I worry this describes me: The more we rely on tech, the more we deskill our bodies (Aeon Essays). The PO thinks I am barricaded in my apartment when I am trying to get my writing done, but all that work keeps me pinned in a chair.
We have fallen into habits that are steadily deskilling the human body, eroding capacities honed by evolution to support our wellbeing as we move through the world. Some of these capacities are weakening through disuse: we have come to rely on our phones, for example, and now, increasingly, on AI, to rapidly do work that would once have required something more physical – like looking around, or asking someone, or going to find and consult a book. Reliance on GPS may weaken both our spatial attention and the fluency of our wayfinding. In surrendering to a quick technological fix, we are, moment by moment, doing less sensing, navigating, remembering, walking, choosing, and attending. Other capacities are being retrained by machines and algorithms to work against us: for instance, smartphones and chatbots can train us to keep reaching for them even when we no longer enjoy using them, turning a conscious choice into an automatic habit and a colossal waste of time. The body that results is less able to assess its own condition, improvise and regulate itself. The crucial distinction is between technologies that strengthen our capacities and those that repeatedly substitute for the actions through which those capacities are formed.
Algorithms that regurgitate patterns and recommendations can release us from the effort of exploration and disrupt the play and curiosity from which preferences are formed and understood.
Thankfully, I have nothing to do with social media.
When Kant remembered a book by David Hume he’d read years earlier, he was woken from what he called his ‘dogmatic slumber’. Kant had believed that pure reasoning could teach us every absolute truth about the world, but Hume had asked a question that that stumped him: what reason do we actually have to believe that the future will resemble the past? We may have seen the Sun rise a thousand times, but how do we know it will rise tomorrow? The belief that the future will resemble the past is, Hume argued, merely a kind of habit. Kant couldn’t answer Hume’s challenge and was silenced for a decade.
When Kant finally broke his silence with the Critique of Pure Reason (1781), he offered a radical answer. We can know the world only as it appears to our minds, and that is where our science sits; the noumenal world – the Ding an sich (the ‘thing-in-itself’) – simply lies beyond our reach. Causation is not something we discover in the world, but something the mind supplies for experience to be coherent at all. When we watch a cat push a glass off a table, we don’t see a bare sequence of motions and then infer, by some metaphysical principle, that the push caused the fall. No: we see the push as causing the fall. The causal structure is not a hypothesis we add to the experience; it is part of how the experience comes to us in the first place. It is in our minds already.
So far, so good: Kant has met Hume’s challenge, and the workings of science are intelligible: we are structuring our experiences. But the work is not done, for there remains mathematics, the very language in which the sciences are framed. Hume was content that arithmetic and algebra are merely the unpacking of definitions; that proving a theorem is like unpacking a suitcase to find an outfit. Kant could not leave it there. If mathematics were only such unpacking, how could it underwrite the sciences? Either the sciences tell us nothing new about the world, or something has gone missing from the account.
I never got around to studying Kant. Let me confess to a distrust of German philosophy.
What Dummett took from Frege’s work on logic was that the problems of mathematics are, at heart, problems of language. Where things had gone wrong, he thought, was that Frege had grounded his account in a mind-independent notion of truth. ‘In this respect (and in this respect alone),’ Dummett wrote, ‘Frege’s new approach to logic was retrograde.’ For Frege, logic answered to truth: the rules were good because they preserved something already fixed. Dummett turned this around.
Following Wittgenstein’s later thinking, Dummett argued ‘a theory of meaning is a theory of understanding.’ And understanding, he insisted, must be manifestable: whatever a competent speaker knows in knowing what a sentence means must be something she can, in principle, display in her use of language. In The Logical Basis of Metaphysics (1991), Dummett gave this account of language, logic and reality its most sustained form. Our linguistic practices – the ways in which we are prepared to assert, justify and infer – determine logic. Logic, in turn, determines what counts as a fact, what counts as truth, and ultimately what we are entitled to regard as real.
Consider how a child learns the word ‘red’. We do not begin by telling her about light of a certain wavelength, or the metaphysics of colour properties, or the conditions that would make ‘this is red’ true. We point at things. We correct her when she calls a ripe tomato green; we approve when she calls a fire engine red. Over time, she comes to use the word as we do – and at that point, she understands it. There is no further fact, hidden behind the practice, in which her understanding consists. The understanding is the practice, competently exercised.
I am not smart enough to understand how this does not justify the pragmatism of William James:
The constitution of our language is our current practice for public discourse. As it is extensible in this way, what we claim as ‘true’ is not a fixed structure with a ceiling we are forever failing to reach, but something that can change. Gödel’s verdict never applied to mathematics, but only to some edition of the constitution. Within the Sandqvist system, we can attend to the extension systematically. Hilbert’s words outlive his programme: Wir werden wissen. We shall know. Not because the answers are waiting at the end of a ladder, but because truth goes exactly as far as we have built the rungs.
The politics of masculinity at the end of the Roman republic (Aeon Essays)
Cicero (and other Roman writers), influenced by Greek philosophical explorations of virtue, might sometimes attribute to women virtue of a more generalised kind. But the Latin term virtus never completely lost its association with masculinity. Noting the word’s derivation, Cicero observes in his treatise on the management of emotions, the Tusculan Disputations:
the proper virtue of a man is above all courage, whose particular functions are contempt for death and pain. We must exercise these qualities if we wish to be virtuous, indeed if we wish to be men.Closely concerned with philosophical approaches to dealing with grief and the fear of death, this treatise is also about what it means to be a man and how manhood can be forged in – and by – challenging circumstances. ‘For surely virtue [virtus] gives sufficient to make us live bravely; if bravely, sufficient too to make us high-souled and in fact never appalled by any event and always undefeated,’ he asserts. Similar concerns surface in other works he wrote around this time: in On Ends, he stresses the importance of self-control – which he defines as avoiding behaviour that’s ‘unmanly’ – parum virile.
Hegseth’s future as Pentagon chief at center of lame-duck defense battle - if anyone should Cicero it is Hegseth, but it is also too late for him to understand how unmanly he is. The sooner that loon goes, the safer the country.
sch 10/19
