Showing posts with label category error. Show all posts
Showing posts with label category error. Show all posts
Friday, 8 June 2012
Saturday, 18 February 2012
Realities
The UK Foreign Secretary, William Hague, has warned of a new 'Cold War' and arms race in the middle east if Iran's nuclear ambitions are allowed to go unchecked. It is of course now conventional wisdom in some quarters that the real Cold War was a raging success, ensuring the peace of the world for decades and banrupting the evil empire, thus enabling western governments and business to lead the ex-Soviet peoples to the standards of democratic government and economic benefit that they now enjoy. But such advantages are not to be allowed to the lesser breeds: for them, Israel, the US and UK on on the verge of thinking a hot war would be preferable.
In the US a Moroccan man has been charged with attempting to carry out a suicide attack at the Washington Capitol. He had been under investigation for over a year by the FBI and supplied by them with a fake explosive vest. It would appear he had no more reliable source of supply.
The UK government has revealed that in 2009/10 it paid out £2 million in compensation and costs to 40 child asylum sekers wrongly detained in adult facilities. Under previous procedures a single immigration officer could decree the age of an undocumented minor.
The Chairman of RBS has defended the bank's chief executive, who recently declined an almost £1 million bonus but is about to receive £600,000 worth of shares arising from an earlier bonus award ("These were announced last year and endorsed by 99.2% of our shareholders"), by explaining that Mr Hester "is doing one of the hardest jobs in the world" - even harder, he almost said, than gaining asylum in this country as an unaccompanied Afghan minor, winning the Ubekistan presidential election with over 90 per cent of the vote, developing an Iranian nuclear bomb, or blowing up the US Congress. Mr Hester "is being paid at the low end of the range." Earlier Mr Hester had told journalists in his office that he had considered resigning after the fuss over his bonus but had decided that would be "too indulgent". "One doesn't need it. No one in this room, none of you – even if you're not on the same salary as me – no one is starving and by those standards one can't win this discussion."
Meanwhile, at the Sun, Rupert Murdoch has 'lifted the suspensions' of journalists who have been arrested but not charged. How high can you get?
In the US a Moroccan man has been charged with attempting to carry out a suicide attack at the Washington Capitol. He had been under investigation for over a year by the FBI and supplied by them with a fake explosive vest. It would appear he had no more reliable source of supply.
The UK government has revealed that in 2009/10 it paid out £2 million in compensation and costs to 40 child asylum sekers wrongly detained in adult facilities. Under previous procedures a single immigration officer could decree the age of an undocumented minor.
The Chairman of RBS has defended the bank's chief executive, who recently declined an almost £1 million bonus but is about to receive £600,000 worth of shares arising from an earlier bonus award ("These were announced last year and endorsed by 99.2% of our shareholders"), by explaining that Mr Hester "is doing one of the hardest jobs in the world" - even harder, he almost said, than gaining asylum in this country as an unaccompanied Afghan minor, winning the Ubekistan presidential election with over 90 per cent of the vote, developing an Iranian nuclear bomb, or blowing up the US Congress. Mr Hester "is being paid at the low end of the range." Earlier Mr Hester had told journalists in his office that he had considered resigning after the fuss over his bonus but had decided that would be "too indulgent". "One doesn't need it. No one in this room, none of you – even if you're not on the same salary as me – no one is starving and by those standards one can't win this discussion."
Meanwhile, at the Sun, Rupert Murdoch has 'lifted the suspensions' of journalists who have been arrested but not charged. How high can you get?
Friday, 6 January 2012
The categorical truth
In celebration of Professor Stephen Hawkin's seventieth birthday, The BBC has organised a programme in which a wide range of 'ordinary' people put their questions to him. One example given in this morning's announcement of the programme asked what happened before the big bang.
Stephen Hawkin's reply was to the effect that nothing happened, or rather that the question was a category error. Using an analogy to explain (surely a technique close to a category error itself), he said it was like asking what was south of the South Pole.
I don't think it will entirely satisfy (though perhaps there was more in the full answer) most 'ordinary' people - or at least will not prevent the question recurring. Were we to stand at the South Pole we would have a sense of something further 'south', although strictly speaking we had reached the ultimate. Yet above our heads, still in the direction we falsely though understandably label 'south', we perceive, not more land, but other matter in sky and space beyond. I think Profesor Hawkin's questioner was probably asking the nature of that otherness 'before' 'time'. I suppose the answer is that we cannot know, or perhaps, signalled by the increasing need to put 'ordinary' words here into inverted commas, we can know only in abstruse mathematical notation. 'Ordinary' people may find a requirement to accept that time has a beginning as problematic as the requirement to accept that space has no end, and wonder whether any image they can summon up of the boundary of time would be less fanciful than the image of the finite universe as a saucer balanced on the back of an elephant.
Stephen Hawkin's reply was to the effect that nothing happened, or rather that the question was a category error. Using an analogy to explain (surely a technique close to a category error itself), he said it was like asking what was south of the South Pole.
I don't think it will entirely satisfy (though perhaps there was more in the full answer) most 'ordinary' people - or at least will not prevent the question recurring. Were we to stand at the South Pole we would have a sense of something further 'south', although strictly speaking we had reached the ultimate. Yet above our heads, still in the direction we falsely though understandably label 'south', we perceive, not more land, but other matter in sky and space beyond. I think Profesor Hawkin's questioner was probably asking the nature of that otherness 'before' 'time'. I suppose the answer is that we cannot know, or perhaps, signalled by the increasing need to put 'ordinary' words here into inverted commas, we can know only in abstruse mathematical notation. 'Ordinary' people may find a requirement to accept that time has a beginning as problematic as the requirement to accept that space has no end, and wonder whether any image they can summon up of the boundary of time would be less fanciful than the image of the finite universe as a saucer balanced on the back of an elephant.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)