Digressions&Impressions

Unknown unknowns and Deleuze's virtual

Reports that say that something hasn't happened are always interesting to me, because as we know, there are known knowns; there are things we know that we know. There are known unknowns; that is to say, there are things that we now know we don't know. But there are also unknown unknowns – there are things we do not know we don't know.— Donald Rumsfeld [wikipedia]

A great philosopher creates new concepts: these concepts simultaneously surpass the dualities of ordinary thought and give things a new truth, a new distribution, a new way of dividing up the world.--Deleuze

But the virtual is not the same thing as the possible--Deleuze

We must understand that the virtual is not something actual but is for that no less a mode of being,--Deleuze

There are three general ways of thinking about the possible: (i) we take the present world as kind of a baseline, from which we project alternatives; (ii) we create a maximally plural list of 'worlds' available to, say, an omniscient being, and distinguish among these; (iii) we treat the possible as a species of quantitative probability ranging from impossible (zero probability) to necessity (probability 1) [and lots of permutations of these three]. There are, of course, ways to treat (ii) and (iii) as intimately related; and it is possible to recover (i) as a special case of (ii).

Now, Rumsfeldian unknown unknowns do not contradict any of the three approaches to probability sketched above. Even so, none of these three approaches is especially useful to help us think about unknown unknowns. For, in practice, it's our imaginations and the features of our formal machinery that constrain what enters the list of the (metaphysically/logically) possible. Logical analysis may be useful to make transparent hidden assumptions about the possible, it will not reveal an unknown unknown--genuine epistemic or metaphysical uncertainty is hard to model in it. For, all three ways of thinking about the possible have a kind of this-world bias built into them; to say this informally, while it's easy to prove the existence of God in some modal logics, it's actually pretty hard, despite the presence of monsters, to get really crazy; that is, the possible always has some resemblance to the actual.

Can one be funny in analytical philosophy?

IT is sometimes said that the world might itself be vague. Rather than vagueness being a deficiency in our mode of describing the world, it would then be a necessary feature of any true description of it. It is also said that amongst the statements which may not have a determinate truth value as a result of their vagueness are identity statements. Combining these two views we would arrive at the idea that the world might contain certain objects about which it is a fact that they have fuzzy boundaries. --Gareth Evans

"Is Gareth Evans (the philosopher) funny?" I ask myself in reflecting on his famous "Can There Be Vague Objects?"*

By this I do not mean the kind of funny in which one uses a principle denied by the opponent as an undisputed premise in one's argument against them.** This kind of funny is generally an expression of situational power--one can assert and get away with it. It is a byproduct that accompanies the clever in a certain milieu.

I also do not mean the kind of funny that presents itself as rigor, yet does not axiomatize or stipulate the rules of the sentential operator.*** In fairness to Evans, there is funniness here because Evans might respond that this problem, while real, is really his unnamed opponent's problem. It's not clear that the principled metaphysical indeterminatist has a right to a definite logic of vagueness.