waste

Given the slip

When, in “Was heißt ‚praktisches Wissen‘?” (there's a nice mess of typography for you [1]), Müller is trying to make sense of the "direct falsification" of an intention (or its report) by an act, the fourth possibility he canvasses seems to lose some of its features between its introduction and its discussion. Or perhaps: it is introduced with a collection of features that don't really belong together and when discussed only one of these is attended to. The example is that I say "now I press Button A" and then press Button B [2]; the first three possibilities Müller considers are that (1) between the intention and the act falls a changing of my mind; (2) I discover that I can't press Button A and press B instead, since they do the same thing; (3) between deciding what to do and doing it I forget what I was going to do. The fourth is: the possibility that "ich versehentlich („geistesabwesend“ oder indem ich „mich vergreife“) etwas anderes tue, als ich zu tun gedenke und behaupte". The gloss on "versehentlich" (whose definition here combines a few distinguishable things: "inadvertently", "erroneously", and "by mistake" aren't the same) as "absent-minded" is what gets picked up in the discussion later, where Müller likens what is going to the case of a driver who, told to go left, echoes "left" and then turns confidently to the right. Here, he says, possibly there is no right answer to the question of what the driver didn't know, what he said or what he did. And if the case really is one of absent-mindedness, that may well be right; but if it's one of proceeding erroneously, it needn't at all be the case. Consider: I am giving a narrative of my actions so as to explain them to you, my apprentice. Naturally in doing this I sometimes turn partially to face you and so I come to say "now I press Button A" but, the two buttons being very close to each other, press B instead. I don't do this absentmindedly and I don't think there should be any question as to whether I perhaps didn't know what I was saying. (Perhaps I do do it versehentlich.)

That Anscombe should choose the locution "now I press Button A" instead of "now I'm pressing Button A" is interesting; the former is much more suited for the imagined scenario of above, because it is more suited to describing what is to be done (what one does, what is habitually done, etc.) than it is to describing what is actually being done. I hesitate before the panel, uncertain how to proceed, and remind myself: I just did such-and-such, so "now I press Button A". Clumsily I press Button B anyway, but here what I was claiming to know wasn't what I was actually up to.

[1] The HTML entity for this symbol: „ is "„", that is, I guess, bottom double quotation mark. But for this symbol: ‚ it's "‚", that is, I continue to guess, single bottom quotation mark. Why the position of the "b" relative to the single-or-double determiner should vary is beyond human comprehension.

[2] Actually, the example Müller considers has the agent saying that he shall press Button B and then presses Button A, and he quotes the translation of Intention (Absicht, not Intention, which reminds me that if you look in the index for the first volume of Wittgenstein's Remarks on the Philosophy of Psychology there are a few entries for Intention but many more for Absicht, while in the second volume there are practically none for Absicht and many for Intention—how intriguing) giving the example just so. But in the English original it's the other way around. Bizarre.

A solution to all your social networking anxieties

Well, not really, but you'd be surprised at how much I didn't get done while doing this (aided in part by the out-of-dateness of Dive into Greasemonkey and by general ignorance on my part).

It is well known that social networking thingummies are a good idea at most only insofar as no one's relationship every goes south. In the event that that does happen, though, and you want formally to dissociate yourself from the other party or parties, you're faced with two potential downsides: first, everyone else might know; second, the other parties will know, too, and if you could prevent the first effect you probably can't prevent the second. The second is of course even worse by being formal. Thus we have such phenomena as the facebook-wide announcement of a breakup, to which one simply mightn't know how to react. (I say "mightn't" because I of course don't participate in these things.) And to the parties themselves there must seem something particularly cold about having whatever has been going on in their lives reduced to "so and so has changed his or her relationship status". And Twitter is no exception in this regard, since, even though it has a comparatively impoverished ontology in which (as I understand it) one simply follows and has followers, but no more detail than that exists, nevertheless that one now is, or no longer is, following someone is no doubt knowable at least to that person if not to curious others.

So you might find yourself keeping someone on your list of followeds out of purely political motives, despite not caring a whit about what that person says. How might one best deal with this? Simple: deception! Using this simple Greasemonkey script you can—should it work—automagically delete certain updates from ever appearing before your eyes, without, nevertheless, having unfollowed anyone. And can cause them to reappear later, should you so desire it. It has been only moderately tested on locally-hosted files (don't ask how I obtained them; it's too terrible) since I don't have a twitter account. Though I did discover that someone using one of the other names I've used online in the past (you thought "ben wolfson" was my only pseudonym?) had an account and was following, and was followed by, several people I actually do know. Mysterious. Anyway, while I think it should work mostly, I won't be very surprised if it doesn't, since it hasn't exactly been subject to rigorous testing.

update: this seems more featureful.

Three things

I and me. I feel me—are two objects. Our false philsophy is embodied in the entire language; we can, so to speak, not reason without reasoning falsely. One does not consider that speaking, no matter of what, is a philosophy. Everyone who speaks German is a folk philosopher, and our university philosophy consists in moderations of the former. Philosophy is the rectification of the use of language, that is, the rectification of a philosophy, and indeed of the most common. Only the common philosophy has the advantage that it possesses declinations and conjugations. Thus the true philosophy is always taught with the language of the false. To explain words does not help, for in explaining words I do not yet change the pronouns and their declination. (Lichtenberg, H146; German previously.)

The rules of grammar are mere human statutes, which is why when he speaks out of the possessed the Devil himself speaks bad Latin. (Lichtenberg, C17 in Hollingdale's edition and translation, which means only that in a complete edition it is in book C somewhere after the sixteenth aphorism.)

God himself can make no promises to man except in a human language. (Anscombe, "Rule, Rights and Promises", qtd. in Moran & Stone, "Anscombe on Expression of Intention".)

And yet I don't have finger(1)

Purging dotfiles in anticipation of hd swaps and the initiation of a new backup regime—something, the purging I mean, harder to do than I anticipated, since mostly they have cryptic names and may well be in active use without my knowledge—I discover that I have a .plan file:

Well: I've punched a time-clock, and Ive completed a Ph.D., and I'd like to let you in on a dirty little secret: unalienated labour is not all that it was cracked up to be by the old Marxists. A bit of fishing, a bit of criticism,... well, it's just not like that. You don't go fishing. Or at least, you don't go fishing very often. And when you do go fishing, you can't really fish, because you're too busy fretting about the criticism you should be doing instead: "Why am I fishing?! I should be criticizing!"

So punctuated. It was modified last on March 7, 2005 (though changed last on January 27, 2007—presumably the distinction is between the file and its contents). I have never had a reason to have a .plan file on my own computer, and certainly didn't need one in mar 2005, though that is about, I believe, when I got the computer I'm currently using. I was very confused about whether I might have written it, but apparently it was said by the invisible adjunct in April of 2003, when, I guess, I may well have read it. (That seems implausible. Perhaps I was rather directed to the post in question later, perhaps by Tim Burke?)

White

It has long been known to me that I enjoy putting things on top of other things; there is, I believe, a photo of me, taken a few years ago, looking pleased with a three-story construction made out of little laminated flyers, still up on a bulletin board. Long known! Even occasionally reflected on. But somehow it escaped my attention just how many things there are on top of which other things can be put, and, contrariwise, how many things that can be put on the tops of other things there are, until, on Sunday, I put a large, heavy branch (dead and down, no worries) on top of an even larger and, presumably, much heavier congeries of rock. And then returned the next day to photograph it, actually having to rebalance it because it had fallen. And not doing a very good job of it—it was windy, yes, but also it wasn't really balanced. So I headed back once again today to get it right, and, if I may say so, got it right, achieving this aim by placing a small rock just behind the point at which it pivots. At any rate, during the fifty minutes I was about, it stayed admirably put. (It was also less windy.) To pass time before a middle-aged couple sitting directly beneath where I would be manipulated my massive wood left, I made two small rock towers, out of fairly small rocks, only about nine or ten per, reaching about a foot high; after getting the branch stable, I made three more, which, despite involving only twelve or thirteen rocks per, were considerably larger and more interesting (for one of them the rocks were resting on a triangular nest of twigs which were themselves balancing on the larger rock used as the basis for all of them).

Superbly awesome as all those were, what was really amazing was this: when I went to leave, I only got about ten feet away before someone else, coming up, asked me if I had made the structures on the boulders and then if I had seen Mystic River. An odd question. He corrected himself and asked about Rivers and Tides, which would have been striking enough if he hadn't also had a small flyer for it in his wallet which he tried to give to me. I assured him that I was aware of the movie and could remember its name fine, which is true. My initial interest in the movie came before I had ever heard of Goldsworthy, because Fred Frith did the soundtrack.

This seems an astonishing coincidence. I find myself astonished.

So as not to forget, pt 2

For a long time after reading Tristram Shandy, but not immediately after, I thought that there was a part in it in which Walter Shandy interrupts some speech of his at the point where he is about to refer to some object or other. The interruption consists of his instead producing the object itself, as if to insert it into his words, and then carrying on: not that he says "this" and ostends, but that he undertakes the more radical maneuver of holding it up wordlessly. It turns out that I got the matter somewhat wrong, as you can see here (this is in book III, and you want chapters thirteen, fourteen, and fifteen—they're short). I link rather than transcribe not only because, despite the chapters' shortness qua chapters, it would still be a lot to type out, but also because neither ASCII nor HTML can reproduce the variety of dash-lengths Sterne uses. First of all, it's not Walter at all, but rather Dr Slop. And second, while that is what happens (I mean Slop does just show an item instead of saying anything), you can't tell at first that that's what's going on, because precisely what was going on isn't explained until ch. 15, and the speech occurs in ch. 13, which consists almost entirely of speech, so that Slop's action, rather than being described in the text as you read it (there is no "and here he does such and such"), is just represented by a placeholder in his speech, a row of asterisks. This one, who very kindly found the passage for me, thereby sparing me the absolutely unbearable pain of rereading the book, maintains that the row of asterisks is there because, while Slop means to pull out simply the forceps, he also pulls out a squirt (whatever that is), and Toby therefore misunderstands him, and there is no way to represent this mistake and mis-taking while merely recapitulating his words/action (or anyway I think that's the interpretation). I'm not so sure; it seems to me that it could well simply be there as a place-holder, to be filled in later when the speech is over; no word can go there because nothing is said, and for whatever reason the content of ch. 14 is meant to come after that of ch. 13, though it could just as well, albeit with different rhetorical effect, precede it. (And even if ch. 14 preceded 13, replacing the asterisks in Slop's speech with an interposed description of what happened would have the effect of chopping his speech into two parts: as things are it is all one thing, and the long description of what happened, coming after the text of his speech, does not make it seem as if the action itself took a long time, which the description's interposition might risk.)

Wooden bouzouki

If this appeared on a record put out by Locust, it would probably get good reviews. The album on which it appears, Hommage à Tsitsanis, was recorded when Tsitsanis was 65, and he was most active prior to WW2, so there's your hook. I expect to hear of the reissue shortly.