cheapesthostings2

Consider the following sentence: " You ate the blueberries because your fingers are stained." What is odd about it is that ordinarily, when we say "X because of Y" we mean "Y is the cause of X". For example, "The window broke because the baseball hit it" means that the baseball hitting the window caused it to break. But in this case, the sentence surely doesn't mean that your fingers being stained caused you to eat the blueberries. Now one might object that it's a weird sentence, and that instead it should be " I believe you ate the blueberries because your fingers are stained. " But the original version is not confusing to an English speaker, and people sometimes do speak this way. Language is a complicated business. And language about causality is particularly tricky. It is well known that correlation does not imply causation . But when scientific studies are reported in the media, this dictum is often forgotten. Professor...

In an op-ed in today's issue of the Los Angeles Times, Michael Shermer wrote about the rush "to find the deep underlying causes of shocking events", with reference to the shooting in Tucson, Arizona and the recent mass bird deaths. Shermer made some good points, but parts of his argument were flawed. For example, he cited statistics from the National Institute of Mental Health to argue that unbalanced people are not uncommon, and Given these statistics, events such as the shooting in Tucson are bound to happen, no matter how nicely politicians talk to one another on the campaign trail or in Congress, no matter how extreme tea party slogans are about killing government programs, and no matter how stiff or loose gun control laws are in this or that state. By chance — and nothing more — there will always be people who do the unthinkable. In other words, he is pointing out what he sees as an inevitability, and then attributing it to chance. But an inevitability is the opposi...

These days everyone seems to be in favour of people taking responsibility. But in the self-help world, an unusual spin on this idea has become popular: "You are responsible for your feelings." (Sometimes the word "emotions" is used instead of "feelings", and here I'll treat the two terms synonymously.) Now it makes sense to talk about taking responsibility for your behaviour—although it's easier said than done—but what would it mean for a person to take responsibility for their internal state of being? The question hinges on what we mean by the word "responsibility". Consider the following scenario: suppose you're helping to organize a party and you take responsibility for the drinks. In this case, taking responsibility means looking after, taking care of. Applying this to our feelings makes a good deal of sense. Ultimately, each of us needs to look after and take care of our feelings. Other people's behaviour can of course have a...