Proper standards

“...we never see people pulling down all the houses of a city...”

How obvious is the Katrina reference here? Had to point it out.

“...[square] them with the standards of reason...”

This is the fundamental obstacle for any project like D’s. It’s not the question, what is true? Or, what do/can I know? It’s the question of squaring what you know with standards.

(Continuing the building metaphor, by the way, as a carpenter who squares a piece of wood against a straight edge. The Wittgenstein comparisons—his house, the notion of language as a city, even slab language itself—come right back to mind. I didn’t appreciate that before.)

But this problem is harder, in a way, the same way that it’s easier to be a cabinetmaker if you have good tools than if not, but how can we tell which are the good tools? And if the good tools are machined, then how do we tell which are the good machines—that is, the ones that make the good tools?

There’s no way around it: the good tool, or the machine that makes it (a plane, say) is one that produces a good edge on the wood, read by another good tool (the measuring device—a T-square, say)—all of which is fed to a single processor: the mind of the carpenter, or perhaps an architect. The mind that judges whether the standard has been met has to be able to judge the standard and judge the particular case (the planed edge) and then judge them in comparison to one another. How do we explain this sort of meta-judgment?

Another metaphor: the Patriots offense got solved by the Giants’ defensive line, which kept the Giants never more than one play away from winning, setting up the Manning-Tyree circus play. That is more or less the Carton-Boomer analysis this morning on the FAN, or maybe it was Mike and the Mad Dog last night on Mike’d Up—I forget. Anyway, one question is whether the Giants ultimately succeeded—of course they did, if my tv box was working last night, and I can believe the images I saw on it. A second question (which is like the carpenter’s meta-judgment question) is how do we know that that is the right analysis of what happened?

What’s the relevant standard to apply? Is it mere winning? (But there’s more than one way to win—maybe Brady just had a bad ankle after all, and played sloppy because of it, allowing Strahan and Tuck to get through more often.) Is it that this potent Patriot offense should have put more points up against this over-achieving Giant team? Is it that the Giants, in Manning, have a stumbling and uncertain quarterback, who cannot reasonably be expected to outperform Brady, though obviously he did—and thus the right analysis has to explain Brady’s performing below expectations?

How do we judge what is the proper standard?