Fodor foo-ey

Warning: (amateur) philosophy ahead.

I like Jerry Fodor's articles in the LRB. They are always well-written, provocative, and often wrong. Here is a recent example. Jerry is talking about whether physical things can increase your brain capacity, so that in particular if you lose your notenook (PDA, whatever), have you literally lost (a part of) your mind. To kick things off, he needs a dubious definition:

The mark of the mental is its intensionality (with an ‘s’); that’s to say that mental states have content; they are typically about things. And (with caveats presently to be considered) only what is mental has content.

What? Where did that come from, in particular the `only' clause? There is no motivation for it. It's just like saying that only brains can have frabble, and so my notebook can't be a part of my mind because it isn't frabbly. The key point being that frabble is meaningless and so by definition unfalsifiable.

Once Jerry has got away with his definition, his path is clear to disparage fancy electronics and humble paper alike:

That’s not, however, because iPhones are ‘external’, it’s because iphones don’t, literally and unmetaphorically, have contents.

In other words, privileging wetware-implemented connotations above other kinds is what allows Fodor to say that notebooks don't have contents, and hence can't be parts of brains. But there's no reason for such prejudice. I like my red hardback notebook because it is better than my memory: I would rather use it than my aging wetware for some things. It's deeply unfair to say that just because neurons are inside and paper is outside, neurons are somehow better. Just because we don't know how, exactly, we access internal memory there is no reason to claim that someone (in Jerry's case a female someone) doesn’t have to think about (or, in any literal sense, ‘consult’) her memories; she just has them.

There's a lot more of this kind of thing in the article, including the claim that only minds can entertain modal connotations (`what ifs'), all of which seem to me to follow from the initial act of wetware apartheid. C'mon, Jerry, notebooks might not have feelings, but they certainly sometimes have contents.

Hard edged thoughts from Asia

A little while ago I was in Hong Kong (cue gratuitous Blade Runner themed pictures of the city at night). On the way back, I read a paper Dilemmas of an Economic Theorist. It was probably a good thing that I was on a plane at the time: the spluttering of disbelief that such egocentric ramblings was published in a peer reviewed journal would probably have disturbed my neighbours if I had been at home. As it was I took another swig of Cathay's Bonnes Mares and composed a list of objections:

• Firstly this paper seems entirely ignorant of any philosophy of science. While economics clearly isn't scientific, one might at least hope one of the referees had heard of Popper if not Lukacs. Anyway. The author poses the 'problem': Should we abandon a model if it produces absurd conclusions or should we regard a model as a very limited set of assumptions that will inevitably fail in some contexts? This simply shows the importance of defining a domain of applicability. Then if the model doesn't work within the domain, you have falsified it. It's wrong. Move on.


• The next 'dilemma' is even more absurd. Should our models be judged according to experimental results? What else are you going to judge them on? How nicely they are typeset? Whether they give you a warm and fuzzy feeling when you cuddle them? That such a question is posed in an eminent journal just shows how deeply screwed some academic economics is.



• Finally we have Do we have the right to offer advice or to make statements that are intended to influence the real world?

Ignoring the temptation to suggest on the basis of the foregoing economists have no right to enter a university let alone try to influence the real world, what else is economics for?

Show me an economist who is willing to put his own money on a trading strategy based on his theorists, and I'll respect him - Soros is the obvious example. Show me one who is trying to help a country improve its growth, or ameliorate poverty, or any other laudable objective, and I'll respect her too. But an academic who write papers as fatuous as Dilemmas of an Economic Theorist? Even the famously polite Chinese might have a problem finding something good to say about him.

The rules of theoretical physics

The New Yorker has a discussion of new books by Lee Smolin and Peter Woit here. Both authors discuss the problem with String Theory - that it isn't a theory at all, in the conventional scientific sense of making predictions that, if false, disprove the theory.

Both authors suggest part of the problem is that the game of physics is currently set up to reward mathematical dexterity over physical veracity, so we have a generation of theoretical physicists growing up who are fabulous mathematicans but who have no incentive to produce better physical theories. Of course once a community gets established and so acquires some power, this becomes self-perpetuating. They define physics as what they do, despite the evidence to the contrary.

(I'm not saying this is bad work, academically, and neither are Smolin or Woit: just that it is not science because it isn't falsifiable. One should never underestimate the ingenuity of the experimentalists, so perhaps one day some of these theories will be testable, but no one appears to have any idea how to do that today.)

This, then, is a great example of a game labouring under an unhelpful historical precedent. Particle physics used to be over-funded partly because it was glamourous science (a theory of everything my arse - a theory of everything that matters to a small number of theoretical physicists more like) and partly because it was seen as useful for building bigger bombs. Now we don't need bigger bombs and particle physics hasn't had much to say about the Universe since the neutrino mass debacle of 1985 or so. So maybe it's time for the rest of physics - all those people doing useful and interesting atmospheric, solid state, and statistical* physics - to rise up against the particle people and take some of their funding. Because, in science as in finance, that is one way of keeping score.

*Quantum computation is looking seriously interesting at the moment...