A rough-and-ready distinction

Reading Charlie and the Chocolate Factory to Samuel:

He’s interested in, of all things, its physics – e.g., why a person (or an Oompa-Loompa), having drunk a “fizzy lifting drink,” should rise in the air.

Why does an ice-cube rise in a glass of water?, Samuel asks. It’s the right sort question. I’m impressed.

What blows Samuel’s mind is that, in Charlie, chewing a stick of gum produces the same sensory/​nutritive effect as eating a three-course meal (I’m not sure he realizes it isn’t possible).

And the detail that really gets him is that, at one point during the second “course,” the gum tastes like a baked potato. Why this should impress Samuel so much, I don’t know.

That the gum turns Violet Beauregarde into a blueberry interests him less.

That she could be de-juiced back to near-normalcy interests him somewhat more.

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I once knew a college student who was very interested in The Lord of the Rings – for its metaphysics (her word).

Like, why Elves and Men differ as to mortality?, I asked.

Yes, she said.

That strikes me as the wrong approach.

Could this be one way to distinguish fantasy from science fiction? I.e., is physical or metaphysical inquiry appropriate for science fiction but not for fantasy?

Authors/​works you couldn’t inquire about in that spirit (at least, not lamely):

Homer

Hamlet

Gulliver

M. R. James

Jekyll & Hyde (but see this paper, which I don’t disparage)

Alice

The Curdie books

Narnia (I haven’t read Michael Ward’s Planet Narnia)

Harry Potter (too many ad hoc creatures and spells)

The Borrowers

Charlotte’s Web

And, I’d say – despite all the “world-building” – The Lord of the Rings.

By contrast, Lewis’s “space” books more readily invite physical/​metaphysical scrutiny. So does Slaughterhouse-Five. So does A Wrinkle in Time. So too, perhaps, might Watership Down, which I haven’t read.

So does Dante; the Divine Comedy is metaphysical SF with all the is dotted and ts crossed.

And it’s possible to go further down this path with H. P. Lovecraft than one might expect.

The Charlie books are an interesting case. There are physical explanations for some of the phenomena. These explanations don’t hold up for very long, and they’re articulated with the Alice books’ madcap irreverance; but they have a prima facie plausibility. It’s appropriate to try to work out the underlying laws – if you’re a child. Not so much if you’re grown up.

Plumb tuckered out

An absolute knackering (knacking?) this day, what with the intensive cleaning of various ground-floor rooms. I have been dozing intermittently since 8:00pm. The boys, for the third or fourth time since the floor’s uncluttering, are running in circles, as in Alice in Wonderland’s Caucus Race. This is lively even by their standards – doubtless a spillover of last night’s mirth (we attended an “open house” at Samuel’s new school; I spent most of it chasing Daniel through the halls).

♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦

I saw very little of the Olympics – none of it in “real” time – but was taken with this handballer’s story (NYT). He, too, has sleep apnea. Yes, this is what it’s like.

Earlier today I was slumped on the sofa, unable to remain fully conscious, while Samuel and Daniel crawled over me. I’d beg them to do a little cleaning. They wouldn’t. At last I rallied, was a virtual tornado for an hour and a half, and made the place spotless. The boys helped enough to earn some basement TV time. Then they came back upstairs, beheld the emptiness, and ran their first Caucus Race. Samuel tackled Daniel a few times. Daniel would urge him to stand up and keep running. High spirits.

I actually am the least tired adult in the house. Karin is pregnant again, you see.

Lord willing, our third son will be born the first week of December.

♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦

P.S. The boys have been watching the infamous (but, to my mind, charming) Peppa Pig show. Samuel now calls himself Peppa; Daniel, he calls George; Karin, Mommy Pig; and yours truly, Daddy Pig. My parents visited; they are, respectively, Abuela and Abuelo Pig.

A passion for exactitude

It’s time for a long quotation from the philosopher Michael Dummett. I mention him once or twice every ten years.

(I just realized that, as of December, I’ve been blogging for twenty years. I started on Xanga, and when that service became costly I switched to Blogger/​Blogspot. I may write a recapitulation soon.)

This is from pp. 3–5 of Voting Procedures (1984), one of Dummett’s excursions into what, for him, is “popular” philosophy.

In view of all this, one would expect that voting procedures and their operation would have been the subject of a considerable amount of intellectual enquiry. One would expect also that the results of such investigations would be well known both to political and social theorists and to all those concerned with practical affairs, and would be applied both by those who have frequently to take part in voting and, above all, by those concerned to devise voting procedures to be as fair and as satisfactory as possible. Of these two natural expectations, the first is indeed satisfied, but the second hardly at all. In the period since the end of the Second World War, a considerable body of theory concerning voting has been built up. This topic was pioneered by Professor Duncan Black, an economist, who published some articles about it in the late 1940s, and a book, The Theory of Committees and Elections, in 1958: an important contribution, not expressed specifically in terms of voting, was made by Professor Kenneth Arrow in his book Social Choice and Individual Values of 1951 [see note 1 below]. Since then, and especially in the last two decades, the theory initiated by Black and Arrow has been extensively developed, principally in articles published in learned journals. One of the most surprising features of all this is how recent this work is. Duncan Black devoted a section of his book to a historical survey. From this it emerged that almost the only serious work on the theory of voting that had previously been done was carried out in France just before and during the Revolution, by Borda, Condorcet, and Laplace; this work had subsequently been almost entirely forgotten, save by a few British mathematicians of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, who made insignificant contributions to it. A minor exception, not noticed by Black, is the unimpressive section devoted to the subject by the German philosopher Hermann Lotze in his Logik of 1874. The only exception mentioned by Black is the remarkable intervention by C. L. Dodgson (Lewis Carroll), contained in three pamphlets which he wrote in complete ignorance of the work of his predecessors, and which were directed at the voting procedure to be adopted by the governing body of Christ Church, Oxford, to which he belonged [see note 2 below].

[Note 1:] See the Bibliography for works by Arrow and Black. Arrow’s possibility theorem (more exactly called an impossibility theorem) is so fundamental to the subject that he is often credited with having been the modern initiator of it, especially since his basic notation has become standard. This is unfair to Black, who was the real twentieth-century pioneer of the theory of voting, as well as a diligent researcher into its earlier history; it may be due in part to the fact that, although Black’s original papers on the subject appeared in 1948–9, his book was not published until 1958, while Arrow’s celebrated monograph came out in 1951. Black was, in particular, the originator of the concept of single-peakedness (not used in the present book), with which Arrow is sometimes credited but which he in fact took over from Black. Single-peakedness is a condition which guarantees the existence of a top. For the case when some preference scales are weak, the condition was weakened by Farquharson and myself in our paper of 1961; alternative though analogous sufficient conditions were later given by Inada, Sen, and Pattanaik.

[Note 2:] See the Bibliography. It is a matter for the deepest regret that Dodgson never completed the book that he planned to write on the subject. Such were his lucidity of exposition and his mastery of the topic that it seems possible that, had he ever published it, the political history of Britain would have been significantly different.

I especially like Dummett’s asides on Dodgson (Carroll) and the also-ran, Lotze.

Once, eleven years ago, I mentioned Dummett by way of griping about George Saunders. Since then, I’ve read and enjoyed four full books by Saunders and zero by Dummett. It wouldn’t hurt to finish Dummett’s trenchant On Immigration and Refugees; completing one of his Frege books, much as I adore them (all too often uncomprehendingly, it must be admitted), is above my pay grade.