The Everpresent Wordsnatcher

New blog

2008-12-06T13:33:00.001-05:00

Several years ago I started a blog to share personal updates and musings for my family and friends. More recently, I’ve also blogged about philosophical puzzles and ideas, and I’ve appreciated it when other philosophers have occasionally showed up. But it’s turned out to be an awkward double life for the blog. Since there’s personal stuff in the archives, I’ve wanted the blog to keep a low profile—which means I don’t get as much feedback and discussion from other philosophers as I’d like. Conversely, as the content and audience have become more academic, I’ve been less comfortable writing much about my personal life.

My solution: I’ve started a new philosophy blog. Tell your friends. I’ve moved over a few posts from earlier this year to kick it off (but without the comments, alas). For philosophy discussion, go there. For whatever is left after that, keep your dial pointed right here.

All things great and small

2008-11-16T09:42:00.001-05:00

This is a blog-sized summary of a paper I’m working on.

For more than a century now, there’s been a problem with “everything”. Here’s a simple version: say you have all of the sets. Then there ought to be a set of just those things—a set X that contains all the sets. But in that case X is a member of itself, which no set can be. Paradox!

In 1906 Bertrand Russell writes,

[T]he contradiction results from the fact that…there are what we may call self-reproducing processes and classes. That is, there are some properties such that, given any class of terms all having such a property, we can always define a new term also having the property in question. Hence we can never collect all of the terms having the said property into a whole; because, whenever we hope we have them all, the collection which we have immediately proceeds to generate a new term also having the said property.

Michael Dummett (1993) calls properties like this indefinitely extensible—the main example is “set”, but related paradoxes also show up for “cardinal number”, “order-type”, “property”, and “proposition”. Because of this a lot of philosophers are driven to conclude that we can’t speak intelligibly of all the sets (cardinals, properties, etc.). Whenever we think we’ve caught them all, another pops up to defy us. And if we can’t talk about every set, then we also can’t talk about plain everything—since that would have to include all the sets.

This kind of argument leaves open an escape to somebody with enough nerve: one way out is to deny outright that there are any sets (cardinals, properties, etc.). This is kind of an attractive view anyway, since sets are a lot spookier than, say, tables and chairs and galaxies and electrons—even without the paradoxes. The strong-nerved people who deny the existence of such things are called nominalists (contrasted with platonists or realists).

I have a way to close of the nominalists’ escape route. What we need is a new indefinitely extensible property that isn’t “abstract” (like “set”, etc.): instead, it applies to concrete, material objects. (Even nominalists don’t want to deny those!) I don’t claim that there actually are any such things, though: instead I claim that there could be. This is enough, because it would be very odd if it turned out that “absolutely everything”-talk was intelligible just by luck. The people who think it makes sense to talk that way think that it necessarily makes sense to talk that way. If they’re right, then it shouldn’t even be possible for something to be the way I suggest.

Here’s the idea. Material things could be made of atoms: they might have smallest parts that cannot be divided any further. Alternatively, they could be made of “atomless gunk” (David Lewis’s term (1991)): any piece of it contains ever-smaller bits. Inside our “atoms” we find protons, in the protons we find quarks, and it never stops. Gunk has a long pedigree as a theory of how the world is—and even if it happens to be false about our world, it sure seems like a way a world could possibly be.

But gunk doesn’t by itself give us what we need: it could be that the parts of a gunky material object eventually run out. If you follow finite chains of decreasing objects, there is always something further down—but if you follow infinite chains, you may succeed in getting all the way to the bottom, with nothing smaller below. But also, (it seems) that might not happen. As you go further and further down to smaller and smaller parts, there are always smaller parts further on. An object with parts like this I’ll call supergunk.1

More precisely, an object X is hypergunk iff it satisfies the following condition:

For any parts of X, the x’s, such that each x is a part of or has as a part each of the x’s, there is something that is a proper part of each of the x’s.

From this condition it follows that “part of X” is an indefinitely extensible property: X is indefinitely divisible. So if there’s trouble for the sets, there is just as much trouble for supergunk. And it sure seems like there could be supergunk (even if there isn’t any in the actual world). So the nominalist has a problem with “everything”, too.

Daniel Nolan (2004) describes something he calls “hypergunk”, but unfortunately that’s a bit different. ↩

Vote!

2008-11-04T13:31:00.001-05:00

Do it now!

Fiction skepticism

2008-10-14T10:13:00.001-04:00

This post is inspired by Dinosaur Comics, but I can’t find the relevant comic—it was from a while ago. If anyone knows, tell me.

There are lots of fictional characters. Most fictional characters think that they are real. And they seem (to themselves) have all the reasons to believe they are real that I do. But in fact, they are fictional. They are mistaken. Moreover, there are so many fictional characters—let’s say there are vastly more of them than there are real people (though I doubt this is true). So it is antecedently much more likely that I am fictional than that I am a real flesh-and-blood person. My evidence gives me no way to discriminate between the two situations, since there are (deceived) fictional people with the same kind of evidence. So I have some reason to believe that in fact I am fictional, or at least to doubt whether I am real.

If this is a real skeptical problem, then it seems like it should be worse than some other such problems. To be concerned about the possibility of being a brain in a vat is one thing—but suppose that I knew there were actually lots of deceived brains in vats around in my world. That seems much more justification-threatening than merely possible such brains—though I admit I’m not sure why. And there really are lots of fictional characters, even though there aren’t lots of brains in vats.

But in fact, fiction skepticism sounds sillier to me than the usual skeptical scenarios. But, again, I’m not sure why.

Fatalism and fundamentality

2008-10-13T21:34:00.001-04:00

Here’s another argument for fatalism (from a conversation with Dean Zimmerman):

If P is true, then P is true in virtue of some Q which is fundamentally true.
If P is true in virtue of Q, and Q is necessarily true, then P is necessarily true.
Whatever is fundamentally true is necessarily true.
Therefore, if P is true then P is necessarily true.

Understand “P is necessarily true” as “P cannot be changed”. The conclusion is that whatever is a fact cannot be changed. Thus if there are facts about the future, then the future is fixed, so that no one can do anything about it.

The most suspicious premise of the three is the third—and indeed, I think it is false. But it does have some tug. I think the tug comes from a principle of sufficient reason (PSR):

If P is contingently true, then there is some further reason for why P is true.
If P is fundamentally true, then there is no further reason for why P is true.
So if P is fundamentally true, then P is necessarily true.

The full argument is more or less Leibniz’s. It is unsound, since this version of the PSR is false (though I think there is a good methodological principle in the neighborhood). But I won’t defend this claim right now.

For now I just want offer a sociological speculation: I suspect that something like this kind of reasoning is what drives people to views like presentism in order to rescue our freedom. Suppose that there are future things; why would their existence threaten our power to make it such that there be different things instead? Existing future things would threaten this freedom, if tenseless existence facts are fundamental (at least for fundamental sorts of things), and the fundamental facts could not be changed. The right thing to say to this is that (some) fundamental facts, including tenseless existence facts, can be changed.

(I heard a good joke today—Adam Elga attributed it to Steve Yablo: “Everyone talks about how people could have done otherwise. But why doesn’t anyone?”)

In other words

2008-10-03T10:37:00.001-04:00

This endorsement is a bit more eloquent than mine.

Politicking

2008-09-28T15:38:00.001-04:00

I don’t usually write about politics, but I just donated to the Obama campaign, and I thought you might be interested in a few of the reasons. (For some of my readers voting for Obama is a foregone conclusion, but I know others aren’t so sure. This is chiefly for them.)

Foreign policy. An Obama presidency gives the U.S. a shot at regaining some stature in the world. Every non-U.S. citizen I’ve met shakes their head grimly at the last eight years, and McCain’s approach to foreign policy isn’t significantly different from Bush’s, as far as I can tell. Obama, on the other hand, not only opposed our military adventurism in Iraq, but also has a serious commitment to taking on what I take to be the much bigger foreign policy issues (at least in terms of number of lives at stake): global poverty and AIDS. I can’t even find these issues mentioned on johnmccain.com.
The environment. As far as doing good for the poorest people in the world, climate change is the biggest issue right now—and this is an issue our government has to take an active role in. McCain admits that climate change is a real and serious issue, but a president will have a hard time leading where even his own party won’t follow. McCain even chose a vice president who is on record denying—this year—that climate change is a human problem. This does not bode well. This is a moral issue: it’s not just about the extinction of polar bears; we’re talking about spreading deserts (one of the big issues behind the Darfur genocide), loss of fresh water for the people already most pressed, and natural disasters in places much worse equipped for it than New Orleans.
- http://www.time.com/time/politics/article/0,8599,1837868,00.html
The economy. Obama’s stance makes more sense than McCain’s: cutting services to save the wealthy’s investment capital isn’t what we need—now less than ever. (I’m reminded of Hoover vs. Roosevelt.) And in particular, McCain’s response this week has been embarrassing. His comments have been decried by the WSJ, and by rushing presidential politics into the midst of the bailout he’s seriously impeded the process.
McCain has run an unethical, dishonest campaign. That’s unacceptable.
- http://www.chicagotribune.com/news/columnists/chi-oped0914chapmansep14,0,4287762.column
- http://tpmelectioncentral.talkingpointsmemo.com/2008/09/obama_campaign_launches_ad_hit.php
Palin. Even her one-time supporters are recognizing that Sarah Palin is way out of her depth, and she’s faking it, badly. This is worth taking seriously; she could be president.
- http://andrewsullivan.theatlantic.com/the_daily_dish/2008/09/watching-palin.html
Abortion. I disagree with much of what Obama says about abortion (though my position is more moderate than it once was)—but even on this point I think he’s the better candidate. The fact is that Republican policies have generally led to an increase in the number of abortions. Why? Some of the main reasons women have abortions are poverty and lack of health care. And these are issues I think Obama will do much, much better on.
- http://www.publicchristian.com/index.php?p=734
- http://www.sojo.net/index.cfm?action=sojomail.display&issue=041013#5
Since you have to register to see the latter article, here’s an excerpt:

When President Bush took office, the nation’s abortion rates were at a 24-year low, after a 17.4% decline during the 1990s. This was an average decrease of 1.7% per year, mostly during the latter part of the decade. (This data comes from Minnesota Citizens Concerned for Life using the Guttmacher Institute’s studies).

Enter George W. Bush in 2001. One would expect the abortion rate to continue its consistent course downward, if not plunge. Instead, the opposite happened.

…Under President Bush, the decade-long trend of declining abortion rates appears to have reversed. Given the trends of the 1990s, 52,000 more abortions occurred in the United States in 2002 than would have been expected before this change of direction.

Those are some of my main considerations. I’m interested to know if you agree with them; if there are things you think I’m getting wrong, you can let me know. These issues are important enough to warrant talking about, and hopefully getting right together.

Patriotic Duty

2008-09-22T12:29:00.002-04:00

Make sure you're registered to vote!

A reason for theism

2008-03-18T18:03:00.001-04:00

In science, in philosophy, and in daily life, we evaluate theories in order to decide what to believe. The criteria we use in these evaluations include virtues like simplicity, elegance, unity, and symmetry. These theoretical virtues—what we might generally call a theory’s “beauty”—give us reasons to believe in one theory over another.

Why? Why should a theory’s elegance make it any more credible? The fact that the beauty of a theory gives us reason to believe in it is among the pieces of data we should look to explain in our theory of the world. Insofar as some account provides a better explanation for this fact than other accounts do, this explanatory power gives us some reason to suppose the account to be true.

If theism is true, it provides a good explanation. Theoretical beauty point us to the truth because someone who values these virtues is responsible for what is true. This is why pursuing theoretical virtues is a useful heuristic in our search for the truth. There’s more to the story than that, but a conventional theism has the resources to fill in the details. And it strikes me as better able to explain beauty-driven reasons than rival theories of the world. This explanatory power gives me a reason to believe theism is true.

More fatalism

2008-03-02T14:11:00.000-05:00

In response to my previous post, Jonathan Ichikawa offered a more puzzling variant of the fatalist argument. International tensions are high, and a captain spies a foreign frigate off his starboard. He reasons,

Either there will be a battle or there won’t be a battle.
If there will be a battle, there’s no harm in firing the cannons now.
If there won’t be a battle, there’s no harm in firing the cannons now.
So, there’s no harm in firing the cannons now.

Something is wrong here.

“There’s no harm in firing the cannons now” means something like “Firing the cannons now will lead to no worse consequences than doing otherwise.” Now let’s suppose that “if” expresses a material conditional. Then the argument is valid. But the world could be like this:

The captain fires the cannons. It starts a battle, which leads to a terrible war and thousands of ugly deaths. If the captain hadn’t fired the cannons, none of this would have happened.

In this case, the first premise is true. The third premise is also true, because the antecedent is false. But the second premise is false: there will be a battle, but there’s very great harm in firing the cannons now. Moreover, whatever “if” means, it means something at least as strong as the material conditional. So Premise 2 really is false in the war-world.

Then why does it sound true? Probably because we naturally hear it as saying something like “If there will be a battle anyway, there’s no harm in firing the cannons now.” That is, we implicitly give the antecedent some kind of modal force.

If (necessarily, there will be a battle), then there’s no harm in firing the cannons now.

This is true: if the battle is inevitable, the captain might as well take the first shot. But the reasoning fails precisely because the battle is not inevitable: the antecedent of this conditional is false.

There may be something more general going on here: maybe when someone says “It will be the case that P”, in general we hear this as saying “No matter what, it will be the case that P”. Maybe “will” even has this modal force as part of its content. On this alternative story, Premise 2 is true after all, and the fatalist argument shows roughly what the fatalist thinks it shows: in general, “There will be a battle or there won’t be a battle” is false! But this does not mean that the future is “open”: rather it means that this is false:

Necessarily, there WILL be a battle, or, necessarily, there WILL not be a battle.

Where “WILL” is an artificial version of “will”, with all of the modal overtones stripped out—it means merely “at some future time”. If something like this semantic story is true, it would explain a lot of our confusions about the future: our language naturally leads us to confuse tense with modality.

Fatalism

2008-01-27T20:03:00.001-05:00

This is well-trod ground, but I was thinking about this old puzzle this afternoon and I wanted to work through it myself.

There’s an argument that Aristotle discusses, I think, to the effect that our present actions make no difference to future events. It goes like this. Let B be the proposition “There will be a sea battle tomorrow”, and let A be the proposition “The captain starts the attack.”

Either B or not B. (Premise)
Suppose B.
In that case, whether or not A, B.
So A makes no difference as to whether B.
Now drop the assumption that B, and suppose instead not-B.
In that case, whether or not A, not-B.
So again A makes no difference as to whether B.
So in any case, A makes no difference as to whether B.

That is, the captain’s decision makes no difference as to whether there will be a sea battle. But fatalism like this is crazy, isn’t it?

This argument, or something like it, has led some people to deny excluded middle for at least some sentences about the future. They say that there is no fact of the matter whether there will be a sea battle tomorrow, and only when tomorrow comes will the proposition become either true or false. Otherwise, they reason, how could we make free decisions that affect the future?

This response is unnecessary. We should stop and ask, what do we mean by the expression “Whether or not P, Q”? Here’s a reasonable thing to mean by it:

(If P then Q, and if not-P then Q) or (If P then not-Q, and if not-P then not-Q).

In other words, either P and not-P equally well imply Q, or else P and not-P equally well imply not-Q. Intuitively, in no case does Q’s truth value depend on P’s.

But now we need to be careful about what we mean by “if”. In classical logic we take “If P then Q” to be logically equivalent to “Q or not-P.” (This meaning of “if” is called “the material conditional”.) On that understanding of “whether or not” and “if”, (3) logically follows from (2), and (6) logically follows from (5).

But in ordinary English usually what we mean by “If P then Q” is something stronger than just “Q or not P”. For instance, both of the inferences “It isn’t raining; so if it’s raining then it’s Tuesday” and “It’s raining; so if it’s Tuesday then it’s raining” sound weird at best, false at worst. Something closer to what we usually mean by “If P then Q” is “Necessarily, not P or Q” (or “In every relevant case, not P or Q”)—this may be too strong, but we’ll work with it. If we read “if” this way, then the analysis I gave for “Whether or not P, Q” is equivalent to “Necessarily, Q” or (“In every relevant case, Q”). And that sounds about right.

If we understand “whether or not” in the natural way, then the inference from “B” to “Whether or not A, B” is no good. It’s just like reasoning “B, therefore necessarily B.” On the other hand, if we insist on understanding “whether or not” in terms of the “if” of classical logic, then we shouldn’t allow the inference from “Whether or not A, B” to “A makes no difference as to whether B”. It sounds okay, but that’s just because we’re using the words “whether or not” in a funny artificial way. On neither of the two ways of understanding “whether or not” does the argument go through. We don’t have to deny that there are objective facts about the future in order to avoid fatalism.

Vast and spacious

2006-09-24T22:04:00.000-04:00

i spent most of today in the american museum of natural history, up in new york city. this was the first of what i hope will be many museum pilgrimages (the other two of my big three are the met and moma). i was there for close to five hours, and i only explored a little corner of it--never made it anywhere close to the dinosaurs. my favorite part was the Hall of the Ocean, standing before dioramas of angler fish and tubeworms by deep sea vents, and giant kelp forests, and the sperm whale wrestling the giant squid, and i gasped like a little kid and my mouth hung open, and it all moved me powerfully (i'm quite serious here) to worship god in my heart--as the psalm says,

How many are your works, O LORD!
In wisdom you made them all;
the earth is full of your creatures.

There is the sea, vast and spacious,
teeming with creatures beyond number—
living things both large and small.

There the ships go to and fro,
and the leviathan, which you formed to frolic there...

May the glory of the LORD endure forever;
may the LORD rejoice in his works.

(similarly, it made me think a lot about conservation and global warming and stuff (i saw an inconvenient truth last week, which you probably oughta go see), and to pray for the preservation of the earth. that was all part of it.)

the Hall of Biodiversity was like that too, and the Hall of the Universe--galaxies colliding and comets swirling around the sun--so numinous, you know?

and then i came back and went to church, and i got all grumpy again. sigh.

On miracles

2006-12-03T23:08:00.000-05:00

Just a quick sketch of an argument against thinking of miracles as violations of laws of nature. I doubt it's very original (In fact, I know it isn't, because Geoff Anders was talking about something like this a while back), and I'm sure it's fairly naÃ¯ve. But anyhow, into the breach.

First, I'm concerned with official laws of nature, rather than statistical laws. Official laws say what happens, categorically: all ravens are black; momentum is conserved; the evolution of the quantum wave-function obeys such-and-such a differential equation—that kind of thing.

(Statistical laws, on the other hand, say that certain things are more likely than others to occur, in whatever sense of "likely" is appropriate here. It's hard to say what precisely constitutes a "violation" of a statistical law, but at least on some readings miracles certainly do violate some statistical laws, simply by virtue of being unusual events. But the unusual, in various degrees, is really pretty commonplace.)

Second, i'm concerned with macroscopic miracles: events at the scale of people and everyday objects. Lazarus is raised from the dead, Moses parts the Red Sea, that kind of thing. Maybe there are miracles that occur on the Planck scale, which are only detectable with sensitive instruments; but these aren't the sort of miracles that make a difference to most religions.

Then the main argument is just this: on our best accounts, the official laws of nature don't rule out any macroscopic events to speak of. (This, by the way, is also a problem for "falsifiability" accounts of scientific theories---in case that coffin needed any more nails.)

For illustration, imagine that the official laws are Newtonian mechanics. People die, sometimes; this is one of the events that is consistent with the laws (I presume). Well, it's a fact about Newtonian mechanics that if an event is consistent with it, the time-reversal of that event is consistent too. So run the death backwards, and---presto!---Lazarus rises from the dead. (Statistical laws broken? Hell yeah (in some suitable sense of "broken"). But that, remember, is none of our concern.)

The kinds of observations we ordinarily make of the world aren't nearly fine-toothed enough to distinguish states of affairs in which (according to the dynamics) run-of-the-mill events are about to occur, from states of affairs in which (still according to the dynamics) great marvels are about to occur. And so miraculous events are never physically impossible, conditionalized on our knowledge of the physical state of the world. And, I claim, this situation isn't peculiar to Newtonian mechanics. It ought to be a feature of any good candidate for the official laws (have to think more about why this would be true).

(When quantum physics enters the picture, the story is even more fun. My grip on the quantum world is loose, but as I understand the folk tales, anything is possible.)

So if macroscopic events can count as miracles (as I assume they can), then miracles aren't violations of the official laws of nature.

The beginning and the end

2007-01-06T19:26:00.000-05:00

Here's a combination of views that I think a lot of people like me (college-educated Christians from evangelical churches) hold more or less unreflectively:

Young-earth creationism is silly. The scientific evidence (biology, geology, cosmology) overwhelmingly suggests that the earth is four or five billion years old, the universe began in a Big Bang about thirteen billion years ago, etc., etc.

Some kind of broadly millenial eschatology is sensible. The universe will not end in a gradual cold death, wiping out all possibility of life as the energy density goes to zero (as suggested by the current observations of the amount of matter in the universe, as far as I know), or for that matter in a heat death where the universe collapses again toward a singularity. Rather, God will redeem the world, restoring the universe to a state of perfect justice when Christ returns, and so on. Alternatively, God will destroy the universe and replace it with a good one (somehow managing to get people from this one to the other one—don't ask me).

That's kind of a weird combination. At any rate, there's an asymmetry. Physics tells us how the universe began, but not how it will end. That is, it's silly to think that the beginning of the universe would be different from what it looks like it was---that the past would be discontinuous with what we observe. And yet it's sensible to think that the end of the universe will be different from what it looks like it will be: again, discontinuous with what we observe.

Maybe this asymmetry is okay. After all, it really does feel like our pastward and futureward extrapolations are based on different kinds of evidence. But I don't really know what to say.

(Or maybe Christians who take both eschatology and science seriously need to believe the energy density of the universe will stay delicately balanced forever? Or maybe they should believe the final return and resurrection is in an important way non-physical? Anyone?)

Some moving considerations

2007-03-02T15:56:00.000-05:00

In Tim Maudlin's class we've been going through theories of space-time. I had a worry last week that he talked me out of, but now I'm back to thinking there's something worth saying. First some background.

First player: "Newtonian space-time". Space is made out of lots of points that persist through time. So I can pick out a point at 1:00, call it A, and then at 2:00 I can meaningfully ask of any point in space whether it's the same point as A (and in general, how far it is from A). We can either think of the points as enduring through time (the way Newton did), so a point B being the same point as A means that A=B—it's numerically the same object. Or we can think of the points as being points in space-time, and there's some special "sameness" relation that holds between space-time point A (which only exists at 1:00) and space-time point B (which only exists at 2:00).

Second player: "Neo-Newtonian space-time". Space-time is made out of lots of points. The points don't persist through time, so in general it isn't meaningful to ask of a point at 1:00 whether it's the same as a point at 2:00. (Instead, there's a weaker kind of structure, called "affine structure". If I have a point A at 1:00, a point B at 2:00, and a point C at 3:00, it makes sense to ask whether A, B, and C are "in a straight line", which physically means that an object could travel through A, B, and C without accelerating at all.)

Nobody wants to believe in Newtonian space-time: it posits more structure than Newtonian physics needs. For instance, in Newtonian space-time we can ask whether the universe is drifting at some uniform rate, but this kind of motion wouldn't have any physical consequences. Nobody believes in Neo-Newtonian space-time nowadays either, but it's the kind of space-time we would want to believe in if we still believed in Newtonian physics. And I think what I'm going to say applies to the sort of space-time people do generally believe in, too.

Third player: the "at-at" theory of motion. This is a theory of what it is for an object to move. And the simple theory goes like this: an object moves if (and only if) it is at different places at different times. It's a nice theory.

Finally, here's my worry: it looks to me like the at-at theory requires full Newtonian space-time. The theory doesn't make sense if it isn't possible for an object to be at the same place at different times. And this kind of structure isn't around in the Neo-Newtonian universe. So in NN-world the at-at theory makes motion meaningless.

First response: that's right! It doesn't make sense to ask, in absolute terms, whether an object is at different places at different times, and so there isn't any absolute motion. Instead, there's only relative motion. We can ask about point A at 1:00 and point B at 2:00 whether they're the same point relative to a frame of reference. If I pick New Brunswick as a frame of reference, then there is a definite fact of the matter whether a car at the corner of Suydam and Nichol at 1:00 is at the (relatively) same point at 2:00. And so there is a definite fact of the matter whether the car moved relative to this frame of reference. And (the response goes) those are the only kind of definite motion facts.

The problem for this response is that there is absolute motion in Newtonian physics. This is a fact that perplexed everybody for centuries. Imagine two balls, attached by a chain, alone in the universe. Are they spinning or not? There's a way to find out the answer: measure the tension in the chain. If they aren't spinning, there's no tension. If they are spinning, there is some. This is a frame-independent, absolute fact. And if the ball-chain assembly is rotating (absolutely), then the balls must be moving (absolutely). In NN-world the at-at theory can't account for this.

Second response (this is my gloss on what Tim said in class): ok, simple at-at was wrong. But we don't need to abandon the heart and soul of the at-at theory. And the heart and soul is this: there is nothing to moving above and beyond positions and times, no primitive motion properties. In short: motion supervenes on the space-time trajectory. That is to say, if you know all of the space-time points an object occupies through its lifetime, you know everything there is to know about the object's motion.

The revised at-at theory seems fine. I have but three remarks.

First remark. On the simple at-at theory, position was primary, velocity secondary (it reduces to change in position), and acceleration tertiary (it reduces to change in velocity). On the revised at-at theory, this isn't true. Acceleration isn't primitive, but neither does it reduce to velocity-facts or position-facts. It reduces to space-time trajectory facts and affine structure facts, those alone and those directly.

Second remark. In the olden days, the at-at theory offered an account of motion that was independent of the structure of space-time. You can do this if you have genuinely enduring places, points in space that are numerically the same from moment to moment. Then you can tell if an object is moving by looking purely that the numerical identity or distinctness of the points it occupies over time. When we switched to the four-dimensional picture, though, we had to appeal to space-time structures to make sense of motion. In Newtonian space, the structure exactly mirrors the endurance of points. In Neo-Newtonian space it's weaker than that. In either case, the mere occupancy relations doesn't tell you whether or not an object moves: it's the occupancy relations plus the cross-time spatial structure, the "links" between 1:00 points and 2:00 points.

Third remark. Some people took the simple at-at theory to be an account of the meaning of "move". Revised at-at, though, looks nothing like an account of the meaning of "move". And I can't see any plausible meaning account in its vicinity.

(One attempt: "to move is to have a non-inertial space-time trajectory." But that doesn't capture merely relative motions. So should we say "move" is ambiguous between relative and absolute motion, with totally different definitions for each? That doesn't sound like plausible semantics to me.)

Why study philosophy?

2007-10-13T12:05:00.000-04:00

Going on two years ago I offered six reasons to study philosophy. Now that I'm a year and change into the process of becoming a philosopher, I think it's time to revisit my reasons.

A lot is different now. I'm reading less Discourses On Natural Religion and Euthyphro and more Parts of Classes and From Discourse to Logic. The questions I'm asking aren't the ones that sprang from a sophomore's crisis of faith. They're questions that are increasingly difficult to explain—sometimes even to other philosophers—and justify—sometimes even to myself. "Does space have simple parts?" "What does 'if' mean?" "What's the best way to describe quantum mechanical states?" "What makes arithmetic true?" More and more of my life is dedicated to the technical and obscure. What does this have to do with the deep questions?

And I'm making serious sacrifices to do this. I have one of the best stipends in the business, but it doesn't compare to what I made as an intern (and my rent is truly absurd). I've given up almost all control over where I'll live. I've moved twice in two years, I'm in a city of strangers, and I can probably plan on several more moves in the next decade or so. My girlfriend and I are doomed to at least another year of despicable long distance.

So a poignant question is, what the hell am I doing?

I'm studying philosophy. Here's why.

I like it. And I think I'm reasonably good at it.

Philosophers are entrusted today with caring for the twin virtues of reason and tolerance. There are few other corners of academia where you will find people so dedicated to pursuing the truth, governed by a common commitment to following good arguments where they lead, to logic and rigor and clarity—and who at the same time disagree with each other passionately, fundamentally, and respectfully. The world—in particular, my religion—desperately needs these traits. Part of my mission is to practice and promote them.

More often than not, the questions I work on these days aren't the soul-eating questions I had in college. But neither are they disconnected from them. When you dig into a hard question, you quickly discover that a good answer depends on a more subtle question. Answering the new question demands some careful logic, or clearing up what some of your words mean, or solving some other puzzle that, if you had started out by asking it, would have seemed obscure and trivial. It's these last questions that philosophers spend most of their time on. That's good! We have a chance at answering some of the obscure questions, and if we can manage that, then we may have a real shot at the big game. Appropriating Dr. King: unclarity anywhere is a threat to clarity everywhere.

Studying philosophy is good for me. The effects are a bit mixed now that it's my job—academia affords plenty of opportunity for selfish ambition, arrogance, and dishonesty. Still I maintain: philosophy is essential training in intellectual humility, in asking questions, testing assumptions, and charitably hearing out opponents. It makes me more useful to my church and better equipped to serve and worship God.

When I'm tempted to think that philosophers don't matter, it's worth remembering: they mattered immensely to me. I'm not helping the most people I could in the most tangible ways I could. But leaving my part unplayed would silence a note in a chord and leave the whole piece hollower. Or to use a more familiar metaphor: "If the whole body were an eye, where would the sense of hearing be?"

A hasty nominalist argument

2008-01-26T21:30:00.000-05:00

Here's a quick and dirty argument against the view that properties are things.

"If Fido is a dog then Fido has the property of being a dog" is a logical truth. (Premise)
Logical truths are permutation invariant: that is, they remain true when individuals are arbitrarily exchanged. (Premise)
Suppose "the property of being a dog" refers to an individual D, and "the property of being a cat" refers to an individual C. (For reductio)
Consider a model M in which C and D are exchanged. "If Fido is a dog then Fido has the property of being a dog" is true in M if and only if Fido has C—that is, if and only if Fido is a cat. So the Fido sentence is false in M.
But this contradicts (1) and (2). So (3) is false.

You can easily make parallel arguments against numbers, propositions, and any other domain where you think there are parallel logical truths. (E.g., "If there are eight planets then the number of planets is eight." "If snow is white then the proposition that snow is white is true.") The proposition case is very similar to an argument David Lewis makes in chapter 3 of Plurality—though he worries about necessary truth, rather than logical truth.

I don't find the argument especially convincing, but I think it's interesting anyway. And I think that's all I'll say about it just now.

In Keeping With Tradition

2004-08-30T02:03:00.000-04:00

i follow in time-honored paths by devoting this post to a brief yet redundant account of my blogging philosophy. the prospect of Blog has figured in my mind for some time, and with it the question, "what shall my blog be?" didactic and sensible like Speaking Natalie? poignant and frank like Free Thoughts (though not a blog)? witty and absurd like Blaaaugh? or (if i dare) the pinnacle of blogdom, something like eric brill's blog? the answer is pretty clear: all of the above, and more. with this prelude, i introduce The Blogging Principles of Jeff.

my blog will be in english.

lorem ipsum

my spelling and capitalization will be inconsistent; even so, i will use punctuation.

i will not apologize for failing to post.

i will occasionally be vague, wordy, or incomprehensible. it happens. you learn to live with it. at least, i do.

i will attempt to be brief.

At Home

2004-09-09T01:52:00.000-04:00

i think the accomplishment of the summer that i'm most proud of is all the reading i've done. at school i read christ and culture and the scandal of the evangelical mind and the first half of warranted christian belief (with david jones) and prince caspian and winnie-the-pooh, not to mention essays and occasional blogs and emails, as well as papers for my research. since i've been home i've read the wonderful wizard of oz and cheaper by the dozen, both for the first time, and the phantom tollbooth, not at all for the first time, which are all three delightful books. also, i watched nicholas nickleby with the gang (rob picked it), and pirates of the caribbean for the fourth or fifth time--a wonderful, well-executed, and inspiring movie, even speaking as a boy with no great love for disneyland. and there were quite a few movies at school, too, several of them quite worth seeing (i still really want to see the second half of spirited away). all in all, i'd have to say that's a pretty good haul for one summer, and better than i had any right to expect.

i've also started sight-reading whatever music we have around the piano, as i usually do after i've been home for a little while. hymns, showtunes and etudes, and when i get bored i start adding sevenths and dotted rhythms or switch it into minor. it helps that my family has the best electric piano i have ever played anywhere, with the exception of my grandparents' house, and that's only because theirs is almost identical. the piano was a christmas gift from grandpa years ago, and its bench is my favorite place in the house, the place that feels most like home, most spontaneous and relaxing and secure. in that seat i have violins and vibraphones and voices under my direction, and i have endless jokes with myself and with my family (this afternoon i played "do re mi" on a jazz scale and "we shall overcome" as a dirge), and operettas to invent with rob, and the endless quiet discipline (which i've never mastered) of scales and study. sightreading from the orange classics book, especially when it gets dark and the lamps come on, reminds me powerfully of high school--the winter nights (in bellingham, winter starts in october and winter nights start at about four in the afternoon, so about half the year seems to consist in winter nights) when i would play from the same book, and with it the feeling of structured time, order, direction, certainties, leading youth group and working at the library and waiting for buses in the rain.

which of course makes me think about Home and Place--the constant themes in the past three years since stanford and the past eight since morelos. when i flew out of san jose, i recognized all the surrounding geography--the suburbs (though they all look alike) and the bridges and the bay and the soft wrinkled tan ridges, and point reyes and tomales bay sort of in the distance--i knew their names, but also they were places that meant something to me, that conjured images and smells and feelings. and it struck me as i descended a couple hours later into sea-tac that i didn't know puget sound geography nearly so well as i know san francisco bay, despite having lived two summers in seattle and seventeen years in bellingham. as we banked into the descent i completely lost my bearings--i didn't even know what direction i was facing (except that it couldn't be east since i didn't see mount rainier).

and while i left the santa cruz mountains, a snatch of a song i once heard had come unbidden to mind: "these are my mountains; this is my home".

this is very strange to me.

being home (by which at the moment i mean being in bellingham) is wonderful--lots of reunions and sleeping in and being with my family and of course the piano, but i also feel a little out of place. i'm in a place i haven't been since christmas, and not for longer than a couple weeks at a time for about two years. my room has been home to two (three?) boarders in that time. the two pets we had are both gone, and a new dog is in their place. many of my friends are already back at school. brian is in mexico (though he'll be back in a week), and elizabeth went and became a sophomore in high school some time when i wasn't looking, cut her hair short, and started going by "liz". my church is in a new building (i got lost when i tried to drive to it last week), and my little town is growing up with new housing complexes and parking lots and thirty-five zones. i don't think me and toto are in kansas anymore.

and i'm the worst of it. i'm allergic to the closed up dusty houses, and can hardly remember to bring kleenex with me when i go out. i've been cold all the time, and when it rains (every other day or so, though everyone tries hard to convince me that the summer was beautiful until i arrived) i feel like going out would shrivel me up, and i wouldn't even consider biking through that sprinkling deluge. the brave and hardy pioneer of old is gone--

Where now the bike and rider? Where is the horn that was blowing?
Where is the helmet and raincoat, and the tail light glowing?

--to paraphrase Tolkien.

you'd think a person would get used to changing, or at least get resigned to it. but i've been changing for twenty-one years, and other people for a lot longer than that, and neither phenomenon seems remotely natural to me. and the prospect that the next year, the next two years, the next three years at the very least, will be chock-full with the worst kinds of changes--homes and vocations and relationships--well, i can't say i like it. not one bit.

i think i'd give up and just move back to ... to somewhere, and work in the children's library forever and live in my basement and fend off would-be boarders with a lego arsenal, except

except for the thing that i can't express without falling back on quotations, but fortunately i have many to turn to--these thoughts are nothing beyond what is common to my age and station. like natalie recently spake, "uncertainties behind, uncertainties before...and what does it all come down to? holy." or tina: "i know i'm confused...but at the end of the day i can rest assured..." or the writer of hebrews: "by faith ... abraham obeyed and went, even though he did not know where he was going." a friend asked me yesterday if i was worried about the future. she called my answer a cop-out, but it's the only answer i've got. yes i'm scared, but i know him who holds the stars. in the words of the old hymn:

"Let not your heart be troubled,"
His tender word I hear,
And resting on His goodness
I lose my doubts and fears.
Though by the path He leadeth
But one step I may see,
His eye is on the sparrow
And I know He watches me.

this seems like a fitting inauguration to the upcoming year.

so much for brief.

Woohoohoo!

2004-09-22T19:28:00.000-04:00

One of my longtime dreams has today been realized: Today I sang in harmony with myself. Four parts. Barbershop. My brother downloaded a trial version of Adobe Audition (a pretty neat piece of software), and he's got all sorts of random sound equipment he's collected over the years, so I decided that The Time Had Come.

Ladies and gentlemen, I present to you Jeff Russell, Jeff Russell, Jeff Russell, and Jeff Russell, singing an arrangement by Jeff Russell. Jeff Russell directed, and the recording engineer is Jeff Russell. Special thanks to Brian Russell.

Kinda spooky, no?

For those interested, this eight track (the four parts are all doubled), one minute song took something like forty minutes of recording time, and with a total novice in the driver's seat, around two and a half hours of mixing. Besides some basic balancing, I filtered noise, added reverb, and did some pitch correction (pitch correction is fun!). The quality's not exactly professional (and it's in mono), but speaking as a wet-nosed newbie with no equipment outside of a PC, one mic, one amp, and some free software, this really ain't so hard as I thought--Testimony, consider the Knoll again.

Status Report

2004-09-27T16:05:00.000-04:00

Alive. At Oxford. Exhausted. More later.

Exploring

2004-09-28T12:54:00.000-04:00

'I should see the garden far better,' said Alice to herself, 'if I could get to the top of that hill: and here's a path that leads straight to it -- at least, no, it doesn't do that -- ' (after going a few yards along the path, and turning several sharp corners), 'but I suppose it will at last. But how curiously it twists! It's more like a corkscrew than a path! Well, this turn goes to the hill, I suppose -- no, it doesn't! This goes straight back to the house! Well then, I'll try it the other way.'
--Lewis Carroll, Through the Looking Glass

The reports of the Stanford House have not been exaggerated. It's an old brick building--actually, three houses built together with connecting doors--with a red front door facing right on High Street. Inside, it feels coiled around on itself, up and down and around in terrible snarls of stairway. Clearly this place was built from end to end and back again over a couple of centuries without the planning foresight of an earthworm. A room would be finished, and the next tenant would say, "By jove, I've always wanted to have a kitchen in that corner. A pity the bedroom's in the way." And the foreman would reply, "Not to worry, sir, we'll just bung a stairway in around back. "That's jolly, but I'd really like it to be midway between the levels of the two floors." "On the nose, old chap; my thoughts precisely. If we come at it from beneath, I think we can wrap it around the alcove while hardly cutting into the library's ceiling at all." "Right-ho, my good man. Capital, what."

They built rooms around, on top of, and through each other every which way and tied the whole package together with snaky little halls and stairways. If you walk from one end of the so-called "first floor" to the other, you traverse about a dozen undulating staircases. I've been lost twice, the first time when Dan the junior dean was showing me to my room. The clearance is low everywhere; I've knocked my head four times so far, and instated a universal maxim: Never back through a doorway.

Oxford is the same thing on a grander scale. Since my circadian rhythm is still in cut time (more like 11/16, really), I woke up at about half past four this morning. After unsucessfully dozing for a while, I left the house at sunrise to go exploring. The streets are built on the same principle as the Stanford House's corridors, but with a bit more versatility in the width department and not quite so many staircases. You never know whether a road, lined with stone walls, or shopfronts, or gothic (pardon my architectural ignorance) churches, colleges, museums, and libraries, will suddenly twist into a car park or a blind alley, or open into a thoroughfare, or be blocked by an iron gate, or drop off into the Cherwell. I wandered down Merton Street, then cut north through a crack of an alley and crossed High Street into Radcliffe Square. I gawked at the Radcliffe Camera, a great circular domed thing, and rambled northward and eastward through the streets past all sorts of wonderful buildings I don't know the names of, until I found myself smack against the Cherwell. After poking around a bit I found a footbridge, and crossed over into some great meadows that extend I don't know how far. So I walked along overgrown pathways around these meadows, on the banks of the Cherwell where ducks and swans and little black and white ducklike birds that honk to each other like old bicycle brakes [J.R.--the tour guide this afternoon told me they were coots].

The parks and meadows stretch much farther than I guessed when I first saw them. When I started my walk northward I saw a biggish lawn out to my right, and thought it would be nice to walk around it and head back. Some time later after having followed roads that more or less paralleled the edge was when I crossed the Cherwell, only to find the bit of green extending in every direction--I wandered around "that bit of green" for more than an hour, i'd guess, and never spied the east end of it. By this point I had set the Magdalen bridge back to the west side of the Cherwell as my eventual destination, but it turned out to be more difficult to attain than I'd expected, between paths and gates and trees and lots of bits of water with sporadic footbridges twisted up together. At one point I thought for sure I'd reached it, and suddenly found myself with fifteen feet of water separating me from the arch of the bridge as the path bent back like a horseshoe. I followed this new tributary looking for a bridge; at last I found one, only to confront a notice:

Magdalen Fellows' Garden
Visitors are welcome to the Fellows' Garden, but they are advised that there is no way out at the other end. Please do not pick the flowers.

I did eventually find my way out, not by way of the Magdalen bridge, but a footbridge a bit upstream, through the college itself. The journey involved climbing around an excitingly closed gate in the middle of a bridge, and returning to the street sheepishly stepping past a sign reading, "Closed to visitors until 12pm". It seems that somewhere in my ramble I inadvertently got behind the "stay out"s, which added immeasurably to both the beauty and the excitement.

Among the parks I also saw the Magdalen deer park, and met a cheerful man who was picking up conkers from the ground--according to the internet, the american term is "horse chestnuts". "I love conkers," he said, tossing them across the fence to the deer (blithely ignoring the "Do not feed the deer"). "The deer love 'em. Those deer'll eat about anything that doesn't eat them first." It wouldn't have been anything to write home about, except that he was so friendly and his accent so charming (so be sure to read his lines with a charming accent). I'm a sucker for a good accent. Wonderful country, this.

[Note on the parks: evidently their original reason was that the rivers' seasonal flooding made the land not much good for building on. But even with today's tremendous property values, Oxford has kept a high value on preserving these acres of beautiful meadows, lawns, woods, and gardens in the midst of the city. Some of them are still used as pastureland. So I've got loads of trail and green space within a couple minutes' walk to the north, south, and east of here, even being in the heart of urban Oxford.]

Forthcoming

2004-10-06T02:44:00.000-04:00

Spent four days in Oxford. Then spent four days in Ireland. Then spent one day trying to catch up with emails and trying to get a blog post written. Failed on both counts. Sorry. There, that's another Blogging Principle violated. Going strong here. You will hear about Ireland shortly. But not briefly. Cheerio.

Ireland

2004-10-06T16:48:00.000-04:00

Getting this much anticipated post out has been a trick. Its posted date is a bit of wishful thinking, really.

The difficulty is that I've had quite an eventful week, eventful enough that none of you really want to sit through all the events. New things are like that, and I've had two new countries, fifty new people, and an entirely new sort of living to adjust to this week. On the other hand, within a couple weeks all the novelties will be exhausted, and I'll have nothing to write about except my insights into the Cartesian Circle. So I think the best policy is to pace myself, sating your appetite for my life in tiny bits.

Ireland is not a tiny bit, though. Ireland is a great emerald island an hour's flight to my west covered in an irregular patchwork of fields and pastures. It's a island that has been violently divided, that never experienced Britain's industrial revolution, and until recently was one of the poorest in the world. But you wouldn't guess that, at least not at first, stepping into Dublin, a bustling city of a million people on the Liffey River. The city center swarms with youth, bars and clubs and theatres and ethnic restaurants and fashionable shopping, with optimism and left-leaning social policies and lively nightlife and high art and culture and literary tradition. We stayed in an upscale hotel across from Trinity College--J.D. and I in a great big room on the top floor--within a short walk of everything.

And everything was about what Stephanie, our fearless coordinator, had in store for us. Pummeled from every side by a battery of walking tours dull and grand, we visited old paintings and old books and old houses and old churches and old castles. Ireland is an old place: we saw, for instance, the Book of Kells, a 9th (or was it 8th?) century illuminated manuscript, and we toured Dublin Castle, originally built by Norman occupiers in the 12th century, but at whose foundations has been discovered a Viking wall from much earlier. The castle, which has been used by every government since the Norman invasion, is like a physical timeline of Ireland: Norman battlements built on Viking walls, with a Georgian entryway leading up to a Victorian hall displaying portraits of the succession of viceroys, and a great state chamber where the Irish president is now inaugurated, displaying the flags of the orders of the Irish knights who once swore allegiance to Britain, the flag of the Republic of Ireland, and the flag of the European Union.

And the whole thing stands as a symbol of the main theme of Ireland, that runs through every monument, street name, and church. The deep-running pain of memory, of tension, of ambivalence. Statues of the martyrs of the 1916 uprising against England--gun smugglers and incendiaries executed for treason. And then also, less celebrated, of the English lord who brought Dublin its water supply system. Great breathtaking cathedrals like Christchurch, built as monuments to the authority of the Church of England and the Protestant religion, or like St. Audeon's, as security for the Norman occupation--political weapons. There are weapons everywhere--every beauty is broken.

We saw in Dublin Castle the layers of conquest built up on one another: all our cities are built and rebuilt on upward climbing layers of rubble. It's heartbreaking and distressing to think about how our cultures are built in every aspect on history's rubbish heap. It would be enough for despair, but for the promise--

And I will abolish the bow, the sword and war from the land,
And will make them lie down in safety...
Yes, I will betroth you to Me in righteousness and in justice,
In lovingkindness and in compassion,
And I will betroth you to Me in faithfulness.
Then you will know the LORD.

That's kind of trite-sounding just whipping it out there like that, and the thought process is much longer than that, but this is getting too heavy already.

So instead, there's Kildare. On Sunday morning everyone was to meet down in the hotel lobby in order to board a bus for the day's activities: first a tour of Russbourough house, then a lunch stop in the townlet of Kildare, and then a jaunt through hill and dale to a secluded and ancient monastic site called Glendalough. This was all planned out in a fair bit of detail on our itinerary, beginning at the top with our departure at ten o'clock sharp. Very sharp. So sharp, in fact, that it sliced a few of us clean off, leaving us standing kind of disbelievingly in said lobby at 10:01. The five of us--Steph, Casey, Paula (that is, Christina), Sonia, and I--held a council of strategy.

The resulting strategem was as follows: a strike on the Dublin central bus station, followed by a maneuver by coach to Kildare, ETA 1330, which, being a small town, would afford ready opportunity to join forces with the advance party, scout the town, board the originally missed coach en masse at 1400 to continue our reconnaissance to Glendalough, completing the tour by the originally scheduled 1730. With precise execution, there was no conceivably difficulty.

So we five boarded a bus for Kildare and rode through strip-malled suburb, O'Reilly's-bar-and-peaked-roof-cottage-filled town, and open tree-bordered pasture country. We arrived at Kildare's triangular square (that's what the guidebook called it) at about 1340, and immediately fanned out across the four blocks of central Kildare. And continued to fan until a bit past 1400, by which point it became clear that, wherever the group might be eating lunch, it was almost definitely not Kildare.

So we had lunch ourselves, at a pub called Silken Thomas. A pub in the great pub tradition, with dimmish lighting and some unidentifiable sport on a big screen and locals hobnobbing loudly at the bar, and I had a steak and vegetable pie (think stew in a crust) with chips and veggies, since the atmosphere fit so well.

After lunch Steph and Sonia decided to head back directly, catching the next bus for Dublin. But Casey and Paula and I decided that Kildare wasn't such a bad place, and so we went Exploring. It was a very short walk out of the town center and into the great green countryside, on a long lane sporting authentic Irishmen walking small terriers, occasional gusty rain, and liberally sprinkled horse and sheep residue. It was wonderful and refreshing. We walked to the Irish National Stud (look no further), provider to the race industry (quite popular--every small town has its operating bookmaker) of breeding horses, though we didn't tour there. We wandered through a small cemetery--graves adorned with flowers, incense, and statues of the Virgin--and followed a short path to peaceful St. Brigid's Well, where the trees waved colorfully with ribbons and bells tied for blessings. We also wandered a bit more through the town proper: a harsh composite of sleepy (it being Sunday) and idyllic country town unknown to time, along with a drab drear (as the gray rain swelled) and disrepair that says, I've seen better days and don't know what to do with these. As we walked down a row of quiet old-world cottages like the one pictured above, we passed a handful of kids smoking in the street, and breaking their windows one by one with a tire iron. I don't know, though; maybe Kildare hasn't seen better days. Maybe it's still waiting for them.

Dang it, I've gone melancholy again. So, after our pleasant explorations our expedition party boarded another bus for Dublin, this time a wonderful double-decker bus, and we took the front row of seats in the top, looking out on the entire course of fields and highways and hamlets, until the rain came in sheets and the windows steamed up and Paula and Casey fell asleep and Ireland faded behind the mist and falling darkness. Mmmm.

Turns out, by the way, that the main body bypassed Kildare altogether in their rush, as they fell further and further behind schedule, and hit Glendalough (the main attraction, in my view) only very briefly. So our independent expedition was a winner all around.

Saw lots of other things in Dublin and surrounds, but your patience is already exhausted I suspect. Stay tuned for accounts of classes, my wonderful college, cooking, singing, rowing, and libraries. Or at least some of those.

Notes of a Linguistic Character

2004-10-10T09:48:00.000-04:00

"happy-clappy": lively/charismatic/"low" church
"bellsy-schmellsy": liturgical/sacramental/"high" church

not sure if those are official english terms or coined on the spot (the spot being in this case the corpus christian union before-church breakfast this morning), but apt enough, and to my ear rather characteristically english.

some more commonplace vocabulary:

rubbish 1. n. trash, garbage. "the rubbish men went on strike." "there's a rubbish bin under the counter." 2. adj. of poor quality or bad taste. "that's rubbish music."
salad, n. vegetables of any kind in any context. "salad on your sandwich?"
first, n. 1. top marks at university. "do you think you'll get a first?" 2. a person who achieves top marks. "she was a first in maths at cambridge."
bloke, n. person, esp. male; guy. "some blokes have been working on the road all day."
footballer, n. one who plays soccer. (also cricketer, though not rugbyer)
swish, adj. up-to-date, spiffy, high-tech: "the screens in the Bod aren't so swish."

lots of rather subtle differences, too--you'll have noticed above that university is a mass noun (like "college" for americans, but i've only heard "college" as a count noun here). lots of vocabulary has no great change in meaning, but a change in commonness: "clever" supplants "smart", "brilliant" for "cool", etc.

further bulletins will be posted as noted.