Maverick Philosopher

False Abstraction

Surely one of the idiocies of the age is the oft-repeated, "Diversity is our strength." Anyone who repeats this bit of thoughtless group-speak wears his folly like a scarlet letter.  I'll leave it to the reader to work out why the falsehood is false and how it  illustrates the fallacy of false abstraction. Why do I have to do all the work?

But a soupçon of  sanity is beginning to glimmer in the heads of  some of the original progenitors of  DEI nonsense.  See here.

Trump's 'Bloodbath' Remark

Outdoing themselves in hyper-ventilatory TDS-fueled rage, Joe Scarborough and the rest of the mendacious insanos at MSDNC (aka MSNBC) and at other lamestream media outlets have seized upon Trump's bloodbath remark as if to illustrate Ayn Rand's point about context-dropping. Although I am no fan of Rand or her acolyte Peikoff as you can readily discern from my Rand category, this term from her lexicon does earn a non-plenary MavPhil endorsement.

Context matters!

Argumentum ad Lapidem?

No way, I say.  Over at Substack.

Ed comments:

"He did not maintain that rocks and trees do not exist; he did not deny or even question whether they are; he offered an unusual ontological account of what they are, namely, ideas in minds, including the divine mind." (BV)

True, but careful examination of Berkeley’s argument shows that he provides no clear definition or explanation of what “ideas” are.

He opens the Treatise as follows:

It is evident to any one who takes a survey of the objects of human knowledge, that they are either ideas actually imprinted on the senses; or else such as are perceived by attending to the passions and operations of the mind; or lastly, ideas formed by help of memory and imagination -- either compounding, dividing, or barely representing those originally perceived in the aforesaid ways.

But is it “evident”? I look at the brown and black colours of the surface of my desk. These appear to be qualities of the desk surface itself, and not “imprinted on the senses” at all. Is Berkeley saying that the desk surface itself is imprinted on my senses? But that strange claim has to be clarified. Later on he offers a critique of the idea of substance, arguing that ideas are mental items, therefore cannot be supported by an immaterial item, substance. But that begs the question. If ideas are sensible qualities like colours, what evidence is there for their being mental items?

As for Johnson’s argument, what is the quale corresponding to resistance? Resistance, i.e. Newtonian force, is the most material of qualities. How can there be a quale of resistance without resistance itself?

BV: Newton's First Law of Motion implies that a stone, say, will remain at rest unless acted upon by an external force such as Johnson's kick.  An object at rest thus resists being moved.  This resistance is a (dispositional) property of physical things.  The quale corresponding to this resistance could be called felt resistance.  It is a mental in nature and cannot exist without a perceiver who, for example, tries to move a rock with his foot.

"How can there be a quale of resistance without resistance itself?"  An idealist of the Berkeleyan sort could say that there can't be a quale of resistance without resistance itself but then go on to say that (i) physical things are nothing more than objects of the divine mind, and (ii) resistance qualia exist only in finite (creaturely) minds. In this way the distinction between resistance qualia and resistance itself could be upheld.

The point I was making in my Substack article was that the good bishop cannot be refuted by kicking a stone. This is because Berkeley is not denying that there are stones; he is making a claim about the mode of being of stones, namely that their being/existence is ideal: they are accusatives of divine awareness and nothing more.  As I read him, Berkeley is not an eliminativist about stones and trees in quads, etc.  You could call him an ontological reductionist about such and sundry.

Daniel Dennett, by comparison is an eliminativist about qualia.  He I can refute by kicking 'stones,' namely his cojones. If I kick him in the groin, he will be brought to understand that felt pain, phenomenal pain, lived pain, is the most real thing in the world, and cannot be denied. I am assuming, of course, that he is not a zombie (as philosophers use this term). But that leads us in a different direction.

The No True Scotsman or No True Muslim Fallacy

Substack latest.

In logic a fallacy is not a false belief but a pattern of reasoning that is both typical and in some way specious. Specious reasoning, by the very etymology of the term, appears correct but is not. Thus a logical fallacy is not just any old mistake in reasoning, but a typical or recurrent mistake that has some tendency to seduce or mislead our thinking. A taxonomy of fallacies is useful insofar as it helps prevent one from seducing oneself or being seduced by others.

By the way, the study of logic won't get you very far, but it is fun and of some use, especially at a time when shockingly mendacious and dimwitted people have taken over the government of the greatest nation on Earth.  Examples are legion from the top down. You know their names.

Allergy to Unclarity

Philosophers who are allergic to unclarity make the mistake of thinking that anything that cannot be made totally clear is meaningless and can be dismissed, as if all and only the clear is real.

A Mistake Many Make

They think that what is not immediately intelligible to them is unintelligible, period, or perhaps even a product of willful obfuscation.

The Australian positivist, David Stove, somewhere takes umbrage at a passage from Heidegger and pronounces it gibberish, when the passage is not gibberish at all. The miserable Stove, unwilling to to do his homework, and with no understanding of Heidegger's intellectual antecedents, dismisses as gibberish what is not immediately intelligible to his shallow positivist pate.  He is a trenchant polemicist in some of his writing, so I am simply responding in kind.

I need to find that passage.

But let me say something good about old Stove: he was one formidable opponent of the scourge of political correctness.

There are some interesting materials for and against the curmudgeon in my Stove category.

De mortuis nil nisi bonum? De mortuis bonum et malum.

Add This to the Fallacy File

Beware of Kafkatrapping!

Race, Social Construction, and Lewontin's Fallacy

I asked a correspondent what it means when leftists say that race is a social construct. Here is his response with my comments:

What do they even mean?  I wonder about that too.  What could it mean to say that race is a "social construct"?  Do they mean that there are no biological or ancestral differences at all between Whites and Blacks and Orientals?  That's just ridiculous -- like saying there are no biological differences between human beings and gorillas. 

It is indeed ridiculous on the face of it. It's like saying that the difference between fish and mammals is a mere artifact of our conceptual decisions and classificatory activities. It implies that reality has no inherent structure or intelligibility; whatever intelligibility it has it acquires from us. But that is tantamount to saying that there is no reality. It is Kant gone wild: the Critical Philosophy without the Ding an sich and without an invariant categorial framework.

Here is perhaps the deepest metaphysical error of the Left: leftists deny that there is a reality antecedent to our classifications and conceptualizations. (V. I. Lenin was of course an exception.) Everything becomes a social-political construct. How convenient for identity-political totalitarians! The bird of reality can be carved up any way that suits the will to power of some interest group -- because there is no bird to carve. Next stop: the Twilight Zone. Rachel Dolezal is black. Elizabeth Warren is a Cherokee. Warren, a.k.a. Fauxcahontas, despite her contribution of a recipe for lobster bisque to Pow Wow Chow, that must-have cook book for the bien pensant, is the Rachel Dolezal of American politics. Continuing in the alimentary mode, she is now anent her Presidential pretensions, 'toast.'

I think in most cases they don't mean anything much.  They haven't thought about it.  It's a smart-sounding phrase they picked up from PBS or from some half-wit university lecturer.  It's the kind of thing the bien pensant people say.  So they say it too.  And they know that, whatever it really means, it must be true and morally right to say it.  They know that only Nazis disagree.  I've talked to some educated intelligent Leftists who say stuff like this.  They usually just retreat to Lewontin's fallacy--more differences within races than between, and all of that.  Again, it seems they just don't want to think about it and they use these dumb phrases as a way to avoid thinking.  The dumb phrases change once in a while.  I guess in earlier decades we'd hear more about how "There is only one race, the human race".  But it may be a mistake to expect any clear or coherent meaning behind these propaganda phrases.  

That's right. You might think that those who inhabit academe would be critical thinkers; the truth, however, is that many if not most are all-too-ready to succumb to groupthink, whether to advance themselves career-wise, or to fit in and be accepted, or just because they lack the skeptical, scientific spirit.

Lewontin's Fallacy?

A. W. F. Edwards on Lewontin's Fallacy

Wikipedia on Lewontin's Fallacy

Neven Sesardic, Race: The Social Destruction of a Biological Concept

On the Correct Use of 'Begging the Question'

On Thursday, June 21, 2012 I  heard Dennis Prager on his nationally-syndicated radio show use 'beg the question' when what he meant was 'raise the question.'  This is a very common mistake nowadays.

I correct Mr. Prager because I love him.

The visage of Jeff Dunham's 'Walter' signals that a language rant is in the offing should you be averse to such things.

To raise a question is not to beg a question. 'Raise a question' and 'beg a question' ought not be used interchangeably on pain of occluding a distinction essential to clear thought. To raise a question is just to pose it, to bring it before one's mind or before one's audience for consideration. To beg a question, however, is not to pose a question but to reason in a way that presupposes what one needs to prove.

Suppose A poses the question, 'Does Allah exist?' B responds by saying that Allah does exist because his existence is attested in the Koran which Allah revealed to Muhammad. In this example, A raises a question, while B begs the question raised by A. The question is whether or not Allah exists; B's response begs the question by presupposing that Allah does exist. For Allah could not reveal anything to Muhammad unless Allah exists. 

The phrase 'beg the question' is not as transparent as might be hoped. The Latin, petitio principii, is better: begging of the principle. Perhaps the simplest way to express the fallacy in English is by calling it circular reasoning. If I argue that The Los Angeles Times displays liberal bias because its reportage and editorializing show a left-of-center slant, then I reason in a circle, or beg the question. Fans of Greek may prefer hysteron proteron, literally, the later earlier. That is, what is logically posterior, namely, the conclusion, is taken to be logically prior, a premise.

Punchline: Never use 'beg the question' unless you are referring to an informal fallacy in reasoning. If you are raising, asking, posing a question, then say that. Do your bit to preserve our alma mater, the English language. Honor thy mother! Matrix of our thoughts, she is deeper and higher than our thoughts, their sacred Enabler.

Of course, I am but a vox clamantis in deserto.  The battle has already been lost.  So why do I write things like the above?  Because I am a natural-born scribbler who takes pleasure in these largely pointless exercises. 

And perhaps there is a bit of virtue-signaling going on. 

The Fallacy of Objections

Via Vlastimil V.:

There is something "which may be called the Fallacy of objections, i.e. showing that there are objections against some plan, theory or system, and thence inferring that it should be rejected; when that which ought to have been proved, is, that there are more, or stronger objections against the receiving than the rejecting of it. This is the main, and almost universal Fallacy of infidels, and is that of which men should be first and principally warned."  Richard Whately, Logic, 1849, ch. V "On Fallacies," p. 82. See here.

How quaint our concern with the lore of logic while jihadi's  cut throats on London Bridge and leftist thugs shout down the sane at universities.  Logic books and books in general are of no use against barbarians and thugs. Magazines are much more effective. 

The No True Scotsman or No True Muslim Fallacy

This is a substantial revision, in the light of recent events, of an entry from about six years ago.  This post examines the fallacy that Antony Flew brought to our attention and suggests that 'No True Muslim' is an equally good name for it.

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

In logic, a fallacy is not a false belief but a pattern of reasoning that is both typical and in some way specious. Specious reasoning, by the very etymology of the term, appears correct but is not. Thus a fallacy is not just any old mistake in reasoning, but a typical or recurrent mistake that has some tendency to seduce or mislead our thinking. A taxonomy of fallacies is useful insofar as it helps prevent one from seducing oneself or being seduced by others.

Fallacies are either formal or informal.  An example of a formal fallacy is Affirming the Consequent.  An example of an informal fallacy is Petitio Principii.  Note than an argument that is formally valid can yet be informally fallacious.  Arguments that beg the question are examples.

Among the so-called informal fallacies is Antony Flew's No True Scotsman. Suppose A says, "No Scotsman puts sugar in his porridge." B replies, "But my uncle Angus puts sugar in his porridge." A responds, "Your Uncle Angus is no true Scotsman!"

 

Second Example.  Call it 'No True Muslim.'  A says, "Islam is a religion of peace; Muslims do not do things like murder cartoonists and journalists with whose ideas they disagree." B replies, "On 7 January 2015, two Muslim gunmen forced their way into the offices of Charlie Hebdo in Paris, France and killed Stéphane Charbonnier, the editor of the satirical weekly, and several others." A responds, "Those gunmen were not true Muslims."

Third Example. A: "Nowadays all chess players use algebraic notation." B: "Not so, Ed Yetman does not use algebraic notation. He uses descriptive notation exclusively." A: "Ed Yetman? You call him a chess player?!"

Fourth Example. A: "When a complete neuroscience is achieved, we will know everything about mind, brain, and consciousness." B: "I can't agree, even a completed neuroscience will not explain how consciousness arises from brain activity." A: "A neuroscience that can't explain consciousness would not be a completed neuroscience."

Clearly, something has gone wrong in these examples. Person A is making an illicit dialectical move of some kind. The general form of the mistake seems to be as follows. Person A makes a universal assertion, one featuring a quantifier such as 'all,' 'no,' 'everything' whether explicit or tacit. Person B then adduces a counterexample to the universal claim. Person A illicitly dismisses the counterexample by modifying his original assertion with the use of 'true' or 'real' some equivalent designed to exclude the counterexample.  Thus Uncle Angus is excluded as a counterexample by dismissing  him as not a true Scotman, and the Muslim gunmen are excluded by dismissing them as not true Muslims.

The fallacy is informal since the fallaciousness depends on the content or subject matter. So we need to ask: When is it not a fallacy? By my count, there are at least four classes of cases in which the No True Scotsman move is not fallacious.

1. When the original assertion is either a logical truth or an analytic truth. If I point out that all bachelors are male, and you reply that your sister Mary is a bachelor, then I am justified in dismissing your 'counterexample' by saying that Mary is not a true bachelor, or a bachelor in the strict sense of the term.

2. When the original assertion is synthetic but necessary. If Saul Kripke is right, 'Water is H₂O' is synthetic but necessary. If I say that water is H₂O, and you object that heavy water is not H₂O but D₂O, then I am entitled to respond that heavy water is not water.

3. When the original assertion involves stipulation. Suppose Smith defines a naturalist as one who denies the existence of God, and I respond that McTaggart is an atheist who is not a naturalist. Have I shown that Smith is wrong? Not all. Smith may respond that McTaggart is not a naturalist as he defines the term. Wholly or partially stipulative definitions cannot be said to be either true or false although they can be more or less useful for classificatory purposes.  Second example. Suppose Jack claims that libertarians favor open borders and Jill responds by adducing the case of libertarian John Jay Ray who does not favor open borders. Jack is within his epistemic rights in saying that Ray is not a full-fledged libertarian.

4. When the original assertion specifies the content of a belief-system or worldview.  Suppose I point out that Communists are anti-religion, believing as they do that it is the opiate of the masses, an impediment to social progress, the sigh of the oppressed, flowers on the chains that enslave, etc.  You say you know people who are Communists but are not against religion.  I am entitled to the retort that such 'Communists' are not Communists at all; they are not true or real or genuine Communists, that they are CINOs, Commies in Name Only, etc.  I have not committed the fallacy under discussion.

Back to the Muslims.  A Muslim is so-called because of his adherence to the religion, Islam.  There are certain core beliefs that are definitive of Islam, and thus essential to it,  and that a Muslim must accept if he is to count as a Muslim.  To take a blindingly  evident example, no Muslim can be an atheist.  Also: no Muslim can be a trinitarian, or a pantheist, or a polytheist, or believe in the Incarnation.  And of course there are more specific doctrines about the Koran, about the prophet Muhammad, etc., that are essential to the faith of Muslims.

Now suppose I point out that Muslims deny that Jesus is the son of God.  You reply that your Muslim friend Ali accepts that Jesus is the son of God.  Then I commit no fallacy if I retort that Ali is no true Muslim.