What's it all about?

Since this is the first real post to my not-so-new blog I
thought I would say a few words about what I now have in
mind for it.
.
I'm trying to construct a philosophical sausage machine.
This machine will have fed in at one end philosophical ideas
and discussions from this and other blogs and internet fora,
and out of the other end will from time to time drop
perfectly formed masterpieces of insightful philosophical
prose, ready-to-publish through the amazing amazon POD
publishing machine.
.
How to achieve this is not so easy to see, but I shall give
it a go.
.
The proximate provocation (one of my favourite phrases) has
been J.L,Speranza, who lured me back to contemplating blogs
by sucking me into his Grice Club.
It was my own fault of course, because I suggested that our
conversations about the connections (or lack of them)
between the philosophies of Carnap and Grice should be
upgraded into a collaborative project to produce a small
book to try out this POD thing.
.
So Speranza made another blog for it ("The City of Eternal
Truth" which I think is a bit of Bunyon quoted by Grice in
PGRICE), and I made another "Carnap Corner" so that the
eternal city could be symmetrically flanked by the two
philosophers who would secure it.
.
A Tornado from Speranza ensued and I have yet to assimilate
the content of the dozens of messages he sent me almost
instantly as contributions to our project.
In my world things don't move quite that fast.
I like to have plenty of wide open space for deep thought.
.
That project was an ostensibly small addition to an already
inflated collection of ambitions which I was incubating
(at rbjones.com). but the new ways of working which it
brings are rather badly needed for the main project I was at
that time (and still) trying to get moving.
I had that called the "HOT philosophy" project, because I
wanted a book to pop out of the end and read as if its
writing had been an exhilarating philosophical adventure.
.
Though I had wanted the HOT philosophy project to be an open
enterprise, the process exposed to all who cared to see, I
wasn't convinced that my method of exposure would make it
easy enough to see or to get involved in.
A blog may be the answer.
.
But why stop at one?
HOT philosophy, the book, is intended to fall into three
parts. The first provides some background and clears some
ground. The ground to be cleared is primarily Quine and
Kripke so there will be some entertainment there. This is
in the search for a manner of philosophising which will suit
me (and perhaps some others). We may think of a tenuous
analogy with Hume to hint at the structure of the book.
The first part corresponds to Hume's scepticism.
What Hume then does is to offer, instead of a remedy for our
credulity, a diagnosis for it. He says its all just a bad
habit that we constantly infer from inadequate evidence
unjustified conclusions about things like material objects
and causal connections. He then proposes to model phlosophy
on the empirical sciences (something of a non-sequitur I
feel) and to undertake an enquiry into human nature.
.
In my HOT philosophy project, the discovery of the first part
is not the credulity of simple folk, but the irrationality,
particularly, of philosophers, especially when they gather
together into academic institutions. Now when this was
causing me some difficulty, I obtained my relief from an odd
place, from a book by Howard Bloom called Global Brain.
Putting aside the headline theme of the book, what it told
me about the social behaviour of life throughout the entire
history of its evolution on this planet helped me (I
imagined) to understand and come to terms with the belief
that that academic discipline which prided itself most of
all on its rationality (analytic philosophy) should be
nothing of the sort.
.
The purpose of the second part of my book is to examine the
supposed insights which came to me from Bloom (and on which
I elaborated on my own account in the years which followed).
The aim is to subject these ideas to philosophical analysis
and to see what can be made of them. So this is the
diagnostic phase of HOT philosophy, dressed up in
philosophical analysis to give it a bit more meat than
Hume's rather bald conclusion.
.
The third part is then to be more forward looking.
Whereas Hume looked forward to a philosophy undertaken after
the manner of Newtonian empirical science, I, like Rusell
and Carnap prefer a philosophy closer to Aristotle's
demonstrative science, as augmented by modern advances and
technologies. The third part addresses analytic method and
how it can be made as rigorous as can be bearing in mind
that as philosophers we habitually address just those
problems which are most difficult to pin down with the
requisite precision for formal analysis. The ideas here are
to be a melding of ideas which come from thinking about the
architecture of cognitive agents (things which know), and
ideas which come from a new approach to the resolution of
sceptical doubts. A synthesis of elements of cognitive
engineering with epistemological ideas forged in the furnace
of pyrrhonean scepticism. This is Philosophy as
Engineering, the architectural analysis of cognitive agents.
The third part of the HOT philosophy book will address this
topic in prose, but the project as a whole will include a
formal component as a project hosted by Google code and
called X-Logic. This will develop formal models and
undertake formal reasoning about these models, using modern
interactive proof tools.
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Now back to the blogs.
The plan is that this blog will be top cover for all my
projects, but that some projects will have separate blogs.
All the blogs will be have secondary archives and discussion
lists at RBJblogs@rbjones.com.
The HOT philosophy project has such disparate parts that I
will not make one new blog for it.
The first part will be covered here, and the second and third
parts will probably each have a blog of their own,
.
The blogs are just one end of the sausage machine.
The later stages in the process will also be fully
accessible at rbjones.com and at the hosting site for
"x-logic" (http://code.google.com/p/x-logic, though you
won't find much there yet).
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Another project is one which I once called "A Formal History
of Philosophical Logic" (and sundry variations on that
theme), but have most recently billed as "Analyses of
Analysis". This was the principle home for my attempts at
philosophically oriented formal modelling.
This I am tempted to turn into another open source project,
but will leave fallow for a while.
.
RBJ