Spencer Case thinks I need to expand my musical horizons. I don't disagree. He writes,
O.K. here are my five picks for good folk/rock music within the last ten years.
First, "The Wrote and the Writ" by Johnny Flynn, an artist I've just discovered. I chose it because of the syncopated guitar and the outstanding lyrics.
Second, "Right Moves" by Idaho's own Josh Ritter. Ritter been one of my favorites for about six years. He isn't instrumentally out of this world like some of the other artists here, but he's a great songwriter. It's hard to find a representative song for him for a first exposure, but this seems like a safe bet. Third, "Simple as This" by Jake Bugg, another new discovery. Great lyrics.
Fourth, "Don't Need No" by Punch Brothers. I've seen these guys live and they are amazing.
Fifth, "Big Parade" by Lumineers. These guys are from Denver and actually, they are quite popular now. So not everything on this list is obscure.
As far as I'm concerned, these artists prove good music is alive and well, if under-appreciated. Interested to hear how you think they stack up.
It's good stuff, Spencer. I enjoyed 'em all. Here are some obscure tunes/renditions I think you'll enjoy if you haven't heard them already. I won't make any invidious comparisons. It's all good.
The president’s belief that little of what he does is ideologically driven suggests he is living with a pampered, unchallenged mind. He has been told he is so smart for so long that he sees only clarity in his actions and unchallengeable reason in his conclusions. The president’s belief in his own intellect makes him think that whatever he does is simply the only thing a thinking person would do. Nothing ideological about that.
Roger's reading is possible, but not likely. I incline to a darker view. Obama knows that he is a leftist and that leftism is not the only option. He knows that there are sincere, highly intelligent, principled people who oppose the leftist agenda with an impressive armamentarium of facts and arguments. Although Obama hangs with his sycophantic own for the most part, he cannot not know about the black conservative Thomas Sowell, for example, and his views. And given how smart Obama is supposed to be, he will have discerned that Sowell and other black conservatives cannot be dismissed as Uncle Toms.
When Obama said that he is not ideological he was simply lying. He was stating something he knows to be false with the intent to deceive.
As soon as I took office, I asked this Congress to send me a recovery plan by President's Day that would put people back to work and put money in their pockets. Not because I believe in bigger government -- I don't.
In this example, Obama's mendacity enters the Orwellian. Opposing bigger government, he is for smaller government. Bigger government is smaller government.
The truth is that the man is thoroughly untruthful. Why does he so brazenly lie, bullshit, prevaricate? Because he believes that there is nothing wrong with mendacity in the service of a noble cause. I don't think the man is simply out for his own wealth and power: he sincerely believes in the leftist agenda and that the glorious end justifies and requires the mendacious means.
For this reason he never comes clean about his real goals and values.
If you think about it this way, it all makes sense. He had to lie again and again about the content of the ACA. Otherwise it would not have passed. He knows best what is good for us, and his lies are for our own good.
Opposition to Obama's policies is precisely that, opposition to his policies. If you think race has anything to do with it, you are either delusional or lying. One must realize that for a leftist, lying is not wrong if it is in the service of what they take to be a noble end. Mendacity's affront to 'bourgeois' morality is as nothing compared to the wonderful achievement of what they call 'social justice.' This is why Obama and his supporters brazenly lie and lie about their lying, as well as deploying the other modes of untruthfulness. The end justifies the means. They have no qualms of conscience because they don't see what they are doing as wrong. The distress of the five and a half million who have had their insurance policies cancelled is taken in stride as part of the cost of implementing a system that they imagine will serve the common good.
A government big enough and powerful enough to control health care delivery will be in an excellent position to demand ‘appropriate’ behavior from its citizens – and to enforce its demand. Suppose you enjoy risky sports such as motorcycling, hang gliding, mountain climbing and the like. Or perhaps you just like to drink or smoke or eat red meat. A government that pays for the treatment of your injuries and ailments can easily decide, on economic grounds alone, to forbid such activites under the bogus justification, ‘for your own good.’
But even if the government does not outlaw motorcycling, say, they can put a severe dent in your liberty to enjoy such a sport, say, by demanding that a 30% sales tax be slapped on all motorcycle purchases, or by outlawing bikes whose engines exceed a certain displacement, say 180 cc. In the same way that governments levy arbitrary taxes on tobacco products, they can do the same for anything they deem risky or unhealthy.
The situation is analogous to living with one’s parents. It is entirely appropriate for parents to say to a child: ‘As long as you live under our roof, eat at our table, and we pay the bills, then you must abide by our rules. When you are on your own, you may do as you please.’ The difference, of course, is that it is relatively easy to move out on one’s own, but difficult to forsake one’s homeland.
The nub of the issue is liberty. Do you value it or not? And how much? Which trumps which: liberty or equality of outcome?
In other words, Republicans oppose Obama's policies, not the man, because they believe the president will so inexorably change the structure of our social and economic system by mandating and punishing human behavior that nothing less than individual freedom is at stake. Under present circumstances, this hardly seems delusional. Does anyone really believe that subsidized policyholders with pre-existing conditions won't eventually face other mandates and penalties related to their lifestyle choices?
What distinguishes an institution from a flash mob is that its rules endure. They can be changed, of course. But only by significant supermajorities. That’s why constitutional changes require two-thirds of both houses plus three-quarters of the states. If we could make constitutional changes by majority vote, there would be no Constitution.
As of today, the Senate effectively has no rules. Congratulations, Harry Reid. Finally, something you will be remembered for.
Barack Obama may be remembered for something similar. His violation of the proper limits of executive power has become breathtaking. It’s not just making recess appointments when the Senate is in session. It’s not just unilaterally imposing a law Congress had refused to pass — the Dream Act — by brazenly suspending large sections of the immigration laws.
Except that he is asking them to break the law. His own law. Under Obamacare, no insurer may issue a policy after 2013 that does not meet the law’s minimum coverage requirements. These plans were canceled because they do not.
The law remains unchanged. The regulations governing that law remain unchanged. Nothing is changed except for a president proposing to unilaterally change his own law from the White House press room.
That’s banana republic stuff, except that there the dictator proclaims from the presidential balcony.
I stumbled across this word on p. 539 of the heaviest, fattest, stompingest tome in my library, Richard Routley's Exploring Meinong's Jungle and Beyond (Ridgeview, 1980). The thing is 1,035 pages long. I could kill a cat with it, and you hope I won't. A mere $500 for an Amazon used copy. One copy available at the moment. No, I won't sell my copy unless you give me $500,000.00 for it. Cash on the barrel head.
In this way depauperate objects such as the present king of France can be seen as limiting cases of fictional items . . .
2. Severely diminished; impoverished: "But there were no pleasures in Australia. How could my friend admire so paleontologically depauperate a place?"(Jake Page).
Why did the Aussie Routley change his name to 'Sylvan'? Because of a love of forests? (L. silva, silvae) Because of a preference for Meinongian jungles over Quinean desert landscapes?
I don't know and it doesn't matter, but this tome does. I've slogged through most of it over the years. Very rich, very technical, very good.
Man is godlike and therefore proud. He becomes even more godlike when he humbles himself.
The central thought of Christianity, true or not, is one so repellent to the natural human pride of life that one ought at least to entertain the unlikelihood of its having a merely human origin. The thought is that God humbled himself to the point of entering the world in the miserably helpless and indigent way we in fact do, inter faeces et urinam, and to the point of leaving it in the most horrendous way the brutal Romans could devise, and from a most undistinguished spot, a hill in an obscure desert outpost of their empire.
Due to the various Linked-In scams, my policy has been to ignore all invitations. I received one that appeared to be from a man I know, but when I contacted him, he said he hadn't sent it. The ways of the scammers are as multifarious as they are devious, so to save time I delete first and ask questions later.
What may appear to be rudeness is really just caution. It is in the nature of the consevative to be cautious, as it is in the nature of the leftist to be reckless and foolish and to make a mess of things. Example: Obamacare.
More than one. Here is one. And as old Chisholm used to say, you are not philosophizing unless you have a puzzle. So try on this aporetic triad for size:
1. Purely fictional objects do not exist.
2. There are true sentences about purely fictional objects, e.g., 'Sherlock Holmes is a detective' and 'Sherlock Holmes is purely fictional.'
3. If a sentence of the form Fa is true, then there exists an x such that 'a' refers to x.
The triad is logically inconsistent: any two limbs entail the negation of the remaining one. So the limbs cannot all be true despite the considerable plausibility of each. So one of the propositions must be rejected. But the first is nonnegotiable since it is true by definition. The leaves two options: reject (2) or reject (3).
Suppose we reject (2). One way to do this is by supplying a paraphrase in which the apparent reference to the nonexistent is replaced by real reference to the existent. For example, the apparent reference to Sherlock, who does not exist, is replaced by real reference to a story in which he figures, a story that, of course, exists. The elliptical approach is one way of implementing this paraphrastic strategy. Accordingly,
4. Sherlock Holmes is a detective
and
5. Sherlock Holmes is fictional
are elliptical for, respectively,
6. In the Conan Doyle stories, Sherlock Holmes is a detective
and
7. In the Conan Doyle stories, Sherlock Holmes is fictional.
But note that while (5) is plainly true, (7) is plainly false. So (7) cannot be taken as elliptical for (5) This is a serious problem for the 'story operator' approach. Or consider the true
8. Sherlock Holmes does not exist.
(8) is surely not short for the false
9. In the Conan Doyle stories, Sherlock Holmes does not exist.
The point can be made with other 'extranuclear' predicates such as 'merely possible' and 'mythological.' If I say that Pegasus is mythological, I don't mean that, according to legend, Pegasus is mythological. But the story operator approach also has trouble with 'nuclear' predicates such as 'detective.' But I'll save that for a subsequent post.
I'll end with a different challenge to the story operator approach. Consider
10. Pinocchio was less of a liar than Barack Obama.
Whether you consider (1) true or false, it is certainly not elliptical for
11. In Carlo Collodi's The Adventures of Pinocchio (1883), Pinocchio was less of a liar than Barack Obama.
To put it vaguely, the the trouble with the story operator appoach is that it traps fictional characters within particular stories, songs, legends, tales, etc. so that (i) it becomes difficult to understand how they can show up in different different stories, songs, etc. as they obviously do in the cases of Faust and Pinocchio, and (ii) it becomes difficult to understand how they can show up in comparisons with nonfictional individuals.
It’s a good question. Hegel and Aquinas are certainly comparable in the sense that they treated a wide variety of topics in philosophy and theology, and unified and organized them. Another similarity resides in the prominence of theology in their writings – but with the following caveat: Whereas, in the scholastic approach adopted by Aquinas, philosophy (Aristotelian, Platonic, Stoic, etc.) is the “handmaid of theology,” with Hegel the relationship is inverted: theology becomes the handmaid of philosophy.
It is certainly true that for Aquinas, philosophia ancilla theologiae, "philosophy is the handmaiden of theology," where the theology in question is a reflection on, and systematization of, the data of divine revelation, and not a branch of philosophy. But it strikes me as not quite right to say that, for Hegel, the relationship is inverted.
First of all, in what sense is philosophy a handmaiden to theology for Aquinas? Philosophy takes us some distance toward the knowledge of the ultimate truth about the ultimate matters, but not all the way, and not to the truly essential. It takes us as far as we can go on the basis of experience and discursive reason unaided by revelation But if we would know the whole truth about the ultimate matters, and indeed the saving truth, then we must accept divine revelation. We can know that God exists by unaided reason, for example, but not that God is triune. Thus, for Aquinas, theology supplements and completes what we can know by our own powers. It neither contradicts the latter, nor does it express it in a more adequate form: it goes beyond it. A second sense in which philosophy is ancillary to theology is that philosophy supplies the tools of theology, though not its data. It supplies concepts and argumentative procedures with which the data of revelation can be articulated and organized and shown to be rationally acceptable, a reasoned faith, though not a rationally demonstrable faith.
For Hegel, however, the content of theology and philosophy are the same; it is just that philosophy expresses this content in an adequate conceptual manner whereas theology expresses it in an inadequate pictorial manner. To throw some Hegelian jargon, the thinking of theology is vorstellendes Denken; the thinking of philosophy is superior: begriffliches Denken. If Hegel were Aquinas on his head, then Hegel would have to be saying that philosophy brings in new content beyond that of theology. But that's not his view. And if Aquinas were Hegel on his head, then Aquinas would have to be saying that the content of philosophy and theology is the same, but that philosophy expresses it inadequately. And that is not what he is saying.
Hegel clearly subordinates theology to philosophy but it is incorrect to say that, for Hegel, theology is the handmaiden of philosophy in the way that philosophy is the handmaiden of theology for Aquinas.
This cavil having been lodged, Kainz's piece is a useful little piece of journalism for those who don't know anything about this topic.
It does annoy me, however, that Kainz doesn't supply any references. For example, we read:
Hegel was critical of Catholicism at times, in his writings and lectures. For example, he once made a scurrilous remark about the Catholic doctrine of the Eucharist . . . .
Very interesting, but what exactly does he say and where does he say it? Inquiring minds want to know. Would it have killed Kainz to insert a few references into his piece? Then a serious dude like me who has almost the whole of Hegel in German and English in his personal library could check the context and amplify his knowledge of the work of the Swabian genius.
As you use them, the terms 'fictional', 'intentional', 'possible', 'incomplete', and others like 'past' have a distinctive effect on the concept terms they qualify. Ordinary adjectives have the effect of narrowing the extension of the concept term they qualify: the red balls are a subset of the balls, the female prime ministers are a subset of the prime ministers, and so on. The terms in question have the opposite effect. They appear to widen, or indeed offset altogether, the extension of the qualified concept. They are thus potent alienating terms. So the question arises, What is the relation (if any) between the concepts 'fictional person' and 'person', between 'intentional object' and 'object', and 'possible X' and 'X'? Ordinary qualification can be uniformly understood in terms of set intersection. Is there a uniform explanation underlying these alienating qualifications?
1. First of all, contrary to what David says, there are plenty of ordinary adjectives that do not narrow the extension of the terms they qualify. There are redundant adjectives, alienans adjectives, and there is the construction known as the contradictio in adiecto. For example, 'decoy' in 'decoy duck' is an ordinary adjective despite its being an alienans adjective; it is just as ordinary as 'female' in 'female duck,' which I call a specifying adjective and which does narrow the extension of the noun 'duck.' I see no reason to say that specifying adjectives are the only ordinary ones.
2. We can agree on this: red balls are a proper subset of balls, and female prime ministers are a proper subset of prime ministers. We will also agree that round balls are a subset of balls, though not a proper subset, and that female girls are an improper subset of girls. We could say that the last two examples illustrate the null case of specification. We could make a distinction between properly specifying and improperly specifying adjectives corresponding to the distinction between proper and improper subsets.
3. We can also agree that specificatory qualification (but not all qualification) can be uniformly understood in terms of set intersection if the intersection is non-null. The set of cats and the set of dogs has an intersection, but it is the null set. Intersection is defined over all sets, disjoint or not, hence one cannot say that the set of dogs and the set of cats do not intersect. They intersect all right; it is just that their intersection is empty. 'Canine cat' is an example of a contradictio in adiecto which reflects the fact that the corresponding sets are disjoint. 'Canine' does not specify 'cat.' It does not divide the genus into two species, the canine cats and the non-canine cats.
4. I can't, pace David, think of an example in which an adjective widens the extension of the term it qualifies. Can you? For example, 'former' in 'former wife' does not widen the extension of 'wife.' It is not as if there are two kinds or species of wives, former and present. Tom's former wife is not his wife. 'Former' does not narrow the extension either. It is an alienans adjective. It is the same with 'artificial leather.' Alligator leather and cowshide are two kinds of leather, but artificial and real are not two kinds of leather.
5. We will agree that all or most the following constructions from ordinary, i.e., non-philosophical English feature alienans adjectives, adjectives that shift or 'alienate' or 'other' the sense of the term they qualify:
former wife
decoy duck
negative growth
faux marble
ex-priest
putative father
artificial leather
legally dead
male chauvinist (on one disambiguation of its syntactic ambiguity; see article below)
generational chauvinist (I am a generational chauvinist when it comes to popular music: that of my generation is superior to that of the immediately preceding and succeding American generations.)
6. Note that the adjective in 'alienans adjective' is not alienans! Note also that 'putative' and 'artificial' function a little differently. Exercise for the reader: explain the difference and formulate a general test for alienans adjectives.
7. Observe that 'artificial' in 'artificial insemination' is not an alienans adjective in that artificial insemination is indeed insemination, albeit by artificial means. Whatever the means, you are just as pregnant. So whether an adjective is alienans or not depends on the context. A false friend is not a friend, but false teeth are teeth.
8. We now come to more or less controversial examples:
same-sex marriage (Conservative position: same-sex marriage is not marriage)
merely possible animal ('The chimera is a merely possible animal.')
future individual
incomplete individual
Is a (purely) fictional man a man? You might be tempted to say yes: Hamlet is fictional and Hamlet is a man, so Hamlet is a fictional man. But the drift of what I have been arguing over the last few days is that a fictional man is not a man, and that therefore 'fictional' functions as an alienans adjective. But I am comfortable with the idea that a merely possible man is a man. What is the difference?
There might have been a man distinct from every man that exists. (Think of the actual world with all the human beings in it, n human beings. There could have been n + 1.) God is contemplating this extra man, and indeed the possible world or maximal consistent state of affairs in which he figures, but hasn't and will not ever actualize him or it. What God has before his mind is a completely determinate merely possible individual man. There is only one 'thing' this man lacks: actual existence. Property-wise, he is fully determinate in respect of essential properties, accidental properties, and relational properties. Property-wise the merely possible extra man and the actual extra man are exactly the same. Their quidditative content is identical. There is no difference in Sosein; the only difference is Sein, and Sosein is indifferent to Sein as Aquinas, Kant, and Meinong would all agree despite their differences. As Kant famously maintained, Sein is not a quidditative determination, or in his jargon 'reales Praedikat.'
For this reason a merely possible (complete) man is a man. They are identical in terms of essence or nature or quiddity or Sosein, these terms taken broadly. If God actualizes the extra man, his so doing does not alter the extra man in any quidditative respect. Otherwise, he ould not be the same man God had been contemplating.
9. Brightly hits upon a happy phrase, "alienating qualifications." In my first bullet list we have examples of alienating qualifications from ordinary English. I expect Brightly will agree with all or most of these examples. His questioin to me is:
Ordinary qualification can be uniformly understood in terms of set intersection. Is there a uniform explanation underlying these alienating qualifications?
If Brightly is looking for a test or criterion I suggest the following:
Let 'FG' be a phrase in which 'F' is an adjective and 'G' a noun. 'F' is alienans if and only if either an FG is not a G, or it does not follow from x's being an FG that x is a G. For example, your former wife is not your wife, a decoy duck is not a duck, artificial leather is not leather, and a relative truth is not a truth. Is an apparent heart attack a heart attack? It may or may not be. One cannot validly move from 'Jones had an apparent heart attack' to 'Jones had a heart attack.' So 'apparent' in 'apparent heart attack' is alienans.
Now it is obvious that a decoy duck is not a duck, and that a roasted turkey is not a turkey, but the cooked carcass of a turkey; but it is not so obvious that a fictional man is not a man, while a merely possible man is a man. To establish these controversial theses -- if 'establish' is not too strong a word -- requires philosophical inquiry which is of course very difficult and typically inconclusive. But once we have decided that a certain philosophical phrase is an alienating qualification, then my test above can be applied.
A fine jeremiad. And of course we cannot call Obama the Mendacious and his shills on their brazen lies for that would be discrimination! To discriminate between justifiable and unjustifiable discrimination is itself unjustifiably discriminatory.
Peter and I discussed the following over Sunday breakfast.
Suppose I want a table, but there is no existing table that I want: I want a table with special features that no existing table possesses. So I decide to build a table with these features. My planning involves imagining a table having certain properties. It is rectangular, but not square, etc. How does this differ from imagining a table that I describe in a work of fiction? Suppose the two tables have all the same properties. We also assume that the properties form a logically consistent set. What is the difference between imagining a table I intend to build and imagining a table that I do not intend to build but intend merely to describe as part of the fictional furniture in a short story?
In the first case I imagine the table as real; in the second as fictional. Note that to imagine a table as real is not the same as imagining a real table, though that too occurs. Suppose I remember seeing Peter's nondescript writing table. To remember a table is not to imagine one; nonetheless I can imagine refurbishing Peter's table by stripping it, sanding it, and refinishing it. The imagined result of those operations is not a purely imagined object, any more than a piece of fiction I write in which Peter's table makes an appearance features a purely fictional table.
The two tables I am concerned with, however are both nonexistent. In both cases there is a merely intentional object before my mind. And in both cases the constitutive properties are the same. Moreover, the two are categorially the same: both are physical objects, and more specifically artifacts. Obviously, when I imagine a table, I am not imagining a nonphysical object or a natural physical object like a tree. So there is a clear sense in which what I am imagining is in both cases a physical object, albeit a nonexistent/not-yet-existent physical object.
So what distinguishes the two objects? Roman Ingarden maintains that they differ in "ontic character." In the first case, the ontic character is intended as real. In the second, intended as fictional. (The Literary Work of Art, p. 119).
Now I have already argued that purely fictional objects are impossible objects: they cannot be actualized, even if the constitutive properties form a logically consistent set. We can now say that the broadly logical impossibility of purely fictional objects is grounded in their ontic character of being intended as fictional. The table imagined as real, however, is possible due to its ontic character of being intended as real despite being otherwise indistinguishable from the table imagined as fictional.
Now here is the puzzle of actualization formulated as an aporetic triad
a. Every incomplete object is impossible.
b. The table imagined as real is an incomplete object.
c. The table imagined as real is possible, i.e. actualizable.
The limbs are collectively inconsistent, but each is very plausible. At any impasse again.
As an ornery aporetician, I want ultimately to say that an equally strong case can be made both for and against the thesis that ficta are impossibilia. But here I only make (part of) the case for thinking that ficta are impossibilia.
Preliminaries
Every human being is either right-handed or not right-handed. (But if one is not right-handed, it doesn't follow that one is left-handed. One could be ambidexterous or ambisinistrous.) What about the fictional character Hamlet? Is he right-handed or not right-handed? I say he is neither: he is indeterminate with respect to the property of righthandedness. That makes him an incomplete object, one that violates the law of Excluded Middle (LEM), or rather one to which LEM does not apply.
Hamlet (the character, not the play) is incomplete because he has all and only the properties ascribed to him by the author of the play, and the author left Hamlet's handedness unspecified. It is worth noting that Hamlet the play is complete and this holds for each written token of the play, the type of which they are tokens, and each enactment of the play. This is because the play and its enactments are actualia.
But don't we say that Hamlet the play is fictional? We do, but what we mean is not that the play is an object of fiction, but that the people and events depicted therein are fictional. The play is not fictional but entirely real. Of course, there could be a play that is a mere object of fiction: a play within a play. The same holds for novels. My copies of Moby Dick are each of them complete and actual, hence full-fledged citizens of the real, with all the rights and privileges pertaining thereunto; but Ishmael, Queequeg, and Ahab are not. They are objects of fiction; those books are not. And presumably the type of which they are tokens, though an abstract object, is also actual and complete. A person's reading or 'enactment' of the novel is typically a long, interrupted process; but it too is complete and actual and resident in the real order.
Back to the character Hamlet: he is an incomplete object, having all and only the properties ascribed to him in the play (together with, perhaps, entailments of these properties). London Ed balks at this:
I don't follow this at all. I don't agree with the second sentence "He has all and only ….". Of course Shakespeare said that there was a person called ‘Hamlet’ who had certain properties (e.g. he said that Hamlet was a prince of Denmark. It doesn’t follow that there is someone who has or had such a property. For example, legend says that there was a horse called ‘Pegasus’ that flew. It doesn’t follow that there are or were flying horses.
This objection shows misunderstanding. I did not say or imply that there exists in actuality, outside the mind, a man named 'Hamlet.' The point is rather that when I read the play there appears before my mind a merely intentional object, one that I know is fictional, and therefore, one that I know is merely intentional. If Ed denies this, then he denies what is phenomenologically evident. And, as a matter of method, we must begin with the phenomenology of the situation.
Suppose I write a two-sentence novel:
It was a dark and rainy night. Shakey Jake, life-long insomniac, deciding he needed a nightcap, grabbed his flashlight and his raincoat and headed for the Glass Crutch bar and grill, a local watering hole a half a mile from his house.
Now I couldn't have written that, and you can't understand it, without thinking about various intentional objects that do not exist. Am I saying that there exist objects that do not exist? No, that would be a contradiction. Nor am I committed to saying that there are objects that have mind-independent being but not existence. Furthermore, I am not committed to Meinong's doctrine of Aussersein.
All I am doing is holding fast to a phenomenological datum: when I create a fictional character as I just did when I created Shakey Jake the insomniac, I bring before my mind an intentional object. (The act-object schema strikes me as having pretty good phenomenological credentials, unlike the adverbial schema.) What can we say about this merely intentional object? First, it is no part of the acts through which I think it. My acts of thinking exist in reality, but Shakey Jake does not exist in reality. (This point goes back to Twardowski.) When I think about Hamlet or Don Quixote or Shakey Jake, I am not thinking about my own mind or any state of my mind. I am not thinking about anything real. But it doesn' t follow that I am not thinking of anything.
If Ed denies that there are merely intentional objects, then he is denying what is phenomenologically evident. I take my stand on the terra firma of phenomenological givenness. So for now, and to get on with it, I simply dismiss Ed's objection. To pursue it further would involve us a in a metaphilosophical discussion of the role of phenomenological appeals in philosophical inquiry.
Ficta are Impossibilia
Let us confine ourselves to purely fictional objects and leave out of consideration real individuals who are partially fictionalized in fables, legends, apocryphal stories, so-called historical novels that blend fact and fiction, and the like. One of my theses is that purely fictional objects cannot exist and thus are broadly logically impossible. They are necessarily nonexistent, where the modality in question is broadly logical. It does not follow, however, that pure ficta have no ontological status whatsoever. They have a mode of being that could be called existential heteronomy. On this point I agree with Roman Ingarden, a philosopher who deserves more attention in the Anglosphere than he receives here.
Earlier I gave an argument from incompleteness: the incomplete cannot exist and so are impossible. But now I take a different tack.
Purely fictional objects are most plausibly viewed as made up, or constructed, by novelists, playwrights, et al. It may be that they are constructed from elements that are not themselves constructed, elements such as properties or Castaneda's ontological guises. Or perhaps fictional objects are constructed ex nihilo. Either way, they have no being at all prior to their creation or construction. There was no Captain Ahab before Melville 'cooked him up.' But if Ahab were a merely possible individual, then one could not temporally index his coming to be; he would not come to be, but be before, during, and after Melvlle's writing down his description.
The issue could be framed as follows. Are novels, plays, etc. which feature logically consistent pure ficta, something like telescopes that allow us to peer from the realm of the actual into the realm of the merely possible, both realms being realms of the real? Or are novels, etc. more like mixing bowls or ovens in which ficta are 'cooked up'? I say the latter. If you want, you can say that Melville is describing something when he writes about Ahab, but what he is describing is something he has made up: a merely intentional object that cannot exist apart from the acts of mind trained upon it. He is not describing something that has ontological status apart from his mind and the minds of his readers. He is also not descrbing some real feature or part of himself as subject. So we could say that in describing Ahab he is describing an item that is objectively but not subjectvely mind-dependent.
Here is an Argument from Origin:
1. Pure ficta are made up or constructed via the mental acts and actions of novelists, playwrights, et al.
2. Ahab is a pure fictum.
Therefore
3. Ahab came into being via the mental activity of a novelist or playwright. (from 1,2)
4. No human being comes into being via the mental activity of novelists, et al., but via the uniting of human sperm and human egg.
5. Ahab is not a human being. (from 3, 4)
6. A merely possible human being is a human being, indeed a flesh-and-blood human being, though not an actual flesh-and-blood human being.
Therefore
7. Ahab is not a merely possible human being, but a fictional human being where 'fictional' unlike 'merely possible' functions as an alienans adjective.
This argument does not settle the matter, however, since it is not compelling. A Meinongian or quasi-Meinongian could, with no breach of logical propriety, run the argument in reverse, denying (7) and denying (1). One man's modus ponens, etc.
There is much that is right in this piece by the editors of NRO. But I am sure glad that Kennedy was in charge back in October, 1962 as opposed to Bill Clinton or, God forbid, the feckless Obama. The Irishman was a resolute commie-fighter who stood tall against Krushchev, the shoe-banging butcher of the Ukraine.
John F. Kennedy was assassinated 50 years ago today. Here is The Byrds' tribute to the slain leader. They took a traditional song and redid the lyrics. The young Bob Dylan here offers an outstanding interpretation of the old song. And Dave van Ronk's version is not to be missed.
He was a friend of mine, he was a friend of mine His killing had no purpose, no reason or rhyme Oh, he was a friend of mine
He was in Dallas town, he was in Dallas town From a sixth floor window a gunner shot him down Oh, he died in Dallas town
He never knew my name, he never knew my name Though I never met him I knew him just the same Oh, he was a friend of mine
Leader of a nation for such a precious time Oh, he was a friend of mine
I was in the eighth grade when Kennedy was gunned down. We were assembled in an auditorium for some reason when the principal came in and announced that the president had been shot. The date was November 22, 1963. I remember it like it was yesterday. I was seated behind my quondam inamorata, Christine W. My love for her was from afar, like that of Don Quixote for the fair Dulcinea, but at that moment I was in close physical proximity to her, studying the back of her blouse through which I could make out the strap of her training bra . . . .
It was a tale of two nonentities, Lee Harvey Oswald and Jack Ruby. Both were little men who wanted to be big men. Oswald, acting alone, shot Kennedy. Ruby, acting alone, shot Oswald. That is the long and the short of it. For details, I refer you to Bugliosi.
Suppose you present careful arguments against Obama's policies and ideas, foreign or domestic or both. Some black is sure to jump up and shout, "Racist! You hate him because he's black!" Oprah Winfrey is the latest example. There is no point in arguing with such an idiot, argument being fruitful only with those who inhabit the plane of reason; but you must respond. I suggest "If I'm a racist, then you are a tribalist."
If I oppose Obama's policies because he is black,then you support them because he is black. If I'm a racist, then you are a tribalist! If his being black is no reason to oppose his policies, then his being black is no reason to support them either. If racism is bad, then so is your knee-jerk tribalism.
One of the sad facts about blacks is that many if not most of them cannot seem to transcend their tribal identification. They identify, not as human beings or as rational animals or as Americans, but as blacks. That tribal identification so dominates their consciousness that even the calmest and most polite arguments against Obama's ideas cannot be comprehended except as personal attacks on their man who is, first and foremost, a black man, even though he is half-white. That tribal identification was also at play in the O. J. Simpson trial. The prosecution presented a mountain of evidence of his guilt and yet the black dominated jury acquitted him of double homicide.
My advice to blacks: if you want to be judged by "the content of your character and not the color of your skin," to adapt the words of Martin Luther King, Jr., then drop the tribal identification. if you want to be treated as individuals, then stop identifying as members of a racial group. Why is your race so important to you? Are you perhaps raaacists?
I wanted to say as well that I enjoyed your recent post on fictional vs. possible objects. You point out that being internally contradictory is not a necessary condition on being metaphysically impossible. This seems to me exactly right. Another way to make this point is to think about, for example, a necessarily existing unicorn. There is nothing internally contradictory about the idea that a unicorn might exist in every possible world. Yet such a being is surely impossible. Otherwise, if it were possible, then there would actually exist a necessarily existing unicorn. This follows by the modal reasoning we find in Plantinga's modal ontological argument and, in particular, the distinctive axiom of S5 modal logic. In order to avoid Gaunilo-style parodies of the modal ontological argument, we must deny that being internally contradictory is a necessary condition on being metaphysically impossible.
I accept John's example and his reasoning. Ain't agreement grand? We philosophers must enjoy it when it comes and while it lasts. And so we can add the necessarily existent unicorn and his colleagues to the list of metaphysical impossibilia whose impossibility does not derive from internal contradictoriness along with internally consistent fictional objects such as Hamlet. Are there any other categories of metaphysical impossibilia?
Many scholastics would add extramental universals and privations to the list of metaphysical impossibilia despite their lack of internal contradictoriness. Thus humanity cannot exist outside the mind. Nor can blindness.
It is important not to lose sight of the big picture:
Americans are beginning to understand that the essence of the Affordable Care Act is that millions of people are being conscripted to buy overpriced insurance they would never choose for themselves in order to afford Mr. Obama monies to spend on the poor and those who are medically uninsurable due to pre-existing conditions. Both Mr. Obama and Republicans are blowing smoke in claiming that the damage done to the individual market by the forced cancellation of "substandard" plans (i.e., those that don't meet the purposes of ObamaCare) can somehow be reversed at this point. It can't be.
The basic idea behind Mr. Obama’s scheme is that government can better handle the complexities of medical care than the market can. Government scientists, technocrats and regulators think they have the collective brainpower to fairly manage a complicated, interconnected health care system and do it for less than businessmen could.
The planners got everything they wanted. They got to write the law without a single Republican looking over their shoulders. They had three years to do it with an essentially unlimited budget. The might of the entire federal government was called in to build HealthCare.gov. With all that, the Obamacare rollout was an epic failure of big government that was worthy of the old Soviet Union.
Obamacare is objectionable both morally and economically. It violates the liberty of the individual and central planning doesn't work.
There is no one top-down Solution. Solutions must be piecemeal and market-based. For starters: tort reform and direct payment by individuals for minor procedures and preventative care (check-ups, blood work, colonoscopies, etc.) Costs will come down just as automotive maintenance costs would skyrocket if oil changes and such were paid by automotive care insurance. Imagine taking your car in for an oil change, paying a $10 copay with the insurance company being billed $200, for what now costs the individual $20.
The best proof of this to date is the bitter wrangling and the wastage of time, effort, and money over Obamacare. This fight will continue until Obamacare is repealed or gutted. In the long and nasty process, the political climate in this country is bound to become ever more toxic. Way to go, liberals, way to go!
Big government leads to big trouble as we fight endlessly, acrimoniously, and fruitlessly over all sorts of issues that we really ought not be fighting over. The final clause of the First Amendment of the U. S. Constitution enshrines the right "to petition the Government for a redress of grievances." So the more the government does things that grieve us, by intruding into our lives and limiting our liberties, the more we will petition, lobby, and generally raise hell with the government and with our political opponents.
If you try to tell me how much soda I can buy at a pop, or how capacious my ammo mags must be, or how I must speak to assuage the tender sensitivities of the Pee Cee, or if you try to stop me from home-schooling my kids, or force me to buy health insurance, then you are spoiling for a fight and you will get it. Think of how much time, energy, and money we waste battling our political enemies, working to undo what we take to be their damage, the damage of Obamacare being the example du jour.
So if you want less contention, work for smaller government. The smaller the government, the less to fight over.
A good read about one liberal's Obamacare cancellation. Excerpt:
Last week the frustration of people like Peter and me—Obamacare supporters who lost their current plans—was heard by the White House, which promptly panicked. On Thursday, President Obama announced a policy change that would allow insurance companies like Regence to keep customers like me on the old Wood plan for one more year. To that I say: Hah! Thanks for nothing.
The idea that an insurer like Regence can, or will, spin on a dime and revive our ol’ $587 Woody within the next six weeks is absurd. It skews the market and undermines the entire premise of the Affordable Care Act – which is that by balancing the halt (allowing pre-existing conditions) and the hale (forcing robust young adults to get in the pool), the exchanges will over time produce a system that offers quality health care at a price my family can afford.
Our liberal finally wakes up when Obama's incompetence affects him personally. But apparently he still doesn't care that Obama and the Dems lied brazenly, lied about their lies, continue to lie, bullshit, and prevaricate, and that when pushed to the wall, Obama tampered 'extra-legally' as pundits delicately put it with what his team referred to as "settled law." But deeper than all this is the crazy assumption that central planning by incompetent bureaucrats can be made to work when experience abundantly teaches that it doesn't.
"To be or not to be, that is the question." Or at least that is one question. Another is whether Hamlet, that very individual, might have been actual.
It is a mistake to conflate the fictional and the merely possible. Hamlet, for example, is a fictional individual, the central character and eponym of the Shakespearean play. Being fictional, he does not actually exist. But one might be tempted to suppose that while there is no man Hamlet in actuality, there could have been, that Hamlet is a possible individual. But far from being possible, Hamlet is impossible. Or so I shall argue.
First we need to agree on some definitions.
D1. x is impossible =df x cannot exist, i.e., x is necessarily nonexistent.
D2. x is incomplete =df there is a property P such that x is indeterminate with respect to P, i.e., it is not the case that x instantiates P and it is not the case that x does not instantiate P.
The Main Argument
1. Hamlet is an incomplete object. He has all and only the properties ascribed to him in the play that bears his name. It is neither the case that he eats his eggs with hot sauce nor that he doesn't.
2. Necessarily, for any x, if x is an incomplete object, then x does not exist.
Therefore
3. Necessarily, Hamlet does not exist. (from 1, 2)
Therefore
4. Hamlet is an impossible object. (from 3, D1)
The reasoning is correct and premise (1) is surely true. If you are inclined to reject (2), claiming that it does not hold for quantum phenomena, I will simply sidestep that whole can of worms by inserting 'macroscopic' or 'mesoscopic' or some other suitable qualifier between 'an' and 'incomplete.'
Note that Hamlet is impossible even if the properties he is ascribed in the play are members of a logically consistent set. One could say, with a whiff of paradox, that Hamlet is impossible despite the fact that his properties are compossible. His impossibility follows from his incompleteness. What this shows is that not every impossible object harbors internal contradiction. So there there are at least two types of impossibilia, those whose impossibility derives from inconsistency and those whose impossibility derives from incompleteness. To be admitted to the elite corps of the actual, one must satisfy both LNC and LEM. That the impossible needn't be internally contradictory is an insight I owe to Daniel Novotny who kindly sent me a free copy of his excellent book on the scholasticism of the Baroque era entitled, Ens Rationis from Suarez to Caramuel (Fordham 2013). I am indebted in particular to his discussion on p. 108.
Objection: "Hamlet is possible; it is just that his actualization would have to consist in his completion. Surely God could actualize Shakespeare's Hamlet (the prince, not the play) by appropriately supplementing his property set."
Reply: Suppose God were to try to actualize Hamlet, the very same individual encountered in the play. To do so, God would have to supplement Hamlet's property set, bringing it to completeness. For only that which is wholly determinate can exist in (macroscopic) actuality. But there is more than one way to effect this supplementation. For example, if the fictional Hamlet is indeterminate with respect to whether or not he takes his eggs with hot sauce, an actual Hamlet cannot be. He either eats egggs or he doesn't, and he either takes them with hot sauce or he doesn't.
Let AH1 be hot-sauce Hamlet and AH2 non-hot-sauce Hamlet. Both are complete. Let FH be the incomplete fictional individual in the play.
We may now argue as follows.
If God brings about the actuality of both AH1 and AH2, then, since they are numerically distinct, neither of them can be identical to FH. But God must actualize one or the other if FH is to become actual. If God actualizes one but not the other, then it is possible that he actualize the other but not the the one. But then the actualization of either is contingent. Thus if God actualizes FH as AH1, then, since he could just as well have actualized AH2 as FH, the identity of FH with AH1 is contingent. But identity cannot be contingent: if x = y, then necessarily x = y. Therefore, God can actualize neither and fictional Hamlet is impossibly actual, i.e., impossible.
Here is a third consideration. It seems to be part of the very sense of the phrase 'fictional individual' that such individuals be, well, fictional, that is, irreal or unreal. Now the real includes not only the actual and the necessary, but that which is really possible albeit unactual. Thus real possibilities cannot be made up by minds and so cannot be fictional. Therefore Hamlet, as a fictional being, is not a possible being.
According to Novotny, "Suarez and other Baroque scholastic authors seem to assume without question that consistent fictions, such as Hamlet, might become real beings. This implies that Hamlet is a possible being and that therefore he is a real being. [. . .] For several reasons I do not think that a consistent fiction as such is a real possible being." (108)
I agree, and the arguments above are my way of fleshing out Novotny's misgivings.
Addendum (21 November)
The original main argument above is invalid as a commenter points out. Here is
The Main Argument Repaired
0. Necessarily, for every x, if x is a fictum of a finite mind, then x is incomplete.
0*. Necessarily, Hamlet is a fictum of a finite mind, Shakespeare's. (That very fictional individual could not have been the fictum of any other mind.)
Therefore
1. Necessarily, Hamlet is an incomplete object. He has all and only the properties ascribed to him in the play that bears his name. It is neither the case that he eats his eggs with hot sauce nor that he doesn't. (from 0, 0*)
2. Necessarily, for any x, if x is an incomplete object, then x does not exist.
Therefore
3. Necessarily, Hamlet does not exist. (from 1, 2)
So, while the president has been telling us that, under the vaunted grandfathering provision, all Americans who like their health-insurance plans will be able to keep them, “period,” his administration has been representing in federal court that most health plans would lose their “grandfather status” by the end of this year. Not just the “5 percent” of individual-market consumers, but close to all consumers — including well over 100 million American workers who get coverage through their jobs — have been expected by the president swiftly to “transition to the requirements under the [Obamacare] regulations.” That is, their health-insurance plans would be eliminated. They would be forced into Obamacare-compliant plans, with all the prohibitive price hikes and coercive mandates that “transition” portends.
Obamacare is a massive fraudulent scheme. A criminal investigation should be opened. Obviously, the Obama Justice Department will not do that, but the House of Representatives should commence hearings into the offenses that have been committed in the president’s deception of the American people. (emphasis added)
Here’s fodder for a follow-up MP post, if you care to pursue it. I do not endorse the following objection, but I wonder how you’d reply.
In “David Lewis on Religion” you say: "To be a good philosopher of X one ought to know both philosophy and X from the inside, by practice." But there is some prima facie tension between this claim and your insistence that arguments don’t have testicles (or skin color).
Objector: “You, Maverick Philosopher, can never know *from the inside* the relevant experiences of women (or racial minorities), so your arguments are not to be taken seriously.” Why not let Lewis’s arguments stand or fall on their merits? And if his arguments *are* defective in some way Lewis cannot see due to his irreligiousity, then mustn't you allow the same charge against your political/cultural arguments mutatis mutandis?
"Arguments don't have testicles" is my preferred response to women (and men) who claim that men have no right to an opinion about the morality of abortion due to their inability to become pregnant. An argument for or against abortion is good or bad regardless of the sex of the person giving the argument. And similarly for race. One doesn't have to be black to have a well-founded opinion about the causes and effects of black-on-black crime. The point holds in general in all objective subject areas. For purposes of logical appraisal, arguments can and must be detached from their producers.
It is also clear that one can be a competent gynecologist without being a woman, and a competent specialist in male urology without being a man. Only a fool would discount the advice of a female urologist on the treatment of erectile dysfunction on the ground that the good doctor is incapable of having an erection. "You don't know what it's like, doc, you don't have a penis!" In objective matters like these, the 'what it's like' is not relevant. One needn't know what it's like to have morning sickness to be able to prescribe an effective palliative. I know what it is like to be a man 'from the inside,' but my literal (spatial) insides can be better known by certain women.
But in other subject areas, the 'what it is like' is relevant indeed. Consider Mary, a character in a rather well known piece of philosophy-of-mind boilerplate.
Mary is a brilliant neuroscientist who has spent her entire life in a visually impoverished state. Pent up in a room from birth and sheltered from colors, her visual experience is restricted to black and white and shades of gray. You are to imagine that she has come to know everything there is to know about the brain and its visual system. Her access to the outer world is via black-and-white TV. The neuroscience texts over which she so assiduously pores have beeen expurgated by the dreaded Color Censor.
Mary knows every third-person, objective fact about the physics of colors and the neurophysiology of color perception. But there is plenty she dos not know: what it is like to see a red rose or a blue sky. That sort of thing. In Chisholm-speak, she does not know what it is like to be appeared-to redly.
So let's say Mary knows everything there is to know about colors from the outside, but nothing about them from the inside. She has no first-person, experiential, knowledge of colors. Do you think she would be in a position to write about the phenomenology of color? Obviously not.
Analogously, a philosopher of religion who has never had a religious experience, and indeed lacks a religious sensibility or disposition such as would incline one to have such experiences, is in no position to write about religion. And this, even if he knows every objective fact about every religion. Thus our imagined philosopher of religion knows the history of religions and their sociology, and can rattle off every doctrine of every religion. He knows all about the Christological heresies and the filioque clause and the anatta doctrine, etc. He is like Mary who knows all about colors from the outside but nothing about them from the inside. He knows the externals and trappings, but not the living essence.
He literally does not know, from the inside, what he is talking about just as Mary literally does not know, from the inside, what she is talking about.
Now no analogy is perfect (else it wouldn't be an analogy) but the foregoing analogy supports the following response to the above objection. The objection is that one cannot consistently maintain both that
(i) some claims and arguments are such that their logical appraisal (their evaluation in terms of truth, validity, soundness, relevance etc.) can and must be conducted independently of inquiries into the natures and capacities and environments of the persons who advance the claims and arguments
and
(ii) some claims and arguments are such that their logical appraisal can legitimately involve inquiry into the nature, capacities, and environments of the persons who advance the claims and arguments.
My response is that one can, with no breach of logical propriety, maintain both (i) and (ii). It depends on whether the subject matter is wholly objective or also necessarily involves elements of subjectivity. If we are talking about the morality of abortion, then the arguments are good or bad independently of who is making them. They are neither male nor female. But if we are talking about the phenomenology of colors, then a person such as Mary is disqualified by her lack of experience should she advance the claim that there are no phenomenal colors or color qualia or that the whole reality of color perception is exhausted by the neurophysiology of such perception.
Can a man know what it is like to be a woman, or more specifically, what it is like to be a woman in philosophy? (There is an entire website devoted to this variation on Nagel's question.) Some women complain bitterly about their experiences as women in the male-dominated field of philosophy. (And some of these women have legitimate grievances.) Can a man know what it is like to be mocked or ridiculed or made to feel stupid? Of course. Who has never been mocked or ridiculed or made to feel stupid? The point here is that men and women have the same types of experiences. I can't feel your pain, only Bill Cinton with his special powers can do that. But I feel pain and so I know what it is like for you to feel pain, whether you are male of female, human or feline. Since I know what it is like to be ridiculed, I know what it is like for a woman to be ridiculed. But an irreligious person does not know what it is like to have a religious experience for the simple reasons that he does not have them.
I know fear and so does my cat. But he has never experienced Heideggerian Angst. So if he were, per impossibile, to say something about it, having read, per impossibile, the relevant sections of Sein und Zeit, we would be justified in ignoring his opinions. Go take a car nap! The irreligious person is like my cat: he lacks a certain range of experiences.
I am not saying that if one has religious experiences, then one will necessarily reject the view that religion is buncombe. For it is possible to have a certain range of experiences and yet decide that they are non-veridical. What I am saying is that religious experiences are a sine qua non for anyone who expects to be taken with full seriousness when he talks or writes about religion. So given that David Lewis did not have a religious bone in his body, as his wife stated, that gives me an excellent reason not to take with full seriousness his asseverations on religion. He literally does not know what he is talking about.
Ludwig Wittgenstein, by contrast, was clearly a religious man. So I take his writings on religion with utmost seriousness, which is not to say that I endorse his philosophy of religion.
This from Nancy Pelosi's website (emphasis added):
The Affordable Care Act, signed into law by President Obama in 2010, ensures that all Americans have access to quality, affordable health care and significantly reduces long-term health care costs. This historic legislation, in the league of Social Security and Medicare, will lead to healthier lives, while providing the American people with more liberty to pursue their hopes and dreams.
This is another good example of an Orwellian use of language. Americans love liberty and so Pelosi, in an attempt to deceive, works 'liberty' into her statement, advancing a claim of Orwellian absurdity, namely, that limitations on the liberty of individuals and private entities are in reality enhancements of liberty.
War is peace. Slavery is freedom. Less liberty is more liberty. The Orwellian template: X, which is not Y, is Y.
Obviously, Obamacare entails a reduction in liberty via its various mandates and penalties for not obeying the mandates. There is first of all the individual mandate that requires that citizens buy health insurance or else pay a fine or tax or fee. Obviously, if the government forces you to buy something when you were not forced to buy that thing before, that is a lessening of one's liberty, not an increase of it. There are also employer mandates and HHS mandates. Overview here. I should think that if a man is forced to buy a policy that necessarily includes maternity care, then that is a reduction in cjoice not an enhancement thereof. But maybe I'm wrong and Big Bro is right. Maybe less choice = more choice.
What would Pelosi have to say to be intellectually honest? She would have to admit that on a progressive scheme such as the one she favors, while liberty is a value, liberty is trumped by the value of (material) equality or 'fairness.' Conservatives see it the other way around. This is part of the "conflict of visions," to borrow a very useful phrase from Thomas Sowell.
But instead of being honest, Pelosi and many of the rest of her ilk try to have it both ways at once: more government control of one's life and more liberty.
This is what could be called a STFU moment, Nancy, you either speak the truth, or STFU. Nancy has a right to her vision of an ideal society. But she has no right to her stealth tactics and her Orwellianisms.
I would say the same to Obama. Come clean, my man! Man up! Make the case for your progressive vision and all that it entails: robust, 'energetic' government; increased wealth redistribution via government-controlled health care; a retreat from American exceptionalism; a "fundamental transformation of America." Make the case as best you can and try to respond to the libertarian/conservative objections as best you can. Let's have a 'conversation.' Aren't you guys big on 'conversations'?
But if you try t0 win by cheating and lying and prevaricating and bullshitting, then: STFU. Man up or STFU.
Obama and Pelosi and the Dems want us to trust them. "Just trust us; when the ACA is implemented you will then know what is it and and you will experience its manifold benefits." If Obama would be our collective mama, then we have to be able to trust him or her.
Unfortunately, Obama has lied brazenly about the content of the ACA some 30 times, and then lied about his lying. His supporters have lied and prevaricated and obfuscated as well.
So why should we trust anything Obama or any Dem says from this moment on?
Liberals are characteristically enthusiastic about doing good with other people's money. But when young, healthy, middle-class liberals discover that the Obamacare redistribution scheme counts them as belonging to the 'other people' who will foot the bill, they become decidedly less enthusiastic.
I met a very interesting man last Sunday, Boniface Thayil. He showed up at our little chess club wanting to learn the game. So I gave him his first lesson. He knew nothing, not even the names of the pieces, let alone how they move. Now he knows a little something. I hope he shows up again tomorrow.
We got to talking. His dark complexion prompted me to ask whether he is Pakistani or perhaps from India. He said he was from the state of Kerala in India, came to Seattle, Washington as a young man, earned a degree in chemical engineering, and had been employed in Chicago. His intelligence and wide interests prompted me to learn more about him via Google. The search pulled up one Kim Thayil. The name rang a bell. A while back I had read about Soundgarden and some Seattle 'metal' bands. So I clicked on this link.
"Kiss Alive was the second album I ever bought, and the first record that made me realize things could be a lot louder and more violent than the Beatles. It emphasized volume and guitar over harmony, melody and lyrics; all the stuff I never listened to anyway," he told Mudhoney's Mark Arm.
Assembling various facts, it seemed possible that Kim was the son of Boniface, so I e-mailed the latter and found out that the former was.
Here is a Soundgarden tune as performed by Johnny Cash, Rusty Cage. Good song. I like it. Here is the rather more 'metallic' Soundgarden version.
Here is some of Kim Thayil's guitar work. The quotation above explains why I can't relate to much of this stuff. Some examples of the guitar work that speak to me follow. It is a generational thing, no doubt. It seems to come from the heart and speak to the soul whereas the metal stuff is more akin to industrial noise. "Music to pound out fenders by." (Ed Abbey) Sorry, boys. De gustibus, et cetera. There is no arguing sensibility. Argument comes too late.
Joe Satriani, Sleep Walk Satriani can tear up the fingerboard, but note how he restrains himself to deliver a beautiful melody and say something musically.
Steely Dan, Reelin' in the Years Amazing guitar work starting at 1:58 and at 3: 38.
Ventures, Memphis. Mighty fine guitar-slingin' by both lead players.
Addendum (11/17)
Martin e-mails:
Hi Bill. Longtime blog follower, here.
Concerning your comment on your Kim Thayil post: "It seems to come from the heart and speak to the soul whereas the metal stuff is more akin to industrial noise."
As you say, there is no arguing sensibility. Nonetheless, just for the hell of it, check out the link below, a sub-forum of reddit called "change by view", and especially the first comment at the top of the chain:
Of course, that concerns death metal, which makes Soundgarden sound very melodic.
Thanks, Martin. I forced myself to listen to the song to which the poster refers. This is music, not to pound out fenders by, but to watch the West decline by. Suppose you like this at 17, will you like it at 57? Suppose you first hear it with a girl who you go on to marry. Will you say to her 20 years later, "Hey baby, they're playing our song"? Well, nobody could accuse it of being sentimental.
To recover from the above, I listened one more time to the marvellous Embryonic Journey by Jefferson Airplane. I loved it in '67 and I love it now. I don't believe this is just generational chauvinism on my part.
I don't usually recommend anything from Slate, but Fred Kaplan's Killing Conspiracy is a must-read. The money quote:
. . . If horrible events can be traced to a cabal of evildoers who control the world from behind a vast curtain, that’s, in one sense, less scary than the idea that some horrible things happen at random or as a result of a lone nebbish, a nobody. The existence of a secret cabal means that there’s some sort of order in the world; a catastrophic fluke suggests there’s a vast crevice of chaos, the essence of dread.
As the old adage has it, “Big doors sometimes swing on little hinges.” John F. Kennedy’s murder was a big door—had he lived, the subsequent decades might have looked very different—and Lee Harvey Oswald was a preposterously small hinge. The dissonance is wildly disorienting. It makes for a neater fit, a more intelligible universe, to believe that a consequential figure like John Kennedy was taken down by an equally consequential entity, like the CIA, the Mafia, the Soviets, Castro … take your pick.
We are beings who seek Deep Meaning in all the wrong places.
The split between lawmakers and the White House reflects the dilemma the president finds himself in as he seeks to follow through on last week’s acknowledgment about his incorrect promise on health care coverage.
A statement is either true or false, correct or incorrect. "No Republican voted for Obamacare' is a statement and it happens to be true or correct. But it is incoherent to speak of a promise as either correct or incorrect. 'I promise to loan you $100 on Friday' is a promise, not a statement. A promise is either fulfilled or not fulfilled. If, come Friday, I loan you $100, then I fulfill my promise. If I don't, then either (i) the promise I made is insincere, or (ii) something happened outside my control that prevented me from loaning you the money, or (iii) I reneged on my promise.
To speak of Obama's now famous lie -- If you like your health plan you can keep your health plan, period -- as an incorrect promise shows total confusion or perhaps willful obfuscation. First, there is no such thing as an incorrect promise. Second, a lie is not a promise. Obama lied about the already existent content of the ACA. He did not promise what that content would be.
And then Bubba comes along to add a further layer of incoherence and absurdity to this sorry spectacle.
Under pressure from Bill Clinton, Obama yesterday tried to correct his 'incorrect promise' by changing the law, something he is not constitutionally authorized to do. The passing , repealing, and amending of laws is a legislative function, not an executive function.
On his radio show this morning, cigar aficionado Dennis Prager said, and this is very close to a verbatim quotation:
The purpose of a cigarette is nicotine. The purpose of a cigar is taste. All they have in common is tobacco and fire.
Not quite. Agreed, the main purpose of cigarette smoking is nicotine delivery, although some cigarette smokers, not many, care about taste. And it is also true that while cigarette smoke is inhaled, cigar smoke is not. Cigar smoke is tasted. But the ingestion of nicotine via the blood vessels in the mouth (take a look under your tongue, you will need a mirror for this) is also part of what the cigar aficionado is after. He is out for a certain characteristic 'lift' or 'high.' It is mild until you get to the end of the stick. Luftmenschen in particular like this lift. It powers their dialectic. And fiddling with the accessories of smoking gives them time to formulate responses to objections. Every man is a philosopher when he is blowing smoke.
But above the cigar stands, or lies, the pipe.
If the cigarette is a one-night stand, the cigar is a brief affair. The typical cigarette smoker is out for a quick fix, not for love. The cigar aficionado is out for love, but without long-term commitment. The pipe, however, is a long and satisfying marriage. But rare is the pipester who is not a polygamist. The practice of the pipe, then, is a long and satisfying marriage to many partners among whom no jealousy reigns.
This completes the first proof of the superiority of the pipe.
I dedicate this, and all subsequent posts on lying and the several senses of 'is,' to Bill Clinton and Barack Obama who, by their brazen mendacity, have inadvertently fueled the fires of logico-linguistic inquiry.
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Tony Hanson e-mails and I comment in blue:
I hope things are well for you. Sorry for the haste of this message but time is a commodity of which lowly adjuncts have little.
Your posts on lying are interesting. You hint at this in one of your posts but I have not seen anyone raise questions about whether a falsehood is a necessary condition for lying. Further evidence perhaps of the family resemblance approach:
Shady, Bonnie and Clyde rob a bank. They stash the loot under the wood pile at the hideout. A few days later Clyde notices the money is gone. Shady and Bonnie, in a conspiracy to take the loot for themselves, bury it under the oak tree at the cemetery. Clyde drags Shady out of the house and demands to know where the money is. In an attempt to deceive Clyde, he says the money is buried under the bridge by the river. Clyde drags Shady down to the bridge and to Shady's chagrin there is the loot. (Bonnie had moved the loot from the oak tree to the bridge in attempt to have it for herself).
So Shady's statement that the loot was at the bridge was true, though he did attempt to deceive. Did Shady lie or not?
Is a false statement necessary [for a lie] or just the belief that a statement is false?
BV: Counterexamples to the dictionary definition similar to Hanson's were proposed by Monokroussos and Lupu in the discussion threads and are familiar from the literature. Here is the dictionary definition (that I was defending):
D1. To lie =df to make a false statement with the intention to deceive.
Given the Shady example, I think we have three options:
A. Take it as a clear case of lying and reject or revise the dictionary definition. B. Hold fast to (D1) and maintain that Shady did not lie. C. Maintain that there is no one univocal sense of 'lie' in English but rather a family of related senses at the center of which is the paradigmatic sense, a sense captured by (D1).
Here is a revision:
D2. To lie =df to make an untruthful statement with the intention to deceive.
An untruthful statement is one that is believed to be false by the maker of the statement and hence can be either true or false.
Here is a problem with (D2). Jones is under audit by the IRS. The high number of personal exemptions he claimed flagged him for audit. Jones, who has no children, say to an IRS agent, intending to deceive him, "All of my children live at home." Since Jones has no children, he does not believe it to be false or true that they live at home. And yet Jones is presumably lying to the IRS agent. (Example via Chisholm ia SEP article.)
But back to our metaphilosophical quandary. I suspect that each of (A)-(C) leads to trouble, but (C) leads to less trouble. Philosophers have proposed a number of definitions, see the SEP article on lying and deception, but no consensus has been reached. This does not prove that no consensus can be reached or that the quest for a definition must end in failure. But it is pretty good evidence for this conclusion.
As for the (B) approach, I could just insist that (D1) captures the essence of lying. But lacking as I do special access to Plato's topos ouranos, that insistence would smack of arbitrarity.
So what exactly is wrong with the (C) approach? Peter Lupu in conversation suggested that this leads to the abandoning of the ancient Platonic project of seeking the natures of justice, knowledge, virtue, and so on. But maybe not. If some concepts are family-resemblance concepts, it doesn't follow that all are. It could be that there are incorrect and correct (literal) uses of 'lies' and cognates, but that the correct uses are not unified by one univocal sense, but form a resemblance class. Thus there would be no strict One to their Many. But it would not follow that there are no strict ones-in-manys or ones-over-manys.
Consider this list:
lie lie lie.
How many words? One or three? Can't be both. Make a distinction. There are three tokens of the same type. The type is a one-in-many. We could also say that if each token is used in the (D1)-sense, there is exactly one sense common to all three uses.
I found your most recent post on a right to health care very interesting. It seems to me that much of the discussion of rights, not only about putative rights to health care, but about rights in general, depends on a certain controversial principle, namely:
If x has a right to y, and if z is a means of achieving y, then x has a right to z.
BV: We should distinguish between weaker and stronger versions of the principle:
P1. If x has a right to y, and if z is a means of achieving y, then x has a right to seek to acquire z.
P2. If x has a right to y, and if z is a means of achieving y, then x has a right to be given z.
Consider the following straightforward argument in support of gun rights:
(1) I have a right to life and security of my person. (2) If I have a right to life and security of my person, then I have a right to the means whereby these rights may be secured and protected. (3) Guns may be used to secure and protect my right to life and security of my person. (4) Therefore, I have a right to own a gun.
This seems to me very plausible, but of course (2) relies on the controversial principle identified above.
BV: I would say that the argument relies on (P1) but not (P2).
In similar fashion, any argument for the claim that each of us has a right to health care will probably have to rely on a similar premise. I can imagine an argument going something like this:
(1) I have a right to life and security of my person. (2) If I have a right to life and security of my person, then I have a right to the means whereby these rights may be secured and protected. (3) Affordable health care may be used to secure and protect my right to life and security of my person. (4) Therefore, I have a right to affordable health care.
As before, premise (2) relies on the controversial principle identified earlier. And, as you point out in your post, similar arguments could be run to establish that each of us has a right to food, shelter, and clothing.
BV: But again, all one needs is the weaker principle, (P1). If I have a right to life, then I have a right to sustain my life. A necessary means to that end is food. So I have a right to food. But all that means is that I have a right to seek to acquire food (by hunting, fishing, foraging, growing, buying, bartering, begging, etc.) It does not mean that I have a right to be supplied with food by others. I have no positive right to be fed. What I have is a negative right not to be impeded in my quest for food and other vital necessities. (Adults are under discussion, not young children.)
Here, then, is my question: what ought we to think about the controversial principle?
BV: The first thing we should think about it is that it is ambiguous as between (P1) and (P2). I would say that (P1) is very plausible if not obviously true. But it needs qualification. Do I have a right to biological or chemical weapons? I have the right to repel a home invasion using a shotgun, but presumably not the right to repel such an invasion using biological agents that are likely to spread throughout the neighborhood. So consider
P1*. If x has a (negative) right to y, and z is a minimally efficacious means of achieving y,then x has a (negative) right to acquire z.
By 'minimally efficacious' I mean a means to an end that is an efficient and effective means to the end in view but not so powerful or extensive as to bring with it negative consequences for others. My right to buy food would then not be a right to buy all the food in the supermarket. My right to repel home invaders does not translate into a right to lay waste to the entire neighborhood in so doing. No doubt further refinements are needed, but (P1) strikes me as on the right track.
Although I am inclined to think that the principle is false, what is of interest to me is a more troublesome question. Any false general claim may have true instances. Are there true instances of this false general principle? How do we go about deciding which instances of the principle are true and which not? Can the principle be used to establish gun rights but not rights to health care or food/shelter/clothing?
BV: I should think that guns and butter are on a par. More fully, guns, food, shelter, clothing, certain medicines, bandages, certain medical appliances, e. g. sphygmomanometers for the hypertense, etc. are all on a par. Given that I have the natural negative right to life, then surely I have the right to pursue and acquire those things that I need to defend and sustain my life. What I don't have is the positive right to be given them by others or by the government, especially given the fact that the government produces no wealth but gets its wealth by coercive taking. (Not that I am opposed to governmental coercion, within limits. There simply cannot be a government that is not coercive. I am very pleased that the government has forced Bernie Madoff into prison, thereby doing to him what it would be a crime for me to do to him.)
So I don't think my gun argument suffers from probative overkill, 'proving too much.' The pattern of argument extends to food, shelter, and clothing, etc. But contemporary liberals are in the same boat: their pattern of argument extends to food, shelter, clothing, etc. But their extension does amount to probative overkill and a reductio ad absurdum of their original argument. If there is a positive right to health care services and health insurance (these are of course not the same), then a fortiori, there is a positive right to food, shelter, and clothing. But this is absurd, ergo, etc.
Food, shelter, and clothing are more important than health care in that one can get along for substantial periods of time without health care services but one cannot survive for long without food, shelter, and clothing. Given this plain fact, why don’t the proponents of ‘free’ universal health care demand ‘free’ food, shelter, and clothing? In other words, if a citizen, just in virtue of being a citizen, has a right to health care, why doesn’t the same citizen have the right to what is more fundamental, namely, food, shelter, and clothing?
I mean this as a reductio ad absurdum. I fear that liberals, being liberals, may just bite the bullet and embrace rights to food, shelter, and clothing.
Why isn't health care a commodity in the way that automotive care is? If I want my car to run well, I must service it periodically. I can either do this myself or hire someone to do it for me. But surely I have no right to the free services of an auto mechanic. Of course, once I contract with a mechanic to do a specified job for a specified sum of money, then I have a right to his services and to his services being performed correctly. But that right is contingent upon our contract. Call it a contractually acquired right. But I have no right to free automotive services just in virtue of the fact that I own a car. So why is it any different with my body? Do I have a right to a colonoscopy just in virtue of my possession of a gastrointestinal tract?
Of course, I have a right to life, and I cannot live without health care most of which, by the way, I provide for myself via proper diet, exercise, and all the rest. But the negative right to life does not entail the positive right to be given the services of doctors and dentists.
If you insist that people do have a right to medical and dental services, then you owe us an explanation of why they do not also have a right to food, shelter, and clothing, as well as to a vast array of other things that they 'need' such as cars and cell phones.
I've heard the fatuous Hillary say that health care is not a privilege but a right. First of all, who ever said it was a privilege? Second, it needs arguing that it is a right. And good luck with that. Besides, it is the fallacy of false alternative to say or imply that health care is either a right or a privilege. It might be some third thing.
My view is that health care is a commodity. You either provide it for yourself or you hire someone to provide it for you. In the latter case, you must pay for it. It is no different in principle from housing. Just as there is a 'housing market' there is a 'health care market.' If there were a right to health care, then there would also be a right to housing. But there is no right to housing. Therefore, there is no right to health care. Do Obama and his ilk have a reasoned response to this argument?
Talk of this and that as a right is mostly empty blather. One ought to reflect on what it could mean to call something a right.
Rights and duties are correlative. My right to X generates in others the duty to either provide me with X or not interfere with my possession or exercise of X. Thus my right to life induces in others the duty or obligation to refrain from injuring or killing me. So if I have a right to health care, then others have the duty to provide me with it. Think about that. But who are those others? The government? The government has no money of its own; its revenue comes from taxing the productive members of society. But why are these productive citizens under any obligation to provide 'free' services to anyone? Taxation is by its very nature coercive. How does one justify morally the taking by force of money from one person to give it to another? Why should productive citizens who take care of themselves pay for those who abuse their bodies? There is also the practical question of whether the productive will allow themselves to be fleeced. Not to mention the fact that the government infantilizes the population by doing for them what they ought to be doing for themselves and removing their incentives to taking care of themselves.
Government should do no harm. Primum non nocere. But a government that weakens and unmans its citizens, turning them into dependents on the state, does harm. This is entirely consistent with people caring about one another and taking care of one another within the free associations of civil society that lie between the individual and Leviathan. It is also consistent with a modicum f regulation, oversight, and mandating from the side of the state to prevent the truly needy from ending up on the skids.
If we meet in the desert and you are out of water and food, I will give you some of mine, ceteris paribus. But I am under no moral obligation to help you; you have no right to my supplies. My helping you will be supererogatory and reflective of my being an especially nice guy. Similarly, you have no right to insurance or medicine or a pap smear or a sigmoidoscopy, and I have no obligation to contribute via taxation so that you may get these things.
Nor do you have any right to contraceptives or abortifacients to be supplied at taxpayer expense. Besides, forcing people to pay for what violates their moral sensibility is a moral outrage. Abortion is a very great evil even if liberals are too morally obtuse and willfully stupid to understand it.
Positive rights, rights to be given this or that, need arguing, but I hear precious little by way of argument from liberals.
A government big enough and powerful enough to provide one with ‘free’ health care will be in an excellent position to demand ‘appropriate’ behavior from its citizens – and to enforce its demand. Suppose you enjoy risky sports such as motorcycling, hang gliding, mountain climbing and the like. Or perhaps you just like to drink or smoke or eat red meat. A government that pays for the treatment of your injuries and ailments can easily decide, on economic grounds alone, to forbid such activites under the bogus justification, ‘for your own good.’
But even if the government does not outlaw motorcycling, say, they can put a severe dent in your liberty to enjoy such a sport, say, by demanding that a 30% sales tax be slapped on all motorcycle purchases, or by outlawing bikes whose engines exceed a certain displacement, say 180 cc. In the same way that governments levy arbitrary taxes on tobacco products, they can do the same for anything they deem risky or unhealthy.
The situation is analogous to living with one’s parents. It is entirely appropriate for parents to say to a child: ‘As long as you live under our roof, eat at our table, and we pay the bills, then you must abide by our rules. When you are on your own, you may do as you please.’ The difference, of course, is that it is relatively easy to move out on one’s own, but difficult to forsake one’s homeland.
The nub of the issue is liberty. Do you value it or not? And how much? Which trumps which: liberty or equality of outcome?
Then there are the practical considerations. Nationalized health care in the UK and Canada doesn't seem to work very well. See here. Apparently some Brits pull their own teeth with such advanced dental appliances as pliers and vodka. That was the way dentistry was done in the days of Doc Holliday who was, as you know, a dentist besides being a damned good shot.
If you want to make sure every healthy person paying low rates in the individual market right now can keep their [sic] plan, then you have two choices. One is to abolish Obamacare altogether, which means making it impossible for people with preexisting conditions to get affordable insurance. Clinton doesn’t want to do that — he continues to endorse the law. The second is to come up with some other source of funding to compensate insurance companies for their losses. Clinton doesn’t say where that money would come from.
When Clinton delivered a well-received speech at the Democratic National Convention last summer, President Obama joked he should appoint the former president as “Secretary of Explaining Stuff.” Of course, if he actually had a job like that, he would be fired within days.
Jim Slagle points me this morning to a post of his that links to four papers by David Lewis on religion from Andrew Bailey's Lewis page. (Occasional MavPhil commenter Bailey deserves high praise for making available online papers by van Inwagen and Lewis.) Slagle goes on to make some criticisms of Lewis with which I agree.
Since Lewis "didn't have a religious bone in his body" as I recall his wife Stephanie reporting in an A. P. A. obituary, a serious question arises: if you don't know a subject-matter from the inside, and indeed by sympathetic practice of that subject-matter, how seriously should we take what you have to say about that subject-matter?
For example, how seriously ought one take a philosopher of law who has never practiced law or who doesn't even have a law degree? How seriously ought one take a philosopher of physics who has never done physics? Such a philosopher does not know the subject from the inside by practice. Equally, how seriously should one take a physicist such as the benighted Lawrence Krauss who does not know philosophy from the inside, by practice, yet pontificates about philosophical questions? In the case of Krauss, though not in the case of all such physicists, we should not take him seriously at all.
To be a good philosopher of X one ought to know both philosophy and X from the inside, by practice.
Why should it be any different for the philosophy of religion? I incline to the view that one should not take too seriously what a philosopher says about religion unless he knows religion from the inside by the sincere and sympathetic practice of a particular religion. David Lewis, without a doubt, was one of the best philosophical practitioners of his generation. And yet he understood nothing of religion from the inside.
I am not saying that we should dismiss what Lewis says about religion. I am saying that we should not take it too seriously. He literally doesn't know (by sympathetic practice, from the inside) what he is talking about.
It cuts the other way too. What many if not most religionists says about philosophy is stupid and pointless because it 'betrays' no understanding of philosophy from the inside by sympathetic practice.
Yesterday I argued that atheism is not a religion. Well, theism is not a religion either, but for different reasons. Atheism is not a religion because it amounts to the rejection of the central commitment of anything that could legitimately be called a religion. (So if atheism were a religion, it would amount to a rejection of itself.) This core commitment is the affirmation of the existence of a transcendent reality, whether of a personal or impersonal nature, contact or community or identification with which is the summum bonum and the ultimate purpose of human existence.
Theism is not a religion for at least two reasons.
First, there is no religion in general, only particular religions, and theism is not a particular religion. Theism is merely a proposition common to many different (monotheistic and polytheistic) religions. It is the proposition that God or gods exist. As such, it is simply the negation of the characteristic atheist proposition. No extant religion consists of the theist's bare metaphysical asseveration, and no possible religion could consist of it alone.
Second, both doctrine and practice are essential to a religion, but a theist needn't engage in any specifically theistic practice to be a theist. He need only uphold the theoretical proposition that there is such a being or such beings as God or gods.
If theism is not a religion, then, as Tully Borland suggested to me, it is difficult to see how a reference to God in the Pledge of Allegiance could be construed as violating the Establishment Clause of the First Amendment to the U. S. Constitution. The clause reads as follows: "Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof . . . ."
"One nation under God" from the Pledge is at most an affirmation of theism. But theism is not a religion. So the occurrence of the word 'God' in the pledge does nothing to establsh any religion as the state religion. Understandably, atheists don't like that word in the Pledge, but the Establishment Clause gives them no ground for removing it.
Similarly with "In God We Trust" on our currency. This is more than a bare affirmation (or presupposition) of the existence of God; it brings in the further notion of trusting God, a notion that is admittedly religious. But which religion is established by "In God We Trust"? Judaism? Christianity? Islam? All three Abrahamic religions have monotheism in common. Obviously, if Congress were to establish a state religion it would have to be some one particular religion. But no particular religion has proprietary rights in "In God We Trust." So why should we think that the phrase violates the Establishment Clause.
And the same goes for the Ten Commandments as I maintained years ago when I first took to the 'sphere. The Decalogue is common to the three Abrahamic religions. So if a judge posts them in his chambers, which religion is he establishing by so doing?
Once again we see what extremists contemporary iberals are. The plain sense of the Establishment Clause is that there shall be no state religion. One has to torture the Clause to extract from it justification to remove all references to God and every last vestige of religion from the public sphere, a sphere that ever expands under liberal fascism while the private sphere contracts.
Some pundits and journalists keep referring to Obama's signature "If you like it, you can keep it, period" as a promise.* This is an incoherent use of 'promise.'
Suppose a loan originator hands you a mortgage contract and says, "I promise you that this loan is not callable." (A callable loan is one in which the lender reserves the right to demand payment in full, plus interest, at any time.) If you are not stupid you will point out that this is not a question of the making and keeping of promises, but only one of the actual and explicit content of the contract. You will demand to see where in the contract it is stated that the loan is not callable. If the loan officer cannot locate the passage, or you find words to the effect that the loan is callable, then you know that the loan officer is lying about the content of the mortgage contract. At this point you might say to the officer, ironically, "I see you broke your promise, or perhaps it was a false promise from the start."
The point ought to be obvious and equally obvious its relevance to Obama's signature lie. One cannot promise what a document will contain given that there is an easily ascertainable fact as to what it does contain. Obamacare was a bill before it became law, but either way it has a definite content. It is not for Obama to promise what is in the ACA but to report truthfully as to what the definite content is.
Coherent: "I promise to sign the bill." "I promise to have a bill written that will provide that anyone who wants to keep his plan or doctor can do so."
Incoherent: "I promise that I was once an adjunct professor of law." "I promise that the ACA provides that anyone who wants to keep his plan can do so, period." "I promise that if you read the bill, you will see that it does so provide."
If you insist that our POMO POTUS made a promise with his signature avowal, will you say that he broke his promise or that he made an insincere promise from the start? Either way you don't understand the concept of promising.
Another mistake that some journalists make is to describe the Obama lie as a half truth. Not so. A statement that is false cannot be half-true. Compare
1. All of you who like your plan can keep your plan, period.
2. Most of you who like your plan can keep your plan, period.
(1) is false and (2) is true. (1) is not rendered half-true or partially true due to the presence of the universal quantifier or the fact that (1) entails (2).
'All politcians lie' entails 'Some politicians lie.' The latter is true; the former false, not half-true. Note finally that 'wholly true' is pleonastic.
_________________
* For example, "President Barack Obama’s “if you like it, you can keep it” promise has House Democrats facing a dilemma as they look ahead to a vote on Republican legislation to preserve existing health plans."
Adjuncts are the peons of the academic world, the lowest men and women on the collegiate totem pole, the bottom-most rungs of the ladder of higher education -- pick your metaphor. But a consequence of ObamaCare, intended or not, is that many are now worse off than they were before. There is some irony in this considering that Obama himself was once an adjunct professor of law.
Because they are paid so little, adjuncts must teach many courses to make a living. But the ACA requires employers with more than 50 full-time employees to provide health insurance if they work an average of 30 hours per week including work both within and outside the classroom. Finding the financial burden too heavy to bear, many colleges have simply restricted the number of courses adjuncts can teach. The result is that the lowly adjunct must shuttle between different institutions, wasting time and gasoline, to keep his number of courses the same. The top-down initiative that was intended to help the poorly paid part-timers ends up making them worse off. Central planning in action.
For more, see this Chronicle of Higher Education piece.
Atheism is not a religion. But the following is not a good reason for thinking so:
Atheism (and here I mean the so-called “weak atheism” that does not claim proof that god does not exist), is just the lack of god-belief – nothing more and nothing less. And as someone once said, if atheism is a religion, not collecting stamps is a hobby. That really ought to end the discussion right there. Clearly, a mere lack of belief in something cannot be a religion.
Right, a mere lack of belief in something cannot be a religion. But atheism is not a mere lack of belief in something. If atheism is just the lack of god-belief, then tables and chairs are atheists. For they lack god-belief. Am I being uncharitable? Suppose someone defines atheism more carefully as lack of god-belief in beings capable of having beliefs. That is still unacceptable. Consider a child who lacks both god-belief and god-disbelief. If lacking god-belief makes him an atheist, then lacking god-disbelief makes him a theist. So he is both, which is absurd.
Obviously, atheism is is not a mere lack of belief, but a definite belief, namely, the belief that the world is godless. Atheism is a claim about the way things are: there is no such thing as the God of Judaism, or the God of Christianity, or the God of Islam, or the gods of the Greek pantheon, or . . . etc. The atheist has a definite belief about the ontological inventory: it does not include God or gods or any reasonable facsimile thereof such as the Plotinian One, etc. Note also that if you deny that any god exists, then you are denying that the universe is created by God: you are saying something quite positive about the ontological status of the universe, namely, that it does not depend for its existence on a being transcendent of it. And if it does not so depend, then that implies that it exists on its own as a brute fact or that it necessarily exists or that it causes itself to exist. Without getting into all the details here, the point is that if you deny that God exists, this is not just a denial of the existence of a certain being, but implies a positive claim about the ontological status of the universe. What's more, if there is no creator God, then the apparent order of the universe, its apparent designedness, is merely apparent. This is a positive thesis about the nature of the physical universe.
Atheism, then, is not a mere lack of god-belief. For it implies definite positive beliefs about reality as a whole and about the nature and mode of existence of the physical universe.
Why then is atheism not a religion? No good purpose is served by using 'religion' to refer to any set of action-guiding beliefs held with fervor and commitment. For if one talks in that hopelessly loose way, then extreme environmentalism and Communism are religions.
Although it is not easy to craft a really satisfactory definition of religion, I would say that all and only religions affirm the existence of a transcendent reality,
whether of a personal or impersonal nature, contact or community or
identification with which is the summum bonum and the ultimate purpose
of human existence. For the Abrahamic faiths, Yahweh, God, Allah is the
transcendent reality. For Taoism, the Tao. For Hinduism, Brahman. For
(Mahayana) Buddhism, the transcendent state of nirvana. Since atheists precisely deny any such transcendent reality contact with which is our highest good and ultimate purpose, atheism is not a religion.
"But aren't militant atheists very much like certain zealous religionists? Doesn't militant atheism function in their lives much as religion functions in the life of the religiously zealous?" No doubt, but if one thing is like another, that is not to say that the one thing is the
other or is a species of the other.
And another thing. If atheism is not a religion, then, while there can be atheist associations, there cannot be, in any serious sense of the word, an atheist church.
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