Author: Huenemann

bell hooks

UVU HONORS PROGRAM TO WELCOME AWARD-WINNING SCHOLAR BELL HOOKS

On March 29, the Utah Valley University Honors Program and
College of Humanities, Arts and Social Sciences will welcome
award-winning cultural theorist, philosopher and social activist bell
hooks, who will give an address entitled ”Ending Domination: Race, Sex
and Class”. Hailed as one of the “100 Visionaries Who Could Change
Your Life” by Utne Reader, her writings cover a broad range of topics
incorporating issues on feminism, race, class, education, mass media and
engaged pedagogy.
“We thought it would be impossible to get a scholar of her
level to visit us, but this has exceeded all of our hopes and
expectations,” said Shannon Mussett, Associate Professor of Philosophy
and Gender Studies Coordinator at UVU. “We couldn’t be more thrilled
to have her. Engaged learning is part of the spirit of her theory, so
she really ties into UVU’s community and philosophy. She’s going to
bring in a voice that we don’t often get where we are, and it’s a
voice that speaks to issues that matter to every person.”
bell hooks (née Gloria Watkins) is a distinguished professor of
English at City College in New York. Born in Hopkinsville, Kentucky in
1952, hooks received her B.A. from Stanford University in 1973, her M.A.
in 1976 from the University of Wisconsin and her Ph.D. in 1983 from the
University of California-Santa Cruz. She has held positions as professor
of African and African-American studies and English at Yale University,
associate professor of women’s studies and American literature at
Oberlin College in Oberlin, Ohio, and as distinguished lecturer of
English Literature at the City College of New York. She has published
more than 30 books and numerous scholarly and mainstream articles,
appeared in several documentary films and participated in various public
lectures. In 1992, her book “Ain’t I a Woman?: Black Women and
Feminism” was named one of the 20 most influential women’s books in
the last 20 years by Publishers Weekly.
“bell hooks deliberately writes so that it’s accessible to
everybody,” Mussett said. “She intentionally speaks to everyone. Her
books are clearly written so that anyone can pick them up and get
something out of them. She will speak to many different kinds of
students and the paths they take. The event is open for every person to
attend, whoever wants to come. It’s the whole spirit of her theory.
It’s not in any way to be closed off from anyone.”
The lecture will begin at 4 p.m. in the Ragan Theater on Monday,
March 29, 2010. It is general admission seating and open to the public.
There will be a question and answer session following her talk.

Most of what exists

… is dark. Dark matter is, for the most part, matter that doesn’t show itself in any way except through gravitation. Dark energy, we think, explains why the universe keeps getting bigger faster. Beyond these facts, there’s not a lot we know about these two things. Which together constitute just about everything. (That “etc.” in the chart includes everything we can possibly see, including ourselves.) [image from Wikipedia]

Fairness and farming

Here is an article describing some recent “findings” suggesting that the economics of early farming communities helped to create the basic notion of fairness. (My scare quotes are there since I can’t really see that the researchers have proven anything. They’ve taken some people living today that they think are kinda sorta like people living thousands of years ago, and have them play a few simple games, and draw their conclusions. Seems dubious, but what do I know?)

A primer on intentionality and the mind/body problem

There’s been a flurry of posts over on SHAFT’s website, all having some connection to the question of whether science can disprove God’s existence, and I muddied the waters further by bringing up the problem of intentionality. But I did not take the time to explain what the problem is. So I thought I’d make some attempt to do so here.

A cool feature of mentality — and maybe the crucial one — is that ideas can be “about” things. They can be representational. But how does an idea, or a thought, or a word, or a sentence, manage to be “about” something else? That, fundamentally, is the problem of intentionality. (Note: it has nothing to do with “intending to do something,” or having “good/bad intentions.” Different matter altogether.) It’s a question of meaning.

Initially, it seems like intentionality is a problem for materialists. For how does some hunk of matter ever come to be “about” some other hunk of matter? We can complicate the hunks by putting them into activity, and into causal relation with the hunks of matter they are supposed to be about, but it still is initially puzzling how one dynamic system can be about another. It is for this reason that some philosophers have thought materialism can’t handle intentionality, and so they have posited something special (special properties, capacities, or substances) in order to explain aboutness.

In the early 1960s, W.V. Quine worked through a careful thought experiment meant to show that determinate meanings, or intentionality, cannot simply surface out of physical behavior. His thought experiment was about a couple of linguists who confronts a bunch of people speaking a language no one else has encountered before. He argues that these two linguists could come up with two very different translation books, each of which did a perfect job of capturing what the people say and do. (So, for example, the term “Gavagai” could be equally well translated both as “Lo, a rabbit!” and as “Look — undetached rabbit parts!”). But Quine didn’t take the conclusion to be that we need to invent some special stuff to settle the matter, since he was a hard-headed materialist (except when it came to logic). Instead, he concluded that there was no fact to the matter about which translation was right. This result is called “the indeterminacy of translation.”

One may agree or not with Quine’s conclusion. But his thought experiment seems quite sound: no amount of physical behavior can be interpreted in only one way. There are always alternative and equally apt interpretations.

The same goes for computers. You can’t read a unique program off the behavior of the machine. (You can always come up with some program, but you can always come up with more than one.) The question about what the program really is cannot be settled empirically. And the same, it seems, for human beings and their behaviors, which are just like super complicated computers.

This seems like a puzzling conclusion, since don’t we all actually mean something when we say something or think about something? The indeterminacy of translation does not seem to jibe with first-person experience. So how do we get at least the appearance of determinacy of meaning out of a fundamental indeterminacy (if materialism is true, and we don’t call in special stuff to solve the mystery for us)? Indeed: how do we get any appearance of meaning at all?

That’s the question materialists have to answer. I’m not saying they can’t answer it, but I am saying it is a toughie.

The question was dramatized with John Searle’s “Chinese Room” idea. So you are in a room, and your job is to take inputs in the form of written Chinese, look them up in a great big book, where you find an appropriate Chinese response, and return it as output. Anyone outside the room says “Hey! The guy in there understands Chinese!” But there is no real understanding of Chinese anywhere in the room. So, Searle concludes, the behavior of “understanding” does not constitute genuine understanding.

There’s more to say, maybe in a part 2 of this post, but I’ll leave it at that for now.