I have long and often encountered discussion that implicitly or explicitly involves notions of property or of ownership, which discussion is rendered incoherent from a failure to consider what it means for something to be property, what it means to own something.

Some confusion arises because we have come often to use the word property casually to mean an object (physical or more abstract) to which ownership of some sort may apply, without our considering whether the object is well conceptualized for purposes of considering property rights,[1] and without considering that actual ownership associated with that object might be distributed in some complicated ways amongst multiple parties.

One might, for some reason, associate a plot of land with an object imagined as beginning at the center of the Earth and extending into the atmosphere (or beyond); from such an association, and then from a presumption that the whole object were property, farmers were once known to shoot at airplanes as trespassing vehicles. Yet other folk would assert that owning a plot of land as such only entitled one to control things to lesser depths and heights, in which case the rights could be associated with a smaller object, representing a sub-object as it were. One person might be thought to have the right to farm the aforementioned land, and another to extract its mineral resources so long as he didn't thereby interfere with the farming. Possibly others would claim peculiar easements, allowing them to travel through some or all of the object without thereby trespassing. There might be purported rights entitling still others to flows of resources such water, air, and electromagnetic radiation travelling through the object. In the case of sunlight (an electromagnetic radiation), the rights would typically be presumed to involve only some space above the soil, and the farmer might both have claims against her neighbors doing things that reduced her sunlight and be constrained by similar claims for her neighbors.

If we are thinking in terms of one object, and then change to thinking of an object within it, previously relevant rights of ownership may become irrelevant. If we instead think in terms of an object of which our original object is but a part, then new claims may become relevant. Two objects, neither of which is completely contained in the other, may share some third object as a part; so that any thorough consideration of ownership involving these two objects containing the third may involve rights that are literally identical and rights that are different. The minimal object relevant to describe some asserted set of property rights might not be sufficient to describe other rights none-the-less associated with that object. The minimal object in each of the previously mentioned cases (of farming, of easement, of mineral extraction, and of unobstructed resource flow) is somewhat different from the minimal object in the other cases.

A farmer who somehow forfeits her right not to have sunlight artificially obstructed may still be imagined to own the plot of land on which she grew her crops, yet she doesn't own what once she owned. Likewise, a house-holder who somehow surrenders his right to come and go from the plot on which the house sits doesn't own what once he owned. And, though it would perhaps seem very unsual, one might imagine these rights not transformed into claims for those who have prior rights to surrounding spaces, but instead coming into possession of third parties. For example, perhaps I speculate that I can buy whatever rights I need to build a skyscraper, on the assumption that I can buy a right to block the sunlight to a neighboring farm; I could purchase that latter right first, then discover that I am thwarted as to other purchases. This might work nicely for the farmer, but she no longer has a right that she once had; she no longer owns something that she once owned.

We can still express what things are owned as if they are objects, but we must then select our objects to match our rights of use. And our discourse can become strained and unnatural if we insist on always treating the thing owned as a distinct object rather than as a right of use. For example, if Timo is exclusively entitled to inhabit a cabin in the Winter and James is likewise entitled to inhabit it in the Summer, and we must express them as owning distinct objects, then we must treat the cabin in Winter as one object and the cabin in Summer as another. Indeed, we will surely have to be far more contrived in our construction of objects to account for what the two jointly do not own of the cabin! On the other hand, we can say that each has a right to use the cabin in some way without necessarily specifying how other rights of use are distributed; the concept of the cabin is available without first settling questions of ownership.

I don't propose that we generally stop using the word property as in the ordinary sense of a piece of property, merely that we understand that this everyday use may be misleading. Nor would I suggest that we should somehow stop thinking in terms of objects when we carefully consider ownership. But we must be alert to the fact that our choice of objects with which to think is largely taxonomic and to some degree arbitrary, and we should not take results that are no more than artefacts of that taxonomy as anything more profound.

In fact, the right of use may be recognized as itself an object of an abstract sort, but the right to use a right of use is not distinct from simply that right of use, and thus cannot be dissociated from it.[1.5]

My laboring of the relationship of ownership to objects and their uses isn't quibbling nor pirouetting. People who imagine an object as such to be owned tend all too often to imagine it somehow being owned beyond any of its various possible uses. They thus imagine that it can remain the property of one person or group even as another party — most often those in control of the state — appropriate its use, and even as this second party seizes every right of use. It then also becomes absurdly thinkable that one person might retain every right of use that she had, associated with an object, yet transfer ownership to some other party. Ownership would be reduced to absolutely nothing more than something such as a formal title.

When the state regulates property, it is taking rights of use and hence ownership. This transfer is relevant to questions of compensation (as in the case of the guarantees of the Fifth Amendment to the US Constitution[2]), and of whether state regulation of the means of production is a form of socialism.

[1] The word object comes from the Latin ob-iacere, meaning throw-before, and referred originally to that thrown before the mind. What we now call objects are, however, mental organizations of what is thrown before us. Thus, to use a classic example, we can talk about my hand as an object, and my fist as an object; they seem to be the same object, yet only sometimes. (We may still, in good conscience, use the word objective for perceptible external reality. And extending it to include unperceived and imperceptible external reality shouldn't cause more than mild discomfort; the rightful demands of etymology are not unlimited.)

[1.5] This paragraph was added on 24 May.

[2] That Amendment (with an underscore by me) reads

No person shall be held to answer for a capital, or otherwise infamous crime, unless on a presentment or indictment of a grand jury, except in cases arising in the land or naval forces, or in the militia, when in actual service in time of war or public danger; nor shall any person be subject for the same offense to be twice put in jeopardy of life or limb; nor shall be compelled in any criminal case to be a witness against himself, nor be deprived of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law; nor shall private property be taken for public use, without just compensation.

The entry in Sibley's Birds for Common Raven begins Uncommon.

This case illustrates the important distinction between names and descriptions. Common raven is a name; it was surely intended to be a name that worked as a description, but it presently fails as the latter while continuing to be the former.

A description can be usefully analyzed. It has components, each of which has independent meaning, and considering those meanings allows one better to understand the thing described.

A name as such is not analyzed; sometimes it might usefully be analyzed; sometimes it cannot be analyzed; sometimes analysis is misleading (as in common raven).

Often, what we call description is no more than naming. For example, if someone points to something and asks What is that?, and I say an urn, then all that I have really done is to provide a name, perhaps trusting the other person to know what urn means. On the other hand, if I say an ancient urn or a ceramic urn or an empty urn, then I have described it (though surely not as thoroughly as it might be described).

Notice that all description is constructed of names. The audience might subsequently ask for descriptions corresponding to names used, but eventually one reaches a point at which the names are of things that cannot be described (though alternative names might be offered).

Occasionally, I read something mocking someone for not understanding a description, such that a more perspicacious observer would recognize that the someone being mocked was treating the description as a name. This error may be no more foolish than wondering whether the common raven is a common bird.

At a site whose content seems intended to entertain, I read of a teacher who is said to have challenged his or her students to explain time and to define time. The words explain and define are treated in the narrative as if referring to the same task, which suggests something about the sort of answer sought. None of the students succeeded in doing what the teacher asked.

While we might perhaps have different conceptions of time, the essential concept of time is not one that we assemble from and with other concepts. Time is fundamental in our experience. Thus, when we seek to define time, the best that we can do is to find synonyms that might seem to put us into loops. For example, The Oxford Shorter English Dictionary defines time with duration, and duration with time. But to define a term is to coördinate it with a concept; so either definition actually works just fine as a definition, on the assumption that we have a concept for the complementary term.

Definitions often involve conveying a concept by showing how to assemble it from and with other concepts; that is perhaps what one expects when asked to explain a concept or a word. But disassemblies that somehow never reached an end would never reach a concept. We must at some stage somehow point to a concept without further use of definition. In the case of time, we have reached a concept that we cannot disassemble; in the case of time, we have found a word for which we can find only either simple synonyms or assemblies in which its concept lurks undisintegrated, even if unrecognized.

Years ago, a friend and I were talking about something, and he mentioned Hitler. I declared

I don't know why you ever liked that guy!

in reply to which he barked

Oh! That is a lie![1]

Well, no, it wasn't a lie. I escalated by betting him dinner on the matter. Then I explained to him that, since the truth of a proposition is a precondition for it to be known, one of the ways that I could not know why he'd ever liked Hitler would be if he'd never liked Hitler. Another way would be if I'd never believed that he'd liked Hitler, regardless of how my friend really felt about Hitler.

Indeed, the contradiction of I don't know why you ever liked that guy! is I know why you at some time liked that guy! Formally,[2] So,

I don't know why you ever liked that guy!

was a truth (though perhaps not a simple truth, as he'd had trouble seeing it).

Having won the wager, I waived the prize; my objectives in betting had all been met. Now, had he won the wager, then I'm sure that he'd have collected; but had I claimed, as he'd thought, that he'd once liked Hitler, then he'd have been quite justified in extracting the dinner; it would have disincentivized my insulting him in such a way, and off-set the felt sting of the calumny.

[1] That was how he spoke. He often began with Oh!, and when learning English in Hong Kong he had been taught to avoid contractions.

[2] (2015:09/24): I have edited the formal expression, seeking to have it capture more completely the structure of the natural-language expression.

Yester-day after-noon, I misread a rumpled sign in the distance. It was an advertisement for guitar lessons, but I thought that it offered

Of course, I wouldn't expect guilt lessons to be seriously and openly advertised (though some college courses seem indeed to be guilt lessons). Rather, I had thought that the advertisement were a joke or a work of art. I suppose now that this were a matter of illusory found art.

An institution is a constructed,[0] persistent organizing practice or relationship within a culture. When most people hear or read the word institution, they think first of an organization of a sort, somewhat like that a firm though typically for some purpose other than pursuit of pecuniary profit. But, really, the scope is much wider, which is how one may, for example, speak or write of the institution of marriage.

Economists and other social thinkers recognize as institutions a great many practices and relationships that most people don't conceptualize as such. For example, languages are institutions; markets are institutions, and monies are institutions within those institutions; professional codes of ethics are institutions; and so forth.

Any given society is exactly a society, rather than merely some selection of people, to the extent that it is characterized by institutions.

Institutions can be hard to see as institutions; they can be hard to see at all. That which pervasively informs our thinking can be invisible for lack of contrast. The fact that a competent social thinker will recognize institutions that most people over-look does not mean that any given social thinker will recognize all the institutions of the society that he or she observes, or in which he or she participates. Rather, I do not think that any social thinker manages to attain such a profound awareness. If there is a meaning to most here, then I think that none of us sees most of the institutions. We participate in them, we use them, but we are unconscious of them.

Although one might imagine some outside agency acting to preserve an institution, more typically a practice or relationship will be persistent to the extent that it is self-perpetuating. It might be self-perpetuating in some fairly direct manner, or it might be thus simply by conferring some advantage on those who adopt it. Something that behaves in a self-perpetuating manner can seem to be purposeful. There are, in fact, some who would insist that a thing that behaves in a self-perpetuating manner truly is purposeful, but I don't want to enter into that debate here. Whether it be purpose or something that merely seems like purpose, there may not be any person to whom one could point and properly say that the purpose were his or were hers. Perhaps no individual wants the institution perpetuated — in some cases[1] participants may actually want an end to the institution — but acting through people the institution perpetuates itself.

So my claim is that we live and act within a rich frame-work of practices and relationships, largely unrecognized, that affect and effect events as if with purposes distinct from our own.

This concept may be related to various things.

In Jungian theory, there is postulated a collective unconscious, which is a set of structures of the unconscious mind, shared amongst animals to the extent that they are biologically related. In general, these structures include instincts; in humans, they also include symbols (called archetypes). Jung believed that the collective unconscious were dormant in the zygote; so that a person whose biological parents were of one ethnic group but who were raised from birth by members of another would have the collective unconscious of the biological parents, rather than of the family in which he or she were raised. I assert that this collective unconscious does not exist; but that something rather like it does, with the very important difference that it is transmitted experientially. The actual collective unconscious is the aforementioned unrecognized institutional frame-work.

Evolutionary psychology, also known as sociobiology, has sought to explain behavior (including human behavior) in terms of some habits leading to more reproductive success than do others. That much is surely part of a proper explanation of human behavior, but these theorists have had a propensity to insist or to presume that the mechanism of transmission is in the DNA of the chromosomes or of the mitochondria. (In this commitment, they have been rather like the Jungians.) After entirely too much delay, some of them acknowledged that cultures as such could be affected by evolutionary pressures. They developed the notion that Richard Dawkins called the meme,[2] and that EO Wilson grotesquely called the culgen (or something like that),[3] which was that of a culturally transmitted, self-perpetuating pattern, somewhat analogous to the chromosomal and mitochondrial genes. These patterns are institutions, viewed individually. We would be consciously aware of some of these patterns, but by no means of all.

Some people are convinced that all events are effected to some purpose, a thought typically expressed as Everything happens for a reason. This claim surely goes too far, but one could see how observing many events that seemed to happen towards a purpose, which purpose was not that of any one of us, could suggest a theory that all reälized outcomes were in some sense intended.

Others do not necessarily think that all events are effected to some purpose; but, perceiving in some events apparent purposefulness that cannot plausibly be imputed to any ordinary person, take this apparent purposefulness as evidence that events have been or are being guided an extraordinary person — G_d. As a metaphor, this works rather well, though the impersonal G_d of Spinoza would be a better fit for the institutional framework; but, in any case, the apparent purposefulness is not good evidence for the involvement of a literal G_d.

Where many believers have been too quick to see the work of G_d, many non-believers have been too quick to see mere chance-coïncidence. But teasing-out the difference between that which is mere accident from that which works to the purposes or quasi-purposes of a frame-work of unrecognized parts is at best extremely difficult, if not impossible. A pattern can be found in any data set, and from it the number of super-patterns that may potentially be extrapolated are infinite. Additionally, most of us want to find significance in our lives, which biases us to see not only purposes but purposes of particular sorts behind events.

[0 (2017:07/07)] A discussion of rather different matters impelled me to recognize that I needed to distinguish institutions from unconstructed, persistent organizing practices or relationships within a culture.

[1] For example, sub-optimal Cournot-Nash equilibria.

[2] Largely due to laziness and misunderstanding, this word came thereafter to have its popular meaning of a widely spread expression of any sort.

[3] It's appalling how little philological sense is now had by otherwise educated people.

The January-February 2012 issue of American Scientist contains an abridged reprinting of an article by BF Skinner, followed by a newer piece, frequently polemical, by a behaviorist, Stephen F. Ledoux.[0] In his polemic, Ledoux contrasts what he insists to be the scientific approach of behaviorology[1] with the ostensibly untestable and mystical approach of reference to an inner agent.

There's a problem here, but it's not unique to behaviorists. A large share of those who would study human nature scientifically do not know what science is.

Although courts and journalists and sociologists have declared that science is what scientists do, this formula is either a perverse begging of the question or simply wrong. The nature of science is not definitionally what is done by those recognized as scientists by academia nor by some narrower or wider society. Science does not start with academic degrees nor with peer review nor with the awarding of grants.

Science is reasoned analysis of — and theorizing about — empirical data.

Some want to use science more narrowly. It's in no way essential to the principal purpose of this essay that all rational analysis and theorizing about empirical data should count as science; but it is essential to see that whatever sort of analysis and theorizing is employed must be rational and that the data must ultimately be empirical. (I doubt that, at this stage, a behaviorist would feel a need to disagree.) To side-step absurd semantic arguments, I will sometimes write rational empiricism for the concept that I would simply call science.

An ostensible science that accepts as fact unjustified empirical propositions is no science at all. That is not to say that each thing that, in everyday language, we call a science (eg, biology) must be a self-contained set of explanations. It is perfectly acceptable for one such science to be built upon the results of a prior rational empiricism (eg, for chemistry to build upon physics).

If we carefully consider what we take to be fact (and which may indeed be fact), we recognize that there is a theoretical or conjectural support to our acceptance of most of it. Such propositions taken as fact cannot be the foundation of rational empiricism because the aforementioned support must itself have been rational empiricism for rational empiricism to proceed from these propositions. Rational empiricism cannot start with measurement[1.50] nor with notions of things to be measured such as with mass or as with the speed of light; rational empiricism cannot start with a geometry. These notions arise from interpretation and conjecture.[2]

Rational empiricism starts with what may be called brute fact — data the awareness of which is not dependent upon an act of interpretation.[3] If the belief in a proposition depends upon any such act, regardless of how reasonable the act might be, then the proposition is not truly a brute fact.[4]

To develop propositions from brute facts that contradict known brute facts would be to engage in self-contradiction, which is not reasonable in interpretation nor in theorizing. It is especially unreasonable to develop propositions that contradict the very brute facts from which they were developed.[5]

Philosophers have a long history of exposing where propositions are reliant upon prior interpretation and assumption. Towards an extreme, we are asked how we know ourselves not to be brains in vats, fed stimuli corresponding to a virtual reälity. It's not my intention to labor this question, beyond noting that it may be asked, and that acts of interpretation are entailed in any belief about whether we are other than about 3 pounds of tissue, bobbing-about in Pyrex™ jars, with electrodes attached here-and-there, whether the belief (for or against) be knowledge or not.

I referred to this question about whether one is a brain-in-a-vat as towards an extreme, rather than at an extreme, because a case in which stimuli are purely engineered is not an extreme. The presence itself of stimuli is not a brute fact. We conjecture their existence in our explanation of the sensations or sense-perceptions or perceptions that appear in our minds. If those things appear in our minds ex nihilo, then there are no stimuli, engineered or otherwise. That the mind is associated with a brain (or something like it) is not a brute fact. We build a model of reality that includes a body for us, and decide that our minds are housed within that body (as an activity or as a substance) or otherwise associated with it.[6]

The formation of sense-perceptions and of perceptions would seem to involve acts of interpretation; perhaps one would want to claim that the formation even of sensations involves interpretation. However, the presences of such things in the mind are themselves brute facts, whatever may be the theorized or conjectured origins of those things.[7] If by inner we understand the kernel of our belief system, and by outer we understand that which is built around that kernel, and if we begin our notion of mind with the capacity for sensations and the system that interprets these, then we should reälize that rational empiricism begins with the inner agent that the behaviorists and others want to dismiss as fictitious, mystical, superstitious; and it is the outer that is hypothesized in our explanation of the evidence. Those who attempt to deny or otherwise to exclude the inner self are trying to turn science on its head. Rational empiricism starts with a mind, and works its way out. And science, whether we simply equate it with rational empiricism or instead see it as a specific variety thereof, is thus committed to the existence of a mind, which is present in its foundation.

I say a mind advisedly; because, when rational empiricism starts, it starts anew with each mind. Of course, some minds do a better job of the rational empiricism than do others. The mind may be relatively inert rather than interpretive, or its interpretation may be largely irrational from the earliest stages.

If the mind continues, then it may develop an elaborate theory of the world. My own mind has done just this. And one of the important features of this theory is the belief in other minds (implicit in some of what I've been writing). Now, if we set aside issues of rationality, then an elaborate theory of the world might be developed without a belief in other minds. But as I constructed my theory of the world, including a theory of my having a body, it seemed that some of the other things out there exhibited behaviors similar those of my own body, such that those behaviors of my own body were in part determined by my mind. Subsequently, my theory of minds in general, including my own, began to be informed by their behavior.[8] According to later features of the theory that I hold of these minds, some minds do a better job of developing a theory of other minds than do other minds. Some never develop such a theory; others develop theories that impute minds to things that have none; some assume that any mind must necessarily be almost identical to their own minds.

As communication developed between my mind and these other minds, my theories of things-more-generally began to be informed by what I was told of those other things. One of my problems from that point forward was ascertaining the reliability of what I was told. (It might here be noted that my aforementioned development of a theory of the world was of course in very large part a wholesale adoption of those claims that I considered reliable.) And that brings us to collaborative theorizing, of which what many people now think science to be a special case.

But science is not essentially social. It does not pause between acts of communication, nor do we require the resumption of conversation as such to learn whether our most recent attempts were or were not science (though what we learn in conversation may tell us whether our prior conclusions continue to be scientific).

Consider whether Robinson Crusoe can engage in science, even on the assumptions that Friday will never appear, that Mr Crusoe will never be rescued, and that there is no means for him to preserve his work for future consideration. He can certainly engage in rational empiricism. He can test his conclusions against different sets of observations. (He can even quantify many things, and develop arithmetic models!)

Or imagine that you think that you see Colonel Inchthwaite commit a murder, though you are the only witness. Further, whenever you confront the Colonel and he is sure that there are no other witnesses and no recording devices, he freely admits to the murder. Your hypothesis that he has committed murder is tested every time that you query him. The fact that only you witnessed the apparent murder doesn't make your experience mystical. Your theory is a reasoned conclusion from the empirical evidence available to you.

Of course, others cannot use Mr Crusoe's work. And I will readily grant that it might be unscientific for someone else to believe your theory of murder. (That someone else may have little reason to believe your testimony, may have no independent means to test the theory, may have a simpler explanation to fit the evidence available to him or to her.)

Which is all to say that there can be private science, but it is only when the science of one's position is shared that it may become science for others.[10] (And, even then, they may have other evidence that, brought to bear upon one's position, renders it unscientific.)

The notion of science as intrinsically collaborative proceeds in part from a presumption that science is what those widely recognized as scientist do,[11] and in part from identifying science with the subject of the sociology of those seen (by some researcher) as scientists. But much of what people take to be science is, rather, a set of requirements — or of conventions attempting to meet requirements — for social interaction amongst would-be scientists to be practicably applied in the scientific development of belief.

It might be asked whether the scientists manque who deny the mind plausibly can have no experience of it, and under what circumstances.

One theory might be that, indeed, some of these alleged scientists have no experience of consciousness; perhaps they are things that behave indistinguishably or almost indistinguishably from creatures with consciousness, yet do not themselves possess it. Perhaps there are natural machines amongst us, which behave like more, yet are just machines.[12] But I'm very disinclined to accept this theory, which would seem effectively to entail a reproductive process that failed to produce a creature of one sort then successfully produced mimicks thereöf, as if bees and bee-flies might have the same parents.

Another theory would be that some of these alleged scientists are autistic, having minds, but having trouble seeing them. There is actually a considerable amount of mind-blindness amongst those who attempt social science. An otherwise intelligent person without a natural propensity to understand people may involve him- or herself in the scientific study of human nature — or in an ostensibly scientific study thereöf — exactly as an outgrowth and continuation of attempts to understand it by unnatural means. These attempts may in fact be fruitful, as natural inclinations may be actively defective. The autistic can offer us an outsider perspective. But outsiders can be oblivious to things of vital importance, as would be the case here.[13]

(And one must always be alert to attempts by people who fail at the ordinary game of life to transform themselves into winners by hijacking the meta-game, rewriting the rules from positions of assumed expertise.)

A remaining theory would be that these are rather more ordinary folk, who encountered what appeared to them to be a profound, transformative theory, and over-committed to it. (There seems to be an awful lot of that sort of thing in the world.) Subsequently, little compels them to acknowledge consciousness. They aren't often competently challenged; they've constructed a framework that steers them away from the problem; and most people seem to be pretty good at not thinking about things.

While the behaviorists have run off the rails in their insistence that minds are a fiction, that does not mean that the study of human behavior with little or no reference to the mind of the subject is always necessarily a poor practice. As I stated earlier, some people assume that any mind must necessarily be almost identical to their own minds, and a great many people assume far too much similarity. I find people inferring that, because they have certain traits, I must also have these same traits, when I know that I do not; I find them presuming that others have traits that I am sure that those others do not, again based upon a presumed similarity. A study of pure behavior at least avoids this sort of error, and is in some contexts very much to be recommended.

[0] I began writing this entry shortly after seeing the articles, but allowed myself repeatedly to be distracted from completing it. I have quite a few other unfinished entries; this one was at the front of the queue.

[1] When behaviorists found other psychologists unreceptive to their approach, some of them decided to decamp, and identify that approach as a separate discipline, which they grotesquely named behaviorology, combining Germanic with Greek.

[1.50 (2015:06/10)] The comment of a friend impels me to write that, by measurement I intended to refer to the sort of description explored by Helmholtz in Zählen und Messen, by Suppes and Zinnes in Basic Measurement Theory, and by Suppes, Krantz, and Tversky in Foundations of Measurement. This notion is essentially that employed by Lord Kelvin in his famous remark on measurement and knowledge. Broader notions are possible (and we see such in, for example, Rand's Introduction to Objectivist Epistemology).

[2] Under a narrowed definition of science that entails such things as measurement, a reality in which quantification never applied would be one in which science were impossible. Many of those inclined to such narrow definitions, believing that this narrowed concept none-the-less has something approaching universal applicability, struggle to quantify things for which the laws of arithmetic are a poor or impossible fit.

[3] The term brute fact is often instead used for related but distinct notions of fact for which there can be no explanation or of fact for which there is no cause. Aside from a need to note a distinction, I am not here concerned with these notions.

[4] Propositions that are not truly brute fact are often called such, in acts of metaphor, of hyperbole, or of obliviousness.

[5] Even if one insisted on some other definition of science — which insistence would be unfortunate — the point would remain that propositions that contradict known brute fact are unreasonable.

[6] Famously or infamously, René Descartes insisted that the mind interfaced with the brain by way of the pineal gland.

[7] I am sadly sure that some will want to ask, albeït perhaps not baldly, how the mind is to know that its sensation of its sensation is correct, as if one never sensed sensations as such, but only sensations of sensations. And some people, confronted with the proposition put that baldly, will dig-in, and assert that this is indeed the case; but if no sensation can itself be sensed except by a sensation that is not itself, then no sensation can be sensed, as the logic would apply recursively.

[8] Take a moment now, to try to see the full horror of a mind whose first exposures to behavior determined by other minds are largely of neglectful or actively injurious behavior.

[9] If I impute less than certainty to some proposition then, while the proposition may be falsified, my proposition about that proposition — the plausibility that I imputed to it — is not necessarily falsified. None-the-less, it is easier to speak of being wrong about falsified propositions to which one imputed a high degree of plausibility.

[10] The confusion of transmittability with rationality is founded in stupidity. Even if one allowed science to be redefined as a collaborative activity, somehow definitionally requiring transmittability, private rationality would remain rational. But I promise you that some will adopt the madness of insisting that, indeed, any acceptance of private evidence by its holder is mystical.

[11] When would-be scientists imitate, without real understanding, the behavior of those whom they take to be scientists, the would-be scientists are behaving in a way analogous to a cargo cult.

[12] Some people are convinced that they are unique in possessing consciousness, and the rest of us are just robots who do a fair job of faking it. This is usually taken as madness, though there is rather wide acceptance of a certitude that all other sorts of animals are natural machines, and that anything that seems as if it proceeds from love by a dog or by a pig is just the machine performing well.

[13] The presence of consciousness is here a necessary truth, but the proper grounds of its necessity are not obvious to most who are aware of consciousness; thus it should be unsurprising that a markèdly autistic person could not see this truth in spite of its necessity.

The most effective way to hide some things is to shine a light directly upon them. People will then not believe what they are shown.

My short article was rejected by one journal yester-day, and submitted to another in the wee hours of this morning. And, yes, that's just how the previous entry began.

This time, an editor at the rejecting journal informed me that an unnamed associate editor felt that the article didn't fit the purposes of the journal. I got no further critique from them than that. (It should be understood that, as many submissions are made, critiquing every one would be very time-consuming.)

With respect to my paper on indecision, I had some fear that I would run out of good journals to which I might submit it. With respect to this short article, I have a fear that I might run out of any journal to which I might submit it. It just falls in an area where the audience seems small, however important I might think these foundational issues.

My short article was rejected by one journal yester-day, and submitted to another in the wee hours of this morning.

At the journal that rejected it, the article was approved by one of the two reviewers, but felt to be unsuited to the readership of the journal by the other reviewer and by the associate editor. Additionally, the second reviewer and the associate editor suggested that it be made a more widely ranging discussion of the history of subjectivist thought, which suggestion shows some lack of appreciation that foundational issues are of more than historical interest, and that the axiomata invoked by the subjectivists are typically also invoked by logicists. (I say appreciation rather than understanding, because the reviewer briefly noted that perhaps my concern was with the logic as such.)

I made three tweaks to the article. One was to make the point that axiomata such as de Finetti's are still the subject of active discussion. Another was to deal with the fact that secondary criticism arose from the editor's and the objecting reviewer's not knowing what weak would mean in reference to an ordering relation. The third was simply to move a parenthetical remark to its own (still parenthetical) paragraph.

The journal that now has it tries to provide its first review within three months.