academy fights: round 2 to the fascists

in june, professor norman finkelstein was denied tenure by depaul university thanks to a concerted effort by alan dershowitz. today, the university of colorado fired tenured professor ward churchill thanks to an effort by the horowitz-ACTA crowd.

i remember long ago reading an essay by stephen king in which he instructed his readers how to act when they've heard of a case of censorship: to immediately get the censored material and read it. censorship usually targets interesting and relevant ideas. finkelstein and churchill have not been censored, but they have been punished for their political views by a system that is supposed to reward intellectual accomplishment and protect the academy from political intimidation. for the enemies of critical thought, actual censorship is not a viable short-term goal, so they are instead making inroads into a more manageable goal: distorting academic debate by intimidating faculty who are independent-minded and critical in tone.

in the case of finkelstein and churchill, i happen to have read extensively of both of their works, and i recommend them without reservation. they are two of the sharpest analytical minds that i've ever read, and they both write clearly and engagingly on important topics. it is partly for these reasons that they are being targeted by the enemies of intellect. for these reasons i suggest that the appropriate response to this particular attack on critical thinking is to read these authors.

neither decision was plausible on its merits. in finkelstein's case, there was no pretense of applying the universal standards for tenure - quality of teaching and research. he was denied tenure for his "tone". if this seems like a subjective non-standard, that's because it is. he was denied tenure because conservatives don't like what he writes, and because twice he's made the conservative intellectual establishment look very, very foolish. first as a graduate student, by exposing joan peters' anti-palestinian propaganda tome "from time immemorial" as a fraud; then by demonstrating the extraordinary stupidity and absence of merit in alan dershowitz's anti-palestinian book "the case for israel".

in churchill's case, there was a pretense of applying a reasonable standard - he was accused of research misconduct. but the pretense is transparent. the president of the university who recommended his termination is a right-wing ideologue who belongs to ACTA, a highly ideological group, founded by lynne cheney and joe lieberman, dedicated to opposing critical thinking in the academy about history and politics. when it became public knowledge a few years ago that churchill had written a highly inflammatory essay about 9-11, the university president promised to subject churchill's writings to an extraordinary level of scrutiny, and convened a committee that did so. in a report that is itself subject to complaints of misconduct (but has not been investigated), the committee concluded that churchill had plagiarized and falsified information relating to native american history, though not in any scholarly writing. the faculty panel charged with making a recommendation recommended against dismissing prof. churchill. as prof. gary leupp has suggested, if "boards of regents in this country were to investigate and punish the falsification of Native American history by scholars, or if society in general were to investigate such falsification in the media, popular culture and political discourse, we’d all be in for a very time-consuming process resulting in a whole lot of people out of jobs." the president, however, overruled the faculty's recommendation and recommended dismissal to the university's board of regents, which rubber-stamped his recommendation 8-1, with no public debate.

these attacks on the academy can't be seen separately from the ascendancy of fascism generally, including the bush administration's war on civil liberties, the erosion of institutions and laws intended to protect us from centralized power, and the increasing concentration of wealth and centralization of power, in this country and worldwide. follow my recommendation, do yourself and the world a favor, and read finkelstein and churchill.

breaking news

fascists win the day. exemplary native american scholar ward churchill has been fired from his job as tenured professor at the university of colorado for his political views.

impeach the president; and impeach the president

impeach the president
impeach the president

beating a retreat on exceptives

i’ve been emphasizing, including in this blog, that exceptives can only be licensed by universals. that’s what i believed until less than an hour ago. i now think that exceptives are licensed by members of a semantic class that corresponds to roberto zamparelli’s strong determiners (see his 1995 rochester dissertation). interestingly, membership in this class, as zamparelli pointed out, has a syntactic correlate, since strong determiners appear to occur in a DP shell that encompasses the phrase projected by the other class of determiners, predicative determiners. this is evidenced in the general possibility of cooccurrence of strong and predicative determiners, with the strong determiner always linearly preceding the predicative one in english. membership in the class seems to correspond to the acceptability of phrases like the following, with “Det” standing in for the determiner:

Det friend that i have

strong determiners are acceptable stand-ins for Det; predicative ones are not.

i’ll suggest that the following are strong determiners:

every
all
each
no
the five
the first n/the last n
the only n
the tallest
most
my five
any (including free choice any)

some of these, of course, are not a single determiner but a combination of a determiner and another determiner (five), superlative adjective (tallest, arguably most/least), or uniquely identifying adjective (only). also possible are combinations of three elements when the third is a cardinal, like the tallest three or the only five.

here are some predicative determiners:

some
a/an
five
many
few

notice how they fare with respect to licensing exceptives.

every/each president was protestant, except kennedy
all the presidents were protestant, except kennedy
no president was protestant, except kennedy
the forty-three presidents so far have been protestant, except kennedy
the first three/last three presidents were protestant, except kennedy
the only four presidents to have presided over the vietnam war were protestant, except kennedy
the tallest presidents have been protestant, except kennedy.
most of the high schoolers helped out, except the tenth graders
my five rabbits are herbivorous, except fluffy.
i don’t eat any vegetables except kale (negative polarity any)
i would eat any vegetable except kale (free choice any)

the predicative determiners fare considerably worse.

*some presidents are protestant, except kennedy
*a president is protestant, except kennedy
*five presidents have been protestant, except kennedy
*many presidents have been protestant, except kennedy
*few presidents have been protestant, except kennedy

(i’m fudging a bit here; few and maybe many seem to fall in the same category as most:
few of the high schoolers helped out, except the tenth graders
many of the high schoolers helped out, except the tenth graders)

what about the “Det friend that i have” construction? here are the strong determiners

every friend that i have is a mensch
all the friends that i have are mensches
?each friend that i have is a mensch
no friend that i have is a mensch
the five friends that i have are mensches
the first three/the last friends that i’ve had were mensches
the only friend that i have is a mensch
the tallest friend that i have is a mensch
most friends that i have are mensches
*my five friends that i have are mensches
?don’t insult any friend that i have (negative polarity any)
any friend that i have is a mensch (free choice any)

a couple are somewhat odd, and “my five” is ungrammatical, presumably for the independent reason that “my N “ doesn’t combine well with restrictive relatives. as a whole, the class of strong determiners does well in this construction.

predicative determiners do less well:

*some friends that i have are mensches
*a friend that i have is a mensch
*five friends that i have are mensches
*many friends that i have are mensches
?few friends that i have are mensches

there's more to be said. but that's it for now.

a startling discovery

i just realized that law school and loss-cool are homonyms (homophones? i'm not good with these terms).

stay tuned for further developments on this story.

against induction

some of you who know me know that one of my charming quirks is that i don't believe in empirical induction. i don't mean in hume's sense - it's not just that i don't think induction leads to weaker inferences than deduction. my skepticism is this: i don't believe that induction exists as an independent mode of reasoning. i believe that there is nothing gained by adding induction to our reasoning toolbox, because anything that it does is already covered by abduction. since there are things covered by abduction that are not covered by induction, it is induction that is redundant.

my initial formulation of induction is as follows:

for every individual P and attribute X, frequent observation that an instance of P has attribute X, with no observation that P lacks attribute X, licenses the inference that every P has attribute X.

i don't think much of the critique is contingent on this particular formulation; i welcome feedback on it.

i can think of four arguments against induction, but i don't have good names for them at the present. i'm aware from personal experience and from reading feyerabend that good marketing is essential to philosophical and scientific progress, so i will start trying to think up some good names - maybe get burson-marsteller to do some pro bono work on my behalf. in the meantime, here are the names of the arguments.

1. the raven paradox argument
2. the argument from the structure of logic
3. the unvarying datum argument
4. the clash with theory argument

in this post i'll give very quick summaries. i'll plan to elaborate in the future.

1. the raven paradox argument

take the following proposition:

(p) every raven is black

(p) is logically equivalent to (p')

(p') every non-black thing is not a raven

if induction is valid, then observing many black ravens lets us infer (p) (and (p')). so far, so good. but observing many non-black non-ravens also lets us infer (p) (and (p')), and this goes against our understanding of what good evidence is. right now i can see an orange curtain, a greyish ceiling fan and white walls. they are not good evidence that all ravens are black, but induction suggests that they are.

this argument, due to hempel, has generated a number of solutions intended to rescue induction. i don't think they're very good, and i hope to address them in the future. i believe my approach - to dump induction in the harbor - makes more sense.

2. the argument from the structure of logic

logic is about drawing conclusions from premises using formal rules. the rules are rigid, while the premises and conclusions vary. i suggest that this restricts the modes of reasoning to two: given premises, reasoning to conclusions - this is deduction; and given conclusions, hypothesizing premises - this is abduction. there is no room for other modes of reasoning like induction. it is possible, of course, that induction is a submode of abduction; but if induction is to not be redundant, then the burden is on its advocates to show that it has interesting properties that set it apart from ordinary abduction.

3. the unvarying datum argument

suppose P has two subtypes: P' and P''. and suppose we observe, frequently and unvaryingly, that instances of P' have attribute X. does this license an inference that all P have attribute X? by induction, it does. and then it follows that all instances P'', about which we've observed nothing, have attribute X. this is preposterous.

the same situation arises with respect to a P with no subtypes, but which could in principle be observed under different conditions but is observed in only one kind of condition. suppose that in all the observations, P has attribute X. induction would lead us to believe that every P has attribute X, without accounting for the possibility that it is an artifact of the conditions of observation.

4. the clash with theory argument

induction allows us to infer that the sun will rise tomorrow. suppose we have a very good theory of the cosmos which predicts with certainty that before tomorrow, the earth will stop rotating, or else that the sun will explode. it is rational to believe the theory rather than our past experience. but induction allows us to infer that the sun will rise tomorrow. so induction licenses an irrational inference.

feedback welcome.

EDIT: how could i forget the grue argument of nelson goodman?

5. the grue argument

define the attribute grue as follows.

for some time t and all P, P is grue iff it is green if observed before t and blue if not observed before t.

if some P has been observed before t, then induction allows us to infer with equal probability at t that P is green and that P is grue. this means that it predicts with equal force that P will appear green and that P will appear blue next time it is observed.

transferring

no, not me. some of my friends and colleagues at case are starting to announce that they're transferring. i have two kinds of reaction to this.

1 . i hope enough people above me transfer that i grade on to law review.
2. why are so many people anxious to leave? cleveland rocks! see 30 rock.

EDIT: how could i forget sloopy? i looked for a youtube vid with the O-H-I-O but they all sucked.

happy 89th to nelson mandela!

here's a few music videos in his honor. reportedly mr. mandela is a great admirer of paul robeson; so are the manics. i hope he likes them too.

manic street preachers: let robeson sing

DAM: born here

immortal technique: the 4th branch

more on most

earlier i raised the following challenge to the generalization that only universals admit of exceptions:

most of the students helped out, except the tenth graders

the challenge is that exceptive phrases are pretty well established as applying to universals, and most is not a universal.

i suggested a solution: that there should be understood a presupposed partition on the set of students, based on grade. so that the sentence can be restated as follows:

given a partition of the students into equivalence classes based on grades, every equivalence class except the one consisting of the tenth graders is such that most of its members helped out.

this solves the problem of the universal by introducing one, albeit an invisible one, to license the exceptive. it also gets the truth conditions of the sentence right. but it is a challenging approach, because in the absence of independent justification for an invisible presupposed partition and universal quantifier, it is a rather ad hoc solution. in this post i try to support the analysis by bringing one source of independent evidence for an invisible universal, from negative polarity item licensing.

i noted in my previous post that most differs from other quantifiers, such as some.

*some of the students helped out, except the tenth graders

recently i remembered the fact, discussed in the literature on polarity items*, that some and most have different properties as far as licensing any. most licenses it sort of, while some doesn't.

most (of the) people with any self-respect abhor imperialism
*some (of the) people with any self-respect abhor imperialism

i'm generally a believer in semantic and pragmatic licensing of polarity items (as opposed to, say, syntactic licensing), though not a firm believer. i don't see pragmatics as being a licenser in this case, so let's assume it's semantics. usually, negative polarity items (which we'll assume any is here. why? cause fuck free choice any, that's why) are assumed to be licensed in downward-entailing contexts. the first argument of most is not generally seen as a downward-entailing context, because of facts like the following.

most high school students are evil
-/->
most tenth-graders are evil

but what if these sentences were interpreted as i've suggested, as universal statements ranging over equivalence classes of a presupposed partition? and what if the set expressed in the consequent was one of the equivalence classes presupposed in the antecedent? in that case, there would be an entailment.

given a partition of the set of high schoolers by grade, for every equivalence class E, for most x, x a high school student in E, x is evil.

-->

given a partition of the set of high schoolers by grade, for every equivalence class E, for most x, x a tenth-grader in E, x is evil.

if this universal interpretation is available, it helps us solve the puzzle of why most is a sort-of licenser of any. It's because most is sort of downward-entailing in its first argument, because it is sort of a universal quantifier.

now, the same would be true of some. If it was susceptible to a universal interpretation, it would be as downward-entailing as most is in the example just given. We would then expect it to license both an exceptive and any in its first argument. but it does neither, which we can attribute to its inability to accommodate to a universal interpretation.

the larger mystery, of why most can do what other quantifiers can't, still exists. but at least we've suggested a connection between two properties: licensing of any and support for exceptives.

this approach is surely wrong. and you know what? that doesn't bother me, because i don't have to publish in linguistics anymore.

-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=--=-
* i would guess this is in myriam uribe-echebarria's dissertation, for instance.

the first step is understanding

chomsky's summary of iran, iraq and neoliberalism here. it's from a year ago but perfectly timely, as far as i can tell.