I suspect I think about the Roman Empire more than your average bear does, yet I also think about cheese vastly more often than I do about Visigoths and what-not.

I find the idea that epistemic hedging is somehow _never_ in order just baffling. That we do it too much in analytic philosophy seems a correct observation, but this sort of “off with their heads!” one-size-fits-all rule is simply unjustifiable.

I need something like both hedges to convey what seems to me what I want to say: he’s in the gray zone for that supreme category of greats, and if swords were to be crossed on the matter, I’d be offering my blade on the “yes he is” side.

Without the “one of the” hedge, it’s just false — I love Cavell but he isn’t even arguably _the_ greatest in that category. And indeed without the “arguably”, I feel like I am too brashly overstating matters, to say he simply _is_ one of the greatest.

To see why you really need access to both, consider: “Cavell is arguably one of the greatest American philosophers of the last century.” That seems to me a good & true thing to say. But take away either hedge, and it’s problematic.

“arguably” seems to me a perfectly serviceable workaday tool of a word. Nothing fancy but gets the job done economically. But anyway if it’s a problem, then _it_ is the problem, not some violation of a mythical “one hedge only” rule.

Well that’s certainly true and we could trade examples from great philosophers all day! But fwiw I just don’t see anything stylistically amiss in the example you quoted. Your stipulation seems to me like saying, like, “one adjective per noun phrase only”or some other under-motivated “rule” of style.

I disagree. You are allowed in any such assertions, both one semantic/metaphysical hedge, and one epistemic one. The quoted text is thus permissible.

Happy Papa Was a Rollin’ Stone Day, to all who celebrate.

The Finger-Taker's Son Rules of engagement, and what it means to find "common ground" with supremacists.

I wrote about a murder in the state where "'woke' goes to die," the people who want to be held innocent of making such things inevitable while insisting we persuade them to stop; about rules of engagement w/supremacists and what it means to find "common ground."

armoxon.substack.com/p/the-finger...

Hi Pekka!

my goodness, but that is some hair!

Great group of folks!!

This seems a great hypothesis, definitely worth some empirical attention!

Perhaps relatedly I was just now teaching my 10yo son some logic and he asked if in addition to true and false, one could have the truth value “bonk!”

I don’t know if that sort of work has been done! there’s a lot of stuff on manipulating judgments of validity but they are mostly content effects, that I know of.

Then we’ll treat it as an empirical question! I’ll pound the table and if it persuades you, we’ll know it counts as an aggressive hand gesture for such purposes.

Is this distinct from, or a variant of, table thumping?

cat pix!

This sounds good to me!

Hoo boy.

Is anyone measuring anything like the probability of the various candidates conditional on Trump’s being somehow out of the race?

How many zuzim for a pair of wolves?

who that?

We already have a Presidio, so it’s like we are halfway there.

It’s that last prepositional phrase there that brings it all together.

isn’t the trick to think of two other folks whose work you can recommend alongside your own, as a beard?

Check out my interview with Peg Brand Weiser about Camus's The Plague: Philosophical Perspectives (2023), which she edited for OUP. We discuss pandemics, fighting fascism, modern death, heroism, and solidarity. youtu.be/V0FI7AgiZCE

What @audreysh.bsky.social said.

I’m fairly confident that that is not true of the Ryan Gosling character in the recent flick?