Dr. Brandon Beasley 🇨🇦

Yes, I am aware that what I just did was apply a hermeneutics of suspicion to the hermeneutics of suspicion in order to criticize the hermeneutics of suspicion. I am not unaware of the irony. I have a hunch there's a wrinkle here that escapes self-refutation, but I haven't figured it out yet.

I sometimes think similarly about all such "hermeneutics of suspicion" frameworks in the humanities and social sciences. One of the things that makes them attractive is that the appear to offer a "key" to see the "hidden secrets" about why people do what they do and why things happen.

Now out in Studies in HPS! 'Artefactualism and the twofold experience of modelling': authors.elsevier.com/a/1mH3%7E8yu...

Short article building on the phenomenology of modelling experience as discussed in @msuarez.bsky.social's excellent book, Inference and Representation.

Sometimes it seems like a lot of (NOT ALL of) contemporary Marxism is really just a conspiracy theory for academics. I suppose that's part of what Popper was getting at in calling it a pseudoscience.

"You know that was Peirce's fundamental point—there was no private knowing, and even to identify consciousness with private knowing was just nonsense. He said a lot of other things I never could get, but that is fundamental."

-- John Dewey, 1946 (see Collected Works, Supplementary Vol. 1, p. 242)

It seems to me that people use Bayesianism to make the following bad inference:

1. Present available evidence suggests the credence we should give to the belief 'That X exists' is ~1%.
2. Therefore, there is only ~1% chance X exists.

Am I missing something? Bc that seems to be a bad inference.

Dear god, can someone PLEASE tell my students that "novel" is not a synonym for "book"! Where on earth did they learn this?

Tom Stoppard: An Appreciation “Words, words. They’re all we have to go on.”

New post on my blog, 'Human Meanings': open.substack.com/pub/beasley/...

Tom Stoppard has died, evidently. One of my favourite playwrights, by far.

“Words, words. They're all we have to go on.”
― Tom Stoppard, Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead

The contemporary version, on SLS, is "GLS is go for ALS", which is, from my perspective, entirely lacking in drama. Not the same!

There's a sense of excitement I get, which no other aspect of any space program can replicate, when at T-31 seconds of a shuttle launch, the GLS officer says "GLS is go for autosequence start". It triggers an excitement and wonder that is ingrained in me from being a kid watching shuttle launches.

It is Dewey's view of values & the meaning present in "consummatory" ends that makes his emphasis on consequences (as opposed to antecedents) avoid a facile emphasis on mere 'practical' success. In particular because inquiry is to be used to shape values & meanings to make for *intelligent* ends.

I miss the space shuttle.

Post-1982 Rorty = Nietzsche + James

Unpacking some of the layers: Clearly, one aspect of this is that the *idea* of "the future", or what was "futuristic", for someone like me, was forged in childhood, which overlaps with this time (I turned 12 in 1999). Pre-9/11 optimism is a big part of it, too.

More to come.

Saw this comment on a YouTube video of synthwave music, and it has really stuck with me. I don't care to unpack all the different layers, I just sort of want to sit with it, as it has a certain resonance of "truth" for me.

"The 80s and 90s were the closest to the future we ever got."

Not many know Dewey contributed a book to The International Encyclopedia of Unified Science (Theory of Valuation, 1939) & was on the Advisory Committee. Actually, the Committee is a remarkable list of people. These names together may surprise some committed to certain historiographic narratives.

Why? Because 3 out of the top 5 (namely, 3, 4, and 5) cited philosophers of mind are people who are part of the 4E and/or phenomenology-based views in phil mind and cog sci. A very interesting indication that what was once a minority report in phil mind is now a big player.

This list is remarkable: Most cited philosophers of mind and cogsci (with Google Scholar pages):
Andy Clark (Sussex): 68,900
David Chalmers (NYU): 68,300
Evan Thompson (British Columbia): 54,700
Shaun Gallagher (Memphis): 52,700
Dan Zahavi (Copenhagen): 36,200

leiterreports.com/2025/11/06/m...

A Problem of Evil for Atheists? Suffering, Redemption, and Hope in a Godless Universe

My latest occasional piece of writing:
open.substack.com/pub/beasley/...

Hot off the press: Michael Kremer’s and my resurrection of Margaret Macdonald.

It occured to me a while back, reading Margaret Cavendish to teach her as a critic of Descartes, that, because her vitalism is closely linked to her ideas about mind (and given some of the specific claims she makes), one might see her view as a proto-embodied cognition theory.

As always, James is a partial exception; though really I think he is a post-Kantian despite himself.

(Kant & Hegel) + (19th century advancements in biology) + (19th century physiological psychology) + (statistics) = Pragmatism

...intellects vast, cool and unsympathetic, regarded this earth with envious eyes and slowly and surely drew their plans against us."

-- From Orson Welles' War of the Worlds radio play, 1938

Happy Halloween!

...over this small spinning fragment of solar driftwood which by chance or design man has inherited out of the dark mystery of Time and Space. Yet across an immense ethereal gulf, minds that are to our minds as ours are to the beasts in the jungle...

...perhaps almost as narrowly as a man with a microscope might scrutinize the transient creatures that swarm and multiply in a drop of water. With infinite complacence, people went to and fro over the earth about their little affairs, serene in the assurance of their dominion...

"We know now that in the early years of the 20th century, this world was being watched closely by intelligences greater than man's and yet as mortal as his own. We know now that as human beings busied themselves about their various concerns, they were scrutinized and studied...

(Also, the snake has tiny little vestigial-looking legs, which is hilarious to me. Had the artist ever even *seen* a snake? Honestly, probably not...)

Hegel, Phenomenology of Spirit, para. 802 (modification of Pinkard's translation).