Creativity vs The World

Below is my radio documentary, Creativity vs The World.  A three minute investigation into the battle between creativity and real world concerns over time and money.

The documentary focuses on Alma, a musician who has received some attention from the BBC 'Introducing...' programmes and various podcasts, and who continues to write and perform in the time outside of  her full-time job and the general demands of living.

You're not safe anywhere these days...

Creativity versus The World

Wittgenstein's Tractatus and Logical Positivism

Logical Positivism, while now seen as mainly being of historical interest, was in the earliest years of the 20th Century, seen as an important philosophical movement, propounded mainly by a group that became known as the first Vienna Circle.  The Vienna Circle met at a cafe called Cafe Central.  The circle was interrupted by the First World War, but resumed afterwards.  Logical Positivism rejected all forms of metaphysics and a priori propositions, instead advocating a single, rational language of science that would evolve to become more precise as uncertainties and idiosyncrasies emerged.

This Circle was heavily influenced by the early work of Ludwig Wittgenstein, whose Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, or the Tractatus for short.

The Tractatus consisted of seven main statements, each of which is supposed to be self-evident.  Each of these seven propositions have a number of sub-statements that relate to the 'parent' statement.

The main seven statements are:

1. The world is everything that is the case. *
2. What is the case, the fact, is the existence of atomic facts.
3. The logical picture of the facts is the thought.
4. The thought is the significant proposition.
5. Propositions are truth-functions of elementary propositions. (An elementary proposition is a truth-function of itself.)
6. The general form of truth-function is: [, , N()].  This is the general form of proposition.
7. Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent.

There were many criticisms of Logical Positivism, one of the earliest came from Karl Popper, who argued that the Logical Positivist's requirement that a statement be scientifically verifiable was too strong.  Popper argued that instead, it should be possible to use a criterion of falsifiability.  

As an example of falsifiability, the statement 'All pigeons are grey.' can be proven as false by observing one brown pigeon.  However, the statement 'Grey pigeons do exist.' is not falsifiable, therefore stands as a valid statement.

Wittgenstein himself heavily criticised the Tractatus in his later work, and even some of its staunchest defenders later admitted that Logical Positivism was flawed.  Nevertheless, the movement was considered influential between the late 1920s and early 1930s and deserves to be remembered, albeit for historical reasons, rather than as a current branch of philosophy.

The New Journalism

The New Journalism is the name of a book by Tom Wolfe.  It also describes the changes that took place in journalistic style from the early 1960s onward.

Journalistic writing pre the early 1960s had always been deliberately dry, attempting to give the facts of a case in a manner that was scientific and accurate, but was devoid of personality.  The reasons for this were many, not least due to the belief that by allowing personality into news reports, they could not be impartial.

In the 1960's some brave new journalists began experimenting with the tools used by novelists to inject personality into their writing, in an attempt to increase reader engagement.

Several masterpieces were created.  Not least Truman Capote's In Cold Blood and later Hunter S. Thompson's Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas.

In The New Journalism, Wolfe argues that the four key devices that New Journalism took from fiction writers were:

1. Scene by scene construction - tell the story in a filmic, scene by scene progression.
2. Full and faithful recording of the dialog - include each character's hesitations, retractions and repetitions.
3. Third-person point of view - present each scene through the eyes of a particular character
4. Record a person's mannerisms, gestures, clothing and furniture - in doing so you show a great deal of how a person interacts with the world around them.

New Journalism continues to be popular today.  Indeed, some modern feature writers use the techniques of New Journalism without knowing or thinking about where those techniques originated from. 

Logic

This seminar paper is devoted to looking at the works of Frege, Russell and others with regard to Logic, Language and Epistemology.

Logic

John Stuart Mill wrote System of Logic, which set forth a system of formal logic.  Mill wanted to disassociate himself from the work of Hobbes, which he accused of nominalism.  Nominalism, to Mills, was the theory that a proposition can only be true if the subject and predicate are names of the same thing.  

Mill argued that this worked in situations where both predicate and subject were proper names, but was not suitable for proving other propositions, where this was not the case.

It should be noted that, unlike Hobbes, Mill believed that a name could not just be a specific name such as 'John Mill', but a descriptive term such as 'man' or 'wise'.  Mill also believed that the laws of physics, arithmetic and logic only existed as well-confirmed generalisations.

Mill was in opposition to Frege on these points.  Frege believed that arithmetic and logic were both known a priori.  However, Frege's contributions to logic were in moving away from the simple subject-predicate method of logic that was used by Mills and those before, and his formulation of arguments and functions, concepts that will be familiar to any software developers out there.  

Frege's system works as follows:

Tyson beat Bruno

In the sentence above, the term 'beat' would comprise the function, while 'Tyson' and 'Bruno' would each be arguments of the function.  Frege developed an entire system of notation for illustrating logical problems in this manner.

Frege's innovations were independently arrived at by C.S. Peirce, an American philosopher.  However, Peirce's contributions were largely overlooked at the time of their creation, and (like Frege) the true quality of what he had achieved was only recognised posthumously.

One of Peirce's arguments, was that our forms of inference (induction, hypothesis and analogy) all depend on sampling, therefore he argued, the mathematical laws of probability are necessary for non-deductive inference to occur.  Peirce also argued that it was by the ongoing extension of our experience, that we gain proficiency at generating hypotheses.

Peirce's work, while valuable, was not closely examined by Russell and Whitehead, who instead concentrated on Frege's Begriffsschrift when creating their own three volume work entitled the Principia Mathematica. The Principia Mathematica received much greater attention than either Frege or Peirce's work.  This is possibly due to the replacement of the system of symbols that Frege used with a more accessible form of notation.

Russell and Whitehead's work drew largely from Frege's work, but made use of a different set of axioms to Frege's.  Where Frege used 'if and 'not' as his primitive connectives, Russell and Whitehead used 'or' and 'not'.  Their term for these connectives was 'logical constants'.

However, it was Wittgenstein who first realised that 'axiomatic' systems were not the only (or most intuitive method for showing logic in a rigorous form.  Wittgenstein was the first to use truth tables, a simple and elegant method for setting out the constituent components of  a proposition and the proposition itself.

For example, if the proposition was to see under which circumstances 'p and q' were true, a table could be laid out as follows:

p	q	p & q
T	T	T
T	F	F
F	T	F
F	F	F

The work of Frege, Russell and Wittgenstein was criticised in some quarters.  A group of logicians known as  'intuitionists', and founded by L.E.J. Brouwer, considered mathematics to be a construct of the human mind, and therefore they considered that only demonstrable mathematical proofs could be assigned the value of truth.  That is, they did not accept that the existence of 'p' was proven by disproving 'not p'.

Frege, Russell and Whitehead had hoped, as part of their work, to establish that arithmetic was a branch of logic.  However, Kurt Godel, an Austrian logician and philosopher, published a paper in 1931 entitled 'On Formally Undecidable Propositions of Principia Mathematica and Related Systems' which proved conclusively that arithmetic was not a complete system, by constructing a formula within the system used by Principia Mathematica that can be shown to be true, but is not provable within the system itself.  This paper ended attempts to prove that arithmetic was a complete system in itself.

Focus then switched to a previously neglected form of logic known as Modal Logic, which had largely been neglected since the Middle Ages.  Interest in this form of logic was revived by C.I. Lewis who was interested in implication.  Lewis believed that Russell and Whitehead's work regarding 'material implication' was flawed, and suggested that the only genuine implication was known as strict implication.  However, critics considered Lewis's strict implication to be no less flawed than the work carried out by Russell and Whitehead.

Further study has taken place in logic in the years since Russell, Frege, Wittgenstein et al.  But many of the conventions and developments that they were responsible for are still used by modern logicians today.

Satre, Fanon and Existentialism

It was in the preface to Frantz Fanon's Wretched Of The Earth that Jean-Paul Sartre spoke out against colonialism.  In it, Sartre points out the inevitability of what is to follow in the Algerian war, as he ponders on the plight of Algeria specifically and Africa in general.

Sartre, taking the philosophies of Kierkegaard and Nietzsche, was one of the most famous exponents of existentialism in literature, with his first novel Nausea considered, along with Albert Camus' The Outsider, to be the pre-eminent fictional texts of the existentialist movement.

Fanon's book was designed to draw attention to the injustices of colonialism and act as a call to arms for the people of Algeria.  In his preface, Sartre draws attention to the inevitable results of a people rising against their colonial oppressors.  He points out that the bitterness on both sides will only increase as more and more casualties are amassed on both sides.  How the people of France, safe in their homes, will maintain a wilful ignorance of the affair, not wishing to delve too closely into a tangled politics where they risk realising that they are 'the bad guy'.

In some ways, this situation is a more extreme example of the current British deployment to Afghanistan.  Few are the people who are able to tell me what our objectives in Afghanistan are.  Most are aware that it is 'something to do with terrorism'.  It is interesting that there are so few questions being asked about a situation where British soldiers are dying for a seemingly unknown objective.

Is it surprising that Sartre agreed to write the preface to such a controversial book?

I believe not.  Sartre's belief in existentialism, the unique and subjective view of each individual born into this world, meant that such a book would act as a rallying point for many unique individuals and assist them in working towards a common aim.  Sartre was not against society, he simply believed that each individual viewed it differently.

Tabloid Nation (parts 2 and 3) - Seminar Paper

Tabloid Nation parts 2 and 3 cover the history of the Daily Mirror from 1934 when Harry Guy Bartholomew gained control, to 1984 when the paper was sold by Reed International to Robert Maxwell.

Harry Guy Bartholomew (known as 'Bart') turned the Mirror into a clone of the New York newspaper, the Daily News.  Bart was not well enough connected to persuade the board of directors to back him in making the changes he wanted, so he enlisted the help of Cecil Harmsworth King, who was Rothermere (the owner's) nephew.  King was to handle the delicate discussions required with the board, while Bart pushed the paper in the direction of the American tabloids he so admired.

At the very beginning, Bart enlisted the help of Basil Nicholson, an advertising copywriter to assist on the editorial side, but after a falling out, Bart ruthlessly replaced him with Hugh Cudlipp.

As the changes Bart made took effect and circulation figures began to rise, Bart wondered how he could rid himself of King as a potential rival for overall control of the company.  Things went his way when he refused to take on control of the Pictorial (a Sunday sister paper to the Daily Mirror) and the job was instead given to King.  Bart thought the paper was beyond saving.  

King took Cudlipp to be day to day editor of the Pictorial, angering Bart hugely.  From that moment Bart became antagonistic toward both King and Cudlipp.

This state of affairs was interrupted by the second world war, during which Cudlipp was conscripted, and during which the Daily Mirror was so downbeat that it was accused in some quarters of trying to help the German war effort!  

Upon the wars end, Bart was promoted to Chairman of the company, with King promoted to Head of Advertising and Finance Director.  The Daily Mirror concentrated its immediate post-war efforts on getting a Labour government into power, in which it succeeded, but going into the 1950s, the real battle at the Daily Mirror was that between Harry Guy Bartholomew and Cecil King.

At first it seemed that Bart had the upper hand.  As the Mirror overtook the Express in terms of circulation, Bart felt vindicated in his leadership.  However, alcohol took its toll on him, and eventually King was able to oust Bart and replace him, as Bart's alcoholism had reached such a pitch as to render him impossible to work with.

King retrieved Cudlipp from the Daily Express, where he'd been exiled after a falling out with Bart a couple of years earlier and together they set about making the changes necessary to take the paper forward.  Through the 1950s the paper had the lower end of the market almost to itself, allowing its growth to continue to outstrip the Daily Express, it's middle-class rival.

The sheer amount of cash that the Daily Mirror was bringing in presented its own problems.  Mainly, how to spend it.  King moved the company to new purpose-built premises known as Holborn Circus, for which it paid £9 million cash.  

During the 60s the Daily Mirror began to stockpile journalistic talent in the same way that the Daily Express had done during its glory days. However, the 60's ended badly for the Daily Mirror, with King seemingly involved in moves to try and remove Harold Wilson from government.   The final straw was an article by King entitled 'ENOUGH IS ENOUGH', which led to his sacking from the Mirror and IPC.

The 1950s and early to mid 1960s were the true golden days for the Daily Mirror.  From this point, things begin a slow but steady decline.

With King gone, Cudlipp was asked to step into his shoes.  This was not a task he entirely relished.  He considered himself an expert journalist, but did not claim to be a businessman.  

During King's time as chairman, he had acquired a huge number of other newspapers and magazines, often without performing any meaningful due diligence on what he was buying.  One of the newspapers in the IPC stable was the Sun.  Cudlipp wanted rid of this weak, under-performing title and attempted to sell it to Maxwell.  However, the unions got wind of this plan and threatened to strike if there was any sign of Maxwell being sold the Sun.  Rupert Murdoch, who had entered the British press by purchasing the News Of The World, saw an opportunity.  At present his presses were idle for six days a week, and by taking on a going concern for a bargain price, he could begin printing his daily newspaper for a fraction of the cost a completely fresh start would cost him.  

Murdoch got the Sun, installed Larry Lamb as editor and began a head to head war against IPC's flagship title, the Mirror.

By 1978, the Sun overtook the Mirror's circulation figures for the first time.  It had done this by focusing on synergies with television as the emergent medium and the younger generation, who it knew it needed in order to compete with the Mirror.

The Mirror's board and senior editorial staff were ageing by this point and no longer in touch with this generation's youth.  It paid the price.  Leaking money, the Mirror was sold to Reed International, who frankly, didn't know what to do with it.  Reed made one serious attempt to reform the Mirror, installing Clive Thornton at the top of the company.  Thornton attempted to enact sweeping cost-cutting exercises at the Mirror, but needed the support of the unions.  Thornton made sincere and generous offers to the unions, who considered Thornton's offer, then told him where to go.  Desperate for somebody to take the now loss-making enterprise off of it's hands, Reed International accepted an offer from one Robert Maxwell, who was offering, from Reed's perspective, what seemed to be a very good deal.

The development of the modern British press.

The development of the modern press was facilitated on a technical level by the Gutenberg press, which was initially developed to reproduce bibles, but was modified in the 19th Century to create the rotary press.  This development is credited to Friedrich Koenig, a German who moved to London and there secured funding to develop and patent his design.

By this time presses were being used for far more than reproducing bibles, with pamphlets, books and the first newspapers such as the Daily Courant being produced.

However, it was later that papers assumed the form that they now form here, with the Daily Mail being produced by Northcliffe in 1896 and the Daily Mirror in 1903, which was the one of the first pictorially led daily newspaper to achieve mainstream success.  (Thanks to the efforts of Harry Guy Bartholomew and Hannan Swaffer)

Newspapers faced their first real challenge in the 1920s with the advent and availability of radio.  In the US, newspaper sales were decimated by radio, which was largely unregulated and commercial.  However, in the UK only the BBC were allowed to broadcast and they were given a charter that insisted their programming should educate the British public.  As such, human interest stories and less salubrious subjects were left to the newspapers, which enjoyed continued success.

The Daily Mirror continued to lead the tabloid pack until well into the 1970s.  However, the Daily Mirror tracked the baby boomers as they got older, while a brash young upstart called 'The Sun', under the ownership of Rupert Murdoch saw a gap in the market, targeting the younger generation and concentrating largely on making celebrities out of television presenters and actors from popular soap operas.

The Sun soon overtook the Mirror in terms of circulation, and Rupert Murdoch used the money to purchase a stake in, and build the reputation of Sky Broadcasting.

Will Murdoch continue to rule the airwaves in the age of the internet?  He has the intelligence to make the transition, but may lack the appetite.  Indeed, some of his tweets regarding recent attempts to enforce draconian copyright protections on the internet suggest that he lacks the will to try.  If he does indeed set himself up in opposition to this new age of collaboration, this would be unfortunate for him.  However, I suspect those whose space he would have moved into, if he had embraced this new way of thinking, are breathing a sigh of relief.