What makes a date a date?

It is clear that the analytic philosophical community is failing to provide some of the basic services that the public has a right to expect from its local philosophical experts. Take the area of conceptual analysis, for example. Contemporary analytic philosophy will furnish one with countless attempts to give necessary and sufficient conditions for the concepts of cause, necessity, or knowledge.* But what of the concepts that really matter to us in our everyday lives?

For instance, consider the concept of a date. Surely this is one place where we face issues of conceptual analysis on a daily basis. "Was meeting for drinks last night a date?" "Did he just ask me out?" "I can't believe that he told you it was a date, but maybe it was?" Clearly these are questions we face all the time. And our confusion about them often involves a certain degree of confusion about just what should count as a date in the first place.

Here, then, is that rare creature: a case in which the methods of analytic philosophy are directly relevant to the problems that we all face in everyday life. So one might have thought that we would find analytic philosophers falling over themselves to offer accounts of datehood and to refute competing accounts of what makes a meeting a date. But so far as I can see, the analytic philosophical literature is shockingly silent on this issue.**

I don't intend here to fill this gap - for surely these issues are too serious to be dealt with in a blog-post. But, with the reader's permission, I will make some initial comments on the difficulties philosophers are likely to encounter in this area:

(1) It is clearly insufficient to make a meeting a date that both parties involved have romantic or sexual feelings for one another. Nor is it sufficient that both parties know of these feelings. For surely a sexually charged friendship does not consist of a series of dates.

(2) Moreover, it is clearly insufficient to make a meeting a date that both parties want it to be a date. Nor it is sufficient that these desires are common knowledge between the parties. For, even in the face of such common knowledge, it is plainly possible for these desires to be frustrated.

(3) What, then, of cases in which both parties believe a meeting to be a date? Plainly this is not a necessary condition on a meeting being a date - for it is surely possible to discover that one has been on a date only after the fact. But is it even a sufficient condition? Not necessarily. For we may both believe that some meeting is a date because we also believe that it satisfies some condition that it does not in fact satisfy. In such cases, it seems natural to say that although we both thought our meeting was a date, we were both mistaken.

(4) A more plausible condition on datehood, I would suggest, is teleological in character. For thinking of something as a date does involve thinking of it as having a certain aim - or, in other words, it involves thinking of it as having certain success conditions. For instance, when I think of a meeting with someone as a date, I think of this meeting as having as its aim further romantic or sexual interactions with that person of some sort. And, no matter how much fun a date might be on its own, if it fails to produce further interactions of this sort - whether on the night in question or in the future - there is an important sense in which it may be regarded as a failure.

I’m not sure this is correct, but it seems a more promising line of thought than those noted above. As such, it might provide us with the beginnings of a philosophical account of the essence of dating. But surely it is only a beginning.

* Not that any of these are worth a damn, of course.

** This, I take it, is one reason for the relative popularity of continental philosophy among a certain demographic. Whatever their faults, continental philosophers are certainly not afraid to address the issues I am discussing here.

The art of conversation

One of the reasons why I tend to find it difficult to engage in causal conversation is the high standards I have for it. Unless I (or someone else) has something particularly original, witty, or thoughtful to say, I get bored and anxious in conversational contexts very quickly.* But perhaps my standards for causal conversation aren't high, they're simply wrong.

"Obviously", you may think. And it seems that the experts on the conversational art would agree. Here's Virginia Woolf, for instance, on the subject:

There must be talk, and it must be general, and it must be about everything. It must not go too deep, and it must not be too clever, for if it went too far in either of these directions somebody was sure to feel out of it, and to sit balancing with his tea cup, saying nothing.

(From the The New York Review of Books)

So, according to Woolf, it's not just that conversation needn't be any of things I demand, it's that it shouldn't be any of these things, at least to any great degree. So the norms I've been applying to myself and others when conversing with them - the norms that are the source of so much anxiety for me when making conversation - are simply the product of my failure to identify the real aims of conversation.

I suppose this is more or less right. But if these are the norms that govern conversation, this seems to raise the question of why conversation was and is considered by so many so terribly valuable. After all, do we really want to be part of a conversation in which, "if anyone said a brilliant thing it was felt to be rather a breach of etiquette—an accident that one ignored, like a fit of sneezing, or some catastrophe with a muffin." To my mind, at least, there seems to be something rather perverse in the idea of conversing with others while simultaneously making sure that what one has to say is not too intelligent or too provocative. Of course, such conversation will bring the pleasures that come whenever we interact with others. But shouldn't it be possible to enjoy these pleasures without limiting ourselves to talk that is of an artificially low level?

* This, for example, is why I've always found the conversations people have while high so insufferable. But here again, the reflections above may help to explain why otherwise intelligent people find drugs a suitable conversational aid. After all, if the comments above are correct, then the greatest obstacle to good conversation among intelligent people may sometimes be, not a lack of intelligence, but rather an excess of it.

It's sad that,

statistically speaking, I'm more likely to remember Mother's Day than I am my mother's birthday. Although when one thinks about it, this is really no great surprise. I have a bad head for dates, at least of a non-historical kind, and in the weeks preceding Mother's Day we all are bombarded with reminders that our yearly chance to demonstrate our love for our mothers is fast approaching. Still, the fact that I'm more likely to remember a holiday manufactured (in large part) by the greeting card companies than I am the day of my mother's birth indicates something sad in my relationship with her. A certain distance. Or perhaps a certain impersonality.

In any case, from now I won't be celebrating Mother's Day or any other mass-produced holiday of this kind. It's time for me to concentrate on the arbitrary celebrations that really matter.

Slogans and catchphrases

We'll always be your sugar!

- Domino Sugar

I have a bad reaction to this one. It's quite pushy and more than a bit clingy. I want to say to Domino Sugar: "It's early in our relationship. Let's just go slowly... Don't crowd me. If we're going to build a relationship that's going to last, you need to respect my boundaries."

Does Ann Landers get questions like this?

I spill salt. I want to remove any taint of bad luck that results. The proper response: throw salt over my shoulder. But which one? Left or right? The logic of superstition suggests that choosing the wrong shoulder will only redouble my bad fortune. So it makes no sense to gamble. Perhaps a pinch over both, with the hope that this will be sufficiently confusing for the fates that I'll escape without consequence?

Any advice would be welcome.

Note to self

Some phrases I hope not to use on this blog:

"it seems to me"
"Now" as a way of beginning a sentence or a paragraph
"I think"
"perhaps"
"as such"
Any variation on "it is relatively clear that"
"obviously"
Any modifier that weakens a claim
Any modifier that makes me less than fully responsible for a claim

Further suggestions are welcome.