Intuition, Imagination and Philosophical Methodology by Tamar Szabo Gendler

(I’m commenting on this book because it took two weeks out of my reading time and was painful. It turned out to be one of those books with which I disagreed on so many levels that I had to set out how and why.)

Perhaps the single most interesting thing Professor Gendler says is about his inability to process the following sentence from an imaginary novel: “In killing her baby, Giselda did the right thing: after all, it was a girl”. The poor guy blows a fuse at this. Exhibiting a phenomenon he calls “imaginative resistance”, he refuses to imagine a world where killing a girl baby would be the right thing to do. Which is kinda odd, because that would be this one. Killing baby girls because they are girls is standard operating procedure in many cultures, some of which have colonies in the UK and the USA. And a sentence like that is to be found in many feminist dystopias. Most of J G Ballard’s mid-period novels open with a shocker like that. Its function is exactly to push you out of your imaginative rut and accept the imaginative world they going to set up. (He has a similar problem with Kipling’s The White Man’s Burden” he can imagine that there are or were white men who felt like that, but not that that’s the way they should have felt. He’s very PC is our good Professor.)

In one approach to explaining what knowledge is, we take knowledge to be what people know, and knowing to be the primary epistemological act and state. Knowing is believing things for which we have evidence and which are true. It is definitive and certain - because it is true. Knowledge is something people have (though that may be species-ist, of course), and dies with them.

In another approach, knowledge is something that people can have, but exists in some sense independently of knowers. Knowledge can be forgotten, and re-discovered. It is held in books, photographs, academic papers and other media, and also in people’s memories. It can be learned and understood. It does not have to be true, but it does have to be our current best attempt at the truth.

In the first approach, the key mental act is believing. Knowing is an honorific term for those believings that are of true things. Believing is so fundamental that all propositional attitudes are taken to be shades of believing. Which of course gives us a problem when dealing with counterfactuals such as thought-experiments and imaginative fiction. Do we “believe” a thought-experiment, and if not, what are we doing? These are the questions Gendler sets out to examine some answers to.

There are two little problems with the project. The first is that those answers are irrelevant to an epistemologist. Epistemology is a normative discipline, as is Logic. It’s only a philosopher’s job to tell us how we do think, so they can tell us to stop thinking like that as it will only get us into trouble.

The second is that mental states have no relevance to understanding how we think. That may seem odd, but consider that mental states are exactly like the states of a computer while it does something. Two computers may be in very different states and be doing the same thing (because they have different operating systems, hardware architectures and so on). It’s what the computers are doing that matters, not the exact disposition of 0’s and 1’s inside them while they are doing it.

The emphasis on ‘belief’ is a hangover from religious and tribal law and society. The priests and witch-doctors didn’t give a hoot what went on in your grandfather’ head, but they did care that he acted in such-a-way and said specific things on specific occasions. If they said that he did not ‘believe’ they were talking about his behaviour, not his mental state. At some point, probably when someone invented souls, belief-as-behaviour was associated to belief-as-state-of-soul and thence to the “mind". The point of ‘believing’ was and is commitment. You were going to fight for the tribe and the church, you were going to trust the tribal elders and your relatives, and of course, you’re going to wave the flag of whatever political causes have insinuated themselves into your chosen academic pursuit. (cough *Climate science* cough)

(The real reason so many Anglo academics have a problem with Popper? Popperians don’t commit, as the core of his approach is the demand that you specify in advance the conditions under which you would abandon your theory / belief. But if you’re going to get an academic gravy train running, everyone must commit.)

If you are a believer in belief, then thought-experiments and fiction, make-believe generally, is difficult to describe and incorporate into your theory of knowledge. If you believe that belief about the world must be at heart rational, then instincts are even harder to incorporate. Or you banish instinct and make-believe to a nether world of irrationality, and accept that, at times the irrational can guide us despite itself.

One example Gendler takes is Galileo’s famous thought experiment whereby a light and a heavy weight are tied together by a strap and dropped. According to Aristotle, heavier weights fall faster. How fast does our assembly fall? Try working out some of the alternatives: as fast as the maximum, the average, the sum. None quite hold together.

The argument is a rhetorical trick. His audience were a handful of literate Florentines and the scholars of the Catholic Church. These were ingenious, practical, commercially-minded and for all intents and purposes, atheist, men. Faced with Galileo’s argument, they knew very well Aristotle’s ideas could be saved. But at the cost of ever-mounting complexity. The only assumption that sounds neat is that, in fact, all objects fall at the same speed, mod air resistance. It’s not a physical argument at all, but a methodological one.

Gendler thinks the argument is about physics, and wonders how can an argument about an imaginary situation affect our beliefs about the real world. How can that even be legitimate? This drags him into horrible problems, which can all be avoided the moment we accept that we don’t believe a darn thing, but use the assumptions that work best for us. Until they don’t. Then we try some different stuff until we find something that works. (That attitude, of course, suits people with a knack for problem-solving, extemporisation and generally winging-it. That’s a minority and getting smaller.)

If this was phenomenology, I wouldn’t mind. I’m partial to a bit of phenomenology. But it isn’t. It’s an attempt to systematise stuff that really isn’t. In the final chapters he discusses a mental state he calls “alief”. These are propensities to behave in such a way that is automatic, arational, action-generating, affect-laden and prior to anything else we learned. He says that he hasn’t run across this idea anywhere before, which is odd, because regular people call these, “instincts”. Aliefs are, however, a translation of instincts into the language of belief, a kind of “propositionalisation” of instinct, if you will. The trick can be turned, and Gendler turns it, but should we coo and applaud?

Some things make sense. Usually because they have been designed by men to make sense. The rest may not be random, but it sure was a mess cobbled together in a hurry. Thus the human mind. It does the job, but how it does, is, like the making of laws and sausages, something we would sleep better for not knowing.

Trying to habilitate instinct as a belief-related process, and hence a quasi-cognative one, is right up there with ego-psycho explanations of promiscuity. Not because it’s post-hoc, but because it is trying to find pattern and sense where there isn’t any. Galileo’s argument was a trick, and a good one, not an attempt to exploit some subtle state of mind which validly allows reasoning about imaginary situations to influence our beliefs about real situations. Heck, most people don’t allow reasoning about real situations to influence their beliefs about real situations. The process Gendler wants to describe would happen, if it happens at all, in a very small number of minds, mostly, one suspects, minds with tenure.

Three Reasons for Reading, and One for Quitting Half-Way Through

In February I spent two weeks grinding my way through a collection of essays in contemporary epistemology. I could have read at least three novels or pop non-fiction books in that time. And enjoyed the experience. It felt like a wasted month, especially compared to January. Why did I do it? Well, I’m a philosopher, and every now and then I should read some recent stuff. The only thing I got out of the experience was a resolution that I was only going to read the big names from now on.

Why do we read? For useful knowledge, as when I read a software product manual; for interest, as when I read about Renaissance warfare or the life and paintings of Gustav Caillebote; for guidance and ideas, as when I read books on problem-solving or game; to understand more about the world I live in, which is what the pop non-fiction does; or for entertainment, as a Jasper Fforde; or for that mixture of entertainment and information that happens when reading classic fiction, as Moll Flanders.

And there’s another reason: to challenge myself. That’s why I read lecture notes on Algebraic Geometry, or attempt the Phenomenology of Spirit (again), or now or books on modern art back in the Never-Minds. (I read Henry James when I was far too young on the same basis: it would be good for me. And while I found The Portrait of a Lady a huge drag, The Ambassadors and Roderick Hudson stay with me as excellent reading experiences.)

Finally, because I’m interested in art and literature, I read some books because they are legends in and of themselves. Why on earth else would anyone read Ulysses? I’m reading Maldoror, started and finished Proust, and banged my head against The Man Without Qualities, for this reason. I have read and forgotten many nineteenth-century novels on that basis. Call that duty reading.

Books are a way of getting knowledge that you would never get in life. A way for their writers to share experience, thoughts and knowledge, their fantasies and stories, with their readers. I choose books based on what it seems to offer, and most of the time, I’m a pretty good judge of a book from a few samples. Sometimes I get it wrong. When I realise I’ve got it wrong, I don’t throw the book away. I grind it out. Maybe I should be more willing to throw it out. After all, I spend as much on a meal, and that gets thrown away after twenty-four hours. And the point is that I could be reading something that entertains or informs me, and I’m not. I’m wasting time.

So what do I do in March? What I really want is something that’s absorbing enough to stop me looking out of the window during the commute. Start reading, and, OMG it’s time to get off the train! That’s always worth having.

February 2014 Review

I was doing fine right up to Saturday 8th. I got food poisoning. I don’t know what happens when you get food poisoning, but I lost three kilos. Also a night’s sleep. For at least twelve hours I wondered if I would ever be well again. It’s very, very noisy. You do not want the details. All I could do Sunday was drink very small amounts of Dioralyte. I was back at work on Tuesday. I missed Spin class. That was it.

I got a cold on the evening of the 25th. When you get a cold, it creeps up on you, and you spend two weeks being pathetically sniffy and a bit slow. That’s because you have a lousy immune system that can’t get rid of the virus. Step inside my body. At 20:00 I was okay - a little burpy, but that can happen. At 22:00 I was ready to fall asleep, and at 23:00 I was sitting up in bed because my stomach was churning and I was hot and couldn’t breath well if I lay down. You don’t want the recordings of me coughing and retching at 01:00 in the morning, and I’m pretty sure the neighbours didn’t want to hear it either.

When viruses land in your body, you have no beach or air defences worth a damn, and a few guys with pitchforks to fight them off. The virus lands, takes possession and stays there until it gets bored and moves on. When it lands on me, IF it gets past the beach defences and the anti-aircraft missiles, there’s a kinetic response. Drones are launched to provide reconnaissance data. Special forces track the the virus, ready to light it up with lasers. There’s a naval bombardment of Cruise missiles lasting about forty minutes. Every one of those things hits home. Then there’s two hours of air strikes by B2s, F117s and A10’s. The follow the armour and infantry. All this gives me a huge fever. I can’t lie still, sit still, stay awake, fall asleep, or even breathe much. By 04:00, it’s all over. The fever breaks and the virus is DEAD. Expelled. Burned. Trashed. I get a short break while the bodies are burned and the enemy materiel is taken into stores. Then the engineers move in. There is a throat to be soothed, a stomach to be fed - carefully - ribs to be relaxed after all the retching, sleep to be caught up on and waste material to be removed.

I was back at work Thursday 28th. I missed Yoga that evening. That’s all. You would still be whinging about not feeling up to it.

Also, I spent way too long reading Intuition, Imagination and Philosophical Methodology by Tamar Szabo Gendler, which I will discuss in an Amazon review at some point. I made good progress with the Comte de Lautremont’s Maldoror, until the fever put a stop to it and gave it some bad associations which will wear off after a while.

So here’s the inventory: I saw Out of the Furnace, Dallas Buyers Club and Monuments Men at Cineworld, Rough Cut on Curzon Online, Only Lovers Left Alive at the Curzon Soho, and Everybody Street at the ICA. Plus some jazz documentaries on You Tube. I saw the Pina Bausch 1980 at Sadlers Wells.

Sis and I had supper at Les Deux Salons, and my friend from Utrecht and I had a pizza at Jamie’s in Richmond and supper at Picture.

I upgraded my iPhone 4S to iOS7 (slow, I know), and my Mountain Lion Air and Snow Leopard MacBook Pro to Mavericks, getting an extra 2GB of RAM in the Pro first. Thanks Mr Cook, I now have two up-to-date Macs. I tried Ubuntu 12.04 on my Asus, which worked okay, but guys! It gave me an error message when I tried to install Chrome. That’s just bad packaging. No. Stop it. I’d love to move to a Linux, but I don’t want to get involved with OS clutter like that.

I had the kitchen planners in to measure up, mutter and give me a quote, which I’ve thought about and will accept as soon as I feel clear enough in the head to trust myself. And I ordered half-a-dozen A1 picture frames, which turned out to be a bit of drama, resolved by the driver offering to leave them in my garden shed.

The advantage of an inventory is that it can dispel the feeling that “last month really sucked, and I was sick all the time”. I wasn’t. I missed one Spin class, one Yoga class and one weight-training session. That’s it. Everything else got done.

One-Eighth of an Avocado

Nutrition for exercise is notoriously full of Bro Science.



 My recent attempt at cutting carbs and increasing protein, which is fairly standard advice, resulted in, uh, tight bowls and I abandoned it. I needed something, so I went looking on the medical shelves again.

Serious books - as opposed to academic studies - on sports and exercise nutrition are hard to find, and usually heavily theoretical. More food science than actually useful how-to’s. So I was pleased to run across Susan Kleiner’s Power Eating in Blackwells on Charing Cross Road a couple of weeks ago. Ms Kleiner is a real PhD with more letters after her name than most people, but much more important, has worked with the Seattle Seahawks, the Cleveland Browns, Miami Heat and the Seattle SuperSonics. Those are organisations that need and will pay for results, and aren’t going to hire a cute nutritionist because PR. I’m inclined to read with some respect, especially as she dishes the dirt on the obviously faddy stuff.

So, here’s Dr Kleiner’s example diet for a man looking to maintain weight, lose fat and hence gain muscle:

Preworkout Snack: 1 cup plain yoghurt+¾ cup blueberries

Breakfast: 1 slice wholemeal bread, 1 cup fat-free milk, ½ cup orange juice, ½ cup fruit, 1 cup sautéed vegetables, 1 whole egg+4 egg whites, 21g Whey protein with the milk, ⅛ avocado spread on the bread

Lunch: 6-inch Subway with extra meat, banana

Dinner: ½ baked sweet potato, 3oz grapes, 1 cup steam asparagus 4 cups mixed green salad, 6 oz grilled salmon, olive oil, green tea.

There’s also two snacks in there that amount to a piece of fruit and a handful of nuts each.

I am NOT doubting the correctness of this advice. It’s a huge relief to find that someone who knows what they are talking about is in favour of carbohydrate. And vegetables.

BUT… Did that ⅛ avocado get you as well? I’m a live-alone bachelor. What do I do with the other ⅞ of the avocado? Avocados go brown really fast, even in the fridge. I know what the cooks at the Seahawks do, they give the other seven parts to seven other players. The chef at a restaurant would do the same thing. But I can’t. I’m left with most of an avocado that’s going to be wasted.

I can do the breakfast. I added the milk and whey protein, plus some vegetables to my usual stuff the next day. I try to avoid bread if I can because I react to it. (As I’ve discovered I now burp for a good couple of hours after eating commercial cakes in cafes. Damn. No more carrot cake.)

I could do a dinner like that except Tuesday, Thursday and Friday, which are all late-home evenings that leave me about ninety minutes before lights out. Damn. I really have to get all the fish organised: Dr Kleiner is fish fan.

One thing I took away was the need to feed the system soon after exercise. Remember I commute, so I work out and spend the next ninety minutes travelling and settling back into the house. Dr Kleiner is working with people who can be fed soon after training with no problem, and writing for people who don’t have long commutes. That dinner is being eaten way before I get a chance to start. I’m thinking protein powder and a cafe smoothie. Dr Kleiner suggests protein-carb smoothies after exercise for men looking to build muscle, and once again I was asking HOW? I make it at home at 06:15, put in a Thermos which I carry around all day and finally consume it twelve hours later. Milk and banana? I don’t think so. But it’s a snip if I’m a Seattle Seahawk or a High-School athlete. The team support prepare it.

There's more than one reason why office guys who commute are not in the same shape as well-advised and trained athletes. One-eigth of an avocado is one of them. It's why restaurants can serve better meals than you can make at home.

Anyway, I’m putting this into action for the next few months. It means a new set of buying habits, but that’s okay.

Blue Skies Are The Real Subject, Soho Square

It's occurred to me more than once that what I really take pictures of is blue skies. Sure there's some kind of other stuff in there, but what's really happening is that blue. The weather has been stormy and rainy, then again it has been sunny now and then. Not like the unrelenting grey skies of 2013. This can only be contributing to my overall reasonable mood.

Soho Square; Centre Point at the top of Tottenham Court Road; Tottenham Court Road station Crossrail site above ground; the back of that building is in the centre of London?; and by contrast The Mall, along which everybody in Europe seemed to be walking that lunchtime, but I couldn't get that shot because it was into the sun.

Sometimes You Are Living The Answer...

...but you just don't know it.

I found myself saying this recently. There's no more need to ask what I should be doing. Because I'm doing it. This is it - I've arrived. And of course, it's that old same-place, different-attitude thing. I'm doing the things I need to be doing: being in gainful employment, paying my due bills and taxes (which in high-tax, nanny state UK discharges all my social responsibilities as well), exercising and eating properly, behaving soberly and with reciprocal courtesy and consideration, and continuing to learn and develop my culture and skills.

That’s it. It’s fairly minimal because I’m a bachelor in later years. Friends? Sex? Sure, but not so much at my age. That’s another subject.

January 2014 Review

I came out of the two-week rest caused by gym closures and Christmas and said "Since when was a 20kg plate actually heavy?" I may have used stronger language. One week rests are okay - just. Two weeks causes serious strength loss.

I changed around my exercise plan: Clarissa's hour-long spinning class on Tuesday, Yoga on Thursday, weights on Friday and Sunday, and added some lifts before the Spin, just to keep it up. That plus a sudden drop in my carb intake meant what has happened before - constipation which I cured with some tea from a Chinese herbalist. More details would be serious over-sharing. Add in an hour of Thai Combination at Thai Charms in Teddington every other Sunday after the gym, something I'm continuing until the stiffness and tension in my legs goes.

I made a little promise to myself to clear all the unread books I've had on the Unread Book Shelf, and so got through Ian Bone's Bash The Rich, Stephen Turnbull's The Art of Renaissance Warfare, 730 pages of Francis Pryor's The Making of the English Landscape, volume ten of Transmetropolitan, and Kahneman's Thinking Fast and Slow. There's a few left, and I may never get round to Moll Flanders.

I saw Leviathan, Beyond Burlesque, All This Can Happen and Oh Boy at the ICA; American Hustle, The Railway Man, The Wolf of Wall Street, Jack Ryan: Shadow Recruit and Out of the Furnace at Cineworld; and This Must Be The Place, and The Great Beauty through Curzon Online. Plus a few episodes of The Big Bang Theory while ironing. Must-see? Oh Boy, without a doubt. And yes, the Cineworld Unlimited card definitely makes it easier to go see a movie: the marginal cost is just the ice-cream. (Ice cream is medicinal. Everyone knows that.)

Sis and I had supper at Karpo, and I got to see King's Cross at 18:00 hours - where the heck do all those people come from? A lot must come from Kings Place and Central St Martins. I ate at the bar at Duck Soup, 10 Greek Street and Jackson and Rye, and tried the burgers at Grillshack. Props to Laura Fitzgerald (aka Boo In London) for the reviews.

Bose QC20i's are amazing. Sure you hear yourself breathe in the quiet passages, and when I eat an apple I need to take the buds out, but otherwise, I put them in, turn on the noise cancelling, play some music and the outside world goes away. Except wind. Wind is noisier with the phones in than out. Also, they take up way less space in the messenger bag, and that means I can use the smaller messenger.

And then there was the bit when someone stole my license plates. Uh-huh. Stole. My. License. Plates. This never happens. You have experienced hundreds of thousands of car-view and none of them have been of cars with missing plates. Well, mine did one Friday evening. I will write about that on another occasion.