Dorris Lessing is the latest of a growing list of notable people who have spoken out against the internet, claiming in short that it makes us stupid. Another prominent example is the author Andrew Keen who argues first that user generated content (along with copyright infringement and the like) is undermining the business models that enable the production of quality content – content that is vetted by professionals. On the other side you have people like Lawrence Lessig who argues in defence of the cult of the amateur and the democratisation of content production. It’s interesting that the internet has produced such divergent interpretations of its contribution. Either it will liberate us from the elite culture makers, or it will doom us to a swill of endless mediocrity where we can’t tell fact from fiction. Either it will be the birth of a new democratic consciousness, or the end of consciousness itself. I’m not going to take a side in this particular debate. It is an old debate as I will point out in greater detail below. However, there is a manner in which the internet may provide for a genuine raising of consciousness, one which is continually overlooked by the pundits. It’s nature is not what you’d expect – and it certainly doesn’t rely on a wholesome belief in the goodness of the average human being.
Carl Sagan has to be one of the greatest popularisers of science we’ve ever had. He fascinated an entire generation with his documentaries and perhaps inspired many of the scientists who work throughout the world today. In the clip below I think we get a sense of the motivation he had for his efforts. He knew full well that the achievements of science and culture could all be swept away in an uprising of the ignorant and the stupid. He deeply felt the importance of his popularising work – and this video shows why.
A while back I wrote about the brave new revenue sharing world that is fast approaching. I argued that in order to infiltrate word of mouth distribution channels, companies would begin to share revenue with their services. I predicted that the result would be the total commodification of our social lives and I painted nightmare scenarios where we were paid to influence our friends, colleagues and loved ones for the sake of a share in the profit. I want now to explore the possible effects of this change on our day to day lives. To what extent will our private, social lives become an extension of a capitalistic process that begins with a marketing decision made by the board members of a corporation, or the political advisors to a demagogue? To what extent was this always the case? And what would be the danger to society were this to become the case? Might we lose something vital that protects society – that allows it to adapt in response to change?
Well – that’s not a particularly kind paraphrase of what is known as Meinongian position. In their own words they would say not that non-existent objects exist. They want to stay true to the reasonably common sense position that non-existent objects don’t exist. However, they will claim that while they categorically don’t exist, nevertheless it is true to say that in some sense there are non-existent objects
In my last post on the topic of names, I examined the referential theory and explained some of the classic difficulties that it has faced. The descriptivist theory of names attempts to avoid these difficulties by denying that the semantic content of a name is the object to which it refers. Instead the theory claims that some kind of description of the object is included in the semantic content of the name. The first person to propose this kind of theory of Frege – and the descriptivist theory was to remain the dominant view up until the second half of the twentieth century. It was displaced as the dominant theory and replaced once again by the referentialist view, thanks largely to the criticisms of Saul Kripke. Given the failure of the descriptivist theory, we are left in a somewhat baffling position, with no theory being entirely satisfactory. We are left in the position where the process of reference, something as familiar to us as eating, remains an unsolved part of larger mystery concerning how we use language.
Most of us wouldn’t think there was anything problematic about the meaning of names. When I use the name ‘Brad’ to talk about my good friend, we wouldn’t think to question what I actually meant by the name ‘Brad’. After all, I just mean Brad – that guy who pops up on MSN chat to distract me from my studies. But it turns out that a workable semantics of names is one of the most elusive goals of the philosophy of language today. In a very real sense, we still don’t know what names mean. There is still no agreement on how it is that we manage to use names as we do, or even how it is that we can refer to objects at all. At this point, your commonsense ideas are probably causing you to scoff. Of course we know what names mean – they mean whatever object they stand for! And maybe they do. By the end of this article, you might still think as you did at the beginning – but I doubt you’ll remain so confident.
I’ve long been fascinated by the means by which the marketers so effectively manage to determine our choices in the marketplace. This effectiveness has long been appreciated by the corporations who spend hundreds of billions of dollars a year in marketing their services and products. While information about how these techniques work, and the reasons for their success, are starting to filter down to ordinary people (empowering their choices and to some degree liberating them from the malaise) – still many are unaware of their implicit involvement in marketing processes. We are helping the marketers and we don’t even know it. What I’ll attempt to demonstrate is the degree to which classic marketing techniques rely on the competitive and combative elements of human nature to re-inforce the individual marketing message. Once it is seen just how involved we all are, the insidious nature of corporate marketing becomes stark. We begin to realise just how much we help the marketers to do what they do.
Given how many seem to enjoy the great puzzles I wrote about in a previous post, I thought I would write about some more. So here are a couple more great puzzles and paradoxes: Searle’s Chinese Room and the Monty Hall Problem.
For those interested in the Liar Paradox and would like to read an interesting solution, my thesis supervisor Nick Smith has written a paper.
Stephen Neale in his book “Facing Facts??? presents a proof that he claims: (a) ‘demonstrates conclusively that any supposedly non-truth-functional operation must satisfy an exacting logical condition in order to avoid collapsing into a truth-function, and that (b) any theory of facts, states of affairs, situations, or propositions must satisfy a corresponding condition if such [...]