Sundry items making no coherent whole

I've added content to the following old posts:

• America's Critical-Thinking Movement in the 1930s & '40s
• Some quotations on facts
• John Albert Chadwick, WWI vet who left Cambridge logic for an Ashram

These old lines by Mike Royko seem timely:

I always believed that being a Cubs fan built strong character. It taught a person that if you try hard enough and long enough, you'll still lose. And that's the story of life. .... [a year later] Being a Cub Fan prepares you for life because everyone in life winds up a loser. Just check the cemetery. (Royko, 'A Farewell to Cubs' April 20, 1980, and 'When Ya Gotta Go' April 9, 1981, rpt. in For the Love of Mike: More of the Best by Mike Royko [University of Chicago Press, 2001], p. 35 & p. 40)

Leonard Nimoy explains the Spock pinch (the link is to the video for a 1969 CBC interview).

The BBC's list of 10 'lost' books worth our time.

The Guardian's 'top 10 philosopher's fictions'.

Pardon my crooked scanning of this image:

New Words in 1919 (from The New Republic, Oct. 1, 1919)

Hermann Broch (c. 1939-1948): 'When living in a twilight haze, one cannot distinguish between the conditions of nature and those of culture. One's attitude towards culture, then, resembles that of animals towards nature.'* (Hermann Broch Massenwahntheorie: Beitrage zu einer Psychologie der Politik, ed. Paul Michael Lützeler, [Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp Verlag, 1979], p. 69; trans. of 1st sentence: Stefan Andriopoulos, Possessed, trans. author & Peter Jansen [University of Chicago Press, 2008], n. 456)

Roland Barthes (1984): 'Myth consists in turning culture into nature, or at least turning the social, the cultural, the historical into "the natural".' (Barthes, in The Rustle of Language, trans. Richard Howard, [NY: Hill & Wang, 1986; 1st published in French in 1984], p. 65)

C. D. Broad (1954):

[Aunt Julia's] cat for a great many years was a large tom, whom even I (who am inclined to be weak about cats) must admit to have been ugly, greedy, lecherous, and lacking in affection. She lavished good food on him .... She had named him Urijah .... Urijah survived his mistress for several years. He was treated with the same marked generosity by my cousin Ernest, who surely cannot have approved of his character, and died in extreme and unlovely old age. (Broad, 'Autobiography', The Philosophy of C. D. Broad, ed. Paul Arthur Schilpp [NY: Tudor Publishing Company, 1959], p. 20)

James Lees-Milne (1942): '... Ronnie Norman, the eternal handsome schoolboy, noisily loquacious until he finds the conclusion to an argument, when he stops like an unwound clock.' (James Lees-Milne, Diaries, 1942-1954, ed. Michael Bloch, entry for Jan 12, 1942)

The 'Indiscreet charm of Beryl Bainbridge' by Philip Hensher.

Beryl Bainbridge in Coronation Street:



* Broch's above-quoted remarks in German: 'Wenn der Mensch sich im Dämmerzustand befindet, kann er nicht zwischen den Gegebenheiten von Natur und Kultur unterscheiden. Seine Einstellung gegenuber der Kultur ahnelt dann der des Tieres gegenuber der Natur.'

Did an Oxford-comma error lead the press to overstate British gains at the Battle of Loos?

Debate has long raged about use of the Oxford comma (aka the serial comma). This troubling comma has its own Twitter feed, and it can be crucial for interpreting laws. [Update March 19, 2017: Here's a more recent example of a legal case involving the controversial comma.]

I was raised in accordance with The Canadian Style, which includes the Government's of Canada's recommendation not to bother with the serial comma unless it is required for resolving an ambiguity. Some have called any wider use of the serial comma unCanadian. Indeed, it is said to be unAustralian and unBritish, too (despite its Oxford pedigree). It is reputed to be an American thing.

I found an antecedent of the Government of Canada's advice in an Ontario high-school textbook from the 1920s. The book is called High-School English Composition. ^{(H. W. Irwin and J. F. van Every [Toronto: The Copp Clark Company, 1921, rpt. 1929])} The authors say that the serial comma should be used only when necessary. To exemplify its capacity to alter one's meaning, they give this example:

During the Great War, when the British troops were engaged in a critical struggle with the Germans for the possession of Hill 70, General French sent the following message to England: 'We captured the western outskirts of Bulluch [sic., should be Hulluch], the village of Loos, and the mining works around it and Hill 70.' By an error, the message was made to read: 'We captured the western outskirts of [H]ulluch, the village of Loos, and the mining works around it, and Hill 70.' The insertion of the comma after 'it' conveyed the impression that Hill 70 had been captured. In consequence, public celebrations and rejoicings were held in all parts of the country. (pp. 199-200)

It's difficult to find much by way of corroboration for this tale, and the putative celebrations sound far-fetched. Still, the sentence that implies the taking of Hill 70 (and close re-phrasings of it) did appear in newspapers on Sept. 27, 1915 and shortly thereafter. On Oct. 16, 1915, the New York Times (p. 2) quotes a passage from the British Daily News under the headline, 'War Office Official Gives Evasive Answers When Questioned', according to which the Under Secretary for War had tried to clarify matters by saying:

There has been a misunderstanding on this point. The message from Sir John French, which was published in the papers of Sept. 27, stated that we had captured the western outskirts of Hulluch village, Loos and the mining works around it and Hill 70. This was been [sic.] read to mean that Hill 70 had been taken. If the words were correctly read it would be seen that the capture only of the mining works around Hill 70 was claimed.

Critical thinking as meta-thinking in Gadske's dissertation

Critical thinking is often associated with what psychologists call metacognition. In such cognition, the mind thinks (and hopefully gains knowledge) about its own operations. This is akin to what Kant pursued in his own work, where the mind turns its focus back upon itself in order to reflect on its own functioning. Philosophers say that such thinking is 'higher-order' in nature (though they sometimes reserve this phrase for a more restricted kind of thought). Here, 'higher-order' does not mean simply that the thinking is very sophisticated; rather, the point is that such thoughts take as their object further thoughts (just as higher-order desires are directed at other desires).

Some authors identify critical thinking with a specific type of higher-order thinking or metacognition. For example, in his unpublished, 1940 dissertation, Richard Edward Gadske* writes:

The adjective 'critical', therefore, suggests a very special phase of thinking. Thus, critical thinking becomes a process of becoming aware and criticising the thinking that has already taken place. In other words, it is a process of thinking about thinking from the point of view of a critic.' (Gadske, Demonstrative Geometry as a Means for Improving Critical Thinking, unpublished doctoral dissertation, Northwestern University [Evanston, Illinois, June, 1940], p. 9; emphasis added)

A critic, says Gadske, is one 'who expresses a judgment on any matter with respect to its value, truth, or beauty'. (Ibid.) However, Gadske's notion of critical thinking might extend beyond what philosophers typically mean by 'higher-order thinking' and what psychologists seem to mean by 'metacognition', since it may be directed at the thinking of others (rather than just at one's own thinking). As Gadske puts it, critical thinking occurs

... when a person is analyzing his own thinking as well as the thinking of others through the media of self-scrutiny, questioning, discrimination, search, and research with respect to any situation that may be of interest or of vital concern to him. (Ibid.; emphasis added)

But critical thinking, on Gadske's conception, may yet be a species of higher-order thought or metacognition. After all, even if my aim is to assess the thoughts of someone else, it's hard to see how I can do so without exploring those thoughts, and this seems to require me to think those thoughts (or relevantly similar ones). I have to make those thoughts my own before I can subject them to critical scrutiny. Also, recall (from the previous post) that critical thinking is plausibly taken to be directed at a decision that culminates in a judgment of my own. That is, the outcome should be a decision about what I ought to think (or believe or conclude). Thus, even if my focus initially was on someone else's thinking, the critical-thinking process must include a step whereby I assess the thoughts and consider the sort of judgment that I ought to form about them.

Still, one may doubt that critical thinking is always a matter of thinking about one's own thinking. When I reflect on whether local real-estate prices will go up in the next year, I entertain propositions about recent market trends, interest rates, the approaching introduction of a new land-transfer tax, etc. Here, my thoughts seem transparent: rather than thinking of them, I think, via them (or through them), of the market, interest rates, new taxes, etc. Insofar as I consider logical and evidential relations, they are relations among propositions about these things (rather than relations among my thoughts about the propositions).

Regardless of the merits of Gadske's conception, his notion of critical thinking is similar to one of Richard Paul's later definitions. According to Paul, 'Critical thinking is thinking about your thinking while you’re thinking in order to make your thinking better'.

*Richard Edward Gadske (1901-1989) was born in Chicago on April 4, 1901. He held a B.S. in Electrical Engineering (awarded by the University of Colorado or the South Dakota School of Mines -- the records are conflicting -- in 1925) and two advanced degrees in Education from Northwestern University: an M.S. (1932) and a doctoral degree (1940). As an undergraduate, he played on a varsity football team for four years. For most of his career, he taught math at New Trier High School (Winnetka, Illinois). He coached high-school football, basketball, baseball, and track teams. In WWII, he served for four years as a commander in the US Navy. He died on July 21, 1989. (Gadske was the high-school advisor of James C. Warren, who is one of the Tuskegee airmen. Warren played on football and baseball teams that Gadske coached, and Gadske accompanied the young Warren to father-son events.)