Richard Rorty Interview

The following are excerpts from an interview with Philosopher Richard Rorty. The complete interview can be found here.

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Int: How do you respond to the recent conservative attacks on the academy?

Rorty: I think that the academic left has made sort of an ass of itself and has given easy targets for the conservatives, but basically I think that the conservatives are just either jealous of the soft life that we professors have or else working for the Republicans and trying to underm~ne the universities the same way they undermined the trade unions. I mean that the universities and colleges are bastions of the left in America, and the closest thing we have to the left is roughly the left wing of the Democratic Party, and if you look at the statistics on what kind of professor votes for what, the humanities and the social science professors always vote overwhelmingly democratic, and obviously the youth that is exposed to courses in social sciences and humanities is going to be gently nudged in a leftward direction. The Republicans are quite aware of this fact, and they would like to stop it from happening. Any club that will beat the universities is going to look good to them. The more the English depanments make fools of themselves by being politically correct, the easier a target the Republicans are going to have.

Int: Is that what you meant by "making asses of themselves"?

Rorty: I think that the English departments have made it possible to have a career teaching English without caring much about literature or knowing much about literature but just producing rather trite, formulaic, politicized readings of this or that text. This makes it an easy target. There's a kind of formulaic leftist rhetoric that's been developed in the wake of Foucault, which permits you to exercise a kind of hermeneutics of suspicion on anything from the phonebook to Proust. It's sort of an obviously easy way to write books, articles, and it produces work of very low intellectual quality. And so, this makes this kind of thing an easy target from the outside. It permits people like Roger Kimball and D'Souza to say these people aren't really scholars, which is true. I think that the use made of Foucault and Derrida in American departments of literature had been, on the whole, unfortunate, but it's not their fault. Nobody's responsible for their followers.

Int: You have criticized Foucault and others for their radical politics.

Rorty: What I object to about them is that they never talk in terms of possible legislation, possible national economic policy, things that might actually be debated between political candidates and you might pass a law about or something like that. It seems to me to be a continuation of the '60s attitude that the system is so hopelessly corrupt that you don't really take part in the day-to-day politics. You rise above it and sneer at it. They don't even try to be solutions. They're radical critiques without radical proposals.

Int: Should philosophers offer specific political proposals?

Rorty: I don't think there's any general rule. I mean, some people are good at this; some people aren't. Everybody's supposed to try to be a good citizen, but not philosophy professors any more than nurses or plumbers.

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Int: In Contingency, Irony and Solidarity, you extoll the "strong poet." Do you think that a person should be considered deficient or bad, if he or she were not a strong poet?

Rorty: Yeah, I think that of the various potentialities that human beings might hope to fulfill, such a person fulfills only some and leaves others unfulfilled. I think it comes to saying: Ideally, people ought to be both imaginative and nice. Some people are nice without being imaginative. Some people are imaginative without being nice. One out of two isn't bad, but it would be nice to have both.

Int: Are there any private virtues other than imagination?

Rorty: No. That's just because I'm extending the term 'imaginative' to mean every project of self-creation, every sense of duty to oneself.

Int: How do think that the university can encourage imagination?

Rorty: I think that liberal education holds out examples of people who have done something startling and original and thus inspires people to think, "Gee, maybe I could do something startling and original too." But it isn't that one department rather than another is in charge of this activity. Philosophy departments hold out the examples of people like Hegel and Nietzsche and Wittgenstein, and art departments hold out the examples of people like Da Vinci and Cezanne.

Int: Do you have any suggestions about teaching style?

Rorty: Teaching is largely a matter of some kind of rapport established between the teacher and the student. This is purely accidental and unpredictable and unplannable. You can have an utterly dry teaching style and yet something in what you're saying and the way you're saying it will turn certain students on. I think the nice thing about our education system is that you get to see a lot of different teachers doing their thing about a lot of different figures. Sooner or later, something might grab you.

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Int: In Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature, you attacked Putnam's early philosophy. What do you think of his more recent work?

Rorty: I think our views are practically indistinguishable, but he doesn't. He thinks I'm a relativist and he isn't. And I think: if I'm a relativist, then he's one too.

Int: Why do you think Putnam sees you as a relativist?

Rorty: Beats me. I wrote an article about it, but that was as far as I got.

Int: Do you still believe that epistemology should be replaced by hermeneutics?

Rorty: No, I think it was an unfortunate phrase. I wish I'd never mentioned hermeneutics. The last chapter of Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature isn't very good. I think I just should have said: we ought to be able to think of something more interesting to do than keep the epistemology industry going.

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Int: What led you to major in philosophy?

Rorty: Lack of any better ideas. I might equally well have gone into English or History, but I had been more fascinated by my philosophy course than by anything else. It was like choosing a major without anything much in mind. Occasionally, I've regretted not being a historian, but by now, I think it doesn't really make much difference, because after you get tenure, you can do what you want anyways.

Invisibility Possible Researchers Say

The following is from here.

Invisibility theories see light of day
New materials that can change the way light and other forms of radiation bend around an object may provide a way to make objects invisible, researchers say.

Two separate teams of researchers have come up with theories on ways to use experimental "metamaterials" to cloak an object and hide it from visible light, infrared light, microwaves and perhaps even sonar probes.

Their work suggests that science fiction portrayals of invisibility, such as the cloaking devices used to hide space ships in Star Trek, might be truly possible.

Harry Potter's cloak or The Invisible Man of films and fiction might be a bit harder to emulate, however, because the materials must be used in a thick shell.

The concept begins with refraction - a quality of light in which the electromagnetic waves take the quickest, but not necessarily the shortest, route.

This accounts for the illusion that a pencil immersed in a glass of water appears broken, for instance.

"Imagine a situation where a medium guides light around a hole in it," physicist Ulf Leonhardt of Britain's University of St Andrews, wrote in one of the reports, published in Friday's issue of the journal Science.

The light rays end up behind the object as if they had travelled in a straight line.

"Any object placed in the hole would be hidden from sight. The medium would create the ultimate optical illusion: invisibility," Mr Leonhardt wrote.

"Such devices may be possible. The method developed here can be also applied to escape detection by other electromagnetic waves or sound."

The theory is different from that used on modern "stealth" bombers, for example, which bounce radar off their surfaces so they cannot be seen.

Instead, an object would be encased in a shell of metamaterials and they would create an illusion akin to a mirage, said David Schurig of Duke University in North Carolina, who worked on the second report.

Metamaterials are composite structures that deliberately resemble nothing found in nature. They are engineered to have unusual properties, such as the ability to bend light in unique ways.

Like all physics, the invisibility idea requires a little imagination.

"Think of space as a woven cloth," Mr Shurig said.

"Imagine making a hole in the cloth by inserting a pointed object between the threads without tearing them."

The light, or microwaves, or radar would travel along the threads of the cloth, ending up behind the object without having touched it.

"You just need the right set of material properties and you can guide light," Mr Shurig said.

-Reuters

Genetic study reveals surprises in human evolution

The following is from Reuters.

Genetic study reveals surprises in human evolution
Wed May 17, 2006 4:13pm ET

LONDON (Reuters) - Humans' evolutionary split from their closest relatives, chimpanzees, may have been more complicated, taken longer and probably occurred more recently than previously thought, scientists said on Wednesday.

After comparing the genomes, or genetic codes, of the two species they suggest the initial split took place no more than 6.3 million years ago and probably less than 5.4 million years ago.

The process of separation may have taken about 4 million years and there could have been some inter-breeding before the final break.

"The study gave unexpected results about how we separated from our closest relatives, the chimpanzees," said David Reich of the Broad Institute and Harvard Medical School's Department of Genetics in Massachusetts.


Instead of analyzing genetic differences between humans and chimpanzees, Reich and researchers from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) and the Broad Institute of Harvard and MIT looked at variations in the degree of divergence between the two in different regions of the genomes.

The analysis, published in the journal Nature, shows some regions in the human genome are older than others which means they trace back to different times in the common ancestral population of the two species.

The youngest regions are unexpectedly recent, according to the researchers, which means the separation between the two species was more recent than previously thought.

"A hybridization event between human and chimpanzee ancestors could help explain both the wide range of divergence times seen across our genomes, as well as the relatively similar X chromosomes," Reich explained.

Hybridization refers to the initial separation of two species followed by interbreeding and then the final split.

The findings also raise questions about the 7 million year old fossil of a skull called "Toumai" which was thought to be the earliest member of the human family.

The skull, which has a mixture of primitive and human-like features and dates, was hailed as probably the most important fossil discovery in living memory because it was thought to belong to an ancient ancestor of modern humans.

Some scientists had argued it was a fossil of a female ape.

"It is possible that the Toumai fossil is more recent than previously thought," said Nick Patterson, of the Broad Institute and a co-author of the study.

"But if the dating is correct, the Toumai fossil would precede the human-chimp split. The fact that it has human-like features suggest that human-chimp speciation (separation) may have occurred over a long period with episodes of hybridization between the emerging species," he added.

Monkey Talk

Monkeys use 'words' to talk to each other - just like humans
MATT DICKINSON

SCIENTISTS in Scotland have found the first evidence that monkeys can string "words" together to communicate in a way similar to humans, it was reported yesterday.

Researchers at St Andrews University discovered that putty-nosed monkeys in West Africa share the human ability to combine different sounds to mean different things.

During observations of the species in the Gashaka Gumti National Park, Nigeria, Kate Arnold and Klaus Zuberbühler found the creatures use their two main call types - "pyows" and "hacks" - to alert each other against predators.

A string of pyows warn against a loitering leopard, while a burst of hacks indicate a hovering eagle.

But a sentence made up of several pyows followed by a few hacks tells the group to move away to safer terrain.

Dr Arnold, a primate psychologist, discovered the phenomena by playing variations of the calls back to the monkeys and seeing how they behaved.

She said it showed the animals can encode fresh information by combining two existing ones, rather than creating a new sound. "These calls were not produced randomly and a number of distinct patterns emerged."

Previously, it was thought that animal communication systems used one particular signal to mean one particular thing.

Dr Arnold said: "This is the first good example of animal calls being combined in meaningful ways."

Dr Zuberbühler added: "This is the first good evidence of a syntax-like natural communication system in a non-human species."

The research has been carried out by the pair over the past three years in Africa, and is to appear in the science journal Nature.

Michael Hopkin, from the publication, said: "These building blocks that they use are being strung together - you could describe them as words."

This article: http://news.scotsman.com/scitech.cfm?id=737052006

Searching for Hoffa

FBI searching Michigan farm for Hoffa's body: paper
Thu May 18, 2006 6:26am ET

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - FBI agents may be on the trail of new clues to the 30-year-old mystery disappearance of legendary former U.S. union chief Jimmy Hoffa, a Detroit newspaper reported on Thursday.

After an undisclosed informant offered a tip in recent weeks, the bureau began a search for the body of the former Teamsters president on a Michigan horse farm, the Detroit News said on its Web site.

It quoted FBI Special Agent Dawn Clenney as saying the search began on Wednesday with a team of bureau agents and local police in Milford Township near Detroit.

Hoffa disappeared from a restaurant in nearby Bloomfield Township on July 30, 1975, and his body was never found, despite various confessions and tips. An FBI memo later that year suggested his disappearance was probably the work of an organized crime group that wanted to prevent him from regaining control of the powerful union and its pension fund.

His son, James P. Hoffa, is current Teamsters union president.

Bush Proposes “Virtual Fence” Along Border

These politicians would have saved a lot of time if they had listened to Buchanan’s proposal to construct a wall along the border.

“Mr. President. . .construct that wall!”

Seeking to Control Borders, Bush Turns to Big Military Contractors
By ERIC LIPTON
Published: May 18, 2006 NY Times

WASHINGTON, May 17 — The quick fix may involve sending in the National Guard. But to really patch up the broken border, President Bush is preparing to turn to a familiar administration partner: the nation's giant military contractors.

Lockheed Martin, Raytheon and Northrop Grumman, three of the largest, are among the companies that said they would submit bids within two weeks for a multibillion-dollar federal contract to build what the administration calls a "virtual fence" along the nation's land borders.

Using some of the same high-priced, high-tech tools these companies have already put to work in Iraq and Afghanistan — like unmanned aerial vehicles, ground surveillance satellites and motion-detection video equipment — the military contractors are zeroing in on the rivers, deserts, mountains and settled areas that separate Mexico and Canada from the United States.

It is a humbling acknowledgment that despite more than a decade of initiatives with macho-sounding names, like Operation Hold the Line in El Paso or Operation Gate Keeper in San Diego, the federal government has repeatedly failed on its own to gain control of the land borders.

Through its Secure Border Initiative, the Bush administration intends to not simply buy an amalgam of high-tech equipment to help it patrol the borders — a tactic it has also already tried, at a cost of hundreds of millions of dollars, with extremely limited success. It is also asking the contractors to devise and build a whole new border strategy that ties together the personnel, technology and physical barriers.

"This is an unusual invitation," the deputy secretary of homeland security, Michael Jackson, told contractors this year at an industry briefing, just before the bidding period for this new contract started. "We're asking you to come back and tell us how to do our business."

The effort comes as the Senate voted Wednesday to add hundreds of miles of fencing along the border with Mexico. The measure would also prohibit illegal immigrants convicted of a felony or three misdemeanors from any chance at citizenship.

The high-tech plan being bid now has many skeptics, who say they have heard a similar refrain from the government before.

"We've been presented with expensive proposals for elaborate border technology that eventually have proven to be ineffective and wasteful," Representative Harold Rogers, Republican of Kentucky, said at a hearing on the Secure Border Initiative program last month. "How is the S.B.I. not just another three-letter acronym for failure?"

President Bush, among others, said he was convinced that the government could get it right this time.

"We are launching the most technologically advanced border security initiative in American history," Mr. Bush said in his speech from the Oval Office on Monday.

Under the initiative, the Department of Homeland Security and its Customs and Border Protection division will still be charged with patrolling the 6,000 miles of land borders.

The equipment these Border Patrol agents use, how and when they are dispatched to spots along the border, where the agents assemble the captured immigrants, how they process them and transport them — all these steps will now be scripted by the winning contractor, who could earn an estimated $2 billion over the next three to six years on the Secure Border job.

More Border Patrol agents are part of the answer. The Bush administration has committed to increasing the force from 11,500 to about 18,500 by the time the president leaves office in 2008. But simply spreading this army of agents out evenly along the border or extending fences in and around urban areas is not sufficient, officials said.

"Boots on the ground is not really enough," Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff said Tuesday at a news conference that followed Mr. Bush's announcement to send as many as 6,000 National Guard troops to the border.

The tools of modern warfare must be brought to bear. That means devices like the Tethered Aerostat Radar, a helium-filled airship made for the Air Force by Lockheed Martin that is twice the size of the Goodyear Blimp. Attached to the ground by a cable, the airship can hover overhead and automatically monitor any movement night or day. (One downside: it cannot operate in high winds.)

(Page 2 of 2)

Northrop Grumman is considering offering its Global Hawk, an unmanned aerial vehicle with a wingspan nearly as wide as a Boeing 737, that can snoop on movement along the border from heights of up to 65,000 feet, said Bruce Walker, a company executive.

Closer to earth, Northrop might deploy a fleet of much smaller, unmanned planes that could be launched from a truck, flying perhaps just above a group of already detected immigrants so it would be harder for them to scatter into the brush and disappear.

Raytheon has a package of sensor and video equipment used to protect troops in Iraq that monitors an area and uses software to identify suspicious objects automatically, analyzing and highlighting them even before anyone is sent to respond.

These same companies have delivered these technologies to the Pentagon, sometimes with uneven results.

Each of these giant contractors — Lockheed Martin alone employs 135,000 people and had $37.2 billion in sales last year, including an estimated $6 billion to the federal government — is teaming up with dozens of smaller companies that will provide everything from the automated cameras to backup energy supplies that will to keep this equipment running in the desert.

The companies have studied every mile of border, drafting detection and apprehension strategies that vary depending on the terrain. In a city, for example, an immigrant can disappear into a crowd in seconds, while agents might have hours to apprehend a group walking through the desert, as long as they can track their movement.

If the system works, Border Patrol agents will know before they encounter a group of intruders approximately how many people have crossed, how fast they are moving and even if they might be armed.

Without such information, said Kevin Stevens, a Border Patrol official, "we send more people than we need to deal with a situation that wasn't a significant threat," or, in a worst case, "we send fewer people than we need to deal with a significant threat, and we find ourselves outnumbered and outgunned."

The government's track record in the last decade in trying to buy cutting-edge technology to monitor the border — devices like video cameras, sensors and other tools that came at a cost of at least $425 million — is dismal.

Because of poor contract oversight, nearly half of video cameras ordered in the late 1990's did not work or were not installed. The ground sensors installed along the border frequently sounded alarms. But in 92 percent of the cases, they were sending out agents to respond to what turned out to be a passing wild animal, a train or other nuisances, according to a report late last year by the homeland security inspector general.

A more recent test with an unmanned aerial vehicle bought by the department got off to a similarly troubling start. The $6.8 million device, which has been used in the last year to patrol a 300-mile stretch of the Arizona border at night, crashed last month.

With Secure Border, at least five so-called system integrators — Lockheed, Raytheon and Northrop, as well as Boeing and Ericsson — are expected to submit bids.

The winner, which is due to be selected before October, will not be given a specific dollar commitment. Instead, each package of equipment and management solutions the contractor offers will be evaluated and bought individually.

"We're not just going to say, 'Oh, this looks like some neat stuff, let's buy it and then put it on the border,' "Mr. Chertoff said at a news conference on Tuesday.

Skepticism persists. A total of $101 million is already available for the program. But on Wednesday, when the House Appropriations Committee moved to approve the Homeland Security Department's proposed $32.1 billion budget for 2007, it proposed withholding $25 million of $115 million allocated next year for the Secure Border contracting effort until the administration better defined its plans.

"Unless the department can show us exactly what we're buying, we won't fund it," Representative Rogers said. "We will not fund programs with false expectations."

The Power of Christ Compels You!

Owned!

Force a Price War: Boycott EXXON MOBIL

According to FORTUNE, EXXON earned more than any U.S. company in history last year (Wal-Mart was #2). It made "$339.9 billion in revenue and profits of $36.1 billion. . .more than the profits of the next four companies on the FORTUNE 500 combined.”

I recently received a mass e-mail suggesting a boycott of EXXON and MOBIL gas stations in an attempt to force a price war. The idea is as follows: If EXXON and MOBIL can’t sell gas, they’ll start bringing down prices, and other gas companies will follow suit in order to stay competitive. Honestly, I don’t know if such actions will have the desired effect, but with gas currently at $3.00 a gallon, I'm of the mind that anything is worth a try.

Also, why stop there? With the blatantly shady business strategies EXXON MOBIL is practicing, why not stop buying ALL of their products? Here is a list of all their brand names that we should pass up when given a chance, effectively "flipping the bird" to EXXON MOBIL (see this page for a visual of labels for the following brand names):

EXXONMOBIL
EXXON
ESSO
SPEEDPASS
MOBIL DELVAC
MOBIL
ON THE RUN
MOBIL 1

For your consideration, here is a copy of the mass e-mail I was sent:

This makes MUCH MORE SENSE than the "don't buy gas on a certain day" campaign that was going around last April or May! The oil companies just laughed at that because they knew we wouldn't continue to "hurt" ourselves by refusing to buy gas. It was more of an inconvenience to us than it was a problem for them. BUT, whoever thought of this idea, has come up with a plan that can really work. Please read on and join with us! By now you're probably thinking gasoline priced at about $1.50 is super cheap.

Me too! It is currently $2.79 for regular unleaded in my town. Now that the oil companies and the OPEC nations have conditioned us to think that the cost of a gallon of gas is CHEAP at $1.50 - $1.75; we need to take aggressive action to teach them that BUYERS control the marketplace....not sellers. With the price of gasoline going up more each day, we consumers need to take action. The only way we are going to see the price of gas come down is if we hit someone in the pocketbook by not purchasing their gas! And, we can do that WITHOUT hurting ourselves.

How? Since we all rely on our cars, we can't just stop buying gas. But we CAN have an impact on gas prices if we all act together to force a price war. Here's the idea:

For the rest of this year, DON'T purchase ANY gasoline from the two biggest companies (which now are one), EXXON and MOBIL. If they are not selling any gas, they will be inclined to reduce their prices. If they reduce their prices, the other companies will have to follow suit.

But to have an impact, we need to reach literally millions of Exxon and Mobil gas buyers. It's really simple to do! Now, don't wimp out at this point.... keep reading and I'll explain how simple it is to reach millions of people. I am sending this note to 30 people. If each of us sends it to at least ten more (30 x 10 =300) ... and those 300 send it to at least ten more (300 x 10 =3,000)...and so on, by the time the message reaches the sixth group of people, we will have reached over THREE MILLION consumers. If those three million get excited and pass this on to ten friends each, then 30 million people will have been contacted! If it goes one level further, you guessed it..... THREE HUNDRED MILLION PEOPLE!!!

Again, all you have to do is send this to 10 people. That's all.

How long would all that take? If each of us sends this e-mail out to ten more people within one day of receipt, all 300 MILLION people could conceivably be contacted within the next 8 days!!!

I'll bet you didn't think you and I had that much potential, did you? Acting together we can make a difference. If this makes sense to you, please pass this message on. I suggest that we not buy from EXXON/MOBIL UNTIL THEY LOWER THEIR PRICES TO THE $1.30 RANGE AND KEEP THEM DOWN. THIS CAN REALLY WORK.