Soccer, Irish American Rap, and Other Strange Things

I don't know why the philosophers are involved, but this is pretty much every soccer match I've ever watched:

Musical Interlude -- When I first heard parts of House of Pain's "Jump Around" in the 90s, I thought it was just another gangster rap song, didn't really care for it.

It came around in my life again a few years later in a completely different context, so different that I actually didn't recognize it. Then it dropped out of my life again for a couple of decades.

For some odd reason, it came up on YouTube for me recently and I decided to play it. Turns out there's an Irish American theme to it, which was completely new to me. If you don't like the music (which I can understand), turn it down and just watch the video. With a different sound, it could fit in here.

Other Irish-themed rap tunes on the same album include "Shamrocks and Shenanigans" and "Danny Boy, Danny Boy."

The Problem of Ancient Primary Sources

Having finished one philosophical discussion, Grim recently asked for suggestions for the next project. I suggested maybe a discussion of how to read these texts. How can someone today read and understand Plato, or Aristotle, or other ancient philosophical works?

Many years ago I took some courses in reading classical Chinese. The textbook gave us selections from primary sources like Confucius, Mencius, and Tang Dynasty poets, and also provided extensive glossaries, and we were expected to translate a selection before each class. In class, we would each read our translations, and then we would discuss where we had problems, or where noticeable differences between our translations had appeared.

At one point, I started feeling like I was getting it. Not like I was an expert, but the texts started making sense more naturally. I did what I thought was a good translation of a particular text and felt kinda proud of it, for a beginner.

When I read my translation to the class, the professor paused for a moment. "That's a very plausible translation," he said. "But I'm afraid it's wrong." And he proceeded to give the correct translation.

I understood where I had erred, but not why. Surely there must be some marker in the text that would have indicated the change he gave me, a marker I wasn't aware of. So I asked him, how could I know which way to translate this?

"Well," he replied, with a touch of reluctance, "you have to know the story before you begin."

So then much more recently we were discussing akratēs at the Hall, "the puzzle of someone who knows what is right but does the wrong thing anyway." In the comments, I was trying to work through a definition of virtue, and Grim made a suggestion. "You probably need to read Plato's Parmenides. Socrates was very young when that conversation is supposed to have happened; and it raises all these questions beyond the practical to the metaphysical."

The phrase "beyond the practical to the metaphysical" should have been put in flashing red lettering. In any case, I thought I was going to read more about virtue, but instead ... well, here. I'll put a selection from the beginning of it below the fold, with some discussion of difficulties I had reading it.

Just the Facts, Ma'am

We recently had an invigorating discussion about facts, so I thought I'd actually look the word up. I know, linguists tell us that dictionaries don't define words, they document usage. I'll make no appeals to authority here! Nonetheless, it's an interesting selection from the OED. Who knew that facts can be acts, disputed, and guilt? Or that Sgt. Friday never said,"Just the facts, Ma'am"?

fact, n., int., and adv.

Etymology:  < classical Latin factum deed, action, event, occurrence, achievement, misdeed, real happening, result of doing, something done, in post-classical Latin also thing that has really occurred or is actually the case, thing known to be true (11th cent.; from 13th cent. in British sources), case, legal dispute (from 13th cent. in British sources), use as noun of neuter past participle of facere to make, do < an extended form of the Indo-European base of do v.

 I. Senses relating primarily to action.

1. An action, a deed, a course of conduct; (formerly also occas.) †an effect, a result. Also as a mass noun: action, deeds, as opposed to words. Now somewhat rare.

Interesting that the word also carries the meaning of actions, deeds, events. Real things, indeed.

II. Senses relating primarily to truth.

6. Law
 a. The sum of circumstances and incidents of a case, looked at apart from their legal bearing.
 b. In pl. with the same sense. Also: items of information used or usable as evidence.

7. That which is known (or firmly believed) to be real or true; what has actually happened or is the case; truth attested by direct observation or authentic testimony; reality.

Firmly believed?

8a. A thing that has really occurred or is actually the case; a thing certainly known to be a real occurrence or to represent the truth. Hence: a particular truth known by actual observation or authentic testimony, as opposed to an inference, a conjecture, or a fiction; a datum of experience, as distinguished from the conclusions that may be based on it.

b. With the and following clause or preposition.
 (a) The actual occurrence of an event; the real existence of a situation or state of affairs.
E.g.: 1986   Amer. Scholar 65 572/1   The fact of their nationality colors the way men and women think, particularly about politics and society.
(b) The circumstance that something is the case.

 c. Uses emphasizing the truth of an assertion, esp. in fixed phrases.
 (a) The (honest) truth. Freq. in the fact is with that-clause, esp. asserting something surprising, unwelcome, or controversial, or making an admission; also colloq. (orig. U.S.) without the.
 (b) A true statement. Freq. in (and) that's a fact.

d. A person, an institution, etc., undoubtedly in existence; a person or thing experienced or seen.

9 is interesting because it goes against what I think a fact is. I'll leave all the example sentences.

9. A piece of information allegedly or conceivably true; something presented as a fact (in sense A. 8a) but which is disputed or unproven; (more strongly) an unproved assertion, an allegation.

1566   W. Painter Palace of Pleasure I. lii. f. 304,   I humblie beseche you to tell me the truth of this facte.

1632   J. Hayward tr. G. F. Biondi Eromena 21   They resolved that the Admirall should goe disguised..to assure himselfe of the fact [It. fatto].

1699   tr. C. de Saint-Evremond Arguments M. Herard 113   The Fact is false, there has been no dissipation of the Cardinal's Goods by Monsieur Mazarin.

a1729   S. Clarke Serm. (1730) V. i. 8   It would have been absurd to allege, in preaching to Unbelievers, a Fact which itself presupposed the Truth of Christ's Mission.

1797   Morning Chron. 27 Aug. 2/4   If another soldier should call you a jail-bird, and the truth of the fact be notorious.

1824   Westm. Rev. 2 209   This is..a false fact, supported by a supposed motive.

1872   W. H. Lamon Life Abraham Lincoln xi. 236   Douglas denied the fact; and Lincoln attempted to prove his statement by reading a certain passage from Holland's ‘Life of Van Buren’.

1941   A. M. Lindbergh Diary 13 Oct. in War within & Without (1980) 233   It bases its accusations on false statements and inaccurate facts.

1968   Hartford (Connecticut) Courant 29 Aug. 16/4   One cannot help but question the credibility of the writer's facts.

2002   Vanity Fair June 160/3   Waksal hotly disputed some of the facts in that story.

10. Guilt, especially actual guilt as opposed to suspicion. Obs.

Phrases

P9. orig. U.S. "just the facts ma'am" and variants: used with reference to the eliciting or presentation of an unembellished or straightforward account of factual information. Also attrib.: strictly factual; unembellished, dry.With allusion to the investigative technique of police detective Sergeant Joe Friday in the U.S. radio and television series Dragnet (first broadcast in 1949), although the exact phrase ‘Just the facts ma'am’ did not occur in either the television or radio series.

Compounds

C1 a.   fact-fetishism n.

1957   D. MacDonald Triumph of Fact iii, in Anchor Rev. No. 2. 122   Fact-fetishism is to some extent a class phenomenon.
1964   K. Winetrout in I. L. Horowitz New Sociol. 149   We wind up with fact-fetishism, with a ‘social science of the narrow focus, the trivial detail, the abstracted almighty unimportant fact’.
2010   P. Garrett Victorian Empiricism 201   An all too familiar definition of empiricism as fact-fetishism.

C2.  fact-proof adj. impervious to facts, willing to disregard facts.

1828   Foreign Q. Rev. Feb. 28   Nothing softer than the Reviewer's fact-proof cranium could resist it.
1909   G. B. Shaw John Bull's Other Island p. ix,   He is never quite the hysterical, nonsense-crammed, fact-proof, truth-terrified, unballasted sport of all the bogy panics..that now calls itself ‘God's Englishman’.
2010   Sydney Morning Herald (Nexis) 2 Nov. 11   So anger is a standard tool, used by both sides of politics. Is there anything new about it? One striking feature of rage 2010 seems to be that it is increasingly fact-proof.

Source: "fact, n., int., and adv.". OED Online. March 2015. Oxford University Press. http://www.oed.com/view/Entry/67478?result=1&rskey=b6Jdx4& (accessed March 24, 2015).

No Wonder It's Hard to Develop Virtuous Citizens

Related to Grim's recent post that discussed developing virtues in our citizenry, I recently ran across an article in the New York Times by philosophy professor Justin P. McBrayer that considers one reason why it's difficult to do today. The article is a quick read, so I'll let you take in the rest there, but the problem begins with this:

When I went to visit my son’s second grade open house, I found a troubling pair of signs hanging over the bulletin board. They read:

Fact: Something that is true about a subject and can be tested or proven.

Opinion: What someone thinks, feels, or believes.

Hoping that this set of definitions was a one-off mistake, I went home and Googled “fact vs. opinion.”

I agree with McBrayer that a lot of young people today end up with a serious case of doublethink. On the one hand, they insist that things like sexual morals are merely personal opinions. On the other, they are great devotees of social justice, which is nothing but a system of morality. It's very strange. His partial explanation for why that is sounds true to me.