This is our revolution, too

Frederick Bowie in Open Democracy:

ScreenHunter_03 Feb. 23 12.10 Ongoing protests and actions in places from Madison, Wisconsin, to Central London have already appealed to the Egyptian experience, both explicitly, and symbolically. American public service workers last week brandished Egyptian flags to express their rejection of the state's attempts to deprive them of their union rights, while British activists have called for a day of action in March to “bring Tahrir Square to Hyde Park”. While the nature of every act of human revolt is specific and, at some level, untranslatable, the energy of empowerment which it releases is by its nature infectious, and transgressive. How long before here, in the West, our own governments' politically-motivated “austerity” programmes create the conditions in which a thousand Tahrirs can bloom? Looking back to recent events in France and Greece, we may feel that day is perhaps not so far away.

Noam Chomsky recently claimed that what western leaders are really afraid of is not an Islamist takeover in the Arab region, but the emergence of genuinely independent and democratic Arab states which will no longer kow-tow to Washington and do its bidding. That is surely part of the story. But I believe that what they are most afraid of is not just the emergence of democracy in the Arab world. However uncomfortable and embarrassing that may be, they know they can live with it. What they are most afraid of is that, having slept through the last 60 years of democracy, their own citizens/subjects may be about to wake up again to their own power: that, having seen what it is like when a people dictate to their government what it should do for them, rather than the reverse, we might start to take our own rights back, wholesale, rather than waiting for our rulers to grant us them in homeopathic doses – or fob us off with a placebo.

More here. [Thanks to Kris Kotarski.]

Nearer to Truth than History

From Guernica:

Reza_500 The day before the 2010 midterm elections, I sat down with Reza Aslan at his home in Los Angeles to discuss poetry, politics, and what comes next. In the most literal sense, “next” for Aslan is, in large part, centered around the publication of the groundbreaking anthology, Tablet & Pen: Literary Landscapes from the Modern Middle East. As controversial as it is revelatory, the anthology marks a new phase in the life of the scholar and artist who, perhaps unenviably, is one of the most recognizable commentators on the modern Middle East (a term that Aslan is quick to point out is a Western invention). Through his appearances on The Daily Show and The Colbert Report, not to mention mainstream news outlets (after we spoke he was on his way to record an interview with Australia’s Insight news program), Aslan has become something of a celebrity. As I was reading Aslan’s books to prepare for this interview, I was stopped no less than five times by people who can only be described as fans. Most of these people had read his books, but all knew him from television. As we spoke, the subject of social media came up repeatedly, both in terms of the implications it’s had on his own career and, on a deeper level, how notions of borders and identity are shifting as the demarcations between local and global are increasingly blurred. I wondered what possibilities and challenges these issues offered Aslan in his new role as an anthologist.

Aslan describes Tablet and Pen as a “pivot” in his career’s mission to “build bridges between peoples of the West and the Middle East,” and while that is true, it’s equally important to note that the book can also be seen as an entirely new way of envisioning the anthology form. As opposed to the usual compendium of poems and stories whose sheer critical mass is meant to signify the historical importance of the anthology’s subject, Aslan has created a book that functions more like a novel.

More here.

In defense of low-alcohol brews

Jason Wilson in The Smart Set:

ID_QT_WILSO_SESSI_AP_001 I love a good argument. I particularly love a good argument about drinks. And I especially love a good drinks argument in which manifestos are published. This is why — whether we're talking about wine, spirits or beer — it's endlessly amusing to bring up the topic of alcohol content.

In wine, there are supporters of high-alcohol fruit bombs versus sommeliers who refuse to put any wine over 14 percent on their lists. In spirits, it's the opposite: Many craft bartenders thumb their noses at whiskey that falls below 100 proof. And in beer, there's the perennial issue of the session beer.
Session beers are low-alcohol, high-flavor, easy-drinking, reasonably priced beers that one might drink all night long and still be able to walk home without doing something stupid. Essentially, a session beer is the opposite of the 8 to 12 percent hop/sour/funk monsters that so many beer geeks love.

The idea of finding a really good session beer occurred to me when I was at my local bar, a place with two dozen craft beers on tap. I noticed that more than half the bar was drinking bottles of Miller Lite (4.17 percent alcohol by volume) or Bud Light (4.2 percent). This, while right at their disposal was everything from Maudite (8 percent) to Dogfish Head 90-Minute IPA (9 percent) to Scaldis Bush de Noel (12 percent) to even my own current session beer, Victory Prima Pils (5.3 percent).

I asked one of the guys — a tough-looking dude with a chinstrap beard and lots of tattoos — why he wasn't drinking any of the great beers on tap. He glared at me. “I'm gonna drink for, like, the next five hours. Do you want to see what happens when I drink more than one of those?”

More here.

The Invisible Line Between Black and White

This article is posted in honor of Black History Month:

From Smithsonian:

Black For much of their history, Americans dealt with racial differences by drawing a strict line between white people and black people. But Daniel J. Sharfstein, an associate professor of law at Vanderbilt University, notes that even while racial categories were rigidly defined, they were also flexibly understood—and the color line was more porous than it might seem. His new book, The Invisible Line: Three American Families and the Secret Journey from Black to White, traces the experience of three families—the Gibsons, the Spencers and the Walls—beginning in the 17th century. Smithsonian magazine's T.A. Frail spoke with Sharfstein about his new book:

People might assume that those who crossed the line from black to white had to cover their tracks pretty thoroughly, which would certainly complicate any research into their backgrounds. But does that assumption hold?

That’s the typical account of passing for white—that it involved wholesale masquerade. But what I found was, plenty of people became recognized as white in areas where their families were well known and had lived for generations, and many could cross the line even when they looked different. Many Southern communities accepted individuals even when they knew those individuals were racially ambiguous—and that happened even while those communities supported slavery, segregation and very hard-line definitions of race.

More here.

Paradigms Lost? Cowboys and Indians in the Battle Over Economic Ideas

_63G1654_2Mark Blyth over at Triple Crisis:

By the time the G20 met in Paris last weekend only the degree of fiscal rectitude was up for grabs, Obama having joined the consolidators. And as for the lofty goals of INET [Institute for New Economic Thinking], it is significant that their next meeting will be held at the Bretton Woods hotel where the post-war Keynesian order was assembled. These new economic thinkers seem to be searching for ‘Paradigms lost.’

All of which makes me wonder about the conditions under which the economic ideas that, as Keynes put it, “dominate the economic thought, both practical and theoretical, of the governing and academic classes of this generation” change? As I argue in a new piece for the journal Governance, if one views the problem of paradigm shift as one where some series of events act as anomaly generators that undermine the theory, leading to its eventual and ultimate collapse and replacement, then the 2008 crisis was as close to a perfect natural experiment as you can get. To list some of the howlers: prices were not right in any sense, liquidity turned out to be a social property after all, VaR and associated techniques of risk management proved to be worse than useless, and the whole experiment cost (so far) around $2-3 trillion dollars.

You might then think that given such large losses and red faces we really should now be living in a post-neoclassical world. Yet we are not. Here are two reasons why this is the case: one that I don’t buy and one that I do buy.

“There is (still) no Alternative” – There is No New Paradigm.

This is a very odd but powerful form of argument. Odd, when you consider that this blog, INET, and hundreds of other sources are actively building one. Powerful, in that by saying that ‘unless you replace one complete integrated mathematically perfect theory with another one you should stick with the one you have got.’

I have always been suspicious of this form of argument for three reasons. First, part of the pathology of the old paradigm was precisely its perfectly integrated general form, which made it quite useless for acting in the world. Any new paradigm should be robust to the world, which means partial and revisable in the light of experience. Economists tend not to like that idea.

A History, a Theory, a Flood

Dyson_1-031011_jpg_470x453_q85

The vision of the future as an infinite playground, with an unending sequence of mysteries to be understood by an unending sequence of players exploring an unending supply of information, is a glorious vision for scientists. Scientists find the vision attractive, since it gives them a purpose for their existence and an unending supply of jobs. The vision is less attractive to artists and writers and ordinary people. Ordinary people are more interested in friends and family than in science. Ordinary people may not welcome a future spent swimming in an unending flood of information. A darker view of the information-dominated universe was described in a famous story, “The Library of Babel,” by Jorge Luis Borges in 1941.3 Borges imagined his library, with an infinite array of books and shelves and mirrors, as a metaphor for the universe. Gleick’s book has an epilogue entitled “The Return of Meaning,” expressing the concerns of people who feel alienated from the prevailing scientific culture. The enormous success of information theory came from Shannon’s decision to separate information from meaning. His central dogma, “Meaning is irrelevant,” declared that information could be handled with greater freedom if it was treated as a mathematical abstraction independent of meaning. The consequence of this freedom is the flood of information in which we are drowning. The immense size of modern databases gives us a feeling of meaninglessness. Information in such quantities reminds us of Borges’s library extending infinitely in all directions. It is our task as humans to bring meaning back into this wasteland. As finite creatures who think and feel, we can create islands of meaning in the sea of information. Gleick ends his book with Borges’s image of the human condition: We walk the corridors, searching the shelves and rearranging them, looking for lines of meaning amid leagues of cacophony and incoherence, reading the history of the past and of the future, collecting our thoughts and collecting the thoughts of others, and every so often glimpsing mirrors, in which we may recognize creatures of the information.

more from Freeman Dyson at the NYRB here.

You will commit a crime in the future

Youwillcommittacrimeinthefuture__1298057304_2670

The ability to predict what someone will do in the future would be a seriously handy superpower. And it’s one that companies like Netflix and Amazon, by crunching the massive trails of data most of us leave behind these days, have come pretty close to acquiring. Surely, though, there is something more ambitious to be done with our dazzling modern technology than trying to guess what kind of microwave someone’s going to want next. Something like preventing murders. It’s a seductive notion, that we could know who will and who won’t commit a crime in the future. And while it may call to mind the science-fiction world of “Minority Report,” making judgments about people’s potential to be dangerous is in fact an essential — and routine — part of how the American justice system works. It is what parole boards do, and what sentencing hearings are for. The consequences of getting such high-stakes decisions wrong can be devastating, as was made tragically plain last Christmas when police say a fellow officer from Woburn was shot and killed by 57-year-old Domenic Cinelli, a career criminal who had been paroled in 2008 while serving three concurrent life sentences for armed robbery. What if we had a better method for reliably identifying threats like Cinelli?

more from Leon Neyfakh at The Boston Globe here.

Rosa Parks (1913-2005)

This article is posted in honor of Black History Month:

From Biography.com:

Rosa The Montgomery, Alabama city code required that all public transportation be segregated and that bus drivers had the “powers of a police officer of the city while in actual charge of any bus for the purposes of carrying out the provisions” of the code. While operating a bus, drivers were required to provide separate but equal accommodations for white and black passengers by assigning seats. This was accomplished with a line roughly in the middle of the bus separating white passengers in the front of the bus and African-American passengers in the back. When an African-American passenger boarded the bus, they had to get on at the front to pay their fare and then get off and re-board the bus at the back door. When the seats in the front of the bus filled up and more white passengers got on, the bus driver would move back the sign separating black and white passengers and, if necessary, ask black passengers give up their seat.

On December 1, 1955, after a long day at work at the Montgomery Fair department store, Rosa Parks boarded the Cleveland Avenue bus for home. She took a seat in the first of several rows designated for “colored” passengers. Though the city's bus ordinance did give drivers the authority to assign seats, it didn't specifically give them the authority to demand a passenger to give up a seat to anyone (regardless of color). However, Montgomery bus drivers had adopted the custom of requiring black passengers to give up their seats to white passengers, when no other seats were available. If the black passenger protested, the bus driver had the authority to refuse service and could call the police to have them removed. As the bus Rosa was riding continued on its route, it began to fill with white passengers. Eventually, the bus was full and the driver noticed that several white passengers were standing in the aisle. He stopped the bus and moved the sign separating the two sections back one row and asked four black passengers to give up their seats. Three complied, but Rosa refused and remained seated. The driver demanded, “Why don't you stand up?” to which Rosa replied, “I don't think I should have to stand up.” The driver called the police and had her arrested. Later, she recalled that her refusal wasn't because she was physically tired, but that she was tired of giving in. The police arrested Rosa at the scene and charged her with violation of Chapter 6, section 11 of the Montgomery City code. She was taken to police headquarters where later that night she was released on bail. On December 8, Rosa faced trial and in a 30 minute hearing was found guilty of violating a local ordinance. She was fined $10, plus a $4 court fee.

More here.

Tuesday Poem

The Tao Te Ching
of Lao Tzu
Verse 1.

Existence is beyond the power of words
To define:
Terms may be used
but none of them are absolute
In the beginning of heaven and earth there were no words,
Words came out of the womb of matter;
And whether a man dispassionately
Sees to the core of life
Or passionately sees the surface,
The core and the surface
are essentially the same,
Words making them seem different
Only to express appearance.
If name be needed, wonder names them both:
From wonder to wonder
Existence opens.

version by Witter Bynner
from The Way of Life According to Lao Tzu, 1944

Twisted Light Could Enable Black Hole Detection

From Scientific American:

Twisting-light-oam_1 Black holes, as their name suggests, are dark. Perfectly dark. A black hole's gravity is so intense that beyond a certain boundary in its vicinity, known as the event horizon, nothing can escape. Not a rocket with its boosters on full blast nor a photon of light. Nothing. Despite the fact that astronomers cannot peer at what goes on inside the event horizon, a black hole's gravitational effects on its neighborhood allow for a number of indirect observations. Swirls of infalling gas heat up and give off radiation to illuminate a black hole's vicinity, and the orbits of stars around a black hole allow astronomers to estimate its mass. Now researchers have proposed a new optical technique to observe and study black holes by measuring the imprint they should leave on the light that passes near an event horizon.

A black hole's gravitational pull is so strong that it warps the spacetime around it. And if a black hole rotates, as would be the case for a hole that forms from the collapse of a spinning star, it drags spacetime along with it, a phenomenon known as frame dragging. (Less massive bodies also cause frame dragging on a smaller scale; NASA's Gravity Probe B launched in 2004 to measure the frame-dragging effects of Earth's rotation with sensitive gyroscopes.) According to a new analysis, the frame dragging of a black hole should put a detectable twist on nearby photons by imparting a trait known as orbital angular momentum. A light beam with orbital angular momentum looks a bit like a helix or coil when its component waves are mapped out. Whether any point along the beam is a wave peak, a trough or something in between depends on where that point lies with respect to the helix's central axis.

More here.

From Sea Stories to Scientology: L. Ron Hubbard at 100

Our own Morgan Meis in The Smart Set:

ID_IC_MEIS_LRON_AP_001 His name was L. Ron Hubbard. This year, 2011, happens to be the 100th anniversary of his birth (on March 13, to be exact). By the mid-1950s, Hubbard was a legend. He'd written in every field and form imaginable. The pulps were his bread and butter. He churned out stories and novels. He wrote adventures and mysteries and thrillers and sci-fi. In 1934 he published, among other things, a mystery story called “Calling Squad Cars!”; a sea adventure featuring black pearls called “Pearl Pirate”; a Western called “Maybe Because—!”; an adventure story called “Yellow Loot” that includes a race along China's Great Wall; a detective story called “The Carnival of Death,” in which a U.S. Treasury agent solves murders at a carnival; and “Tooby,” a musical story about a tuba.

In 1940, Hubbard really seemed to hit his stride. He published a story called “Fear” in Unknown, one of the pulp magazines of the time. In the story, a professor publishes a paper debunking myths about the existence of devils and demons and is then hounded by said devils and demons. Ray Bradbury liked “Fear” a lot, calling it “a great scare.” Hubbard also wrote a sci-fi story called “Final Blackout.” It's the story of a lieutenant who comes to rule England after years of atomic warfare. Robert Heinlein (Starship Troopers, Stranger in a Strange Land) famously said the story was, “as perfect a piece of science fiction as has ever been written.”

More here.

Is all of technology the equivalent of an evolving seventh kingdom of life?

David E. Nye in American Scientist:

ScreenHunter_01 Feb. 22 10.26 Whether it’s intended to be so or not, the title of Kevin Kelly’s What Technology Wants is a provocation to most historians of technology, who would reply almost unanimously that technology has no wants or desires. Each tool or machine has latent uses, but each is only an inert object until human beings decide whether and how to use it. In contrast, Kelly talks about technology as a composite whole that emerged before human beings existed and that facilitated their rapid domination of the planet. For him, technology has intentions, and it is radically accelerating evolution.

Kelly has been thinking about technology for most of his life, first as a backpacker wandering the Third World, later as one of the pioneers of what became the Internet, and finally as one of the founders and editors of Wired magazine. He overcame his early suspicion of Western technology largely as a result of his encounter with interactive computer technologies. He was one of several in the counterculture to move from working on the Whole Earth Catalog to celebrating the Internet as a new online facilitator of grassroots movements.

Kelly argues that all technologies, from the stone ax to the computer chip, should be seen as a collectivity—the technium, which is “the greater, global, massively interconnected system of technology vibrating around us” and includes “culture, art, social institutions, and intellectual creations of all types.” He coins the term because he wishes to emphasize the idea of technology as an overarching entity that constitutes the equivalent of an evolving “seventh kingdom of life,” one that “predated our humanness.”

More here.

What would Feynman do?

Eric Lippert in Fabulous Adventures in Coding:

Feynman No one I know at Microsoft asks those godawful “lateral-thinking puzzle” interview questions anymore. Maybe someone still does, I don't know. But rumour has it that a lot of companies are still following the Microsoft lead from the 1990s in their interviews. In that tradition, I present a sequel to Keith Michaels' 2003 exercise in counterfactual reasoning. Once more, we dare to ask the question “how well would the late Nobel-Prize-winning physicist Dr. Richard P. Feynman do in a technical interview at a software company?

Interviewer: Now we come to the part of the interview where we test your creative thinking. Don't think too hard about it; just apply common sense and explain your reasoning. Here's the problem.

You are in a room with three switches that each control a different light fixture in another room. You cannot see from the switch room into the lamp room. Your task is to determine which switches control which light fixtures, but you may only go into the room with the lights once. How do you determine which switch controls which light?

RPF: That seems straightforward. I could obtain a number of large mirrors, and, if necessary, a telescope. I enter the room with the lights once and position the mirror so that it reflects all three lights out the door of the room. I continue placing mirrors, aligning them as necessary to reflect the photons emitted by the lights until I am back in the room with the switches. Now I can see the lights, possibly through the telescope if the distance is large, and I can toggle the switches on and off so as to determine which light is controlled by which switch.

More here.

Is this Irony or Absurdity?: Saif al-Islam Al Qadhafi’s Disseration

Saif-Al-Islam-Gaddafi-007 Saif “will fight to the last minute, until the last bullet” Qadhafi's dissertation :”THE ROLE OF CIVIL SOCIETY IN THE DEMOCRATISATION OF GLOBAL GOVERNANCE INSTITUTIONS: From ‘Soft Power’ to Collective Decision-Making? (seriously)

This dissertation analyses the problem of how to create more just and democratic global governing institutions, exploring the approach of a more formal system of collective decision-making by the three main actors in global society: governments, civil society and the business sector. The thesis seeks to make a contribution by presenting for discussion an addition to the system of international governance that is morally justified and potentially practicable, referred to as ‘Collective Management’. The thesis focuses on the role of civil society, analysing arguments for and against a role for civil society that goes beyond ‘soft power’ to inclusion as voting members in inter-governmental decision-making structures in the United Nations (UN) system, the Bretton Woods institutions, the World Trade Organisation (WTO) and other institutions.

The thesis defends the argument that inclusion of elected representatives of non-governmental organisations (NGOs) in tripartite decision-making structures could potentially create a more democratic global governing system. This conclusion is supported by a specially-commissioned survey of leading figures in NGOs and IGO decision-making structures.

[H/t: John Western]

Off the Charts: Did Wall Street Kill Rock and Roll?

Chart-of-the-day-music-industry-1973-2009-feb-2011 This chart's been making the rounds lately everywhere, from top political bloggers to financial gadflies to music industry maven Bob Lefsetz. It's gone viral, crossed over, become a smash … in other words, it's done everything that records don't do anymore. (Except maybe Cee Lo's, which is retro in every good possible way.)

This chart's got a 'hook' – in this case, a simple and clean presentation that illustrates the rise and fall of the music business. And it has so many overtones: economic, musical, personal …

The story's simple: Vinyl got replaced by tape, then tape started falling off just as revenues from CDs picked up the slack and started skyrocketing. The business kept falling upward, making more and more money as it went. Until it didn't.

When Things Go Wrong … It Hurts Me Too

I had it … I had a deal lined up. I was going to make it.

In the late seventies rock and roll seemed to be booming. I had some songs and a five-piece band, and two managers were fighting over me. One was still struggling, on the way up. He'd take me out to breakfast once in a while according to then-standard manager/artist protocol: rented limo, Eggs Benedict and champagne, an offer of coke in the back seat on the way back. He'd managed to scrape up an offer from a second-rate record company that had a lot of hits once, but was struggling to be relevant again. The other manager couldn't care less about impressing me. But he had a superstar New Wave client and got me into a couple of major labels, both of which booked studio time for demos.

The first manager was a nice guy – not always a plus in a manager – and he had the hustle it might've taken to break an unknown act. But I dropped him and went with the guy who had the superstar in his stable. Everything was going great until I met the superstar at a party and mentioned his name. “I'm sorry I have to walk the same planet as that asshole,” she said. Uh-oh.

Read more »

Expressing Fidelity Through Sorrow’s Hope

By Maniza Naqvi

Faizphoto Separated for now, from Ami, in this journey of life and death, I feel myself displaced: trying to find meaning in everything, wanting to be able to express her being in everything that I do and struggling to not feel muted and exiled. I feel her touch each time that sorrow becomes overpowering as though to say—I am here with you:

With such love, oh beloved, at this time, the memory of you has placed its hand on my heart’s visage/ A sensation, still, though now it is the morning of separation, set the day of exile, arrived reunion’s night.”

Is qadr piyaar sey, eh, jan e jahan rakha hai/Dil ke rukhsaar par is wakht teri yad nay hath.

Yun guma ho tha hai garchey hai abhi subhay firaq/Dhal, gaya hijr ka din ah bhi gayee wasal ki raat.

And in this moment as I write this piece which is meant to be about this photograph and about the immortality and intensity of poetry and poets, I search for Ami’s gentle touch. Ami with her perfection in relating her understanding of meanings, her precision of thought, her clarity of language and her passion for prose filled my life with poetry. My understanding of Urdu poetry was through Ami and my father. Ami recited poetry to me and helped me read it in my mother tongue—she explained and translated the difficult vocabulary and gave meaning to its detailed and often culturally specific symbolism and context of my motherland. With Ami’s help I read and understood a handful of shers contained in Faiz Ahmed Faiz’s book of poetry called Nuskhaye Wafa, on the inside cover of our copy of the book I had scrawled in pencil my own alternative title:—“A Prisoners and Exiles Guide to Survival.” One of my favorite poems or ghazals of Faiz begins with:

Merey dil merey musafir, Huwa pir sey hokum sazir key watan badar hon hum tum.

My heart, my traveler, Once again we are ordered into exile you and I.

It is this photograph of Faiz Ahmed Faiz that I want to write about. But in this moment I cannot see it through any other lens then that of the sorrow and loss of Ami, my mother whose intekal or transition from this life occurred January 17, 2011.

Read more »

Symptoms

by Jen Paton

ScreenHunter_02 Feb. 21 10.42 Some travelers to Paris, mostly the Japanese, are supposed to suffer psychologically when the real City of Light does not match up to the imagined one. The disease is called Paris Syndrome: “fragile travelers can lose their bearings. When the idea they have of the country meets the reality of what they discover it can provoke a crisis.”

Perhaps it’s an ailment that doesn’t just afflict foreigners. Europeans seem to have developed a kind of Europe Syndrome, in that the ideas they have of their countries, or more precisely, their cities, fail to meet the reality of contemporary urban Europe, and they just aren’t sure how to deal with it. Hence the growing success of rightist nationalism from Sweden to Hungary, with attendant visions of forests of minarets growing across the continent. Hence, also, the scrambling of so many European leaders to declare multiculturalism failed and dead. But how can something have failed, let alone be dead when it is being lived, however precariously, every day? Can multiculturalism as a lived reality fail or die, when it simply is?

This partial sightedness stood out to me in reading many of the reviews of Alejandro González Iñárritu’s Biutiful, reviews which cannot help but note that Javier Bardem returns to a Barcelona that is anything but the sundrenched, nubile-American filled playground of Woody Allan’s Vicky Christina Barcelona.

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Why should we care about Kant?

by Dave Maier

A reader writes in to ask (“naïvely,” as he thinks):

In Kant's transcendental idealism, what is at stake? And, if we take it that it is a form of anti-realism and a source of later anti-realisms in philosophy, what is at stake in anti-realism? […] I see that one answer is that anti-realism lends itself readily to relativism, and if we want the comfort of believing that what we hold to be true or valuable is true or valuable “in fact”, then realism seems attractive and anti-realism problematic, whereas on the other hand we might think that we empowering our mental faculties in some important way if we adopt an idealist or anti-realist conclusion. [Also,] if truth has some kind of epistemic criteria and does not reduce to correspondence to a reality, but these criteria are objective in the sense that they enable us to establish that a claim is indeed true or correct, this might be thought to facilitate the meaningfulness of our moral and aesthetic claims against the possibilities of emotivism and expressivism. […] Maybe this move owes a debt to Kant, because Kant's idealism gives epistemic criteria for the truth even of empirical propositions while nonetheless maintaining an “empirical realism” according to which there are objective truths.

Dear reader:

That is one heck of a question, and not at all naïve. It would be a better and much different world if everyone were clear on realism, anti-realism, their relation to each other and to the other views which try to get beyond them, not to mention Kant. I am not a Kant scholar, but as a pragmatist I do have some things to say about realism et al, so let me give your question a necessarily compressed as well as highly contentious go.

Immanuel_kant As I see it, the best way to approach Kant is to see him as trying to get past a traditional impasse (not of course always seen as such by the tradition itself): that our intellect is such as constantly to pose questions about its relation to the world that it cannot answer. It's not that these questions are simply too hard – there's no philosophical problem with that, as we run into such problems all the time – but that they are incoherent. That is, in reflecting on itself as operating in the way that it in fact does, our intellect is inevitably drawn to certain conceptual train wrecks like a moth to a, um, train wreck. In Kant's own striking image, we're like the dove, who, tired of dealing with wind resistance, yearns for the ideal perfection of a vacuum – which would of course make flight impossible. (For more on the dove image, see here – a much better post than this one, if I do say so myself.) According to Kant and those of us following him this far, the trick is to get off the train at the right time – not following the moth into disaster, but also resisting nihilistic calls to abandon train travel entirely. As you can imagine, this can be a tricky business indeed.

Read more »