From an interview with Gonzalo Munévar by Paul Newall about Paul Feyerabend:

PN: How would you describe the relevance of Feyerabend’s thinking today and his legacy for the future?

GM: The big philosophical problem about science was that the scientific method worked but we could not prove so: classical skepticism, Popper’s efforts notwithstanding. Feyerabend came in and cleaned house: the so-called “scientific method” did not work; it actually got in the way of scientific progress (as defined by the empiricists themselves). I think this is a finding of the greatest importance, although not his only contribution. Philosophy cannot – should not – be the same after that, even though professional philosophers will keep on doing pretty much the same things for as long as they can get away with it. I am reminded of Romero’s film “The Dawn of the Dead”, in which the zombies go to the shopping mall to walk around and window-shop as they used to do when they were alive. Analytic philosophy no longer makes sense, in great part thanks to Feyerabend, but there you have it: a philosophy for zombies. But the zombies are still in charge, so who knows how Feyerabend’s legacy will play in the years to come.

Based on Gonzalo’s recommendation, I have ordered a copy of Feyerabend’s posthumous book, The Conquest of Abundance.

[Tags: feyerabend gonzalo_munevar philosophy science ]

2 Comments »

The Hyperlinked Society: Questioning Connections in the Digital Age, edited by Joseph Turow and Lokman Tsui, is now available in full online. It’s an anthology of essays about hyperlinks and society by a great collection of folks. (And then there’s my contribution, which argues that the Internet is good — what a surprise! — because the hyperlinked architecture of the Web mirrors the architecture of morality itself.)

[Tags: hyperlinks morality philosophy ]

6 Comments »

Im reading Julian Warners “From Writing to Computers,” published in 1994. In a wonderful chapter he looks at the senses in which the Western tradition thought documents contained or were intelligent — written documents “appear to understand what they are saying,” Plato says. Warner looks carefully at Platos Phaedrus, a seminal text for those concerned with the transition from oral to written cultures. Thats the one where Plato worries that the onset of written documents will ruin human memory: Those who acquire the skill of writing “will cease to exercise their memory and become forgetful; they will rely on writing to bring things to their remembrance by external signs instead of on their own internal resources.”

Plato has another complaint: Writings cant respond to questions: “writing involves a similar disadvantage to painting. The productions of paintings look like living beings, but if you ask them a question they maintain a solemn silence.” Ive taken these quotes from Plato from Warner pp. 58-59.

Makes you wonder what Plato would have made of chat, IM, and SMS.

Tags: plato julian_warner chat sms im

2 Comments »

I’m working on a talk for Reboot, a very fun conference in Copenhagen. Because it’s an after-dinner talk, and because it’s a bunch o’ geeks, I plan on talking in a hugely preliminary way about some of what I’ve been researching for the past few months. I’m assuming the audience’s preemptive forgiveness. Also, with luck, they’ll all be a little drunk. At the moment, my talk is called “Babbage’s Noise,” mainly because I like the way it sounds.

I’m still trying to pick a thread through the morass of material I’ve happily sunk into. The outline I’m currently sewing together — unsuccessfully, so I reserve all rights to ditch everything and talk about Cluetrain or how everything is mixed up smooshy miscellaneous if I have to — begins by talking about Charles Babbage’s intense irritation about the hurdigurdy players outside his window. Babbage is, of course, routinely pointed to as having in the 1820s invented a precursor to the modern computer, which many say got just about all the elements of the architecture right. Fascinating guy. I then want to compare his use of the term “information” with the modern formulation, which comes from Claude Shannon, but which was quickly transmogrified.

Ultimately, I want to argue that Babbage’s machines had nothing essential to do with information in the sense in which we use the term in the modern age. Babbage thought he was applying Adam Smith’s principle of the division of labor to the production of tables. My talk will spend some time on the history of tables, because I think it’s really interesting. But the main argument against reading the modern idea of information back into history is that modern information is encoded and symbolic, neither of which were true for Babbage’s machines, although I grant that it sure looks that way.

And I think I have an overly-clever way of bringing it back to the modern sense of noise. (Possible spoiler alert, depending on where the talk goes: Communication theory generalizes based on the exceptional case when communication is derailed by noise.)

I’d be more clear about this, but I don’t understand what I’m talking about. And, yes, as usual, that won’t stop me. [Tags: babbage shannon information_theory reboot hypotheses_gone_wrong ]

1 Comment »

In the June issue of Harper’s, Gary Keizer has an article called “Turning away from Jesus: Gay rights and the war for the Episcopal Church” that I kept trying not to like, I think because he’s too right and too good. But the article won me over. Alas, Harper only posts miniature, unreadable images of the pages, so you’ll have to do something primitive like trudge to your local library to read it.

Gary paints a picture of a church traditionally less interested in enforcing doctrinal homogeneity than in ministering to those in need. He personally favors the ordination of gay clergy, but the article focuses a level up from that: How can a church handle disagreement and difference? And he explicitly applies those lessons beyond the church to the country and the world.

It made me think of AKMA‘s idea of differential hermeneutics, a theory of interpretation (which is to say, of understanding) that assumes we’re never going to agree. He opposes this to what he calls “integral hermeneutics,” which aims at resolving issues, and thus showing that one person’s interpretation is right and another’s is wrong. And, yes, AKMA is fully aware of the issues that arise from his position. (I blogged about this here.)

I am convinced that Gary and AKMA are raising exactly the right questions, and are answering them the only way that lets us live together in peace, which is not to say in harmony or quietude. And I find what they say based upon their similar religious convictions to be quite in line with what I understand the Jewish attitude toward interpretation to be: The arguing continues all the way into the next life. If you’re so lucky. [Tags: episcopalians gay_rights gary_keizer akma peace judaism everything_is_miscellaneous ]

4 Comments »

I’m just finishing reading Albert Borgmann’s Holding on to Reality: The Nature of Information at the Turn of the Millennium, a work about information, the Net, and philosophy, published in 1999. It’s terrific.

I particularly liked his synthetic view of information throughout the ages, starting with “natural information,” through writing, printing, and the modern age’s idea. He is enthusiastic, but certainly not evangelical. Throughout, he reminds us how deeply human experience is embedded in flesh.

Borgmann is a good writer. He takes care to keep his readers interested, which may sound obvious but is totally non-obvious to most philosophers. If only.

I wish I had read this book earlier.

[Tags: albert_borgmann philosophy infohist ]

1 Comment »

I’ve just sent out a new issue of my newsletter, JOHO. (You can sign up to receive it via email, for free of course, here.)

[Tags: joho attention history roflcon humor woodstock media ethan_zuckerman teaching john_palfrey ]

2 Comments »

BoingBoing points to some wonderful comments by Vint Cerf in an interview in Esquire, including:

The closer you look at something, the more complex it seems to be.

So true. And also quite different from one of the founding ideas of Western culture. For the ancient Greeks, beneath the apparent complexity there had to be a simple order, or else knowledge wasn’t possible.

You have to wonder about the role our current technology has played in our moving from the Greeks to Vint. (1) We are far better able to externalize ideas now, so that we can know more than we could when memory was confined to what fit in our skulls and could be written down by hand. (2) Our technology now lets us put things together far more complexly than the physical world does; reality is designed to keep things apart (to be something is to not be something else, said Aristotle), while the Web is designed to link things together. (3) Our technology connects us in socially complex ways, enabling us to understand things together.

And it’s not just that things become more complex the closer you look. They also become more interesting. Everything is interesting if looked at closely enough. I take that as one of the lessons of the Net. [Tags: vint_cerf philosophy ]

1 Comment »

Nice post today by Gene Koo about Wikipedia’s view of truth in a postmodern world. A social process replaces the simple one-to-one relationship which we used to think “knowing” was. Something like that.

[Tags: wikipedia knowledge philosophy postmodernism ]

4 Comments »

I’m too nervous to be able to blog about the course I’m co-teaching with John Palfrey, beyond saying that we had our first session yesterday, and there’s a course blog open to the students as posters and to anyone as a reader. (We didn’t have time yesterday to tell the students the URL, so none have posted there yet.) Well, I will say a couple more things: The title of the course is “The Web Difference,” and it’s about whether and how the Web is different, and what that means for law and policy. Also, JP is an awesome teacher. OMG.

What the heck. Yesterday, after going through preliminaries and intros, JP led the class for half an hour in a discussion of a case in which awful things were said on a discussion board, yet the discussion board owner was not held liable. If those things had been said in a newspaper, the paper could have been sued. What’s the difference in the two situations and why might the law be different in them? I led a similarly-themed discussion, far more awkwardly, about whether friendship on the Web is “real” and how it differs from real world friendship. [Tags: web john_palfrey webdiff harvard ]

16 Comments »