Maverick Philosopher

Lukas Novak Against the Millian Theory of Names

Lukas Novak in a comment writes,

It seems to me that the theory [the Millian theory of proper name] must fail as soon as its psychological implications are considered (those about beliefs are among them). In a judgement "Peter is wise" Peter must be somehow represented, not just linguistically but mentally. And since we are not omniscient, Peter-qua-represented will not equal Peter-qua-real ("warts and all"). In other words, there will have to be some conceptual content corresponding to "Peter" through which Peter will be represented; i.e. a "Sinn" or imperfect "Art der Gegebenheit" of Peter.

BV:  I agree. The human mind is finite.  So when I make a judgment about Peter, it cannot be Peter himself who is before my mind, Peter with all his properties.  And yet something must be before my mind if I am to affirm that Peter is wise or even just to  entertain the proposition that Peter is wise.  Furthermore, this thinking reference or mental reference is prior to any linguistic reference.  We can call this the primacy of the intentional over the linguistic.  Chisholm championed it, but it is a controversial thesis.  Now what it is that I have before my mind if it is not Peter himself?

Here very difficult questions arise.  It seems we need some intermediary item to mediate the mind's commerce with the thing in reality.  One vexing question is whether this intermediary item is or is not an ontological constituent of the infinitely-propertied thing in reality.  If the intermediary item is a Fregean sense, then it is not such a constituent, but belongs in a third world (Third Reich?) of its own, a realm of Platonica, sealed off from the realm of primary reference (the first world)  containing things like Peter. If the intermediary item is a Castanedan guise, then it is an ontological constituent of Peter.

Connected with this is the dispute whether Husserl's noema is something like Frege's Sinn.

I agree that "there will have to be some conceptual content corresponding to 'Peter' through which Peter will be represented." 

This seems to me completely unrelated to the question of rigidity/non-rigidity of reference. It seems to me that all Kripke & Co. can (and do) prove is that names (normally) refer rigidly. But in my opinion rigidity/non-rigidity is not part of the semantics of an expression (Kripke's tacit assumption), but a way of its usage. Undeniably, you can use even a description rigidly, if you choose so. ("The president of the U.S. might very well not be a president" is perfectly meaningful and true, if "the president of the U.S." is meant to rigidly refer to whomever satisfies the description in the actual world.).

BV.  Now you have lost me, Lukas.  Suppose sense determines reference.  And suppose the sense of 'Socrates' is specified by the definite description, 'the wisest Greek philosopher.' Used attributively as opposed to referentially (Donnellan), this definite description is non-rigid: it picks out different individuals in different possible worlds.  So if the sense of 'Socrates' is given by 'the wisest Greek philosopher,' then the reference of 'Socrates' will be non-rigid.  What then do you mean by "completely unrelated"?

But IMHO there is something true in the "mere label" intuition about names. I take names to have a dual role: First, they serve as imagined labels we use to mark individuals in order to be able to uniquely identify them. So far Kripke's intuitions are correct. But this role of a name is non-linguistic; in this role the name is not a sign but an imagined quasi-property of the individual. We could as well use real labels, real or imagined colours, numbers etc. Once an individual is named ("baptized"), we always have a descriptive content the one who (in this context) bears the name so-and-so uniquely representing that individual at our disposal. If we marked our individuals by means of colours, we would need a special linguistic item to represent such a description: the linguistic phrase "the one who (in this context) is marked by the colour so-and-so". But since we used words and not colours as our labels, we can use these very words as shorthands for such descriptions - and this is (usually) the other, properly linguistic role of proper names. Just like all other categorematic (extra-logical) terms, names in this role stand for a mental content, a "something-qua-mentally-represented" and in virtue of this can linguistically refer to the named individual. Note that this relation of "referring to" is distinct from (and conditioned by) the extra-linguistic relation of "naming" or "being a label of". This is why the theory is not circular (pace Kripke). Many names have this "minimal" meaning; but there are others, like "Jack the Ripper", that are shorthands for more substantial descriptions. But this does not preclude their capability to be used to refer rigidly - which, I would say, is the same thing as to supposit de re (in modal and other (hyper)intensional contexts). You need not expel the "reference-fixing descritpion" from the sphere of meaning in order to save the possibility of rigid reference.

BV:  You are on to something important here.  We need to distinguish the tagging/labeling function of names from their properly linguistic function.  Suppose you and I each have a black cat and that the cats are practically indistinguishable. To tell them apart, to identify them, to refer to them, I put a red collar on mine and you put a blue collar on yours.  The collars are tags or labels.  As you point out, in effect, these collars are not signs of the cats, but something like properties of them or features of them.  The collars by themselves have no semantic or referential function. The collars are, in themselves, senseless tags.  The baptizing of a cat is the attaching of a collar.  Corresponding to the physical act of my attaching a red collar to my cat is the sense expressed by the sentence,  'the cat with the red collar is Bill's cat.'

What makes the red collar signify Bill's cat cannot be the merely physical fact that the cat wears a red collar.  We are brought back to intentionality and sense.  A mind (my mind) must intend to mark my cat with a red collar, and to communicate this intention to Lukas I must use some such sentence as 'the cat with the red collar is my cat.'

The semantic function of a name cannot be  exhausted by the object to which it refers since no physical item (whether a cat collar or sounds in the air or marks on paper) refers to anything.  There has to be more to the semantics of a name than the object to which it refers.  A name that actually names something cannot be a senseless tag.

Related articles

A Meditation on Certainty on Husserl's Birthday

Husserl's Critique of the Image-Theory of Consciousness

Why Physics Needs Philosophy

Continental Philosophers I Respect and the 'Continental-Analytic Divide'

Divine Simplicity and God's Contingent Knowledge: An Aporetic Tetrad

A Curious Extrapolation

The old man's libido on the wane, he thinks more clearly and more truly about sexual matters.  And when the waning of all his physical forces and endowments reaches its term -- will he then think best of all, or not at all?

The dove soars through the air  and imagines it could soar higher and with less effort if there were no air to offer resistance.  But the dove is mistaken.  The dove on the wing does not understand the principle of the wing, Bernoulli's principle.  Are we like the dove? The dove needs the air to fly.  Do we need the body to think?  Is the body necessary for thought?  Pascal says that our whole dignity consist in thought.  Is our dignity tied of necessity to the flesh ?

Or are we like the rocket whose propulsion has nothing to do with wings, the rocket the  principle of whose propulsion is Newton's Third Law of Motion: To every action there is an equal but opposite reaction?

A curious extrapolation and a strange analogy.

Related articles

A Battle of Titans: Plato Versus Aristotle

Death Penalty, Abortion, and Certainty

The Potentiality Argument Against Abortion and Feinberg's Logical Point About Potentiality

Changing the Engine Air Filter on a 2013 Jeep Wrangler

Obama's Islamophobia

Roger L. Simon:

Barack Obama suffers from serious case of the real Islamophobia -- fear of telling the truth about Islam. Even though a "progressive," he says nary a word about the rampant misogyny and homophobia in Islam or about Sharia law whose medieval strictures are preferred by 51% of American Muslims. Nor does he seem to care that so few of these same American Muslims actively oppose radical Islam. The president prefers the Hamas-linked CAIR to courageous reformers like Dr. Zuhdi Jasser. But that's no surprise. For Obama, radical Islam doesn't even exist.

Read it all.

Related articles

Denying that There is Political Correctness . . .

What Explains the Left's Toleration of Militant Islam?

The Danger of Appeasing the Intolerant

Kripke, Belief, Irrationality, and Contradiction

London Ed comments:

I also note a confusion that has been running through this discussion, about the meaning of ‘contradiction’. I do not mean to appeal to etymology or authority, but it’s important we agree on what we mean by it. On my understanding, a contradiction is not ‘the tallest girl in the class is 18’ and ‘the cleverest girl in the class is not 18’, even when the tallest girl is also the cleverest. Someone could easily believe both, without being irrational. The point of the Kripke puzzle is that Pierre seems to end up with an irrational belief. So it’s essential, as Kripke specifies, that he must correctly understand all the terms in both utterances, and that both utterances are logically contradictory, as in ‘Susan is 18’ and ‘Susan is not 18’.

Do we agree?

Well, let's see.  The Maverick method enjoins the exposure of any inconsistent polyads that may be lurking in the vicinity.  Sure enough, there is one:

An Inconsistent Triad

a. The tallest girl in the class is the cleverest girl in the class.
b. The tallest girl in the class is 18.
c. The cleverest girl in the class is not 18.

This trio is logically inconsistent in the sense that it is not logically possible that all three propositions be true.  But if we consider only the second two limbs, there is no logical inconsistency:  it is possible that (b) and (c) both be true.  And so someone, Tom for example, who believes that (b) and also believes that (c) cannot be convicted of irrationality, at least not on this score.  For all Tom knows  -- assuming that he does not know that (a) -- they could both be true:  it is epistemically possible that both be true.  This is the case even if in fact (a) is true.  But we can say more: it is metaphysically possible that both be true.  For (a), if true, is contingently true, which implies that it is is possible that it be false.

By contrast, if Tom entertains together, in the synthetic unity of one consciousness, the propositions expressed by 'Susan is 18 years old' and 'Susan is not 18 years old,' and if Tom is rational, then he will see that the two propositions are logical contradictories of each other, and it will not be epistemically possible for him that both be true.  If he nonetheless accepts both, then we have a good reason to convict him of being irrational, in this instance at least.

Given the truth of (a), (b) and (c) cannot both be true and cannot both be false.  This suggests  that the pair consisting of (b) and (c) is a pair of logical contradictories.  But then we would have to say that the contradictoriness of the pair rests on a contingent presupposition, namely, the truth of (a).  London Ed will presumably reject this.  I expect he would say that the logical contradictoriness of a pair of propositions cannot rest on any contingent presupposition, or on any presupposition at all.  Thus

d. Susan is 18

and

e. Susan is not 18

form a contradictory pair the contradictoriness of which rests on their internal logical form -- Fa, ~Fa -- and not on anything external to the propositions in question.

 So what should we say?  If Tom believes both (b) and (c), does he have contradictory beliefs?  Or not? 

The London answer is No!  The belief-contents are not formally contradictory even though, given the truth of (a), the contents are such that they cannot both be true and cannot both be false.  And because the belief-contents are not formally contradictory, the beliefs themselves -- where a belief involves both an occurrent or dispositional state of a person and a belief-content towards which the person takes up a propositional attitude -- are in no theoretically useful sense logically contradictory.

The Phoenix answer suggestion is that, because we are dealing with the beliefs of a concrete believer embedded in the actual world, there is sense to the notion that Tom's beliefs are contradictory in the sense that their contents are logically contradictory given the actual-world truth of (a).  After all, if Susan is the tallest and cleverest girl, and the beliefs in question are irreducibly  de re, then Tom believes, of Susan, that she is both 18 and not 18, even if Tom can gain epistemic access to her only via definition descriptions.   That belief is de re, irreducibly, is entailed  by (SUB), to which  Kripke apparently subscribes:

SUB:  Proper names are everywhere intersubstitutable salva veritate.

A Second  Question

If, at the same time,  Peter believes that Paderewski is musical and Peter believes that Paderewski is not musical, does it follow that Peter believes that (Paderewski is musical and Paderewski is not musical)?  Could this conceivably be a non sequitur? Compare the following modal principle:

MP:  If possibly p and possibly ~p, it does not follow that possibly (p & ~p).

For example, I am now seated, so it is possible that I now be seated; but it is also possible that I now  not be seated, where all three occurrences/tokens of 'now' rigidly designate the same time.  But surely it doesn't follow that it is possible that (I am now seated and I am now not seated).  Is it perhaps conceivable that

BP:  If it is believed by S that p and it is believed by S that ~p, it does not follow that it is believed by S that (p & ~p)?

Has anybody ever discussed this suggestion, even if only to dismiss it?

 Related articles

What Exactly is Kripke's Puzzle About Belief?

Ortcutt and Paderewski: Against the Millian Theory of Proper Names

Begging the Question Against Meinong

The Grand Central Conundrum in the Philosophy of Fiction

Is it a Contradiction?

Islam is not Islam!

London Ed on Reference to What is Not

Nietzsche, Truth, and Power

The Mystery of Language: Tool, Enabler, Dominatrix?

I have spoken before, romantically no doubt, of the mother tongue as our alma mater, our dear mother to whom we owe honor. Mater and matrix of our thoughts, she is yet deeper and higher than our thoughts, their sacred Enabler.

So I was pleased to come across a similar, albeit more trenchant, observation in Karl Kraus' Beim Wort Genommen, Koesel Verlag, 1955, pp. 134-135:

Ich beherrsche die Sprache nicht; aber die Sprache beherrscht mich vollkommen. Sie ist mir nicht die Dienerin meiner Gedanken. Ich lebe in einer Verbindung mit ihr, aus der ich Gedanken empfange, und sie kann mit mir machen, was sie will. Ich pariere ihr aufs Wort. Denn aus dem Wort springt mir der junge Gedanke entgegen und formt rueckwirkend die Sprache, die ihn schuf. Solche Gnade der Gedankentraechtigkeit zwingt auf die Knie und macht allen Aufwand zitternder Sorgfalt zur Pflicht. Die Sprache ist eine Herrin der Gedanken, und wer das Verhaeltnis umzukehren vermag, dem macht sie sich im Hause nuetzlich, aber sie sperrt ihm der Schoss.

I do not dominate language; she dominates me completely. She is not the servant of my thoughts. I live in a relation with her from which I receive thoughts, and she can do with me what she will. I follow her orders. For from the word the fresh thought springs, forming retroactively the language that created it. The grace of language, pregnant with thought, forces me to my knees and makes a duty of my expenditure of trembling conscientiousness. Language is a mistress of thought. To anyone who would reverse the relationship, she makes herself useful but denies access to her womb.

I might have translated Herrin as dominatrix if I wanted to accentuate the masochistic tone of the passage. 'Mistress' is obviously to be read as the female counterpart of 'master.'

Related articles

It's Enough

Meditation is Hard

Relative Truth?

I have spoken before, romantically no doubt, of the mother tongue as our alma mater, our dear mother to whom we owe honor. Mater and matrix of our thoughts, she is yet deeper and higher than our thoughts, their sacred Enabler.

So I was pleased to come across a similar, albeit more trenchant, observation in Karl Kraus' Beim Wort Genommen, Koesel Verlag, 1955, pp. 134-135:

Ich beherrsche die Sprache nicht; aber die Sprache beherrscht mich vollkommen. Sie ist mir nicht die Dienerin meiner Gedanken. Ich lebe in einer Verbindung mit ihr, aus der ich Gedanken empfange, und sie kann mit mir machen, was sie will. Ich pariere ihr aufs Wort. Denn aus dem Wort springt mir der junge Gedanke entgegen und formt rueckwirkend die Sprache, die ihn schuf. Solche Gnade der Gedankentraechtigkeit zwingt auf die Knie und macht allen Aufwand zitternder Sorgfalt zur Pflicht. Die Sprache ist eine Herrin der Gedanken, und wer das Verhaeltnis umzukehren vermag, dem macht sie sich im Hause nuetzlich, aber sie sperrt ihm der Schoss.

I do not dominate language; she dominates me completely. She is not the servant of my thoughts. I live in a relation with her from which I receive thoughts, and she can do with me what she will. I follow her orders. For from the word the fresh thought springs, forming retroactively the language that created it. The grace of language, pregnant with thought, forces me to my knees and makes a duty of my expenditure of trembling conscientiousness. Language is a mistress of thought. To anyone who would reverse the relationship, she makes herself useful but denies access to her womb.

I might have translated Herrin as dominatrix if I wanted to accentuate the masochistic tone of the passage. 'Mistress' is obviously to be read as the female counterpart of 'master.'

Why Do So Many Christians Support Donald Trump?

The faults of Trump the vulgarian are legion.  He is nasty, petty, petulant, egomaniacal . . . no true conservative . . . .  So why do so many conservative Christians support him?  Here is the answer.

By the way, he acquitted himself well last night, coming in second to Ted Cruz.  And he graciously allowed that he was "honored" by his fine showing in Iowa.  I would like to see a Cruz-Trump ticket, or a Trump-Cruz ticket.  What I'd really like to see is an indictment of Hillary for her crimes.  That won't happen, however.  Obama's Department of Social Justice won't allow it.

Maverick Philosopher III Passes 3.5 Million Mark

This, the third main incarnation of MavPhil, commenced operations on Halloween, 2008.  Since then it has racked up 3,501,215 page views.  Daily average:  1,321.21. Total posts:  6,357. Total comments:  8,775.

 

Here are the entries for 31 October 2008.

Will I ever hang up the keyboard?  I've been at this, almost daily, since May of 2004.

I can't see myself quitting as long as health and eyesight hold out.  Blogging is just too deeply satisfying.

For one thing it satisfies the need to teach of someone who hated most classroom teaching.  Philosophy is a magnificent, beautiful, and noble thing,  but it is wasted on the typical undergraduate.  In a class of 35, five might be worth teaching.  And I taught at good schools.  That is one of the reasons I resigned a tenured position at the age of 41.  If you are reading this, you want to be here, and I'm glad to have you.

Second, blogging attracts the like-minded.  Isolation is relieved and friendships are made, the genuine friendships of spiritual affinity as opposed to the superficial ones of mere propinquity.  Ralph Waldo Emerson would have been a blogger for sure.  "The good of publishing one's thoughts is that of hooking you to like-minded men, and of giving to men whom you value . . . one hour of stimulated thought." (Bliss Perry, The Heart of Emerson's Journals, p. 94.)

Third, blogging is superior to private journal writing because the publicity of it forces one to develop one's ideas more carefully and more thoroughly.

Fourth, the blogger has a reach that far exceeds that of the person who publishes in conventional ways. 

More Reasons to Blog

Related articles

Saying and Asserting are Not the Same

We Were Under CyberAttack Yesterday

Three Million Page Views

Surge City

What Exactly is Kripke's Puzzle About Belief?

I will try to explain it as clearly and succinctly as I can.  I will explain the simplest version of the puzzle, the 'monoglot' version.  We shall cleave to English as to our dear mother.

The puzzle is generated by the collision of two principles, one concerning reference, the other concerning disquotation.  Call them MILL and DISQ.

MILL:  The reference of a proper name is direct: not routed through sense as in Frege.  The meaning of a name is exhausted by its reference.  The semantic value of a name is just the object to which it refers.  (Gareth Evans plausibly recommends 'semantic value' as the best translation of Frege's Bedeutung.)

DISQ:  If a normal English speaker S sincerely assents, upon reflection, to 'p,' and 'p' is a sentence in English free of indexical elements, pronominal devices, and ambiguities, then S believes that p.

The puzzle is interesting, and not easily solved, because there are good reasons for accepting both principles.  The puzzle is puzzling because the collision of the two principles takes the form of a flat-out logical contradiction.

And as we all know, philosophers, while they love paradoxes, hate contradictions.

(DISQ) strikes this philosopher as a principle than which no more luminous can be conceived.  How could one who is competent in English and familiar with current events sincerely and reflectively assent to 'Hillary is a liar' and not believe that Hillary is a liar?  The intellectual luminosity of (MILL), however, leaves something to be desired.  And yet it is plausible, and to many experts, extremely plausible.  Brevity being the soul of blog, I cannot  now trot out the arguments in support of (MILL).

The collision of (MILL) and (DISQ) occurs at the intersection of Mind and World.  It comes about like this.  S may assent to

a. Cicero was a Roman

while failing to assent to

b. Tully was a Roman

even though

c.  Cicero = Tully.

Given (DISQ), S believes that Cicero was a Roman, but may or may not believe that Tully was a Roman.  But how is this possible given the truth of (c)?  Given (c), there is no semantic difference between (a) and (b):  the predicates are the same, and the names are semantically the same under (MILL).  For on the latter principle, the meaning of a name is its referent.  So sameness of referent entails sameness of meaning, which is to say: the semantic content of (a) and (b) is the same given the truth of (c).

How can S believe that Cicero was a Roman while neither believing nor disbelieving that Tully was a Roman when the sentences express the very same proposition?  This is (an instance of) the puzzle.  Here is another form of it.  Suppose S assents to (a) but also assents to

d. Tully was not a Roman.

On (DISQ), S believes that Tully is not a Roman.  So S believes both that Cicero was a Roman and that Tully was not a Roman.  But Cicero = Tully.  Therefore, S believes that Cicero was a Roman and S believes that Cicero was not a Roman.  This certainly looks like a contradiction. 

It seems that our governing principles, (MILL) and (DISQ), when applied to an ordinary example, generate a contradiction, the worst sort of intellectual collision one can have.

The Paderewski case is similar.  On different occasions, Peter assents to 'Paderewski is musical' and 'Paderewski is not musical.'  He has no qualms about assenting to both since he supposes that this is a case of two men with the same name.  But in reality he is referring to one and the same man.  By (DISQ), Peter believes both that Paderewski is musical and that Paderewski is not musical.  Given (MILL), Peter believes contradictory propositions.  How is this possible given that Peter is rational?

Given the luminosity of (DISQ), one might think the solution to Kripke's puzzle about belief is simply to jettison (MILL).

Not so fast.  There are powerful arguments for (MILL).

Related articles

Islam is not Islam!

Peter van Inwagen, "A Theory of Properties," Exposition and Critique

Background for a Discussion of Kripke's "A Puzzle About Belief"

Ortcutt and Paderewski: Against the Millian Theory of Proper Names

Validity and Semantics: Will the Real Frodo Baggins Please Stand Up?

Oakeshott on the Conservative Temperament

Before one is a conservative or a liberal ideologically, one is a conservative or a liberal temperamentally, or by disposition. Or at least this is a thesis with which I am seriously toying, to put it oxymoronically. The idea is that temperament is a major if not the main determinant of political commitments. First comes the disposition, then come the theoretical articulation, the arguments, and the examination and refutation of the arguments of adversaries. Conservatism and liberalism are bred in the bone before they are born in the brain.

If this is so, it helps explain the bitter and intractable nature of political disagreement, the hatreds that politics excites, the visceral oppositions thinly veiled under a mask of mock civility, the mutual repugnance that goes so deep as to be unlikely to be ascribable to mere differences in thinking. For how does one argue against another's temperament or disposition or sensibility? I can't argue you out of an innate disposition, any more than I can argue you out of being yourself; and if your theoretical framework is little more than a reflection at the level of ideas of an ineradicable temperamental bias, then my arguments cannot be expected to have much influence. A certain skepticism about the role and reach of reason in human affairs may well be the Oakeshottian upshot.

But rather than pursue the question whether temperament is a major if not the main determinant of political commitments, let us address, with the help of Michael Oakeshott, the logically preliminary question of what it is to be conservatively disposed. Here are some passages from his "On Being Conservative" (from Rationalism in Politics and Other Essays, Basic Books, 1962, pp. 168-196, bolding added):

 

The general characteristics of this [conservative] disposition are not difficult to discern, although they have often been mistaken. They centre upon a propensity to use and to enjoy what is available rather than to wish for or to look for something else; to delight in what is present rather than what was or what may be. Reflection may bring to light an appropriate gratefulness for what is available, and consequently the acknowledgment of a gift or an inheritance from the past; but there is no mere idolizing of what is past and gone. What is esteemed is the present; and it is esteemed not on account of its connections with a remote antiquity, nor because it is recognized to be more admirable than any possible alternative, but on account of its familiarity: not, Verweile doch, du bist so schoen, but Stay with me because I am attached to you.

[. . .]

To be conservative, then, is to prefer the familiar to the unknown, to prefer the tried to the untried, fact to mystery, the actual to the possible, the limited to the unbounded, the near to the distant, the sufficient to the superabundant, the convenient to the perfect, present laughter to utopian bliss. Familiar relationships and loyalties will be preferred to the allure of more profitable attachments; to acquire and to enlarge will be less important than to keep, to cultivate and to enjoy; the grief of loss will be more acute than the excitement of novelty or promise. It is to be equal to one's own fortune, to live at the level of one's own means, to be content with the want of greater perfection which belongs alike to oneself and one's circumstances.

[. . .]

The disposition to be conservative is, then, warm and positive in respect of enjoyment, and correspondingly cool and critical in respect of change and innovation: these two inclinations support and elucidate one another. The man of conservative temperament believes that a known good is not lightly to be surrendered for an unknown better. He is not in love with what is dangerous and difficult; he is unadventurous; he has no impulse to sail uncharted seas; for him there is no magic in being lost, bewildered, or shipwrecked. If forced to navigate the unknown, he sees virtue in heaving the lead every inch of the way. What others plausibly identify as timidity, he recognizes in himself as rational prudence; what others interpret as inactivity, he recognizes as a disposition to enjoy rather than to exploit. He is cautious, and he is disposed to indicate assent or dissent, not in absolute, but in graduated terms. He eyes the situation in terms of its propensity to disrupt the familiarity of the features of his world.

[. . .]

. . . what makes a conservative disposition in politics intelligible is nothing to do with natural law or a providential order, nothing to do with morals or religion; it is the observation of our current manner of living combined with the belief (which from our point of view need be regarded as no more than an hypothesis) that governing is a specific and limited activity, namely the provision and custody of general rules of conduct, which are understood, not as plans for imposing substantive activities, but as instruments enabling people to pursue the activities of their own choice with the minimum frustration, and therefore something which it is appropriate to be conservative about.

[. . .]

And the office of government is not to impose other beliefs and activities upon its subjects, not to tutor or to educate them, not to make them better or happier in another way, not to direct them, to galvanize them into action, to lead them or to coordinate their activities so that no occasion of conflict shall occur; the office of government is merely to rule. This is a specific and limited activity, easily corrupted when it is combined with any other, and, in the circumstances, indispensable. The image of the ruler is the umpire whose business is to administer the rules of the game, or the chairman who governs the debate according to known rules but does not himself participate in it.

[. . .]

. . . the office he attributes to government is to resolve some of the collisions which this variety of beliefs and activities generates; to preserve peace, not by placing an interdict upon choice and upon the diversity that springs from the exercise of preference, not by imposing substantive uniformity, but by enforcing general rules of procedure upon all subjects alike.

Government, then, as the conservative in this matter understands it, does not begin with a vision of another, different, and better world, but with the observation of the self-government practised even by men of passion in the conduct of their enterprises; it begins in the informal adjustments of interests to one another which are designed to release those who are apt to collide from the mutual frustration of a collision. Sometimes these adjustments are no more than agreements between two parties to keep out of each other's way; sometimes they are of wider application and more durable character, such as the International Rules for the prevention of collisions at sea. In short, the intimations of government are to be found in ritual, not in religion or philosophy; in the enjoyment of orderly and peaceable behaviour, not in the search for truth or perfection.

[. . .]

. . . politics is an activity unsuited to the young, not on account of their vices but on account of what I at least consider to be their virtues.

Nobody pretends that it is easy to acquire or to sustain the mood of indifference which this manner of politics calls for. To rein-in one's own beliefs and desires, to acknowledge the current shape of things, to feel the balance of things in one's hand, to tolerate what is abominable, to distinguish between crime and sin, to respect formality even when it appears to be leading to error, these are difficult achievements; and they are achievements not to be looked for in the young. Everybody's young days are a dream, a delightful insanity, a sweet solipsism. Nothing in them has a fixed shape, nothing a fixed price; everything is a possibility, and we live happily on credit. There are no obligations to be observed; there are no accounts to be kept. Nothing is specified in advance; everything is what can be made of it. The world is a mirror in which we seek the reflection of our own desires. The allure of violent emotions is irresistible. When we are young we are not disposed to make concessions to the world; we never feel the balance of a thing in our hands - unless it be a cricket bat. [Jim Morrison: "We wnat the world, and we want it now!"] We are not apt to distinguish between our liking and our esteem; urgency is our criterion of importance; and we do not easily understand that what is humdrum need not be despicable. We are impatient of restraint; and we readily believe, like Shelley, that to have contracted a habit is to have failed. These, in my opinion, are among our virtues when we are young; but how remote they are from the disposition appropriate for participating in the style of government I have been describing. Since life is a dream, we argue (with plausible but erroneous logic) that politics must be an encounter of dreams, in which we hope to impose our own. Some unfortunate people, like Pitt (laughably called "the Younger"), are born old, and are eligible to engage in politics almost in their cradles; others, perhaps more fortunate, belie the saying that one is young only once, they never grow up. But these are exceptions. For most there is what Conrad called the "shadow line" which, when we pass it, discloses a solid world of things, each with its fixed shape, each with its own point of balance, each with its price; a world of fact, not poetic image, in which what we have spent on one thing we cannot spend on another; a world inhabited by others besides ourselves who cannot be reduced to mere reflections of our own emotions. And coming to be at home in this commonplace world qualifies us (as no knowledge of "political science" can ever qualify us), if we are so inclined and have nothing better to think about, to engage in what the man of conservative disposition understands to be political activity.

Related articles

Is Man Basically Good?

'Islamophobia' and 'Hoplophobia'

'Contemporary Liberals'

Before one is a conservative or a liberal ideologically, one is a conservative or a liberal temperamentally, or by disposition. Or at least this is a thesis with which I am seriously toying, to put it oxymoronically. The idea is that temperament is a major if not the main determinant of political commitments. First comes the disposition, then come the theoretical articulation, the arguments, and the examination and refutation of the arguments of adversaries. Conservatism and liberalism are bred in the bone before they are born in the brain.

If this is so, it helps explain the bitter and intractable nature of political disagreement, the hatreds that politics excites, the visceral oppositions thinly veiled under a mask of mock civility, the mutual repugnance that goes so deep as to be unlikely to be ascribable to mere differences in thinking. For how does one argue against another's temperament or disposition or sensibility? I can't argue you out of an innate disposition, any more than I can argue you out of being yourself; and if your theoretical framework is little more than a reflection at the level of ideas of an ineradicable temperamental bias, then my arguments cannot be expected to have much influence. A certain skepticism about the role and reach of reason in human affairs may well be the Oakeshottian upshot.

But rather than pursue the question whether temperament is a major if not the main determinant of political commitments, let us address, with the help of Michael Oakeshott, the logically preliminary question of what it is to be conservatively disposed. Here are some passages from his "On Being Conservative" (from Rationalism in Politics and Other Essays, Basic Books, 1962, pp. 168-196, bolding added):

 

The general characteristics of this [conservative] disposition are not difficult to discern, although they have often been mistaken. They centre upon a propensity to use and to enjoy what is available rather than to wish for or to look for something else; to delight in what is present rather than what was or what may be. Reflection may bring to light an appropriate gratefulness for what is available, and consequently the acknowledgment of a gift or an inheritance from the past; but there is no mere idolizing of what is past and gone. What is esteemed is the present; and it is esteemed not on account of its connections with a remote antiquity, nor because it is recognized to be more admirable than any possible alternative, but on account of its familiarity: not, Verweile doch, du bist so schoen, but Stay with me because I am attached to you.

[. . .]

To be conservative, then, is to prefer the familiar to the unknown, to prefer the tried to the untried, fact to mystery, the actual to the possible, the limited to the unbounded, the near to the distant, the sufficient to the superabundant, the convenient to the perfect, present laughter to utopian bliss. Familiar relationships and loyalties will be preferred to the allure of more profitable attachments; to acquire and to enlarge will be less important than to keep, to cultivate and to enjoy; the grief of loss will be more acute than the excitement of novelty or promise. It is to be equal to one's own fortune, to live at the level of one's own means, to be content with the want of greater perfection which belongs alike to oneself and one's circumstances.

[. . .]

The disposition to be conservative is, then, warm and positive in respect of enjoyment, and correspondingly cool and critical in respect of change and innovation: these two inclinations support and elucidate one another. The man of conservative temperament believes that a known good is not lightly to be surrendered for an unknown better. He is not in love with what is dangerous and difficult; he is unadventurous; he has no impulse to sail uncharted seas; for him there is no magic in being lost, bewildered, or shipwrecked. If forced to navigate the unknown, he sees virtue in heaving the lead every inch of the way. What others plausibly identify as timidity, he recognizes in himself as rational prudence; what others interpret as inactivity, he recognizes as a disposition to enjoy rather than to exploit. He is cautious, and he is disposed to indicate assent or dissent, not in absolute, but in graduated terms. He eyes the situation in terms of its propensity to disrupt the familiarity of the features of his world.

[. . .]

. . . what makes a conservative disposition in politics intelligible is nothing to do with natural law or a providential order, nothing to do with morals or religion; it is the observation of our current manner of living combined with the belief (which from our point of view need be regarded as no more than an hypothesis) that governing is a specific and limited activity, namely the provision and custody of general rules of conduct, which are understood, not as plans for imposing substantive activities, but as instruments enabling people to pursue the activities of their own choice with the minimum frustration, and therefore something which it is appropriate to be conservative about.

[. . .]

And the office of government is not to impose other beliefs and activities upon its subjects, not to tutor or to educate them, not to make them better or happier in another way, not to direct them, to galvanize them into action, to lead them or to coordinate their activities so that no occasion of conflict shall occur; the office of government is merely to rule. This is a specific and limited activity, easily corrupted when it is combined with any other, and, in the circumstances, indispensable. The image of the ruler is the umpire whose business is to administer the rules of the game, or the chairman who governs the debate according to known rules but does not himself participate in it.

[. . .]

. . . the office he attributes to government is to resolve some of the collisions which this variety of beliefs and activities generates; to preserve peace, not by placing an interdict upon choice and upon the diversity that springs from the exercise of preference, not by imposing substantive uniformity, but by enforcing general rules of procedure upon all subjects alike.

Government, then, as the conservative in this matter understands it, does not begin with a vision of another, different, and better world, but with the observation of the self-government practised even by men of passion in the conduct of their enterprises; it begins in the informal adjustments of interests to one another which are designed to release those who are apt to collide from the mutual frustration of a collision. Sometimes these adjustments are no more than agreements between two parties to keep out of each other's way; sometimes they are of wider application and more durable character, such as the International Rules for the prevention of collisions at sea. In short, the intimations of government are to be found in ritual, not in religion or philosophy; in the enjoyment of orderly and peaceable behaviour, not in the search for truth or perfection.

[. . .]

. . . politics is an activity unsuited to the young, not on account of their vices but on account of what I at least consider to be their virtues.

Nobody pretends that it is easy to acquire or to sustain the mood of indifference which this manner of politics calls for. To rein-in one's own beliefs and desires, to acknowledge the current shape of things, to feel the balance of things in one's hand, to tolerate what is abominable, to distinguish between crime and sin, to respect formality even when it appears to be leading to error, these are difficult achievements; and they are achievements not to be looked for in the young. Everybody's young days are a dream, a delightful insanity, a sweet solipsism. Nothing in them has a fixed shape, nothing a fixed price; everything is a possibility, and we live happily on credit. There are no obligations to be observed; there are no accounts to be kept. Nothing is specified in advance; everything is what can be made of it. The world is a mirror in which we seek the reflection of our own desires. The allure of violent emotions is irresistible. When we are young we are not disposed to make concessions to the world; we never feel the balance of a thing in our hands - unless it be a cricket bat. [Jim Morrison: "We wnat the world, and we want it now!"] We are not apt to distinguish between our liking and our esteem; urgency is our criterion of importance; and we do not easily understand that what is humdrum need not be despicable. We are impatient of restraint; and we readily believe, like Shelley, that to have contracted a habit is to have failed. These, in my opinion, are among our virtues when we are young; but how remote they are from the disposition appropriate for participating in the style of government I have been describing. Since life is a dream, we argue (with plausible but erroneous logic) that politics must be an encounter of dreams, in which we hope to impose our own. Some unfortunate people, like Pitt (laughably called "the Younger"), are born old, and are eligible to engage in politics almost in their cradles; others, perhaps more fortunate, belie the saying that one is young only once, they never grow up. But these are exceptions. For most there is what Conrad called the "shadow line" which, when we pass it, discloses a solid world of things, each with its fixed shape, each with its own point of balance, each with its price; a world of fact, not poetic image, in which what we have spent on one thing we cannot spend on another; a world inhabited by others besides ourselves who cannot be reduced to mere reflections of our own emotions. And coming to be at home in this commonplace world qualifies us (as no knowledge of "political science" can ever qualify us), if we are so inclined and have nothing better to think about, to engage in what the man of conservative disposition understands to be political activity.