What's in a Name?

As those of you familiar with philosophy and logic already know, using quantifier terms as names is a really bad idea. In case you're not familiar with this, the problem is basically that, presumably, we wouldn't want the claim "Everybody loves tacos" to be true just because someone decided to name their kid 'Everybody' and he, in fact, loves tacos. So, this is pretty clear to those of us with backgrounds in even a little bit of logic. However, you may need to teach this to your students at some point and, in thinking about this today, I thought of a funny (and perhaps useful) way of looking at it.

In the Odyssey, there is a scene in which Odysseus and his crew are stranded on an island populated by hostile cyclopes. They are captured by a particular cyclops named Polyphemos, who intends to eat them, I think. Anyhow, when Polyphemos inquires after his name, Odysseus cleverly introduces himself as 'Nobody', which Polyphemos more-or-less uncritically accepts. When Polyphemos falls asleep, Odysseus and his men poke out his eye with a huge sharpened stick, and escape by tying themselves to the undersides of his sheep. Polyphemos cries out for help, and his fellow cyclopes reply by asking him who is hurting him. Now the real problem is apparent: Polyphemos replies by stating that "Nobody is hurting me." As a result, the other cyclopes are puzzled and fail to come to the aid of Polyphemos while Odysseus and his men escape.

So, the moral of the story is: If you interpret quantifier terms as names, you'll have your eye poked out, your sheep stolen, and your friends won't even help you. If that's not a Brandom-esque proto-norm, I don't know what is! (By "Brandom-esque proto-norm" I am referring to Brandom's picture of norms arising from non-normative sanctions--punishment basically--as described in Making It Explicit, which is an extraordinarily complex and interesting work.)

I Have a Blog?!

(The title of this post should be read with an expression of slightly irritated astonishment, in order to pay homage to Prince John's line in Robin Hood: Men in Tights: "I have a mole?!") Welcome to my blog! Before I get down to anything serious, I should make a few caveats. First, those who know me can attest to the fact that, despite my being a philosopher, having a blog, and having given said blog a seemingly pretentious title and description, neither I nor my blog is accurately described as pretentious. In fact, it is my view that, as far as purportedly philosophical blogs go, it is a general truth (perhaps nomological!) that pretension and quality of philosophical inquiry are inversely proportional. Furthermore, I think it is also a fact that the philosophical quality of blogs often varies more-or-less directly with their jocularity. Hence, my Augustian advice for interpretation of this blog: if it appears pretentious to you, reinterpret the offending lines in a manner such that it is obvious that they are intended humorously.

Now, with that out of the way, why am I making a blog? As far as I can see, there are at least three advantages (can you tell that I'm an analytic philosopher now?). First, there's the obvious but important fact that it will provide me with an excellent way to pretend to get something productive accomplished when I don't feel like doing serious work. Second, I've noticed that, since beginning graduate school, the quality of my thinking has increased while the quality of my writing has decreased, so I'm hoping that writing in a less formal style will help to improve my serious writing as well. Third, this blog should give me a forum in which to write about things which I find philosophically interesting, but that don't really fit into the sorts of discussions that I have normally. I'll do my best to be clear, but prepare yourself for some ideas that may be less than half-baked.

Finally, I'll offer an explanation as to the title of this blog. I once saw a bumper sticker that advised (commanded? I can never tell how forceful the imperatives in bumper stickers are supposed to be) that I "Live an Incredible Life." That's not a bad slogan, I suppose, but I think a much better slogan is: "Live an Incredulous Life." Now, I'm hardly a committed skeptic or anything like that, but I think that's more-or-less the rule that I live by (whether I want to or not!)--the world just strikes me as a profoundly strange place, which presents more fascinating questions than could possibly be answered (or even asked) in a lifetime. Philosophy is, I think, ultimately about confronting this strangeness. I think Wilfrid Sellars expressed this sentiment (or something quite similar) better when he noted that: "The aim of philosophy is to understand how things in the broadest possible sense of the term hang together in the broadest possible sense of the term."