Specter of Reason

[See update at the bottom for a very brief review of Death Proof .] 2007 saw the closing of the original Alamo Drafthouse in downtown Austin, TX.  Quentin Tarantino marked the event with an on-location film festival.  It was not his first at the Alamo Downtown, a theater which reveled in the independent, low-budget, nitty gritty feel that he and Robert Rodriguez celebrated in Grindhouse (including Death Proof  and Planet Terror ), which also came out in 2007. I had gone to a Tarantino film festival at the Alamo Downtown just two years earlier, in 2005, the year Entertainment Weekly ranked the Alamo Drafthouse as the #1 movie house in America .  (That was when the Alamo Drafthouse had just begun to expand outside of Austin, but was still limited to Texas locales.)  It was Tarantino's sixth film festival, " QT6 ."  I and about ten or so others managed to attend all of the screenings, including the all-night horror marathon. Tarantino introduced on...

Several scientists have made a declaration on consciousness .  (You can read coverage from a  Scientific American blog  here .) Unfortunately, I think the declaration is more likely to promote confusion rather than clarity. What does it mean to "experience affective states?" What characterizes intentional behavior as such? These are problematic questions and I don't see this declaration helping matters. They seem to be ignoring the difficulties, not overcoming them. One basic difficulty is that the word "consciousness" has multiple recognized definitions. For most people, I think if you told them octopuses had consciousness, they'd think that octopuses had self-awareness, higher order thoughts about their lives and experiences, and such. But that is not what the science shows. (I'm not saying octopuses don't have these things, but only that the science doesn't show it.) I suspect that the scientists making this declaration take "consciou...

I've completed my masters thesis.  It's over one hundred pages, by far the longest thing I've ever written.  And it's not half bad, in my opinion, though there are a few arguments I would have liked to flesh out in more detail. The first half is on the history of the concept of subsidiarity and its relation to the foundations of human rights law, including some criticism of the liberalism we find in Mill, Rorty and, most recently, Nussbaum.  I advocate an alternative, which I call pragmatic secular constructivism .  It is secular in the sense that it does not give religious belief a privileged place in political discourse; however, I take an accepting position towards the inclusion of religious language in political affairs.  My argument is that religious perspectives are going to influence politics one way or another, so long as religion is an influential factor in social life; and that if explicitly religious language is barred from entrance into the politic...

I want to clarify and expand on a point I recently raised against Ryle. A friend has suggested that I moved a little too quickly through the points, especially concerning the relevance of Wittgenstein, so I'll try to make it a bit more cogent. I'll draw some connections to Dennett, Millikan and Kripke in the process. It begins with Ryle's distinction between museum-possession and workshop-possession of factual knowledge (see Ryle, "Knowing How and Knowing That," 1946). Let MUSEUM(p) = museum-possession of knowledge that p. Let WORKSHOP(p) = workshop-possession of knowledge that p. Ryle claims that MUSEUM(p) is impoverished with respect to knowing-how, where "knowing how" is a general term for intelligence associated with the application or expression of knowledge. In order to intelligently exploit one's propositional knowledge that p, one needs WORKSHOP(p). Ryle is also clear that, in order to know that p, one must establish or derive the f...

I often qualify the music I post online, saying I'm still rusty, that it works well enough despite the imperfections, and so on.  Not this time.  I'm completely happy with these two recordings.  (Actually, I don't have any problems with  the last one I posted , either.) These were both recorded on the same day.  The first is an improvisation which develops into something meant to conjure the spirit of McCoy Tyner: Second, an original composition I'm calling "Serenity Junction": If you're paying attention, you'll notice that the first recording is actually based on the opening of "Serenity Junction."

I want to further explain my misgivings about Ryle's account of knowing-how ( see here ).  Ryle's positive view of knowing-how is embedded in his arguments against intellectualism. As Jason Stanley noted during his "meisterkurs," these arguments are targeted against a number of different positions at the same time, and Ryle lumps them all together under the banner of "intellectualism." First there is the notion that all knowledge is knowing the answer to a question. This is the position Jason wants to defend. Ryle is also arguing against the view that the intellect is the defining feature of the mind: that to be a person is to have a mind, and to have a mind is to have an intellect, where the intellect is defined as that which considers and grasps propositions, or truths. I think Jason wants to defend this position, as well; and it may very well be entailed by the first position. Along with these views is the view that, in order to act intelligently, ...

I'm just 24 hours back from Jason Stanley's "meisterkurs" at the Berlin School of Mind and Brain. It was phenomenal. It was great to finally meet Jason in person. He was wonderfully receptive and gracious. I didn't have time to ask him everything I wanted, but a number of important bases were covered. He was excited and good-humored and always kept me on the edge of my seat. I was glad to see him being critical of some of the arguments in his recent book. At one point, he seemed to want to reject the idea of practical ways of thinking as a natural kind or category of cognitive capacities. He said he had never claimed they were necessary in the first place, at which point I picked up my copy of his book and turned to page 130 and read aloud: "[Practical ways of thinking] are necessary to explain the acquisition of skill on the basis of knowledge of facts, which are true propositions." Jason responded that he didn't know what he meant by...