Author: Andrew Taggart

• February 15, 2015

  You can come to the desert but you cannot stay here

  You can come to the desert, you can live here, but you cannot stay here. We knew this when we arrived in Joshua Tree, yet I doubt we knew why. Yesterday, Aleksandra found a beautiful skull of a baby coyote, fully intact and blanched, cleaned, and preserved by the desert sun. She is right to say that the desert…
• February 9, 2015

  Amazement doesn’t add up

  I am amazed when what I am in the presence of doesn’t immediately add up. It is not the concrete particular, not something about some thing but the general furniture of the world that carries me into amazement. Then, the world presents itself to me as a mystery, full and true. I didn’t know that–. I…
• February 6, 2015

  From insistence to amazement

  1. I insist that P. OED Etymology:  < Latin insistĕre to stand upon, persist, dwell upon Insisting that P means either (a) maintaining that a thing is so (OED) or (b) urging that some course of action must be taken. Example of (a): ‘I insist that federal taxes are too high.’ Example of (b): ‘Off with his head! Off with…
• February 4, 2015

  ‘The intensity of a conviction’: Doubt, certitude, and provisionality

  A few days ago, I came across this statement by the notable biologist Peter Medawar: ‘the intensity of the conviction that a hypothesis is true has no bearing on whether it is true or not.’ What he says is true: we may have a strong, firm belief that P without its being true that P. But there may…
• February 3, 2015

  Fallibilism: Saying what you believe without insisting

  This would be our Socratic starting point: Say what you believe, but do not insist that it must be true or that your belief cannot be incorrect. Stated this way, the position looks a lot like fallibilism. Key to our understanding of human beings is the fact that they do err. The desire to find a secure position…