Tag Archives | Lapsus Linguae

Itchy and Scratchy

I never actually knew what itching was for, so I looked it up. According to this article, it’s thought to be an evolutionary mechanism that is sending the signal something is happening on your skin that’s like a bug crawling on your skin, so go flick that bug off before it bites you. (Of course, as is often the case with such mechanisms, it generates more false alarms than genuine ones.)

backscratcher

Interesting. But this next paragraph bugged me (pun not originally intended):

The same fibers that send itching signals are also used to send pain signals to the brain, which once led some scientists to believe that itching was a form of light pain. That notion has since been dispelled by research, which showed that pain and itching elicit opposite responses. Pain causes us to withdraw and itching causes us to scratch.

Now I haven’t read the research the article refers to; there may be better arguments in it than the one described here. But the one described here is not impressive.

First, and most obviously: pain just doesn’t always cause us to withdraw; sometimes it does, but there are many different kinds of pain. People usually clutch their heads when they have headaches, for example; that’s the opposite of withdrawing.

Moreover, even if, counterfactually, all pains did in fact cause withdrawal behaviour, it’s not obvious that this fact should be regarded as part of the essence of pain. What’s essential to pain, surely, is that it makes us want to avoid doing whatever causes the pain; but wanting to avoid touching the location of the pain seems a distinct and accidental feature (since touching the location of the pain does not always necessarily increase the pain).

In any case, if you find that case X differs from standard cases of Y by lacking feature Z, you’re then faced with a choice of either denying that X is a Y or denying that feature Z is essential to being a Y. In this case, then, scientists were faced with the choice between either denying that withdrawal behaviour is essential to pain or denying that an uncomfortable sensation that inherently makes us want to get rid of it counts as a pain. Which is the more plausible choice?

You want proof?  I'll give you proof!

More broadly, while the question of what physiological mechanisms underlie pain is presumably an empirical, natural-scientific question, the question of whether a particular kind of sensation is a pain seems more like a conceptual, philosophical question to which scientific “research” is irrelevant.

Here’s my argument for that claim. Suppose that scientific experts announced tomorrow that headaches are not actually a form of pain. (I choose headaches because they’re more paradigmatically a form of pain than itches.). Headaches may feel like pains, these experts aver, but they’re really not pains, because they involve neuronal thingummy B instead of neuronal thingummy A. Would you take this seriously? Surely not, because feeling like pain is simply what we mean by pain – it’s part of the conceptual grammar of the term. Anyone who talks of something’s feeling like pain but not being pain would have to be using the word “pain” with a new, nonstandard meaning, just as someone who talked of something’s being a regular quadrilateral but not a square would have to be using the word “square” with a new, nonstandard meaning. (Or else using some of the other words in the sentence nonstandardly.)

The researchers described in this article may well have confused constitutive with enabling conditions. And that takes me to a broader grump about scientists, namely, that scientists tend to be unaware that there is such a thing as a philosophical objection to a thesis. They tend to assume that anything that sounds like a coherent hypothesis (such as the possibility of time travel, or the suggestion that the universe we live in is actually 2-dimensional – to pick a couple of actual examples) is thereby fit for empirical investigation, without considering that in such cases a) there is a prior question as to whether the thesis so much as makes sense (for if it does not, then those who take themselves to be performing an empirical investigation of it will actually not be investigating anything – or at least not that), and b) the training and tools to determine whether it does makes sense are the specialisation of a field other than their own.

(But then, a still more egregious problem is the philosophers who are confused about this.)


How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love IP

Intellectual property rights are a cause of disagreement between Lysander Spooner, Stephan Kinsella, and Ayn Rand.

That’s the first sentence of a paper I’m grading for my business ethics class. It seems true (grammar aside). But it strikes me that this creates a problem for my anti-IP position.

After all, it’s an established philosophical principle that nothing nonexistent can cause something real. Yet intellectual property rights are the cause of a real disagreement. Therefore, intellectual property rights must exist. Damn.

Okay, back to grading.


Beyond Being

The Good is not being, but beyond being, surpassing it in dignity and power. — Plato

According to CBS News, the Department of Homeland Security has had its eye on Faisal Shahzad since 1999. That’s pretty impressive for a Department that didn’t exist until 2002.

Wow, so government agencies can do their jobs just as well when they don’t exist as when they do! I guess that settles the debate over anarchism.


American Movie

You’d think that if someone were going to make a whole movie about piranhas, they’d at least bother to find out how to pronounce the name of the damn fish.


The Dialethic Right

Two things conservatives like to say:

Our constitutional rights aren’t granted to us by government. Our rights come from God, and the Constitution simply recognises them.

Illegal immigrants and terrorist suspects don’t have constitutional rights because they’re not American citizens.


Name That Critter

llama, not emu

llama, not emu

I sent the following letter to the Opelika-Auburn News on April 4th; it wasn’t published:

To the editor:

Page C1 of the April 4th paper features a picture of two animals with the caption “Spring brings a new generation of emus to a farm on Society Hill Road.”

emu, not llama

emu, not llama

Perhaps it does, but emus are ostrich-like birds. The animals pictured are obviously either llamas or alpacas – in any case, mammals rather than birds.

Perhaps this was meant to run three days earlier?

Roderick T. Long

(I put some pics up to make their mistake look slightly less egregious.)


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