Eurosong and philosophy

Why Bonnie Tyler's 'Believe in me' is a bit like a Trolley Problem:

Cornel West and MM McCabe

Talking about Philosophy in the Public Sphere, at a meeting at CRASSH.

Public art

After the wonders of the Snowy Farr memorial liquorice torpedoes and the Goth-rock Corpus clock (I can't say enough how very very sorry I am about that last one), here comes another bit of public art to disturb the retinas of the people of Cambridge.  To celebrate the fact that Parker's Piece in 1863 saw the first playing of football according to the 'Cambridge Rules', the City Council have commissioned a thing.  Here is the initial design as released today.  This is not a drill, people.

It is a really big Subbuteo referee standing on a circle on which the rules will be inscribed.  Oh yes it is.

Here is the press release, if you can bear it.

And I don't know about you, but when I had a Subbuteo set within days all the players (including my prized England team in their 1982 Admiral kit) looked like this:

Adding up in Politics 3.11

At the B Club yesterday, we were discussing an interesting chunk of Aristotle Politics 3.1, 11281a41–b15.  There, Aristotle is offering an argument in favour of the view that the masses might be given authority in elections and audits of public officials even if each individual involved is not a good (spoudaios) person.

The idea seems to be that a collection of individuals, each of whom has some evaluative ability, may, as a group, have overall a greater evaluative competence than a single expert.  (It is important to note that Aristotle is cautious and does not think this always happens.  It just might happen sometimes.)  So there is some notion of there being an additive quality of the relevant skill or character trait.  Provided the individuals in the group are not entirely slavish then you can add them together and sum their respective competences.  This seems odd just because it is not clear that virtue and wisdom (aretē and phronēsis: 1281b4–5) are the kinds of things that can be summed in this fashion according to Aristotle.  Now it is possible to claim that what Aristotle means here is that collective decision-making by a group of individually deficient judges can be effective because the group itself generates a kind of helpful reflection: each learns from the others and overall a good decision is reached. Perhaps that is a plausible idea. [1]

Unfortunately, I am not sure this fits very well with the way the rest of the paragraph is presented and, in particular, the various analogies that are offered.  Aristotle goes on to claim that a good person brings together in one individual the relevant skills and competences but these might be scattered and distributed between a number of individuals, each of whom is worse overall than the good person, but who when combined are better.  This is not a mere additive notion since the idea here is that the group comes together as if to form a single agent (1281b5).  This also seems to make better sense of the analogy of the feast at 1281b2–3: many people bring dishes to a meal.  The feast is better than a single dish, even if that single dish is excellent while each of the many dishes in the feast is not as good as the single dish.  This seems plausible to me only on the assumption that the group of many dishes (deipna) contains a variety of dishes and, what’s more, that variety is such that for example one is a starter, one a main course, one a dessert and they combine to make a feast (dapanē 1281b3).  It is not obvious (though I can see how someone might want to argue for it) that a collection of a large number of mediocre but pleasant chocolate mousses is better than a single really excellent chocolate mousse.   Certainly, I’m not at all convinced that the collection is better in terms of chocolate mousse-ness.  But if each dish brings something different that contributes to the overall meal as a whole then perhaps the collection may be better than the single very good item taken on its own.

Incidentally, this notion of adding together complementary parts into a whole is probably present already at 1281b4–5 where the many individuals each have a ‘part’ (morion) of virtue.  If we think of the parts not merely as ‘a certain quantity’ but rather as parts in the sense that each jigsaw piece is a part of the overall puzzle, then adding together all of these parts is what is needed for a good whole.

If that is right then thinking in terms of collective decision making that involves debate, reflection, learning from one another and so on, might be a more plausible way to defend the idea of the competence of crowds, but it doesn’t fit well with Aristotle’s analogies which are instead put in terms of this ’jigsaw pieces and jigsaw-puzzle’ model.

This idea of a sum of the good parts of a collection of different items, where each item is overall not that great, seems also to be what Aristotle has in mind in the analogy from aesthetic judgement at 1281b8–10: if each person makes a good judgement about a separate aspect of the performance (one is good at flute-playing evaluation, another at evaluating some part of the dancing) then they might add up to a single all-round excellent judge.  It doesn’t matter that the good flute judge has no idea about choreography because it’s only the flute-judging jigsaw piece that he provides.  Similarly, at the end of the paragraph Aristotle seems to have in mind that the collection is a collection of just those positive aspects of each of the individuals.  He compares a single beautiful person with an combination of a set of different beautiful parts from different individuals: Clooney’s jawline, Grant’s eyes, etc. etc.  (1281b12–15).

But that raises is another worry.  It’s just not true that if you bung together a collection of the best bits of different faces the collection is going to be as good as if not better than a single beautiful face.  Here’s the proof:

[1] I think this is the sort of view favoured in R. Kraut, Aristotle: Political Philosophy (Oxford, 2002), 402–6.

The Gray Lectures 2013

Plato's Philebus, reviewed

An 'untimely (deliberately anachronistic) review'  by Ronald de Sousa in Topoi 32 (2013): 125-8.  (Link to the pdf here.)

A snippet:

The work is offered in the form of a dialogue—in that respect, at least, it is not ‘‘trendy’’—between Socrates and an interlocutor called Protarchus. The latter defends a position attributed to one Philebus, a curiously ghostly character who unaccountably ‘‘leaves the field’’ on the first page, intervening again only three or our times to reiterate a simple-minded praise of pleasure as the supreme good. That is not the only one of this work’s quirks of style. Its organization is somewhat confusing. Its central pages contain an analysis and classification of pleasures, in the course of which Socrates attempts to persuade his interlocutor that some pleasures are false, but little is done in the dialogue to relate this claim to the work’s announced topic. One is left to assume, I suppose, that falsity might detract from the claim of any conditions to be life’s chief good. In this review, I shall not attempt to deal with the somewhat messy structure of the whole; neither shall I attempt to canvas all the topics that come up only to be desultorily dropped. I shall concentrate instead on the arguments adduced for the claim that pleasures can be false.

There untimely reviews are an interesting idea.  You can read the editorial here.

Could be another wasted afternoon...

 I've ended up this afternoon going back to and fiddling with something I wrote quite a while ago.  To be honest, I was looking for another file on my computer and saw this one as I was scrolling down.  I remembered spending some time on it and so I opened it up to have a look.  I had more or less abandoned it because it was, I came to see, a bit flabby in places and half-baked in others.  But I have now spent the afternoon thinking that maybe, just maybe, with a tweak here and a trim there, there might be something worth salvaging.  Surely it can't all be hopeless?

Oh dear.  I'm not very good at just writing off the work and chalking it up to experience.  After all, it would be odd if a significant proportion of what I type out were not in fact pretty useless.  But arrogance or sheer bloody-mindedness tells me otherwise. 

Epicuro Sulla Natura II

I got to my college pigeon hole today for the first time in a while.  Two nice surprises: a book from my friend in Lyon and, entirely unexpected, a copy of Giuliana Leone's new edition of Epicurus' Peri Physeōs Book II (PHerc. 1140/993 and 1783/1691/1010).  Thanks!  It's a hefty thing, so it will take me quite some time to digest it but it looks very interesting.  And it's good to know that it is now available.

Here's a link to order it from amazon.it.

Cambridge 1944

From the UEA East Anglian Film Archive.  You can watch the whole thing here.

Some stills:

Here are some bright young chaps leaving (I think) one of Corpus' staircases in the morning:

And here is a chap off for a bath:

And here is Will Spens, Master of Corpus:

There are also some interesting scenes of the undergraduate ARP services practising out in Trinity's Great Court.  And of the Provost of King's, John Tressider Sheppard, lecturing on Homer, the poetry 'of friendship and freedom'.

The pundit's 'for me': a philosophical analysis

It is not clear what the precise force and implications are of the sports pundit’s qualifier ‘for me’ (hereafter: ‘FOR ME’).  It is extremely common in most forms of pundit-discourse but there is no agreed single account of its force.  This is a brief introduction to some of the principal philosophical options.

Consider the following examples:

1.             ‘Rio, for me, is a world class defender.’

2.             ‘For me, that’s a yellow card at worst.’

3.             ‘That was never a foul, for me.’

Note that in natural language the ‘for me’ qualifier can be placed within, before, or after the clause it governs.  We can nevertheless clarify the three examples as follows:

4.             (FOR ME) Rio is a world class defender.

5.             (FOR ME) That’s a yellow card at worst.

6.             (FOR ME) That was never a foul.

A popular line of analysis notes that in many—perhaps the majority of—cases FOR ME is used in evaluative claims.  This analysis then offers a deflationary reading such that FOR ME is either simply redundant or else simply marks what comes next as being an evaluative claim.  FOR ME in that case makes no independent contribution to the meaning of the clause.

Further, some interpreters take FOR ME to be a marker of the expressivist nature of such claims.  This is more plausible in some cases than others.  For example, it is at least prima facie plausible that there is no fact of the matter whether Rio Ferdinand is a world class defender.  In that case it is sensible to understand §6 above as having the force: ‘Hooray for Rio Ferdinand’s defensive skill and ability!’  FOR ME, in this case, is an explicit marker of the fact that the clause it governs is not truth-apt. [1]

Other interpreters find this unsatisfactory since it would render the many hours of TV punditry in reality no more than a group of men in bad suits shouting ‘Boo!’ and ‘Hooray!’ to one another.  (This is known as the ‘TalkSPORT’ objection.)  Attempts to modify the view, such that punditry expressions may nevertheless stand to one another in familiar logical relations, ‘Quasi-Punditry’, remain controversial. [2]

Alternatively, if FOR ME claims do have a truth value then there are further differences of opinion over how best to account for them.  For example, one view begins with the observation that FOR ME claims are almost always offered in contexts of dissent.  So, ‘§6 (FOR ME) That was never a foul’ is most likely to be uttered on the occasion of an official having decided that an offence has occurred.  Assuming something like FIFA-positivism, the official’s blowing his whistle and indicating a foul is just what it is for a foul to have been committed.  So §6 is false.  The view that all such FOR ME locutions are in fact false is sometimes called the ‘Error Theory’ of punditry or, alternatively, ‘Shearerism’.

A more extravagant line, associated with some rather extreme general accounts of punditry, begins from the premise of Pundit Infallibility [3].  Given Pundit Infallibility, if the pundit utters §1 then it must be true (despite appearances) that Rio Ferdinand is indeed a world-class defender.  But what if another pundit, sitting at the same time on the same sofa, should then utter §7 ‘No, for me, he has lost a yard of pace and won’t any more cut it at the highest level’?  We might initially think that §1 and §7 cannot both be true; but this is just what Pundit Infallibility requires.  In this situation, the FOR ME qualifier relativises the claim to the respective pundit.  So FOR LINEKER Rio is a world-class defender and FOR LAWRENSON Rio is not a world-class defender.  Some critics worry about the plausibility of this analysis since (1) it again threatens to make it impossible for there to be genuine agreement or disagreement between pundits; (2) in cases such as §3 above it seems odd to think in any sense that, granted a foul was in fact awarded, it can be true that there was no foul, FOR WHOMEVER.  In response to (1) some critics simply accept this consequence.  In response to (2) some less parsimonious critics posit that there is in fact some private world for each pundit such that they can remain infallible.  In this case FOR LAWRENSON… has roughly the force of IN LAWRENSON’S WORLD… 

[1]  This view is most commonly ascribed to a line of thought inspired by the Scottish Enlightenment pundit, Alan Hansen.

[2]  Quasi-punditry is often associated with pundits connected with Blackburn Rovers, a club where, it is sometimes said, it is possible to ‘have one’s half-time pie and eat it’.

[3] Historically, this view can probably be traced back to the ancient pundit Jimmy Hill and his claim that ‘The pundit is the measure of all things: of fouls that are that they are fouls, of offsides that are not that they are not offsides’.  The interpretation of this claim is, of course, also rather controversial.