This is a waste of money earmarked for security.


Now, let's consider what chain of thought led to the production of this magnum opus. I present a dialogue, wherein I ridicule both the poster and the dialogues of Plato:
Socrates: Now, I ask you, is it not the case that only by placing motivational posters can we encourage our guardians to keep a close eye on their secrets?
Meno: It is as you say, O wise Socrates.
Socrates: And thusly, it follows that we must use cartoon vampires on these posters, for the cartoon vampire is long known as a symbol of information security.
Meno: Only a fool or woman would disagree.
Fin.

But wait! there's more.

I have absolutely no idea what the hell is going on here. I'm pretty sure that the Navy (the producers of this artwork) aren't in the business of launching happy black children into space. But I've been wrong before.

From DefenseTech.

Draft: Valuing is not believing

A (very) short paper on chapter 5 of Michael Smith's The Moral Problem. I argue that Smith seriously misrepresents Lewis's argument against identifying valuing and believing, and that this has serious consequences for Smith's argument. In fact, I argue that Lewis's (real) argument is sound, and thus Smith's big claim in chapter 5 is just false.

Valuing is not believing
In Chapter 5 of The Moral Problem, Michael Smith claims that valuing can be reduced to believing. Smith’s defense of this claim requires him to respond to an argument to the contrary from David Lewis. Smith’s response to Lewis grossly misrepresents Lewis’s position, and does so in such a way that fatally undermines Smith’s claim that valuing can be reduced to believing. Lewis’s argument, as quoted by Smith, is as follows:

[I]f valuing something just meant having a certain belief about it, then it seems that there would be no conceptual reason why valuing is a favourable attitude. We might not have favoured the things we value. We might have opposed them, or been entirely indifferent. So we turn to desires [for an account of valuing].1

Lewis’s argument is straightforward. We can present the argument more formally:

1. Valuing x entails favoring x.
2. It is not the case that believing x entails favoring x.
3. Therefore, valuing is not believing.

This argument is valid. Smith’s response is to argue that there is a defeasible conceptual connection between believing valuable and desiring. Smith writes:

Lewis’s argument against identifying valuing with believing thus depends crucially on the idea that there is some sort of conceptual connection between valuing and desiring. But does granting such this conceptual connection really preclude identifying valuing with believing valuable? Lewis seems to think it does, but it is not at all clear why. After all, as he himself notes...it isn’t just a conceptual possibility, it actually happens, that we are indifferent, or opposed, to what we value. Whatever the precise nature of the conceptual connection between valuing and desiring, then, it does not obviously preclude the sort of indifference or opposition to what we value that the identification of valuing with believing valuable makes possible.2

But note that Smith has changed the topic. Lewis’s argument against Smith’s proposed identification rests on the fact that there is no conceptual connection between believing and favoring, whereas Smith is talking about conceptual connections between believing and desiring. Lewis recognizes the fact that we might not desire what we value, and indeed his account of valuing as desiring to desire is aimed at explaining this fact. Smith exploits Lewis’s recognition. He quite rightly points out that any conceptual connection between valuing and desiring must be defeasible, even on Lewis’s own account. But Lewis’s argument does not rest on any conceptual connection between valuing and desiring. Smith’s efforts to show that a connection could exist between beliefs and desires thus tell us nothing at all about the success of Lewis’s argument against Smith’s position.

To put it another way, Lewis has offered the argument 1-3 above. Smith has responded not to that argument but to this variant:

1a. Valuing x entails desiring x.
2a. It is not the case that believing x entails desiring x.
3a. Therefore, valuing is not believing.

This argument is also valid, but it is substantially weaker than Lewis’s original argument. Smith rejects premise 2a., but in so doing he does not reject 2. I will argue that 1. and 2. are both true and thus Lewis’s argument is in fact sound. Lewis claims that we favor that which we value, not that we desire it (indeed, he couldn’t coherently claim that we desire that which we value). Favoring is a pro-attitude and nothing more. Intuitively, it seems right to say that we favor that which we value. In the case of the heroin addict, for example, we would certainly say that the addict favors a substance-free life, even if he or she does not desire it. Similarly, we would say that anyone who opposed what he or she valued was confused (about the nature of valuing, perhaps) and practically irrational. I think it fair to say that this claim, that we favor that which we value, is something like a platitude about valuing.

Even if it is not a platitude, Smith would have to affirm this claim. Smith’s theory of normative reasons is supposed to explain how normative and motivating reasons fit together and how they can come apart–that is, how it can be the case that an agent might believe that some course of action is the best option but nonetheless do otherwise.3 And believing that some course of action is the best option is clearly a pro-attitude. If we did not favor that which we valued, we would not see any need to explain how normative and motivating reasons come apart. It follows that 1. from Lewis’s original argument is true.

Premise 2. of the original argument is also true, or at least highly plausible. First, the premise is intuitively plausible. We don’t think that beliefs about the world entail any attitude at all. It would be very odd indeed if, say, my belief that the world is round entails that I like the curvature of the Earth (or that I dislike it, for that matter). Even normative beliefs do not seem to entail pro-attitudes. We often say things like, ”This is the right thing to do, but I don’t like it.” Such claims, taken at face value, indicate that we might have a normative belief without having a corresponding pro-attitude toward the object of that belief. Further, notice that beliefs and pro-attitudes are dissimilar in several ways.4 The former have propositional content while the latter do not. Beliefs can be right or wrong, but pro-attitudes cannot. And beliefs and proattitudes are modally separable, just as beliefs and desires are separable. That is, given any belief/pro-attitude pair, we can imagine someone having the belief but lacking the attitude or vice-versa. The upshot of these considerations is that that beliefs do not seem to entail pro-attitudes. Since Smith ignores 2. entirely, opting instead to focus on 2a. from his caricature of Lewis’s argument, I can see no reason not to accept 2. Hence Lewis’s argument is sound, and values are not beliefs. Smith’s thesis in chapter 5 is thus shown to be false.

1 'Dispositional Theories of Value', Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society Supplementary Volume. 113-37. Quoted in The Moral Problem, p. 147.
2 The Moral Problem, p. 148.
3 See, e.g. p. 136, where Smith writes: ”The puzzle. . . is to explain how it can be that accepting normative reason claims can both be bound up with having desires and yet come apart from having desires.”
4 We do, of course, say things like ”I believe that bacon is delicious,” but this sentence does not actually express a belief (as Smith and I use the term), instead expressing a pro-attitude.

The problem with power

A story of bureaucracy gone awry,
or, why I have libertarian sympathies

Once upon a time (last year or so), the philosophy department set up a trio of wireless routers. The routers were set up in faculty offices, so that the whole department would be bathed in their aura of connectivity. Faculty and students frolicked* in the lounge and in the offices, gladly taking advantage of the university's nigh-inexhaustible supply of bandwidth. And all was good, for a time. But then the bureaucrats at University Information Services caught wind of this idyllic place, and they came with tape of red to shut down the philosophers' network. One day, without warning, they shut down the routers by the simple method of turning off the Ethernet jacks. And thus were the philosophers punished, for now they could not connect to the Internets at all.

And when the philosophers asked, "Why have you taken these punitive measures? How can our wireless connection be restored?" they were told that their store-bought routers (purchased from Best Buy for $50 a pop) were Against Policy, and UIS-Approved routers would cost $650 each. These UIS-Approved devices were in no way superior to the cheaper devices that the philosophers already had on hand. And moreover, the UIS-Approved network would be an open network, just as the philosophers' network was before the time of trials. So the new routers were no more secure than the old. The only reason for this punitive measure was that the philosophers were going against The Policy, which (this storyteller imagines) must have been laid down by the Pope Himself, speaking ex cathedra, for such is its force.

ଇ————

I know how much it costs to set up three wireless routers, and there's no bloody way it costs almost $2000. But we're going to pay, because UIS can simply cut off the department's Internet access if we refuse. I'm just a philosopher, but I'd call this system a "protection racket." And that's why we should never give anyone any power ever.

The end.

* in the manner of children, with no untoward conduct whatsoever

Oh noes

Watch out, Georgetown: The Right Brothers are coming to take Georgetown back! That's right, America's #1 shitty conservative nu-country duo will be here live for "Take Georgetown Back" Day—a day which is to cool for Google. I know what you're thinking: "but Dan, I'm stuck in Florida/the Carolinas/New York/a bathroom and can't be there for the party. Woe is me!" Never fear: you can watch a video of The Right Brothers' hit song "Tolerate This" at their website. Here are the lyrics to the first verse, if you want to sing along. Liberals, hold on to your cherished ideals, because they're about to be torn apart by rock!

I heard you found a new religion that's got nothing to do with God
They're politically correct, a liberated little sect, the self appointed tolerance squad
You say that you've been enlighted and the problem lies with people like me
You say that you're tolerant and open-minded, well, here's your chance to prove it to me

Chorus
(Tolerate this) I believe in marriage between a woman and a man
(Tolerate this) I believe in driving the biggest car I can
(Tolerate this) A good old fashioned spanking is necessary, not cruel
You're preaching tolerance to me while you're standing there shaking your fist
Well, tolerate this

Oh, snap! That's certainly not something I hear from know-it-all jackasses in intro classes. Boy howdy, I'm questioning my commitment to tolerance in the face of this blistering attack. But don't think that The Right Brothers limit their inept handling of complex issues to political philosophy. No, they're also ineptly handling economics with their hit song "Trickle Down."

If we take away his revenue with taxes that are high
Then he won't take the chance and put his money on the line
But give him the incentive let him reap the benefits
The cash will grow and so it goes and everybody wins

You can listen to that fucking masterpiece, if you want. Remember: bleeding from the ears is how liberalism leaves the body.

I guess the important thing to take away from all this is that GOP talking points don't sound better when set to music.

The imperative march

Philosophy-wise, here's what I'm up to these days. A short paper entitled "(At Least Some) Interrogatives Are Not Imperatives." The quick summary: Nuel Belnap and my professor, Mark Lance, claim that interrogatives are imperatives in terms of semantic content. That is, they claim that we can understand interrogatives as requests (in straightforward cases, as requests to make an assertion that answers the question). I argue that this position is false, and use rhetorical questions and open questions as counterexamples. This paper is very short (773 words) and so it moves fast and adopts something of an informal tone. I also don't have the space to develop any of the ideas, so I rely heavily on a few examples.

(At Least Some) Interrogatives Are Not Imperatives

In "Declaratives Are Not Enough," Nuel Belnap writes, "[L]et me observe just for example that an interrogative act can be either an injunction—occasionally even a ‘command’ if you like…or a request…; and in fact it may be that the varieties of the interrogative act are not fewer than the varieties of the imperative, which are legion." In the same vein, he writes: "Consider the perfectly idiomatic Quine does not avoid the declarative fallacy; therefore, who does?…notice that the ostensible interrogative conclusion can be paraphrased by the following imperative: Quine does not avoid the declarative fallacy, so tell me who does." While Belnap does not explicitly argue that all interrogatives can be interpreted as imperatives, he does suggest that this is the case. I think this position (even if it is not Belnap’s position) is interesting, informative, and not without some merit, and so it is worth discussing. I also think it is mistaken.

There are two good reasons to consider interrogatives to be a species of imperatives. First, this is true for at least one class of interrogatives—those in which the speaker employs an interrogative in order to elicit an assertion in the form of an answer from his or her audience. Consider Belnap’s example of a District Attorney questioning a witness on the stand. The DA’s questions are imperatives that request "or perhaps demand) assertions from the witness. Another example: consider a professor lecturing to a class. The professor stops, and asks a student, "Why is the knowledge argument a problem for physicalism?" We can treat this question as a request for the student to expound upon the topic.

Another reason to treat interrogatives as imperatives is economy. It would make our theories much simpler if a whole class of linguistic phenomena "the interrogatives) were explainable in terms of another class "the imperatives). Other things equal, simpler theories are superior to complex ones, and thus we have good reason to explore the possibility that interrogatives can be so explained.

Unfortunately, there are some classes of interrogatives that cannot be explained in terms of imperatives. One such class is rhetorical questions. Rhetorical questions are interrogatives "at least grammatically) but they are not requests for assertions "since they are not requests for answers). Consider the song "My Way." Sinatra says, "But what is a man? What has he got? If not himself, then he has not." It would be exceedingly bad form if an audience member offered an answer mid-performance. Sinatra’s questions ought not be understood as requests for assertions.

Of course, not all imperatives are requests for assertions. So perhaps rhetorical questions are imperatives of a different kind. I find this implausible. When a speaker utters a rhetorical question, he or she typically doesn’t expect answers. Nor does he or she expect anything else from the audience "although there may be a standing expectation that the audience will be quiet, attentive, and respectful). This suggests that rhetorical questions are not imperatives at all.

Open questions also cannot be explained in terms of interrogatives. By "open question," I mean a question that is not asked of a particular audience, but is instead presented as an unsolved mystery. For example, a physicist might ask "Are strings really the basic building block of matter?" Another example: a mathematician asks, "Is the Riemann hypothesis true?" Neither the physicist nor the mathematician would expect to receive an answer to either of these questions, which suggests that the questions are not requests for an assertion.

Open questions are not rhetorical questions, either "or at least they are not always rhetorical questions). We might imagine the mathematician asking about the Riemann hypothesis in the context of a lecture about unsolved problems in mathematics. In this case, we can paraphrase the question "Is the Riemann hypothesis true?" as a declarative—"No one knows if the Riemann hypothesis is true," for example. This suggests that we might take open questions to be a variety of declarative. But we cannot always do this for rhetorical questions; Sinatra’s questions cannot be replaced by declarative sentences "at least, not without ruining the song).

I have shown that the claim, suggested by Belnap, that interrogatives are a species of imperatives is false. Rhetorical questions and open questions cannot be understood as the speaker requesting certain assertions or actions from his or her audience. Thus they cannot be imperatives. I have also suggested that open questions might be better understood as a species of declarative. This, I think, is itself suggestive of the possibility that interrogatives might still be explainable in terms of some combination of other locutions.

Carter on Dawkins on evolution

Joe Carter of the evangelical outpost has missed the boat in a post on a recent article by Richard Dawkins on evolution. The article can be found at Pharyngula.

Carter misreads Dawkins at several points. For example, Dawkins' article leads off as follows:

The world is divided into things that look designed (like birds and airliners) and things that don't (rocks and mountains). Things that look designed are divided into those that really are designed (submarines and tin openers) and those that aren't (sharks and hedgehogs). The diagnostic of things that look (or are) designed is that their parts are assembled in ways that are statistically improbable in a functional direction. They do something well: for instance, fly.

Dawkins has laid out a simple typology. There are things that look designed and are designed, things that look designed and aren't designed, and things that don't look designed. This last category is ostensibly divided into things that don't look designed and aren't, and things that look designed and are, but Dawkins doesn't mention this division. Carter's response completely misrepresents Dawkins's position.

Notice that Dawkins claims that the way we discern whether something is designed or not designed is the same: their parts are assembled in ways that are statistically improbable in a functional direction. In order to make such a distinction Dawkins must have something akin to William Dembski's "explanatory filter" otherwise he would have no way of knowing whether an object is "designed" or "designoid." How is he able to determine that birds, but not airplanes, could be created by gradual natural processes? He doesn't say. It's one of the gnostic mysteries known only by neo-Darwinists.

Carter claims that Dawkins is setting out a criterion for distinguishing designed and undesigned objects. But Dawkins does no such thing. Dawkins writes: "The diagnostic of things that look (or are) designed is that their parts are assembled in ways that are statistically improbable in a functional direction. They do something well: for instance, fly." Dawkins is clearly saying that this is how we establish that something looks designed, not that this establishes that something is designed (or is not designed). If we want to make the latter distinction, we do so by examining the facts of the case. Planes can't reproduce, and so evolutionary processes (such as descent with modification) can't operate on airplanes. Birds, on the other hand, do reproduce, and so they can be the products of evolution. We don't need Dembski's explantory filter (a terrible misnomer, since it doesn't explain anything) to make a distinction.

Carter also makes a mistake when he writes,

Because complexity is not inherently related to survival, though, we can't assume that the process of natural selection is responsible for increasing the complexity of an organism. In fact, it seem rather obvious that a decrease in complexity could, in some instances, aid in survival (mammals, for example, are more complex than some creatures but their longer gestational periods to birth can reduce their chances of survival). Dawkins is merely begging the question by assuming that natural selection is the process by which complexity is created.

Dawkins never says that natural selection creates complexity. Carter is just creating this from whole cloth, as best I can tell. In fact, Dawkins explicitly says that mutation is the source of new genetic variation.

So where does complexity come from? There's a lower bound for complexity—namely, zero complexity—beyond which no organism can pass. Suppose that total complexity can be plotted with a continuous function. Now suppose that this function has random slope at any particular point. This would correspond to a situation where mutation alone is operative. In the long run, total complexity will tend to increase, because of the presence of the lower bound. So natural selection is in some sense unnecessary when we want to explain complexity. Natural selection acts as a sieve, filtering out mutations that harmfully impact the organism's fitness, and preserving those mutations that are beneficial. Some of those mutations will also increase total complexity; some won't. Indeed, loss of information lies behind one model for producing evolutionary pathways for so-called "irreducibly complex" structures. This model (duplication plus loss of function) also doesn't make reference to natural selection; mutation alone can produce irreducibly complex structures in this way.

Carter also spices up his post with a number of pointless personal attacks. He writes that "Dawkins is, inexplicably, what passes for a 'public intellectual' in England. He is a zoologist by training, an evangelical atheist by temperament, and a dullard by nature. Time and again he is called out for his illogical, inaccurate, or simply inane claims and yet is always treated as if he were something more than an intellectual poseur." He talks about "gnostic mysteries known only by neo-Darwinists" and the requisite slander about "evolutionists (people who have an almost religious faith in the ability of the theory to provide 'scientific' explanations." These remarks are especially out-of-place, since he begins his post by outlining a strategy that hinges on "think[ing] critically and logically." I've got no problems with insults; I use them quite regularly. But I try not to use them when I'm engaged with a serious thinker. Carter's post is written as though it were a serious attempt to engage with Dawkins (though this might be too charitable, given his penchant for misrepresenting his opponent). I'm of the opinion that he needs to drop the insults when he's doing serious work.

Grammar

The importance of the Oxford comma:

Research chemist Herman Meinke took these pictures. Herman has grown 18 foot corn, gigantic vegetables etc. and one major university, after turning a well pump off and pouring this amazing water down a well (pump off 4 hrs.) was AMAZED to find BACTERIA had gone from SKY HIGH to ZERO!

Herman Meinke grew a major university? I wonder which one.