30th International Wittgenstein Symposium: Saturday

Closing day, yesterday, more rain, less people.

I hoped my paper "Understanding Epistemic Relevance" went well. The topic was how we might understand the concept of relevant (semantic) information. The discussion was extremely enjoyable and fruitful, at least on this side of the dialogue. We managed to avoid the "veridicality" issue (should x be true in order to count as semantic information?) and concentrated on a number of interesting aspects of relevance and semantic information.

One of the best questions was asked by Fred Dretske. It addressed a crucial assumption in the paper, namely that in order to understand what relevance means, if one relies on an analysis in terms of questions+answers, then one has to assume that the agents involved are fully rational. Fred's concern was that this leaves out concrete applications to cases in which the agent is either unable (a child, a mentally handicapped person) or unwilling (e.g. for moral, religious or psychological reasons) to ask the question that would elicit the sort of information that would be considered relevant to that agent.

I tried to explain that the answer to this challenge is twofold:

1. a model is an abstraction, and its specific implementations might require some adaptation
2. the counterfactual analysis is there to take care of the "flexibility" required to adapt the model to the practical implications: Peter would have asked the right question if he had not been too shy, for example, and hence the information x, which constitutes an answer to his potential question, is relevant, insofar as he would have asked for it.
   

There were other interesting issues (when does an implementation of a model, which requires some adaptation, become an ad hoc solution? why do we provide advice, and hence what we consider relevant information, even when we are not been asked?).

The interested reader may wish to look at the full paper, which is forthcoming in Erkenntnis.

A final comment on the Symposium. All the people I spoke too were impressed by the program. The organisers Herbert Hrachovec and Alois Pichler, are to be congratulated for a very interesting and stimulating meeting. On the whole, it was great to be there (though I'm very happy to be finally back in Oxford).

30th International Wittgenstein Symposium: Friday

Friday, penultimate day at the Wittgenstein Symposium. It's raining. Several people have already left.

First corrigendum: I failed to mention that I missed some talks at the beginning of the meeting. In particular, I was told by reliable sources that two were very interesting: Fred Dretske's and Allen Renear's.

I cannot comment on either, but I heard that the audience was apparently unable to accept Fred's point that something may count as semantic information only if it is true. It must be people who also think that whales are fish, since they live in water. Intuitions can be a great point of departure, but they are certainly an awful point of arrival. We had a similar difficulty today, during the pannel session (see below).

Second corrigendum: I was wrong, yesterday (see previous post below). There was another poor (I'm being kind) talk today, on ethical challenges posed by the internet. I've seen this done so many times. Someone wakes up and bang, he suddenly realises that there is an ongoing revolution, something must be done or said, and so he seats tightly in his studio and speculates. Forget about the fact that we have more than half a century of advanced research in information and computer ethics and that most of it is just a click away precisely because of that revolution the philosopher is now so excited about. The speculator will follow some intellectual game of his own creation and come up with a confabulation that will seek to make sense of everything and more, reconstruct the past and predict the future. Aren't you glad that scientists are sweating under the pressure of their experiments and databases on well-defined issues?

Back to the paper. It was divided into two parts, one on kowledge the other on challenges.

It was hard to tell where (actually, whether) one could start fixing it. The proposal to replace the classic tripartite account of knowledge (which, like democracy, may be faulty and disappointing, but it's still better than any other option we have seen so far) with a bunch of vague and foggy suggestions, randomly extracted from a wimsical choice of quotations from mainly sociological literature (stuff like: knowledge is valuable information) failed to raise to the level of being worth a refutation.

The suggestions, in the second half, were largely lifted from well-known literature (without references, most unfortunately; for example, it was odd to recognise bits of my own work, including stuff on the infosphere) partly vague and uninteresting. A simple example of how badly things went? The discussion of "permanent beta" failed to mention Google and its software-release strategy.

I asked why we should abandon the tripartite definition (and hence attempts to improve it) in favour of the author's preferred salad of socio-cultural perspectives. The answer: we as philosophers shouldn't really go out and teach people what "knowledge" is or isn't, we should listen and participate in the intercultural, interdisciplinary discourse about it. Which in a way makes sense, if you really do not care to understand the nature of "knowledge", but rather why people say the silly things they say. So, next time someone asks what we mean by "inflation", "energy", "algorithm", "gene", "demonstration" or any other technical concepts, run a sociological analysis of your own taste. It's so much easier than doing some scientific work about it.

Luckily, there was the very good talk of Charles Ess to redress the situation. Charles spoke extensively on the cultural and ethical implications brought about ICTs at a global level. I enjoyed the refreshing informativeness of his analysis of the actual development of the Internet (accurate and recent data) and of the relevant ethical concepts in non-EU non-US cultures. His point about the lack of ethical neutrality of ICTs, and especially his well-chosen references to African and Buddhist literature, were very convincing. The debate centred largely on how pluralism and individualism might be reconciled without running into some form of relativism. We do not have an answer, but Charles' efforts seem to me to be going in the right direction.

The panel session in the afternoon (I took part) was interesting. We spent far too much time on the "veridicality" issue (x qualifies as semantic information only if x is true) without making any progress: arguments on one side (pro), expressions of dislike on the other. Next time you go to the doctor and you ask how is your health, would you like to get some information in the strong sense (which includes truth) or in the weak sense (which is mere content, basically anything that makes sense)? No brainer right? So do Fred Dretske and I think, but we seemed to be a very small minority.

During the rest of the session, tentative questions and suggestions were aired. The interactions seemed overall fruitful. Many felt that we are onto something, when speaking of this new philosophy of information. I couldn't agree more, of course. So I offered the following analogy, to try to coalesce the discussion around something in common.

Every now and then, philosophy moves house. The new place looks a bit familiar, because it contains some old furniture (problems, theories, methods, conceptual constructs). But it is also new, extraneous, somewhat disorienting: new rooms, newly bought furniture and everything is in a different place, perhaps in less (or even more) fitting locations. Moreover, as I was very nicely reminded, we should take the opportunity to throw away all the rubbish we have accumulated in the previous house. Fresh start, as it were. The new place looks partly familiar, party entirely new. We try to find our new balance, adapt it to your needs, while also adapting ourselves to it. In practice, we develop a new philosophy.

In offering the analogy I had in mind Wittgenstein's architectural interest (and the house he designed in Vienna). I also hoped to convey a sense of the importance of our new informational environmentalism. We are constructing our new environment, it would be great to do it properly.

30th International Wittgenstein Symposium: Thursday

A flight from San Francisco to LA + a flight from LA to London + 24 hours in Oxford + another flight to Vienna (Austrian Airlines are excellent, I fully recommend them) + one hour car drive later (that is, after the Google meeting, see previous post), and here I'm, a bit jet-lagged, attending and speaking at the 30th In. Wittgenstein Symposium in Kirchberg am Wechsel.

This is not California, or Silicon Valley, or Google Headquarters. At the meeting, you pay 1 euro for your coffee (sic) and there is no wireless, but half a dozen, arthritic PCs, which are so sluggish that the 10cents per minute you are charged to check your email (airport business model?) become a fortune.

Luckily, the staff is helpful, the weather is fine, and the close Mamas restaurant offers a very nice refuge: free WiFi, decent food (pizza/coke being your nerdy blogger's unimaginative usual food; but I am trying to switch to salads, thinking of the next squash season and the team back in College) and comfortable seats. The green mountains and valleys surrounding us are astoundingly beautiful. The village pleasant.

This year the conference is dedicated to The Philosophy of Information Society. This has attracted an unusual range of papers, some embarrassingly poor (trust me, I've seen crap, but some appalling papers still managed to astonish me), some truly excellent (more on both presently).

There is the usual amount of Wittgenstein scholarship - as one may expect - though with a digital bent, and more than a pinch of St. Wittgenstein Church goers (the believers who dedicate their lives to the exegesis of The Philosopher's venerable Scriptures), as one is by now used to fear (after all, whom am I to speak? Oxford is one of the strongholds of Wittgensteinian scholasticism).

Some speakers dare to suggest that it is time to move on. To someone used to see Wittgenstein as part of the history of philosophy syllabus (great as Descartes and Kant are great) this sounds like a very good idea, actually so good that it has well passed its best-before date. But here it seems original and rather risky, almost provocative, seeing the reactions among some of the attendees.

And now for the papers.

So far, the worst two (but I cannot imagine anything could beat them) are the following.

One paper (Catholic education: you censure the sin not the sinner) was supposed to address the problem of the global production of knowledge.I thought it might be interesting or at least informative. I was wrong on both accounts.

Some trite but, admittedly, conceptually innocuous remarks on globalization were soon followed by utterly unjustified (though not unjustifiable) complains (no empirical evidence or logical support provided, they were merely vented) on how science is becoming increasingly specialised (no historical insights offered either), fordist (you sure?, is the lab culture fordist? and the peer-reviewed system? and the conferences? and...?) and apparently narrow-minded (read: people need to spend years of hard work before becoming experts... and hence having less chances of giving talks like this).

The shallowness was so breathtaking, it made you think of a black hole. We kept swirling into it. Increasingly bewildered, I heard the speaker saying that scientists (yes, the whole category, no pointless discrimination required) are no longer driven by curiosity or scientific interest (ah good old days!) but only greedy publish-or-perish strategies (disgusting! And, on top of that, they publish in English, how disheartening for the speaker, whose English, to be fair, was very good).

All this would have been already preposterous had we been drinking an espresso at Mamas. I was still hoping things might suddenly, if inexplicably, improve when we were treated to the following couple of observations. Of course, philosophers can afford to care little about how science is going stinky rotten these days, since we (well, "you", really, the speaker being careful about indexicals) are a bunch of impractical daydreams anyway (ok, if was phrased a dash less explicitly than that, but not much). And neuroscientists (yes, the speaker had a very broad view of whom should be nailed to their responsibilities once and for all, for goodness' sake) are ruining our beautiful understanding of the mind we have inherited from Christianity (no, this time it was not put a dash more subtly than that; this is almost a quotation). It was a this theological turning point that I left the room. It was the most polite thing I could possibly do.

The other talk at the bottom of the list was on silence and grammar in Wittgenstein. There wasn't anything as bad as the arrogant nonsense and incompetence I illustrated above, the problem was another. It was a long sermon. No thesis stated, no problem tackled, no question answered, no reasoning, no ifs&thens, no nothing. It was not wrong because it was not right either. Goody-goody, probably deeply felt by the speaker and I would say rather convincing in leading the audience. It really made you conclude with an "Amen" at the end of it. But I kept quiet, and I did not leave either; I behaved properly and just made a mental note never to read or listen to this person again. Unlikely, but just in case.

And now for the good stuff. Very good indeed.

The two talks I enjoyed most so far (two more days to go) were:

Greg Chaitin's. On Wednesday, he gave a brilliant exposition of his philosophy of mathematics, his digital epistemology and ontology and his criticism of the theory of incomputable irrationals. I had already heard a similar talk at ECAP 2007, but I still enjoyed it enormously, not least because Greg and I have had opportunities to discuss digital ontology since then and, despite our different views (basically, he is for, I'm against it), his remarks are always intellectually instructive and very stimulating. I still believe he is wrong about the vaibility of a Neo-Pythagorean ontology of bits, but I fully respect the view and find it most intriguing. If you are interested, his views on the topic are published in his most recent book (more information here).

Juliet Floyd's. This was today. Absolutely fascinating. She reconstructed Wittgenstein's philosophy of mathematics and Wittgenstein's interactions with Turing and the computational tradition impeccably and engagingly. The scholarship was first-class, insightful, accurate and precise, but never obstructive. The emphasis on what I would like to define Wittgenstein's and Turing's interest (and bias) for visual thinking was most convincing. And the delivery was engaging. I learned a lot and, as with the best papers, did not realise time was flying. Ah, I almost forgot: all references to mathematical and logical issues were based on solid, technical knowledge, a refreshing pleasure, after the talks mentioned above.

This is all for now. I also met old friends (hi Charles!) and made new ones. So far, it was definitely worth the long trip and the jet-lag. I'm glad and grateful for the invitation.