Maverick Philosopher

Samuelson on Social Security as Middle-Class Welfare

Here.  Excerpt:

Here is how I define a welfare program. First, it taxes one group to support another group, meaning it's pay-as-you-go and not a contributory scheme where people's own savings pay their later benefits. And second, Congress can constantly alter benefits, reflecting changing needs, economic conditions and politics. Social Security qualifies on both counts.

Part of the problem with the SS system is that no one quite agrees on just what it is or is supposed to be.  Some call it a Ponzi scheme. (Steve Forbes, Judge Andrew Napolitano)  But obviously it isn't.  Ponzi schemes are fraudulent in intent by definition.  SS is not.  What Napolitano et al. presumably mean  is that it like a Ponzi scheme in being unsustainable.  But that is not quite right either for it is sustainable if one is willing to do one or more of the following:  raise taxes, limit/postpone benefits, reduce spending in other areas, increase the money supply thereby inflating the currency.

To call the SS system a form of welfare as Robert Samuelson does is closer to the mark but still wide of it.  How can it be called welfare when the recipients of it (most of them anyway) have paid in a lifetime's worth of contributions?  The average hard-working  Joe who has contributed all his life via  payroll taxes will bristle, and with justification, if he is branded a welfare recipient when he retires.  He will insist that he has worked hard and long, and now wants what is due him: the money that was coercively taken from him plus a reasonable return. 

So SS is not a welfare scheme either, Samuelson's slanted definition notwithstanding, though it is like one in some respects.

My understanding is that when it was originally set up,  in the '30s, SS was envisaged as destitution insurance.  The idea was that a decent society does not allow its members to fall into the gutter and eat cat food if through no fault of their own they end up destitute at the end of their lives.  But of course if it is destitution insurance, then, like all insurance, the 'premiums' will be small relative to the payout, and only those who end up destitute would get a payout.  But the system is nothing like this now.  It has transmogrified into a retirement program, but one without individual accounts and the sort of  fiscal discipline that they would bring.

So it's not a Ponzi scheme, not a welfare scheme, and not a form of insurance, if  these terms are used strictly.  (And if you are not using them strictly, then you shouldn't pretend to be contributing to a serious discussion.)  Conceptually, SS is a mess, a mess that aids and abets all the unhelpful rhetoric that we hear on all sides.

If memory serves, Speaker Boehner (before he was speaker) called for means-testing.  The moral absurdity of that should be evident, especially  when espoused by a supposed conservative.  You work hard all your life, you play by the rules, defer gratification, exercise the old virtues, and end up well off.  And now the government penalizes you for having been self-reliant and productive.  Disgusting.  You expect that from a liberal.  But from a conservative?

As one further indication of the conceptual mess that is the SS system, consider that the FICA tax is called a tax.  It is no doubt a coercive taking, but what other kind of tax brings with it an expectation of getting one's money back down the line?  Property owners pay real estate taxes to the county.  But no one who pays these taxes expects to be able to pay a visit to the Assessor's office sometime in the future to recoup what he has paid.  That's not the way a tax works.  So why is the FICA tax called a tax?  This is just another indication of the conceptual obfuscation built into the SS system.

 

Talk Doesn't Pay, So Psychiatry Turns Instead to Drug Therapy

This article is positively depressing.    What do you prescribe, doc?

From the Inside of a Fortune Cookie

"Mental activity keeps you busy at this time."  Only at this time?

"All happiness is in the mind."  This is an example of a half-truth the believing of which is pragmatically very useful.

"If you chase two rabbits, both will escape."  Reminds me of the Lovin' Spoonful tune Did You Ever Have to Make Up Your MInd?

"If you think you're too small to be effective, you have never been in bed with a mosquito."  Does this have a sexual meaning?

Dreaming and Waking

When I wake up from a dream I realize I was dreaming; but when I go to sleep and dream there is no parallel recognition that I was awake.

Serious philosophical juice can be squeezed from this observation.  Some other time.

Mosques Flourish in America; Churches Perish in Muslim World

Read it!

Saturday Night at the Oldies: Two About and One by Boston

The Kingston Trio, MTA.   The Standells, Dirty Water.  Sweet memories of riding the trolleys and walking along the banks of the river Charles.  My love of Boston is More Than a Feeling.

Multiple Universes and Possible Worlds

Tibor Machan makes some obvious but important points about multiple universes.  One is that  there cannot be two or more universes if by 'universe' is meant everything that exists in spacetime.  I would add that this is a very simple conceptual truth, one that we know to be true a priori.  It lays down a contraint that no empirical inquiry can violate on pain of tapering off into nonsense.  So talk of multiple universes, if not logicaly contradictory, must involve an altered, and restricted, use of 'universe.'  But then the burden is on those who talk this way to explain exactly what they mean.

Philosophers often speak of possible worlds.  There is nothing problematic about there being a plurality of possible worlds, indeed an infinity of them.  But there is, and can be, only one actual world.  The actual world is not the same as the physical universe.  For not everything actual is physical.  My consciousness is actual but not physical.  A second reason is that the actual world is a maximal state of affairs, the total way things are.  It is a totality of facts, not of things, as Ludwig the Tractarian once wrote.    But the physical universe is a totality of physical things not of facts. 

For more see Some Theses on Possible Worlds.

Self-Reference and Individual Concepts

The following can happen.  You see yourself but without self-recognition.  You see yourself, but not as  yourself.  Suppose you walk into a room which unbeknownst to you has a mirror covering the far wall.  You are slightly alarmed to see a wild-haired man with his fly open approaching you.  You are looking at yourself but you don't know it.  (The lighting is bad, you've had a few drinks . . . .) You think to yourself

1. That man has his fly open!
but not
2. I have my fly open!

Now these propositions -- assuming they are propositions -- are obviously different.  For one thing, they have different behavioral consequences.  I can believe the first without taking action with respect to my fly, or any fly.  (I'm certainly not going to go near the other guy's fly.)  But if I believe the second I will most assuredly button my fly, or pull up my zipper.

So it seems clear that (1) and (2) are different propositions.  I can believe one without believing the other.  But how can this be given the plain fact that 'that man' and 'I' refer to the same man?  Both propositions predicate the same property of the same subject.  So what makes them distinct propositions?

I know what your knee-jerk response will be.  You will say that, while 'I' and 'that man' have the same referent, they differ in sense just like 'Hesperus' and 'Phosphorus.'  Just as one can believe that Hesperus is F without believing that Phosphorus is F despite the identity of the two, one can believe that (1) without believing that (2) despite the fact that the subject terms are coreferential.

The trouble with this response is that it requires  special 'I'-senses, and indeed a different one for each user of the first-person singular pronoun.  These go together with special 'I'-propositions which are a species of indexical proposition.  When I believe that I am F, I refer to myself via a special Fregean sense which has the following property: it is necessarily a mode of presentation of me alone.  We can also think of this 'I'-sense as an individual concept or haecceity-concept.  It is a concept such that, if it is instantiated, it is instantiated (i) by me, (ii) by nothing distinct from me, (iii) and by the same person in every possible world in which it is instantiated.

But what on earth (or on Twin Earth) could this concept be, and how could I grasp it?  The concept has to 'pin me down' in every possible world in which I exist.  It has to capture my very thisness, or, in Latin, my haecceitas.  But a better Latin word is ipseitas, ipseity, selfhood, my being a self, this one and no other.    In plain old Anglo-Saxon it is the concept of me-ness, the concept of being me.

The theory, then, is that my awareness that

3. I am that man!

consists in my awareness that the concept expressed by 'I' and the concept expressed by 'that man' are instantiated by one and the same individual.  But this theory is no good because, even if my use of 'I' expresses an haecceity-concept, that is not a concept I can grasp or understand.  Maybe God can grasp my haecceity, but I surely can't.  Individuum ineffabile est said the Scholastics, echoing Aristotle. No finite mind can 'eff' the ineffable.  The individual in his individuality, in his very haecceity and ipseity, is ineffable.

Self-reference is not routed though sense, however things may stand with respect to other-reference.  When I refer to myself using the first-person singular pronoun, I do not refer to myself via a Fregean sense.

So here is the problem expressed as an aporetic pentad:

a. (1) and (2) express different Fregean propositions.
b. If two Fregean propositions are different, then they must differ in a constituent.
c. The difference can only reside in a difference in subject constituents.
d. The subject constituent of (2) is ineffable.
e. No sense (mode of presentation) or humanly-graspable concept can be ineffable.

This pentad is inconsistent:  (a)-(d), taken together, entail the negation of (e).  The only limb that has a chance of being false is (a).  One could say that (1) and (2), though clearly different, are not different by expressing different Fregean propositions.  But then what would our positive theory have to be?

 

Review : Modes of Being

Herewith, a little summary of part of what I have been arguing.  Most analytic philosophers would accept (A) but not (B):

A. There are kinds of existent but no kinds of existence.
B. There are kinds of existent and also kinds of existence.

I have been defending the intelligibility of (B) but without committing myself to any particular MOB doctrine.    I use 'modes of being' and 'kinds of existence' interchangeably. Of course I grant to Reinhardt Grossmann and others that the following inference is invalid:

1. K1 and K2 are dramatically different categories of existent
Ergo
2. Instances of K1 differ from instances of K2 in their mode of existence.

But an invalid argument can have a true conclusion.  So one can cheerfully grant the invalidity of the inference from (1) to (2) while insisting that there are categories  the respective members of which differ in their very mode of existence.  For example, although one cannot straightaway infer from the dramatic difference between (primary) substances and accidents that substances and accidents differ in their mode of existence, it is difficult to understand how they could fail to so differ.  After all, accidents depend on substances in that they cannot exist except in substances as modifications of substances, and this dependence is neither causal nor logical.  So I say it is existential dependence. 

Consider a bulge in a carpet.  The bulge cannot exist apart from the carpet whose bulge it is, whereas the carpet can exist without any bulge.  You might be tempted to say that bulge and carpet both simply exist, but that they are counterfactually related: Had the carpet not existed, the bulge would not have existed.  That's true, but what makes it true?  I say it is the fact of the bulge's existential dependence on the carpet.  Accidents exist in a different way than substances.

You could resist this conclusion by simply denying that there are substances and accidents.  Fine, but then I will shift to another example, wholes and parts, say.  Do you have the chutzpah to deny that there are wholes and parts?  Consider again the house made of bricks.  And now try this aporetic pentad on for size:

1. The house exists. 
2. The bricks exist. 
3. The house is not the bricks. 
4. The house is not something wholly diverse from the bricks, something in addition to it, something over and above it. 
5.  'Exist(s)' is univocal. 

The pentad is inconsistent: the limbs cannot all be true.  So what are you going to do?  Deny (1) like van Inwagen?  Maybe that is not crazy, but surely it is extreme.  (2), (3), and (4) are are undeniable.  So I say we ought to deny (5).  The house does not exist in the same way as the bricks.

 

Taxation: A Liberty Issue

Despite their name, liberals seem uninterested or insufficiently interested in the 'real' liberties, those pertaining to property, money, and guns, as opposed to the 'ideal' liberties, those pertaining to freedom of expression. A liberal will go to any extreme when it comes to defending the right to express his precious self no matter how inane or obnoxious or socially deleterious the results of his self-expression; but he cannot muster anything like this level of energy when it comes to defending the right to keep what he earns or the right to defend himself and his family from the criminal element from which liberal government fails to protect him. He would do well to reflect that his right to express his vacuous self needs concrete back-up in the form of economic and physical clout. Scribbler that I am, I prize freedom of expression; but I understand what makes  possible its retention.

Taxation then is a liberty issue before it is a 'green eyeshade' issue: the more the government takes, the less concrete liberty you  have. Without money you can't get your kids out of a shitty public school system that liberals have destroyed with their tolerate-anything mentality; without money you cannot live in a decent and secure neighborhood.  Without money you can't move out of a state such as California which is 'under water' due to liberal fiscal irresponsibility.

Taxation is a liberty issue.  That is one thought as April 15th approaches.  Another is that the government  must justify its taking; the onus is not on you to justify your  keeping. Government exists to serve us, not the other way around.

Chess and Philosophy

In chess, the object of the game is clear, the rules are fixed and indisputable, and there is always a definite outcome (win, lose, or draw) about which no controversy can arise.  In philosophy, the object and the rules are themselves part of what is in play, and there is never an incontrovertible result. 

So I need both of these gifts of the gods.  Chess to recuperate from the uncertainty of philosophy, and philosophy to recuperate from the sterility of chess.

Withdrawn From Circulation

The very best books, or so it seems, are usually the ones that get withdrawn from circulation in local public libraries, while the trash remains on the shelves. The librarians' bad judgement, however,   redounds to my benefit as I am able to purchase fine books for fifty cents a pop. A while back, the literary luminaries at the Apache Junction Public Library saw fit to remove Linda Hamalian, A Life of Kenneth Rexroth (Norton, 1991) from the shelves.

Why, I have no idea. (It wasn't a second copy.) But I snatched it up. A find to rejoice over. A   beautifully produced first edition of over 400 pages, the Antiquarian Booksellers' Association of America wanted $25 for it. I shall set it on the Beat shelf next to Kerouac's Dharma Bums wherein Rexroth figures as Reinhold Cacoethes. I hope the two volumes refrain from breaking each other's spines.

Moral: Always search diligently through biblic crap piles, remainder bins and the like. It is amazing what treasure lies among the trash. 

More on Existence and Completeness

It is time to recommence 'hostilities' with Edward Ockham.  (I do thank him for engaging my ideas.)

I lately made two claims.  One is that existence entails completeness.  The other is that completeness does not entail existence.  In support of the second claim, I wrote:

Why can't there be complete nonexistent objects?  Imagine the God of Leibniz, before the creation, contemplating an infinity of possible worlds, each of them determinate down to the last detail.  None of them exists or is actual.  But each of them is complete.  One of them God calls 'Charley.'  God says, Fiat Charley! And Charley exists.  It is exactly the same world which 'before' was merely possible, only 'now' it is actual.

To this Edward responds:

I say: if the God of Leibniz is contemplating something, then there is something he is contemplating. And I say that if each of them is determinate down to the last detail, some things are equivalent to them. And if each of them is complete, at least one of them is complete. All of the consequents imply existential statements, and whatever follows from the consequent, follows from the antecedent. I may be wrong, but all of this looks like an elementary example of the quantifier shift fallacy. If it is possible that a unicorn exists, it does not follow that some unicorn is such that it possibly exists. 'Possibly Ex Fx' does not imply 'Ex possibly Fx'.

But doesn't our friend make a mistake in his very first sentence?  He moves from

a. God is contemplating something
to
b. Something is such that God is contemplating it.

But in intentional contexts quantifier exportation fails.  Ironically, Edward taxes me with a quantifier shift fallacy when he commits one himself! 

Furthermore, Edward is insulting the divine omnipotence and omnsicience.  For he is saying  in effect that God cannot bring before his mind a completely determinate intentional object -- an object whose mode of existence is merely intentional -- without that object being actual.  But surely God can do that: he can conceive of a world that is fully determinate but only possibly existent.  Such a world enjoys esse intentionale only.  It exists only as an accusative of the divine intellect.  What then must be added to make it real or actual or existent?  The theist can say that the divine will must come into play.  God wills that one of the possible worlds enjoy, in addition to esse intentionale, esse reale as well.  Let there be Charley!

(Other questions arise at this point which are off-topic, for example, why Charley over Barley?  Why Charely over any other world?  Must God have a reason?  And what would it be?  Would it be because Charley is the best of all possible worlds?  Is there such a things as the BEST of all possible worlds?  Why some world rather than no world?  And so on.) 

You don't have to believe in God to appreciate the point I am making.  The point is that existence cannot be identified with completeness.  Admittedly, everything that exists -- in the mode of esse reale of course -- is complete, but there is more to existence than completeness.  The theological imagery is supposed to help you understand the ontological point.  All I need for my argument is the conceivability of the God of Leibniz.  If you can conceive such a God, then you can conceive the irreducibility of existence to completeness.  And if so, you can grasp that completeness does not entail existence.

In the end the dispute may come down to a profound and irresolvable difference in intuitions. For some of us existence is a deep (thick) topic, for others it is superficial (thin).  I say it is deep.  Part of what that means is that it cannot be explicated in broadly logical  terms: not in terms of indefinite identifiablity, or property-possession, or instantiation, or completeness, or anything else. 

Of Hearse and Haul

You can't tow a U-Haul with a hearse. 

'Booty' and 'Holocaust' to be Removed from New Edition of Bible

Did they take the word 'ass' out too?  Or has that word already been removed?  Leave it to a liberal jackass to pander to the dumbest among us. 

We conservatives need to gird our loins, saddle our asses and and sally forth to smite these change-for-the-sake-of-change jackwagons, planting our boots in their 'booties' as needed.  (Figuratively speaking, of course.)

Boethius Contra Nietzsche on Time and Transition

Like Nietzsche, "I am grieved by the transitoriness of things."  (Letter to Franz Overbeck, 24 March 1887, quoted in R. Hayman,  Nietzsche: A Critical Life, Penguin, 1982, p. 304) Unlike Nietzsche, I
appreciate that the Eternal Recurrence of the Same is no solution.

The problem with time is not that it will end, but that its very mode of being is deficient. The problem is not that our time is short, but   that we are in time in the first place. For this reason, more time is no solution. Not even endlessly recurring time is any solution. Even if time were unending and I were omnitemporal, existing at every time, my life would still be strung out in moments outside of each other, with the diachronic identifications of memory and expectation no substitute for a true unity. To the moment I say, Verweile doch, du bist so schön (Goethe, Faust) but the beautiful moment will not abide, and abidance-in-memory is a sorry substitute, and a self diachronically constituted by such makeshifts is arguably no true self. Existing as we do temporally, we are never at one with ourselves: the past is no longer, the future not yet, and the present fleeting. We exist outside ourselves in temporal ec-stasis. We are strung out in temporal diaspora. The only Now we know is the nunc movens.

But we sense and can conceive a nunc stans, a standing now. This conception of a standing now, empty except for the rare and partial mystic fulfillment, is the standard relative to which the moving now is judged ontologically deficient. Time is but a moving and inadequate image of eternity.  So we of the tribe of Plato conceive of the divine life as the eternal life, not as the omnitemporal or everlasting life. Our spokesman is Boethius, inspired by Philosophia herself:

     Eternity is the simultaneous and complete possession of infinite
     life. This will appear more clearly if we compare it with temporal
     things. All that lives under the conditions of time moves through
     the present from the past to the future; there is nothing set in
     time which can at one moment grasp the whole space of its lifetime.
     It cannot yet comprehend tomorrow; yesterday it has already lost.
     And in this life of today your life is no more than a changing,
     passing moment. And as Aristotle said of the universe, so it is of
     all that is subject to time; though it never began to be, nor will
     ever cease, and its life is coextensive with the infinity of time,
     yet it is not such as can be held to be eternal. For though it
     apprehends and grasps a space of infinite lifetime, it does not
     embrace the whole simultaneously; it has not yet experienced the
     future. What we should rightly call eternal is that which grasps
     and possesses wholly and simultaneously the fullness of unending
     life, which lacks naught of the future, and has lost naught of the
     fleeting past; and such an existence must be ever present in itself
     to control and aid itself, and also must keep present with itself
     the infinity of changing time. (The Consolation of Philosophy, Book
     V; the Latin below the fold)

Paul Auster

I picked up The Brooklyn Follies (2006) and the first couple of lines sucked me right in. "I was looking for a quiet place to die.  Someone recommended Brooklyn . . . ."

Anarchism and Eliminativism

Anarchism is to political philosophy  as  eliminative materialism is to the philosophy of mind.  But untenable positions have their uses.  They serve as foils for the development of sensible theories.

How Prevent a Proliferation of Modes of Being?

An astute reader comments:

Allowing for multiple modes of being may lead to too many or infinitely many modes. Using your own example and oversimplifying on purpose: if the mode of being of the house made of bricks is different from that of the bricks, what prevents us from claiming that there are different modes of being for all other structures that could be made from these bricks? I think there should be explicit arguments against this motivation.

A side note/question:  "no individual can be instantiated." You state this as a self evident truth. It would help if you elaborate on this point.

I have read your blog for over a year, mostly due to my interest in identity, existence and other basic notions that I consider fundamental. I respect your intellectual honesty and find your general reflections stimulating and deep but not dry.

1. My claim is not that a house, a corral, a wall, etc. made of the same bricks each has a different mode of being.  These wholes have the same mode of being as each other.  The claim is rather that certain types of whole -- not necessarily every type of whole --  possess a different mode of being than their parts. 

In the argument I gave, I made the simplifying assumption that the bricks are simples.  But of course they are not and so the argument can be iterated in their case assuming that each brick is a whole of parts of the same type as the whole of bricks.  Iterating the argument 'all the way down' we come finally to simples which exist-independently while all the wholes 'on the way up' exist-dependently.

My concern is to legitimate the very idea of there being modes of being as against the analytical orthodoxy according to which there cannot be any such modes.  I grant, however,  that if the MOB doctrine led to an endless proliferation of modes then that upshot would strongly count against it. 

2.  "No individual can be instantiated."  This follows if you accept the following definitions.

D1. X is an individual =_df X has properties but is not itself a property.
D2. X is a property =_df X is possibly such that it is instantiated. 

Since no individual is a property and only properties can be instantiated, no individual can be instantiated.  To be instantiated is to have an instance. 

3. "I respect your intellectual honesty and find your general reflections stimulating and deep but not dry."  I shall try to live up to that comment.  Thank you!

 

Kierkegaard on the Impotence of Earthly Power

  The following passage from Concluding Unscientific Postscript embodies a penetrating insight:

. . . the legal authority shows its impotence precisely when it shows its power: its power by giving permission, its impotence by not being able to make it permissible. (p. 460, tr. Swenson & Lowrie)

My permitting you to do X does not make X permissible.  My forbidding you to do X does not make X impermissible.  My permitting (forbidding) is justifed only if what I permit (forbid) is in itself permissible (impermissible).  And the same goes for any finite agent or collection of finite agents. A finite agent may have the power to permit and forbid, but it cannot have the power to make permissible or impermissible.  Finite agency, then, betrays its impotence in exercising its power.

For example, the moral permissibility of killing in self-defense is what it is independently of the State's power to permit or forbid via its laws.  The State cannot make morally permissible what is morally permissible by passing and enforcing laws that permit it.  Nor can the State make morally impermissible what is morally permissible by passing and enforcing laws that proscribe it.

Here below Might and Right fall asunder: the powerful are not always just, and the just are not always powerful.  But it would be a mistake to think that the mighty cannot be right, or that the right cannot be mighty.  The falling asunder is consistent with a certain amount of overlap.

Power does not confer moral justification, but neither does impotence.  (For example,the relative weakness of the Palestinians relative to the Israelis does not confer justification on the Paestinian cause or its methods.)  See The Converse Callicles Principle: Weakness Does Not Justify.

The State is practically necessary and morally justifiable.  Or so I would argue against the anarchists.  But fear of the State is rational: its power is awesome and sometimes misused.  This is why the State's power must be hedged round with limits.

We don't know whether or not God exists.  But we do know that nothing is worthy of being called God unless it is the perfect harmonization and colaescence of Might and Right, of Power and Justice, of Will and Reason. 

Tough questions:  Could such a transcendental Ideal (in Kant's sense) be merely a transcendental Ideal impossible of existence in reality?  And could anything impossible count as an ideal?  But if God is possible would he not have to be actual?