Irad Kimhi & the equivalence of Chemistry & Cheese fondling

Irad Kimhi writes-

If a Goddess, or an Angel, or a beautiful Alien descending from a flying saucer, tells us something is intelligible to them, we take it on trust if such be our present need. We don't look the gift-horse in the mouth. Granted the thing may not be perfectly intelligible to us- indeed, it may contradict our normal method of reasoning and judging- but, so what? In view of the strangeness of the circumstance, it would be silly to too tightly cling to our quotidian habitus.

Indeed, the same thing might happen even absent the appearance of any Goddess or Angel when we feel inspired & subject to 'a divine afflatus' or, at the other extremity, in jeopardy of our lives or something more than our lives.

At such moments, we experience a sort of 'ontological dysphoria'- we no longer feel at home in the world, we are in the wrong Universe- and the ordinary metaphors by which we render our life-word intelligible suddenly hypertrophy in a cancerous manner. This baroque 'meta-metaphoricity'- where we move to a plane where metaphors are taken as facts and yet more metaphors, also to be taken as facts, are constructed upon their basis- making mock of the notion of compossibility, is nonetheless of epistemic value. It causes us to see that even our quotidian metaphors display the incompossibility between our 'thinking' and 'being'.

Yet, no great scandal arises thereby because a poetic manner of speaking is wholly congenial to us. Indeed, developmentally speaking, it precedes the prosaic language of Logic and Decision theory.

Thus, we experience no jolt, or aporia, when Socrates suddenly speaks of the method of palinode- starting in one direction and then reversing oneself midway- because we can think of the reason for this swerving as being because we are coming up to a cliff edge. We continue our ascent, changing direction as needed because to fail to do so would be to fall away from our aim. We feel we are on the right path, though we don't know it in the sense demanded by Philosophy.

We can equally imagine being blind-folded and rendered deaf and then pushed out to cross a dangerous terrain. Suppose an unknown telepath, sympathetic to us, was able to see this terrain. The telepath could steer us safely to the other side if only we trusted this 'voice in our head'. To rationalise it, one might say 'this voice emanates from some archaic part of our brain which uses information from some frequency beyond the range of sight or sound. In normal life, we have no need for it. I am fortunate that I belong to a genetic lineage which has conserved this particular trait.'

Again, what is happening here is we feel, but do not know, something about the truthfulness of a voice in our head. Later on, if we learn the identity of the telepath we might put aside our theory of an archaic part of our brain as having rescued us. However, we might continue to affirm that it was this archaic module which caused us to trust the telepath's commands. Whether we do so or not scarcely matters. What counts is that we survived.

Both Socrates, when his discourse changes direction by way of palinode, and the person listening to a voice in his head and who thus becomes able to cross a dangerous terrain, exemplify what Parmenides is getting at. Logic is a sort of akrebia- it is a strict adherence to rules which may result in your going over a cliff-edge or refusing to listen to a voice in your head. There is a gracious 'economia'- which is non-deterministic, which has no simple algorithmic description- to which we must open ourselves.

Suppose we have intercepted an encrypted message from the enemy. An autistic savant, who is otherwise non-verbal, sees it and renders into plain text. The message states the enemy's bombing targets. We then verify that those locations were indeed targeted. We can say- 'we know the true meaning of the message'. However, it may be, the enemy has deliberately sent this message and appeared to target certain locations because they know we have an autistic savant who can solve NP complete problems by some non-deterministic method. Suppose they can detect our counter-measures. Then they can encode any NP problem as an attack plan and thus get our autistic savant to solve it for them.

This is the problem with relying upon non-deterministic 'oracles'- if they can really do the work we require of the them, they can also do work we foolishly require of them such that we ourselves are undone.

Evolutionary Game Theory explains why consciousness and language should be deceptive and strategic. It also explains why philosophy should be about 'distinctions without a difference' which can store up and release 'capacitance diversity'. This is why Mathematical Logic can only become 'univalent' in a context and protocol bound manner on a terrain which sharply distinguishes types or categories.

Kimhi takes the old fashioned view-

A mystic may see that Chemistry is the same as Cheese fondling. So might an omniscient being. But, for our purposes, it is better that the homology here not be univalent.

Bearing this in mind, let us return to Irad Kimhi's views as summarised by this sympathetic article in the NYT

For many decades, our understanding of logic has been defined by a distinction between the “force” and “content” of a proposition — that is, between the act of asserting something and what it is you are asserting. If we don’t draw this distinction, according to a standard view of logic, it is not clear why the following sort of inference is valid:

Premise 1: P —> Q [e.g., “If it’s raining, then things are wet”]

Premise 2: P [“It’s raining”]

Conclusion: Q [“Things are wet”]

Note that this conclusion follows only if P (“it’s raining”) is unambiguously the same thing in each of the premises. But in the first premise, P is not asserted (“it’s raining” is entertained as a possibility), whereas in the second premise P is asserted (“it’s raining” is presented as fact). Therefore, according to this view, the assertion or “force” of P must be external to logic. An assertion is a psychological attitude (“I think … ”), a fact about what someone happens to believe. Logic, by contrast, concerns the abstract relations that hold among the “contents” — roughly, the meanings — of propositions.

In other words, logic provides us not with an empirical understanding of how our thinking actually works (that’s the purview of psychology), but with a normative understanding of how thinking should work. There is no “I” in logic.

Kimhi argues that this view is wrong, and that the distinction between psychology and logic has led our understanding of thinking astray. Consider that the following statement does not, according to the standard view, constitute a logical contradiction: “It’s raining, but I don’t believe it’s raining.” Why? Because the first part of the sentence concerns a state of affairs in the world (“it’s raining”), whereas the second part concerns someone’s state of mind (“I don’t believe it’s raining”).

Moore's paradox crops up all the time in ordinary life. I recall holding Dad to the promise he had made to take us to the drive-in to watch 'Dr. No' despite the fact that it had started raining. We did go in the end, probably because my Mom thought the thing would be a wash out- I wouldn't be able to glut my gaze on the spectacle of the neo-Imperialist James Bond murdering Chinese people by reason of the torrential downpour and thus learn my lesson. Things didn't pan out that way. Once Arsulla Undress emerged from the glittering waters of the Caribbean Sea, even Dad got interested. Mum had remained primly at home, but, no doubt, got her comeuppance that night.


My point is that my belief that it wasn't raining was justified. The correct Structural Causal Model here was- 'It is not raining. Since it is not raining Dad has to take us to see Dr. No at the drive-in. Watching Dr. No, whether or not it is raining, will be the high point of my young life.' This model was confirmed- for me- and, in the end, that's all that matters.


Belief is not the same thing as Knowledge. It is useful to make this distinction. Moore's paradox is silly because we all think Mom's cooking is the best in the world while knowing this couldn't possibly be the case.

Kimhi wants to rescue the intuition that it is a logical contradiction to say, “It’s raining, but I don’t believe it’s raining.” But to do this, he has to reject the idea that when you assert a proposition, what you are doing is adding psychological force (“I think … ”) to abstract content (“it’s raining”). Instead, Kimhi argues that a self-conscious, first-person perspective — an “I” — is internal to logic. For him, to judge that “it’s raining” is the same as judging “I believe it’s raining,” which is the same as judging “it’s false that it’s not raining.” All are facets of a single act of mind.If my 'I' is internal to logic, it can do anything I want it to. If it fails me in some way, I will send it to bed without its supper and then go and sit beside it after it has cried itself to sleep and I will wake it up and say 'You were adopted. Nobody really loves you. Also, you smell. The other kids make fun of you behind your back.'

One consequence of Kimhi’s view is that “It’s raining, but I don’t believe it’s raining” becomes a logical contradiction. Another consequence is that a contradiction becomes something that you cannot believe, as opposed to something that you psychologically can but logically ought not to believe (as the traditional cleavage between psychology and logic might suggest). A final consequence is that thinking is not just a cognitive psychological act, but also one that is governed by logical law.

That's not the final consequence. The final consequence is that the species corresponding to Kimhi's stipulation can only be created in the laboratory and goes extinct almost immediately.

In other words, the distinction between psychology and logic collapses. 

So does the distinction between Chemistry and Cheese fondling, or Econometrics and making cat like noises, or reading this and doing something useful.

Logic is not a set of rules for how to think; it is how we think, just not in a way that can be captured in conventional scientific terms. 

Logic can be used to give alethic discourse 'univalent foundations' so that automated proof checking becomes cheap and easy.

Since computers are important, Logic is important even for inveterate Cheese fondlers or lapsed Econometricians who now concentrate exclusively on making cat like noises.

Thinking emerges as a unique and peculiar activity, something that is part of the natural world, but which cannot be understood in the manner of other events in the natural world.

Because all things in the natural world exist only as ultra-Cheese subject to hyper-fondling in a manner which is the dual of the Holy Ghost's Kantorovich-Monge problem.

 Indeed, Kimhi sees his book, in large part, as lamenting “the different ways in which philosophers have failed to acknowledge — or even denied — the uniqueness of thinking.”

But Philosophers have only failed to acknowledge because their cheese has not been correctly fondled. That's what we should all be lamenting and grieving over.

Genius? Folly? Something in between? It is hard to canvass a wide range of opinion about Kimhi’s work. He and his book have, until now, existed within a relatively small subsection of the philosophical world. But even within that world, there are those who are wary of his intellectual project — yet impressed by it all the same. Brandom, whose life’s work relies on the distinction between force and content that Kimhi attacks, admits to finding his former student’s ideas “deeply uncongenial” and “threatening.” He also describes them, however, as “radically original” and part of a new intellectual movement that is “bound to transform our philosophical understanding.”

The problem here is 'philosophical understanding' is shite and even if it is transformed, shite it will remain.