Specifics

A thing I've noticed:

Sarah Palin has now, in several interviews, used the following phrasing. In reference to which newspapers she reads, which constitutional rulings she disagrees with, and other completely non-essential issues:

Interviewer:
Name me a specific case of X.

Palin:
I can name you specific cases of X. You know, I think it's important in terms of X bla bla bla. So, you know, X.

Interviewer:
And what specific case of X are you thinking about?

[At which point she says basically more of the same, and you scream in agony and close the window you were looking at.]

So she specifically says that she can name specific cases of whatever it is (newspapers, constitutional law cases. Y'know: elitist things), and then reveals that she can't. Anyway, watch for it. As Michael Bérubé says, it's like watching a student try to fake a term paper in real time. Which, btw, is exactly the feeling I got watching that "all under the umbrella of job creation"-answer, which Tina Fey repeated verbatim in the Saturday Night Live sketch.

Et tu, Brute

Here's an 8-part lecture on the philosophy of mind, given by John Searle. I've only seen the first bit (I'll watch the rest if I get the time), but it seems like a nice introduction to the field.

He gets into what he has earlier called the "brute fact vs. social fact" distinction at the end of part 1. This brought up something I was reading about that distinction last year around this time, as I was finishing up my MA thesis. This is how I remember it:

The brute facts are the world, independent of the observer. The social facts are facts that depend on social decisions and, I guess, aesthetics: matters of taste, in the broadest possible sense (what to do: commit mass murder or have a nice cup of tea?).

You kick a rock, Newton says, the rock will brutalise your foot. The rock and its physical nature is a brute fact which bruises your foot. The physical pain is a brute fact too, probably - neural signals and responses. But what the pain means is a social fact. It depends on you and your community's relationship to physical pain and/or rocks.

In general, as a rule, I think we can almost never go wrong if we assume that most facts are social facts. Even things which seem very obviously to be brute facts, like said rock, are, when you think about it, crawling with social facts: what do you think about rocks? What do you think about pain? Why do you kick the rock? Have you kicked rocks before? Does the rock remind you of your mother? Etc. Etc.

Michael Bérubé has an argument which I think I agree with in his book Rhetorical Occasions that the distinction between what is a brute fact and social fact is a social fact, in the day-to-day business of being alive. If you believe the rock is an illusion, the rock doesn't stop being a brute fact, and if you change your mind upon having kicked it, it doesn't care. But in the interaction with your community, there is no solid basis to ever completely arbitrate the dispute over what is a brute fact and what is a social fact. You can change your community's mind, but their state of mind is generally much further from the brute facts than one would think.

I mean, kicking the rock is a pretty damn convincing argument, but it's still rhetoric.

Ex-blogger (oh, and professor or something) Michael Bérubé has written a 9-page essay on the event of Richard Rorty's death which I'm looking forward to reading. It's called "Richard Rorty and the Politics of Modesty" (pdf).

Re: the first paragraph:
Have you ever noticed that when people are writing about the recently deceased, they always begin by using the full name even though the person in question didn't Richard Rorty becomes Richard McKay Rorty, and Ronald Reagan (no similarity implied) becomes Ronald Wilson Reagan. There's something ritualistic in the public declaration of death. The use of the fuhttp://www.blogger.com/img/gl.link.gifll name accentuates the individuality of the deceased as well as the formality of the event. I wonder if that isn't one of the oldest functions of the public sphere: the public declaration of birth and death, habeas corpus, non habeas corpus, bring out yer dead.

Oh, and Bérubé is also going for Obama. Yup. Me, Bérubé, Stevie Wonder, Josh Lyman and Oprah.