Maverick Philosopher

What Is the Appeal of Ordinary Language Philosophy?

One source of its appeal is that it reinstates much of what was ruled out as cognitively meaningless by logical positivism but without rehabilitating the commitments of old-time metaphysics. Permit me to explain. (My ruminations are in part inspired by Ernest Gellner, to give credit where credit is due.) 

Crudely put, as befits a crude philosophy, logical positivism is just Hume warmed over. The LPs take his famous two-pronged fork and sharpen the tines. Hume spoke of relations of ideas and matters of fact, and consigned to the flames anything thing that was not one or the other. In the Treatise of Human Nature, he spoke of "school metaphysics and divinity" as deserving of such rude treatment. Since Hume's day, old-time metaphysics and theology have had a forking hard time of it.

The LPs spoke of two disjoint classes of statements and maintained that every cognitively meaningful statement must be a member of the one or the other. The one class contains the truths of logic and mathematics and such analytic statements as 'Every cygnet is a swan' all interpreted as true by convention. The other class consists of statements empirically verifiable in principle. Any statement not in one of these two disjoint classes is adjudged by the LPs to be cognitive meaningless. Thus the aesthetic statement, 'The adagio movement of Beethoven's Ninth exceeds in beauty anything Bruckner wrote' is by their lights not false, but cognitively meaningless, though they generously grant it some purely subjective emotive meaning. And the same goes for the characteristic statements one finds in theology, metaphysics, and ethics. Such statements are not false, but meaningless, i.e., neither true nor false.

Imagine a debate between a Muslim and a Christian. Muslim: "God is one! There is no god but God (Allah)!" Christian: "God is triune (three-in-one)." For an LP, the debate is meaningless since theological assertion and counter-assertion are meaningless. The assertions are neither analytic nor empirically verifiable. Or consider a debate between two Christians. They are both Trinitarians: there is one God in three divine Persons. But the man from Rome maintains that the Holy Ghost proceeds from the Father and the Son (filioque) while the man from Constantinople maintains that the Holy Ghost proceeds directly from the Father. For an LP, this debate about the procession of Persons is cognitively meaningless. I chose these examples to show how attractive LP is. For many of you will be inclined to think of these debates as in some sense meaningless. "How could one know one way or the other?" Many of you will be inclined to want to tie meaningfulness to empirical verifiability. Nevertheless, Logical Positivism  is untenable. But that is not my present point.

My present point concerns the appeal of OLP. The OL boys weren't out to resurrect metaphysics. They took on board the anti-metaphysical animus of the LPs. But their approach allowed the salvaging of ways of talking that the LPs had no interest in preserving. Religious language is a key example. So what I am contending is that one source of the appeal of OL philosophy was that it allowed religious talk and thus religion itself to be saved from the forking accusation of meaninglessness. But it did this without crediting old-time metaphysics. You can see why that would appeal to a lot of people. To explain this properly would take a lot of scribbling.

But the central idea is that religion is a form of life and a language game, a self-contained language game that needs no justification ab extra. Hence it needs no justification from metaphysics or philosophy generally. It is in order as it is -- to use a characteristically Wittgensteinian turn of phrase. By the same token, religion cannot be attacked from the side of philosophy. It is an island of meaning unto itself, and is insofar forth insulated from criticism. (L. insula, ae = island.) Nor can it come into conflict with science or be debunked by science. Within the religious language game there are valid and invalid moves, things it is correct and incorrect to say; but the langauge game itself is neither correct nor incorrect. It just is. Religion is a groundless system of belief, a system of belief that neither needs nor is capable of justification. Since I reject both LP and OLP, I am not endorsing this view of religion. I am merely explaining one of the reasons why people are attracted to OLP: it allows them to practice a religion while ignoring both the threat from traditional philosophy (which demands the justification of key religious tenets) and the the threat of positivism which makes positive science the ultimate arbiter of reality.

This post truncates a larger discussion to be found in What is Right and What is Wrong in Wittgenstein's Philosophy of Religion.

Wittgenstein on Time and Flux

Ludwig Wittgenstein, Philosophical Remarks, ed. Rush Rhees, trs. Hargreaves and White, Chicago 1975, p. 83:

52. It's strange that in ordinary life we are not troubled by the feeling that the phenomenon is slipping away from us, the constant flux of appearance, but only when we philosophize. This indicates that what is in question here is an idea suggested by a misapplication of our language. 

This indicates to me that Wittgenstein lacked a metaphysical sensibility. It is precisely in ordinary life, and prior to his occupation with technical metaphysics, that the metaphysician feels and is saddened by the transitoriness of things, the flux of phenomena, the passage of time. That feeling is part of what sets him on the path of technical metaphysics in the first place. It is the fundamental sense of the transience and unreality of this world that disposes him to take seriously metaphysical writings when he first encounters them. And it is the lack of this sense in G. E. Moore and in Wittgenstein which disposes them to be puzzled by the writings of metaphysicians like Bradley and McTaggart and to set out to debunk them either by defending common sense (as if the metaphysician were simply denying it) or by bringing us back to ordinary language used in ordinary ways.

Wittgenstein says that "only when we philosophize" are we troubled by the flux of phenomena. Not only is this plainly false, it suggests that there is something aberrant rather than natural about philosophizing, as if philosophy were a disease of cognition needing treatment rather than refutation. I simply deny this.  If there is a cognitive defect, it is in those who fail to perceive the relative unreality of the transient.

Philosophy arises quite naturally in people of a reflective disposition who have a sense of the relative unreality, the ontological non-ultimacy, of the world of time and change. Philosophy is not a disease, but a response to the inherent questionableness of the world and our lives in it.   In the Theaetetus, Plato speaks of wonder as the "feeling of the philosopher." This wonder is not mere puzzlement induced by linguistic confusion but a questioning elicited by the nature of things, a questioning that is a transcending of this world, a transcending that issues in attempts to put into language the essence of the world.

It is the possibility of this transcending that Wittgenstein questions. He questions it by questioning the meaningfulness of the sorts of extended uses of ordinary words that the metaphysician employs. The metaphysician takes a word like 'present' from ordinary usage and then says something extraordinary like, 'The present alone is real,' or 'Only the present experience has reality.' Wittgenstein objects to this with a sort of Contrast Argument:

We are tempted to say: only the experience of the present moment has reality. And then the first reply must be: As opposed to what? Does it imply that I didn't get up this morning? (For if so, it would be dubious.) But this is not what we mean. Does it mean that an event that I'm not remembering at this instant didn't occur? Not that either. (85)

Wittgenstein's point is that when one says that the present alone is real, one is using 'present' in an extended sense, one in which it no longer contrasts with 'past' and 'future.' He seems to think that the presentist metaphysician is saying something that conflicts with such obvious facts as that one got up in the morning. But here is where Wittgenstein's Contrast Argument becomes hard to credit. Wittgenstein's mistake is to think that when the presentist, saying that the present alone is real, implies that the past is unreal, he is implying that the past is nothing at all in a way that would render it false that we got up this morning. But of course the presentist does not deny the gross facts; what he does is reinterpret them. His point is something like this: the reality of the past is relative to, or derivative from, the (absolute) reality of the present.

The Kehowski Contretemps: Political Correctness Alive and Well at Glendale Community College

Here,  here, and here.

The Elusive Assertoric Component

William of Woking comments:

 Consider again

(1) Tom runs

(2) that Tom runs

(3) It is true that Tom runs

We have agreed that (1) and (3) are semantically identical. Yes, they express the very same propositional content or thought. They have the very same meaning (Sinn).   We also agree that (2) is verbally more complex than (1), likewise (3) is verbally more complex than (2). Yes, that's obvious. 

Do you agree that it logically follows that in some cases, increasing the verbal complexity can reduce the semantic complexity? I argue as follows. Either (2) is semantically more complex than (1) or less complex. If more complex, then it follows that (2) is semantically more complex than (3), because of the semantic identity we agreed. In which case it logically follows that increasing the verbal complexity (in the move from (2) to (3)) reduces the semantic complexity. Therefore &c. Or (2) is semantically less complex than (1). In which case it logically follows that increasing the verbal complexity (from (1) to (2)) reduces the semantic complexity.

Your argument seems correct: in some cases increasing verbal complexity reduces semantic complexity.  But what exactly do you mean by 'semantic complexity'?  Verbal complexity seems clear: if one expression contains more words than another, then the first expression is verbally more complex.  But you need to explain to us exactly what you mean when you say that one expression is semantically more complex than another.  For example, (1) and (2) are semantically distinct.  The first has a truth-value, the second doesn't.  But which is semantically more complex?  What criterion do you use to decide that?  I don't see that (2) is semantically more complex than (1).  If you think of 'that' as a sentential operator, then you can say that (2) results from (1) when 'that' operates upon (1).  But that is not to say that (2) is semantically more complex than (1).  For 'that' by itself carries no meaning.  It is syncategorematical as opposed to autocaregorematical to use some Medieval lingo.

If you agree to this, then I have a large part of what I propose, for nearly all your negative arguments rest on the observation that a token of the same verbal expression (i.e. with the same verbal complexity) may appear to lack the assertoric component that the other has. My reply here is that this is consistent with 'semantic subtraction' operators. The token of the expression (1) above ('Tom runs') is identical to the token included in the that-clause in (2).   No, they are distinct tokens; they are only type-identical. Yet (2) as a whole appears not to be an assertion. To be precise: (2), by itself, cannot be used to make an assertion.  You would argue, in general, that this is because there is no such thing as a semantic component of assertion. I reply, in general, that this is because of the 'negative effect' of the 'that operator'.

I'm afraid this is still very unclear.  Consider the sentence 'Tom sucks.'  Now consider two tokens of this sentence type.  (T1)  'Tom sucks' uttered by Tanya to express contempt for Tom. (T2) 'Tom sucks' uttered by Tony to describe how Tom is ingesting his cola.  From the point of view of grammar, both tokens are in the indicative mood.  But only one is being used to make an assertion.  Therefore, there cannot be an assertoric component in indicative sentence types.  And whether there is anything assertoric about a token depends on how it is used in a concrete situation.

In any case, what is the wider relevance of all this?  What's at stake here?  Where are you going with this?

The Amazing Resiliency of the Human Body

Proved once again by the antics of wildman Dennis Hopper who managed to cling to the mortal coil for 74 years despite prodigious self-abuse. 

Saturday Night at the Oldies: Sleep, Dreams, and Insomnia

Bobby Lewis, Tossin' and Turnin (1961).  Santo and Johnny, Sleepwalk (1959).  Joe Satriani's cover blows the original and every other cover clean out of the water. Masterful guitar work.  Bobby Edwards, You're the Reason I Don't Sleep at Night.  A country crossover hit from 1961.  Leadbelly, Where Did You Sleep Last Night (1944).  Here's hoping your Dream Lover doesn't leave you with Tears on Your Pillow. 

Cops: A Necessary Evil

I don't much like law enforcement agents (qua law enforcement agents) and I try to avoid contact with them, not because I violate laws or have something to hide, but because I understand human nature, and I understand how power corrupts people, not inevitably, but predictably. Cops and sheriffs are too often arrogant, disrespectful, and willing to overstep their lawful authority. But there is a species of varmint that I like even less than law enforcement agents: criminals and scofflaws. They are the scum of the earth. To clean up scum you need people who are willing to get dirty and who share some of the attributes of those they must apprehend and incarcerate. I mean such attributes as courage, cunning, some recklessness, with a dash of ruthlessness thrown in for good measure. Government and its law enforcement agencies are a necessary evil. That is not pessimism, but realism. There are anarchists and others who dream of a world in which good order arises spontaneously and coercive structures are unnecessary. I want these anarchists and others to be able to dream on in peace. For that very reason, I reject their dangerous utopianism.

The Religious Man's Positivism

Superstition is the religious man's positivism.

Love Thy Neighbor

It is easy to feel compassion for those distant in time and space. But we are enjoined to love our neighbor. This is made somewhat easier by careful choice of one's neighborhood.

Assertion Again

The enigmatic William of Woking e-mails from London:

Hardly a week passes by without my pondering over your objection to my position on assertion.  Would it help us if I try to clarify my position again?  And it would help me, if you clarified what your position is. My position is:

1. The semantics of a sentence is compositional, i.e. a sentence has a meaning, and the meaning has parts. (The semantic composition doesn't necessarily have to correspond to the verbal composition, although it often will).

 

This principle of the compositionality of meaning seems intuitively clear and unproblematic.  The meaning of a semantic whole is a function of  (is uniquely determined by) the meanings of its semantic parts. So far, so good.

2. There is a component of the meaning of the sentence which corresponds to assertion. By this, I mean that without this component, we no longer have a sentence, and by means of this anyone who grasps or understands this component will be correctly taken to be stating what is capable of truth and falsity.

By a sentence you mean a declarative sentence.  Such sentences are either true or false.  You speak of a component of meaning that corresponds to assertion, a component without which a sentence would not be a sentence.  This I don't understand.  Which  component of 'Tom is tall' corresponds to assertion?  It can't be 'Tom' or 'tall.'  And it can't be 'is' because 'is' is a syntactic, not a semantic, component. 

You may also be conflating the question of what makes a sentence assertible and the question of what makes a sentence a sentence as a opposed to a set, sum, or list of its parts.  E.g, what distinguishes the sentence 'Tom runs' (which is either true or false) from the list: Tom, runs (which is neither true nor false)?

If I am given 'Tom is tall' and 'Is Tom tall?' I will classify the first as declarative (indicative) and the second as interrogative.  The difference in grammatical mood is indicated by word order and presence/absence of the question mark.  But there is no one component in 'Tom is tall' that makes it indicative.  So I honestly don't know what you are claiming by (2).

Which of these do you disagree with? Which of them needs further clarification? I suspect you don't agree, for reasons you have given before, namely that the very same sentence can be uttered without the speaker being understood to be stating something true or false (e.g. if the speaker winks, or visibly crosses their fingers, or utters the sentence in an explicitly arch or ironic way).

Right.  I made the point that one can utter an indicative sentence and not make an assertion.   Suppose Johnny is picking his nose in public, and Mommy says to Johnny, 'We don't do that.' Mommy utters an indicative sentence, and yet does not make an assertion; she issues a command.  An assertion is either true or false, a command is neither.  If Johnny is a smartass, he might continue picking his nose while saying to his mother, 'You didn't tell me to cease and desist from rhinotillexomania, you merely stated that people like us don't generally engage in it.'  You could call that the smartass exploitation of the difference between sentence meaning and speaker's meaning.

I conclude that what makes a sentence indicative and what makes it an assertion are two different things.  Indicativity pertains to a sentence-type by itself apart from its tokening by a speaker.  Assertion, however, is a speech act and belongs to pragmatics.  Furthermore, I do not see that the indicativity of a sentence is signaled by some one separable component of it.  Which proper part of 'Tom runs' makes it indcative?  No proper part. 

A second example.  'Obama sucks' is an indicative sentence.  But a tokening of this sentence type will not typically express a proposition or convey an assertion; it will typically be used to express dislike or contempt.  So again, whatever it is that make a sentence indicative is different from whatever it is that makes it an assertion.

You have also objected that assertion 'is an act', but I have never clearly understood this objection. I agree that uttering a sentence is an act. But semantics i.e. meaning cannot exist without signs, which are physical and tangible tokens for the thoughts and concepts we want to express. Nor can we express our thoughts (which are personal and subjective events) without the signs. So even if assertion is an act (of producing sign-tokens), that is not inconsistent with what I am claiming. What you need to show is that no physical or verbal or written sign corresponds to assertion. (If that is your objection, but I don't really understand it, as I say).

My point was that assertion is a speech act that belongs within pragmatics, not semantics or syntactics.  Perhaps you will grant me that.  What you are looking for, apparently, is a part of a sentence that makes it an assertion.  But whether or not a sentence is an assertion depends on how it is used in a concrete situation.

Marxist Utopianism Illustrated by a Passage from The German Ideology

Here is a famous passage from Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, The German Ideology (ed. C. J. Arthur, New York: International Publishers, 1970, p. 53):

. . . as soon as the distribution of labour comes into being, each man has a particular, exclusive sphere of activity, which is forced upon him and from which he cannot escape. He is a hunter, a fisherman, a shepherd, or a critical critic, and must remain so if he does not want to lose his means of livelihood; while in communist society, where nobody has one exclusive sphere of activity but each can become accomplished in any branch he wishes, society regulates the general production and thus makes it possible for me to do one thing today and another tomorrow, to hunt in the morning, fish in the afternoon, rear cattle in the evening, criticise after dinner, just as I have a mind, without ever becoming hunter, fisherman, shepherd or critic.  

With all due respect to Dennis Prager, Marx did not envisage a society in which people do no work, but one in which their work was non-alienating and fulfilling.  If you have ever worked a factory job where you are required to perfom a mindless repetitive task for low wages for eight or more hours per day, then you should be able to sympathize somewhat with Marx.  But the sympathy is not likely to survive a clear recogntion of the absurdity of what Marx is proposing above. 

First of all, it is is silly to say that "each can become accomplished in any branch he wishes."  Could Saul Kripke have become a diplomat or a chaffeur or an auto mechanic if he wished?  PeeWee Herman a furniture mover or Pope?  Woody Allen a bronco-buster?  Evel Knievel a neurosurgeon?  And if Marx has actually done any 'cattle rearing,' he would have soon discovered that he couldn't be successful at it if he did it once in a while when he wasn't in the mood for hunting, fishing, or writing Das Kapital.

Utopian, reality-denying nonsense.  Dangerous, murderous  nonsense.  Incoherence: dictatorship of the proletariat, classless society, worker's paradise.  Cuba?  North Korea?  Communist China?  Dictatorship of the dictator (Stalin, Mao, Fidel . . .).  Classlessness by reduction of all to one class, that of the impoverished and oppressed.

Thanks to the Left: Balkanization, Tribalism, Civil War

For more than two centuries, individuals with diverse backgrounds have come together to form a national ‘melting pot’ and harmonious society sustained by allegiance to the country and its founding principles. But today’s open-ended mass migration, coupled with the destructive influences of biculturalism, multiculturalism, bilingualism, multilingualism, dual citizenship, and affirmative action, have combined to form the building blocks of a different kind of society—where aliens are taught to hold tightly to their former cultures and languages, balkanization grows, antagonism and conflict are aroused, and victimhood is claimed at perceived slights. If a nation does not show and teach respect for its own identity, principles, and institutions, that corrosive attitude is conveyed to the rest of the world, including newly arriving aliens. And if this is unchecked, the nation will ultimately cease to exist.
Mark Levin, Liberty and Tyranny: A Conservative Manifesto, (New York: Threshold Editions, 2009), pp. 160-161.  Here.

Presentism and Existence-Entailing Relations: An Aporetic Tetrad

It is plausibly maintained that all relations are existence-entailing. To illustrate from the dyadic case: if R relates a and b, then both a and b exist.   A relation cannot hold unless the things between which or among which it holds all exist.  A weaker, and hence even more plausible, claim is that all relations are existence-symmetric: if R relates a and b, then either both relata exist or both do not exist. Both the stronger and the weaker claims rule out the possibility of a relation that relates an existent and a nonexistent. (So if Cerberus is eating my cat, then Cerberus exists. And if I am thinking about Cerberus, then, given that Cerberus does not exist, my thinking does not relate me to Cerberus.  This implies that  intentionality is not a relation, though it is, as Brentano says, relation-like (ein Relativliches).)

But if presentism is true, and only temporally present items exist, then no relation connects a present with a nonpresent item. This seems hard to accept for the following reason.

I ate lunch  an hour ago. So the event of my eating (E) is earlier than the event of my typing (T). How can it be true that E bears the earlier than relation to T, and T bears the later than relation to E, unless both E and T exist? But E is nonpresent. If presentism is true, then E does not exist.  And if E does not exist, then E does not stand in the earlier than relation to T.  If, on the other hand, there are events that exist but are nonpresent, then presentism is false.

How will the presentist respond? Since E does not exist on his view, while T does, and E is earlier than T, he must either (A) deny that all relations are existence-symmetric, or deny (B) that earlier than is a relation. He must either allow the possibility of genuine relations that connect nonexistents and existents, or deny that T stands in a temporal relation to E.

To  fully savor the problem we  cast it in the mold of an aporetic tetrad:

1. All relations are either existence-entailing or existence-symmetric.

2. Earlier than is a relation.

3. Presentism: only temporally present items exist.

4. Some events are earlier than others.

Each limb of the tetrad is exceedingly plausible.  But they cannot all be true:  any three, taken together, entail the negation of the remaining limb.  For example, the first three entail the negation of the fourth.  To solve the problem, we must reject one of the limbs.  Now (4) cannot be rejected because it is a datum.

Will you deny (1) and say that there are relations that are neither existence-entailing nor existence-symmetric?  I find this hard to swallow because of the following argument.  (a) Nothing can have properties unless it exists.  Therefore (b) nothing can have relational properties unless it exists. (c) Every relation gives rise to relational properties:  if Rab, then a has the property of standing in R to b, and b has the property of standing in R to a.  Therefore, (d) if R relates a and b, then both a and b exist.

Will you deny (2) and say that earlier than is not a relation?  What else could it be?

Will you deny presentism and say that that both present and nonpresent items exist?  Since it is obvious that present and nonpresent items cannot exist in the present-tense sense of 'exists,'  the suggestion has to be that present and nonpresent (past or future) items exist in a tenseless sense of 'exist.'  But what exactly does this mean?

The problem is genuine, but there appears to be no good solution, no solution that does not involve its own difficulties.

Guns in the Delusional World of the Leftist

Your typical leftist wants it to be illegal for a citizen to own  a gun for self-defence.  In recent news, an 80 year old Chicago man shot and killed an armed  home invader thereby defending himself, his elderly wife and his grandson.  Well done, old man,  a boon service to humanity.  The miscreant was a scumbag with a long rap sheet.  But in Chitown it is illegal to own a handgun!  That bespeaks a  serious paucity of common sense in the Windy City.  There ought not be any such law.  But since there is, it must be enforced.  Right?  In the topsy-turvy world of leftist 'thought,' one enables the criminal while penalizing the decent citizen.

Laws should be few in number, rational in content, clear and concise in formulation, enforceable, and enforced.  Laws should not be passed for 'feel good' purposes, to show that one is a bien-pensant 'caring' liberal.  All reasonable people abhor gun violence.  But the solution is not legislation that will be ignored by malefactors and serve only to hamstring the law-abiding.

Did Holder, Napolitano, Obama, et al. Lie When They Said They Hadn't Read the Arizona Law?

J. O. e-mails:

 A caller on the Dennis Miller Show called in and said something very insightful I thought you would like. Miller was asking callers to call in about Eric Holder et al. not reading the Arizona Illegal Immigration law, and the caller said that he thought they HAD read it and were lying about not having read it. Why? Because there isn't anything in it that could possibly be unconstitutional. If there was, it would be plastered all over the news, the exact offending line. Of course they've read it, but by saying they haven't they can criticize it without actually having to show what is wrong with it.

I thought this was insightful, and so I shared it with you.

Now I hadn't thought of that, perhaps because I have more respect for these people (Attorney General Holder, et al.) than I should have.  But now that you mention it, the caller's supposition is very plausible.  How could they fail to have read it?  First of all, all three are legally trained.  Their reading comprehension extends to legalese, and they have staff members who could have summarized it for them.  Second, SB 1070 and the clarificatory  HB 2162 are very short as laws go and easily accessible to anyone with Internet access.  Third, one of them, Homeland Security 'czar' Janet Napolitano (not to be confused with the astute Judge Andrew Napolitano), is a former governor of Arizona, and one would think she would have a keen interest in any laws enacted there, especially laws that have a direct bearing on national security.  Or is Napolitano of Homeland Security unfazed by the possibility of terrorists entering the country via the southern border?

The more I think about it, the more preposterous it sounds for the Attorney General of the U. S. to show no interest in the content of a law when said law mirrors at the State level Federal immigration law.  Would he not want to check whether the law perhaps is inconsistent with Federal law?  How can he not have an interest in the content of a law that is being debated on the international stage?

The caller's surmise seems quite credible.  Why not lie, if it serves your purpose?  The purpose being to prevent anything serious being done about the problem of illegal immigration.  Bear in mind that, for the Left,  the end justifies the means, and 'bourgeois morality' be damned.

Frondizi on the Philosophical Attitude

Risieri Fondizi's What is Value? An Introduction to Axiology, tr. S. Lipp (Open Court, 1963) has stood up well since its English debut over forty five years ago. What follows is a noteworthy metaphilosophical observation of Frondizi's:

The philosophical attitude is basically problematic. He who is not capable of grasping the sense of problems and who prefers to seize upon the first solution that presents itself, and which offers him illusory stability, runs the risk of being submerged, together with his so-called solution, in a sea of difficulties. (p. 26)

'Problematic' can mean dubious. But what Frondizi intends is best rendered by 'problem-oriented.' A philosopher is someone who is sensitive to puzzles, problems, and mysteries. Or, as I like to say, the philospher is one who has the aporetic sense.   I once heard Roderick Chisholm say that one is not philosophizing until one has a puzzle. That's exactly right. But of course it's an old thought. At Theaetetus 155, Plato tells us that philosophy begins in wonder or perplexity, this being the characteristic feeling of the philosopher. Aristotle echoes the idea at Metaphysics 982b10.

Wilfrid Sellars once likened the philosopher's touch to that of King Midas. Whatever the king touched, turned into gold; whatever the  philosopher touches turns into a puzzle. The trouble with this comparison is that it suggests that philosophers create their difficulties. Not so: they discover them, or at least some of them. We could call the ones that are discovered the ground-level problems, distinguishing them from problems that arise as artifacts of theories proposed in solution of the ground-level problems. The ground-level problems are in a  certain sense 'out there' independent of our linguistic and conceptual operations. Pace Wittgenstein, they are not engendered by a  "bewtchment of our understanding by language" (eine Verhexung unseres  Verstandes durch die Sprache). Pace Rorty, they do not arise as artifacts of arbitrarily adopted ways of talking.

The problem of universals, for example, is a perennial problem. It may not interest you, or seem important, but it is there whether you like it or not, and it has repercussions for problems you probably will find important. We attribute properties to things, and sometimes the things to which we attribute the properties actually have them. But what are properties? Are they mental in nature, or perhaps linguistic? Or are properties independent of language and mind? If the latter, are they universals (repeatable entities) or particulars (unrepeatable entities such as sets or tropes)? If properties are universals, can they exist uninstantiated, or can they only exist when instantiated?  How are properties related to the things that have them. 

These are some of the questions that arise when we think about what is somewhat misleadingly called the problem of universals. 'The problem of properties' is perhaps a better moniker.

The onus probandi is on anyone who claims that this problem (or cluster of problems) is not genuine.

Another Round with Reppert on AZ SB 1070: Reasonable Suspicion

In his most recent post on this topic, Victor Reppert tells us that his "main concern is with the 'reasonable suspicion' clause. That strikes me as horribly vague."  Here is the relevant SB 1070 passage as amended by HB 2162 which contains the clause in question:

For any lawful contact stop, detention or arrest made by a law enforcement official or a law enforcement agency of this state or a law enforcement official or a law enforcement agency of a county, city, town or other political subdivision of this state in the enforcement of any other law or ordinance of a county, city or town or this state where reasonable suspicion exists that the person is an alien who and is unlawfully present in the United States, a reasonable attempt shall be made, when practicable, to determine the immigration status of the person, except if the determination may hinder or obstruct an investigation. 

Reppert continues:

In our state, most illegals are Hispanics, but most Hispanics are not illegals. If you define your conception of what it takes to have reasonable suspicion, and on my blog I made an un-remarked-upon recommendation that we have reasonable suspicion just in case we have objective criteria leading to the conclusion that it is more likely than not that the person is illegal, then you could at least eliminate the worst of the profiling problems. You can't just stop a Hispanic and make an immigration status inquiry, because being Hispanic is not sufficient for it to be more than 50% likely that the person is here illegally. (Emphasis added)

I believe Reppert is missing the point here.  I agree with the last quoted sentence.  But the  1070 law does not mandate that Hispanics be stopped at random to have their status checked.  The law clearly states the conditions under which an immigration inquiry may proceed:

1.  There must be a lawful stop, detention, or arrest.

2. The stop, detention, or arrest must be made in the enforcement of a law other than 1070.

3.  There must be reasonable suspicion that the person is an illegal alien.

4.  The immigration inquiry must be practicable.

5.  The immigration inquiry must not hinder or obstruct an investigation.

I should think that Reppert's 50% rule is satisfied if all the conditions are observed.  For example, during a lawful traffic stop, the cop has the right to ask for a driver's license.  If the Hispanic driver has no license, no proof of insurance, no registration, has a campesino sticker on his bumper, is driving a junker, etc.  then the the chance that he is illegal is way over 50%.

There is a distinction I made earlier which is very important and which Reppert may be ignoring, the distinction between a law and its enforcement.  If a law is reasonable and just, it is these things whether or not some cowboy of a cop oversteps his legitimate  authority in its enforcement.  It would be absurd to argue that a particular law should be repealed because there may be abuses in its enforcement.  For any such argument would 'prove too much': it would prove that every law ought to be repealed.  For every law is such that an abuse can occur in its enforcement.

Cuba Attacks Arizona!

This is good for a laugh.  First China, then Cuba.  Will North Korea join in on the fun? 

Five Grades of Self-Referential Inconsistency: Towards a Taxonomy

Some sentences, whether or not they are about other things, are about themselves. They refer to themselves. Hence we say they are 'self-referential.' The phenomenon of sentential self-referentiality is sometimes benign. One example is 'This sentence is true.' Another  is 'Every proposition is either true or false.' Of interest here are the more or less malignant forms of self-reference. One example is the so-called Liar sentence:

1. This sentence is false.

If (1) is true, then it is false, and if false, then true. This is an example of an antinomy. In pursuit of a taxonomy, we might call this Grade I of self-referential inconsistency. Grade I, then, is the class
of self-referentially inconsistent sentences that issue in antinomies.

There are other self-referential sentences that are not antinomies, but imply their own necessary falsehood. These are such that, if true, then false, and if false, then false, and are therefore necessarily false. For example,

2. All generalizations are false.

If (2) is true, then, since (2) is itself a generalization, (2) is false. But its falsity does not imply its truth. So, if false, then false. Assuming Bivalence, it follows that (2) is necessarily false, whence it follows that its negation -- Some generalizations are true  -- is necessarily true, and moreover an instance of itself. A second example might be

3. There are no truths.

If (3) is true, then it is false. And if false, then false. So, (3) is necessarily false, whence it follows that its negation -- There are truths -- is necessarily true.

Examples (2) and (3) belong to Grade II in my tentative taxonomy. These are self-referential sentences that entail their own necessary falsehood. Grade III comprises those self-referential sentences that are such that if true, then neither true nor false, and if false, then false. For example,

4. There are no truth-bearers.

If (4) is true, then, since (4) is a truth-bearer, (4) is neither true nor false. But if false, then false. If we define the cognitively meaningful as that which is either true or false, then (4) is either cognitively meaningless or false. A more interesting example that seems to belong in Grade III is the Verifiability Principle of the Logical Positivists:

5. Every cognitively meaningful sentence is either analytic or empirically verifiable in principle.

If (5) is supposed to be cognitively (as opposed to emotionally) meaningful, and thus not a mere linguistic recommendation or pure stipulation, then it applies to itself. So if (5) is true, then (5) --
which is clearly neither analytic nor verifiable -- is meaningless. So, if true, then meaningless, and if false, then false. Therefore, either meaningless or false. Not good!

Grade IV comprises those self-referential sentences that can be described as self-vitiating (self-weakening) though they are not strictly self-refuting. For example,

6. All truths are relative.

If (6) is true, then (6) is relative, i.e., relatively true. It is not the case that if (6) is true, then (6) is false. So (6) is not self-refuting. Nevertheless, (6) is self-vitiating in that it relativizes and thus weakens itself: if true, it cannot be absolutely true; it can only be relatively true. It is therefore a mistake, one often made, to say that he who affirms (6) contradicts himself.  He does not.  He would contradict himself only if he maintained that it is nonrelatively true that all truths are relative.  But no sophisticated relativist would say such a thing.  Other examples which seem to fall into the category of the self-vitiating:

7. Every statement is subject to revision. (Quine)
8. Every theory reflects class interests. (Marxism)
9. All theory is ideology. (Marxism)
10. Nothing can be known.
11. Nothing is known.
12. Nothing is certain.
13. All truth is historical.
14. All is opinion.

What is wrong with self-vitiating propositions? What does their weakness consist in? Consider (8). If (8) is true, then the theory that every theory reflects class interests itself reflects class interests. Suppose (8) reflects the class interests of the proletariat. Then what is that to me, who am not a proletarian? What is it to anyone who is not a proletarian? If (8) is true only for you and those with your interests, and your interests are not my interests, then I have been given no reason to modify my views.  The trouble with (7)-(14) and their ilk is that they make a claim on our rational attention, on our common rational interest, while undercutting that very claim.

It seems we need a fifth category. The sentences of Grade V are such that, if they are true then they are, not false, and not self-vitiating, but non-assertible. Consider

15. No statement is negative.

(15) applies to itself and so at first appears to refute itself: if (15) is true, then it is false. And if false, then false; hence necessarily false. But consider a possible world W in which God destroys all negative statements and makes it impossible for anyone to make a negative statement. In W, (15) is true, but non-assertible. (15) does not prove itself to be false; it proves itself to be non-assertible.

Can the same said of

16. All is empty (Buddhism)?

I think not, for reasons supplied here.

Finally, we consider

17. All memory reports are deceptive.

This is subject to the retort that one who asserts (17) must rely on memory, and so must presuppose the reliability of the faculty whose reliability he questions by asserting (17). For if anyone is to be in a position responsibly to affirm (17), to affirm it with a chance of its being true, he must remember that on some occasions he has misremembered. He must remember and remember correctly that some of his memories were merely apparent. It seems obvious, then, that the truth of (17) is inconsistent with its correctly being affirmed as true. If true, it is unaffirmable as true. But this is different from saying that (17), if true, is false. Although (17) is unaffirmable or non-assertible if true, it seems that (17) could be true nonetheless.

Illegal Immigration, The Catholic Bishops, and the Misuse of Scripture

(Written 26 April 2006, revised 23 May 2010)

At the website of the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops, we read:

Why is the Catholic Church involved in the immigration issue? There are several reasons the Catholic Church is involved in the  immigration debate. The Old and New Testaments, as well as the encyclicals of the Popes, form the basis for the Church's position.  In Gospel of Matthew, Jesus calls upon us to "welcome the  stranger,for what you do to the least of my brethren, you do unto me. " (Mt. 25-35, 40).

There is a deep mistake being made here, and we should try to understand what it is. The mistake is to confuse the private and public spheres and the different moralities pertaining to each.

Note first that if one scriptural passage can be invoked as a basis for public policy and law, then any can. We are enjoined in other New Testament places to "Resist not the evildoer," "Turn the other cheek," and the like. 

Injunctions such as these cannot be made the basis for public policy whatever value they have in the private sphere.

Imagine a society that implements a policy of not resisting (apprehending, trying, convicting, incarcerating) rapists, murderers, and miscreants generally. Such a society would seal its own death
warrant and cease to function. It is a fact of human nature that people, in the main, behave tolerably well only under threat of punishment. People for the most part do not do the right thing because  it is the right thing, but out of fear of punishment. This is not pessimism, but realism, and is known to be true by all unprejudiced students of history and society.  Conservatives know this 'with their bones'; liberals need to learn it the hard way.  Therefore not even a 'Christian' society can afford to make "Resist not the evildoer" a principle of public policy.

As for turning the other cheek, it is a policy that works well in certain atypical circumstances. If a man has a well-formed conscience, and is capable of feeling shame, then turning the other cheek in the face of his affront can achieve a result far superior to that achieved by replying in kind. Nonviolence can work. Gandhi's nonviolent resistance to the British may serve as an historical example. The Brits could be shamed and in any case Gandhi had no other means at his disposal. But imagine what would happen if Israel turned the other cheek in the face of its Islamist enemies who would blow it off the face of the earth at the first opportunity?

Once your enemy has reduced you to the status of a pig or a dog fit only to be slaughtered, then there is no way to reach him, shame him, or persuade him by acts of forebearance and kindness. You must resist him, with deadly force if necessary, if you wish to preserve your existence.  The evil triumph when the good fail to defend themselves.

But is it not better to suffer wrong than to inflict it, as Socrates maintained? Would it not be better to perish than to defend one's life by taking life? Perhaps, but only if the underlying metaphysics and
soteriology are true. If the soul is immortal, and the phenomenal world is of no ultimate concern -- being a vale of tears, a place through which we temporarily sojourn on our way to our true home --
then the care of the soul is paramount and to suffer wrong is better than to inflict it.

The same goes for Christianity which, as Nietzsche remarks, is "Platonism for the people." If you are a Christian, and look beyond this world for your true happiness, then you are entitled to practice
an austere morality in your private life. But you are not entitled to impose that morality and metaphysics on others, or demand that the State codify that morality and metaphysics in its laws and policies. For one thing, it would violate the separation of Church and State. More importantly, the implementation of Christian morality would lead to the destruction of the State and the State's ability to secure life, liberty, and property -- the three Lockean purposes for which we have a state in the first place.

The problem of confusing private and public morality is well understood by Hannah Arendt ("Truth and Politics" in Between Past and Future, Penguin 1968, p. 245):

The disastrous consequences for any community that began in all earnest to follow ethical precepts derived from man in the singular -- be they Socratic or Platonic or Christian -- have been frequently pointed out. Long before Machiavelli recommended protecting the political realm against the undiluted principles of the Christian faith (those who refuse to resist evil permit the wicked "to do as much evil as they please"), Aristotle warned against giving philosophers any say in political matters. (Men who for professional reasons must be so unconcerned with "what is good for themselves" cannot very well be trusted with what is good for others, and least of all with the "common good," the down-to-earth interests of the community.) [Arendt cites Nicomachean Ethics, Book VI, and in particular 1140b9 and 1141b4.]

There is a tension between man qua philosopher/Christian and man qua citizen. As a philosopher/Christian, I am concerned with my soul, with its integrity, purity, salvation. I take very seriously indeed the Socratic "Better to suffer wrong than to do it" and the Christian "Resist not the evildoer." But as a citizen I must be concerned not only with my own well-being but also with the public welfare. This is true a fortiori of public officials and people in a position to influence public opinion, people like Catholic bishops. So, as Arendt points out, the Socratic and Christian admonitions are not applicable in the public sphere.

A Catholic bishop, therefore, who is pro illegal immigration on the strength of the "welcome the stranger" passage demonstrates a failure to understand the simple point that Arendt undescores.

What is applicable to me in the singular, as this existing individual concerned with the welfare of his immortal soul over that of his perishable body, is not applicable to me as citizen. As a citizen, I
cannot "welcome the stranger" who violates the laws of my country, a stranger who may be a terrorist or a drug-smuggler or a human-trafficker or a carrier of a deadly disease or a person who has no respect for the traditions of the country he invades; I cannot aid and abet his law-breaking. I must be concerned with public order and the very conditions that make the philosophical and Christian life possible in the first place. If I were to aid and abet the stranger's lawbreaking, I would not be "rendering unto Caesar the things that are Caesar's."

Indeed, the Caesar verse provides a scriptural basis for Church-State separation and indirectly exposes the fallacy of the Catholic bishops who cannot comprehend the simple distinctions I have tried to set forth.

Mexico City and Washington Gang Up on Phoenix

A very good piece by Debra Saunders in the SF Chronicle.  It is heartening to know that not everything that emanates from San Francisco is PeeCee nonsense. 

Saturday Night at the Oldies: Three More Torch Songs

A couple of weeks ago I hauled out some old torch songs from the musty mausoleum. Here are a couple more.  The definition again: "A torch song is a sentimental love song, typically one in which the singer laments an unrequited or lost love, where one party is either oblivious to the existence of the other, or where one party has moved on." (Wikipedia)

Gogi Grant, The Wayward Wind (1956).  Made the #1 Billboard position.  The tune has haunted me since I was six years old.  Toni Fisher, The Big Hurt (1959).  Made the Billboard #3 slot.  The first verse hints at the origin of 'torch song':

Now it begins, now that you've gone
Needles and pins, twilight till dawn
Watching that clock till you return
Lighting that torch and watching it burn

Is this the first recording to use a phase shifter?  Pretty far-out for the 'fifties.  While we're on the topic of special effects, the first fuzz tone occurs as far as I know in Marty Robbins' Don't Worry About Me (1961).

 

Atheism, Materialism, and Intellectual Respectability

Joseph A.  e-mails:

Just a quick question. You recently posted that you think atheism can be intellectually respectable. Fair enough. But wouldn't you agree that intellectual respectability in general seems to be assumed more often than it should be?

To put a point on the question: Do you think materialism is intellectually respectable? I seem to recall you saying that (at the least) eliminative materialism is a view you wouldn't bother teaching in a philosophy course. Yet it also seems that some people, even those who would argue that theism isn't intellectually respectable, would bend over backwards to deny that EM isn't as well.

We should begin with a working definition of 'intellectually respectable.'  I suggest the following:

A view V is intellectually respectable =_df V is logically consistent with (not ruled out by) anything we can legitimately claim to know.

People claim to know all sorts of things they do not know, which explains the qualifier 'legitimately.'   Note also that truth and intellectual respectability are different properties.  What is true might not be intellectually respectable, and what is intellectually respectable might not be true.  Truth is absolute while intellectual respectability is relative to the class of people to whom 'we' in the definition refers.  And which class is this?  Well, it would include me and Peter Lupu and other astute  contemporaries who are well apprised of the facts of logic and mathematics and science and history and common sense.  It would not include a lady I once encountered who thought that the Moon is the source of its light.  That opinion is not intellectually respectable. 

There are indefinitely many views that are clearly not intellectually respectable, and indefinitely many that clearly are.  The interesting cases are the ones that lie in between.  Let's consider two.

1. Eliminative materialism.  This is defended by some otherwise  sane  people, but I would say it is not intellectually respectable.  For it is ruled out by plain facts that we can legitimately claim to know, such facts as that we have beliefs and desires.  It is a  position in the philosophy of mind that denies the very data of the philosophy of mind.  Here is an argument that some might think supports it:

(1) If beliefs are anything, then they are brain states; (2) beliefs exhibit original intentionality; (3) no physical state, and thus no brain state, exhibits original intentionality; therefore (4) there are no beliefs. 

But anyone with his head screwed on properly should be able to see that this argument does not establish (4) but is instead a reductio ad absurdum of premise (1) according to which beliefs are nothing if not brain states.  For if anything is obvious, it is that there are beliefs.  This is a pre-theoretical datum, a given.  What they are is up for grabs, but that they are is a starting-point that cannot be denied except by those in the grip of  an ideology.  Since the argument is valid in point of logical form, and the conclusion is manifestly, breath-takingly,  false, what the argument shows is that beliefs cannot be brain states.

2.  Theism.  Not every version of theism is intellectually respectable, obviously, but some are.  If you think otherwise, tell me which known fact rules  out a sophisticated version, say, the version elaborated over several books by Richard Swinburne.  ('Known fact' is not pleonastic in the way 'true fact' is; a fact can be unknown.)

a.  Will it be the 'fact' that nothing immaterial exists?  But that's not a fact, let alone a known fact.  Abstracta such as the proposition expressed by 'Nothing immaterial exists' are immaterial but indispensable.  Arguments to the effect  that they are dispensable merely show at the very most that it is debatable  whether abstracta are dispensable, with the upshot that it will not be a known fact that nothing immaterial exists.  No one can legitimately claim to know that nothing immaterial exists.

 b.  Will it be the fact that nothing both concrete and immaterial exists?  Even if this is a fact, it is not a known fact.  I am arguably a res cogitans.  We do not know that this is not the case the way we know that the Moon is not fifty miles from Earth.

c. Will it be the fact of evil?  But how do you know that evil is a fact at all?  Can you legitimately claim to know that the people and events you call evil are objectively evil and not merely such that you dislike or disapprove of them?  But even if evil is an objective fact, what makes you think that it is logically inconsistent with the existence of God? The Hume-Mackie logical argument from evil is almost universally rejected by contemporary philosophers. 

My claim is that there is no fact which we can claim to know -- in the way we can claim to know that the Moon is more than 50 miles from Earth -- that rules out the existence of God.  But I also claim that there is no such fact that rules it in.  Both theism  and atheism are intellectually respectable. I take no position at the moment on the question whether one is more respectable than the other, or more likely to be true; my claim is merely that both are intellectually respectable -- in the way that eliminative materialism and the belief that the Moon is its own source of light are not intellectually respectable.

Eat, Drink, and Beat Harry

There are cartoons we never forget. One in Chess Life some years back depicted two intense guys bent over a chess board. The caption read, "Eat, drink, and beat Harry."

Emmanuel Lasker would have liked that. He was always going on about the role of Kampf, stuggle, in chess. Lasker would also have liked this quotation lifted from Michael Gilleland's erudite weblog:

After all, what would life be without fighting, I should like to know? From the cradle to the grave, fighting, rightly understood, is the business, the real highest, honestest business of every son of man. Every one who is worth his salt has his enemies, who must be beaten, be they evil thoughts and habits in himself, or spiritual wickednesses in high places, or Russians, or Border-ruffians, or Bill, Tom, or Harry, who will not let him live his life in quiet till he has thrashed them. (Thomas Hughes, Tom Brown's Schooldays, Part II, Chapter V.)

Next time I'm paired with Crazy Harry, I'm going to thrash that meshuggeneh patzer and I'm going to thrash him good.

The Ambiguity of 'Verify'

There are sentences the uttering of which falsifies them, and sentences the uttering of which verifies them. An example of the former is 'I am not talking now.' The act of uttering this sentence falsifies it. By contrast, the act of uttering 'I am talking now' verifies it.  If to falsify is to make false, then to verify is to make true.

But 'verify' (from L. veritas, truth) is ambiguous, and clarity will be served if we distinguish its two senses, one epistemological, the other ontological.

In the epistemological sense, to verify a claim is to ascertain whether or not it is true. In its ontological sense, to verify is to make true. My saying 'I am now talking' makes true the proposition expressed by the sentence; it is not part of any ascertaining of the truth of the proposition expressed. The utterance-event is the truth-maker of the proposition in question. It is the ontic ground of the proposition's truth.  There is, therefore, a clear sense in which the truthmaker of a truthbearer is its verifier.

Liberace and Liberation

Did Liberace seek liberation? No, he sought to make a big showy splash in the world -- which he did. But now the ripples have all subsided, and all that is left is a cheesy Las Vegas museum stuffed with his gaudy possessions --except that he no longer possesses what once possessed him.

Left and Right

For a leftist, one can never be too far left, and anyone the least bit  conservative is a  'fascist.'

Are Immigration Laws Discriminatory?

Liberals routinely complain that immigration laws such as the recently enacted Arizona Senate Bill 1070 are 'discriminatory.'  This is nonsense, of course, but it is important to understand why.

1.  Let's start with the very notion of discrimination.  Discrimination as such is neither good nor bad.  In this respect it is like change.  Change as such  is neither good nor bad: there is change for the good and change for the bad.  Change for the good is improvement, but not all change is improvement.  (Obama take note.)  Similarly, there is justifiable discrimination and unjustifiable discrimination.  As a matter of fact we all discriminate all the time.  When you refuse to eat rotten food and insist on fresh, you are discriminating.  When you forbid your children from associating with crackheads, you are discriminating.  When you sort arguments into the valid and the invalid, you are discriminating.  When you accept the true and reject the false, you are discriminating.  Such discriminations are obviously justifiable.  But that is to understate the point.  Anyone who fails to discriminate between people with whom it would be dangerous for his children to associate and those with whom it would not be dangerous is  guilty of dereliction of parental duty. Discrimination is not only in a vast range of cases permissible; it is obligatory.

2.  The same goes for laws.  Every law discriminates against those who either do or fail to do the actions either proscribed or prescribed by the law.  A law that proscribes the operation of a motor vehicle while intoxicated discriminates against drunk drivers. Is that a problem?  Of course not.  Discrimination in cases like these is obviously justifiable. 

3.  So there is a clear sense in which SB 1070 is discriminatory:  it discriminates against those who are in the country illegally.  Now I hope our liberal pals are not opposed to 1070 for its being discriminatory in this sense.  Presumably, what they will say is that it 'targets' Hispanics and discriminates against them unjustifiably.  But this is a false and scurrilous allegation.  It does not 'target' Hispanics, it targets illegal aliens.  Of course, the vast majority of illegal aliens in the Southwest are Hispanics.  But that is irrelevant.  The objection to them is not that they are Hispanic, but that they are illegal.

It takes a little subtlety of mind to understand this, but not that much.  Suppose someone said that drunk driving  laws are unjust because they disproportionately affect those of Irish extraction.  You would of course respond that if they are the ones who are doing most of the drunk driving, then it only right that they should be the ones who disproportionately suffer the penalty.  You would point out that, even if it is true that most drunk drivers are Irish, the objection to them is not that they are Irish, but that they are drunk drivers.

4.  1070 does not unfairly 'target' Hispanics despite the barrage of lies emanating from the Left.  So what are liberals/leftists really opposed to? They are opposed to the very notion of national sovereignty and national borders.  They simply do not want border control.  But being  mendacious, they will not come out and clearly state that.  So they use weasel phrases like 'comprehensive immigration reform' which either mean nothing or are code for amnesty and open borders. 

Seize and Squeeze

Seize the day and squeeze it for all the juice it's worth. Repeat tomorrow. And no day without a little Emerson:

 . . . we should not postpone and refer and wish, but do broad justice where we are, by whomsoever we deal with, accepting our   actual companions and circumstances, however humble or odious, as  the mystic officials to whom the universe has delegated its whole pleasure for us. (From "Experience")

Generalizations are the Offspring of Wisdom

People foolishly oppose generalization. One often hears, 'Never generalize!' But of course that itself is a generalization in the imperative mood. The partisan of brute particularity who so opines is hoist by his own petard.

So it was with pleasure that I heard Dennis Prager one day  remark   that "Generalizations are the mother of wisdom." But being a quibbler and a pedant, I cannot forebear to suggest an improvement:

   Generalizations are the offspring of wisdom

 or

   Generalization is wisdom's distillate.

 For wisdom does not spring from generalization; it is rather that generalizations spring from wisdom as its expression and codification.

Is Atheism Intellectually Respectable? On Romans 1:18-20

Joe Carter over at First Things argues that "We have to abandon the politically correct notion that atheism is intellectually respectable."  My own view is that  theism and atheism are both intellectually respectable.  Carter makes his case by invoking St. Paul:

In Romans, St. Paul is clear that atheism is a case of vincible ignorance: “For his invisible attributes, namely, his eternal power and divine nature, have been clearly perceived, ever since the creation of the world, in the things that have been made. So they are without excuse.” Acknowledging the existence of God is just the beginning—we must also recognize several of his divine attributes. Atheists that deny this reality are, as St. Paul said, without excuse. They are vincibly ignorant. 

Rather than quote the whole of the Pauline passage at Romans 1: 18-20, I'll summarize it. Men are godless and wicked and suppress the truth. What may be known about God is plain to them because God has made it plain to them. Human beings have no excuse for their unbelief. "For since the creation of the world, God's invisible qualities -- his eternal power and divine nature -- have been clearly seen, being understood from what has been made . . . ."

Paul's claim here is that the existence and nature of God are evident from creation and that unbelief is a result of a willful turning away from the truth.   There is no excuse for unbelief because it is a plain fact that the natural world is divine handiwork.  Now I am a theist and I am sympathetic to Christianity. But although I have one foot in Jerusalem, the other is  planted firmly in Athens (philosophy, the autonomy of reason). And so I must point out that to characterize the natural world as 'made' or 'created' begs the question in favor of theism. As begging the question, the Pauline claim about the evidentness of the world's being created offers no support for theism.  It is an analytic proposition that there is no creation without a creator. So if the heavens and the earth are a creation, then it follows straightaway that a creator exists.

But is the world a divine creation? This is the question, and the answer is not obvious. That the natural world is a divine artifact is not evident to the senses, or to the heart, or to reason. Of course, one can argue for the existence of God from the existence and order of the natural world. I have done it myself. But those who reject theistic arguments, and construct anti-theistic arguments, have their reasons too, and it cannot fairly be said that what animates the best of them is a stubborn and prideful refusal to submit to a truth that is evident.  It is not evident to the senses that the natural world is a divine artifact. 

I may be moved to marvel at "the starry skies above me" (Kant).  But seeing is not seeing as.  If you see the starry skies as divine handiwork, then this is an interpretation from within a theistic framework.  But the datum seen can just as easily be given a nontheistic interpretation.

At the end of the day you must decide which of these interpretations to accept. You will not find some plain fact that will decide it for you.  There is no fact you can point to, or argument you can give, that definitively rules out theism or rules it in.

If the atheism of some has its origin in pride, stubborness and a willful refusal to recognize any power or authority beyond oneself, or beyond the human, as is plainly the case with many of the cyberpunks over at Internet Infidels and similar sites, not to mention such luminaries as Russell and Sartre, it does not follow that the atheism of all has this origin.

It is all-too-human to suspect in our opponents moral depravity when we cannot convince them. The Pauline passage smacks of that all-too-humanity. There are sincere and decent atheists, and they have plenty of excuse for their unbelief. The best of them, if wrong in the end, are excusably wrong.

Paul appears to be doing what ideologues regularly do when pushed to the wall in debate: they resort to ad hominem attacks and psychologizing:  you are willful and stubborn and blinded by pride and lust; or you are a shill for corporate interests; or you are 'homophobic' or 'Islamophobic' or xenophobic; or you are a fear-monger and a hater; or you are a liar or insincere or stupid; or you are a racist, etc. 

Joe Carter does the same thing. 

Objection: "You are ignoring the deleterious noetic consequences of original sin. Because our faculties have been corrupted by it, we fail to find evident what is in itself evident, namely, that the world is a divine artifact.  And it is because of this original sin that unbelief is inexcusable."

This response raises its own difficulties.  First, how can one be morally responsible for a sin that one has not oneself committed but has somehow inherited? Second, if our faculties have been so corrupted by original sin that we can no longer reliably distinguish between the evident and the non-evident, then this corruption will extend to all our cognitive operations including Paul's theological reasoning, which we therefore should not trust either. 

For a different take on Carter's piece, see Michael Liccione's Why Atheism Can Be Respectable.

In Romans, St. Paul is clear that atheism is a case of vincible ignorance: “For his invisible attributes, namely, his eternal power and divine nature, have been clearly perceived, ever since the creation of the world, in the things that have been made. So they are without excuse.” Acknowledging the existence of God is just the beginning—we must also recognize several of his divine attributes. Atheists that deny this reality are, as St. Paul said, without excuse. They are vincibly ignorant. 

Paul's claim here is that the existence and nature of God are evident from creation and that unbelief is a result of a willful turning away from the truth.   There is no excuse for unbelief because it is a plain fact that the natural world is divine handiwork.  Now I am a theist and I am sympathetic to Christianity. But although I have one foot in Jerusalem, the other is  planted firmly in Athens (philosophy, the autonomy of reason). And so I must point out that to characterize the natural world as 'made' or 'created' begs the question in favor of theism. As begging the question, the Pauline claim about the evidentness of the world's being created offers no support for theism.  It is an analytic proposition that there is no creation without a creator. So if the heavens and the earth are a creation, then it follows straightaway that a creator exists.

But is the world a divine creation? This is the question, and the answer is not obvious. That the natural world is a divine artifact is not evident to the senses, or to the heart, or to reason. Of course, one can argue for the existence of God from the existence and order of the natural world. I have done it myself. But those who reject theistic arguments, and construct anti-theistic arguments, have their reasons too, and it cannot fairly be said that what animates the best of them is a stubborn and prideful refusal to submit to a truth that is evident.  It is not evident to the senses that the natural world is a divine artifact. 

I may be moved to marvel at "the starry skies above me" (Kant).  But seeing is not seeing as.  If you see the starry skies as divine handiwork, then this is an interpretation from within a theistic framework.  But the datum seen can just as easily be given a nontheistic interpretation.

At the end of the day you must decide which of these interpretations to accept. You will not find some plain fact that will decide it for you.  There is no fact you can point to, or argument you can give, that definitively rules out theism or rules it in.

If the atheism of some has its origin in pride, stubborness and a willful refusal to recognize any power or authority beyond oneself, or beyond the human, as is plainly the case with many of the cyberpunks over at Internet Infidels and similar sites, not to mention such luminaries as Russell and Sartre, it does not follow that the atheism of all has this origin.

It is all-too-human to suspect in our opponents moral depravity when we cannot convince them. The Pauline passage smacks of that all-too-humanity. There are sincere and decent atheists, and they have plenty of excuse for their unbelief. The best of them, if wrong in the end, are excusably wrong.

Paul appears to be doing what ideologues regularly do when pushed to the wall in debate: they resort to ad hominem attacks and psychologizing:  you are willful and stubborn and blinded by pride and lust; or you are a shill for corporate interests; or you are 'homophobic' or 'Islamophobic' or xenophobic; or you are a fear-monger and a hater; or you are a liar or insincere or stupid; or you are a racist, etc. 

Joe Carter does the same thing. 

Objection: "You are ignoring the deleterious noetic consequences of original sin. Because our faculties have been corrupted by it, we fail to find evident what is in itself evident, namely, that the world is a divine artifact.  And it is because of this original sin that unbelief is inexcusable."

This response raises its own difficulties.  First, how can one be morally responsible for a sin that one has not oneself committed but has somehow inherited? Second, if our faculties have been so corrupted by original sin that we can no longer reliably distinguish between the evident and the non-evident, then this corruption will extend to all our cognitive operations including Paul's theological reasoning, which we therefore should not trust either. 

For a different take on Carter's piece, see Michael Liccione's Why Atheism Can Be Respectable.

Why Mix Philosophy and Politics?

I am sometimes asked why I intersperse political entries with narrowly philosophical ones.  But in every case the question was put to me by someone who tilts leftward.  If my politics were leftist, would anyone complain?  Probably not.  Academe and academic philosophy are dominated by leftists, and to these types it seems entirely natural that one will be a bien-pensant latte-sipping lefty.  Well, I'm here to prove otherwise.  Shocking as it will  seem to some, leftist views are entirely optional, and a bad option at that.

I could of course post my political thoughts to a separate weblog.  But given that philosophy attracts more liberals/leftists than conservatives, it is good for them to be exposed to views  that they do not encounter within the enclaves they inhabit.  Or are contemporary liberals precisely illiberal in their closemindedness to opposing views?  One gets that impression.

Posting the political to a separate weblog would also violate my 'theory' of blogging.  My blog is micro to my life's macro.  It must accordingly mirror my life in all its facets  as a sort of coincidentia oppositorum of this situated thinker's existence.

I Was Forced to Show My Papers!

Things are really getting bad here in the fascist state of Arizona.  Why just this morning I was forced to show ID when I went to vote.  I strolled into the polling place looking a fright after several hours of hiking.  I introduced myself as 'King Blog' but that cut no ice with the  old ladies who manned the place.  They asked to see my driver's license! What chutzpah!  What bigotry!  A bunch of damned Nazis, if you want my opinion.  What if I forgot it, or never had one? Then the Nazi bastards would have disenfranchised me!  The very act of requesting ID is an act of disenfrachisement and intimidation.  Besides, it prevents me from voting twice, which I have the right to do.  I should have adapted a line from B. Traven's The Treasure of the Sierra Madre.  Papers?  I don't need no stinkin' papers!  I'm a human being.  You just hate me because I smell like I spent the night under a bridge.  I have the right to do whatever I want, wherever I want, and vote wherever I want and as many times as I want.

I'm gettin' the hell out of this rattlesnake infested inferno of gun-totin' yahoos, rednecked racists, and xenophobic immigrant-bashers.  I'm going where a man can be free.  I'm headed for the People's Republic of China.  "Live free or die," as I always say.

The Upside of the Arizona Bashing

The ACLU and -- are you ready for this? -- China have joined the bash Arizona band wagon.  The upside is that many liberals and illegals will leave or not come here in the first place. And that makes Cactus Ed very happy.  He recommends Arizona: How Big is Big Enough?  and Immigration and Liberal Taboos.

From the first piece:

. . . the religion of endless growth -- like any religion based on blind faith rather than reason-- is a kind of mania, a form of lunacy, indeed a disease. And the one disease to which the growth mania bears an exact analogical resemblance is cancer. Growth for the sake of growth is the ideology of the cancer cell. Cancer has no purpose but growth; but it does have another result -- the death of the host.

Cactus Ed here provides us with the makings of an 'environmental' argument against illegal immigration.

Crude or Earthy?

A past inamorata once offered, with some justice, that I am crude. "Not crude, but earthy," was my reply. A colleague once described my eyes as "beady." "Do you mean penetrating?"

Am I pigheaded in my opinions, or admirably firm? Monomaniacal or single-minded? Open-minded or empty-headed? Well-rounded or scattered? Am I precise or obsessive-compulsive? Is my rigor mentis in truth rigor mortis?

Cardinal Mahony, nAZi Hunter

When I first landed in Arizona, way back in 1991, I noticed bumper stickers that read, 'Do AZ I do.'  Well, if you do AZ I do, does that make you a nAZi?

Apparently, Cardinal Roger Mahony,  Catholic Archbiship of Los Angeles, thinks so: "I can't imagine Arizonans now reverting to German Nazi and Russian Communist techniques whereby people are required to turn one another in to the authorities on any suspicion of documentation."  Go read his entire post.  It's beneath refutation.  Yet another clear proof that the Roman church is on the skids.

I would advise my Catholic friends to consider what you are supporting when you support this church.  What matters in life is truth, not any old corrupt institution that claims to have it.  You should be skeptical of all institutions, while acknowledging the good that they have done and can do. They are easily corrupted.  Like the houses where I live,  they either have termites or they will get them.

What you have to understand about religious leftists like Mahony is that they have two religions, their nominal religion and the 'religion' of leftism.  And the second usually trumps the first.

No Comity Without Commonality

Would that the fetishizers of diversity and inclusion understood that social harmony presupposes commonality.  But theirs is a bogus diversity and inclusiveness in any case, excluding as it does those who disagree with them.

Decadent Art

This by e-mail from a doctoral student in Canada:

I am writing to you because I have a couple of questions . . . about your  recent (May 12) blog post, and I was curious to hear a bit more about your views. [. . .]  My questions concern your assertion that "I also agree that if one is going to violate people's beliefs in the manner of  that 'artist' Andres Serrano then one ought to do it on one's own time and with one's own dime, as the saying goes." I assume that you're referring to "Piss Christ" and the controversy that surrounded it.

That's right.  Context is provided by Mike Valle's post to which I was responding.


1. Why do you feel that "Piss Christ" (or Serrano's other works--again, I assume you're referring here mostly to the religious icons and bodily fluids) is (are) a "[violation] of people's beliefs"? The claim that it "violates beliefs" is much stronger than simply saying that it is distasteful, since it ascribes an active quality to the work.

Of course, it is more than distasteful or disgusting, although it is that; it shows profound disrespect and contempt for Christianity.  And it is not the work itself that violates the beliefs and sensibilities of Christians and plenty of non-Christians as well, but the work in the context of its production and public display.  It should be offensive to any decent person, just as "Piss-Buddha," if there were such an 'art work,' would be offensive to me and other non-Buddhists.  Buddha was a great teacher of humanity and should be honored as such.  (That is why decent people were offended when the Taliban destroyed the ancient Buddhist statuary.) The same goes for Jesus and Socrates and so many others.  Christians of course believe that Jesus was much more than a great teacher of humanity, but whether he was or not is immaterial to the point at issue.  Or imagine "Piss-King" in which a figurine of Martin Luther King, Jr. is supended in urine. Everyone would take that, and rightly so, as expressive of contempt for the black American civil rights leader, as offensive as Southern racists' references to King back in the '60s as Martin Luther Coon.

On the Abstractness of Mathematical Sets

Let us agree that x is concrete iff x is causally/active passive and abstract otherwise.  Many say that mathematical sets ('sets' hereafter: 'mathematical' as opposed to 'commonsense') are abstract objects, abstract entities, abstracta.  Why?

Argument One:  In set theory there are singleton sets, e.g. {Quine}.  Obviously, Quine is not identical to {Quine}.  The second is a set, the first is not.  Yet the difference cannot be the difference between two concreta.  Quine is a concretum.  Therefore, {Quine} is an abstractum.  This is of course meant generally: singletons are abstracta.  Now if singletons are abstracta, then all sets are. 

Argument Two:  In set theory there is a null set.  It is not nothing, but something despite having no members. Yet it cannot be a concrete something.  Therefore, it is an abstract something.  And if one set is abstract, all are.

Contra Argument One:  A statue and the lump of clay that constitute it are numerically distinct.  (For the one has properties the other doesn't have, e.g., the lump, but not the statue, can exist without having the form of a statue.)  And yet both are concrete, i.e., both are causally active/passive.  If this is possible, why should it not also be possible that Quine and {Quine} both be concrete?  One could say that Quine and {Quine} occupy the same 'plime' to borrow a term form D. C. Williams, the same place-time, in the way statue and lump do.

Contra Argument Two:  Possibly, there is a concrete atomic entity. Being atomic, it has no parts.  So why should a set's having no members rule out its being concrete?

Are any of these arguments compelling?

George Will

Astute thinkers such as George Will give me hope.  See his latest article, Europe's Lack of Discipline.  The indiscipline, however, is also ours.

Saturday Night at the Oldies: Johnny Otis

His signature number was Willie and the Hand Jive.  The video begins with a late 'fifties car commercial that Los Angelenos who were around then should be able to appreciate.  Those are some meaty mamas demonstrating the hand jive.  Slow Hand's version.  No, muchachos, neither 'hand jive' nor 'slow hand' have anything to do with masturbation.

The American and Leftist Trinities

The American trinity is becoming as devalued as the 'copper' penny on which we read it: Liberty, In God We Trust, E Pluribus Unum.  In the ascendent is the Leftist trinity: Equality, In Government We Trust, Diversity Über Alles.

Obscurity and Celebrity

Too shadowy to be worth protecting by Travenesque ruses designed to keep it enshrouded in obscurity, the self is  too substantial to be conferrable by fame.

B. Traven

The initial is not the start  of a name but another false clue to throw the curious off the scent -- while piquing their curiosity.  B. Traven, you be one clever dude.

Truth and Institutions

The truth is too magnificent a thing to be the the property of any one institution.  Too magnificent a thing, and too elusive a thing to be owned or housed or patented or reduced to the formulas of a sect or finitized or fought over.

Arizona SB 1070: The Threat is Stronger than the Execution

Eine Drohung ist stärker als eine Ausführung is a saying often attributed to grandmaster Aron Nimzovich.  (On the correctness of the attribution, chess aficionados will find interesting this piece by Edward Winter.)  It occurred to me this morning that the maxim also applies to SB 1070, about which I have said quite a bit of late. (Scroll down.) The law doesn't go into effect until July 29th, and already illegals are leaving the state in significant numbers.  See here, and here.

In the 1070 case, not only is the threat stronger than the execution, the perceived threat is stronger and far more effective  than the real threat.  But liberals, in their preternatural obtuseness, have only themselves to blame for this.  By egregiously and willfully misrepresenting the law, by their hyperbole and hysteria,   they are bringing about the very effect -- the attrition of lawbreakers -- that the framers of the law intended!  Way to go!

Another thing I get a kick out of  is the call to boycott, not merely the Grand Canyon State, but the Grand Effing Canyon herself.  Don't these nimrods understand that it is a national park and that revenues lost will be lost, not to Arizona, but  to the federal government that liberals want ever to expand?  The fewer visitors to the Grand Canyon the better.  More solitude for me and mine.

I'll bet the shade of old 'Cactus Ed' Abbey is having a good laugh over this.

Broadly Logical Modality

David Brightly has difficulty with the notion of broadly logical modality.  Let me see if I can clarify this notion sufficiently to satisfy him.  It might be best to begin with the notion of narrowly logical impossibility.  I'll number my paragraphs so that David can tell me exactly where he disagrees or finds obscurity.

1.  There are objects and states of affairs and propositions that can be known a priori to be impossible because they violate the Law of Non-Contradiction (LNC).  Thus a plane figure that is both round and not round at the same time, in the same respect, and in the same sense of 'round,' is impossible, absolutely impossible, simply in virtue of its violation of LNC.  I will say that such an object is narrowly logically (NL) impossible.  Hereafter, to save keystrokes, I will not mention the 'same time, same respect, same sense' qualification which  will be understood to be in force.

2.  But what about a plane figure that is both round and square?  Is it NL-impossible?  No.  For by logic alone one cannot know it to be impossible.  One needs a supplementary premise, the necessary truth grounded in the meanings of 'round' and 'square' that nothing that is round is square.  We say, therefore,  that the round square is broadly logically (BL) impossible.  It is not excluded from the realm of the possible by logic alone, which is purely formal, but by logic plus a 'material' truth, namely the necessary truth just mentioned.

3.  If there are BL-impossible states of affairs such as There being a round square, then there are BL-necessary states of affairs such as There being no round square.  Impossibility and necessity are interdefinable: a state of affairs is necessary iff its negation is impossible.  It doesn't matter whether the modality is NL, BL, or nomological (physical).  It is clear, then, that there are BL-impossible and BL-necessary states of affairs.

4.  We can now introduce the term 'BL-noncontingent' to cover the BL-impossible and the BL-necessary.

5.  What is not noncontingent is contingent.  (Surprise!) The contingent is that which is possible but not necessary.  Thus a contingent proposition is one that is possibly true but not necessarily true, and a contingent state of affairs is one that possibly obtains but does not necessarily obtain.  We can also say that a contingent proposition is one that is possibly true and such that its negation is possibly true.  The BL-contingent is therefore that which is BL-possible and such that its negation is BL-possible.

6. Whatever is NL or BL or nomologically impossible, is impossible period.  If an object, state of affairs, or proposition is exckluded from the realm of possible being, possible obtaining, or possible truth by logic alone, logic plus necessary semantic truths, or the (BL-contingent) laws of nature, then that object, state of affairs or proposition is impossible, period or impossible simpliciter.

7.   Now comes something interesting and important.  The NL or BL or nomologically possible may or may not be possible, period.  For example, it is NL-possible that there be a round square, but not possible, period.  It is BL-possible that some man run a 2-minute mile but not possible, period.  And it is nomologically possible that I run a 4-minute mile, but not possible period.  (I.e., the (BL-contingent) laws of anatomy and physiology do not bar me from running a 4-minute mile; it is peculiarities not referred to by these laws that bar me.  Alas, alack, there is no law of nature that names BV.) 

8.  What #7  implies is that NL, BL, and nomological possibility are not species or kinds of possibility. If they were kinds of possibility then every item that came under one of these heads would be possible simpliciter, which we have just seen is not the case.  A linguistic way of putting the point is by saying that 'NL,' 'BL,' and 'nomological' are alienans  as opposed to specifying adjectives:  they shift or 'alienate' ('other') the sense of the noun they modify.  From the fact that x is NL or BL or nomologically possible, it does not follow that x is possible.  This contrasts with impossibility.  From the fact that x is NL or BL or nomologically impossible, it does follow that x is impossible.  Accordingly, 'NL,' 'BL,' and 'nomological' do not shift or alienate the sense of 'impossible.' 

9.  To appreciate the foregoing, you must not confuse senses and kinds.  'Sense' is a semantic term; 'kind' is ontological.  From the fact that 'possible' has several senses, it does not follow that there are several species or kinds of possibility.  For x to be possible it must satisfy NL, BL, and nomological constraints; but this is not to say that these terms refer to species or kinds of possibility.

 

The Right to Ridicule Religion

Mike Valle over at Fists in the Wind writes:

I support the absolute right of all of these people to ridicule religion all that they want. I don't think the government should fund any of it, but I do believe in this fundamental principle: The right to ridicule religious beliefs absolutely trumps the so-called "right" not to have one's religious beliefs ridiculed.

I basically agree with Mike's post.  In particular, I agree that there is no 'right' not to have one's religious beliefs ridiculed, and I also agree that if one is going to violate people's beliefs in the manner of  that 'artist' Andres Serrano then one ought to do it on one's own time and with one's own dime, as the saying goes.  Adolescent  purveyors of schlock who delight in offending the sensibilities of the 'bourgeoisie'  or the 'booboisie' in H. L. Mencken's phrase have no right to taxpayer money.  Dumb notions are rampant on the Left, and one of the dumbest is that a refusal of sponsorship amounts to censorship. This notion is beneath refutation, so I will say no more about it.

But I do have one minor bone to pick with Mike.  He speaks of the right to ridicule religion as 'absolute.'  I wonder what he means by this term.  Does he mean that there are no conceivable circumstances in which the exercise of the right in question could not be justifiably limited or prevented?  If that is what he means, then I disagree. 

Consider property rights.  Absolute?  Are there no conceivable circumstances in which a man's right to property cannot be justifiably limited or infringed?  Suppose I own half of Montana, and the federal government needs a few acres for a defense installation.  It forces me to sell those acres at fair market value.  I say that's a legitimate exercise of eminent domain.  Or how about free speech?  It is widely recognized that one cannot justifiably say just anything anywhere to anybody.  The right to free speech is not the right to speech that incites violence in a situation in which an outbreak of violence can be reasonably expected to occur if the speech is delivered.

Same goes for the ridiculing of religion via speech, gestures, placards, and Serrano style 'art.'  Suppose Marilyn Manson is burning Bibles on stage at some venue in Los Angeles near Biola.  Some Biola students and there and are recognizable as such.  Suppose the ridicule is ramped up to the point that the Christians in the audience are in danger of grave bodily harm.   Then I say the right to ridicule meets its limit.  But that is to say that the right is not absolute.  It is relative to the circumstances.

Michael Scarpalanda on Arizona Senate Bill 1070

Craig M. Thompson writes:

I have enjoyed your commentary on the current situation in Arizona.  I ran across an interesting article at The Witherspoon Institute on illegal immigration called Arizona, Congress, and the Immigration Mess.   And I was hoping that you might comment on some of the points that he makes against SB 1070.  Thanks for the consideration!

And thank your for alerting me to this article by Michael Scarpalanda, who holds the Gene and Elaine Edwards Family Chair in Law at the University of Oklahoma College of Law.  Here are some comments.

The article begins unpromisingly by referring to "Arizona's draconian response" to the problem of illegal immigration.  I must immediately protest.  To refer to SB 1070 as "draconian" is an egregious misuse of language.  One should not toss this word around without knowing what it means.  It derives from the name of the first legislator of written laws of Athens, Greece.  The harshness of Draco's code gave rise to the adjective 'draconian' which is properly applied only to laws and sanctions that are harsh, cruel, and unreasonable.  Now there is nothing draconian about SB 1070 as you may verify for yourself by simply reading it.  See also the fact sheet.

Turning now to the article, we read:

On April 30, 2010, Arizona’s governor signed SB 1070 into law, setting off waves of hyperbolic reactions and counter-reactions. Among other things, the law states that “for any lawful contact made by a law enforcement official or agency . . . where reasonable suspicion exists that the person is an alien who is unlawfully present in the United States, a reasonable attempt shall be made . . . to determine the immigration status of the person.” An alien unlawfully present can be taken into custody, charged with a state crime, and transferred to federal custody.

Several questions immediately arise. What is “lawful contact”? What constitutes “reasonable suspicion”? How will immigration status be determined?

Scarpalanda fails to mention that a week after Governor Brewer signed into law SB 1070, she signed into law House Bill 2162 which modifies and clarifies the language of 1070, in particular, the phrase "lawful contact."  For more on this, together with quotations from 2162, see this post of mine.

When cavils like those that Scarpalanda raises are made it is pretty good evidence that one is dealing with a liberal who simply does not want immigration laws enforced.  Not knowing anything about Scarpalanda, I cannot know whether this is true in his case.  But in the vast majority of cases of liberal-leftist hyperventilation over 1070 it is spectacularly clear that one is dealing with open borders types who do not respect the rule of law except when it can be invoked to further the leftist agenda.

Although the law forbids using race as the sole determining factor in forming “reasonable suspicion,” the law will undoubtedly have a disproportionate impact on Arizona’s Hispanic population, including those who are United States citizens or lawful permanent residents. How could it not? Race, ethnicity, and accent will almost surely be factors in deciding whether to verify a person’s immigration or citizenship status.

Again, Scarpalanda ignores the 2162 modifications of 1070, in particular, this one: "A law enforcement official or agency of this state or a county, city, town or other political subdivision of this state may not solely consider race, color or national origin in implementing the requirements of this subsection except to the extent permitted by the United States or Arizona Constitution."

Scarpalanda is worried that the new law will have a "disproportionate impact on Arizona's Hispanic population."  But how could it fail to?  The majority of illegal aliens are Hispanic!  Here we note the twisted logic of the Politically Correct.  These people display an unthinking quota mentality: they think there is something unfair about a law if , when it is enforced, it affects more members of one  group than another, or affects a group 'disproportionately.'  But to think in this way is to show that one is morally obtuse.  Vastly more men than women abuse their spouses.  But it is surely no valid argument against laws prohibiting spousal abuse that they disproportionately 'target' men.  Because more men commit this crime than women, it is to be expected that more men will be 'targeted.'  Similarly, because more Hispanics than Asians or Blacks or Caucasians violate immigration laws in such southern border states as Arizona, it is to be expected that Hispanics will be disproportionately affected by the enforcement of immigration laws.  It is only to be expected, and there is nothing unjust about it.

Despite  the shoddiness of most of Scarpalanda's article (failure to link to the relevant documents, failure to take into consideration the House bill's modification of the Senate bill, use of the bad argument just exposed), his positive proposals near the end are actually quite reasonable: secure the borders to stem the tide of future illegals; provide for the legalization of the the large numbers of productive, non-criminal illegals already here; adopt a temporary worker program.

But Job One is to secure the border by building and maintaining a physical barrier that stretches from the Pacific Ocean to the Gulf of Mexico.  All the better heads agree on this. 

 

Los Angeles on the Skids

"The mayor's residence is near Wilshire Boulevard, which is named for a socialist who made and lost several fortunes before dying destitute. The life of Henry Wilshire is a cautionary tale for this city where the climate is usually Mediterranean and the fiscal climate is now Greek."  Read the rest of George Will's Trickle-Down Misery in L. A.