Maverick Philosopher

Patrick Toner on Hylomorphic Animalism

Herewith, some  comments on and questions about Patrick Toner's fascinating paper, "Hylemorphic Animalism" (Philos Stud, 2011, 155: 65-81). 

Patrick Toner takes an animalist line on human persons.  Animalism is the doctrine that each of us is identical to an animal organism.  A bit more precisely, "Animalism involves two claims: (1) we are human persons and (2) human persons are identical with animals." (67)

Animalism

Let's consider the second claim.  Toner endorses Eric Olson's 'thinking animal' argument for (2).  Based on Toner's summary, I take the argument to go as follows.  I am now sitting in a chair thinking a thought T.  There is also now an animal sitting in this very chair and occupying the same space.  Is the animal also thinking T?  There are four possibilities.

 

a. I am identical to the animal occupying my chair, and the thinker of my thoughts is identical to this animal.

b. I am not identical to the animal occupying my chair, but I share the space with an animal that thinks all my thoughts.

c. I am not identical to the animal occupying my chair, but I share the space with a nonthinking animal.

d. There is no animal in my chair; hence I am not not identical to it.

Of the four possibilities, Toner considers (a) to be actual.  "It's the least ugly of the choices.  Indeed, it's positively common-sensical, compared with the other rather nutty options." (70)

I agree that (b) and (d) can be excluded right away.   But I don't see that (c) is 'nutty' and I don't see that (a) is "positively common-sensical." Common sense has nothing to say about abstruse metaphysical topics such as this one. 

The Corpse Objection to Animalism

On (a), the thinker of my thoughts is numerically identical to this living human organsm with which I am intimately associated. But If I am (identically) my body, then me and my body ought to have the same persistence conditions.  But they don't:  when I die I will cease to exist, but (most likely) a corpse will remain.  Now if a = b, then there is no time t at which a exists but b does not exist, and vice versa. So if there are times when I do not exist but my body does exist, then I cannot be identical to my body.  On (a), I will not survive death, but my body will: it will survive as a corpse.  Therefore I am not identical to my body.  

Toner's Response to the Corpse Objection

The Corpse Objection, in a nutshell, is that I cannot be identical to my animal body because it will survive me.  My body exists now before my death and it will exist then after my death.  It is the same body dead or alive.  Toner's response is a flat denial of survival.  My body will not survive me.  Death is a substantial, as opposed to an accidental, change.  When I die the animal body that I am will cease to exist and one or more new bodies will begin to exist. So it is not as if one bodily substance undergoes an accidental change, going from being alive to being dead; one bodily substance ceases to exist and one or more others begin to exist.  The change is not alterational but existential.  This implies that the body itself did not exist while the animal was alive.  As Toner puts it:

Neither the body itself, nor any of its atomic parts, existed while the animal was alive.  This just follows from the account of substance I've given, according to which substances have no substances as parts,  -- there is only one substance here in my boundaries, and it's an animal.  When the animal dies, whatever is left over is not the same thing that was there before. (71)

Two Questions

1. One question is  whether, assuming that I am just this living animal body, my dying is an accidental change or a substantial change. I will suggest that it is more plausible to think of it as an accidental change.

If my dying  is an accidental change, then something that exists now in one form will exist post mortem in a different form.  This something could be called the proximate matter of my body.  This matter is organized in a certain way and its organs and various subsystems are functioning in such a way that the entire bodily system has the property of being alive.  (For example, the lungs are oxygenating the blood, the heart is pumping the blood to the brain, the pathways to the brain are unobstructed, etc.)  But then suppose I drown or have a massive heart attack or a massive stroke.  The body then ceases to have the property of being alive. On this way of looking at things, one and the same body can exist in two states, alive and dead.  There is diachronic continuity between the living and dead bodies, and that continuity is grounded in the proximate matter of the body.

If, on the other hand, my dying is a substantial  change, and I am just this living body, then at death I cease to exist entirely, and what is left over, my corpse, is something entirely new, 'an addition to being' so to speak.  I cease to exist, and a corpse comes to exist.  But then the only diachronic continuity as between the live body and the corpse is prime (not proximate) matter.

But what makes the corpse that comes to exist my corpse?  Suppose I am just a living animal and that I die at t1.  A moment later, at t2, two corpses come into existence. Which one do you bury under the 'BV' tombstone?  Which is the right one, and what makes it the right one?  Or suppose Peter and I die at the same instant, in the same place, and that dying is a substantial change.  Peter and I cease to exist and two corpses C1 and C2  come into existence. Which is my corpse and which is Peter's?  Practically, there is no problem: we look different and our looking different and having different dimensions, etc. is due to our different proximate matter, matter that is the same under two different and successive forms.

What this suggests is that dying is an accidental change, not a substantial change.  It is an accidental change in the proximate matter of a human body. But if so, then the Corpse Objection holds and animalism is untenable.

There is also the very serious problem that substantial change requires prime matter, and prime matter is a very questionable posit.  But I won't pursue this topic at present.

2. My second main question concerns how animalism is compatible with such phenomena as the unity of consciousness and intentionality.  On animalism I am just a living human animal.  The thinker of my thoughts is this hairy critter occupying my blogging chair.  Is it the whole of me that is the res cogitans?  Or only a proper part of me?  Presumably the latter.  If an animal thinks, then presumably it thinks in virtue of its brain thinking.

The animalist thus seems committed to the claim that the res cogitans, that which thinks my thoughts, is a hunk of living intracranial meat.  But it is not so easy to understand how meat could mean.  What a marvellous metabasis eis allo genos whereby meat gives rise to meaning, understanding, intentionality! It is so marvellous that it is inconceivable.  My thinkings are of or about this or that, and in some cases they are of or about items that do not exist.  I can think about Venus the planet and Venus the goddess and I can think about Vulcan even though there is no such planet.  How can a meat state possess that object-directedness we call intentionality?  Brains states are physical states, and our understanding of physical states is from physics; but the conceptuality of physics offers us no way of understanding the intentionality of thought.

And then there is the unity of consciousness.  Can animalism account for it?  At Plato's Theaetetus 184c, Socrates puts the following question to Theaetetus: ". . . which is more correct — to say that we see or hear with the eyes and with the ears, or through the eyes and through the ears?" Theatetus obligingly responds with through rather than with. Socrates approves of this response:

Yes, my boy, for no one can suppose that in each of us, as in a sort of Trojan horse, there are perched a number of unconnected senses which do not all meet in some one nature, the mind, or whatever we please to call it, of which they are the instruments, and with which through them we perceive the objects of sense. (Emphasis added, tr. Benjamin Jowett)

The issue here is the unity of consciousness in the synthesis of a manifold of sensory data. Long before Kant, and long before Leibniz,  Plato was well aware of the problem of the unity of consciousness. (It is not for nothing that A. N. Whitehead described Western philosophy as a series of footnotes to Plato.)

Sitting before a fire, I see the flames, feel the heat, smell the smoke, and hear the crackling of the logs. The sensory data are unified in one consciousness of a selfsame object. This unification does not take place in the eyes or in the ears or in the nostrils or in any other sense organ, and to say that it takes place in the brain is not a good answer. For the brain is a partite physical thing extended in space. If the unity of consciousness is identified with a portion of the brain, then the unity is destroyed. For no matter how small the portion of the brain, it has proper parts external to each other. Every portion of the brain, no matter how small, is a complex entity. But consciousness in the synthesis of a manifold is a simple unity. Hence the unity of consciousness cannot be understood along materialist lines.

Conclusion

I tentatively conclude that option (c) above -- I am not identical to the animal occupying my chair, but I share the space with a nonthinking animal -- is, if not preferable to Toner's preferred option, at least as good as it, and not at all "nutty.'  The Corpse Objection to Animalism seems like a good one, and Toner's response to it is not compelling, involving as it does the idea that dying is a substantial change, a response that brings with it all the apories surrounding substance and prime matter.  Finally, it is not clear to me how animalism can accommodate intentionality and the unity of consciousness.

But perhaps Professor Toner can help me understand this better.

Related articles

Hylo- or Hylemorphic?

The Word 'Racism' and Some of its Definitions

'Racism' and 'racist' are words used by liberals as all-purpose semantic bludgeons.  Proof of this is that the terms are never defined, and so can be used in wider or narrower senses depending on the polemical and ideological purposes at hand.  In common parlance 'racism' and 'racist'  are pejoratives, indeed, terms of abuse.  This is why it is foolish for conservatives such as John Derbyshire to describe themselves as racists while attempting to attach some non-pejorative connotation to the term.  It can't be done.  It would be a bit like describing oneself as as an asshole, 'but in the very best sense of the term.'  'Yeah, I'm an asshole  and proud of it; we need more assholes; it's a good thing to be.'  The word has no good senses, at least when applied to an entire human as opposed to an orifice thereof.  For words like 'asshole,' 'child molester,' and 'racist' semantic rehabilitation is simply not in the cards.  A conservative must never call himself a racist.  (And I don't see how calling himself a racialist is any better.)  What he must do is attack ridiculous definitions of the term, defend reasonable ones, and show how he is not a racist when the term is reasonably defined.

Let's run through some candidate definientia of 'racism':

1. The view that there are genetic or cultural differences between racial groups and that these differences have behavioral consequences.

Since this is indeed the case, (1) cannot be used to define 'racism.'  The term, as I said, is pejorative: it is morally bad to be a racist.  But it is not morally bad to be a truth-teller.  The underlying principle here is that it can't racism if it is true.  Is that not obvious?

Suppose I state that blacks are 11-13% of the U.S. population.  That cannot be a racist statement for the simple reason that it is true.  Nor can someone who makes such a statement be called a racist for making it.  A statement whose subject matter is racial is not a racist statement.  Or I inform you that blacks are more likely than whites to contract sickle-cell anemia.  That too is true.  But in this second example there is reference to an unpleasant truth.  Even more unpleasant are those truths about the differential rates of crime as between blacks and whites.  But pleasant or not, truth is truth, and there are no racist truths. (I apologize for hammering away at these platitudes, but in a Pee Cee world in which people have lost their minds, repetition of the obvious is necessary.)

2. The feeling of affinity for those of one's own racial and ethnic background.

It is entirely natural to feel more comfortable around people of one's own kind than around strangers.  And of course there is nothing morally objectionable in this. No racism here.

3. The view that it is morally justifiable  to put the interests of one's own race or ethnic group above those of another in situations of conflict or limited resources.  This is to be understood as the analog of the view that it it morally justifiable to put the interests of oneself and one's own family, friends, and neighbors above the interests of strangers in a situation of conflict or limited resources.

There is nothing morally objectionable in his, and nothing that could be legitimately called racism.

4. The view that the genetic and cultural differences between races or ethnic groups justify genocide or slavery or the denial of political rights.

Now we arrive at an appropriate definiens of 'racism.'  This is one among several  legitimate ways of defining 'racism.'  Racism thus defined is morally offensive in the extreme.  I condemn it and you should to.  I condemn all who hold this.

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Why Do Jews Do So Well and Arabs So Poorly?

What is Racism?

Adam Carolla on Black Reparations

Blunt, crude, but effective.  Nuanced refutation of leftard lunacy has its place, but also this kind of  pushback. 

Guns: Ten Important Observations

Getting through to liberals on a topic like this is well-nigh impossible, so willfully benighted are they.  So why do I write on these topics?  First to clarify my own ideas for my own enjoyment and edification.  Second, to provide argumentative ammo for my conservative and libertarian friends.  Third, because I am a happy culture warrior and joyful scribbler. 

1. Is anybody against gun control?  Not that I am aware of.  Everybody wants there to be some laws regulating the manufacture, sale, importation, transportation, use, etc., of guns.  So why do liberals routinely characterize conservatives as against gun control?  Because they are mendacious.  It is for  the same reason that they label conservatives as anti-government.  Conservatives stand for limited government, whence it follows that that are for government.  This is a simple inference that even a liberal shallow-pate should be able to process.  So why do  liberals call conservatives anti-government?  Because they are mendacious: they are not  interested in civil debate, but in winning at all costs by any means.  With respect to both government and gun control, the question is not whether but how much.

2. Terminology matters.  'Magazine' is the correct term for what is popularly called a clip.  Don't refer to a round as a bullet.  The bullet is the projectile.  Avoid emotive phraseology if you are interested in serious discussion.  'Assault weapon' has no clear meaning and is emotive to boot.  Do you mean semi-automatic long gun?  Then say that.  Don't confuse 'semi-automatic' with 'fully automatic.'  Bone up on the terminology if you want to be taken seriously.

3.  Gun lobbies benefit gun manufacturers.  No doubt.  But they also defend the Second Amendment rights of citizens, all citizens.    Be fair.  Don't adduce the first fact while ignoring the second. And don't call the NRA a special interest group.  A group that defends free speech may benefit the pornography industry,  but that is not to say that the right to free speech is not a right for all.   Every citizen has an actual or potential interest in self-defense and the means thereto.   It's a general interest.   A liberal who has no interest in self-defense and the means thereto is simply a liberal who has yet to be mugged or raped or had her home invaded.  Such a liberal's interest is yet potential.

4. Question for liberals: what is your plan in case of a home invasion?  Call 9-1-1?  What is your plan in case of a fire?  Call the Fire Department?  Not a bad thought.  But before they arrive it would help to have a home fire extinguisher at the ready.  Ergo, etc.

5.  The president and Congress are fiddling while Rome burns.  Compared to the fiscal crisis, the gun issue is a non-issue.  That really ought to be obvious.  There was no talk of it early in the Obama administration.  Why not?  It looks to be a red herring, a way of avoiding a truly pressing issue while at the same time advancing the Left's totalitarian agenda.  One can strut and posture and show how sensitive and caring one is while avoiding painful decisions that are bound to be unpopular and for some pols suicidal.  I am talking about entitlement reform. Here's a part of a solution that would get me tarred and feathered. After a worker has taken from the Social Security system all the money he paid in plus, say, 8% interest, the payments stop.  That would do something to mitigate the Ponzi-like features of the current unsustainable system.

6. Believe it or not, Pravda (sic!) has warned Americans about draconian gun control.  'Pravda,' if I am not badly mistaken, is Russian for truth.  That took real chutzpah, the commies calling their propaganda organ, Truth.   Well, the former commies speak truth, for once, here:  "These days, there are few things to admire about the socialist, bankrupt and culturally degenerating USA, but at least so far, one thing remains: the right to bear arms and use deadly force to defend one's self and possessions."  Read the whole thing.  Some days I think the US is turning into the SU what with Obama and all his czars.

7. Nannystaters like Dianne Feinstein ought to think carefully before they make foolish proposals. The unintended consequences may come back to bite them.  Gun and ammo sales are through the roof.  Although more guns in the hands of responsible, trained, individuals leads to less crime, more guns in civilian hands, without qualification, cannot be a good thing.

8. It doesn't follow, however, that if, per impossibile (as the philosophers say) all guns were thrown into the sea we would be better off. The gun is an equalizer, a peace-preserver, a violence-thwarter.  Samuel Colt is supposed to have said, "Have no fear of any man no matter what his size, in time of need just call on me and I will equalize."  Granny with her .45  is a pretty good match for an unarmed Tookie Williams.

9.  SCOTUS saw the light and pronounced it an individual right.  You persist in thinking the right to keep and bear arms is a collective right?  I wonder if you think that the right to life is also collective. If my right to life is an individual right, how can my right to defend my life and the logically consequent right to the means to such defense not also be an individual right? 

10.  My parting shot at the gun-grabbers. 

Addendum.  Tony Bevin usefully contributes the following:

You write (#9):

 

"SCOTUS saw the light and pronounced it an individual right. "

 

An oft overlooked fact is the definition of "milita" in the United States legal code.   It is easily available to anyone who searches for US Code militia (reproduced below, emphasis mine):

 

(a) The militia of the United States consists of all able-bodied males at least 17 years of age and, except as provided in section 313 of title 32, under 45 years of age who are, or who have made a declaration of intention to become, citizens of the United States and of female citizens of the United States who are members of the National Guard.

(b) The classes of the militia are— 

        

(1) the organized militia, which consists of the National Guard and the Naval Militia; and 

        

(2) the unorganized militia, which consists of the members of the militia who are not members of the National Guard or the Naval Militia

The link:

 

http://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/10/311

 

So it's not just a SCOTUS decision, but the individual right to bear arms is specifically defined in the U.S. Code of Law.

 

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Why Would Anyone Need a Semi-Automatic Rifle?

Topical Insanity: Guns

The Problem: Gun Culture or Liberal Culture?

Getting through to liberals on a topic like this is well-nigh impossible, so willfully benighted are they.  So why do I write on these topics?  First to clarify my own ideas for my own enjoyment and edification.  Second, to provide argumentative ammo for my conservative and libertarian friends.  Third, because I am a happy culture warrior and joyful scribbler. 

1. Is anybody against gun control?  Not that I am aware of.  Everybody wants there to be some laws regulating the manufacture, sale, importation, transportation, use, etc., of guns.  So why do liberals routinely characterize conservatives as against gun control?  Because they are mendacious.  It is for  the same reason that they label conservatives as anti-government.  Conservatives stand for limited government, whence it follows that that are for government.  This is a simple inference that even a liberal shallow-pate should be able to process.  So why do  liberals call conservatives anti-government?  Because they are mendacious: they are not  interested in civil debate, but in winning at all costs by any means.  With respect to both government and gun control, the question is not whether but how much.

2. Terminology matters.  'Magazine' is the correct term for what is popularly called a clip.  Don't refer to a round as a bullet.  The bullet is the projectile.  Avoid emotive phraseology if you are interested in serious discussion.  'Assault weapon' has no clear meaning and is emotive to boot.  Do you mean semi-automatic long gun?  Then say that.  Don't confuse 'semi-automatic' with 'fully automatic.'  Bone up on the terminology if you want to be taken seriously.

3.  Gun lobbies benefit gun manufacturers.  No doubt.  But they also defend the Second Amendment rights of citizens, all citizens.    Be fair.  Don't adduce the first fact while ignoring the second. And don't call the NRA a special interest group.  A group that defends free speech may benefit the pornography industry,  but that is not to say that the right to free speech is not a right for all.   Every citizen has an actual or potential interest in self-defense and the means thereto.   It's a general interest.   A liberal who has no interest in self-defense and the means thereto is simply a liberal who has yet to be mugged or raped or had her home invaded.  Such a liberal's interest is yet potential.

4. Question for liberals: what is your plan in case of a home invasion?  Call 9-1-1?  What is your plan in case of a fire?  Call the Fire Department?  Not a bad thought.  But before they arrive it would help to have a home fire extinguisher at the ready.  Ergo, etc.

5.  The president and Congress are fiddling while Rome burns.  Compared to the fiscal crisis, the gun issue is a non-issue.  That really ought to be obvious.  There was no talk of it early in the Obama administration.  Why not?  It looks to be a red herring, a way of avoiding a truly pressing issue while at the same time advancing the Left's totalitarian agenda.  One can strut and posture and show how sensitive and caring one is while avoiding painful decisions that are bound to be unpopular and for some pols suicidal.  I am talking about entitlement reform. Here's a part of a solution that would get me tarred and feathered. After a worker has taken from the Social Security system all the money he paid in plus, say, 8% interest, the payments stop.  That would do something to mitigate the Ponzi-like features of the current unsustainable system.

6. Believe it or not, Pravda (sic!) has warned Americans about draconian gun control.  'Pravda,' if I am not badly mistaken, is Russian for truth.  That took real chutzpah, the commies calling their propaganda organ, Truth.   Well, the former commies speak truth, for once, here:  "These days, there are few things to admire about the socialist, bankrupt and culturally degenerating USA, but at least so far, one thing remains: the right to bear arms and use deadly force to defend one's self and possessions."  Read the whole thing.  Some days I think the US is turning into the SU what with Obama and all his czars.

7. Nannystaters like Dianne Feinstein ought to think carefully before they make foolish proposals. The unintended consequences may come back to bite them.  Gun and ammo sales are through the roof.  Although more guns in the hands of responsible, trained, individuals leads to less crime, more guns in civilian hands, without qualification, cannot be a good thing.

8. It doesn't follow, however, that if, per impossibile (as the philosophers say) all guns were thrown into the sea we would be better off. The gun is an equalizer, a peace-preserver, a violence-thwarter.  Samuel Colt is supposed to have said, "Have no fear of any man no matter what his size, in time of need just call on me and I will equalize."  Granny with her .45  is a pretty good match for an unarmed Tookie Williams.

9.  SCOTUS saw the light and pronounced it an individual right.  You persist in thinking the right to keep and bear arms is a collective right?  I wonder if you think that the right to life is also collective. If my right to life is an individual right, how can my right to defend my life and the logically consequent right to the means to such defense not also be an individual right? 

10.  My parting shot at the gun-grabbers. 

Addendum.  Tony Bevin usefully contributes the following:

You write (#9):

 

"SCOTUS saw the light and pronounced it an individual right. "

 

An oft overlooked fact is the definition of "milita" in the United States legal code.   It is easily available to anyone who searches for US Code militia (reproduced below, emphasis mine):

 

(a) The militia of the United States consists of all able-bodied males at least 17 years of age and, except as provided in section 313 of title 32, under 45 years of age who are, or who have made a declaration of intention to become, citizens of the United States and of female citizens of the United States who are members of the National Guard.

(b) The classes of the militia are— 

        

(1) the organized militia, which consists of the National Guard and the Naval Militia; and 

        

(2) the unorganized militia, which consists of the members of the militia who are not members of the National Guard or the Naval Militia

The link:

 

http://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/10/311

 

So it's not just a SCOTUS decision, but the individual right to bear arms is specifically defined in the U.S. Code of Law.

 

'The Punishment Must Fit the Crime'

In my various defenses of capital punishment (see Crime and Punishment category) I often invoke the principle that the punishment must fit the crime.  To my surprise, there are people who confuse this  principle, label it PFC, with some barbaric version of the lex talionis, the law of the talion, which could be summed up as 'An eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth.'  The existence of this confusion only goes to show that one can rarely be too clear, especially in a dumbed-down society in which large numbers of people cannot think in moral categories.  Recently I received the following from a reader:

If your argument is that the punishment must fit the crime, what about cases of extreme cruelty (Ted Bundy, e.g.)? Should the state have tortured him? Of course not, that would be inhumane. What makes this different from the death penalty?

This question shows a confusion of PFC with the 'eye for an eye' principle.  Everything I have written on the  topic of capital punishment assumes the correctness of Amendment VIII to the magnificent  U. S. Constitution: "Excessive bail shall not be required, nor excessive fines imposed, nor cruel and unusual punishments imposed." (emphasis added).

The exact extension of 'cruel and unusual punishments' is open to some reasonable debate.  But I should hope that we would all agree that drawing and quartering, burning at the stake, crucifixion, the gouging out of eyes, and disembowelment are cruel and unusual.  And here in the West we would add to the list the stoning of adulterers, the cutting off the hands of thieves, the flogging of women for receiving a kiss on the cheek from a stranger, and genital mutilation. 

So PFC does not require the state-sanctioned gouging out of the eye of the eye-gouger, or the raping of the rapist, or the torturing of Ted Bundy, or the poisoning by anti-freeze of the woman who disposes of her husband via anti-freeze cocktails.  ("Try this, sweetie, it's a new margarita recipe I found on the Internet!")

PFC is a  principle of proportionality.  The idea is that justice demands that the gravity of the punishment match or be  proportional to the gravity of the crime.  Obviously, a punishment can 'fit' a crime in this sense without the punishment being an act of the same type as that of the crime.  Suppose a man rapes a woman, is caught, tried, convicted, and sentenced to a night in jail and a $50 fine.  That would be a travesty of justice because of its violation of PFC.  The punishment does not fit the crime: it is far too lenient.  But sentencing the rapist to death by lethal injection would also violate PFC: the punishment is too stringent.

Now consider the case of the man Clayton Lockett -- a liberal would refer to him as a 'gentleman' -- who brutally raped and murdered a girl, a murder that involved burying her alive.  His execution was 'botched' because ". . . lethal injection has becoming increasingly difficult after European pharmaceutical companies stopped exporting drug compounds used for the death penalty in line with the EU outlawing of executions . . . ." Death is surely the fitting punishment for such a heinous deed. If you deny that, then you are violating PFC.

But if death is the appropriate punishment in a case like this, it does not follow that the miscreant ought to be brutally raped, tortured, and then buried alive.  That would be 'cruel and unusual.'  Death by firing squad or electric chair would not be cruel and unusual.

Now either you see that or you don't.  If you don't, then I pronounce you morally obtuse.  You cannot think in moral categories.  You do not understand what justice requires.

Related issue. Suppose you believe that we either are or have immortal souls.  Would you still have good reason to consider murder a grave moral breach?  See Souls and Murder.

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Capital Punishment and the Difference between Conservatives and Leftists

Capital Punishment: From One Extreme to Another

What can you be flogged for in Iran?

The Problem: Gun Culture or Liberal Culture?

What Ever Happened to Mario Savio? From Free Speech to No Speech

Some of us are old enough to remember Mario Savio and the 1964 Free Speech Movement.  But then the young radicals of those days, many of whom had a legitimate point or two against the Establishment, began the "long march through the institutions" and are now the Establishment, still fancying that they are "speaking truth to power" even as they control the levers of power.  Unfortunately, power has corrupted them. Former radicals have hardened into dogmatic apparatchiks of political correctness and unbending authoritarians.   What began as a free speech movement has transmogrified into a no speech movement, as Ron Radosh shows:

 

 

At the very start of the early New Left — circa the 1964-65 academic year — students in Berkeley, California, started what was called the Free Speech Movement (FSM). Back in those days, university administrators did not allow early supporters of the civil rights movement to try to gather support on campus or solicit donations to various civil rights organizations. The police were called in to arrest the offenders, mass arrests were made, and giant rallies surrounding the Sproul Hall steps had nationwide repercussions, including a backlash to the protests from California residents who backed Ronald Reagan’s campaign for governor of California a few years later. Reagan emphasized his opposition to the actions of the student radicals.

It also led to a speech by a young student named Mario Savio, whose following words sound today like a clarion call by a libertarian:

But we’re a bunch of raw materials that don’t mean to be — have any process upon us. Don’t mean to be made into any product! Don’t mean — Don’t mean to end up being bought by some clients of the University, be they the government, be they industry, be they organized labor, be they anyone! We’re human beings! … There’s a time when the operation of the machine becomes so odious — makes you so sick at heart — that you can’t take part. You can’t even passively take part. And you’ve got to put your bodies upon the gears and upon the wheels, upon the levers, upon all the apparatus, and you’ve got to make it stop. And you’ve got to indicate to the people who run it, to the people who own it, that unless you’re free, the machine will be prevented from working at all.

How times have changed. The very New Left students of that era — so many of whom now run the universities against which they once protested — have moved from support of free speech to what might be termed the “No Speech Movement.” Or, perhaps more accurately, speech for which only those whom they approve should be allowed. Nowhere has this been clearer than in the various incidents surrounding invited graduation speakers at some of the most well-known private liberal arts colleges as well as one state university.

Read it all.

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Here

The Problem: Gun Culture or Liberal Culture?

This is a repost, slightly redacted, from 2012 to help stem the tsunami of folderol sure to wash over us from the orifices of the mindless gun-grabbing Left in the wake of the Isla Vista rampage.

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

Without wanting to deny that there is a 'gun culture' in the USA, especially in the so-called red states, I would insist that the real problem is our liberal culture.  Here are four characteristics of liberal culture that contribute to violence of all kinds, including gun violence.

1. Liberals tend to have a casual attitude toward crime. 

This is well-documented by Theodore Dalrymple.  Here is a list of his articles. No Contrition, No Penalty is a short read.  See also my Crime and Punishment category.

It is interesting to note that Connecticut, the state in which the Newtown massacre occurred, has recently repealed the death penalty, and this after the unspeakably brutal Hayes-Komisarjevsky home invasion in the same state.

One of the strongest voices against repealing the death penalty has been Dr. William Petit Jr., the lone survivor of a 2007 Cheshire home invasion that resulted in the murders of his wife and two daughters.

The wife was raped and strangled, one of the daughters was molested and both girls were left tied to their beds as the house was set on fire.

The two men convicted of the crime, Joshua Komisarjevsky and Steven Hayes, are currently on death row.

Anyone who cannot appreciate that a crime like this  deserves the death penalty is morally obtuse.  But not only are liberals morally obtuse, they are contemptibly stupid in failing to understand that one of the main reasons people buy guns is to protect themselves from the criminal element, the criminal element that liberals coddle.  If liberals were serious about wanting to reduce the numbers of guns in civilian hands, they would insist on swift and sure punishment in accordance with the self-evident moral principle, "The punishment must fit the crime,"  which is of course not to be confused with lex talionis, "an eye for an eye."  Many guns are purchased not for hunting or sport shooting but for protection against criminals.  Keeping and bearing arms carries with it a grave responsibility and many if not most gun owners would rather not be so burdened.  Gun ownership among women is on the upswing, and it is a safe bet that they don't want guns to shoot Bambi.

2. Liberals tend to undermine morality with their opposition to religion. 

Many of us internalized the ethical norms that guide our lives via our childhood religious training. We were taught the Ten Commandments, for example. We were not just taught about them, we were taught them.  We learned them by heart, and we took them to heart. This early training, far from being the child abuse that A. C. Grayling and other militant atheists think it is, had a very positive effect on us in forming our consciences and making  us the basically decent human beings we are. I am not saying that moral formation is possible only within a religion; I am saying that some religions do an excellent job of transmitting and inculcating life-guiding and life-enhancing ethical standards, that moral formation outside of a religion is unlikely for the average person, and that it is nearly impossible if children are simply handed over to the pernicious influences of secular society as these influences are transmitted through television, Internet, video games, and other media.  Anyone with moral sense can see that the mass media have become an open sewer in which every manner of cultural polluter is not only tolerated but promoted.  Those of use who were properly educated way back when can dip into this cesspool without too much moral damage.  But to deliver our children over to it is the real child abuse, pace the benighted Professor Grayling.

The shysters of the ACLU, to take one particularly egregious bunch of destructive leftists, seek to remove every vestige of our Judeo-Christian ethical traditiion from the public square.  I can't begin to catalog all of their antics.  But recently there was the  Mojave cross  incident. It is absurd  that there has been any fight at all over it.  The ACLU,  whose radical lawyers  brought the original law suit, deserve contempt   and resolute opposition.  Of course, I wholeheartedly endorse the initial clause of the First Amendment, to wit, "Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion . . . ." But it is hate-America leftist extremism on stilts to think that the presence of  that very old memorial cross on a hill  in the middle of nowhere does anything to establish Christianity as the state religion.  I consider anyone who  believes that to be intellectually obtuse and morally repellent.  One has to be highly unbalanced in his thinking to torture such extremist nonsense out of the First Amendment, while missing the plain sense of the Second Amendment, one that even SCOTUS eventually got right, namely, the the right to keep and bear arms is an individual, not a collective, right.

And then there was the business of the tiny cross on the city seal of Los Angeles, a symbol that the ACLU agitated to have removed.   I could continue with the examples, and you hope I won't.

 3. Liberals tend to have low standards, glorify the worthless, and fail to present exemplary human types.

Our contemporary media dreckmeisters apparently think that the purpose of art is to degrade sensibility, impede critical thinking, glorify scumbags, and rub our noses ever deeper into sex and violence. It seems obvious that the liberal fetishization of freedom of expression without constraint or sense of responsibility is part of the problem. But I can't let a certain sort of libertarian or economic conservative off the hook. Their lust for profit is also involved.

What is is that characterizes contemporary media dreck? Among other things, the incessant presentation of  defective human beings as if there are more of them than there are, and as if there is nothing at all wrong with their way of life. Deviant behavior is presented as if it is mainstream and acceptable, if not desirable. And then lame justifications are provided for the presentation: 'this is what life is like now; we are simply telling it like it is.' It doesn't occur to the dreckmeisters that art might have an ennobling function.

The tendency of liberals and leftists is to think that any presentation of choice-worthy goals or admirable
styles of life could only be hypocritical preaching.  And to libs and lefties, nothing is worse than hypocrisy.  Indeed, a good indicator of whether someone belongs to this class of the terminally benighted is whether the person obsesses over hypocrisy and thinks it the very worst thing in the world.  See my category Hypocrisy for elaboration of this theme.

4. Liberals tend to deny or downplay free will, individual responsibility, and the reality of evil.

This is connected with point 2 above, leftist hostility to religion.  Key to our Judeo-Christian tradition is the belief that man is made in the image and likeness of God.  This image is that mysterious power in us called free will.  The secular extremist assault on religion is at the same time an assault on this mysterious power, through which evil comes into the world.

This is a large topic.  Suffice it to say for now that one clear indication of this denial is the bizarre liberal displacement of responsibility for crime onto inaminate objects, guns, as if the weapon, not the wielder, is the source of the evil for which the weapon can be only the instrument.

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Saturday Night at the Oldies: Happy Birthday, Bob!

America's greatest songwriter, Bob Dylan, turns 73 today.  We celebrate with some outstanding covers of some of his best songs. There are two reasons for sending you to the covers: Dylan's own renditions tend to get removed from YouTube very shortly after they've been posted; many cannot stand Dylan's voice.  If you are among the latter, these renditions may change your mind about his music.

Steven Stills, The Ballad of Hollis Brown

Jimi Hendrix, All Along the Watchtower

No reason to get excited
The thief he kindly spoke
There are many here among us
Who feel that life is but a joke
But you and I we've been through that
And this is not our fate
So let us not talk falsely now
The hour is getting late.

Nanci Griffith, Boots of Spanish Leather

Byrds, Chimes of Freedom

Lucinda Williams, Positively Fourth Street

Joan Baez, Daddy You've Been on My Mind

Judy Collins, Mr. Tambourine Man

Ramblin' Jack Elliot, Just Like Tom Thumb's Blues

Peter, Paul and Mary, Don't Think Twice It's Alright

The Band, When I Paint My Masterpiece

Alanis Morissette, Subterranean Homesick Blues/(3:09) Blowin' in the Wind

Peter, Paul and Mary, Too Much of Nothing

The Band, I Shall Be Released

Laurence Auster comments: This Dylan song can seem amorphous and mystical in the negative sense, especially as it became a kind of countercultural anthem and meaningless through overuse. But the lyrics are coherent and profound, especially the first verse:

 

 

They say everything can be replaced
They say every distance is not near
But I remember every face
Of every man who put me here.

 

The modern world tells us that everything is fungible, nothing is of real value, everything can and should be replaced—our spouse, our culture, our religion, our history, our sexual nature, our race, everything. It is the view of atomistic liberal man, forever creating himself out of his preferences, not dependent on any larger world of which he is a part. The singer is saying, No, this isn’t true. Things have real and particular values and they cannot be cast off and replaced by other things. And, though we seem to be distant, we are connected. I am connected to all the men, the creators and builders and poets and philosophers, and my own relatives and friends, who have come before me or influenced me, who created the world in which I live.

Bloomfield, Kooper, Stills, It Takes a Lot to Laugh. it Take a Train to Cry 

Finally, one by the master himself, Not Dark Yet.  Thanks, Bob, for over 50 years of music, memories, and inspiration.  May the Never Ending Tour roll on, and may you die with your boots on.

Addendum:  I just now discovered this great version of Visions of Johanna by Marianne Faithful.  Not that it comes close to the surreal magic of the best Dylan versions. . . .

Addendum 5/25: Having listened to Faithful's Visions a few more times, it impresses me even more.  But it still does not come close to the surreal magic, et cetera.

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Derbyshire's Defenestration Revisited

The Left's race-baiting just won't stop.  Here Jay Rockefeller plays the race card against Ron Johnson in a manner so egregious that it would in the early 19th century get the Democrat scumbag challenged to a duel.  There are so many recent incidents of race-baiting that the thought of laying in the links is a dreary one indeed.  So I'll just remind you of the John Derbyshire case which now lies about two years in the past.  Around that time I wrote the following.  Very instructive, in part about NRO's need to 'go along to get along.'

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

In case you are not familiar with the word, 'defenestration' is from the Latin fenestra, window.  Defenestration is thus the act of literally or figuratively throwing something or someone out of a window, or the state of having been ejected through such an aperture.  In plain English, John Derbyshire, 'Derb,' got the boot from NRO's Rich Lowry.    (Pardon the mixed metaphors.)  Derb's  free-lance contributions are no longer wanted there.  And all because of Derb's The Talk: Nonblack Version.

Go ahead, click on the link and read the piece.  If nothing else, it will hold your interest.  It is also a good litmus test of your political affiliation.  If it enrages you and strikes you as a racist screed, then you are a (contemporary) liberal.  If you accept its advice as sound, though perhaps in need of minor qualification or correction here and there, then you are a person as sane and reasonable and moderate as your humble correspondent.  If you think Derb didn't go far enough, then chances are you are an extreme right-wing crazy. 

I have just read Derb's talk, very carefully,  a second time.  What is so offensive about it?  Facts are facts.  What's true is true.  The criterion of truth is not agreement with liberal ideology.  Consider this piece of advice:

(10h) Do not act the Good Samaritan to blacks in apparent distress, e.g., on the highway.

That could use some qualification.  If a well-dressed black, alone, were in automotive distress, I might stop to render aid.  But if it were a carload of teenaged gangsta rapper types, I'd accelerate. I wouldn't want to catch a stray round in what could be termed an inverse drive-by shooting.   But if you are giving advice to your kids, you might say something like the above sans qualification, in the same way you would advise them to avoid biker bars at midnight in bad parts of town without feeling the need to point out the obvious, e.g., that not every biker is a brute out to rape and pillage.

So what's to take offense at?

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The Left's race-baiting just won't stop.  Here Jay Rockefeller plays the race card against Ron Johnson in a manner so egregious that it would in the early 19th century get the Democrat scumbag challenged to a duel.  There are so many recent incidents of race-baiting that the thought of laying in the links is a dreary one indeed.  So I'll just remind you of the John Derbyshire case which now lies about two years in the past.  Around that time I wrote the following.  Very instructive, in part about NRO's need to 'go along to get along.'

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

In case you are not familiar with the word, 'defenestration' is from the Latin fenestra, window.  Defenestration is thus the act of literally or figuratively throwing something or someone out of a window, or the state of having been ejected through such an aperture.  In plain English, John Derbyshire, 'Derb,' got the boot from NRO's Rich Lowry.    (Pardon the mixed metaphors.)  Derb's  free-lance contributions are no longer wanted there.  And all because of Derb's The Talk: Nonblack Version.

Go ahead, click on the link and read the piece.  If nothing else, it will hold your interest.  It is also a good litmus test of your political affiliation.  If it enrages you and strikes you as a racist screed, then you are a (contemporary) liberal.  If you accept its advice as sound, though perhaps in need of minor qualification or correction here and there, then you are a person as sane and reasonable and moderate as your humble correspondent.  If you think Derb didn't go far enough, then chances are you are an extreme right-wing crazy. 

I have just read Derb's talk, very carefully,  a second time.  What is so offensive about it?  Facts are facts.  What's true is true.  The criterion of truth is not agreement with liberal ideology.  Consider this piece of advice:

(10h) Do not act the Good Samaritan to blacks in apparent distress, e.g., on the highway.

That could use some qualification.  If a well-dressed black, alone, were in automotive distress, I might stop to render aid.  But if it were a carload of teenaged gangsta rapper types, I'd accelerate. I wouldn't want to catch a stray round in what could be termed an inverse drive-by shooting.   But if you are giving advice to your kids, you might say something like the above sans qualification, in the same way you would advise them to avoid biker bars at midnight in bad parts of town without feeling the need to point out the obvious, e.g., that not every biker is a brute out to rape and pillage.

So what's to take offense at?

Should Mark Cuban Get the Donald Sterling Treatment? Notes on Prejudice

Bill Plaschke of the L. A. Times lays into Mark Cuban, owner of the Dallas Mavericks, for statements like these:

“I mean, we’re all prejudiced in one way or another,” he said. “If I see a black kid in a hoodie and it’s late at night, I’m walking to the other side of the street. And if on that side of the street there’s a guy that has tattoos all over his face – white guy, bald head, tattoos everywhere – I’m walking back to the other side of the street.  And the list goes on of stereotypes we all live up to and are fearful of.”

The word 'prejudice' needs analysis.  At a bare minimum, two senses of the term ought to be distinguished.

'Prejudice' could refer to blind prejudice: unreasoning, reflexive (as opposed to reflective) aversion to what is other just because it is other, or an unreasoning pro-attitude toward the familiar just because it is familiar.  We should all condemn blind prejudice, or at least blind prejudice of the aversive sort.  It is execrable to hate a person just because he is of a different color, for example. No doubt, but how many people do that?  How many people who are averse to blacks are averse because of their skin color as opposed to their behavior patterns? Racial prejudice is not, in the main, prejudice based on skin color, but on behavior. 

'Prejudice' could also mean 'prejudgment.'   Although blind aversive prejudice is bad, prejudgment is generally good.  We cannot begin our cognitive lives anew at every instant.  We rely upon the 'sedimentation' of past exerience.  Changing the metaphor, we can think of prejudgments as distillations from experience.  The first time I 'serve' my cats whisky they are curious.  After that, they cannot be tempted to come near a shot glass of Jim Beam. They distill from their unpleasant olfactory experiences a well-grounded prejudice against the products of the distillery.

My prejudgments about rattlesnakes are in place and have been for a long time.  I don't need to learn about them afresh at each new encounter with one. I do not treat each new one encountered as a 'unique individual,' whatever that might mean.  Prejudgments are not blind, but experience-based, and they are mostly true. The adult mind is not a tabula rasa.  What experience has written, she retains, and that's all to the good.

So there is good prejudice and there is bad prejudice.  The teenager thinks his father prejudiced in the bad sense when he warns the son not to go into certain parts of town after dark.  Later the son learns that the old man was not such a bigot after all: the father's prejudice was not blind but had a fundamentum in re.

But if you stay away from certain parts of town are you not 'discriminating' against them?  Well of course, but not all discrimination is bad. Everybody discriminates.  Liberals are especially discriminating.  The typical Scottsdale liberal would not be caught dead supping in some of the Apache Junction dives I have been found in.  Liberals discriminate in all sorts of ways.  That's why Scottsdale is Scottsdale and not Apache Junction. 

Is the refusal to recognize same-sex 'marriage' as marriage discriminatory?  Of course!  But not all discrimination is bad.  Indeed, some is morally obligatory.  We discriminate against  felons when we disallow their possession of firearms.  Will you argue against that on the ground that it is discriminatory? If not, then you cannot cogently argue against the refusal to recognize same-sex 'marriage' on the ground that it is discriminatory.  You need a better argument.  And what would that be?

'Profiling,' like 'prejudice' and 'discrimination,' has come to acquire a wholly negative connotation.  Unjustly.  What's wrong with profiling?  We all do it, and we are justified in doing it.  Consider criminal profiling.

It is obvious that only certain kinds of people commit certain kinds of crimes. Suppose a rape has occurred at the corner of Fifth and Vermouth. Two males are moving away from the crime scene. One, the slower moving of the two, is a Jewish gentleman, 80 years of age, with a chess set under one arm and a copy of Maimonides' Guide for the Perplexed under the other. The other fellow, a vigorous twenty-year-old, is running from the scene.

Who is more likely to have committed the rape? If you can't answer this question, then you lack common sense.  But just to spell it out for you liberals: octogenarians are not known for their sexual prowess: the geezer is lucky if he can get it up for a three-minute romp.  Add chess playing and an interest in Maimonides and you have one harmless dude.

Or let's say you are walking down a street in Mesa, Arizona.  On one side of the street you spy some fresh-faced Mormon youths, dressed in their 1950s attire, looking like little Romneys, exiting a Bible studies class.  On the other side of the street, Hells (no apostrophe!) Angels are coming out of their club house.  Which side of the street would you feel safer on?   On which side will your  concealed semi-auto .45 be more likely to see some use?

Do you struggle over this question?

The problem is not so much that liberals are stupid, as that they have allowed themselves to be stupefied by that cognitive aberration known as political correctness.

Their brains are addled by the equality fetish:  everybody is equal, they think, in every way.  So the vigorous 20-year-old is not more likely than the old man to have committed the rape.  The Mormon and the Hells Angel are equally law-abiding.  And the twenty-something Egyptian Muslim is no more likely to be a terrorist than the Mormon matron from Salt Lake City. 

Getting back to Mark Cuban, what he is quoted as saying above makes perfect sense.  His prejudices are reasonable prejudgments.

If you walk like a thug, and talk like a thug, and dress like a thug, and are plastered with tattoos and facial hardware like a thug, then don't be surprised if people give you a wide berth. 

It is the willful self-enstupidation of liberals that unfits them for the appreciation of such commonsensical points  as I have just reiterated.

The Converse of Pandora's Box

Unable to contain her curiosity, Pandora opened her box and a multitude of evils escaped into the world.  The blogger, unable to contain his curiosity as to the comments he might receive, opens his combox and a multitude of evils _________________. (You finish the sentence.)

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Floods in Serbia

Dear Sir,

I am regular reader of your blog from Serbia. I have an plea for you - if you find it inappropriate just skip it.

You may know that my country and its neighbors was hit by terrible floods last few days. I will be very grateful if you can share a call for help on your blog. I must clarify that I am aware that this is very unusual appeal  for blog dedicated to philosophy and I will continue to follow in good faith whatever be your decision.

 

Best wishes,

Miloš Milojević,

Belgrade

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Vehicle and Cross

In this life the body that begins as a vehicle ends as a cross.  It carries us until such time as we carry it -- and are nailed to it, and expire on it and of it.

Linguistic Change and Linguistic Conservatism

May a linguistic conservative such as your humble correspondent coin new expressions? Of course. A conservative is not one opposed to change as such, or linguistic change as such. A conservative is one who is opposed to unnecessary, or idiotic, or deleterious changes –- the kind our dear liberal friends love to introduce. An example of a change that was unnecessary was the renaming of the Western Division of the American Philosophical Association to ‘Central Division’ some years back. I couldn't care less about the useless and politically correct A. P. A. nowadays, but at the time the change rankled this  curmudgeon for two reasons. First, the change is wholly unnecessary: given that there is a Pacific Division and a Western Division, one would have to be consummately stupid indeed not to realize that the former is to the west of the latter.

Second, this wholly unnecessary change obliterates an interesting piece of history, namely, that the A.P. A. once had only two divisions. Should Case Western Reserve University change its name because the Western Reserve region of Ohio is practically in the East nowadays?

By the way, that strange name is an amalgam of 'Case Institute of Technology' and 'Western Reserve University.' Case Institute of Technology was where Michelson and Morley in 1881 conducted the famous experiment that put the ether hypothesis out of commission. When I was a Visiting Assoc Prof of Phil there in 1989-1991, I got a thrill out of conducting some of my classes in Morley Hall.

True, ‘Western Division,’ was a misnomer – but only if one takes it as a description in disguise as opposed to a logically proper name the meaning of which is exhausted by its reference. Recall Saul Kripke’s old example of ‘Holy Roman Empire’ from Naming and Necessity. The entity denoted was neither holy, nor Roman, nor an empire. But that did not prevent the phrase in question from functioning as a proper name. Similarly with ‘Western Division.’

Global Warming: Questions That Need Distinguishing

My posting of the graphic to the left indicates that I am a skeptic about global warming (GW).  To be precise, I am skeptical about some, not all, of the claims made by the GW activists.  See below for some necessary distinctions. Skepticism is good.  Doubt is the engine of inquiry and a key partner in the pursuit of truth.

A skeptic is a doubter, not a denier.  To doubt or inquire or question  whether such-and-such is the case is not to deny that it is the case.  It is a cheap rhetorical trick of GW alarmists when they speak of GW denial and posture as if it is in the ball park of Holocaust denial. 

What can a philosopher say about global warming? The first thing he can and ought to say is that, although not all questions are empirical, at the heart of the global warming debate are a set of empirical questions. These are not questions for philosophers qua philosophers, let alone for political ideologues. For the resolution of these questions we must turn to reputable climatologists whose roster does not sport such names as 'Al Gore,' 'Barbra Streisand,' or 'Ann Coulter.' Unfortunately, the global warming question is one that is readily 'ideologized' and the ideological gas bags of both the Right and the Left have a lot to answer for in this regard.

I have not investigated the matter with any thoroughness, and I have no firm opinion. It is difficult to form an opinion because it is difficult to know whom to trust: reputable scientists have their ideological biases too, and if they work in universities, the leftish climate in these hotbeds of political correctness is some reason to be skeptical of anything they say.

For example, let's say scientist X teaches at Cal Berkeley and is a registered Democrat. One would have some reason to question his credibility.  He may well tilt toward socialism and away from capitalism and be tempted to beat down capitalism with the cudgel of global warming.  Equally, a climatologist on the payroll of the American Enterprise Institute would be suspect.   I am not suggesting that objectivity is impossible to attain; I am making the simple point that it is difficult to attain and that scientists have worldview biases like everyone else.  And like everyone else, they are swayed by such less-than-noble motives as the desire to advance their careers and be accepted by their peers.  And who funds global warming research?  What are their biases?  And who gets the grants?  And what conclusions do you need to aim at to get funded?  It can't be a bad idea to "follow the money" as the saying goes.

Off the top of my head I think we ought to distinguish among the following questions:

1. Is global warming (GW) occurring?

2. If yes to (1), is it naturally irreversible, or is it likely to reverse itself on its own?

3. If GW is occurring, and will not reverse itself on its own, to what extent is it anthropogenic, i.e., caused by human activity?

(3) is the crucial empirical question. It is obviously distinct from (1) and (2). If there is naturally irreversible global warming, this is not to say that it is caused by human activity. It may or may not be. One has to be aware of the post hoc ergo propter hoc fallacy. Suppose there is a close correlation between global warming and man-made carbon emissions. It doesn't straightaway follow that the the human activity causes the warming. But again, this is not a question that can be settled a priori; it is a question for climatologists.

4. If anthropogenic, is global warming caused by humans to a degree that warrants action, assuming that action can be taken to stop it?

5. If GW is caused by humans to an extent that it warrants action, what sorts of action would be needed to stop the warming process?

6. How much curtailment of economic growth would we be willing to accept to stop global warming?

The first three of these six questions are empirical and are reserved for climatologists. They  are very difficult questions to answer.  And it is worth pointing out that climatology, while an empirical science, falls short of truly strict science.    This useful article lists the following five characteristics of science in the strict and eminent sense:

1. Clearly defined terminology.
2. Quantifiability.
3. Highly controlled conditions. "A scientifically rigorous study maintains direct control over as many of the factors that influence the outcome as possible. The experiment is then performed with such precision that any other person in the world, using identical materials and methods, should achieve the exact same result."
4. Reproducibility. "A rigorous science is able to reproduce the same result over and over again. Multiple researchers on different continents, cities, or even planets should find the exact same results if they precisely duplicated the experimental conditions."
5. Predictability and Testability. "A rigorous science is able to make testable predictions."

These characteristics set the bar for strict science very high, and rightly so.  Is climate science science according to these criteria? No, it falls short on #s 3 and 4.  At the hardest hard core of the hard sciences lies the physics of meso-phenomena.  Climatology does not come close to this level of 'hardness.'  So don't be bamboozled: don't imagine that the prestige of physics transfers undiminished onto climatology.  It is pretty speculative stuff and much of it is ideologically infected. 

Our first three questions are empirical. But the last three are not, being questions of public policy. So although the core issues are empirical, philosophers have some role to play: they can help in the formulation and clarification of the various questions; they can help with the normative questions that arise in conjunction with (4)-(5), and they can examine the cogency of the arguments given on either side. Last but not least, they can drive home the importance of being clear about the distinction between empirical and conceptual questions.

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No Dissent Allowed! 79-Year old Skeptical Climate Scientist Victim of Witch-Hunt - Fears for his 'safety' after declaring himself a skeptic

My posting of the graphic to the left indicates that I am a skeptic about global warming (GW).  To be precise, I am skeptical about some, not all, of the claims made by the GW activists.  See below for some necessary distinctions. Skepticism is good.  Doubt is the engine of inquiry and a key partner in the pursuit of truth.

A skeptic is a doubter, not a denier.  To doubt or inquire or question  whether such-and-such is the case is not to deny that it is the case.  It is a cheap rhetorical trick of GW alarmists when they speak of GW denial and posture as if it is in the ball park of Holocaust denial. 

What can a philosopher say about global warming? The first thing he can and ought to say is that, although not all questions are empirical, at the heart of the global warming debate are a set of empirical questions. These are not questions for philosophers qua philosophers, let alone for political ideologues. For the resolution of these questions we must turn to reputable climatologists whose roster does not sport such names as 'Al Gore,' 'Barbra Streisand,' or 'Ann Coulter.' Unfortunately, the global warming question is one that is readily 'ideologized' and the ideological gas bags of both the Right and the Left have a lot to answer for in this regard.

I have not investigated the matter with any thoroughness, and I have no firm opinion. It is difficult to form an opinion because it is difficult to know whom to trust: reputable scientists have their ideological biases too, and if they work in universities, the leftish climate in these hotbeds of political correctness is some reason to be skeptical of anything they say.

For example, let's say scientist X teaches at Cal Berkeley and is a registered Democrat. One would have some reason to question his credibility.  He may well tilt toward socialism and away from capitalism and be tempted to beat down capitalism with the cudgel of global warming.  Equally, a climatologist on the payroll of the American Enterprise Institute would be suspect.   I am not suggesting that objectivity is impossible to attain; I am making the simple point that it is difficult to attain and that scientists have worldview biases like everyone else.  And like everyone else, they are swayed by such less-than-noble motives as the desire to advance their careers and be accepted by their peers.  And who funds global warming research?  What are their biases?  And who gets the grants?  And what conclusions do you need to aim at to get funded?  It can't be a bad idea to "follow the money" as the saying goes.

Off the top of my head I think we ought to distinguish among the following questions:

1. Is global warming (GW) occurring?

2. If yes to (1), is it naturally irreversible, or is it likely to reverse itself on its own?

3. If GW is occurring, and will not reverse itself on its own, to what extent is it anthropogenic, i.e., caused by human activity?

(3) is the crucial empirical question. It is obviously distinct from (1) and (2). If there is naturally irreversible global warming, this is not to say that it is caused by human activity. It may or may not be. One has to be aware of the post hoc ergo propter hoc fallacy. Suppose there is a close correlation between global warming and man-made carbon emissions. It doesn't straightaway follow that the the human activity causes the warming. But again, this is not a question that can be settled a priori; it is a question for climatologists.

4. If anthropogenic, is global warming caused by humans to a degree that warrants action, assuming that action can be taken to stop it?

5. If GW is caused by humans to an extent that it warrants action, what sorts of action would be needed to stop the warming process?

6. How much curtailment of economic growth would we be willing to accept to stop global warming?

The first three of these six questions are empirical and are reserved for climatologists. They  are very difficult questions to answer.  And it is worth pointing out that climatology, while an empirical science, falls short of truly strict science.    This useful article lists the following five characteristics of science in the strict and eminent sense:

1. Clearly defined terminology.
2. Quantifiability.
3. Highly controlled conditions. "A scientifically rigorous study maintains direct control over as many of the factors that influence the outcome as possible. The experiment is then performed with such precision that any other person in the world, using identical materials and methods, should achieve the exact same result."
4. Reproducibility. "A rigorous science is able to reproduce the same result over and over again. Multiple researchers on different continents, cities, or even planets should find the exact same results if they precisely duplicated the experimental conditions."
5. Predictability and Testability. "A rigorous science is able to make testable predictions."

These characteristics set the bar for strict science very high, and rightly so.  Is climate science science according to these criteria? No, it falls short on #s 3 and 4.  At the hardest hard core of the hard sciences lies the physics of meso-phenomena.  Climatology does not come close to this level of 'hardness.'  So don't be bamboozled: don't imagine that the prestige of physics transfers undiminished onto climatology.  It is pretty speculative stuff and much of it is ideologically infected. 

Our first three questions are empirical. But the last three are not, being questions of public policy. So although the core issues are empirical, philosophers have some role to play: they can help in the formulation and clarification of the various questions; they can help with the normative questions that arise in conjunction with (4)-(5), and they can examine the cogency of the arguments given on either side. Last but not least, they can drive home the importance of being clear about the distinction between empirical and conceptual questions.

Philosophy Always Resurrects Its Dead

First posted 8 February 2011.  Time for a re-run.

Etienne Gilson famously remarked that "Philosophy always buries its undertakers."  That is the first of his "laws of philosophical experience." (The Unity of Philosophical Experience, Scribners, 1937, p. 306) As a metaphilosophical pronunciamento it is hard to beat.  It is equally true that philosophy always resurrects its dead.  Let that be my first law.  The history of natural science is littered with corpses, none of which is an actual or potential Lazarus.  Not so in philosophy.

None of the classical problems has ever been demonstrated to be a pseudoproblem pace Wittgenstein, Carnap and such epigoni as Morris Lazerowitz; none of the major theories proposed in solution of them has ever been  refuted once and for all; no school of thought has been finally discredited.

 

Thomism, to take an example, was once largely confined to the academic backwaters of Catholic colleges where sleepy Jesuits taught the ancient lore from dusty scholastic manuals to bored jocks.  (I am not being entirely fair, but fair enough for a blog post.)  But in the last twenty years an increasing number of sharp analytic heads have penetrated the scholastic arcana and have been serving up some fairly rigorous forward-looking stuff that engages with contemporary analytic work in a way that was simply beyond the abilities of (most) of the sleepy Jesuits and old-time scholastics.

Gilbert Ryle once predicted with absurd confidence, "Gegenstandstheorie . . . is dead, buried, and not going to be resurrected."  (Quoted in G. Priest, Towards Non-Being, Oxford, 2005, p. vi, n. 1.) Ryle was wrong, dead wrong, and shown to be wrong just a few years after his cocky prediction.  Variations on Meinong's Theory of Objects flourish like never before due to the efforts of such brilliant philosophers as Butchvarov, Castaneda, Lambert, Parsons, Priest, Routley/Sylvan, and Zalta, just to mention those that come first to mind. And the Rylean cockiness has had an ironic upshot: his logical behaviorism is temporarily dead while Meinongianism thrives.  But Ryle too will be raised if my parallel law of philosophical experience -- Philosophy always resurrects its dead -- holds.

It may be worth noting that if philosophy resurrects its dead then it can be expected to raise the anti-philosophical (and therefore philosophical) positions of philosophy's would-be undertakers.  Philosophy, she's a wily bitch: you can't outflank her and she always ends up on top.

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First posted 8 February 2011.  Time for a re-run.

Etienne Gilson famously remarked that "Philosophy always buries its undertakers."  That is the first of his "laws of philosophical experience." (The Unity of Philosophical Experience, Scribners, 1937, p. 306) As a metaphilosophical pronunciamento it is hard to beat.  It is equally true that philosophy always resurrects its dead.  Let that be my first law.  The history of natural science is littered with corpses, none of which is an actual or potential Lazarus.  Not so in philosophy.

None of the classical problems has ever been demonstrated to be a pseudoproblem pace Wittgenstein, Carnap and such epigoni as Morris Lazerowitz; none of the major theories proposed in solution of them has ever been  refuted once and for all; no school of thought has been finally discredited.

 

Thomism, to take an example, was once largely confined to the academic backwaters of Catholic colleges where sleepy Jesuits taught the ancient lore from dusty scholastic manuals to bored jocks.  (I am not being entirely fair, but fair enough for a blog post.)  But in the last twenty years an increasing number of sharp analytic heads have penetrated the scholastic arcana and have been serving up some fairly rigorous forward-looking stuff that engages with contemporary analytic work in a way that was simply beyond the abilities of (most) of the sleepy Jesuits and old-time scholastics.

Gilbert Ryle once predicted with absurd confidence, "Gegenstandstheorie . . . is dead, buried, and not going to be resurrected."  (Quoted in G. Priest, Towards Non-Being, Oxford, 2005, p. vi, n. 1.) Ryle was wrong, dead wrong, and shown to be wrong just a few years after his cocky prediction.  Variations on Meinong's Theory of Objects flourish like never before due to the efforts of such brilliant philosophers as Butchvarov, Castaneda, Lambert, Parsons, Priest, Routley/Sylvan, and Zalta, just to mention those that come first to mind. And the Rylean cockiness has had an ironic upshot: his logical behaviorism is temporarily dead while Meinongianism thrives.  But Ryle too will be raised if my parallel law of philosophical experience -- Philosophy always resurrects its dead -- holds.

It may be worth noting that if philosophy resurrects its dead then it can be expected to raise the anti-philosophical (and therefore philosophical) positions of philosophy's would-be undertakers.  Philosophy, she's a wily bitch: you can't outflank her and she always ends up on top.

How Much Time for Philosophy? Part II

Dear Bill,

Thanks for that post!

Here are my two simple comments:

How much time should one spend on philosophy? "A good chunk of the day," you say; assuming that one is above all else interested in truth (about ultimate issues) and/or in the Absolute. But should one be interested in either of these? That's a philosophical problem. And I guess that in your view philosophy can't settle it: philosophically, it is as reasonable to be interested as not to be.

Even assuming that kind of interest, why do philosophy a good chunk of the day? Once one has toiled through the central apories of philosophy, something like glancing at their concise list may be sufficient. I mean sufficient for what you want from philosophy: intellectual humility and appreciation of the question what, if anything, lies beyond the limits of the discursive  intellect and how one may gain access to it.

Best,

 

V.

Dear V.,

Thank you for your comments which are both penetrating and very useful to me.

Response 1.  Philosophers (the real ones, not mere academic functionaries) seek the ultimate truth about the ultimate matters.  I take it we agree on that. But should one seek the ultimate truth about the ultimate matters?  You rightly point out that whether one should or shouldn't (or neither) is itself a philosophical problem.  And you also clearly see that if the problems of philosophy are insoluble, then this particular problem is insoluble.  And if it is insoluble, then philosophy is no more reasonable to pursue than to eschew.

Well, I accept the consequence.  But it is reasonable to pursue philosophy, and that suffices to justify my pursuit of it.  And who knows?  Perhaps I will definitively solve one or more philosophical problems to the satisfaction of all competent practioners.  You understand that I do not claim to know (with certainty) that the insolubility thesis is true. My claim is merely that it is a reasonable conjecture based on some two and a half millenia of philosophical experience.  It is reasonable to conjecture that no problem has ever been solved by us because no problem is soluble by us.  I expect the future to be like the past. (But then so did Russell's chicken who expected to be fed on the day the farmer wrung his neck.)

Response 2.  Let's assume that the pursuit of philosophy is reasonable and worthwhile for some of us as an end in itself (and not because we are paid to do it, or teach it.)  But why continue with it day after day for many hours each day? As you put it so well, why does it not suffice to glance from time to time at a concise list of the central apories to gain the promised benefits of intellectual humility and the motivation to look beyond philosophy for routes to truth?

There are several considerations.

1. There is the sheer intellectual pleasure that people like us derive from thinking and writing about the problems of philosophy.  The strangeness of the ordinary entrances us and we find disciplined wondering about it deeply satisfying.  We humans like doing well what we have the power to do, and those of us who like thinking and writing and entering into dialog with the like-minded are made happy by these pursuits even if solutions are out of the reach of mortals.  What Siegbert Tarrasch said of chess is also true of philosophy, "Like love, like music, it has the power to make men happy."

2. Then there is the humanizing effect of the study of the great problems.  Bear in mind that for me the problems are genuine and deep and some of them are of great human importance. They are not artifacts of non-workaday uses of language, nor are they sired by erroneous empirical assumptions or remediable logical errors.  I firmly reject their Wittgensteinian and 'Wittgenfreudian' dismissal, or any other sort of anti-philosophical dismissal or denigration.  (Morris Lazerowitz was a 'Wittgenfreudian,' or, if you prefer, 'Freudensteinian.')  So it is deeply humanizing to wrestle with the problems of philosophy.  We are brought face to face with our predicament in this life.  To change the metaphor, we are driven deep into it.

3. It is also important to grapple with the problems of philosophy and plumb their depths so that we can mount effective critiques against the scientistic junk solutions that are constantly being put forth in once good but now crappy publications such as Scientific American and peddled by sophists and philosophical know-nothings like Lawrence Krauss.

4. Since it is not the case that all solutions are equally good or equally bad, it is useful to know which are better and which worse.  Even if the mind-body problem is ultimately insoluble, some 'solutions' can be known to be either worthless or highly unlikely to be true.  Eliminative materialism is a prime  candidate for the office of nonsense theory.

5. Since the insolubility thesis as I intend it is put forth tentatively and non-dogmatically, it must be continually tested.  This is done by trying to solve the problems.  The insolubility thesis is not an excuse for intellectual laziness.

6. But perhaps the most important point is that philosophy, pursued in the manner of the radical aporetician, can itself be a spiritual practice. This is a large topic, and brevity is the soul of blog; so I'll content myself with a brief indication.

The insolubilia of Western philosophy, if insoluble they are, could be likened to the koans of the Zen Buddhists.  The point of working on a koan is to precipitate a break-through to satori or kensho by a transcending of the discursive intellect.  

If you said to the Zen man that he is wasting his time puzzling over insoluble koans, he would reply that you are missing the point.  "The point is not to solve them, but to break on through to  the other side, to open the doors of perception beyond the discursive to the nondual." 

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We Were Under CyberAttack Yesterday

Typepad bloggers were subjected to yet further outages yesterday, outages Typepad claims were caused by a Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attack.  Every outage an outrage to the 'blogsessive.' Let's hope we don't see a repeat of April's fiasco.

So I managed to snag only 744 pageviews yesterday. But traffic is overall good.  15 May saw a surge of 2298.  And a few days ago I passed the 2.5 million pageviews mark.  Presently total page views for this third  version of MavPhil, commenced on Halloween 2008, stand at 2,503,919. 

That averages to 1,235.28 pageviews per day.  Total posts including this one: 5098.  Total comments: 7018.

I thank you for your patronage. 

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An Inferential Semantics for Empty Names?

London Ed submits this for our evaluation:

While apparently conceding that empty proper names have an 'inferential role', rightly underscores the need for me to demonstrate that its meaning is just this role, i.e. to demonstrate that the 'inferential semantics' is a sufficient as well as a necessary explanation of (empty) proper names.

Here are some arguments to elucidate this inferential role, and to show that it is sufficient to explain everything we need to know about empty proper names (indeed, all proper names, but leave that aside for now).

Argument 1.  Proper names are neither descriptive nor object-dependent.

Consider the meaning of the following two sentences:

There is a hobbit called 'Frodo'.  Frodo has large feet.

I have argued that at least part of the semantics of the proper name 'Frodo' is to join the predicate 'hobbit' in the first sentence to the predicate 'has large feet' in the second. It allows us to infer 'some hobbit has large feet'.  And by repeated use of this inference in successive propositions in a narrative, it allows us to connect an increasingly complex description to each character in the narrative. It tells us which character we are talking 'about' by telling us which description to increase. Does it have any further function than this?  Is it descriptive? Does it mean something like "hobbit called 'Frodo'"? No, for consider

There is a hobbit called 'Frodo'.  There is another hobbit called 'Frodo'.

Clearly if there can be two characters in a narrative with the same name (as sometimes there are), the indefinite description 'called N' is not sufficient to individuate the character. Or consider

There is a hobbit called 'Frodo'.  Frodo might not have been called 'Frodo'

This implies 'some hobbit called Frodo might not have been called Frodo', which is not inconsistent, so long as 'some hobbit' is read with wide scope.  I won't argue this at length here, but it is easy to show that all the arguments which Kripke levels at the description theory of names can be reused or reinterpreted in the case of empty names.  But if an empty proper name is non-descriptive and if there is no object that it corresponds to (either real or intentional), the simplest explanation is that its meaning is its inferential properties.

BV Comment 1.  I take it that your view is that no indefinite or definite description supplies the meaning (sense) of any empty name.  You rely on Kripke-type arguments.  But distinguish:

a. Reference is not routed through sense, but direct

and

b. Names lack sense entirely.

It might be that while the reference of a name is  not routed through an associated sense, the name nevertheless has a sense.  Your view, however, rules that out.  And doesn't Kripke speak of a sense that "fixes the reference" of a name without being part of the mechanism by which reference is achieved?  But let's not get sidetracked into Kripke exegesis!

If I understand you, you want to maintain that names and other singular referring devices such as indexicals and demonstratives are purely syntactical devices.  I honestly don't see how that could be true.  I gave the example earlier of the first-person singular pronoun. Assume that when Frodo says 'I am hungry' he refers directly to Frodo and not via a special reference-mediating I-sense.   Still, any use of 'I' has as part of its meaning that a producer of such a linguistic token is a person or a (potentially) self-conscious being, a being that can speak or think.

In this connection, David Kaplan speaks of character as opposed to content.  "The character of an expression is set by linguistic conventions and, in turn, determines the content of the expression in every context." (Themes from Kaplan, p. 505)  The character of the pure indexical 'I' is given by the rule:

'I' refers to the speaker or writer. (505)

My criticism, then, is that if the semantics of singular referring devices reduces to the inferential roles these words play, then there is no accounting for Kaplanian content since that does not vary with context or inferential role.

Leaving aside idexicals and demonstratives, all or most names seem to have associated with them a semantic content which cannot be reduced to the purely syntactical.  Consider the song Carmelita about an apparently purely fictional character named  'Carmelita.'  That name carries the sense 'female.'  And the same goes for the wicked Felina in Marty Robbins' El Paso. There are male names, female names, and unisex names.  If Carl is married to Carla, then you know the marriage is not same-sex.

Argument 2. Referential insulation

Consider the first sentence above: "There is a hobbit called 'Frodo'".  This is indefinite, i.e. it does not tell us which hobbit is called 'Frodo'.  Specifically, even if hobbits are mentioned in some earlier part of the narrative, this sentence on its own does not generate any further inferences about hobbits. It is a 'referential insulator', it does not 'refer backwards' to any previous sentence.The second  sentence "Frodo has large feet", by contrast, does refer back. But only to the first sentence. Any third sentence can refer back to this one, and a fourth sentence to the third, and we can construct a whole referential chain, each of which refers back to the previous link. But the chain stops at the first sentence, the insulating sentence. This suggests that the second definite sentence, or back-referring sentence, has meaning only insofar as it refers back. But its back-reference is exhausted by its inferential properties. Ergo etc.

BV Comment 2.  Suppose I grant the the meaning of 'Frodo' in the second sentence is exhausted by its back reference to 'Frodo' in the first sentence.  This back reference is entirely intralinguistic: it is a word-word relation, not a word-world relation.  So far, so good.  Consider this quantified sentence:

(Ex) (x is a hobbit called 'Frodo' & x has large feet).

'Frodo' in the second sentence -- 'Frodo has large feet' -- plays the role of the second bound variable in the above quantified sentence, and that role is purely syntactical.  The second sentence is synonomous with 'He has large feet' in the context in question. 

So perhaps what you are up to is this:  You want to construe names as pronouns used anaphorically as opposed to demonstratively.  You are of course aware of the ambiguity of a sentence like  'Feser inscribed his book.'  That could mean that Feser inscribed Feser's book, in which case 'his' is being used anaphorically, or it could mean that Feser inscribed some other person's book, in which case 'his' is being used demonstratively.  Suppose I say 'Feser inscribed his book' while pointing to Peter.  Then 'his' refers to an extralingusitc item, Peter.  On the first disambiguation, however, 'his' is syntactically bound to 'Feser' and the reference is an intralinguistic back reference.

Here is the problem.  'Frodo' in the first sentence cannot be construed as a pronoun used anaphorically.  You cannot introduce 'Frodo' without packing some meaning into it.  And that is exactly what you do when you say that Frodo is a hobbit.  Surely you don't think that 'hobbit' is a purely syntactical device.  We agree of course that 'hobbit' has a null extension, but it must have some intension, and that intension cannot be reduced to syntax.  Hence 'Frodo' when first introduced has to have some meaning that is irreducible to syntax or inferential role.

Even if back reference is exhausted by inferential properties, and the meaning of a back-referring term reduces to its syntactic role, surely the meaning of a name -- even if it is empty -- cannot on its first introduction be reduced to its syntactic role.

In short, your "ergo, etc." is a non sequitur.

Argument 3.  Definition not object-dependent.

The definition of the name 'Frodo' occurs in the first sentence ("There is a hobbit called 'Frodo'").  This tells us that any subsequent usage of 'Frodo' refers back to this sentence. But it is a general existential proposition. On the assumption that general existential propositions aren't object-dependent, it follows that we can define a proper name without requiring an object. Given that we can define its meaning without having an object, it follows that its meaning is not object-dependent.

BV Comment 3: This argument seems OK in relation to empty names.  Do you mean it to apply to non-empty names as well?

Argument 4. Pronouns are not object-dependent.

Consider

There is a hobbit called 'Frodo'.  He has large feet.

Clearly the pronoun 'he' refers back to the first sentence, not to any object. But the two sentences together do not signify any more than the two 'Frodo' sentences above.  But if the two 'Frodo' sentences have the same meaning as two object-independent sentences, it follows that the two 'Frodo' sentences are object-independent also.

BV Comment 4.  To be true, your thesis has to be modified:  Pronouns used anaphorically are not object-dependent.

Suppose you don't know that prosciutto is called 'prosciutto.'  But you want some anyway and you know what it looks like.  You belly up to the deli counter, point to the delectable item, and say 'I want some of this!'  Surely the meaning of the demonstrative pronoun 'this' in this context is object-dependent. 

But the same goes for the pure indexical 'I.'  The indexical reference is achieved without a demonstration -- there is no need to point to oneself when saying 'I' -- but 'I' is secure against reference failure.  One cannot token 'I' without referring to something.  So 'I' used indexically -- not as a Roman numeral say -- is object-dependent for its meaning.

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Hylo- or Hylemorphic?

The first footnote to Patrick Toner's "Hylemorphic Animalism" (Phil. Studies, 2011, 155: 65-81) reads:

The more common spelling is "hylomorphic," but David Oderberg has convinced me to substitute this spelling. After all, the Greek term in question is hyle, not hylo.

By this reasoning we should write 'cruxade,' 'cruxiform,' and 'cruxial' instead of the standard 'crusade,' 'cruciform,' and 'crucial.'  After all, the Latin term in question is crux, not crus or cruc.

Furthermore, why not write 'hylemorphec' rather than 'hylemorphic'?  After all, the Greek term in question is morphe, not morphi.

Why don't we write 'polisology' and 'polisics' rather than 'politology' and 'politics'?  After all, the Greek term in question is polis, not polit.

And why don't we write 'morphelogy,' and 'gelogy' and 'gemetry' rather than 'morphology,' 'geology,' and 'geometry'?  After all, etc.

What am I missing?

For a conservative there is a defeasible presumption in favor of traditional ways of doing things.  Note 'defeasible.'  Conservatives are not opposed to change; they are opposed to unnecessary and foolish and deleterious and change-for-the-sake-of-change change.  You could say that they are opposed to Obaminable change.

Addendum (18 May)

Ed Feser writes,

I had this debate with David years ago and initially defended "hylomorphism" precisely on the conservative grounds that that is the standard usage.  (You'll notice that in my book Philosophy of Mind I use "hylomorphism.")  However, "hylemorphism" is not David's invention, and when I was writing the Aquinas book I found that some (though of course not all) of the old manuals did indeed use "hylemorphism."   So there hasn't in fact been uniformity on the spelling.  Hence I decided "Fine, what the heck." I'm not committed to it the way David is, though.

I am aware that 'hylemorphism' is not Oderberg's invention and that this spelling has also been used.  But unless I am badly mistaken, the 'hylo' forms occur more frequently that the 'hyle' forms.  So while Oderberg's usage is not an innovation, it does go against standard usage.  That's one consideration.  Another is euphony.  The 'hylo' compounds roll right off the tongue; the 'hyle' forms are slightly 'stickier.'  But your tongue may vary.  And then there are the considerations adduced above.

It just now occurs to me that there is one instance where the 'o' would be out of place.  Edmund Husserl speaks of hyletische Daten, the translation being 'hyletic data.'  Here the 'e' satisfies the exigencies of euphony quite nicely.

This is surely no earth-shaking matter.  But on one way of looking at things it is wonderful that civilization has advanced to such a point that large numbers of people can spend time discussing such a scholarly punctilio.

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Automotive Frugality

Keith Burgess-Jackson is one frugal dude:

I've had only three vehicles in the past 31 years: (1) a 1976 Oldsmobile Cutlass, purchased from my brother Glenn in May 1983; (2) a 1989 Pontiac Grand Am, purchased new in August 1989; and (3) a 2007 Honda Accord, purchased new in February 2007. How many vehicles have you had in the past 31 years?

In one sense old Keith has me beat.  I've owned four cars during this time period: (1) a 1978 VW bus purchased used in spring '79; (2) a 1988 Jeep Cherokee bought new at Thanksgiving 1987; (3) a low-mileage, immaculate, 2005 Jeep Liberty Renegade 'stolen'  used for a paltry $12 K on St. Valentine's Day, 2009; (4) a 2013 Jeep Wrangler Sport purchased new at Thanksgiving 2012.

So I've owned four vehicles during the period when Keith owned three.

But there is a sense in which I have him beat:  I owned the Cherokee for over 21 years, whereas the longest he has owned a vehicle appears to be less than eight years.

The old Cherokee is celebrated in the first article below.

In my whole life I have owned only four cars, the ones mentioned and a 1963 Karmann Ghia convertible purchased for $650 from my half-brother in 1969.  The license plate read: GOE 069.  I kid you not. I sold it in 1973 when I headed east for grad school.  I should have kept it.  Just like I should never have sold that Gibson ES 335 TD.  That was the dumbest thing I ever did.

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Are Problems in Applied Ethics Insoluble?

Long-time Pakistani reader A. A. presents me with a nice challenging question:

You hold the view that the central problems of philosophy are insoluble. I assume that also includes central questions of ethics and meta-ethics, such as the existence of objective moral values. What implication does this have, however, for the more peripheral and applied problems of ethics, such as the moral status of abortion? Does it imply that they are also essentially insoluble?

Consistency demands that I drive to the end of the road.  So yes, my metaphilosophical thesis implies that the moral problem of abortion, for example, is insoluble.  Does the fact that I must, on pain of inconsistency, draw this conclusion amount to an objection to my metaphilosophy?  Let's see.

One objection might run as follows.  "If you are a solubility skeptic, then you can't take a position for or against the morality of abortion.  But you yourself have argued over many posts against the moral permissibility of abortion.  You do take a position.  Therefore, at the end of the day you are not a solubility skeptic."

I don't think this objection need cause me any trouble.  For it is consistent with what I maintain that I also maintain that some arguments on a topic are better than others, and that some are good enough to win our tentative assent, an assent sufficient to justify action in support of our causes.  One can be a solubility skeptic and also maintain that some arguments are very bad and bare of probative force.  Consider the Woman's Body Argument:

1. The fetus is a part of a woman's body.
2. A woman has the right to do whatever she wants with any part of her body.
Therefore
3. A woman has the right to do whatever she wants with the fetus, including having it killed.

This is clearly a very bad argument, involving as it does an equivocation on the term 'part.'  For an analysis in depth, see here. 

The Potentiality Argument, however,  is a good argument.  It is not open to any obvious refutation, despite what some people erroneously think.  But it is not an absolutely compelling argument.  For one thing, its underlying nomenclature and conceptuality is broadly Aristotelian: there is talk of potency and act, substance and accident, and so on.   The broadly Aristotelian metaphysical framework, though defensible and ably defended by many,  is however not without its difficulties, some of which are explored in my Aristotle category.  These age-old difficulties bleed into the Potentiality Argument, rendering it less than absolutely rationally compelling.

Any argument in applied ethics  will rest on normative-ethical and meta-ethical presuppositions, with these in turn resting on metaphysical presuppositions.  Starting at the periphery with the problems of applied ethics we are ineluctably drawn toward the center where the core problems live.  For example, any discussion about the morality of abortion will lead to questions about rights and duties, the nature of persons, identity over time, the nature of change, and many others besides.  The insolubility of the core problems extends to the peripheral problems. But this does not prevent us from taking definite rationally defensible stands on such issues as abortion.

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The Illiberalism of Contemporary 'Liberals'

Go Kirsten!  Kirsten Powers has it all: beauty, brains, and the female equivalent of that which I was about to refer to using a word I decided not to use.  I think I'm in love.  And she stands up to Bill O'Reilly displaying grace under pressure when the pugnacious Irishman becomes obnoxious.  She's smarter than O'Reilly and she knows it.  Bill does too.  But hats off to O'Reilly  for giving the young whippersnappers a forum and for speaking truth to power lo these many years.  He is an inspiring profile in civil courage.

"Speaking truth to power" is a lefty phrase that we need to co-opt.  Leftards use the phrase even when they have power.  You see, for a lefty, having power is supposedly bad and so they have to pretend that they don't have it even when they do.  It's like money in that respect.  They like to posture that they are anti-Establishment when they are the Establishment, and that they are dissenting when they are spouting and toeing the party line.  They also think they somehow own dissent as if conservatives are somehow barred by the very meaning of the word from dissenting.

In any case, Miss Powers really hits the nail on the head in her column:  Here is some of it and it ought to anger you with a righteous anger:

Don't bother trying to make sense of what beliefs are permitted and which ones will get you strung up in the town square. Our ideological overlords have created a minefield of inconsistency. While criticizing Islam is intolerant, insulting Christianity is sport. Ayaan Hirsi Ali is persona non grata at Brandeis University for attacking the prophet Mohammed. But Richard Dawkins describes the Old Testament God as "a misogynistic … sadomasochistic … malevolent bully" and the mob yawns. Bill Maher calls the same God a "psychotic mass murderer" and there are no boycott demands of the high-profile liberals who traffic his HBO show.

The self-serving capriciousness is crazy. In March, University of California-Santa Barbara women's studies professor Mireille Miller-Young attacked a 16-year-old holding an anti-abortion sign in the campus' "free speech zone" (formerly known as America). Though she was charged with theft, battery and vandalism, Miller-Young remains unrepentant and still has her job. But Mozilla's Brendan Eich gave a private donation to an anti-gay marriage initiative six years ago and was ordered to recant his beliefs. When he wouldn't, he was forced to resign from the company he helped found.

Got that? A college educator with the right opinions can attack a high school student and keep her job. A corporate executive with the wrong opinions loses his for making a campaign donation. Something is very wrong here.

As the mob gleefully destroys people's lives, its members haven't stopped to ask themselves a basic question: What happens when they come for me? If history is any guide, that's how these things usually end.

Powers is a Dem.  But she's young; give her time.

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Joachim Fest, Not I

One of the books I am reading is Joachim Fest's Not I: Memories of a German Childhood (orig. publ. in German in 2006 by Rowohlt, tr. Martin Chalmers, New York, Other Press, 2013).

The title alludes to Mark 14:29: "But Peter said unto him, Although all shall be offended, yet will not I."

WSJ review by T. J. Reed here.  I reproduce a sizeable chunk of it in case it ends up behind a pay wall:

The [Fest] family lives under a shadow. Their dissent is no secret. Father had been a member of the Reichsbanner, the organization in which his Catholic Centre Party had joined with liberals and Social Democrats to defend the republic against Communists and Nazis. It's not every school headmaster who gets involved in street fights and comes home bloody, as Johannes Fest did. But after 1933 he was a headmaster no longer, suspended indefinitely by the new political masters. The family's status and income were lost, their lives transformed. Grandfather had to come out of retirement to earn a bit for them. Father never worked again. The Nazis did try to cajole him back into teaching, since any observable dissent was bad publicity. They even offered accelerated promotion if he would outwardly conform. He remained firm.

Family tension became palpable. Mother, bearing the brunt of straitened family circumstances, asks Father if he might not compromise. Weren't lies always the resort of the "little people"? He replies: "We aren't little people." It is one of the maxims that guided the conduct of Fest's father and a few friends. (The title of his son's memoir comes from a Gospel passage that he would often quote, Peter promising Jesus: "Even if all others fall away—not I.") There were some Germans who made sure that they were carrying something in both hands when they went out into the street, the only plausible ground for not giving the required "Heil Hitler" salute to anyone they met. But Fest's father goes out resolutely empty-handed.

"Keep your head down," Johannes [father of Joachim] told his family, "but don't let it make you smaller." Young Joachim didn't always listen. A classmate reports him for carving a Hitler caricature on his desk. (He has been scribbling them on surfaces all over town.) As a consequence, he is removed from the school; his brothers too. The episode is just one instance of an independence akin to his father's.

The friends of the Fests—they now became former friends—and many neighbors and acquaintances fell by the wayside, even without being keen Nazis. Only one of the 12 families in the apartment block was in the party. The rest merely went along as things changed, drifting deeper into acquiescence, making excuses even as stable social and political structures fell apart in the name of a new "people's community." The Nazis, after all, were formally the legitimate government, however brutal their conduct of affairs—from the realm of international diplomacy to the arbitrary laws that replaced justice down to the small changes in everyday life, the swindles and favoritism of party members.

By recording these small changes, Joachim Fest creates a picture of how the one-party state operated on an intimate level, and exerted its unbreakable grip. It recalls the bleak account of incremental misery in Victor Klemperer's diaries of the period. A woman sees a Jewish-looking man in the street not wearing a star, pursues and denounces him. There are first rumors and then reliable evidence of atrocities.

Anti-Semitism had considerably more popular resonance than many other Nazi policies, such as the campaign for "Lebensraum" in the east. How many Germans would have wanted to up sticks and resettle somewhere on the vast Russian plains? As for Jewish Germans themselves, even after Kristallnacht there were those who waited for the Nazi "phase" to pass. Their trust in a culture that had produced Kant, Goethe, Schiller, Lessing and Beethoven, a culture into which they felt they had assimilated, meant that they delayed escape too long.

But was it German culture that produced Kant, Goethe, et al.?  Or was it the Graeco-Roman and Judeo-Christian culture that had its sources in Athens and Jerusalem? That is one question.  A second question is whether talk of production is anywhere near adequate, whether any culture could produce such geniuses as opposed merely to providing  a fertile soil in which they developed themselves.

A third question is whether we are not now drifting toward a totalitarian unculture in which the slightest deviations from politically correct modes of thought and speech bring down drastic punishments on those who think they can speak their minds in private and in public without fear of reprisal from illiberal 'liberals.'

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How Much Time Should be Spent on Philosophy?

Our Czech friend Vlastimil Vohanka writes,

You blogged that doing philosophy has great value in itself; even if philosophy is aporetic. But how often, or how long per day or month, should one devote to it? Doing philosophy seems (to me at least) to have diminishing returns, if philosophy is aporetic. Or has your experience been different?

My approach to philosophy could be called radically aporetic.  Thus I hold not only that philosophy is best approached aporetically, via its problems, but also that its central problems are insoluble.  Thus I tend, tentatively and on the basis of inductive evidence,  to the view that the central problems of philosophy, while genuine and thus not amenable to Wittgensteinian or other dissolution, are true aporiai, impasses.  It is clear that one could take a broadly aporetic approach without subscribing to the insolubility thesis.  But I go 'whole hog.'  Hence radically aporetic.

I won't explain this any further, having done so elsewhere, but proceed to V.'s question.

I take our friend to be asking the following.  How much time ought one devote to philosophy if philosophy is its problems and they are insoluble?  But there is a deeper and logically prior question lurking in the background:  Why do philosophy at all if its problems are insoluble? What good is philosophy aporetically pursued?

1. It is good in that it conduces to intellectual humility, to an appreciation of our actual predicament in this life, which is one of profound ignorance concerning what would be most worth knowing if we could know it. The aporetic philosopher is a Socratic philosopher, one who knows what he knows and knows what he does not know. The aporetic philosopher is a debunker of epistemic pretense. One sort of epistemic pretense is that of the positive scientists who, succumbing to the temptation to wax philosophical, overstep the bounds of their competence, proposing bogus solutions to philosophical problems, and making incoherent assertions. They often philosophize without knowing it, and they do it incompetently, without self-awareness and self-criticism.  I have given many examples of this in these pages.  Thus philosophy as I conceive it is an important antidote to scientism.  Scientism is an enemy of the humanities and I am a defender of the humanities.

There is also the threat emanating from political ideologies such as communism and leftism and Islamism and their various offshoots.  The critique of these and other pernicious worldviews is a task for philosophy.  And who is better suited for debunking operations than the aporetician?

2. Beyond its important debunking use, philosophy aporetically pursued has a spiritual point and purpose. If there are indeed absolutely insoluble problems, they mark the boundary of the discursive intellect and point beyond it.  Immersion in philosophical problems brings the discursive mind to an appreciation of its limits and raises the question of what, if anything, lies beyond the limits and how one may gain access to it.

I take the old-fashioned view that the ultimate purpose of human life, a purpose to which all others must be subordinated, is to search for, and if possible, participate in the Absolute.  There are several approaches to the Absolute, the main ones being philosophy, religion, and mysticism. 

The radical aporetician in philosophy goes as far as he can with philosophy, but hits a dead-end, and is intellectually hnest enough to admit that he is at his wit's end.  This motivates him to explore other paths to the Absolute, paths via faith/revelation and mystical intuition.  The denigration of the latter by most contemporary philosophers merely shows how spiritually benighted and shallow they are, how historically uniformed, and in some cases, how willfully stupid.

But once a philosopher always a philosopher. So the radical aporetician does not cease philosophizing while exploring the other paths; he uses philosophy to chasten the excess of those other paths.  And so he denigrates reason as little as he denigrates faith/revelation and mystical intuition.  He merely assigns to reason its proper place.

Now to V.'s actual question.  How much time for philosophy?  A good chunk of every day.  Just how much depending on the particular circumstances of one's particular life. But time must also be set aside for prayer and meditation, the reading of the great scriptures, and other religious/ mystical practices.

For one ought to be a truth-seeker above else. But if one is serious about seeking truth, then one cannot thoughtlessly assume that the only access to ultimate truth is via philosophy.   A person who refuses to explore other paths is like the churchmen who refused to look through Galileo's telescope.  They 'knew' that Aristotle had 'proven' the 'quintessential' perfection of celestial bodies, a perfection that would disallow any such 'blemishes' as craters.  So they refused to look and see.

One of my correspondents is a retired philosophy of professor and a Buddhist.  He maintains that one ought to spend  as much time meditating as one spends on philosophy.  So if one philosophizes for five hours per day, then one ought to meditate for five hours per day!  A hard saying indeed!   

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In the Orwellian world of the leftist loon, black is white, so black privilege, which exists, becomes white privilege, which doesn't.

But there is no point in serious discussion with delusional leftards, so the best course of action is mockery and derision either in the moderate style of Kurt Schlichter or the take-no-prisoners style of Jim Goad.

In the interests of full disclosure, I am not now and never have been a redneck or a Southerner and I don't agree with everything Goad says.  But I am heartily sick of lying liberal scum and their endless race-baiting, double-standards, and preternatural dumbassery.     

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More on Values and Variables and Logical Form: An Aporetic Hexad

David Brightly comments:

. . .  my old copy of Alan Hamilton, Logic for Mathematicians, CUP 1978, uses 'statement variables' in his account of the 'statement calculus', as here. The justification for 'variable' is surely that statements have values, namely truth and falsehood. The truth value of a compound statement is calculated from the truth values of its component simple statements by composition of the truth functions corresponding to the logical connectives. This is analogous to the evaluation of an arithmetic expression by composition of arithmetic functions applied to the values of arithmetic variables.

I detect a possible conflation of two senses of 'value.'  There is 'value' in the sense of truth value, and there is 'value' in the sense of the value of a variable.

If I am not mistaken, talk of truth values in the strict sense of this phrase enters the history of logic first with Gottlob Frege (1848-1925).  Truth and Falsity for him are not properties of propositions, but values of propositional functions.  Thus the propositional function denoted by 'x is wise'  has True for its value with Socrates as argument, and False for its value with Nero as argument.  Please note the ambiguity of 'argument.'  We are now engaging in MathSpeak.  The analogy with mathematics is obvious.  The squaring function has 4 for its value with 2 or -2 as arguments.  Propositional functions map their arguments onto the two truth values.

But we also speak in a different sense of the value of a variable.  The bound variables in

(x)(x is a man --> x is mortal)

range over real items.  These items are the values of the bound variables but they are not truth values.  Therefore, one should not confuse 'value' in the sense of truth value with 'value' in the sense of value of a variable.  When Quine famously stated that "To be is to be the value of a [bound] variable" he was not referring to truth values.

Brightly says that "The justification for 'variable' is surely that statements have values, namely truth and falsehood."  I think that is a mistake that trades on the confusion just exposed.  Agreed, statements have truth values.  But it doesn't follow that that placeholders for statements are variables.

I was pleased to see that Hamilton observes the distinction I drew several times between an abbreviation and a placeholder.  He uses 'label' for 'abbreviation,' but no matter.  But I distinguish a placeholder from a variable while Hamilton doesn't.  

To appreciate the distinction, first note that with respect to variables we ought to make a three-way distinction among the variable, say 'x,' the value, say Socrates, and the substituend, say 'Socrates.'  Now consider the argument:

Tom is tall or Tom is fat
Tom is not tall
-------
Tom is fat

This argument has the form of the Disjunctive Syllogism:

P v Q
~P
-------
Q.

Obviously, 'P' and 'Q' are not abbreviations (labels); if they were then the second display would not display an argument form.   It would be an abbreviated argument.  But it doesn't follow that 'P' and 'Q' are variables. For if they were variables, then they would have both substituends andf values.  But while they have substituends, e.g., the sentences 'Tom is tall' and 'Tom is fat,' they don't have values.  Why not?  Because we are not quantifying over propositions (or statements if you prefer).   There are no quantifiers in the form diagram.  (This is not to say that one cannot quantify over propositions.)

'Tom' is tall' is one of many possible substituends for 'P.'  But 'Tom is tall' is not the value of 'P.'  For we are not quantifying over sentences.  We are not quantifying over propositions either.  So *Tom is tall* is also not a value of 'P.'

My thesis is that placeholders in the propositional calculus are arbitrary propositional constants.  Since they are constants, they are not variables.   It is a subtle distinction, I'll grant you that, but it seems necessary if we are to think precisely about these matters.  But then one man's necessary distinction is another man's hair-splitting.

You also argue that London must wrongly decide that 'if roses are red then roses are red' (RR) is a contingency, because we say it can be seen as having the form 'P-->Q' and in general statements of this form are contingencies. Indeed they are. But we don't so decide. We say this is a special case in which P and Q stand for the same simple sentence, 'roses are red', not different ones. P and Q are therefore either both true or both false and either way the truth function for --> returns true. Hence this special case is tautologous. We disagree that the move from RR to 'P-->Q' must be seen as an abstraction. We retain the information that P and Q stand for specific substatements within RR, which may themselves have internal structure. 'Form' is a device for making such structure explicit.

So you are saying that 'P --> Q' has a special case that is tautologous. But that makes no sense to me if RR has both forms.  A sentence (understood to have one definite meaning) is tautologous if its logical form is tautologous, and if RR has the form 'P--> Q' then it it is not tautologous as an instance of that form.  So you seem committed to saying that RR is both tautologous and not tautologous.

Isn't that obvious?  If one and same sentence (understood to have one definite meaning) has two logical forms, one tautologous and the other non-tautologous, then one and the same sentence is both tautologous and non-tautologous -- which is a contradiction.

One solution, as I have suggested several times already, is to say that, while 'P --> P' is a special case of 'P -->Q,' namely the case in which P = Q, the two forms are not both forms of 'If roses are red, then roses are red.'  Only one of them is, the first one.  The second is a form of the first form, not a form of the English sentence.

Putting the problem as an aporetic hexad:

1. 'P -->P' is a special case of 'P --> Q'
2. If a proposition s instantiates form F, and F is a special case of form G, then s instantiates G.
3. 'P --> P' is a tautologous form.
4. 'P --> Q' is a non-tautologous form.
5. No one proposition instantiates both a tautologous and a non-tautologous form.
6. 'If roses are red, then roses are red' instantiates the form 'P --> P.'

The hexad is inconsistent.  Phoenix and London agree on (1), (3), (4), and (6).  The Phoenician solution is to reject (2).  The Londonian solution is reject (5).

But the Phoenicians have an argument for (5):

7. The logical form of a proposition is not an accidental feature of it but determines the very identity of the proposition.
Ergo
8. If s instantiates form F, then necessarily, s instantiates F.
ergo
5. No one proposition instantiates both a tautologous and a non-tautologous form.

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On the Use and Abuse of Occam's Razor

I am not historian enough to pronounce upon the relation of what is standardly called Occam's Razor to the writings of the 14th century William of Ockham. The different spellings of his name will serve as a reminder to be careful about reading contemporary concerns into the works of philosophers long dead. Setting aside historical concerns, Occam's Razor is standardly taken to be a principle of theoretical economy or  parsimony that states:

   OR. Do not multiply entities beyond necessity.

It is sometimes formulated in Latin: Entia non sunt multiplicanda praeter necessitatem. The principle is presumably to be interpreted qualitatively rather than quantitatively, thus:

   OR*. Do not multiply TYPES of entity beyond necessity.

It is not individual entities that are not to be multiplied, but types or kinds or categories of entity.  To illustrate.  Some criticized David Lewis' extreme modal realism on the ground that it proliferates concreta: there are not only all the actual  concreta , there are all those merely possible ones as well.  He responded quite plausibly to the proliferation charge by pointing out that the Razor applies to categories of entity, not individual entities, and that category-wise his ontology is sparse indeed.

'Multiply' is a picturesque way of saying posit. (Obviously, there are as many categories of entity as there are, and one cannot cause them to 'multiply.')  And let's not forget the crucial qualification: beyond necessity.  That means: beyond what is needed for purposes of adequate explanation of the data that are to be explained.  Hence:

OR**  Do not posit types of entity in excess of what is needed for purposes of explanation.

So the principle enjoins us to refrain from positing more types of entity than we need to explain the phenomena that need to be explained. It is obvious that (OR**) does not tell us to prefer theory T1 over theory T2 if T1 posits fewer types of entity than T2. What it tells us is to prefer T1 over T2 if T1 posits fewer types of entity AND accounts adequately for all  the data. So there is a trade-off between positing and accounting.

Our old pal London Ed sometimes seems to be unaware of this.  He seems to think that simply brandishing the Razor suffices to refute a theory.  Together with this he sometimes displays a tendency to think that whole categories of entity can be as it were  shamed out of existence by labeling them 'queer.'  I picked up that word from him.  A nice, arch, donnish epithet.  But that is just name-calling, a tactic best left to ideologues. 

What is offensive about Razor brandishing is the apparent ignorance on the part of some brandishers of the fact that we all agree that one ought not posit types of entity in excess of the needs of explanation. What we don't agree on, however, is whether or not a given class of entities is needed for explanatory purposes.  That is where the interesting questions and the real disagreements lie. 

The Razor is a purely methodological principle.  It does not dictate any particular ontology.  Taken as such, and apart from its association with the nominalist Ockham, it does not favor nominalism (the view that everything is a particular) over realism (the view that there are both particulars and universals).  It does not favor any ontology over any other. 

Nor does it rule out so-called 'abstract objects' such as Fregean propositions.  I gave an argument a while back (1 August 2010 to be precise) to the conclusion that there cannot, as a matter of metaphysical necessity, be nothing at all, that there must be at least one abstract object, a proposition.  A fellow philosopher commented on that post, Thinking about Nothing, and made the objection that I was multipying entities.  But again, the salient question is whether the entity-positing is necessary for explanatory purposes.  If my argument was a good one, then it was.  One cannot refute such an argument simply by claiming that it introduces a type of entity that is less familiar than one's favorite types.

To sum up.  Philosophy is in large part, though not entirely, an explanatory enterprise.  As such it ought to proceed according to the methodological principle formulated above as (OR**).  This principle is not controversial.  Hence it should not be presented to one's opponents as if it were controversial and denied by them.  Nor is it a principle that takes sides on the substantive questions of ontology. 

What I am objecting to is the idea is that by earnest asseverations of a wholly uncontroversial methodological principle one actually  advances the substantive debate.  After all, no one enjoins that we multiply entities beyond necessity.

Satan and Man at Harvard

Abdication of authority.  There is no coward like a university administrator. 

Must Singular Thoughts be Object-Dependent?

What follows are some ideas from London Ed about a book he is writing.  He solicits comments.  Mine are in blue.

The logical form thing was entertaining but rather off-topic re the fictional names thing. On which, Peter requested some more. 

Let’s step right back. I want to kick off the book with an observation about how illusion impedes the progress of science. It looks as though the sun is going round the earth, so early theories of the universe had the earth standing still. It seems as though objects are continuously solid, and so science rejected the atomists’ theory and adopted Aristotle’s theory for more than a millenium.

A final example from the psychology of perception: in 1638, Descartes takes a eye of a bull and shows how images are projected onto the retina. He finally disproves the ‘emissive theory of sight’. The emissive theory is the naturally occurring idea that eyesight is emitted from your eye and travels to and hits the distant object you are looking at. If you ask a young child why you can’t see when your eyes are shut, he replies (‘because the eyesight can’t get out’). 

Scientific progress is [often] about rejecting theories based on what our cognitive and perceptual framework suggests to us, and adopting theories based on diligent observation and logic.

We reject ‘eyebeams’. We reject the natural idea that the mental or sensitive faculty can act at a distance.  When we look at the moon, science rejects the idea that a little ethereal piece of us is travelling a quarter of a million miles into space. Yet – turning to the main subject of the book – some philosophers think that objects themselves somehow enter our thoughts. Russell writes to Frege, saying “I believe that in spite of all its snowfields Mont Blanc itself is a component part of what is actually asserted in the proposition ‘Mont Blanc is more than 4,000 metres high”. Kaplan mentions, with apparent approval, the idea that the proposition ‘John is tall’ has two components: the property expressed by the predicate ‘is tall’, and the individual John. “That’s right, John himself, right there, trapped in a proposition”.  The dominant theory in modern philosophical logic is ‘direct reference’, or object-dependent theories of semantics: a proper name has no meaning except its bearer, and so the meaning of ‘John is tall’ has precisely the components that Kaplan describes.

BV:  I too find the notion that there are Russellian (as opposed to Fregean) propositions very hard to swallow.  If belief is a propositional attitude, and I believe that Peter is now doing his grades, it is surely not Peter himself, intestinal contents and all, who is a constituent of the proposition that is the accusative of my act of belief.  The subject constituent of the proposition cannot be that infinitely propertied gnarly chunk of external reality, but must be a thinner sort of object, one manageable by a finite mind, something along the lines of a Fregean sense.

The purpose of the proposed book is to advance science by showing how such object-dependent theories are deeply mistaken, and also to explain why they are so compelling, because of their basis on a cognitive illusion as powerful as the illusions that underlie the geocentric theory, or the emissive theory of sight.

What is the illusion? The argument for object dependence is roughly as follows

(1) We can have so-called ‘singular thoughts’, such as when we think that John is tall, i.e. when we have thoughts expressable [expressible] by propositions [sentences, not propositions] whose subject term is a proper name or some other non-descriptive singular term.

(2) A singular term tells us which individual the proposition is about, without telling us anything about it. I.e. singular terms, proper names, demonstratives, etc. are non-descriptive. They are ‘bare individuators’.

BV:  This is not quite right.  Consider the the first-person singular pronoun, 'I.'  This is an indexical expression.  If BV says, 'I am hungry,' he refers to BV; if PL says 'I am hungry,' he refers to PL.  Either way, something is conveyed about the nature of the referent, namely, that it is a person or a self. So what Ed said is false as it stands.  A use of 'I' does tell us something about the individual the sentence containing 'I'  is about.

Examples are easily multiplied.  Apart from the innovations of the Pee Cee, 'she' tells us that the individual referred to is female.  'Here' tells us that the item denoted is a place, typically.  'Now' picks out times.  And there are other examples.

There are no bare items.  Hence there cannot be reference to bare items.  All reference conveys some property of the thing referred to.  But variables may be a counterexample.  Consider 'For any x, x = x.' One could perhaps uses variables in such a way that there is no restriction on what they range over.  But it might be best to stay away from this labyrinth.

One criticism, then, is that there are no bare individuators.  A second is that it is not a singular term, but a use of a singular term that individuates.  Thus 'I' individuates nothing.  It is PL's use of 'I' that picks out PL.  

(3) If a singular term is non-descriptive, its meaning is the individual it individuates. A singular term cannot tell us which individual the proposition is about, unless there exists such an individual.

The course of the book is then to show why we don’t have to be forced into assumption (3).  There doesn’t have to be (or to exist) an individual that is individuated. The theory of non-descriptive singular terms is then developed in the way I suggested in my earlier posts. Consider the inference

Frodo is a hobbit
Frodo has large feet
-------
Some hobbit has large feet

I want to argue that the semantics of ‘Frodo’ is purely inferential. I.e. to understand the meaning of ‘Frodo’ in that argument, it is enough to understand the inference that it generates. That is all.

BV:  'Frodo' doesn't generate anything.  What you want to say is that the meaning of 'Frodo' is exhausted by the inferential role this term plays in the (valid) argument depicted.  Sorry to be such a linguistic prick.

What you are saying is that 'Frodo,' though empty, has a meaning, but this meaning is wholly reducible to the purely syntactical role it plays in the above argument.  (So you are not an eliminativist about the meanings of empty names.)  But if the role is purely syntactical, then the role of 'Frodo' is the same as the role of the arbitrary individual constant 'f' in the following valid schema:

Hf
Lf
-------
(Ex)(Hx & Lx).

But then what distinguishes the meaning of 'Frodo' from that of 'Gandalf'?

Meinongian nonentities are out.  Fregean senses are out.  There are no referents in the cases of empty names.  And yet they have meaning.  So the meaning is purely syntactical.  Well, I don't see how you can squeeze meaning out of bare syntax.  Again, what distinguishes the meaning of the empty names just cited?  The obviously differ in meaning, despite lacking both Sinn and Bedeutung.

We don’t need an object-dependent semantics to explain such inferences, and hence we don’t need object-dependence to explain the semantics of proper names. If an inferential semantics is sufficient, then the Razor tells us it is necesssary: Frustra fit per plura, quod potest fieri per pauciora.

BV:  You should state explicitly that you intend your inferential semantics to hold both for empty and nonempty names.

And now we see the illusion. The proposition

John is thinking of Obama (or Frodo, or whomever)

has a relational form: “—is thinking of –”.  But it does not express a relation. The illusion consists in the way that the relation of the language so strongly suggests a relation in reality. It is the illusion that causes us “to multiply the things principally signified by terms in accordance with the multiplication of the terms”.

That’s the main idea. Obviously a lot of middle terms have been left out.  Have at it.

BV:  So I suppose what you are saying is that belief in the intentionality of thought is as illusory as the belief in the emissive theory of sight.  Just as the the eye does not emit an ethereal something that travels to the moon, e.g., the mind or the 'I' of the mind -- all puns intended! -- does not shoot out a ray of intentionality that gloms onto some Meinongian object, or some Thomistic merely intentional object, or some really existent object. 

You face two main hurdles.  The first I already mentioned.  You have to explain how to squeeze semantics from mere syntax.  The second is that there are theoretical alternatives to the view that intentionality is a relation other than yours.  To mention just one: there are adverbial theories of intentionality that avoid an act-object analysis of mental reference. 

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Saturday Night at the Oldies: Obscure '60's Psychedelia

How many of these do you remember?   If you were too much of the '60s then you probably don't remember anything assuming you still animate the mortal coil; if you were too little of the '60s then you won't remember any of these for a different reason.  But among the latter are some very beautiful songs from that amazingly creative time.

Fever Tree, The Sun Also Rises

Fever Tree, San Francisco Girls

Love,  Alone Again Or

Jefferson Airplane, Embryonic Journey

Moby Grape, Omaha

Moby Grape, I am not Willing

H.P. Lovecraft, The White Ship

Quicksilver Messenger Service, Pride of Man

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Fever Tree, The Sun Also Rises

Fever Tree, San Francisco Girls

Love,  Alone Again Or

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Moby Grape, Omaha

Moby Grape, I am not Willing

H.P. Lovecraft, The White Ship

Quicksilver Messenger Service, Pride of Man

Placeholders, Variables, and Logical Form

London Ed refers us to Understanding Arguments: an Introduction to Informal Logic, Robert Fogelin and Walter Sinnott-Armstrong, and provides this quotation:

Perhaps a bit more surprisingly, our definitions allow 'roses are red and roses are red' to be a substitution instance of 'p & q'. This example makes sense if you compare it to variables in mathematics. Using only positive integers, how many solutions are there to the equation 'x + y = 4'? There are three: 3+1, 1+3, and 2+2. The fact that '2+2' is a solution to 'x + y = 4' shows that '2' can be substituted for both 'x' and 'y' in the same solution. That's just like allowing 'roses are red' to be substituted for both 'p' and 'q', so that 'roses are red and roses are red' is a substitution instance of 'p & q' in propositional logic.

In general, then, we get a substitution instance of a propositional form by uniformly replacing the same variable with the same proposition throughout, but different variables do not have to be replaced with different propositions. The rule is this:

Different variables may be replaced with the same proposition [Ed: Let's call this the London rule], but different propositions may not be replaced with the same variable.

Suppose I am given the task of determining whether  the conditional English sentence 'If roses are red, then roses are red' is a tautology, a contradiction, or a contingency.  How do I proceed?

Step One is translation, or encoding.  Let upper case letters serve as placeholders for propositions.  Let '-->' denote the truth-functional connective known in the trade as the material or Philonian conditional.  I write 'P --> P.'

Step Two is evaluation.  Suppose for reductio that the truth value of 'P -->P' is false.  Then, by the definition of the Philonian conditional, we know that the antecedent must be true, and the consequent false.  But antecedent and consequent are the same proposition.  Therefore, the same proposition  is both true and false. This is a contradiction.  Therefore, the assumption that conditional is false is itself false.  Therefore the conditional is a tautology.

Now that obviously is the right answer since you don't need logic to know that 'If roses are red, then roses are red' is a tautology. (Assuming you know the definition of 'tautology.')  But if if Fogelin & Co. are right, and the 'P -->Q' encoding is permitted, then we get the wrong answer, namely, that the English conditional is a contingency.

I am assuming that if 'P-->Q' is a logical form of 'If roses are red, then roses are red,' then 'P -->Q' is a legitimate translation of 'If roses are red, then roses are red.'  As Heraclitus said, the way up and the way down are the same.  The assumption seems correct.

If I am right, then there must be something wrong with the mathematical analogy.  Now there is no doubt that Fogelin and his side kick are right when it comes to mathematics.  And I allow that what they say is true about variables in general.  Suppose I want to translate into  first-order predicate logic with identity the sentence, 'There is exactly one wise man.'  I would write, '[(Ex)Wx & (y)(Wy --> x = y)].'  Suppose Siddartha is the unique wise man.  Then Siddartha is both the value of 'x' and the value of 'y.' 

So different variables can have the same value.  And they can have the same substituend.  In the example, Siddartha is the value and 'Siddartha' is the substituend.  But is a placeholder the same as a variable?  I don't think so.   Here is a little argument:

No variable is  a constant
Every placeholder is an arbitrary constant
Every arbitrary constant is a constant
-------
No placeholder is a variable.

A placeholder is neither an abbreviation, nor a variable.  It is an arbitrary constant.  Thus the logical form of 'Al is fat' is Fa, not Fx. Fa is a proposition, not a propositional function.   'F' is a predicate constant.  'a' is an individual constant.  We cannot symbolize 'Al is fat' as Fx.  For Fx is not a proposition but a propositional function.  If 'a' were not an arbitrary constant, then Fa would not depict the logical form of 'Al is fat,' a form it shares with other atomic sentences.

Here is another argument:

Every variable is either free or bound by a quantifier
No placeholder is either free or bound by a quantifier
-------
No placeholder is a variable.

Here is a third argument:

Every variable has a domain over which it ranges
No placeholder has a domain over which it ranges
-------
No placeholder is a variable.

A fourth argument:

There is no quantification over propositions in the propositional calculus
-------
There are no propositional variables in the propositional calculus
If there are no propositional variables in the propositional calculus, then the placeholders in the propositional calculus cannot be variables
-------
The placeholders in the proposition calculus cannot be variables.

Punchline: because placeholders are not variables, the fact that the different variables can have the same value and the same substituend does not show that different placeholders can have the same  substituend.  'If roses are red, then roses are red' does not have the logical form 'P -->Q' and the latter form does not have as a substitutution-instance 'If roses are red, then roses are red.'

As I have said many times already, one cannot abstract away from the fact that the same proposition is both antecedent and consequent.

What one could say, perhaps, is that 'P --> P' has the higher order form 'P --> Q.'  But this latter form is not a form of the English sentence but a form of the form of the English sentence.

Ed can appeal to authority all he wants, but that is an unphilosophical move, indeed an informal fallacy.  He needs to show where I am going wrong.

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Abbreviations, Place-Holders, and Logical Form

On Her Deathbed: "I Fear that There is Nothing on the Other Side"

This from a correspondent:

My grandmother is on her deathbed.  My mother flew out to Boston to be there with her when she dies.  Of course my grandmother is putting up a good fight; however, they expected her to die yesterday.  My mother had a conversation with her while she was lucid.  She asked her, “Why are you fighting so hard?  Do you fear something?”

My grandmother’s reply, “I fear that there is nothing on the other side.”  Here is a woman who has spent eighty nine years of her life devoting herself to the [Catholic] church and her family.  Now, when it comes down to death she is clinging on because her entire life is behind her and the only thing that she faces in front of her is the uncertainty of whether there is a heaven awaiting her in the coming days.

If you were there at my grandmother’s deathbed and she would convey to you her fears, what would you tell her? 

I'm a philosopher, not a pastor, and what a dying nonphilosopher needs is pastoral care, not philosophical dialog.  But if I were to play the pastor I would say something along the following lines. 

"You have lived your long life faithfully and devotedly in the embrace of Holy Mother the Church.  She has presided over central events in your life, your baptism, first communion, confirmation, and your marriage.  She has provided guidance, moral instruction, comfort, and community  as you have navigated life's difficulties and disappointments.  She provided meaning and solace when your parents died, and your husband, and your many friends and relatives.  If your faith was a living faith and not a convenience or a matter of social conformity, then from time to time you had your doubts.  But through prayer and reflection you have repeatedly reaffirmed your faith.  You faith was made deeper and truer by those doubts and their overcoming." 

"I ask you now to recall those moments of calm reflection and existential lucidity, those moments when you were at your best physically, mentally, and spiritually.  I ask you to recall them, and above all I ask you not to betray them now when you are weak. Do not allow the decisions and resolutions of your finest and and clearest hours to be taken hostage by doubts and fears born of weakness.  Your weakness has called forth the most vicious attacks of the Adversary and his agents.  You have lived in the faith and now you must remain true to a course of life judged right at the height of your powers.  Your doubts are of the devil and they must be put aside.  Pray, and remain true to a course judged right." 

So that is what I would say to the old Irish Catholic woman on her deathbed.  I would exhort her to remain true to a course judged right in the moments of her highest existential lucidity and to bring her life to a successful completion.  The hour of death is not the time to grapple with the devil of doubt!

To myself and the others for whom the hora mortis is still a ways off, to those in the  sunshine of their strength, physical and mental, I say the following.  Now is the time to wrestle with doubts and either defeat them or succumb to them.  Now is the time to get serious about The Last Things.  It is far better to get serious  about them before they get serious about you.  Now is the time to face the reality of death without evasion and to prepare for a happy death.  Now is the time to realize that you don't have all the time in the world, that as the Zen Master Dogen says, "Impermanence is swift."  Now is the time to stop fooling yourself about how you are going to live forever.  For "What is your life? You are a mist that appears for a little while and then vanishes." (James 3, 14)

Related:  Six Types of Death Fear

Three Possible Death Bed Thoughts

Boko Haram and the Kidnapped School Girls

An important piece by Ayaan Hirsi Ali.

On the Scientism Front

We defenders of the humanities need to do battle on three fronts against three enemies: scientism, leftism, Islamism.  Each is represented by a disturbing number of crapweasels, individuals who won't own up to who and what they are.  Thus prominent scientisticists -- to give an ugly name to an ugly bunch -- will deny that there there is any such thing as scientism.  (See my Scientism category for documentation.)  And the same goes, mutatis mutandis, for the Pee Cee crowd and the Islamists. 

Here are two links so that you may know your enemies. 

Thomas Nagel and Stephen C. Myer's Signature in the Cell

Why Neil de Grasse Tyson is a Philistine (HTs: Dave Lull, J. Orsak, W. Chambers, et al.)

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Roger Scruton At The New Atlantis: 'Scientism In The Arts & Humanities'

Dallas Willard Remembered

Dallas Willard died on this date one year ago.  Here is what I wrote at the time.

The Eliminative Materialist

The eliminative materialist is a bit like a man who blows his brains out to be rid of a headache.  No head, no headache, no problem!

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If not, why not?

How Reasonable is it to Rely on Reason Alone?

Edith Stein, Finite and Eternal Being, tr. Reinhardt, ICS Publications, 2002, p. 22:

Reason would turn into unreason if it would stubbornly content itself with what it is able to discover with its own light, barring out everything which is made visible to it by a brighter and more sublime light.

Is it unreasonable to rely on reason alone, or is this exactly what reason demands?  If the latter, how could reason validate its demand?  Reason cannot validate itself by appeal to itself:  A circular validation is no validation at all.  So it is by a sort of transrational faith that reason relies on itself and accepts only what it can validate by its own lights.  But if reason allows transrational faith in justification of itself, then it ought to be open to other transrational or suprarational sources of insight.

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Solubility Skepticism, Religion, and Reason

Ruffin Crozat writes,

There is much depth in your short post on religion and reason from 6 May. Here are two points I often ponder about this topic:

First, I appreciate the difficulty of solving philosophical problems, but I wonder about the claim that they are insoluble (I suppose “insoluble” means “insoluble by humans alone”). If the problems are beyond mere human knowledge, how could we know this? One may inductively suspect insolubility by reflecting upon his experience of practicing philosophy, but how could he know the unknowable? If we can’t solve philosophical problems by philosophizing, then it seems we can’t conclude insolubility by philosophizing because this very conclusion would be a philosophical conclusion.

BV:  I hold that the central problems of philosophy are most of them genuine, some of them humanly important, but all of them insoluble.  And you are right, by 'insoluble' I mean insoluble by us or by beings of a similar cognitive architecture, ectypal intellects in Kant's jargon.   Furthermore, pace Nicholas Rescher, I don't count a 'solution' that is relative to some set of background assumptions and cognitive values as a solution.  Of course there are solutions in this sense.  Nominalists solve the problem of univerals in one way, realists in another, conceptualists in a third, etc. But those are merely intramural solutions.  What is wanted are solutions acceptable to all, solutions that hold ouside the walls of self-reinforcing enclaves of the like-minded.

You ask a very important question:  How could one know that the central philosophical problems are insoluble?  You yourself supplied the clue:  by induction from philosophical experience.  The best and the brightest have been at this game for thousands of years but not one single problem has been solved during this period, solved to the satisfaction of all competent practitioners. Everything is up for grabs, even the most elementary and picayune topics.  Take a look at what is going one as we speak in the thread on logical form.  Philosophers can't even agree on the most basic concepts of deductive logic.  There is controversy everywhere.  This is a plain fact.

The strife of systems and the ubiquity and longevity of controversy need explaining and I offer the insolubility thesis as the best explanation.  Why haven't the problems been solved?  Because they are insoluble.  I agree with Benson Mates on this point.  Of course, the following is an invalid argument form:  Such-and-such has hitherto not been accomplished; ergo, such-and-such will never be accomplished.  But then every inductive argument is invalid.  Some inductive arguments, however, do quite reasonably support their conclusions. 

But you can and should press your objection.  If I maintain that the problems of philosophy are insoluble, then, given that the metaphilosophical problem of whether or not philosophical problems are soluble is a philosophical problem,  it follows that the metaphilosophical problem is insoluble.  Is this a difficult for my position?  Not obviously.  I simply 'bite the bullet' as they say.  I accept that the meta problem is also insoluble.

In fact, the insolubility of the meta problem is further evidence of my thesis.

In other words, I am not dogmatizing.  I am not claiming to know with certainty that the problems of philosophy are insoluble.  I am not claiming to have solved the meta problem.  I am merely claiming that the insolubility thesis is very reasonably maintained.  Not every truth is such that we can know it to be true.  With some truths the most we can expect here below is reasonable belief.

Compare God and the soul.  I do not claim to know with certainty whether either exists.  I claim merely that it it is reasonable to affirm both.  

Second, I agree that it’s wise to intelligently practice religion and mysticism -- which, by the way, rules out superstition and group-think! Take religion: religious practice does not exclude reason, as Mates’ quote implies. It is a false dilemma to say “One can seek truth either by reason or religion, but not both.” Why not both? If I try to lift a stone and realize I can’t manage alone, this would not entail that I can or should stop lifting. If a stronger person assists me, and I trust his assistance, I can still lift. He may request my help. He may even require that I give it my all, and I may grow from the effort. Likewise, intelligent religion requires reason.

Consider Christianity: The biblical conception of faith is “trust based on good reasons”. This point is clear in passages such as Hebrews 11:1 and 1 Peter 3:15. In the Gospels, Jesus himself reasons and encourages others to do the same. Christian faith calls for the whole self: heart, mind, soul, and strength.  

I’d be interested in your thoughts on reason and intelligent religion.

BV: I basically agree with you.  Reason in the end must confess its own infirmity.  It cannot deliver on its promises. The truth-seeker must explore other avenues.  Religion is one, mysticism is another. 

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Logical Form and the Symmetry Thesis

"The most conspicuous purpose of logic, in its applications to science and everyday discourse, is the justification and criticism of inference." (Emphasis added, Willard Van Orman Quine, Methods of Logic, 2nd revised ed., Holt, Rinehart & Winston, 1959, p. 33.

Perhaps the dispute in the earlier thread could be resolved if we all could agree on the following.

1. The most specific logical form of a deductive argument A is the form relevant for assessing whether the reasoning embodied in A is valid or invalid.

2. Every deductive argument has exactly one most specific form.

3. Symmetry Thesis:  if the most specific form of A is valid, then A is valid; if the most specific form of A is invalid, then A is invalid.

In case 'most specific logical form' needs explanation, consider the difference between the following valid  form from the predicate calculus and the following invalid form from the propositional calculus:

Fa
Ga
-------
(Ex)(Fx & Gx)

p
q
-------
r.

The former is the most specific logical form of 'Al is fat, Al is gay, ergo, something is both fat and gay.'  The latter, if a form of the argument at all, is less specific: it abstracts from the internal subpropositional logical structure of the constituent propositions.

Now three examples in illustration of (1)-(3).

Example One.  Call the following argument 'Charley':

Tom is tall
-------
Tom is tall.

Although the above display, which is a written expression of the argument and not the argument itself, shows two tokens of the sentence type 'Tom is tall,' the argument consists of exactly one proposition.  Anyone who executes the reasoning displayed infers the  proposition *Tom is tall* from itself.  (I am using asterisks to mention propositions.  So '*Tom is tall*' is an abbreviation of 'the proposition expressed by a tokening of the sentence type "Tom is tall".') 

It is perfectly clear that the reasoning embodied by Charley is valid and that its form is 'P ergo P.'  The reasoning is not from P to some proposition that may or may not be identical to P.  Therefore the concrete episode of reasoning does not have the form 'P ergo Q.' 

But let us irenically  concede that if one wished, for whatever reason, to abstract not only from the content of the argument but also from the plain fact that the argument involves exactly one proposition, one could view the form 'P ergo P' as a special case of 'P ergo Q.'   And I will also concede, to keep peace between Phoenix and London, that the argument instantiates the second invalid form, even though I don't believe that this is the case.

Either way, the Symmetry Thesis stands and the Asymmetry Thesis falls.  For as G. Rodrigues in the earlier thread pointed out, 'P ergo P' is the most specific form of Charley. 

Example Two.  Call the following argument 'Kitty Kat.'

If cats like cream, then cats like cream
Cats like cream
-------
Cats like cream.

Please note that there is no equivocation in this example: 'Cats like cream' has the same sense in all four of its occurrences.

Kitty Kat's most specific form is 'P --> P, P, ergo P.'  This form is valid.  So Kitty Kat is valid, notwithstanding the fact, if it is a fact, that Kitty Kat also instantiates the formal fallacy, Affirming the Consequent: P --> Q, Q, ergo P.  By (1) above, the fact, if it is a fact, that Kitty Kat instantiates Affirming the Consequent is irrelevant to the assessment of the validity/invalidty of the reasoning embodied in Kitty Kat.

Example Three.  Call the following example 'Massey':

If God created something , then God created everything.
God created everything.
-------
God created something.

 

This argument fits the pattern of the formal fallacy, Affirming the Consequent:

 

If p then q
q
-------
p.

 

But the argument also has a valid form:

 

Every x is such that Cgx
-------
Some x is such that Cgx. 

Please note that if an argument is valid, adding  a premise can't make it invalid; this principle is what allows us to disregard the first line.

 

(Example adapted from Gerald J. Massey, "The Fallacy behind Fallacies," Midwest Studies in Philosophy VI (1981), pp. 489-500)

The most specific form of Massey is the predicate logic form above displayed.  Since it is valid, Massey is valid.

Symmetry Thesis vindicatus est.

Is everybody happy now?      

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A Question for Benson Mates

According to Benson Mates (1919-2009), all the major problems of philosophy are "insoluble though intelligible." (Skeptical Essays, U. of Chicago Press, 1981, p. 13)  If true, this would explain why the problems of philosophy have not been solved.  But "the rational minds among us are not inclined to give up the struggle, while the rest become religious mystics or philosophical obscurantists . . . ." (p. x)

But why continue to struggle with the problems of philosophy?  To better appreciate the insolubility thesis?  Apparently, Mates thinks that while the problems can't be solved or dissolved, one ought to keep trying to solve them anyway.  But how rational is this?  I should think that a "rational mind" should not attempt to do what he has already convinced himself cannot be done. Is it not more rational to seek a path to truth beyond philosophy?

How rational is it to place one's sole faith in reason when one has, by one's own lights, seen the infirmity of reason?

If a certain weight needs lifting, a weight beyond my ability to lift, and known to be such, does it make sense to struggle with it?  Or is it more rational to seek assistance?  By rejecting out of  hand the assistance of religion and mysticism --  which he foolishly conflates -- Mates shows that his commitment to reason is irrational, as irrational as my pride-driven conceit that I am master of any difficulty that I should encounter.

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The Liberal

A liberal is the kind of person who would extend the right to vote to felons but will not grant the right to life to the unborn.  How 'liberal' is that?  How 'inclusive'?  How respectful of 'diversity'?

Should felons be allowed to vote?  The conservative answers with alacrity.  "Of course not.  Why should those who cannot order their own lives prudently be allowed to have a say in the ordering of society?"

There is no wisdom on the left.

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The Proctology of a Pessimist

Arthur Schopenhauer was a foe of noise in all its forms, as one can see from his delightful essay, On Noise. The “infernal cracking of whips” especially got on his nerves. (One wonders what he would say about the Beelzebubic booming of boom boxes.)

One day, a cleaning lady made what he considered to be an excessive racket outside his rooms. He asked her to quiet down, which led to an argument. Push came to shove, and the lady ended up at the foot of the stairs. The local court ruled in favor of the Putzfrau, and Schopenhauer was ordered to pay her a monthly sum of money for the rest of her long life. When at last she died, the philosopher opened his journal and penned what is arguably the greatest Latin pun of all time: Anus obit, onus abit.

What wit, what pith, what anagrammatical punsterism! All hail to Schopenhauer and his scowl of Minerva! Note first that the line is an anagram: there are two constructions, in this case two independent clauses, each of which represents a transposition of the letters of the other. A second example of an anagram: Democritus docet risum = Democritus teaches laughingly. The second thing to note is that ‘anus’ has two Latin meanings depending on whether the ‘a’ is short or long. Short, it means alte Frau, Greisin, old woman. (My Latin dictionary is Lateinisch-Deutsch.) Long, it means 1) Fussring, 2) (euphem.) After (= anus in the English sense).

Schopenhauer’s aphorism in English: The old woman/anus is dead; the burden is lifted. So Schopenhauer was not necessarily being crude, though of course he was punning.

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Decadent Art, Buddhist Statuary, and the Taliban

Our Czech friend, Vlastimil Vohanka, writes:

A question: Do you remember the title of your blog post in which you argued, if I recall correctly, that the Taliban damage to the Buddha statues would be evil -- or ought not to take place -- even if nobody ever got to know about it? I also recall dimly that the post was a reply to Peter Lupu. Is the post still online, somewhere?

Vlasta, I believe you are referring to this post.  It was a response, not to Peter Lupu, but to Mike Valle. (I had the pleasure of their company at Sunday breakfast  yesterday.)

Here is how the post begins:

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

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

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

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

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

The decadent art of the 20th century reflects not only the corruption of aesthetic sensibility but also a moral corruption.  So my objection to Serrano is not merely aesthetic but moral.  The purpose of art is not to debase but to elevate, refine, ennoble. 

[. . .]

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

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

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

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

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

Tenth Anniversary Pledge

This weblog commenced operations on 4 May 2004.  I thank you for reading.

My pledge: You will never see advertising on this site.  You will never see anything that jumps around in your visual field.  I will not beg for money with a 'tip jar.'  This is a labor of love and I prize my independence.

I also pledge to continue the fight, day by day, month by month, year by year, against the hate-America, race-baiting, religion-bashing, liberty-destroying, gun-grabbing, lying fascists of the Left.  As long as health and eyesight hold out.

I will not pander to anyone, least of all the politically correct.

And I won't back down.  Are you with me?

Addenda:

Philosopher TB writes, "I’m with you, man!  I’ve learned a good deal from your blog, and, what’s better, you inspire me to be a better person.  I’ve only been following for about a year, but it was a great year of blogging."

JC writes, "Congratulations on ten years of fighting leftist nonsense! If you're interested in reading some history dealing with leftist delusions I recommend Simon Schama's Citizens: A Chronicle of the French Revolution. I also recommend this excellent docudrama on the French Revolution: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-SP4iii_THQ

I also cannot recommend enough Martin Malia's The Soviet Tragedy: A History of Socialism in Russia, 1917-199.

 

The Johnny Cash version of "I Won't Back Down."  

 

TC writes, "Congratulations on celebrating 10 years in the Blog world.  It appears that you are attracting and interacting with some first rate minds and providing a great service to the public.  I hope that some of your correspondents who are still in the academic world or in other positions in which they might be able to influence people are recommending your page. Congrats again and keep up the great work!"

 

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Logical Form and the Supposed Asymmetry of Validity and Invalidity: A Defense of Symmetry

For the 'Londonistas,'  Ed and David, partners in logical investigations.  We are unlikely ever to agree, but clarification of differences is an attainable and worthwhile goal, here, and in every arena of controversy.  Have at it, boys.

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

1. Suppose someone reasons as follows. 'Some Englishmen are Londoners; therefore, some Londoners are Englishmen.'  To reason is one thing, to reason correctly another.  So one can ask: Is this specimen of reasoning correct or incorrect?  This is the sort of question with which logic deals.  Logic is the study of inference and argument from a normative point of view.   It seeks to articulate the criteria of correct and incorrect reasoning.  It is analogous to ethics which seeks to articulate the criteria of correct and incorrect action.

2. We all take for granted that some reasoning is correct and some incorrect, and we are all more or less naturally good at reasoning correctly.  Almost everyone grasps immediately that if Tom is an Englishman and some Englishmen are Londoners, it does not follow that Tom is a Londoner. What distinguishes the logician is his reflective stance.  He reflects upon reasoning in general and tries to extract and systematize the principles of correct reasoning.  'Extract' is an apt metaphor.  The logician  develops a theory from his pre-theoretical understanding of argumentative correctness.  As every teacher of logic comes to learn, one must already be logical to profit from the study of logic just as one must already be ethical to profit from the study of ethics.  It is a matter of making explicit and raising to the full light of awareness what must already be implicitly present if the e-duc-ation, the drawing out into the explicit is to occur.  This is why courses in logic and ethics are useless for many and positively harmful for some.  But they do make some of us more logical and more ethical.

3.  Correctness in deductive logic is called validity, and incorrectness invalidity.   Since one can argue correctly from false premises and incorrectly from true premises, we distinguish validity from truth.  Consider the following argument:

Some Englishmen are Londoners
-------
Some Londoners are Englishmen.

We say of neither the premise nor the conclusion that it is either valid or invalid: we say that it is either true or false.  And we do not say of the argument that it is true or false, but that it is either valid or invalid. We also speak of inferences as either valid or invalid. 

4.  What makes a valid argument valid?  It can't be that it has true premises and a true conclusion.  For there are invalid arguments that satisfy this condition.  Some say that what makes a valid argument valid is the impossibility of the premises' being true and the conclusion false.  Theirs is a modal explanation of validity.  Equivalently,

D1. Argument A is valid =df necessarily, if A's premises are all true, then A's conclusion is true.

This necessity is plainly the necessity of the consequence (necessitas consequentiae), not the necessity of the consequent (necessitas consequentiis):  in the majority of cases the premises and conclusion are all contingent propositions.

The modal explanation of validity in (D1) is fine as far as it goes, but it leads to the question: what is the ground of the necessity?  If validity is explained by the RHS of (D1), what explains the necessity?  What explains the necessitas consequentiae of the conditional on the RHS of (D1)?

Enter logical form.

The validity of a given valid argument evidently resides in something distinct from the given argument.  What is this distinct something?  It is the logical form of the argument, the argument form.  The form F of an argument A is distinct from A because F is a universal (a repeatable) while A is a particular (an unrepeatable).  Thus the form

All S are M
All M are P
-------
All S are P

is a one-in-many, a repeatable.  It is repeated in every argument of that form.  It is the form of  indefinitely many syllogisms, although it is not itself a syllogism, any more than 'All S are M' is a proposition.  A proposition is either true or false, but 'All S are M' is neither true nor false.  To appreciate this, bear in mind that 'S' and 'M' are not abbreviations but placeholders.  If the letters above were abbreviations, then the array above would be an (abbreviated) argument, not  an argument form.  An argument form is not an argument but a form of indefinitely many arguments. 

Now validity is a property of argument forms primarily, and secondarily of arguments having valid forms. What makes a valid argument valid is the validity of its form:

D2. Argument A is valid =df A is an instance of a valid argument form.

D3. Argument form F is valid =df no  instance of F has true premises and a false conclusion.

Validity is truth-preserving: a valid argument form will never take you from true premises to a false conclusion.  (Exercise for the reader: show that invalidity is not falsehood preserving.)  In sum, an argument is valid in virtue of having a valid form, and a form is valid if no argument of that form has true premises and a false concusion. The logical form of a valid argument is what makes it impossible for the premises to be true and the conclusion false.

5.  If a valid argument is one with a valid form, one will be tempted to to say that an invalid argument is one with an invalid form.  Call this the Symmetry Thesis:

ST. If an argument  is an instance of a valid form, then it is valid, and if it is an instance of an invalid form, then it is invalid.

But there are examples that appear to break the symmetry, e.g.:

If God created something , then God created everything.
God created everything.
-------
God created something.

This argument fits the pattern of the formal fallacy, Affirming the Consequent:

If p then q
q
-------
p.

But the argument also has a valid form:

Every x is such that Cgx
-------
Some x is such that Cgx. 

(Example adapted from Gerald J. Massey, "The Fallacy behind Fallacies," Midwest Studies in Philosophy VI (1981), pp. 489-500)

So which is it? Is the argument valid or invalid?   It can't be both and it can't be neither.  One option is to abandon the Symmetry Thesis and maintain that having a valid form is sufficient for an argument to be valid, but that having an invalid form is not sufficient for it to be invalid. One would then be adopting the following Asymmetry Thesis:

AT.  Having a valid form suffices for an argument to be valid, but having an invalid form does not suffice for an argument to be invalid.

Another option is to hold to the Symmetry Thesis and maintain that the Massey argument is really two arguments, not one.  But before exploring this option, let us consider the unintuitive consequences of holding that one and the same argument can have two different forms, one valid, the other invalid. 

6. Consider any valid syllogism.  A syllogism, by definition, consists of exactly three different propositions: a major premise, a minor premise, and a conclusion.  So every valid syllogism has the invalid form: p, q, ergo r.  Generalizing, we can say that any argument whose validity hinges upon the internal subpropositional logical structure of its constituent propositions will instantiate an invalid form from the propositional calculus (PC).  For example, any argument of the valid form, Some S are P; ergo, Some P are S, is an instance of the invalid PC form, p, ergo q. 

To think of a valid syllogism as having the invalid form p, q, ergo r is to abstract away from the internal subpropositional logical structure that the syllogism's validity pivots on.  But if this abstraction is permitted, one may permit oneself to abstract away from the requirement that the same terms in an argument be replaced by the same placeholders.  One might then maintain that

All men are mortal
Socrates is a man
-------
Socrates is mortal

has the invalid logical form

All Fs are Gs
a is an H
-------
a is a G

But why stop there?  By the same 'reasoning,' the Socrates syllogism has the invalid form:

All Fs are Gs
a is an H
-------
b is an I.

But if one abstracts away from the requirement that the same term or sentence be replaced by the same placeholder, then we get the result that the obviously valid

Tom is tall
-------
Tom is tall

has the valid form p ergo p and the invalid form p ergo q.  Here we are abstracting away from the fact that a proposition entails itself and ascending to the higher level of abstraction at which  a proposition entails a proposition.  After all, it is surely true that in our example a proposition entails a proposition.

I submit, however, that our example's having an invalid form is an intolerable result.  Something has gone wrong.  Surely the last argument has no invalid form.  Surely one cannot lay bare the form of an argument, in an serious sense of 'argument,'  if one abandons the requirement that the same term or sentence be replaced by the same placeholder. To do that is to engage in vicious abstraction.  It is vicious because an argument in any serious sense of the term is not just a sequence of isolated propositions, but a sequence of propositions together with the idea that one of them is supposed to follow from the others.  An argument in any serious sense of the term is a sequence of propositions that has the property of being putatively such that one of them, the conclusion, follows from the others, the premises.  But no sequence of propositions can have this property if the argument's form allows for different terms/propositions to have different placeholders.

7.  So I suggest that we abandon the Asymmetry Thesis and adopt the Symmetry Thesis according to which no valid argument has any invalid forms.  Let me now try to motivate this proposal.

An argument form is an abstraction from an argument.  But it is also true that an argument is an abstraction from a concrete episode of reasoning by a definite person at a definite time.  Clearly, the same argument can be enacted by the same person at different times, and by the same or different persons at different times.  I can 'run through' the argument that the null set is unique any number of times, and so can you.  An argument in this sense is not a concrete episode of arguing (reasoning) but a sequence of propositions.  A proposition, of course, is not the same as a sentence used to express  it.

Now I grant that an argument taken in abstraction from an episode of reasoning (and as the content of that reasoning) can instantiate two or more argument forms.  But I deny that a concrete episode of reasoning by a definite person at a definite time can instantiate two or more argument forms. So my claim is that while an argument in abstracto can have two or more forms, an argument in concreto, i.e. a concrete episode of reasoning cannot have more than one form.  If this form is valid the argument in concreto is valid.  If invalid, the argument in concreto is invalid.  To illustrate:

Suppose I know that no Democrat supports capital punishment.  Then I learn that Jones is a Democrat.  Putting together these two pieces of information, I infer that Jones does not support capital punishment. By 'the concrete episode of reasoning,' I mean the reasoning process together with its content.  One first thinks of the first proposition, then the second, then one infers the third, and all of this in the unity of one consciousness.  The content is the argument considered in abstraction from any particular diachronic mental enactment by a particular person at a particular time.  The reasoning process as a datable temporally extended mental process is also an abstraction from the concrete episode of reasoning which must include both, the reasoning and its content.

Now the concrete episode of reasoning embodies a pattern.  In the example, I reason in accordance with this pattern:

(x) (Fx --> ~Gx)
Fa
-------
~Ga

Which is also representable as follows:

No Fs are Gs
a is an F
-------
a is not a G.

The pattern or logical form of my concrete episode of reasoning is assuredly not: p, q, ergo r.  This is consistent with saying that the argument in abstracto instantiates the invalid form p, q, ergo r in addition to the valid form above.

The point I am making is this.  If we take an argument in abstraction from the concrete episode of reasoning in which it is embodied, then we may find that it instantiates more than one form.  There is no denying that every valid syllogism, considered by itself and apart from the mental life of an agent who thinks it through, instantiates the invalid form p, q, ergo r.  But no one who reasons syllogistically reasons in accordance with that invalid form.  Syllogistic reasoning, whether correct or incorrect, is reasoning that is sensitive to the internal subpropositional logical structure of the syllogism's constituent propositions.  The invalid form is not a form of the argument in concreto.

 One must  distinguish among the following:

• The temporally extended event of Jones' reasoning.  This is a particular mental process.
• The content of this reasoning process, the argument in abstracto as sequence of propositions.
• The concrete episode of reasoning (i.e. the argument in concreto)  which involves both the reasoning and its content.
• The verbal expression in written or spoken sentences of the argument.
• The form or forms of the argument in abstracto.
• The verbal expression of a form or forms in a form diagram(s).
• The form of the argument in concreto.

 My point, again, is that we can uphold the Symmetry Thesis if we make a distinction between arguments in the concrete and arguments in the abstract.  But this is a distinction we need in any case.  The Symmetry Thesis holds for arguments in the concrete.  But these are the arguments that matter because these are the ones people actually give.

Applying this to the Massey example above, we can say that while the abstract argument expressed by the following display has two forms, one invalid, the other valid:

If God created something , then God created everything.
God created everything.
-------
God created something

there is no one concrete argument, no one concrete episode of reasoning, that the display expresses.  One who reasons in a way that is attentive to the internal subpropositional structure of the constituent propositions reasons correctly.  But one who ignores this internal structure reasons incorrectly.

In this way we can uphold the Symmetry Thesis and avoid the absurdities to which the Asymmetry Thesis leads.

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