Maverick Philosopher

Obamacare and Wussification

An ugly word for an ugly thing.  Either one.

The Obamacare provision which allows children to remain covered by their parents' health care insurance until the age of 26 promotes wussification.  Do I need to explain this? Not to a conservative, for whom the old virtue of self-reliance is indeed a virtue and therefore something to be encouraged and not undermined. 

 

Representation and Causation, with Some Help from Putnam

1. Materialism would be very attractive if only it could be made to work. Unfortunately, there are a number of phenomena for which it has no satisfactory explanation. One such is the phenomenon of
representation, whether mental or linguistic. Some mental states are of or about worldly individuals and states of affairs. This fact comes under the rubric 'Intentionality.'  How is this intentional directedness possible given materialist constraints? Following Chisholm and Searle, I subscribe to the primacy of the intentional over the linguistic. But let's approach the problem of representation from the side of linguistic reference. How is it that words and sentences mean things? How does language hook onto reality? In virtue of what does my tokening (in overt speech, in writing, or in any other way) of the English word-type 'cat' refer to cats? What makes 'cat' refer to cats rather than to pictures of cats or statues of cats or the meowing of cats?  This, in linguistic dress, is the question, What makes my thought of a cat, a thought of a cat?  And how is all this possible in the materialist's world?

2. The materialist has more than one option, but a very tempting one is to reduce reference to causation. The idea is roughly that the referent of a word is what causes its tokening. Thus 'cat'-tokenings refer to cats because cats cause these tokenings. Suppose I walk into your house and see a cat. I say: "I see you have cat." My use of 'cat'  on this occasion -- my tokening of the word-type -- refers to cats because the critter in front of me causes my 'cat'-tokening.  That's the idea.

3. Unfortunately, this is only a crude gesture in the direction of a theory. For it is obvious, as Hilary Putnam points out (Renewing Philosophy, Harveard UP, 1992,p. 37), that pictures of cats cause 'cat'-tokenings, but   pictures of cats are not cats. Cats are typically furry and cover their feces. Pictures, however, are rarely furry and never cover their (nonexistent) feces. Yet I might say, seeing a picture of a cat over your fireplace, "I see you like cats." In that sentence, 'cat' is used to refer to cats even though what caused my 'cat'-tokening was not a cat but a non-cat, namely, a picture of a cat.

Indeed, practically anything can cause a 'cat'-tokening: cat feces, cat hair, cat caterwauling. Suppose I see Ann Coulter engaged in a 'cat-fight' with Susan Estrich on one of the shout shows. I say, "They are fighting like cats." Nota Bene: my use of 'cat' in this sentence is literal, but it is not caused by a cat! (My example, not Putnam's).

4. Our problem is this: what determines the reference of a word like 'cat'? What makes this bit of language represent something extralinguistic? 'Cat' is a linguistic item; a cat is not. (French   'philosophers' take note.) In virtue of what does the former target the latter? If both a cat and a pile of cat scat can cause a 'cat'-tokening, then the causal theory of reference is worthless unless it can exclude these extraneous (excremental?) cases.

The problem is that 'cat' refers to something quite specific, cats, whereas 'cat'-tokenings can be caused by practically anything. To solve this problem, a notion of causation must be invoked that is also quite selective. It turns out, however, that this selective notion of  causation presupposes intentionality, and so cannot be used in a noncircular account of intentionality. Let me explain.

4. Context-Sensitive versus Context-Independent Concepts of Causation. We often in ordinary English speak of 'the cause' of some event, a myocardial infarction say, even though there are many contributing  factors: bad diet, lack of exercise, hypertension, cigarette smoking, high stress job, an episode of snow-shoveling. Which of these will be adjudged 'the cause' is context- and interest-relative. A physician who gets a kick-back from a pharmaceutical concern will point to hypertension, perhaps, so that he can prescribe a massive dose of angiotensin-converting enzyme inhibitor, while the man's wife might say that it was the snow shoveling that did him in.

To take a more extreme example, suppose a man dies in a fire while in bed. The salient cause might be determined to be smoking in bed. No one will say that the flammability of the bedsheets and other room
furnishings is the cause of the man's incineration. Nevertheless, had the room and its furnishings not been flammable, the fire would not have occurred! The flammability is not merely a logical, but also a   causal, condition of the fire. It is part of the total cause, but no one will consider it salient. The word is from the Latin salire to leap, whence our word 'sally' as when one sallies forth to do battle at a
chess tournament, say.   A salient cause, then, is one that jumps out at you,  grabbing you by your epistemic shorthairs as it were, as opposed to being a mere background condition.

Putnam cites the example of the pressure cooker that exploded (p. 48).  No one will say that it was a lack of holes in the pressure cooker's vessel that caused the explosion. A stuck safety valve caused the   explosion. Nevertheless, had the vessel been perforated, the contraption would not have exploded!

What these examples show is that there is an ordinary-language use of 'cause' which is context-sensitive and interest-relative and (if I may) point-of-view-ish. A wholly objective view of nature, a Nagelian view from nowhere, would not be able to discriminate the salient from the nonsalient in matters causal. In terms of fundamental physics, the whole state of the world at time t determines its state at subsequent  times. At this level, a short-circuit and the current's being on are equally causal in respect of the effect of a fire. Our saying that the short-circuit caused the fire, not the current's being on, simply advertises the fact that for us the latter is the normal and desired state of things, the state we have an interest in maintaining, and that the former is the opposite.

The ordinary notion of cause, then, resting as it does on our interests and desires, presupposes intentional notions. I cannot be interested in or desire something unless I am conscious of it. And I   cannot adjudge one state of affairs as normal and the other as  abnormal unless I have interests and desires.

5. Recall what the problem was. The materialist needs to explain reference in physicalist terms. He thinks to do so by invoking physical causation. The idea is that the referents of a word W cause W-tokenings. The reference of a word is determined by the causal influence of the word's referents. So it must be cats, and not  pictures of cats, or the past behavior or English speakers that causes  'cat'-tokenings. But surely the past behavior of English speakers is part of the total cause of present 'cat'-tokenings. (See Putnam, pp. 48-49.) 'Cat' does not refer to this behavior, however. To exclude the   behavior as non-salient requires use of the ordinary interest-relative notion of causation. But this notion, we have seen, presupposes intentionality.

6. The upshot is that the above causal account of representation --  which is close to a theory proposed by Jerry Fodor -- is viciously circular: it presupposes the very notion that it is supposed to be   reductively accounting for, namely, intentionality.

Does a Cube Have 12 Edges?

Well of course.  In reality every cube has 12 edges. But one could think of a cube without thinking of something that has 12 edges, and indeed without thinking of something that lacks 12 edges.  If you know what a cube is, and I ask you, "How many edges does a cube have," you might reply, "I don't know."  During this exchange you are most assuredly thinking of a cube, but a cube indeterminate in respect of the property of having 12 edges.  What you have before your mind is an incomplete object, one that, because incomplete, cannot exist.  Your thought has an intentional object, but it is an object that does not exist.

Another example.  Peter shows up at my door.  I note that he is wearing a brown leather vest.  Now anything made of leather must be made of cow leather or horse leather or alligator leather or . . . .  But the leather vest that is before my mind as the object of my visual experience is indeterminate with respect to type of leather.  What is before my mind is an intentional object.

Peter's vest is brown, and in reality everything brown is colored.  But the intentional object of my visual experiencing is brown but not colored.  Extracting the principle, we may erect the following thesis:

Non-Closure Under Property-Entailment:  Intentional objects, reflecting as they do the finitude of the human mind, are not closed under property-entailment. 

It follows from this principle that no merely intentional object exists.  (For everything that exists is complete.)  But that is not to say that they are denizens of Meinong's realm of Aussersein.  Talk of merely intentional objects does not commit one to Meinongianism.  One could take the line that merely intentional objects are "ontically heteronomous" to borrow a phrase from Roman Ingarden: their existence is parasitic upon the existence of the mental acts whose intentional objects they are.

Now there are problems with this sketch of a theory of intentional objects, but it is not an obviously senseless or incoherent theory.  So I suspect Edward of London feigns incomprehension when he says he doesn't understand it.  Does he have a better theory? 

Spring in January in Central Arizona

 

Sitting in back of my house the other day, in a T-shirt, reading A. N. Prior's Objects of Thought, this is what I had to look at. 

 

The Aporetics of the Intentional Object, Part I

Here is a puzzle that may be thought to motivate a distinction between intentional and real objects, a distinction that turns out to be problematic indeed.

Puzzle.  One cannot think without thinking of something, but if one is thinking of something, it does not follow that  something is such that one is thinking of it.

Example.  Tom is thinking of the fountain of youth.  So he is thinking of something. But there is no fountain of youth.  So from the fact that Tom  is thinking of the fountain of youth, it does not follow that something is such that Tom is thinking of it.

The puzzle expressed as an aporetic dyad:

1. One cannot think without thinking of something.
2. If one is thinking of something, it does not follow that something is such that one is thinking of it.

Both limbs make a strong claim on our acceptance.  The first is utterly datanic.  The second, though exceedingly plausible, and indeed true as far as I can see, is not datanic.  It is reasonably denied by Meinong and the Meinongians.  For if some items have no being at all, and if the fountain of youth counts as a beingless item (as it does for Meinong & Co.), and if Tom is thinking of the fountain of youth, then it does follow that something is such that Tom is thinking of it.  This shows that our puzzle rests on a presupposition  which ought to be added to our dyad so as to sire the following aporetic triad or antilogism:

1. One cannot think without thinking of something.
2. If one is thinking of something, it does not follow that something is such that one is thinking of it.
3. There are no beingless items.

Though the limbs are individually plausible, they appear collectively inconsistent.  If they really are inconsistent, then we face a genuine aporia, an intellectual impasse: we have three propositions each of which we have excellent reason to think is true, but which cannot all be true on pain of logical contradiction.

There is at least the appearance of contradiction.  For if Tom is thinking of a mermaid, and there are no mermaids, then Tom is both thinking of something and not thinking of something.  Tom's thought has an object and it does not have an object.  It has an object because no one can think without thinking of something.  It does not have an object because there are no mermaids.  So we have at least an apparent contradiction.

To dispel the appearance of contradiction, one could make a distinction.  So let us distinguish the intentional object from the real object and see what happens.  Every intentional state is a directedness to an object, and the intentional object is simply that to which the intentional state is directed precisely as it is intended in the mental act with all and only the properties it is intended as having. So when Tom thinks of a mermaid, a mermaid is his intentional object.  For it is that to which his thought is directed. But there is no 'corresponding' real object because there are no mermaids in reality.  Accordingly, 'Tom's thought has an object and it does not have an object' is only apparently a contradiction since what it boils down to is 'Tom's thought has an intentional object but it does not have a real object' -- which is not a contradiction.

Unfortunately, this solution brings with it its own difficulties.  In this post I will mention just one.

The putative solution says that if I am thinking about Pegasus or Atlantis or the fountain of youth, my thinking has an intentional object, but that there is no corresponding real object.  But what if I am thinking of Peter, who exists?  In this case the theory will have to maintain that there is a real object corresponding to the intentional object.  It will have to maintain this because every intentional state has an intentional object.  The theory, then, says that when we intend the nonexistent, there is only an intentional object.  But when we intend the existent, there is both an intentional object and a corresponding real object.  There is a decisive objection to this theory.

Clearly, if I am thinking about Peter, I am thinking about him and not about some surrogate intentional object, immanent to the mental act,  which somehow mediates between the act and Peter himself.  The mental act terminates at Peter and not at an intentional object.  Intentionality, after all, is that feature of mental states whereby they refer beyond themselves to items that are neither parts of the mental act nor existentially dependent on the mental act.  Clearly, it is intrinsic to the intentionality of my thinking of Peter that my thinking intends something that exists whether or not I am thinking of it. 

This objection puts paid to the notion that intentionality relates a mind (or a state of a mind) to a merely intentional object which functions as an epistemic intermediary or epistemic surrogate. This scheme fails to accommodate the fact that intentionality by its very nature involves a transcending of the mind and its contents towards the transcendent.  Suppose I am thinking about a mountain.  Whether it exists or not, what I intend is (i) something whose nature is physical and not mental; and (ii) something that exists whether or not I am thinking about it.

The point I just made is that when I think of Peter, it is Peter himself that my thought reaches: my thought does not terminate at a merely intentional object, immanent to the act, which merely stands for or goes proxy for or represents Peter.  This  point is well-nigh datanic.  If you don't understand it, you don't understand intentionality.  One will be tempted to accommodate this point by saying that when one thinks of what exists, the IO = the RO.  But this can't be right either.  For the intentional object is always an incomplete object, a fact that reflects the finitude of the human mind.  But Peter in reality is a complete object.  Now identity is governed by the Indiscernibility of Identicals which states, roughly, that if x = y, then x and y share all properties.  But the IO and the RO do not share all properties:  The IO is indeterminate with respect to some properties while the RO is wholly determinate.  Therefore, the IO is never identical to the RO.

So the point I made cannot be accommodated by saying that the IO = the RO in the case when one thinks of the existent.

Where does this leave us?   I argued that our initial puzzle codified first as a dyad and then as a triad motivates a distinction between intentional and real objects.  The distinction was introduced in alleviation of inconsistency.  But then we noted a serious difficulty with the distinction.  But if the distinction cannot be upheld, how do we solve the aporetic triad?  It looks as if the distinction is one we need to make, but cannot make.

Are You a Liberal? Take This Test

The following statements in boldface are taken verbatim from Dennis Prager's Are You a Liberal? I comment briefly on each in turn. Mirabile dictu, it turns out I am not a liberal! I could make of each  of these items a separate post. (And you hope I won't.) I don't want to hear anyone complain that I am not arguing my points. I argue plenty elsewhere on this site. In any case, that is not my present purpose.

Ayn Rand on Abortion

The following quotations from Rand can be found here, together with references.

An embryo has no rights. Rights do not pertain to a potential, only to an actual being. A child cannot acquire any rights until it is born. The living take precedence over the not-yet-living (or the unborn).

Abortion is a moral right—which should be left to the sole discretion of the woman involved; morally, nothing other than her wish in the matter is to be considered. Who can conceivably have the right to dictate to her what disposition she is to make of the functions of her own body?

If Ayn Rand weren't so popular among adolescents of all ages, if she were an unknown as opposed to a well-known hack, I wouldn't be wasting time refuting this nonsense.  But she is very influential, so it is worthwhile  exposing her incoherence.  If you complain that my tone is harsh and disrespectful, my reply will be that it is no more harsh and disrespectful than hers is: read the quotations on the page to which I have linked.  He who is strident and polemical will receive stridency and polemic in return.  You reap what you sow.

In the first paragraph above Rand equates the unborn with the not-yet living.  This implies that a third trimester fetus is not living.  What is it then?  Dead?  Or is it perhaps neither living nor dead like an inanimate artifact?  Obviously, a human fetus is a living biologically human  individual.  Obviously, one cannot arbitrarily exclude the pre-natal from the class of the living -- unless one is a hack or an ideologue.

Let me expand on this just a bit.  One cannot answer philosophical questions by terminological fiat, by arbitrarily rigging your terminology in such a way that the answer you want falls out of the rigging.  Would that Rand and her followers understood this.  My post Peikoff on the Supernatural carefully exposes another egregious example of the shabby trick of answering philosophical questions by terminological fiat.

Now consider the enthymematic argument of the first two sentences of the first paragraph above.  Made explicit, it goes like this. (1) Rights do not pertain to a potential,  only to an actual being. (2) An embryo is a potential being. Therefore, (3) An embryo has no rights. 

A being is anything that is or exists.  So if x is a merely potential being, then of course it cannot have any rights.  A merely potential being is either nothing or next-to-nothing.  But a human embryo is not a merely potential being; it is an actual human (not canine, not lupine, not bovine, . . .) embryo.    Indeed it is an actual biologically human member of the species homo sapiens.  That is a plain fact of biology.  So the second premise is spectacularly false. 

If Rand were to say something intelligent, she would have to argue like this:

(1*) Rights do not pertain to potential persons, only to actual persons. (2*) An embryo is a potential person. Therefore, (3) An embyo has no rights.  Unlike Rand's argument, this argument is worth discussing.  But it is not the argument Rand gives.  I have countered it elsewhere.  See Abortion category.

The second paragraph quoted above is as sophomoric as the first -- if that's not an insult to sophomores.  It is a clumsy gesture in the direction of what is often called the Woman's Body Argument. Follow the link for the refutation. 

From the Mail: Bryan Magee on Kant and the Theistic Proofs

Dear Dr. Vallicella,

I am of the understanding that one of your post-graduate degrees focussed on Kant. With your knowledge of said philosopher I wonder if I might trouble you to answer a few questions for me?

These questions pertain to Kant's criticism's of the cosmological argument for God's existence. I know that this argument comes in three basic forms: Leibnizian, Thomistic, and Kalam. Did Kant direct criticism to all three versions? Brian Magee has stated, "The fact simply is that Kant has demolished the traditional 'proofs' of God." (Confessions of A Philosopher, p.198) Many other credentialed philosophers make similar claims. In your view, is Magee's strident assertion justified? Do any of Kant's criticism's of the cosmological argument still have force today, or are you of the opinion that the work of recent philosophers has blunted the arguments of the Prussian?

Of course, I don't expect you to provide any counter-arguments to Kant. I am merely curious as to your take on the questions I have asked and I am quite happy for your answer to be brief. Thank you for your time.

Regards,

Stephen Lewin

Dear Mr. Lewin,

Thank you for writing and for reminding me of that delightful book by Bryan Magee.  Unfortunately, the sentence you quote  I do not find on p. 198.  But on p. 156, we read that Kant's philosophy ". . . demolishes many of the most important religious and theological claims . . . ."  On the same page Magee bestows upon Kant the highest praise.  He is "the supreme understander of the problem of human experience," "the supreme clarifier," and "the supreme liberator." For Magee, Manny is the man!

A little farther down on the same page we find your quotation:  "The fact simply is that Kant has demolished the traditional 'proofs' of God."

You ask whether Magee's confident claim is justified.  No, but first a comment on 'demolishes' as it occurs in the above quotations.  Magee uses it in connection both with claims and with arguments.   But to demolish a claim is not the same as to demolish an argument.  Presumably, to demolish a claim such as the claim that God exists would be to show that it is obviously false because ruled out on broadly logical grounds, or else ruled out on the ground that it is inconsistent with some well-known empirical fact or set of empirical facts.  Clearly, Kant does not demolish the claim that God exists in this sense of 'demolish.'  Ditto for the claim that the soul is a simple substance.  Nor is it his intention to demolish these claims.  At most he shows them to be unknowable or unprovable.  And he thinks that is a salutary thing to have shown.  "I have found it necessary to deny knowledge in order to make room for faith," Kant famously remarks in the preface to the 2nd edition of the Critique of Pure Reason (Bxxx).  I suggest that Magee is being sloppy when he speaks of demolishing theological claims.  He may be confusing 'show to be false' with 'show to be unknowable or unprovable.'  I receommend a careful reading of the 1787 preface as a counterbalance to Magee's Kant interpretation as der Alles-Zermalmer, the all-pulverizer.

Now what would it be to demolish an argument?   To demolish an argument is to expose a clear mistake in it such as a formal fallacy or a plainly false premise. I believe that Kant demolished the ontological argument "from mere concepts" which is essentially Descartes' Meditation V ontological argument.  Kant did this by isolating a presupposition of the argument which is plainly false, namely, the proposition that  some concepts are such that, by sheer analysis of their content, one can show that they are instantiated. Surely Kant is right that no concept, not even the concept of God, includes existence.  Interestingly, Aquinas would agree with this. 

But there are modal versions of the ontological argument that are immune to the Kantian critique.  See my "Has the Ontological Argument Been Refuted?" Religious Studies 29 (1993), pp. 97-110.  As for the cosmological argument, Kant thinks that it depends on the ontological argument and collapses with it.  This is an intricate matter that I cannot go into now.  If you are interested, see my article, "Does the Cosmological Argument Depend on the Ontological?" Faith and Philosophy, vol. 17, no. 4 (October 2000), pp. 441-458. 

Another idea of Kant's is that there cannot be a First Cause because the category of causality has no cognitive employment beyond the realm of phenomena.  Schopenhauer borrows this notion and pushes it for all its worth.  Relevant here is my post, On the Very Idea of a Cause of Existence: Schopenhauer on the Cosmological Argument.  But it cannot be said that either Kant or Schopenhauer demolished the cosmological argument because their critiques rest on their own questionable metaphysical systems.

And as you suggest above,  there are Kalam and Thomist versions of the CA that Kant doesn't even consider.  Kant's knowledge of the history of philosophy was meager and the metaphysics he criticized was that of the Wolffian school which derives from Leibniz.

Finally, I refer you to my article, "From Facts to God: An Onto-Cosmological Argument,"  International Journal for the Philosophy of Religion 48 (2000), pp. 157-181.

 

The Knot at the End of the Thread

To philosophize without dogma is like sewing without a knot at the end of the thread. (Kierkegaard)  But to philosophize with dogma is not to philosophize at all.

Unreasonable Disappointment

I cannot be reasonably disappointed if I fail to achieve what was never in my power to achieve.

The Realist Speaks

Most people are basically decent.  Just don't put them under too much moral pressure.

Ubi Amor, Ibi Oculus

They say that love is blind.  But if love blinds, is it love?  Or is it rather infatuation?  "Where there is love, there is sight."  I found this fine Latin aphorism in Josef Pieper, Death and Immortality (Herder and Herder, 1969, p. 21).  The translation is mine.  Pieper credits Thomas Aquinas, Commentary on the Sentences 3 d. 35, I, 21. Pieper adds that "The dictum comes from Richard of St. Victor." (Pieper, p. 133, n. 29.)

Only to the eye of love is the ipseity and haecceity of the beloved revealed, and only the eye of love can descry the true nature and true horror of death.  That is my gloss on the aphorism and its context.  I should arrange a confrontation between Pieper and Epicurus who Pieper views as a sophist. (p. 29)

Know Thyself!

"OK," says the Buddhist, "But what's to know?"

Terror Attack at Moscow's Main Airport

NYT account here.   "Vladimir Markin, a spokesman for Russia’s Investigative Committee, said the attack was probably carried out by a male suicide bomber, and that authorities were trying to identify him."

Was he a Confucian perhaps, a Buddhist, or a Christian? The Gray Lady provides no clue.  Maybe he was a generic faith-based bomber.  After all, everyone knows that all religions are equal and so equally likely to inspire terrorist acts.

Jack LaLanne Dead at 96

An inspiration.  Brother Jackass will carry you over many a pons asinorum for many a year if properly fueled and disciplined.  Reform your diet and set aside two to three hours per day for vigorous exercise.  Lalanne swam an hour a day and lifted weights for two.  Right up until the end.  And he always 'went to failure'  doing his reps until he could do no more.

Bill Muehlenberg's Culture Watch

I happened upon this site today, and it looks good based on the one article I read, Shariah and Democracy.  You decide.

Thilo Sarrazin and Muslim Integration

A friend gave me a copy of Thilo Sarrazin, Deutschland Schafft Sich Ab (Germany Does Away With Itself), but I haven't had time to read it.  So I found this summary of some of Sarrazin's points useful.  I cannot vouch for its accuracy.

 

A Memorable Weekend 40 Years Ago This Weekend

We have it on good authority that the unexamined life is not worth living.  The same goes for the unrecorded and the unremembered life.  So I pause to remember my best pal (at the time) and my best gal (at the time) and the trip we took in my 1963 Karmann Ghia convertible up the California coast to my favorite city (at the time). Van Morrison, Brown-Eyed Girl.  Thelonious Monk, 'Round Midnight.  Scott MacKenzie, San Francisco.  While I was with the girl, Tom, fellow Kerouac aficionado and memory babe, stumbled upon a Monk gig, dug him and met his wife.  Tom tells me that his remembrances of things past play like movies in his head.  Me, I have to keep a journal.

My Intentionality Aporia 'Ockhamized'

Edward of London proposes the following triad

O1. The proposition ‘Bill is looking for a nonexistent thing’ can be true even when there are no nonexistent things.
O2. The proposition ‘Bill is looking for a nonexistent thing’ expresses a relation between two things.
O3. Every relation is such that if it obtains, all of its relata exist.

as a nominalistic equivalent to my

W1. We sometimes think about the nonexistent.
W2. Intentionality is a relation between thinker and object of thought.
W3. Every relation R is such that, if R obtains,then all its relata exist.

Edward imposes the following contraint on aporetic polyads: "The essence of an aporetic polyad is that any proper subset of statements (including the singleton set) should be consistent on its own, and only the whole set being inconsistent."  I accept this constraint. It implies that nothing can count as an aporetic polyad if one of its limbs is self-contradictory. 

My definition runs as follows.  An aporetic polyad is a set S of n self-consistent propositions (n>1) such that (i) any n-1 members of S, taken in conjunction, entail the negation of the remaining member; (ii) each member of S has a strong claim on our acceptance.  Edward's constraint follows from this definition.  For if any member is self-inconsistent, then it cannot have a strong claim, or any claim, on our acceptance.

If I understand Edward, he is urging two points.  His first point is that my formulation of the triad is inept because (W1), unlike (O1), is self-contradictory.  If this charge sticks, then my formulation does not count as an aporetic polyad by my own definition.  His second point is that his version of the triad has a straightforward and obvious solution:  reject (O2). 

Reply to the First Point.  There is nothing self-contradictory about 'We sometimes think of the nonexistent.'  As I made clear earlier, this is a datanic, not a theoretical, claim.  On this score it contrasts with the other two limbs.  It is meant to record an obvious fact that everyone ought to grant instantly. Because the fact is obvious it is obviously self-consistent.  So if Edward denies (W1), then it is not profitable to to continue a discussion with him. 

All I can do at this point is speculate as to why Edward fails to get the point.  I suppose what he is doing is reading a theory into (W1), a theory he considers self-contradictory.    But (W1) simply records a pre-theoretical fact and is neutral with respect to such theories as Meinong's Theory of Objects.  Suppose I am imagining a winged horse.  If so, then it would be false to say that I am imagining nothing.  One cannot simply imagine, or just imagine.  It follows that I am imagining something. We are still at the level of data.  I have said nothing controversial.  One moves beyond data to theory if one interprets my imagining something that does not exist as my standing in a relation to a Meinongian nonexistent object.  That is a highly controversial but possible theory, and it is not self-contradictory contrary to what Edward implies.  But whether or not it is self-contradictory, the main point for now is that

1. BV is imagining a winged horse

Is neutral as between the following theory-laden interpretations

2. BV (or a mental act of his) stands in a dyadic relation to a Meinongian nonexistent object.

and

3. BV is imagining winged-horse-ly.

The crucial datum is that one cannot just imagine, or simply imagine.  We express this by saying that to imagine is to imagine something.  But 'imagine something' needn't be read relationally; it could be read adverbially.  Accordingly, to imagine Peter (who exists) is to imagine Peter-ly, and to imagine Polonious (who does not exist) is to imagine Polonious-ly.  I am not forced by the crucial datum to say that imagining involves a relation between subject and object; I can say that the 'object' reduces to an adverbial modification of my imagining. 

So even if the relational reading of (1) were self-contradictory -- which it isn't --  one is not bound to interpret (1) relationally.  Now (1) is just an example of (W1).  So the same goes for (W1).  (W1) is obviously true.  He who denies it is either perverse or confused.

Reply to the Second Point.  One can of course solve Edward's triad by denying (O2). But the real question is whether one can easily deny the distinct proposition  (W2).  I say no.  For one thing, the alternatives to saying that intentionality is a relation are not at all appetizing. All three of the limbs of my triad lay claim to our acceptance, and none can be easily rejected -- but they cannot all be true.  That is why there is a problem. 

Intentionality in Locks and Keys?

The mind-body problem divides into several interconnected subproblems. One concerns the relation of consciousness to its material substratum in the brain and central nervous system. A second concerns the aboutness or intentionality of (some) conscious states. A third problem is how a physical organism can be subject to the norms of rationality: How does an abstract argument-pattern such as Modus Tollens 'find purchase in' and 'govern' the transitions from one brain state to another? A fourth subproblem has to do with mental causation. Obviously, mental states are causally efficacious in bringing about physical states and other mental states. My desire for another cup of java is part of the causal chain that eventuates in the physical process of ingesting caffeine. Note also that knowledge of the physical world would presumably not be possible unless physical states could enter into the etiology of mental states. (I say 'presumably' because my formulation begs the question against idealism. And don't let anyone tell you that idealism is not a live option! The fact that it is not much discussed these days doesn't mean anything. Academic philosophers can be as fashion-conscious as teenage girls, and as worried about how they appear; idealism is currently not discussed in the more fashionable salons.)

Divide and conquer is one approach to any complex problem: separate out the subproblems and try to solve them separately. For example, separate the 'qualia' problem — which is part of the first subproblem mentioned — from the intentionality problem.

It might be that there is nothing specifically mental about intentionality at all. Perhaps intentionality is to be found in nature and in artifacts below the level of mind. If so, it may be possible to understand intentionality at the level of mind by working up to it 'from below.' It may be possible to build a 'gradualist bridge' from mindless intentionality to minded intentionality. One might then come to understand how intentionality in us has 'evolved.'

Now one very serious question is whether intentionality can be prised apart from consciousness and treated separately. This is a question Colin McGinn raises with great skill. It deserves  a separate post. In this post, however, I will examine a passage from Daniel Dennett in which our man, having separated the qualia and intentionality problems, tries to get from mindless intentionality to the minded variety. The passage is from Kinds of Mind, p. 35:

Intentionality in the philosophical sense is just aboutness. [. . .] A lock and key exhibit the crudest form of intentionality; so do the opioid receptors in brain cells — receptors that are designed to accept the endorphin molecules that nature has been providing in brains for millions of years. [. . .] This lock-and-key variety of crude aboutness is the basic design element out of which nature has fashioned the fancier sorts of subsystems that may more deservedly be called representation systems, so we will have to to analyze the aboutness of these representations in terms of the (quasi?) aboutness of locks-and-keys in any case.

If I am thinking about Jude Acers, my thought is about him: he is not about my thinking. Generalizing, we can say that intentionality is an asymmetrical relation: if X stands in the intentional relation to Y, then Y does not stand in the intentional relation to X. (Brentano rightly pointed out long ago that intentionality is not a relation, strictly speaking, but ein Relativliches, something relation-like; but this nuance does not harm my point.)

Now in Dennett's example, is the lock about the key or the key about the lock? Well, there is a sense in which each is about the other. By studying the key, I can infer something about the lock, and by studying the lock I can infer something about the key. Each provides information about the other, and to a locksmith, a great deal of information.

There are many cases like this. Animal droppings on the trail provide information about what manner of critter has been by recently. Bear scat 'means' bears have been around. One sort of footprint 'indicates' that a coyote has passed by, another sort a mountain lion. The paw of a coyote provides information about the type of print it would leave if it were to leave a print, and a footprint provides information about the design of the paw. (Here 'design' just means pattern.)

So in the coyote case as in the lock and key case we have symmetrical aboutness: lock is about key, and key about lock; paw is about footprint, print is about paw. Or consider a compass needle. It is about magnetic North in the sense that one can infer where magnetic North is from the direction in which the the needle is pointing. But equally, one can infer from the location of magnetic North where a properly functioning compass needle will point.

The symmetry of this sort of aboutness — call it aboutness₁ — gives us excellent reason to distinguish it from intentionality, or aboutness₂, which is asymmetrical.

From this one can see that Dennett is completely mistaken in his claim that lock-and-key aboutness is a "form of intentionality." It is not a form of intentionality, and to think that it is is to confuse the the two senses of 'aboutness' lately distinguished. Dennett himself seems to be aware of this since at the end of the passage quoted he shifts his ground and speaks of "quasi-aboutness." This fudge is very telling. No doubt there is some likeness as between lock-and-key aboutness and intentional aboutness, but that proves nothing since everything is like everything else in some respect.

The point is that one gains no insight at all into how intentionality emerges — if it does emerge — by having it compared with locks and keys. Note also that to infer something about the lock from the key presupposes genuine intentionality on the part of the locksmith.

To sum up. To build his gradualist bridge, Dennett looks for a form of primitive intentionality below the level of mind or consciousness. He thinks he has found it in his lock and key example. But what I have just shown is that the symmetrical aboutness in the lock and key case is not, and cannot be, a form or type or species of intentionality — which is asymmetrical. The former merely resembles the genuine article. But if A resembles B, it does not follow that A is a form of B. A decoy duck resembles a duck but is not type of duck.

Ockhamite Advice for Leftists

Do not multiply enemies beyond necessity! By libeling those who disagree with you, for example.  Making enemies for no good reason is generally foolish.  It can come back to bite you.

Nick Gillespie on Cartoonist Steve Benson

There are several reasons why I don't subscribe to the Arizona Republic, and Steve Benson is one of them. Here.  Editorial cartooning is indeed the lowest of art forms. 

They Have Our Soul Who Have Our Bonds

Just one of the thoughts in this outstanding piece by Mark Steyn.

Posits or Inventions? Geach and Butchvarov on Intentionality

One philosopher's necessary explanatory posit is another's mere invention.

In his rich and fascinating article "Direct Realism Without Materialism" (Midwest Studies in Philosophy, 1994), Panayot Butchvarov rejects  epistemic intermediaries as "philosophical inventions." Thus he rejects  sense data, sensations, ways of being appeared to, sense experiences, mental representations, ideas, images, looks, seemings, appearances, and the like. (1)  Curiously enough, however, Butch goes on to posit nonexistent or unreal objects very much in the manner of Meinong!  Actually, 'posit'  is not a word he would use since Butch claims that we are directly acquainted with unreal objects.  (13) Either way, unreal objects such as the proverbial hallucinated pink rat  are not, on Butchvarov's view, philosophical inventions.

But now consider the following  1961 passage from Anscombe and Geach's Three Philosophers, a passage that is as if directed against the Butchvarovian view:

But saying this  has obvious difficulties. [Saying that all there is to a sensation or thought of X is its being of X.] It seems to make the whole being of a sensation or thought consist in a relation to something else:  it is as if someone said he had a picture of a cat that was not painted on any background or in any medium, there being nothing to it except that it was a picture of a cat.  This is hard enough: to make matters worse, the terminus of the supposed relation may not exist -- a drunkard's 'seeing' snakes is not related to any real snake, nor my thought of a phoenix to any real phoenix.  Philosophers have sought a way out of this difficulty by inventing chimerical entities like 'snakish sense-data' or 'real but nonexistent phoenixes' as termini of the cognitive relation. (95, emphasis added)

Butchvarov would not call a nonexistent phoenix or nonexistent pink rat real, but that it just a matter of terminology.  What is striking here is that the items Geach considers chimerical inventions Butchvarov considers not only reasonably posited, but phenomenologically evident!

Ain't philosophy grand?  One philosopher's chimerical invention is another's phenomenological given. 

What is also striking about the above  passage is that the position that Geach rejects via the 'picture of a cat' analogy is almost exactly the position that Butch maintains. Let's think about this a bit.

Surely Anscombe and Geach are right when it comes to pictures and other physical representations.  There is a clear sense in which a picture (whether painting, photograph, etc.) of a cat is of a cat. The intentionality here cannot however be original; it must be derivative, derivative from the original intentionality of one who takes the picture to be of a cat.   Surely no physical representation represents anything on its own, by its own power.  And it is also quite clear that a picture of X is not exhausted by its being of X.  There is more to a picture than its depicting something; the depicting function needs realization in some medium.

The question, however, is whether original intentionality also needs  realization in some medium.  It is not obvious that it does need such realization, whether in brain-stuff or in mind-stuff.  Why can't consciousness of a cat  be nothing more than consciousness of a cat?  Why can't consciousness be exhausted in its being by its revelation of objects? 

Bewusstsein als bewusst-sein.  Get it?

But this is not the place to examine Butchvarov's direct realist conception of consciousness, a conception he finds in Moore, Wittgenstein, Heidegger and Sartre, and contrasts with a mental- contents conception.

 

Aquinas on Intentionality: Towards a Critique

Yesterday I quoted Peter Geach in exposition of Aquinas' theory of intentionality.  I will now quote Anthony Kenny in exposition of the same doctrine:

The form is individuated when existing with esse naturale in an actual example of a species; it is also individuated, in quite a different way, when it exists with esse intentionale in the mind of a thinker.  Suppose that I think of a crocodile.  There seem to be two things that make this thought the thought that it is: first, that it is a thought of a crocodile and not, say, of an elephant; second, that it is my thought and not yours or President Bush's.  Other things may be true of thoughts -- e.g. that they are interesting,  obsessive, vague -- but these seem to be the two things essential to any thoughts: that they should be someone's thoughts, and that they should be thoughts of something.  The theory of intentionality is meant to set out both  these features.  The form of crocodile when existing in nature is individuated by the matter it informs; when existing intentionally, it is individuated by the person in whose mind it exists. (Aquinas on Being, Oxford 2002, p. 169)

The idea, then, is that one and the same form is both in the thing outside the mind (the crocodile in Kenny's example) and in the mind of the person who is thinking about the crocodile.  It is this self-same form that makes the thought a thought of a crocodile as opposed to a thought of something else.  But the form exists in mind and in thing in two different ways.  It exists in the mind with esse intentionale (intentional be-ing), but exists in the thing with esse naturale (natural be-ing).  (My use of 'be-ing' to translate esse is not for the sake of being cute but to underscore the crucial distinction between the infinitive esse (to be) and the present participle ens, both of which can be translated with 'being.')

The distinction between the two modes of be-ing is needed in order to avoid the consequence that a mind thinking about a crocodile either has a crocodile in it or is itself a crocodile.  A thought of a red sunset is not a red thought, and a thought of a crocodile does not have the properties characteristic of a crocodile.

I now pass over to critique.  Let's first note a distinction that I fudged yesterday for the sake of brevity, brevity being the soul of blog.  Reverting to yesterday's example, it is the distinction between thinking of  a cat (some cat or other) and thinking of a particular cat such as Max Black.  It is one thing to explain how my thought of a cat is a thought of a cat (as opposed to a dog or a kangaroo), and quite another to explain how my thought of Max the cat is a thought of Max. The Thomist theory may well be up to the first task.  But I'm not sure it is up to the second.

Matter is the principium individuationis.  What makes  a cat an individual cat numerically distinct from other cats is its signate or designated matter (materia signata).  In extramental reality, then, Max's individuality is bound up with his signate matter.   But when Max's form exists in my mind with esse intentionale, it is exists in an immaterial way.  What then individuates Max's form as it exists in my mind with esse intentionale?  And if nothing individuates it, then what makes my thought of Max the cat a thought of Max (as opposed to a thought of some cat or other)?

I hope to expatiate further on this tomorrow.

The Progressive "Climate of Hate"

A primer.

Esse Intentionale and Esse Naturale: Notes on Geach on Aquinas on Intentionality

A theory of intentionality ought to explain how the objective reference or object-directedness of our thoughts is possible.  Suppose I am thinking about a cat, a particular cat of my acquaintance whom I have named 'Max Black.'  How are we to understand the relation between the mental act of my thinking, which is a transient datable event in my mental life, and its object, namely the cat I am thinking of?  What makes my thinking of Max a thinking of Max?

Here is what Peter Geach has to say, glossing Aquinas:

What makes a sensation or thought of an X to be of an X is that it is an individual occurrence of that very form or nature which occurs in X -- it is thus that our mind 'reaches right up to the reality'; what makes it to be a sensation or thought of an X rather than an actual X or an actual X-ness is that X-ness here occurs in the special way called esse intentionale and not in the 'ordinary' way called esse naturale.  This solution resolves the difficulty.  It shows how being of an X is not a relation in which the thought or sensation stands, but is simply what the thought or sensation is . . . .(Three Philosophers, Cornell UP, 1961, p. 95) 

But what the devil does that  mean?  Allow me to explain.  The main point here is that ofness or aboutness is not a relation between a mental act and its object.  Thus intentionality is not a relation that relates my thinking of Max and Max.  My thinking of Max just is the mental occurrence of the very same form or nature -- felinity -- which occurs physically in Max.  Max is a hylomorphic compound, a compound of form and (signate) matter.  Old Max himself, fleas and all, is of course not in my mind.  It is his form that is in my mind.  But if felinity informs my mind, why isn't my mind a cat?  Here is where the distinction between esse intentionale and esse naturale comes in.  One and the same form -- felinity -- exists in two different modes.  Its mode of being in my mind is esse intentionale while its mode of being in Max is esse naturale.

Because my thought of Max just is the intentional occurrence of the same form or nature that occurs naturally in Max, there is no problem about how my thought reaches Max.  One could call this an identity theory of intentionality. 

What if Max were, unbeknownst to me, to cease to exist while I was thinking about him?  My thinking would be unaffected: it would still be about Max in exactly the way it was about him before.  The Thomist theory would account for this by saying that while the form occurs with esse intentionale in my mind, it does not occur outside my mind with esse reale.

That in a nutshell is the Thomist theory of intentionality.  There is more to it of course, and it is open to some very serious objections.  These will be discussed tomorrow perhaps.

A Reply to "Ockham's Nominalism"

The following is a response to "Ockham's Nominalism"  by our London sparring partner, Edward Ockham.  His words are in black, mine are in blue.  Comments are enabled.

At this stage, I should discuss Peter Lupu’s objections (mostly in the extended comment on Vallicella’s blog here) to the nominalist program.

I should first explain what I think the nominalist program is. I am taking my lead from a principle that William of Ockham neatly formulates in his Summa Logicae book I, chapter 51, where he accuses 'the moderns' of two errors, and says that the root of the second error is “to multiply entities according to the multiplicity of terms and to suppose that every term has something real (quid rei) corresponding to it”. He says grumpily that this is erroneous and leads far away from the truth. ('Radix est multiplicare entia secundum multitudinem terminorum, et quod quilibet terminus habet quid rei; quod tamen abusivum est et a veritate maxime abducens'). See also an early definition of nominalism here.

What does he mean? Well he says that it is an error. He implies it is a common one, by attributing to the moderns and by the fact he mentions it all. Thus he implies that there exist terms which do not have something real corresponding to them.

A net that snags every fish in the sea brings in too large a catch.  The trouble with the above explanation of nominalism is that it will be accepted by almost all philosophers, including plenty who would not identify themselves as nominalists.  For few if any philosophers hold that for each word in a sentence there is a corresponding referent.  Consider

1. Nobody came to the party.

No one will take 'nobody' in (1) as a name.  ("Well, I'm glad to hear that at least one person showed up.  How is Nobody doing these days?")  (1) is easily analyzed so as to remove the apparent reference of 'nobody.'  And the same goes for a long list of other synsemantic or syncategorematical expressions.  Would any philosopher say that in

2. I'm a day late and a dollar short

every word has a referent?  Edward needs to give examples of philosophers who hold that 'nobody' in (1) and 'and' in (2) have referents.  Let us hope he does not weasel out of this challenge.  Since no one assumes that every term has something real corresponding to it, the above definition of 'nominalism' is too broad to be of any use.

If Ockham is correct, the relevant distinction to draw is between queer and straight terms. Straight terms have something real corresponding to them, queer terms don’t. Furthermore, there must at least be some temptation to imagine that queer terms refer to or denote something, otherwise there would be little point in making it.

There is no need for this bizarre terminological innovation.  We already have 'autosemantic' and 'synsemantic' and equivalents.  Do not multiply terminology beyond necessity!

And let us note that synsemantic terms have useful semantic roles to play despite their not referring to anything.  There is a rather striking difference between 'I will come' and 'I will not come,' a difference that rides on the synsemantic particle 'not' which, as synsemantic, does not refer to anything.

Which brings me to the main point raised by Peter Lupu, who asks “What are ‘queer-entities’ and how do we determine whether a given entity is “queer” or “straight”? There are two parts to his question. In answer to the first, there are no such things as queer entities, if Ockham is right. There are only ‘queer terms’. These, by definition, are terms that don’t refer to or denote anything, and so by implication there are no ‘queer entities’.

In other words, synsemantic terms do not refer.  True by definition.

This is what makes any debate with realists difficult. Realists, namely those who think that queer terms refer, will persist in using the queer terms as if they did refer, and so will ask what kinds of thing are referred to, what is their ‘ontological status’ and so on. Ockhamists will naturally refuse to use these terms as if they referred, and refer the names of the terms instead, typically by using real or scare quotes.

No, realists are not those who think that queer terms refer since no one thinks that queer, i.e., nonreferring terms, refer.  Edward needs to explain the criteria for deciding whether a given term is queer or straight.  Is 'Edward' a queer term?  If not, why not?

[. . .]

That deals with Peter's first question. What are queer entities? We can't say, because there are no such things, just as we can't say what kind of things ghosts are. But we can say what 'queer terms' are. These are terms that are categorical, but which (a) have no reference or denotation and (b) appear, or are believed by many, typically on grounds of reason alone, to have a reference or denotation.

This doesn't advance the discussion at all.  First of all, we are not told what 'categorical' means.  More importantly, we have not been supplied with criteria for distinguishing queer from straight terms, to acquiesce for the nonce in this idiotic terminology. 

Peter’s second point, on how we determine whether given entity is “queer” or “straight”, I will leave for the next post, although clearly the first point applies here also. If the nominalist is right, we cannot ask this question of anything, just as we cannot ask whether a UFO came from Alpha centauri or Betelgeuse. We can only ask whether a given term is queer or straight. More to follow.

This doesn't get us anywhere.  We can ask, of a given term, whether or not it has a referent.  But then we need to be supplied with some method for answering this question.  Consider

3. Wisdom is a virtue.

Presumably, Edward will put 'wisdom' down as queer.  But on what grounds?  Is it because  he just knows (again by what method?) that everything that exists is a particular, and that if 'wisdom' has a referent then it must be a universal?  Or is there something about the word itself that tips him off that it is nonreferring? 

Is he appealing to some paraphrastic method?  Is he suggesting that what (3) expresses can be expressed salva significatione by a sentence containing no term making an apparent reference to a universal?  And in particular, would he accept the following paraphrase:

3*.  If anyone is wise, then he is virtuous?

So far, then, Londonistas 0, Phoenicians 1.

The Consolation of Philosophy

Dear Sir:

I read, or attempt to read, your blog almost every day. Some of your  
"technical" analysis and commentaries go right over my head, but I try  
to persevere.

Sometimes things click into place - from my point of view. And I found  
your recent examination of the question Is Death Evil? very helpful.  
Curious though it might seem, my fear of death was reduced (a bit) by  
your considerations.

Alex A.
Lincoln
England.

Two Puzzles Anent Brentano's 1874 Locus Classicus on Intentionality

All contemporary discussion of intentionality traces back to an oft-quoted passage from Franz Brentano's Psychology From an Empirical Standpoint.  First published in 1874 in German, this influential book  had to wait 99 years until it saw the light of day in the Anglosphere.  And in the Anglosphere to go untranslated is to go unread.  Here is the passage: 

Every mental phenomenon is characterized by what the Scholastics of the Middle Ages called the intentional (or mental) inexistence of an object and what we might call, though not wholly unambiguously, reference to a content, direction toward an object (which is not to be understood here as meaning a thing), or immanent objectivity.  Every mental phenomenon includes something as object within itself, although they do not all do so in the same way.  In presentation something is presented, in judgment something is affirmed or denied, in love loved, in hate hated, in desire desired and so on. (Humanities Press, 1973, ed. McAlister, p. 88)

This passage is not only puzzling in itself, but also puzzling in that it is not clear what it has to do with the discussions of intentionality that it spawned.  I think most philosophers nowadays would agree that something like the following is the thesis of intentionality:

Thesis of Intentionality.  It is characteristic of certain mental states (the intentional states) to refer beyond themselves to items (i) that are not part of the state and (ii) may or may not exist.

Example.  If I am in a state of desire, then a complete description of this mental state must include a specification of what it is that I desire.  One cannot simply desire, or just desire.   At a bare minimum we need to distinguish between the desiring and that which is desired.  As Brentano says above, in desire something is desired. 

Unfortunately, the word 'something' will cause some people to stumble including some esteemed members of the Commenter Corps.  They will get it into their heads that a concrete episode of desire cannot exist unless there also exists, independently of the desire, something that is desired.  But this cannot be what is meant.  For if Poindexter desires a perpetuum mobile, he is just as much in a state of desire as his pal Percy who desires Poindexter's sloop, despite the fact that there is and can be no perpetuum mobile, while there is Poindexter's sloop.  And as for wanting a sloop, it could be that Percy wants a sloop without wanting any sloop that (presently) exists: he wants a sloop that satisfies a description that no sloop in existence satisfies.  Or a woman wants a baby.  She doesn't want to adopt or kidnap an existing baby; she wants to 'bring a baby into the world.'  Obviously, her longing is for something that does not presently exist, and indeed for something that does not exist at all if what does not yet exist does not exist.

In  cases like these , the states of desire refer beyond themselves to items that are (i) not part of the states and that (ii) do not exist.  After all, someone who wants a sloop does not want a mental state, or any part of a mental state, or anything immanent to a mental state, or anything whose existence depends on the existence of a mental state.  Wanting a sloop, by its very intentional structure, intends something which, if it exists, exists independently of any mental state.  And note that from the fact that there is nothing that satisfies the sloop-desire it does not follow that the desire is directed to an immanent object.

It is also important to realize that the reference beyond itself of mental acts is an intrinsic (nonrelational) feature of these acts: what makes my thought of Las Vegas precisely a thought of Las Vegas is not the obtaining of a relation between me (or my mental state) and the city of Las Vegas.  For suppose I am thinking of Las Vegas, and while I am thinking of it God does to it what he is said to have done to Sodom and Gomorrah.  Would my thinking of Las Vegas be in any way affected as to its own inner nature?  No.  The act of thinking and its content are what they are whether or not the external object exists.

Part of the thesis of intentionality , then, is that certain mental states are intrinsically such as to point beyond themselves to items that may or may not exist.  Intrinsically, because the object-directedness is not parasitic upon the actual existence of the external object.  But can one find the thesis of intentionality as I have spelled it out  in the above passage? 

No, and that is our first puzzle. It is puzzling that the 1874 'charter' has little to do with what subsequently flew under the flag 'intentionality.'  Two points:

a. Although Brentano speaks of "reference to an object,"  he makes it clear that this object is an immanent object, one contained in the mental phenomenon or act.  As such, the object is indistinguishable from a mental content.  And then there is the talk of "the intentional (or mental) inexistence of an object."  'Inexistence' does not mean nonexistence but existence-in (inesse).  The idea is that the object exists in the act and not independently of the act.  But then the object is a mere content, and the notion of a reference beyond the mental state to something transcendent of it is lost.

b. It is also striking that in the 1874 passage  there is no mention of the crucial feature of intentionality that is always mentioned in later discussions of it, namely, that the items to which intentional states refer  may or may not exist, or may or may not obtain (in the case of states of affairs).  For example, if Loughner believes that the earth is flat, then his mental state is directed toward a state of affairs which, if it obtains, is a state of affairs involving the earth and nothing mental.  But neither the obtaining nor the nonobtaining of this state of affairs follows from Loughner's being in the belief-state.

It seems as if for the Brentano of 1874 intentionality is something wholly internal to the mental phenomenon, a relation that connects the act with its content, but does not point beyond the content to the external world.  "If every mental phenomenon includes as object something within itself," then every intentional object exists in the mode: existence-in.  I am therefore inclined to agree with Tim Crane:  "Brentano’s original 1874 doctrine of intentional inexistence has nothing to do with the problem of how we can think about things that do not exist."

Of course, in the later Brentano intentionality is tied to the latter problem.  On Crane's analysis, Brentano simply changed his  mind after 1874.  I see it slightly differently:  the later view is implicit in the 1874 passage but cannot emerge clearly because of Brentano's adherence to Scholastic conceptuality.  But this is a contested exegetical point.

The second puzzle concerns an apparent misunderstanding by Brentano of the Scholastic doctrine of esse intentionale.  This is puzzling because Brentano was steeped in Aristotle and the Scholastics due to his priestly formation, not to mention his doctoral work under Trendelenburg.

In the passage quoted Brentano identifies intentional inexistence with mental inexistence, which implies that below the level of mind there is no esse intentionale.  But this is not Scholastic doctrine.  For an explanation of this, see Gyula Klima.  We will come back to this.

 

Is Death Evil?

So is death evil or not?  What is my answer?  The answer depends on metaphysics.

1. If we are natural beings only, nothing but complex physical systems, continuous with the rest of nature and susceptible in principle of complete explanation by physics and biology, then I cannot see how death in general could be accounted evil.  The premature death of some is perhaps evil on the ground that death deprives the decedent of what he might otherwise have enjoyed.  The happy and healthy 20 year old who is cut down by a stray bullet arguably suffers a loss, not one that he can experience, but a loss nonetheless.  (One can suffer a loss merely by being the subject of it without actually experiencing it.)  There is of course a residual technical puzzle about how a person who no longer exists can be the subject of loss, but for present purposes I won't worry further about this.

My main point is that it cannot be maintained on naturalistic principles that death in general is evil for humans.  For suppose a person lives a productive life of 90 or so years, a life which on balance has been satisfying to the person and enriching to those who have come in contact with him.  What is evil about the death of such a person?  And if death is not evil for such a person, then the philosophical question whether death in general is evil must be answered in the negative.  Here are some further considerations:

a.  It is a conceptual truth that one cannot be deprived of the impossible.  Now healthy productive living after a certain age is nomologically impossible.  So a person who dies at a ripe old age of 90 or 100 is not being deprived of anything by dying.  (Adjust the numbers upwards if you care to.)  At the point at which further living become nomologically impossible, one cannot be said to be deprived by death of a good.  Of course, the old person may want  to live on a another year or decade, but that is irrelevant.

b. Death removes from the decedent  the goods of life but also removes the evils, which are not inconsiderable.  I will spare the reader a litany of the miseries and horrors of this life.  If he opens his eyes he will quickly become apprised of them.  (But don't generalize from your own favorable experience: readers of this blog are members of an elite cadre of well-placed and fortunate individuals.)

c.  Even if being dead involves a loss for the decedent after a long and satisfying life, there cannot on naturalistic principles be any experiencing of this loss by the decedent, so how big a deal could it be?  Suppose your will stipulates that on your death $100, 000 of your estate shall go to Oxfam. Your executrix blows the whole wad at Nordstrom's.  It is arguable though not perfectly clear that you have been violated -- but you'll be able to 'live' with it, right?  Others can say that you were wronged.  But what could that be to you who no longer exists?

On this naturalistic way of thinking, then, death cannot in general be an evil for humans.  At most, the premature death of some individuals is evil.  But even this is not clear because of the problem of 'the subject of loss/deprivation.' 

But how do you know that naturalism is true?  That you believe it with great conviction cuts no ice.  As Nietzsche says, in his typically exaggerated and febrile way, "Convictions are the greatest enemies of truth."  Can you prove naturalism?  If you try, you will soon entangle yourself in a thicket of thorny metaphysical questions from which you will not escape unbloodied. You cannot prove it.  I guarantee it.

2.  How then could death be evil?  Here is one way.  Suppose there is the possibility of personal survival of bodily death (with divine assistance) and the possibility of further intellectual, moral, and spiritual development in fellowship with others who have survived and in fellowship with God.  Now if some such version of theism is true, and if one dies and becomes nothing -- the possibility of survival not having been realized either because the person in question refuses the divine offer or is judged unworthy of it -- then one will have been deprived of a great good.  One will have missed out on the beatitude for which we have been created.  So death (annihilation) would be a very great evil on this scheme, an incomparably greater evil than the evil of death on a naturalistic scheme, assuming it could be said to be evil on a naturalistic scheme.  (You will have noticed that 'the problem of the subject' arises on both schemes.) 

As I see it, death is evil because it deprives us of what some of us feel is our 'birthright' as spiritual beings: continued intellectual, moral, and spiritual progress.  We cannot quite believe that we are nothing more than complex physical systems no more worthy of continuance than trees and swamps and clouds.  We feel it to be absurd that the progress we have made individually but also collectively will be simply obliterated, that our questions will go unanswered, our hopes dashed, that the thirsting after justice will go unslaked.  We are not reconciled to the notion that there will be no redemption, that there will be no answer to or recompense for the terrible crimes that have been inflicted on the innocent.  As easy as it is to be reconciled to the death of others viewed objectively, it is difficult to be reconciled to the utter annihilation of those we love.  If death is annihilation, then this life is absurd, a big seductive joke, and we are the butt of it.

Think of the great questions that have tormented the best minds for millenia.  Does it not strike you as a perfectly absurd arrangement that one day these questions will just cease with the last human being and go unanswered forever?  All that painstaking inquiry and no answer, not even the answer that the questions posed were meaningless and unanswerable!

There is a certain sort of secular humanist who fools himself with dreams of human progress toward a 'better world' in which a sort of secular redemption will be achieved.  But this is pure illusion and pure evasion.  It is nothing but feel-good claptrap.  On a naturalistic scheme there can be no redemption for the billions who have been the victims of terrible injustice.  Be a naturalist if you must, but don't fool yourself with humanistic fantasies.  There is no secular substitute for the redemption that only God could bring about.  Be an honest naturalist, a nihilist naturalist.

But of course what I have just said in exfoliation of the sense some of us have of being more than complex physical systems, a sense of having a higher destiny, proves nothing and can be easily rebutted: Death is not an evil because none of what some feel is their birthright as imago Dei is really possible.  It is just pious claptrap born of dissatisfaction with the way things are.  One may feel that it is 'a rotten deal' and 'a bad arrangement' that one must die and be annihilated just when one is starting to make real progress toward understanding and enlightenment and happiness.  But that feeling is just a quirk of some (malcontent) natures: it doesn't prove anything.

3.  So once again we end up in good old Platonic fashion, aporetically, at an impasse.  There is simply no solution to the problem of whether death is evil without a solution to the underlying metaphysical question in philosophical anthropology:  What is man?  (The fourth of Kant's famous questions after: What can I know? What ought I do?  What can I hope for?)  And to the question What is man? there is no answer that can withstand the scrutiny of, and receive the endorsement of, all able practioners.

That is not to say that there is no correct answer.  It is to say that, even if there is, one cannot know it to be correct.  And if one cannot know it to be correct, then it is not an answer in any serious sense of the term.

So I arrive once again at the following long-held conviction.  In the final analysis one must DECIDE what one will believe and how one will live.  There is no evading one's doxastic and practical freedom and responsibility.  When it comes to the ultimate questions one must decide what is true and how one will live.  No one can help you, not even God.  For supposing God, or a divine emmisary, to appear to you right now, you would still have to decide that  it was indeed God or a being from God who was appearing to you; and you would still have to decide whether or not to credit his revelation.  What if the divine intermediary told you to murder your innocent son?  What would you say?  If you were rational your would say, "Get the hell out of here; by commanding me to do what is plainly immoral you prove that you are an illusion."  Or maybe you would decide to accept the veridicality of the experience.  Either way you would be deciding.  (See Abraham and Isaac category and Doxastic Voluntarism category)

The decision as to what to believe and how to live is of course not whimsical or thoughtless or quick or light-hearted.  It must be made with all due doxastic vigilance and fear and trembling, but there is no getting around the need for decision.  But what if you refuse to decide and simply acquiesce in something imposed from without?  Then that too is a decision on your part.

 

How Much Value Do You Attach to This Life?

It is the hour of death.  You are informed by an utterly reliable source that you have exactly two options.  You can either accept death and with it utter annihilation of the self, or you can repeat your life with every last detail the same.  But if every last detail is to be the same, and you decide to sign up for another round on the wheel of becoming, you realize that you are signing up for an infinity of rounds.

So which will it be?  Has your life been so valuable that you would be willing to repeat it, and indeed repeat it endlessly? 

The Tucson Massacre: Paul Krugman et al. Continue to Get Pounded

And rightly so:

Roger Kimball: 

Loughner’s pistol was probably still warm when Krugman wheeled into print in an effort to make political capital out of the tragedy.  “Assassination Attempt in Arizona” should join that rogues’ gallery of disgusting Times stories that wallow in the gutter of political innuendo and mendacity even as they preen themselves on their exhibition of holier-than-thou virtue.

The folks at Powerline instantly got to the crux of the matter with The Contemptible Krugman, noting that he was among the first to “seek political advantage from mass murder.” Krugman’s column, they show, belongs to the Lillian Hellman species of utterance as described by Mary McCarthy: everything he wrote is a lie, including “and” and “the.” “We don’t have proof yet that this was political,” Krugman begins,  “but the odds are that it was.”

Charles Krauthammer:

Not only is there no evidence that Loughner was impelled to violence by any of those upon whom Paul Krugman, Keith Olbermann, the New York Times, the Tucson sheriff and other rabid partisans are fixated. There is no evidence that he was responding to anything, political or otherwise, outside of his own head.

[. . .]

. . . fighting and warfare are the most routine of political metaphors. And for obvious reasons. Historically speaking, all democratic politics is a sublimation of the ancient route to power - military conquest. That's why the language persists. That's why we say without any self-consciousness such things as "battleground states" or "targeting" opponents. Indeed, the very word for an electoral contest - "campaign" - is an appropriation from warfare.

See also John Hayward, The Climate of Krugman.  And don't miss Pat Buchanan, Poisonous Politics.

 

Seventeen-Syllable Sketches

Be

Between phony formality
And false familiarity
Be.

Pulp, p. 152

Aim low
Don't try
To sleep in your own bed at night
Is success enough.

Bukowski

Too degraded
To be called effete
His droppings were poems
Nonetheless

Meat Wheel 

Meat wheel rolling
Ever voiding
Hopes of mortals
Moiling
In the Void.

Maker of Gravemakers

Born to die
Lupine Road
1922
Wolf to girls
Who make graves.

Forgetful Troglodyte

The bridge bum forgot
The shirt he stole
Which I found
And wore to Geneva.

Animation

You are alive!
So not just body.
Mystery of animation!

Universalia ante rem

Same shape
Different size.
Two Tabasco bottles
On the window sill.

 

Egyptian Muslims Serve as Human Shields at Coptic Christmas Mass

As things currently stand, Islam is uniquely violent among the world religions and a major threat to Western civilization. That is not to say that all or even most Muslims are violent or evil people.  It is to say that Islam is an ideological superstructure wherein acts of unspeakable violence can be easily legitimated.  To mention but one example, Iran's Mahmoud Ahmadinejad has repeatedly called for the destruction of the state of Israel while in frenzied pursuit of the means thereto.  Where do you think he gets his ideas?  Why don't Western statesmen make similar demands for the destruction of foreign states?

Islam in the 21st century can be usefully compared to Communism in the 20th.  Many intelligent, idealistic, and morally decent people were drawn to Communism in the last century because they believed that in the wake of war and economic depression it was the only way forward for humanity.  Whittaker Chambers and Douglas Hyde are two who come readily to mind.  (See Communism category.)  These decent people, who eventually saw the light, were sucked into a demonic ideology. 

There are many decent Muslims.  Perhaps there is hope that they can begin to reform and enlighten Islam from within.   Here are examples.

 

The Arizona Shooting

Here is excellent commentary from Victor Davis Hanson to offset the leftist scumbaggery emanating from Paul Krugman and his ilk with his irresponsible and vile talk of a Climate of Hate.  How preternaturally moronic our leftist pals who cannot distinguish conservative dissent from hate!  You see, leftists think they own dissent, a bizarre conceit I thoroughly demolish in Does the Left Own Dissent?

Yes, we conservatives have targeted you leftists.  That's a metaphorical way of talking.  It is evidence of your appeal to the double standard that you have no beef with Obama's "If they bring a knife to the fight, we bring a gun."

And here are some observations by Jared Lee Loughner's philosophy teacher.  Apparently, logic didn't do him any good.  Loughner, I mean.  The Slate writer, by the way,  is clueless when it comes to logic.  He writes, "A syllogism is a form of argument in which a conclusion is inferred from a set of premises."

Exercise for the reader: explain why that is worthless as a definition of 'syllogism.'

 

Keith Parsons Update

Apparently, Keith Parsons' decision to abandon the philosophy of religion has garnered a lot of attention.  Here is my commentary from last September.

Update 1/13:  My man Peter Lupu leaves a comment at  Secular Outpost.  And Ed Feser rips into Parsons here, once again substantiating  my playful reading of his name as an acronym: Filosophical Erudition Sans Excessive Restraint.

A Routley/Sylvan Argument for the Utter Nonexistence of Past Individuals

Many of us are inclined to say that purely past individuals (James Dean, Scollay Square, my cat Zeno, anything that existed but does not exist now), though past, yet exist.  Of course, they don't presently exist.  But why should only what presently exists, exist? Why should that which loses the temporal property of presentness fall into an abyss of nonbeing?  Surely that is not obvious. Presentism may be true, but it is not obviously true.  Nor is it a position favored by common sense as some contemporary writers seem to think.  Let me sketch a couple of anti-presentist considerations.  I will not present them rigorously and I do not claim that they are absolutely compelling.

Purely past individuals are part of the actual world inasmuch as they are not merely possible.  And what is actual exists.  So purely past individuals exist (tenselessly).  Or will you say that when Dean ceased to presently exist he underwent a transformation from an actual being to a merely possible one?  How then would you distinguish between past merely possible beings and past actual beings?  As far as I know Dean did not have any children.  Suppose that is true.  Still, he might have had a child.  In the past, that was a possibility, though it is not a possibility now.  Surely there is a difference between a past possible individual such as Dean's child and an actual past individual such as Dean.  Dean was; his child never was.

Moreover, we refer to past individuals and we say true things about them. 'James Dean died in a car crash in 1955.' 'Dean's fame is mainly posthumous.' 'Scollay Square was located in Boston.' The subject terms of these sentences not only did refer to something, they do refer to something, something that exists, though not at present.  Furthermore, whatever has properties exists. Dean has properties, ergo Dean exists. That is not to say that he presently exists, but if he didn't exist in any sense, how could he have properties?  So a case can be made for the reality or existence of past individuals.

But this morning I stumbled upon an interesting argument from Richard Routley, who later in life came to call himself Sylvan. (Presumably because of an attraction to forests and jungles and an aversion to desert landscapes.) In any case, after beginning p. 361 of  Meinong's Jungle and Beyond (Ridgeview 1980) with some question-begging sophistry that I won't bother to expose, he uncorks an interesting argument on the other side of the question, one that that stokes my aporetic fire:

Purely past and purely future items are, like merely possible items, not (now) determinate in all extensional respects: hence (applying the results of 1.19) they do not exist.  Compare the items Aristotle and Polonious, and remember Peirce's question as to how long before Polonious died had he had a hair cut and Russell's as to the baldness of the present king of France.  Well, is Aristotle bald now?If he is, how long has he been bald? If not, how long since he had a hair cut and how long is his hair? Since Aristotle has ceased to exist, it is false that Aristotle is now bald and false that he is not now bald . . . . Thus Aristotle is indeterminate in respect of the extensional property of (present) baldness. Hence he does not exist now; hence he does not exist.

The argument is short and snappy:

1. For any x, if x exists, then x is now determinate in all extensional respects.
2. It is not the case that purely past individuals are  now determinate in all extensional respects.
Therefore
3. It is not the case that purely past individuals exist.

The argument is valid but why should we accept (1)?  I have no problem with the following two cognate principles which I warmly embrace:

1*. For any x, if x now exists, then x is now determinate in all extensional respects.

1**. For any x, if x exists, then x is determinate in all extensional respects.

But I see no reason to accept the question-begging (1).  After all, Aristotle, unlike Polonious, exists, but Aristotle -- if (2) is to be believed -- is not now determinate in respect of baldness or the opposite.

Suppose, however, that we accept (1).  Why should we also accept (2)?  Presumably because it is not now the case that Aristotle is either bald or not bald. But this far from clear.  During his life, Aristotle either counted as bald or as not bald.  Suppose he counted as bald.  Then I say that Aristotle exists (tenselessly) and is (tenselessly) bald.  So he is now determinate in respect of baldness or its opposite.  He is tenselessly bald and so is now tenselessly bald.

What Routley has done in the above passage and surrounding text is merely beg the question in favor of presentism.  He has given us no non-question-begging reason to accept it.

The Giffords Assassination Attempt: Now the Blather Begins

Shooting Stuns Nation screamed the headline of this morning's Arizona Republic.  Brace yourself for the crapload of liberal-left blather that has already begun to descend upon us in the wake of this terrible event.  Perhaps later I will weigh in on this, but for now I refer you to Jack Shafer, In Defense of Inflamed Rhetoric and Byron York, Journalists Urged Caution After Ft. Hood, Now Race to Blaim Palin for Arizona Shootings.

Report from Pakistan

As things stand at present, Islam is uniquely violent among the world religions and a major threat to Western civilization.  (And its own 'civilization,' such as it is, ought to be judged by its rotten and poisonous fruits.)  To make matters worse, radical Islam has found plenty of useful idiots on the Left to lend them witting and unwitting aid and comfort.  But blinded as they are by their political correctness, one cannot expect these useful idots to be moved by such evidence as is presented in the following report from a courageous Pakistani correspondent:

 

Dear Bill,

 

As you have expressed concern about Islam in the past before on your blog, I thought I should inform you about these developments in Pakistan.  A few days ago, the Governor of Punjab, Salman Taseer, was assassinated by his own security guard, because he had dared to criticize the "blasphemy law" in Pakistan, a law that is held sacred by the fundamentalist Muslims. The worrisome thing is that the whole country went into celebration at this murder and this murder was widely praised and justified. You can read about these reactions here, which have also upset me gravely:

http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2011/jan/06/pakistan-salman-taseer-assassination?CMP=twt_gu

I think these reactions have very significant things to say, and something that the West must be made aware of.

I have expressed my concerns in this blog post:

http://awaisaftab.blogspot.com/2011/01/islamist-consensus.html

I would appreciate if you could mention something about this incident and the reactions on your blog. Islam is fast becoming a threat to humanity.  Just a humble request.

 

Regards,

Awais Aftab

The Twardowski-Meinong-Grossmann Solution to the Problem of Intentionality

Perhaps the central problem to which the phenomenon of intentionality gives rise can be set forth in terms of an aporetic triad:

1. We sometimes think about the nonexistent.
2. Intentionality is a relation between thinker and object of thought.
3. Every relation R is such that, if R obtains,then all its relata exist.

The datanic first limb is nonnegotiable, a 'Moorean fact.'  The other two limbs, being more theoretical, can be denied if one is willing to pay the price.  But something has to give since they cannot all be true. 

Brentano denied (2) with unpalatable consequences to be explored in a separate post. Why not accept (2), deny (3) and admit that there are abnormal relations, relations that connect existents with nonexistents?      

Consider the round square, that well-worn example that goes back at least to Bernard Bolzano.  Since there is no such thing, and cannot be, one will be tempted to say that the round square is an idea (presentation, Vorstellung) without an object.  That is what  Bolzano maintained using that very example of rundes Viereck.  (Theory of Science, pp. 88-89)  In section 5 of Zur Lehre vom Inhalt und Gegenstand der Vorstellungen (1894), Kasimir Twardowski criticizes Bolzano's position.

Twardowski distinguishes among the following:  there is the expression 'the round square.'  Then there is the mental act, the act of presentation (Vorstellungsact) that transpires in someone who uses the expression with understanding.  Corresponding to the act is a content (Inhalt)  which constitutes the meaning of the expression.  But there is  also a fourth item, that to which the expression refers, the round square itself, that which combines logically incompatible properties and whose existence one denies as soon as one advances from the presentation round square to a judgment about it. (Cf. the Brentanian theses that judgments are founded upon presentations, and that every judgment is existential, involving the acceptance or rejection of a presentation.)

This of course  sticks in the craw.  One hesitates to admit that there is something outside the mind to which 'round square' refers, something that has the property of nonexistence.  It smacks of a contradiction.  Clearly, 'There exists an x such that x does not exist' IS a contradiction, but this is not what a Meinongian will say.

Note that Twardowski has a couple of powerful reasons for not identifying the round square and its colleagues with mental contents.  The first is that contents exist while nonexistent objects don't.  So the round square cannot be identified with the content expressed by 'the round square.'  The second reason is that we ascribe to the round square attributes that not only cannot be ascribed to the corresponding content, but are logically incompatible to boot.  Thus no content is round and no content is square and of course no content is both round and square.  Since contents exist, they cannot have contradictory properties.

These arguments, spelled out a bit perhaps, show that mental contents cannot go proxy for nonexistent items, whether merely possible like the celebrated golden mountain or impossible like the round square.  One could extend the argument to cover abstract objects which are not mental contents or in any way mind-dependent.  They too are unsuited to go proxy for nonexistents.  For (1) abstracta exist while nonexistents do not, and (2)  the properties of nonexistent concreta cannot be attributed to abstracta.  Thus a flying horse is an animal, a golden mountain is a mountain, and a round square is round.  But no abstract object is an animal or a mountain or round.

When I think about the round square or the golden mountain (in whatever psychological mode)  the object of my thought is neither a mental content nor an abstract object.  What is it then?  Why, it is the round square or the golden mountain!  As bizarre as this sounds, it makes a certain amount of sense.  If I want to climb the golden mountain, I want to climb a physical prominence, not a mental content or an abstractum.

The position under examination, then, is not only that every mental act has a content, but that every mental act has an object as well.  But not all of these objects exist.  One obvious advantage of this approach is that it allows us to hold onto (2) of our opening triad in full generality: in every case, intentionality relates a thinker through a content to a transcendent object, and not to some surrogate object, either! 

Why is this a good thing?  Well, if intentionality is relational only in some cases, the veridical cases, then it cannot be essential to mental acts to be of an object:  whether or not an act actually has an object will depend on contingent facts in the world beyond the mind.  For Brentano, all mental acts are intentional by their very nature as mental.  The Twardowski-Meinong approach upholds this.

But the price is very steep: one must accept that there are items that actually instantiate properties (not merely possibly instantiate them), and that these items nevertheless do not exist, or indeed, as on Meinong's actual view, have any mode of being at all.  This is his famous doctrine of the Aussersein des reinen Gegenstandes, the 'extrabeing of the pure object.'  Thus the golden mountain is actually golden and actually a mountain despite having no being whatsoever.  It is a pure Sosein utterly devoid of Sein.

Some, like van Inwagen, think that Meinong's theory of objects is obviously self-contradictory.  I don't believe this is right, for reasons detailed here.  Even so, I find Meinong's theory incoherent.  'Some items have no being at all' is not a formal contradiction.  Still, I cannot get a mental grip on the notion of an item that actually has properties, but is wholly beingless.

In addition, one must accept that there are genuine relations that connect existents to nonexistents. 

The price is too steep to pay.  The Twardowski-Meinong-Grossmann solution is just as problematic as the original problem.

REFERENCE:  Reinhardt Grossmann, The Categorial Structure of the World, Indiana UP, 1983, p. 197 ff.

Two Motivations for a Relational Account of Intentionality (Peter Lupu)

(A guest post by Peter Lupu.  Minor edits and comments in blue by BV.)

There are at least two ways in which the relational character and object-directedness of intentional states such as beliefs, wants, desires, seekings, etc., is motivated:

A. The individuation of intentional states;

B.  Aristotle’s belief-desire model of explaining actions.

I. Motivation (A). Consider the following:

1) Jake seeks the golden mountain;

2) Jake seeks the keys to his car.

Clearly, (1) and (2) express two different intentional states of the same individual. But, in virtue of what do (1) and (2) express two different intentional states? It appears that the best and only explanation for the difference is that the two cases relate Jake to two different objects: i.e., in (1) Jake seeks the golden mountain; in (2) Jake seeks his car keys; and, of course, the golden mountain and Jake’s car keys are two distinct objects.

The point, though correct, needs to be made with a bit more exactitude. Presumably, the intentional states are numerically distinct in virtue of occurring at  different times.  If so, someone could reply that what makes the states different is their occurring at different times.  The question, however, is not what makes the states token-distinct, but what makes them type-distinct.  And the answer can only be that it is distinctness of intentional object that explains type-distinctness of states.

Why Is Rome Called the Eternal City?

Because there's always Rome.  Why Episcopalians Cross the Tiber.

Intentionality and Haecceity

Steven Nemes inquires:

Do you think that your stand on intentionality not requiring the existence of the intentional object is contradictory with your argument against haecceity properties (as non-qualitative thisnesses)? You say that an individual can have the property of searching after Atlantis, let's say, even if Atlantis doesn't exist. But your argument against haecceities is that identity-with-Socrates would be nonsense if Socrates didn't exist.

How would you solve the apparent contradiction?

Let's first note an ambiguity that infects 'intentional object.' Intentionality is object-directedness.  So there is a clear sense in which every intentional mental state 'takes an accusative,' 'is of or about an object.'  That object could be called the intentional object.  Accordingly, whether I want a three-headed dog or a one-headed dog, my wanting has an intentional object.  The nonexistence of three-headed dogs does not prejudice the object-directedness of my wanting a three-headed dog.  It is equally important to note that the existence of one-headed dogs plays no role in making my wanting a one-headed dog object-directed.  This is because object-directedness is an intrinsic feature of mental acts.  To see this more clearly, suppose I want a one-headed dog that is distinct from every one-headed dog that presently exists.  This mental state is object-directed, but its object-directedness does not derive from the present existence of any one-headed dog, or anything else.

But one could also use 'intentional object' to refer to the mind-independent entity, if there is one, that satisfies the description (definite or indefinite) that expresses the content of the intentional state.  If we use the term in this second way, then my wanting a three-headed dog does not have an intentional object.

It is only in this second sense that intentionality does not require the existence of the intentional object.  It is part of the very essence of wanting as an intentional mental state that it be a wanting of something (that is an objective genitive, by the way, not a subject genitive.)  But it doesn't follow that the something exists.  Similarly for perceiving, imagining, believing, etc.

As for the haecceity-property identity-with-Socrates, it is nothing at all at times and in worlds in which Socrates doesn't exist.  I stick to that self-evident point pace Plantinga. (See A Difficulty With Haecceity Properties)

It seems to me that my line on haecceities is entirely consistent with my line on intentionality.  Socrateity (identity-with-Socrates) essentially involves Socrates himself, that very individual, in a way in which seeking Atlantis (construed as a mental state, not as a physical action or actions) does not essentially involve Atlantis itself.  And this is a good thing since there is no such island.

You seem to think that an intentional mental state acquires its object-directedness from without in virtue of the mind-independent existence of an entity that the state is directed to.  It is this misconception that suggests to you that there is a contradiction in my affirming  both

1. An haecceity H of x is nothing if x does not exist
and
2. It is not the case that a wanting W of x is nothing if x does not exist.

But note that  'H of x' is a subjective genitive whereas 'W of x' is an objective genitive.  The haecceity or nonqualitative thisness of Atlantis is nothing at all because Atlantis does not exist. There is nothing for it to be the haecceity of.   But a wanting of Atlantis is what it is whether or not Atlantis exists. 

And similarly in other cases.  An ancient Greek can be a Zeus-worshipper whether or not Zeus exists.   But the same Greek cannot own a slave unless there exists some slave he owns.  The instance of of ownership requires for its individuation the existence of both relata.  But the instance of worshipping does not require the existence of both relata.

Camus and Shestov

Albert Camus is a frustrated rationalist. He values reason and wants  the world to be rationally penetrable, but he finds that it is not. What he calls the Absurd consists in the disproportion between the human need for understanding and the world's unintelligibility, "the unreasonable silence of the world." (Myth of Sisyphus, Vintage 1955, p. 21, tr. Justin O'Brien)

Lev Shestov, on the other hand, is an irrationalist. He delights in  what he takes to be reason's impotence.

Such wild diversity in the life of the mind and spirit does not delight me, but it does fascinate me and serve as a goad to struggle on, day by day, for as much light as can be attained in these inasuspicious circumstances until the curtain falls -- or lifts.

Was Camus Contemplating Baptism?

Albert Camus, one of the luminaries of French existentialism, died on this day in 1960, in a car crash.  He was 46.  Had he lived, he might have become a Christian. Or so it seems from Howard Mumma, Conversations with  Camus. This second-hand report is worth considering, although it must  be consumed cum grano salis. See also Camus the Christian?

An Interview With Kenneth Minogue

Read.

A Defense of Presentism

An article by Ned Markosian.

For the New Year

One of the elements in my personal liturgy is a reading of the following passage every January 1st. I must have begun the practice in the mid-70s.

Friedrich Nietzsche, The Gay Science, Book Four, #276, tr. Kaufmann:

For the new year. -- I still live, I still think: I still have to live, for I still have to think. Sum, ergo cogito: cogito, ergo sum. Today everybody permits himself the expression of his wish and his dearest thought: hence I, too, shall say what it is that I wish from myself today, and what was the first thought to run across my heart this year -- what thought shall be for me the reason, warranty, and sweetness of my life henceforth. I want to learn to see more and more as beautiful what is necessary in things; then I shall be one of those who makes things beautiful. Amor fati: let that be my love henceforth! I do not want to wage war against what is ugly. I do not want to accuse. Looking away shall be my only negation. And all and all and on the whole: someday I wish to be only a Yes-sayer.

Nietzsche found it very difficult to let looking away be his only negation.  And so shall I.