Dear Frank,

I want to write a post for you. We share a lot of cuddles and a lot of feeds, you and I, but somehow it’s still your big brother who gets all the column inches. He is so big and loud and you are so small and – well, loud, but less loud. Actually you are a very polite baby and take ages to resort to shouting, preferring a sort of light snort when you’d like to be noticed. I’ve tried this myself at bars and, trust me, it doesn’t work. I have no doubt you’ll learn to resort to the ear-bursting stuff rather quicker in future.

You are now seven weeks and three days old. You have got over the jaundice and the sticky eyes have mostly cleared up too, leaving you as a pale pink piglet, soft and plump, with a cute little snub nose and eyes that may well remain blue. You have those silly short limbs that babies have but I think you may be leggier than your brother. You are certainly an easier baby than he was, without being a passive lump; you don’t have colic, though you’re currently suffering a cold, and you will sit quite happily for some time in your Exciting Vibrating Bouncy Chair, listening to its inane music and staring at your father’s philosophy books. You’re smiling earlier and more often than Hugh: we saw what we thought might be the first one at five-and-a-half weeks and you now regularly respond to our smiles. You patiently endure Hugh’s embraces, though it’s possible you will enact a dire revenge later.

In one respect you are awkward: you don’t reliably feed to sleep, and even if you do you almost always wake up if placed in your cot. You have decided that Mummy and Daddy’s bed is much better. So I get to cuddle your warm little curled up form all night, half out of the covers because I’m scared you’ll be suffocated, providing a breast whenever you wake up and start to snuffle. You feed frequently – about every two hours during the day, with one longer stretch – but at night (at present) you usually make it through from nine-ish until about two and then again until five. You don’t poo very much, which is considerate.

You are a charming little person. Even now you are beginning to unfold from the tightly sealed newborn bud of yourself, but you’re still mostly hidden away. I love you now, but I’m also impatient to meet the you you will become.

Your adoring Mum,

Dot.

Dot writes: many are the trials of Hugh’s teddy. He is dragged by one leg through flowerbeds, rubbed against a snotty nose, narrowly escapes sharing the bath, and gets far too involved at meal-times, against the advice of Hugh’s parents. Yesterday the birthday celebrations were too much for him and he had to go in the wash.

This meant Hugh had to sleep a night without him.

I prepared a couple of alternatives: a yellow duck and Thomasina the Transvestite Cat (he’s ginger but wears a dress), one of Grandma’s presents to Frank. Then I put Hugh put in his sleeping bag and took him onto my lap for his bedtime cuddle.

“Teddy!” exclaims Hugh.

“Teddy is wet. Would you like the duck?”

Hugh looks dubiously at the duck. “No guck.”

“Or the cat, perhaps?”

He pushes the cat away. “Dig-dig! Chax!”

So my son slept the night* clutching a Bruder model digger with caterpillar tracks. He’s taken it with him to the childminder’s today as well.

*Actually he had a horrible broken night, which may have been because of Teddy or may have resulted from too many party nibbles. He has a cold too. But let’s not go into that.

Zero:

One:

Two:

Dot writes: I’ve just spent a little time adding new links to our blogroll. We’ve tended to keep it short in the past but I think a change of policy is called for, and I was inspired by Belgian Waffle to get round to doing something about it. I’ll carry on adding more links as I think of them, though I’ll try not to swamp the list with the Mummy blogs and midwifery blogs that I am particularly interested in myself. At the moment the bulk of the posts are my diary posts, but Ken does still contribute thoughts on current affairs, philosophy and language, and even I occasionally pop my head out of the nursery window. The blogroll ought to reflect that.

I’ve wondered if we would get more hits if we separated our blogs out, and had a proper philosophy blog (so people looking for philosophy wouldn’t be put off by all the stuff about infant sleeping habits), a proper baby blog, a proper books/culture blog etc. But this is who we are and we do at least manage to post fairly often this way. I would like more comments, though. The best way to get them is probably to start commenting more on other people’s blogs. I haven’t signed up for NaBloPoMo but I hereby resolve to leave at least one comment per day for this month and show some of the nice people out there that they’re being read. And maybe they’ll come back and talk to us.

I have been reading a couple of densely argued, complex and interesting papers by Paul Boghossian, “The Rule Following Considerations” (Mind 98 (1989): 507-49) and “The Status of Content” (Philosophical Review 99 (1990): 157-84). I thought it might help me to understand the intricacies of Boghossian’s arguments to blog about them and try to lay out the rich vein of argumentation. The main goal of the discussion is pretty clear. Boghossian contends that the sceptical solution leads to some kind of contradiction (on either of the two plausible ways of making sense of it). The sceptical solution replaces the realist truth-conditional picture of language with a sceptical assertion-conditional one. Boghossian argues that the assertion conditional account, considered as a form of nonfactualism about meaning, leads to contradiction in view of what one has to say about truth to maintain a nonfactualist stance about anything, and what one has to say about truth given nonfactualism about meaning in particular. He also argues that the sceptical solution leads to contradiction when considered as a form of error-theory. Thus he challenges the sceptic to put up or shut up: show there is some other way to understand the sceptical solution or withdraw.

The contradiction affecting the nonfactualist version of the sceptical solution is supposed to be that it entails that truth is not a robust property but it presupposes (so also entails?) that truth is a robust property (1989: §16, 1990: 175).

First let me summarise the argument that nonfactualism works only with robust accounts of truth. Nonfactualism about a discourse holds that the predicates of the discourse do not denote properties, nor do the sentences of the discourse express propositions or have genuine truth conditions (1990:160, 1989: §15). Boghossian claims that this much is inconsistent with minimalism about truth, which holds that simply being of the right syntactic sort is sufficient for a sentence to truth-evaluable. Sentences must be significant (‘disciplined by norms of correct usage’ and declarative in form (‘possess an appropriate syntax’) (1990: 163). Now Graham Oppy, Michael Smith and Frank Jackson have challenged this minimal definition of truth-aptness, but the criteria can stand for the present purposes. Given his assumptions about minimalism about truth and nonfactualism, Boghossian draws the obvious inference that nonfactualism is incompatible with minimalism because it is constitutive of nonfactualism that it denies that (some range of) significant declarative sentences have truth conditions. Nonfactualism is therefore committed to a nonminimal or ‘robust’ theory of truth (1990: 165, 1989: §16).

So far so good, but what of the argument that nonfactualism entails that truth is not a robust property? I am having a bit of trouble with this. I think I know what the steps are supposed to be but I can’t tie them to the text and the principles employed in the text even if they deliver the conclusion, look unacceptable to the sceptic to me. So there’s a petitio principi allegation lurking in the wings. I think it is supposed to go like this
1. Nonfactualism says predicates don’t express properties.
2. So it ought to say the predicate ‘true’ doesn’t express a property.
3. The claim that ‘true’ doesn’t express a property is a central commitment of minimalism about truth.
So, nonfactualism implies minimalism about truth.

In ‘the Status of Content’ to get from “the predicate ‘x has truth condition p’ does not express a property” to ” ‘x is true’ does not express a property”, he goes this way:

The truth value of a sentence is fully determined by its truth condition and the relevant worldly facts. There is no way, then, that a sentence’s possessing a truth value could be a thoroughly factual matter (“true” does express a property) if there is nonfactuality in one of its determinants (“has truth condition p” does not express a property (1990: 175)

Isn’t there a hint of use/mention looseness in this passage? Going by the first sentence of the passage it is the truth-condition that matters for the truth value, not the predicate ‘has a truth condition’, but ignore this. ( I suppose the implicit idea is that the predicate would fail to express the property only if the property didn’t exist…. but that is not scepticism. Kripke never denies that addition and quaddition and the other functions exist, only that we have words and concepts to express them)

My worry about this passage is that the first sentence seems to buy in to the truth-conditional picture that the sceptic rejects. The sceptic is supposed to reject the whole picture of sentences having truth conditions. If you reject talk of truth conditions, you likely reject the lore associated with them. If the sceptic says sentences don’t have truth values, where does the argument go from there? Why can’t the sceptic claim that truth is a property of other things besides sentences (propositions say)? For the sake of argument, assume the sceptic says the following about truth: Propositions are sets of possible worlds and a proposition is true if and only if the actual world is a member of the set of worlds that constitutes the proposition. So the truth of a proposition consists in having the actual world as a member. This doctrine seems open to the sceptic. It has nothing particular to do with language. There would still have been set of possible worlds even if intelligent life hadn’t evolved.

The equivalent passage in the Rule-Following Considerations paper is:

Since the truth condition of any sentence S is (in part, anyway) a function of its meaning, a non-factualism about meaning will enjoin a non-factualism about truth conditions: what truth conditions S possesses could hardly be a factual matter if that in virtue of which it has a particular truth-condition is not itself a factual matter (1989: §15).

It is the same move.

I think my argument above is more direct. Nonfactualism says predicates don’t express properties. ‘True’ is a predicate. So the nonfactualist is committed to the claim that ‘true’ doesn’t express a property. This is minimalism about truth.

My worry about this argument is the status of the definitional connection between minimalism about truth and the denial that ‘true’ expresses a property in the context of scepticism. With scepticism about meaning in the picture, we ought to separate out elements of the minimalist thesis. The core element is the denial that truth is a substantive property. This is set alongside a view about what the predicate ‘true’ does given that it doesn’t express a property. The second thesis in the absence of the first would not count as minimalism about truth. Nonfactualism about meaning, if combined with the toy theory of truth described earlier, accepts the second thesis but rejects the first (or at least accepts the denial that the predicate expresses the property without denying that there is a property (of having the actual world as a member)).

Boghossian seems much too quick in ‘the Status of Content’. He equates ”true’ does not refer to a property’ with the denial that truth is a genuine property (1990: 175). And the toy theory would appear to be a counter-example to that move.

(this was also posted over at the Dublin Philosophy Blog)

Dot writes: the Irish do Halloween in a big way. When I first moved here I remember being startled by how big it was, and also by the fact that in addition to costumes, pumpkins in the window and trick-or-treating they have bonfires and fireworks. (Fireworks, as it happens, are illegal here, but they have them anyway.) As a child I don’t remember celebrating Halloween particularly, but there was a festival in late autumn when we had after-dark parties with bonfires and fireworks, and it was one of the highlights of my year, right up there with Christmas and the Royal Norfolk Show. We’d eat jacket potatoes cooked in tinfoil in the bonfire and then we’d take our sparklers round the corner where it was dangerous and dark and wave them about to see the trails of light they left. The festival was Guy Fawkes Night and involved burning a Catholic in effigy. It took me an amazingly long time to click why it wasn’t celebrated in Ireland.

Anyway, this helps to explain why I really wasn’t up to speed with the Halloween jollities. There were no pumpkins in our window and Hugh wore a costume that his childminder bought for him last year, after a half-hearted last minute dash to Dunnes Stores on my part yielded no results. He didn’t go trick-or-treating either (the costume was shown off at a birthday party). At least we did have sweets ready for when the doorbell rang and, to an enthusiastic cry of ‘Trick or treat!’ from their parents, Peppa Pig, Spiderman and a skeleton pirate wandered vaguely in and started playing with Hugh’s toy garage. Our friends Sarah and Dave and John and Emily are rather more organised than we are. I have until next year to think of two stupendously excellent ideas for Halloween costumes, learn to sew, and get them ready. Suggestions on A4 paper with extensive instructions, please.

Ken writes:

Via Language Log, I came across this comic.

It turns out this is a hypothesis by a linguist called Roman Jakobson and the comments on the original language log post link to an essay by R Trask expounding and defending the suggestion.

It’s ingenious!
p.s. sorry about the size of the image. You might need to adjust the size of your browser window to display the image properly (or you could just click the image and navigate to the comic book site).

Dot writes: my official breastfeeding reading for today is an academic book I’m reviewing, but after a good start my ability to concentrate is flagging (also Frank is asleep on my lap and I’m getting pins and needles in my bum and typing at a funny angle so as not to rest my elbow on his face, and all this somehow makes following a complex argument hard). (Hugh is at the childminder’s or I wouldn’t even be trying.) So instead I will remark on my leisure reading. I’m taking a break from fiction to read a couple of popular science books on the intersection of genetics and (pre-)history: Brian Sykes’s The Seven Daughters of Eve, which I finished yesterday, and Stephen Oppenheimer’s The Origins of the British.

The Sykes book is good fun. The Seven Daughters aspect (we all descend from seven individual women who lived at different times 45,000 to 10,000 years ago, and whom Sykes has given slightly sappy names such as Xenia and Jasmine) is less interesting than the earlier chapters: Sykes discusses the mitochondrial DNA evidence for the origins of the Polynesians (Asia) and whether any modern Europeans are descended from Neanderthals (no). I was much more impressed by the validity of arguing from mDNA than I expected and he succeeds in making academic conferences sound exciting. On the other hand he is a bit over-fond of the first person singular. For example, the Polynesians are ‘the people I have come to regard as the greatest maritime explorers the world has ever seen’. Well, that’s a new insight I’m glad he’s shared with the rest of us! [The preceding sentence should ideally be written in a special Sarcasm Font.]

Ken, who’s read both books already, says Oppenheimer’s is the better of the two, and it certainly deals with questions that I find extremely interesting. The major thrust of the argument as far as I can tell at present is that the English are genetically related to neighbouring North French/Belgian/Dutch populations, without any obvious sign of an influx from further north such as would be expected if there had been large scale immigration by Angles, Jutes and Saxons; Ken tells me Oppenheimer also argues that a Germanic language was probably spoken in south-Eastern England before the Anglo-Saxon invasions, which would explain the surprising lack of Celtic influence on English. I’m encouraged that he acknowledges the help of reputable historians and archaeologists such as Barry Cunliffe and Helena Hamerow. On the other hand I can’t help but be irritated by hamfistedness with my own field: ‘Beowulf – our first written poem and the only surviving complete saga in Old English – used a Germanic language’ (p. 10). So what about, for example, the inscription on the Ruthwell Cross, which predates the Beowulf-manuscript by around three hundred years? And what sense of saga would that be, since it’s presumably not the sense of an extended prose narrative? [More sarcasm font there.]

Interdisciplinarity is hard.

Dot writes: this morning I misguidedly put my cup of tea on the floor (this was because I had to sit in the armchair not on the sofa, as Hugh was playing house with the sofa cushions). Of course within a few minutes Hugh had tripped over it and spilled the whole lot. So as Ken rushed to mop it up (I was feeding Frank) Hugh stood by the puddle, gazing on in distress, and exclaimed “I sorry, I sorry, I sorry” over and over. Then after a bit he said “mess!” And then “tea.” And then, satisfied that he had been adequately contrite, he went back over to the sofa and resumed his demands for “more ‘ouse! more ‘ouse!”

Cuuuute.

Dot writes: I had a very good day on my own with the boys yesterday while Ken went to Belfast for a conference, but who cares about that. This morning it’s back to horrible: Hugh awake at 5.20, sopping wet and very angry. Only because the clocks went back last night that made it 4.20. Heroic Dad dealt with it until he could no more, and then we had a session of all four in one bed but with Hugh kicking, bouncing and shouting, whereupon baby was transferred to his cot, only Hugh then got even noisier, and finally Mummy accepted that it was her turn and took him downstairs to play house with the sofa cushions. Ken unfortunately didn’t manage to get back to sleep. Now at 6.55/5.55 we are all up except for Frank. What sort of household is it where the five-week-old baby is the soundest sleeper?

The thing is, because Hugh has slept through the night for ages now, when he does wake for some reason (such as catastrophic nappy failure) we can’t get him back to sleep. Future strategy (or should that be tactics?): bigger nappies. And possibly drugs. And, in a real emergency, stick him in the car and drive blearily round the block. I was quite tempted to do that this morning, even though it is windy and wet and the transition to and from the car would have negated any soporific effect, because we now have my mum’s Renault Scenic and after initial difficulties with the clutch I have fallen in love with it. It makes me feel like a proper mum of two even more than the double buggy does. It makes me want to have another baby just because there is such gloriously ample room for another car-seat. Fortunately Frank and Hugh between them are about the most effective contraceptive imaginable.

You know, life really isn’t that bad right now. Hugh is getting much better with the baby, learning to play on his own a little more, becoming more quiescent at nappy changes and bedtime, and learning new words (yesterday’s were ‘pillow’ and ‘concrete’). Meanwhile Frank sometimes stops feeding and seems to like his new vibrating bouncy chair. However I tend to be propelled to the blog by the need to process trauma. I tell myself that this may at least make other people feel better. Some wise words from Fiona Looney:

It is as though we are all on a quest to find a worse child than ours: a smaller, sadder, fatter, balder small person to give us some hope that ours is not so bad after all.
(Misadventures in Motherhood, p. 11

I may have quoted this before on this blog. Still – how true.