Maverick Philosopher

Excluded Middle, Bivalence, and Tertium Non Datur

Dave Gudeman comments:

I was surprised to see you distinguishing between bivalence and the LEM. As far as I can tell, in the traditional and most common formulations, they are identical.

Here is the way I understand it.  They are not identical.  Excluded Middle is a law of logic, whereas Bivalence is a semantic principle. (See Michael Dummett, Truth and Other Enigmas, Harvard UP, 2nd ed. , 1980, p. xix; Paul Horwich, Truth, Oxford UP, 2nd ed., 1998, p. 79) If 'p' is a place-holder for a proposition, any proposition, then Excluded Middle is:

LEM. p v ~p.

If 'p' is a propositional variable, and we quantify over propositions, then we have the universal quantification

LEM*. For all p, p v ~p.

It is understood that the wedge in the above formulae signifies exclusive disjunction. Why is that understood? Because both p and not-p is excluded by the Law of Non-Contradiction:

LNC. ~(p & ~p).  

If I may be permitted parenthetically to wax poetic in these aseptic precincts, (LNC) possesses a 'dignity' in excess of that possessed by (LEM). What I mean is that there are some fairly plausible counterexamples to (LEM), but none that are very plausible to (LNC).  Few philosophers are dialetheists; many more accept truth-value gaps.

The laws of logic are purely formal: they abstract from content or meaning. They are syntactic principles. Bivalence, by contrast, is a semantic principle. It goes like this:

BV. Every proposition is either true or false.

Tertium non datur means that a third is not given: there is no third truth value.  (TND) is also a semantic principle:

TND. No proposition is neither true nor false.

So the difference between (LEM) and (BV) is that the first is a syntactic principle and the second a semantic principle. But is this a difference that makes a difference? Is there a conceivable case where (LEM) is true but (BV) false?  I don't know the answers to these questions. Either that or I forgot them.

But if you conflate the two principles,  then you are in good company. W. V. O. Quine, Mathematical Logic, Harvard UP, 8th ed., 1976, p. 51: ". . . the law of excluded middle, which is commonly phrased as saying that every statement is either true or false . . . ."

Of E-Mail and Doing Nothing

I do appreciate e-mail, and I consider it rude not to respond; but lack of time and energy in synergy with congenital inefficiency conspire to make it difficult for me to answer everything. I am also temperamentally disinclined to acquiesce in mindless American hyper-kineticism, in accordance with the Italian saying:

Dolce far niente

Sweet to do nothing

which saying, were it not for the inefficiency lately mentioned, would have been by now inscribed above my stoa. My paternal grandfather had it emblazoned on his pergola, and more 'nothing' transpires on my stoa than ever did beneath his pergola.

So time each day must be devoted to 'doing nothing': meditating, traipsing around in the local mountains, contemplating sunrises and moonsets, sunsets and moonrises, and taking naps, naps punctuated on one end by bed-reading and on the other by yet more coffee-drinking.

Without a sizeable admixture of such 'nothing' I cannot see how a life would be worth living.

I do appreciate e-mail, and I consider it rude not to respond; but lack of time and energy in synergy with congenital inefficiency conspire to make it difficult for me to answer everything. I am also temperamentally disinclined to acquiesce in mindless American hyper-kineticism, in accordance with the Italian saying:

Dolce far niente

Sweet to do nothing

which saying, were it not for the inefficiency lately mentioned, would have been by now inscribed above my stoa. My paternal grandfather had it emblazoned on his pergola, and more 'nothing' transpires on my stoa than ever did beneath his pergola.

So time each day must be devoted to 'doing nothing': meditating, traipsing around in the local mountains, contemplating sunrises and moonsets, sunsets and moonrises, and taking naps, naps punctuated on one end by bed-reading and on the other by yet more coffee-drinking.

Without a sizeable admixture of such 'nothing' I cannot see how a life would be worth living.

Two Senses of 'Presupposition' in Van Til and in General

Cornelius Van Til, The Defense of the Faith, 4th ed., p. 279: "Thus the truth of Christianity appears to be the immediately indispensable presupposition of the fruitful study of nature." My gloss:

The fruitful study of nature presupposes the truth of Christianity.  It is a fact that we study nature, and it is a fact that our natural-scientific procedures are successful in many ways and in many areas of inquiry.  Now what is factual is actual, and what is actual is possible. But how is it possible? What are the conditions of the possibility of our successful understanding of nature and (some of) her laws? We are being told by Van Til that an indispensable and thus necessary condition is the truth of Christianity.

This illustrates one legitimate use of  'presupposition.' Presupposition in this sense relates an activity or procedure to a proposition.  To say that activity A presupposes proposition p is to say that A could not be undertaken with the hope of success  were p not true. 

For example, the procedures of natural science presuppose the intelligibility of nature.  We would not seek the laws of planetary motion, for example, if we did not antecedently believe that the motion of the planets was regular and law-like and understandable by us. But IS nature intrinsically intelligible, intelligible an sich? We have  good reason to think so given the success of our physics as shown by its technological implementation.

The presupposition of the intelligibility of nature is therefore well-grounded .

We can push our transcendental regress a step further by asking: what does the intelligibility of nature itself presuppose? What are the conditions of the possibility of nature's being understandable by us?  What would have to be the case for nature to be intelligible to us?  Here are some candidate answers:

A. The intelligibility of nature presupposes the truth of Christianity. (Van Til)

B. The intelligibility of nature presupposes the existence of God. (It is only because a supreme Intelligence created the world that it is intelligible.)

C. The intelligibility of nature presupposes the truth of Kant's transcendental idealism according to which "The understanding is the law-giver of nature." 

D. The intelligibility of nature presupposes an immanent order and teleology along the lines of Thomas Nagel's Mind and Cosmos. On Nagel's view, the rational order is self-explanatory, a necessary feature of anything that could count as a cosmos. Nagel views the intelligibility of the world as "itself part of the deepest explanation why things are as they are." (17).  Now part of the way things are is that they are understandable by us.  Given that the way things are is intelligible, it follows that the intelligibility of the world is self-explanatory or self-grounding. "The intelligibility of the world is no accident." (17)   "nature is such as to give rise to conscious beings with minds; and it is such as to be comprehensible to such beings." (17) See my Nagel category for much more on Nagel's book and other works of his.

I myself incline toward (B).  (A) entails (B), but I see no reason to accept (A).  The sort of bottom-up reasoning that can plausibly justify us in positing God cannot plausibly justify us in positing the God of orthodox Christian theism with all the Reformed add-ons.

The other sense of 'presuppose' is in play here: "I therefore presuppose the Reformed system of doctrine." (Van Til, p. 27) A presupposition in this sense is an assumption that is accepted unconditionally, uncritically, without question. 

Bottom-Up and Top-Down

The first sense of presupposition fits with a bottom-up approach. We start with various features of the world we experience and we then ask what makes them possible.  We attempt  a regress from the given to the hidden. We start with the world, not with God, and we aim to arrive at God.  But if we arrive at God in this way, then the properties we will be justified in attributing to God will  only be those needed for our explanatory purposes.   Those properties are in a certain sense tied to our starting points.  For example, one might reason along these lines: the universe is contingent, but its existence is not a brute fact; so it must have a cause external to it.  In this way we get to God as First Cause.  Or we start from the intelligibility of nature and arrive at God as the supremely intelligent source of the intelligibility we find here below.  Supposing we can get to the true God in this way, a God that needn't have caused anything, or sourced the intelligibility of anything distinct from himself,  it nonetheless remains the case that the properties of this God will reflect the facts we start with and our need to explain them. 

The second sense of presupposition fits with a top-down approach.  We start with God, or at least we try to start with God, and then, instead of regressing from the given to the hidden conditions of the possibility of the given, we progress from the hidden to the given.  This is possible if the God who is hidden to the natural man with his natural intellect has revealed himself.   I understand Van Til to be saying that we know the true God, the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob only because he has revealed himself to us.  The revelation that Van Till accepts is the final truth, not only about God, but also about man, and the universe.  Since it the revelation of God, it cannot be questioned.   We can say that for Van Til, God and his revelation understood along Reformed lines constitute the Absolute Presupposition.

Interim Conclusion

Van Til's bottom-up  transcendental argumentation appears to be a sham. Despite appearances, he is not trying to justify belief in the God of orthodox Christian theism by argumentation from given facts (the existence of nature, its order, beauty, and intelligibility) to that which must be presupposed if they are to be so much as possible; he is not trying to justify belief in the Christian God at all.  For he just assumes the existence of the Christian God as something that needs no justification and cannot be questioned since it is that without which there would be no questioning or proving or anything else.

With that absolute presupposition in place as his unquestionable starting point, he can then advance, but not justify, claims like (A) above: 

A. The intelligibility of nature presupposes the truth of Christianity.

What Van Til is doing in effect is simply presupposing the truth of (A)! What he ought to be doing, however, is giving us a reason to accept (A). It comes as no surprise, then, that Van Til claims that all reasoning is circular reasoning. (123) We will have to examine that claim and Oliphint's defense of it in a separate post.

Van Til just assumes the truth of his worldview and then in effect says: See! I can explain everything, including why there is no neutral ground for the assessment of worldviews, and why people who reject the particulars of my worldview reject them.  But this is of no help to someone who sees no reason to accept his worldview  in the first place.

Suppose I grant that that sin has noetic consequences. I grant the thesis.  But that leaves open the question as what exactly the noetic consequences are. Is it a noetic consequence of sin that I do not accept Van Til's worldview?  Or is rather a noetic consequence of sin that Van Til denies that there is a neutral ground for the assessment of worldviews?

Fascinating! More later. And thanks again to Dave Bagwill for inspiring me to get going on this.

Facebook

For my commentary on the passing scene, go to my FB page. Friend requests are welcome from those with a broadly conservative outlook.

Just Getting Started at 70

A valued correspondent offers,

I'm 70 years old, but I feel like I'm just getting started. Maybe that's a common experience.

I follow not far behind, and I can relate to the sentiment. I am just getting started as I near the end of the trail. The clock is running and I feel like a chess player in time trouble.  I am working on a book that I hope will sum it all up for me and bring my life to a rounded completion.  Will I have time before the flag falls?

Death is the muse of philosophy and one of her great themes. Now death is Janus-faced. One of her faces is that of the Grim Reaper, the other that of the Benign Releaser. 

How bad can death be if it releases us from this obviously unsatisfactory and bewildering predicament? Only the spiritually insensate could be blind to the horror of this life, a horror mitigated but not outweighed by the beauty in the world and goodness in some people. 

You live in a charnel house that is on fire and you pronounce it a wonderful abode?  How could escape from it not be good? On the other side of the question, that persons cease to exist utterly seems to be a very great evil, something intolerable barely conceivable. To appreciate this one must not think abstractly and objectively -- one dies, all men are mortal -- but concretely and subjectively: I will die. You, dear heart, will die.

When we think concretely and personally about death, our own death, and the deaths of those we love, we find ourselves agreeing with Arthur Schopenhauer: "The heart rebels against this, and feels that it cannot be true." ("The Vanity of Existence" in The Will to Live, ed. R. Taylor, p. 229)  Let us assume that you love and cherish your wife. Your loving her has conferred upon her uniqueness, at least relative to you. (Josiah Royce) Now imagine her lovable and loving unique personality blotted out of existence forever.  Or consider your own case. You have devoted a lifetime to becoming who you are. You have worked steadily at the task of self-individuation. Only to become nothing? Could things be arranged so badly for us? But then the whole thing would be a bad joke.

Is death evil or not?  No one knows. That we remain in the dark on a question so close to the heart and mind is yet another reason why our condition is a predicament. Should we therefore conclude that the good of escaping it outweighs the bad of personal cessation? No one knows.

The Epicurean reasoning strikes many as sophistical.  And maybe it is, though it is not obvious that it is. "When I am, death is not; when death is; I am not."

Dying is the end of trail, the last step on the via dolorosa.  It is indisputably evil, the only good thing about it being that it will force jokers finally to become serious. Will you be cracking jokes as you gasp for breath and feel yourself helplessly sliding into the abyss? Death, however, is not the last step; it is beyond the trail and its trials and beyond dying, a transcendent  'state' shrouded in mystery, or maybe not even a state: just mystery.

Companion post: On the 'Inconceivability' of Death

Van Til on an Absolutely Certain Proof of Christianity

Cornelius Van Til, The Defense of the Faith, 4th ed., p. 381:

The best, the only, the absolutely certain proof of the truth of Christianity is that unless its truth be presupposed,there is no proof of anything.

Van Til's  claim, to employ some Kantian jargon, is that the truth of Christianity is a condition of the possibility of proving anything. That's quite a claim. Let's put it to the test.

One can prove that the null set is unique by reductio ad absurdum. We begin the reductio by assuming that the null set is not unique, that there are two or more null sets. By the Axiom of Extensionality, two sets differ numerically only if one has a member the other doesn't have, or vice versa. But the null set, by definition, has no members. So the assumption leads to a contradiction. Therefore there cannot be two or more null sets. Hence the null set is unique. 

The proof presupposes the Law of Non-Contradiction (LNC), and I am willing to grant that LNC and the other laws of logic can be argued to presuppose in their turn the existence of an omniscient necessary being. One argument to this conclusion is the Anderson-Welty argument which I critically examine here. I conclude that, while the argument is not rationally compelling, it does contribute to the rationality of belief in God.  In other words, the Anderson-Welty argument is a good reason to believe in the existence of God. It does not, however, establish the existence of God in a definitive manner. It does not show that the existence of God is absolutely certain.

At the very most, then, one can plausibly argue to, but not prove, the existence of an omniscient necessary being whose existence is a presupposition of our rational operations in accordance with the laws of logic.  But this is a far cry from what Van Til asserts above, namely, that the truth of Christianity with all its very specific claims is a condition of the possibility of proving anything. Trinity and Incarnation are among these specific claims. How are these doctrines supposed to bear upon the laws of logic?  Perhaps the Van Tilians have an answer to this. If they do, I would like to know what it is. But not only is Van Til's conception of God Christian, it is also Calvinist so that all the characteristic claims of Calvinism are also packed into the conception of a God that is supposed to be a condition of the possibility of all  proof.  How does predestination, for example, bear upon the laws of logic?

A New and Improved Argument for the Necessity of Something

Previous versions were long-winded.  Herewith, an approach to the lapidary.

1) If nothing exists, then something exists.
2) If something exists, then something exists.
3) Either nothing exists or something exists.
Therefore
4) Necessarily, something exists.

The argument is valid. The second two premises are tautologies. The conclusion is interesting, to put it mildly: it is equivalent to the proposition that it is impossible that there be nothing at all.  But why accept (1)?

Argument for (1)

5) If p, then the proposition expressed by 'p' is true.
Therefore
6) If nothing exists, then nothing exists is true.
7) The consequent of (6) commits us to the existence of at least one proposition.
Therefore
1) If nothing exists, then something exists.

Surely (5) is unproblematic, being one half of the disquotational schema,

DS. P iff the proposition expressed by 'p' is true.

For example, snow is white if and only if snow is white is true. The semantic ascent on the right-hand side of the biconditional involves the application of the predicate 'true' to a proposition. So it is not the case that the left and right hand sides of the biconditional say the same thing or express the same proposition. The LHS says that snow is white; the RHS says something different, namely, that the proposition expressed by 'snow is white' is true. The RHS has an ontological commitment that the LHS does not have: the RHS commits us to a proposition. Since the RHS is true, the proposition exists. (Cf. Colin McGinn, Logical Properties, Oxford UP 2000, 92-93. I am taking from McGinn only the insight that the LHS and RHS of (DS) do not say the same thing.)

But what about the inference from (5) to (6)? Can it be questioned? Yes, if we are willing to countenance counterexamples to (5) and thereby call into question Bivalence, the semantic principle that every proposition is either true or false, but not both. I'll pursue this in a later post. If, however, one accepts Bivalence and its syntactic counterpart, Excluded Middle, then it looks as if I've got me a rigorous a priori argument for the necessity of something and the impossibility of there being nothing at all.

Do Fire Alarms Make Assertions?

The Opponent writes,

The alarm means 'there is a fire in the building'. An assertion has taken place, that there is a fire. But it is triggered by a sensor in the building. So asserting is not just something people do.

This is a loose way of talking quite in order in ordinary life, but false if taken literally and strictly. I have no objection to people in ordinary life saying things like, 'The fire alarm is telling us that there's a fire in the building.'  But people don't talk like that. You tell me, "There's a fire!" I ask, "How do you know?" You reply, "The fire alarm went off." You DON"T say, "The fire alarm told me so,"or "The fire alarm made an assertion to that effect." You COULD say, "A fireman told me so."

But let's not get hung up in Ordinary Language analysis. The 1950s are long gone.

My claim is that a mechanical contraption cannot make an assertion any more than a 'sensor' can sense anything.  Thermostats don't feel heat and smoke detectors do not smell smoke.  Oscilloscopes do not detect sine waves; an engineer detects  a sine wave by the instrumentality of the oscilloscope. Neither my dipstick nor the oil on my dipstick asserts that there is sufficient oil in the crankcase; I infer that there is from the oil I observe on the dipstick. Inferring, like asserting, is something people do.

All meaning traces back ultimately to Original Meaners, Original Sinn-ers. Am I being too clever for clarity?

A green light means proceed.  A red light means stop.  But how did those signals come to acquire their conventional meanings? From us, from minds whose intentionality is original, not derived.    Surely you don't believe that green, or a green light, intrinsically means that one may proceed.

Let us see if the Opponent and I can find some common ground. I concede that there is a clear sense in which the sounding of a fire alarm means that there is a fire in the building. But this meaning is an instance of derivative, as opposed to original, intentionality. The intentionality derives from us. The sounding of the alarm means what it means only because we have assigned it that meaning.  Its intentionality or meaning is thus not intrinsic to it. After all, a fire alarm could be constructed for deaf people that emits a smell instead of a sound, perhaps the awful smell of burnt hair.  Obviously, such a smell is not intrinsically significative of anything.

So: if the Opponent concedes that the intentionality of a fire alarm is merely derivative, then we have agreement. If he holds that it is original, then the disagreement continues.

There is a similar pattern with sentences and propositions. I will allow you to say that a sentence is true or false in a secondary or derivative sense so long as you admit that it is propositions that are the primary truth-bearers.  Do we have a deal?  A declarative sentence is true in virtue of expressing a true proposition.

The Primacy of the Intentional Over the Linguistic

This entry, at Maverick Philosopher: Strictly Philosophical, probably best exposes the deepest root of my disagreement with Dr. Buckner.

Where Less is More

Alexander Pope advises that we drink deep of the Pierian spring, for a little learning is a dangerous thing. A little knowledge, like a little learning, is indeed a dangerous thing except in the case of persons, where a lot of knowledge endangers love, respect, and admiration. Propinquity breeds familiarity, and familiarity contempt. Distance preserves and augments what propinquity diminishes. In matters sartorial this holds as well, as witness the robes of the judge which add an aura of dignity and majesty to a poor mortal who, under the aspect of eternity, and under the distancing attire, is as wretched as the man in the dock.

The Sentimentalist

The sentimentalist clings to his petty coins of memory, playing the miser, loathe to make donation of them to oblivion; all the while mocking himself from the heights of a magnanimity which is as much his as his pettiness.

God, the Cosmos, Other Minds: In the Same Epistemological Boat?

Tony Flood has gone though many changes in his long search for truth. He seems to have finally settled down in Van Til's presuppositionalism.  Tony  writes,

God, the cosmos, and a plurality of minds other than one’s own are in the same epistemological boat. [. . .] To be skeptical about one but not the other two is arbitrary. Our innate predisposition to be realistic about all three is divinely written “software” that informs our cerebral “wetware.”

I wish I could accept this, but I don't, and I believe I have good reasons for my non-acceptance.

By "in the same epistemological boat," Flood means that God, the physical universe, and other minds are all on a par in respect of dubitability. No one of them is more open to reasonable doubt than the other two, and none of them is open to reasonable doubt. Therefore, one can no more reasonably doubt the existence of God than one can doubt the existence of other minds.  Atheism is on a par with solipsism in point of plausibility.

And bear in mind that by 'God' here is meant something very specific, the triune God of Christian theism, the God of the Bible as understood by Van Til and Co.  It is one thing to argue -- and it can be done with some plausibility -- that the validity of all reasoning about any subject presupposes the existence of an omniscient necessary being. It is quite another to argue that the presuppositum must be the God of Christian theism as the latter is expounded by a Calvinist!

Now I concede that doubts about the external world and the the reality of other minds are hyperbolic, and if taken as genuine doubts, as opposed to thought experiments deployed in an epistemology seminar, unreasonable. No one really doubts the existence of rocks or other minds.  Not even Bishop Berkeley doubts, let alone denies, the existence of rocks, the tree in the quad, and suchlike.  This is why it is perfectly lame to think that Berkeley's idealism can be refuted by kicking a stone. (See Of Berkeley's Stones and the Eliminativist's Beliefs and Argumentum ad Lapidem?)

The hyperbolic skepticism of Descartes' dream argument and its latter-day brain-in-the-vat incarnations are methodological tools of the epistemologist who seeks to understand how we know what we know, and what it is to know what we know.   A philosopher who wonders how knowledge is possible may, but need not, and typically does not, deny or have any real doubt THAT knowledge is possible. For example, I may be firmly convinced of the existence of so-called abstract objects (numbers, sets, propositions, uninstantiated properties, etc.) but be puzzled about how knowledge of such entities is possible given that there is no causal interaction with them.  That puzzlement does not get  the length of doubt or denial. The same holds, mutatis mutandis, for knowledge of the past, knowledge of other minds, and knowledge of the external world.

My point, then, is that (i) practically no one has real doubts about the existence of the external world or the existence of other minds, and that (ii) it would not be reasonable to have such doubts.  But (iii) people do have real doubts about the existence of the God of Christian theism, and (iv) it is not unreasonable to have such doubts.  The various arguments from evil, and not just these, cast reasonable doubt on Christian theism.

One type of real doubt is an 'existential' doubt, one that grips a person who succumbs to it, and induces fear and perhaps horror.  There are those who lose their faith in God and suffer in consequence.  They experience a terrible sense of loss, or perhaps they fear that they have been duped by crafty priests who exploited their youthful innocence and gullibility to infect them with superstitious nonsense in order to keep the priestly hustle going.  One can lose one's faith in God, and many do.  No one loses his faith in the external world or in other minds. And this for the simple reason that there was no need for faith in the first place.

I believe I have said enough to cast serious doubt on, if not refute, the idea that God, the the cosmos, and other minds are are in the same epistemological boat. That's a boat that won't float.

Assertion and Truth In Itself

The Ostrich reports that  he gave up on my transcendental argument from assertion to truth when he came to this paragraph:

To further unpack the concept of assertion, we note that whatever is asserted is asserted to be true independently of one's asserting it.  Of course, it does not follow from one's asserting that p that p is true independently of one's asserting it.  That's a further question. The point is rather that the act of assertion purports to get at reality as it is in itself.  This is a matter of conceptual necessity: the act of assertion would not be what it is if it did have a built-in nisus or directedness toward truth.

He grants that " it can be true that p even though no one asserts that p, or believes that p, or thinks that p." But he has trouble with "reality as it is in itself."

But ‘the act of assertion purports to get at reality as it is in itself’? And I still don’t really understand the ‘act’ involved in asserting. I agree that uttering the utterance ‘grass is green’ is an act. Definitely an act. Is it an ‘act of assertion’? Well the utterance-act is performed against the backdrop of conventional meaning and so forth. The conventional or literal meaning of the English sentence ‘grass is green’ is that grass is green. So the utterer is aiming to communicate the proposition (in your sense of ‘proposition’) that grass is green.

To assert that grass is green I must produce a token of a sentence (sentence-type) in some language that has the meaning that 'grass is green' has in English. So I can assert that grass is green by the assertive utterance of 'das Gras ist grün': I don't need to be speaking English. But let's stick to our mother tongue.

We can use 'sentence' and 'sentence type' interchangeably. But we must scrupulously distinguish sentences/sentence types from sentence tokens.  I use 'token' both as a noun and as a verb. One way to token a sentence is by uttering it. Another way is by writing it on a piece of paper. A third is by carving it into stone. And of course there are other more sophisticated ways of tokening or encoding a sentence.  To utter a sentence is to say it, whether sotto voce, or loudly. But you have to use your tongue and vocal cords, etc.  An utterance is the act of an agent. The speaker is  the agent; the saying or speaking of the words composing a sentence is the act. We can use 'inscribe' to covering tokenings that do not require speech, as when I write 'Sally is drunk' on a piece of paper and hand it to you to convey to you the proposition that -- wait for it -- Sally is drunk!  I can do that in such away that it constitutes an assertion and is taken by you to be one.  And let's be clear that by sentences in this discussion we mean sentences in the indicative mood.  I discern no difference between such a sentence and a declarative sentence.

Are you with me so far?

Now suppose I assert that grass is green and I do so in English.  To do this I must produce a token of 'Grass is green' either by utterance or by inscription or in some other way such as sign language.   I produce this token with the intention of (i) expressing a proposition or thought and (ii) conveying it to my hearer or reader.  I intend by my act of communication to convey to my hearer  or reader what I take to be a truth, where a truth is a true proposition. 

To assert is to assert something.  We must distinguish the asserting from that which is asserted.  That which is asserted is the proposition. Now what I assert, I assert to be true. That's analytic: I am merely unpacking (analyzing) the concept of assertion.

Now stop and think about that. It would make no sense to say that what one asserts, one asserts to be false. Of course, one can assert that a certain proposition is false. For example, I can assert that the proposition Trafalgar Square is in Brighton is false. But this is no counterexample to my claim since I assert it to be true that the proposition in question is false.

Of course, not everything I assert to be true IS true in reality. But that does not alter the fact that whenever one makes an assertion, the proposition one asserts is asserted to be true.  Every sincere assertion aims at truth whether or not it hits the target. Every sincere assertion is truth-directed as a matter of conceptual necessity.

To assert, then, is to assert to be true. But not only that. What I assert to be true I assert to be true independently of my asserting it or anyone's asserting it.  What is true independently of anyone's asserting it is true in itself. What is true in itself is true in reality.  What is true in reality is true extramentally and extralinguistically. 

We can therefore say that anyone who makes an assertion purports to say something true about reality as it is in itself.

Alles klar?

Saturday Night at the Oldies: Some 'Song' Songs

Mose Allison, The Song is Ended

Punch Bros., Dink's Song

Dave van Ronk, Dink's Song

Arlo Guthrie, Percy's Song

Fairport Convention, Percy's Song

Doors, Alabama Song

Roberta Flack, Killing Me Softly with his Song

Bob Dylan, Song to Woody

Chad and Jeremy, Summer Song

Simon and Garfunkel, 59th Street Bridge Song

Brook Benton, The Boll Weevil Song

UPDATE 1/20. A reader asks:

A black dude singing a hillbilly song? Where do you find these things?

That was a big hit when I was a boy, and I never forgot it.  It was played on the rock stations. Another great Brook Benton tune is It's Just a Matter of Time.

Charley Pride is another black guy who sang country songs. Is Anybody Going to San Antone?

A Transcendental Argument from Assertion to Truth

We start with a fact: we make assertions. The fact is actual, so it must be possible. What are the conditions of its possibility? What has to be the case for assertion to be possible?  I will argue that there has to be truth for assertion to be possible.

We proceed by unpacking the concept of assertion.

By 'assertion' I mean the speech act of asserting a proposition, not the proposition asserted taken in abstraction from the act of assertion.  Clearly, the asserting and the proposition asserted -- the content of the assertion -- must be distinguished despite the fact that there is no act of assertion without a content.  To assert is to assert something.

If one asserts that p, then one asserts it to be true that p. There is a conceptual link between assertion and truth.  Whatever is asserted is presented as true by the one who makes the assertion. And it doesn't matter whether the proposition asserted is true or false.  Suppose that, unbeknownst to me, the proposition I assert is false; it is still the case that I assert it to be true. 

Assertion is the overt verbal  expression of belief, and believing a proposition to be true is logically consistent with the proposition's being false. To believe a proposition is to believe it to be true, and to assert a proposition is to assert it to be true.

To further unpack the concept of assertion, we note that whatever is asserted is asserted to be true independently of one's asserting it.  Of course, it does not follow from one's asserting that p that p is true independently of one's asserting it.  That's a further question. The point is rather that the act of assertion purports to get at reality as it is in itself.  This is a matter of conceptual necessity: the act of assertion would not be what it is if it did have a built-in nisus or directedness toward truth.

We take a step further by noting that to assert a proposition is to affirm it as true independently of anyone's asserting of it. This follows because a proposition such as The Moon is a natural satellite of Earth can be asserted by anyone. If so, then to assert a proposition is to assert it as intersubjectively true, true for all assertors. But if a proposition is asserted to be true independently of anyone's asserting it, then it is asserted to be true not just intersubjectively, but absolutely (non-relatively). But there is no need to speak, pleonastically, of absolute truth; it suffices to speak of truth. Truth is absolute by its very nature.

The main point here is that when one makes an assertion one purports to state what is true in itself independently of any of us.  The presupposition of truth is built into the concept of assertion.  Now could this presupposition fail in every case of assertion?  Granted, it fails in some cases. There are false assertions. Could every assertion be false? Well, if every assertion is false, then it is true that every assertion is false, and if I assert that this is so, then I make a true assertion, one that is true independently of my assertion.  Therefore, it cannot be that every assertion is false. So some assertions are true,  absolutely true.

Therefore, for assertion to be possible, there must be some (absolute) truths even if we do not know which propositions are the true ones.

In sum: assertion is actual, hence possible. But it cannot be possible unless there are truths that are true independently of anyone's assertions.  This is because, as a matter of conceptual necessity, assertion is linked to truth.  Therefore, given that assertions are made as a matter of fact,  there are truths. 

I have just argued from the fact that we make assertions to the existence of truth (truths) as a transcendental presupposition of assertion.

But the following question disturbs me: Is truth merely a transcendental presupposition, or is it also an absolute presupposition?

A Merely Transcendental Presupposition?

Have I really proven the existence of truths that subsist independently of our acts of assertion (and independently of all our other discursive operations), truths that would subsist even if if we did not exist; or have I merely proven that we cannot make assertions  without presupposing truth?

I have argued that the fact of assertion presupposes the existence of truths: if there are true assertions, then there is truth. But also: if there are false assertions, then there is truth. But it doesn't follow that necessarily there are truths. For the fact of assertion entails the existence of assertors who are the agents of the various acts of assertion.  But these agents are contingent beings. We who assert might not have existed. It follows that the fact of assertion, the starting point of my transcendental argument, is a contingent fact.

What this seems to entail is that the necessity that there be truths is a conditional, as opposed to an absolute, necessity. I would like to be able to conclude that it is is absolutely necessary that there be truth. But the contingency of my starting point seems to spread to my conclusion, relativizing it.

Word of the Day: Eloignment

Removal to a distance, withdrawal.

Eloignment has fallen into desuetude, as has 'desuetude.'  Archaic. Quite useless for communication with deplorables, or with anyone except me and Dave Bagwill who hipped me to the word.

Van Til and Romans 1:18-20

I tip my hat to David Bagwill for recommending that I read Cornelius Van Til. So I sprang for the fourth edition of The Defense of the Faith, with Oliphint's annotations, P & R Publishing, 2008. Van Til's presuppositionalism is intriguing even if in places preposterous. Having discussed Romans 1:18 a couple of time before in these pages, I looked to see what Van Til had to say about it. But first my take, one that Van Til & Co. might dismiss as 'Romanist' or worse.

Rather than quote the whole of the Pauline passage at Romans 1: 18-20, I'll summarize it. Men are godless and wicked and suppress the truth. What may be known about God is plain to them because God has made it plain to them. Human beings have no excuse for their unbelief. "For since the creation of the world, God's invisible qualities -- his eternal power and divine nature -- have been clearly seen, being understood from what has been made . . . ."

Paul's claim here is that the existence and nature of God are evident from creation and that unbelief is a result of a willful turning away from the truth.   There is no excuse for unbelief because it is a plain fact that the natural world is divine handiwork.  Now I am a theist and I am sympathetic to Christianity. But although I have one foot in Jerusalem, the other is  planted firmly in Athens. It therefore strikes me that to characterize the natural world as 'made' or 'created' begs the question in favor of theism. As begging the question, the Pauline claim about the evidentness of the world's being created offers no support for theism.  It is an analytic proposition that there is no creation without a creator. So if the heavens and the earth are a creation, then it follows straightaway that a creator exists.

But is the world a divine creation? This is the question, and the answer is not obvious. That the natural world is a divine artifact is not evident to the senses, or to the heart, or to reason. Of course, one can argue for the existence of God from the existence and order of the natural world. I have done it myself. But those who reject theistic arguments, and construct anti-theistic arguments, have their reasons too, and it cannot fairly be said that what animates the best of them is a stubborn and prideful refusal to submit to a truth that is evident.  It is simply not objectively evident to the senses or the intellect or the heart that the natural world is a divine artifact. If it were objectively evident, then there would be no explanation of the existence of so many intellectually penetrating, morally upright, and sincere atheists.  Even if the atheisms of Nietzsche, Russell, Sartre, and Hitchens could be dismissed as originating  in pride, stubborness, and a willful refusal to recognize any power or authority beyond oneself, or beyond the human, as may well be the case with the foregoing luminaries, it does not follow that the atheism of all has this origin.

I am moved to marvel at "the starry skies above me."  This was one of two things that filled Kant with wonder, the other being "the moral law within me."  But  seeing as is not seeing.  If you see the starry skies as divine handiwork, then this is an interpretation from within a theistic framework.  But the datum seen can just as easily be given a non-theistic interpretation.

It is all-too-human to suspect in our opponents moral depravity when we cannot convince them. The Pauline passage smacks of that all-too-humanity. There are sincere and decent atheists, and they have plenty of excuse for their unbelief.  The fact of evil being perhaps the best excuse. The best of them, if wrong in the end, are excusably wrong.

Or so I tend to think. But I am open to a change of view and a change of heart (metanoia).

I suppose I will be told that I am falsely assuming that there are some neutral data that we can access via reason unaided by revelation, data that will supply premises for arguments to the existence of God, arguments that would constitute a philosophically neutral, theologically uncommitted preambulum fidei in Thomas's sense, when such a neutral method can only in the end issue in the conclusion that Christian theism is not true. The correct method, I will be told, is to start with and adhere to the presupposition that Christianity is true, lock, stock, and barrel, and to see everything in its light:

Roman Catholics and Arminians, appealing to the 'reason' of the natural man as the natural man himself interprets his reason, namely as autonomous, are bound to use the direct method of approach to the natural man, the method that assumes the essential correctness of a non-Christian and nontheistic conception of reality. The Reformed apologist, on the other hand, appealing to that knowledge of the true God in the natural man which the natural man suppresses by means of his assumption of ultimacy, will also appeal to the knowledge of the true method which the natural man knows but suppresses. The natural man at bottom knows that he is the creature of God. He knows also that he is responsible to God. He knows that  he should live to the glory of God. He knows that in all that he does he should stress that the field of reality which he investigates has the stamp of God's ownership upon it. But he suppresses his knowledge of himself as he truly is. (123-124)

At this point in the text comes a footnote referencing Romans 1: 18 ff.

Above I suggested that Paul begs the question. Now to beg a question is to assume what one needs to prove.  But there is no need to prove what one presupposes.  So one who presupposes the truth of Christian theism cannot be accused of begging the question. There just is no question that can be neutrally engaged by the reason of the natural man if the truth of Christian theism is presupposed.

The ultimate principle of all proof is the Law of Non-Contradiction. It therefore cannot be proved, but only presupposed.  One who affirms it cannot therefore be reasonably accused of begging the question: there simply is no question here that can reasonably be disputed.

But this leaves unanswered the question why we ought to presuppose the truth of Christian theism. For the latter, with all of its very specific claims about Trinity, Incarnation, etc. is rather unlike the logical law just mentioned -- to put it in the form of an understatement.  Why not presuppose atheism as many today do? They too can and do make claims about what we 'know' and what we 'suppress.'  We all know deep down that we are nothing but clever land mammals slated for extinction, with no higher origin or higher destiny, but we suppress this ugly truth because we are unwilling to face the dreadful facts.

If a gratuitous assertion can be met with a gratuitous counter assertion, the same goes for a gratuitous presupposition.

More later.

Atomic Sentences and Syncategorematic Elements

The Ostrich tells me that Frege has no copula. That's not wrong, but there is a nuance that muddies the waters. Suppose Al is fat. The symbolization as Fa suggests the absence of a copula and thus the absence of a syncategorematic element. There appears to be only two categorematic elements, a and F. Well, let's see.

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

According to Fred Sommers (The Logic of Natural Language, Oxford UP, 1982, 166), ". . . one way of saying what an atomic sentence is is to say that it is the kind of sentence that contains only categorematic expressions." Earlier in the same book, Sommers says this:

In Frege, the distinction between subjects and predicates is not due to any difference of syncategorematic elements since the basic subject-predicate propositions are devoid of such elements.  In Frege, the difference between subject and predicate is a primitive difference between two kinds of categorematic expressions. (p. 17)

Examples of categorematic (non-logical) expressions are 'Socrates' and 'mammal.'  Examples of syncategorematic (logical) expressions are 'not,' 'every,' and  'and.'  As 'syn' suggests, the latter expressions are not semantic stand-alones, but have their meaning only together with categorematic expressions.  Sommers puts it this way: "Categorematic expressions apply to things and states of affairs; syncategorematic expressions do not." (164) 

At first I found it perfectly obvious that atomic sentences have only categorematic elements, but now I have doubts.  Consider the atomic sentence  'Al is fat.' It is symbolized thusly: Fa.  'F' is a predicate expression the reference (Bedeutung) of which is a Fregean concept (Begriff) while 'a' is a subject-expression or name the reference of which is a Fregean object (Gegenstand).  Both expressions are categorematic or 'non-logical.'  Neither is syncategorematic.  And there are supposed to be no syncategorematic elements in the sentence:  there is just 'F' and 'a.'

But wait a minute!  What about the immediate juxtaposition of 'F' and 'a' in that order? That juxtaposition is not nothing.  It conveys something.  It conveys that the referent of 'a' falls under the referent of 'F'.  It conveys that the object a instantiates the concept F. I suggest that the juxtaposition of the two signs is a syncategorematic element.  If this is right, then it is false that atomic sentences lack all syncategorematic elements.

Of course, there is no special sign for the immediate juxtaposition of 'F' and 'a' in 'Fa.'  So I grant that there is no syncategorematic element if such an element must have its own separate and isolable sign. But there is no need for a separate sign; the immediate juxtaposition does the trick.  The syncategorematic element is precisely the juxtaposition.

Please note that if there were no syncategorematic element in 'Fa' there would not be any sentence at all.  A sentence is not a list.  The sentence 'Fa' is not the list 'F, a.'  A (declarative) sentence expresses a thought (Gedanke) which is its sense (Sinn).  And it has a reference (Bedeutung), namely a truth value (Wahrheitswert).  No list of words (or of anything else) expresses a thought or has a truth value.  So a sentence is not a list of its constituent words.  A sentence depends on its constituent words, but it is more than them.  It is their unity. 

We here touch upon the ancient problem of the unity of the proposition first descried by the immortal Plato.

So I say there must be a syncategorematic element in 'Fa' if it is to be a sentence.  There is need of a copulative element to tie together subject and predicate.  It follows that, pace Sommers, it is false that atomic sentences are devoid of syntagorematic elements.

Note what I am NOT saying.  I am not saying that the copulative element in a sentence must be a separate sign such as 'is.'  There is no need for the copulative  'is.'  In standard English we say 'The sea is blue' not 'The sea blue.' But in Turkish one can say Deniz mavi and it is correct and intelligible.  My point is not that we need the copulative 'is' as a separate sign but that we need a copulative element which, though it does not refer to anything, yet ties together subject and predicate.  There must be some feature of the atomic sentence that functions as the copulative element, if not immediate juxtaposition then something else such as a font difference or color difference.

At his point I will be reminded that Frege's concepts (Begriffe) are unsaturated (ungesaettigt).  They are 'gappy' or incomplete unlike objects.  The incompleteness of concepts is reflected in the incompleteness of predicate expressions.  Thus '. . . is fat' has a gap in it, a gap fit to accept a name such as 'Al' which has no gap.  We can thus say that for Frege the copula is imported into the predicate.  It might be thought that the gappiness of concepts and predicate expressions obviates the need for a copulative element in the sentence and in the corresponding Thought (Gedanke) or proposition.

But this would be a mistake.  For even if predicate expressions and concepts are unsaturated, there is still a difference between a list and a sentence.  The unsaturatedness of a concept merely means that it combines with an object without the need of a tertium quid.  (If there were a third thing, then Bradley's regress would be up and running.)  But to express that a concept is in fact instantiated by an object requires more than a listing of a concept-word (Begriffswort) and a name.  There is need of a syncategorematical element in the sentence.

So I conclude that if there are any atomic sentences, then they cannot contain only categorematic expressions.

The Ostrich tells me that Frege has no copula. That's not wrong, but there is a nuance that muddies the waters. Suppose Al is fat. The symbolization as Fa suggests the absence of a copula and thus the absence of a syncategorematic element. There appears to be only two categorematic elements, a and F. Well, let's see.

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

According to Fred Sommers (The Logic of Natural Language, Oxford UP, 1982, 166), ". . . one way of saying what an atomic sentence is is to say that it is the kind of sentence that contains only categorematic expressions." Earlier in the same book, Sommers says this:

In Frege, the distinction between subjects and predicates is not due to any difference of syncategorematic elements since the basic subject-predicate propositions are devoid of such elements.  In Frege, the difference between subject and predicate is a primitive difference between two kinds of categorematic expressions. (p. 17)

Examples of categorematic (non-logical) expressions are 'Socrates' and 'mammal.'  Examples of syncategorematic (logical) expressions are 'not,' 'every,' and  'and.'  As 'syn' suggests, the latter expressions are not semantic stand-alones, but have their meaning only together with categorematic expressions.  Sommers puts it this way: "Categorematic expressions apply to things and states of affairs; syncategorematic expressions do not." (164) 

At first I found it perfectly obvious that atomic sentences have only categorematic elements, but now I have doubts.  Consider the atomic sentence  'Al is fat.' It is symbolized thusly: Fa.  'F' is a predicate expression the reference (Bedeutung) of which is a Fregean concept (Begriff) while 'a' is a subject-expression or name the reference of which is a Fregean object (Gegenstand).  Both expressions are categorematic or 'non-logical.'  Neither is syncategorematic.  And there are supposed to be no syncategorematic elements in the sentence:  there is just 'F' and 'a.'

But wait a minute!  What about the immediate juxtaposition of 'F' and 'a' in that order? That juxtaposition is not nothing.  It conveys something.  It conveys that the referent of 'a' falls under the referent of 'F'.  It conveys that the object a instantiates the concept F. I suggest that the juxtaposition of the two signs is a syncategorematic element.  If this is right, then it is false that atomic sentences lack all syncategorematic elements.

Of course, there is no special sign for the immediate juxtaposition of 'F' and 'a' in 'Fa.'  So I grant that there is no syncategorematic element if such an element must have its own separate and isolable sign. But there is no need for a separate sign; the immediate juxtaposition does the trick.  The syncategorematic element is precisely the juxtaposition.

Please note that if there were no syncategorematic element in 'Fa' there would not be any sentence at all.  A sentence is not a list.  The sentence 'Fa' is not the list 'F, a.'  A (declarative) sentence expresses a thought (Gedanke) which is its sense (Sinn).  And it has a reference (Bedeutung), namely a truth value (Wahrheitswert).  No list of words (or of anything else) expresses a thought or has a truth value.  So a sentence is not a list of its constituent words.  A sentence depends on its constituent words, but it is more than them.  It is their unity. 

We here touch upon the ancient problem of the unity of the proposition first descried by the immortal Plato.

So I say there must be a syncategorematic element in 'Fa' if it is to be a sentence.  There is need of a copulative element to tie together subject and predicate.  It follows that, pace Sommers, it is false that atomic sentences are devoid of syntagorematic elements.

Note what I am NOT saying.  I am not saying that the copulative element in a sentence must be a separate sign such as 'is.'  There is no need for the copulative  'is.'  In standard English we say 'The sea is blue' not 'The sea blue.' But in Turkish one can say Deniz mavi and it is correct and intelligible.  My point is not that we need the copulative 'is' as a separate sign but that we need a copulative element which, though it does not refer to anything, yet ties together subject and predicate.  There must be some feature of the atomic sentence that functions as the copulative element, if not immediate juxtaposition then something else such as a font difference or color difference.

At his point I will be reminded that Frege's concepts (Begriffe) are unsaturated (ungesaettigt).  They are 'gappy' or incomplete unlike objects.  The incompleteness of concepts is reflected in the incompleteness of predicate expressions.  Thus '. . . is fat' has a gap in it, a gap fit to accept a name such as 'Al' which has no gap.  We can thus say that for Frege the copula is imported into the predicate.  It might be thought that the gappiness of concepts and predicate expressions obviates the need for a copulative element in the sentence and in the corresponding Thought (Gedanke) or proposition.

But this would be a mistake.  For even if predicate expressions and concepts are unsaturated, there is still a difference between a list and a sentence.  The unsaturatedness of a concept merely means that it combines with an object without the need of a tertium quid.  (If there were a third thing, then Bradley's regress would be up and running.)  But to express that a concept is in fact instantiated by an object requires more than a listing of a concept-word (Begriffswort) and a name.  There is need of a syncategorematical element in the sentence.

So I conclude that if there are any atomic sentences, then they cannot contain only categorematic expressions.

Presupposition and Excluded Middle

If Socrates dies at time t, then Socrates was alive prior to t. If Socrates does not die at t, then Socrates was alive prior to t.  Since both 'Socrates dies at t' and 'Socrates does not die at t' entail 'Socrates was alive prior t,' we say that the latter is a semantic presupposition of 'Socrates dies at t.'

But wait a minute! Doesn't what I have written generate an inconsistent tetrad?

1) p entails q

2) Not-p entails q

3) Necessarily, for any p, either p or not-p (Law of Excluded Middle)

4) q is contingent.

The conjunction of the first three limbs entails the negation of the fourth. So something has to give.

It is a datum that q -- 'Socrates was alive prior to t' -- is contingent: true in some but not all possible worlds. So we either reject semantic presupposition (which requires the truth of both (1) and (2) ) or we reject Excluded Middle.

Why not reject Excluded Middle? Socrates dies at t and Socrates does not die at t are contradictories: each is the negation of the other.  There is no possible world in which both are true.  And yet there are possible worlds in which neither is true. Those are the worlds in which Socrates does not exist.

Contingency and Composition

Joe, who describes himself as "a high school student with a passion for philosophy of religion and metaphysics," asked me a long series of  difficult questions. Here is one of them:

After reading [Edward] Feser's Five Proofs, I have had difficulties with the concept of sustaining causes. First, Feser argues  that composites require a sustaining cause in order to "hold them together" or keep them conjoined. But this seems to presuppose that all composite things (be it physical composites or metaphysical composites) are contingent.

 

But why suppose that, necessarily, all composites are contingent? What is incoherent about this:

 

X is a necessary being (i.e. X cannot fail to exist). X has metaphysical parts A, B, and C. Each of A, B, and C are also necessarily instantiated in reality, and the relations between A, B, and C are all necessarily instantiated in reality.

 

Why ought we to rule out this epistemic possibility? This seems to be a necessary being which is composite. It would be a counter-example to the assumption that composition entails contingency (where contingency means can fail to exist).

 

If we take composition broadly enough, composition does not entail contingency.  Consider the set, {1, 3, 5}. Assume that numbers are necessary beings. Then of course the set will also be a necessary being.  Furthermore, the relations that hold between the members of this set hold necessarily. For example, necessarily, 3 < 5, and necessarily, 3 > 1.  So if we think of sets as composite entities, then it is not the case that all composites are contingent.

 

But what Feser is concerned with are material particulars, or material substances, to use the Aristotelian-scholastic jargon, e..g., a horse, a statue, a man.  And of course these cannot be taken to be sets of their metaphysical parts.  If I understand Feser, what he is asking is: what makes a contingent being such as Socrates contingent?  The question is not whether he is contingent, but what makes him contingent. What is the ground of his contingency?  The answer is that Socrates is contingent because he is composite.  Composition or rather compositeness is the ground of contingency. His contingency is explained by his compositeness, in particular, his being a composite of essence and existence. So at the root of contingency is the real distinction (distinctio realis) of essence and existence in finite substances.

 

The claim is not that every composite entity is contingent, but that every contingent substance is contingent in virtue of its being composite. 

 

Now if a contingent substance is contingent in virtue of its being composed of essence and existence, then a necessary being, or rather, a necessary being that has its necessity from itself and not from another, is necessary in virtue of its being simple, i.e., absolutely non-partite.  This is how Thomists feel driven to the admittedly strange and seemingly incoherent doctrine of divine simplicity. 

 

If there is to be an ultimate explanation of the existence of contingent beings, this explanation must invoke an entity that is not itself contingent.  The ultimate entity must exist of metaphysical  necessity and have its necessity from itself.  Thomism as I understand it plausibly maintains that the ground of the divine necessity is the divine simplicity. God is necessary because in God essence and existence are one and the same.

A Little Unsolicited Advice for the Mature Members of the Distaff Contingent

Warning: 'Sexist' content up ahead! Snowflakes to your safe spaces!

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

Your sag and bag
Won't hurt your charm
But no man wants
A hag or nag
Upon his arm.

 

Implication and Presupposition

Dave Bagwill asks:

To be more clear: Do all propositions imply an ontology? Is 'imply' strong enough to bear the weight of 'assertion'? Or is 'imply' basically an equivalent of 'presuppose'?

Still not clear enough. Dave. Not even the third question is clear since you didn't specify the  sense of 'imply.'  But the third question is clear enough to warrant a brief answer, which is: No. Consider the following which is an intuitively clear example of a proposition resting on a presupposition:

Tom regrets lying to his wife.

Necessarily, if Tom regrets lying to his wife, then Tom has lied to his wife. The antecedent implies (in the sense of 'entails') the consequent. (I have defined 'entails' on many occasions.) But note that it is also true that, necessarily, if Tom does not regret lying to his wife, then Tom has lied to his wife.

This yields a criterion of one type of presupposition. A proposition p presupposes a proposition q just in case both p and its negation ~p entail q. One could also say that an entailment of a proposition p is a presupposition of p if and only if p's presupposition survives the negation of p.  (If the preceding sentence does not make sense to you, forget it, and focus on the one preceding it.) Consider now:

Tom is drunk.

Necessarily, if Tom is drunk, then someone is drunk. But it is not the case that, necessarily, if Tom is not drunk, then someone is drunk.

So by the criterion lately enunciated, the 'survival of negation' criterion to give it a name, 'Tom is drunk,' while it implies (entails) that someone is drunk, does not presuppose that someone is drunk.

Therefore, to answer Dave's question, 'imply' (in the sense of 'entails') is not equivalent to 'presuppose.'

Alles klar?  Vielleicht nicht!

One could conceivably balk, or baulk in the case of the Bad Ostrich, as follows: It is not clear, or it is false, that if Tom does not regret lying to his wife, then Tom has lied to his wife.  The Ostrich could say, "Tom does not regret lying because he didn't lie in the first place."

As you can see, the topic of presupposition is a murky one, and part of the murkiness is due to the fact that presupposition is at the interface of the semantic and pragmatic, and it is not clear how they gear into each other, if you will excuse the mixed metaphors.

The Political Malpractice of the Democrats

(Cross-posted at my FB page where comments are allowed.)

Leading Democrats have reversed themselves on the need for a border wall to help secure the U. S. Mexico border. Notice, I said 'help secure.' No one thinks that a physical barrier suffices to insure border security.

It should be noted, though, that many of those voices loudly condemning a border wall as cruel or ineffective have previously gone on record about our need for thorough border security.

In 2005, Barack Obama declared, “We simply cannot allow people to pour into the U.S. undocumented, undetected, unchecked, circumventing the people who are waiting patiently, diligently, lawfully to become immigrants in this country.”

Sen. Chuck Schumer knew the dangers of illegal immigration back in 2009. “People who enter the United States without our permission are illegal aliens and illegal aliens should not be treated the same as people who enter the U.S. legally,” he said.

Even Hillary Clinton said in 2014: “I voted numerous times when I was a senator to spend money to build a barrier to try to prevent illegal immigrants from coming in and I do think you have to control your borders.”

Our leading Democrats were for it before they were against it. How should we interpret the reversal? Two possibilities.

A. Clinton, Schumer, and the rest did not mean what they said when they said they were for border security. They felt safe saying it because they knew no decisive action would be taken, and that the stream of Hispanic illegals would continue unabated to their political advantage. Saying what they did not really mean, or only half-meant, allowed them to posture as patriots concerned with the security of the homeland while reaping the benefits of illegal immigration.

B. They meant what they said, but reversed themselves to oppose the hated Trump.

I incline toward (A). What say you?

 

A wall divides lawmakers over securing the country

It is obvious that for many, cynical politics are prioritized over the…

Ideology at Odds with Open Inquiry

(Cross-posted at my FB page where comments are allowed.)

You will recall how Galileo got in trouble with the Inquisition. But now the Roman Catholic Church is a spent force culturally speaking and, under the 'leadership' of Bergoglio, is busy accommodating itself to the Left, which is now the arbiter of what is 'correct' and 'permissible.'

This philosopher asks: Could it be racist if it is true?

The Left responds: It cannot be true, because it is racist, and it is racist since it implies that we are not all equal as a matter of empirical fact.

Note what has happened. Christianity taught the equality of persons as sons and daughters of the Supreme Person. The Left jettisons the metaphysical foundation and misunderstands the normative claim about equality as a factual claim.

The Left goes only half way with the death of God. They reject God, but not the equality that makes sense only if God exists. This incoherence fuels their opposition to scientific research that contradicts the leftist equality axiom. And so Dr. Watson, despite his accomplishments, must be banned to scientific Siberia.

Science must play the handmaiden to leftist ideology just as philosophy and science had to play the handmaiden to theology in the Middle Ages and a long time thereafter.

And you STILL support the Left?

 

DNA pioneer loses honours over race claims

Nobel Prize-winning scientist James Watson has repeated remarks about…

Saturday Night at the Oldies: Phil Ochs and Tim Hardin

Joan Baez, There but for Fortune. Ochs' best song in its best rendition.

Phil Ochs, Changes

YouTuber comment, good except for the exaggeration in the last sentence:

Somewhere, in a parallel universe, in another dimension, where there's musical justice, Phil Ochs wasn't just Bob Dylan's sidekick in the early 60's, who released a bunch of albums that are long out of print, failed to gain international recognition, got choked by muggers and lost his ability to sing, disappeared into alcoholism and severe depression, and hanged himself on his birthday, and is remembered only thanks to documentaries about Greenwich Village and the Folk Revival. No, in some other reality he's remembered as one of the absolutely greatest songwriters, guitarist, and singers in the history of popular music . . . .

Phil Ochs, Pleasures of the Harbor. Brings back memories of '67 and shows that Ochs could break out of the protest/topical rut. 

Christopher Hitchens on Phil Ochs and those days.

Ochs' protest songs were too obvious and bound to the events of the day. Dylan's best protest songs avoided these defects to float free of the specific and enter the ethereal.  This is part of the reason why Ochs is tied to his time and place and remembered only by the aficionados but Dylan has a permanent place in the pantheon of Americana. For example, these great Dylan anthems lay it between the lines and have stood the test of time:

Clancy Bros., When the Ship Comes In

Alanis Morissette, Blowin' in the Wind

Joan Baez, A Hard Rain's Gonna Fall

And now some great tunes from the ill-starred Tim Hardin. I discovered him in '67 when I bought his Tim Hardin 2 LP.  Still have it in mint condition. Do I hear $10,000?  At the time, I thought that Hardin might displace Dylan in my adolescent affections or else become a sort of second Dylan.  But of course that did not happen since Dylan is on 'a whole other level'  despite Hardin's being a very fine songwriter and performer.

Tim Hardin, Lady Came from Baltimore

Tim Hardin, Reason to Believe

Small Faces, Red Balloon. Great version! I prefer it to Hardin's original. But then, I don't know. Both good.  Hardin died of a heroin overdose in 1980.  'Red Balloon' is a heroin reference. See here:

"Red Balloon" is a confessional song about Tim's mixed feelings toward heroin and its effects upon him. Heroin is often sold in balloons, so the "bought myself a red balloon" line refers to buying and taking heroin. The "blue surprise" is the adverse effects of heroin. One such effect is the loss of libido or sexual desire - "took the lovelight from my eyes." (or possibly mistreating your loved ones) "The pinning of my eyes" is probably some adverse physical effect. In the song he is addressing heroin (according to the magazine's interpretation) when he states "you were so easy to get to know, but will we see one another again...I hope so." The Troubadour version seems to confirm this, talking about running around on the lower East Side, much like in the old Cocaine song talking about going down to Beale and Main looking for the man who sells Cocaine. So though on the surface it appears to be a childlike song about balloons and children, it's actually quite the opposite.

Don't mess with the stuff, muchachos. I speak from experience. It can very easily kill you. This is part of the reason why I have such utter contempt for those obstructionist crapweasels, Nancy the Knucklehead Pelosi, the Botox-ed-up face of the Democrat (Demon Rat?) party, and her sidekick Chucky the Scumbag Schumer who in effect promote open borders and the flow of  drugs into the country.

Tim Hardin, Black Sheep Boy

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

Tim Hardin, If I Were a Carpenter

Battling the Bad Ostrich over Assertion

BV said:

I will now pose a problem for the view that assertion = proposition.  Suppose I give the following valid argument, an instance of modus ponens.  By 'give an argument,' I mean that I assert its premises, and I assert  its conclusion as following from the premises, and this  in the presence of one or more interlocutors.  Thus the argument is to be taken in concreto, not in abstracto.

If Tom is drunk, then Tom ought not drive
Tom is drunk
-----
Tom ought not drive.

If the argument is valid, as it plainly is, then, in both of its occurrences,  the sentence 'Tom is drunk' must express the same proposition.  But this cannot be the case if  a proposition is identical to an assertion. For the proposition Tom is drunk occurs unasserted in the major, but asserted in the minor.  (To assert a conditional is not thereby to assert either its antecedent or its consequent.) Since one and the same proposition can occur unasserted in one context and asserted in another, we must distinguish between a proposition and an assertion.

The Ostrich responds:

I deny that the sentence ‘Tom is drunk’ in the major expresses a proposition at all. It expresses a proposition in the minor, I agree. I also claim that both sentences must have the same content in major and minor. But having the same content is not the same as expressing the same proposition. Perhaps we should rewrite the major as follows:

That Tom is drunk implies that Tom ought not drive.

We connect a name for contents, using a that-clause, with the connector ‘entails’. Thus we express the whole argument as follows

It is the case (that Tom is drunk implies that Tom ought not drive)
It is the case that Tom is drunk
It is the case that Tom ought not drive.

BV counter-responds:

The Ostrich carelessly leaves out the parentheses in the minor and in the conclusion of his re-write of the original argument.  His re-write should look like this:

It is the case (that Tom is drunk implies that Tom ought not drive)
It is the case (that Tom is drunk)
It is the case (that Tom ought not drive).

'That Tom is drunk' is not a sentence but a nominal phrase.  In the major, it names a proposition, the proposition expressed in English by a tokening of 'Tom is drunk.'  It has to name a proposition because the implication relation connects propositions to propositions. In the minor 'that Tom is drunk' also expresses a proposition. It has to if the argument is to be valid.

So one and the same proposition -- the one named by 'that Tom is drunk' -- occurs in both the major and the minor.  It is just that in the major it is not asserted, whereas in the minor it is.  Therefore, a proposition is not the same as an assertion -- which was my claim all along.  (Not original with me, of course.  From Frege via Peter Geach.)

So the Ostrich re-write is useless rigmarole.  Consider the following re-write:

That Tom is drunk implies that Tom ought not drive
Tom is drunk
Tom ought not drive.

This is valid. In the major, 'That Tom is drunk' names but does not assert a proposition. In the minor 'Tom is drunk' asserts the very same proposition.  So one and the same proposition can be both asserted and left unasserted. Therefore, a proposition is not the same as an assertion.

The Ostrich tells us, "But having the same content is not the same as expressing the same proposition." I don't understand that.  A content in this context just is a proposition.

Misgivings About Deflationary Theories of Truth

1. From my survey of the literature, there are four main types of truth theory being discussed: substantive theories, nihilist (for want of a better label) theories, deflationary theories, and identity theories.  Let me say just a little about the first two main types and then move on to deflationism.

2. Substantive theories maintain that truth is (i) a metaphysically substantive item, presumably a property or relation, (ii) susceptible of non-trivial analysis or explication. Correspondence, coherence, and pragmatic theories count as substantive theories.  Such theories purport to analyze truth in terms of other, presumably more basic, terms such as a relation of correspondence or adequation to reality or to facts or mind-independent things as in Veritas est adequatio intellectus ad rem.  Or in terms of coherence of truth-bearers (beliefs, propositions, etc.) among themselves.  Or in terms of conduciveness to human flourishing as in William James' "the true is the good by way of belief."    Or in terms of broadly epistemic notions such as rational acceptability or warranted asseribility as in the Putnamian-Peircean 'Truth is rational acceptability at the ideal limit of inquiry.'

The latter is not a good proposal for reasons I won't go into now, but it illustrates the project of giving a substantive theory of truth.  One tries to analyze truth in more basic terms.  One tries to give an informative, non-circular answer to the  question, What is truth?  The substantive approach is in the Grand Tradition deriving from Plato wherein one asks What is X?  (What is justice? (Republic) What is piety? (Euthyphro) What is knowledge? (Theaetetus) What is courage? (Laches)

The substantive approach to truth can be summed up in three propositions:

A. The facts about truth are not exhausted by the substitution-instances of the equivalence schemata 'p' is true iff p and *p* is true iff p.

B.  There is a substantive property of truth common to all and only truths.

C.  This substantive property is susceptible of analysis or explication.

3. The 'nihilist' as he is known in the truth literature rejects substantive theories, not because they are substantive, but because they are theories.  He may grant that truth is a deep, substantial, metaphysically loaded, ontologically thick, topic.  But he denies that one can have a theory about it, that one can account for it in more basic terms: truth is just too basic to be explained in more fundamental terms.  The nihilist accepts (A) and (B) above but denies (C).

4.  The deflationist, like the nihilist, rejects substantive theories of truth.  The difference is that the deflationist holds that an account of truth is possible albeit in very 'thin' terms, while the nihilist denies that any account is possible thick or thin:  truth is too basic to be accountable.  Nihilism allows truth to be a thick (metaphysical) topic.  Deflationism disallows this.  Deflationists deny (A), (B), and (C).

5.  The deflationist makes a big deal out of certain seemingly obvious equivalences and he tries to squeeze a lot of anti-metaphysical mileage out of them.  Here are two examples, one involving a declarative sentence, the other involving a proposition.  Note that asterisks around a sentence, or around a placeholder for a sentence, form a name of the proposition expressed by the sentence. 

E1. 'Grass is green' is true iff grass is green.

E2. *Grass is green* is true iff grass is green.

Now let us assume something which, though false, will simplify our discussion.  Let us assume that there is no other type of use of the truth predicate other than the uses illustrated in logical equivalences like the foregoing.  (Thus I am proposing that we ignore such uses as the one illustrated by 'Everything Percy says is true.') 

The deflationist thesis can now be formulated as follows:  There is nothing more to truth  than what is expressed by such truisms as the foregoing equivalences.  Thus there is no metaphysically substantive property of truth that the LHS predicates of 'Grass is green' or of *Grass is green.*  The content on both sides is exactly the same: 'is true' adds no new content.  'Is true' plays a merely syntactic role.  In terms of Quine's disquotationalism (which is a version of the deflationary approach), 'is true' is merely a device of disquotation.  'Is true' has no semantic dimension: it neither expresses a substantive property, nor does it refer to anything.  Truth drops out as a topic of philosophical inquiry.  There is no such property susceptible of informative explication in terms of correspondence, coherence, rational acceptability, or whatnot.  The question What is truth? gets answered by saying that there is no such 'thing' as truth: there are truths, and every such truth reduces via the equivalence schema to a sentence or proposition in which the truth predicate does not appear.  Accordingly, there is nothing all truths have in common in virtue of which they are truths.  There is only a multiplicity of disparate truths.  But even this says too much since each 'truth' reduces to a sentence or proposition in which 'true' does not appear.

6. Now for my misgivings about deflationism.  But first three preliminary points.

a. Equivalence is symmetrical (commutative); if p is equivalent to q, then q is equivalent to p.  But explanation is asymmetrical: if p explains q, then q does not explain p.  From ' p iff q' one cannot infer 'p because q' or 'q because p.' 'p iff q' is consistent with both.   Connected with the asymmetry of explanation is that equivalences do not sanction reductions.  Triangularity and trilaterality are logically equivalent properties, but it doesn't follow that either reduces to the other.

b. If two items are equivalent, then both are propositions or sentences.  There cannot be equivalence between a sentence or proposition and something that is neither. 

c. To define equivalence we need to recur to truth.  To say that p, q are logically equivalent is to say that there is no possible situation in which p is true and q false, or q true, and p false.

Now what is the deflationist saying? His thesis is negative: there is nothing to truth except what is captured in the the equivalence schemata and their substitution-instances. Consider

E2. *p* is true iff p.

First Misgiving: The truth of the biconditional is not in question.  But equivalences don't sanction reductions. See point (a) above. From (E2) one cannot infer that the LHS reduces to the RHS, or vice versa.  But the deflationist is saying that the LHS reduces to, and is explained by, the RHS.  But what is his justification for saying this?  Why not the other way around?  Why not say that p because *p* is true?

Second Misgiving:  For an equivalence to hold, both sides must be true (or false).  Suppose both sides are true.  Then, although the predicate 'true' does not appear on the RHS, the RHS must be true.  So, far from dispensing with truth, the equivalence schemata and their instances presuppose it!

You don't get it, do you?  Let me try an analogy with existence.  He who is deflationary about truth can be expected to be deflationary about existence as well.  A deflationist about existence might offer this equivalence schema:

F. Fs exist iff something is an F.   (E.g., 'Cats exist iff something is a cat.')

I grant that every instance of the schema is true.  So our deflationist about existence announces that 'exist' on the LHS of (F) plays a merely logico-syntactic role and that there is no substantive property of existence.  He could put his point paradoxically by saying that there is nothing existential about general existentials. But is it not obvious that if something is an F, then that thing must exist?  Are we quantifying over a domain of nonexistents?  If yes, then the equivalence fails.  But if we are quantifying over a domain of existents, then the existence of those existents is being presupposed.  So, even though 'exist' does not occur on the RHS of (F), existence is along for the ride.  Same with (E2).  Even though 'true' does not occur on the RHS of (E2), truth is along for the ride.  In both cases, existence and truth in meaty substantive senses are being presupposed.

Third Misgiving.  'Grass is green' and 'It is true that grass is green' have exactly the same content. That is perfectly obvious and denied by no one.  'Is true' adds no new content.  But how is it supposed to follow that truth is not a substantive property?  What follows is that truth is not a content property.  How do our deflationist pals get from 'Truth is not a content property' to 'Truth is not a substantive property'?  Isn't it obvious that truth refers us outside the content of the proposition or sentence?

Compare existence.  A thing and the same thing existing have exactly the same quidditative content.  The fastest runner and the existing fastest runner are numerically the same individual. Does it follow that existence is not a property?  No, what follows it that existence is not a quidditative property.  Existing Amby Burfoot and Amby Burfoot are quidditatively the same.  But if Burfoot lacked existence he wouldn't be able to do any running, or anything else: he would be nothing at all. Same with truth.  There is no difference in content between p and true p.  But it makes a world of difference whether p is true or false just as it makes a world of difference whether an individual exists or not.

Fourth Misgiving.  If p and q are equivalent, then both are propositions.  The instances of (E) therefore do not get us outside the 'circle of  propositions.'  But isn't it obvious that whether or not a sentence or a proposition or a belief (or any truthbearer) is true or false depends on matters external to the truthbearer?

Fifth Misgiving.  Is (E1) even true? If grass is green, it doesn't follow that 'grass is green' is true.  For grass is green whether or not the English language exists.

1. From my survey of the literature, there are four main types of truth theory being discussed: substantive theories, nihilist (for want of a better label) theories, deflationary theories, and identity theories.  Let me say just a little about the first two main types and then move on to deflationism.

2. Substantive theories maintain that truth is (i) a metaphysically substantive item, presumably a property or relation, (ii) susceptible of non-trivial analysis or explication. Correspondence, coherence, and pragmatic theories count as substantive theories.  Such theories purport to analyze truth in terms of other, presumably more basic, terms such as a relation of correspondence or adequation to reality or to facts or mind-independent things as in Veritas est adequatio intellectus ad rem.  Or in terms of coherence of truth-bearers (beliefs, propositions, etc.) among themselves.  Or in terms of conduciveness to human flourishing as in William James' "the true is the good by way of belief."    Or in terms of broadly epistemic notions such as rational acceptability or warranted asseribility as in the Putnamian-Peircean 'Truth is rational acceptability at the ideal limit of inquiry.'

The latter is not a good proposal for reasons I won't go into now, but it illustrates the project of giving a substantive theory of truth.  One tries to analyze truth in more basic terms.  One tries to give an informative, non-circular answer to the  question, What is truth?  The substantive approach is in the Grand Tradition deriving from Plato wherein one asks What is X?  (What is justice? (Republic) What is piety? (Euthyphro) What is knowledge? (Theaetetus) What is courage? (Laches)

The substantive approach to truth can be summed up in three propositions:

A. The facts about truth are not exhausted by the substitution-instances of the equivalence schemata 'p' is true iff p and *p* is true iff p.

B.  There is a substantive property of truth common to all and only truths.

C.  This substantive property is susceptible of analysis or explication.

3. The 'nihilist' as he is known in the truth literature rejects substantive theories, not because they are substantive, but because they are theories.  He may grant that truth is a deep, substantial, metaphysically loaded, ontologically thick, topic.  But he denies that one can have a theory about it, that one can account for it in more basic terms: truth is just too basic to be explained in more fundamental terms.  The nihilist accepts (A) and (B) above but denies (C).

4.  The deflationist, like the nihilist, rejects substantive theories of truth.  The difference is that the deflationist holds that an account of truth is possible albeit in very 'thin' terms, while the nihilist denies that any account is possible thick or thin:  truth is too basic to be accountable.  Nihilism allows truth to be a thick (metaphysical) topic.  Deflationism disallows this.  Deflationists deny (A), (B), and (C).

5.  The deflationist makes a big deal out of certain seemingly obvious equivalences and he tries to squeeze a lot of anti-metaphysical mileage out of them.  Here are two examples, one involving a declarative sentence, the other involving a proposition.  Note that asterisks around a sentence, or around a placeholder for a sentence, form a name of the proposition expressed by the sentence. 

E1. 'Grass is green' is true iff grass is green.

E2. *Grass is green* is true iff grass is green.

Now let us assume something which, though false, will simplify our discussion.  Let us assume that there is no other type of use of the truth predicate other than the uses illustrated in logical equivalences like the foregoing.  (Thus I am proposing that we ignore such uses as the one illustrated by 'Everything Percy says is true.') 

The deflationist thesis can now be formulated as follows:  There is nothing more to truth  than what is expressed by such truisms as the foregoing equivalences.  Thus there is no metaphysically substantive property of truth that the LHS predicates of 'Grass is green' or of *Grass is green.*  The content on both sides is exactly the same: 'is true' adds no new content.  'Is true' plays a merely syntactic role.  In terms of Quine's disquotationalism (which is a version of the deflationary approach), 'is true' is merely a device of disquotation.  'Is true' has no semantic dimension: it neither expresses a substantive property, nor does it refer to anything.  Truth drops out as a topic of philosophical inquiry.  There is no such property susceptible of informative explication in terms of correspondence, coherence, rational acceptability, or whatnot.  The question What is truth? gets answered by saying that there is no such 'thing' as truth: there are truths, and every such truth reduces via the equivalence schema to a sentence or proposition in which the truth predicate does not appear.  Accordingly, there is nothing all truths have in common in virtue of which they are truths.  There is only a multiplicity of disparate truths.  But even this says too much since each 'truth' reduces to a sentence or proposition in which 'true' does not appear.

6. Now for my misgivings about deflationism.  But first three preliminary points.

a. Equivalence is symmetrical (commutative); if p is equivalent to q, then q is equivalent to p.  But explanation is asymmetrical: if p explains q, then q does not explain p.  From ' p iff q' one cannot infer 'p because q' or 'q because p.' 'p iff q' is consistent with both.   Connected with the asymmetry of explanation is that equivalences do not sanction reductions.  Triangularity and trilaterality are logically equivalent properties, but it doesn't follow that either reduces to the other.

b. If two items are equivalent, then both are propositions or sentences.  There cannot be equivalence between a sentence or proposition and something that is neither. 

c. To define equivalence we need to recur to truth.  To say that p, q are logically equivalent is to say that there is no possible situation in which p is true and q false, or q true, and p false.

Now what is the deflationist saying? His thesis is negative: there is nothing to truth except what is captured in the the equivalence schemata and their substitution-instances. Consider

E2. *p* is true iff p.

First Misgiving: The truth of the biconditional is not in question.  But equivalences don't sanction reductions. See point (a) above. From (E2) one cannot infer that the LHS reduces to the RHS, or vice versa.  But the deflationist is saying that the LHS reduces to, and is explained by, the RHS.  But what is his justification for saying this?  Why not the other way around?  Why not say that p because *p* is true?

Second Misgiving:  For an equivalence to hold, both sides must be true (or false).  Suppose both sides are true.  Then, although the predicate 'true' does not appear on the RHS, the RHS must be true.  So, far from dispensing with truth, the equivalence schemata and their instances presuppose it!

You don't get it, do you?  Let me try an analogy with existence.  He who is deflationary about truth can be expected to be deflationary about existence as well.  A deflationist about existence might offer this equivalence schema:

F. Fs exist iff something is an F.   (E.g., 'Cats exist iff something is a cat.')

I grant that every instance of the schema is true.  So our deflationist about existence announces that 'exist' on the LHS of (F) plays a merely logico-syntactic role and that there is no substantive property of existence.  He could put his point paradoxically by saying that there is nothing existential about general existentials. But is it not obvious that if something is an F, then that thing must exist?  Are we quantifying over a domain of nonexistents?  If yes, then the equivalence fails.  But if we are quantifying over a domain of existents, then the existence of those existents is being presupposed.  So, even though 'exist' does not occur on the RHS of (F), existence is along for the ride.  Same with (E2).  Even though 'true' does not occur on the RHS of (E2), truth is along for the ride.  In both cases, existence and truth in meaty substantive senses are being presupposed.

Third Misgiving.  'Grass is green' and 'It is true that grass is green' have exactly the same content. That is perfectly obvious and denied by no one.  'Is true' adds no new content.  But how is it supposed to follow that truth is not a substantive property?  What follows is that truth is not a content property.  How do our deflationist pals get from 'Truth is not a content property' to 'Truth is not a substantive property'?  Isn't it obvious that truth refers us outside the content of the proposition or sentence?

Compare existence.  A thing and the same thing existing have exactly the same quidditative content.  The fastest runner and the existing fastest runner are numerically the same individual. Does it follow that existence is not a property?  No, what follows it that existence is not a quidditative property.  Existing Amby Burfoot and Amby Burfoot are quidditatively the same.  But if Burfoot lacked existence he wouldn't be able to do any running, or anything else: he would be nothing at all. Same with truth.  There is no difference in content between p and true p.  But it makes a world of difference whether p is true or false just as it makes a world of difference whether an individual exists or not.

Fourth Misgiving.  If p and q are equivalent, then both are propositions.  The instances of (E) therefore do not get us outside the 'circle of  propositions.'  But isn't it obvious that whether or not a sentence or a proposition or a belief (or any truthbearer) is true or false depends on matters external to the truthbearer?

Fifth Misgiving.  Is (E1) even true? If grass is green, it doesn't follow that 'grass is green' is true.  For grass is green whether or not the English language exists.

Contention Got You Down?

Two observations to buck you up:

No abrasion, no pearl.

No pressure, no diamonds.

Free Speech and Open Inquiry Under Attack at Major Universities

In September 2016, one of the living giants of Christian scholarship, the Oxford emeritus philosopher Richard Swinburne, gave an address to the Midwest Society of Christian Philosophers, in the US. He spoke about Christian sexual ethics. In an aside — meaning this wasn’t the main topic of his talk — he affirmed the orthodox Christian view that homosexuality is morally wrong. For this, he was denounced by some Christian philosophers in the audience, and the head of the group quickly apologized for the keynote speaker, Swinburne, affirming Christian orthodoxy in an address to Christian philosophers. I wrote about it here. 

It is scandalous that a leading Christian philosopher cannot state an orthodox Christian position — something that all Christians affirmed until the day before yesterday — at a gathering of Christian philosophers.

Here is something equally scandalous, but far more dangerous. John Finnis is equally a giant in the world of Christian scholarship. He is a philosopher of law who specializes in natural law theory. Though he’s now based at Notre Dame, he is an emeritus professor at Oxford. Among his past students: Supreme Court justice Neil Gorsuch, and Princeton constitutional law professor Robert George.

Finnis is now the object of a petition at Oxford asking that he be removed from teaching postgraduate students because of his views on homosexuality.

Read it all: The John Finnis Line in the Sand

Two Senses of 'Assertion'

Ed e-mails:

The crux is what is meant by ‘assertion’. Aristotle’s system is quite clear. We have two terms on the left and right, and the copula in the middle, plus a negation sign which (in Latin) can either appear on the left of the copula (a parte ante) or the right (a parte post). Assertion = enunciation = proposition. Assertion divides into affirmation (no negation sign) and denial or negation (includes negation sign).

The two terms specify precisely what is affirmed or denied in the assertion/proposition.

Then suppose some of John’s children are sleeping. We can express this using the two term plus copula in any of the following ways.

·Some children fathered by John are sleeping things

·Some things fathered by John are sleeping children

·Some sleeping children are things fathered by John

·Some sleeping things fathered by John are children

All of these assert the existence of some children such that they sleep, and they are fathered by John.

I have no objection to the above as a setting forth of one sense of 'assertion.'  In this sense, an assertion is the content or proposition asserted.  But I  must quibble with the last sentence: "All of these [sentences/propositions] assert  that the existence of some . . . ."  That is a loose way of talking, allowable in some contexts, but not in the present one in which we are discussing assertion, presupposition, Excluded Middle, and  cognate topics. A proposition doesn't assert anything, and neither does a sentence. People assert, and when they do, what they assert is a proposition. 

The second sense of 'assertion,' then , comes into play when we use the word to refer to a speech act.  We do various things with words: make assertions, ask questions, issue commands, express wishes,  etc. These two senses of 'assertion' must be kept separate if we are to make any headway with the really interesting questions about presupposition, excluded Middle, and the rest. 

So far I have said nothing the least bit tendentious or controversial. I have merely pointed out two senses of 'assertion.'

I will now pose a problem for the view that assertion = proposition.  Suppose I give the following valid argument, an instance of modus ponens.  By 'give an argument,' I mean that I assert its premises and its conclusion as following from the premises in the presence of one or more interlocutors.

If Tom is drunk, then Tom ought not drive
Tom is drunk
-----
Tom ought not drive.

If the argument is valid, as it plainly is, then, in both of its occurrences,  the sentence 'Tom is drunk' must express the same proposition.  But this cannot be the case if  a proposition is identical to an assertion. For the proposition Tom is drunk occurs unasserted in the major, but asserted in the minor.  (To assert a conditional is not thereby to assert either its antecedent or its consequent.) Since one and the same proposition can occur unasserted in one context and asserted in another,  we must distinguish between a proposition and an assertion.

What we ought to say is that a proposition is the content of an assertion as a speech act.  A proposition cannot be the same as an assertion because there are unasserted proposition. And when a proposition is asserted, what gives it the 'assertoric quality' to coin a phrase is something external to the proposition itself, namely, a person's speech act of asserting it.

Ed won't accept this. But I don't understand why. Perhaps he can explain it.

Apologia Pro Vita Mea: A Reply to a Friendly Critic

Vito Caiati responds to yesterday's Could it be like this?

In yesterday's post, you write, “So I say: if you have the aptitude and the stamina, you live best by seeking the ultimate truth about the ultimate matters with your whole heart and mind and soul, with everything else you do subordinate to that quest and in service of it, and you keep up that quest until the hour of death, always a little out of breath, with no comfortable lounging in any dogmatic edifice, whether atheist, theist, or agnostic.”

The "always a little out of breath" bit gives my statement of a personal credo a perhaps excessively romantic and needlessly literary accent.  But the questing life is the highest life for me, and not just for me. That I sincerely believe. I will add, however, that integral to an examined life is a critical examination of whether the highest life is indeed the examined life. So I am aware of the danger of erecting a dogmatic edifice of my own.

While I appreciate the intellectual and spiritual sentiment that underlies this assertion, I am troubled by two things: First, the fact, which you have acknowledged in the past, that only a minute portion of humanity possesses either the “aptitude” or “stamina” to engage in [the search for] “the ultimate truth about the ultimate matters.”  That this is the case is beyond dispute, but why should it be so?  

It is indeed beyond dispute and is further evidence that the human condition is a predicament, and a nasty one, a predicament to which there may be no good solution.

I find the question very troubling. Historical demographers estimate that between 80 and 100 billion human beings have lived and died since the origin of our species.  The figure is staggering, but as staggering is the fact that all have met their ends in complete ignorance of ultimate truth. 

But we don't know that, Vito. It is after all possible that when Thomas Aquinas had the mystical experience that put an end to his writing, he veridically experienced the ultimate truth and enjoyed an earthly foretaste of the Beatific Vision.  And if the angelic doctor's amanuensis, Reginald, never had any such experience but believed what the master taught, and if what he taught was true, then Reginald too was in contact with the ultimate truth, not in propria persona, but "through a glass darkly," that glass being faith. And the same holds for all the millions of Christians, not to mention adherents of other religions, throughout the ages who have believed without verifying glimpses into the Unseen and also without being able to give good reasons for their belief.  It may have been that all these folks were in contact with ultimate truth even if they can't be said to have known such truth in a manner to satisfy exacting modern requirements on knowledge.

Disease, hunger, violence, physical or mental infirmity, and indigence have precluded even the notion of such a search for most.  The lack of a philosophical or religious inclination has precluded it for almost all of the rest. Thus, a gross and general ignorance of final matters has been and remains the lot of mankind.  Something is profoundly wrong here, and the conviction that a few might have the means and inclination to diverge from the norm is, at best disquieting, and at word [worst?], questionable.

So even if an ultimate, saving truth could be discovered by a proper search, circumstances and personal inadequacy have prevented and will prevent the vast majority from ever finding it on their own.  Something is indeed "profoundly wrong here."  But of course this is just one more goad to the seeker's seeking. 

Second, the search, whether it has taken a religious or philosophic form, has endured for thousands of years and produced no definite or even probable answers, so why continue to engage in it? The assumption appears to be that if pursued with the right attitude, sufficient dedication, and intellectual honesty, it will yield something of this “ultimate truth.” But is it not the case that all the evidence weighs against this belief?

The problem is not that no definite answers have been produced, but that there are too many of them, they contradict one another on key points, and that this is good reason to be skeptical of any particular answer.  To add to the trouble, what I just said will be denied by many intelligent and sincere philosophers.  They will insist that their worldview is either true or more likely to be true than any other, and that the plethora of mutually incompatible worldviews is no decent argument to the contrary. But this too is just part of the predicament we are in, a predicament that the spiritually sensitive find intolerable and seek a way out of.

I am not saying that one is not entitled to devote oneself to this search, but I do not understand the conviction that it a worthwhile pursuit. All sorts of scientific questions remain unresolved, some for hundreds of years, but in approaching them, we are encouraged by the signs of small progress that have been made.  We have no such intellectual incentives in the matters of which you speak. Now, I understand that we have not been able to reach any sort of agreement on a host of other matters, from politics to morals, but in such cases, we at least understand the rough givens with which we are dealing. Of “the ultimate truth about the ultimate matters,” we lack such an understanding. This is hardly encouraging.

This is the nub of the matter. I said in effect that the best life for a human being is a life whose dominant purpose is the search for the ultimate truth about the ultimate matters. (By the way, this search does not exclude politics and morality which rest on controversial philosophical assumptions.) And of course I mean a truth that one existentially appropriates (makes one's own) and lives. There are several ways of objecting to my thesis. Some will claim to have the truth already, and see no point is seeking what one possesses.  There are the dogmatic atheists for whom God and the soul are no longer issues. There are the dogmatic theists who have an answer for everything.  There are the dogmatic agnostics who are quite convinced that nothing can be known or even reasonably believed about ultimates (God, the soul, the meaning of human existence) and who think bothering one's head over these questions is simply foolish and might even drive one crazy such that the best way to live is to focus on the easily accessible foreground objects in the Cave and to make friends with finitude, accepting whatever mundane satisfactions come along until death puts an end to it all.

Vito may be flirting with the agnostic camp. He wonders how what we may as well call The Quest could be "a worthwhile pursuit." One of his arguments is that very few are in a position to pursue the Quest. The other is that the Quest, although pursued by the best and the brightest since time immemorial, has arrived at no solid result acceptable to all thinking people.

To the first point, I would say that the value of the Quest does not depend on how many are in a position to pursue it.  To the second point, I would say that no serious quester give up the Quest for the reason Vito cites.  The Quest is his vocation; he is called to it even if he cannot explain who or what is calling him. He finds deep satisfaction in the searching and the momentary glimpses of insight, and his satisfaction is reinforced by his conviction that the paltry objects pursued by the many are relatively worthless. He sees the vanity, the emptiness, of the world that most find most solidly real. Name and fame, property and pelf, are to him bagatelles.  The Quest is his spiritual practice and it is satisfying to the quester even when there is no tangible outcome. He likes to pray, meditate, study, reason, think, write.  This is all underpinned by a faith that there will be a favorable outcome, if not here, then Elsewhere.

Another Round on (Semantic) Presupposition: An Inconsistent Pentad

Ed writes,

p = *Socrates has just stopped talking*

q  = *Socrates was talking just now*

1. p presupposes q

2. If p presupposes q, then (p or not-p) entails q

3. It is necessary that p or not-p

4. It is necessary that q

5. It is not necessary that Socrates was talking just now

We agree with (1) in some sense. In (2), we try to sharpen that sense, i.e. of ‘presupposition’. (3) is a logical truth. So is (4): if the antecedent is necessary, so is the consequent. (5) is obviously true (unless we hold the necessity of the past, but the example could be changed with the same problematic result).  

My feeling is that we are not being sharp enough about ‘presupposition’. What exactly is it?

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

The above propositions are collectively inconsistent: they cannot all be true.  But there is a philosophical problem only if all of the propositions are plausible. (2), however, is not at all plausible and seems to reflect a blunder on Ed' s part.  The idea behind semantic presupposition is that if p presupposes q, then both p and its negation entail q. What Ed should have written is

       2* If p presupposes q, and p is true, then p entails q, and if p is false, then not-p entails q.

For example, if I stop talking at time t, then my stopping entails my talking immediately before t; if I keep talking at t, then that also entails my talking immediately before t.  The proposition presupposed is the same whether I stop talking or keep talking.

Clearly (2) and (2*) are different propositions. So I solve the pentad by rejecting (2) and its consequences.

If Nothing Exists, is it True that Nothing Exists? Well Yes, but Then . . .

Here is a puzzle for London Ed and anyone else who finds it interesting. It is very simple, an aporetic dyad.

To warm up, note that if snow is white, then it is true that snow is white.  This seems quite unexceptionable, a nice, solid, datanic starting point. It generalizes, of course: for any proposition p, if p, then it is true that p.  Now the connection between antecedent and consequent is so tight that we are loathe to say that it just happens to hold.  It holds of necessity.  So here is the first limb of our aporetic dyad:

a) Necessarily, for any p, if p, then it is true that p.

Equivalently: there is no possible world in which both p and it is not true that p.  For example, there is no possible world in which both 7 + 5 = 12 and it is not true that 7 + 5 = 12.

Intuitively, though, there might have been nothing at all.  Is it not possible that nothing exists? Things exist, of course. But might it not be that everything that exists exists contingently? If so, then there might never have existed anything. Our second limb, then, is this:

b) Possibly, nothing exists.

Equivalently: There is at least one possible world in which nothing exists.

Both limbs of the dyad are plausible, but they can't both be true.  To see this, substitute 'nothing exists' for 'p' in (a) and drop the universal quantifier and the modal operator. This yields:

c) If nothing exists, then it is true that nothing exists.

But (c) can't be true in every world given (b).  For if (c) is true, then something does exist, namely, the truth (true proposition) that nothing exists. But (c) is true in every world given (a).

Therefore (a) and (b) cannot both be true: the dyad is logically inconsistent.

So something has to give, assuming we are not willing to accept that the dyad is an aporia in the strict sense, a conceptual impasse that stops the discursive intellect dead in its tracks.  A-poria: no way.  Do we reject (a) or do we reject (b)? If a solution is possible, then I am inclined to reject (b).

But then I must affirm its negation:

d) Necessarily, something (or other) exists.

(Note that if it is necessary that something exist, it does not follow that some one thing necessarily exists. If there is no possible world in which nothing exists, it does not follow that there is some one thing that exists in every world.)

Yikes! Have I just proven by a priori reasoning the necessary existence of something or other outside the mind?  Of course, I have not proven the necessary existence of God; I may have proven only the necessary existence of those abstract objects called propositions.

(Father Parmenides, with open arms, welcomes home his prodigal son?)

Could it be like this?

I find the following scenario exceedingly strange. We die and become nothing and no question gets answered. Could it be like this? It is epistemically possible, possible for all we know. All we know is damned little. But then what would have been the point of the evolution of animals that pose unanswerable questions? No point! Human life would then be like a joke, but a joke without a teller.

We can't know that the above scenario is true, and we can't know that it is false. So in the end you must decide what you will believe and how you will live. There is no theoretical resolution of the problem; the resolution must be personal, pragmatic, and existential. So I say: if you have the aptitude and the stamina, you live best by seeking the ultimate truth about the ultimate matters with your whole heart and mind and soul, with everything else you do subordinate to that quest and in service of it, and you keep up that quest until the hour of death, always a little out of breath, with no comfortable lounging in any dogmatic edifice, whether atheist, theist, or agnostic.

You meet death with faith, hope, and love. Faith that in some way we cannot now understand we will continue to exist as persons; hope that this is the case and that our present predicament will open out onto something marvellous and finally satisfactory; love for everybody and everything that brought us to this point. You don't want death to find you cursing and snarling, doubting and despairing, let alone sunk in evil-doing.

But to meet death in that salutary way, you must live now as if the above is true. So you can't live like Anthony Bourdain who lived for food and the pleasures of the flesh ("The body is not a temple but an amusement park.") He hanged himself last year as if to say: there is no life beyond this brief material life and its paltry pleasures; so when they run out, you ought to as well. Was he quite sure that there is nothing beyond this mortal predicament? Is that not an astonishing form of dogmatism, the equal of the dogmatism of those who claim to have precise information about the afterlife, its rewards and punishments, and who gets which?

Related:

The Body: Temple or Amusement Park?

Man Does Not Live by Bread Alone

More on Assertion and Presupposition

I continue to worry this technical bone, which is not a mere technicality, inasmuch as the topic of presupposition opens out upon some very Big Questions indeed. Anyway, back to work. I thank Ed Buckner for getting me going on this.

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

It should be obvious that one does not assert everything that the content of one's assertion entails.  If I assert that Venus is a planet, I do not thereby assert that either Venus is a planet or Putin is a former KGB agent, even though the content of my assertion entails the disjunctive proposition.  The content of an assertion is a proposition, and for any proposition p, p entails p v q.

A more interesting, and more difficult, question is whether one asserts any proposition that the content of one's assertion entails (apart from the proposition that is the content of the assertion).

Suppose you ask who won the 10K Turkey Trot and  I assert that Tony won the race.  Do I thereby also assert that he competed in it?  That he competed in it is entailed by the fact that he won. And it is entailed in a stronger sense that the sense in which Venus is a planet entails Venus is a planet or Putin is a former KGB agent.   For there is a semantic connection between winning and competing, but no semantic connection in the Venus-Putin case. You could say that it is analytically impossible that Tony win without competing: what makes it true that there is no possible world in which Tony wins but does not compete is the semantic connection between winning and competing.

Still, I want to say that Tony's competing is presupposed but not asserted when I assert that he won the race.  Necessarily, anything red is colored.  But when I assert that Tom the tomato is red, I do not thereby assert that it is colored, although of course I presuppose that it is colored. Note the word 'thereby.' It is no doubt possible for me to assert that Tom is colored, a 'vegetable of color' if you will, but that is a different assertion.

Go back to Tony the runner. That Tony did not cheat by taking a short cut is analytically entailed by the fact that he won. (To win a foot race it does not suffice to be the first to cross the finish line. Remember Rosie Ruiz of Boston Marathon 1980 notoriety?)  Will you say that when I assert that Tony won the race I also thereby assert that he did not cheat by taking a shortcut? I would say No. For that would be an unbearably counter-intuitive thing to say. I presuppose, but do not assert, that Tony did not cheat by taking a shortcut

You can see how this series of questions can be extended. One can cheat  by  getting a head start or by jumping in at mid-course, which is what Rosie Ruiz did at Boston. You can cheat by hiring a a world-class doppelgaenger, by wearing special shoes . . . .

Note also that if Tony won, it follows that he either won or didn't win. Will you say that when I assert that Tony won the race I am also thereby asserting that he either won it or didn't?  When I assert that Tony won, I am not asserting the Law of Excluded Middle (LEM). At most, LEM is a presupposition of my assertion, and of every assertion.

If Tony won, then it was possible that he win.  For everything actual is possible. But when I assert that Tony won, I presuppose, but do not assert, that it was possible at the time of the race that Tony win.

I am toying with a strong thesis:

When an agent A makes an assertion by uttering or otherwise tokening a sentence s (which is typically, but needn't be, in the indicative mood), the content of the assertion is exactly the (Fregean) proposition explicitly expressed by the tokening of s and no other proposition.  Propositions other than the content proposition that are entailed by the content proposition are at most presuppositions of the assertion.

Why hold this view? Well, it seems to me that what I assert on any occasion is precisely what I intend to assert on that occasion and nothing else.  When I make an assertion I translate into overt speech a belief that I have. The content/accusative of the belief is a Fregean proposition and there is nothing in that proposition that is not open to my mind at the time I express my belief.

 

 

Did Kepler Die in Misery?

Either he did or he didn't. Suppose I say that he did, and you say that he didn't. We both presuppose, inter alia, that there was a man named 'Kepler.'  Now that proposition that we both presuppose, although entailed both by Kepler died in misery and Kepler did not die in misery is no part of what I assert when I assert that Kepler died in misery.

Why not?

Well, to proceed by reductio, if what I assert when I assert that Kepler died in misery is that (there was a man named 'Kepler' & he died in misery), then what you assert when you contradict  me is that (either there was no man named 'Kepler' or that he did not die in misery). But the latter is not what you assert, and the former is not what I assert.  That is because we take it for granted that there was a man who rejoiced under the name 'Johannes Kepler.'

What I assert is that Kepler died in misery, and what you assert is that Kepler did not die in misery.  But we both presuppose that there was a man named 'Kepler.'  The proposition that we both presuppose, while entailed by what we each assert, is not part of what we each assert.

That, I take it, is Frege's famous argument in Ueber Sinn und Bedeutung.

It seems pretty good to me.

Assertion and Presupposition: An Argument for a Distinction

1) Someone, such as Sophomore Sam, who asserts that there are no truths does not assert that there are truths.

And yet

2) That there are no truths entails that there is at least one truth.  (Why? Because it is impossible for the first proposition to be true and the second false.)

Therefore

3) If someone S asserts that p, and p entails q, it does not follow that S asserts that q.  (Assertion is not closed under entailment.)

4) Although Sam does not ASSERT that there is at least one truth when he assertively utters the sentence 'There are no truths,' he is in some relation to the proposition that there is at least one truth. I will say that he PRESUPPOSES it.

Therefore

5) There is a distinction we need to make and it is reasonably labelled the distinction between ASSERTING a proposition and PRESUPPOSING  a proposition.  An act of asserting can carry a presupposition that is not asserted.  Sam's act of asserting that there are no truths presupposes but does not assert that there is at least one truth.

If you don't accept this argument, tell me which premise(s) you reject and why.

Krauthammer's Fundamental Law

Here is Krauthammer's Fundamental Law:

To understand the workings of American politics, you have to understand this fundamental law: Conservatives think liberals are stupid. Liberals think conservatives are evil.

It's cute and clever, a nice piece of journalese, but not quite right, although it gets at part of the truth.

 

Krauthammer's 'law' conversationally implies that conservatives do not think that contemporary liberals or leftists are evil. But surely many of us do. Leftists routinely slander us with such epithets as: sexist, racist, white supremacist, xenophobic, homophobic, Islamophobic, and so on. This is morally vicious behavior and to that extent evil. My view is that many if not most so-called liberals are not good people. You are not a good person, for example, if you routinely dismiss legitimate concerns for the rule of law in the matter of immigration by accusing conservatives of having an irrational fear of foreigners.  That is a vicious refusal to take conservatives seriously as  rational beings and address their arguments.

 

A second problem with Krauthammer's 'law' is that intelligent conservatives do not think of most liberals  as stupid but as having the wrong values, or, when they have some of the right values, not prioritizing them correctly.  Generally speaking, political differences reflect differences in values and principles, not differences in intelligence or 'information.' 

Is Assertion Closed Under Entailment? Assertion and Presupposition

Suppose a person asserts that p. Suppose also that p entails q. Does it follow that the person asserting that p thereby asserts that q?  If so, and if p and q are any propositions you like, then assertion is closed under entailment.  If assertion is not closed under entailment, then there will be examples in which a person asserts that p, p entails q, but the person does not assert that q.

By 'entailment' I understand a relation between propositions. P entails q iff it is impossible for p to be true, and q false. By 'assertion' I mean a speech act, an act of asserting, a concrete, datable, linguistic performance, not a proposition.  By 'the content of an assertion' I mean the proposition expressed  when a person makes an assertion. A proposition is not the same as a sentence. 'The war has come to an end' is a sentence in English. 'Der Krieg hat zu Ende gekommen' is a sentence in German.  The sentences are different, both at the type level and at the token level. And yet they can both be used to express one and the same thought. That same thought is the proposition.  By 'thought' here I do not mean an occurrent episode of thinking, but the accusative (direct object) of such an act of thinking. You could also call it a 'content' although that term is ambiguous for reasons I won't go into now.

Preliminaries aside, back to our question.

That James no longer works for Amazon has among its entailments that James worked for Amazon, that someone named 'James' worked for Amazon, and that someone no longer works for Amazon.

Now suppose I assert that James no longer works for Amazon.  Do I thereby assert that James worked for Amazon?  I say No.

Here is a more striking example. Sophomore Sam asserts that there are no truths.  The content of his act of assertion, namely, the proposition that there are no truths, entails that the content of his assertion is not true.  But surely the latter is no part of what Sam asserts. 

So assertion is not closed under entailment.

Suppose that Tom asserts that he is glad that Trump beat Hillary.  The content of the assertion entails that Trump beat Hillary. But that Trump beat Hillary is not what Tom asserts.  We can say that Tom's act of assertion presupposes that Trump beat Hillary.  But neither Tom nor his act of assertion is a proposition. So if Tom's act of assertion presupposes that Trump beat Hillary, then presupposition is not a relation between propositions, but a relation between a non-proposition (a person or his speech act) and a proposition.

On the other hand, that Tom is glad that Trump beat Hillary entails that Trump beat Hillary. This is a relation between propositions and it makes some sense to say that the first presupposes the second.

This raises a question. Is presupposition primarily something that people do, or is it primarily a relation between propositions?