Quote

A great deal of our math, science, philosophy, and everyday behavior presupposes that stability and equilibria are the default states, and everything else involves some perturbation. This is a mental model, a conceptual frame, a tacit belief, a presupposition - whatever you want to call it.

Dale Jamieson

Change background

T
T
T

Change font

TAGS & TOPICS

Dale Jamieson
Age: 77
Born: 1947
Born: October 21
Academic
Jurist
University Teacher
Sioux City
Iowa
Great
Philosophy
Math
Tacit
Belief
Model
Presupposes
Call
Mental
Conceptual
Whatever
Models
Default
Science
Everyday
Equilibrium
Else
Behavior
Frame
States
Deal
Involves
Perturbation
Everything
Deals
Stability
Presupposition

More quotes by Dale Jamieson

Image
The erosion of agency has consequences for our politics. As a result of all this, the fundamental ethical challenge of the anthropocene is the recovery of agency, or alternatively to come to terms with its loss and to understand how to go on.
Dale Jamieson
Image
In this era of globalization we are witnessing struggles within individual states about what their identity and interests consist in.
Dale Jamieson
Image
Since we're not very good at something as basic as controlling our reproduction, life is really bad for more people than ever before.
Dale Jamieson
Image
Environmental philosophy just is philosophy full stop. It only sprung up as distinct subfield because mainstream philosophy was ignoring some of the most important philosophical challenges of our time.
Dale Jamieson
Image
When I first started studying climate change back in the 1980s, I was struck by how difficult it was be for people to understand this issue.
Dale Jamieson
Image
Ethical systems are fundamentally conservative and primarily directed towards regulating interactions within communities.
Dale Jamieson
Image
Many environmental questions are in a deep way philosophical, despite our penchant for treating them as if they were only technological, economic, or whatever.
Dale Jamieson
Image
It is probably true that the economic benefits of being in the EU are a net positive to the UK, but a large number of people do not share in these benefits and the result is increasing inequality.
Dale Jamieson
Image
Most process philosophy is historicist (e.g., Hegel) and not concerned with deep time. Maybe Whitehead is an exception. He may be a really important philosopher for all I know. I've never been able to read him.
Dale Jamieson
Image
You can't imagine anything like nature as we know it without predators.
Dale Jamieson
Image
The bizarre thing about the anthropocene is that never has humanity been more powerful and never have individual humans felt so powerless. This is because so much that drives the circumstances of the anthropocene is the aggregation of apparently negligible acts, often amplified by technology, rather than decisive acts by autonomous decision-makers.
Dale Jamieson
Image
If we don't have historical consciousness we can't really understand problems in all their dimensions, and if we can't understand problems than we can't find solutions.
Dale Jamieson
Image
Philosophers (and probably most intellectuals) are more interested in pursuing what they see as the logical implications of their theories than they are in paying attention to the shlumpy diversity of defensible values that people actually have, and then trying to figure out how these might be negotiated in the life of an agent or community.
Dale Jamieson
Image
Some philosophers have begun writing sympathetically about predator elimination as a way of reducing animal suffering. From an environmental perspective this is somewhere between naïve and potentially disastrous.
Dale Jamieson
Image
We live on a restless planet in a violent universe.
Dale Jamieson
Image
Climate change is not going to be prevented. It's not even going to be mitigated to the degree a rational person would want. As a result we're going to have to live with climate change and try to reduce the extent and rate of change as much as possible. This is not an inspiring or sexy project.
Dale Jamieson
Image
Acts are right in virtue of the goodness of their consequences.
Dale Jamieson
Image
Moral revolutions are typically seen retrospectively. Prospectively, the revolutionaries tend to look like crazy people, and sometimes they are.
Dale Jamieson
Image
I played with English and Sociology in college but dropped out to work in the anti-war movement. I was going around denouncing the Viet Nam war as immoral but one day it dawned on me that I didn't know what that meant. I signed up for an ethics class at San Francisco State to find out the answer.
Dale Jamieson
Image
In the face of the collective action problems that are at the heart of the environmental crisis, consequentialists should seek to inculcate the green virtues which includes the virtue of cooperativeness. This would not bring about the best possible world but it would set us on the path of making it better.
Dale Jamieson