And the perils of indecision

Multicolumnar ideas had been lurking like Greek temples in my so-called mind as 2008 came to an end. There are so many annual journalistic clichés available, looking back at all our past-years’ mistakes and resolving never to repeat them in 2009. One annoyance that I must get off my chest here and now: Can we ban such empty constructions as “X is much worse than you may think”? Or “Y is much simpler than many suppose”? We may never have thought of X one way or the other, or made suppositions about the ease of Y, yet we tend to nod and move on as though some meaningful proposition has been asserted; and, worse, that some judgment has been validated beyond dispute. Let’s learn to recognize these sneaky-weasely variations of “proof by insinuation.”

Those of you attracted to fine literature and “literary programming” may be interested in Vladimir Nabokov’s devious “proofs by rhyme” (as well as “proofs by anagram”). For example, when discussing tribal antagonisms, he adds the warning: remember that stranger rhymes with danger. And so it does, but it also rhymes with manger, a place of rest for budding messiahs. The link also loses punch when you consider semantic drift: in Chaucer’s day danger meant aloofness! The counterexamples outnumber the examples. I invite CS pairs in both directions, such as Gates/mates and Knuth/truth. Yes, Nabokov is playfully weaving verbal “conceits” with no serious claim that strangers are dangerous because of a few shared syllables. Yet one must remain alert against endowing words and sounds with fanciful metalinguistic and a-historical “baggage.”

This year-end topic richesse can lead to a malady called writer’s glut, considerably more painful than writer’s block, which can be cured with a few double Islay single-malts.¹ Gluts are harder to handle as the writer is torn between equally attractive, rival tropes. One is reminded of that poor creature in the philosopher’s menagerie: Buridan’s ass, not to be confused with Schrödinger’s cat, Maxwell’s daemon, Shanks’s pony, or Schopenhauer’s hedgehog. Buridan’s poor animal eventually dies of starvation, transfixed by indecision, stranded equidistantly

THE FLAWS OF NATURE

Stan Kelly-Bootle, Author

 

between two identical piles of hay. (Note that there’s no immediate connection with the asses of the pons asinorum [asses’ bridge], which refers to the challenges of Euclid’s fifth proposition about isosceles triangles [quid googlet]).

Buridan’s ass, in fact, is a strange case of misattribution since the 14^th-century philosophe, Jean Buridan, although intrigued by inertia and the ethics of conflicting choices, never discussed them in terms of this donkey’s dilemma. Buridan attacked many a strawman argument ( including Occam’s razor), but never mentioned asses or equal piles of straw. In one of those quirks of celebrity, Buridan is remembered today solely for an animal invented by Buridan’s enemies who mocked his “moral determinism.” Aristotle, it was, who many centuries earlier first discussed the potential paralysis induced by opposing temptations.

In Aristotle’s version, it is a man, described as equally thirsty and hungry, who finds himself midway between, and beyond the reach of, a drink and a meal. You’ll notice that Aristotle’s scenario is less symmetrical than Buridan’s, introducing spurious complexities, such as ensuring that a drink and meal can somehow be made equally tempting. Indeed, we Irish neo-Cartesians (“I drink, therefore I am” and vice-versa) would deny any meaning to the phrase “equally thirsty and hungry.” This is a self-evident category error: two predicates that belong to distinct metric spaces, and therefore resistant to orderings and comparisons. Every Irish thirst (known technically, however transient, as “Bejays, I’m spittin’ feathers”) is equally demanding, and each maximally overrides all other bodily cravings, even beyond the death and wake of Finnegan. Thus the tiniest “touch of the craythur” trumps every food offering, even the most comprehensive Irish Breakfast enriched with extra chips, pets de none, and black pudding. (A death-cell prisoner, ordering a full Irish Breakfast as her last meal, is said to have died of excess cholesterol before the sentence could be carried out.) Aristotle’s man was replaced by an ass by Buridan’s foes on the grounds no rational human would ever starve while calculating the most attractive course of action to the n^th decimal place. Spinoza went as far as saying that