Pragmatically Moe-diated Semantic Relations

I am only making this post because it seemed wrong to listen to a Locke Lecture and then not post on it. Philosophical content should be approaching absolute zero, here. But the series must be completed!!

There are some problems with the recording of Brandom's fifth Locke Lecture, "Incompatibility, Modal Semantics, and Intrinsic Logic": The recording of Brandom's lecture cuts out before the end, the appendix he keeps referencing is not included in the handouts online, whoever replied to Brandom was not recorded at all, and Bramdom's reply to them is almost entirely missing. And the Q&A seems to be largely building off of bits of the lecture that didn't get recorded. Less than ideal.

Here's what I was able to get from what was recorded: Brandom thinks that any language-game which allows assertions and denials (any autonomous discursive practice) stands in some special relation to S5 modal logic, and classical logic among non-modal logics. Whatever the details of this are supposed to be is, I take it, explained in the appendix I haven't found. Brandom has some way of going from relations of commitment and entitlement among assertions to relations of compatibility/incompatibility among assertions, and then to modal terms (via set theory?); the modal terms are then used to define negation, conjunction, and logical consequence. The upshot is that negation & pals are supposed to be shown to be treatable without an anterior notion of truth; truth, representation, intensional notions, and intentionality all look to be able to be handled down-stream of practices of "giving and asking for reasons" which don't presume them. I'm not sure what to make of all this, given the level at which Brandom's handling it in this lecture. I think it would help if half the lecture material hadn't disappeared. Or if I'd read "Making It Explicit" ever. I get a feeling that there's something sneaky going on in the way Brandom "validates classical propositional logic" and S5 by introducing logical operators by drawing attention to specific sorts of semantic relations, and this appears to have been brought up in the parts of the lecture I didn't hear, but I can't put my finger on what's bothering me about it.

Here's what I can gather of what went on that wasn't recorded: Bramdom has some idea for what to do with intuitionistic logic, but no idea what to do with relevance logics. Whatever was said in the reply to Brandom here, it caught him off-guard. Brandom thinks this is a problem, but he hadn't thought of it at all before the question & answer section of this lecture. I'm curious what all I missed, here. I suspect that it fell out that Brandom's general strategy for handling logical operators won't work for handling certain non-classical versions of the operators, which is a problem given what Brandom's said earlier about wanting to avoid asking "Which is the true logic?"; I rather liked the latter, so I'm curious about the details of the former. Still one lecture to go; maybe it'll come up again.

And now it's glasses-time.

At one point Haruhi.tv had a hidden page with Mikuru images. That's where this pic is from. When I looked through my image directories, I was surprised to find that it's the only pic I have that's just Mikuru wearing glasses.


Thankfully, there is no shortage of Nagato images where she still has her glasses. <3


No shortage at all.


Plenty of glasses pics to go around.


I decided not to post any NWS ones. It just makes sense. And then it occurred to me that I should really save Yuki pics for future use. Don't want to end up using lame pics just because I want to put up a Yuki one.


I've gotten tired of having to hunt for pics that are small enough for my current template; I've had several that end up getting cut off, anyway. 400 pixels just isn't very wide. So I've resized a lot of pics for this post. But not this one. It was always a little small.


Asakura is love. <3


Why did she have to be killed off? She just wants to murder people to see what happens when she kills them. IS THAT SO WRONG?


I have no idea what any of the text on any of these images says. I actually edited out the text on some of the images I put up in earlier posts, just to avoid accidentally throwing up embarrassing messages unintentionally. Now I am THROWING CAUTION TO THE WIND. For all I know, this image reads "I AM A PEDOPHILE; RON PAUL '08". Or more realistically, it might just say something like "Meganekko Rape Doujin Adult-only 18+". Which, ceteris parabus, is something I'd prefer not to have on my blog. But that is just one of the risks you run from trolling imageboards for pics.


This was one of the only images I had of Tsuruya with glasses. What the hell? Tsuruya and glasses is like peanut butter and celery. Man, I haven't had that in years. I need to eat more vegetables. And buy some peanut butter.


She was a background character in Haruhi. There is fan-art of her. I found at least three or four pieces while selecting pics for this update. Good job, Internet.


Sometimes the internet frightens and confuses me. Why does this exist? ;_;


Whenever I hear someone say "megane", what comes to mind is a scene from "Ultimate Girls":
Big Breasts (this is actually what they called her; I forget her actual name) was fighting a giant robot/alien mangaka. The mangaka throws a pair of glasses at her, and they land square on her face. Big Breasts is confused by this attack.

Big Breasts: Megane?
Mangaka-alien: Megane-KOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO!

And then he fires a giant laser from his crotch.

Ultimate Girls is one of the worst shows I have ever watched (in full). In my defense, you could view it online for free (legally), and I couldn't get BitTorrent to work at the time. Still, it had things like a magical-girl transformation sequence involving robot ejaculate. That's a special kind of terrible you can really only get from anime.


And now for some walls

to close out the post.