Image explanation

The image I've added to the title bar is my backyard - literally. Well, that's a half-truth. First, the distant peak is Ben Lomond. That's the peak in the left-to-center part of the image. I can see that peak from my bedroom window. If you were to place my residence in the image, I would live between the peak in the foreground and the peak in the background.

Since I'm from the east coast where mountains are mostly inland and they're not as majestic as the ones in the West, I've always had a strange fascination with the Wasatch Front. When I first moved to Salt Lake, I would wake up, walk outside, and be amazed that the mountains were still there. If I move back to the east coast, it'll be a strange adjustment to not seeing snow-capped mountains all the time.

WMDs are so 2003; ELMDs are definitely 2009

We've all heard about W.M.D.s, but do you know that the Bush administration will soon be using a new acronym?

The new acronym the Bush administration will have the general public learn before 2009 is E.L.M.D. What's it stand for? Extraordinary Level of Mass Disruption.

According to a new presidential directive linked by dailykos.com, the president may continue his reign presidency if some event leads to "extraordinary levels of mass disruption."

You may ask: what is an extraordinary level of mass disruption? According to the directive, almost anything counts as an E.L.M.D. There could be a massive amount of cases of heartburn that causes a run on Tums. The Bush administration could argue that "that" is an E.L.M.D.

Where does this lead? It's simple. The Bush administration had to fudge a "contingency" plan to remain in power after the 2008 election. Using the directive, the Bush administration can strike down virtually any previous directive (if not Constitutional amendment) for one reason: he's the President.

Given the current political environment, we will surely see the Republican base stand behind Bush's new directive. This will go to show that even if the President creates a directive inconsistent with the Constitutional law, people will follow him blindly.

Paradise Lost and Envy

Anyone who's ever played golf with me knows how attached I am to my clubs. I've had my clubs since 1991. This is unprecedented among golfers. Players typically turn over 5 to 10 sets in that time. But I'm playing with the same clubs I played in high school and college.

I play them because I know how far I can hit each club within 5 yards and because I hit them straight, 90% to 95% of the time. My feeling has always been: why change clubs if I have such confidence in my irons.

I've been feeling a bit nostalgic since 2005. In 2005, I went to 2nd Swing, a now defunct used golf equipment store on State St. in Salt Lake City. Before I entered the store, I resolved that if I found an old TPA XXIV putter, I would buy it - no matter how expensive it was. I played the TPA XXIV putter for most of the 90s, and I racked up several tournament wins using it. I could sink putts from almost any distance through the worst Donald Ross undulations - I grew up at Ponkapoag #1, a Donald Ross design and municipal course in Canton, MA. Sure enough, 2nd Swing had one for $10. So, I bought it, and I began to play it again.

It felt great to have an old friend back in my bag.

The first few rounds were rough. I couldn't sink a 2- or 3-foot putt to save my life. I was frustrated! But I remembered that that was how things started when I bought my first TPA putter in 1989. So, I held onto it for the last two seasons.

This season my putting has been fairly decent. I'm averaging 16.75 putts per 9 holes. That's not too bad since I don't practice more than 1-hour per week. My success in putting, however, has made me want to purchase the set of clubs I had before my current set.

My current set consists of 2-SW Lynx Tour Design irons, the same type of irons Fred Couples used to win the '92 Masters and Ernie Else used to win the '94 U.S. Open. Before I played Lynx irons, I had a set of Taylor Made Tour Precision T-D irons. I've been searching for a set on eBay. Call me nostalgic or retro-golfer; whatever, I don't care. I just enjoy these clubs over the ultra-fat-ultra-huge irons many players prefer today.

(I'm hunting for a Tour Burner 7-degree Taylor Made driver with a Tour Silver stiff (or extra-stiff) flex shaft. If anyone's seen one, let me know. I'll pay big money for it!)

Two Quick Notes

(1) The Creation Museum opens Memorial Day in Cincinnati. Anyone interested in learning how to regress scientifically ought to attend the grand opening celebration. The museum reportedly has exhibits (animatronic for sure) depicting the co-existence of humans and dinosaurs, the age of the Earth is merely 6,000 years old, and the Earth is actually flat.

In association with the Creation Museum's opening, we should note that three of the Republican candidates for the Presidency deny - yes, deny, reject, "deep six" - evolution. The country could have a leader that rejects scientific consensus in favor of what's said in the pulpit. (Does this remind anyone of a period known as the "Dark Ages?")

(2) 30-something males - including myself - reportedly earn less than their fathers' generation did at the same age when incomes are adjusted for inflation. I don't find this surprising at all! Molly Selvin, of The Los Angeles Times, reports that John E. Morton, director of the Economic Mobility Project at the Pew Charitable Trusts, says that outsourcing and the demise of higher-paying manufacturing jobs have contributed to the lagging male incomes. These factors along with women entering the workforce might have exerted downward pressure.

Granted, these factors may have played a role in the declining income, but "corporate greed" more likely is the source of lower wages for young, ambitious 30-something workers. If corporations can hire young workers at a lower wage and if younger workers feel that they need to take a job that pays lower than their expectations to provide for their family or themselves, then they will do it. Corporate bosses know this, and they take advantage of it.

Ashton Square Rising

In today's Standard Examiner, Scott Schwebke reports a new development named "Ashton Square." Apparently, Ogden's Community and Economic Development Director Stuart Reid has created and will soon construct a new development in downtown Ogden. The development will be named after his grandson and known as "Ashton Square." The development will contain retail, entertainment, and residential space, and it will be located in the new redevelopment scheme known as "The Junction."

I'm not sure if Stuart has done his homework. Retail and entertainment space will be very enticing for local businesses if the lease agreements are reasonably priced. My guess is they won't be. I say this because he's expecting to sell residential units starting at $300K and penthouses in the Ashton for $1Million.

The median home price in Ogden is $127K, according to Money.com. The median income is $42K. On that kind of income, one cannot afford anything but a house at $500K. Living expenses excluded. So, if you want a fancy house and nothing else, then living in the Ashton is affordable.

Two things favor Stuart's plan. First, the median age of Ogden residents is 28.1 years. This is good because young residents will tend to stay in the area if the economy remains in good shape. This is the second point. The economy is in very good shape. Job growth is good, and income taxes are very low for one of the top places to live in the country.

Time will be tell whether Ashton Square succeeds or flops. With at least 24 people interested in purchasing residential units, it seems that Ashton Square might succeed.

Hempel on Experimental Philosophy

Have others thought about using social scientific methods in philosophy? This question has been bugging me for a while. Some Norweigan philosophers have used empirical assessments in philosophical research, e.g., Arne Naess. The historical record is - for the most part - untouched. So, why not explore it? That's exactly what I've set out to do.

I'd like to comment on a comment of Naess's work. Naess worked up some empirical assessments for the use of synonymy in ordinary language. He endeavored to develop a theory of meaning and meaning relationships in actual usage. The title of his preliminary work was Toward a Theory of Interpretation and Preciseness, which was published in Theoria in 1949. Hempel provided a commentary on the preliminary work in the Journal of Symbolic Logic 15.2: 154 (1950).

Hempel raises three points with respect to Naess's empirical work in interpretation and preciseness. (I haven't had a chance to read Naess's book of the same title released after Hempel's comments were published in J. Symbolic Logic, but it'd be interesting to discover whether Naess took Hempel's comments seriously.) First, Hempel argues that since it is hard to formulate empirical questions without becoming overly abstract or vague, he thought it would be unlikely that a "reasonably precise and well-confirmed general theory" would be attained. Second, a virtue of Naess's project is that synonymy is relativized to persons and kinds of situations, but this also translates into trouble for Naess since there is no "clear indication of what the range of permissible values for the situation variables" will be. Finally, Hempel says that Naess's procedure is questionable given that he has constructed an elaborately defined system of concepts first and then to look at the theoretical connections later.

In one form or another, these same objections have been raised against experimental philosophy recently. So, it seems fruitful for current experimentalists to have an idea of the exchange between Naess and Hempel (and others).

Toulmin on Naess's Expressions of Truth

Stephen Toulmin writes of Arne Naess's empirical work on expressions of "true," etc (Arne Naess. 1953. An Empirical Study of the Expressions "True," "Perfectly Certain," and "Extremely Probable." Oslo: Kommisjon Hos Jacob Dybwad, pp. 41):

One must hope that, before Naess gets too immersed in the practical work of framing and using more and more similar questionnaires, he will sit down and tell us what exactly they are designed to prove. Until this is done, it will be easy for philosophers to ignore his work.

Like experimental philosophers today, both philosophers and social scientists are concerned with Naess's empirical work. On the one hand, his article is written to expose the importance of ordinary intuitions. This leaves the philosophers suspicious. On the other hand, he doesn't want to draw too many conclusions from the data he collected because psychologists would be suspicious.

Toulmin continues:

It would be a pity if Naess's work were to be entirely ignored, for, reading through the paper, one certainly feels that the reactions of his answerers prove something about the nature of our concepts.

Toulmin complains that Naess's work lacks a clear thesis, though he finds Naess's contribution important. It shows that people's intuitions can be harnessed by empirical means.

Addendum: My apologies to everyone, especially Richhard! I wrote this post in haste on Friday evening before going to a party. My mind must have been on the party, not on writing the post. I've added links or citations for Naess's and Toulmin's work. (Link to jstor is hand-recorded, so here's the citation for Toulmin's review: (Jan., 1956.) Philosophical Review 65(1): 116-118.)

Why should we care about the problem of evil?

I don't know why I have been thinking about problems in the philosophy of religion, but I have been. Some of my journal entries have been about immortality and the problem of personal identity. Future Blog Post Spoiler: I don't think there's a serious problem of personal identity at all if our resurrected selves are completely distinct from our physical selves; we don't have to be the same people we are now - both physically and psychologically speaking - to live an everlasting life. But that's for another post.

Something I noticed when I taught the philosophy of western religion course and a component of my introduction to philosophy course this semester is that many students intuitively believe the problem of evil is a real problem. (When I talk about the problem of evil in this post, I mean the "logical" problem of evil.) They immediately see the inconsistency in the existence of an omniscient, omnipotent, omni-benevolent and the existence of evil. The inconsistency is a problem for them; but why is it a problem for them? Is the inconsistency enough to drive us to worry about the problem of evil? In other words, is the inconsistency an appropriate motivator for exploring the problem of evil?

In any logic class, the instructor will say that inconsistencies, particularly contradictions, are bad because anything follows from a contradiction. We all want our points to be more salient than that. So, we avoid contradictions.

People are notoriously bad at doing logic, which is shown by Wason's selection task. If people are bad at logic and if people don't like to do things they're bad at, then people will conclude that they won't like a formal logic problem. This is not the case, according to my straw poll. Despite the fact that people are bad at logic and that people don't like to do things they're bad at, people like the logical problem of evil and they see what the problem is.

People who like activities they're bad at are unreasonable. If a person is bad at something, then engaging in that activity is harmful. They're suffering through it. No one should want to hurt themselves. People who purposefully hurt themselves are unreasonable.

I'm probably way off here, but I'm not sure there's any good motivational story for discussing the problem of evil.

Is the LDS Church Christian?

I've heard a lot of hype lately about the Mormon Church. Some argue that "Mormons" (a.k.a., and more appropriately I might add, the LDS Church) aren't Christians. The hype probably is due in part to Mitt Romney's bid for the White House. Much of the discussion of Romney's Mormonism is reminscient of Kennedy's Catholicism playing a factor in decision-making if (or when) he reaches the White House.

Given that I'm a gentile living among the Latter-Day faithful, I couldn't pass up a chance to discuss this question. Let me get a few things straight: I'm not a Mormon, I have no ties to the LDS Church, and I'm not going to convert anytime soon. Second, I don't think any of the criticisms of the LDS faith are any good. Finally, I believe that none of the arguments supporting the view that the LDS Church is Christian are any good. Both sides of the debate have a long way to go!

One of the more controversial beliefs of the LDS Church is that men become Gods after they die. Very few of the Christian denominations believe that eternal salvation involves men becoming Gods. For this reason, they've dismissed the LDS Church as a Christian denomination on doctrinal grounds.

To my understanding, deification is not an integral part of LDS theology. The Book of Mormon or the other scriptures of the restoration do not mention deification. It was Lorenzo Snow, a president of the LDS Church, that declared, "As man now is, God once was; as God now is, man may be." So, the Church's fifth president - and prophet - asserted that men will become Gods.

Some LDS scholars defend this principle by arguing that any loving father would want his children to have what he has. So, by analogy, God, the father, wants for his children to be endowed with the same powers and privileges he has. The argument comes with a restriction; God is and will always be the only object of his children's worship.

For the most part, the argument appears to be a good one. But it suffers from two major defects. First, there may be a strange Oedipal complex that results if we think that a father wants his children to have all of what he has. Clearly, there might be some things that the father doesn't want his children to have. So, by analogy, God may not want his children to have the powers and privileges he has. Thus, man may not become what God is.

Second, the analogy compares the natural world with a supernatural world. If the natural world and supernatural world differ in important ways, then the analogy breaks down. Thus, man may not become what God is.

Be that as it may, I think there is good reason to think that deification should be an acceptable Christian theological doctrine. For one, eternal salvation has been thought to be about sharing in the vision of God's grace. If we share in God's vision and if this is an acceptable Christian doctrine, then we may become a part of God. Becoming a part of God is to be as God is. So, the doctrine of deification may not be as controversial as some may think it is; and, we may say that the LDS Church is Christian on this doctrinal ground.

The piano sounds like a philosophers carnival

The latest philosophers carnival has been posted at nichomachus.net. The latest carnival has a theme. Its them is "practical philosophy." Access it by clicking here.

OPC2 is on(line)

The second annual online philosophy conference is now on! Check it out by clicking here. Thanks to Thomas Nadelhoffer and Eddy Nahmias for another fine program!

When opportunity knocks...

Gas prices have soared above the $3.00 mark in Ogden. Gas stations are selling 85 octane - the lowest possible grade at higher altitudes - for an average cost of $3.15 to $3.21. (Readers at lower altitudes should note that the cheapest grade octane available at your stations is probably 86 or 87 octane.) So, when Ogden consumers find cheap gasoline prices, they're going to call their friends and their friends are going to call their friends, etc.

That's exactly what happened Saturday! At approximately 1pm, a computer glitch at a local Ogden gas station caused the pump for premium gasoline to drop from $3.39 9/10 per gallon to $.33 9/10 per gallon. That's real cheap gasoline!

When an unsuspecting Ogdenite filled up his Dodge Ram truck for little more than $20.00, he praised God and called his friends. His friends called their friends. Soon, the station had a long line of cars stretching as far as the eye could see. Watching the event one would be reminded of the oil crisis in the 70s.

A lot people got away with a lot of gas for a tenth of the cost per gallon. According to reporter Molly Bennett of Ogden's Standard Examiner, a Sinclair employee was noted as saying, "No one said a word [about the cost of the gasoline]. People are so dishonest." I didn't partake of the gas fest (primarily because I had filled up Friday for a whopping $30.00, which is a huge amount since I drive a Saturn SL-series automobile). But I can only say to the Sinclair employee, "it takes one to know one."

UPDATE: In today's (5/15/07) Standard Examiner, Wasatch Rambler writer Charles Trentelman suggests that the above is a classic example of stealing gas. Perhaps it is, if we widen the definition of "stealing." But I like to think that we're a capitalistic society.

I think Trentelman makes a harsh accusation because businesses ought to be responsible for selling their products at the marked price. When I sign up for a cell phone or the like, a customer service representative tells me that'll be $59.95/mo. The paperwork says that the company may charge me "fees" for services rendered. When I get my monthly bill and I have to pay $75.00, I don't think they're stealing from me; that'd be awfully arrogant! It is my responsibility to read through the material carefully for all of the fees. So, just as its my fault in the cell phone case, it's the businesses responsibility - the fault of the station attendant - for not changing the cost of the gasoline, shutting down the pump(s), etc.

Is it "troops" or "soldiers"?

I may have heard something about the distinction between "troops" and "soldiers" on NPR a few weeks ago, but the media's ignorance of the distinction didn't bother me until I read a few stories in the Standard Examiner and on msn.com today.

Oftentimes soldiers are referred to as "troops." But is that the appropriate use of the term? What are the rules for using the term "troops"? Something doesn't seem correct about the use of that term.

"Troop" is defined in the Oxford English dictionary (noun) as "a body of soldiers." Notice that there is no 's' added to the end of the word for it to include more than one soldier. So, a platoon, or approximately 40 soldiers, is a "troop." Similarly, a squad, approximately 12 people, is a "troop." No additional 's' is needed for it to refer to more than one soldier.

The media ignore the fact that one can refer to many soldiers with the word "troop". They use the word "troops." That may seem to be a bit redundant. If the word "troop" denotes a number of soldiers, then that suggests that "troops" refers to a number of many soldiers. That's not how the media use it. For example, on msn.com, a caption of a photo reads, "Iraqi soldiers and U.S. troops conduct a joint search mission..." There are only 6 people in the photo, so my first theory of media usage is out the window.

What else could the media be denoting by the term? Well, here's a theory - it's one that would undermine the belief that the media are liberally biased. They could be referring to the fact that U.S. military personnel are tougher than other people, such as "Iraqi soldiers." Sometimes the term "troop" or "trooper" is used with reference to a person's tough disposition. For instance, saying that you're a trooper means that you are resilient and strong. By implication, this means that those who are referred to as mere "soldiers" aren't as tough as their "trooper" counterparts.

Whatever the use of the term, we have to get clear on what we mean when we use it. I'd hate to "support the troops" but not "support the Iraqi soldiers." After all, we're there to "liberate" them from an "oppressive" regime.

TGIF

Step 24 is a bit of an impediment, but the rest is gravy.

Ticket to Ride

A Brood Comb has two recent posts I found very amusing. One is the comic book series entitled Action Philosophers! They are a must read. I found the Mill comic most enjoyable.

The second I used to generate the ticket stub (see below) for all incoming introductory philosophy students. Tanasije created a ticket for the upcoming online philosophy conference.