Although Sam Harris is out of his depth on philosophical topics, and wrong about religion, he talks sense on politics and is courageously blunt about the threat to civilization of radical Islam. Hats off to Harris! Excerpts with emphases and comments added:
One of the most galling things for outside observers about the current war in Gaza is the disproportionate loss of life on the Palestinian side. This doesn’t make a lot of moral sense. Israel built bomb shelters to protect its citizens. The Palestinians built tunnels through which they could carry out terror attacks and kidnap Israelis. Should Israel be blamed for successfully protecting its population in a defensive war? I don’t think so.
[. . .]
But there is no way to look at the images coming out Gaza—especially of infants and toddlers riddled by shrapnel—and think that this is anything other than a monstrous evil. Insofar as the Israelis are the agents of this evil, it seems impossible to support them. And there is no question that the Palestinians have suffered terribly for decades under the occupation. This is where most critics of Israel appear to be stuck. They see these images, and they blame Israel for killing and maiming babies. They see the occupation, and they blame Israel for making Gaza a prison camp. I would argue that this is a kind of moral illusion, borne of a failure to look at the actual causes of this conflict, as well as of a failure to understand the intentions of the people on either side of it.
BV: Harris ought to have pointed out that nine years ago, in 2005, Israel withdrew all of its settlements and military from Gaza. In what sense, then, is Gaza under occupation? True, Israel kept control of the borders, sea-lanes and air space, but if they didn't, Hamas could import even more rockets and other armaments. Even much of the cement that should have been used for peaceful purposes has been diverted into tunnel construction.
[. . .]
The truth is that there is an obvious, undeniable, and hugely consequential moral difference between Israel and her enemies. The Israelis are surrounded by people who have explicitly genocidal intentions towards them. The charter of Hamas is explicitly genocidal. It looks forward to a time, based on Koranic prophesy, when the earth itself will cry out for Jewish blood, where the trees and the stones will say “O Muslim, there’s a Jew hiding behind me. Come and kill him.” This is a political document. We are talking about a government that was voted into power by a majority of Palestinians.
Some people argue that the success of science using methodological naturalism is evidence of metaphysical naturalism because, according to them, why would the methods work unless the subject was naturalistic? My question is: do you think this is a fair argument to make?
It depends on what exactly the argument is.
The argument the reader reports is unimpressive. It comes down to saying that the natural sciences are successful because metaphysical naturalism is true. But the success of the sciences in explaining much of what goes on in the natural world is consistent with both the truth and the falsity of metaphysical naturalism. So scientific success does not entail metaphysical naturalism. Does the former provide nondemonstrative evidence of the latter? It is not clear how it could. How could there be empirical evidence of a metaphysical proposition?
Metaphysical naturalism (MN) is the thesis that "all that exists is the space-time world . . . ." The space-time world is the physical world. The thesis, then, is that reality is exhausted by the physical world. The quotation is from David Armstrong.
Now if MN is true (false), then it is presumably necessarily true (false). For it is a metaphysical claim, a claim about the nature of reality. If MN is necessarily true, if true, then it is hard to see how there could be empirical evidence either for it or against it.
Perhaps one could argue as follows:
1. The sciences of nature, physics in particular, have been extremely successful in explaining much about the physical world.
2. This explanatory success, though at present partial, will one day be complete: everything about the physical world will eventually have a natural-scientific explanation, and indeed one that adheres to the constraints of methodological naturalism. (Methodological naturalism is not a thesis or proposition, but an injunction or procedural principle: In explaining natural phenomena, do not invoke as explanantia anything non-natural or supernatural.)
3. If a complete explanation of the physical world and everything in it, including human beings and their cultural artifacts, is achieved by natural-scientific means under the constraints of methodological naturalism, then one would have no good reason not to be metaphysical naturalist.
Therefore
4. One ought to be a metaphysical naturalist.
The problem with this argument is premise (2). It is nothing but a leap of faith. One pins one's hopes on future science, to invoke a widely-bruited battle cry. (And isn't there something utterly bizarre about hoping to be shown to be nothing but a complex physical system? And to be profoundly disappointed if one were shown to have an eternal destiny and the possibility of unending bliss? "Damn! I was so hoping to be nothing but a bag of bones and guts slated for destruction in a few years!")
Not only is (2) a leap of faith and as such something rather unseemly for hard-nosed materialist types to advocate, there is really no chance that natural science operating under the constraints of methodological naturalism and eschewing the sort of panpsychism recently urged by Thomas Nagel, will ever explain in a satisfactory non-question-begging way:
The very existence of the physical universe
How life arose from abiotic matter
How sentience arose from the merely alive
How self-consciousness -- the ability to deploy thoughtfully the first-person singular pronoun -- arose from the merely alive or from mere sentience
How intentionality arose from the merely alive
How something like a first-person perspective is possible, a "view from nowhere," a perspective without which no third-person perspective would be possible and with it the objectivity presupposed by scientific inquiry
The intrinsic intelligibility of the world which is a presupposition of scientific inquiry
Where the laws of nature come from
Why the physical constants have precisely the values they have
The normativity of reason and how it governs our mental processes
The applicability of mathematics to natural phenomena: no mathematics, no physics!
The existence of mathematical objects and the truth of mathematical propositions.
I am never bored. Tired sometimes, but not bored. A nap and a double espresso work every time. These are times that try our souls while stimulating our minds. Who can be bored?
Regular reader, João Gabriel of Porto, Portugal, writes to thank me for my "great blog" and to recommend Lars Svendsen's A Philosophy of Boredom.
we can invoke story operators and substitute for (1)
1*. In the Tolkien story, Frodo is a hobbit.
From (1*) one cannot validly infer (2). So far, so good. But what about the true
3. Frodo is a purely fictional character
given that the following is plainly false:
3*. In the Tolkien story, Frodo is a purely fictional character. (?)
How do we block the inference from (3) to
4. There are purely fictional characters. (?)
At this juncture, London Ed makes a paraphrastic move:
Note that 'fiction' just means what is contrived, or made up, or invented. To say that Frodo 'is' a fictional character is simply to say that he is made up, which itself no more than saying that someone (Tolkien) made him up.
Indeed, that is what 'fiction' means, 'pure fiction' leastways. 'Fiction' is from the Latin fingere. So Ed would paraphrase (3) as
3P. Someone (Tolkien) made up (created, invented, contrived) Frodo.
Now if the paraphrase is adequate, then (3) does not commit us ontologically to anything beyond Tolkien. It does not commit us to the existence of fictional characters. Ed wants to avoid views like that of van Inwagen according to which purely fictional items exist. It is worth noting that Ed agrees with van Inwagen about the univocity of 'is' and 'exists.' There are no modes of existence/being for either of them. And for both the one sense of 'is'/'exists' is supplied adequately and completely by the existential quantifier of modern predicate logic. Both are thin theorists when it comes to existence.
But is (3P) an adequate paraphrase of (3)?
I don't think so. If Tolkien made up Frodo, but Frodo does not exist, then what did Tolkien create? A mere modification of his own consciousness? No. He created a character that outlasted him and that cannot be identified with any part of Tolkien's body or mind. Tolkien ceased to exist in 1973. But no one will say that the character Frodo simply vanished in 1973. When Tolkien ceased to exist, his mental contents ceased to exist. But when the writer ceased to exist, Frodo did not stop being a quite definite fictional character. So Frodo cannot be identified with any mental content of Tolkien. Nor could Frodo be said to be an adverbial modification of one of Tolkien's acts of thinking.
I grant that Frodo is an artifact. He came into being by the creative acts of Tolkien and is dependent on Tolkien for his coming into being, and perhaps even tied to Tolkien for his very identity: essentiality of origin for ficta. Frodo is also dependent on the continuing existence of physical copies of LOTR. Frodo is an artifact that came into being and can pass out of being. This makes Frodo a contingent artifact. What's more, Frodo is not merely a content in Tolkien's mind: he can be thought about and understood and referred to by many different minds. So Frodo has a curious status: he is in one way dependent and in another independent.
Now I claim that if one admits that there are different modes of being/existence, one can make sense of this. Fictional characters have a dependent mode of being, but they are, nonetheless, items in their own right. They obviously don't exist in the way a fiction writer exists. But it would be false to say that they don't exist at all. After all, Frodo cannot be identified with a mental content of Tolkien.
So while it is true that someone made up Frodo, as Ed rightly insists, that does not suffice to show that Frodo does not exist.
Ed's paraphrase is inadequate. And so he is stuck with the problem of blocking the inference from (3) to (4).
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UPDATE (7/31). I said above, "Frodo is also dependent on the continuing existence of physical copies of LOTR." That's not quite right. If all the copies of LOTR were destroyed tomorrow, Frodo would continue on as a cultural artifact in the oral tradition for as long as that tradition was maintained. But once that tradition petered out, it would be all over for Frodo if there were no physical copies of LOTR (electronic or otherwise) or writings about LOTR on hand. The dependence of abstract cultural artifacts on human beings, their practices and memories, is not easy to understand. We are in the realm of Hegel's objektiver Geist.
UPDATE (7/31): The following entry is deeply confused. But I will leave it up for the sake of the commenters, David Gordon and AJ, who refuted it. In my defense I will say something Roderick Chisholm once said about himself in a similar connection, namely, that I wrote something clear enough to be mistaken.
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The following two sentences are in the active and passive voices, respectively:
1. Tom said that someone was in the vicinity.
2. Someone was said by Tom to be in the vicinity.
Both sentences 'say the same thing,' i.e., express the same proposition, the same thought, the same Fregean Gedanke. Aren't active-to-passive and passive-to-active transformations in general truth- and sense-preserving? But the two sentences have different entailments.
(2), which is de re, entails that someone was in the vicinity. (1), which is de dicto, does not entail that someone was in the vicinity. But if the two sentences have different entailments, then they cannot express one and the same proposition.
The puzzle expressed as an aporetic triad:
A. (1) and (2) express the same proposition.
B. (2) entails a proposition -- Someone was in the vicinity -- that is not entailed by (1).
C. If p, q are the same proposition, then for any proposition x, p entails x iff q entails x.
The limbs of the triad are individually plausible but collectively inconsistent.
How do we solve, or perhaps dissolve, this puzzle?
According to the New York Times, Secretary of State John Kerry is hoping for a cease-fire to "open the door to Israeli and Palestinian negotiations for a long-term solution." President Obama has urged Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to have an "immediate, unconditional humanitarian cease-fire" -- again, with the idea of pursuing some long-lasting agreement.
If this was the first outbreak of violence between the Palestinians and the Israelis, such hopes might make sense. But where have the U.N., Kerry and Obama been during all these decades of endlessly repeated Middle East carnage?
The Middle East must lead the world in cease-fires. If cease-fires were the road to peace, the Middle East would easily be the most peaceful place on the planet.
"Cease-fire" and "negotiations" are magic words to "the international community." But just what do cease-fires actually accomplish?
In the short run, they save some lives. But in the long run they cost far more lives, by lowering the cost of aggression.
At one time, launching a military attack on another nation risked not only retaliation but annihilation. When Carthage attacked Rome, that was the end of Carthage.
But when Hamas or some other terrorist group launches an attack on Israel, they know in advance that whatever Israel does in response will be limited by calls for a cease-fire, backed by political and economic pressures from the United States.
It is not at all clear what Israel's critics can rationally expect the Israelis to do when they are attacked. Suffer in silence? Surrender? Flee the Middle East?
Or -- most unrealistic of al -- fight a "nice" war, with no civilian casualties? General William T. Sherman said it all, 150 years ago: "War is hell."
If you want to minimize civilian casualties, then minimize the dangers of war, by no longer coming to the rescue of those who start wars.
Israel was attacked, not only by vast numbers of rockets but was also invaded -- underground -- by mazes of tunnels.
There is something grotesque about people living thousands of miles away, in safety and comfort, loftily second-guessing and trying to micro-manage what the Israelis are doing in a matter of life and death.
Such self-indulgences are a danger, not simply to Israel, but to the whole Western world, for it betrays a lack of realism that shows in everything from the current disastrous consequences of our policies in Egypt, Libya and Iraq to future catastrophes from a nuclear-armed Iran.
Those who say that we can contain a nuclear Iran, as we contained a nuclear Soviet Union, are acting as if they are discussing abstract people in an abstract world. Whatever the Soviets were, they were not suicidal fanatics, ready to see their own cities destroyed in order to destroy ours.
As for the ever-elusive "solution" to the Arab-Israeli conflicts in the Middle East, there is nothing faintly resembling a solution anywhere on the horizon. Nor is it hard to see why.
Even if the Israelis were all saints -- and sainthood is not common in any branch of the human race -- the cold fact is that they are far more advanced than their neighbors, and groups that cannot tolerate even subordinate Christian minorities can hardly be expected to tolerate an independent, and more advanced, Jewish state that is a daily rebuke to their egos.
In general, the liberal principle persists that when Arabs on the offense kill lots of Arabs it is normal, but when Jews in defense kill far fewer Arabs it is reprehensible. If Israel were weak, Hamas would do to it what ISIS is now doing to Christians, and the world would react to the rout and slaughter of the Jews with the indifference that it shows to Christians. Wait, it does that anyway.
I would add that to understand the Left you must understand that lefties typically leap to the defense of the perceived underdog regardless of what the underdog has done to deserve the treatment he receives. Right and wrong don't come into it. The relative weakness of the underdog is taken to justify his criminality while the decent people who defend themselves are urged, quite absurdly, to show restraint. The terrorist entity, Hamas, whose charter calls for the destruction of the state of Israel, understands this, a fact that lends a bit of sanity to their otherwise insanely self-destructive attack on Israel. They seek the sympathy of the morally obtuse Left.
This morally disgusting characteristic of leftists is also illustrated by the recent furor over so-called 'botched executions.' They take the side of the scum of the earth while not even mentioning the suffering of the innocent victims. For documentation of this claim, seeCapital Punishment and the Difference between Conservatives and Leftists.
Here. (An entertaining video clip, not too long, that sums up his main doctrine.)
Alan Watts was a significant contributor to the Zeitgeist of the 1960s. Just as many in those days were 'turned on' to philosophy by Ayn Rand, others such as myself were pushed toward philosophy by, among other things, Alan Watts and his writings. But early on I realized that there was much of the pied piper and sophist about him. He once aptly described himself as a "philosophical entertainer" as opposed to an academic philosopher. Entertaining he was indeed.
I heard him speak in the last year of his life on 17 January 1973. He appeared to be well into his cups that evening, though in control. Alcohol may have been a major contributor to his early death at age 58 on 16 November 1973. (See Wikipedia) What follows is a journal entry of mine written 18 January 1973.
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I attended a lecture by Alan Watts last night at El Camino Junior College. Extremely provocative and entertaining. A good comparing and contrasting of Jewish, Christian, Islamic, Hindu and Chinese views.
At random: One must give up the desire to be secure, the desire to control. Ego as totally illusory entity which is really nothing but a composite of one's image of oneself and certain muscular tensions which arise with attempts to achieve, grasp, and hold on. The self as opposed to the ego is God, God who forgot who he was. The world (cosmos) as God's dream. Thus the self-same Godhead reposes in each individual. There is no spiritual individuality. And therefore, it seems, no possibility of relation.
Consider the I-Thou relation. It presupposes two distinct but relatable entities. If there is only one homogeneous substance, how can there be relation? But perhaps I'm misinterpreting the Wattsian-Hindu view by thinking of the Hindu deity as substance rather than as function, process. Watts himself denies the existence of substance. Last night he made the well-known point as to the linguistic origin of the notion of substance. [This is of course not a "well-known point."]
Denial of the ego -- i.e. its relegation to the sphere of illusion -- would seem to go hand in hand with denial of substance. [Good point, young man!] Watts seems very close to as pseudo-scientific metaphysics. He posits a continuum of vibrations with the frequency of the vibrations determining tangible, physical qualities. Yet he also says that "We will always find smaller particles"; that "We're doing it"; that the fundamental reality science suppsedly uncovwers is a mental, a theoretical construct.
Thus, simultaneously, a reliance on a scientific pseudo-metaphysics AND the discrediting of the scientific view of reality.
2. There are some purely fictional characters, e.g., Sherlock Holmes.
(1) looks to be an analytic truth: by definition, what is purely fictional is not, i.e., does not exist. But (2) also seems to be true. And yet they cannot both be true if 'are' has the same sense in both sentences.
London Ed is against "messing about with the copula" as he puts it. Thus he is opposed to making a distinction between two senses of 'are' in alleviation of our dyad's apparent inconsistency. Is there another way to solve the problem?
One way is to look for ontologically noncommittal paraphrases of those sentences that appear to commit us to fictional items. Roderick Chisholm has some suggestions for us. Consider the sentence
3. There is no detective who is as famous as Holmes.
Chisholm's paraphrase:
To say that there is no detective who is as famous as Holmes is to compare two numbers. (1) The first is the number of people who interpret Holmes as the name of a detective; and (2) the second is the number of people who interpret some name other than Holmes as the name of a detective. The comparative statement tells us that the first number is larger than the second. (A Realistic Theory of Categories, CUP 1996, pp. 122-123.)
Boiled down, we have
3P. The number of people of who take 'Holmes' to be the name of a detective is greater than the number of people who take some name other than 'Holmes' to be the name of a detective.
Very clever. Off the top of my head, (3P) looks to be an adequate paraphrase that does not commit us to the existence of a fictional entity. But if the paraphrastic method is to work, it must work against every example. Just one recalcitrant example counts as a "spanner in the works." What about this example of mine:
4. Obama is a worse liar than Pinocchio.
Perhaps we can paraphrase away the reference to Pinocchio with
4P. The traits we know Obama to possess are more indicative of mendacity than the traits we attribute to the character named 'Pinocchio.'
Questions for London Ed (and anyone else who is following this):
a. Do you endorse this paraphrastic approach? If not, why not?
b. Van Inwagen says things that imply that he thinks that the paraphrastic approach does not work. Why does he say this? Does he have examples of sentences that cannot be treated by this approach?
Inwagen gives persuasive arguments that there is only one sort of existential quantifier, that we cannot quantify over ‘things’ that are in some sense ‘beyond being’, and that ‘exists’ means the same as ‘is’ or ‘has being’. No review of his work would be complete without a careful discussion of these arguments, but as I agree with them, I will not discuss them here.
The problem I want to discuss is with his main thesis. He aims to explain what he calls ‘fictional discourse’, namely discourse like “There are characters in some 19th-century novels who are presented with a greater wealth of physical detail than is any character in any 18th-century novel." Such sentences are true, according to him, but when we translate them into quantifier-variable idiom, we have to use the existential quantifier which, on his view, is equivalent to ‘exists’. This seems to imply that fictional characters like Tom Sawyer and Mr Pickwick exist. Inwagen bites the bullet, and argues that they do exist. They are abstract objects, which exist in exactly the way that numbers exist. So when we say, in a work of literary criticism, that “Mrs Gamp is a character in a novel”, the proper name ‘Mrs Gamp’ refers to an abstract or ‘theoretical’ entity.
BV: I don't think Ed is representing van Inwagen correctly here. Numbers cannot come into being, but it is plausible to hold that fictional characters do. So while fictional characters, for van Inwagen, are abstract entities, he remains noncommittal on the question whether they are abstract artifacts in the way that chess could be thought of as a abstract artifact, or instead abstract non-artifacts like numbers and cognate platonica. See the last paragraph of "Existence, Ontological Commitment, and Fictional Entities."
This leads to the following problem. Inwagen argues that when a sentence like “Tom Sawyer was a boy who grew up along the banks of the Mississippi River in the 1840s” appears in a work of fiction, it is not true. Indeed, it is not even false, since it does not make an assertion at all (Existence, Ontological Commitment, and Fictional Entities, p.148, footnote 15). But when it appears in a work of literary criticism, as ‘literary discourse’, it is true. But if it is true, it seems to imply that there was some individual who is [in] the extension of the property expressed by ‘boy who grew up along the banks of the Mississippi River in the 1840s’, and yet there was no such individual.
Inwagen resolves the problem as follows. Tom Sawyer the fictional character exists, but he does not have the property ‘boy who grew up along the banks of the Mississippi River in the 1840s’. Nor does Mrs. Gamp have properties such as being old, being fat and so on. He concedes that this sounds odd (Creatures of Fiction, p. 304-5), but he argues there is something rather like it in a familiar philosophical doctrine, namely Descartes’ thesis that a person such as Jones is an immaterial substance, and so cannot have properties like ‘being tangible’, ‘weighing 220 lbs’ and so on, but only properties appropriate to immaterial objects, such as ‘thinking about Vienna’, ‘being free from pain’ and so on. Descartes says that Jones bears a relation to the properties on the former list that is not the relation of ‘having’ or ‘exemplifying’ but, rather, the relation of “animating a body” that has or exemplifies the property. We say that Jones is about six feet tall, but we should really say ‘animates a body that is six feet tall’: “what looks like predication in ordinary speech is not always predication”.
Thus when we say that Tom Sawyer is the main character in a well-known book of the same name, we are saying something that is true because the copula ‘is’ signifies the relation of having or exemplifying. But if we say, in literary discourse, that Tom is a boy, or that he is a resident of Mississippi, it is true because the copula signifies a quite different relation, which Inwagen calls ‘holding’.
BV: This is an accurate summary of van Inwagen's position as I understand it.
Problems
Bill has already identified some problems with Inwagen’s thesis. For example, he says that when I think of Mrs Gamp, I think of a woman. But according to Inwagen, I am thinking of an abstract or theoretical entity, and no theoretical entity has gender.
I shall not discuss these (although I broadly agree with them), but will mention some further ones.
1. Plot summaries. I discussed plot summaries in a comment to Bill’s post. We have a clear notion of what counts as a ‘correct’ summary. E.g. “Tom Sawyer lives with his Aunt Polly and his half-brother Sid” is correct, “Tom Sawyer lives with his Aunt Polly and his sisters Lizzie, Jane, Kitty, Lydia and Mary” is clearly not. But this notion of ‘correctness’ is close enough to the notion of truth that Inwagen’s theory needs to deal with it. If we assimilate it to Inwagen’s notion of truth in ‘literary discourse’, i.e. if we regard a statement in a plot summary as of the same kind as “Mrs Gamp is a character in a novel”, then we have the problem that plot summaries are written ‘in universe’, and that the names of the characters refer to the characters as characters, and not as abstract theoretical entities. But if we assimilate plot summaries to condensed versions of the original literary work, we have the problem of how they can be ‘correct’ at all. It is fundamental to Inwagen’s account that sentences in a work of fiction do not make assertions at all, and so cannot admit of truth or falsity – or correctness or incorrectness.
BV: Ed's point here seems to be that van Inwagen cannot account for the correctness of plot summaries. It is clear that some summaries are correct or accurate and that some are not. Now a summary of a piece of fiction is either itself a piece of (severely condensed) fiction, in which case it contains sentences that are, on van Inwagen's theory, neither true nor false, or it is not a piece of fiction but a piece of writing containing true sentences about the content of the fictional work being summarized. This disjunction appears to be a dilemma. For on the first disjunct, it is hard to see how a plot summary could be correct or true. But the second disjunct is also unacceptable. For suppose the summary contains the sentence 'Mrs Gamp is a fat old lady.' Then 'Mrs Gamp' in this sentence takes an abstract existent as its referent, an existent that does not HAVE but HOLDs the properties of being fat, being old, and being a lady, when the novel is not about abstract objects at all, but is about concrete objects one of which HAS, but does not HOLD, the properties of being fat, old and a lady.
A very astute criticism that may in the end hit the mark. I don't know.
Suppose I write a three-sentence novella:
It was a dark and rainy night. Shaky Jake, life-long insomniac, awakened from his dogmatic slumbers by the rythm of the rain, and deciding he needed a nightcap, grabbed his flashlight and his raincoat and headed for the Glass Crutch bar and grill, a local watering hole a half a mile from his house. Bellying up to the bar, he said to the 'tender: "One scotch, one bourbon, one beer."
A correct plot summary: An insomniac awakened by the rain goes to a bar for a drink.
An incorrect summary: A philosopher in La Mirada, California, dreaming about the ontological argument, is awakened when an earthquake causes a copy of David Hume's A Treatise of Human Nature to fall on his head.
Ed's question is how the first summary can be correct and the second incorrect if fictional sentences 'in universe' as Ed writes, lack truth-values. I am not convinced that there is a problem here. For a summary to be correct it doesn't have to be true of anything; it merely has to reproduce in condensed form the sense of the the piece of fiction summarized. I can take in the sense of a sentence without knowing whether it is true or false. A summary merely boils down the sense of the original.
2. ‘Sincere’ fiction. Not all fiction is ‘insincere’, i.e. knowingly made up. What if a sincere but deluded person writes a long account about characters (angels, spirits etc) and events which were ‘revealed’ to him in a vision? Contra Inwagen, his claims are assertions, and are capable of truth or falsity.
BV: But is this a case of literary fiction? The delusive account is fictional in that it is false, but that might be different use of 'fictional.' Why can't van Inwagen insist that literary fiction is by definition 'insincere' in Ed's sense?
3. Story-relative reference. Any serious account of fiction needs to deal with the way that names in fiction (and empty names generally) are able to identify or individuate within the story by telling the reader which character is being talked about. Inwagen needs to explain how such story-relative reference works, for his theory does not address it. He also has the problem that ‘literary discourse’ also seems to use story-relative reference. Consider the story (A) “A man called Gerald and a boy called Steve were standing by fountain. Steve had a drink”, and the statement (B) “In the second sentence the proper name ‘Steve’ identifies Steve." Statement (B) is true, and so is ‘literary discourse’, according to Inwagen, and so ‘Steve’ in (B) identifies an abstract object. But it clearly ‘refers back’ to the ‘Steve’ in (A). How can a term referring to an abstract object also refer back to a character in a story, when the character is not an abstract object?
BV: Van Inwagen might respond by saying that in (B) ''Steve' identifies Steve only in the sense that 'Steve' in the second sentence has 'Steve' in the first sentence as antecedent. So there is no (extralinguistic) reference at all, and 'Steve' in (B) does not pick out an abstract object.
Note the ambiguity of 'Ed signed his book.' It could mean that Ed signed Ed's book. Or it could mean that Ed signed a book belonging to someone distinct from Ed. (Suppose, while pointing at Tom, I say to Peter, "Ed signed his book.") In the first case, 'his' exercises no (extralinguistic) reference. In the second case it does.
4. The problem is worse in the case of names whose emptiness is in doubt. Suppose I make a reference statement: “Luke 1 v5 refers to Zachary, a high priest at the temple”. Like many characters in the New Testament, we are not certain whether Zachary existed or not. If he did exist, the name in my reference statement refers to him. If not, according to Inwagen, it refers to an abstract object. How can the semantics of the sentence be so utterly different without my knowing? For I don’t know whether Zachary existed or not, and so I don’t know what the semantics of the reference statement is. But surely I do.
BV: I don't think van Inwagen will have any trouble with this objection. Suppose we don't know whether Zachary existed or not. Our not knowing this is not the same as our not knowing whether he is nonfictional or fictional. For we know that the NT is not a work of fiction -- assuming that, necessarily, every work of fiction involves pretence on the part of its author or authors. If we agree that the NT is not a work of fiction and it turns out that Zachary never existed, then van Inwagen can say that no one had all the properties ascribed to Zachary. His theory does not require him to say that 'Zachary' refers to an abstract object.
5. What about statements where we say what the author says? For example “Dickens says that Mrs Gamp is fat”. Inwagen would classify this as literary discourse, but if so, the token of ‘Mrs Gamp’ refers to an abstract object. But Dickens is surely not saying that an abstract object is fat?
The general problem, and here I think I am agreeing with Bill, is that the semantics of proper names as used in fiction (or ‘sincere’ fiction) doesn’t seem to be enormously different from the semantics of the same names as used in ‘literary discourse’. Yet, according to Inwagen, the difference is as enormous as it gets.
Before getting on with tonight's theme, we pause to remember Johnny Winter (1944-2014). Can a white boy play the blues? I heard the question debated in the '60s and I took the line that the blues was a language anyone could learn whether a Jew like Mike Bloomfield (Albert's Shuffle) or an albino like Johnny Winter (Serious as a Heart Attack).
Wikipedia: According to [Dylan] biographer Clinton Heylin, "When The Ship Comes In" was written in August 1963 "in a fit of pique, in a hotel room, after his unkempt appearance had led an impertinent hotel clerk to refuse him admission until his companion, Joan Baez, had vouched for his good character". Heylin speculates that "Jenny's Song" from Brecht and Weill's Threepenny Opera was also an inspiration: "As Pirate Jenny dreams of the destruction of all her enemies by a mysterious ship, so Dylan envisages the neophobes being swept aside in 'the hour when the ship comes in'." Dylan's former girlfriend Suze Rotolo recalls that her "interest in Brecht was certainly an influence on him. I was working for the Circle in the Square Theater and he came to listen all the time. He was very affected by the song that Lotte Lenya's known for, 'Pirate Jenny'."[1]
A penetrating article by William Kilpatrick. The following comparison of Islamism and Communism is very good. Liberals ought to study it unless they wish to remain enclosed in their dangerous, and possibly terminal, ignorance. Emphasis added.
Let’s draw an analogy to another globe-spanning ideology—communism. Take the case of Soviet-bloc communism. Should we have wanted it to succeed or fail? Considering the oppressive nature of communism, it’s surprising how many in the West had mixed feelings about the question. Many Western elites had the same attitude toward Soviet-bloc communism as they do today toward Islam. Like Islam, Soviet communism also seemed permanent—an inevitable force of history with which, it seemed, we had to come to terms. Western apologists for communism were willing to grant that Soviet communism had its faults, but that was because it was a misinterpretation of true communism. It needed reform, yes, but the basic model was sound. Yet, for all its Western cheerleaders, Soviet communism did fail, and it failed in large part because Western leaders stopped making accommodations with communist ideology (as they had during the Carter administration) and began to challenge it instead.
The analogy to Soviet communism limps, however, in one crucial respect. Soviet communism was not a religion. In fact, many attributed the evils of communism to its godless nature. As with the Nazi threat which preceded it, communism was perceived to be a political, not a religious, movement. Although Hitler tried to revive pagan-Teutonic mythology and although Stalin encouraged a religious-like cult of personality around himself, no one in the West thought of Nazism or communism as legitimate expressions of religion.
It’s a different story with Islam. Islam is looking more and more like a world-threatening ideology, but it is more immune to criticism than either Nazism or communism because it is a recognized and long-established religion. To challenge it is to court charges of anti-religious bigotry. In addition, something in our conscience makes us reluctant to reprove a fellow religion.
We are conditioned to have a favorable view of religion—especially other people’s religion. It somehow doesn’t seem right to contemplate Islam’s failure. To get around this difficulty, some critics of Islam contend that it is nothing but a political ideology and ought to be labeled as such. But this rebranding effort is a difficult sell because, by most standard definitions of the term, Islam does qualify as a religion. To most people, moreover, it certainly looks like a religion. The pagan-like symbols and ceremonies of the Nazis were clearly ersatz, but the same can’t be said of the centuries-old observances of Muslims. When people prostrate themselves in prayer five times a day, it’s hard to make the case that what they’re doing is nothing more than a power play.
The truth of the matter is that Islam is a hybrid: it’s both a political ideology and a religion. And although the political side of Islam may turn out to be every bit as dangerous as Nazism or communism, the religious side provides considerable protection from criticism. Because of its religious nature, it seems improper to engage Islam in the kind of ideological warfare the West waged against fascism and communism.
Yet the threat to the West and to the rest of the world is, by all appearances, increasing. Egyptians, Nigerians, Kenyans, Pakistanis, Filipinos, and others are finding it difficult to arrest the spread of radical Islam within their borders. In Europe, Islamization moves on apace, and no one has found the formula for resisting it. In Iraq, Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi has proclaimed the creation of a new caliphate state, declared himself caliph, and has called on Muslims worldwide to join him in waging war against infidels. We hear a lot about all the different forms of Islam, but the idea of the caliphate is that there should be only one unified Islam. Like communism, the caliphate is intended to be a borderless community—a trans-national and ever-expanding empire of true believers. That’s because, like communism, Islam aspires to be a universal belief system.
Unlike communism, however, Islam has the advantage of conducting its proselytizing activities under the banner of religion. During the Cold War, communists did not have the benefit of being able to set up recruitment and indoctrination centers all over the free world. Yet, in effect, Islam does. Mosques are not just places of worship; they are often centers of political activity and, not infrequently, of jihad activity. As a popular Muslim poem puts it, “The mosques are our barracks, the domes our helmets, the minarets our bayonets, and the faithful our soldiers.” That may seem like a bit of poetic exaggeration, but it is taken seriously in the Muslim world. Recep Erdogan went to jail for quoting those lines when Turkey was still a secular state. That he is now the leader of that country provides a good indication of which way the wind is blowing.
Of course, for a non-Muslim to even hint at the possibility that mosques might serve such purposes is to invite accusations of Islamophobia and bigotry. Likewise, to suggest that there are similarities between Islam and communism or between Islam and Nazism puts one on the fringe of acceptable discourse. Which goes to prove the point: Islam’s religious status puts it beyond criticism. You can criticize very radical Islamic radicals and very extreme Islamic extremists—just as long as you add that, of course, their activities have nothing to do with the religion of Islam.
Might does not make right, but neither does impotence or relative weakness. That weakness does not justify strikes me as an important principle, but I have never seen it articulated. The Left tends to assume the opposite. They tend to assume that mightlessness makes right. I'll dub this the Converse Callicles Principle.
The power I have to kill you does not morally justify my killing you. In a slogan: Ability does not imply permissibility. My ability to kill, rape, pillage and plunder does not confer moral justification on my doing these things. But if you attack me with deadly force and I reply with deadly force of greater magnitude, your relative weakness does not supply one iota of moral justification for your attack, nor does it subtract one iota of moral justification from my defensive response. If I am justified in using deadly force against you as aggressor, then the fact that my deadly force is greater than yours does not (a) diminish my justification in employing deadly force, nor does it (b) confer any justification on your aggression.
Suppose a knife-wielding thug commits a home invasion and attacks a man and his family. The man grabs a semi-automatic pistol and manages to plant several rounds in the assailant, killing him. It would surely be absurd to argue that the disparity in lethality of the weapons involved diminishes the right of the pater familias to defend himself and his family. Weakness does not justify.
The principle that weakness does not justify can be applied to the Israeli-Hezbollah conflict from the summer of 2006 as well as to the current Israeli defensive operations against the terrorist entity, Hamas. The principle ought to be borne in mind when one hears leftists, those knee-jerk supporters of any and every 'underdog,' start spouting off about 'asymmetry of power' and 'disproportionality.' Impotence and incompetence are not virtues, nor do they confer moral justification or high moral status, any more than they confer the opposite.
The principle that mightlessness makes right seems to be one of the cardinal tenets of the Left. It is operative in the present furor over the enforcement of reasonable immigration laws in Arizona. To the south of the USA lies crime-ridden, corrupt, impoverished Mexico. For millions and millions it is a place to escape from. The USA, the most successful nation of all time, is the place to escape to. But how does this disparity in wealth, success, and overall quality of life justify the violation of the reasonable laws and the rule of law that are a good part of the reason for the disparity of wealth, success, and overall quality of life?
A character in a novel is an example of a purely fictional item provided that the character is wholly 'made up' by the novelist. Paul Morphy, for example, is a character in Francis Parkinson Keyes' historical novel, The Chess Players but he is also a real-life 19th century New Orleans chess prodigy. So Paul Morphy, while figuring in a piece of fiction, is not a purely fictional item like Captain Ahab or Sancho Panza or Frodo.
Earlier I said that it is a datum that Frodo, a purely fictional item, does not exist. Saying that it is a datum, I implied that it is not something that can be reasonably questioned, that it is a 'Moorean fact.' After all, most of us know that Frodo is a purely fictional character, and it is obvious -- isn't it? -- that what is purely fictional does not exist. Whatever is purely fictional does not exist looks to be an analytic proposition, one that merely unpacks the sense of 'purely fictional.'
The lesson I mean to convey by these examples is that the nonexistence of [Sherlock] Holmes is not an ontological datum; the ontological datum is that we can use the sentence 'Sherlock Holmes does not exist' to say something true.
I think this sentence would make more sense if van Inwagen had 'linguistic datum' for the second occurrence of 'ontological datum.' If the nonexistence of Holmes is a datum, then it is an ontological datum; but the fact that we can use the sentence in question to say something true is a linguistic datum.
In any case, PvI is saying the opposite of what I was saying earlier. I was saying something that implies that the nonexistence of Holmes is an ontological datum in virtue of his being a purely fictional entity whereas PvI is saying in effect that Holmes exists and that his existence is consistent with his being purely fictional. One man's datum is another man's (false) theory!
To sort this out, we need to understand PvI's approach to ficta.
Van Inwagen's Theory of Fictional Entities
We first note that van Inwagen holds to the univocity of 'exists' and 'is.' The ontological counterpart of this semantic thesis is that there are no modes of being/existence. He also has no truck with Meinongian Aussersein. Bear in mind that Aussersein is not a mode of being. And bear in mind that the doctrine of Aussersein is not the same as, and goes far beyond, the thesis that there is a weak mode of being had by the fictional Mrs. Gamp and her ilk. The thesis of Aussersein is that
M. Some items are such that they have no being whatsoever.
For van Inwagen, (M) is self-contradictory. He thinks that it entails that something is not identical with itself, which, if the entailment went through, would amount to a reductio ad absurdum of (M). (95) Now I have argued that van Inwagen is wrong to find (M) self-contradictory. But let's assume that he is right. Then it would follow, in conjunction with the univocity thesis, that everything exists and indeed in the same sense of 'exists.' And what sense is that? The sense supplied by the existential quantifier of standard modern predicate logic. Van Inwagen is thoroughly Quinean about existence. There is nothing more to existence than what existential quantification expresses. I call this a dogma of analysis. Fo an attempt at refutation, see my "Existence: Two Dogmas of Analysis" in Neo-Aristotelian Perspectives in Metaphysics, eds. Novotny and Novak, Routledge, 2014, pp. 45-75.
Now consider the sentence
1. Tom Sawyer is a character in a novel by Mark Twain.
By van Inwagen's lights, when (1) is translated into the quantifier-variable idiom it can be seen to imply that Tom Sawyer exists. I won't repeat van Inwagen's tedious rigmarole, but the idea is simple enough: (1) is plainly true; (1) cannot be supplied with an ontologically noncommittal paraphrase; and (1) ontologically commits us to the existence of the fictional character, Tom Sawyer. This is plausible and let's assume for present purposes that it is right: we accept (1) as true, and this acceptance commits us to the existence of a referent for 'Tom Sawyer.' Tom Sawyer exists! The same goes for all pure ficta. They all exist! They exist in the same sense that you and I do. Indeed, they actually exist: they are not mere possibilia. (What I just said is, strictly, pleonastic; but pleonasm is but a peccadillo when precision is at a premium.)
But now we have a problem, or at least van Inwagen does. While we are ontologically committed to the existence of purely fictional characters by our use and acceptance of true sentences such as (1), we must also somehow accommodate everyone's firm conviction that purely fictional characters do not exist. How?
When we say that Sherlock Holmes does not exist, we can be taken to express the proposition that "No one has all the properties the fictional character Sherlock Holmes holds . . . ." (105, emphasis added) There are properties that fictional characters HAVE and those that they HOLD. Among the properties that fictional characters HAVE are such logical properties as existence and self-identity, and such literary properties as being a character in a novel, being introduced in chapter 6, being modelled on Sancho Panza, etc. Among the properties fictional characters HOLD are properties like being human, being fat, having high blood pressure, being a resident of Hannibal, Missouri, and being a pipe-smoking detective.
What van Inwagen is doing is making a distinction between two modes of property-possession. A fictional item can possess a property by having it, i.e., exemplifying it, in which case the corresponding sentence expresses an actual predication. For example, a use of 'Tom Sawyer was created by Mark Twain' is an actual predication. A fictional item can also possess a property by holding it. For example, 'Tom Sawyer was a boy who grew up along the banks of Mississippi River in the 1840s' is not an actual predication but a sentence that expresses the relation of HOLDING that obtains between the fictional entity and the property expressed by 'was a boy who grew up, etc.'
With this distinction, van Inwagen can defang the apparent contradiction: Tom Sawyer exists & Tom Sawyer does not exist. The second limb can be taken to express the proposition that no one exemplifies or HAS the properties HELD by the existing item, Tom Sawyer.
To put it in my own way, what van Inwagen is maintaining is that there really is an entity named by 'Tom Sawyer' and that it possesses (my word) properties. It exemplifies some of these properties, the "high-category properties," but contains (my word) the others but is not qualified (my word) by them. Thus Mrs Gamp contains the property of being fat, but she does not exemplify this property. Analogy (mine): The set {fatness} is not fat: it holds the property but does not have (exemplify) it.
For van Inwagen, creatures of fiction exist and obey the laws of logic, including the Law of Excluded Middle. So they are not incomplete objects. On a Meinongian approach, Tom Sawyer is an incomplete nonexistent object. For van Inwagen, he is a complete existent object. Now although I am not aware of a passage where van Inwagen explicitly states that purely fictional entities are abstract objects, this seems clearly to be entailed by what he does say. For Tom Sawyer exists, and indeed actually exists -- he is not a merely possible being -- but he does not interact causally with anything else in the actual world. He does not exist here below in the land of concreta, but up yonder in Plato land. So if abstract entities are those that are causally inert, Tom Sawyer is an abstract object. That is consistent with what van Inwagen does explicity say, namely, that "creatures of fiction" are "theoretical entities of [literary] criticism." (Ontology, Identity, and Modality, p. 53.)
Some Questions about/Objections to van Inwagen's Theory
1. The theory implies that Sherlock Holmes exists, and exists as robustly as I do. That he exists follows from there being truths about him. That he exists as robustly as I do follows from the rejection of Meinongian nonentities and the rejection of modes of being/existence (and also of degrees of being/existence). But when I think about Sherlock I seem to myself to be thinking about something that does not exist. For I know that Sherlock is a purely fictional item, and I know that such items do not exist. If I am asked to describe the object of my thinking, I must describe it as nonexistent, for that is how it appears. So what should we say? Should we say that when I think of Sherlock, unbeknownst to myself, I am thinking of an existing abstract object? Or should we say that there are two objects, the one I am thinking of, which is nonexistent, and the existent abstract object?
Either way there is trouble. Surely I am the final authority as to what I am thinking of. It is part of the phenomenology of the situation that when I think about a detective that I know to be purely fictional I am thinking about an item that is given as nonexistent. But then the existing abstract object is not the same as the object I am thinking of. Van Inwagen's abstract surrogate exists; the object I am think of does not exist; ergo, they are not the same object.
On the other hand, if there are two objects, and it is van Inwagen's surrogate object that I am really thinking of when I think of Sherlock, then I am always in error when I think of pure ficta. I appear to myself to be thinking about nonexistent concreta when in reality I am thinking about existent abstracta.
2. When I think of Sherlock, I think of a man, and when I think of Mrs Gamp, I think of a woman. But no abstract object has sex organs. So either I am not thinking of what I appear to be thinking of, and a systematic error infects my thinking of pure ficta, or I am thinking of what I appear to be thinking of, namely, a man or a woman, in which case I am not thinking of an abstract existent.
3. When I think of Mrs Gamp as fat, I think of her as exemplifying the property of being fat, not as holding the property or containing it or encoding (Zalta) it. But then I cannot be thinking about an existent abstract object, for no such object is (predicatively) fat.
According to the Meinongian, when one think about Mrs Gamp, one thinks about a fat woman who does not exist. According to van Inwagen, when one thinks about Mrs Gamp, one thinks about an existing abstract object that is (predicatively) neither a woman not fat. Pick your poison!
I say neither theory is acceptable.
A Possible Objection to My Critique
"In the articles you cite, van Inwagen doesn't address our thinking about fictional items. He is not doing descriptive psychology or phenomenology; his approach is linguistic. He argues that fictional discourse -- discourse about fictional items -- commits us ontologically to fictional entities. He then tries to square this commitment with our acceptance of such sentences as 'Sherlock Holmes does not exist.' Your objections, however, are phenomenologically based. So it is not clear that your objections hit their target.
In response I would say that no adequate theory of fictional discourse or fictional objects can abstract away from the first-person point of view of one who thinks about fictional objects. Such linguistic reference as we find in a sentence such as (1) above is parasitic upon intentional or thinking reference. But this is a very large and a very hairy theme of its own. See The Primacy of the Intentional Over the Linguistic.
I feel it to be my duty to do my bit, day by day, to counteract the tsunami of liberal-left Unsinn from the crapweasels of PC by linking to outstanding writers and thinkers. There is no way I can write with the authority of a Victor Davis Hanson or a Thomas Sowell or a Charles Krauthammer on history or economics or politics. But I can help spread the word.
A lot happened that fabulous and far-off summer of '69, now 45 years past. I won't bore you with any autobiographical tidbits, and of course some of you remember the moon landing; but that was also the summer when Ted Kennedy's car killed Mary Jo Kopechne.
Let me attack yesterday's puzzle from a different angle. The puzzle in one sentence: we think about things that do not exist; but how is this possible given that they do not exist?
Here is the problem set forth as an aporetic hexad:
1. When I think about Frodo, as I am doing right now, I am thinking about, precisely, Frodo: not about some semantic or epistemic intermediary or surrogate or representative. I am thinking about a concrete, albeit nonexistent, item. I am not thinking about an idea in my mind, or a mental image, or any mental content; nor am I thinking about an abstract entity of any kind such as a property; nor am I thinking of a word or a phrase or anything linguistic.
2. Thinking about (thinking of) is a relation the relata of which are a subject who thinks and an object thought of. Thinking is triadic: ego-cogito-cogitatum.
3. Every relation is such that if it obtains, then all its relata exist/are.
4. There are no different modes of existence/being. This is the ontological counterpart of the semantic thesis of the univocity of 'exists' and 'is' and cognates.
5. To exist is to exist extramentally and extralinguistically, where the minds in question are finite.
6. Frodo, a purely fictional item, does not exist.
The limbs of the hexad are individually plausible but jointly inconsistent. To solve the problem we must reject one of the limbs. But which one? (6) is a datum, and (5) is an unproblematic definition. So the the candidates for rejection are (1)-(4). I'll take these in reverse order.
Deny (4): There are two modes of being, esse reale and esse intentionale. When we say, with truth, that Frodo does not exist, we mean that he lacks esse reale. But we can still think about him in a manner to satisfy (1)-(3) since he has merely intentional being.
Deny (3): Twardowski-Meinong-Grossmann Solution. There are items that have no being at all, and there are genuine relations that connect existents such as minds to beingless items in the realm of Aussersein.
Deny (2): Thinking-of is not relational, whether or not the obtaining of a relation requires that all its relata exist. This can be developed in different ways. Adverbial theories, Brentano's theory, Butchvarov's theory.
Deny (1): One way to deny (1) is via abstract artifactualism. A number of philosophers, including van Inwagen, have been putting forth some version of this view. The idea is that purely fictional items such as Frodo are created by the authors of works of fiction in which they figure. They are a peculiar species of abstract object since they come into being, unlike 'standard' abstract objects. They exist, but they are abstract. Meinong, by contrast, held that they are concrete but do not exist or have any being at all. Here is a paper that defends artifactualism against some objections by Sainsbury.
Now, gentlemen, pick your poison! Which limb will you deny? I claim, though this is but a promissory note, that no theory works and that the problem, though genuine, is insoluble.
As usual, the mainstream media is all wrong about Islam. In FrontPage Magazine, Daniel Greenfield points out that “looting was the core of Muhammad’s conquests.” And it came with Allah’s seal of approval. Numerous passages in the Koran and in the biography of Muhammad attest to the legitimacy of booty as the proper reward of fighting. Islam has no trouble with looting, says Greenfield, because it is “innately a gang religion”:
The gang … finds meaning in the ethos of the fight and in the comradeship of fellow gang members. That is why jihad is so central to Islam … Jihad is the gang culture of Islam. Its bonding rituals are central to Islam, whose original elements derive mainly from the raids of Mohammed and his companions…
Young men don’t join gangs just for the booty, but also for the sense of brotherhood the gang confers, and, perhaps primarily, for proof of masculinity. Psychologists and sociologists have known for a long time that gangs are particularly appealing to fatherless boys because boys who lack the guidance of fathers are most likely to feel insecure about their masculine identity, and thus most likely to seek confirmation of it in the ultra-masculine activities of gangs. Social scientists were hardly the first to discover this basic fact of male psychology. From the earliest times, almost all societies developed special rites of initiation for males to assist them in the passage from boyhood to manhood, and to channel them away from anti-social activities.
When boys grow up in communities without the guidance of fathers and elders and without established rites of initiation and confirmation, they tend to create their own initiation groups and rituals of passage. This is why modern urban areas with high concentrations of fatherless boys are the places where gang formation is highest.
The epidemic of fatherless boys is a worldwide phenomenon and it spells more recruits for the Islamic jihad. The reason the jihad doesn’t have a recruitment problem is that it appeals to basic masculine psychology. It promises action, male bonding, legitimate looting, a cause to fight for, subservient females in this world, and dozens more in the next. It’s the reason Muslims have been extremely successful in recruiting prisoners to Islam both in Europe and America. As I noted in Christianity, Islam, and Atheism:
In the United States, roughly 80 percent of inmates who find faith during their incarceration choose Islam. Many of these men are in prison in the first place because they were attracted to the masculine world of gangs. Now they’re being offered the chance to join the biggest, most powerful “gang” in the world. We’re seeing the beginning of a trend in the West: fatherless boys joining gangs, then ending up in prison, then coming out of prison as converts to Islam and the jihad. (p. 169)
There seems to be no shortage of young men willing to join up with the warrior culture of Islamic jihad. How about our own warrior culture—the U.S. military? The military still produces warriors, but the military culture is changing in ways that may make it less attractive to potential future warriors. Traditionally, the military has served, among other things, as an initiation into manhood. Past Marine recruiting campaigns, for example, were built around themes such as “The Marines Make Men” or “A Few Good Men.”
Two weeks in Greece passed both quickly and slowly. No access to internet or phone, much walking (on a lonely hillside I found a deserted monastery built on the ruins of a 6th century pagan temple) and much thinking. In particular, thinking about the 'Meinongian' thesis that there are objects that do not exist, and that 'there are Fs' can be understood in a 'wide' or unrestricted sense, so that nonexistent entities are to be included [in the ] domain of quantification and discourse, but also in a 'narrow' sense, including only existing objects.
You implictly defend this view often, but explicitly here: "the crux of the matter is whether there are different ways of existing, or different modes of existence. I say there are ...". Here is a brief critique of this view. Consider:
(1) Tom is thinking of Frodo
(2) There is no such thing as Frodo
I think we both agree that both of these propositions* are true. If so, what are we to make of the following argument?
BV: Yes. We can call them data sentences. They record Moorean facts.
(3) Proposition (1) is of the form 'aRb', where a = 'Tom', R = 'is thinking of' and b = 'Frodo'
BV: Permit me a quibble. You don't want to say that a = 'Tom,' you want to say that 'a' is a placeholder for 'Tom.' Likewise for the other terms. It seems to me that you are making two very minor mistakes. One is use-mention confusion; the other is confusing a placeholder with an abbreviation. Sorry to be such a pedant!
I would add that if we distinguish between grammatical and logical form, then proposition (1) is of the grammatical form, aRb. It is at least conceivable that the deep logical form of (1) be something else. Brentano, no slouch of a philosopher, would read (1) as nonrelational, as having the form of 'Tom is a Frodo-thinker.' An adverbialist would take (1) as having the form of 'Tom is thinking Frodo-ly.'
(4) The truth of a proposition of the form 'aRb' always implies the truth of 'for some x, x = b and aRx', and hence the truth of 'for some x, x = b.'
BV: Agreed if you insert 'logical' right before 'form' in (4).
(5) [Interpreting (4)] If Tom is thinking of Frodo then there is such a thing as Frodo.
(6) [from (5) and (1), modus ponens] There is such a thing as Frodo.
(7) [(6) and (2)] Contradiction.
BV: For this reductio ad absurdum to be formally valid, you need an auxiliary premise to the effect that 'For some x, x = b' asserts the existence of b. In other words, you must read the particular quantifier 'For some x, ___ x ___' as an existential quantifier, where an existential quantifier expresses existence, where existence is real, i.e., mind-independent, existence. It is at least a question whether existence can be reduced to someness!
We might attempt to resolve the contradiction as follows. We should read (6) as asserting existence in some wide or unrestricted quantification sense, as follows:
(6A) There is such a thing[w] as Frodo
where 'thing[w]' ranges over all kinds of things, existent and non-existent. Likewise, we should read (2) as asserting existence in some narrow or restricted quantification sense, as follows:
(2A) There is no such thing[n] as Frodo
where 'thing[n]' ranges only over real or existing things. Where there is ambiguity, there is no real contradiction. To assert that Frodo is a thing in the wide sense does not contradict the assertion that he is not a thing in the narrow sense.
BV: I have been toying with a solution something like this, except that it is not strictly Meinongian. For Meinong, items like Frodo have no being whatsoever. That is his famous doctrine of Aussersein. I have been toying with the idea that they have being all right, but merely intentional being, esse intentionale as opposed to esse reale, where these are two different modes of being/existence. Lukas Novak, who shares with me the idea that thinking is genuinely relational, denies that it is impossible to refer to what has no being. See Lukas Novak on Reference to What is Not.It looks like I am fighting a war on two fronts, the London front and the Prague front.
My objection is as follows.
BV: Your objection, I take it, is to a solution along the lines I sketched.
Consider:
(8) Tom thinks that there is such a thing as Frodo, but he is wrong
The conjunct 'but he is wrong' is a negation, and in order to be a negation, what it negates must have the same sense as what is asserted (inside the belief context). Having the same sense includes the terms having the same range, and so the range of the term 'thing' as it occurs in the assertion must be identical to the range of the same term as it occurs (although elided) in the negation. I.e. (8) can be expanded into
(8A) Tom thinks that there is such a thing[x] as Frodo, but it is not the case that there is such a thing[x] as Frodo
where 'x' indicates sameness of range. I.e. if the range in the assertion is narrow, it is so in the negation, and likewise if it is wide. Thus the range of the term 'thing' is irrelevant.
BV: Now you've lost me completely. There is clearly a difference between (1) -- Tom is thinking of Frodo -- and 'Tom thinks that there is such a thing as Frodo.' I don't understand why you shifted to the latter sentence. To think about x is not to think that there is such a thing as x, nor is it to think that there is not such a thing as x. It is just to think about x.
At this point in the dialectic I don't know what you are up to. From previous discussions, your aim was to pin a certain exportation fallacy on me, the fallacy of moving from
Tom is thinking of Frodo
to
There exists an x such that x = Frodo & Tom is thinking of x.
That is clearly a non sequitur; I recognize it as such, and I don't commit it. If Tom is thinking of Frodo, then Tom is thinking of something; but it doesn't follow that this thing exists. On Meinong's theory, Tom is thinking of a beingless item. On my theory, he is thinking of an item that has esse intentionale but not esse reale. On Meinong's theory, intentionality is a relation, but the object relatum has no being at all. On my theory, is a relation, but the object relatum has merely intentional being.
Yet the form of 'Tom thinks that there is such a thing as Frodo' is also 'aRb', where a is 'Tom', b is 'Frodo', and R is 'thinks that there is such a thing as'. If premiss (4) above were true, then from (8) we could derive 'there is such a thing such that Tom thinks that there is such a thing as it', which would mean Tom was right, rather than wrong.
My solution to the problem, as I have argued before, is to reject premiss (4). 'Tom is thinking of Frodo' has the grammatical form 'aRb', but that is not its logical form. Clearly its logical form includes an internal quantifier, i.e. a quantifier that is included inside the belief operator, but cannot be legitimately exported outside.
BV: Now I think I see what you are up to. You take
(1) Tom is thinking of Frodo
to have the logical form of
(9) Tom is thinking that Frodo exists.
And then your point is that (9) does not entail
(10) Frodo exists.
I agree that the inferential move from (9) to (10) is invalid. But I think it is a mistake that (1) can be replaced by (9). Suppose I am thinking of something. It might be London's Trafalgar Square or Boston's Scollay Square. The former exists (last time I checked) but the latter no longer exists. Clearly I can have either thought without the additional thought that the square in question exists or does not exist. To think about something is not eo ipso to think that the thing in question exists -- or to think that it does not exist.
Perhaps I have misunderstood you.
___________________ *Proposition: (def) a sentence capable of truth or falsity, and so not a question, a command or a prayer.
I don't believe I have ever read a column by Richard Fernandez of The Belmont Club that is more penetrating, thought-provoking, or chilling than his Seven Gambit. Excerpts:
Just as soon as Israel accepted an Egyptian-brokered ceasefire Hamas fired 47 rockets killing one Israeli citizen. Anyone who has followed the conflict could have predicted this with certainty; the point of a ceasefire — for a terrorist organization — is to break it for exactly the same reason it purposely attacks women and children.
Dr. Anna Geifman tried to explain that the reason why innocents are selected as terror targets is because “children are the last consecrated absolute”. That is just why they must be killed in the cruelest way possible. For “militant nihilism strives to ruin first and foremost what their contemporaries hold sacred”.
Nihilism isn’t the absence of a belief. It is something subtly different: it is the belief in nothing. The most powerful weapon of terrorism is therefore the unyielding No. “No I will not give up. No I will not tell the truth. No I will not play fair. No I will not spare children. No I will not stop even if you surrender to me; I will not cease even if you give me everything you have, up to and including your children’s lives. Nothing short of destroying me absolutely can make me stop. And therefore I will defeat you even if you kill me. Because I will make you pay the price in guilt for annihilating me.”
It’s an extremely powerful weapon. The Absolute No is a devastating attack on the self-image and esteem of civilization. Hamas will demonstrate the No, the Nothing. It will show that deep down inside Israelis — and Americans — are animals like them.
[. . .]
The power of Hamas lies in that they will never stop hating. No ceasefire, concession, negotiation or entreaty will move them. That is their inhuman strength. The Jews can even exterminate them, but only at the cost of destroying all the ideals they hold dear. If the last Hamas activist could speak he would say this:
“Shoot! I am the last. Carry out your ethnic cleansing, just as the Nazis tried with you. You will never be able to look yourself in the mirror again. The price of victory is to win on our terms. Nothing will remain of your precious Jewish self-esteem, of the illusion that you are a civilization dedicated to morality. What will you do after you kill me? Go to your synagogue and a hymn of praise to your God?
“At that moment your faith will desert you. For you claim your God does not desire blood, that yours is a God of love and I say therefore He is false. The only real Gods are those of Hate. A God that does not live by blood does not exist as my God who lives by blood exists; and when you pull the trigger you will be worshipping at my altar! I have won at last. Come to prayer. Come to Islam.”
[. . .]
Wars through history have exacted an irreparable spiritual price from its [their] combatants.
[. . .]
It’s not an original thought. William Tecumseh Sherman knew before Collins that War is Hell; that the only excuse for it was the belief that you could in the subsequent peace, chain up the devils. He wrote in his letters, “you cannot qualify war in harsher terms than I will. War is cruelty, and you cannot refine it … If the United States submits to a division now, it will not stop, but will go on until we reap the fate of Mexico, which is eternal war.”
Nor has its character changed much. Curtis LeMay, during what we remember as the Good War, shared his formula for defeating the enemy. “If you kill enough of them, they stop fighting.”
Human beings are remarkably good at calling up the devil in their fellow human beings. They start out Christian enough, but give them time. In the first Christmas of the Great War, when fighting was but a few months old, there enough fellow-feeling among the combatants remained to spontaneously create what is now remembered as the Christmas Truce.
Through the week leading up to Christmas, parties of German and British soldiers began to exchange seasonal greetings and songs between their trenches; on occasion, the tension was reduced to the point that individuals would walk across to talk to their opposite numbers bearing gifts. On Christmas Eve and Christmas Day, many soldiers from both sides—as well as, to a lesser degree, from French units—independently ventured into “no man’s land”, where they mingled, exchanging food and souvenirs. As well as joint burial ceremonies, several meetings ended in carol-singing. Troops from both sides were also friendly enough to play games of football with one another.
By the next year they were modifying their bayonets so it would hurt more when you stabbed the enemy. When we look at Hamas we are looking at some[thing] very old and ancient. Does the devil win in Seven? For that matter does he win on earth?
Say no if you can. For Hamas is determined to prove that you too are like them. Just like them.
Your post on why the left “went ballistic” over the Hobby Lobby case was well-done as usual, and I for one was grateful for your emphasis that the so-called contraceptives in question were really abortifacients, and that the latter is not a proper adjective for the former. I do have a couple of questions/comments though.
First, about the left and religion. While I don’t like the politics or the theology of people like Jim Wallis of Sojourners or the President’s former pastor Jeremiah Wright, it certainly seems that they are really religious and their politics flow from their faiths. I’m inclined to say that they have a mistaken anthropology and overvalue one understanding of justice at the expense of other legitimate senses, but wouldn’t say that they’re not really religious or that their true religion is leftism. (Well, maybe if I knew more about Wright’s theology I would say that about him. But I don’t believe that all lefties who claim to be Christians are just faking it and make a god out of the state and/or left-wing politics.)
Second, the statement that “they don't have the right to use the coercive power of the state to force others to pay for them when the contraceptives in question violate the religious beliefs of those who are forced to pay for them” seems to be overdrawn, at least if it’s generalized. If a Jehovah’s Witness owns a business, does he have the right to refuse to pay for an employee’s insurance when it pays for a blood transfusion? What about a pacifist being forced to pay taxes to support a war effort (especially one that doesn’t involve direct national self-defense)? There are all sorts of things we’re forced to pay for even though they violate our moral and religious beliefs, and while we can sometimes successfully fight those challenges (when, e.g., it poses an “undue burden”) there are other times when we must knuckle under unless we wish to engage in civil disobedience.
Maybe I will get to the first objection later.
Here is a very blunt response to the second. If you are opposed on moral grounds to blood transfusions, then you hold a position that is not morally or intellectually respectable. Therefore, IF the government has the right to force employers to provide health insurance that covers blood transfusions for employees, THEN it has the right to violate the beliefs of a Jehovah's Witness when it comes to blood transfusions. And the same goes for pacifism. If pacifism is the view that it is always and everywhere wrong to kill or otherwise harm human beings, then I say you hold a view that is not morally or intellectually respectable. I could argue this out at great length, but not now; I told you I was going to be blunt.
Note, however, that the blood transfusion case as described by Monokroussos is importantly different from the pacifism case. The first case arises only if something like the PPACA -- ObamaCare -- is in effect . I say the bill should never have been enacted. Government has no right to force private enterprises to provide any health insurance at all to their employees, and no right to force workers to buy health insurance, and no right to specify what will and will not be covered in any health insurance plan that employers provide for their employees.
The pacifism case is much more difficult because it arises not from a dubious law but from the coercive nature of government. I believe that government is practically necessary and that government that governs a wide territory wherein live very diverse types of people must be coercive to do its job. Moreover, I assume, though I cannot prove, that coercive government is morally justified and has the moral right to force people to do some things whether or not they want to do them and whether or not they morally approve of doing them. Paying taxes is an example. Suppose you have a pacifist who withholds that portion of his taxes that goes to the support of what is perhaps euphemistically called 'defense.' Then I say the government is morally justified in taking action against the pacifist.
But if the government has the right to force the pacifist to violate his sincerely held moral principles, why is it not right for the government to force the pro-lifer to violate her sincerely held principles? The short and blunt answer is that pacifism is intellectually indefensible while the pro-life position is eminently intellectually defensible. But the pro-choice pacifists won't agree!
Clearly, there are two extremes we must avoid:
E1. If the government may force a citizen to violate (act contrary to) one of his beliefs, then it it may force a citizen to violate any of his beliefs.
E2. The government may not force a citizen to violate any of his beliefs.
The problem, which may well be insoluble, is to find a principled way to navigate between these extremes. But what common principles do we share at this late date in the decline of the West?
Perhaps we can agree on this: the government may legitimately force you to violate your belief if your belief is that infidels are to be put to the sword, but it may not legitimately force you to violate your belief if your belief is that infanticide and involuntary euthanasia are wrong. (Suppose the government demands that all severely retarded children be killed.) But even here there will be dissenting voices. Believe it or not, there are those who argue from the supposed moral acceptability of abortion to the moral acceptability of infanticide. May the Lord have mercy on us.
So what's the solution? The solution is limited government, federalism, and an immigration policy that does not allow people into the country with wildly differing values and moral codes. For example, the Hobby Lobby case would not have come up at all if government kept out of the health care business.
The bigger the government, the more to fight over. But we don't seem to have the will to shrink the government to its legitimate constitutionally-based functions. So expect things to get worse.
It was 30 years ago tomorrow, during a training run. Running pioneer James F. Fixx, author of the wildly successful The Complete Book of Running, keeled over dead of cardiac arrest. He died with his 'boots' on, and not from running but from a bad heart. It's a good bet that his running added years to his life in addition to adding life to his years. I've just pulled my hardbound copy of The Complete Book of Running from the shelf. It's a first edition, 1977, in good condition with dust jacket. I read it when it first came out. Do I hear $1000? Just kidding, it's not for sale. This book and the books of that other pioneer, George Sheehan, certainly made a difference in my life.
The atavism and simplicity and cleansing quality of a good hard run are particularly beneficial for Luftmenschen. Paradoxically, the animality of it releases lofty thoughts.
See here for a comparison of Fixx and Sartre. And here for something on George Sheehan. Now for some 'running' tunes.
Del Shannon, Runaway. Charles Weedon Westover was born 30 December 1934 and is best known for his 1961 #1 hit, "Runaway." Suffering from depression, Shannon committed suicide on February 8, 1990, with a .22-caliber rifle at his home in Santa Clarita, California. Following his death, the Traveling Wilburys honored him by recording a version of "Runaway".
I should have mentioned it last night. Today, 20 July, is not only the 30th anniversary of Jim Fixx's death, but also the 49th anniversary of the release of Bob Dylan's Like a Rolling Stone. Wikipedia:
The song had a huge impact on Bruce Springsteen, who was 15 years old when he first heard it. Springsteen described the moment during his speech inducting Dylan into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 1988 and also assessed the long-term significance of "Like a Rolling Stone":
The first time I heard Bob Dylan, I was in the car with my mother listening to WMCA, and on came that snare shot that sounded like somebody'd kicked open the door to your mind ... The way that Elvis freed your body, Dylan freed your mind, and showed us that because the music was physical did not mean it was anti-intellect. He had the vision and talent to make a pop song so that it contained the whole world. He invented a new way a pop singer could sound, broke through the limitations of what a recording could achieve, and he changed the face of rock'n'roll for ever and ever "[66][67]
Dylan's contemporaries in 1965 were both startled and challenged by the single. Paul McCartney remembered going around to John Lennon's house in Weybridge to hear the song. According to McCartney, "It seemed to go on and on forever. It was just beautiful ... He showed all of us that it was possible to go a little further."[68]Frank Zappa had a more extreme reaction: "When I heard 'Like a Rolling Stone', I wanted to quit the music business, because I felt: 'If this wins and it does what it's supposed to do, I don't need to do anything else ...' But it didn't do anything. It sold but nobody responded to it in the way that they should have."[68] Nearly forty years later, in 2003, Elvis Costello commented on the innovative quality of the single. "What a shocking thing to live in a world where there was Manfred Mann and the Supremes and Engelbert Humperdinck and here comes 'Like a Rolling Stone'".[69]
Your humble correspondent was lying in the sand at Huntington Beach, California, when the song came on the radio. It was like nothing else on the radio in those days of the Beatles and the Beach Boys. It 'blew my mind.' What is THAT? And WHO is that? I had been very vaguely aware of some B. Dylan as the writer of PPM's Don't Think Twice. I pronounced the name like 'Dial in.' That memorable summer of '65 I became a Dylan fanatic, researching him at the library and buying all his records. The fanaticism faded with the '60s. But while no longer a fanatic, I remain a fan.
To deliberately wage war so that your own people can be telegenically killed is indeed moral and tactical insanity. But it rests on a very rational premise: Given the Orwellian state of the world’s treatment of Israel (see: the U.N.’s grotesque Human Rights Council), fueled by a mix of classic anti-Semitism, near-total historical ignorance, and reflexive sympathy for the ostensible Third World underdog, these eruptions featuring Palestinian casualties ultimately undermine support for Israel’s legitimacy and right to self-defense.
In a world of such Kafkaesque ethical inversions, Hamas’ depravity begins to make sense. This is a world in which the Munich massacre is a movie and the murder of Klinghoffer is an opera — both deeply sympathetic to the killers. This is a world in which the U.N. ignores humanity’s worst war criminals while incessantly condemning Israel, a state warred upon for 66 years which nonetheless goes to extraordinary lengths to avoid harming the very innocents its enemies use as shields.
It’s to the Israelis’ credit that amid all this madness they haven’t lost their moral scruples. Or their nerve. Those outside the region have the minimum obligation, therefore, to expose the madness and speak the truth. Rarely has it been so blindingly clear.
Concerning tropes, Peter van Inwagen says, "I don't understand what people can be talking about when they talk about those alleged items." (Existence: Essays in Ontology, Cambridge UP, 2014, p. 211.) He continues on the same page:
Consider two tennis balls that are perfect duplicates of each other. Among their other features, each is 6.7 centimeters in diameter, and the color of each is a certain rather distressing greenish yellow called "optical yellow." Apparently, some people understand what it means to say that each of the balls has its own color -- albeit the color of one is a perfect duplicate of the color of the other. I wonder whether anyone would understand me if I said that each ball had its own diameter -- albeit the diameter of one was a perfect duplicate of the diameter of the other. I doubt it. But one statement makes about as much sense to me as the other -- for just as the diameter of one of the balls is the diameter of the other (6.7 centimeters), the color of one of the balls is the color of the other (optical yellow).
Although van Inwagen couches the argument in terms of what does and does not make sense to him, the argument is of little interest if he is offering a merely autobiographical comment about the limits of his ability to understand. And it does seem that he intends more when he says that he doubts whether anyone would understand the claim that each ball has its own diameter. So I'll take the argument to be an argument for the objective meaninglessness of trope talk, not just the PvI-meaninglessness of such talk:
1. It is meaningful to state that each ball has its own color if and only if it is meaningful to state that each ball has its own diameter.
2. It is not meaningful to state that each ball has its own diameter.
Therefore
3. It is not meaningful to state that each ball has its own color.
Therefore
4. Talk of tropes is meaningless.
The argument is valid, and (1) is true. But I don't see why we should accept (2). So I say the argument is unsound.
I am not defending the truth of trope theory, only its meaningfulness. I am maintaining that trope theory is a meaningful ontological proposal and that van Inwagen is wrong to think otherwise.
It is given that the two tennis balls have the same diameter. But all that means is that the diameter of ball A and the diameter of ball B have the same measurement, 6.7 cm. This fact is consistent with there being two numerically distinct particular diameters, the diameter of A and the diameter of B.
What's more, the diameters have to be numerically distinct. If I didn't know that the two balls were of the same diameter, I could measure them to find out. Now what would I be measuring? Not each ball, but each ball's diameter. And indeed each ball's own diameter, not some common diameter. I would measure the diameter of A, and then the diameter of B. If each turns out to be 6.7 cm in length, then we could say that they have the 'same diameter' where this phrase means that A's diameter has the same length as B's diameter. But again, this is consistent with the diameters' being numerically distinct.
There are two diameters of the same length just as there are two colored expanses of the same color: two yellownesses of the same shade of yellow. So I suggest we run van Inwagen's argument in reverse. Just as it is meaningful to maintain that the yellowness of A is numerically distinct from the yellowness of B, it is meaningful to maintain that the diameter of A is numerically distinct from the diameter of B. Looking at the two balls we see two yellownesses, one here, the other there. Similarly, measuring the balls' diameter, we measure two diameters, one here, the other there.
Again, this does not show that trope theory is true, but only that it makes sense. It makes as much sense as van Inwagen's proposal according to which optical yellow is an abstract property exemplified by the two balls.
The inaugural meeting, back in January, Scottsdale Community College, to protest the rising tide of tobacco-wackery. I just stumbled across this shot, a 'selfie' or perhaps an 'us-y' taken by Mike Valle of SCC.
But these days, it seems, no one wants to be a dog racist—and this is where things start to get really weird. “The opposition to pit bulls might not be racist,” Junod writes in his Esquire piece. “It does, however, employ racial thinking.” Jeez, Louise. I suppose, then, it is time that I confess: I am a pug supremacist. Go ahead and judge me, America. Say what you will, but the worst thing a pug can do is fart you to death.
Rather than being what it began as, a “narrowly political strategy for living peacefully in a world of inexorably clashing comprehensive views of reality and the human good,” liberalism has for many become that comprehensive view of reality and the human good. Your neighbor’s ideas are no longer different. They are heretical. Liberalism could become the problem that it was intended to solve.
Mark Anderson, presently on a sort of Nietzsche pilgrimage, sent me this panoramic shot. Left-click to enlarge. Mark explains:
The photo shows lake Sils. The little settlement below is Isola. Further to the right, where the lake ends, is Sils-Maria. The large patch of green that may look like an island right up against Sils is the Chasté peninsula, one of Nietzsche’s favorite places. He even fantasized about building himself a hermit’s hut there.
Could I present liberal-left ideas in such a way that the reader could not tell that I was not a liberal? Let me take a stab at this with respect to a few 'hot' topics. This won't be easy. I will have to present liberal-left ideas as plausible while avoiding all mention of their flaws. And all this without sarcasm, parody, or irony. What follows is just shoot-from-the-hip, bloggity-blog stuff. Each of these subheadings could be expanded into a separate essay. And of course there are many more subheadings that could be added. But who has time?
Abortion. We liberals believe that a women's right to choose to terminate a pregnancy is a very important right that must be upheld. We are not pro abortion but pro choice, believing that decisions concerning a woman's reproductive health are ultimately her decisions, in consultation with physicians and family members and clergy, but are not the business of lawmakers and politicians. Every woman has a right to do what she wants with her body and its contents. While we respect those who oppose abortion on religious grounds, these grounds are of a merely private nature and cannot be made the basis of public policy. Religious people do not have the right to impose their views on the rest of us using the coercive power of the state.
Voting Rights. We liberals can take pride in the role our predecessors played in the struggle for universal suffrage. Let us not forget that until the ratification of the 19th Amendment to the U. S. Constitution on 18 August 1920, women were not allowed to vote. We liberals seek to preserve and deepen the progress that has been made. For this reason we oppose voter identification laws that have the effect of disenfranchising American citizens by disproportionately burdening young voters, people of color, the elderly , low-income families, and people with disabilities.
Gun Control. We live in a society awash in gun violence. While we respect the Second Amendment and the rights of hunters and sport shooters, we also believe in reasonable regulations such as a ban on all assault weapons and high-capacity magazines.
Marriage. We liberals believe in equality and oppose discrimination in all its forms, whether on the basis of race, national origin, religion, gender, or sexual orientation. For this reason we support marriage equality and same-sex marriage. Opposition to same-sex marriage is discriminatory. As we become more enlightened and shed ancient superstitions, we extend the realm of freedom and equality to include more and more of the hitherto persecuted and marginalized. The recognition of same-sex marriage is but one more step toward a truly inclusive and egalitarian society.
Taxation and Wealth Redistribution. We liberals want justice for all. Now justice is fairness, and fairness requires equality. We therefore maintain that a legitimate function of government is wealth redistribution to reduce economic inequality.
Size and Scope of Government. As liberals we believe in robust and energetic government. Government has a major role to play in the promotion of the common good. It is not the people's adversary, but their benefactor. The government is not a power opposed to us; the government is us. It should provide for the welfare of all of us. Its legitimate functions cannot be restricted to the protection of life, liberty, and property (Locke) or to the securing of the negative rights of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness (Jefferson). Nor can it be restricted to the securing of these and a few others: people have positive rights and it is a legitimate function of government to ensure that people received the goods and services to which they have a positive right.
Health and Human Services. A decent society takes care of its members and provides for their welfare. The provision of welfare cannot be left to such institutions of civil society as private charities. It is a legitimate state function. People have positive rights to food, water, shelter, clothing, and health services. These rights generate in those capable of satisfying them the duty to provide the things in question. It is therefore a legitimate function of government to make sure that people get what they need.
Capital Punishment. We liberals are enlightened and progressive people. Now as humankind has progressed morally, there has been a corresponding progress in penology. The cruel and unusual punishments of the past have been outlawed. The outlawing of capital punishment is but one more step in the direction of progress and humanity and indeed the final step in implementing the Eight Amendment's proscription of "cruel and unusual punishments." There is no moral justification for capital punishment when life in prison without the possibility of parole is available.
The Role of Religion. As liberals, we are tolerant. We respect the First Amendment right of religious people to a "free exercise" of their various religions. But religious beliefs and practices and symbols and documents are private matters that ought to be kept out of the public square. When a justice of the peace, for example, posts a copy of the Ten Commandments, the provenience of which is the Old Testament, in his chambers or in his court, he violates the separation of church and state.
Immigration. We are a nation of immigrants. As liberals we embrace immigration: it enriches us and contributes to diversity. We therefore oppose the nativist and xenophobic immigration policies of conservatives while also condemning the hypocrisy of those who oppose immigration when their own ancestors came here from elsewhere.
Here, with a response by McGinn. Merits the coveted MavPhilimprimatur and nihil obstat.
In fairness to Churchland, it is her letter, not her, that Cavell calls "hysterical." A politically incorrect word these days, I should think. Isn't 'hysterical' etymologically related to the Latin and Greek words for womb? According to the Online Etymology Dictionary:
1610s, from Latin hystericus "of the womb," from Greek hysterikos "of the womb, suffering in the womb," from hystera "womb" (see uterus). Originally defined as a neurotic condition peculiar to women and thought to be caused by a dysfunction of the uterus. Meaning "very funny" (by 1939) is from the notion of uncontrollable fits of laughter. Related: Hysterically.
It is hard for many of us to understand why so many leftists have worked themselves up into a frothing frenzy over the 5-4 SCOTUS Hobby Lobby decision, a frenzy that in the notable cases of Nancy Pelosi and Hillary Clinton has spilled over into shameless lying. But even among those lefties who are not lying about the decision, and who understand what it was and just how narrow and circumscribed it was, there are those who are still going nuts over it. Why?
The upshot of the decision was that closely-held, for-profit companies such as Hobby Lobby may not be coerced by the government into providing exactly four, count 'em, four, abortion-inducing contraceptives for its employees in violation of the religious beliefs of the proprietors of the company. That's it!
(Parenthetical Terminological Observation: There is an interesting terminological question here that perhaps only philosophers could get excited over, namely: how can a substance or device that destroys a fertilized egg, a conceptus, be legitimately referred to as contraceptive? A genuine contraceptive device, such as a diaphragm, prevents conception, prevents the coming into being of a conceptus. Contraception comes too late once there is a fertilized ovum on the scene. 'Abortifacient contraceptive' is a contradictio in adjecto. Call me a pedant if you like, but what you call pedantry, I call precision. One ought to insist on precision in these matters if one is serious and intellectually honest.)
My question again: why the liberal-left frenzy over such a narrow and reasonable Supreme Court decision, one that did not involve the interpretation of the Constitution, but the mere construction of a statute, i.e., the interpretation of an existing law? (And of course, the decision did not first introduce the notion that corporations may be viewed as persons!)
1. The first point is that ". . . while the religious right views religion as a fundamental, and indeed essential, part of the human experience, the secular left views it as something more like a hobby, so for them it’s as if a major administrative rule was struck down because it unduly burdened model-train enthusiasts."
First a quibble. It is not correct to imply that it is only the religious right that views religion as an essential component of human experience; almost all conservatives do, religious and nonreligious. I gave an example the other day of the distinguished Australian philosopher David M. Armstrong who, while an atheist and a naturalist, had the greatest respect for religion and considered it an essential part of human experience.
Well, could religion be reasonably viewed as a hobby? Obviously not. It cuts too deep. Religion addresses the ultimate questions, the questions as to why we exist, what we exist for, and how we ought to live. It purports to provide meaning to an otherwise meaningless existence. Religions make total claims on the lives of their adherents, and those who take their religion seriously apply it to every aspect of their lives: it is not something that can be hived off from the rest of one's life like a hobby.
It is because of this total claim that religions make to provide ultimate understanding, meaning, and directives for action that puts it at odds with the totalizing and the fully totalitarian state. The ever-expanding, all-controlling centralized state will brook no competitors when it comes to the provision of the worldview that will guide and structure our lives. This is why hostility to religion is inscribed into the very essence of the Left. In fact, I would go so far as to say that there cannot really be a religious Left: those on the Left who are 'religious' live as if leftism is their real religion.
I would reformulate McArdle's first point as follows. The Left has no understanding of religion and no appreciation of it. They see it as a tissue of superstitions and prejudices that contributes nothing to human flourishing. They want it suppressed, or else marginalized: driven from the public square into the realm of the merely private.
That the SCOTUS majority took religion seriously is therefore part of what drives leftists crazy.
2. McArdle's second point has to do with negative and positive rights and the role of the state. A positive right is a right to be provided with something, and a negative right is a right to not having something taken away. Thus my right to life is a negative right, a right that generates in others the duty to refrain from killing me among other things. The right to free speech is also a negative right: it induces in the government the duty not to prevent me from publishing my thoughts on this weblog, say. But I have no positive right to be provided with the equipment necessary to publish a weblog. I have the negative right to acquire such equipment, but not the positive right to have it provided for me by any person or by the state.
Now suppose you think that people have the positive right to health care or health care insurance and that this includes the right to be provided with abortifacients or even with abortions. Then the crunch comes inevitably. There is no positive right to an abortion, we conservatives say, and besides, abortion is a grave moral evil. If the state forces corporations like Hobby Lobby to provide abortions or abortifacients, then it violates the considered moral views of conservatives. It forces them to to support what they consider to be a grave moral evil.
People have the legal right to buy and use the contraceptives they want. But they don't have the right to use the coercive power of the state to force others to pay for them when the contraceptives in question violate the religious beliefs of those who are forced to pay for them. To a conservative that is obvious.
But it riles up lefties who hold that (i) religion is a purely private matter that must be kept private; (ii) there is a positive right to health care; (iii) abortion is purely a matter of a woman's reproductive health.
3. McArdle's third point has to do with the Left's destruction of civil society. I would put it like this. The Left aims to eliminate the buffering elements of civil society lying between the naked individual and the state. These elements include the family, private charities, businesses, service organizations and voluntary associations of all kinds. As they wither away, the state assumes more of their jobs. The state can wear the monstrous aspect of Leviathan or that of the benevolent nanny whose multiple tits are so many spigots supplying panem et circenses to the increasingly less self-reliant masses. To cite just one example, the Obama administration promotes ever-increasing food stamp dependency to citizens and illegal aliens alike under the mendacious SNAP acronym thereby disincentivizing relief and charitable efforts at the local level while further straining an already strapped Federal treasury. A trifecta of stupidity and corruption, if you will: the infantilizing of the populace who now needs federal help in feeding itself; the fiscal irresponsibility of adding to the national debt; the assault on the institutions of civil society out of naked lust for ever more centralized power in the hands of the Dems, the left wing party. (Not that the Repubs are conservative.)
From the foregoing one can see just how deep the culture war goes. It is a struggle over the nature of religion, its role in human flourishing, and its place in society. It is a battle over the nature of rights. It is a war over the size and scope and role of government, the limits if any on state power, and the state's relation to the individual and to the institutions of civil society.
In one sense, Alan Dershowitz was right to refer to the Hobby Lobby decision as "monumentally insignificant." In another sense wrong: the furor over it lays bare the deep philosophical conflicts that divide us.
I am critical of giving feminism and race the extra attention and insulation from criticism that comes from designating these topics as “entire sub-disciplines of philosophy.” Given that it’s considered impolitic to criticize “entire sub-disciplines of philosophy,” we should vigorously debate what deserves to be considered as such. Knowledge, ethics, and being-qua-being deserve that distinction. It’s not obvious that feminism and race do.
As many suspected, I am an expert in neither philosophy of race nor feminist philosophy. I need not be. One could have principled reservations about a discipline called “conservative studies” without being an Edmund Burke scholar. If you know that conservatism is a position in political philosophy, you might reasonably think it shouldn’t also be a discipline unto itself.
That is essentially the point I’m pressing against feminism as a sub-discipline of philosophy. Let feminism be discussed alongside conservatism, libertarianism, liberalism, fascism, and socialism in political-philosophy classes. Why must feminism, alone among these “isms,” also have its own brand of epistemology, ethics, literary theory, and biology? I doubt feminists would tolerate libertarian counterparts to any of these.
I think Case is making two logically distinct points here, points that ought to be explicitly distinguished.
The first is that, just as conservatism is not a philosophical subdiscipline unto itself, neither should feminism be. The second is that, whether or not feminism is its own subdiscipline, it is dubious to suppose that it entails its own epistemology, ethics, and ontology.
The second point invites parody. If Jewish philosophy implied its own epistemology, etc., what would that look like?
Jewish epistemology: Your mother has privileged access. Jewish ethics: ‘can’ implies ‘don't.' Jewish logic: if not p, what? q maybe? Jewish decision theory: maximize regret.
What principles would a feminist ontology include? That male entities are entia non grata? That they are unnecessary posits? I am tempted to make further jokes about razors and nomological danglers, but I'll leave that to the reader.
Surprisingly, Brian Leiter adopts a civil tone in his discussion of Case. Perhaps the taste of his own medicine administered by me and others has had a salutary effect on him.
Here. Kelly utterly demolishes Pelosi's shameless fabrications.
That the Left lies repeatedly and blatantly and shamelessly about matters that are easily checked says something about them. Among other things, it says that they view politics as war. "All's fair in love and war." "The end justifies the means." Truth is not a value for the Left unless it serves their agenda. You have to understand that. It is the agenda that matters, the things to be done. "The philosophers have variously interpreted the world, but the point is to change it." (Karl Marx, 11th Thesis on Feuerbach, my emphasis.) And they think they know what sorts of change are truly ameliorative. But that is precisely what they do not know, and why Obama and his crew are proving to be a disaster both for the country and for the world.
And that the mainstream media does not call the Left on its lies shows that they have abdicated their journalistic responsibilities. They are in the tank for their man. But that may change somewhat as Obama exposes more and more of his incompetence and lawlessness. I don't reckon that Chris Mathews and the rest of the Obama shills over at MSNBC are getting quite the same thrill 'up the leg' as they did back in 2008.
Occasionally, Robert Paul Wolff says something at his blog that I agree with completely, for instance:
To an extent I did not anticipate when I set out on life’s path, books have provided many of the joys and satisfactions I have encountered. I am constantly grateful to the scholars and thinkers who have written, and continue to write, the books from which I derive such pleasure, both the great authors of the past . . . and those less exalted . . . .
Gratitude is a characteristically conservative virtue; hence its presence in Wolff softens my attitude toward him.
As Wolff suggests, our gratitude should extend to the lesser lights, the humbler laborers in the vineyards of Wissenschaft, the commentators and translators, the editors and compilers and publishers. Beyond that, to the librarians and the supporters of libraries, and all the preservers and transmitters of high culture, and those who, unlettered themselves in the main, defend with blood and iron the precincts of high culture from the barbarians who now once again are massing at the gates.
Nor should we forget the dedicated teachers, mostly women, who taught us to read and write and who opened up the world of learning to us and a lifetime of the sublime joys of study and reading and writing.
A reader wants my thoughts regarding the following hypothetical scenarios.
I own a modestly nice car, say, a 2014 Honda Accord with some bells and whistles. I treat it fairly well, ensuring that it receives in a timely fashion all of the required maintenance. I get it washed and waxed with pride. The one deficiency I have is that I park my car with some indiscretion. I am not that vigilant with locking my doors. You warn me that this is a mistake. I counter by saying that there are other cars that are more valuable, say BMWs and Audis and that I don't park my car in so-called 'bad areas.' Nonetheless, to my foolish shock and surprise, my car is stolen one day. Could it then be said that I am at least partially responsible for having my car stolen?
Yes, you are partially responsible, and the thief is partially responsible, but his part is larger than yours. You are the victim of the crime and he is the perpetrator. I blame both of you for the crime, loading the lion's share of the blame upon the perpetrator. But I blame you too, and in blaming you, I blame the victim. Clearly, it is right, proper, and just to blame the victim within limits and subject to qualifications.
This is why the accusation, "You are blaming the victim!" cuts little ice with me. In some, but not all, situations some judicious blaming of the victim is perfectly appropriate. People who cannot see this are in many cases victims of their own political correctness and ought to be blamed for not using their faculties and thus for being victims of their own self-induced political correctness. This is a sort of meta-level blaming of the victim.
We ought to distinguish the legal, the moral, and the prudential aspects of the situation. I will set the legal questions aside since in the above scenario the victim hasn't done anything legally wrong. (In related scenarios, however, the victim would probably be criminally negligent under the law, e.g, you leave your child in the car, keys in ignition, engine running, while you enter a convenience store for a cup of coffee, and your child is abducted.)
The prudential and moral aspects alone interest me. But before I explain the difference, let's consider my reader's second scenario.
If we say yes, then I wish to change the elements of our hypothetical scenario in attempts to pump some uncomfortable intuitions. Say instead of owning a modestly nice car, I own a modestly nice female body. I treat it fairly well, making sure I go to the doctor in a timely manner and go to the spa. However, I lack vigilance with myself and drink a lot at frat parties. You warn me that this is not wise. I counter by saying that there are other women more foolish than I and that I don't frequent 'bad places.' Yet, to my foolish shock and surprise, some abuse occurs. Could it be said that I am then at least partially responsible for the abuse?
Yes, of course.
Contemporary sentiment is that there is no one to blame for sexual assault except for the perpetrator. And while I agree that the perpetrators are primarily the culpable ones, I also think that there must be some level of personal responsibility that must be practiced. I don't think it terribly offensive for us to encourage women to exercise a healthy level of skepticism of one's fellow human being, yet feminists will cry foul, that we are punishing women for the potential crimes of others when we say it is their responsibility to not party or dress a certain way or hang out with a certain crowd or drink themselves to oblivion, that we should focus our efforts on disciplining the would-be perpetrators with more education.
My reader obviously has his head screwed on Right (which fact is also part of the explanation of why he reads my weblog in the first place). I agree entirely with what he says. I would only add to it.
What the attractive young woman does when she 'struts her stuff' in dangerous precincts is both imprudent and immoral. I don't need to explain why it is imprudent. It is immoral because she is tempting others to commit immoral acts. Of course, if she ends up being raped, the lion's share of the moral blame lands on the rapist. But it would be absurd to suggest that she bears no moral responsibility for the rape. She did something morally wrong: she tempted testosterone-crazed drunken frat boys to have their way with her when she knows what such animals are like. (They didn't call the John Belushi flick Animal House for nothing. And look what happened to him: he rode the Speedball Express to Kingdom Come.) The principle here, one probably admitting of exceptions, is something like this:
(P) It is morally wrong to suborn immoral behavior.
'Suborn' is most often used in legal contexts, but as the hyperlinked definition shows, it has a broader meaning extendible to the moral sphere. Surely, it is in general morally wrong to tempt, entice, persuade people to commit immoral acts.
If you reject (P), what would you be maintaining? That it is morally acceptable to suborn immoral behavior? That is is morally obligatory to suborn such behavior? That the subornation of immoral behavior is morally neutral? None of the above, say I.
If you have moral sense, you will accept (P). Unfortunately, moral sense is in short supply in these benighted times. Can we blame this one on liberals too?
My points are made even more forcefully, and more elegantly, in the first two articles below, especially the second.
BV: The examples given above are not examples of solicitation as per the definition to which you linked. The well-endowed but scantily-clad female who advertises her charms in dangerous precincts is not soliciting the crime of rape or any other crime against her person. The definition also implies that solicitation must be between a person A and some other person B. But if a person acts in such a way as to tempt another to commit a crime, there needn't be any particular person who is being tempted.
Let's consider another example. I withdraw a large sum of money from an outdoor ATM machine at night in a bad part of town and then walk down the street ostentatiously counting my wad. I don't see that that foolish behavior would count as solicitation by the above definition. After all, I don't want to be robbed, and there is no specific person I am persuading to rob me. But if I offer you $10,000 to kill my wife so that I can collect on a life insurance policy, then that is a clear case of solicitation, as per the definition, whether or not you agree to attempt the dastardly deed and whether or not you succeed.
The problem with suborning is that many educated speakers understand it to mean bribing someone to say something false under oath. Bribing is crucial to suborning. A material element of the criminal charge is your use of corrupt or illegal inducements (e.g., a bribe) to bring about a perjury. If you merely "tempt, entice, [rhetorically] persuade people to commit immoral acts" (your terms), you are not suborning, though you may be soliciting immoral/criminal behavior.
BV: So you are saying that the offer of a bribe is essential to subornation? If memory serves, however, in the impeachment proceedings against Bill Clinton, one of the charges was subornation of perjury. Was it alleged that Clinton offered a bribe to the person or persons he attempted to persuade to perjure themselves? I'm just asking. And what exactly is a bribe in the eyes of the law? A monetary inducement only?
In any case, I thought I made it clear that I was not talking above about the law but about morality. I linked to a dictionary definition of 'suborn' that is broader than a legal definition. But it may be that 'suborn' is not the best word for what I am trying to convey.
As a principle about suborning, I don't think there is anything controversial about (P)--but it has a pretty narrow scope. If you replace (P) with a much broader solicitation principle, to include things like tempting and speaking in favor, it's not clear to me at least that (P) will fly without a lot of qualification.
BV: The sort of counterexample to (P) that occurred to me was what goes on in a 'sting' operation by an undercover law enforcement agent.
"Tempting" has always puzzled me. If I put you in a position where it would be easy for you to embezzle a large sum of money, have I tempted you or just shown my faith in your honesty? And if you choose to steal the money, what blame should attach to me because of your (unsuspected) bad character? Am I to be blamed for not acting on the assumption that you will turn into a thief if given the chance? Similarly for the lady who dresses in a sexy outfit and gets attacked. Why are we blaming her because some men have no self-control or decency?
BV: Now that is a good point. You leave the bank vault open with me nearby while you go out for lunch. Are you tempting me to steal or evincing faith in my honesty? Well, if you don't know me, or don't know me well, then you ought to bear some moral responsibility for my pilfering of the pelf. But if you knew me very well and knew that I was hitherto always honest, then I think very little or perhaps no blame would attach to you.
The case of the sexually attractive and scantily-clad female who advertises her endowments around people she doesn't know is relevantly different. She knows what men in general are like and knows that her behavior is risky and yet she does it anyway. I say she bears some of the blame for the abuse she experiences.
Suppose I know that Jack is an alcoholic and I ply him with strong drink at my Thanskgiving feast. He drives off drunk and slaughters a family of four. Do I bear some moral responsibility for the slaughter? Of course I do. But suppose I don't know Tom, but in good faith I sell him a gun, having no reason to suspect him of criminal intent, but Tom then kills his wife using the gun I sold him. Am I to any degree morally responsible for the crime? No, not to any degree.
Here is yet another entry from the now-defunct Powerblogs site. It is pretty good, I think, and deserves to be kept online.
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Have I been in existence as one and the same human individual from conception on? Of course, I and any intra-uterine predecessors I may have had have been genetically human from conception on: at no time was there anything genetically lupine or bovine or canine or feline in my mother's womb. The question is whether I am numerically the same human individual as the individual that came into existence at 'my' conception.
The following argument seems to show that no zygote is a human being and that I have not been in existence as one and the same human individual from conception on. The argument is a variant of a much more complicated argument presented by Peter van Inwagen in Material Beings, Cornell UP, 1990, p. 152 ff. (In note 55, van Inwagen cites Peter Geach, The Virtues, Cambridge UP, 1977, p. 30.)
The argument is essentially this:
1. A zygote is already a human being. (assumption for reductio) 2. When a zygote divides, it ceases to exist. (premise) Therefore 3. When a zygote divides, the human being it is ceases to exist. (from 1, 2) 4. At or after a zygotic division that terminates a human being, a new human being comes to exist. (premise) Therefore 5. Pregnancy involves the creation of two human beings. (from 1, 4) 6. (5) is absurd: there is only ever one human being in the womb. Therefore 7. (1) is false: A zygote is not a human being.
Since the inferences are valid, the soundness of the argument rides on the truth of its premises. I will not question the truth of (4). The normal outcome of (a human) pregnancy is the birth of a human being. Premise (2), however, seems open to doubt.
First we need to understand the reaoning behind (2). If Z splits into A and B, there appear to be three possibilities: Z continues to exist as A; Z continues to exist as B; Z ceases to exist. But any reason one gives why Z continues to exist as A is equally good as a reason why Z continues to exist as B. Since Z cannot continue to exist as two things, both of the first two possibilities are ruled out. This leaves the third: Z ceases to exist.
There is however a fourth possibility: when a zygote divides, it does not cease to exist, but changes from a one-celled to a two-celled organism. Of course, one thing cannot become two things. But a one-celled organism that becomes a two-celled organism is arguably one and the same organism which exists at two different times. One thing does not become two things; a one-celled thing becomes a two-celled thing.
Zygote Z becomes embryo AB. Must we say that Z ceases to exist and AB begins to exist? Why can't we say that the organism that is Z continues to exist as AB? Crude analogy: I have a burning log L in my fireplace. L breaks into two burning pieces P1 and P2. Does L cease to exist to be replaced by P1 and P2? One could say that, but it seems equally reasonable to say that L continues to exist composed of two distinct parts P1 and P2.
Van Inwagen rules out the possibility I am suggesting:
It does not follow, therefore, from the fact that the zygote is an organism, and hence a real object, that the two-cell embryo that replaces it is a real object. Why should we believe that there something that B and C compose? They adhere to each other, but we have seen that there is no reason to suppose that two objects compose anything. (Material Beings, p. 153)
I don't understand why van Inwagen says that "there is no reason to suppose that two objects compose anything." I find bizarre his denial that there are such things as ships and houses, and the implication above that an embryo, though composed of living things, is not itself a living thing.
Was I once a zygote? Yes, as far as I can see, van Inwagen's argument notwithstanding.
One thing is very clear: metaphysics is unavoidable. Just a little thought about a 'hot button' issue such as abortion lands you right in it.
Left-wing bias at the NYT is nothing new, of course, but the following opening paragraph of a July 8th editorial is particularly egregious. But before I quote it, let me say that the problem is not that the editors have a point of view or even that it is a liberal-left point of view. The problem is their seeming inability, or rather unwillingness, to present a matter of controversy in a fair way. Here is the opening paragraph of Hobby Lobby's Disturbing Sequel:
The Supreme Court violated principles of religious liberty and women’s rights in last week’s ruling in the Hobby Lobby case, which allowed owners of closely held, for-profit corporations (most companies in America) to impose their religious beliefs on workers by refusing to provide contraception coverage for employees with no co-pay, as required by the Affordable Care Act. But for the court’s male justices, it didn’t seem to go far enough.
This is a good example of the sort of Orwellian mendacity we have come to expect from the Obama administration and its supporters in the mainstream media. War is peace. Slavery is freedom. A defense of religious liberty is a violation of religious liberty. Those who protest being forced by the government to violate their consciences and religious beliefs are imposing their religious beliefs. The Orwellian template: X, which is not Y, is Y.
Every statement in the opening paragraph of the NYT editorial is a lie. The 5-4 SCOTUS decision in Burwell v. Hobby Lobby defended principles of religious liberty. It did not violate any women's rights. Neither the right to an abortion nor the right to purchase any form of contraception were affected by the decision. The ACA mandate to provide contraceptives was not overturned but merely restricted so that Hobby Lobby would not be forced to provide four abortifacient contraceptives.
I won't say anything about the ridiculous insinuation in the last sentence, except that arguments don't have testicles.
Truth is not a value for the Left. Winning is what counts, by any means. They see politics as war, which is why they feel justified in their mendacity.
The quite narrow question the Supreme Court had to decide was whether closely held, for-profit corporations are persons under the Religious Freedom and Restoration Act . "RFRA states that “[the] Government shall not substantially burden a person’s exercise of religion.”3 (Ibid.)
If Hobby Lobby is forced by the government to provide abortifacients to its employees, and Hobby Lobby is a person in the eyes of the law, then the government's Affordable Care Act mandate is in violation of the Religious Freedom and Restoration Act. For it would substantially burden Hobby Lobby's proprietors' exercise of religion if they were forced to violate their own consciences by providing the means of what they believe to be murder to their employees. So the precise question that had to be decided was whether Hobby Lobby is a person in the eyes of the law. The question was NOT whether corporations are persons in the eyes of the law, as some benighted cmmentators seems to think.
Note also that the issue here is not constitutional but statutory: the issue has solely to do with the interpretation and application of a law, RFRA. As Alan Dershowitz explains (starting at 7:52), it has to do merely with the "construction of a statute."
This entry takes up where I left off yesterday. R. Crozat, responding to yesterday's post, e-mails:
I agree that philosophy is tasked to evaluate the philosophical claims of scientists. Your post on Professor Gleiser does the job.
In addition to confusing seeing with object seen, Gleiser seems to mix physics with meaning. He writes “You say, “I’m reading this word now.” In reality, you aren’t.” Here, his use of "reading" confuses:
a) an optical process that enables reading, with
b) actual reading, which is the interpretation and understanding of the meaning of information.
Gleiser's description of the optics is informative, but he misunderstands the nature of reading. He refers to “reading” then proceeds to treat the optics as if optics is reading. But they are not identical. Clearly, one can run his eyes over words without reading them. The light-traveling and eye-running are physical; the reading is mental/intentional. Gleiser’s mistake is like confusing driving with a gasoline fill-up, photography with light and lens, or jogging with trail-mix, bones and muscles.
I can imagine Socrates rephrasing Phaedo 99b: “Fancy being unable to distinguish between a mental faculty and the process without which that faculty could not be enabled!”
My correspondent is exactly right. I spotted the blurring of seeing and reading too, but decided not to pursue it in the interests of brevity, brevity being the soul of blog, as has been observed perhaps too often in these pages.
Reading involves understanding, but one can see a word, a phrase, a sentence, and so on without understanding it. So there is more to reading than seeing. Seeing is with the eyes; understanding is with the mind. Note also that one can read without seeing, reading Braille being an example of this.
I would add to what my correspondent states by making a tripartite distinction among (i) the causal basis of visual perception, (ii) seeing, and (iii) reading. It is not just reading that is intentional or object-directed; seeing is as well. To see is to see something as something. One cannot just see, and all seeing is a seeing-as. It may be that our physicist is guilty of a three-fold confusion.
There is no reading (in the ordinary sense of the word) without seeing, and there is no seeing without brain, eyes, neural pathways, light, physical objects, etc. But to confuse these three is a Philosophy 101 mistake.
The quotation from Phaedo 99b is entirely apt although the topic there is not seeing and understanding, but free human action. Plato has Socrates say:
If it were said that without bones and muscles and other parts of the body I could not have carried my resolutions into effect, that would be true. But to say that they are the cause of what I do, . . . that my acting is not from choice of what is best, would be a very loose and careless way of talking.
Our physicists need to educate themselves so as to avoid the loose and careless ways of talking that they readily fall into when, eager to turn a buck, they inflict their pseudo-philosophical speculations on the unwitting public.
One of the tasks of philosophy is to expose bad philosophy. Scientists pump out quite a lot of it. Physicists are among the worst. I have given many examples. Here is another one. Let's get to work. Dartmouth physicist Marcelo Gleiser writes in There is No Now,
You say, “I’m reading this word now.” In reality, you aren’t. Since light travels at a finite speed, it takes time for it to bounce from the book to your eye. When you see a word, you are seeing it as it looked some time in the past. To be precise, if you are holding the book at one foot from your eye, the light travel time from the book to your eye is about one nanosecond, or one billionth of a second. The same with every object you see or person you talk to. Take a look around. You may think that you are seeing all these objects at once, or “now,” even if they are at different distances from you. But you really aren’t, as light bouncing from each one of them will take a different time to catch your eye. The brain integrates the different sources of visual information, and since the differences in arrival time are much smaller than what your eyes can discern and your brain process, you don’t see a difference. The “present”—the sum total of the sensorial input we say is happening “now”—is nothing but a convincing illusion.
Gleiser is confusing seeing with object seen. True, light travels at a finite speed. So the word seen is the word as it was one nanosecond ago. But it doesn't follow that I am not seeing the word now. The seeing occurs now at time t, the word seen, however, is not the word as it is at t, but the word as it was at t* (t*<t).
When I glance at the sun, I see it as it was about eight minutes ago. But it does not follow that the seeing (glancing) is not occurring now, or that there is no now.
Suppose that at time t I am visually aware of a word and of a cat. I am focused on the word, but the cat is nearby in the periphery of my visual field. So the seeing of the word and the seeing of the cat are simultaneous seeings. But the word I see is the word as it was one nanosecond ago, whereas the cat I see is the cat as it was, say, 10 nanoseconds ago. So I grant that there are a couple of illusions here.
The first illusion is that if a seeing occurs at time t, then the object seen is as it is at t. This cannot be given the well-known facts that Gleiser adduces. The object seen is as it was at an earlier time t*. But if you see through (forgive the pun) the first illusion, you may still succumb to the second. The second illusion is that objects seen at the same time t are as they were at the same time t*, where t* is earlier than t. In my example, the seeing of the word and the seeing of the cat occur at the same time, call it t. But, given that word and cat are at different distances from the subject, there is no one time t*, earlier than t, such that word and cat were as they were when they were seen.
But again, that does not show that the present moment or the Now is an illusion.
Gleiser's thesis is that there is no Now, that it is a "cognitive illusion." He sums up:
To summarize: given that the speed of light is fast but finite, information from any object takes time to hit us, even if the time is tiny. We never see something as it is “now.” However, the brain takes time to process information and can’t distinguish (or time-order) two events that happen sufficiently close to one another. The fact that we see many things happening now is an illusion, a blurring of time perception.
Gleiser is just confused. There is an illusion, but it is the illusion that we see things as they are now. But that is not to say that there is no Now, or that the Now is an illusion. In fact, Gleiser presupposes that there is a Now when he says that we never see anything as it is now. Right now the Sun is in some definite state, but the physics of visual perception make it impossible to see the Sun as it is now. If it had gone supernova three minutes ago, it would appear to us now as it usually does.
Geiser confuses an epistemological claim -- We never see anything distant from us as it is at the precise time of the seeing -- with an ontological claim: there is no present moment.
There is other nonsense in Gleiser's piece. Take this sentence: "The notion of time is related to change, and the passage of time is simply a tool to track change." I'll leave it to the reader to sort this out. I've had enough!
The muse of philosophy must have visited my otherwise undistinguished classmate Dolores back in the fifth grade. The topic was dirty jokes and that we should not tell them or listen to them. "But sister," Dolores piped up, "what if you laugh not because the joke is dirty but because it is funny?"
It was a good distinction then and a good distinction now.
I posted on Armstrong's naturalism yesterday, and that got me to thinking whether he ever said anything anywhere about religion. A little searching turned up the following 2002 interview of Armstrong by Andrew Chrucky. Here is an excerpt that touches upon Armstrong's view of religion:
Chrucky: Let me move on to something else. What I would want to know from a philosopher if I were an ordinary person. Probably the first things I would want to know is: Are you religious in any way? Armstrong: No. I'm not.
Chrucky: What is your take on religion? Armstrong: I have the greatest respect for it. I think it may be the thing that many people need, and it enshrines many truths about life. But I do not think it is actually true.
Chrucky: So, it expresses truth in some metaphorical way? Armstrong: In some metaphorical and symbolic way, I think it grasps at truth. And I think it gives hope and comfort to many.
Chrucky: I am not much into religion as a subject, but perhaps someone like Bultmann who was demythologizing religion is someone you would find favor with? Armstrong: I am quite happy with religion going on the way it is. I don't want to alter the religions. That's not my interest. But I suppose that if you are considering what is the truth behind religion then it would have to be demythologized.
Chrucky: How do you view the state of the world? Right now there seems to be a rise in fundamentalism all over. Armstrong: Yes.
Chrucky: You know Iran became a theocracy, and there seems to be a Christian-Islamic confrontation going on. How does one resolve this? Is there a philosophical way of looking at it? Armstrong: No. I don't think so.
Chrucky: Is there a need for dialogue? . . . so that religions confront one another, or is this hopeless? Armstrong: I don't really know. I really don't have any views on this point. I think of myself as in the Christian and Jewish tradition, and in the tradition of Greece. Matthew Arnold thought of Hebraism and Hellenism as the twin poles of Western culture. I see myself as a person in the stream within that culture, and I think it may perhaps be the best tradition of thought and life that has so far been evolved. Certainly I don't think we should be apologetic about it.
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This interview confirms what I suspected was Armstrong's attitude toward religion. As a naturalist, he cannot consider any of the characteristic claims of religion to be literally true. But as a conservative, he has "the greatest respect for it" and he appreciates the important and beneficial role it plays in the lives of many people. While not true in its characteristic claims, religion "enshrines many truths about life." Armstrong endorses the notion that Hebraism and Hellenism are the twin poles of Western culture, the tradition of which is the best that has so far been evolved. Armstrong sees himself in that tradition. One might wonder, however, whether his work in philosophy has had or will have the effect of undermining it.
He is clearly a traditionalist who takes the great problems of philosophy seriously and unabashedly uses phrases like 'great problems.' He respects the tradition even while diverging from it. I cannot imagine him writing a book like David Stove's The Plato Cult. His approach in philosophy is direct, realistic, ontological, nonlinguistic. He is also traditional in that he sees an important role for philosophy. He is far from scientism as I tried to make clear in my earlier post.
A final observation. Armstrong's is a disinterested search for truth. He is like Aristotle in that regard. One cannot imagine his naturalism becoming a substitute religion for him.
The late David Malet Armstrong has a serious claim to being Australia's greatest philosopher. His life work is summed up in his Sketch for a Systematic Metaphysics (Oxford UP, 2010). It is from the Introduction to this slim volume that I draw the following précis of his naturalism.
Armstrong on Naturalism
1. Naturalism for Armstrong is the thesis that "all that exists is the space-time world . . . ." The space-time world is the physical world. The thesis, then, is that reality is exhausted by the physical world.
2. Naturalism is an assumption: it is assumed to be true.
3. Armstrong admits that he has no argument for naturalism except that it is a position that many would accept, both philosophers and non-philosophers. There is no philosophical reasoning whereby one could prove that any metaphysical scheme, including naturalism, is correct. To think otherwise is "folly." I agree. One cannot prove naturalism or any form of anti-naturalism.
4. Armstrong also describes naturalism as an "hypothesis," one that many would accept as plausible. "The space-time entity seems obviously to exist. Other suggested beings seem much more hypothetical." (1)
5. Though naturalism cannot be proven, one can attempt to develop it into a coherent vision of the fundamental structure of the world or of the general nature of things, a vision (his word) that can then be put into competition with other visions. The development of a vision of things will involve argumentation but also bare assertion. "I argue where I can, but at times I simply assert."
6. The exclusion of so-called abstract entities or abstract objects such as mathematical sets, unexemplified universals, and numbers from the roster of the real is because of their lack of causal power. What causal role could they play? "And if they play no causal role it is hard to see how we can have good reasons for thinking that they exist." (2)
We ought to distinguish between
A. To exist is to be capable of entering into causal relations
and
B. We have no good reasons for postulating entities that are incapable of entering into causal relations.
Armstrong affirms (B), but he also seems committed to (A) since (A) is entailed by naturalism. Naturalism is the view that reality is exhausted by the space-time world, the view that nothing exists except what exists in the space-time world. Given that the space-time world is a world of causal interactions, it follows that all and only that which is causally active/passive exists. If you are an Armstrongian naturalist, then you cannot posit such causally inert entities as mathematical sets even if there are some good reasons for postulating them.
7. The space-time world, the physical world, is Wilfrid Sellars' world of the scientific image, not that of the manifest image. It is therefore the task of physics, or perhaps total natural science, to tell us what the physical world, and thus all of reality, is like.
8. Now if naturalism is true and physics (or total science) informs us as to nature's laws and properties, why do we need metaphysics? Why isn't physics all the metaphysics we need? Why shouldn't we embrace both the ontological thesis of naturalism and the epistemological thesis of scientism? After all, they seem to go together. If all that exists is the system of space-time-matter, and physics tells us what there is to know about it, then what room is there for metaphysics?
There is room for metaphysics according to Armstrong because we need a systematic account of such topic-neutral notions as cause, class, property, relation, quality, kind, resemblance, quantity, number, substance, fact, truth, law of nature, power, and others.
For example, common experience and the sciences inform us as to what causes what, but not as to what causation is. What is causation? What distinguishes a causal from a noncausal event sequence? Is causation 'in the objects' mere regular succession as Hume thought (or as Hume is often taken to have thought)? Or is there more to it? And what is that more? Does the cause produce the effect? Does the cause bring the effect into existence? Can x cause y even if the x-y sequence does not instantiate any regularity? What are the relata of the causal relation? Can a substance be a causal relatum? Is causation a relation at all? And so on. All of these are questions in metaphysics (ontology) for Armstrong.
So a thoroughgoing naturalist who restricts the real to the space-time system needn't embrace scientism; he can maintain that there is room for metaphysics in one sense of that ancient word: not an inquiry into what is beyond the physical or natural, but an inquiry into the deepest and most pervasive structures of the natural. (Armstrong does not mention scientism or make the point I just made, but it clearly follows from what he says.
Why I am Not a Naturalist (A Brief Sketch)
Armstrong is surely right that one cannot prove naturalism. Equally, one cannot disprove it. But there reasons that make its rejection reasonable.
There are questions that naturalism cannot satisfactorily answer. Among them: Why does anything at all exist? Or, more precisely, why does anything contingent at all exist? The space-time system exists and it exists contingently -- there is no logical or metaphysical necessity that there be a space-time system at all, or the precise one that we find ourselves in. But the space-time entity, as Armstrong calls it, lacks the resources to explain its own existence. I won't argue this here, but I have in other places. There are also good reasons to reject the suggestion that the space-time system exists as a matter of brute fact.
Deeper than the question, Why does anything at all exist? is the question, What is it for any contingent thing to exist? Does Armstrong have an answer for this question? Surely it is a central question of metaphysics. We cannot decide what exists or why anything exists unless we know what it is for something to exist. He doesn't deal with it as far as I know, but he does seem to have an implicit answer, (A) above which can also be formulated as follows:
A*. For any x, x exists iff x is possibly such as to be either a cause or an effect.
A**. For any x, x exists iff x has the power to bring about a change in itself or in another or the liability to have a change brought about in it.
But even if these biconditionals are true, they presuppose existence rather than accounting for it. A thing cannot have a causal power or a causal liability or stand in a relation unless it 'already' (logically speaking) exists. What makes a thing exist, therefore, cannot be its having a power or liability or its standing in a relation.
Long story short, A's naturalism has no satisfactory answer to either of my existence questions.
And then there are questions about mind, questions about consciousness, qualia, intentionality, reason, and the like. They notoriously resist naturalistic treatment. Armstrong, who is famous for his intellectual honesty, readily admits this:
I do not know how to refute the claim that intentionality is an irreducible phenomenon, a phenomenon that is something different from the physical processes in the brain. So in my philosophy of mind I face difficulties from the alleged qualia and from the phenomenon of intentionality that seem rather greater than anything I am aware of in the rest of my ontological scheme. (115)
That naturalism is not compelling is also evident from the fact that naturalists disagree bitterly among themselves as to what shape it should take. Some naturalists want to countenance abstracta while others are eliminativists about the mind.
But I don't reject naturalism simply because it does not have satisfactory answers to all the questions that need answering; I also reject it on the basis of all the experiences (mystical, religious, paranormal) that point to, though they do not prove, what William James calls the "reality of the unseen." Such experiences by themselves may not cut much ice, but in conjunction with an array of rigorous arguments against naturalism and an array of rigorous argments for some form or anti-naturalism, they play an important role in a cumulative case argument for the reasonableness of anti-naturalism.
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