I was reading Keith DeRose’s Assertion, Knowledge and Context, and I was feeling unconvinced by the old Bank Cases that are meant to motivate contextualism. I thought the ‘relevant alternatives’ explanation of the cases was much to be preferred. If you don’t know the cases, here’s Jason Stanley’s version of the case.

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(Originally posted on Crooked Timber.)

We all know there are lots of horror stories about trying to find work in academia. The smart money is on not even starting a PhD unless you are prepared to sell your soul on the job market. Just say no to those fancy scholarships. Unless, it seems, they’re from a good school in philosophy, where the numbers don’t exactly support the bad tidings.

Thanks to lobbying from various sources (prominent amongst them being Brian Leiter’s Philosophical Gourmet Report) we now have quite a bit of data about how philosophy PhDs do on the job market. And the news on the whole is fairly good, or at least much better than I had expected.
Continue reading →

I managed to miss the bus I was meant to catch home tonight from South Station. Things didn’t turn out too badly. There was a still later bus I could, and did, catch, so I just got home a little later than expected. I had hoped to write some philosophy for the blog when I got home, but given the time I think I’ll have little time to write much more than the story of my trip home.

I don’t really know how I managed to miss the bus in question. It was, or I guess it must have been, just a few metres from where I was sitting. I was reading a newspaper and listening to a CD, but I thought that I would have noticed an interstate bus arriving just near where I was. Apparently not, it turns out.

For a while after it was perfectly clear that I’d missed the said bus, I managed by sheer force of will to believe that (a) the bus was somehow running late and (b) all the people who seemed to have been waiting for that bus had caught some other bus, or walked off to get Dunkin’ Donuts ‘coffee’ or had been vaporised by a passing spaceship or something so (c) I hadn’t really missed the bus. Obviously that wasn’t a state of mind that a reasonable person could maintain forever, so after a few minutes, by which stage it was abundantly perfectly clear I’d missed the said bus, I stopped believing the bus would still arise. But my willpower was still strong enough for me to keep holding it as a live possibility that (a) the bus was somehow running late and (b) all the people who seemed to have been waiting for that bus had caught some other bus, or walked off to get Dunkin’ Donuts ‘coffee’ or had been vaporised by a passing spaceship or something so (c) I hadn’t really missed the bus. It was remarkable, if I do say so myself, just how long I was able to maintain this state of mind. Of course at the time I thought it was the most natural thing in the world.

From now on I’m not going to bother seriously arguing for doxastic voluntarism. I’m just going to ostend my period of not believing I’d missed the 1am Providence local, and the even more remarkable period of believing I had not missed it, and point out that if those events existed then doxastic voluntarism is true. And since I was there I’m pretty sure the events did exist. Though, I did manage to miss the nearby presence of an interstate bus, so maybe I’m not the most reliable source about who really was there. So I’d understand if you, dear reader, doubted my account of the events. You’d be wrong, but I’d understand.

It isn’t surprising in general that I’d miss a bus from South Station to Providence, especially after midnight. It’s not uncommon for me to be catching that bus after a drink or two, and sometimes after a couple of drinks I’m not the most alert person in the world. What is surprising was that tonight was when I missed the bus. It wasn’t that I hadn’t touched a drop all day, not by any means, but for a temporal part of Brian located in South Station after midnight I was positively sober, as judicious as (a) Hooker. (That joke is awful on so many levels I don’t know where to start – ed. In that case you’re probably going to dislike the next fifty jokes, because this post is about to turn positively catachlyseimic.)

Why did Brian’s situation at the bus station remind him of Bloom?

Both of them had missed an intermodal transfer late at night. In both cases this led to minor inconvenience, but not to any catastrophe.

What were the differences between Bloom’s situation and Brian’s?

Brian missed an embarkation, Bloom missed disembarking. Bloom was on a train, Brian was meant to be on a bus. Bloom was going to an area of ill-repute, Brian was leaving South Station for Providence. Bloom had been drinking heavily.

Why was Brian pleased to see a comparison between himself and Bloom?

Because Bloom is Everyman, the übermensch for non-English English speakers. Bloom is curious, thoughtful, loyal, principled, industrious. And at the end of the day, he gets the girl.

In what respects was the comparison between Brian and Bloom flawed?

It is essential to Bloom’s character that he not see himself as a character in a novel. Such self-comparisons are better suited for one like Bloom’s friend Stephen.

What is the relationship between Brian’s age and that of Bloom and Stephen?

It is equidistant between Bloom’s age and Stephen’s. If all three were twice as old as they actually are, Brian’s age would be equidistant between Bloom’s age and Stephen’s. If all three were nine years older than they actually are, Brian’s age would be equidistant between Bloom’s age and Stephen’s.

Before Brian missed the bus, what story was suggested as being suitable for TAR?

A prominent garden statist lover of wisdom self-ascribed authorship of a semanal nominal modal book.

Was the self-ascription correct?

No. It was laughable, inadvertant, accidental, Freudian, forgiveable.

What was the highlight of the show at the Paradise Rock Club on May 28?

A quartet featuring a vibraphone and three players on a glockenspeil.

Could the instrument a trois have been instead a second vibraphone, a xylophone or a camel?

Visual evidence was insufficient to determine whether it was a glockenspeil, a second vibraphone or a xylophone. Auditory evidence would have been sufficient to determine this had circumstances for processing the evidence been ideal and the processor sufficiently knowledgable. Both visual and auditory evidence confirmed that the second instrument was not a camel.

Are temporal parts the right category of thing to be drunk or sober?

No. Only fusions of past and present temporal parts are of the right category to be drunk or sober. A temporal part may be the truthmake for the claim that a particular past-present fusion is drunk or sober. Fusions of past, present and future temporal parts are never drunk or sober, but are sometimes hungover.

What albums did Brian listen to in transit between Boston and Providence?

Sleeping with Ghosts by Placebo. Elephant by White Stripes. Rings Around the World by Super Furry Animals.

How good were these albums?

All were excellent albums, but none were better than earlier works by their respective artists, some critical opinion to the contrary.

What is the worst. blogpost. ever?

Charles Murtagh’s post that The Usual Suspects is the worst movie ever.

Is it really worse than Andrew Sullivan’s MoDo/Raines post?

There are several perfectly good transcendental arguments that that post could not, and hence does not, exist.

If Brian’s short-term journeys resembled Bloom’s, which other literary character did Brian’s longer-term journeys resemble?

Odysseus. Both keep trying to return home, even when Fate sends them to circumstances that many objective observers would decree better than a simple return to home. Brian has a comfortable, high-pay, low-work, low-stress position at a prestigous university. Odysseus twice lands on islands with beautiful nymphs with lovely braids, the second of whom offers to make him immortal.

What differences are there between Odysseus and Brian?

Odysseus is a war hero, a champion athelete, and crafty. Brian is a philosopher.

What differences between Odysseus’s voyage and Brian’s?

Providence, RI does not resemble Circe’s island, or Calypso’s. Australia does not resemble rocky Ithaca. Brian will not be killing any suitors when he returns home. Brian gets to visit home during the voyage.

What are the striking differences between Providence, RI and the islands on which Odysseus stays?

Those islands contain beautiful nymphs with lovely braids. Providence, RI reveals no distinctive sign of supernatural inhabitants.

What are the striking differences between rocky Ithaca and Australia?

Ithaca is largely barren, while Australia is, at least along the seaboard, incredibly fertile. It produces grapes, people and ideas in high quality. (Though some of the people who grow the ideas often have odd, even defective, ideas about personnel. It is unknown whether the people who grow the grapes have a similar shortcoming.)

What are the striking similarities between rocky Ithaca and Australia?

Both are islands. Both are far away from those travelling in distant lands.

Why will Brian not kill any suitors when he returns home?

The moral injunction against killing. The legal codification of that moral injunction. The absence of any suitors.

When will Brian next visit home?

Leaving Monday June 2, arriving Melbourne June 4, leaving Melbourne July 1, returning July 1.

Will the philosophy papers blog be updated in his absence?

Yes. Paul Neufeld, who runs ephilosopher, will run the papers blog while Brian is away.

Will TAR be updated while Brian is away?

Yes, but not as frequently as it is updated while Brian is in America. And there will be fewer links to other sites, since Brian spends less time internetted in Australia than he does in America.

What effect will this have on philosophical productivity around the world?

Several competing models have been advanced in this area. One school of thought is that long interrogative posts on TAR have effectively removed all the audience, so it will have no discernable impact. Another school is that the time freed up from TAR-related procrastination will lead to a huge productivity rise. A third school says that there will be a rise in output, but 120% of the new output will go on other blogs, leading to a net reduction in non-blog philosophising.

I managed to miss the bus I was meant to catch home tonight from South Station. Things didn’t turn out too badly. There was a still later bus I could, and did, catch, so I just got home a little later than expected. I had hoped to write some philosophy for the blog when I got home, but given the time I think I’ll have little time to write much more than the story of my trip home.

I don’t really know how I managed to miss the bus in question. It was, or I guess it must have been, just a few metres from where I was sitting. I was reading a newspaper and listening to a CD, but I thought that I would have noticed an interstate bus arriving just near where I was. Apparently not, it turns out.

For a while after it was perfectly clear that I’d missed the said bus, I managed by sheer force of will to believe that (a) the bus was somehow running late and (b) all the people who seemed to have been waiting for that bus had caught some other bus, or walked off to get Dunkin’ Donuts ‘coffee’ or had been vaporised by a passing spaceship or something so (c) I hadn’t really missed the bus. Obviously that wasn’t a state of mind that a reasonable person could maintain forever, so after a few minutes, by which stage it was abundantly perfectly clear I’d missed the said bus, I stopped believing the bus would still arise. But my willpower was still strong enough for me to keep holding it as a live possibility that (a) the bus was somehow running late and (b) all the people who seemed to have been waiting for that bus had caught some other bus, or walked off to get Dunkin’ Donuts ‘coffee’ or had been vaporised by a passing spaceship or something so (c) I hadn’t really missed the bus. It was remarkable, if I do say so myself, just how long I was able to maintain this state of mind. Of course at the time I thought it was the most natural thing in the world.

From now on I’m not going to bother seriously arguing for doxastic voluntarism. I’m just going to ostend my period of not believing I’d missed the 1am Providence local, and the even more remarkable period of believing I had not missed it, and point out that if those events existed then doxastic voluntarism is true. And since I was there I’m pretty sure the events did exist. Though, I did manage to miss the nearby presence of an interstate bus, so maybe I’m not the most reliable source about who really was there. So I’d understand if you, dear reader, doubted my account of the events. You’d be wrong, but I’d understand.

It isn’t surprising in general that I’d miss a bus from South Station to Providence, especially after midnight. It’s not uncommon for me to be catching that bus after a drink or two, and sometimes after a couple of drinks I’m not the most alert person in the world. What is surprising was that tonight was when I missed the bus. It wasn’t that I hadn’t touched a drop all day, not by any means, but for a temporal part of Brian located in South Station after midnight I was positively sober, as judicious as (a) Hooker. (That joke is awful on so many levels I don’t know where to start – ed. In that case you’re probably going to dislike the next fifty jokes, because this post is about to turn positively catachlyseimic.)

Why did Brian’s situation at the bus station remind him of Bloom?

Both of them had missed an intermodal transfer late at night. In both cases this led to minor inconvenience, but not to any catastrophe.

What were the differences between Bloom’s situation and Brian’s?

Brian missed an embarkation, Bloom missed disembarking. Bloom was on a train, Brian was meant to be on a bus. Bloom was going to an area of ill-repute, Brian was leaving South Station for Providence. Bloom had been drinking heavily.

Why was Brian pleased to see a comparison between himself and Bloom?

Because Bloom is Everyman, the übermensch for non-English English speakers. Bloom is curious, thoughtful, loyal, principled, industrious. And at the end of the day, he gets the girl.

In what respects was the comparison between Brian and Bloom flawed?

It is essential to Bloom’s character that he not see himself as a character in a novel. Such self-comparisons are better suited for one like Bloom’s friend Stephen.

What is the relationship between Brian’s age and that of Bloom and Stephen?

It is equidistant between Bloom’s age and Stephen’s. If all three were twice as old as they actually are, Brian’s age would be equidistant between Bloom’s age and Stephen’s. If all three were nine years older than they actually are, Brian’s age would be equidistant between Bloom’s age and Stephen’s.

Before Brian missed the bus, what story was suggested as being suitable for TAR?

A prominent garden statist lover of wisdom self-ascribed authorship of a semanal nominal modal book.

Was the self-ascription correct?

No. It was laughable, inadvertant, accidental, Freudian, forgiveable.

What was the highlight of the show at the Paradise Rock Club on May 28?

A quartet featuring a vibraphone and three players on a glockenspeil.

Could the instrument a trois have been instead a second vibraphone, a xylophone or a camel?

Visual evidence was insufficient to determine whether it was a glockenspeil, a second vibraphone or a xylophone. Auditory evidence would have been sufficient to determine this had circumstances for processing the evidence been ideal and the processor sufficiently knowledgable. Both visual and auditory evidence confirmed that the second instrument was not a camel.

Are temporal parts the right category of thing to be drunk or sober?

No. Only fusions of past and present temporal parts are of the right category to be drunk or sober. A temporal part may be the truthmake for the claim that a particular past-present fusion is drunk or sober. Fusions of past, present and future temporal parts are never drunk or sober, but are sometimes hungover.

What albums did Brian listen to in transit between Boston and Providence?

Sleeping with Ghosts by Placebo. Elephant by White Stripes. Rings Around the World by Super Furry Animals.

How good were these albums?

All were excellent albums, but none were better than earlier works by their respective artists, some critical opinion to the contrary.

What is the worst. blogpost. ever?

Charles Murtagh’s post that The Usual Suspects is the worst movie ever.

Is it really worse than Andrew Sullivan’s MoDo/Raines post?

There are several perfectly good transcendental arguments that that post could not, and hence does not, exist.

If Brian’s short-term journeys resembled Bloom’s, which other literary character did Brian’s longer-term journeys resemble?

Odysseus. Both keep trying to return home, even when Fate sends them to circumstances that many objective observers would decree better than a simple return to home. Brian has a comfortable, high-pay, low-work, low-stress position at a prestigous university. Odysseus twice lands on islands with beautiful nymphs with lovely braids, the second of whom offers to make him immortal.

What differences are there between Odysseus and Brian?

Odysseus is a war hero, a champion athelete, and crafty. Brian is a philosopher.

What differences between Odysseus’s voyage and Brian’s?

Providence, RI does not resemble Circe’s island, or Calypso’s. Australia does not resemble rocky Ithaca. Brian will not be killing any suitors when he returns home. Brian gets to visit home during the voyage.

What are the striking differences between Providence, RI and the islands on which Odysseus stays?

Those islands contain beautiful nymphs with lovely braids. Providence, RI reveals no distinctive sign of supernatural inhabitants.

What are the striking differences between rocky Ithaca and Australia?

Ithaca is largely barren, while Australia is, at least along the seaboard, incredibly fertile. It produces grapes, people and ideas in high quality. (Though some of the people who grow the ideas often have odd, even defective, ideas about personnel. It is unknown whether the people who grow the grapes have a similar shortcoming.)

What are the striking similarities between rocky Ithaca and Australia?

Both are islands. Both are far away from those travelling in distant lands.

Why will Brian not kill any suitors when he returns home?

The moral injunction against killing. The legal codification of that moral injunction. The absence of any suitors.

When will Brian next visit home?

Leaving Monday June 2, arriving Melbourne June 4, leaving Melbourne July 1, returning July 1.

Will the philosophy papers blog be updated in his absence?

Yes. Paul Neufeld, who runs ephilosopher, will run the papers blog while Brian is away.

Will TAR be updated while Brian is away?

Yes, but not as frequently as it is updated while Brian is in America. And there will be fewer links to other sites, since Brian spends less time internetted in Australia than he does in America.

What effect will this have on philosophical productivity around the world?

Several competing models have been advanced in this area. One school of thought is that long interrogative posts on TAR have effectively removed all the audience, so it will have no discernable impact. Another school is that the time freed up from TAR-related procrastination will lead to a huge productivity rise. A third school says that there will be a rise in output, but 120% of the new output will go on other blogs, leading to a net reduction in non-blog philosophising.

Matthew Yglesias made the following observation about how philosophy gets taught at Harvard, and I suspect what he says is true of lots of other places.

One of the things that’s dawned on me as I approach graduation is that for all the hours I’ve put into listening to lectures and participating in seminars on philosophy, I’ve never really had anyone speak to me on the topic of how, in practice, philosophy is done. In part, I suppose, this is just because the research methods of a discipline without any facts to research are intrinsically mysterious, but that seems to be all the more reason why a teacher would want to spend some time talking about how one would go about trying to do some original philosophy. Indeed, it would appear that the main advantage of combining the roles of teacher and scholar in one person — the university professor — would be that a professor is in a position to impart precisely that sort of knowledge.

As some people noted in the (very interesting) comments thread on that post, the main way one learns to do philosophy, like the way one learns to ride a bike or speak a language or write a blog, is by just doing it. Every comment a professor, or fellow student, provides on what is good or bad philosophy is part of the knowledge one picks up on how to do philosophy. (Here I’m basically echoing what JW said in that comments thread.)

In interests of community service, though, I thought I might make a little bit of that tacit knowledge more explicit.

A lot of what many of us (at least many of my peers) do in philosophical research is apply old ideas to new fields. The danger of this is that a lot of work ends up sounding like the caricature one hears of Hollywood movie pitches. ("It’s Full Metal Jacket meets Sleepless in Seattle.") The upside is that when it works we get really interesting new results. A cheesy example of this is my using Goodman’s important discovery, that gruelike predicates exist, to make trouble for Nick Bostrom’s indifference principle. A more serious example is Ted Sider’s using a variant of David Lewis’s argument for mereological universalism to argue for the existence of temporal parts. A more recent (and more bloggish) example is Matt’s question from yesterday about whether the causal exclusion argument shows that ethical properties are either epiphenomenal or reducible to physical properties.

(Answer: it would if causal exclusion arguments were any good. But they’re not so it doesn’t. I think the great final drive-a-stake-through-the-heart-of-causal-exclusion-arguments paper is yet to be written, and despite some early delusions to the contrary I’m not the one to write it, but this note by Ted is a pretty good start. Roughly, I think causal exclusion arguments that show there are no baseballs are as good as any other causal exclusion arguments, but there are baseballs, so these causal exclusion arguments are no good, so no causal exclusion arguments are any good.)

And sometimes we do philosophy by having fertile imaginations and catching lucky breaks. In Cleveland I was flipping through the menu at a bar/restaurant when something in one of the music reviews of the regular bar bands there caught my eye. The critic said that they made complicated time signatures sound as easy as 4/4. I was reading this all quickly, it was a music review on a menu after all, so at first I thought it said that they made complicated time signatures sound like 4/4. And I was worried whether that really could be true. In fact, it seemed to be that taken literally it was something that couldn’t even be true in a story.

That linked to one of my little obsessions this year, finding out the limits of what can and can’t be represented in fiction, and how this relates to the limits on imagination. It seemed, that is, that the following little story should generate imaginative resistance. (Andy Egan provided good advice on each of the following stories – at least on the bits that aren’t obviously mistaken.)

The band played Waltzing Matilda twice over, once as a waltz, and the second as a march, and it sounded exactly the same both times. Indeed, later phonological analysis revealed that duplicate sound waves were emitted from the speakers on the two run-throughs.

I think this can’t be true, even in the story. If it was a waltz the first time and a march the second, and least one of the sounds better have been different. More evidence I think that imaginative resistance has nothing to do particularly with moral properties, and everything to do with ‘higher-level’ properties.

The methodological lesson was that I was able to get a philosophical example from a dinner menu. I hope that means I can claim the meal in question as a tax deduction. To continue the story, I was then struck by the ways in which a review of a blues band is like a scouting report on a young pitcher. Reflecting on this, I started working on a similar example, and got roughly this:

Like many of his countrymen, Mardo Petrinez relies on deception to hide which kind of pitch he throws. Many pitchers use the same delivery motion for their fastball and changeup. Petrinez goes several steps further. All four of his pitches – fastball, curveball, sinker, slider – use the same grip, the same arm motion, the same hand motion and are delivered with the same speed and same trajectory. Needless to say, batters have no idea which pitch they are seeing at any one time. Somehow this hasn’t prevented a few of them from hitting said pitches very very hard.

Again, this can’t even be true in the fiction. I don’t want to try and give a reductive analysis of ‘curveball’ in terms of speed, trajectory etc, but suffice to say that if two pitches are identical from the time the ball goes into the pitching hand to the time it hits the catchers glove (or in this case the bat) then it cannot be true that one’s a fastball and the other’s a curveball, even in the fiction.

The takehome lesson from all this is that there are philosophical examples everywhere. All one needs is to have a stock of philosophical puzzles in mind, so it is easier to recognise examples when they come up. And being the kind of person who misreads menus doesn’t hurt either.

Matthew Yglesias made the following observation about how philosophy gets taught at Harvard, and I suspect what he says is true of lots of other places.

One of the things that’s dawned on me as I approach graduation is that for all the hours I’ve put into listening to lectures and participating in seminars on philosophy, I’ve never really had anyone speak to me on the topic of how, in practice, philosophy is done. In part, I suppose, this is just because the research methods of a discipline without any facts to research are intrinsically mysterious, but that seems to be all the more reason why a teacher would want to spend some time talking about how one would go about trying to do some original philosophy. Indeed, it would appear that the main advantage of combining the roles of teacher and scholar in one person — the university professor — would be that a professor is in a position to impart precisely that sort of knowledge.

As some people noted in the (very interesting) comments thread on that post, the main way one learns to do philosophy, like the way one learns to ride a bike or speak a language or write a blog, is by just doing it. Every comment a professor, or fellow student, provides on what is good or bad philosophy is part of the knowledge one picks up on how to do philosophy. (Here I’m basically echoing what JW said in that comments thread.)

In interests of community service, though, I thought I might make a little bit of that tacit knowledge more explicit.

A lot of what many of us (at least many of my peers) do in philosophical research is apply old ideas to new fields. The danger of this is that a lot of work ends up sounding like the caricature one hears of Hollywood movie pitches. ("It’s Full Metal Jacket meets Sleepless in Seattle.") The upside is that when it works we get really interesting new results. A cheesy example of this is my using Goodman’s important discovery, that gruelike predicates exist, to make trouble for Nick Bostrom’s indifference principle. A more serious example is Ted Sider’s using a variant of David Lewis’s argument for mereological universalism to argue for the existence of temporal parts. A more recent (and more bloggish) example is Matt’s question from yesterday about whether the causal exclusion argument shows that ethical properties are either epiphenomenal or reducible to physical properties.

(Answer: it would if causal exclusion arguments were any good. But they’re not so it doesn’t. I think the great final drive-a-stake-through-the-heart-of-causal-exclusion-arguments paper is yet to be written, and despite some early delusions to the contrary I’m not the one to write it, but this note by Ted is a pretty good start. Roughly, I think causal exclusion arguments that show there are no baseballs are as good as any other causal exclusion arguments, but there are baseballs, so these causal exclusion arguments are no good, so no causal exclusion arguments are any good.)

And sometimes we do philosophy by having fertile imaginations and catching lucky breaks. In Cleveland I was flipping through the menu at a bar/restaurant when something in one of the music reviews of the regular bar bands there caught my eye. The critic said that they made complicated time signatures sound as easy as 4/4. I was reading this all quickly, it was a music review on a menu after all, so at first I thought it said that they made complicated time signatures sound like 4/4. And I was worried whether that really could be true. In fact, it seemed to be that taken literally it was something that couldn’t even be true in a story.

That linked to one of my little obsessions this year, finding out the limits of what can and can’t be represented in fiction, and how this relates to the limits on imagination. It seemed, that is, that the following little story should generate imaginative resistance. (Andy Egan provided good advice on each of the following stories – at least on the bits that aren’t obviously mistaken.)

The band played Waltzing Matilda twice over, once as a waltz, and the second as a march, and it sounded exactly the same both times. Indeed, later phonological analysis revealed that duplicate sound waves were emitted from the speakers on the two run-throughs.

I think this can’t be true, even in the story. If it was a waltz the first time and a march the second, and least one of the sounds better have been different. More evidence I think that imaginative resistance has nothing to do particularly with moral properties, and everything to do with ‘higher-level’ properties.

The methodological lesson was that I was able to get a philosophical example from a dinner menu. I hope that means I can claim the meal in question as a tax deduction. To continue the story, I was then struck by the ways in which a review of a blues band is like a scouting report on a young pitcher. Reflecting on this, I started working on a similar example, and got roughly this:

Like many of his countrymen, Mardo Petrinez relies on deception to hide which kind of pitch he throws. Many pitchers use the same delivery motion for their fastball and changeup. Petrinez goes several steps further. All four of his pitches – fastball, curveball, sinker, slider – use the same grip, the same arm motion, the same hand motion and are delivered with the same speed and same trajectory. Needless to say, batters have no idea which pitch they are seeing at any one time. Somehow this hasn’t prevented a few of them from hitting said pitches very very hard.

Again, this can’t even be true in the fiction. I don’t want to try and give a reductive analysis of ‘curveball’ in terms of speed, trajectory etc, but suffice to say that if two pitches are identical from the time the ball goes into the pitching hand to the time it hits the catchers glove (or in this case the bat) then it cannot be true that one’s a fastball and the other’s a curveball, even in the fiction.

The takehome lesson from all this is that there are philosophical examples everywhere. All one needs is to have a stock of philosophical puzzles in mind, so it is easier to recognise examples when they come up. And being the kind of person who misreads menus doesn’t hurt either.

As mentioned below, there have been a few references in the blogworld to Paul Berman’s article in the NY Times magazine about Sayyid Qutb, the ‘philosopher of Al Qaeda’ as they call him there. I said I didn’t like it very much, so this post is to say why. It’s a little long, because I’m a little too lazy to edit it properly.

Qutb’s picture, hardly an original one, is that Western culture is based largely on a merger between Jewish and Greek ideas. (I’m told that developing this idea is one of the main theme’s of Finnegan’s Wake, but heaven knows how one could tell.) From the Jews we get the monotheistic religion, with a few epicycles having been added in the last few millenia. From the Greeks we get the idea that spiritual life and material life can be separated. So we abandon the Jewish idea of letting religous convictions govern all aspects of daily life. Crudely, we accept large parts of Exodus but none of Leviticus. (Some people in the West like the anti-gay lines there, but unless they follow Orthodox practices in all other aspects of life they are obviously hypocrites and should be ignored.) This, Qutb thought, was a disasterous combination. And you know, I think Berman agrees.

Europe’s scientific and technical achievements allowed the Europeans to dominate the world. And the Europeans inflicted their ”hideous schizophrenia” [the separation of spiritual life from material life] on peoples and cultures in every corner of the globe. That was the origin of modern misery — the anxiety in contemporary society, the sense of drift, the purposelessness, the craving for false pleasures. The crisis of modern life was felt by every thinking person in the Christian West. But then again, Europe’s leadership of mankind inflicted that crisis on every thinking person in the Muslim world as well. Here Qutb was on to something original. The Christians of the West underwent the crisis of modern life as a consequence, he thought, of their own theological tradition — a result of nearly 2,000 years of ecclesiastical error. But in Qutb’s account, the Muslims had to undergo that same experience because it had been imposed on them by Christians from abroad, which could only make the experience doubly painful — an alienation that was also a humiliation.

That was Qutb’s analysis. In writing about modern life, he put his finger on something that every thinking person can recognize, if only vaguely — the feeling that human nature and modern life are somehow at odds.

Whatever one thinks of the merits of following the Greeks here, the conclusion is just ridiculous. As Joan Robinson apparently said in response to one of Paul Samuelson’s lectures, I don’t so much object to what the young man is saying as to what he means behind it. If modern life is somehow at odds with human nature, just which other time period is more in harmony with it. Perhaps he thinks it was when we were all hunter-gatherers on the savannah. Perhaps he thinks it was when a large percentage of us were slaves. Perhaps he thinks it was when we had Dickensian labour conditions. Perhaps he thinks it was when 51% of us were compelled by social custom to be removed from civil society at an early age and spend and/or sacrifice their lives in child-bearing and rearing.

Early in Ulysses Stephen says that history is a nightmare from which he is trying to awake. Some days it feels like my life is just what Stephen would have when he wakes up, and I’m more than a little grateful.

It may not be in keeping with Berman’s idea of human nature to spend more time worrying about the quality of this season’s Gap stock, or whether that cute guy/girl in the bar likes one’s looks than about, say, the relevance of religion to dining practices or the divinely mandated division of labour between the sexes, but that’s just too bad for Berman. And, though it bothers me less, for Qutb.

I suspect most readers will agree so far, so let me move on to the parts that is more likely to lose friends and influence people. Here is Berman’s entire conclusion.

It would be nice to think that, in the war against terror, our side, too, speaks of deep philosophical ideas — it would be nice to think that someone is arguing with the terrorists and with the readers of Sayyid Qutb. But here I have my worries. The followers of Qutb speak, in their wild fashion, of enormous human problems, and they urge one another to death and to murder. But the enemies of these people speak of what? The political leaders speak of United Nations resolutions, of unilateralism, of multilateralism, of weapons inspectors, of coercion and noncoercion. This is no answer to the terrorists. The terrorists speak insanely of deep things. The antiterrorists had better speak sanely of equally deep things. Presidents will not do this. Presidents will dispatch armies, or decline to dispatch armies, for better and for worse.

But who will speak of the sacred and the secular, of the physical world and the spiritual world? Who will defend liberal ideas against the enemies of liberal ideas? Who will defend liberal principles in spite of liberal society’s every failure? President George W. Bush, in his speech to Congress a few days after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks, announced that he was going to wage a war of ideas. He has done no such thing. He is not the man for that.

Philosophers and religious leaders will have to do this on their own. Are they doing so? Armies are in motion, but are the philosophers and religious leaders, the liberal thinkers, likewise in motion? There is something to worry about here, an aspect of the war that liberal society seems to have trouble understanding — one more worry, on top of all the others, and possibly the greatest worry of all.

But what the world needs now is not another deep thought. What the world needs is a way of recognising how much value there is in everyday life. It needs therapy more than this kind of philosophy. To not be able to see enough value in everyday life to keep on keeping on without believing in some external source of value just is a form of depression, perhaps the worst kind there is.

There is something odd about the terminology used around here. Some, and I suspect Berman is among them, suggest that life is not meaningful without some deep idea to guide it. And this is meant to be a bad thing. But lives are, in the most important sense, not meaningful, and this is a good thing. Things that are meaningful, street signs, sentences in blogs, etc are not intrinsically valuable – their value consists in their utility. If lives are to be justified in terms of their meaning, that is to say that they have instrumental value only. And that is the first step on the road to ruin, or at least calamitous war.

I thought the primary lesson of the 20th century was that deep ideas are dangerous. Small ideas are the lifeblood of the world, and they are safe to boot. Someone who has a new idea for representing the relationship between thought and world, or for curing a particular kind of cancer, or for describing the history of the Jews through the Dublin traipsings of an ad salesman, is not likely to start a war over their idea. Someone who has a new idea for the overall arrangement of society is somewhat more war-prone. Deep thoughts are literally dangerous. Paraphrasing Keynes somewhat, the armies of the world are moved by little else.

This of course is not meant to be a move in the war of ideas. I’m not likely to relieve someone’s existential angst by pointing out that it is a form of depression. But I doubt that any move in the war of ideas will cure this. What will cure it? Well, who knows, but I suspect psychologists know a fair bit more than you or I, or than they did 100 years ago. What we need is to get people to see the world in roughly the way Ramsey does, in this utterly delightful passage.

My picture of the world is drawn in perspective, not like a model to scale. The foreground is occupied by human beings and the stars are all as small as threepenny bits. I don’t really believe in astronomy, except as a complicated description of part of the course of human and possibly animal sensation. I apply my perspective not merely to space but also to time. In time the world will cool and everything will die; but that is a long time off still, and its present value at compound discount is almost nothing. Nor is the present less valuable becuse the future is blank. Humanity, which fills the foreground of my picture, I foind interesting and on the whole admirable. I find, just now at least, the world a pleasant and exciting place. You may find it depressing; I am sorry for you, and you despise me. But I have reason and you have none; you would only have a reason for despising me if your feeling corresponded to the fact in a way mine didn’t. But neither can correspond to the fact. The fact is not in itself good or bad; it is just that it thrills me but depresses you. On the other hand, I pity you with reason, because it is pleasanter to be thrilled than to be depressed, and not merely pleasanter but better for all one’s activities.

I don’t agree with all of that. Call me crazy, call me old-fashioned, but I do believe in astronomy. And when this depression leads the depressed to try and kill as many people as possible, potentially including me, well perhaps the despise becomes mutual. But I think the overall picture is just right.

More positively, I think that what moves us forward here is not one big idea, but thousands of small ideas. The best, as in most useful, ambassadors for liberal democracy are not the high theorists, but the millions of artists, innovators and entrepeneurs that make liberal democracy recreate itself every few years in the image of its people’s imagination. Less theoretically, a Victoria’s Secret or Abercrombie and Fitch catalogue is likely to win more hearts and minds than most essays on political philosophy. And if that doesn’t work, well there are millions more ideas where they came from.

This is not to deprecate the role of political philosophy, or of philosophy more generally. It is rather to say that the picture Berman ends with, which I think is a picture widely shared by philosophers, is not at all helpful. The image we get is of the philosopher as Captain Ahab, staking it all on the hunt for the one big catch, the one big deep idea that will change everything. Some people follow this life pattern, and unlike the real Ahab some of them beat the odds and catch a whale of sorts. But it’s not a helpful role model.

To loop back to Joyce (again!) the better role model is Bloom, the flawed but decent everyman whose life is ‘defined’ by how well he does the little things, not by its dramatic arc. Philosophy should be like this too – dealing with the challenges that face us day-to-day, perhaps hoping and checking from time to time that we are not just walking in giant circles, but having value in how well it handles the details, and makes small progress not in how dramatic its big picture may be. Geoff Nunberg says somewhere (it’s in one of the papers on his site, but it’s a little late for me to look where, so the quote may be inaccurate) that a discipline has become a science when second-rate practicioners can make valuable contributions to it. Ahabian philosophy can’t be like that, but a philosophy of puzzle-raising and solving can be. (You may think I have a vested interest in this model of philosophy being accepted…) And those kind of sciences have been much more successful than those that spend their time between paradigm shifts interpreting the words of the great man who last moved the field.

I do pity the people who cannot see the value in a life of everyday pleasures and successes, or at least I pity the non-criminals amongst their number, and it is a source of constant regret that more people don’t see the value in that kind of approach to philosophy.

UPDATE (and clarification): Re-reading that it strikes me that I might have painted with an even broader brush than I intended. Not that it was meant to be a subtle post, but still. The targets, as it were, are not meant to be those people, which would include I suspect most every adult in the world, who thinks that part of the value of their life is constituted by their participation in a grand story. Such stories, be they political, religous, artistic, scientific, or whatever, are an important part of many perfectly healthy lives. Rather, the targets are those who think their life would be valueless without such a narrative, who think that the pleasures and rewards of everyday life are not worth the cost. While I am deliberately flippant above about what makes everyday life valuable, let’s not forget that a large part of it consists in caring for, and where necessary nurturing, those that one loves. Someone who doesn’t find sufficient value even in this I think is a cause for concern. One concern about such a person is that they may think my life is valueless unless I’m participating in the same grand narrative that they see themselves in. But as Ramsey points out, serious costs start to accrue well before that. My main objection to Berman’s piece was the suggestion that we aren’t telling the right narrative, that philosophers should be searching for it, and that perhaps nightmarish history should be our guide. I think by the time a story is needed, it is already too late for anything but therapy. Retail therapy is widely recommended.

As mentioned below, there have been a few references in the blogworld to Paul Berman’s article in the NY Times magazine about Sayyid Qutb, the ‘philosopher of Al Qaeda’ as they call him there. I said I didn’t like it very much, so this post is to say why. It’s a little long, because I’m a little too lazy to edit it properly.

Qutb’s picture, hardly an original one, is that Western culture is based largely on a merger between Jewish and Greek ideas. (I’m told that developing this idea is one of the main theme’s of Finnegan’s Wake, but heaven knows how one could tell.) From the Jews we get the monotheistic religion, with a few epicycles having been added in the last few millenia. From the Greeks we get the idea that spiritual life and material life can be separated. So we abandon the Jewish idea of letting religous convictions govern all aspects of daily life. Crudely, we accept large parts of Exodus but none of Leviticus. (Some people in the West like the anti-gay lines there, but unless they follow Orthodox practices in all other aspects of life they are obviously hypocrites and should be ignored.) This, Qutb thought, was a disasterous combination. And you know, I think Berman agrees.

Europe’s scientific and technical achievements allowed the Europeans to dominate the world. And the Europeans inflicted their ”hideous schizophrenia” [the separation of spiritual life from material life] on peoples and cultures in every corner of the globe. That was the origin of modern misery — the anxiety in contemporary society, the sense of drift, the purposelessness, the craving for false pleasures. The crisis of modern life was felt by every thinking person in the Christian West. But then again, Europe’s leadership of mankind inflicted that crisis on every thinking person in the Muslim world as well. Here Qutb was on to something original. The Christians of the West underwent the crisis of modern life as a consequence, he thought, of their own theological tradition — a result of nearly 2,000 years of ecclesiastical error. But in Qutb’s account, the Muslims had to undergo that same experience because it had been imposed on them by Christians from abroad, which could only make the experience doubly painful — an alienation that was also a humiliation.

That was Qutb’s analysis. In writing about modern life, he put his finger on something that every thinking person can recognize, if only vaguely — the feeling that human nature and modern life are somehow at odds.

Whatever one thinks of the merits of following the Greeks here, the conclusion is just ridiculous. As Joan Robinson apparently said in response to one of Paul Samuelson’s lectures, I don’t so much object to what the young man is saying as to what he means behind it. If modern life is somehow at odds with human nature, just which other time period is more in harmony with it. Perhaps he thinks it was when we were all hunter-gatherers on the savannah. Perhaps he thinks it was when a large percentage of us were slaves. Perhaps he thinks it was when we had Dickensian labour conditions. Perhaps he thinks it was when 51% of us were compelled by social custom to be removed from civil society at an early age and spend and/or sacrifice their lives in child-bearing and rearing.

Early in Ulysses Stephen says that history is a nightmare from which he is trying to awake. Some days it feels like my life is just what Stephen would have when he wakes up, and I’m more than a little grateful.

It may not be in keeping with Berman’s idea of human nature to spend more time worrying about the quality of this season’s Gap stock, or whether that cute guy/girl in the bar likes one’s looks than about, say, the relevance of religion to dining practices or the divinely mandated division of labour between the sexes, but that’s just too bad for Berman. And, though it bothers me less, for Qutb.

I suspect most readers will agree so far, so let me move on to the parts that is more likely to lose friends and influence people. Here is Berman’s entire conclusion.

It would be nice to think that, in the war against terror, our side, too, speaks of deep philosophical ideas — it would be nice to think that someone is arguing with the terrorists and with the readers of Sayyid Qutb. But here I have my worries. The followers of Qutb speak, in their wild fashion, of enormous human problems, and they urge one another to death and to murder. But the enemies of these people speak of what? The political leaders speak of United Nations resolutions, of unilateralism, of multilateralism, of weapons inspectors, of coercion and noncoercion. This is no answer to the terrorists. The terrorists speak insanely of deep things. The antiterrorists had better speak sanely of equally deep things. Presidents will not do this. Presidents will dispatch armies, or decline to dispatch armies, for better and for worse.

But who will speak of the sacred and the secular, of the physical world and the spiritual world? Who will defend liberal ideas against the enemies of liberal ideas? Who will defend liberal principles in spite of liberal society’s every failure? President George W. Bush, in his speech to Congress a few days after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks, announced that he was going to wage a war of ideas. He has done no such thing. He is not the man for that.

Philosophers and religious leaders will have to do this on their own. Are they doing so? Armies are in motion, but are the philosophers and religious leaders, the liberal thinkers, likewise in motion? There is something to worry about here, an aspect of the war that liberal society seems to have trouble understanding — one more worry, on top of all the others, and possibly the greatest worry of all.

But what the world needs now is not another deep thought. What the world needs is a way of recognising how much value there is in everyday life. It needs therapy more than this kind of philosophy. To not be able to see enough value in everyday life to keep on keeping on without believing in some external source of value just is a form of depression, perhaps the worst kind there is.

There is something odd about the terminology used around here. Some, and I suspect Berman is among them, suggest that life is not meaningful without some deep idea to guide it. And this is meant to be a bad thing. But lives are, in the most important sense, not meaningful, and this is a good thing. Things that are meaningful, street signs, sentences in blogs, etc are not intrinsically valuable – their value consists in their utility. If lives are to be justified in terms of their meaning, that is to say that they have instrumental value only. And that is the first step on the road to ruin, or at least calamitous war.

I thought the primary lesson of the 20th century was that deep ideas are dangerous. Small ideas are the lifeblood of the world, and they are safe to boot. Someone who has a new idea for representing the relationship between thought and world, or for curing a particular kind of cancer, or for describing the history of the Jews through the Dublin traipsings of an ad salesman, is not likely to start a war over their idea. Someone who has a new idea for the overall arrangement of society is somewhat more war-prone. Deep thoughts are literally dangerous. Paraphrasing Keynes somewhat, the armies of the world are moved by little else.

This of course is not meant to be a move in the war of ideas. I’m not likely to relieve someone’s existential angst by pointing out that it is a form of depression. But I doubt that any move in the war of ideas will cure this. What will cure it? Well, who knows, but I suspect psychologists know a fair bit more than you or I, or than they did 100 years ago. What we need is to get people to see the world in roughly the way Ramsey does, in this utterly delightful passage.

My picture of the world is drawn in perspective, not like a model to scale. The foreground is occupied by human beings and the stars are all as small as threepenny bits. I don’t really believe in astronomy, except as a complicated description of part of the course of human and possibly animal sensation. I apply my perspective not merely to space but also to time. In time the world will cool and everything will die; but that is a long time off still, and its present value at compound discount is almost nothing. Nor is the present less valuable becuse the future is blank. Humanity, which fills the foreground of my picture, I foind interesting and on the whole admirable. I find, just now at least, the world a pleasant and exciting place. You may find it depressing; I am sorry for you, and you despise me. But I have reason and you have none; you would only have a reason for despising me if your feeling corresponded to the fact in a way mine didn’t. But neither can correspond to the fact. The fact is not in itself good or bad; it is just that it thrills me but depresses you. On the other hand, I pity you with reason, because it is pleasanter to be thrilled than to be depressed, and not merely pleasanter but better for all one’s activities.

I don’t agree with all of that. Call me crazy, call me old-fashioned, but I do believe in astronomy. And when this depression leads the depressed to try and kill as many people as possible, potentially including me, well perhaps the despise becomes mutual. But I think the overall picture is just right.

More positively, I think that what moves us forward here is not one big idea, but thousands of small ideas. The best, as in most useful, ambassadors for liberal democracy are not the high theorists, but the millions of artists, innovators and entrepeneurs that make liberal democracy recreate itself every few years in the image of its people’s imagination. Less theoretically, a Victoria’s Secret or Abercrombie and Fitch catalogue is likely to win more hearts and minds than most essays on political philosophy. And if that doesn’t work, well there are millions more ideas where they came from.

This is not to deprecate the role of political philosophy, or of philosophy more generally. It is rather to say that the picture Berman ends with, which I think is a picture widely shared by philosophers, is not at all helpful. The image we get is of the philosopher as Captain Ahab, staking it all on the hunt for the one big catch, the one big deep idea that will change everything. Some people follow this life pattern, and unlike the real Ahab some of them beat the odds and catch a whale of sorts. But it’s not a helpful role model.

To loop back to Joyce (again!) the better role model is Bloom, the flawed but decent everyman whose life is ‘defined’ by how well he does the little things, not by its dramatic arc. Philosophy should be like this too – dealing with the challenges that face us day-to-day, perhaps hoping and checking from time to time that we are not just walking in giant circles, but having value in how well it handles the details, and makes small progress not in how dramatic its big picture may be. Geoff Nunberg says somewhere (it’s in one of the papers on his site, but it’s a little late for me to look where, so the quote may be inaccurate) that a discipline has become a science when second-rate practicioners can make valuable contributions to it. Ahabian philosophy can’t be like that, but a philosophy of puzzle-raising and solving can be. (You may think I have a vested interest in this model of philosophy being accepted…) And those kind of sciences have been much more successful than those that spend their time between paradigm shifts interpreting the words of the great man who last moved the field.

I do pity the people who cannot see the value in a life of everyday pleasures and successes, or at least I pity the non-criminals amongst their number, and it is a source of constant regret that more people don’t see the value in that kind of approach to philosophy.

UPDATE (and clarification): Re-reading that it strikes me that I might have painted with an even broader brush than I intended. Not that it was meant to be a subtle post, but still. The targets, as it were, are not meant to be those people, which would include I suspect most every adult in the world, who thinks that part of the value of their life is constituted by their participation in a grand story. Such stories, be they political, religous, artistic, scientific, or whatever, are an important part of many perfectly healthy lives. Rather, the targets are those who think their life would be valueless without such a narrative, who think that the pleasures and rewards of everyday life are not worth the cost. While I am deliberately flippant above about what makes everyday life valuable, let’s not forget that a large part of it consists in caring for, and where necessary nurturing, those that one loves. Someone who doesn’t find sufficient value even in this I think is a cause for concern. One concern about such a person is that they may think my life is valueless unless I’m participating in the same grand narrative that they see themselves in. But as Ramsey points out, serious costs start to accrue well before that. My main objection to Berman’s piece was the suggestion that we aren’t telling the right narrative, that philosophers should be searching for it, and that perhaps nightmarish history should be our guide. I think by the time a story is needed, it is already too late for anything but therapy. Retail therapy is widely recommended.

My resistance paper is going to be absurdly long. Part of the problem is that I’m having much more fun writing the examples than I am having writing the philosophy. So naturally I spend more time on them. But the philosophy has a certain amount of space it needs to take. So the paper will be unmanagable and unpublishable and so on. So I will have to serialise it here. Or I don’t have to but I will anyway.

One of the key points will be something noted by Tamar Gendler and developed somewhat by Stephen Yablo. We have imaginative resistance whenever an author says that in the fiction p, where p is some fact that if it obtains only does so in virtue of some more fundamental facts obtaining, and it is specified in the fiction that those more fundamental facts do not obtain. The moral/descriptive case is only one version of this. Here is another, one with nothing at all to do with morality.

A Quixotic Victory
   —What think you of my redecorating Sancho?
   —It’s rather sparse, said Sancho.
   —Sparse. Indeed it is sparse. Just a television and an armchair.
   —Where are they, Senor Quixote? asked Sancho. All I see are a knife and fork on the floor, about six feet from each other. A sparse apartment for a sparse mind. He said the last sentence under his breath so Quixote would not hear him.
   —They might look like a knife and fork, but they are a television and an armchair, replied Quixote.
   —They look just like the knife and fork I have in my pocket, said Sancho, and he moved as to put his knife and fork besides the objects on Quixote’s floor.
   —Please don’t do that, said Quixote, for I may be unable to tell your knife and fork from my television and armchair.
   —But if you can’t tell them apart from a knife and fork, how could they be a television and an armchair?
   —Do you really think being a television is an observational property? asked Quixote with a grin.
   —Maybe not. OK then, how do you change the channels? asked Sancho.
   —There’s a remote.
   —Where? Is it that floorboard?
   —No, it’s at the repair shop, admitted Quixote.
   —I give up, said Sancho.
   Sancho was right to give up. Despite their odd appearance, Quixote’s items of furniture really were a television and an armchair. This was the first time in months Quixote had won an argument with Sancho.

Not the best bit of fiction ever written, but for a first draft I’m moderately pleased with it. My initial temptation was to run the whole thing as a tribute to the Dead Parrot sketch, but that may have been a little obvious. Not that using Quixote and Sancho Panza is other than obvious.

My resistance paper is going to be absurdly long. Part of the problem is that I’m having much more fun writing the examples than I am having writing the philosophy. So naturally I spend more time on them. But the philosophy has a certain amount of space it needs to take. So the paper will be unmanagable and unpublishable and so on. So I will have to serialise it here. Or I don’t have to but I will anyway.

One of the key points will be something noted by Tamar Gendler and developed somewhat by Stephen Yablo. We have imaginative resistance whenever an author says that in the fiction p, where p is some fact that if it obtains only does so in virtue of some more fundamental facts obtaining, and it is specified in the fiction that those more fundamental facts do not obtain. The moral/descriptive case is only one version of this. Here is another, one with nothing at all to do with morality.

A Quixotic Victory
   —What think you of my redecorating Sancho?
   —It’s rather sparse, said Sancho.
   —Sparse. Indeed it is sparse. Just a television and an armchair.
   —Where are they, Senor Quixote? asked Sancho. All I see are a knife and fork on the floor, about six feet from each other. A sparse apartment for a sparse mind. He said the last sentence under his breath so Quixote would not hear him.
   —They might look like a knife and fork, but they are a television and an armchair, replied Quixote.
   —They look just like the knife and fork I have in my pocket, said Sancho, and he moved as to put his knife and fork besides the objects on Quixote’s floor.
   —Please don’t do that, said Quixote, for I may be unable to tell your knife and fork from my television and armchair.
   —But if you can’t tell them apart from a knife and fork, how could they be a television and an armchair?
   —Do you really think being a television is an observational property? asked Quixote with a grin.
   —Maybe not. OK then, how do you change the channels? asked Sancho.
   —There’s a remote.
   —Where? Is it that floorboard?
   —No, it’s at the repair shop, admitted Quixote.
   —I give up, said Sancho.
   Sancho was right to give up. Despite their odd appearance, Quixote’s items of furniture really were a television and an armchair. This was the first time in months Quixote had won an argument with Sancho.

Not the best bit of fiction ever written, but for a first draft I’m moderately pleased with it. My initial temptation was to run the whole thing as a tribute to the Dead Parrot sketch, but that may have been a little obvious. Not that using Quixote and Sancho Panza is other than obvious.