Maverick Philosopher

A Minor Correction Anent 'Absurd' with a Little Help from Mark Rothko

In a Substack entry I distinguished four senses of 'absurd,' the logico-mathematical, the semantic, the existential, and the ordinary. About the existential sense I had this to say:

3) Existential.  The absurd as the existentially meaningless, the groundless, the brute-factual, the intrinsically unintelligible.  The absurdity of existence in this sense of 'absurd' is what elicited Jean-Paul Sartre's and his character Roquentin's  nausea.  The sheer, meaningless, disgusting, facticity of the chestnut tree referenced in the eponymous novel, for example, was described by Sartre as de trop and as an unintelligible excrescence.

That's pretty good, but it leaves out an important nuance.  In "A Case in Reason for God's Existence?" Joseph Donceel, S. J. points out that it is not enough for a thing to count as absurd in what I am calling the existential sense that it be meaningless or unintelligible.  For the absurd is not simply that which makes no sense; it is that  which makes no sense, but ought to, or is supposed to.  To say that life is absurd is not merely to say that it has no point or purpose; it is to say that it fails to meet a deep and universal demand or expectation on our part that it have a point or purpose. Donceel:

No one calls decorative painting absurd, but many people feel that most modern painting is absurd, because they expect it to make sense for them, and it does not. We understand what is meant when people say of reality or of life that it does not make sense. But their claim that it is absurd implies that it should make sense, that they expect it to make sense. (God Knowable and Unknowable, ed. Roth, Fordham UP, 1973, p. 181.) 

The decadent 'art' of Mark Rothko et al., which is presumably intended to be art and not mere wall decoration or ornamentation meant to add a splash of color to an otherwise drab room, reflects the absurdist sensibility of the post-modern era. Healthy folk -- as opposed to neurotic 'transgressive' NYC hipsters -- find it absurd because it defeats their expectation that art should 'mean something' not just in the sense of representing something, but in the sense of representing something that inspires and uplifts and is beautiful in the Platonic sense that brackets (encompasses) the Good, the True, and the Beautiful.

At the opposite end of the spectrum there is kitsch, the king of which is Thomas Kinkade. Bang on the hyperlink to see samples of his work. I am not for kitsch, but I will take it over the decadent stuff. It is less fraying of the fabric of civilization. At the present time, the anti-civilizational forces are on the march and in dire need of stiff-necked opposition. But now I am straying into aesthetics about which I know little. But that doesn't stop me since, as you know, one of my mottoes is:

Nescio, ergo blogo.

Hegel on History: Another Case of Misattribution

Misattributed to Hegel: "We learn from history that we do not learn from history." Close, but that's not what he says. 

I haven't checked the following quotations, but they look good to the eye of one who has read his fair share of the Swabian genius. HT: Seth Nimbosa

Was die Erfahrung aber und die Geschichte lehren, ist dieses, daß Völker und Regierungen niemals etwas aus der Geschichte gelernt und nach Lehren, die aus derselben zu ziehen gewesen wären, gehandelt haben. (Vorlesungen über die Philosophie der Weltgeschichte)

What experience and history teach is this — that nations and governments have never learned anything from history, or acted upon any lessons they might have drawn from it. (Lectures on the Philosophy of World History, tr. H. B. Nisbet (1975))

I'll leave it to the reader to ponder the internal coherence, or rather incoherence, of the Hegelian observation.

Related:

Misattributed to Socrates

A Misattribution [of mine] Corrected

If you can show me that I have made a mistake, I will admit my error.  How many people do that? Am I now 'signaling my virtue' or setting a good example? You decide. 

Of course, it is easy to admit minor errors.  It is the big ones that we are loathe to admit.

Fetterman Unfettered: Against Ableism

In the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania, John Fetterman is currently competing with Dr. Mehmet Oz for a seat in the U. S. Senate. Any objective person who observes both men in action can see that Fetterman is mentally, morally, and politically unfit for office.  (I won't comment on the 'hoodie,' the ugly forearm tattoos, the neck bulge, the man's lack of a career outside of politics, or his 'anti-gravitas': the man's overall thuggish appearance.)

Mentally, he has trouble formulating clear sentences.  A recent stroke has left him impaired. Morally, he is a brazen liar: he recently stated in a debate with Dr. Oz that he supports fracking when it is obvious from his previous assertions and his overall position that he does not. Politically, he supports destructive hard-Left positions with respect to drugs and crime and everything else.

But let's say you believe in 'equity' as wokesters use the word. You believe in equality of outcome and proportional representation regardless of merit and qualifications.  If 'equity' is your concern why shouldn't a stroke-impaired man be a U. S. senator? After all, if dementia is no bar to high office, why should stroke-impairment be?  Fetterman's fit with the Biden bunch couldn't be tighter. To demand qualifications for high office or for any job at all is to discriminate against the unqualified, and we now know that discrimination is among the worst of sins. We are all equal and the supposed accomplishments and talents of Dr. Oz the heart surgeon really ought to count for nothing in an equitable society. We have made progress in the 'progressive' sense of the term. And we are better people for it. 

The disabled are just as qualified as the rest of us. For they are not really disabled at all; they are differently abled.  I myself was born with only one functioning ear. But this birth defect gives me the ability to block out sound in bed by putting my good ear down on the pillow. Clearly, this wonderful ability of mine compensates for all of the drawbacks of monaural hearing such as the inability to tell from which direction a sound is coming. The point generalizes: all disabilities are really abilities in disguise. No one should ever be evaluated in any way on the basis of supposed 'talents' or 'qualifications' or 'abilities' or 'accomplishments.' What I said in my first paragraph convicts me of the thought crime of 'ableism.'  I ought to check myself into the nearest 'progressive' re-education camp.

On the Correct Use of 'Begging the Question'

Substack latest.

When Vocabulary Contracts . . .

. . . thought contracts with it.

'Depredatory'

The phrase 'depredatory Left' popped into my head this morning. I asked myself whether 'depredatory' is a recognized adjective. Then I thought, "If it isn't, it ought to be, and I shall introduce it." Well it's already in recognized dictionaries, as it ought to be. 

Words of the Day: 'Claque' and 'Clique'

Definitions and differentiation here.

Questions about Pronouns, Sex, and 'Wokism'

Elliot Crozat writes, 

During my visit, one of our conversation topics was pronoun usage. If I recall, on one of the hikes, you gave the example "He who hesitates is lost” and asked about the function of ‘He.’ You then said that this pronoun seems to function as a universal quantifier such that, for any x, if x hesitates, then x is lost. I agree. Our agreement suggests that pronouns can function logically in ways that differ from their merely grammatical appearance.

BV: Right. Although 'he' and 'she' are classified grammatically as pronouns, their logical function in examples like the one I gave is not pronominal, but quantificational. Pronouns typically have noun antecedents, but 'he' in 'He who hesitates is lost' has no antecedent. It functions like a bound variable. I can imagine a Yogi Berra type joke. I say to Berra, "He who hesitates is lost," and he replies, "You mean Joe Biden?" (Here is a real Yogi Berra joke. Someone asked Berra what time it is. He replied, "You mean now?")

I spoke today with a friend, a philosopher, who is under some pressure from his employer to use the ‘preferred pronouns’ of colleagues and others even if such 'pronouns' don't align with the biological sex of the 'preferrers.' For various reasons concerning clarity and accuracy of language, freedom of speech and thought, and ideological disagreement, my friend is concerned about how to navigate this progressivist current in a responsible manner. We discussed some ideas.

Here’s one. Suppose a biological male, Mark, desires and requests to be referred to as ‘she.’ Suppose also that, generally speaking, all pronouns that are indexicals (i.e., demonstratives) refer to their respective persons or objects as they objectively are. Smith, a colleague of Mark, attempts to refer to Mark as ‘she.’ It would seem, then, that ‘she’ fails to refer – or that Mark fails to refer via ‘she’ – and thus ‘she’ is a useless and confusing bit of language. Smith’s use of ‘she’ is unhelpful on this account.

BV: I will first make the minor point that an indexical is not the same as a demonstrative. Every demonstrative is an indexical, but not conversely. Suppose I am standing before the deli counter. Having temporarily forgotten that the name of what I want is 'prosciutto,' I say to the deli man, "I'd like some of that." My use of the demonstrative 'that' must be accompanied by a demonstration if I am to succeed in conveying my request. I have to point to the meat I want. But I don't have to point to myself when I utter the indexical 'I' in 'I'd like some of that." 'I' is not a demonstrative. 

A second minor point is that 'I' sometimes functions as a bound variable.  Suppose that in explaining intentionality to a student, I say, "I cannot think without thinking of something." I have not made an autobiographical remark. The proposition I am attempting to convey to the student is that, for any person x, if x thinks, then x thinks of something. 

Grammatical pronouns can function pronominally, indexically, and quantificationally.  Here is a sentence featuring a pronoun functioning pronominally and which therefore has  an antecedent:

Peter always calls before he visits.

In this sentence, 'Peter' is the antecedent of the third-person singular pronoun 'he.'  It is worth noting that an antecedent needn't come before the term for which it is the antecedent:

After he got home, Peter poured himself a drink.

In this sentence 'Peter' is the antecedent of 'he' despite occurring after 'he' in the order of reading.  The antecedency is therefore referential rather than temporal.  In both of these cases, the reference of 'he' is supplied by the antecedent.  The burden of reference is borne by the antecedent.  So there is a clear sense in which the reference of 'he' in both cases is not direct, but mediated by the antecedent. (And if the reference of the antecedent is mediated by a Frege-style sense or Sinn, then we have a double mediation.)  The antecedent is referentially prior to the pronoun for which it is the antecedent.  But suppose I point to Peter and say

He smokes cigarettes.

This is an indexical use of 'he.'  Part of what makes it an indexical use is that its reference depends on the non-linguistic context of utterance: I utter a token of 'he' while pointing at Peter, or nodding in his direction.  The sentence need not be situated in a linguistic context.  Another part of what makes 'he' in the example an indexical is that it refers directly, not just in the sense that the reference is not routed through a description or sense associated with the use of the pronoun that fixes the reference to Peter and nothing else, but also in that there is no need for an antecedent to secure the reference.  Now suppose I say

I smoke cigars.

This use of 'I' is clearly indexical, although it is  purely indexical (David Kaplan) inasmuch as there is no need for a demonstration:  I don't need to point to myself when I say 'I smoke cigars.'  And like the immediately preceding example, there is no need for an antecedent to nail down the reference of 'I.'  Not every pronoun needs an antecedent to do a referential job.

In fact, it seems that no expression, used indexically, has or could have an antecedent.  Hector-Neri Castaneda puts it like this:

Whether in oratio recta or in oratio obliqua, (genuine) indicators have no antecedents. ("Indicators and Quasi-Indicators" reprinted in The Phenomeno-Logic of the I, p. 67)

 For a quantificational use of a grammatical pronoun, consider

He who hesitates is lost.

Clearly, 'he' does not function here pronominally -- there is no antecedent -- nor does it function indexically.  It functions like the bound variable in

For any person x, if x hesitates, then x is lost.

But is this token ‘she’ a pronoun in appearance only? It seems to function in some ways like a proper name (perhaps a sobriquet or a tag of sorts) of one who has undergone a name change. On this view, the token ‘she’ wouldn’t function as a rigid designator, since there are possible worlds in which Mark doesn’t use ‘she.’ But the token seems to work as a name or tag for Mark in relevant circumstances.

BV: I would say that 'she' has a sense which requires that any human being  successfully referred to by its use is a biological female. I am inclined to say that if you try to refer to a biological male as 'she,' then the reference won't be successful. But this is none too clear.  

Consider the example of Cassius Clay, who underwent a change in the way he viewed himself and hence selected a new name to reflect his subjective change of ‘self-identification.’ As a matter of respect for Clay as a person, others began to call him by his new name ‘Ali.’

Is the Clay-Ali scenario relevantly similar to the situation of Mark, who in this world subjectively identifies as female despite being biologically male and having formerly identified as male? Suppose Smith speaks about Mark by saying “She went to the market.” Does Smith refer successfully to Mark in virtue of using “she” as something like a proper name rather than a pronoun?

BV: One can change one's religion but one cannot change one's sex. That's an important difference. I myself find it very easy to identify with women, but surely it is impossible for me to identify as a woman if that means:  apperceive or interpret myself or alter my physicality or raiment in such a way as to bring it about that I become a woman. I can no more identify as a woman than I can identify as a cat or a carrot. Of course, I can pretend to be a woman and even successfully pass myself off as one.  (Cf. the movies "Tootsie" and "Mrs. Doubtfire" which you no doubt have seen.) But a man in drag remains a man, even if he is in what I call  'super-drag' where this includes surgical mutilation and augmentation of the body, hormone replacement 'therapy,' etc.  And the sexual frisson/excitation that a man might feel when putting on panties and bra is male frisson is it not? And thus further proof that he remains a man even if he has had his genitalia lopped off and a vagina fashioned from his former penis? 

I am inclined to say that a literal sex change operation is an impossibility. No animal can change its sex or have its sex changed.

Here is a proof from the metaphysics of time. Tell me what you think of it. Every adult woman was a girl. Every adult male was a boy.  The past is unalterable. (Not even God  can restore a virgin.) Now it is possible for a man to become a woman only if it is possible for a man to have been a girl. But that is impossible because it is impossible to alter the past.  Therefore, it is impossible for a man to become a woman no matter how he is altered, even chromosomally. The nature of time rules it out.

Here is another thought. You can change your religion or your political affiliation, but not your race or your sex.  These non-negotiable facts are extra-linguistic. Now with the exception of mere Millian tags, the senses of words determines their reference and not the other way around. I suggested above that one cannot successfully refer to a biological male using 'she.' And this for the reason that 'she' has a sense that is sexually restrictive, assuming that it is being used to refer to sexually-polarized animals such as human beings as opposed to ships and flags as in "She's a grand old flag; she's a high-flying flag . . . ." So is the extra-linguistic fact I mentioned partially determining the sense of 'she'? That's what I am puzzling over at the moment. But I am just 'shootin' from the hip here and perhaps what I have written is not sufficiently clear to permit evaluation.  

If the proper name account doesn’t succeed, perhaps ‘she’ has a non-indexical use. Some pronouns have non-indexical applications. David Braun lists three types of pronoun use: indexical(demonstrative), bound variable, andunbound anaphoric. See https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/indexicals/#IndNonIndUsePro

Perhaps ‘she’ has a bound variable use, such as: “Every male who subjectively identifies as a female believes she will be better off doing so.” Or maybe ‘she’ has an unbound anaphoric use, such as: “Mark was late to work today. She was caught in traffic.”

These non-indexical accounts seem strained to me, and hence I’m thinking the proper name account might be better. Or maybe there is still another account that best explains what is happening in these linguistically-odd situations. Maybe all efforts to refer to Mark as 'she' fail to refer.

I’d like to hear what you have to say on this issue, since you’ve thought deeply about pronouns and about the philosophy of language. I’d be glad to give you a call this weekend to chat, if you're free. Or we can discuss via email. 

BV: I have time for one more comment. 'Mark was late for work because she was caught in traffic.' If I heard that I would ask, "Who was the female in question and what did her getting caught in traffic have to do with Mark's being late for work?"

Your philosopher friend should politely tell his employer that his preferred pronouns are those of standard English and that, while he is willing to tolerate the linguistic innovations of others, he expects toleration in return. If his tolerance is met with intolerance, then he should politely remind the intolerant about who has the guns.

Is 'Monkey Pox' Racist?

Substack latest.

Short, sweet, and lethal. Match grade argumentative ammo for your encounters with your leftist pals.

Left, Right, Gender, and Sex

There is nothing in the graphic below to disagree with, although more could be said. But one quibble: The correct word is not 'gender,' but 'sex.' Gender is a grammatical category first and foremost. But it is not unreasonable to allow a widening of the term to cover certain social roles that one's sex fits one to play.  So if you want to talk about gender roles, go right ahead. One such is the firefighter role.  This is a social role typically filled by biological males, and for good reason. Men make better firefighters than women due to their  greater physical strength, an attribute grounded in their sex, which is a biological category.  That men are physically stronger than women is a generic statement, and such a statement, since it is not a universal affirmative, cannot be refuted by adducing cases in which some woman is stronger than some man.

So it is entirely natural and unsurprising that men are 'over-represented' among firefighters. You would have to be in the grip of the 'equity' delusion to think that there is something wrong with this 'over-representation.' The term is here being used in its factual or non-normative sense. It is a mark of the muddled to confuse factual and normative uses of terms. There are proportionally more male firefighters than female. This is a 'feature' grounded in biological  reality not a 'bug' introduced by 'sexists.' It is a fact that does not need fixing.

Wokesters are social constructivists gone wild. No doubt there are social constructs. For example, textbooks of biology are social constructs. They would not exist if social animals such as ourselves did not exist and did not interact socially to produce them and to consume them. Biology itself is a cooperative social enterprise, and, as such, a social construct.  Just don't confuse biology with the biotic, or, in general, the study of some range of natural  phenomena with the natural phenomena studied.  Biology is a social construct, but the biologists we are familiar with are all of them human animals and therefore not social constructs.

It should be obvious that not everything could be a social construct. Life itself, as a necessary precondition of all social constructing, cannot itself be a social construct.  The same goes for the abiotic stratum that undergirds the biotic. Could the social constructors themselves be social constructs? Whose? Who constructs the constructors? Either a vicious infinite regress arises, or you must accept the nonsense of social constructivist bootstrapping: one socially constructs oneself. And note that such  self-construction could not be social if others did not help with the task. This adds a further layer of absurdity. If my self-construction requires your help, and yours mine, then we must first exist non-socially in order to socially construct each other. But then I am not, at bottom, a social construct.

And then there is the fact that, before human beings came along, there already was sexual polarity in plants and animals.  Will you seriously maintain that there was no such sexual polarity before humans made the scene and started doing botany and biology? 

If you think about all of this carefully, you should be able to see the absurdity of the idea of 're-imagining' (as a wokester might say) what is natural and both logically and temporally antecedent to the social as a social construct. The world cannot be social construction 'all the way down.'

I cannot explain it now in any detail, but this woke social constructivism, which issues in such lunacies as that babies on birth are 'assigned' their sex, is a particularly virulent and degenerate form of metaphysical idealism according to which reality is mind-made. This idealist motif has coherent articulations, but woke social constructivism is not one of them. 

Why are Women 'Over-Represented' among Realtors?

Here is my Substack answer to the title question together with a healthy serving of conceptual analysis as part of  my ongoing quest to disembarrass sad wokeheads and Dementocrats of their fatuities, fallacies, and overall intellectual feculence. ('Feculence' as you may know is from feces.)  I am being polite. I am showing some 'class.' 

But here is something very important for you to know.

In the political sphere, and not just there, the ability to kick ass is far more important than class. The first value clearly trumps the second. It is a mark of a RINO not to understand this.

So I predict that, even if the Republicans gain control of both the House and the Senate come November, they will not deploy their majorities in an effective way against their political enemies. Little will get done to reverse the assault on the Republic. And that is because they, as a group and because of the large number of RINOs, do not have the civil courage to punch back in the manner in which they are punched at. 

Trump tried to teach them how to fight, but they ignored his clear message, or, more likely, they simply lack the civil courage to implement it.  Of the four cardinal virtues, courage is the most difficult to display. For it, unlike the other three, exacts a high cost.  I myself lack the courage, not to mention the social skills, to enter the political arena. I'm Italian, a lover not a fighter -- until pushed to the wall.

In any case, no true philosopher could consider the political the locus of ultimate reality.

Word of the Day: Cack-Handed

Substack latest.

Short. Entertaining. Makes important points about language and male-female relations.  Improve your vocabulary. Read it!

Leftists, especially those of the 'woke'-Orwellian stripe, do not want you to have a large vocabulary. They do not want you to be able to think in a nuanced manner. 

I Know My Limits

I know my limits, but I also know that I have limits that I don't know.   Complete self-knowledge would require both knowledge of my known limits and knowledge of my unknown limits. Complete self-knowledge, therefore, is impossible. 

(Note how 'I' is used above.  It is not being used as the first-person singular pronoun. It is being used as a universal quantifier. As above used, 'I' does not have an antecedent; it has substituends (linguistic items) and values (non-linguistic items). The above use of 'I' is a legitimate use, not a misuse.)

On 'Stuff' and 'Ass'

A Substack language rant. Excerpt:

'Ass' is another word gaining a currency that is already excessive. One wonders how far it will go. Will 'ass' become an all-purpose synecdoche? Run your ass off, work your ass to the bone, get your ass out of here . . . ask a girl's father for her ass in marriage? In the expression, 'piece of ass' the reference is not to the buttocks proper, but to an adjoining area. 'Ass' appears subject to a peculiar semantic spread. It can come to mean almost anything, as in 'haul ass,' which means to travel at a high rate of speed. I don't imagine that if one were hauling donkeys one could make very good time. So how on earth did this expression arise? (I had teenage friends who could not refer to a U-Haul trailer except as a U-Haul-Ass trailer.)

The Orwellian Abuse of Approbatives: 'Democracy'

An approbative word or phrase is one the conventional use of which indicates an approving or appreciative attitude on the part of the speaker or writer.  The opposite is a pejorative.  'Democracy' and 'racism' as currently used  in the USA and elsewhere in the Anglosphere are examples of the former and the latter respectively. If we distinguish connotation from denotation, we can say that approbatives have an axiologically positive, and pejoratives an axiologically negative, connotation. 

Approbatives are like honorifics, except that the latter term is standardly used in reference to persons.

You will have noticed by now that the hard Left, which has come to dominate the once-respectable Democrat Party, has become infinitely abusive of the English language as part of their overall strategy of undermining what it has taken centuries to build. They understand that the subversion of language is the mother of all subversion.

And so these termitic Orwellians take the word 'democracy,' and while retaining its approbative connotation, (mis)use it to denote the opposite of its conventional referent. They use it to mean the opposite of what it standardly or conventionally means.  What they mean by it is either oligarchy or in the vicinity thereof. Hillary Clinton, for example, regularly goes on about "our democracy." But of course, in violation of the Inclusion plank in the Diversity, Equity, Inclusion  (DEI) platform, "our democracy" does not include what Hillary calls "deplorables" or what Barack Obama calls "clingers." Whom does it include? Well, her and her globalist pals.

A clever piece of linguistic chicanery. Take a word or phrase with a positive connotation and then apply the Orwellian inversion algorithm. Use 'democracy' in such a way that it excludes the people.

Crossposted at Substack.

'Infra Dig'

Can you dig it? Substack latest.

'Unthinkable' Used Thoughtlessly

People say that such-and-such is 'unthinkable.' An electromagnetic pulse, for example, one that destroys the power distribution grid, would be a calamity in comparison to which the COVID-19 pandemic would pale into insignificance. An EMP event is said to be 'unthinkable.' And yet we are now thinking about it. What one thinks about can be thought about, and is therefore thinkable. So the calamity in question is precisely not 'unthinkable.' Nor is it 'unimaginable.' I can imagine it and so can you. People use these expressions because they thoughtlessly repeat what they hear other people say. That's my explanation. Do you have a better one?

 

Not every test is a litmus test. So why do people refer to any old test as a litmus test? Same explanation. Not every record is a track record. Not every list is a laundry list.  I could continue with the examples. And you hope I won't. Don't be a linguistic lemming. The mind you save may be your own.

 

Language matters. The subversion of language is the mother of all subversion. 

 

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Word of the Day: Assuasive

Merriam-Webster: soothing, calming. Example: "Like all good listeners, he has a way of attending that is at once intense and assuasive: the supplicant feels both nakedly revealed and sheltered, somehow, from all possible judgment." (David Foster Wallace)

I am a good listener, but far more intense than assuasive.

You have the verb 'assuage' in your vocabulary; now add the adjective 'assuasive.'

Don't Talk Like a 'Liberal'

When you do, you validate their obfuscatory and question-begging jargon.

 

For example, leftists believe in something they call 'hate speech.' As they use the phrase, it covers legitimate dissent.

 

It is foolish for a conservative to say that he is for 'hate speech,' or that 'hate speech' is protected speech. Dennis Prager has been known to make this mistake. We conservatives are for open inquiry and the right to dissent. Put it that way, in positive terms.  

 

If leftists take our dissent as 'hateful,' that is their presumably willful misapprehension. We shouldn't validate it.

 

Don't let leftists frame the debate. He who controls the terms of the debate controls the debate.

Word of the Day: Prodromal

From 'prodrome,' a premonitory symptom of disease.

Etymology: French, literally, precursor, from Greek prodromos, from pro- before + dromos act of running, racecourse — more at PRO-, DROMEDARY

Example of use found at Diogenes' Middle Finger:

Now we are engaged in a prodromal civil war, and American constitutional democracy is the contest’s prize. The universities and the media, always diseased, have progressed from mischief into depravity. Various states are attempting to mandate that their schools teach critical race theory — that is racism — and elected leaders on the coasts have resigned their cities to thuggery and ruin. - David Mamet - Playwright and Screenwriter

'Constitutional democracy' is right, not 'democracy'! Tucker Carlson take note.

Never use 'democracy' sans phrase! 

A Pronoun Puzzle: "He who hesitates is lost"

Grammatically, 'he' is a pronoun. Pronouns have antecedents. What is the antecedent of 'he' in the folk saying supra? It does not have one. 

A Yogi Berra type joke is in the offing. We're hiking. We must go forward; we can't go back. But the path forward is perilous and requires a bold step over an abysmal chasm. I say, "He who hesitates is lost!" My hiking partner, a smartass, replies, "You mean Biden?"

My witticism is modelled on a genuine Yogi Berra joke. You are asked what time it is and you reply, "You mean now?"

'He' in the folk saying is grammatically a pronoun, but it does not function logically as one. How then does it function?

I say it functions as a universal quantifier. Not like a universal quantifier, but as one. Thus:

For any x, if x hesitates, then x is lost.

This strikes me as clear as day. Rather less clear is the role of the first-person singular pronoun in 'I think, therefore I am.'  Does 'I' in this context have an antecedent, and if it does, what or who is the antecedent?   Anythng you say will land you in the aporetic frying pan. Or so I could argue.

Later.

'Handsome Devil'

I visited a couple of aunts some years back. As I entered her house, Aunt Ada exclaimed, "My, you are a handsome devil!" Aunt Margaret said to Ada, "Don't call him a devil!" But of course Ada did no such thing; Margaret failed to appreciate that 'handsome' in 'handsome devil' in this context and almost all others functions as an alienans adjective.

For more examples and a definition see my adjectives category.

The Left's Verbal Theft

A lot of conservatives are making the mistake of surrendering perfectly good words to the Left. This is another indication that conservatives in the end conserve little or nothing. The fact that leftists use and misuse 'narrative' or 'problematic' or 'toleration' or 'diversity' or 'equity' does not make these words radioactive. Or take 'spiritual' and 'spirituality.' The fact that some airhead says that she is not religious but spiritual is no reason for a conservative to avoid 'spiritual.' Nor does the Left own such phrases as 'toxic masculinity' and 'existential threat.' Are you seriously going to maintain that there are no instances of machismo that are not reasonably described as 'toxic'?

 

Consider the sad case of Cynthia Garcia. This foolish middle-aged woman and mother thought it would be fun to party with the Hells (no apostrophe!) Angels in their Mesa, Arizona clubhouse of a Saturday night. They of course demanded sex; she showed disrespect, even after they stomped her, and so they brutally murdered her. There are differing accounts of the exact details.  But the upshot was brutal. Two of them stabbed her to death and attempted to cut her head off,  dumping her remains in the desert proximal to the Rio Salado shooting range.

 

Of course, normal masculine behavior is not toxic, and the feminization of boys is a serious threat to social stability and the survival of the Republic. But just as a Nazi is no cure for a commie, a biker brute is no cure for a feminized boy.

 

The subversion of language is the mother of all subversion. 

 

You should no more allow the Left's theft of perfectly good English words than you should allow their question-begging and question-burying coinages such as 'Islamophobia' and 'homophobia' and 'transphobia.' I have gone over this many times and I am not in the mood to repeat myself.  Enough compromising with our political enemies; resist them.

 

Filed under Language Matters which, after I hit 'post,' will contain 554 entries.  There is plenty of ammo here for those of you with the cojones to take up the fight.

'The Wrong Side of History'

This is a re-thought and  much improved version of a post that first appeared on this weblog on 15 May 2012. 

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I once heard a prominent conservative tell an ideological opponent that he was 'on the wrong side of history.' This question I want to raise is whether this is a phrase that a self-aware and self-consistent conservative should use. For if there is a 'wrong side,' then there must be a 'right side.' 'Right side of history,' however, suggests that history is moving in a certain direction, toward various outcomes, and that this direction and these outcomes are somehow justified or rendered good by the actual tendency of events. But how could the mere fact of a certain drift justify or render good or attach any positive normative predicate to that drift and its likely outcomes? For example, we are moving in the United States, and not just here, towards more and more intrusive government, more and more socialism, less and less individual liberty. This has certainly been the trend from FDR on regardless of which party has been in power. Would a self-aware conservative want to say that the fact of this drift justifies it or renders it good?  Presumably not.

'Everyone today believes that such-and-such.' It doesn't follow that such-and-such is true. 'Everyone now does such-and-such.' It doesn't follow that such-and-such is morally permissible.  'The direction of events is towards such-and-such.' It doesn't follow that such-and-such is a good or valuable outcome. (If a mountaineer is sliding into the abyss and fails to self-arrest, would you say that he is headed in a salutary direction?) In each of these cases there is arguably if not obviously a logical mistake. One cannot validly infer truth from belief, ought from is, values from facts, desirability* from the fact of being desired, or progress from change.  Progress is change for the better. But that a change is for the better is not validly inferable from the change qua change.

One who opposes the drift toward a socialist surveillance state, one in which 'equity' (equality of outcome) is enforced by state power, a drift that is accelerating, and indeed jerking under President Biden, could be said to be on the wrong side of history only on the assumption that history's direction is the right direction. Now an Hegelian might believe that.  Marxists and 'progressives' might believe it. Alexandre Kojève reads Hegel as claiming  that the master-slave dialectic in the Swabian's Phenomenology of Spirit (ch. 4, sec. A) is the motor of history, which, I note, clearly anticipates the opening paragraph of the Communist Manifesto:

The history of all hitherto existing society is the history of class struggles. Freeman and slave, patrician and plebeian, lord and serf, guild-master and journeyman, in a word, oppressor and oppressed, stood in constant opposition to one another, carried on an uninterrupted, now hidden, now open fight, a fight that each time ended, either in a revolutionary reconstitution of society at large, or in the common ruin of the contending classes.

Logically prior to the question of what the motor of history is, is the question of whether it has one. If history has a motor, it lies deeper than the succession of events and any empirical regularities the events display; it lies deeper as the driver of these events and the ground of their patterns and regularities.  The Hegelians and the Marxists, despite their important differences, have their answer: there is a motor but the motor is immanent, not transcendent, and the end state will be attained in the here and now, in this material world by human collective effort, and not hereafter by transcendent divine agency.  Crudely put, the 'pie' is not in 'the sky' but in the future. This is what is meant by the immanentization of the eschaton.  

For Kojève and his fellow travellers, 'right side of history' has a legitimate use: you are on the right side if you are hip to, and in line with, history's internal 'logic,' dialectical to be sure, a logic driven by a spiritual Logos in Hegel, which is a secularization and immanentization of the triune God of Christianity, but in Marx arguably the same except stood on its head and materialized.  You are on the 'right side' which is also the left side if you march in step with the beat of  the internal 'drummer' toward the immanent eschaton whereat all alienation and class distinctions will be at an end, a state in which the State will have withered away (V. I. Lenin), all coercion will cease, a state  in which all will be free and equal, mutual recognition and respect will be universal and humanity will realize itself fully als Gattungswesen, as species-being, and embrace this life, this world, and its finitude, making it so beautiful and so satisfying that there will be no hankering for the nonexistent hinter worlds of the metaphysicians and the religionists. The friends of finitude will achieve such a rich state of self-realization that their finite lives, albeit extended somewhat by technological means,  will suffice and there will be no longer any craving for nirvanic narcotics or religious opiates.

So while the mere fact of a certain empirically discernible drift of events does not justify or render good the drift and its probable outcomes, a drift driven by a hidden motor might. This brings us to the theocon, the theistic conservative. 

Many if not most conservatives are theists and theists typically believe in divine providence. God provides and he fore-sees (pro-videre). God created the world and he created it with a plan in mind. The teleology is built in and not up for decision by such frail reeds as ourselves. He created it for a purpose and in particular he created us for a purpose. For theists God is the hidden motor, the Prime Mover, and First Cause, both efficiently and finally. God is Alpha, Omega, and everything in between. He caused the world to exist ex nihilo and he gave it its purpose which in our case is to  share in his life and to achieve our ultimate felicity and highest good thereby.  A theistic conservative, then, has a legitimate use for 'right side of history.' You are the right side when you submit to the divine plan and live you life in accordance with it.  You are on the wrong side when you don't, in rebellion and glorifying your own miserable ego.

To conclude, I see two ways of attaching a legitimate sense to the expressions 'right side of history' and 'wrong side of history.'  One is theistic, the other atheistic, as above.

I now refer you to Malcolm Pollack's effort in a similar direction. We pretty much agree, except that he doesn't credit the atheist option which is a secularization and immanentization of the theistic.  I am a theist myself, for the record. 

Is the secularization a betrayal, a fulfillment, or a disaster which is the inevitable consequence of the false Judeo-Christian starting point?

Before logging off, I would like to recommend to Malcolm and the rest of you Leo Strauss, On Tyranny, which includes the Strauss-Kojeve correspondence and a very clear and informative introduction.

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*Note the ambiguity of 'desirable' as between 'worthy of being desired' and 'able to be desired.' I intend the former.

Saturday Night at the Oldies: Some 1940's Proto-Rock

Freddie Slack and Will Bradley Trio (1940), Down the Road A Piece.

If you like to boogie woogie, I know the place.
It's just an old piano and a knocked out bass.
The drummer man's a guy they call Eight Beat Mack.
And you remember Doc and old "Beat Me Daddy" Slack.

Man it's better than chicken fried in bacon grease
Come along with me, boys, it's just down the road a piece.

Ella Mae Morse (1945), The House of Blue Lights.  Shows that 'square' and 'daddy-o' and 'dig' were already in use in the '40s.  I had been laboring under the misapprehension that this patois first surfaced in Beat/Beatnik circles in the '50s.

The Meaning of 'Liberal' in South Africa

David Benatar, The Fall of the University of Capetown (Politicsweb Publishing, 2021, p. v, emphasis added):

Whereas in the United States it [the word 'liberal'] is often used as a term of opprobrium by those on the right to refer to those on the (or their!) left, in South Africa it is regularly used as a pejorative term by those on the far left in a way that connotes 'right-winger.' Real [classical] liberals are neither on the far right nor the far left of the political spectrum. They are liberals because they support (individual) liberty. This goes hand in hand with non-racialism, and tolerance of views one dislikes.  Liberalism also requires toleration of practices that are either harmless or which harm only those who consent to them. These liberal ideals tend to be antithetical  to those on the ends of the political spectrum. Indeed, both the right and the left have more in common with one another than either would like to admit. It is sometimes difficult to distinguish them.

I call my brand of conservatism American conservatism. I take it to include a sizable admixture of what Benatar calls real and what I call classical liberalism. American conservatism is neither a far right nor a far left position. As I envisage it, American conservatism rejects all of the following: integralism, and indeed any system that attempts to impose by state power a substantive conception of the good for man; alternative right race-based white nationalism; libertarianism with its overemphasis on the economic; all forms of socialism and leftism.

I have various posts that fill in some of the details. I'll find them later, perhaps.  It's Saturday night and time for a drink.  

"Trust, but Verify!"

I said:

Perhaps the greatest diplomatic line of all time was uncorked by Ronald Reagan in his confrontation with Mikhail Gorbachev, he of the Evil Empire: "Trust, but verify!"

The Reagan riposte makes sense diplomatically but not semantically. If I trust you, I do not verify what you say or do. If you think otherwise, then you do not know  what 'trust' means.

Dmitri  replies:

This expression "Trust, but verify" is, among other things, a literal translation of a very popular saying in Russian. I am sure this is part of the reason Reagan used it.

 

And you can trust and still verify, because the person or institution you trust could be worth your overall trust, but err on occasion. In short, you can understand the meaning of trust and, at times, verify a trusted party at the same time.

I counter-respond:

I didn't know that the expression translates a popular Russian saying. Thank you for informing me of that.

On the point of disagreement, I persist in my contention.  Set aside institutions and other objects of  potential trust/distrust. Consider an interpersonal situation with exactly two persons. Suppose that person A says to person B: "I trust you with respect to your assertion that p, but I must verify that p." This was the situation between Reagan and Gorbachev. Gorbachev had made a specific assertion and Reagan said in effect that he trusted Gorbachev's veracity but but still had to make sure that what Gorbachev had asserted was true.

That is what I am claiming makes no semantic or conceptual sense. If I trust that what you are saying is true, then I cannot consistent with that trust verify what you are saying. I am making a simple point about the concept trust.  If you were to deny that there is a unitary concept trust expressible in different languages, then I would say that I am making a simple point about the meaning of  the word 'trust' in English. 

But if I deem a person overall trustworthy with respect to what he asserts, I may, consistent with that overall trust, tell the person that I need to verify a specific assertion that the person makes. So in the end I don't think Dmitri and I are in disagreement.

Various philosophical questions wait in the wings. What is the difference between the meaning or sense of a word and the concept the word expresses, assuming the word, on an occasion of use,  expresses a concept? What is a concept? Are concepts mind-dependent? Are they all general, or are some irreducibly singular?  Should we distinguish between the concept trust and the essence of trust where essences are mind-independent ideal or abstract objects that exist or subsist in splendid independence of minds and language? Is a linguistic prescriptivist committed to the existence of essences?   

The Erasure of History at the University of Leicester

Another incident in the suicide of the West. And in England of all places. The battle appears to be lost in the mother country and in the rest of the Anglosphere with the exception of the United States of America. Here is where the West will make its last stand, or else begin to turn the tide. 

Is the meaning of 'last stand' such that the defenders, fighting against overwhelming odds, always lose? That is what 'last' implies. Custer's last stand was the end of Custer. He stood no more. Or does the meaning of the phrase allow for the defenders to sometimes prevail? Onkel Ludwig taught us that meaning is use. I take it to be an empirically verifiable lexical point that the phrase is used in both ways.  Sometimes linguistic prescriptivists such as your humble correspondent have to acquiesce in the ways of a wayward world. Kicking against the pricks is somethimges pointless. I am tempted to dilate upon 'kicking against the pricks,' but I will resist temptation. 

Jillian Becker: A Terrorism Archive Lost:

If one of the primary purposes of a university is to protect and hand on intellectual heritage, commitment to archive preservation is fundamental to that purpose. Perhaps the reason why the University of Leicester did not protect the IST archive was because it is now committed to erasing the past. An indication of this is in reports that the administration wants to “decolonize” the teaching of English literature by eliminating medieval studies (so Chaucer, inter alia, is to be removed from the curriculum), and “focus on ethnicity, sexuality and diversity,”

Ceasing to teach something does not necessarily entail the destruction of materials used for teaching it. Is it likely that a university entrusted with documents of national and international importance would deliberately discard them because they are no longer useful to its teaching? Would it choose to waste the fruits of long, hard, even dangerous effort exerted against a malign force threatening the Western world? Sadly, I suspect it would if it came to believe that the Western world was systemically at fault and needed to be transformed. But if therefore it would no longer protect documents of public importance, should it still be funded with public money?

The loss of an archive, whether by negligence or decision, is a calamity. To lose it by negligence is barbarously callous. To discard it deliberately is an act of intellectual vandalism, the equivalent of book-burning. If, in either case, a university is responsible, the disgrace must leave a permanent stain on its reputation.

Jillian Becker self portrait (early 1970s)

Other photographs of Jillian Becker

Diversity Worth Having

Diversity worth having presupposes a principle of unity that controls the diversity. Diversity must be checked and balanced by the competing value of unity, a value with an equal, if not greater, claim on our respect.

 

Example. ONE language only in the public sphere makes possible MANY voices to be heard and understood by all. To communicate our differences we need a common language.

 

Talking with one another is preferable to shooting at each other. Polyglot 'cultures' are more conducive to shooting than to talking.

 

I predict more shooting and less talking as the nation declines 'thanks' to the destructive leftists who have infiltrated the once-respectable Democrat Party.

 

Gun and ammo are flying off the shelves, even in the toniest enclaves of the bien-pensant:

 

In Beverly Hills, even the purchase of a firearm comes with certain…expectations. The city’s only gun store, Beverly Hills Guns, is a “concierge service” by appointment only, for a largely affluent clientele. And business is booming.

Since opening in July 2020, the store has seen upscale residents from Santa Monica to the Hollywood Hills increasingly in a panic following several high-profile smash-and-grab and violent home invasion robberies. The apparent siege has brought in a daily stream of anxious business owners and prominent actors, real estate moguls and film execs, says owner Russell Stuart. Most are arming themselves for the first time.

“This morning I sold six shotguns in about an hour to people that say, ‘I want a home defense shotgun,’” says Stuart, whose store is discreetly located in a Beverly Hills office building, with no sign on the doors, down the hall from a diamond dealer. “Everyone has a general sense of constant fear,  which is very sad. We’re used to this being like Mayberry.”

You know things are getting bad when the super-rich who can easily afford the best in private security are buying firearms. 

Honor thy Mother

Our biological mothers bore us into the world of matter; the mother tongue into the realm of objective spirit. Both deserve respect and honor, the latter more so than the former inasmuch as the spirit is higher than the flesh.  What the mother tongue  receives from the matricidal Left is neglect and abuse and Orwellian subversion and distortion. Ingratitude and retromingency are marks of the leftist. To the Left's retromingency in point of pissing on the past I now add the retromingency of the Left's pollution of the headwaters of its expressivity.

On Acquiring a Large Vocabulary

But how useful in a society of semi-literates?

Substack latest.

It's a House, not a Home

Don't talk like a realtor unless you are one.  And even then . . .

Why Women are 'Over-Represented' among Realtors

Have you ever wondered why women are 'over-represented' among realtors? It is because they excel men when it comes to conciliation and mediation.  I don't mean this as a snarky put-down of the distaff contingent.  I mean it as praise.  And if females do not take it as praise, are they not assuming the superiority of male virtues? 

It is a non sequitur to think that if the Xs are 'under-represented' among the Ys, then the Xs must have been the victims of some unjust discrimination.  Men are 'under-represented' among massage therapists, but the explanation is obvious and harmless: men like to have their naked bodies rubbed by women in dark rooms, but women feel uncomfortable having their naked bodies rubbed by men in dark rooms.   It is not as if there is some sort of sexism, 'institutional' or individual, that keeps men out of massage therapy. If you retort that some women do like massages from men not their intimates, then you don't understand generic statements.  

Blacks are 'over-represented'  in the NFL and the NBA. Is that because of some racism 'institutional' or individual, that keeps whitey out?  Of course not. Blacks are better than whites at football and basketball.  Jews are just terrible.  Chess is their athletics.  Jews dominate in the chess world.  Is that because the goyim have been suppressed?  

Does my talk of blacks and Jews make me a racist and an anti-Semite ?  To a self-enstupidated leftist or 'progressive,'  yes.  For they are too often incapable, or have rendered themselves incapable, of distinguishing between a statement whose content is race and a racist statement.  If you accuse me of retailing stereotypes, I will point out that some stereotypes have a basis in reality.  Leftists tend to embrace negative and groundless stereotypes about stereotypes.

I am treading a via media between the excesses of the neo-reactionaries (NRs) and the even worse excesses of the leftists. My challenge to the NRs:  How can you fail to see the importance of equal treatment of men and women?  One NR of my acquaintance claimed that the notion of equality of opportunity is vacuous. Why?  To require that applicants for a job not be discriminated against on the basis of race, sex, or creed, is not vacuous.  It has a definite content. That it could use some spelling out is not to the point.  

What I mean is this. Some creeds are such that people who hold them must be discriminated against. Suppose you are an orthodox Muslim: you subscribe to Islamic law (sharia) and hold that it takes precedence  over the U. S. Constitution and Anglo-American law. You ought to be discriminated against.  You ought not be allowed to immigrate into the USA.  The U. S. Constitution is not a suicide pact.  

Language and Intellectual Honesty

Precision in the use of language is the beginning of intellectual honesty.

The Leftist as Denier of Distinctions

The 'woker' the leftist, the broader the scope of the denial of distinctions necessary for clear thought and rationally informed action. Here are just some of them:

• citizen-noncitizen
• asylum-illegal entry
• legal immigration-illegal immigration
• immigration-emigration. This distinction elided by talk of 'migrants.' 
• hate-dissent
• sex-gender
• dissenting speech-violence
• tax-penalty
• buy back-confiscation
• et cetera ad nauseam.

Propaganda

Despite the term's largely pejorative connotation, propaganda is not by definition false or misleading or harmful. Propaganda is anything of a verbal or pictorial nature that is propagated to influence behavior. Propaganda can consist of truths or falsehoods, good advice or bad, exhortation to good behavior or subornation of bad. Anti-smoking and anti-drug messaging are propaganda but the messages are salutary. Leftist propaganda is destructive, as recent events make abundantly clear,  while conservative propaganda inspires ameliorative action.

Don't Surrender to the Left on Language

The Left's destructiveness extends even unto language. The subversion of language is the mother of all subversion. Punch back against the linguistic hijackers. Here's some argumentative ammo from Peter Kreeft's Socratic Logic, 3rd ed., p. 36, n. 1:

 

The use of the traditional inclusive generic pronoun "he" is a decision of language, not of gender justice. There are only six alternatives. (1) We could use the grammatically misleading and numerically incorrect "they." But when we say "one baby was healthier than the others because they didn't drink that milk," we do not know whether the antecedent of "they" is "one" or "others," so we don't know whether to give or take away the milk. Such language codes could be dangerous to baby's health. (2) Another alternative is the politically intrusive "in-your-face" generic "she," which I would probably use if I were an angry, politically intrusive, in-your-face woman, but I am not any of those things. (3) Changing "he" to "he or she" refutes itself in such comically clumsy and ugly revisions as the following: "What does it profit a man or woman if he or she gains the whole world but loses his or her own soul? Or what shall a man or woman give in exchange for his or her soul?" The answer is: he or she will give up his or her linguistic sanity. (4) We could also be both intrusive and clumsy by saying "she or he." (5) Or we could use the neuter "it," which is both dehumanizing and inaccurate. (6) Or we could combine all the linguistic garbage together and use "she or he or it," which, abbreviated, would sound like "sh . . . it." I believe in the equal intelligence and value of women, but not in the intelligence or value of "political correctness," linguistic ugliness, grammatical inaccuracy, conceptual confusion, or dehumanizing pronouns.

What a sexist Neanderthaler this Kreeft fellow is! Send him to a re-education camp!

 

 

Einstein 'Quotation' Abuse

Written 7 March 2005.

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Senator Charles Grassley (R) was on C-SPAN this morning talking about Social Security reform among other things. He attributed the following quotation to Albert Einstein: "Compound interest is the only miracle in the world."

Did Einstein say that? I rather doubt it. It is too stupid a thing for Einstein to say. And there is no room in his worldview for miracles. There is nothing miraculous about compound interest, and there is no 'magic' in it either. It is very simple arithmetic. Suppose you invest $2000 at 10% compounded annually. At the end of the first year, you have $2,200. How much do you have at the end of the second year, assuming no additions or subtractions from the principal? $2,400? No. What you have is $2,200 + 220 = $2, 420. Where did the extra twenty bucks come from? That is interest on interest. It is the interest on interest on interest . . . that make compounding a powerful tool of wealth enhancement.

But there is nothing miraculous or magical about it. Words mean things. Use them wisely.

And don't look to Einstein for advice on personal finance. 

True For and True

There are expressions that should be avoided by those who aim to think clearly and to promote clear thinking in others. Expressions of the form, ‘true for X’ are prime examples. In a logically sanitized world, the following would be verboten: ‘true for me,’ ‘true for you,’ ‘true for Jews,’ ‘true for Arabs,’ ‘true for the proletariat,’ ‘true for the bourgeoisie,’ ‘true for our historical epoch,’ and the like. Such semantic prophylaxis would disallow such sentences as ‘That may be true for you but it is not true for me.’

The trouble with expressions like these is that they blur the distinction between truth and belief. To say that a proposition p is true for S is just to say that S believes or accepts or affirms that p. This is because one cannot believe a proposition without believing it to be true. Of course, S’s believing that p, and thus S’s believing that p is true, does not entail that p is true. This is obvious if anything is. There are true beliefs and false beliefs, and a person’s holding a belief does not make it true. If you want to say that S believes that p, then say that. But don’t say that p is true for S unless you want to give aid and comfort to alethic relativism, the false and pernicious doctrine that truth (Gr. aletheia) is relative.  'Woke' folk love such obfuscatory expressions, but you don't want to give aid and comfort to them, do you?


A belief is always someone’s belief. This relativity of beliefs to believers explains why one person’s believing that p and another person’s believing that ~p is unproblematic. But truth is non-relative, or absolute. This is why it cannot be the case that both p and ~p. If you have truth, you have something absolute. There is no such thing as relative truth. Relative truth is not truth any more than negative growth is growth or a decoy duck is a duck or artificial leather is leather or faux marble is marble. In the expression, ‘relative truth,’ ‘relative’ functions as an alienans (as opposed to a specifying) adjective: it alienates or shifts the sense of ‘truth.’ Just as it makes no sense to say that there are two kinds of leather, real and artificial, it makes no sense to say that there are two kinds of truth, relative and absolute. Suppose someone sets out to list the kinds of leather. “Well, you got your horse leather, cow leather, alligator leather, artificial leather, real leather, artificially real leather, naugahyde, Barcalounger covering . . . .” One can see what is wrong with this.

The word ‘absolute’ scares some people. But the only reason I use it is to undo the semantic mischief caused by ‘relative truth’ and ‘true for X.’ In a logically perfect world, it would suffice to say ‘true’ or ‘leather.’ There would be no need to say ‘absolutely true’ or ‘real leather’ – “This here jacket a mahn is REAL leather, boy . . . .” If ‘relative’ and ‘artificial’ are (in the above examples) alienating adjectives, then ‘absolute’ and ‘real’ could be called de-alienating: they restore their rightful senses to words that semantic bandits divested them of.

One reason ‘absolute’ scares people is that it suggests dogmatism and infallibilism. Thus if I say that truth is absolute, some people think I am saying that the propositions I affirm as true I affirm as unquestionably or undeniably true. But that’s to confuse an ontological statement about the nature of truth with an epistemological statement about the way in which I accept the propositions I accept. It is consistent to maintain that truth is absolute while being a fallibilist, where a fallibilist holds that either no proposition held to be true, or no member of some restricted class of propositions held to be true, is known with certainty.

In sum, my point is that ‘true for X’ should be avoided since it gives aid and comfort to the illusion that truth is relative. But why exactly is that an illusion? I’ll leave that question for a separate post.

Four Senses of 'Absurd'

Substack latest.

Montaigne on Why Language Matters

My Substack latest begins like this after a quotation from the Frenchman:

Montaigne's point is mine.  Language matters.  It deserves respect as the vehicle and enabler of our thoughts and — to change the metaphor — the common currency for the exchange of ideas.  To tamper with the accepted meanings of words in order  to secure argumentative or political advantage is a form of cheating.  Ludwig Wittgenstein likened languages to games.  But games have rules, and we cannot tolerate those who change the rules mid-game.  We must demand of our political opponents that they use language responsibly, and engage us on the common terrain of accepted usage.

Assorted other rants, riffs, railings, resistings, and refusals are on my Facebook page.

Conspiracy Theories?

The Language Nazi strikes again.

Substack latest.

'Gun Buy Back'

An obfuscatory Orwellianism! Well, what did you expect from the mendacious mouths of Democrat subversives? Substack latest.

On Looking Up Words

Patrick Kurp of Anecdotal Evidence is a man after my own mold:

When I encounter a new word, lengthy or not, I like to know what it means and where it comes from. I won’t necessarily use it, in writing or speech, but I’ve grown accustomed to plugging holes in my knowledge of the world. Plain speaking is essential but so, on the right occasions, are eloquence and verbal lushness. Part of linguistic effectiveness is sensitivity to context and audience. When it’s not mere showing off, deployment of obscure words adds a pleasurable texture to poetry and prose – one of many reasons we read Shakespeare and Sir Thomas Browne. A gifted writer commands styles and is not limited to one. In addition, what’s obscure or pretentious to you may be familiar and homely to me.

My sentiments exactly.

The blogosphere is vast, and she is deep. If the ordinary modes of human interaction have left you high and dry  in your quest for the like-minded, a little fishing in her vasty deeps should satisfy your needs.

On Prejudice

Hector writes,

It seems he [John McWhorter] is not aware that 'prejudice' does not necessarily require a negative attitude towards that concerning which one is prejudiced and is therefore actually not an ideal replacement for 'racist'. Surely, 'bigoted' would be better.

I agree. 'Prejudice' admits of pejorative but also non-pejorative uses.  'Bigot' does not. Note also that racial prejudice is not the only kind.  That is why a careful writer and speaker does not use 'prejudiced' sans phrase, but always adds the appropriate qualifier unless the context makes the addition unnecessary.

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

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

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

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

Is it Better to Write in Latin or in Anglo-Saxon?

Brand Blanshard, On Philosophical Style (Indiana University Press, 1967; orig. pub. 1954), pp. 46-48. I have broken Blanshard’s one paragraph into three.

The question has often been canvassed whether it is better to write, in the main, in Latin or Anglo-Saxon. There is no doubt that one’s writing will have a different mood or atmosphere as the one element or the other predominates. A critic has suggested that if you never want to fail in dignity, you should always use the generic word rather than the specific; do not say, "If any man strike thee on the right cheek, turn to him the other"; say, "If any injury is done to thy person, do not indulge in retaliation." There is a clear difference in the tone of these two; but you will note that in converting from the specific to the general, the author has automatically translated into Latin.

Both components in the language are important; we could not do without either. But just because philosophy runs to generality, and has therefore a natural bent for the Latin, the reader is the more surprised and pleased when he finds it written in the homelier idiom. Of course many writers have never thought of asking whether their writing is predominantly Roman or Saxon. It might pay them to do so.

Raleigh thought that "imperfect acquaintance with the Latin element in English is the cause of much diffuse writing and mixed metaphor. If you talk nonsense in Saxon you are found out at once; you have a competent judge in every hearer. But put it into Latin and the nonsense masquerades as profundity of abstract thought." Unfortunately, the mask may deceive even oneself.

Merit and 'Equity'

Those who lack merit too often seek to achieve by political means what they cannot achieve by accomplishing something. Leftists aid and abet them. Equality before the law and equality of opportunity are not enough for leftists: they demand equality of outcome.  But this cannot arise naturally due to differences in interests, attitudes, abilities, and work habits among individuals and groups. So equality must be imposed by force by government. Thus arises what leftists now call 'equity.'  The word is an obfuscatory coinage of the sort one can expect from Orwellian language-abusers. The typical leftist is a stealth ideologue. His mendacity disallows an outright call for  equality of outcome or result, and merit be damned; he smuggles his thought into sleepy heads with 'equity' in violation of one of the traditional meanings of the word, namely, "justice according to natural law or right." (Merriam-Webster) "Equity' as used by a leftist language-hijacker has a meaning opposite to the traditional one. Hence my accusation of Orwellianism. 

(As you know, Orwell himself was not Orwellian, but the opposite. Interestingly, to call him Orwellian would itself be Orwellian.)

Among the things 'equity' obfuscates is the contradiction in enforced equality of result: the governmental agencies of enforcement are vastly unequal in power to those upon whom they seek to impose 'equity.'

Of late, Big Tech and 'Woke' Capital have proven to be exceptions  to the old rule: their Croesian* economic clout  allows them to buy off the governmental enforcers.  More on this, anon.

________________

*An adjectival form of 'Croesus.' You know who he was.  After coining the (non-obfuscatory) adjective, a little Internet pokey-wokey searching assures me that the adjective is in use in such publications as WSJ and Forbes.  

"One Man's Datum is Another Man's Theory"

Why do I use 'man'? To exclude women? No, to exclude leftists, both men and women. I believe in equality when it comes to the exclusion of the destructive.

In the '70s, when it first really got going, gender-inclusive language seemed to many a very good thing indeed. It showed a welcoming attitude to the distaff contingent, a salutary openness, a gracious concession to those females who felt excluded by (what in fact are) gender-neutral uses of 'man' and 'he,' not to mention a praiseworthy recognition of the excellence of many women in many hitherto male-dominated fields.  Gentlemen are considerate of the feelings of others even when said feelings are unsupported by reason.   And surely it is true that some women are superior to some men in almost every field.  And surely people should be evaluated as individuals on their merits. 

It all started out with good intentions, and many conservatives went along with it, oblivious to the unforeseen consequences. But now, a half-century later,  we see where it has led. 

And so if I use the sex-neutral 'man' and 'he' and cognates, it is not because I am a knuckle-dragger, one who hails from the valley of Neander, but because I am a man of intelligence, discernment, and high culture, a member of the Coalition of the Reasonable, who is doing his tiny bit to resist and if possible reverse the subversion of our glorious alma mater, our fostering mother, the English language.   I am resisting politicization, tribalism, and the weaponization of language.   Can I ramp up my charge to the allegation that the Left is committing matricide against our dear mother?  I'll essay this later.

For I say unto you my brothers and sisters, the subversion of language is propadeutic to the subversion of thought.  The latter, I fear, is what our enemies intend, the thoughtless being the easier to rule and control.

Wokespeak and Wokespoke

Here:

“Equity.” Equity has now replaced the Civil Rights–era goal of “equality” — a word relegated to vestigial Wokespoke. After 60 years, equality apparently was exposed as a retrograde bourgeois synonym for the loaded “equality of opportunity” rather than a necessary, mandated “equality of result.”

And rightly so, since any and every inequality of outcome can only be explained by something nefarious such as racism or sexism.

Related: The Secularization of the Judeo-Christian Equality Axiom

On Acquiring a Large Vocabulary

How does one acquire a large vocabulary? The first rule is to read, read widely, and read worthwhile materials, especially old books and essays.  The second rule is to look up every word the meaning of which you do not know or are not certain of: don't be lazy. The third rule is to compile vocabulary lists. The fourth rule is to review the lists periodically and put the words to use.  Use 'em or lose 'em.

But what good is a large vocabulary in a society of semi-literates? Not only is it of little use, it can harm relations with regular guys social intercourse with whom can be useful.  Among the latter, one needs to pass oneself off as one of them. Use 'big words' and you will strike them as putting on airs, whether or not you are -- not that the semi-literates would understand this old phrase.

While alive to and appreciative of the good in people, one should not overlook the prevalence of the mean, the paltry, the envious, and the resentful. In this joyous season, and in every season.