html template that I made back in the day. I'm not what one thinks of as a person who codes, but I do write these things directly as html, because I find that if I use Blogger's wysiwyg interface things don't end up looking the way I want. Here is the template:

<!DOCTYPE html>
<html>
<head>
<title></title>
</head>
<body>
<font face="calibri" size="3">
<h1></h1>
<div style="line-height:1.5">
<h3>Notes</h3>
<h3>References</h3>
<ul>
<li></li>
</ul>
</div>
</font>
</body>
</html>

I am happy for you to use or adapt it for your own blogposts without acknowledgement. I had to look up how to get the html to display as plain text rather than having it behave as html. You have to replace "<" with "&_l_t_;" (minus the underscores) and ">" with "&_g_t_;" (likewise). The underscores are there because without them I don't know how to make them display as is rather than turning into "<" and ">". I considered not showing you the template at all, but I figured that my production line should allow for a certain amount of looking things up, as long as I don't get too carried away and try look up every last thing, such as the second thing which I didn't look up. It's OK to use a workaround if it's the difference between getting these things out there and having a bunch of fragments sitting on my computer.

There are a few things that aren't in the template but which I do use in my posts, for example hyperlinks, footnotes and images, but text, headings and bullet points are the main thing. I should add templates for links and notes even if not for images, but right now is writing time, not template construction time.

When I'm writing from the template, I need to save a new copy of it with the blogpost title, the date and the .html extension and save it somewhere that my Chromebook will allow me to open html files in a browser from. Then I write the post as html in Caret, periodically saving it and refreshing the version in the browser to see what it looks like. It's presumably not an optimal system but I find it fairly pleasant and it's what I'm building on at the moment. Once I've got the html document as I want it, I can paste it into Blogger, read the preview on that site, correct inevitable typos, read the preview again, and post it. This is supposed to give me control over the process rather than having to do things Blogger's way.

The Production Line

To summarize and elaborate, let's look at the production line as a set of bullet points. This will also allow me to test out another key blogging mechanic:

• Percolation: In the week leading up to sitting down to write the post, I can turn over the ideas for what I'm going to write about in my head. I might write down some notes, but on no account must anything that looks like drafting the post start early.
• Set-up: On the day, get myself somewhere I can work, close my browser tabs, locally save a version of the template with the post name and date, and open it up in the browser.
• Draft: Write the thing! Try not to stop in the middle. Write it in Caret as html and refresh the version in the browser to see what it looks like.
• Proofread: Proofread it in the browser.
• Blogger: Only at this point do I open up Blogger. I paste it into their html interface.
• Preview: Open Blogger's preview and correct any typos. I should do the corrections in Caret and paste the whole thing in again, rather than typing in Blogger and having to go backwards and forwards to get my own copy accurate.
• Final read and post: Once I've read a version in the preview that I haven't seen any typos in, I can post it to the site. For the post's keywords, choose three and don't stress too much about what they are.
• Promotion: Post the link on Bluesky or wherever I'm mostly microblogging nowadays. Watch the plaudits roll in.

Perfectionism

I think that one of the things that stands in the way of me being as prolific as I am in my fantasy is a kind of perfectionism, but I don't want to mislead: perfectionism paradigmatically has benefits and maleffects, and my variety of it is skewed towards the latter. I think my blogposts do skew towards a lack of typos, but aside from that it's really just a kind of obsessive anxiety about putting out something that's not as it should be, even in parts. Last year I did a bit of work on that particular debilitating personality trait of mine with some success, and in a more interesting post than this one I might take a little digression and talk about it, but this is just a test so I'll move on. ¹

The negative aspects of perfectionism speak for themselves, I think, at least in terms of how they might slow a person down. But the positive aspects perhaps deserve a little comment. There are some things that really can't be done well if they're not done with a meticulous attention to detail. But that's not how I roll when it comes to my personal projects. I do a bit of html but don't know how to make "&_l_t_;" display without the underscores, I learned Esperanto on Duolingo but can't follow a podcast in it, I play the guitar badly, I have a blog I hardly ever post on. Regular readers will recall that I occasionally write about set theory but instead of talking sense about it I talk nonsense and make a joke out of it. I actually got a set theory textbook out of the library recently and have been working through it; I'm currently partway through chapter 2 and will let you make your own speculations about how that'll pan out. You get the idea. Perfectionism can lead to perfection, but in my case it typically doesn't. A possible exception is my ability to learn flags, capital cities and other such things that come up in geography trivia games.

The Future

I've got a kind of "If you build it, they will come" attitude towards actually finding interesting things to write about on here. For the moment you should just expect more test posts like this, and you shouldn't expect them regularly at first. The important thing is just getting back in the game, so that when I feel like I've got something interesting to write about, the infrastructure will be in place for me to get it out there.

When I was thinking over some posts I'd written that I was proud of, four that came to mind were this poem, this post about the normativity of logic, this post about a book about ancient Greek philosophy by WKC Guthrie, and this post about collective nouns. So I think poetry, philosophy, and frivolity are the ways to go. I've written about politics in the past too but I don't think I'm very good at it.

I don't often get inspired to write poetry, and while a post like the present one can be dashed off without a great deal of thought, I don't think that's true of poetry, at least not as I write it. Similarly with the two philosophy posts I mentioned: there's no way I could have written those in an hour or two. But frivolity I can probably manage, and probably some less intense philosophy too. I recently had an idea about the Repugnant Conclusion that I could perhaps write a post about. I could also write posts inspired by other people's posts. People sometimes say blogging is dead, but this is obviously bunk. And if the time to write the next instalment comes and I don't have anything interesting to write about, I can just write another one of these. Wish me luck!

Notes

[1] I considered saying a little bit more about it in a footnote to test out the mechanics of footnotes and avoid interrupting the lightness of the main text, but decided to test the mechanics by writing this instead.