A public service announcement

from Pastor Justin Cox of P4CM:

New comments settings

I've had to introduce a word verification step for comments on this blog following a spam attack from ‘freefun0616’. I suppose everyone else had this already but I perhaps foolishly thought I could get away without it. Sorry for the extra inconvenience this will cause.

The Nobel Peace Prize committee has surpassed itself

Having complained two years ago when the prize was given to Al Gore, I could hardly let this year’s awarding of the Nobel Peace Prize to Barack Obama pass without comment. When the deadline for nominations came around (February 1), Mr. Obama had been in office for two weeks. By then, of course, he hadn’t done a whole lot for world peace. Subsequently he hasn’t done a whole lot more.

In 2007 I said that ‘The judges appear, for some reason, to have been motivated to make some kind of political point beyond their remit’. This time there’s no ‘appears’ about it. According to the Norwegian Nobel Committee, the award is justified because

Obama has as President created a new climate in international politics. Multilateral diplomacy has regained a central position, with emphasis on the role that the United Nations and other international institutions can play.

In other words, Obama gets the award for not being George W. Bush. OK, so we can be clear, the members of the Norwegian Nobel Committee are:
Thorbjørn Jagland
Kaci Kullmann Five
Sissel Marie Rønbeck
Inger-Marie Ytterhorn
Ågot Valle

I make the list as a name-and-shame exercise because, frankly, Europeans like this are an embarrassment to the continent (and yes, I consider myself a European). The tireless Bush-baiting was tedious enough while Dubya was still American President; the fact that it’s continuing now is, as I say, embarrassing (and I was never a fan of Dubya). Moreover, it cheapens the efforts of Nobel Laureates who have actually done something for their awards. For what it’s worth, I would have given this year’s prize to Morgan Tsvangirai.

Go here for an excellently-worded response to the fiasco by The Times.

Album review: The Incident by Porcupine Tree

Porcupine Tree, The Incident (Roadrunner: 2009)

In the run-up to the release of this album I had two conflicting emotions. The first was great anticipation, because I’m a big fan of Porcupine Tree and their last album (2007’s Fear of a Blank Planet) was of very high quality. The second was a degree of trepidation when I heard that the new release would actually be a single 55-minute song split up into 14 tracks. That led me to expect a spaced-out affair like The Sky Moved Sideways, and I have more than enough albums like that already.

I needn’t have worried. While this (concept) album definitely sounds like an album, a single piece of work, it also contains a great deal of variety. So, for example, there are downtuned riffs liberally spread throughout, but also haunting synth-glockenspiel on ‘Drawing the Line’, Nine Inch Nails-esque robotic menace on the title track, a soaring guitar solo on ‘Time Flies’ and acoustic guitar atmospherics on that track, ‘Great Expectations’ (also featuring calming piano and vocal harmonies) and album-closer ‘I Drive the Hearse’, which sums the mood of the whole up beautifully with the genius simplicity of its chorus lyrics ‘And silence is another way of saying what I want to say / And lying is another way of hoping it will go away’. At the same time, the unity of the record is shown by the fact that the riff on the album opener ‘Occam’s Razor’ keeps popping up in different places without sounding incongruous, and by the recurrent lyrical themes. When the same few lines unexpectedly turned up on ‘The Séance’ as had on ‘Octane Twisted’ I nearly punched the air. This unity is such that first single ‘Time Flies’ sounds much better in the context of the album than it does on its own; although I should point out that the album version is also considerably longer.

In fact, I can truly say that on this album Porcupine Tree have perfectly married the soft prog (and sometimes spaced out) sounds of their 90s albums with the heavier metal of this decade that got them signed to Roadrunner. You can tell that the band have worked really hard on this piece of work, without falling into attendant traps like over-production. This is the best album that Porcupine Tree have ever released and I can’t see how they will ever be able to top it; but I would love to be proved wrong.

All the above is about CD1. CD2 isn’t up to the same standard, or even, really, that of the Nil Recurring EP, to which it is quite similar in spirit. But, frankly, you can treat CD2 as a bonus. CD1, The Incident, is the album of the year.

Track list: CD1 – The Incident

1. Occam’s Razor
2. The Blind House
3. Great Expectations
4. Kneel and Disconnect
5. Drawing the Line
6. The Incident
7. Your Unpleasant Family
8. The Yellow Windows of the Evening Train
9. Time Flies
10. Degree Zero of Liberty
11. Octane Twisted
12. The Séance
13. Circle of Manias
14. I Drive the Hearse

CD2

1. Flicker
2. Bonnie the Cat
3. Black Dahlia
4. Remember Me Lover

Album review: The Resistance by Muse

Muse, The Resistance (Helium 3: 2009)

There are probably at least two types of Muse fan out there. If you thought Black Holes and Revelations was their best release to date, and genuinely deserved a Mercury Prize nomination, you’ll probably enjoy this album quite a lot. If, however, like me, you felt let down by BHaR, thought that it was mostly filler, and suspected that Muse were halfway to becoming a pop group (and didn’t like the idea of that), you’ll want to give The Resistance a miss. Maybe I’m the only one. Anyway…

1. Uprising: You’ve almost certainly heard this already. Prominent bassline and sci-fi sounds seemingly straight out of the Doctor Who theme tune. Pretty funky.
2. Resistance: The intro reminds me of ‘Interlude’ from Absolution. Overall, it is really rather bland, despite some interesting twiddles in the final section. ‘Love is our resistance’. Ahhh.
3. Undisclosed Desires: Ugh. This is a straightforwardly corny pop song that spends a while threatening to do something interesting, but never does.
4. United States of Eurasia / Collateral Damage: The other song you’ve almost certainly heard already. The piano work is good, but I think Muse’s Queen fascination has been taken to unhealthy levels. I don’t mind admitting that I don’t like Queen.
5. Guiding Light: There’s an 80s synth-pop beat going on here. At 1:00 a riff kicks in, then at 2:06 a guitar solo. I’m not sure at what point exactly, but somewhere between the two it becomes obvious that this is a power ballad. Skip.
6. Unnatural Selection: Finally the album gets somewhere near heavy. Pretty cool riffs; a good, threatening middle section with slowish guitar solo and vocal harmonies that actually remind me of System of a Down (maybe I’m going mad). The standout track so far.
7. MK Ultra: Some more good riffs on both synth and guitar, but a bit of a rubbish chorus. There’s more to like than to dislike here, just.
8. I Belong To You / Mon cœur s'ouvre à ta voix: Quite funky in parts, although not in a way that I think would bear much re-listening before it gets annoying. Not sure about the production, but meh. Terrible lyrics: ‘Then she attacks me like a Leo, / When my heart is split like Rio, / But, I assure you my debts are real’.
9. Exogenesis: Symphony, Part 1 (Overture)
10. Exogenesis: Symphony, Part 2 (Cross-Pollination)
11. Exogenesis: Symphony, Part 3 (Redemption): The band and orchestra merge perfectly. If this three-part ‘symphony’ were being released on its own, say as an EP or single, I’d give it full marks and recommend everyone go out and buy it; but it’s not, and these three tracks can’t save the album from being average.

So there you have it. In keeping with the title, a whole load of songs on this record complain about a mysterious ‘they’. I can understand why a lot of people will like this album, and they’re welcome to it, but I’m not among them.

Getting the crystal ball out

In a comment on the comments on my last post, Blue Devil Knight complained that

It is hilarious that people would liken homosexual lovin' to incest and cannibalism. In 100 years it will be funny to look back at these types of arguments, the kooky old days.

Firstly, I should point out that I didn’t ‘liken homosexual lovin' to incest and cannibalism’; what I did was to cite incest and cannibalism as counterexamples to a certain sexual ethic used to justify ‘homosexual lovin’ (and much else), according to which anything that consenting adults do to each other in private is OK.  But I took care of this at the time.  What I want to do now is to focus on the second of BDK’s contentions, starting with an argumentum ad dinosaur comics:

HT: robhu

The point should be obvious: neither I, BDK nor anyone else has any idea of what people will find acceptable, unacceptable or ‘kooky’ in 100 years’ time, and so trying to argue on that basis is ridiculous on its face.  I also found the specific topic of the dinosaurs’ discussion particularly relevant to the discussion in my blog post.  Maybe if our culture does ‘end up swinging towards rampant fleshotarianism’ in the future, then campaigners for vegetarianism will be accused of ‘carniphobia’ – which would be about as brainless as accusing campaigners for traditional morality now of ‘homophobia’.

Carniphobia: a dialogue

The scene is a university canteen.  Adam is affixing a poster bearing the slogan ‘Meat is Murder’ to the student noticeboard.  Bob, a coursemate of his, approaches Adam.

Bob: What are you doing?
Adam: Organising a vegetarianism meeting.  Are you interested?
B: Furrows his brow  No.  And I didn’t have you down as a carniphobe, either.
A: What?
B: You’re campaigning against people eating meat?
A: Yes.
B: You’re a carniphobe.  You’re bigoted and prejudiced against people like me who eat meat.
A: Puzzled  No I’m not.  I just think eating meat is immoral.  I mean, don’t you think that…
B: If you don’t like eating meat, then don’t do it.  What business of yours is it what grown adults put in their own bodies?
A: Well, I suppose there’s a sense in which it’s not ‘my business’. If someone stole from someone else on the other side of the world today, there’s a sense in which that’s not my business; but that doesn’t mean I’m not entitled to a moral opinion about it, or to campaign against it. Same here.
B: Eating meat is part of who I am!
A: Well, I’m not entirely sure that people are born carnivorous…
B: I WAS!
A: …but even if they are, that doesn’t mean that going along with that is OK.  The fact that you, I or anyone has a tendency, inclination or urge or do something doesn’t make it OK to do that thing, even if the urge or whatever is innate.  Wouldn’t you agree that animals…
B: Eating meat is almost completely accepted in society these days, except by wackos like you.
A: Uh, have you considered the possibility that ‘society’ is wrong about this?

Clive, a representative of the Student Union, approaches Adam and Bob.

Clive: What’s going on?
B: This bigot…
Adam shows one of his posters to Clive
C: No, no, no, you can’t use a university room for a meeting like this!
A: Why not?
C: You’re in contravention of Student Union Equality and Diversity policy.  We can’t condone discriminatory events like this.
B: Thank you.
A: Discriminatory?
C: Yes.  This event discriminates against carnivores, so you can’t hold it on campus.
A: Has the world gone mad?

(This dialogue was inspired by an old blog post from William Vallicella).

‘There is no magic’, part 1: conceptualist semantics

I often hear the complaint that involving God in an explanation for anything that happens in the world is an appeal to ‘magic’ and therefore Not Allowed. In fact, this charge is levelled against any explanation which does not assume metaphysical naturalism. Ray Jackendoff makes this exact move in his 2002 book Foundations of Language: Meaning, Brain, Grammar, Evolution (Oxford: OUP), in the course of giving an outline of what he thinks a semantics of natural language should be like:

I propose to begin from the following surely uncontroversial postulate:

People find sentences (and other entities) meaningful because of something going on in their brains.

That is, we are ultimately interested not in the question: What is meaning? but rather: what makes things meaningful to people? This anchors the enterprise both in the theory of psychology and in ordinary human experience.
A second postulate is:

There is no magic.

That is, we seek a thoroughly naturalistic explanation that ultimately can be embedded in our understanding of the physical world.
Such an explanation comes at a heavy price. (p268)

Now, I could say something about Jackendoff’s first postulate, but for present purposes I want simply to take it as an introduction to the second. Of course, Jackendoff isn’t talking about God – the ‘magic’ charge is one he will come to level at rival theorists in semantics. I want to take a brief look at whether, by his own lights, Jackendoff’s own theory avoids being magical. I hope this will cast some light on the question of whether or not ‘a thoroughly naturalistic explanation that ultimately can be embedded in our understanding of the physical world’ is what we really should be after, or indeed what it would look like. This will take two or three posts; I haven’t decided yet.

Jackendoff thinks that realist views of language end up relying on ‘magic’:

Frege and much of the tradition following him take language to be independent of its human users: it relates directly to the world […] language is indeed “out in the world” and it refers to “objects in the world”; but people use language by virtue of their grasp of it, where “grasp” is a transparent metaphor for the “the mind holding/understanding/making contact with” something in the world. […]

One might interpret Katz’s program this way. he is personally interested only in the part of language that is an abstract object “in the world” […] But an abstract object by definition has no physical manifestations that can impinge on the nervous system. So how does the nervous system “grasp” them? Without a careful exegesis of the term – which no-one provides – we are ineluctably led toward a quasi-mystical interpretation of “grasping,” a scientific dead end. (pp296-9)

So much for those thinkers. Anyway, this is Jackendoff’s own view of word meaning:

Linguistic semantics per se is the study of the interface between conceptualization and linguistic form (phonology and syntax) […] In particular, lexical semantics studies the organizations of conceptualization that can be bundled up in a single word (or to be clearer, in an interface rule whose other end is a morpheme). (p293)

I’ll unpack that a bit. The idea is that a word has a particular meaning – for an individual, remember – by virtue of the fact that the word groups together particular concepts in the individual’s mind. So, what is a concept? This is a fraught question, but I’ll try to give as untendentious a characterisation as possible. Very roughly, a concept is a way of dividing up experience. That is to say, it’s because I have the concept BOOK¹ that I’m able to categorise items around me into books and non-books, and because I have the concept READ that I’m able to categorise actions into those of reading and those of not-reading (or, more accurately, that I’m able to categorise anything into an action of reading or not-an-action-of-reading), and so on. Which is not to say that the concepts themselves just are abilities. Some people say this, but I think that Jackendoff has in mind, rather, that concepts are parts of thoughts. This should become clearer as we go on.

OK, but what is it that gives concepts meaning, then? How can a concept be about books, or reading, or Ray Jackendoff, or natural language semantics? Concepts are in the mind, and these things are out in the world. What is the nature of the connection between them? Jackendoff doesn’t think much of Jerry Fodor’s suggestions for dealing with the problem:

For [Fodor], language is a mental faculty that accesses concepts […] In turn, concepts have a semantics; they are connected to the world by virtue of being “intentional.” The trouble […] is that one cannot make naturalistic sense of intentionality. If suffers from precisely the same difficulty as “grasping” language […]: there is no physically reliable causal connection between concepts and objects. (p300)²

So much the worse for naturalism, you might say. But Jackendoff doesn’t. Instead, he proceeds by ‘pushing “the world” down into the mind of the language-user too, right along with language’ (p303). His solution is that, actually, not only concepts, but also what concepts are about, are in the mind. In fact, concepts just are what they are about:

We must explicitly deny that conceptual structures are symbols or representations of anything in the world, that they mean anything. Rather, we want to say that they are meaning […] Language is meaningful, then, because it connects to conceptual structures. (p306)

Such an explanation comes at a heavy price, all right. What Jackendoff is saying is that the concept BOOK can be about books because books are in the mind – because the book I see ‘in front of me’ is, in fact, a set of sense impressions that are entirely mental. But without some additional qualification this looks like idealism, which I hardly think comports with ‘our understanding of the physical world’, which I’m quite sure Jackendoff takes to be, well, physicalist. Idealism, by his lights, would be ‘magic’.

Jackendoff doesn’t quite go down this route, although at points he seems to be toying with it³. Instead, the trick is to be found in the construction of concepts. That’s what I’ll focus on next time.

Notes
1 It's conventional to give the names of concepts in capital letters. I'm going to follow this convention.
2 The disagreements between Jackendoff and Fodor as to the nature of concepts, and their relation to word meaning, go much deeper than I have time, space or energy for here, although I may return to this issue in the next post. See for example Fodor’s 1998 book Concepts: Where Cognitive Science Went Wrong (Oxford: OUP), pp49-56.
3 See the remarks on Berkeley on p305, and on reality ‘independent of human cognition’ on p309.

Life & Liberty Petition against measures in the Coroners and Justice Bill

From the Christian Legal Centre:

We the undersigned petition the Prime Minister to Abandon the Government's opposition to the free speech protection clause in the Coroners and Justice Bill.

Preserving the sanctity of life and freedom of speech are vitally important to the preservation of liberty and good governance under the rule of law in the United Kingdom. These are under immediate threat by measures in the Coroners and Justice Bill. We the undersigned, therefore, petition HM the Queen, the Prime Minister and the Leader of the House of Lords to:

1. Protect the value of human life in the UK by opposing proposed amendments authorizing state-sanctioned assisted suicide; and

2. Protect freedom of speech by abandoning its opposition to the free speech protection clause currently within the sexual orientation hatred offence which preserves the right to, discuss, criticise and urge to refrain from certain forms of sexual conduct or practices.

Go here to sign the petition. HT: Anglican Mainstream and Christian Today, where you can go for further details. The right to ‘discuss, criticise and urge to refrain from certain forms of sexual conduct or practices’, currently under threat, is something I think reasonable non-Christians will also want to see preserved.

Go Iranians!

Riot after Iranian election - police run away from crowd:

I’ve subscribed to Mousavi1388’s YouTube channel for updates on the situation in Iran.