~Ex Hypothesi~

[...] markets may or may not be the self-organising meshworks described by Fernand Braudel and Manuel DeLanda, but what is certain is that capitalism, dominated by quasi-monopolies such as Microsoft and Wal-Mart, is an anti-market. Bill Gates promises business at the speed of thought, but what capitalism delivers is thought at the speed of business. A simulation of innovation and newness that cloaks inertia and stasis.

Consider Rawls. He says we should think of society - not an ideal society, but society simpliciter - as a “cooperative venture for mutual advantage” governed by rules “designed to advance the good of those taking part in it”. But Rawls is a citizen of the United States, a nation founded on African slavery, aboriginal expropriation, and genocide. How could this possibly be an appropriate way to think of the nation’s origins? Only through a massive and willful ignoring of the actual history, an ignoring that is psychologically and cognitively most feasible for the white population.

Supernanny is a Spinozist insofar as, like Spinoza, she takes it for granted that children are in a state of abjection. They are unable to recognize their own interests, unable to apprehend either the causes of their actions or their (usually deleterious) effects.

Kuhn’s ideas are interesting but, alas, they are much too vague to give rise to anything but lots of hot air. If you don’t believe me, look at the literature. Never before has the literature on the philosophy of science been invaded by so many creeps and incompetents.

Methodology has by now become so crowded with empty sophistication that it is extremely difficult to perceive the simple errors at the basis. It is like fighting the hydra - cut off one ugly head, and eight more formalizations take its place. In this situation the only answer is superficiality: when sophistication loses content then the only way of keeping in touch with reality is to be crude and superficial. This is what I intend to be.

‘There is no logic of discovery’ - in that sense, there is no logic of testing, either; all the formal algorithms proposed for testing, by Carnap, by Popper, by Chomsky, etc., are, to speak impolitely, ridiculous: if you don’t believe this, program a computer to employ one of these algorithms and see how well it does at testing theories! There are maxims for discovery and maxims for testing: the idea that correct ideas just come from the sky, while the methods for testing them are highly rigid and predetermined, is one of the worst legacies of the Vienna Circle.

The advice to regard all knowledge as ‘provisional conjectures’ is also not reasonable. Consider men striking against sweatshop conditions. Should they say ‘it is only a provisional conjecture that the boss is a bastard. Let us call off our strike and try appealing to his better nature’. The distinction between knowledge and conjecture does real work in our lives; Popper can maintain his extreme skepticism only because of his extreme tendency to regard theory as an end for itself.

It is true that he became increasingly aware of the size of the task that lay before the new science, and lost some of his early optimism, particularly with regard to his favoured project of applying medical science, based on physics, to slow down aging. He told Huyghens in January 1638 that he hoped to live for more than a hundred years; in June 1639, when he was forty-three, he expressed, again to Huyghens, the hope of living another thirty years; seven years later he wrote to Chanut: “...so that instead of trying to find means to preserve life, I have found another way, much easier and more certain, which is not to fear death.”

It is these conceptions that lie behind Descartes’s uninviting argument - surprisingly reminiscent of the early Greek philosopher Parmenides - that there cannot be a void because, if there were a void between two things, then there would be nothing between them, which is to say that they would be next to one another.

Reasoning, unlike the gas, is something which the rational sceptic is involved in even when complaining of the gas, and he reasons to conclusions.

Hence if his argument is as suggested, he could equally well prove that he was God. This is a conclusion he resisted.

But falsity in beliefs, unlike badness in apples, is not actually infective: nothing can make a true belief false, not even another false belief.

The property of being not true of itself is true of itself if and only if it is not true of itself.

Yet, if there is no elephant, this seems as poor a candidate for truth as the previous one.

A non-Irish snake does not confirm the hypothesis, since it makes no positive contribution to the evidence in favour of the hypothesis, and may even count against it.