by Akeel Bilgrami

Realism, it is said by philosophers, is the view that truth and reality is objective, i.e., independent of our mentality. But, of course, such a brief statement leaves things very intuitive and underdescribed. How should we understand it in detail?

The form of realism that I find most plausible is best elaborated in terms that are a combination of Kant's idea of ‘transcendental idealism' (without any commitment to the ‘ding an sich') and ‘pragmatism' of a rather specific kind that can be found in Charles Sanders Pierce's path-breaking paper, ‘The Fixation of Belief' and developed within a complex account of belief revision by Isaac Levi.

In being Kantian, it is a realism that renounces what Hilary Putnam has called ‘metaphysical realism' or what perhaps in an earlier time might have been called ‘transcendental realism'. And in being pragmatist, it renounces, a fallibilist, Cartesian epistemology.

Let me speak to its pragmatist side first.

Pragmatism, at its most general, says: Something that makes no difference to practice makes no difference to Philosophy. What is yielded when we apply this dictum more specifically to epistemological matters in Philosophy? It yields the following thought. A pragmatist epistemology claims that something that makes no difference to the cognitive practice of inquiry makes no difference to epistemology. And so it finds that a fallibilist form of doubt that is found in Cartesian skepticism makes no difference to inquiry and therefore is not a credible epistemology.

Thus let us take Cartesian skepticism about the external world. It claims both that all our beliefs about the external world could be false and that of any particular such belief, we could never be certain of its truth. These are two distinct claims since the latter does not entail the former. It is the latter claim that pragmatism opposes. The basis of its opposition is that if we can never know of any given belief about the world that it is true, then truth cannot be a goal of inquiry. It makes no good sense to say that truth is a goal of inquiry even though we are never sure in any given case that we have achieved the goal. That would mean inquiry would be like sending a message in a bottle out to sea. What kind of epistemological enterprise is that? We would never have any control over its success, and all success would appear to be a sort of bonus or fluke.

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“Shot by an unknown photographer in the northern coastal city of Mersa Matruh, west of Cairo, the photo below was posted to Twitter by Yahya Diwer, a freelance photojournalist from Alexandria.

As violence rages across Egypt, this perfectly captures the tension between daily life and the chaos engulfing the nation.”

From Huffington Post.

Adam Shatz in the London Review of Books:

So this is how it ends: with the army killing more than 600 protesters, and injuring thousands of others, in the name of restoring order and defeating ‘terrorism’. The victims are Muslim Brothers and other supporters of the deposed president Mohammed Morsi, but the ultimate target of the massacres of 14 August is civilian rule. Cairo, the capital of revolutionary hope two years ago, is now its burial ground.

To each setback they have undergone since the overthrow of Mubarak, Egypt’s revolutionary forces have responded with the reassuring mantra: ‘revolution is a process.’ But so is counter-revolution, which seems to have prevailed for the foreseeable future. It won not only because the army and the feloul (remnants of the old regime) had superior resources at their disposal, but because they had a unified sense of their aims, something the leaderless revolutionaries conspicuously lacked. The revolution has been a ‘process’ in the manner of a 1960s happening, a meeting of different, often bickering forces that shared the stage only to go their own way after Mubarak’s overthrow. While accusing one another of betraying the revolution, both liberals and Islamists, at various intervals, tried to cut deals with the army, as if it might be a neutral force, as if the people and the army really were ‘one hand’, as people had once chanted in Tahrir Square. Neither had the ruthlessness, or the taste for blood, of Khomeini, who began to decapitate the Shah’s army as soon as he seized power. While the old regime reassembled its forces, Egypt’s revolutionaries mistook their belief in the revolution for the existence of a revolution. By the time Abdel Fattah al-Sisi seized power on 3 July, the revolution existed mainly in their imagination.

More here.

Gary Marcus in The New Yorker:

Hector Levesque thinks his computer is stupid—and that yours is, too. Siri and Google’s voice searches may be able to understand canned sentences like “What movies are showing near me at seven o’clock?,” but what about questions—“Can an alligator run the hundred-metre hurdles?”—that nobody has heard before? Any ordinary adult can figure that one out. (No. Alligators can’t hurdle.) But if you type the question into Google, you get information about Florida Gators track and field. Other search engines, like Wolfram Alpha, can’t answer the question, either. Watson, the computer system that won “Jeopardy!,” likely wouldn’t do much better.

In a terrific paper just presented at the premier international conference on artificial intelligence, Levesque, a University of Toronto computer scientist who studies these questions, has taken just about everyone in the field of A.I. to task. He argues that his colleagues have forgotten about the “intelligence” part of artificial intelligence.

Levesque starts with a critique of Alan Turing’s famous “Turing test,” in which a human, through a question-and-answer session, tries to distinguish machines from people. You’d think that if a machine could pass the test, we could safely conclude that the machine was intelligent. But Levesque argues that the Turing test is almost meaningless, because it is far too easy to game.

More here.

Michael Marcusa in The Atlantic:

They were sitting where they always sit: at the far edge of the makeshift, roadside cafe on the outskirts of of Sidi Bouzid — the small, economically marginalized town in central Tunisia where in December 2010, a young street vendor lit himself on fire and changed the world. There were about 20 of them. Some wore long flowing robes and black skullcaps; some wore jeans, t-shirts, and Yankees hats; nearly all of them had thick beards. My friend had called in advance – they must have known I would be coming. As I took my seat in the circle, they all beamed at me. “Welcome, welcome! We are honored!” said one tall youth with glasses and a jovial smile. Another swiftly handed me the cup of ice cream he had ordered for himself, declaring that it was a gift.

“From now on, when you sit with us, you will be brother Michael!” added another. We were all in our 20s no longer boys, but still learning how to be men. They accepted me unconditionally. For the next two weeks, they welcomed me into their world. Nevertheless, we are different. I am an American. Their hero is Osama Bin Laden.

“The brothers,” as they like to call themselves, are zealous followers of the jihadist Salafist movement – an ultra-fundamentalist religio-political current that combines scriptural purism with a rhetorical embrace of Al-Qaeda's vision.

More here.

Adam Gopnik in The New Yorker:

This week, Eric Holder, the Attorney General, announced, essentially by executive decree, that the Obama Administration would no longer enforce the standing rules on mandatory-minimum sentencing for drug offenders—at least, not for otherwise unoffending individuals. This sounded big on its approach, then left a smaller wake on its departure. There seems to be pretty general pleasure at a decision that does something, however small, about the mad scandal of American incarceration, the almost unbelievable extent and scale of which I wrote about last year. No one with a working heart can fail to miss the injustice in, for example, the case of the college-bound kid who was carted off to prison for ten years, against all the wisdom of the presiding judge, crying for his mother, for simply having been found in a car with drugs inside. And such stories were commonplace. They had to be. As I wrote last year, there are more African-American men now incarcerated in America than were held in slavery in 1861, and more Americans under “judicial control” of one kind or another than Stalin held in his Gulag.

But even if this is the first decisive small stone pitched against a national shame, its specific effect on the imprisoned will still be minimal. Most prosecutions are not federal, no one now in prison will be released, and the careful hedge of politic exceptions—no mercy for drug gangs, dealers, etc.—is bound to create many complications. As so often, though, the critics, I suspect, both underestimate the difficulty of big change and the geometric, multiplier effect of small ones.

More here.

Amana Fontanella-Khan in Slate:

It’s beautiful in Sicily in the spring when
the lemon trees are in bloom

I’m writing because I attended
your concert, it was the sixteenth
of September. You played Prokofiev, and
it’s strange about music: you return
to places that don’t exist. Two questions
keep me busy. One has to do with
conditions and destiny. The other has to do with
Procris. That it occurred to her to run into the forest.
That she couldn’t trust her mate! I visited a
museum of Renaissance painting and then, everywhere,
in the streets, in subways, I saw: light, silky blue and that
special tenderness. In everyone! In the animals! I teach at a
high school here. It’s beautiful in Sicily in the spring when
the lemon trees are in bloom. Perhaps you prefer to travel
according to your own plans but I wanted to ask because music
restores us, and a cloud drifts in through the window into
my apartment as the clouds sweep by every
morning over the park where I walk.
.

by Tua Forsström
from Etter att ha tillbringat en natt bland hästar
publisher: Söderström Förlags, Helsinki, 1998
translation: 2009, Stina Katchadourian
.
Procris

John Bertram interview “graphic designer/creative director John Gall for the upcoming book that I co-edited with Yuri Leving entitled Lolita – The Story of a Cover Girl: Vladimir Nabokov’s Novel in Art and Design being published this month by Print Books,” in The Millions.

JB: Peter Mendelsund eloquently writes in “Fictions”: “in attempting to sell a book, designers must, not always, but sometimes, pander to…a public which can on occasion lack the interpretive subtlety to parse literary subtext — i.e., if the general reading public expects a schoolgirl or schoolgirl uniform on a Lolita jacket, then book buyers and booksellers will also be expecting a schoolgirl or schoolgirl uniform on a Lolita jacket; and one can then reasonably assume that marketing departments in publishing houses will want them as well. In the end, going backward, upriver towards its source, even editors begin to take their cues from misinformed readers at large.” That certainly covers a multitude of sins. What do you think?

JG: Peter is spot on about this, though it is a fine line between pandering and communicating. I am trying to connect to as many people as possible with a cover. How do you do that without dumbing things down? I can’t tell you how many times I’ve had covers shot down because they are too “smart” or too clever, or worse “I don’t get it.” It can be seen as a liability. You won’t reach the people who don’t want to think for more than a second about what they are looking at.

I think a more interesting question might be: Why do people expect a schoolgirl or schoolgirl uniform or a girl in sunglasses with a lollipop? Is it all Kubrick’s fault? It wasn’t always marketing departments and editors forcing this issue. This stuff originated at the source.

Lolita is not only a book but also a cultural touchstone, and it carries a lot of baggage. There is so much visual reference associated with this book. There have been hundreds of covers. These schoolgirl uniforms and lollipops are all part of the visual language attached to the book. This has to be dealt with in some way. The visuals associated with the book are probably better known than the book itself.

For my very first attempt at designing the cover for Lolita, I attempted a typographic solution. After this was shot down, I made the decision to see if there was a way to reinterpret the iconography.

Joshua Hersh in The New Yorker:

Aboul-Ghar’s reputation in pro-democracy politics is well earned. In 2004, during the era of Hosni Mubarak, Aboul-Ghar co-founded the March 9th organization, a group of professors who bravely fought against the interference of state-security services into the operations of Egypt’s universities. In the run up to the 2011 revolution, he was an organizer and spokesman for the National Association for Change, an anti-authoritarian organization led by Mohammed ElBaradei, the Nobel Prize Winner and Egypt’s most prominent liberal politician. And after Mubarak finally fell, he helped create what many viewed as the most substantial political party for liberals, the Social Democratic Party. That fall, as a temporary military regime ruled Egypt, I had met with Aboul-Ghar, who happily assured me that the military would soon be leaving the management of the country to civilians. “My feeling is that the military wants to have a safe retreat,” he said then. “A safe retreat and all their previous privileges.”

Over at Philosophy Bites, Michael Martin on Hume's essay:

In his darkest and most desolate years in Recanati, above all between 1819 and 1823, Leopardi held on to his sanity by filling his notebooks with carefully considered entries on a wide range of topics. The Zibaldone is not a personal diary. One does not find in its pages a howling heart, nor an outpouring of pain, grief and despair (Leopardi reserved that for his poetry). One finds instead a lucid mind thinking aloud by way of an ongoing conversation with the dead, above all the many ancient authors who stacked the family library. Apart from the thoughts that make up what Leopardi calls his “system” – by which he means his philosophy of life, history, nature and the human psyche – the Zibaldone is filled with philologically oriented notes that will bewilder contemporary readers who know nothing of the more obscure works he was in dialogue with. Yet even its most recondite entries vibrate with a distinctly modern voice. It is the voice of quick, free-ranging, syncopated thinking. No matter how eloquent it becomes at times – and no one in the history of Italian prose was more eloquent than Leopardi when he put his mind to it – the style never grandstands, nor does the tone ever turn shrill, as it often does in Kierkegaard and Nietzsche, or, for that matter, Emerson.

more from Robert Pogue Harrison at the FT here.

Rebecca Solnit’s latest book, a series of essays loosely about story­telling, has a table of contents that sits on the page like a mountain tipped on its side. The essays’ titles mirror or refract one another, imparting symmetry. The summit, a chapter titled “Knot,” evokes another of the book’s metaphors, the bringing together of narrative threads. The tipped mountain shape resembles the traditional rise and fall of story structure. But this isn’t the only visual conceit. “Imagine all the sentences in this book as a single thread around the spool that is a book,” Solnit writes. You needn’t imagine it, though: One unspooled essay runs like a news ticker along the base of every page. Shape as a preoccupation makes sense in a book about storytelling. Shapes and lines create order out of chaos, or at least highlight possible orderly paths through it. Solnit’s personal “story of sorts” brings together episodes from a difficult year in her life, one that included a breakup, a brush with her own mortality, and her mother’s descent into Alzheimer’s.

more from Robin Romm at the NY Times here.

Early in Jeff Guinn’s “Manson: The Life and Times of Charles Manson,” the first full biography of the infamous mass killer, there’s a moment of unexpected and discomforting empathy. It’s 1939, and Manson — 5 years old, living with relatives in West Virginia while his mother is in state prison for armed robbery — has embarrassed himself by crying in a first-grade class. To toughen him up, his uncle takes one of his daughter’s dresses and orders the boy to wear it to school. “Maybe his mother and Uncle Luther were bad influences,” Guinn writes, “but Charlie could benefit from Uncle Bill’s intercession. It didn’t matter what some teacher had done to make him cry; what was important was to do something drastic that would convince Charlie never to act like a sissy again.” That’s a key moment in “Manson” — both for what it does and for what it cannot do. On the one hand, it opens up our sense of Guinn’s subject, establishing him in a single brush stroke as more than just a monster, as a broken human being. On the other, it ends so quickly, without revealing what happened once he got to class, that it never achieves the necessary resonance.

more from David L. Ulin at the LA Times here.

From The Paris Review:

One Friday evening in March, I took the train to Columbia University and walked into one of the strangest and most interesting classes I’d ever seen. It was the Laboratory of Literary Architecture, part of the Mellon Visiting Artists and Thinkers Program at Columbia University School of the Arts, and a multimedia workshop in which writing students, quite literally, create architectural models of literary texts. For the past four years, Matteo Pericoli has led the workshop at the Turin-based Scuola Holden creative writing school, and this year, he brought the concept to New York. While the idea seems intuitive enough—each student chooses a text he or she knows inside out, and then builds it—the challenges arise in interpretation. “A text you love is not, necessarily, the best for this project,” said Pericoli. He adds that it is crucial that students work from another author’s text, rather than their own, to facilitate the true objectivity necessary.

…To the Lighthouse bears no resemblance to an English country house by the sea, but rather becomes a structure that centers around a vacancy: that of the mother. The exercise demands both serious imagination and intense discipline—qualities essential to the disciplines of both writing and architecture but presented as dauntingly unfamiliar challenges that both force participants out of their comfort zones, and ultimately create new ones: different, yes, from the initial familiar comfort of a beloved text, but functional and fascinating all the same.

More here.