Thoughts at the Beginning of Reading Two Books

 

I've just started two books.  They've not yet been mentioned on the page where I'm sharing my 2024 readings with an inordinately curious world.  They won't be added there until I've read at least two-thirds of 'em.  I just have some observations from reading the first little bits of them that I want to deal with.

First up is The Panic of 1819 by: The First Great Depression by Andrew Browning (published in 2019).

The link provides a good outline of the story Browning tells.  But I just want to mention one thing near the beginning of the book.  Napoleon sold the former Spanish territories of Louisiana to the US-Americans because he didn't see how he could ever make use of them and he needed immediate money to finance his wars.  The US-Americans had only been planning on negotiating the purchase of New Orleans so as to have a port to get harvests from the interior of the country to markets.  But getting all that territory for the cheap price Napoleon was asking was too tempting to resist.  But where to get the cash up front?  British and Dutch bankers!  But Britain and the Netherlands were at war with Napoleon.  But they loaned the US-Americans the money to buy Louisiana and thereby fund Napoleon's war effort.

That's the kind of thing that makes you think of banker conspiracies and shadowy conspiracies and false-flags ain't it?  Like, maybe the Napoleonic Wars were all a sham and the bankers were behind the scenes the whole time pulling their strings and making their puppets like Napoleon, Jefferson and Pitt the Younger dance.

Except the British government was thinking that long-term, more USA settlement of the North American west would mean future customers for British manufacturers.  So they gave their permission for the loans.

Secondly, I have started David Deutsch's The Beginning of Infinity: Explanations that transform the world (2011)

I'm hung up on his critique of empiricism.  Deutsch is saying that empiricism was an improvement on the previous hegemony of reliance on authority and rules of thumb but it is flawed.  Empiricism says that our minds are blank slates that begin to receive information from the senses.  All knowledge is based on experiences of these sensations.  But Deutsch says that it is the ability to create EXPLANATIONS of what we experience that creates knowledge.  (I thought for a minute that Deutsch was going to champion Kantian categories, but when I checked the index there was just one reference to Kant and it was critical of the idea of a priori truths.)

The problem I have is how Deutsch says needlessly silly things to advance his argument.  For instance, people say that we believe the sun will rise in the morning because it has always done so.  But, asks Deutsch, what if it's really cloudy and we don't see the sun?  What about if we see a bunch of recorded sunrises on a television screen?   It isn't experience and repeatability that justifies our belief in the sun rising in the morning, but explanation.

I don't mind the central point that Deutsch is trying to make.  I just find that it's weakened by such silliness.  You don't have to literally see the sun rise to know that it happened.  And if it's a super cloudy day, it's still brighter than night time.  

In the same section Deutsch tries to argue how it wasn't visual experiences that eventually got us to understand what the stars are, what they're made from and how big and far away they are.  But, I think to be fair, Deutsch should have mentioned how the discovery of Jupiter's moons and their orbiting of that planet, and then, the retrograde motion of Mercury and Venus that got us started.

I just had to get that out of my system.