Maverick Philosopher

A Diversity Paradox for Immigration Expansionists

Liberals love 'diversity' even at the expense of such obvious goods as unity, assimilation, and comity. So it is something of a paradox that their refusal to take seriously the enforcement of immigration laws has led to a most undiverse stream of immigrants. "While espousing a fervent belief in diversity, immigrant advocates and their allies have presided over a policy regime that has produced one of the least diverse migration streams in our history." Here

In the once golden and great state of California, the Left's diversity fetishism has led to a letting-go of academics in the Cal State university system with a concomitant retention of administrative 'diversity officers.'   Unbelievable but true.  Heather McDonald reports and comments in Less Academics, More Narcissism. 

My only quibble is her failure to observe the distinction between 'less' and 'fewer.'  Use 'fewer' with count nouns; 'less' with mass terms.  I don't have less shovels than you; I have fewer shovels.  I need fewer shovels because I have less manure.

Short Views, Long Views, and the Feel for the Real

The long views of philosophy are not to everyone's taste.  If not bored, many are depressed by the contemplation of death and pain, God and the soul, the meaning or meaninglessness of our lives.  They prefer not to think of such things and consider it best to take short views.

Is it best to take short views? Sometimes it is. When the going gets tough, it is best to pull in one’s horns, hunker down, and just try to get through the next week, the next day, the next hour. One can always meet the challenge of the next hour. Be here now and deal with what is on your plate at the moment. Most likely you will find a way forward.

But, speaking for myself, a life without long views would not be worth living. I thrill at the passage in Plato’s Republic, Book Six (486a), where the philosopher is described as a "spectator of all time and existence." And then there is this beautiful formulation by  William James:

The absolute things, the last things, the overlapping things, are the truly philosophic concerns; all superior minds feel seriously about them, and the mind with the shortest views is simply the mind of the more shallow man. (Pragmatism, Harvard UP, 1975, p. 56)

I wrote above, "speaking for myself." The expression was not used redundantly inasmuch as it conveys that my philosopher’s preference for the long view is not one that I would want to or try to urge on anyone else. In my experience, one cannot argue with another man’s sensibility. And much of life comes down to precisely that -- sensibility. If people share a sensibility, then argument is useful for its articulation and refinement. But I am none too sanguine about the possibility of arguing someone into, or out of, a sensibility.

How argue the atheist out of his abiding sense that the univere is godless, or the radical out of his conviction of human perfectibility? If the passages I cited from Plato and James leave you cold, how could I change your mind? If you sneer at my being thrilled, what then? Argument comes too late. Or if you prefer, sensibility comes too early.

One might also speak of a person’s sense of life, view of what is important, or ‘feel for the real.’ James’ phrase, "feel seriously," is apt. To the superior mind, ultimate questions "feel real," whereas to the shallow mind they appear pointless, unimportant, silly. It is equally true that the superior mind is made such by its wrestling with these questions.

Maximae res, cum parvis quaeruntur, magnos eos solent efficere.

Matters of the greatest importance, when they are investigated by little men, tend to make those men great. (Augustine, Contra Academicos 1. 2. 6.)

Of course, with his talk of the superior and the shallow, James is making a value judgment. I myself have no problem making value judgments, and in particular this one.

Although prospects are dim for arguing the other out of his sensibility, civil discussion is not pointless. One comes to understand one’s own view by contrast with another. One learns to respect the sources of the other’s view. This may lead to toleration, which is good within limits.  For someone with a theoretical bent, the sheer diversity of approaches to life is fascinating and provides endless grist for the theoretical mill.

As for the problem of how to get along with people with wildly different views, I recommend voluntary segregation.

Caesar, the Rubicon, Tenseless Truth, Determinism, and Fatalism

In a post the point of which was merely to underscore the difference between absolute and necessary truth, I wrote, somewhat incautiously:

Let our example be the proposition p expressed by 'Julius Caesar crossed the Rubicon in 44 B.C.' Given that p is true, it is true in all actual circumstances. That is, its truth-value does not vary from time to time, place to place, person to person, or relative to any other parameter in the actual world. P is true now, was true yesterday, and will be true tomorrow. P is true in Los Angeles, in Bangkok, and on Alpha Centauri. It is true whether Joe Blow affirms it, denies it, or has never even thought about it. And what goes for Blow goes for Jane Schmoe.

As a couple of astute readers have pointed out, the usual date given for Caesar's crossing of the river Rubicon  is January 10, 49 B.C. and not 44 B. C. as stated above.  If only the detection and correction of philosophical erors were as easy as this!

The erudite proprietor of Finem Respicem, who calls herself 'Equity Private' and describes herself as a "Armchair Philosophy Fangirl and Failed Theoretical Physicist Turned Finance Troublemaker," writes, "Caesar crossed the Rubicon on January 10, 49 B.C., reportedly (though perhaps fancifully) prompting Gaius Suetonius Tranquillus to comment Alea iacta est ('The die is cast.')"  And Philoponus the Erudite has this to say: 

I'm not sure whether you are deliberately testing the faithful readers of The Maverick, but the accepted date for Caesar and Legio XIII Gem. wading across fl. Rubico is 49 BCE, on or about Jan 10th. That's what is inferred from Suetonius' acct of Divus Caesar at the beginning of De Vita Caesarum (written 160 years after the fact) and some other latter sources like Plutarch.

So I stand corrected on the factual point.  Both correspondents go on to raise philosophical points.  I have space to respond to only one of them.

Equity Private asks, concerning the proposition expressed by 'Caesar crosses the Rubicon in 49 B.C.,' "But is it true in 50 BC?  In a deterministic universe, I think it is. In a non-deterministic universe I think it isn't. Are you a determinist?"

To discuss this properly we need to back up a bit.   I distinguish declarative sentences from the propositions they are used to express, and in the post in question I was construing propositions along the lines of Gottlob Frege's Gedanken.  Accordingly, a  proposition is the sense of a context-free declarative sentence.  A context-free sentence is one from which all indexical elements have been extruded, including verb tenses.  Propositions so construed are a species of abstract object.  This will elicit howls of outrage from some, but it is a view that is quite defensible.  If you accept this (and if you don't I will ask what your theory of the proposition is), then the proposition expressed by 'Caesar crosses the Rubicon in 49 B.C.' exists at all times and is true at all times.  (Bear in mind that, given the extrusion of all indexical elements, including verb tenses, the occurrence of 'crosses' is not present-tensed but tenseless.)  From this it follows that the truth-value of the proposition does not vary with one's temporal perspective.  So, to answer my correspondent's question, the proposition is true in 50 B.C. and is thus true before the fateful crossing occurred!

I am assuming both Bivalence and Excluded Middle.    Bivalence says that there are exactly two truth-values, true and false, as opposed to three or more.  If Bivalence holds, then 'not true' is logically equivalent to 'false.'  Excluded Middle says that, for every proposition p, either p is true or it is not the case that p is true.   Note that Bivalence and Excluded Middle are not the same. Suppose that Bivalence is false and that there are three truth-values. It could still be the case that every proposition is either true or not true. (In a 3-valued logic, 'not true' is not the same as 'false.') So Excluded Middle does not entail Bivalence. Therefore Excluded Middle is not the same as Bivalence.  Bivalence does, however, entail Excluded Middle.

Here is a simpler and more direct way to answer my correspondent's question.  Suppose some prescient Roman utters in 50 B.C. the Latin equivalent of 'Julius Caesar will cross the Rubicon next year.'  Given Bivalence and Excluded Middle, what the Roman says is either true, or if not true, then false.  Given that Caesar did cross in 49 B.C., what the prescient Roman said was true.  Hence it was true before the crossing occurred.

Let's now consider how this relates to the determinism question.   Determinism is the view that whatever happens in nature is determined by antecedent causal conditions under the aegis of the laws of nature. Equivalently, past facts, together with the laws of nature, entail all future facts. It follows that facts before one's birth, via the laws of nature, necessitate what one does now. The necessitation here is conditional, not absolute.  It is conditional upon the laws of nature (which might have been otherwise) and the prior causal conditions (which might have been otherwise).

If determinism is true, then Caesar could not have done otherwise  than cross the Rubicon when he  did given the (logically contingent) laws of nature and the (logically contingent) conditions antecedent to his crossing.  If determinism is not true, then the laws plus the prior causal conditions did not necessitate his crossing.  Equity Private says  that the Caesar proposition is not true in 50 B.C. in a non-deterministic universe.  But I don't think this is right.  For there are at least two other ways the proposition might be true before the crossing occurred, two other ways which reflect two other forms of determination.  Besides causal determination (determination via the laws of nature and the antecedent causal conditions), there is also theological determination (determination via divine foreknowledge) and logical determination (determination via the law of excluded middle in conjunction with a certain view of propositions).  Logical determinism is called fatalism.  (See the earlier post on the difference between determinism and fatalism.) 

Someone who is both a fatalist and an indeterminist could easily hold that the Caesar proposition is true at times before the crossing.  Equity Private asked whether I am a determinist.  She should have asked me whether I am a fatalist.  For it looks as if I have supplied the materials for a fatalist argument. Here is a quick and dirty version of an ancient argument known as 'the idle argument' or 'the lazy argument':

1. Either I will be killed tomorrow or I will not. 
2. If I will be killed, I will be killed no matter what precautions I take.
3. If I will not be killed, then I will be killed no matter what precautions I neglect.
Therefore
4. It is pointless to take precautions.

This certainly smacks of sophistry!  But where exactly does the argument go wrong?  The first premise is an instance of LEM on the assumption of Bivalence.  (2) looks to be a tautology of the form p --> (q -->p), and (3) appears to be a tautology of the form ~p -->(q -->~p).  Or think of it this way.  If it is true that I will killed tomorrow, then this is true regardless of what other propositions are true.  And similarly for (3).

Some will say that the mistake is to think that LEM applies to propositions about future events:  in advance of an event's occurrence it is neither true nor not true that it will occur.  This way out is problematic, however.  'JFK was assassinated in 1963' is true now.  How then can the prediction, made in 1962, 'JFK will be assassinated in 1963,' lack a truth-value?  Had someone made that prediction in 1962, he would have made a true prediction, not a prediction lacking a truth-value.  Indeed, the past-tensed and the future tensed sentences express the same proposition, a proposition that could be put using the tenseless sentence 'JFK is assassinated in 1963.'  Of course, no one could know in 1962 the truth-value of this proposition, but that is not to say that it did not have a truth-value in 1962.  Don't confuse the knowledge of truth with truth. 

Suppose I predict today that such-and-such will happen next year, and what I predict comes to pass.  You would say to me, "You were right!"  You would not say to me, "What you predicted has acquired the truth-value, true."  I can be proven right in my prediction only if I was right, i.e., only if my prediction was true in advance of the event's occurrence.

So the facile restriction of LEM to present and past is a dubious move.  And yet the 'lazy argument' is surely invalid!   

Morgenbesserisms

A sampling of the quick wit of Sidney Morgenbesser (1921-2004).

Global Warmism as Ersatz Religion

Here.  Excerpt:

As with religion, it is presided over by a caste of spectacularly unattractive people [you mean, like, Al Gore?] pretending to an obscure form of knowledge that promises to make the seas retreat and the winds abate. As with religion, it comes with an elaborate list of virtues, vices and indulgences. As with religion, its claims are often non-falsifiable, hence the convenience of the term "climate change" when thermometers don't oblige the expected trend lines. As with religion, it is harsh toward skeptics, heretics and other "deniers." And as with religion, it is susceptible to the earthly temptations of money, power, politics, arrogance and deceit.

The terminological shift is what really kicked my skepticism into high gear.  Global climate change is a genus of which global warming is but a species, global cooling being another species.  And of course none of this much matters practically speaking if it is not anthropogenic.  Are we now being asked to believe that burning fossil fuels causes climate change whether or not the change is a warming?  That would be curious: contrary effects having the same cause.

Gingrich and the Kama Sutra

"Newt has more positions than the Kama Sutra." I just heard Michael Medved say this on the Dennis Prager show.  Medved intends it in the best possible sense.

Medved thinks that both Romney and Gingrich would make good presidents.  I agree.  Indeed, any of the Republican candidates would be better than Obama the Incompetent. And I agree with Medved that Gingrich is preferrable to Romney.  But is he more electable than Romney?  He's an intellectual with a funny name.  The average schlep of a voter looks for a regular guy he can relate to.  Like Bill 'Bubba' Clinton.

Climate Gate 2.0

Here and here.  

Europe Stares into the Abyss

Here.  Excerpt:

From the foreign perspective, the situation is clear: Rescuing the euro depends on Germany, which merely has to abandon its resistance to pooling debt. But this sort of "liability union" would not only contradict the so-called no-bailout clause of the European treaties, under which no euro-zone country can be held liable for the debts of another, but it would also be particularly dangerous for the Germans. As Europe's largest economy, Germany would shoulder the biggest burden and, in the end, could even be plunged into ruin with the rest of the euro zone.

 

What is Fatalism? How Does it Differ from Determinism?

Robert Kane (A Contemporary Introduction to Free Will, Oxford 2005, p. 19) rightly bids us not confuse determinism with fatalism:

     This is one of the most common confusions in free will debates.
     Fatalism is the view that whatever is going to happen, is going to
     happen, no matter what we do. Determinism alone does not imply such
     a consequence. What we decide and what we do would make a
     difference in how things turn out -- often an enormous difference
     -- even if determinism should be true.

Although it is true that determinism ought not be confused with fatalism, Kane here presents an uncharitable definition of 'fatalism.' No sophisticated contemporary defender of fatalism would recognize his position in this definition. Indeed, as Richard Taylor points out in a well-known discussion (Metaphysics, Ch. 6), it is logically incoherent  to suppose that what will happen will happen no matter what. If I am fated to die in a car crash, then I am fated to die in that manner --  but it is absurd to append 'no matter what I do.' For I cannot die in a car crash if I flee to a Tibetan monastery and swear off automobiles.  There are certain things I must do if I am to die in a car crash.  As Taylor says,
 
     The expression 'no matter what,' by means of which some
     philosophers have sought an easy and even childish refutation of
     fatalism, is accordingly highly inappropriate in any description of
     the fatalist conviction. (Metaphysics, 3rd ed., p. 57)

Kane's contrast is therefore bogus: no sophisticated contemporary is a fatalist in Kane's sense. Should we conclude that fatalism and determinism are the same? No. I suggest we adopt Peter van Inwagen's definition: "Fatalism . . . is the thesis that that it is a logical or conceptual truth that no one is able to act otherwise than he in fact does; that the very idea of an agent to whom alternative courses of   action are open is self-contradictory." (An Essay on Free Will, p. 23.)

As I understand the matter, fatalism differs from determinism since the determinist does not say that it is a logical or conceptual truth that no one is able to act otherwise than he in fact does. What the determinist says is that the actual past together with the actual laws of nature render nomologically possible only one future. The determinist must therefore deny that the future is open. But his claim is not that it is logically self-contradictory that the future be open, but only that it is not open given the facts of the past, which are logically contingent, together with the laws of nature, which are also logically contingent.

Perhaps we can focus the difference as follows. Suppose A is a logically contingent action of mine, the action, say, of phoning Harry. Suppose I perform A. Both fatalist and determinist say that I  could not have done otherwise. They agree that my doing A is necessitated. But they disagree about the source of the necessitation.

The fatalist holds that the source is logical: the Law of Excluded Middle together with a certain view of truth and of propositions. The determinist holds that the source is the contingent laws of nature
together with the contingent actual past.

Sexual Intracourse

Masturbation is sexual intracourse.

The 'Occupiers'

They occupy, but they themselves are vacant.

Against Irrationalism

The problem is not that we conceptualize things, but that we conceptualize them wrongly, hastily, superficially. The problem is not that we draw distinctions, but that we draw too few distinctions or   improper distinctions. Perhaps in the end one must learn to trace all distinctions back to the ONE whence they spring; but that is in the end. In the beginning people must be taught to conceptualize, discriminate, and distinguish.

A superficial Zen training that attacks the discursive intellect in those who have never properly developed it does a great disservice.

Against Functionalism in the Philosophy of Mind: Argument One

In my last philosophy of mind post on property dualism I posed a problem:

My problem, roughly, is that I don't understand how a physical particular (a brain, a region of a brain, a brain event, or state, or process) can instantiate one or more irreducibly mental properties. Why should there be a problem? Well, if a physical particular is exhaustively understandable in terms of physics (and the sciences based on it) then there is just nothing irreducibly mental about it, in which case it cannot instantiate an irreducibly mental property.

At the end of that post I provided an answer to that question:

Mental properties are functional properties. So when we say that x, a brain event say, has a mental property, all we mean is that it stands in certain causal relations to sensory inputs, behavioral outputs, and intervening brain events. So what makes the brain event mental is simply the relations in which it stands to inputs, outputs and other brain events. Once you grasp this, then you grasp that the brain event can be wholly physical in nature despite its having a mental property. Mental properties are not intrinsic but relational.

The answer, in short, is that mental properties are not intrinsic properties.  But then I wrote,

Unfortunately, this won't do. Felt sadness has an intrinsically mental nature that cannot be functionally characterized. A subsequent post will spell this out in detail.

This is the subsequent post.

Suppose Socrates Jones is in some such state as that of perceiving a tree. The state is classifiable as mental as opposed to a physical state like that of his lying beneath a tree. What makes a mental state
mental? That is the question.

The functionalist answer is that what makes a mental state mental is just the causal role it plays in mediating between the sensory inputs, behavioral outputs, and other internal states of the subject in question. The idea is not the banality that mental states typically (or even always) have causes and effects, but that it is causal role occupancy, nothing more and nothing less, that constitutes the
mentality of a mental state. The intrinsic nature of what plays the role is relevant only to its fitness for instantiating mental causal  roles, but not at all relevant to its being a mental state.

Consider a piston in an engine. You can't make a piston out of chewing gum, but being made of steel is no part of what makes a piston a piston. A piston is what it does within the 'economy' of the engine. Similarly, on functionalism, a mental state is what it does. This allows, but does not entail, that a mental state be a brain or CNS state. It also allows, but does not entail, that a mental state be a state of a  computing machine.

To illustrate, suppose my cat Zeno and I are startled out of our respective reveries by a loud noise at time t. Given the differences  between human and feline brains, presumably man and cat are not in type-identical brain states at t.  (One of the motivations for functionalism was the breakdown of the old type-type identity theory of Herbert Feigl, U. T. Place. J. J. C. Smart, et al.)  Yet both man and cat are startled: both are in some sense in the same mental state, even though the states they are in are neither token- nor type-identical. The   functionalist will hold that we are in functionally the same mental state in virtue of the fact that Zeno's brain state plays the same  role in him as my brain state plays in me. It does the same  mediatorial job vis-a-vis sensory inputs, other internal states, and  behavioral outputs in me as the cat's brain state does in him.

On functionalism, then, the mentality of the mental is wholly relational. And as David Armstrong points out, "If the essence of the mental is purely relational, purely a matter of what causal role is played, then the logical possibility remains that whatever in fact plays the causal role is not material." This implies that "Mental states might be states of a spiritual substance." Thus the very feature of functionalism that allows mentality to be realized in computers and nonhuman brains generally, also allows it to be realized in spiritual substances if there are any.

Whether this latitudinarianism is thought to be good or bad, functionalism is a monumentally implausible theory of mind. There are the technical objections that have spawned a pelagic literature: absent qualia, inverted qualia, the 'Chinese nation,' etc. Thrusting these aside, I go for the throat, Searle-style.

Functionalism is threatened by a fundamental incoherence. The theory states that what makes a state mental is nothing intrinsic to the state, but purely relational: a matter of its causes and effects. In us, these happen to be neural. (I am assuming physicalism for the time being.)  Now every mental state is a neural state, but not every neural state is a mental state. So the distinction between mental and nonmental neural states must be accounted for in terms of a distinction between two different sets of causes and effects, those that contribute to mentality and those that do not. But how make this distinction? How do the causes/effects of mental neural events differ from the causes/effects of nonmental neural events? Equivalently, how do psychologically salient input/output events differ from those that lack such salience?

Suppose the display on my monitor is too bright for comfort and I decide to do something about it. Why is it that photons entering my retina are psychologically salient inputs but those striking the back of my head are not? Why is it that the moving of my hand to to adjust the brightness and contrast controls is a salient output event, while unnoticed perspiration is not?

One may be tempted to say that the psychologically salient inputs are those that contribute to the production of the uncomfortable glare sensation, and the psychologically salient outputs are those that manifest the concomitant intention to make an adjustment. But then the salient input/output events are being picked out by reference to mental events taken precisely NOT as causal role occupants, but as exhibiting intrinsic features that are neither causal nor neural: the glare quale has an intrinsic nature that cannot be resolved into relations to other items, and cannot be identified with any brain state. The functionalist would then be invoking the very thing he is at pains to deny, namely, mental events as having more than neural and causal features.

Clearly, one moves in a circle of embarrassingly short diameter if one says: (i) mental events are mental because of the mental causal roles they play; and (ii) mental causal roles are those whose occupants are mental events.

The failure of functionalism is particularly evident in the case of qualia.  Examples of qualia: felt pain, a twinge of nostalgia, the smell of burnt garlic, the taste of avocado.  Is it plausible to say that such qualia can be exhaustively factored into a neural component and a causal/functional component?  It is the exact opposite of plausible.  It is not as loony as the eliminativist denial of quali, but it is close.  The intrinsic nature of qualitative mental states is essential to them. It is that intrinsic qualitative nature that dooms functionalism.

I conclude that if the only way to render property dualism coherent is by construing mental properties as functional properties, then property dualism is untenable.

Saturday Night at the Oldies: Tim Hardin

What ever happened to Tim Hardin? Well, he died, in 1980, of a heroin overdose.  But he left us some memorable songs. These are my favorites.

Lady Came From Baltimore

Reason to Believe

Black Sheep Boy  If you love me, let me live in peace/Please understand/ That the black sheep can wear the golden fleece/And hold a winning hand.

If I Were a Carpenter

Red Balloon This is a Small Faces cover, but good.

Justifying 'No Problem of Philosophy is Soluble'

Earlier, I presented the following antilogism:

1. All genuine problems are soluble.
2. No problem of philosophy is soluble.
3. Some problems of philosophy are genuine.

I claimed that "(2) is a good induction based on two and one half millenia of philosophical experience." The inductive inference, which I am claiming is good, is not merely from 'No problem has been solved' to 'No problem will be solved'; but from the former to the modal 'No problem can  be solved.'  From a deductive point of view, this is of course doubly invalid.  I use 'valid' and 'invalid' only in connection with deductive arguments.  No inductive argument is valid.  No news there.

Peter Lupu's objection, which he elaborated as best he could after I stuffed him with L-tryptophan-rich turkey and fixin's, was along the following lines.   If the problems of philosophy are insoluble, then so is the problem of induction.  This is the problem of justifying induction, of showing it to be rational.  So if all the problems are insoluble, then we cannot ever know that inductive inference is rational.  But if we cannot ever know this, then we cannot ever know that the inductive inference to (2) is rational.  Peter concludes that this is fatal to my metaphilosophical argument which proceeds from (2) and (3) to the negation of (1).  What he is maintaining, I believe, is that my argument is not rationally acceptable, contrary to what I stated, because (2) is not rationally acceptable.

Perhaps Peter's objection can be given the following sharper formulation.

(2) is either true or false. If (2) is true, then (2) is not rationally justifiable, hence not rationally acceptable, in which case the argument one of whose premises it is is not rationally acceptable.  If, on the other hand, (2) is false, then the argument is unsound.  So  my metaphilosophical argument is either rationally unacceptable or unsound.  Ouch!

I concede that my position implies that we cannot know that the inductive inference to (2) is rationally justified. But it might be rationally justified nonetheless.  Induction can be a rational procedure even if we cannot know that it is or prove that it is.  Induction is not the same as the problem of induction.  If I am right, the latter is insoluble.  But surely failure to solve the problem of induction does not show that induction is not rationally justified.  Peter seems to be assuming the following principle:

If S comes to believe that p on the basis of some cognitive procedure CP, then S is rationally justified in believing that p on the basis of CP only if S has solved all the philosophical problems pertaining to CP.

I don't see why one must accept the italicized principle.  It seems to me that I am rationally justified in believing that Peter is an Other Mind on the basis of my social interaction with him despite my not having solved the problem of Other Minds.  It seems to me that I am rationally justified, on the basis of memory, that he ate at my table on Thursday night despite my not having solved all the problems thrown up by memory.  And so on.

Property Dualism and Supervenience

A reader asked why I didn't mention supervenience in my recent posts on property dualism.  He opines that "the notion was invented to make sense of the position you are arguing against."  Let's see.

My Problem With Property Dualism Roughly Stated

I take a property dualist to be one who maintains all of the following propositions:

1. There are irreducibly mental properties.
2. There are irreducibly physical properties.
3. All particulars are physical particulars.
4. Some but not all particulars instantiate both irreducibly mental and irreducibly physical properties.

My problem, roughly, is that I don't understand how a physical particular (a brain, a region of a brain, a brain event, or state, or process)  can instantiate one or more irreducibly mental properties.  Why should there be a problem?  Well, if a physical particular is exhaustively understandable in terms of physics (and the sciences based on it)  then there is just nothing irreducibly mental about it, in which case it cannot instantiate an irreducibly mental property.  I am making the following assumption:

A. If a nonrelational predicate P is true of a particular x, then there must be something in or about x that grounds P's applicability to x.

So if 'feels pain' is true of a physical particular, and 'feels pain' picks out an irreducibly mental property, then there must be something irreducibly mental about that physical particular.  Otherwise there would be nothing in or about the particular that could render the predicate true of the particular.  But if there is something irreducibly mental about a physical particular, then that particular is not physical in the sense of being exhaustively understandable in terms of physics.

I find (A) to be self-evident.  For suppose you were to deny it.  Then you would be countenancing the following:  there is some particular x that instantiates a property P-ness even though the nature of x excludes P-ness.  You would be countenancing, for example, an electron (which is course a negatively charged particle) which yet instantiates the property of being positively charged.  If a particular has a an intrinsic (non-relational) property, then that property expresses what the  particular is, its nature (in a broad sense of this term).

Now we have to see whether the notion of supervenience can help me with my problem.

Strong Supervenience

The problem for the nonreductive physicalist is that he must avoid both eliminativism and reductionism but without falling into epiphenomenalism, emergentism, or (of course) substance dualism. Epiphenomenalism cannot accommodate the fact that mental phenomena sometimes enter into the etiology of physical events, while emergentism and substance dualism leave physicalism behind. The problem is to somehow secure the reality, the causal efficacy, and the irreducibility of the mental while maintaining the dependence of the mental on the physical. Nice work if you can get it!  What the physicalist needs, it seems, is a dualism of properties together with the idea that the mental properties somehow nonreductively depend on the physical ones. But how articulate this dependency relation?

Enter supervenience. The basic idea is that mental properties are not identical with, but merely supervene upon, physical properties in the way in which ethical properties have been thought (by G. E. Moore, R. M. Hare, and others) to supervene upon natural properties. Suppose A and B are both ethically good. It does not follow that there is any one natural, non-disjunctive, property with which goodness can be identified. Perhaps A is good in virtue of being brave and trustworthy, whereas B is good in virtue of being temperate and just. Goodness is in this sense "multiply realizable." A and B are both good despite the fact that their goodness is realized by different natural properties.

Nevertheless, (i) a person cannot be good unless there is some natural property in virtue of whose possession he is good, and (ii) if a person is good in virtue of possessing certain natural properties, then anyone possessing the same natural properties must also be good. Given that A-properties supervene upon B-properties, the "supervenience T-shirt" might read: "No A-property without a B-property" on the front; "same B-properties, same A-properties" on the back. As Jaegwon Kim puts it, "The core idea of supervenience as a relation between two families of properties is that the supervenient properties are in some sense determined by, or dependent upon, the properties on which they supervene." (Jaegwon Kim, "Epiphenomenal and Supervenient Causation," in Supervenience and Mind: Selected Philosophical Essays, Cambridge University Press, 1995, p. 98.)

Kim's preferred way of cashing this out is in terms of strong supervenience. Let A and B be families of properties closed under such Boolean operations as complementation, conjunction and disjunction. A strongly supervenes on B just in case:

(SS) Necessarily, for any property F in A, if any object x has F, then there exists a property G in B such that x has G, and necessarily anything having G has F.

Applying (SS) to physicalism, we may define the determination thesis of strong supervenience physicalism as the view that, necessarily, (i) for any mental property M, if x has M, then there is  physical property P such that x has P, and (ii) necessarily, anything having P has M.

But how does this help me with my problem?  If x has M and M is an irreducibly mental property, then, by assumption (A) above,  x is at least in part mental, and not wholly physical where 'wholly physical' means 'exhaustively understandable in terms of physics and the sciences based on it.'    This problem is not solved by telling me that x cannot have a mental property without having a physical property, and that anything having that physical property must have the mental property.  For my problem is precisely how x, which is wholly physical, can have an irreducibly mental property in the first place.

One might respond along the following lines.  "Look, the whole idea here is that mental properties are functional properties.  So when we say that x, a brain event say, has a mental property, all we mean is that it stands in certain causal relations to sensory inputs, behavioral outputs, and intervening brain events.  So what makes the brain event mental is simply the relations in which it stands to inputs, outputs and other brain events. Once you grasp this, then you grasp that the brain event can be wholly physical in nature despite its having a mental property.  Mental properties are not intrinsic but relational."

Unfortunately, this won't do.  Felt sadness has an intrinsically mental nature that cannot be functionally characterized.  A subsequent post will spell this out in detail. 

Besides, if the property dualist holds that mental properties are really relational, then, strictly speaking, he is not a property dualist. He is not maintaining that there are two sorts of properties, but that mentality consists of relations and that there are no monadic mental properties.  Furthermore, his talk of irreducibility must mean only that that type-type identities fail, that for every mental property there is not one unique physical property with which it is identical.  Irreducibility  boils down to multiple realizability.  Mental 'properties' are irreducible in that they are multiply realizable. 

Kerouac's 'Lost' First Novel Published

Being a  'completist,' I will of course secure a copy sooner or later.  But I suspect that biographer Nicosia's literary judgment of The Sea is My Brother (reported in the linked story) is just.

Poor Jack barely scraped by while entangled in the mortal coil.  But now that he is "free of that slaving meat wheel, safe in heaven, dead," his literary executors grow fat peddling every last remnant of his literary remains.

When fame comes, its sun shines equally on all of one's productions throwing their differential values into the shade.

Story here.

They Pay So Much for So Little

Update (11/27):  I am told the sign is a fake.  I suspected as much.  Fake or not it makes an important point.  The point being that (i) the Left has done much to destroy the universities, and (ii) government programs, e.g., federally insured loan programs, have done much to cause an education bubble.  The cost of education nowadays is shockingly out of proportion to the value of what the student receives.  This shows what happens when government interferes with the market. (This is not to say that I am opposed to all government regulation as so many  liberals think.  They think that if you are a conservative you must be a laissez-faire capitalist.  That's just plain stupid, but par for the course for the typical  liberal who is apparently unequipped to make a simple distinction between conservative and libertarian.) 

Compare the education sector with the electronics sector.  I paid a paltry $800 over a year ago for my current Hewlett-Packard computer with huge flat-screen montor .  It's an amazing piece of equipment and unbelievably cheap given what I am getting.  ( I paid around $2000 in less-inflated dollars in 1985 for an Apple II-c which was a piece of junk compared to this machine.  No hard drive, a mere 128 kilobytes of RAM.)  Why so cheap?  Because of competition and market discipline. 

It is not that big-government liberals intend to make things worse; the worsening is an unintended consequence of their foolish and ill-thought-out policies, policies that fail to take into consideration the realities of human nature.  One such reality is that if you make it easy for people to borrow monstrous sums of money, they will follow the path of least resistance and do so.  Another such reality is that the educational institutions will raise their tuitions and fees to absorb as much as they can of this easy money without any concern for what they are doing to the students' long-term financial health or to the country's.

In I Too am a Debt-Peon, Justin Smith reports that his first year in the graduate program at Columbia cost him $45,000 which he financed using federally-insured loans.  $45 K!  I don't know which is harder to believe, that any institution could get away with charging such an outrageous amount for a year's worth of courses in a subject  which, noble and magnificent as it is, notoriously bakes no bread, or that anyone could be so stupid as to go $45 K into debt in pursuit of a degree in a subject which, magnificent and noble as it is, notoriously bakes no bread.  Luckily for him, Smith managed to get funding for the rest of his graduate study, and even luckier, got a job. 

But now he complains about having to pay back the debt that he freely and foolishly assumed, and says that he will do what he can to avoid repaying it, thereby stiffing the taxpayers that financed his foolish adventure. 

The Policy of Stealing from the Productive

Stealing as Policy, from the Iron Curtain to Robert Byrd.

Family Dies When Small Craft Fails to Clear Superstition Mountain

These mountains I love are rugged and beautiful but unforgiving.    A small craft departing from Mesa and heading east failed to gain sufficient altitude and slammed into the Flatiron part of Superstition Mountain on Wednesday evening, killing all aboard.  Story here.

Property Dualism, the Red Ball Analogy, and Emergence

This post advances the discussion in the ComBox attached to Could Brains Have Mental Properties?

It would be very easy to be a property dualist in the philosophy of mind if one were also a substance dualist.  What I am having trouble understanding is how a property dualist can be a substance monist. In contemporary discussions, the one category of substances is that of material substances. 'Property dualism,' then, is an abbreviated name for the position in the philosophy of mind according to which mental and physical properties are mutually irreducible -- hence the dualism -- but had by the only kind of substances there are, material substances.  Hence the monism.  But having employed the traditional jargon,  I'll now drop the irridescent word 'substance' which will undoubtedly cause many to stumble and use 'particular' instead.  A particular is an unrepeatable entity.  It needn't be a continuant.  Events and processes count as particulars.

To come directly to my difficulty. How can an irreducibly mental property be instantiated by a physical particular?  An irreducibly mental property is one that is not identical with, or reducible to, any physical property.  Examples of mental properties:  being in pain; thinking about Thanksgiving dinner; having a blue sensation; wanting a cup of coffee.  This post assumes that at least some mental properties are irreducibly mental.  Various arguments have been given; this is not the place to rehearse them.  An irreducibly physical property is one that is not identical with, or reducible to, any mental property.  Examples of physical properties: impedance, ductility, motion, solubility, weighing 10 kg.  I will assume that all physical properties are irreducibly physical.  (It is not that I rule out idealism; it's that the goddess of blogging reminds me that brevity is the soul of blog.)

To further focus the question we need to exclude relational properties.  Weaver's Needle has the property of being thought about by me now.  So a physical particular has now an irreducibly mental property.  But this is unproblematic because the property in question is relational: it does not affect the Needle in its intrinsic nature.  But if my brain is what does the thinking in me, and I am thinking about Weaver's Needle, it is not so easy to understand how my brain, a physical thing, can have the irreducibly mental  intrinsic property, thinking about Weaver's Needle. (If you think that is not an intrinsic property, substitute wanting a sloop, given that there is  no particular sloop in existence that I want.)

So in what follows by 'irreducibly mental properties' I mean 'irreducibly mental intrinsic properties.'

My question is whether the following tetrad is consistent:

1. There are irreducibly mental properties.
2. There are irreducibly physical properties.
3. All particulars are physical particulars.
4. Some but not all particulars instantiate irreducibly mental and irreducibly physical properties.

You might think there is no problem.  Color and shape properties are mutually irreducible. Yet some physical particulars instantiate both color and shape properties.  A red ball is both red and spherical despite the mutual irreducibility of redness and sphericity.  Imagine that the red ball is red all the way through and not red merely on its surface.  This will preempt one from saying that the ball is red in virtue of a proper part of it being red.

So why can't mental and physical properties be had by one and the same physical particular?  Doesn't the analogy show that the tetrad is consistent?  Mental properties are to physical properties as color properties are to shape properties.  Just as one and the same physical particular, a ball say, can be both red and spherical, one and the same particular, a brain (or a portion of a brain or an event or process in a brain) can be both located in a region of space and thinking about Boston or feeling nostalgic.

I will now argue that the analogy is hopeless.

A Point of Disanalogy

Colors and shapes are mutually irreducible, but they are also such that color properties cannot be  instantiated without shape properties being instantiated, and vice versa.  I am talking about colors and shapes in Sellars' "manifest image," colors and shapes as they appear to normal visual perceivers.   No color is a shape; but it is also true that there are no colored particulars without shapes, and no shaped particulars without colors.   This is a point of phenomenology.  One cannot see a colored particular without seeing something that has some shape or other, and vice versa.  (And this is so even if the particular is an after-image.)  But only some material things are minds.  So we have a disanalogy.  Wherever a color property is instantiated, a shape property is instantiated, and wherever a shape property is instantiated, a color property is instantiated.  But it is not the case that wherever a physical property is instantiated a mental property instantiated.  There are plenty of physical particulars that lack mental features even if it is true that everything with mental features also has physical features.  Why the asymmetry?  This needs to be explained.

Mental Properties as Emergent Properties

Assuming that all particulars are physical particulars  -- that there are no unembodied or disembodied or possibly disembodied minds -- why do only some particulars have mental properties? Probably the most plausible thing to say is that only some physical systems are sufficiently complex to 'give rise' to mentality.  This implies that mental properties are  emergent:  they are system features that are not reducible to or explicable in terms of the properties of the parts of the system even when their causal interactions are taken into account.

Bear in mind that not every system feature is emergent.  Suppose a wall is made of 1000 piled stones and nothing else, each stone weighing one lb.  It follows that the system -- the wall -- weighs 1000 lbs.  But the property of weighing 1000 lbs., though a property of the whole and not of any part, is not an emergent property.  For it is determined by the properties of the parts.  In a more complicated system, the parts causally interact in significant ways.  (The stones in the wall interact too, but in insignificant ways.)  Think of a wrist watch.  The property of showing high noon, though a system property, is not an emergent property because it is determined by the properties and causal interactions of the parts.

An emergent property is one that is irreducible to the properties and causal interactions of the items in its emergence base, but somehow emerges from that emergence base and remains tied to it.  The notion of emergence is a curious and possibly incoherent one, combining as it does the notions of irreducibility and dependency.  An emergent property is dependent in that (i) it cannot exist uninstantiated, and (ii) it cannot exist unless the emergence base is sufficiently complex, and will continue to exist only as long as the emergence base retains its 'sufficient complexity.'    An emergent property is irreducible in that it cannot be accounted for in terms of the properties and interactions of the items in the emergence base.  This suggests that emergent properties are real iff they induce causal powers in their possessors above and beyond the causal powers that are explicable in terms of the items in the emergence base.

My point is that if only some physical systems exhibit mentality, namely, those systems that manifest a high degree of (biological) complexity,  then the mental properties of these systems must be emergent properties, properties that induce special causal powers in their possessors.  But then we must ask what are the possessors of these emergent mental properties.  The system as a whole, no doubt.  But what does that mean?  The mereological sum of the physical items that make up the system in question?  But a mereological sum is too frail a reed to support a property.  Indeed, some see no real distinction at all between a sum and its members.  We need something more substantial to serve as support of mental properties.  But I am at a loss to say what that more substantial something is.

The argument so far is as follows.  The red ball analogy fails because only some physical particulars instantiate irreducibly mental properties. This is readily explainable if irreducibly mental properties are emergent properties.  Emergent properties are system properties, properties of complex (biological) systems. But then the question arises as to what these emergent properties are properties of.  They can't be properties of the parts of a system taken distributively any more than the property of weighing 1000 lbs. can be taken to be a property of the stones composing a wall taken distributively.  So emergent properties are properties of wholes or collections of some sort.  But this seems problematic.

For one thing, there are many mental properties had by one minded organism.  I see a javelina; I hear it; I smell it. All in the unity of one consciousness.  The mental properties are not just instantiated; they are co-instantiated, instantiated in or by one thing.  If Manny sees, Moe hears, and Jack smells, it does not follow that there is one minded organism that does all three.  So if mental properties are emergent system properties we need to know which one item it is that instantiates them and unifies them.  The brain as a whole?  What does that mean?  No matter how we construe wholes, whether as mereological sums, mathematical sets ordered or unordered, aggregates, what-have-you, no whole is 'substantiatial' enough to unify the various mental properties that minded organisms exhibit.

It is also unclear how a mere collection could be the subject of experience.  The subject of experience is not merely the support and unifier of mental properties; it is also that which is aware (whether intentionally or non-intentionally) in virtue of the instantiation of the mental propertiers.  How could the subject of experience be a collection of objects?

So I remain in the dark as to what exactly property dualism could be if it is supposed to be a coherent  position.  What is it exactly that instantiates mental properties on this view?

Don't Say 'Turkey Day'

Say 'Thanksgiving' and give thanks. You don't need to eat turkey to be thankful. Gratitude is a good old conservative virtue. I'd expatiate further, but I've got a race to run. You guessed it: a 'turkey trot.' In Mesa, Arizona, 10 kilometers = 6.2 miles.

With only a couple of exceptions I've run this race every year since 1991.  And now it's 2011.  May the Grim Reaper, the Ultimate Repo Man, impart a spring to my step, and a glide to my stride.  We take it to the limit. One more time.

Gratitude: A Thanksgiving Homily

We need spiritual exercises just as we need physical, mental, and moral exercises. A good spiritual exercise, and easy to boot, is daily recollection of just how good one has it, just how rich and full one's life is, just how much is going right despite annoyances and setbacks which for the most part are so petty as not to merit consideration.

Start with the physical side of your life. You slept well, and a beautiful new day is dawning. Your breath comes easy, your intestines are in order. Your mind is clear, and so are your eyes. Move every moving part of your body and note how wonderfully it works, without any pain to speak of.

Brew up some java and enjoy its rich taste, all the while rejoicing over the regularity of nature that allows the water to boil one more time, at the same temperature, and the caffeine to be absorbed once more by those greedy intercranial receptors that activate the adrenalin that makes you eager to grab a notebook and jot down all the new ideas that are beginning to percolate up from who knows where.

Finished with your body, move to your mind and its wonderful workings. Then to the house and its appliances including your trusty old computer that reliably, day after day, connects you to the sphere of Nous, the noosphere, to hijack a term of Teilhard de Chardin. And don't forget the country that allows you to live your own kind of life in your own kind of way and say and write whatever you think in peace and safety.

A quotidian enactment of something like the foregoing meditation should do wonders for you.

Absolute Truth and Necessary Truth

Absolute truth and necessary truth are not the same.

Let our example be the proposition p expressed by 'Julius Caesar crossed the Rubicon in 44 B.C.' Given that p is true, it is true in all actual circumstances. That is, its truth-value does not vary from time to time, place to place, person to person, or relative to any other parameter in the actual world. P is true now, was true yesterday, and will be true tomorrow. P is true in Los Angeles, in Bangkok, and on Alpha Centauri. It is true whether Joe Blow affirms it, denies it, or has never even thought about it. And what goes for Blow goes for Jane Schmoe.

In this sense, p is absolutely or nonrelatively true. But that is not to say that p is necessarily true. A proposition q is necessarily true if and only if q is true in all possible worlds, to use a Leibnizian expression. To avoid 'world' I can say: in all possible circumstances. (A world could be thought of as a maximal circumstance.)  A proposition q is contingently true iff (i) q is true in the actual circumstances, but (ii) not true in all possible circumstances. Now our proposition p concerning Caesar is obviously only contingently true: there is no broadly logical or metaphysical necessity that he cross the Rubicon in 44 BC. He might have crossed it earlier or later, or not at all. Or said river might never have existed for him to cross.

Note that contingent is not the same as contingently true.  If a proposition is contingently true, then it is actually true.  But if a proposition is contingent it may or may not be actually true.  I was born by Caesarean section but  I might not have been.  So the proposition *BV was not born by Caesarean section* though false is contingent: it is true in some but not all possible worlds and false in the actual world.

Here are some theses I am fairly sure of:

1. There are no relative truths: every truth is absolute.
2. An absolute truth need not be a necessary truth: some absolute  truths are contingent.
3. Every truth, whether necessary or contingent, is true in all actual circumstances.
4. The ontological property of absoluteness is not to be confused with any epistemological property such as  that of being known with certainty.

Are All Genuine Problems Soluble? A Metaphilosophical Antilogism

The old questions are still debated.  The problems remain unsolved after millenia: there is no consensus among the competent.  But what does interminable debate and lack of consensus show? That philosophical problems are genuine but insoluble or that they are not genuine because insoluble?  Or something else?

Our metaphilosophical problem may be cast in the mold of an antilogism:

1. All genuine problems are soluble.
2. No problem of philosophy is soluble.
3. Some problems of philosophy are genuine.

Each limb of this aporetic triad lays serious claim to our acceptance.  (1) will strike many as self-evident, especially if soluble means 'soluble eventually' or perhaps  'soluble in principle.'  (2) is a good induction based on two and one half millenia of philosophical experience.  Or can you point to a central or core problem that has been solved to the satisfaction of all able practioners?  Give me an example if you think you have one, and I will blow it clean out of the water.  (3) certainly seems to be true, does it not?  The main problems of philosophy when carefully and rigorously formulated are as genuine as any problem.  And yet the triad's limbs cannot all be true.  The first two limbs, taken together, entail the negation of the third.  So one of them must be rejected.

Think about this metaproblem.  Is it not genuine and important?

For every antilogism there are three corresponding syllogisms, and so our antilogism gives rise to the following three syllogistic arguments:

1. All genuine problems are soluble.
2. No  problem of philosophy is soluble.
-----
~3. No problem of philosophy is genuine.

1. All genuine problems are soluble.
3. Some problems of philosophy are genuine.
-----
~2. Some problems of philosophy are soluble.

2. No problem of philosophy is soluble.
3. Some problems of philosophy are genuine.
-----
~1. Some genuine problems are not soluble.

Each of these syllogisms is valid.  But only one can be sound.  Which one?  Is there any rational way to decide?  The first syllogism encapsulates the view of the logical positivist Moritz Schlick as expressed in his "The Turning Point in Philosophy."  His thesis is that the problems of philosophy are pseudo-problems.  But if so, then the metaproblem we have been discussing, which of course is a philosophical problem, is a also a pseudo-problem.  But if it is a pseudo-problem, then it has no solution.  But it does have a solution for Schlick, one that consists in denying (3).  So the Schlick solution is incoherent.  On the one hand, he maintains that the problems of philosophy are pseudo-problems.  On the other hand, he thinks that the metaproblem of whether philosophical problems are pseudoproblems has a solution.  Thus his position leads to a contradiction.

Many will plump for the second syllogism.  They will be forgiven for so plumping.  They are the optimists who fancy that in the fullness of time solutions will be upon us.

I put my money on the third syllogism. I reject (1), thereby maintaining that some genuine problems are insoluble. Indeed, I want to go further.  I want to maintain that all genuine philosophical problems are insoluble.  I consider the above metaphilosophical problem to be an example of a genuine but insoluble problem.  So I am not claiming that my rejection of (1) solves the metaphilosophical problem. If I made that claim then I would be contradicting myself.  I would be claiming that philosophical problems are insoluble but that the metaproblem (which is a philosophical problem) is soluble. So what am I saying?

Perhaps what I am saying is that I have no compelling reason to prefer the third syllogism to the other two, but that my preferring of the third is rationally acceptable, rationally supportable, and may well lay bare the truth of the matter. 

Alice in Liberal Land

Thomas Sowell's latest.

Jack Ruby's Carousel Club

John Fitzgerald Kennedy was shot down in the streets of Dallas, Texas on this day in 1963.  Yes, I remember exactly where I was and exactly what I was doing when I heard the news.  But I won't bore you with that. Here are Part One and Part Two of a couple of interesting video clips about Jack Ruby who shot Lee Harvey Oswald who shot JFK.

He Was a Friend of Mine, the Byrds' tribute to JFK.  Based on a traditional song, here sung by Dylan, and here by Dave van Ronk.

Obama's No Leader

Robert Samuelson makes the case.

Regress? What Regress? Truth-Making Revisited

Ed continues to repeat his regress argument against truth-makers, despite my hurling invective at it.  I think I called it "breathtakingly rotten" or something equally offensive, all in good fun of course:

I have argued (e.g. here and here that the notion of a ‘truthmaker’ leads to an infinite regress. If there is such a truthmaker, an entity that makes a proposition like ‘Socrates sits’ true - let it be A - then it comes into existence when Socrates sits down, and ceases to exist when he stands up. But then there would have to be a further truthmaker for A existing. I.e. the sentence “A exists” can be true or false, and so requires a further truthmaker B, that makes it true when B exists. But then “B exists” requires yet another truthmaker, and so on ad infinitum.

Now what is the regress supposed to be?  There is an entity  A and it makes-true sentence s.  A is not a sentence, or any other type of representation.  Since we can talk about A, we can say 'A exists.'  'A exists' is contingently true, so it too needs a truth-maker.  So far, so good.

Ed assumes that the truth-maker for "A exists' must be distinct from the truth-maker for s.  Without this assumption, the regress can't get started.  Therefore, to show that his regress argument is bogus, it suffices to show that one and the same entity A can serve as the truth-maker for both s and 'A exists.'

Suppose the truth-maker of 'Tom is tired' is the fact, Tom's being tired.  Now consider the sentence 'Tom's being tired exists.'  I claim that the truth-maker of both sentences is Tom's being tired.   I conclude that there is no regress.

To appreciate this you must note that while 'Tom is tired' is a predication, 'Tom's being tired exists' is not.  It is an existential sentence like 'Tom exists.'  So while the predication requires a fact for its truth-maker, the existential sentence does not.  It does not need a fact as a truth-maker any more than 'Tom exists' does.  The truth-maker of the latter is just Tom.  The truth-maker of  'Tom's being tired' is not the fact, Tom'sbeing tired's existence, but just  Tom's being tired.

There is a second reason why the regress cannot arise.  Ed is a nominalist. He eschews propositions and believes only in sentences.  Well, there is no need for there to be the sentence 'A exists'!  If no one says that A exists, then there is no sentence 'A exists.'  And of course nonexistent sentences do not need truth-makers.   And if someone does say that A exists, there is no need that he, or anyone else, say that the truth-maker of 'A exists' exists.  So for this reason too the regress can't get started.

Ed ends his post on this strange note: "If we buy the idea of a ‘truthbearer’ (a proposition, a thought, whatever), the idea of a ‘truthmaker’ comes with it."  That's plainly false.  That there are truth-bearers is self-evident; that there are truth-makers is not.  Must I dilate further on this self-evident point?  Second, if the quoted sentence is true, and Ed's regress argument is sound, the upshot is that there are no truth-bearers, which is absurd.  In effect, Ed has provided a reductio ad absurdum of his own claim that there are no truth-makers!

What Ed says about representation and the representation of the faithfulness of a representation would require a separate post to discuss.  But I sense the conflation of epistemological questions with ontological ones.

The Link Between Postmodernism and the Left

From Thomas Nagel's essay, "The Sleep of Reason" in Concealment and Exposure (Oxford 2002), p.174 (emphasis added):

 . . . I think there is a more direct link between postmodernism and the traditional ideas of the Left. The explanation of all ostensibly rational forms of thought in terms of social influences is a generalization of the old Marxist idea of ideology, by which moral principles were all debunked as rationalizations of class interest. The new relativists, with Nietzschean extravagance, have merely extended their exposure of the hollowness of pretensions to objectivity to science and everything else. Like its narrower predecessor, this form of analysis sees "objectivity" as a mask of the exercise of power, and so provides natural expression of class hatred. Postmodernism's specifically academic appeal comes from its being another in the sequence of all-purpose "unmasking" strategies that offer a way to criticize the intellectual efforts of others, not by engaging with them on the ground, but by diagnosing them from a superior vantage point and charging them with inadequate self-awareness. Logical positivism and Marxism have in the past been used by academics in this way, and postmodernist relativism is natural for the role. It may now be on the way out, but I suspect there will continue to be a market in the huge American academy for a quick fix of some kind. If it is not social constructionism, it will be something else -- Darwinian explanations of virtually everything, perhaps.

Could Brains Have Mental Properties?

1. Many philosophers of mind who eschew substance dualism opt for a property dualism.   Allowing only one category of substances, material substances, they allow at least two categories of properties, mental and physical.  An example of a mental property is sensing red, or to put it adverbially, the property of sensing redly, or in a Chisholmian variant, being-appeared-to-redly.  Any sensory quale would serve as an example of a mental property.  Their irreducibility to physical properties is the reason for thinking of them as irreducibly mental properties.  This post, taking for granted this irreducibility, focuses on the question whether it is coherent to suppose that a mental property could be had by a physical substance.  Before proceeding, I will note that it is not just qualia, but also the phenomena of intentionality that supply us with putative mental properties.  Recalling as I am right now a particular dark and rainy night in Charlottesville, Virginia, I am in an intentional state.  So one can reasonably speak of my now instantiating an intentional mental property.

In sum, there are (instantiated) mental properties and there are (instantiated) physical properties, and the former are irreducible to the latter.

2. Now could a physical thing such as a (functioning) brain, or a part thereof, be the possessor of a mental property?  Finding this incoherent, I suggest that if there are instantiated mental properties, then there are irreducibly mental subjects.  Or perhaps you prefer the contrapositive:  If there are no irreducibly mental subjects, then there are no irreducibly mental properties.  But it all depends on what exactly we mean by mental and physical properties.

3. What is a physical property?  An example is the property of weighing 10 kg.  Although there are plenty of things that weigh 10 kg, the property of weighing 10 kg does not itself weigh 10 kg.  Physical properties are not themselves physical.   So in what sense are physical properties 'physical'? It seems we must say that physical properties are physical in virtue of being properties of physical items.  And what would the latter be?  Well, tables and chairs, and their parts, and their parts, all the way down to celluose molecules, and their atomic parts, and so on, together with the fields and forces pertaining to them, with chemistry and physics being the ultimate authorities as to what exactly counts as physical. 

So I'm not saying that a physical property is a property of a physical thing where a physical thing is a thing having physical properties.  That would be circular.  I am saying that a physical property is a property of a physical item where physical items are (i) obvious meso- and macro-particulars such as tables and turnips and planets, and (ii) the much less obvious micro-particulars that natural science tells us all these things are ultimately made of.  Taking a stab at a definition:

D1. P is a physical property =_df P is such that, if it is instantiated, then it is instantiated by a physical item.

Admirably latitudinarian, this definition allows a property to be physical even if no actual item possesses it.  This is is as it should be.  

4. Now if a physical property is a property of physical items, then a mental property is a property of mental items.  After all, no mental property is itself a mind.  No mental property feels anything, or thinks about any thing or wants anything. Just as no physical property is a body, no mental property is a mind.  So, in parallel with (D1), we have

D2.  P is a mental property =_df P is such that, if it is instantiated, then it is instantiated by a mental item.

(D2) implies that if there are  any instantiated mental properties, there there are irreducibly mental items, i.e., minds or mental subjects.  Now there are instantiated mental properties.  Therefore, there are irreducibly mental subjects.  For all I have shown, these subjects might be momentary entities, hence not substances in the full sense of the term, where this implies being a continuant.  The main point, however, is that what instantiates mental properties must be irreducibly mental and so cannot be physical.  Therefore, brains could not have mental properties.

This flies in the face of much current opinion.  So let's think about it some more.  If you countenance irreducibly mental properties being instantiated by brains, do you also countenance irreducibly physical properties being instantiated by nonphysical items such as minds or abstracta?  Do you consider it an open question whether some numbers have mass, density, velocity?  How fast, and in what direction, is that mathematical function moving?  If physical properties cannot be instantiated by nonphysical items, but mental properties can be instantited by nonmental items, then we are owed an explanation of this asymmetry.  It is difficult to see what that explanation could be.

Conclusion

5. My argument, then, is this:

a) If there are any instantiated mental properties, then there are irreducibly mental subjects.
b) There are some instantiated mental properties.
Therefore
c)  There are irreducibly mental subjects.

(a) rests on (D2).

The attempt to combine property dualism with substance monism is a failure.  If all substances are physical, then all properties of these substances are physical.  If, on the other hand, there are both mental and physical properties, then there must be both mental and physical subjects, if not substances.  A physical item can no more instantiate a mental property than a mental item can instantiate a physical property. 

Revenge of the Parents

In the moment when one sees in oneself traces of the very attributes one so harshly criticized in one's parents -- in that moment they get their vicarious revenge.

Legal's Mate Via the Smith-Morra Gambit

The summer of '95 found me in Charlottesville, Virginia. A lovely place hard by the Blue Ridge Mountains and the Appalachian Trail. The largesse of the American taxpayer had made it possible for me to attend a National Endowment for the Humanities summer seminar at the University of Virginia. One dark and rainy night, wearied by philosophy of science arcana, I stumbled into the C-ville chess club, sat down opposite an old man, and uncorked this miniature:

 Vallicella - Oldtimer, Charlottesville, 1995

1. e4 c5 2. d4 cd 3. c3 dc 4. Nxc3 e5 5. Nf3 d6 6. Bc4 Bg4 7. Nxe5 Bxd1 8. Bxf7+ Ke2 9. Nd5 mate.

Of course, you knew about Legal's mate. But did you know it could be reached via the Smith-Morra gambit?

Saturday Night at the Oldies: The Only Two Neil Diamond Songs I Like

Solitary Man.  Johnny Cash's version which is even better.  Kentucky Woman.  There were some other good tunes, but then I detected a descent into schmaltz.

More on Trishna

A reader usefully supplements my post Reininger Contra Buddhism:

Dear Professor Vallicella,

With reference to your recent post 'Reininger Contra Buddhism' you might be intrigued by chapter 5 of D. T. Suzuki's Mysticism: Christian and Buddhist where he talks about trishna at length and states:

"The later Buddhists realized that tṛiṣṇā was what constituted human nature--in fact, everything and anything that at all comes into existence--and that to deny tṛiṣṇā was committing suicide; to escape from tṛiṣṇā was the height of contradiction or a deed of absolute impossibility; and that the very thing that makes us wish to deny or to escape from tṛiṣṇā was tṛiṣṇā itself. Therefore, all that we could do for ourselves, or rather all that tṛiṣṇā could do for itself, was to make it turn to itself, to purify itself from all its encumbrances and defilements, by means of transcendental knowledge (prajñā). The later Buddhists then let tṛiṣṇā work on in its own way without being impeded by anything else. Tṛiṣṇā or "thirst" or "craving" then comes to be known as mahākaruṇā, or "absolute compassion," which they consider the essence of Buddhahood and Bodhisattvahood." (Section XI)

I suspect that his unusual interpretation was possibly influenced by his documented reading of Eckhart and Swedenborg, as much as any Buddhist sources, but I found it interesting to read such a famous Buddhist figure interpreting trishna in this way.

Thank you for your excellent blog.

Could Qualia Terms and Neuroscience Terms Have the Same Reference?

I made the point that the vocabularies of phenomenology and neuroscience are radically disparate, such that nonsense arises when one says things like, 'This burnt garlic smell is identical to a brain state of mine.'  To which a Viet Nam veteran, altering the example,  replied by e-mail:

. . . when a neuro-scientist says your smelling this odor as napalm is nothing but a complex neural event activating several regions of the brain..., he isn't claiming you can replace your talk about smells with talk about neural signals from the olfactory bulb. Different ways of talking have evolved for different purposes. But he is saying that beneath these different ways of talking & thinking there is just one underlying reality, namely, neural events in our brain.

 The idea, then, that is that are are different ways of referring to the same underlying reality.  And so if we deploy a simple distinction between sense and reference we can uphold the materialist/physicalist reduction of qualia to brain states.  Well, I have my doubts . . . .

I agree with Thomas Nagel, John Searle, and others that conscious experiences are irreducible to physical states. I have endorsed the idea that felt pain, phenomenal pain, pain as experienced or lived through (er-lebt), the pain that hurts, has a subjective mode of existence, a "first-person ontology" in Searle's phrase. If this is right, then phenomenally conscious states cannot be reduced to physical states with their objective mode of existence and third-person ontology. As a consequence, an exclusively third-person approach to mind is bound to leave something out. But there is an objection to irreducibility that needs to be considered, an objection that exploits Frege's distinction between sense and reference.

The basic idea is that linguistic and epistemic access to one and the same item can be had in different ways, and that duality of linguistic and/or epistemic access need not be taken to argue ontological duality in that to which one gains access. Reference to one and the same item can be routed through different senses or modes of presentation (Frege's Darstellungsweisen). Different terms, with different senses, can be used to target one and the same referent. 'Morning Star' and 'Evening Star,' though differing in sense, can be used to refer to the same celestial body, the planet Venus.  

Why not say something similar about the physical state I am in when I feel pain? Why not say that there are two ways of accessing the same physical state? The one mode of access is via neuroscience, the other is 'from the inside' via the pain's qualitative feel to the one who endures it. If so, there are not two states or events one physical and the other mental differing in mode of existence; there is exactly one state or event, and it is physical. Dualism is avoided. The upshot is that, contra Nagel, the third-person physicalistic approach to the mind does not leave anything out. One may go on to tax Nagel, Searle, and Co. with illicitly inferring a difference in mode of existence from a difference in mode of linguistic/epistemic access. Something like this objection is made by Christopher Peacocke in his review of Nagel's The View from Nowhere (Philosophical Review, January 1989.)

It's a nice try, a very nice try. And it is exactly what one would expect from someone who takes an objectifying third-person view. What's more, it would be in keeping with Occam's Razor if mind could be seamlessly integrated into nature. Unfortunately, the pain I am in is not a mode of presentation, or means of epistemic access, to the underlying brain state. Thus the Fregean analogy collapses. The sense of 'morning star' mediates my reference to Venus; but my pain quale, even if it is caused by the brain state, does not mediate my reference to it.

Let me see if I can make this clear. The suggestion is that the same physical reality appears, or can appear, in two different ways, a third-person way and a first-person way, and that this first-person way of access is no evidence of a first-person way of being. One problem is the one I just alluded to: there is no clear sense in which a pain quale is an appearance of a brain state. The former may be caused by the latter. But that is not to say that the pain quale is of the brain state. The felt pain does not present the brain state to me. It does not present anything (distinct from itself) to me. After all, the felt pain is a non-intentional state. No doubt it has a certain content, but not an intentional or representational content. One can describe it without describing what it is of, for the simple reason that there is nothing it is of. An intentional state, however, cannot be described without describing what it is of.

The Fregean sense/reference analogy therefore breaks down. The basic idea was that one and same reality can appear in different ways, and that the numerical difference of these ways is consistent with a unitary mode of existence of the reality. A felt pain, however, is not an appearance of a reality, but an appearance that is a reality. The appearing of a felt pain is its being, and its being is its appearing. And because this is so, the felt pain is a distinct reality from the brain state. Not only is it a distinct reality, it is a distinct reality with a distinct, irreducibly subjective, mode of existence.

Nagelus vindicatus est. There is something essentially incomplete about a third-person approach to reality. It leaves something out, and what it leaves out is precisely that which makes life worth living. For as Wilfrid Sellars once said to Daniel Dennett over a fine bottle of Chambertin, "But Dan, qualia are what make life worth living!" (Consciousness Explained, p. 383)

In vino veritas.

I made the point that the vocabularies of phenomenology and neuroscience are radically disparate, such that nonsense arises when one says things like, 'This burnt garlic smell is identical to a brain state of mine.'  To which a Viet Nam veteran, altering the example,  replied by e-mail:

. . . when a neuro-scientist says your smelling this odor as napalm is nothing but a complex neural event activating several regions of the brain..., he isn't claiming you can replace your talk about smells with talk about neural signals from the olfactory bulb. Different ways of talking have evolved for different purposes. But he is saying that beneath these different ways of talking & thinking there is just one underlying reality, namely, neural events in our brain.

 The idea, then, that is that are are different ways of referring to the same underlying reality.  And so if we deploy a simple distinction between sense and reference we can uphold the materialist/physicalist reduction of qualia to brain states.  Well, I have my doubts . . . .

I agree with Thomas Nagel, John Searle, and others that conscious experiences are irreducible to physical states. I have endorsed the idea that felt pain, phenomenal pain, pain as experienced or lived through (er-lebt), the pain that hurts, has a subjective mode of existence, a "first-person ontology" in Searle's phrase. If this is right, then phenomenally conscious states cannot be reduced to physical states with their objective mode of existence and third-person ontology. As a consequence, an exclusively third-person approach to mind is bound to leave something out. But there is an objection to irreducibility that needs to be considered, an objection that exploits Frege's distinction between sense and reference.

The basic idea is that linguistic and epistemic access to one and the same item can be had in different ways, and that duality of linguistic and/or epistemic access need not be taken to argue ontological duality in that to which one gains access. Reference to one and the same item can be routed through different senses or modes of presentation (Frege's Darstellungsweisen). Different terms, with different senses, can be used to target one and the same referent. 'Morning Star' and 'Evening Star,' though differing in sense, can be used to refer to the same celestial body, the planet Venus.  

Why not say something similar about the physical state I am in when I feel pain? Why not say that there are two ways of accessing the same physical state? The one mode of access is via neuroscience, the other is 'from the inside' via the pain's qualitative feel to the one who endures it. If so, there are not two states or events one physical and the other mental differing in mode of existence; there is exactly one state or event, and it is physical. Dualism is avoided. The upshot is that, contra Nagel, the third-person physicalistic approach to the mind does not leave anything out. One may go on to tax Nagel, Searle, and Co. with illicitly inferring a difference in mode of existence from a difference in mode of linguistic/epistemic access. Something like this objection is made by Christopher Peacocke in his review of Nagel's The View from Nowhere (Philosophical Review, January 1989.)

It's a nice try, a very nice try. And it is exactly what one would expect from someone who takes an objectifying third-person view. What's more, it would be in keeping with Occam's Razor if mind could be seamlessly integrated into nature. Unfortunately, the pain I am in is not a mode of presentation, or means of epistemic access, to the underlying brain state. Thus the Fregean analogy collapses. The sense of 'morning star' mediates my reference to Venus; but my pain quale, even if it is caused by the brain state, does not mediate my reference to it.

Let me see if I can make this clear. The suggestion is that the same physical reality appears, or can appear, in two different ways, a third-person way and a first-person way, and that this first-person way of access is no evidence of a first-person way of being. One problem is the one I just alluded to: there is no clear sense in which a pain quale is an appearance of a brain state. The former may be caused by the latter. But that is not to say that the pain quale is of the brain state. The felt pain does not present the brain state to me. It does not present anything (distinct from itself) to me. After all, the felt pain is a non-intentional state. No doubt it has a certain content, but not an intentional or representational content. One can describe it without describing what it is of, for the simple reason that there is nothing it is of. An intentional state, however, cannot be described without describing what it is of.

The Fregean sense/reference analogy therefore breaks down. The basic idea was that one and same reality can appear in different ways, and that the numerical difference of these ways is consistent with a unitary mode of existence of the reality. A felt pain, however, is not an appearance of a reality, but an appearance that is a reality. The appearing of a felt pain is its being, and its being is its appearing. And because this is so, the felt pain is a distinct reality from the brain state. Not only is it a distinct reality, it is a distinct reality with a distinct, irreducibly subjective, mode of existence.

Nagelus vindicatus est. There is something essentially incomplete about a third-person approach to reality. It leaves something out, and what it leaves out is precisely that which makes life worth living. For as Wilfrid Sellars once said to Daniel Dennett over a fine bottle of Chambertin, "But Dan, qualia are what make life worth living!" (Consciousness Explained, p. 383)

In vino veritas.

There is no God but God and 'Coffee' is His Name

Image taken from Appeared-to-Blogly, the proprietor of which states that the two loves of his life are coffee and books.  For expressing that sentiment alone, he deserves and receives a link.

Malcolm on Mysterianism

No, not Norman Malcolm, our Malcolm:

Re: your recent post on Mysterianism, it seems that the central paragraph is this:

And so it is with the mysterian materialist. He bids me accept propositions that as far as I can tell are not propositions at all. A proposition is a sense, but the 'propositions' he bids me accept make no sense. For example, he wants me to accept that my present memories of Boston are all identical to states of my brain. That makes no sense. Memory states are intentional states: they have content. No physical state has content. So no intentional state could be a physical state. The very idea is unintelligible. Where there are no thoughts one can always mouth words. So one can mouth the words, 'Memories are in the head' or 'Thoughts are literally brain states.' But one cannot attach a noncontradictory thought to the words.

 

The hinge of it is the assertion "No physical state has content."

But isn't this itself the crux of the mysterian materialist's position? He will dispute your assertion, and reply that it appears that some very specific physical states (or perhaps more accurately, physical processes), namely those that arise in the uniquely complex material objects in our skulls, do in fact have content, and just how that is managed is what we do not yet understand. Your impossibility is his actuality, and so his mystery.

You are right that the mysterian materialist will maintain that some physical states do have content.  But he also maintains that we will never be able to understand how this is possible.  Thus your 'not yet understand' is not accurate. As Colin McGinn, head honcho of the mysterian materialists, puts it, "My thesis is that consciousness depends on an unknowable natural property of the brain." (The Mysterious Flame, p. 28,emphasis added)  Someone who holds that with the advance of neuroscience we will eventually solve the mind-body problem is not a mysterian.

The mysterian materialist position is that mental activity just is brain activity.  If that is actually so, then it is possibly so whether or not we can render intelligible to ourselves how it is so.  For McGinn, we will never render this intelligible because it is impossible to do so.  The mind-body problem is "perfectly genuine" (212) but has never been solved and is indeed insoluble because "our minds are not equipped to solve it, rather as the cat's mind is not up to discovering relativity theory or evolution by natural selection." (212)

You  are right: my impossibility is his actuality.  For him, the proposition that some physical states have content is true but a mystery.  So he asserts what he takes to be a well-defined and possibly true proposition -- *Some physical states have content* -- but also asserts that the question of how this proposition is possible will not ever, and cannot ever, be answered due to the limitations of our cognitive architecture.

My claim is that there is no well-defined proposition before us, or rather that there is no proposition before us that could be true.  There is the sentence 'Some physical states have content' but this sentence expresses no proposition  that could be true.  It's a little like 'Some color is a sound.'  That sentence does not express a proposition that could be true.  I don't believe you would credit the sort of  mysterian who maintains that it is true that some colors are sounds, and therefore possibly true, despite our inability to explain how it is true.  You would laugh out of the room the guy who said it was true but a mystery.  You would say, 'Get out of here, you are talking nonsense.'

How do we know it is nonsense?  We know this by thinking attentively about colors and sounds and by grasping that a color is not the sort of item that could be a sound.  Similalrly, we know it is nonsense to identify a memory of Boston with a brain state by thinking attentively of both and grasping that the one is not the sort of item that could be identical to the other.  (Because the one has content while the other doesn't so the two cannot be identical by the Indiscernibility of Identicals.)

Moving from content to qualia, I would say 'This smell of burnt garlic is identical to some brain state of mine' is on all fours with 'Quadruplicity drinks procrastination.'  It can't be so, and for a very deep reason: the very electro-chemical and other vocabulary (axons, dendrites, synapses, diffusion of sodium ions, voltage differentials, etc.) cannot be meaningfully combined with the vocabulary of phenomenology..  When you combine them you get nonsense.  The resulting propositions -- if you want to call them that -- cannot be true.

Isn't "No physical state has content", in this context at least, question-begging?

I don't believe I am simply begging the question.  It is more complicated than that.  It may help if I lay out both the mysterian and my argument.

Mysterian Argument

1. Mental activity is just brain activity. (Naturalist assumption)
2. We cannot understand how mental states could be identical to brain states.
Therefore
3. This inability to understand does not reflect an objective impossibility but an irremediable limitation in our cognitive architecture:  our minds are so structured that we will never be able to understand the mind-body link.

My Argument

2. We cannot understand how mental states could be identical to brain states.
~3. This inability reflects an objective impossibility.
Therefore
~1. Mental activity is not just brain activity.

The deep underlying issue here seems to be this:  Is our inability to understand how such-and-such is broadly-logically possible a sufficient reason for denying that such-and-such is objectively broadly-logically possible? To put it another way, the issue is whether there could be true mysteries, where a mystery is a proposition that by our best lights must appear either to be or to entail a broadly-logical contradiction.

This issue lies deeper than the naturalism issue.

The Brain-Dead Left

Here, by James Taranto.  And while we are on the brain theme:

The Ultimate Mystery Meat

The Imaginarium of Barack Obama

The latest  from VDH.

Listen Up, Boomers: The Backlash Has Begun

Walter Russell Mead is talkin' 'bout our generation.

A Contradictory Being Who Issues Contradictory Demands

We want a subordinate, a friend, a spouse to do our bidding, to embody in action our own intention, but also to show initiative, to anticipate our unstated wants and needs. Not content to command the other's body, making of it an extension of our will, we want also to command the other's freedom, making of  it an instrument of our freedom.

I say to wifey: Bring me back a case of Fat Tire Ale. Upon her return,  no ale is in evidence. Inquiring why not, I am told that it was unavailable. "Why then did you not fetch me a case of Sam Adam's Boston Ale?"

"Because that is not what you asked for, and had I brought back Sam Adam's you would have complained that it was not Fat Tire."

Reininger Contra Buddhism

Robert Reininger, Philosophie des Erlebens, p. 227:

   Gegen Buddhismus: Trishna nicht ertoeten (ausloeschen), sondern durch
   Ueberhoehung in den Dienst des Vernunftwillens stellen -- sonst fehlt
   diesem die lebendige Kraft, die nur der Daseinsbejahung eignet (A 751,
   1932).

   Against Buddhism: Trishna is not to be killed or extinguished, but
   elevated and placed in the service of the rational will. Without this
   sublimation, the rational will lacks the vital force appropriate to the
   affirmation of existence. (tr. BV)
  

Trishna is Sanskrit for desire, thirst. Central to Buddhism is the notion that the suffering and general unsatisfactoriness of life is rooted in desire, and that salvation is to be had by the  extirpation of desire. Reininger's point is one with which I wholly  agree. The goal ought not be the extinction of desire, but its sublimation. Desire as such is not the problem; the problem is misdirected desire. Properly channeled and sublimated, desire provides the motive force for the rational will.

See my "No Self? A Look at a Buddhist Argument," International Philosophical Quarterly, vol. 42, no. 4 (December 2002), pp. 453-466.)

Different People to Different People

We are different people to different people, and different people are different people to us.

..............

No aphorism can comment on itself, or justify itself, on pain of ceasing to be an aphorism.  But what I am now writing is not part of the above aphorism.

What makes a good aphorism?  A good aphorism is pithy, one or two sentences.  Three at most.  It must lay bare an important truth. A saying clever but false is not a good aphorism. And the same goes for clever but unintelligible.  A good aphorism should have 'literary merit' whatever exactly that is.  I suggest mine does have some, though you are free to disagree.  Note the play on 'different.'  The formulation exploits the ambiguity of 'different' as between numerical and qualitative senses.  We are qualitatively different people to numerically different people, and numerically different people are qualitatively different to us.  Had I written the thing just like that it would have been clear but clunky and devoid of whatever literary value it has.

The thought expressed is not only true but important in the sense that bearing it in mind can help one negotiate the social world with equanimity.  We meet people who like us, people who dislike us, and people who are indifferent.  Some can't see our faults for our virtues; other are virtues for our faults.  One can be discouraged and even depressed at the hostility one arouses in others.  One better takes this all in stride if one never forgets that we are:

Different people to different people. 

Of Meat and Meaning

Learning more and more about a piece of meat won't make manifest how that meat means.

Does Knowledge Entail Belief or Exclude Belief?

A reader who says he is drawn to the view that knowledge excludes belief comments:

I am taking a philosophy class now that takes for granted that knowledge entails belief. My sense is that most philosophers now think that that condition is obvious and settled. They tend to dispute what "justification" means, or add more conditions to the Justified True Belief formula.

That knowledge is justified true belief is a piece of epistemological boilerplate that has its origin in Plato's Theaetetus.  The JTB analysis is extremely plausible.  It is first of all self-evident that there is no false knowledge.  So, necessarily, if S knows that p, then 'p' is true.  It also seems obvious that one can have a true belief without having knowledge.  Suppose I believe that at this very moment Peter (who is 60 miles away) is teaching a class on the philosophy of science, and suppose it is true that at this very moment he is teaching such a class; it doesn't follow that I know that he is teaching such a class.    Knowledge requires justification, whatever exactly that is.  Finally, if S knows that p, how can it fail to be the case that S believes that p?  It may seem obvious that knowledge entails belief.  Necessarily, whatever I know I believe, though not conversely.

So I agree with my reader that most philosophers now think that the belief condition is "obvious and settled."  But most academic philosophers are fashionistas: they follow the trends, stick to what's 'cool,'  and turn up their noses at what they deem politically incorrect.  And they read only the 'approved' journals and books.  I pronounce my 'anathema' upon them.  In any case it is not obvious that knowledge entails belief.

The Case for Saying that Knowledge Excludes Belief

Why not say this:  Necessarily, if S knows that p, then it is not the case that S believes that p?

One cannot understand belief except in relation to other mental states. So let's consider how believing and knowing are related, taking both as propositional attitudes.  They are obviously different, and yet they share a common element. Suppose we say that what is common to S's knowing that p and S's believing that p is S's acceptance of p. I cannot (occurrently) believe that Oswald acted alone unless I accept the proposition that Oswald acted alone, and I cannot (occurrently) know that he acted alone with accepting the very same proposition. To accept, of course, is to accept-as-true. It is equally obvious that what is accepted-as-true might not be true. Those who accept that the earth is flat accept-as-true what is false. Now one could analyze 'S knows that p' as follows:

a) S unconditionally accepts-as-true p
b) p is true
c) S is justified in accepting-as-true p.

This is modeled on, but diverges from, the standard justified-true-belief (JTB) analysis of 'know' the locus classicus of which is Plato's Theaetetus.

And one could perhaps analyze 'S believes that p' as follows:

a) S unconditionally accepts-as-true p
d) S does not know that p.

These analyses accommodate the fact that there is something common to believing and knowing, but without identifying this common factor as belief. The common factor is acceptance. A reason for not identifying the common element as belief is that, in ordinary language, knowledge excludes belief. Thus if I ask you whether you believe that p, you might respond, 'I don't believe it, I know it!' Do I believe the sun is shining? No, I know the sun is shining. Do I know that I will be alive tomorrow? No, but I believe it. That is, I give my firm intellectual assent to the proposition despite its not being evident to me. Roughly, belief is firm intellectual assent in the absence of compelling evidence.

Surely this is what we mean by belief in those cases that clearly count as belief. Lenny the liberal, for example, believes that anthropogenic global warming is taking place and is a dire environmental threat. Lenny doesn't know these two putative facts; he believes them: he unconditionally accepts, he firmly assents to, the two propositions in the absence of compelling evidence. And it seems clear that an element of will is involved in our boy's belief since the evidence does not compel his intellectual assent. He decides to believe what he believes. His believing is in the control of his will. This does not mean that he can believe anything he wants to believe. It means that a 'voluntative surplus' must be superadded to his evidence to bring about the formation of his belief. Without the voluntative superaddition, he would simply sit staring at his evidence, so to speak. There would be no belief and no impetus to action. Beliefs typically spill over into actions. But there would not be even a potential 'spill over' unless there were a decision on Lenny's part to go beyond his evidence by superadding to it his firm intellectual assent.

"But aren't you just using 'believes' in an idiosyncratic way?"

It is arguably the other way around. Someone who says he believes that the sun is shining when he sees that it is shining is using 'believes' in an idiosyncratic way.  He is using 'believes' in a theory-laden way, the theory being the JTB analysis of 'knows.'

"But then isn't this just a terminological quibble? You want to substitute 'accepts' or 'accepts-as-true' for 'believes' in the standard JTB analysis of 'knows' and you want to reserve 'believes' for those cases in which there is unconditional acceptance but not knowledge."

The question is not merely terminological. There is an occurrent mental state in which one accepts unconditionally propositions that are not evident. It doesn't matter whether we call this 'belief' or something else.  But calling it 'belief' comports well with ordinary language.

Let me now elaborate upon this account of belief, or, if you insist, of Aquinian-Pieperian belief.

1. Belief is a form of acceptance or intellectual assent. To believe that p is to accept *p*, and to disbelieve that p is to reject *p*. One may also do neither by abstaining from both acceptance and rejection.  (Asterisks around a sentence make of the sentence a name of the Fregean proposition expressed by the sentence.)

2. If acceptance is the genus, then knowing, believing, and supposing are species thereof. In knowing and believing the acceptance is unconditional whereas in supposing it is conditional. It follows that believing is not common to believing and knowing as on the JTB analysis. To think otherwise is to confuse the genus (acceptance) with one of its species (belief).

                                                           Genus:  Acceptance-as-true

[Species 1:  Knowledge                          Species 2:  Belief]                      [Species 3:  Supposal]

                     Unconditional Acceptance                                                   Conditional Acceptance

 

3. What distinguishes believing and knowing is that the believer qua believer does not know, and the knower qua knower does not believe. Both, however, accept.  What I just wrote appears objectionably circular. It may seem to boil down to this: what distinguishes believing and knowing is that they are distinct!  We can lay the specter of the circle by specifying the specific difference.

If believing and knowing are species of the genus acceptance, what is the specific difference whereby the one is distinguished from the other? Believing that p and knowing that p are not distinguished by the common propositional content, p. Nor are they distinguished by their both being modes of unconditional acceptance. Can we say that they differ in that the evidence is compelling in the case of knowing but less than compelling in the case of believing? That is true, but then the difference would seem to be one of degree and not of kind. But if knowing and believing are two species of the same genus, then we have a difference in kind.  Perhaps we can say that knowledge is evident acceptance while belief is non-evident acceptance.  Or perhaps the difference is that belief is based on another's testimony whereas knowledge is not.  Let's explore the latter suggestion.

4. It is essential to belief that it involve both a proposition (the content believed) and a person, the one whose testimony one trusts when one gains access to the truth via belief. To believe is to unconditionally accept a proposition on the basis of testimony. If so, then there are two reasons why it makes no sense to speak of perceptual beliefs. First, what I sense-perceive to be the case, I know to be the case, and therefore, by #3 above, I do not believe to be the case. Second, what I sense-perceive to be the case I know directly without need of testimony.

On this approach, the difference between believing and knowing is that believing is based on testimony whereas knowing is not. Suppose that p is true and that my access to *p*'s truth is via the testimony of a credible witness W. Then I have belief but not knowledge. W, we may assume, knows whereof he speaks. For example, he saw Jones stab Smith. W has knowledge but not belief.

The Art of Living

It is part of the art to know how to prolong one's life sufficiently to learn what can  be learned only by living.

A Life Well-Lived

A life well-lived must be devoted in some measure to inquiry into the well-lived life.

The Issue of Procreation

Too many procreate thoughtlessly.  Think too much about the issue, however, and you may end up without issue.