The other day I wrote a short post on conditionals noting a strange feature about the behaviour of some conditionals in disjunctions. The idea for the post came up in some working through some of the details in Chris Gauker’s Words Without Meanings, but I thought it was a different point to the one’s he discussed. Going back and actually reading his chapter on conditionals closely, it turns out it was actually a rather similar point to one he was making. I draw the opposite conclusion from the data to Gauker, but it’s similar data. I must have picked up the idea and immediately forgotten from where I picked it up. So I should have credited him at the time. My bad.

At the end of the General Theory Keynes has a brief homage to the power of ideas. I don’t have the text in front of me, so what follows is a rough paraphrase of the most famous line. Madmen in authority, who hear voices telling them what to do, are just recycling the ideas of some economist from a generation past. It seems Keynes wasn’t quite right. Sometimes they are not in authority. And sometimes philosophers not economists. And sometimes thirty hours ago rather than thirty years.