A 'Combat' Summer

This has been one hell of a rough Summer. This blog has been 'collateral damage' due to this.

The Summer started with a nasty surprise. Out of State developers, in an attempt to get their hands on hurricane relief funds voted by Congress, decided to parachute a huge, highly inappropriate development into my quiet neighborhood. Quite naturally, people were up in arms about this, as I was too. Although the people of the neighborhood won a couple of battles, we ultimately lost. It turns out that the developers were having secret meetings with local politicians. When it came time for the vote, big money and political influence mattered more than the voices of the people. It looks like we will have an ugly 'carbuncle' (as Prince Charles might say) and that is the end of it. As we like to say in Louisiana, 'we have the best politicians money can buy'. Boy, it that the truth!

The early Summer was also quite lonely, as my girlfriend was out of town on business. She would call me every few days to vent spleen, whilst I looked after her cat. So, with fighting developers, looking after cats and providing long distance phone support, my regular blog habits fell by the way side. What I did not realize then, was that this was going to be the good part of the Summer.

In July, I began traveling. Initially, I had to go to Europe to take care of some business. Now, some might say that going to Europe sounds like a vacation, let me assure you it was not. In addition, for various reasons, I kept finding myself in places where internet access was almost unknown. When I could find any access, it was expensive and slow. This too was bad for blogging.

Things really got bad though when I came back. First off, no less than five light bulbs had burned out in my house. When getting home in the middle of the night, this is pretty inconvenient, to put it mildly. Of greater concern was the fact that the air conditioning system had stopped working. To top it all, my workshop in the yard had been broken into, all my mowers, weedeaters had been taken, along with several power tools and hand tools. My girlfriend, who was feeding the cat, did not notice the large bit of wood stuck in the door, nor the bit of broken off door, nor the smashed out window frame. When I had called from Europe, she was fixated on the fact that the cat had pissed in the house (like that was my fault!) and with the freaks of the blogosphere. In the meantime, she had also taken it upon herself to reorganize all my papers, such that I still cannot find my house insurance policy! This was not a good way to return from a trip.

Replacing the air conditioning unit took a couple of days. I can provide first hand testimony that no air conditioning and jet lag is a very poor combination. The actual process of replacing the unit was a bit tricky too. It seems that the old unit had been installed using some highly unconventional engineering techniques. Also, working with equipment that weighs in the order of a couple of hundred pounds, when the heat index is over one hundred and five is pretty tough too. In fact, even putting in the new unit was tricky as the new unit was designed for a modern house, which mine is not. Eventually though, I got everything working, which was a great relief. Then just when I thought that my troubles were at an end, my girlfriend sent me an e-mail saying that she thought that we had 'incompatible lifestyles' (whatever that is supposed to mean) and that we were an item no more. It is curious that these 'incompatible lifestyles' had not been an issue in the last two and a half years. Oh well.

This final change in circumstance presented me with some very immediate practical issues. I had booked a trip, to visit family. I had booked the ticket through a far distant airport I would not have normally used, given flight times, etc., as my girlfriend had promised to drop me off and pick me up. The day before I was due to leave the radiator on my truck blew, so I had to get really creative.

I hired a car to get to the airport. That part was easy. The problem was getting back. My flight was not due to land until late at night. Almost all the car hire places were shut by the time my flight arrived. Eventually, I found a company that was open twenty-four hours, but getting this figured out was pretty tense as, until I found this solution, I was going to have to leave a hire car in an airport lot, at great expense.

I thought that once I got to the airport, life would get simpler. Boy, was I wrong. First I was selected for the third degree by the screeners, then when I got to the gate, I discovered my flight was delayed an hour. This was a bit of a problem, as I had quite a tight connection. After much talking on the cell phone, I took my late plane to Chicago, where I was promised a hotel room and meals, by the airline. Once in Chicago, I spent a good deal of time standing in long lines until, as promised, I got a hotel voucher, a voucher for seven dollars for dinner and three dollars for breakfast. So much for airline promises. I thought though that my troubles were over. By this point, I should have known better than to think this.

Shuttle buses are not things many people think about. You wait. They arrive. You get where you are going. Not in this case. After quite a bit of looking around I found the correct location. The hotel promised it would be there almost immediately. Apparently, in Chicago, that means a couple of hours. It was nearly midnight by the time I got to the hotel to be greeted by a check in line over one hundred people long. I just ran and got food, as I was famished. It was one in the morning before I got to my room, after an over priced sandwich.

I eventually reached my destination and had a nice trip, but again one in which the internet never seemed to be available. When I eventually got home (in the very wee hours of the morning), I was greeted by a new horror, my house had been burgled! Clearly the robbers knew what they were doing and they got quite a lot of the good stuff, including a University owned computer. The paperwork on this is, naturally, nightmarish. The neighbor who had been looking after the cat had managed to notice though and filed a police report. Most galling was the fact that the rest of my power tools had gone.

The following week should have been better, even if it did involve insurance companies and other horrors. The main item of business was to get my doctoral student through his dissertation proposal defense. Unfortunately, everything was complicated by my getting massively sick. Initially, I thought I had food poisoning. The illness lasted over a week, during which I was unable to eat very much. At points, I could barely keep water down. To add to the 'fun' my ex-girlfriend started saying some very nasty (and untrue) things about me on her blog. I got my student through his proposal defense, but it has been a week from hell.

These then are the reasons why I have not kept up this blog. Any day now, the semester is going to start. However, I will try and be more diligent, as there are many things that need saying. In the meantime, I am already aware that I have a class schedule conflict to resolve and the wrong textbook for another course. It is going to be one of those semesters. At least I'll have this blog to keep life on the straight and narrow.

The CP

Interview: A Blog Game of 5 Questions

Recently, a new blog 'game' arose. I noticed it over at Veronica's interesting and funny Nine Pearls blog. The rules of the game are as follows:

1. Leave me a comment saying, “Interview me.”
2. I respond by asking you five personal questions so I can get to know you better. If I already know you well, expect the questions may be a little more intimate!
3. You WILL update your journal/bloggy thing/whatever with the answers to the questions.
4. You will include this explanation and an offer to interview someone else in the post.
5. When others comment asking to be interviewed, you will ask them five questions.

As this sounded interesting and amusing, I elected to play this game. Thus, I will now answer Veronica's questions, which are as follows:

1.) Why are you a “combat” philosopher? Were you in the military? Do you simply idolize Sun Tzu?

The name combat philosopher was conferred on me quite a while ago, whilst I was in graduate school. At the time, my main mode of transportation was a motorcycle. Thus, I tended to wander around in a heavy pair of boots and a leather jacket. I consider these minimal safety gear, in addition to a helmet. The boots I had then were similar to army boots. I also had a bad habit of wearing pairs of combat pants at the time. The large pockets were very useful. This was only part on the reason I got this name though.

During this period, I spent sometime away from home at a major summer institute. While there, I got a bit of a reputation for being prepared to argue with anybody, no matter how important, or famous they were, if they made a false or dubious claim. Thus, it was from my attire, plus fearless philosophical 'combat' that were the origins of the name.

On the blog, my goal originally was to use philosophical methods to fight against the stupidity, lies, ignorance and prejudice that we are sometimes fed by the media and the like. My goal was to really do this, not just complain a lot, as we see on some blogs. This was why the name seemed appropriate. An additional reason comes from the fact that philosophy, done correctly, depends very heavily on argument. According to Lakoff and Johnson's, (1980) Metaphors We Live By (University of Chicago Press), arguments are strongly associated with metaphors of war. Thus, again 'combat' seemed to quite hit the spot.

All that being said, I actually prefer Lao Tzu to Sun Tzu. I have never really been in the military, although I did a brief stint in the cadets in high school, before I deserted. I am actually something of a pacifist, apart from on philosophical matters.

2.) Who is your favorite philosopher and why?

The honest answer to this question is probably 'myself'! However, I suspect that was not the answer that the question was supposed to elicit. It is actually hard to say. I do have a fondness for the works of Nietzsche, but he is badly misunderstood in popular culture. I am also impressed by the power and insights of both Kant and Wittgenstein.

3.) According to your entry on the legal status of chickens in Louisiana, you smoke. What brand, how long, how old were you when you started, and have you ever tried to quit?

Oh dear, my great guilty secret. At the moment it is Winston Lights. In my younger days, it was hand rolled Gauloises. I started when I was about seventeen years old. I have tried to quit a few times, a couple of times with success. However, the old monkey has always had a habit of climbing up again on the proverbial back. I am now working on cutting back. I am hoping that the recently reported results concerning the Insula may yield a better solution. On this one, as the Greeks used to say, I suffer a bad case of acrasia.

4.) I have heard that there is long-standing debate in philosophic circles about zombies. How much coffee does one have to consume before hypothetical zombies seem like a good way to make a point?

Oh dear, this is a topic that makes me cringe, just a little. It is claimed to have an origin in the work of Descartes. A reasonable discussion of this topic (at least, as reasonable as is possible, given the topic) can be found here. Recently, Dave Chalmers has been all too responsible for bringing zombies back to life and making them popular. I personally do not have much time for zombie talk. Given that I drink vast amounts of very strong coffee every day, I would say that these zombies have another cause, but I know not what.

5.) What was your favorite thing for lunch in elementary school?

I am pretty sure that the correct answer is ham, cabbage and potatoes. It was a while ago, so my memory is not all that clear. I still love thie meal to this day.

The CP

Allstate Insurance Con Job

Last Summer was not a good time in Combat Philosopher land. The horrors of that period I recounted in my earlier posting "A 'Combat' Summer". It seems that the ripple effects of this period of time continue.

Recently, I received notice of my home owners policy renewal, with The AllState Insurance Company. To my surprise, my insurance has gone up. Last year I paid around $560. This year they want over $1,250! A quick perusal of the AllStateSucks site, tells me I am not alone in getting this kind of surprise.

The problem I have is that there is very little by way of explanation for this sudden increase. There is about $200 in increases that are explained. These are charges related to the State of Louisiana reconstruction, coastal protection and a special program to provide coverage for those individuals who the Insurance industry now refuse to cover. I do not really have a problem with these charges. My socialist inclinations inoculate me from this component of 'sticker shock'. However, I'd love to know what the justification of the increase is.

When I called AllState, they could not provide me with an explanation. They promised to have someone get back to me on this. We shall see. They also said that, because I had three claims in the last two years, this too could be part of the cause.

On the face of it, three claims in two years, does not sound too good. However, this is a classic trick of 'insurance company speak', that is less impressive, when deconstructed. The first claims was for a couple of hundred dollars after the storms of 2005. As my deductible is $500, AllState did not pay me a penny. Thus, this claim is not too impressive.

As for the other two claims, the first occurred when my workshop was broken into. The full cost of that claim (to me, in terms of what I lost) was a little over $1,600. After AllState had finished removing the deductible and depreciating stuff, I got a payment of just over $350. The second claim was for a loss to me of just shy of $900. After all the usual deductions, I got just over $370. Thus, for these putative 'three claims', I lost over $2,500, for which AllState paid me $720!

It seems to me that nearly doubling my premium for this is a bit on the punitive side. Not only that, AllState will get the money they paid me back in about fifteen months. After that, my increased premiums will just contribute to the AllState bottom line.

Of course, in their defence, AllState can whine about risk and losses and all that stuff. In the State of Louisiana, in the year 2005, they did take some hits. These hits were minimised though by their denial of claims, contesting what was wind and what was water damage, and all that. Of course, many insurance companies did this. What I do not get though is why is it that the insurance industry gets to cry and yell when they have to pay out, but nobody gets their money back when there are no major claims. Last time I checked, the insurance companies make a tidy profit almost every year.

I did a bit of looking into the Allstate situation. On their site, they are proud to boast all about how highly their financial strength is rated. They also do not seem to be doing too badly financially. At year end 2006, they had a net income of a mere $4993 million! The poor dears must be feeling better, as in the allegedly 'dreadful' 2005, they still managed to have a net income of $1,765 million. I strongly recommend looking at the numbers, that can be found (in .pdf format) here.

It seems to me that AllState are just a bunch of con artists. They have nice TV commercials, and love their 'corporate responsibility' statements, but when it comes down to it, they are just greedy (or in capitalist speak they 'word hard to ensure shareholder value'). One share in AllState stock is now worth $61.00, so that is fine then.

I will bitch and complain at AllState and begin looking for new insurers. Of course, I have to maintain my policy, at least for now. The folks I feel sorry for are all the people who will not be able to afford insurance, when their premiums double. I will give AllState a bad time, to try and 'persuade' them to review their practices. I will begin with the office of the State insurance commissioner. I doubt I will get anywhere, but it seems like a worthwhile fight. The bastards!

The CP

Update: Well, this post seems to have got AllState's attention. I have had a whole bunch of hits from their machines since I put up this post. It will be interesting to see whether they ever call me back to explain the increase. In the meantime, it is nice to know that they care what is said about them. I would like an explanation from AllState to be posted in the comments section here. I will not hold my breath on this, though. -- The CP.

Better Reasoning IV: Valid Argument Forms I

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[N.B. To quickly link to all the posts in this series, use the URL 'http://combatphilosopher.blogspot.com#reasoning'.]

In the last post in this series, the slightly technical concepts of the validity and soundness of deductive arguments were introduced. Although these ideas may initially appear a little abstract, they turn out to be extremely useful.

It turns out that it is possible to determine the validity of some arguments, merely in virtue of their 'form'. By 'form' here is meant roughly the arrangement of various components of the argument and their relations with respect to certain words which perform special logical functions. Here I will introduce a method for representing these forms in a manner that makes their structure explicit. I will then illustrate the use of this method, with some examples.

It turns out that certain words have a rather precise and predictable effect upon the sentences over which they operate. An important subset of these word are so-called 'logical connectives'. Although a detailed discussion of the connectives will be put to one side for now, we can get a rough and ready idea about logical connectives, by considering the logical role played by the word 'not', in a sentence. 'Not' is one of the more familiar logical connectives.

Suppose we have a sentence like "The cat is on the mat". This sentence will be true in cases when the proverbial cat is indeed on the mat. However, if we add the word 'not' to the sentence, thereby transforming it to "The cat is not on the mat", should the sentence have been true previously, it would now be false. Conversely, had the sentence previously been false (say, due to cat sitting nowhere near the mat), then the reformulation would make the sentence true. This demonstrates how the effect of adding 'not' to a sentence has a fairly obvious and predictable effect upon the truth of the sentence.

Now, by this point, you might be wondering why it is worth bothering to consider such a blindingly obvious example. One reason it is useful to consider this example is because it offers an intuitive method to introduce a rather useful little technical 'trick', known as 'symbolization'.

The first thing to notice about the sentence "The cat is on not the mat" is that it is exactly the same, in terms of it's truth and falsehood conditions, as the sentence "It is not the case that the cat is on the mat." Now, if we suppose that we will let the letter 'S' stand for the entire sentence "The cat is on the mat", then we can rewrite the sentence, after we have added the not (in the second formulation) as simply 'Not S'.

At first, this move might look kind of silly and trivial, however it is not. It makes it possible to state abstract truths about whole classes of sentences. This is because we could change the interpretation of S to something completely different, for example, "Summer is a coming in." and the logical facts would still remain the same. Consider the following abstract logical claim,

"Whenever a sentence 'S' is true, the sentence 'Not S' will be false, and when a sentence 'S' is false, the sentence 'Not S' will be true."

Notice how this claim remains true, regardless whether 'S' is interpreted as being "The cat is on the mat", or as being "Summer is a coming in." This trick makes it possible to make abstract statements about entire patterns of arguments. Moreover, this trick provides us with a handy shorthand with which we can identify valid patterns of inference.

Before proceeding any further, a few more words about this process of symbolization are in order. Traditionally, philosophers use the letters P, Q and sometimes R, when identifying patterns of inference. I have never seen an explanation for why this is the case, but it is useful to know the convention, so that other sources will be compatible with what is said here. I will follow this convention here. The second point to note is that these letters stand for entire propositions. That is to say, things that can be said as complete statements.

Now, we are ready to start looking at some simple patterns of valid inference. Let us begin by considering the way another special logical word functions, the word 'and'. Let us suppose that we happen to know that the sentence "Peas contain chlorophyll" is true (as I believe it to be), and we will also symbolize it with the letter 'P'. Let us also suppose that we also know that the sentence "Tonic water contains quinine" is true (as, again it is), and symbolize it with the letter 'Q'. Under these circumstances, we could validly infer "Peas contain chlorophyll and tonic water contains quinine.", or in symbolic form 'P and Q'. We can express this inference a little more clearly, if we put each premise in symbolic form on a separate line. Doing this results in the inference looking like this,

P
Q
Thus,
P and Q

This is a valid inference, no matter what sentences are substituted for the letters P and Q. This inference is sometime called 'conjunction'.

On the face of it, this may seem a little bit on the trivial side. However, we can imagine an investigator looking into the cause of an odd chemical reaction hypothesising that the reaction had been caused be the interaction between chlorophyll, quinine. Under such circumstances this inference might be made to show that both compounds were present in some mixture containing both peas and tonic water.

It turns out that this inference also works 'the other way'. That is to say that the two inferences,

P and Q
Thus,
P

P and Q
Thus,
Q

are both also valid. Inferences of this kind are called 'simplification inferences'. The really neat thing here (as with the previous case), is that the propositions we substitute for 'P' and 'Q' have no influence on the validity of the inference. To demonstrate this with a slightly silly example, the inference 'bong bongo and pielie pielie, thus bongo bongo', is also valid!

In this post, we have been introduced to a method of representing inferences in a manner which makes making statements about whole classes of inferences relatively easy. We have also seen two examples of valid argument forms concerning the word 'and'. In the next posting in this series, we will look at some further examples of valid argument forms.

The CP

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The Combat Philosopher Returns!

Well, I am back to blogging, after a very brutal, nasty, Summer. Things got a bit away and this blog suffered. If you have been a reader previously, check back in a couple of days to find out all the horrors of the 'combat' Summer.

The CP