From Simple Beginnings a Jungle, Research Time, 30/01/2018

I at first didn’t intend to follow yesterday’s post. I’m still not, really. I’m picking up a thread from a photo caption of all things, spinning it into a new point.

It’s a tricky thing, talking about Karl Marx. In a way, I pity the writers of Deleuze’s Philosophical Legacy, and anyone else who specializes in academic Deleuze scholarship.

I mean, I pity all academics who devote their entire creative lives to the scholarship and interpretation of one or a small few number of historical authors. Do we need more commentary, or do we need more inspiration? Need we separate the two so radically at all?

The entire process looks immensely well-ordered, a perfect balance
among so many complex parts and processes. Of course, the most
perfect balances are also the easiest to disrupt. One shift too far, one
change at just the wrong place and time – the entire system flies to
pieces through the same energy that kept it all together.

You probably know where I fall on that question.

Marx wanted to stand Hegelianism on its feet – put the conceptual and analytic frameworks of thinking to work. His exploration of the dynamics of England’s industrial-imperialist economy literally invented a new kind of science – empirical philosophy.

Scientific research on social and economic relationships, understood according to Hegel’s frameworks of thought. Identify the true contradiction among all the forces that constitute a society, analyze how those irreconcilably-opposed forces could bring their conflict to the highest intensity.

It turned out that the problem wasn’t how you orient your Hegelianism – it was with the whole theoretical toolbox. Social structures and systems* are assembled in very complex, contingent ways.

* Or pretty much any structure or system in the world, but let’s just talk about the social ones for now.

They fall apart from chaotic processes too – one little change interacts with everything else going on, as if it were some Rube Goldberg machine that builds itself as it collapses to pieces and brings down the whole house around it.

So you understand how societies transform not by looking for high-intensity contradictions – that’s more like understanding how societies explode, if anything. Societies transform much more frequently, and much more subtly. Though even the most subtle transformations can eventually constitute entirely different worlds.

What was one revolutionary transformation that happened from Marx’s time to ours (or at least to Deleuze’s)? Labour differentiated. In England’s 1870s economy, working people were miners and factory workers. That’s it. Dirty, scruffy men who live horrible, soot-covered, ash-breathing lives before dying of lung disease. Plus all the slave labour around the colonies who did all the same stuff, but in the sun dying of heatstroke.

I suppose you could say that every technology is as convoluted as a
Rube Goldberg machine, and maybe just as unnecessary. What would
that gain you, though?
I ask that as a serious question.

Now, we have a ton of different working jobs. The factory workers, the miners, yes. But also the retail workers, the taxi and rideshare drivers, medical trades, waiters and bartenders, communications contractors, paid-by-the-post bloggers.

The key with the current labour system, so goes this essay on Marx and Deleuze, is that none of these different groups see much in common with each other. Few of them really have much in their identities and lives in common – other than worrying about their finances.

But the class consciousness that was so easy when Mordorish factory workers made up the bulk of working people? That’s long gone. Why? Because things changed. Economic and technological conditions diversified the number of ways you could get stuck as an underpaid wage slave.

And I’m just talking about the mostly-financialized Western economies. Leave aside the extra complexity of a globalized world whose parity is improving daily.

The world need not have changed in such a way. Maybe it only did so because all the communist revolutions across Europe between the two World Wars were put down, and because Stalin took the only successful such revolution into totalitarianism.

But that’s what happened. The capitalist territories survived the catastrophe of the two world wars, and developed computer technology that diversified their economies. Class solidarity evaporated because there was no longer enough in the identities of the different working people to say they could even be in the same community.

Take a 24-year-old punk rocker girl working at Dollarama for minimum wage. A 50-year-old lifelong steelworker who’s lost his health insurance. An overstressed 32-year-old ad copy writer who might make $4000 one month, then $400 the next (and maybe the next too). What do they have in common?

You can give them lots of good answers. What are the chances they’d believe it?

Subtle Doctors for Subtle Differences, Research Time, 29/01/2018

Pretty much everyone who writes on Gilles Deleuze as a scholar ends up engaging somehow with the ideas of Hegel. Not because Deleuze was a Hegelian in any way,* but because his work was threaded with profound and cutting critiques of the whole Hegelian way of thinking.

When I set out to write Utopias, it was early 2014. I put the outline
together, in a very rough form. That gave me my research guide. I
knew and I know that I'd never have been able to be comprehensive
enough to satisfy everyone – that no one would be able to ask a
question like, "What about what X has to say?" An inescapable
question. I gave myself eight years – I'm now at the halfway
mark, and I have this blog. Manuscript drafted by 2022.

* But if I were ever to come across an academician’s argument that Deleuze actually was a Hegelian, I’d be impressed by its daring and desperation. Daring because it stands against so many of Deleuze’s most explicit motives and goals. Desperate because the scholarship must be overflowing with so many disparate takes that only derangement can distinguish you. Unless it’s character assassination.

I want to see if I can get a very quick but accurate assessment of the Deleuze–Hegel relationship in the next few hundred words of this blog. It’ll be an exercise in the kind of fast yet insightful writing required when philosophy’s history is a tool for a more creative purpose.

When Deleuze’s work was first blowing up in French intellectual circles – the mid-late-1960s – damn near everyone had some element of Hegelian thinking in their philosophy. What does that mean?

A typical mainstream philosophical thinker in France – whether linguist, psychiatrist, social scientist, or socialist – considered the most critical dynamic in any situation the contradiction. Real developments hinged on contradictions – perfectly opposed conflicts, as intractable as A + not-A.

In the marxist politics of the era, for example, contradictions were seen as the engine of revolutions – all the constituents of an industrial society came together in the contradiction of the owner-capitalists and the worker-labourers. The conflict between those two classes determined every other aspect of a society – all other relationships and dynamics depended on how that opposition played out.

Sometimes, I feel constrained by that timeline. As though I could never
squeeze enough work into that time period to achieve a book with the
creative potential I think Utopias can have. The blog has kept my
research on track, and kept it organized. This was unexpected, but a
great benefit – it's helped keep me in step with the times too. Even
the most prestigious professors can't devote all their time to
research and writing – they have teaching, administration, and
promotional work to do. At least my own years conceiving of
Utopias were spent in the chaos of today's contingent labour.
I didn't have to work too hard at keeping my feet in the real world.

All the subtle differences in a society are functions of that contradiction. So if you understand the contradiction’s own dynamics, you’ll be able to understand all the subtler differences in your society. You just deduce the subtle and complex from the simple contradiction.

How do you find the contradiction? Two steps. First, identify the dominant trend in society – its most ascendant feature, if you can follow the analogy. Then, work out what a precisely opposing force would be. If you’re thinking sociologically, it might be a very small, underdeveloped phenomenon.

An example. Think back to marxism. The Shropshire farm boys first coming to the city for the freedom of making good money on those factory floors had no idea they – or at least their class of people – would be so historically pivotal. But those underpaid, spat-upon factory workers were the other half of the dynamic whose back-and-forth would determine how all of English society would develop.

The story itself is inspiring. But that’s not actually how society develops. Same goes for any process – the differences that make a difference aren’t contradictions. They could be contradictions – but contradictions are just one among a vast number of kinds of difference. No by their nature more important than any other.

There might not even be a society whose conflicts have any common theme at all – no less a society for all that messiness.

That said, I knew one thing from the beginning – I was not a
marxist. And I'm still not. Because so much of the marxist
tradition was dominated by the rigidity of Hegelian
thinking that marxist politics became disastrous. Antonio
Gramsci's critiques of his own radical movement haven't
been heard by people today on the front lines. Union
leaders today think solidarity will come naturally from
every group in society outside the masters. But some
interests matter more than others, and what might look
like a glaring, powerful contradiction is really a play of
ineffective surfaces.

Go back to that example of England, where Karl Marx did his first sociological and economic research – that dedicated scientific Hegelian. He found a society whose values were dominated by class superiority – the alliance of landed aristocrats and industry millionaires whose political compromise was to keep the poor in their place.

Not only did the rich dominate the lives of the poor, but popular moral dogma – in informal culture and formal education – taught that such an order was right. Marx saw that same dynamic inspiring absolutist racism in the colonial economy.

The rich have right over the poor – so the poor Englishman would always feel rich compared to the colonized and enslaved African. So racial dynamism is determined by the structure of the fundamental contradiction.

The society perpetuated the very division that would tear it down. The conflict between rich and poor becomes irreconcilable, sparking a revolution that would be humanity’s aufheben. The contradictions are preserved, but transformed so that they reconcile.

The procedure makes perfect sense in conventional logic. And Hegel’s book Logic too. But it isn’t actually how real differences in the world work.

That was Deleuze’s contribution – Hegel put simplification first, because formal logic proceeded in simple functions. But logic is a tool, which we invented. What’s primary is the material mess from which we emerged. That a tool helps you understand the world better in the best places to use it, doesn’t mean that tool is how you see the world’s essence.

Our universe is one of contingency, complexity, feedback loops, interference, chaotic collisions where small, innocuous events can explode in their significance through nothing in their own makeup.

Look at imperialist England. Yes, you can reduce the racist culture of white supremacy to a symptom of the rich-owner/poor-worker dynamic – and our current culture of white supremacy was an ideology designed to make the poor European worker accept his own slavery by making him master of another kind of slave.

But once assembled, the cultural process of white supremacy can develop through the dynamics of its own components and affects. Its relationship to the economic dynamic of centre-periphery is no longer as its function, but as a participant in feedback.

Whether an event or a dynamic ends up having world-shattering significance isn’t a matter of logic, but luck. That’s Deleuze’s rebuttal to the Hegelian way of thinking. Embrace our contingency, our fragility. Build an ethic for fragility.

Get Your Hate On II: Against Simplicity, Research Time, 04/01/2018

I can understand why Gilles Deleuze would have been especially bitter about what pure Analytic Philosophy™ became. It started as a punk rebellion against pretentious Cambridge Hegelianism.

When I was studying the history of early Analytic Philosophy at McMaster University under Nick Griffin, he told me an amazing story about how that field came to be. G. E. Moore was a graduate student at Cambridge, talking with one of his senior professors, J. M. E. MacTaggart. During this casual lunchtime conversation, MacTaggart offhandedly remarks, “Well, of course, time isn’t real.”

Moore's reaction – “What the fresh fuck?!?!” Or the paragraph-long, overly-polite equivalent appropriate to 1890s England.

Of course, as soon as I thought of this example to update the Waverley
case, I had to throw on this album. More than a decade later, it's still
so good!

That punk spirit – the urge to overthrow an oppressive, beyond-the-world, pretentious Hegelian near-mysticism – animated the forge of Analytic Philosophy. But the school’s leaders focussed that spirit on reducing anything that could suggest the metaphysical away from philosophical thought.

What does that Waverley problem amount to today? Here’s an example better suited to the 2010s.

You remember when Untrue came out and no one knew who Burial was? So before 2008, when you talked about “Burial,” the reference of the name was mysterious, unknown. You could point to the album, listen to the music, but you couldn’t say what the real meaning of the name “Burial” was before William Bevan was outed.

It’s a mind-twisting problem to consider on its own terms. People still write essays returning to Bertrand Russell’s “On Denoting” to this day, more than a century later. But Deleuze’s critique still stands – Who the fuck cares? What does it matter?

In the specific context of mathematical logic, it makes perfect sense. But the extreme reductivism of Analytic Philosophy™ reduces philosophical thinking to these problems of word meaning and reference. Everything of wide or visceral relevance is abstracted from philosophy.

So here’s Deleuze’s argument for why Analytic Philosophy™ is to destructive to genuinely creative thinking.

Reason one. When you apply a problem of reference whose proper context is mathematical logic to all philosophical thinking, you end up reducing all of philosophy to logic. The doctrinaire rationalism of the American Analytics – I’m thinking in particular of Willard Quine and the many other thinkers he influenced – raises science to the ideal of thought.

I've come to think of Richard Rorty as having combined the most
profound errors of American Pragmatist™ thinking with those of
doctrinaire Analytic Philosophy™, delivered with all the smugness
of a lifelong Ivy League academician's style.
But that's another post.

But this reductive image of science isn’t even how science actually works. It’s that bizarre science of totalizing unification – the one true form of knowledge. This is why the sub-disciplines of philosophy of science that haven’t yet overcome the influence of Quine and Donald Davidson have become so moribund – their practitioners believe in a unified science that doesn’t exist.

Reason two. Philosophy turns into discourse alone. You exchange logical propositions and proofs – whether as symbolic logic or as propositions with the same simple framework – and evaluate them. Are the inferences valid? According to which system of logic?* A vibrant, creative tradition reduced to tiresome nitpicking.

* Even here, merely admitting that there can be more than one valid system of logic, all mutually incommensurable or irreducible, is more than the presumptions of doctrinaire Analytic Philosophy™ can bear.

Reason three. Philosophical conversation becomes mere debates over opinions. Is this a good argument? Are all your inferences valid? What are the facts and states of affairs that justify what you say?

Deleuze calls it Richard Rorty’s dinner table. Casual arguments over minutiae, tossed off with all the commitment of those who are never at risk from anything. As if conflicts over values, ethics, and ways of living have never killed anyone.

They never killed anyone as comfortable as Rorty, or most of the folks who think such arguments are philosophy’s central subject matter.

Shame to Be So Very Ordinary, Research Time, 01/12/2017

Here’s why I think Gilles Deleuze’s philosophy is ultimately pragmatist – philosophy begins in ordinary life.

It’s not a special communion with being, as the early Greek sages and some modern revanchists saw it. It isn’t a tradition that seeks absolute truths or God’s truths, even though a terrible majority of philosophers in the Western tradition think so.

I'm glad exploring for concepts isn't as dangerous as exploring in
real life. I won't end up like the Franklin Expedition developing
posts for SERRC or book ideas.

When you're trying to say what is philosophy,* Deleuze says you shouldn’t think about the tradition itself and the lofty – sometimes, a little too lofty – pronouncements about philosophy’s purpose. No, look at philosophical thought itself and examine what it’s doing – philosophical thinking creates, analyzes, and maps concepts.

* Narrator: “Hey! That’s the name of this book I’m talking about.”

That makes philosophical thinking ultimately pragmatic – you’re building new concepts, new frameworks for understanding the world. The focus is on navigating problems, and different frameworks for understanding the world make up different ways to make sense of problems, different tools to reveal their complexities from obscurity.

Different substances are visible under different kinds of light. What one lighting condition obscures, another will reveal. Same with concepts. There isn’t one absolutely better set of concepts than another. You get that idea when you think philosophy is about accessing the truth. Because what isn’t true is false.

But when you’re talking about concepts – frameworks for understanding – you have only different models that reveal different aspects of the world. Everything that’s revealed is true, but there won’t be one concept that reveals every truth or all the greatest truths.

That’s why I once said – and still believe – that Deleuze’s thinking carries forward philosophical pragmatism. American pragmatism had a complex account of the production of truths and the plural nature of truth and reason. But the tradition couldn't escape the problems of relativism that kept creeping into John Dewey’s mature thinking.

Don’t think I’m being dismissive of pragmatism. It’s one of the few philosophical -isms with which I self-identify.** The landmark ontological work of his career, Experience and Nature, is a masterpiece that captures the spirit of his whole philosophical movement.

** Even though when I do, I run a decent risk of people thinking I just write commentary and other secondary literature on Dewey.

But that American tradition of pragmatism through its secular trinity of Charles Sanders Peirce, William James, and John Dewey could never get through to the other side of that skepticism – how many truths could still be true, even when they weren’t all coherent with each other. Truth is fractured, but no less true for all that.

The Deleuzian idea repairs this issue by showing how you can throw universal mutual coherence among every truth out the window. All you had to do was demonstrate the logic of philosophical thinking is compossibility. Coherence is a framework of logic and thought, not reality itself.

Reality itself is chaos – understood in the abyssal sense – and philosophical thinking is the best set of techniques humanity has developed to try to think chaos. Coherence is how you make maps and draw paths in chaos – plotting the order that does exist in any chaos by investigating what can and cannot fit together.

A small patch of arid desert can’t develop surrounded by a lush rainforest without a mountain range around its rim. That’s a possibility condition for a desert in the centre of a rainforest.

Mapping a plane of immanence is to do the same survey with concepts.

“You Remembered Being Me Watching You Doing That!” Doctor Who: Before the Flood, Reviews, 12/10/2015

Quite a lot going on in Before the Flood. There’s a common issue, but you have to consider things separately to see it. Consider a few questions.

The Doctor's empty ghost is a beautiful and haunting
image. But I could guess how the Doctor survived his
apparent death easily. That's short-hand for the
problems of this story, Toby Whithouse's whole
approach to narrative, and why he isn't really suited to
write contemporary Doctor Who.

1) Is Toby Whithouse a very original writer? 

2) Who is this War Minister?

3) What sort of crime is violating the boundary between life and death?

4) Did we need a lesson in time paradoxes?

SPOILERS

first, then answers.

1) Not really. Let's look at the different ways he's unoriginal.

A) I’ve already mentioned that his stories tend to conform to old, worn-out or wearing-out conventions. Like The Game, Whithouse’s underwhelming Cold War action drama, one more tired old story of angsty male anti-heroes brooding through their moral compromises. 

I mean, you can make a story about that kind of character if you really want to, but our culture's Frank Miller phase is over, and Whithouse (as well as the fans of Sin City) has yet to realize this.

Now, Before the Flood wasn't particularly angsty in that sense. There was one scene where Cass asked Clara if the Doctor taught her to be so callous with risking others' lives, and where Bennett asks the Doctor whether he used O'Donnell's killing merely to test a theory. But those scenes don’t sit at the heart of Before the Flood’s narrative.

Maybe they would have if Steven Moffat wasn't the script editor.

Given where Capaldi’s Doctor is as a character, he's already dealt with that level of angst. It could be acceptable, if tired, in The God Complex, since all except a small part of the Matt Smith era carried the weight of the Time War. 

However striking the Fisher King's design is, it hasn't
really grown beyond the shadow of H. R. Giger. This
story's second Alien reference.

The Doctor had reason to be in an angst-driven character narrative, but Whithouse’s story was proof that Doctor Who could take this concept no farther. With Before the Flood, Whithouse has given us another red flag for Doctor Who's narratives. 

B) I’ll have to take back my endorsement after last week. Whithouse in the second half returns to the worst tendencies of the base-under-siege story, after spending the first half doing wonderful and interesting new things with that setup. He just returns to the worst features of generic monster suspense stories.

The Fisher King is a terribly generic monster, nothing but murders and bombastic dreams of conquest. Only his abilities to make electromagnetic echoes of the dead make him at all remarkable. But that distinction belongs to the ghosts themselves. 

The Fisher King is a beautifully intricate, grotesque, haunting monster suit. But there's simply no personality other than “Send signal, summon invasion fleet, destroy Earth, enslave humans.” 

Similarly wasted is Prentice the Tivolian, who gets a single scene of irritating all the characters before being shot in the face. David Walliams in The God Complex at least got a whole story's worth of dialogue to explore the character. Though I think the only reason he was so interesting was because David Walliams played him. 

Tivolian culture has a lot of potential for storytelling and character development. I could tell some wonderful stories about a people for whom cowardice, surrender, and betrayal to the stronger power is a virtue. I could tell a wonderful story about a monster who resurrects ghosts from a traumatizing death, weaving together elements from the Fisher King myth.

As Jane Campbell says at the Eruditorum Press review of
this story, it would have been much more interesting if
Bennett had died in a botched attempt to chase the
monster away from his Unspoken Love™ O'Donnell,
giving in to his alpha-male idealism at the cost of his
own life. We would have had more time to follow
through on its tension and plot fallout if Whithouse
hadn't chopped 4 minutes off the front of the episode
with a lecture about the Bootstrap Paradox.

C) Then for the generally unnecessary detail of the two nerdy introvert men having unspoken loves for the women with which they work closely, and one of them being eventually and blatantly reciprocated. 

Bennett’s lost chance with O’Donnell, her not surviving the story, works as a good moment for his character, and for Clara’s. It lets her express how she moved on from Danny's death at the end of last season. Her and Bennett's brief conversation lets the details of his relationship with O’Donnell stay silent, so we can fill in the blanks as we prefer.

Because after talking to Clara, Bennett tells Lunn to express his own feelings for Cass, whose last act in the story is passionately kissing Lunn. This narrative of a man’s passionate unspoken love for a woman he can’t bear to approach about it used to be a central model for a romantic story. 

It isn't anymore. That’s the story of a man who does a great harm to the woman he loves. Because it isn't love: it's blind, single-minded obsession. Unspoken love isn't a paragon of romance anymore because from the perspective of the woman, it’s a creepy, hovering attachment. 

It’s only in the last few years (much too late, by any margin) that I've fully understood that the Unspoken Love story isn't romantic, but a stalker narrative. And I don't think Whithouse has at all. Given the importance of a critical female audience for Doctor Who today, this isn't the direction for the show to travel.

Oh yes, and O’Donnell – the most interesting and charismatic character among the base crew – is fridged so her bland, nebbishy, unspoken lover can brood over her. There's actually a very nice scene between Bennett and O'Donnell just after they arrive in the past, which let me imagine that perhaps they really were an open couple. That way, O'Donnell's death would have had some proper narrative punch, instead of the distasteful scenario Whithouse actually gives us.

2) After more than a decade of carefully seeded clues for the hidden villain of the finale nearly every season, O’Donnell’s brief mention of the War Minister is a clear flag. 

One brief line of Prentice's sketches another interesting
element of Tivolian culture that the story has no space
to follow through on. They're so wheedling to the
invading armies who conquer them, that the empires
eventually get sick of dealing with them and leave.
Their apparent submission is actually a strategy of
resistance. Not passive resistance, but passive-
aggressive resistance.

But it could just as easily be a false flag. It’s mentioned in a list of continuity points, including previous season flag Harold Saxon. The Doctor even says he expects he’ll meet him eventually. 

We in the audience know that this is a standard Doctor Who trick (Bad Wolf, Torchwood, Saxon, “You are not alone,” disappearing bees, the crack in time, Lake Silencio, Clara’s echoes, the soldier theme). We expect it. 

One thing Steven Moffat said about his plan for this season is that he wanted to change Doctor Who around, run against expectations. Part of this meant returning to multi-part stories and cliffhangers, as one-episode 45-minute stories were becoming ordinary. 

But the Doctor dismisses the mention of this War Minister, saying he's sure he'll run into him eventually. Capaldi’s Doctor is more openly meta-fictional than any previous one, so I’ll take his dismissal as a sign that this is just a red herring, playing with the expectations of the audience.

3) It’s an ethical wound in this case. A violation of a person’s whole existence. Terrible enough, and more terrible than breaking the coherence of your own history. 

Not in its effects, of course. Whole timelines are erased, as in the last time the Doctor crossed over a piece of his own timeline in Father's Day, which Whithouse obviously evokes without doing anything new with. More unoriginality there.

It’s not so much that the Fisher King's desecrations of people’s deaths has a larger importance to the fabric of the universe than the integrity of your own timeline. The Time Lords probably wouldn't care. But the Doctor lives by the principle of trying to make the universe a more ethical place, so he’s much more invested in righting this violation.

The whole thing turns out to be a bluff to trick the Fisher King into standing outside so he can die when the town floods and the Doctor can hide in his suspension capsule. I totally knew that was how the Doctor would create a ghost projection and survive, by the way.

4) The opening sequence was a good primer. But it was totally unnecessary to the resolution of the story. It’s a cool narrative framework, but a footnote to the narrative itself. It served to take a few minutes off a story that was running low on plot and made for some more meta-fictional commentary from the Doctor.

I can imagine Steven Moffat being so disappointed on
receiving Whithouse's script for Before the Flood,
spending so much time pedantically explaining the
Bootstrap Paradox when he'd written a better story
about it nearly a decade ago. And it was only
seven minutes long.

Bootstrap paradoxes do play with our expectations of how reality works, however, which is nice. The Doctor didn't know what words his future ghost would say to Clara before he saw them through her phone. Having simply remembered the words, he never thought of them himself. So who did?

Bootstrap paradoxes only appear to be problems because we often think that ideas are generated only through people’s conscious thought. But the story had been playing with that since the beginning. The words that turn a person into a ghost on their death act as active creatures themselves, ideas that exist independently of conscious thought.

So the solution to the bootstrap paradox is to throw away our presumption that all ideas must have a thinker to exist. Accept the notion that a thought can arise from a situation itself – the narrative itself invented the sequence of words that the Doctor’s ghost said. He remembered having heard them, so he spoke them from the suspension chamber. 

It’s the same as the central problem in the plot of Moffat’s Time Crash. You can watch the whole thing at the link. It only takes seven minutes. The Doctor never needed to figure out how to fix the TARDIS malfunction that threatened to blow a hole in the fabric of spacetime and brought Peter Davison’s and David Tennant’s Doctors together. 

Tennant remembered being Davison, watching Tennant fix the TARDIS. They were both part of a narrative in which the narrative – not the people in it – was the active force. 

If the story had explored this idea in more detail – how to act when you’re passive before pre-destination – we’d have a second part of this story that could live up to the innovations of Under the Lake. As it is, all we have are blogs like mine – and any sci-fi stories I may write about bootstrap paradoxes down the road – to explore it.

Instead, Toby Whithouse has written another story with a lot of really interesting ideas, but which ignore their true potential. I don’t think I want him to write Doctor Who anymore.

The Science of Refinement, Composing, 22/12/2014

If I were in film full-time, this would be where I did my
editing, and my life in general would have a much
higher overhead.

Keeping it light today with another post about my editing process on the Ecophilosophy manuscript. Here’s just a quick example of the kind of thing that I do, if you’re not sure what an editing process on a manuscript like this is all about. 

One of the recurring events as I go through this manuscript is me shaking my head in relative shame at some phrase that I included in the original final draft two years ago. I even have moments where I wonder why my committee gave me the damn degree for this work. As I go through the text today, I see so many ways to improve my expression and drastically change quite a few sentences around. 

I like to think that all good writers go through this thought process when they revisit older work that may have sat in a vault for a while. Now, I have no idea whether they actually do. I just like to think this to maintain my self-confidence as a writer. 

Here's an example of the kind of cuts I make and why. I cut the italic part of this sentence, for a reason that I'll explain below.

“Nuanced philosophical reasoning requires precisation because philosophical concepts and systems are so technical and complex enough that each sentence describing a philosophical system must be written with the most exact meaning possible.”

Appropriately, this section of the manuscript is about an approach to philosophical analysis that focusses on making statements more precise, one of the early works of Arne Næss that I discussed last week. The core idea behind this conception of preciseness is that a short statement is usually quite vague or ambiguous. It can have many different interpretations, all of which are valid because they flow from sensible speculation on how the words should be understood. 

These interpretations might not even be mutually compatible, which makes sense because most unproductive philosophical conversations are just people arguing over mutually contradictory interpretations of the same relatively vague sentence or set of sentences. Making a statement more precise means that its set of possible interpretations shrinks without including any new interpretations that weren't in the original, vague set.

Here’s why I made the cut: the meaning of a statement becomes more precise as you add more material. Grammatically speaking, a very precise statement will contain far more than one single sentence. Most sentences, taken on their own, are actually rather ambiguous. Only when you add more and more qualifications, elaborations, and general detail does what you say starts to become more precise. 

So a sentence would inevitably be rather vague, especially if its subject is rather complex and open to many possible interpretations. A paragraph's worth of explanation less so, and as your statement becomes more precise, it grows longer to account for more details and possibilities. So while it’s important that each sentence be written with the most precision possible, its size forces a natural limit. And I didn’t want to focus a reader's attention on individual sentences as the sole vehicle of philosophical meaning. 

It’s Pronounced Næss I: A Hidden Oracle, A History Boy, 18/12/2014

Arne Næss wasn’t exactly hidden, but he isn’t as prominent in typical histories of philosophy as I think he should be. He plays a major role in my Ecophilosophy manuscript, returning multiple times to the manuscript’s argument, each time with a different aspect of his thought in focus, depending on the context manifested by appearing at that point in the book’s overall plot.*

* I realized a while ago that a lot of my writing works by creative repetition, cycling through several key ideas or themes, letting what’s come before change the new occurrence or each concept or image. This is true for my philosophy and my fiction work.

I wanted to find a picture of a fairly young Arne Næss, if
only to be different from almost every other photo out there.

I’ve never really written about Næss on the blog before, even though engaging with his work was vitally important for developing my Ecophilosophy manuscript in the first place. This was the first seriously large production in philosophy that I’ve ever done, and writing it marked a serious transition in my abilities to write and to plan long-form works. 

Most of my research and interpretation of Næss' ideas was already in the past long before I started the Adam Writes Everything blog in July 2013, so I never wrote much about it. Næss’ philosophy played an important role in the Ecophilosophy manuscript, as one major goal that ran throughout the entire project was to rescue his core concepts from the relative neglect into which they’d fallen in the discipline. 

But one of the final results of that manuscript is in pointing out how, while Næss’ ideas get the ball rolling on a genuinely ecological philosophy, they also contain their own limitations that prevent him from finishing the job. My manuscript exists to finish the job.

Næss spent a lot of his career in a strange position that way, always ahead of what would turn out to be the curve, but in ways that never had any direct successors or imitators in the discipline of philosophy. For example, even though he’s mostly known today for the works he composed later in his life on environmental and ecocentric ethics, did you know that Arne Næss was a member of the Vienna Circle?

Næss' entire family live interesting
lives. To illustrate, these are two of Arne
Næss' grandchildren, Ross and Evan,
with their mother, Diana Ross.

You probably didn’t. But Næss didn’t die until he was 96 years old, and that was in 2009. Being born in 1912 gave him the chance to experience every major change in analytic philosophy in the 20th century. He isn’t remembered as a major member of the Vienna Circle because he was never a protagonist in many of their historically significant debates or a direct influence on any of their followers or successors. As well, most of his professional life he spent in Norway, and Oslo is too far outside the major hubs of analytic philosophy’s social networks during its formative years to have been directly powerful.

But his work on logic during the 1930s and 1940s, his first major development as a young philosopher, became the foundation of his first major masterwork, Interpretation and Preciseness. It was an application of set theory to argumentation theory, creating a detailed formal method of how the act of making a statement very precise actually worked. Basically, a description becomes more precise as you add more content and qualifiers, and none of those new qualifiers allow for any possible interpretations beyond what the previous, more general description did.

As well, his period with the logical positivists produced a remarkable early product of his career, Cognition and Scientific Behaviour. This was the first serious work in what has become a rather hot new field, experimental philosophy. Næss literally designed a survey and what we would today call a focus group protocol, which tested people’s intuitions about basic scientific and philosophical concepts like causality. 

This method of doing philosophy, slamming the empirical techniques of the social sciences into what’s typically a purely contemplative practice, is considered controversial and strange today, when it’s practices in the labs and campuses of Joshua Knobe and Jonathan Weinberg. Consider how this must have gone over in the Weimar era of Europe. 

Næss, for much of his career, was a pioneer of new techniques and ideas in philosophy whose status as such was only given retroactively, not because he had any direct successors. He was a harbinger of philosophy’s future in experimentation and an intriguing side contributor to a significant movement. Until he read Silent Spring. . . To be continued

Why Exactly Are We Having This Argument Anyway? Research Time, 08/08/2014

A still from In Plane Sight, a landmark 9/11 conspiracy
documentary. One of my ideas for argumentation theory is
a deflationary paper: If the goal of rational argument is to
construct a position that cannot be denied, then the
conspiracy theory is the prime case. Any reason you raise
against believing in the conspiracy can be dismissed on the
ground that it is a product of the conspirators to distract
from their plans. If it is irrational to believe falsehoods,
then you are irrational to believe the lie that Al Qaeda
destroyed the WTC. The conspiracist would dismiss your
dismissal of conspiracy thinking as inherently irrational as
itself irrational on the same ground: your conception of
rationality is flawed because you believe the falsehood that
the conspiracy is false. Airtight, isn't it?

I finished Michael Gilbert’s book, Coalescent Argumentation, last night. As I’ve said in earlier posts where I’ve described my reactions to his ideas, argumentation and disagreement have long been side interests to me. I have published one essay in argumentation theory, broadly speaking, but the subject is, disciplinarily speaking, so far outside my major areas of focus that I probably won’t publish specifically in it again.

But I do have a few thoughts on Gilbert’s ideas that I think are worth airing. One is that I rarely read books whose authors are so firmly set in the academic world. This is just a trivial observation philosophically, but one with a little more bite in the context of the politics of post-secondary education. Right now, I’m in the process of revising my Collective Vision statement for the SERRC, a short essay that’s getting a complete overhaul to become something of a manifesto for what I hope is a growing movement, in which I would like to play a healthy role over the next years, to liberate critical knowledge producers in the humanities disciplines from an increasingly compromised university system. 

In this context, I find Gilbert’s book, originally written in 1997, to be quite naïve in many ways. For one, a plurality of his examples of arguments are in university settings: faculty members of different ranks and job securities discussing affirmative action, students disputing grades. It reminds me of the essays I’ve read, written since philosophy was institutionalized in universities, that when referring to a raw experience in the authors' daily lives, often describe the inert clutter that they stare at on their desks. It speaks to an insularity of one’s life that can separate your thinking, often against your own desires, from the ability to engage with the world.

Gilbert’s take on argumentation theory makes for a brilliant example of this hopeful but hopeless naïveté. He explicitly pitches his framework for a theory of coalescent argumentation as a way for the theory of argument to engage with and reflect the ways that people actually argue in real life. He identifies four modes of argument: the rational/logical (giving reasons and drawing conclusions based on the implication laws and theorems of formal logic), emotional, visceral (making statements, premises, and conclusions using gestures and other non-verbal signals), and what he calls, in a neologism, kisceral (intuitions, hunches, and gut feelings). This framework is a tool to analyze how people act in different moves of real-life arguments. Its analysis aims to identify the goals of people in a dispute and eventually bring or guide them to agreement.

He opposes this to what he called the Critical-Logical school of argumentation, which focusses only on those elements of disputes which are traditionally taken to be rational. Argumentation is understood as essentially antagonistic, and the goal of arguers is to defeat their opponent and in so doing demonstrate the rational superiority of their position. The Critical-Logical school is also the style of argumentation that produces jackasses. 

This is the form of argumentation and informal logic that, despite the attempted impact of Gilbert’s work, remains the dominant form of teaching informal logic and philosophical argument in the discipline’s undergraduate university programs. Despite Gilbert’s hopes to transform argumentation theory, his ideas remain trapped in the place of an outsider.

This is a shame in an even greater sense, because Gilbert, like many theorists of argumentation that I’ve encountered over the years, expresses a deep social and political hope in their sub-discipline. He believes that the study of argument and education in argumentation can actually aid the resolution of disputes and prevent the escalation of violence in conflict. 

I have heard and read proponents of traditional Critical-Logical argumentation theory similarly express that their goal is to help people express their conflicts more rationally. This is why they stress the verbalization of all premises and contexts for an argument, and decry emotional and instinctive appeals and moves. Gilbert pitches his argumentation theory as a way to teach people how to come to agreement in apparently intractable conflicts. The Critical-Logical perspective would be immediately prescriptive about argument, instructing us from the start on what makes a proper argument. Gilbert's coalescence concept is ultimately normative as well, because it is a means to settle disputes. But he takes there to be far more descriptive work to be done to understand all the facets of how arguments develop and unfold. 

These are all, from their various perspectives, profoundly admirable goals. But I still have doubts about whether the broad political goals of argumentation theory can be applied wholesale to the conflicts of the world at personal, community, national, and global scales. Call it my lack of faith in the naïve hopes of a university town.

Institutionalized Sophistry, Jamming, 21/07/2014

I think a reason most ancient Greek sophists could get away
with such cheap rhetorical tricks in their city assemblies is
because democratic political culture of this sort hadn't yet
developed a worldly sense of cynicism in the West. So
people were more easily bamboozled.

In terms of individual page views, this post from last July is still my most popular. I even noticed that, with no help from my own social media feeds, it experienced a sudden surge in page views this May. It’s about a terrible problem that philosophy departments and programs face because they tend to attract a particular type of undergraduate student. If you’ve hung out in a philosophy student society long enough, you’ll see them: they’re combative, arrogant, finding any excuse to argue with people. They are precisely the people that drive a lot of women and generally kind people out of studying philosophy, and most of them will feel good about having done so.

Having spent most of my twenties encountering such people, I became thoroughly tired of them by the time I began my doctorate in philosophy. Whenever I encountered such confrontational and argumentative people in the classes I taught, I quickly shut them down with the two weapons against which they can’t defend, a smile and an open mind. I even encountered the occasional philosophy professor whose confrontational attitudes had survived his (and it was always a man) impetuous youth. 

I mention this dislike of the undergraduate sophist that philosophy departments tend to produce now and then because of a curious comment in Michael Gilbert’s Coalescent Argumentation that demonstrates how correct my old professor David Hitchcock was when he said I’d like that book.

Gilbert describes just the same attitude of argumentative hostility that I just have, but identifies it specifically as arising in critical reasoning classes. These classes are the bread and butter of most philosophy departments in universities that allocate budgets according to course enrolment numbers. They’re relatively simple courses as well, which focus simply on the rules and techniques for examining and analyzing arguments, the composition and relation of premises to conclusions in day-to-day argumentation.

But critical reasoning as it's typically taught tends to forge or reinforce the aggressive argumentative habits that drive more reasonable people away from philosophy classes. One analyzes an argument, in the typical critical reasoning class, to find its flaws and mistakes. You analyze an argument not to see how it functions, what its aims are, and why it's being made when it is, but only to discover what's wrong with it. More than this, such antagonistic argument is sometimes described as being fun. Most people who have spent any time hanging out with enthusiastic young male philosophy undergraduate students will usually have experienced one person who takes unnecessarily aggressive stands in favour of arguments he (and it is always he) doesn't even really believe in, just to be devil's advocate. Gilbert critiques this model insofar as it reduces all critical thinking to a kind of nihilistic cynicism that's more interested in tearing down what someone else has built than building in your own right.

There's another problem that the book diagnoses in critical reasoning. Critical reasoning classes are themselves often perceived as bird courses, which is really a shame because their basic task — identifying the formal structure of arguments in everyday discourse — can be enormously difficult. When I took elementary logic and reasoning courses in my own undergraduate years, I found these tasks most difficult. You had to cut through a lot of extra material — appeals to emotion, social and political context, the particular relationships of the individuals making the argument — to identify each particular formal element in each person’s argument for his case and the logical rules by which the argument transitioned from one such element to the next.

Gilbert’s idea for reform of critical reasoning would have made this procedure easier in one sense and more difficult in others. One of the concerns of Coalescent Argumentation is to reform critical reasoning classes to make them more practically useful. You don’t understand how an argument actually functions in the world when you strip away all those contextual elements to grasp its essence as its skeletal logical structure. So Gilbert brings the resources of argumentation theory and related academic discourses to analyze both the logical skeletons and the operative political, social, and personal flesh of an argument. As he says in the title of chapter three, his focus is just as much on the arguers as the arguments.

This, however, does make critical reasoning analyses more difficult because you now not only have to extract and analyze the framework of that logical skeleton, but understand as well all the functions and relations of the contextual elements that is physically making that argument in the world. 

Well, philosophy is hard, and so is life.

All for the Sake of an Experiment, Research Time, 08/04/2014

I returned to my Facebook account last night to find a wonderful comment by my friend D: “If these were shorter, I’d read every one.” With this in mind, just a few short reflections. And they actually will be short this time.

I didn’t get many chances to visit Dr Arthur’s seminar on Graham Priest at McMaster this semester, even though I wanted to attend more often. But I got to the last session yesterday, and it was a wonderful class to take part in. If you remember my various discussions of Priest’s book, Beyond the Limits of Thought when I was reading it last semester, I have a very positive attitude toward his general philosophy, though I have some criticisms of his particular inquiries.

The fascinating and contrarian Graham Priest.

A quick refresher for those who don’t want to follow the links. Graham Priest is a logician who has developed dialetheic logic, a form of symbolic logic that allows for the truth of some contradictions. Beyond the Limits of Thought is a survey of huge swaths of the history of Western philosophy for examples of such true contradictions. Priest’s mission statement is that one kind of true contradiction is the attempt to think the limit of thought. It isn’t that tough to conceive: try to think what cannot be thought, or say what cannot be said. Every time we attempt to think through the limits of human language and thought, we always have to straddle this weird borderline position where we can actually articulate what kind of thing would lie outside the limit. So we delineate a limit of thought by being able to point just beyond it. And in pointing, we think what we’ve just declared unthinkable.

It’s a trippy concept, and I quite enjoy it. One point we discussed in the last class, however, was precisely what was the upshot of true contradictions existing other than simply marvelling or meditating upon them. After all, progress in thought often arises from thinking through contradictions that arise in thinking and trying to resolve them. But even if you accept a contradiction as true, its structure is usually remarkably complex. If the limits of thought are any indication, when a true contradiction arises, it already results from an amazingly complicated philosophical investigation. Discovering a true contradiction would, for me, add a further dynamic tension to an already-roiling conceptual mix. 

I’d be comfortable with that, but I fully understand that I’m not like most people. Whether or not you agree that true contradictions are possible, at the very least, Priest's work constitutes a complicated and remarkable philosophical experiment that can push the discipline into strange new directions. It's at least worth testing thought's limits in case it turns out we can step beyond them.

The Content of a True Contradiction, Research Time, 29/01/2014

Having finished Graham Priest’s Beyond the Limits of Thought, you might wonder what one of these true contradictions might be. I discussed the basic logical foundation of it a few posts ago, and one of the conversations I had with friends who read it revolved around what contradictions would actually be true. Because when you open the possibility of true contradictions, you also open yourself to straw man arguments from your enemies to make you look ridiculous.

After all, just because there can be true contradictions doesn’t mean that every contradictory sentence is true. There can be true propositions of regular sorts. That doesn’t mean that every proposition is true. The sentence “I am Adam Riggio and a root vegetable” is contradictory, but it isn’t true because I’m just Adam Riggio, no matter what dreams and aspirations I may have to become a turnip. The sentence “Adam Riggio was born in Jakarta” is a sentence with a non-contradictory form, but its form doesn’t make it true, because it’s empirically false. I don’t even think I want to go to Jakarta. The climate would kill me in the face.

The whole book is an exploration of one type of true contradictions, the contradictions which indicate a limit of thought. We reach a point in our conceptual exploration beyond which our powers to think don’t work. The tricky part of this idea, where contradictions appear, is that in order to identify a limit of thought, we have to transcend the limit. That’s why Priest identifies this contradiction in terms of transcendence and closure. A limit concept of thought generalizes over the totality of what can be thought or expressed or iterated, closing the set. But in order to generalize over that totality, we must refer to what can’t be generalized, transcending the set we just closed. In referring to what can’t be encompassed in the totality of what can be thought, we think it. So we both can think it and are unable to think it. 

Bertrand Russell's most fertile period in philosophy was
spent working to overcome what he held to be intolerable
contradictions in logic. Personally, he also reminds me of
an interesting take on Doctor Who.

In the history of philosophy, this was often conceived as the thought of the infinite. Finite creatures can’t conceive of the infinite, so goes the idea. Especially since in some periods of philosophy’s history, the infinite was conceived as the uncountable, and mathematical conception only included very simple counting methods. When set theory was developed, we now had a system of rules that could count infinite quantities, or at least quantify over them. Being able to do this helped clarify a confusion, or rather identify that our previous thought had been less transparent than we believed. Set theory was a new standard to think about infinity.

Priest’s book looked through the history of philosophy to find the common thread in all these limit concepts of thought: totalizing self-reference. The perfect example in logic is the set of all sets. Being itself a set, it would have to include itself in its own set. But that would make it subject to the classic Russell paradox, that a set being a member of itself implies that it is not a member of itself. Russell’s generation of logicians spent years obsessed with overcoming this contradiction because they took as an unquestionable premise that consistency was a necessary condition of the true, that a contradiction could never be true because reality was consistent. It’s been an obvious and clear truth since Aristotle declared it to be so in his writing.

Aristotle was also a teleological evolutionist and believed in a geocentric cosmology. Aristotle is no authority.

Self-reference is one species of true contradiction. There are probably others, but I don’t want to talk about them today. Except perhaps for one little moment of jamming, a speculation that I’ve wondered about for years, ever since I started studying the nature of human thought and mind. 

The limit of our thought lies in the contradictions of self-reference, reflexive and reflective thought, self-consciousness. We wouldn’t have the personalities we do without self-consciousness, the ability to think beyond immediate needs and immediate perceptions. Self-consciousness is the ability to imagine the future and the past, planning for uncertainties and conceiving of priorities and desires. Self-consciousness is the ability to critique and change ourselves and our behaviour. To do so, we must refer to ourselves, include ourselves in our statements about the world, even as referring to the world implies that we are somehow separate from the world. Sartre, for example, described human consciousness as beyond the world, but embedded in it. Self-conscious creatures like humans may very well be another species of true contradictions walking around all over this planet.

Accepting that Reality is Paradoxical, Research Time, 27/01/2014

Graham Priest is not only a logician and
professor, but an advanced martial artist.

Graham Priest is a logician. This is one important fact about him that you should know. Out of all the achievements of philosophers in the last few decades, I think I have the most respect for what Graham Priest managed in the field of logic. This regards the second fact everyone should know about Graham Priest. He’s probably done more than any other single philosopher to pioneer paraconsistent and dialetheic logical systems, systems of logic that can accept and understand inconsistencies and contradictions. Priest often says it himself: there are true contradictions.

Intuitively, I don’t think that makes sense to a lot of people. It just seems obvious without even having to think about it that one part of reality can’t contradict another part. ‘A and not-A’ is impossible. Today, someone working in logic can use a dialetheic system, a logical calculus in which true contradictions make sense, and if someone accuses them of peddling nonsense, they can simply refer to the precedent of Priest. I’ve done this in conversations with some very narrow-minded philosophers who accused me of being stupid when I just wanted to talk about dialetheic logic. 

This is why I’m so impressed with the success of his career. When Graham Priest was just a young researcher working on his first projects and some older, more established logician scoffed at his work as nonsensical, he couldn’t refer to Graham Priest to back himself up. He hadn’t even yet become The Graham Priest that everyone refers to when they want to get stodgy old traditional logicians off their backs. All he had was his own ingenuity.

The argument he gives in Beyond the Limits of Thought for why you can have true contradictions goes like this. Consider two possible states of affairs, that A is true, and that A is false.

He writes, “Given two states of affairs, there are, in general, four possibilities: one but not the other holds, vice versa, both, or neither.”

1. “A is true” is true, and “A is false” is false. One but not the other.
2. “A is true” is false, and “A is false” is true. The other but not the first.
3. “A is true” is false, and “A is false” is false. Neither.
4. “A is true” is true, and “A is false” is true. Both.

Most commonly, we only believe that (1) and (2) are sensible statements. But the common belief is only one way among many that you can define a negation operator.

The third part of Priest’s Beyond the Limits of Thought engages with the work of Georg Cantor, Frank Ramsay, and Bertrand Russell to remove the paradoxes of self-reference from set theory. These paradoxes all have the basic logical form: a chain of reasoning involving a statement that refers to itself or a set that includes itself will lead to inevitable contradiction. Since there’s nothing in set theory’s basic rules that prevent such self-referring sets from existing, the logical operations of this kind of mathematics are always open to contradiction.

My former colleague in McMaster’s doctoral program, J, returned this semester from her post-doc to take the department’s rotating post as the visiting Bertrand Russell scholar. She gave a talk at the department’s visiting speakers’ series where she discussed some of Russell’s historical work on Leibniz. One of the priorities Russell explicitly had was examining the disparate, uncollected writings of Leibniz’s corpus looking for the principles and interpretations that would make them all internally consistent. He wrote that consistency is the best guide to truth.

A central premise of Russell’s thought (along with Ramsey’s, Cantor’s, Gottlob Frege’s, and just about everyone in the Western philosophical tradition up to Graham Priest) was that a contradiction could not exist, because the truth must be internally consistent. The entire revolutionary period in the creation of contemporary logic from the 1890s to 1910s was defined by the drive to remove the contradictions from self-referring propositions, or at least modify logic and set theory so those self-referring propositions can’t exist. Logic, set theory, and mathematics must be made consistent.

But Priest’s point (and Kurt Gödel’s, if you go back in the history) is that self-referring propositions are inevitable, and can’t be gotten rid of. You need a dialetheic understanding of truth because the ability to form a proposition that refers to itself will always result in contradictions. Any discussion of a totality (such as the set of all sets) refers to itself, because quantifying over all propositions will include the proposition that quantifies over all propositions; otherwise, you’ll fail to quantify over all propositions. When a set includes itself as a member, it simultaneously belongs and does not belong to itself. To a logical perspective that considers contradictions to be nonsense, this would make set theory (and therefore pretty much all the logic developed in the Frege-Russell-Ramsey revolutionary period) nonsense.

Only a dialetheic perspective, that is the perspective Priest developed and endorses, can understand self-referring sets, propositions, statements, and sentences. Only a dialetheic perspective is not offended by the conclusion that the set of all sets both belongs and does not belong to itself. The contradictions of self-reference that arise from set theory do not render set theory nonsensical, but dialetheic. The true heir of the revolution in logic isn’t whoever manages to make the contradictions of self-reference disappear (since no one can do that anyway), but whoever manages to make sense of the contradictions of self-reference. To the best of my knowledge, that person is Graham Priest.

Creep on Creeping On: The Challenge of Daily Life, Research Time, 27/07/2013

One of the late chapters of Jean-Louis Dessalles’ Why We Talk discusses how language works in argumentation, and what we can learn about language’s origins from its argumentative function. This section should be gold mine for philosophical applications, because so much of philosophy of language over the last hundred years has been based on analyzing propositions as the building blocks of arguments.

And I was sadly disappointed for traditional philosophy once again. The problem is a matter of logical rigidity, or rather the rigidity of philosophical logic. Dessalles considers, as an example of the worldly phenomenon of arguing, a conflict over whether some proposition is true. That is, one person is arguing for proposition F, the other for proposition Not-F. A fairly simple matter of marshalling evidence of one over the other. Then he introduces a very strange (for philosophy) idea. If the question of F or Not-F isn’t actually interesting to the people having an argument, the truth of F becomes irrelevant. And as far as understanding that worldly situation, F and not-F wouldn’t have a truth value. They’d be neither true nor false nor meaningless. Just indifferent.

This way of thinking doesn’t quite jive with the logic we learn in introductory philosophy classes. When we learn logic, we’re taught clearly that every statement is either true or false or nonsense, and that logic is, in its practical application, about analyzing statements about the world to understand their precise truth value: the conditions by which the statement can be true. 

Graham Priest has become something of a philosophical hero
to me, because his inventions of multiple logical systems that
put aside typically intuitive logical rules made mathematical
logic more creative than it's ever been since Russell and
Whitehead. He should be remembered with Aristotle, Russell,
and Kripke as humanity's greatest logicians.

Alternatives to this black-and-white logical system were first seriously developed only in the late 20th century by Graham Priest. Of all the philosophers who practiced in the last hundred years, and who are still alive today, I probably stand most in awe of Priest. Priest first gained notoriety (some more philosophically conservative would say he became notorious) for developing what is called a paraconsistent logic. A symbolic logic whose rules allowed contradictory propositions (A and Not-A) to be true. It blatantly flies in the face of everything that was taken for granted, to be so obviously true that only a fool would question it. Logicians and mathematicians have worked on paraconsistent logics over the years, but Priest put the most effort into them. By demonstrating that you can build a logical system that was valid, workable, and practically valuable, that also stripped away all the intuitively basic rules of logic traditionally conceived, he opened up new possibilities for creativity in mathematical logic. These possibilities were not even considered before Priest’s popularization, were not even really thinkable by most people.

Symbolic logic isn’t my strong suit. I can teach it at the introductory level in a philosophy department if I have to, but the student evaluations won’t be the best, and all the computer science students taking the course for an easy mark will make fun of me the entire time. That’s why I stand in awe of Priest’s achievement. He introduced and popularized new directions in a field of philosophy where only one direction was ever conceived as even making sense at all.

These days, if a philosopher wants to do something absolutely weird with logic, he can just refer to Graham Priest as a precedent. Any peer reviewer who would otherwise stand up for the traditional logic of the law of non-contradiction, reductio ad absurdum, the law of the excluded middle, and modus ponens just has to drop his rage. ‘Well, if he’s appealing to Priest as a precedent, then I guess I can grant his dropping all these basic rules and inventing a bunch of different ones.’ That makes his achievement all the more impressive. Before Graham Priest became The Graham Priest, there was no Graham Priest to refer to!