Quietism, Theories, and Nonsense again

Wasting time checking old posts on Blogger blogs for comments I've missed, I found this by Duck over at Currence's place:

[W]hen McDowell is speaking in his "Wittgensteinian" voice, he sometimes says of what he rejects that "[such-and-such locution] seems like it expresses a thought but actually it doesn't." So it's like disjunctivism at the next level up: "philosophical" truths are either obvious trivialities dressed up in hifalutin language, or they're not even coherent thoughts at all (so we don't need to see ourselves as substituting true doctrines for false ones). I think I get this, and I like the apparent self-similarity across level here (which I haven't seen much comment on), but sometimes I *do* want to see myself as doing the latter rather than being *required* to call "nonsense".

Scattered comments:
That is a nice little bit of parallelism, and not one I can recall noticing before Currence's thread.

This way of putting things sounds very like the Tractatus -- some apparent sentences do not, after fiddling with them a bit, express a thought i.e. they are merely sequences of signs which haven't been given a use, though we may have mistaken them for a sentence we understood. And "philosophical" sentences are either trivialities (being either tautologies or sentences which draw attention to features of our notation, such as Occam's Razor, and which are unneeded by anyone who has mastered the notational art), or nonsense which hasn't a use of any kind. In either case, philosophical sentences are not ones that turn out to be either true or false, depending on the way the world turns out to be upon investigation, and so philosophy is not composed of thoeries -- is not a body of doctrine. I suspect the Tractatus is where McDowell draws the thought-talk from, at least.

Of course, it wouldn't take much tweaking to make it sound like the later Wittgenstein -- swap talk of "appearing to have a sense" with talk of latent nonsense, and tell a story about what makes something "coherent" that doesn't make reference to some especial notation.

Either way, I think Duck is right to object that McDowell would object to the claim that "[highest common-factor] views at least manage to say what they claim to, even if they end up falling to one side of the oscillation." For example, consider the Myth of the Given. The notion that the world's impact on a thinker has some rational role to play in that thinker's cognitive life, and even that (in one sense) this impact is independent of the thinker's activity (in that it is not willed), is quite correct. But the Myth of the Given only appears to say this -- since it wants to say also that the world's impacts on a thinker are non-conceptual in a stronger sense than that of not being willed thoughts, it can't tell an intelligible story about how the world's impacts are supposed to play a rational role in a thinker's cognitive life. It's not that the Myth of the Given gets the world's influence wrong, by telling a story which could be true of some creatures, but happens to be false of us -- sense-data theories and the like can't be made sense of at all; we cannot imagine creatures of which it would be an accurate account, let alone ask whether we are such creatures. Where there should be an account of how the unconceptualized datum constrains our conceptual maneuvers, if the theory is to be made robust enough that we can follow along with the account it's trying to give, instead there can only be slips (such as between the space of reasons and the space of nature (considered as the realm of law)) or hand-waving about how there must be a way to fill the gap, even if we haven't hit upon it yet (for clearly sensations play a cognitive role!). But a theory with such large explanatory gaps can't plausibly be judged false -- for all we know, any objections we might bring against it could be addressed by the hypothetical material which has not yet been worked out. But neither can it be judged true, since the gaps might be a critical flaw, never repairable. The sense-data theorist has not finished telling her story about how sensations play a cognitive role, and one shouldn't judge a story before its finish. And so there is a clear sense in which whatever replaces the sense-data account will not be an instance of replacing a false theory with a true one, and in which we have not been able to understand the sense-data theory (since no one has ever said how it's all supposed to work, except in a hand-wavy manner).

Consider also the other pole of Mind and World's dialectical shuffle: "Davidsonian" coherentism. Here, the threat is of making thought into a "frictionless spinning in the void", of losing contact with the world at all; the challenge is that Davidson's account does not give a plausible explanation for how our thoughts could have intentional content. What is called "perception" in Davidson's account is at least something conceptual, something which can play an inferential role, and so (unlike in the Myth of the Given) it is intelligible how percepts could play a rational role in a thinker's cognitive life, once a thinker has percepts. But Davidson's account labels "percepts" just beliefs whose efficient cause is the objects they are about. But Davidson's account of causation does not (at least here) allow that causes can also be reasons -- "the only thing that can count as a reason for a belief is another belief", and the world's impacts are not beliefs. Hence the world's impact on me is no reason for my believing that I perceive that things are thus-and-so. But this shows that what Davidson calls "perception" is not perception as we are generally interested in the term -- as an event in which something happens to me and I notice a fact in the process. So Davidson is not, it turns out, discussing perception -- he is discussing the orthogonal category of thoughts which are efficiently caused by the objects they purport to be about. But how an epistemic theory handles perception is where we can judge whether or not the theory gets the facts right about how our thoughts are about anything. So if Davidson does not discuss perception, then he does not give us an account of how our thoughts have intentional content. But if he didn't give us an account of this, then he did not give us a false account, which needs correcting. Rather, the lacuna in his thought seems sizable enough that it's questionable whether he was discussing thought at all, since what he's discussing does not have a clear way of having content, and thoughts without content are not anything we can recognize as the sort of things we think.

In both cases, the oscillatory slips spoil the whole piece -- rather than talking about perception, since both accounts fail to consider natural-causal events which are simultaneously reasons, both accounts end up discussing... well, nothing I can recognize as something philosophers are interested in. Though if we haven't seen the ways in which the Given and "frictionless spinning" both slip into a muddle (in particular, by ignoring the fact that the realm of nature is not just the realm of law -- that natural causes can also be reasons), then we can take both or either to be discussing perception. But once we stop oscillating, we stop viewing them this way. They just seem confused.

There is an ambiguity in "false doctrine" or "false theory". Consider the analogous case in Christianity of Church doctrine and "false doctrines" -- heresies. Take one of the extravagant forms of Gnosticism, such as the doctrines of Basilides. The whole system of Basilides is called "heretical", and one can equally lambast it as "false doctrines", "opposed to the true Gospel", "pernicious lies" etc. etc. But there are two ways in which one can say that Basilides's system is heretical, is not something passed on by the Apostles -- Basilides asserts some things p where the Church asserts that not-p (such as that Simon of Cyrene was crucified on Good Friday, and not Christ, or that God the Father is not the God worshiped by the Jews, but rather is a rebellious angel), and Basilides also asserts some things q which the Church does not assert the contradictory of (such as the order of the procession of the Archons, or the details of how Not-Being gives rise to Being through the panspermia; the Church does not have any notion of Archons, and so does not order them; neither does she speak of God as Not-Being, and so no account is needed of how Not-Being gives rise to Being). Both p and q are "false doctrines", as they are not part of the teaching of the Church. But only doctrines of the p-sort are replaced in Church doctrine with "true doctrines"; doctrines of the q-sort are simply discarded, and nothing put in their place. (A memorable line from Irenaeus concerning certain doctrines of the Gnostics: "To refute them it is only necessary to make their doctrines publicly known.")

I want to say: all philosophical "theories" are "false doctrines" of the q-sort.

But perhaps I should not say this.

Consider the standard Cartesian story: It appears I might be in error in all of my beliefs about the world; I convince myself from pure reason that God exists and would not allow this; ergo whatever I clearly and distinctly discern is true of the world.

One might say that this is all unintelligible, since it's not conceivable that all of my beliefs about the world might be false, hence we can't understand what Descartes was feeling at the onset (and further can't imagine what he thought was needed to treat whatever he thought he was suffering from). (This seems to be the strategy in which we "tell the skeptic to get lost", since Rorty/Davidson do not appear to think that merely rehearsing the content of their own articles will suffice to sway the skeptic.)

Or one might say that it's simply false that I might be in error in all of my beliefs about the world, and/or that I can prove the existence of God through "pure reason", and/or that God's existence is incompatible with my universal erring, and/or that the criterion of truth is my clearly and distinctly perceiving a fact. (Note the and/ors -- one might disagree with the Cartesian reasoning only in part, or hold only part of it to be intelligible enough to agree or disagree with.)

If one went the latter route, one might replace the Cartesian system with something equally bad, or worse. But must one do this, if one goes the latter route? And if one might not -- then what is the harm in choosing the latter route rather than the former? (Or perhaps in going both ways, as the mood suits? For if neither leads into confusion, then it does not seem to matter which way we opt to speak.)

Perhaps the skeptic would not need to be told to "get lost" if we both showed why we are inclined to assert the (at least apparent) contradictory of his doctrines and why we do not find his doctrines something we can sympathize with (but not either alone). In which case refusing to entertain the notion of philosophical doctrines as p-doctrines would be detrimental to the good of our friend the skeptic. So in talk of sense and nonsense, too, one ought to keep shifting one's posture, so as not to get stiff (C&V 27).

One might speak of "true doctrine" as being what is opposed to "false doctrine", meaning by the latter q-type doctrines. "True doctrines" would just be the ones that aren't things one doesn't cotton to -- "truth" here (as Rorty claims is true generally) is just a compliment we pay to a set of sentences; there might not be anything else in common among the sentences (for they might include metaphors, which at least on a Davidsonian account might very well be false sentences, but none the worse for wear for all that). But calling sentences we like "true" (regardless of whether we hold them all true) needn't lead us into confusion (though it might). Homonyms are a perfectly cromulent part of language. And perhaps certain metaphors may consistently prove useful in dispelling certain confusions -- and so one calls them "true", not meaning to say anything about their truth-value. Just as one called the q-type doctrines "false" without being committed to their having a sense.

One might also simply mean "true" and "false" in the normal sense -- is there a clear line between philosophical talk and the human sciences, between the arena where there are only truisms and confusions and the arena where we can speak of true and false theories without shame? And if not the human sciences, what then of the other sciences? I do not see that there clearly is a line here, in all cases, at all times. (Though one could draw one -- but this would seem to be to say ahead of time what the sciences can talk about, which I don't see is possible. For they might change in all sorts of odd ways. Prophecy is not the business of philosophy, to quote Hegel. And if the sciences can't talk about something, why shouldn't this be a finding of the sciences? Is it a conceptual matter that one can't talk about what happens beyond a singularity? Was it a conceptual confusion that lead many of the moderns to believe that we could never know what the stars were composed of? I should think that the answer one gives to these questions would depend on a great many other, related questions -- and it is not clear to me that there is only one set of answers which is a respectable one, here. I take this sort of thing to be one of the lessons of "Two Dogmas of Empiricism." There is no analytic-synthetic distinction worth having because one can shift around what one calls "analytic" and what one calls "synthetic" without falling into falsehoods -- one holds one point steady, and revolves the others about it. But one could have done this with points which are currently revolving. And so being held steady is not a property held by the point, but only by the manner in which one holds it.)

On the parallelism noted at the start of this post: Good things to believe and bad things to believe can be indistinguishable to those what consider them, at least for some people some of the time in some cases. This is a way of putting it that makes the parallelism appear obvious. And also it holds for non-disjunctive views of perception, and views of philosophy as a body of doctrine, as well as for McDowell-type views. A narrower way of putting it, which aims to exclude the former sorts of views: Good things to believe and bad things to believe can be indistinguishable to those what consider them, and they might not have anything in common apart from that. (So they might not share a common "representational content", or they might not both be "theories" aiming to address some common problem.)

(When I say "scattered", I meant it.)

Since I am posting anyway: Now-Times is looking pretty good; I've just begun to dig around in its archives.

Discussion about the relation of the Science of Logic (and the Encyclopedia) to the Phenomenology is currently going on in a thread there; the ball's in my court at the moment. Weedling out just what I want to say about ss25 of the Encyclopedia. Though it's worth noting that a search seems to show that this is the only place in the Encyclopedia Logic where the Phenomenology is mentioned, and there's only one unambiguous reference in the Philosophy of Spirit that I find -- ss418 has a brief reference to the "here" and "now" of Sense-Certainty. Given this paucity of direct references, it simply seems implausible to me that the Phenomenology is supposed to be a preface to the Encyclopedia system; if it was that important, it would be said more clearly. (And so I am also skeptical that it is to be a necessary propadeutic to the Logic, given that I'm inclined to view the Greater Logic as just the first part of the final system, in accord with ss11 of the Logic -- Hegel publishes the first part of the system early, and by the time he's finished working out his system he's no longer using the Phenomenology to start it. Though Hegel clearly thought at the time of writing ss11 that this would be the role the Phenomenology would play, I don't think it ends up shaking out quite as Hegel imagined.)

I also liked what I read of Inconsistent Thoughts, which I found via the Philosophy Carnival thing. Dialetheism is neat.

I laughed.

Wittgenstein parody encyclopedia entry on "Uncyclopedia."

My favorite bit was the coloring book page.

"I destroy, I destroy, I destroy" is a real quote, incidentally. Page 21 of Culture and Value.

And his site has an RSS feed finally

Clark, the guy from Mormon Metaphysics, appears to not be dead. He has a new blog at Wordpress, now called "Pragmatic Metaphysics". Presumably, it will have posts at some point; right now he's playing with the stylesheet. But it can't hurt to go ahead and update your preferred RSS reader. "Mormon Metaphysics" has spawned plenty of good comment thread discussions about Davidson, Pierce, Derrida, and Heidegger, and presumably this will also hold true of the new blog.

Also, I have decided I like Adam Smith's Lost Legacy. It is a blog about Adam Smith contra the Chicago School's appropriation of him. There are hundreds of posts all devoted to basically the same topic. You have to admire that sort of dedication.

Please also note that I have scratched out some more thoughts on Brandom's fifth Locke Lecture, in the previous post. It occurs to me that I probably should have made it a new post, rather than editing stuff in several weeks later. But it seemed a little short for its own post, at the time.

edit: Oh hey, Kant Blog has updated. Today is a good day to be a Guy Who Never Updates, Ever. Pity I don't know any more about the history of magnetism than he does. If anyone wants to suggest books on the history of science from about 1750 to about 1850, that would be swell.

Brandom Lectures Update

The full audio of Brandom's fifth lecture, along with the reply and the full Q&A section, has been posted to the place the old version was at. I figure this is of interest to some, and wouldn't want it to get buried in an old comment thread.

Hopefully I'll get around to listening to the full version (and the final lecture) sometime before the sun becomes a cold, dark lump of coal the size of your forehead. But no promises!

edit: I have listened to the full version, and have started working through Priest's "An Introduction to Non-Classical Logic". Which has been my first formal introduction to modal logic (though I was of course not entirely ignorant of the stuff before now, my "Logic" course didn't go past the predicate calculus, so I'd been neglecting actually sitting down and working textbook problems for anything more than that). I get what Brandom's been saying about "the modal revolution" now; this stuff is neat.

I'm not sure how much Brandom's claims about "the intrinsic logic" of e.g. intuitionist logic being classical S5 really amount to. The claim seems to boil down to saying that for any autonomous discursive practice, even one in which "Not not A, ergo A" doesn't generally hold as a form of valid inference, you can say how to draw inferences according to classical S5 rules; any autonomous language game is VV-sufficient for laying out classical S5's inferential rules through a semantics that speaks only of commitment and entitlement. But this does not strike me as particularly impressive; there would still be inferences in the discursive practice whose form classical S5 would countenance which the discursive practitioners would not recognize as valid, so it strikes me as odd to say that the "intrinsic logic" of the discursive practice is classical S5. Whatever purpose "intrinsic" logic serves, it doesn't seem to have much of a relation to the inferences reasoners draw, and so it seems like a rather beggarly "intrinsic" feature of their practice. If logic isn't behind the validity of inferences, I don't see what it can be said to do at all.

I don't think there's anything here that Brandom would disagree with; he said in an earlier lecture that he doesn't think the question of "Which is the true logic" is a good one, since various logics can be used to express various sorts of inferential commitments. But then I'm left wondering what calling classical S5 "the intrinsic logic of most familiar logics" is supposed to mean, if it's not supposed to be calling classical S5 "more true" than other logics -- more closely related to our inferential practices, or somesuch. For instance, on page 2 of the lecture handout:

Fact: The incompatibility semantics over standard incompatibility relations with these semantic definitions of connectives validates classical propositional logic.

What is that supposed to mean, if we're not interested in the question of "Which is the true logic"? In what sense can classical propositional logic be "validated" short of being "the true logic"? Is this supposed to be an explanation for why classical logic came along so early, and has been so widely-liked, or something like that? (If so, it strikes me as a bad effort -- classical logic has simple truth-tables, and both "the law of excluded middle" and "the law of noncontradiction" have the support of Aristotle (and most of the tradition), which I think nicely accounts for why non-classical logics always smell a little fishy. But I suspect Brandom doesn't mean to be addressing this question, either. I just don't know what "intrinsic logic" is supposed to signify. Perhaps he's claiming that classical S5 can be worked out purely from talk of commitment and entitlement (and not of truth etc.)? But then I still don't see why "intrinsic logic" should be a good title for this feature of classical S5.)

This is to set to the side that, as I understand it, paraconsistent logics don't have classical S5 as their "intrinsic logic". Whatever the "validation" of classical logic is supposed to amount to, I suspect that this is a serious barrier to it.

On a more positive note: I liked the stuff about holism. Fodor comes under attack from yet another front; suits me fine. I am curious what Brandom's argument for holism entails for a Tarski-style theory of truth (along Davidsonian lines), since in a Tarski-style theory the truth-conditions of a sentence are derived from semantic properties assigned to sub-sentential units, that of satisfaction; the satisfaction relations are the axioms from which the familiar T-sentences are drawn as theorems. Tarski-style theories of truth are compositional. (I think I have this right; I should probably go back and read some of the earlier Davison essays to brush up on this.) Brandom's semantics is not compositional, though it is recursive. "It is holistic, that is, noncompositional, in that the semantic value of a compound is not computable from the semantic values of its components. But this holism within each level of constructional complexity is entirely compatible with recursiveness between levels. The semantic values of all the logically compound sentences are computable entirely from the semantic values of less complex sentences." I suspect that this is not a difference which makes a difference. The Tarskian details that lie behind Davidson's "Convention T" do not seem to play much of a role in the interpretive process; ""S" is true-in-L IFF P, where "P" is a translation of "S" into English, or simply S if L=English" does not seem to need any adjusting if one mucks around with the axiom system Tarski used; McDowell argues in one of his essays ("In Defense of Modesty"?) that intuitionists can make use of a Tarski-style theory of truth as a theory of meaning despite their disagreements about logic, contra Dummett & Wright, and I should think the same holds here: The important part of "Convention T" remains unassailable, though some of the things Davidson wrote about compositionality might need revising.

Cutting it close

I have submitted my grad school application for Chicago. Now I get to wait three months. And hope that FedEx didn't lose my writing sample. And worry that my writing sample was a horrible mess and I should be ashamed of myself for submitting it. And my knee's still all swolen, and the number the hospital gave me for an orthopedist ended up being some guy who only does hip and ankle replacements. And I don't have the slightest idea what I'm supposed to do this spring, since it'll be the first time in my life since toddlerhood to have a "semester" with no classes to go to. And my poor car has been sold for scrap metal. And my mom's having another bladder surgery on Wednesday.

But for now, it's time to relax.

Aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaah.

Hegel and Quietism again (briefly)

Reading through the Pippin/McDowell exchange now. Pippin's postscript was quite enjoyable I thought; probably my favorite piece of his that I've read so far. Though it does seem to miss the point as a criticism of McDowell, as McDowell points out.I've not yet finished the series, but the following bit in "Pippin's Postscript" caught my eye:

To reconceive the way our sensibility is formed as a ‘moment’ in the self-realization of the Concept is to provide a picture of thought that is not confronted with that substantive task. That the forms of thought are the forms of reality can now stand revealed as a platitude. (At least until someone thinks of some other reason to find it problematic.)

It says something about McDowell's quietism that Hegelian doctrines can "stand revealed as platitudes".

Hegel did think that there was something "obvious" about "the coincidence of logic and metaphysics", since he think it's akin to the old idea that "nous governs the world" or more modern thoughts of "Divine Providence", but he's well aware that this is not a platitudinous notion; immediately after he makes the claim, in §24 of the Encyclopedia Logic, there is a very long note apologizing for such a way of speaking, and noting the many objections that readily spring to mind against it (that it appears to credit consciousness to "dead nature" etc.). The remark itself is only a preliminary note; Hegel's trying to give a brief sketch of the Logic (and the whole Encyclopedia system) before he actually sets it out. And it's well known how much Hegel hated trying to summarize his work; his prefaces generally begin with, if they don't entirely consist of, an attack on the notion of philosophical works having prefaces. Hegel generally complains that a preface can't be clear about what's going on in the book unless one has already read & understood the book, but if one already done that then a preface is superfluous. But he includes them because they are a necessary evil; though one is likely to get a horribly misleading impression from a summary, it is at least a starting point, and those are hard to come by.

That the identity of the forms of thought and the forms of reality may "stand revealed as a platitude" seems disingenuous. It may stand revealed as true (pending someone coming up with a good objection to it), but this is because we've sat and thought about it an awful lot (with the help of complicated books by dead German guys). This is not generally what comes to mind when one thinks of "platitudes". If anything is not banal, Hegelianism would seem to be.

It often happens that one only really understands a platitude once one's been through such-and-such. "You can't go home again" is platitudinous, but this hardly stops people from trying; one understands the platitude only once one really feels how distant one has become from one's old home. But the such-and-such in question cannot be just any requirement. Given sufficient training, practice, study, etc. anything can come to seem obvious. But if this was sufficient to make the notion in question into a platitude, then everything would become one. In which case it would be misleading to speak of "platitudes" at all.

It is worth noting what McDowell immediately follows the above bit with:

There is no way to conceive reality except in terms of what is the case, and there is no intelligible idea of what is the case except one that coincides with the idea of what can be truly thought to be the case.

This is clearly McDowell's Tractarianism in view (or if you don't like to call it that, then it's another reference to PI 95). So the reference to "platitudes" is clearly a Wittgensteinian move. (As if TLP 6.13 read "Logic is the mirror of the world; logic is metaphysics". I had to trim out "Logic is not a body of doctrine" because it just seems too forced to leave in place.)

Reading a little further:

It may seem absurd to suggest that the identity-in-difference of thought and reality is a platitude. But it takes work to enable it to present itself as the platitude it is, in the face of our propensity to mishandle immediacy.

Oh, so we just need to get a proper view of mediation and immediacy, and then Hegel's remark will seem platitudinous. Again, this seems a hard pill to swallow. I'll quote Hegel's own exasperated remarks, from the Science of Logic §92, which is more or less a third preface to the book:

This is not the place to deal with the question apparently so important in present-day thought, whether the knowledge of truth is an immediate knowledge having a pure beginning, a faith, or whether it is a mediated knowledge . In so far as this can be dealt with preliminarily it has been done elsewhere. Here we need only quote from it this, there is nothing, nothing in heaven, or in nature or in mind or anywhere else which does not equally contain both immediacy and mediation, so that these two determinations reveal themselves to be unseparated and inseparable and the opposition between them to be a nullity. But as regards the philosophical discussion of this, it is to be found in every logical proposition in which occur the determinations of immediacy and mediation and consequently also the discussion of their opposition and their truth. Inasmuch as this opposition, as related to thinking, to knowing, to cognition, acquires the more concrete form of immediate or mediated knowledge, it is the nature of cognition as such which is considered within the science of logic, while the more concrete form of cognition falls to be considered in the philosophy of spirit. But to want the nature of cognition clarified prior to the science is to demand that it be considered outside the science; outside the science this cannot be accomplished, at least not in a scientific manner and such a manner is alone here in place.

If this is what is needed for us to recognize the platitude as a platitude, it is an awfully tall order. By the time "the more concrete forms of cognition" are being dealt with, you're at the end of Hegel's system. Even if McDowell has significantly easier ways to keep us from "mishandling immediacy" (and in this paper he refers to the entire Phenomenology as devoted to the task), the platitudinousness of Hegel's purported platitude is looking mighty shaky. Hell, in this latter formulation it seems prima facie impossible that it could be a platitude, since I will submit that there just can be no platitude which includes the phrase "identity-in-difference". That is too many hyphens for a platitude.

I am not suggesting that the dissolution of Kant’s problem about conceptual objectivity exhausts Hegel’s thinking; not even that it exhausts his thinking about the relation between thought and reality.
For one thing, Kant’s problem reflects only one way in which unmediated immediacy can make the relation seem problematic.

I wonder if all of Hegel's thoughts are platitudes, or at least all of the ones that involve ways in which mediacy-immediacy can seem problematic, but really isn't.

It occurs to me that one could take a "Wittgensteinian" position against "philosophical theories" along the lines of Goldman's proof that p: "Theories are the sort of thing that might have counterexamples. But if our sayings were to admit of any counterexamples, then this would just show that we've not been sufficiently rigorous in our own anti-theoretical approach, for our non-theories are not supposed to be able to have any counterexamples. Hence there can be no theories in philosophy."

As a final anti-quietist grenade, McDowell again:

Pippin says I hold that objects simply occupy a position of authority over our thinking. But ‘simply’ makes this a travesty.

an aside: Pippin footnotes McDowell, "Self-Determining Subjectivity and External Constraint", which appears to only have been published in German. Anyone have this? I notice that Pippin's citation (in his postscript) is "(6, draft)". I guess McDowell did not include the standard "PLEASE DO NOT CITE THIS IS A DRAFT" disclaimer. edit: Got it, thanks Tom. Though now that I double-check, it turns out it was in Currence's bundle. I could've sworn I looked there for it.

RARH RARH FLAG THE POWAH

I love internet polls. The Telegraph had a web-contest to suggest a new UK flag. Here's the winner:



That's the Gurren-dan logo in the middle, there. The Telegraph article makes it sound like it was just "inspired" by anime or something; nope, that's a straight rip from the Gurren-dan flag. The plain red-and-white background (visible in the OP at about 1:15) was just changed to the Union Jack.

The Norwegian designer, who wishes to remain anonymous, said he intended the flag to represent the union of England, Wales, Scotland and Northern Ireland in a modern, cool light.

The dragon itself was inspired by a Japanese anime television series.

"It represents shouting "UNION!" and joining together; kicking reason to the curb and doing the impossible; fighting the power, and piercing the heavens," he said

And what impact does he think the new flag would have on foreigners like himself?

"That the UK is awesome. I just hope they don't think it's a pirate flag.

"Actually, if this design is rejected as a common flag perhaps the Crown might file it for future use as a privateer ensign on the high seas or in outer space."

It's not clear to me from the article if the designer mentioned that he straight-up took the "dragon" (actually Gurren's face) from a show. I suspect he may have tried to softball it, so that he could get quoted in the Telegraph like he did. "UNION!" is what Kamina/Simon yell when Gurren and Lagann combine to form Gurren-Lagann, or later when Lagann and like a dozen other captured mecha combine to form Dai Gurren-Lagann. "Let's make the impossible possible and kick reason to the curb!" is one of Kamina's catch-phrases; "Your drill is a drill which will pierce the heavens!" is another. And "RARH RARH FIGHT THE POWAH" is the eyecatch jingle. (It pleases me to see that the Telegraph's comments are filled with people shouting "BELIEVE IN YOU WHO BELIEVES IN ME!" -- another fine Kamina moment.)

The last bit is also a reference to the show; the two biggest additions to Gurren-Lagann are a giant boat (which can fly) and a huge spaceship. And then, the moon. You know you're watching a good show when it turns out that the moon is a giant battle fortress, and this is a minor plot point. Incidentally, the way to defeat the moon is with a giant drill. This also works for absolutely everything else ever. If at first the drill does not appear to be working, the solution is either "more drills" or "bigger drills". Or sometimes more, bigger drills with lots of other drills coming out of them. Nested drills. Drill drill drill drill drill.

I don't know why the Telegraph article does not mention which "popular online forum" was responsible for the vote-rigging. It was 2ch. Also, that is not a "Manga cartoon character" riding the dragon. It's Louise Françoise le Blanc de la Vallière from "Zero no Tsukaima", which was a series of light novels and an anime before it got a manga adaptation, and that particular image is from the eyecatch of the anime. Louise there is only a "Manga cartoon character" if "Manga" means "Japanese". (And what's up with that capitalization, Telegraph?)

One of the Japan-submitted flags had leeks on it. Presumably this is Hatsune Miku's proposed flag. This flag manages to feature random loli while remaining on-theme, since Ana-chan is from Corunuwarru, good job 2ch. Though I have no idea what the little yellow triangle is there for, and that's a really lousy picture of Ana.

I voted for the Louise flag. Ride on, Louise. Ride on.