Adventurer and writer Rory Stewart, now an MP,  has an interesting post about the oral culture of the British Houses of Parliament, perhaps the last strong-hold of argument-through-speech in public culture.  The only other places in modern life, a place which is not quite as public, where speech reigns supreme, are court rooms.

On 17 July 1978, the ABC TV current affairs programme, Monday Conference, held a Parliamentary Debate at Sydney University with participants from the Honeywell International Inter-varsity Debating Festival, then being held in Sydney: universities represented included Auckland, Cambridge, Canterbury (NZ), Columbia, Glasgow, Harvard, Nairobi, Oregon, Oxford  and eight Australian universities.  Particularly memorable performances were given by Nicholas O’Shaughnessy (age 26) from Oxford and David Pash (age 19) from Harvard.  Pash, speaking of O’Shaughnessy’s speeches, remarked:

They fall into three categories:  the witty, the stirring, and the vast majority.”

Pash also said:

Where there’s smoke there’s fire. Or, in Latin, Nil combustio sic profumo.“

Pash is now an attorney in LA, and O’Shaughnessy Professor of Communication at Queen Mary, University of London. Ewan Sutherland, a participant from Glasgow and now a telecommunications consultant, has a short report of the Debating Festival here.

Following the Festival, the student newspaper of the Australian National University (ANU), Canberra, Woroni, reported on a visit to ANU by the Oxford University Union Debating Team (issue of 1 August 1978).   This report (with obvious typing errors corrected and one misplaced line – shown by [ ] – re-inserted appropriately) is here:

Complete with jokes generously supplied by the FitWilliam [sic] Museum of Antiquities in Cambridge, the  Oxford University Union Debating Team visited Canberra for four days at the beginning of second semester.  The team was in Australia along with teams from Cambridge, Glasgow, Harvard, Columbia, Oregon, Auckland, Canterbury and several Australian universities including ANU for the first Honeywell International Inter-varsity Debating Festival in Sydney.

Despite the fact that all four members of the team are part of Margaret Thatcher’s shock troops (she was described by one of them as Attila the Hen), they were almost human.  Nicholas O’Shaughnessy wants to be Viceroy of India and developed an accent to match.  John Harrison . . . found solace in the company of Greg Carman.  Marie-Louise Rossi replaced at 4 hours notice a past president of the Oxford Union, Vivienne Dinham.  Mark Sterling, in between drams, managed to defeat the cream sherry of ANU Law School mooting talent, Tom Faunce and Lee Aitken.

There were two debates in Canberra.  The first, on 19th July, was against ANU, ably represented by Andrew Byrnes, Steve Bartos and Vivienne Bath.  The subject was ‘That Only God can Save the Queen‘, which Oxford negated.  By any standards it was a good piece of comedy, though not perhaps describable as a debate.  Oxford were rather the worse for wear, having staggered off a plane from North Queensland just 1.5 hours before the debate began.

On 20th July there was a highly successful debate in the Albert Hall against a team from parliament.   It proved very difficult to get any MPs at all.  Most of the  ALP were overseas on their compulsory annual junkets.  Many Liberals were [  ] discreetly elsewhere on the date of the debate.  No member of the National Party could be found who could string more than about three words together before collapsing in in exhaustion.  In the end we found Michael Baume, Jim Carlton and Michael Hodgman, who turned on a very entertaining performance.  They admirably proved that talent is in inverse proportion to one’s chances of becoming a minister.

On July 21 the Law School staged a moot and lost.  Oxford left for Melbourne on July 22, having only managed [to see Canberra  in the wet.  Every time] that a trip was planned, the heavens opened.

On a marginally more serious  note, the success of the Oxford visit has prompted the Union to try and re-establish Union Night Debates on a regular weekly basis.  These debates are an established and popular feature of many English and Australian universities, and were common here until a few years ago.  If anyone wants to help on the Union Debates Committee, go and talk to someone in the Union Office.

The article was accompanied by a photo of the 19 July debate participants, showing seated (left-to-right) under a portrait of the Queen and a British and an Australian flag: John Harrison, Marie-Louise Rossi, Nicholas O’Shaughnessy, Greg Carman (MC), Vivienne Bath, Steven Bartos and Andrew Byrnes.

Everything else they [election commentators and bloggers] would never see. It existed only for the several thousand cheering people in Vernon Park on that bright morning in Germantown. They would never see, for instance, Obama’s riff on sweet potato pie. It came as he told a story about his campaigning “the other day in a little town in Ohio, with the governor there,” about how he and the governor suddenly felt hungry and “decided we’d stop right there and get some pie.” Now here began a little gem of a story, which had at its center the diner employees who wanted to take a picture with Obama, not least because, as they told him, their boss was a die-hard Republican and “they wanted to tweak him a little with that picture.” All this was heading toward a carefully choreographed finale, where the owner appeared personally with the pie for candidate and governor and Obama looked at the pie and looked at the pie-carrying die-hard Republican owner and “then I said to him”—perfectly elongated pause—“How’s business?”

This brought on great gales of laughter from the crowd. For the joke turned on a point already precisely made: How can even the most die-hard of die-hard Republicans, if he is thinking of his self-interest, how can he vote Republican this year? “If you beat your head against the wall,” Obama demanded of that faraway Republican with his pie, to a blizzard of “oh yeahs!” and “you got that right!” from the crowd, “and it hurts and hurts, how can you keep doing it?” But it was those two words, ”How’s business?”—that casual greeting thrown at the Republican diner owner that showed that there simply could be no other choice this year—that showed the case proved, wrapped up, unassailable.

And yet what struck me in this little model of political art was a tiny riff the candidate effortlessly worked into it from his banter with the crowd. When Obama launched into his story with “Because I love pie,” a woman out in that sea of cheering, laughing people shouted back, “I’ll make you pie, baby!” and to the general hooting laughter the candidate returned, “Oh yeah, you gonna make me pie?” Then, after a beat, amid even more raucous laughter, and several other female voices shouting out invitations, “You gonna make me sweet potato pie?” More shouts and laughter. “All you gonna make me pie?”

“Well you know I love sweet potato pie. And I think what we’re going to have to do here”—and the laughter and the shouting rose and as it did his voice rose above it—“what we’re going to have to do here is have a sweet potato pie contest…. That’s right. And in this contest, I’m gonna be the judge.” The laughter rose and you could hear not only the women but the deep laughter of the men taking delight in the double entendre that was not only about the women and their laughing, teasing offers and about their pie that that lanky confident smiling young man knew how to eat and enjoy and judge, but even more now, amazingly, as people came one by one to recognize, about something else. To those people gathered in Vernon Park that bright sun-drenched morning, it was an even more titillating and more pleasurable double entendre, for it was most clearly about something they’d never had but hoped and dreamed of having and now had begun to believe they were within the shortest of short distances of finally tasting. “Because you all know,” their candidate told them, “that I know sweet potato pie.” “

Reference:

Mark Danner [2008]:  Obama and Sweet Potato Pie.  New York Review of Books, 23 October 2008.

For instance, under the direction of John Fox, the Advanced Computation Laboratory at Europe’s largest medical research charity, Cancer Research UK (formerly, the Imperial Cancer Research Fund) applied Toulmin’s model of argument in computer systems they built and deployed in the 1990s to handle conflicting arguments in some domain.  An example was a system for advising medical practitioners with the arguments for and against prescribing a particular drug to a patient with a particular medical history and disease presentation.  One company commercializing these ideas in medicine is Infermed.    Other applications include the automated prediction of chemical properties such as toxicity (see for example, the work of Lhasa Ltd), and dynamic optimization of extraction processes in mining.

For me, Toulmin’s most influential work was was his book Cosmopolis, which identified and deconstructed the main biases evident in contemporary western culture since the work of Descartes:

• A bias for the written over the oral
• A bias for the universal over the particular
• A bias for the general over the local
• A bias for the timeless over the timely.

Formal logic as a theory of human reasoning can be seen as example of these biases at work. In contrast, argumentation theory attempts to reclaim the theory of reasoning from formal logic with an approach able to deal with conflicts and gaps, and with special cases, and less subject to such biases.    Norm’s dispute with Larry Teabag is a recent example of resistance to the puritanical, Descartian desire to impose abstract formalisms onto practical reasoning quite contrary to local and particular sense.

Another instance of Descartian autism is the widespread deletion of economic history from gradaute programs in economics and the associated priviliging of deductive reasoning in abstract mathematical models over other forms of argument (eg, narrative accounts, laboratory and field experiments, field samples and surveys, computer simulation, etc) in economic theory.  One consequence of this autism is the Great Moral Failure of Macroeconomics in the Great World Recession of 2008-onwards.

References:

S. E. Toulmin [1958]:  The Uses of Argument.  Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press. 

S. E. Toulmin [1990]: Cosmopolis:  The Hidden Agenda of Modernity.  Chicago, IL, USA: University of Chicago Press.

Technorati Tags: Stephen Toulmin, argumentation, logic

This concern with lingustic purity is clearly inspired by France’s envy of Anglo-Saxon practice, which, as is well known, sets its face like flint against all overseas importations.  Regular visitors to London report with awe on the capacity of the English of all social classes for keeping the language clean.  From the blase habitues of the London clubs – raconteurs, bon viveurs, hommes d’affaires – with their penchant for bonhomie and camaraderie, through the soi-disant bien pensants of the passe liberal press to the demi-monde of the jeunesse doree, where ingenues in risque decolletages dine a deux, tete a tete and a la carte with their louche nouveau riche fiances in brassieries and estaminets, pure English is de rigueur, and the mildest infusion of French considered de trop, deja vu, cliche, devoid of all cachet, a linguistic melange or bouillabaisse, a cultural cul-de-sac.

The English want no part of this outre galere, no role in this farouche charade, no rapprochement with this compote.   They get no frisson from detente with diablerie.  And long may it remain so.  “A bas les neologismes!” as you often hear people cry late at night on the Earl’s Court Road.”

Source:  The Guardian Weekly, 1989-01-08 (London, UK).

“I think he sees the world through a writer’s eye,” says senior White House adviser and former Chicago journalist David Axelrod. “I’ve always appreciated about him his ability to participate in a scene and also reflect on it. I mean, I remember when we were meeting clandestinely with the guys who were vetting the vice presidential candidates. There was this courtly southern gentleman who was doing the vetting. The president said to me, ‘This whole scene’s right out of a Grisham novel.’

“I also have to say, one of the great thrills is to watch him work on a speech. It’s not just the content—he’s very focused on that—but more than anyone I’ve ever worked with, he’s focused on the rhythm of the words. Like, he’ll invert words. He’ll say, ‘I need a one-beat word here.’ There’s no question who the best writer in the [speech-writing] group is.”

Winston Churchill won the Nobel Prize for Literature (in 1953, after writing – or perhaps supervising the writing of – his History of the English Speaking Peoples), so there’s hope yet for Bam’s next Nobel.

Technorati Tags: Obama, Winston Churchill, Nobel Prize

Kenneth Arrow (2000), Michael Atiyah (2008), PK van der Byl (1985), James Callaghan (1980), Noam Chomsky (2003), Joan Coxsedge (1979),  Don Dunstan (c. 1977), Steve Fuller (2008), Leszek Gasieniec (2004), Leslie Goldberg (2009), Joe Gqabi (1981), Tim Harford (2011), Bob Hawke (1980), Xavier Herbert (1976), Wiebe van der Hoek (2003), Anahid Kassabian (2009), Michael Kearns (2011), Kgosi Linchwe II Kgafela (1983), Bill Mansfield (1976-1980, several times), Robert May (2011, twice), Mobutu Sese Seko (1981, at gunpoint), Moshoeshoe II (1982), Robert Mugabe (1981-7, numerous times), Ralph Nader (c. 1977), Robert Oakeshott (c. 1985),  Christos Papadimitriou (2009), Joseph Rotblat (2002), Rory Stewart (2009), Oliver Tambo (1987), Edgar Tekere (1981), Rene Thom (1979), John Tukey (c. 1979), Moshe Vardi (2010), Gough Whitlam (1975-8, several times), Gerry Wilkes (1975), Elizabeth II Windsor (1980), Michael Wooldridge (2003), Andrew Young (1979) and Mick Young (1979).

In this list are two Nobelistas (Arrow/Economics and Rotblat/Peace), two Fields Medallists (Atiyah, Thom) and several politicians.   Joseph Rotblat, although then in his 90s, stood for an hour and spoke compellingly without notes of the early history of the atomic bomb.   On the list are three monarchs:  Linchwe II, Kgosi (Paramount Chief) of the Bakgatla in Botswana, King Moshoeshoe II of Lesotho, and Queen Elizabeth II, of Great Britain et al.   At the time I heard Moshoeshoe, his prior attempts to meddle in Lesotho’s politics (including forming his own political party and having his own shadow cabinet) had led the (election-losing-but-power-retaining) government of Prime Minister Leabua Jonathan to send him into exile, and only allow him back into the country on condition that he severely limit his public outings.  His one chance each year to speak unfettered was at the annual graduation ceremony of the National University of Lesotho.   Notoriously, he would take full advantage of this opportunity, speaking for hours, mostly in Sesotho, and he did this on the one occasion I heard him.   Some pleasure was gained in watching PM Jonathan, sitting on the graduation stage alongside him, squirm as his government’s policies were denounced by the head of state.   Although not invited, I also once attended a ceremony at which Queen Elizabeth II, as Australian Head of State, gave a speech (on Australian democracy), so I have included her name in this list.   Bob Hawke I heard give his maiden speech as an MP in the Australian Commonwealth House of Representatives in 1980, a speech I witnessed from the public gallery.  Contrary to both custom and to subsequent newspaper reports, his speech was interrupted by heckling from the Government (ie, Liberal and National Parties) benches; it is the custom in Westminster Parliaments that maiden speeches should be heard in silence, but Hawke arrived in Parliament with enemies pre-made and of long standing.

Of the people I have listed, the speakers who most impressed me as orators were Mugabe, Stewart, Whitlam and A. Young; the speakers who most impressed me as intellects were Fuller, Stewart and Whitlam.  Robert Mugabe’s wily, strategic intelligence and jesuitical reasoning were evident in many of his speeches, which were invariably impressive and solidly argued, and presented with superb control of the audience, in idioms, tones and registers appropriate for the audience and the occasion.  Mugabe did once employ some of Zimbabwe’s best young intellects as personal advisors (eg, Charles Tazvishaya), but I’m sure these speeches were primarily his own work.  Perhaps more than any other modern culture, maShona culture stresses metaphor, parable, allusion, and indirection in communication, and Mugabe was a master of these registers also.   Rory Stewart spoke without notes in entire paragraphs, with nary a pause, a stumble, or even any utterance that was not a valid English word.   Gough Whitlam was always erudite and witty, with a clear appreciation of the power of his own oratory, and with use of classical tropes, for example, mixing long, complex sentences with short ones effectively, and presenting ideas in threes, as Barack Obama often does.

The speakers who least impressed me were Callaghan and Chomsky.   Callaghan, giving an address to an Australian Labor Party fund-raising luncheon in Canberra, a year or so after his election defeat in 1979, spoke to an audience who had each paid a significant amount to hear him (AUD 50, if I recall correctly).  Despite this, he said barely 100 words, along these lines:  “You Australians have a great country here!  Whatever you do, don’t ruin it with socialism!  I’m sure you don’t want to hear my opinions, so let me mingle with you, table-by-table.” These words were spoken notwithstanding that he knew that we had each paid good money precisely in order to hear his opinions.   Callaghan, former British Prime Minister, Privy Counsellor, and newly a Lord of the Realm, then stepped off the platform, went straight to the the official table, and stayed there the remainder of the lunch.   It would have been nice to have heard a speech with an argument or two, or even a reflective anecdote, but I suppose ex-Prime Ministers have no one to write their speeches for them.   If ever there was a demonstration of the difference in the modern British Labour Party between the great prior expectations created before an election and the enormous vapidness of the delivery which ensues in execution after election, this was it:   We didn’t hear about Callaghan’s time in government; instead we got to experience the same style of disappointment that British Labour voters experienced with his time in government.

Although speaking for 75 minutes rather than 5, Chomsky also presented no arguments.  Talking on the broad theme of the vile wickedness of the USA, he instead gave a series of haiku-like statements on topic after topic, mostly examples of evil actions or intentions of varous US administrations, all the way back to Ulysses S. Grant.    These topics were not discussed in any discernible order.  After some time of this topic-flitting, I noticed the lack of continuity and the absence of any apparent order, and so I began to count the number of successive statements on each topic.    I never got past 5 successive statements on the same topic, although I did notice the same topics appeared and re-appeared several times in the course of the talk, subtly restated (not merely repeated), like old patterns coming back into view in a kaleidoscope.   In music theory terms, the form was something like:  A-B-C-D-A-E-D-F-G-H-C-A-H-C-I-J-K-B-L-E-. . . .  Most of the audience seemed to approve of Chomsky’s talk, so he was certainly not unwise in adopting the structure he did.   Indeed, perhaps this was evidence of sophisticated efficiency in his rhetorical-targeting:  If you already believe that the USA is the source of all evil in the modern world, without a single mitigating feature, then you don’t need to hear any arguments demonstrating or supporting this belief; and if you don’t already believe this, then you don’t normally attend public lectures given by Noam Chomsky.

I saw PK van der Byl give an address at an election rally in Mount Pleasant, Harare, Zimbabwe in the election campaign of 1985.   Pieter van der Byle, aka PK, had been a Minister in the Smith Government which declared UDI in 1965, and ended his Rhodesian cabinet career as Minister for Foreign Affairs in 1979.  In 1985, he was a candidate for the non-black-reserved seat of Mount Pleasant, which surrounded the University of Zimbabwe.  It was odd that he chose to contest this seat, as it was surely the most liberal of the non-black-reserved seats, and PK lost the election heavily to Chris Anderson, a white defector from the Rhodesia Front (RF) who had become a Minister in the ZANU-PF government..  (Indeed, in a statistical analysis I did after that election, I found that the vote for each candidate of the Conservative Alliance of Zimbabwe  – the party formerly known as the Rhodesia Front, and still led by Ian Smith  - in each of the 20 non-black constituencies was roughly proportional to the distance of the constituency from Mount Pleasant.)   PK spoke floridly and pompously, almost as if he was a caricature of himself, with a campaign message aimed at elderly white voters who remembered the massacre of nuns in the Belgian Congo by black liberation soldiers in 1960 as if it were yesterday.  The Belgian Congo, as I recall, figured prominently in his campaign speech, and, despite its (then) independence as Zaire being 25 years previously, he never once called the country anything other than the Belgian Congo.   The fact that the Belgians left few miles of paved roads in what became Zaire was given as a reason to support white settler colonialism, since the Rhodesians had paved many hundreds of more miles of road in their utopian white settlement on the highveld.   Never have I seen an election  campaign speech less appropriate to the actual problems of the country or the society in which it was presented.  But the audience, who were mostly of retirement age, and entirely white, lapped it up.

In contrast to PK’s sad memories of Zaire, I happened once to arrive on a flight at Lusaka airport and found my departure for the city blocked by the imminent arrival of Zaire’s president, Mobutu Sese Seko, on a state visit to Zambia.  Everyone inside the airport terminal was herded, at gunpoint, onto the tarmac to wave, cheer and ululate as his eminence deplaned.  We listened as he spoke to the crowd about the brotherly love he and all Zairis had for Zambians, a little in English but mostly in French.  As a  rare white person in the crowd, I was presented to him later (those damn guns in the back again).  I don’t recall much of his oratory.  At the time, I thought him a greedy, dictatorial, kleptocratic, nepotistic, murderous, lily-livered thug, and did not realize he was, in addition to all these fine qualities, a paid agent of CIA.  Who could have known?  How difficult it is to judge people accurately only on what they do in public?

Technorati Tags: Bertrand Russell, TS Eliot, Mao Tse-Tung, Kenneth Arrow, Michael Atiyah, PK van der Byl, James Callaghan, Noam Chomsky, Joan Coxsedge, Don Dunstan, Steve Fuller, Joe Gqabi, Tim Harford, Bob Hawke, Xavier Herbert, Anahid Kassabian, Michael Kearns, Kgosi Linchwe II Kgafela, Bill Mansfield, Robert May, Mobutu Sese Seko, Moshoeshoe II, Robert Mugabe, Ralph Nader, Robert Oakeshott, Christos Papadimitriou, Joseph Rotblat, Rory Stewart, Oliver Tambo, Edgar Tekere, Rene Thom, John Tukey, Moshe Vardi, Gough Whitlam, Gerry Wilkes, Elizabeth II Windsor, Andrew Young, Mick Young

All performatives imply propositions.  There’s no point in my operating a performative like, say, promising, or cursing, unless I have certain beliefs about the nature of reality: that there is indeed such an institution as promising, that I am able to perform it, and so on.  The performative and the propositional work into each other.  

Before commenting on the substance here (ie, religion), some words on Eagleton’s evident mis-understanding of speech act theory and the philosophy of language, a mis-understanding that should have been clear if he tested his words against his own experiences of life.  His statement concerns performatives – utterances which potentially change the state of the world by their being uttered.  Examples include promises, commands, threats, entreaties, prayers, various legal declarations (eg, that a certain couple are now wed),  etc.  But mere propositional statements (that some description of the world is true) may also change the state of the world by the mere fact of being uttered.

First sentence:  “All performatives imply propositions.”  Well, no, Professor E., not at all.  All rationally-uttered, effectively-executed performatives may be used by rational observers to infer propositions.   But different participants and observers in a dialog (speaker, intended audience, over-hearers) may infer different propositions from the very same utterance.  Worse than that, none, some, or indeed all of these inferred propositions may be true.   All manner of propositional content (including none, some and lots) may be intended to be stated or believed by the speaker of a performative utterance, even when that utterance is not effective in changing the state of the world.   Moreover, utterances which change the state of the world may do so in ways not intended or even not predicted by the speaker.

Even when an utterance is itself just a proposition and not intended to change the state of the world, inferring what proposition the speaker intended to state and – a separate question, this - what propositions are true as a result of the utterance, are non-trivial reasoning tasks with the possibility of no definitive solutions, as this example makes clear.

Second sentence:  “There’s no point in my operating a performative like, say, promising, or cursing, unless I have certain beliefs about the nature of reality: that there is indeed such an institution as promising, that I am able to perform it, and so on.”   This statement too is in error.    First, it only makes sense if it applies to rational speakers of performatives (eg, those seeking to achieve some goal), since performatives may be uttered for for any reasons or none at all.   Otherwise, parrots would be allowed to be speakers of performatives.   Second, malicious or deceiving or whimsical speakers may have goals, for which performative utterances not based on reality may be very effective and thus appropriate.  Third, even if we assume a speaker is not malicious, whimsical or being intentionally-deceptive, he or she may make a performative utterance in order to FORM a belief about reality, rather than starting from one.  I may promise you to do some task in order to find out if you desire that task to be done, or to discover if that task be feasible, or to discover if you believe that task to be feasible, or to discover if you are willing to indicate to me that you believe that task to be feasible, or to discover if you are willing to let me think that you believe that task to be feasible, or to allow you to form the belief that you have led me to believe that you believe that task to be feasible, and so on, ad infinitum.

Third sentence: “The performative and the propositional work into each other.”  They may do so, but not necessarily.  As the analysis above makes clear, there is no necessary connection between a performative utterance and any particular proposition believed by the speaker or by the intended hearer, or by any over-hearer.  How could there be such a necessary connection when an infinite number of propositions  may be validly inferred from any performative utterance, as I just showed?

So three erroneous statements in three sentences:   Quite an achievement!   I guess some charitable allowance should be given for the fact that these remarks were in a spoken interview and presumably made off-the-cuff.  But one wonders if the good Prof. E. has ever played poker or bridge, or ever negotiated with a plumber, or ever been in business, or ever instructed any recalcitrant child to do something they don’t wish to.

Technorati Tags: speech act theory, philosophy of language, performatives, propositions

What might have seemed, for example,  mere pointless musings on the correct way to undertake reasoning – by Aristotle, by Islamic and Roman Catholic medieval theologians, by numerous English, Irish and American abstract mathematicians in the 19th century, by an entire generation of Polish logicians before World War II, and by those real-world men-of-action Gottlob Frege, Bertrand Russell, Ludwig Wittgenstein and Alonzo Church – turned out to be EXTREMELY USEFUL for the design and engineering of electronic computers.   Despite Russell’s Zen-influenced personal motto – “Just do!  Don’t think!” (later adopted by IBM) – his work turned out to be useful after all.   I can see the British research funding agencies right now, using their sophisticated and proven prognostication procedures to calculate the society-wide economic and social benefits we should expect to see from our current research efforts over the next 2300 years  – ie, the length of time that Aristotle’s research on logic took to be implemented in technology.   Thank goodness our politicians have shown no myopic utilitarianism this last couple of centuries, eh what?!

All while this man apparently received no direct state or commercial research funding for his efforts as a computer pioneer, playing with “pointless” abstractions like the lambda calculus.

And Normblog also comments.

Technorati Tags: utilitarianism, lambda calculus