Brandon Butler to speak on intellectual property law

This is for your information:

Brandon Butler will speak on intellectual property law at the Billy
Date: Wed, 26.Feb.14
Time: 12:30-13:45
Atrium Auditorium

His short bio: Brandon Butler is the Practitioner-in-Residence at the Glushko-Samuelson Intellectual Property Clinic at the Washington College of Law at American University in Washington, D.C.  Before teaching law, he was the Director of Public Policy Initiatives at the Association of Research Libraries (ARL).  Before that, he was an associate in the Media and Information Technologies practice group at the Washington, D.C. law firm Dow Lohnes PLLC.  He received his J.D. from the University of Virginia School of Law.

I may have a conflict, but if I'm free, I plan to be there. 

Geometric Stacker models

Melissa and Doug's Geometric Stackers on my workbench. A piece or two is missing from peg 3, btw.

I don't recall playing with stacker toys as a kid. Blocks, play-doh, stuff like that, but toys where you stack wood pieces on pegs didn't show up on my radar until I started using them in work on logic.

As part of a larger research problem I'm exploring on the logic of toys, I have some questions about stackers. But first a few observations.

Two obvious big facts about stackers. First, there are lots of brightly colored, variously shaped pieces (they have holes in them that accommodate the pegs they are stacked on). And second, there are those pegs. The pegs force the pieces into some arrangement or other, but the pieces have their various properties independent of their arrangement.

The stackers thus permit a grid system: peg 1, first position--perhaps 1.A, something like that--and on in the obvious way: 1.A, 1.B, 1.C, and so on. The height of the peg and the thickness (height) of each piece, if they are all similar, thus determine how many slots each peg has.

Suppose we create a model as our initial state in which piece a and piece b, both circular, are stacked on peg 1 in the first two positions (1.A and 1.B). Then suppose we create a model to be our final state, in which piece a is still at 1.A, but octagonal piece c is at 2.A and octagonal piece d is at 3.A. (Sorry--next time I'll have more pics. Maybe I'll move this discussion to my Tumblr blog.)

I'll hold off on the list of sentences in the model until Tumblr. For now, let me point out a couple of constraints on the Stackers:

1. The universe has pegs, numbered/slotted into a grid system (as I've been suggesting).
2. It will help enormously to have functions to make instructions simpler: $remove _top-most_ piece _early-most_$. The $_top-most_$ function is a space function (describing location in space), while the $_early-most_$ function is a time function (describing position in time).

Enough for now. 

Logic and writing templates

The little writing book _They say, I say_ is a very pleasant surprise. A colleague recommended I use it in the senior capstone seminar I'm teaching this semester, and so I adopted it sight unseen. I just got it today, and I can tell I'll like it very much.

A few thoughts, prompted as I read the introduction.

[1] Writing templates---strings such as "some object that... though I concede that... I still maintain that..."---serve an obvious practical goal, which I applaud. But they also raise an interesting side question about how logic and rhetoric are intertwined.

The "..." in the templates are obviously meant to be replaced by some content; hence they are extra-logical. But that means that logical bits are needed to create the desired relationships among those contents expressed in the total information. But the templates include rhetorical bits that do some of that work. "Though I concede that" has both a _logical form_, when combined with the informational content suppressed as "...", as well as a _capacity to help persuade the hearer_ to agree to some view (or at least---presumably---to be sympathetic to that view). 

What feature of "though I concede that..." carries the logical information, and what feature carries the rhetorical information? Classic pragmatic-semantic interface issues. I wonder how students "feel" that issue play out as they write.

[2] The authors stress heavily that writing is dialectical---a push-pull between writer as reader (capturing what "they say") and writer as writer (putting forth what "I say"). It occurs to me that there are several ways to flesh this out. The dialectic can be _adversarial_, _synthetic_, _analytic_, or maybe some other way altogether.

The adversarial dialectic pits opposing views against one another. The (hopeful) result is a "push upward"---that is, a resultant force responding to the force due to the feeder forces. The "new truth" is widely seen by its advocates as correcting certain excesses in the philosophy of logic and knowledge---the sort of thing we might suppose Socrates to have gotten right, and many of the rest of us to have gotten wrong. The synthetic dialectic is similar, but the emphasis is on the co-making of that resultant force. The analytic dialectic, unlike the other two, can be thought of as a synthetic dialectic with a downward arrow, if you'll allow me to continue the slightly opaque metaphor. That is, the push is really a pull down toward that which is fundamental.

The abstract inference that occurs to me: Push in this context can be thought of as encryption, pull as extraction. Writing then is a back-and-forth between encrypting processes applied to information, and extracting processes likewise applied to information.

The less abstract punch line: a writer aims at the spot where a bit of information shows more than anyone has a right to expect.

Could slaves be legal agents?

About the most depressing topic in legal theory is slave law.

There must have been legal principles at work as the various American colonies and states wrote laws to regulate their slave populations; if there were principles, there is work for philosophers and logicians to do. I find it an obnoxious and disagreeable thing to think about, and I think it's a permanent, weird stain on the body of law we rightly admire otherwise. But somebody's got to figure it out. It might as well be me--and those of you who've wandered by.

Let me carve out some space for a question.

Did the slave codes see the Negro slave as a legal agent for their master (in the contract-law sense of representative agent)? I'm reminded of an Oliver Wendell Holmes discussion (1891) about agency and contracts as deriving from masters who commission their slaves to act on their behalf, and the thicket of obligations resulting therefrom. It's intriguing to think that so central a tenet of both common law and American law arose from Roman slavery. I wonder how that walks back to American slave law.

There are empirical aspects to that question: What actual legal protections were guaranteed in slave codes? And what protections from masters were guaranteed? (...thereby raising the weird but intriguing question: how did slave-era law seek to protect slaves?)

There's a counterfactual-ish follow-on question as well: Could a Negro slave be a legal principal (in the contract-law sense of one who empowers a representative)? That is, if a slave could be an extension of their master's power as a representative, could they reciprocate? Or perhaps pass responsibility down the chain a bit? Could they delegate another? And if so, do they as an author of obligation have a presence in the law as such?

On the other hand, if they can't be principal, but agent only, is that a stable legal concept? If an entity cannot be the author of such a power, does that not imply that they cannot be the one on whom such power is conferred? What faculty do they lack such that they cannot be principal, and how is it that that lack doesn't thereby ill-suit them for agency altogether?

Here's a clearly philosophical aspect to the Negro-as-legal-agent question: Can the legal protections afforded slaves be understood using other legal frameworks (for example, property law as opposed to contract law)? How should we decide which conceptual framework to use?

A perfectly parallel question can be posed, but focused on Negro-as-criminal-menace instead: Did the slave codes see the Negro slave as a criminal menace to their master?

Empirical aspects: What restrictions were placed on Negro slaves? What slave-to-slave constraints were instituted (that is, constraints on socializing among blacks of different status--free, slave)?

Counterfactual-ish follow-on: Could a Negro slave be a crime victim? If not, why not? Surely someone who can be criminal is capable of the responsibility to follow the law; they are criminal only if they fail to do so. But if they cannot assume responsibility, and so must always be viewed as the ward of another (say, their master), and so cannot be treated legally as one whose property has been stolen, or who has been illegitimately subject to bodily harm, etc., how then could they be treated as criminal at all?

And a philosophical aspect: Can the legal restrictions be understood using other legal frameworks (for example, piracy law, terrorism statutes, property and vandalism statutes)? Is there a way to understand the restrictions in terms of contract law? What would guide the choice of conceptual framework?

(Will Holmes as legal pragmatist be able to help us here? Will Hart and the positivists? Don't know. Doubtful right now, though. Jurists and positivists hate this kind of question.)

This blog will live here a little longer

I blogged here a few years ago, and then let things go quiet. I've decided to revive this blog, and am planning to move it to my own site, but my HTML skills are a little rusty and everything takes longer than you think and all that. So for now I'll post here. Maybe a few days longer (especially now that snow has bought me a little time...).

I'm currently buried in philosophy of law and the logic of toys and games. So my next posts will work that over.
Talk soon, all.

Vernaculars as object languages

Tarski's distinction between metalanguages and the object languages they "talk about" raises an interesting question about vernacular speech.

Suppose we think of a variety of a natural language--say, African-American Vernacular English (AAVE)--as an object language, in the Tarskian sense. The metalanguage we use to state Tarskian truth schemas (following convention T) would presumably be AAVE plus whatever logic we need for those schemas. So far, pretty routine.

But what if we stretch out the time dimension really far? Suppose we allow for time enough to get syntactic change to occur in AAVE? If AAVE as object language has syntactic feature f, while AAVE as metalanguage is alike in every respect except for its logical "richness" and feature f, then the semantic openness Tarski insists is needed to avoid liar paradoxes would be monkey-wrenched, no?

In fact, if syntactic change stood between any object language and its metalanguage, wouldn't those two languages stand with respect to each other just as any two (distinct) languages stood with respect to each other? Suppose, for instance, that AAVE is the object language and standard English is the metalanguage, differing in the syntactic features associated with negation. AAVE possesses such features as are required to license negative concord phenomena, while standard English lacks them. Wouldn't liar antinomies be unresolvable in such a situation?

To withstand this, we need to distinguish logical richness from logical difference in the metalanguage (presumably in the proof theory and model theory of such language).

I realize this is dense. I'll try to unpack it later.

Wittgenstein versus Chomsky

Perhaps it is meant as a teaching device, but I'm always thrown off by the attempt to pit Wittgenstein and Chomsky as competitors in philosophy of language. 

From the Investigations (para. 498) (I guess it's Elizabeth Anscombe's translation): "When I say that the orders 'Bring me sugar' and 'Bring me milk' make sense, but not the combination 'Milk me sugar,' that does not mean that the utterance of this combination of words has no effect. And if its effect is that the other person stares at me and gapes, I don't on that account call it the order to stare and gape, even if that was precisely the effect I wanted to produce."

Nothing Chomsky says preempts that story. More to the point, W is urging a long look at how language is playful, undetermined by its formalizable rule structure. C starts with that rule structure, and attempts robust description of it.

This goes to something that's bothered me for a while (see my earlier post about the state of the philosophy of language). What is philosophy of language about, and what should be its ongoing impact? 

Clearly the W versus C pairing (most recently in the student-friendly collection by Nuccetelli and Seay (Rowman and Littlefield, 2008)) is intended to get rival intuitions about the subject matter going, which is great, pedagogically. But why are we pretending that anyone thinks C is possibly wrong or incomplete? Why not begin with Chomsky, finding the clearest recent statement of the principles and parameters approach he is famous for, and then spend time--as philosophers of language--asking the rich theoretical questions it generates: what counts as syntactic change? what kind of phenomena are syntactic phenomena (licensing, for instance, or movement), and what do they share with other logical objects and their phenomena? is it possible, at least in principle, to achieve an exhaustive logical reduction (so to speak) of the syntax of some L, or would there be some residue? 

I simply don't hear enough discussion by philosophers of language about the enormously interesting (and subtle) theoretical problems in syntax. I think we're too enamored with replaying the battles of old for their own sake. 

(Punchline: let the pragmatists have Wittgenstein...)