Dental war history

I went to see my dentist today, and fittingly read a story about teeth in J. Pollard's "Charge! The interesting bits of military history". Pollard tells in section "Waterloo smile"[p. 147] that during the 18th century dental surgery had developed .. to a level where false teeth carved of ivory could be fitted into jaws of people who had lost some of their original teeth.

However, unlike natural teeth these false teeth did not have an enamel casing and would quickly deteriorate. For people of means, the obvious solution was to wear .. someone else's teeth. I'm sure I do not need to explain why there was a good supply of these after the battle of Waterloo.

Technology needed for the enamel casing was learned a bit later, and "natural teeth" went out of fashion. It is interesting to note that Europeans learned the secrets of manufacturing porcelain ("china") in the early 18th century, though.

Maybe there is nothing, part II

My other obsession has been "concept analysis", "conceptual modelling" or whatever you'd like to call it. As a hobby I have been reading various accounts about concepts, including Quine's From a Logical Point of View (LPV).

Quine's position is that of a moderate nominalist's, and some people have claimed that despite his skilled analysis of opposing views, he fails to give a credible account of what concepts really are. Here, I'd like to propose something, not entirely adopted from Quine but probably quite close. But we need to start from a bit further.

1. Quine says "universals do not exists", LPV p. 10: One may admit that there are red houses, roses and sunsets, but deny [..] that they have anything in common. The words 'houses', 'roses' and 'sunsets' are true of sundry individual entities which are houses and roses and sunsets [..] but there is not, in addition, any entity whatever, which is named by the word [..] 'househood', 'rosehood', 'sunsethood'.

and a bit later p 12: "The explanatory value of special an irreducible intermediary entities called 'meanings' is surely illusory.

2. In his popular article "The World of Universals" (in collection Problems of Philosophy, PP), Russell stated that it is exactly this "sameness" of individual houses that would be called a universal. Here, he uses 'whiteness' as an example, PP p. 95.

Since there are many white things, the resemblance must hold between many pairs of particular white things; and this is the characteristic of a universal. It will be useless to say that there is a different resemblance for each pair, for then we shall have to say that these resemblances resemble each other, and thus at last we shall be forced to admit resemblance as a universal.

3. So, are we really forced to admit universals on the basis that we observe similarity in individuals? The title of this entry was "Maybe there is nothing", so let's simply say NO. Why should we assume that there is anything conceptual in the way we as humans recognize things? A computer can be programmed to classify images based on almost any criteria, or by a random-but-reproducible criteria. Why would we find anything conceptual in that?

Does this mean that concepts as such do not exists? Surely not, but hopefully more about that once I manage to find a new copy of "Situations and attitudes" by Barwise and Perry. I managed to misplace my copy somewhere in Switzerland, Finland or Japan..

Maybe there is nothing, part I

Michel Foucault's notion of discourse is one of my continuous obsessions. Thus, I'm just reading Paul Veyne's informative book "Foucault -- Sa pense'e, sa personne" (Albin Michel, 2008).

Veyne wants to discredit two views of discourse that he finds incorrect: discourse as an ideology and discourse as an infrastructure. To Veyne (and apparently Foucault), discourse is not an imposed ideology, nor forces of productions, but a "pair of glasses through which people of all ages observe and react" (p. 49).

Some authors have mentioned that "discourse" is a difficult term to define. Foucault's examples of "parts of a discourse" are adminstrative procedures or legal practices. He is of course famous for his interest in the "ruptures" of discourse -- points in history where our way of seeing and doing things radically changes. So, in a way (my intepretation) discourse could be informally described as Zeitgeist or common sense reasoning behind everyday practices.

However, let's try a completely different angle and assume that Foucault was simply exaggerating. Suppose there is nothing behind the administrative procedures and legal practices of any era -- they are just adaptations of the era's scientific, technical, political and practical knowledge into administration and law. Suppose moreover that there are no real ruptures in what we find in a sequence of archived documents -- there is only gradual change.

Any support for this argument? No, but I do not have to. It's simply an application of Occam's razor ("entities must not be multiplied beyond necessity"), and maybe discourse is an unnecessary entity. And just to illustrate the point by a current development in law: still in the 1980's, in Finnish law, "provoking someone to an act of homosexuality" was punishable by a fine. Soon (and that's about 25 years after this clause was removed from the codex) same-sex marriages will be legal in Finland. Still, why would we call this a rupture in the legal discourse? Most of the laws that were in effect in the 1980's still stand.

Then, how about Foucault's idea of the autonomy of discourse, meaning that for a researcher, there is no need to look into anything behind it (the forces of production, for example)? Foucault's idea is apparently that if there was something like this, it would be already a part of the discourse. I would think that an empiricist would not like this idea -- most people probably think that there are some real phenomena behind statistics, for instance. But maybe even that would be a part of discourse, since Foucault was a strong believer in "no observation without a theory". Consequently? Maybe it is better to see the "autonomous discourse" idea simply as a research programme, not as a profound theory. I can never be proven or disproven, anyway.

Veyne emphasizes, too, that Foucault was a nominalist. And that brings us to another subject .. to be continued..

French philosophy, long time ago, and even longer

In the first entry of this blog I mentioned R.A. Segal's "Myth -- a very short introduction". Among the best known authors of the topic is of course Roland Barthes whose book Mythologies (1957) I came across.

Mythologies is, naturally, an epitome in French popular philosophy. Writing wittily and understandably about topical and surprising subjects like cooking magazines, wine, wrestling and Citroen DS, Barthes reveals the layer of conventions and semiotic fixations behind those everyday items.

Roll forward to 1989. F. Guattari writes his short pamphlet about the new role of ecology in contemporary thinking. I've read it twice now and I'll let you know when I find out what the idea was.

The Internet Revolution 10 years after

Just by accident I came across Michael Lewis' book Next, written after the Internet boom of the late 1990's. Lewis' argument was that Internet brings down the establishments simply because "the Emperor has no clothes": there is nothing inherently different in things done by a highly paid member of the establishment in a fancy office, compared with things done by a high school student through an internet connection. Moreover, old, centralised business models and computing models will be doomed as well.

Ok, it's 10 years later. People do get legal services and download music (even legally) through Internet. There are peer-to-peer services. There's Google. But mainly internet services seem to be provided by companies that were there before the age of Internet.

Maybe it's because of this sequence by Andy Kessler in the same book, as follows:

1. Rules are established to create order and maintain profits for incumbents.
2. Cheaper technology suddenly allows for bypassing of the rules.
3. Incumbents are fat and dumb and happy with current monopolistic profits and their general situation, so they bad-mouth any new stuff which threatens their incumbency or profits, or both.
4. Fringe players emerge to use ever cheaper technology to simply ignore the rules.
5. Fringe companies attract venture capital since there are profits to be made underselling the incumbents.
6. Incumbents are in denial until their profits are really threatened and/or market share begins to erode.
7. Chaos ensues; fringe players are threatened w lawsuits, government regulations, public shaming, etc.
8. Growth at the fringe accelerates, as it is the right way to do business using new technology.
9. Incumbents co-opt the fringe, or fringe players become the new incumbents and seek to establish new rules.
10. Go to 1.