The first clear statement of relativism comes with the Sophist Protagoras, as quoted by Plato, “The way things appear to me, in that way they exist for me; and the way things appears to you, in that way they exist for you” (Theaetetus 152a). Thus, however I see things, that is actually true — for me. If you see things differently, then that is true — for you. There is no separate or objective truth apart from how each individual happens to see things. Consequently, Protagoras says that there is no such thing as falsehood.

Unfortunately, this would make Protagoras’s own profession meaningless, since his business is to teach people how to persuade others of their own beliefs. It would be strange to tell others that what they believe is true but that they should accept what you say nevertheless. So Protagoras qualified his doctrine: while whatever anyone believes is true, things that some people believe may be better than what others believe. (…)

Protagoras’s own way out that his view must be “better” doesn’t make any sense either: better than what? Better than opposing views? But there are no opposing views, by relativism’s own principle. And even if we can identify opposing views — taking contradiction and falsehood seriously — what is “better” supposed to mean? Saying that one thing is “better” than another is always going to involve some claim about what is actually good, desirable, worthy, beneficial, etc. What is “better” is supposed to produce more of what is a good, desirable, worthy, beneficial, etc.; but no such claims make any sense unless it is claimed that the views expressed about what is actually good, desirable, worthy, beneficial, etc. are true. If the claims about value are not supposed to be true, then it makes no difference what the claims are: they cannot exclude their opposites. (…)

Relativism turns up in many guises. Generally, we can distinguish cognitive relativism, which is about all kinds of knowledge, from moral relativism, which is just about matters of value. Protagoras’s principle is one of cognitive relativism. (…)

Another modern kind of cognitive relativism is linguistic relativism, that truth is created by the grammar and semantic system of particular language. This idea in philosophy comes from Ludwig Wittgenstein, but it turns up independently in linguistics in the theory of Benjamin Lee Whorf. On this view the world really has no structure of its own, but that structure is entirely imposed by the structure of language. Learning a different language thus means in effect creating a new world, where absolutely everything can be completely different from the world as we know it. Wittgenstein called the rules established by a particular language a “game” that we play as we speak the language. (…)

In linguistics, Whorf’s theory has mostly been superseded by the views of Noam Chomsky that there are “linguistic universals,” i.e. structures that are common to all languages. That would mean that even if language creates reality, reality is going to contain certain universal constants. In philosophy, on the other hand, Wittgenstein is still regarded by many as the greatest philosopher of the 20th century. But his theory cannot avoid stumbling into an obvious breach of self-referential consistency, for the nature of language would clearly be part of the structure of the world that is supposedly created by the structure of language. Wittgenstein’s theory is just a theory about the nature of language, and as such it is merely the creation of his own language game. We don’t have to play his language game if we don’t want to. By his own principles, we can play a language game where the world has an independent structure, and whatever we say will be just as true as whatever Wittgenstein says. Thus, like every kind of relativism, Wittgenstein’s theory cannot protect itself from its own contradiction. Nor can it avoid giving the impression of claiming for itself the very quality, objective truth, that it denies exists.

{ Kelley L. Ross | Continue reading }

images { 1 | 2 }

There’s one prediction about driverless cars that I can make with confidence: If millions of them ever roam the public highways, they will be far safer than cars driven by people. My confidence in this assertion does not derive from mere faith in technology. It’s just that if robotic drivers were as dangerous as human ones, then computer-controlled cars would never be allowed on the roads. We hold our machines to a higher standard than ourselves.

Over the past decade, the number of auto accidents in the United States—counting only those serious enough to be reported to the police—has been running at about six million a year. Those accidents kill about 40,000 people and injure well over two million more. Estimates of the economic impact are in the neighborhood of $200 billion. Much of that cost is shared among car owners through premiums for auto insurance.

This safety record certainly leaves ample room for improvement. An appropriate goal for automated vehicles might be to reduce highway carnage to the same order of magnitude experienced in other modes of transport, such as railroads and commercial aviation. That would mean bringing road fatalities down to roughly 1 percent of their current level—from 40,000 deaths per year to 400. (In terms of deaths per passenger mile, cars would then be the safest of all vehicles.)

{ Scientific American | Continue reading }

The Misconception: You celebrate diversity and respect others’ points of view.

The Truth: You are driven to create and form groups and then believe others are wrong just because they are others.

{ You are not so smart | Continue reading }

{ Do you know the game called the Fifteen Puzzle? }

Academics like me are skilled users of turnitin.com. Never heard of it? Ask the nearest undergraduate and watch their cheek blanch. Turnitin is the trade’s leading ‘plagiarism detector’. You upload the student’s essay or dissertation and it’s checked against trillions of words and phrases in seconds. (…)

Take, for example, the indisputably most famous and quoted line in English literature, ‘To be, or not to be, that is the question’. Most theatregoers would think the sentence spit new. But should they also go to a performance of Marlowe’s Doctor Faustus they would hear the following in the hero’s magnificent opening soliloquy, in which he resolves to sell his soul: ‘Bid Oncaymæon farewell, Galen come’. The Greek Oncaymæon transliterates as ‘being and not being’.

‘To be or not to be’ is not a deeply original thought but a hackneyed sophomoric seminar topic. Hamlet is not thinking, he’s quoting. (…)

Voltaire did not apparently say ‘I may not agree with what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it’. As Morson says, ‘the statement belongs to a biographer of Voltaire’. It is what he would have said - utterly Voltairean, but not ipsissima verba.

{ Literary Review | Continue reading }

oil on oak panel { Pieter Bruegel the Elder, The Three Soldiers, 1568 }

If you’re not familiar with the law of diminishing returns, it states that at a certain point adding more effort will not produce significantly more gains. The challenge is knowing when you’ve reached that point.

For many managers this is an important question: How far do I keep going on a project before I declare that it’s “good enough” — and that further effort will not significantly change the outcome?

From my experience, there are two often-unconscious reasons for this unproductive quest for perfection. The first is the fear of failing. (…) The second is the anxiety about taking action.

{ Harvard Business Review | Continue reading }

At their most fundamental level, brains are made up of neurons. And those neurons collectively comprise the two main types of brain tissue: white matter is made up primarily of  axons, and grey matter is made up of  synapses, or the connections between neurons.

Grey matter exists as a thin, relatively flat sheet covering the rest of the brain, and is referred to as the cortex. When you compare the brains of different mammal species, you find that certain measurements of brain structure scale in similar ways. In other words, variables like grey matter volume, total number of synapses, white matter volume, number of neurons, surface area, axon diameter, and number of distinct cortical “areas” maintain common mathematical relationships with each other, whether you’re looking at the brains of mice, rabbits, dogs, cats, hyenas, kangaroos, bats, sloths, bonobos, or humans. (…)

Lots of networks have been compared to urban systems. (…) To what extent, though, might a brain be like a city? There’s the obvious analogy: neurons are like highways. Neurons are channels that carry information in the form of electric signals from one location within the brain to another, while highways are channels that transport people and materials from one location within a city to another. Cognitive scientists Mark Changizi and Marc Destefano think that the analogy goes deeper. (…) They argue that the organization of city highway networks is driven over time by political and economic forces, rather than explicitly planned based on principles of highway engineering – which means that city highway systems may be subject to a form of selection pressure similar to the selection pressure exerted on biological systems.

{ Scientific American | Continue reading }

photo { Keith Davis }

It wasn’t so long ago we thought space and time were the absolute and unchanging scaffolding of the universe. Then along came Albert Einstein, who showed that different observers can disagree about the length of objects and the timing of events. His theory of relativity unified space and time into a single entity - space-time. It meant the way we thought about the fabric of reality would never be the same again.

But did Einstein’s revolution go far enough? Physicist Lee Smolin at the Perimeter Institute for Theoretical Physics in Waterloo, Ontario, Canada, doesn’t think so. He and a trio of colleagues are aiming to take relativity to a whole new level, and they have space-time in their sights. They say we need to forget about the home Einstein invented for us: we live instead in a place called phase space.
If this radical claim is true, it could solve a troubling paradox about black holes that has stumped physicists for decades. What’s more, it could set them on the path towards their heart’s desire: a “theory of everything” that will finally unite general relativity and quantum mechanics.

{ NewScientist | Continue reading }

{ Dutch 1,000-guilder banknote featuring Spinoza }

We should expect men to be more self-aware, transparent, and simple regarding their feelings about short-term sexual attractions, while women have more complex, layered, and opaque feelings on this subject. In contrast, women should be more more self-aware, transparent, and simple regarding their feelings about long-term pair-bonding, while men have more complex, layered, and opaque feelings on this subject. By being more opaque on sensitive subjects, we can keep ourselves from giving off clear signals of an inclination to betray.

{ Overcoming Bias | Continue reading }

Intuition is one of those iffy concepts. Its purpose, use, and ontology have been heavily debated in its long and contentious history. Western proverbial jargon illustrates this: we’ve been told that he who hesitates is lost, but shouldn’t we look before we leap? And believe that we shouldn’t judge a book by its cover, but don’t the clothes make the man?

Now, psychology is weighing in. However, in place of armchair-rationality, it is using empirical data to illustrate how we actually behave. With concrete data, it seems like the intuition debate could finally be put to rest. But the opposite has occurred. Psychology has shown both the powers and perils of intuition only to complicate matters. (…)

First, there is a question about perception: How much do we see? (…)

Second, there is a question about judgment and decision-making: Should I go with my gut? Or think things through?

{ Why We Reason | Continue reading }

oil on canvas { Ingres, Comtesse d’Haussonville, 1845 }

Turns out that your name is more influential than you think.

Researchers found that the “speed with which adults acquire items [correlates] to the first letter of their childhood surname.”

This means that when it comes to purchasing goods, people with last names that begin with a letter closer to the end of the alphabet tend to acquire items faster than people with last names that begin with a letter closer to the beginning of the alphabet. They call it the “Last Name Effect,” and hypothesize that it is caused by “childhood ordering structure.”

In their words, “since those late in the alphabet are typically at the end of lines, they compensate by responding quickly to acquisition opportunities.”

{ Why We Reason | Continue reading }

photo { Louis Stettner, Rue des Martyrs, 1951 }

‘Multiverse’ theory suggested by microwave background

The idea that other universes — as well as our own — lie within “bubbles” of space and time has received a boost.

Studies of the low-temperature glow left from the Big Bang suggest that several of these “bubble universes” may have left marks on our own.

This “multiverse” idea is popular in modern physics, but experimental tests have been hard to come by. The preliminary work, to be published in Physical Review D, will be firmed up using data from the Planck telescope.

{ BBC | Continue reading }

In our Solar System, planets fall into two types. First, there are the rocky planets like Earth, Mars, and Venus, which are similar in size and support gaseous atmospheres. Then there are the gas giants, like Jupiter, Saturn, and Uranus. These huge puff balls are two or more orders of magnitude bigger than their rocky cousins.

Perhaps strangest of all, there are no planets in between; nothing that sits on the borderline between rocky minnow and gas giant.

This sharp distinction has driven much of astronomers’ thinking about planet formation. One of the main challenges they have faced is to come up with a theory that explains the formation of two entirely different types of planet, but no hybrids that share characteristics of both.

That thinking will have to change. It now looks as if we’ve been fooled by our own Solar System. When astronomers look elsewhere, this two-tiered planetary division disappears.

Astrophysicists have now spotted more than 500 planets orbiting other stars and all of these systems seem entirely different to our Solar System. They’ve seen entirely new class of planets such as the Super-Jupiters that are many times larger than our biggest planet with orbits closer than Mercury.

But the one we’re interested in here has a mass that spans the range from Earth to Uranus, exactly the range that is missing from our Solar System.

Astronomers are calling these new types of planet Super-Earths, and so far they have found more than 30 of them.

{ The Physics arXiv Blog | Continue reading }

According to a new study on tiny shrimp (Artemia franciscana), sex with partners from a different time could kill you.

Researchers at the Center for Functional and Evolutionary Ecology (CEFE) in Montpellier, France, collected preserved brine shrimp eggs from various generations, and then reanimated them with water. Nicolas Rode and colleagues mated pairs of brine shrimp that had been reanimated from eggs preserved since 1985, 1996 and 2007, a period representing roughly 160 generations. They found that females that mated with males from the past or future died off sooner than those that mated with their own generation. The longer the time-shift, the earlier they died.

{ PopSci | Continue reading }

Perls proposed that in all relationships people could be either toxic or nourishing towards one another. It is not necessarily true that the same person will be toxic or nourishing in every relationship, but the combination of any two people in a relationship produces toxic or nourishing consequences. And the important thing that I can tell you is that there is a test to determine whether someone is toxic or nourishing in your relationship with them. Here is the test: You have spent some time with this person, either you have a drink or go for dinner or you go to a ball game. It doesn’t matter very much but at the end of that time you observe whether you are more energised or less energised. Whether you are tired or whether you are exhilarated. If you are more tired then you have been poisoned. If you have more energy you have been nourished. The test is almost infallible. (…)

I have a friend named Gerald Edelman who was a great scholar of brain studies and he says that the analogy of the brain to a computer is pathetic. The brain is actually more like an overgrown garden that is constantly growing and throwing off seeds, regenerating and so on. And he believes that the brain is susceptible, in a way that we are not fully conscious of, to almost every experience of our life and every encounter we have. I was fascinated by a story in a newspaper a few years ago about the search for perfect pitch. A group of scientists decided that they were going to find out why certain people have perfect pitch. You know certain people hear a note precisely and are able to replicate it at exactly the right pitch. Some people have relevant pitch; perfect pitch is rare even among musicians. The scientists discovered – I don’t know how - that among people with perfect pitch the brain was different. Certain lobes of the brain had undergone some change or deformation that was always present with those who had perfect pitch. This was interesting enough in itself. But then they discovered something even more fascinating. If you took a bunch of kids and taught them to play the violin at the age of 4 or 5 after a couple of years some of them developed perfect pitch, and in all of those cases their brain structure had changed. Well what could that mean for the rest of us? We tend to believe that the mind affects the body and the body affects the mind, although we do not generally believe that everything we do affects the brain.

{ Milton Glaser | Continue reading }

images { 1 | 2 }

For example, there are primarily three “atoms” of solid-object physical events: hits, slides and rings. Hits are when two objects hit one another, and slides where one slides along the other. Hits and slides are the two fundamental kinds of interaction. The third “atom” is the ring, which occurs to both objects involved in an interaction: each object undergoes periodic vibrations — they ring. They have a characteristic timbre, and your auditory system can usually recognize what kind of objects are involved. For starters, then, notice how the three atoms of solid-object physical events match up nicely with the three fundamental phoneme types: plosives, fricatives and sonorants. Namely, plosives (like t, k, p, d, g, b) sound like hits, fricatives (s, sh, f, z, v) sound like slides, and sonorants (vowels and also phonemes like y, w, r, l) sound like rings.

{ Interview with Mark Changizi/PLoS | Continue reading }

Researchers have begun to create a new technology that could soon allow humans and dolphins to talk to each other.

Dolphins have long been considered by scientists to be the most intelligent animals on the planet. But soon, with the help of newly developed underwater translation software, our two species may actually be able to talk to each other.

Armed with a waterproof computer, divers may soon be able to decipher the chirps of dolphins, then create and project an appropriate response, all in real time.

Since the 1960s, captive dolphins have been communicating via pictures and sounds. In the 1990s, Louis Herman of the Kewalo Basin Marine Mammal Laboratory in Honolulu, Hawaii, found that bottlenose dolphins can keep track of over 100 different words. They can also respond appropriately to commands in which the same words appear in a different order, understanding the difference between “bring the surfboard to the man” and “bring the man to the surfboard”, for example.

{ NewScientist | Continue reading | via DigitalTrends }

related { psssst…Imp is a Dolphin! }

The dialects of Madagascar belong to the Greater Barito East group of the Austronesian family and it is widely accepted that the Island was colonized by Indonesian sailors after a maritime trek which probably took place around 650 CE. The language most closely related to Malagasy dialects is Maanyan but also Malay is strongly related especially for what concerns navigation terms. Since the Maanyan Dayaks live along the Barito river in Kalimantan (Borneo) and they do not possess the necessary skill for long maritime navigation, probably they were brought as subordinates by Malay sailors.

In a recent paper we compared 23 different Malagasy dialects in order to determine the time and the landing area of the first colonization. In this research we use new data and new methods to confirm that the landing took place on the south-east coast of the Island. Furthermore, we are able to state here that it is unlikely that there were multiple settlements and, therefore, colonization consisted in a single founding event.

{ Maurizio Serva, The settlement of Madagascar: what dialects and languages can tell | Continue reading }

A lot of occupations that didn’t exist years ago: two college graduate daughters, one a web designer for a financial firm, other works with a company that does social media marketing. Didn’t exist when they were born. Proliferation of new occupations.

Harder to be a Renaissance person. It was imaginable 400 years ago that you could read, master a relatively large part of the world’s knowledge. Seen it argued that Leibniz knew just about everything that could be known at that time. Da Vinci superior in many fields. Now a Renaissance person if you are good in a couple of things, if you know something about a lot of things. The cost of mastering a lot of things has gone up. (…) How much could a Newton or Leibniz today master? Not all of it. When we went to graduate school in economics (…) Finance was around, but behavioral economics and experimental economics were not, or were less prominent. I used to call myself a macroeconomist–I can’t follow macroeconomics; sort of can; highly mathematical, Euler equation stuff. (…) Profusion of journals in every discipline. If you want to call yourself a master of any field, not sure that leads to true mastery. (…)

Knowledge is more dispersed. Not just an issue for people trying to become academics. True for somebody in business: if you want to be a CEO, there are many more things you have to understand than you used to. You didn’t have to understand information technology to be a CEO. Didn’t have to be an expert in global supply chain management. Didn’t necessarily have to understand logistics, be as sophisticated in finance.

Even for consumers, amount of knowledge you need is more. More different financial instruments available for you to either trip up on or take advantage of. All sorts of different products and services that didn’t exist. (…) Households are outsourcing more of the food preparation, cleaning, lawn care, more complex forms of electronic communication–have cell phone, do you still keep your land line? Life more complex for everybody. Weird thing. Have computer network in house, access Internet wirelessly; running an IT center. Measurement question: has my house gotten more specialized or less specialized? What am I doing with an IT network in my house? Verizon supplies it; I don’t master much of it other than opening the door to let someone in to drill in my wall. Hard to measure these phenomena. Makes us very much dependent on other people’s expertise.

{ Arnold Kling/EconTalk | Continue reading }

Scientists at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute have found that when just 10 percent of the population holds an unshakable belief, their belief will always be adopted by the majority of the society. The scientists, who are members of the Social Cognitive Networks Academic Research Center (SCNARC) at Rensselaer, used computational and analytical methods to discover the tipping point where a minority belief becomes the majority opinion. (…)

The percentage of committed opinion holders required to influence a society remains at approximately 10 percent, regardless of how or where that opinion starts and spreads in the society.

{ ScienceBlog | Continue reading }

paintings { 1. Hippolyte Delaroche, Louise Vernet, Wife of the Artist, on Her Deathbed, 1845 | 2. Fragonard, The Reader, ca.1770-72 }