Tag: Hilary Putnam

An Exegetic Theory of Liberty

Mark Davis1 Comment

A modest proposal:

Congress shall make no law interfering with medical decisions except in the case of public health and in the regulation of the practice of medicine.

But now we immediately face daunting challenges about the meaning of these terms. What are the limits of a “medical decision?” What are the limits of the public health clause? Can the regulation of the practice of medicine impinge on medical decisions if, for example, a procedure is regulated out of availability? Does this create an immediate tension between the preamble and the restrictive clauses?

Let’s take a version of Putnam’s concerns about meaning. What is a neutrino? Many people would simply shrug and admit that they don’t know. Some would recall something like a particle that can pass through stuff. A few of these who have some physics or are widely read might say that they are very light particles that emerge from neutron decay and are needed to balance the nuclear decay equation. This last series of images might include thoughts about giant underground detector baths of water or mineral oil or something. In general, though, we can conclude that defining something that is physical, measurable, but incomplete is a daunting task.

Legal theories have this kind of amorphous semantics, especially with regard to concepts like “liberty.” We certainly have some indelible images like “your liberty ends at my nose” but that doesn’t create a very effective template for legal decision trees. Does a stand-your-ground law preserve my liberty to self-defense or is it an excessive application of force when the two parties’ joint right to life is better preserved by a duty to retreat? Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization lays out the problem of defining liberty:

“Liberty” is a capacious term.

… Read the rest

The Twin Earth Dissonance Conspiracy

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I came of age with some of the mid-to-late 20th century literature that took conspiracies as truss work for calculated paranoia, from Pynchon’s Gravity’s Rainbow to Philip K. Dick’s identity shuffling, and on to the obscurely psychedelic Illuminati books by Robert Shea and Robert Anton Wilson. They were undoubtedly influenced by the dirty tricks and mind control fantasies and realities of the Cold War, from thallium and LSD poisoning plots against Fidel Castro to the Manchurian Candidate and John Birchers; from Dr. Strangelove to ratfucking in the Nixon-era Republican Party.

The fiction paralleled and mimicked those realities but it was also infused with a kind of magical realism where the ideas permeated through the characters in a nexus of paranoia and fantasy. The reader was admitted to eccentric ways of structuring the history of the world and the motives of unseen forces acting through organizations, governments, and powerful people.

While endlessly fun, the fictional forms were also an inoculation: no mundane conspiracy could possibly capture that pulse of inside knowledge of a mystic firmament of lies and outlandish goals canopied above our earth-chained heads.

But here I am again, though much less amused and more fearful.

I think I read ten different reporting and opinion pieces today on the topic of Marjorie Taylor Greene, the shock-curiosity of the day who amplified QAnon, Jewish space lasers, political assassination fantasies, and likely a range of yet-to-be-discovered subjects of scorn and ridicule. Most analysts agree that such fantastical and angry ideas are methods for manipulating gullible people. They are tools for the acquisition of power over others.

The whole project feels like an alternative reality so late in America’s evolution, like we’ve transitioned to a Counter-Earth or Bizarro Htrae or Nabakov’s AntiTerra.… Read the rest