Maverick Philosopher

Are There Any Arguments for an Afterlife in the New Testament?

Philoponus writes,

Is there anywhere in the NT where they argue for an afterlife, or is it an assumption shared by all the authors of the NT?  Passages?

Before I answer this question, there are a couple of logically prior questions of considerable interest.  First, is there any argumentation at all in the NT? Second, does Jesus argue for anything, or does he just make gratuitous (unsupported) assertions? (If he was, and eternally is, God, that would be his prerogative, right?) The answer to both questions is in the affirmative, as you can see from the following quotation from Dallas Willard's essay, Jesus as Logician:

(2). Another illustrative case is found in Luke 20:27-40. Here it is the Sadducees, not the Pharisees, who are challenging Jesus. They are famous for rejecting the resurrection (vs. 27), and accordingly they propose a situation that, they think, is a reductio ad absurdum of resurrection. (vss. 28-33) The law of Moses said that if a married man died without children, the next eldest brother should make the widow his wife, and any children they had would inherit in the line of the older brother. In the 'thought experiment' of the Sadducees, the elder of seven sons died without children from his wife, the next eldest married her and also died without children from her, and the next eldest did the same, and so on though all seven brothers. Then the wife died (Small wonder!). The presumed absurdity in the case was that in the resurrection she would be the wife of all of them, which was assumed to be an impossibility in the nature of marriage.

Jesus' reply is to point out that those resurrected will not have mortal bodies suited for sexual relations, marriage and reproduction. They will have bodies like angels do now, bodies of undying stuff. The idea of resurrection must not be taken crudely. Thus he undermines the assumption of the Sadducees that any 'resurrection' must involve the body and its life continuing exactly as it does now. So the supposed impossibility of the woman being in conjugal relations with all seven brothers is not required by resurrection.

Then he proceeds, once again, to develop a teaching about the nature of God--which was always his main concern. Taking a premiss that the Sadducees accepted, he draws the conclusion that they did not want. That the dead are raised, he says, follows from God's self-description to Moses at the burning bush. God described himself in that incident as "the God of Abraham, the God of Isaac, and the God of Jacob." (Luke 20:35 ) The Sadducees accepted this. But at the time of the burning bush incident, Abraham, Isaac and Jacob had been long 'dead', as Jesus points out. But God is not the God of the dead. That is, a dead person cannot sustain a relation of devotion and service to God, nor can God keep covenant faith with one who no longer exists. In covenant relationship to God one lives. (vs. 38) One cannot very well imagine the living God communing with a dead body or a non-existent person and keeping covenant faithfulness with them.

(Incidentally, those Christian thinkers who nowadays suggest that the Godly do not exist or are without conscious life, at least, from the time their body dies to the time it is resurrected, might want to provide us with an interpretation of this passage.)

Luke 20: 27-40 shows three things: there is argumentation in the NT; there is argumentation by Jesus  in the NT; and to Phil's query, there is argument about the afterlife in the NT, in the form of argument against and for the resurrection of the dead.

It is now my turn to ask  questions inasmuch as I am no scholar of the NT, nor do I play one in the blogosphere.

Q1: Did the Sadducees, in rejecting the resurrection of the body, equate that rejection with the rejection of personal immortality tout court?  My guess is yes.

Q2. Did any of the rabbis hold to a personal immortality along Platonic lines? My guess is no.

Nescio ergo blogo.

Finally, was it true that Jesus was a logician? Well he certainly was a not a theorist of logic along the lines of Aristotle or Frege.  Nor is Dallas Willard claiming that  he was. But Willard succeeds in showing that Jesus did argue and make typical logical moves.  The difference is that between logica docens and logica utens if I understand that distinction. It is the difference between logical theory and logical practice.

I first discovered Dallas Willard (1935-2013) as an undergraduate fascinated with Edmund Husserl and  his quest to make of philosophy strenge Wissenschaft. Willard was a Husserl man, and a good one.  Only much later did I discover  that this USC professor was a Christian apologist. May he rest in peace.

Here is my tribute to him.

No Person is Illegal!

That's true. No person is illegal. But who ever said that any person was?

'Woke' knuckleheads  of the sort who  recently criticized Joey B's SOTU reference to Lincoln Laken Riley's murderer as 'an illegal'  regularly give something like the following lame argument:

1) No person is illegal.

2) If any person is justifiably labelled an 'illegal alien,' then some persons are illegal.

Therefore

3) No person is justifiably labelled an 'illegal alien.'

Therefore

4) The expression 'illegal alien' and such related expressions as 'illegal immigrant' must be banned.

There is no need to concern ourselves with the inferential move from (3) to (4).  The argument is unsound because (2) is plainly false.  

To see that it is false you have to be able to distinguish between agent and action, between doer and deed.  'Illegals' are so-called because of their illegal action, namely their illegal entry into the country, and not because they themselves, as agents, are illegal.  

Of course, an appeal to sweet reason will get you nowhere with a leftist; what they understand is the hard fist of unreason.  

As I have said many times, it is unreasonable to expect that all disputes can be settled reasonably.

And yet we have to have reasons at the ready for the reasonable.   

That is why I wrote the above. Besides, I'm a natural-born scribbler who just loves to write, and loves to read what he has written. The life of the mind is its own reward. 

Bare Assertion and Circularity

"There is no evidence because there is no evidence." Thus some shyster defending Hunter Biden against charges of wrongdoing. I am tempted to call this a presuppositional approach to political apologetics. 

A circular argument is an argument, but because the 'diameter' of the circle is zero, it is no better than a bare assertion. It is a bare assertion dressed up as an argument. You could say that it is a bare assertion in argumentative drag. 

You know about bare assertion: quod gratis asseritur, gratis negatur. How delightful the pithy punch of this Latin tag! Unpacked, and replacing the indicative mood with the permissive, the point is that whatever may be gratuitously asserted may be gratuitously denied.  Thus, with no breach of logical propriety, I am allowed to meet your bare assertion with a bare counter-assertion. From a logical point of view, there is nothing to choose between the two. Or as Hegel writes in the Introduction to the Phenomenology of Spirit, ein trockenes Versichern gilt gerade so viel als ein anderes. (Felix Meiner Ausgabe, 66)  ". . . one dry assurance counts exactly as much as  any other." 

So why did the shyster give a circular argument in defense of Joe Biden's scumbag son? Was he so embarrassed to make a palpably false bare assertion that he felt the need to smuggle it in  under argumentative cover?  "See? I'm not just asserting; I'm arguing."

By the way,  "The apple doesn't fall far from the tree," as the old folk saying has it.

Is it Ever Legitimate to Question Motives?

Of course it is. If it weren't I wouldn't do it! You must question the motives of those who give worthless arguments.

A very short Stack topper.

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.

Is it Ever Legitimate to Question Motives?

Absolutely. Suppose someone 'argues' that a photo ID requirement disenfranchises blacks because blacks don't have photo ID. That is a transparently worthless argument, based as it is on a plainly false premise. Once an argument has been refuted it is perfectly legitimate to inquire into the motives of the one giving it. People who give this and similar 'arguments' are out to make the polling places safe for voter fraud. Their 'arguments' are merely a smokescreen to mask their fraudulent intent.

 

What is NOT legitimate is to think that one can bypass the evaluation phase. Arguments stand and fall on their own merits quite apart from the psychology of their producers. Only after an argument has been show to be unsound is one justified in psychologizing the producer of it.

Logical Barbarity

One encounters it in leftists for whom what is not a mere opinion is a 'checkable fact' -- hence 'fact-checking.'  These chucklewits lack the category of the considered opinion. Considered opinions lie between mere opinions and known facts.

It Ain't Necessarily So: On Not Confusing the Modal with the Temporal

If someone says, ‘Houses sell above the asking price around here,’ it is idiomatically correct, if not quite grammatical, to respond, ‘Not necessarily’ or 'It ain't necessarily so.' ‘Not necessarily’ in this context means not always. Its meaning is not modal, but temporal: there are times when the houses sell above asking price, and times when they do not.

 

In ordinary English, the confusion of the temporal ‘always’ with the modal ‘necessarily’ is not often a problem. But in more abstruse contexts, the distinction must be made. Suppose A asks, ‘Why does the universe exist?’ and receives the reply from B, ‘Because it always existed.’ This does not constitute a good reply even if it is true that the universe always existed. The reason is because a thing’s having existed at every past time gives no good answer to the question as to why it exists at all. Even if the past is infinite, the reply is defective. For even if (i) there is no past time at which the universe does not exist, and (ii) no metrically first moment of time, one can still reasonably ask: ‘But why does the universe exist at all?’ ‘Why not no universe?’

If, however, it were said that the universe necessarily exists (cannot not exist), then (assuming the truth of the universe’s necessary existence) that would amount to a good reply to the question as to why it exists. For if X cannot fail to exist, then it makes no clear sense to ask why it exists if one expects an explanans distinct from the explanandum.

Some atheists think themselves quite clever in objecting to theists as follows. ‘You say that God is needed to explain the existence of the universe; but then what explains the existence of God?' The short answer is that God is a necessary being, one that cannot not exist, and that to ask for the explanation of a necessary being makes no sense. This does not end the debate, of course, but it moves it from the sophomoric level up a notch to the ‘junior’ level.

Intellectual Hygiene Matters!

Didn't I tell you to be skeptical? Motorcycle fatality counted as Covid-19 death.

Elementary point of logic: if an F is counted as a G, it does not follow that the F in question is a G.

About Whataboutism

Here at Maverick Philosopher: Strictly Philosophical.

"If it saves just one life, it will have been worth it."

This is a popular but highly dubious pattern of reasoning.  Heather Mac Donald:

Less than 24 hours after California governor Gavin Newsom closed ‘non-essential’ businesses and ordered Californians to stay inside to avoid spreading the coronavirus, New York governor Andrew Cuomo followed suit. ‘This is about saving lives,’ Cuomo said during a press conference on Friday. ‘If everything we do saves just one life, I’ll be happy.’

Heather Mac goes on to raise serious questions about such knee-jerk responses.

Around 40,000 Americans die each year in traffic deaths. We could save not just one life but tens of thousands by lowering the speed limit to 25 miles per hour on all highways and roads. We tolerate the highway carnage because we value the time saved from driving fast more. Another estimated 40,000 Americans have died from the flu this flu season. Social distancing policies would have reduced that toll as well, but until now we have preferred freedom of association and movement.

 

Would a Cut in the Capital-Gains Tax be Racist?

But of course:

Most of us think of the capital-gains tax, if we think about it at all, as a policy that is neutral as regards questions of race or racism. But given that blacks are underrepresented among stockowners, Klein asked, would it be racist to support a capital-gains tax cut? “Yes,” Kendi answered, without hesitation.

I will leave the logical analysis to my readers.

First step: scrutinize 'underrepresented.' What does it mean? Is it perhaps ambiguous? Does it paper over an important distinction?

Second step: find other arguments of the same logical form and see if they have true premises and a false conclusion.

The purpose of such an exercise is to convince oneself that leftists have lost their minds. There is no point in trying to change their minds. They have vacated the plane of reason. 'Dialog' with them is pointless. They simply have to be defeated or 'quarantined.' Let us hope that their defeat or 'quarantine' can be achieved politically.  

We will have to think further about political quarantine.  That may sound ominous, but the contemporary hard Left, as represented in the USA by the Democrat Party, is a cesspool of political pathogens inimical to the health of the body politic.

On the Illicit Use of 'By Definition'

This is an old entry from 2010. It makes a very important point well worth repeating. The battle against language abusers is never-ending.

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What is wrong with the following sentence:  "Excellent health care is by definition redistributional"?  It is from a speech by Donald Berwick,  President Obama's nominee to head the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, speaking to a British audience about why he favors government-run health care.

I have no objection to someone arguing that health care ought to be redistributional.  Argue away, and good luck! But I object strenuously to an argumentative procedure whereby one proves that X is Y by illicit importation of the predicate Y into the definition of X.  But that is exactly what Berwick is doing.  Obviously, it is no part of the definition of 'health care' or 'excellent health care' that it should be redistributional.  Similarly, it is no part of the definition of 'illegal alien' that illegal aliens are Hispanic.  It is true that most of them are, but it does not fall out of the definition.

This is the sort of intellectual slovenliness (or is it mendacity?) that one finds not only in leftists but also in Randians like Leonard Peikoff.  In one place, he defines 'existence' in such a way that nothing supernatural exists, and then triumphantly 'proves' that God cannot exist! See here.

This has all the advantages of theft over honest toil as Bertrand Russell remarked in a different connection.

One more example.  Bill Maher was arguing with Bill O'Reilly one night on The O'Reilly Factor.  O'Reilly came out against wealth redistribution via taxation, to which Maher responded in effect that that is just what taxation is.  The benighted Maher apparently believes that taxation by definition is redistributional. 

Now that is plainly idiotic: there is nothing in the nature of taxation to require that it redistribute wealth.  Taxation is the coercive taking of monies from citizens in order to fund the functions of government.  One can of course argue for progressive taxation and wealth redistribution via taxation.  But those are further ideas not contained in the very notion of taxation.

Leftists are intellectual cheaters.  They will try to bamboozle you.  Listen carefully when they bandy about phrases like 'by definition.'  Don't let yourself be fooled.

"But are Berwick, Peikoff, and Maher really trying to fool people, or are they merely confused?"  I cannot be sure about those specific individuals, but it doesn't much matter.  The main thing is not to be taken in by their linguistic sleight-of-hand whether intentional or unintentional.

 

'Wankerati' and Other Terms of Abuse

I  picked up a new piece of invective from Mark Steyn.

I believe he intends 'wankerati' to be coextensive with 'left-wing commentariat.'  Read his The Turning Point and see if you don't agree. The brilliant polemicist offers up other choice phrases such as "malign carbuncles on the body politic." That's a reference to Di Fi (Dianne Feinstein), et al. And there's "a chamber full of posturing tosspots."

'Tosspot' is a general term of abuse that conjures up drunkard and sot. It puts me in mind of pot-valiant. One is correctly so described if one's courage derives from the consumption of spirits.

There is a use for abuse. It is a mistake to think that verbal abuse ought never to be employed.

Hands are best employed in caressing and blessing. But sometimes they need to be balled into fists and rudely applied to the faces of miscreants. 

If one resorts to verbal abuse and invective one does not always thereby betray a paucity of careful thought informed by fact. Verbal abuse has a legitimate use in application to the self-enstupidated, the willfully ignorant, and those out for power alone regardless of truth and morality. 

It is not reasonable to think that all are amenable to the dulcet tones of sweet reason; some need to be countered with the hard fist of unreason.  

On the other side of the question, one should never resort to invective if one is trying to persuade a reasonable person. One should proceed as calmly as possible.  Any resort to billingsgate will cause the interlocutor to assume that one lacks good reasons.  

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If you studied the above properly you will probably have learned three or four new words.

If you have a large vocabulary you will love my blog; if you don't, you need it.

Be Skeptical of Activists' Claims

Here's a tip for you. 

When some activist or advocate makes a claim, be skeptical and run the numbers, especially when the advocate has a vested interest in promoting his cause.  

Do you remember Mitch Snyder the advocate for the homeless who hanged himself in 1990?  I heard him make a wild claim sometime in the '80s to the effect that the number of homeless in the U. S. was three million.  At the time the population of the U.S. was around 220 million.  So I rounded that up to 300 million and divided by three million.  And then I knew that Snyder's claim was bogus, and probably fabricated by Snyder, as was later shown to be the case.  It is simply not credible that one in 100 in the U. S. is a homeless person.

When Snyder admitted to Ted Koppel that he made up his number, advocates for the homeless defended his tactic as "lying for justice."  See here. A nice illustration of the leftist principle that the end justifies the means.  Obama implemented the principle when he  lied some 30 times about the Affordable Care Act .  But let's not go over that again.

Philosophy needs no social justification. But one of the salutary social byproducts of its study and practice is the honing of one's critical thinking skills.  I am assuming that the philosophy in question is broadly analytic and not the crapulous crapola  of such later Continentals as Derrida.

Fallacious Liberal-Left 'Reasoning' about Race

Heather Mac Donald:

The GAO [General Accounting Office] found that black students get suspended at nearly three times the rate of white students nationally, a finding consistent with previous analyses. The Obama Education and Justice Departments viewed that disproportion as proof of teacher and principal bias. Administration officials used litigation and the threatened loss of federal funding to force schools to reduce suspensions and expulsions radically in order to eliminate racial disparities in discipline. 

The argument is essentially this:

1) Black students get suspended at a higher rate than white students.

Therefore

2) Teachers and principals are biased against black students.

Clearly, this is a howling non sequitur. (Non sequitur is Latin for it does not follow.)  To make the above into a valid argument one would have to add something like the following premise:

0) Black and white students are behaviorally equal: equally well-behaved or equally ill-behaved.

In the presence of (0), the conclusion follows.

But (0) is manifestly false. For support of this claim, see Mac Donald's article:

According to federal data, black male teenagers between the ages of 14 and 17 commit homicide at nearly 10 times the rate of white male teenagers of the same age (the category “white” in this homicide data includes most Hispanics; if Hispanics were removed from the white category, the homicide disparity between blacks and whites would be much higher). That higher black homicide rate indicates a failure of socialization; teen murderers of any race lack impulse control and anger-management skills. Lesser types of juvenile crime also show large racial disparities. It is fanciful to think that the lack of socialization that produces such elevated rates of criminal violence would not also affect classroom behavior. While the number of black teens committing murder is relatively small compared with their numbers at large, a very high percentage of black children—71 percent—come from the stressed-out, single-parent homes that result in elevated rates of crime.

The same pattern of invalid argumentation is found across the Left.  Leftists regularly assume that different groups are empirically equal. They then incorrectly take the fact that there is no equality of outcome as proof that something nefarious was at work whether racism or sexism or ageism.

But what explains the eagerness of leftists to adopt such an obviously false assumption?

I proffer an explanation in The Secularization of the Judeo-Christian Equality Axiom.

Fake News: 18 School Shootings Since January 1, 2018. The Importance of Definition

The question of how many school shootings have occurred in a given place over a given period of time is an empirical question. But to answer the empirical question, one must first have answered a logically prior question, which is non-empirical. This is the conceptual question as to the definition of 'school shooting.' 

What counts as a school shooting? The supervised, safe, Saturday morning on-campus firing of BB guns at targets? The 'discharge' of a pea shooter? The shotgunning of ducks in  a pond on a school's grounds?  The killing of a stray deer with bow and arrow?

Suppose some punk fires a .223 round at a window of a school in the middle of the night when no one is there from an off-campus position. That could be called a school shooting too. A physical part of the school was shot at.

Or let us say that a distraught person commits suicide by shooting himself while seated in a car parked in a lot of what was formerly a school. This is an a actual case that was cited as a 'school shooting'! See linked article infra. Does this count as a school shooting? Not to someone who is intellectually honest.  

Clearly, what most people mean by a school shooting is an attempted mass shooting in a school or on the premises of a school by one or more assailants armed with deadly weapons, a shooting of students or teachers or administrative personnel that causes death or injury.

That definition no doubt needs tweaking, but if we adopt something like it, then, since January 1st we have in these United States more like three, count 'em, three school shootings. Three too many, but even a liberal gun-grabber knows that 3 < 18. 

Across the board, lying leftists bandy about terms without explicit definitions, or with over-broad definitions. They do this willfully to further their destructive agendas. If you are a decent human being you will do your bit to oppose them.

Now go read the Politifact article.

A Simple Point of Logic Journalists Ought to be Aware Of

One often encounters sentences like this one:

There are many arenas in which all ideas are not considered equal.

This example is from a recent piece in Vox. I could give further recent examples, but one is enough. To simplify, consider just the core thought:

All ideas are not considered equal.

Unfortunately it is not entirely clear what the core thought is. For the sentence is ambiguous as between 

1) No ideas are considered equal

and

2) Some ideas are not considered equal.

The thoughts (propositions) expressed are distinct since the first can be false while the second is true. Although it is fairly clear that the author intended (2), a good writer avoids ambiguous constructions unless for some reason he intends them. So don't write sentences of the form

3) All Fs are not Gs 

if you intend say something of the form

4) Some Fs are not Gs.

Write instead sentences of the form

5) Not all Fs are Gs

which, by simple quantifier negation, is equivalent to (4). 

Class dismissed.

Elizabeth Harman's Abortion Argument

A curious new abortion argument by Princeton's Elizabeth Harman is making the rounds. (A tip of the hat to Malcolm Pollack for bringing it to my attention.) It is not clear just what Harman's argument is, but it looks to be something along the following lines:

1) "Among early fetuses there are two very different kinds of beings . . . ."

2) One kind of early fetus has "moral status."

3) The other kind of early fetus does not have "moral status."

4) The fetuses possessing moral status have it in virtue of their futures, in virtue of the fact that they are the beginning stages of future persons.

5) The fetuses lacking moral status lack it in virtue of their not having futures, in virtue of their not being the beginning stages of future persons. 

Therefore

6) If a fetus is prevented from having a future, either by miscarriage or abortion, then the fetus does not have moral status at the time of its miscarriage or abortion. "That's something that doesn't have a future as a person and it doesn't have moral status." (From 5)

7) If a fetus lacks moral status, then aborting it is not morally impermissible.

Therefore

8) " . . . there is nothing morally bad about early abortion."

Some will say that this argument is so bad that it is 'beneath refutation.'  When a philosopher uses this phrase what he means is that an argument so tagged is so obviously defective as not to be worth refuting. There is also the concomitant suggestion that one who refutes that which is 'beneath refutation' is a foolish fellow, and perhaps even a (slightly) morally dubious character when the subject matter is moral inasmuch as he undermines the healthy conviction that certain ideas are so morally abhorrent that they shouldn't be discussed publicly at all lest the naive and uncritical be led astray.

But to quote my sparring partner London Ed, in a moment when the muse had him in her grip: "In philosophy there is a ‘quodlibet’ principle that you are absolutely free to discuss anything you like."  That's right. The Quodlibet Principle is one of the defining rules of the philosophical 'game.' There is nothing, nothing at all, that may not be hauled before the bench of reason, there to be rudely interrogated. (And that, paradoxically, includes the Quodlibet Principle!)

I hereby invoke that noble and indeed Socratic principle in justification of my attention to Harman's argument.

What's wrong with it?  She is maintaining in effect that the moral status of a biological individual depends on how long it lasts. Accordingly, moral status is not intrinsic to the early fetus  but depends on some contingent future development that may or may not occur. So the early fetus that developed into Elizabeth Harman has moral status at every time in its development, because it developed into what we all recognize as a person and rights-possessor, while an aborted early fetus has moral status at no time in its development because it will not develop into a person and rights-possessor. 

This issues in the absurd consequence that one can morally justify an abortion just by having one. For if you kill your fetus (or have your fetus killed), then you guarantee that it has no future. If it has no future, then it has no moral status. And if it has no moral status, then killing it is not morally impermissible, and is therefore morally justified. 

Is it ever morally right and reasonable to question or impugn motives or character in a debate?

I have just demolished Harman's argument. She has given no good reasons for her thesis. Quite the contrary. She has presented perhaps the most lame abortion argument ever made public. But what really interests me is the bolded question.  And I mean it in general. It is not about Harman except per accidens.

Is it ever morally right and reasonable in a debate to question motives and character? I didn't get a straight answer from London Ed in an earlier discussion.  So I press him again. 

We agree, of course, that arguments stand and fall on their own merits in sublime independence of their producers and consumers. I have hammered on this theme dozens of times in these pages. One may not substitute motive imputation and character analysis for argument evaluation. 

But once I have refuted an argument or series of arguments, am I not perfectly morally justified in calling into the question the motives and character of the producers of those arguments?  I say yes.  

I have a theory about what really drives the innumerable bad pro-abortion/pro-choice arguments abroad in this decadent culture, but I leave that theory for later. Here I pose the bolded question quite generally and apart from the abortion question.

Do you now see my point, Ed? And what do you say? 

Harmon's argument is here. 

Related articles

Death Penalty, Abortion, and Certainty

Rational Argument and the Questioning of Motives

London Ed writes,

. . . my main concern is how rational argument is deflected by questions of motive. Douglas Murray makes the point very well. Consider the proposition ‘Sharia law discriminates against women’. A rational response to this claim would be to investigate the nature of Sharia law, then to settle on a definition of ‘discriminate’, and then finally decide whether Sharia law does or does not fit that definition. This process is aimed at establishing the truth or falsity of the proposition in question. That by definition is rational debate.

Well of course. Who could disagree? The problem, however, is that rational debate does not resolve the main issues that divide us. Argument, even when conducted civilly and in accordance with all the proper canons, is of very limited value. Or can you think of a hot-button issue that has been resolved by rational debate?

But there is another form of response which sidesteps this completely, by questioning the motive of the person making the claim. Since it involves criticism of Sharia and hence of Muslims, the reason for making it must be racism or Islamophobia or whatnot. Note this does not involve any question of truth or falsity. Perhaps the opponent believes it too. No matter. The mere fact of making it [criticism of Sharia] means you are an Islamophobe, and must be shouted down, banned from the country, not allowed a platform etc.

Ed and I of course agree that it is in general wrong in a debate to divert attention from the content of a claim to the motives of the one making it.  The content of a claim is either true or false, either supported or unsupported by evidence, etc.  These properties of the propositional content of the claim are logically independent of anyone's psychology, in particular, the one who makes the claim. For example, here we read that in the U. S. most people with sickle cell disease are of African ancestry.  Clearly, the truth value of that proposition is logically independent of whether or not the person making the claim loves blacks, hates them, wants them all sent back to Africa, etc.  And of course there is nothing 'racist' about pointing out a racial fact like this.

But what I have just said in agreement with Ed is little more than the sort of philosophical boilerplate acceptable to all of us 'competent practioners.'  But it doesn't get us very far.

Here is a much more interesting question: 

Is it ever right to question or impugn motives in a debate?

I say it is sometimes right and sometimes rational. There are those here in the United States who oppose a photo ID requirement at polling places. They claim it 'disenfrachises' certain classes of voters, that it amounts to 'voter suppression.' But of course it does no such thing, and there is not one good argument against photo ID requirements.

The willful and widespread misuse of 'disenfranchise' is by itself a clear indication that the motives of those who misuse the word are unsavory. 

I won't go through these anti-photo ID arguments one more time. But if they are all bad, as I argue that they are, then I have every right to 'psychologize' my ideological enemy and impugn his motives. And that is exactly what I do. More than once I have claimed that leftists oppose photo ID requirements because they want to make the polling places safe for voter fraud. Plain and simple, their motive is to encourage voter fraud. They are out to win any way they can, and in their minds the glorious end justifies the dishonest means. Radicals needn't be inconvenienced by the demands of bourgeois morality. They've read their Alinsky.

I could cite many more examples but one suffices to nail down the general point, which is: it is sometimes right and rational to question motives and indeed, to impute evil motives in explanation of the transparently flimsy arguments our enemies sometimes give, arguments which are mere smokescreens that make a mockery of rational discussion.

So it appears that Ed and I disagree. Surprise!  His claim, if I understand it, is that it is never morally right and rational to question motives in a debate.  My claim is that it sometimes is. 

UPDATE 8/6: Malcolm Pollack responds,

Just read your post on motives. You wrapped it up with:

His claim, if I understand it, is that it is never morally right and rational to question motives in a debate.  My claim is that it sometimes is. 

It seems to me that the thing hinges on that phrase "in a debate". What's a "debate"? In principle it is a joint, rational inquiry, the purpose of which is to arrive at the truth. In that situation, then I'd agree with Ed.

But what we find ourselves dealing with in the social, political, and academic arena these days is rarely "debate", even though it pretends to be ("we need to have a national conversation about [insert left-wing hobby-horse here]"); it's a zero-sum war of conquest. (This is why accusations of inconsistency or hypocrisy, such as pointing out the Left's own widespread racism, so completely miss the point; their consistent principle is always simply that the other side is the enemy, and will be attacked.)

So when we aren't actually having a "debate" at all, then of course I'd agree with you. The key, then, is to be able to tell the difference.

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

Thanks, Malcolm. And in that situation I would agree with Ed too. But if we use 'debate' for what actually passes for debate, then I agree with me -- and you.

I sense that your parenthetical remark is directed against me, given certain things I have said in the past, which is fine: you and I share enough common ground to make rational discussion possible and perhaps even fruitful.  But your remark may need some refinement. Suppose we distinguish two classes of leftist opponents.

Class 1. These are the ones you are referring to. They operate from the commie/Alinksyite playbook. They have one guiding principle which they apply consistently: do whatever it takes to win; the other side is the enemy; attack them and give no quarter.  Thus they will invoke our principles and values against us when it is convenient and conducive to their ends, even though they have no respect for these 'bourgeois' principles and values. For example, they will invoke free speech rights to get themselves heard, but shout down their opponents.

A naive guy like me comes along, who hasn't fully fathomed the depravity of the leftist mind, and protests their hypocrisy, their deployment of a double standard, the inconsistency of their application of the principle of free speech. And then you point out to me that I am "completely missing the point."  My mistake, I suppose, is to assume that leftists share our values, including aversion to hypocrisy and inconsistency in application of standards.

Have I understood your point, Malcolm?  

But it may be a bit more complicated since not all leftists are of the same stripe.  There are also those who belong to:

Class 2. These are the ones that really are hypocrites and deployers of double standards.  They are the ones that fall into inconsistency in the application of a principle such as that of free speech even while accepting the principle. So I can't have "completely missed the point" if there really are people in Class 2 and I point out their hypocrisy and deployment of double standards.

In sum, your parenthetical remark needs the nuancing that I have just provided. 

Let me know if you would like me to open the Combox to allow a reply.

Undocumented Workers and Illegal Aliens

One of the purposes of this website is to combat the stupidity of Political Correctness, a stupidity that in many contemporary liberals, i.e., leftists, is willful and therefore morally censurable. The euphemism 'undocumented worker' is a good example of a PC expression. It does not require great logical acumen to see that 'undocumented worker' and 'illegal alien' are not coextensive expressions. The extension of a term is the class of things to which the term applies. In the diagram below, let A be the class of illegal aliens, B the class of undocumented workers, and A^B the  intersection of these two classes. All three regions in the diagram are non-empty, which shows that A and B are not coextensive, and so are not the same class. Since A and B are not the same class, 'undocumented worker' and 'illegal alien' do not have the same intension or meaning. If two terms differ in extension, then they differ in meaning. (The converse does not hold.) Differing in both extension and intension (sense, meaning), 'undocumented workers' and 'illegal aliens' expressions are not intersubstitutable. 

To see why, note first that there are illegal aliens who are not workers since they are either petty criminals, or members of organized criminal gangs e.g., MS-13, some of whose illegal alien members are  terrorists, or too young to work, or unable to work. Note second that there are illegal aliens who have documents all right -- forged documents. Note third that there are undocumented workers who  are not aliens: there are American citizens who work but without the legally requisite licenses and permits.

 So the correct term is 'illegal alien.' It is descriptive and accurate  and there is no reason why it should not be used.

Now will this little logical exercise convince a leftist to use language responsibly and stop obfuscating the issue? Of course not. Leftism in some of its forms is willfully embraced reality denial, and in other of its forms is a cognitive aberration, something like  a mental illness, in need of therapy rather than refutation. The latter are sick and one cannot refute the sick. They need treatment and quarantine and those who go near them should employ appropriate prophylactics.

So why did I bother writing the above? Because there are people who have not yet succumbed to the PC malady and might benefit from a bit of logical prophylaxis. One can hope.

Hope for the best.  But prepare for the worst.

The winds of change that have blown the Orange Man into the White House have brought us to the shores of hope, hope for a return to sanity and order and the rule of law.

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Obama, Political Correctness, and the Military

Political Argumentation: The Cogency of the 'Hillary is Worse' Defense

The Trump phenomenon provides excellent fodder for the study of political reasoning. Herewith, some thoughts on the cogency of the 'Hillary is Worse' defense for voting for Trump. I'll start with some assumptions.

A1. We are conservatives.

A2. It is Trump versus Hillary in the general: Sanders will not get the Democrat Party nod, nor will there be a conservative third-party candidate. (To be be blunt, Bill Kristol's ruminations on the latter possibility strike me as delusional.)

A3. Donald Trump is a deeply-flawed candidate who in more normal circumstances could not be considered fit for the presidency.

A4. Hillary Clinton is at least as deeply-flawed, character-wise, as Trump but also a disaster policy-wise: she will continue and augment the destructive leftist tendencies of Barack Hussein Obama. Hillary, then, is worse than Trump.  For while Trump is in some ways not conservative, it is likely he will actually get some conservative things done, unlike the typical Republican who will talk endlessly about illegal immigration, etc., but never actually accomplish anything conservative.

With ordinary Republicans it is always only talk, followed by concession after concession.  They lack courage, they love their power and perquisites, and they do not understand that we are in the age of post-consensus politics, an age in which politics is more like war than like gentlemanly debate on the common ground of shared principles.

My Challenge to the NeverTrump Crowd

To quote from an earlier entry:

In this age of post-consensus politics we need fighters not gentlemen.  We need people who will use the Left's Alinskyite tactics against them.  Civility is for the civil, not for destructive leftists who will employ any means to their end of a "fundamental transformation of America."  For 'fundamental transformation' read: destruction. 

It's a war, and no war is civil, especially not a civil war.  To prosecute a war you need warriors.  Trump is all we have. Time to face  reality, you so-called conservatives.  Time to man up, come clean, and get behind the 'presumptive nominee.'

Don't write another article telling us what a sorry specimen he is.  We already know that.  We are a nation in decline and our choices are lousy ones.  Hillary is worse, far worse.

Consider just three issues: The Supreme Court, gun rights, and the southern border.  We know where Hillary stands.  We also know where Trump stands.  Suppose he accomplishes only one thing: he nominates conservatives for SCOTUS.  (You are aware, of course, that he has gone to the trouble of compiling a list of conservative candidates.  That is a good indication that he is serious.)  The appointment of even one conservative would retroactively justify your support for him over the destructive and crooked Hillary.

[. . .]

The alternative [to voting for Trump] is to aid and abet Hillary. 

Are you a conservative or a quisling?

Charles Murray's Challenge to People Like Me

The False Priests are the columnists, media pundits, public intellectuals, and politicians who have presented themselves as principled conservatives or libertarians but now have announced they will vote for a man who, by multiple measures, represents the opposite of the beliefs they have been espousing throughout their careers. We’ve already heard you say “Hillary is even worse.” Tell us, please, without using the words “Hillary Clinton” even once, your assessment of Donald Trump, using as a template your published or broadcast positions about right policy and requisite character for a president of the United States. Put yourself on the record: Are you voting for a man whom your principles require you to despise, or have you modified your principles? In what ways were you wrong before? We require explanation beyond “Hillary is even worse.”

Now one thing that is unclear is whether Murray would accept (A4), in particular, the bit about Hillary being worse.  He doesn't clearly state that they are equally bad.  He says, "I am saying that Clinton may be unfit to be president, but she’s unfit within normal parameters. Donald Trump is unfit outside normal parameters."  Unfortunately, it is not clear what this comes to; Murray promises a book on the topic.

Well, if you think Trump and Hillary are equally bad, then you reject (A4) and we have a different discussion.  So let me now evaluate the above Murray quotation on the assumption that (A4) is true.

The Underlying Issue: Principles Versus Pragmatism

It is good to be principled, but not good to be doctrinaire.  At what point do the principled become doctrinaire?  It's not clear!  Some say that principles are like farts: one holds on to them as long as possible, but 'in the end' one lets them go.  The kernel of truth in this crude saying is that in the collision of principles with the data of experience sometimes principles need to be modified or set aside for a time.  One must consider changing circumstances and the particularities of the precise situation one is in.  In fact, attention to empirical details and conceptually recalcitrant facts is a deeply conservative attitude.  

For example, would I support Trump if he were running against Joe Lieberman?  No, I would support Lieberman.  There are any number of moderate or 'conservative' Democrats that I would support over Trump.  But the vile and destructive Hillary is the candidate to beat! And only Trump can do the dirty job.  This is the exact situation we are in.  If you are a doctrinaire conservative, say a neocon like Bill Kristol, then, holding fast to all of your principles -- and being held fast by them in turn -- you will deduce therefrom the refusal to support either Trump or Hillary.  Like Kristol you may sally forth on a quixotic quest for a third conservative candidate.  Just as one can be muscle-bound to the detriment of flexible and free movement, one can be principle-bound to the detriment of dealing correctly and flexibly with reality as it presents itself here and now in all its recalcitrant and gnarly details.

Conclusion:  The 'Hillary is Worse' Defense is Cogent

Part of being a conservative is being skeptical about high-flying principles.  Our system is the best the world has seen and it works for us. It has made us the greatest nation on the face of the earth -- which is why almost everyone wants to come here, and why we need walls to keep them out while commie shit holes like East Germany needed walls to keep them in.  (The intelligent, industrious Germans were kept in poverty and misery by a political system when their countrymen to the west prospered and enjoyed the fabled Wirtschaftswunder. Think about that!)  But from the fact that our system works for us, it does not follow that it will work for backward Muslims riven by ancient tribal hatreds and infected with a violent, inferior religion.  The neocon principle of nation-building collides with gnarly reality and needs adjustment.

Murray's point seems to be that no principled conservative could possibly vote for Trump, and this regardless of how bad Hillary is. His reasoning is based on a false assumption, namely, that blind adherence to principles is to be preferred to the truly conservative attitude of adjusting principles to reality.  Murray's view is a foolish one: he is prepared to see the country further led down the path to "fundamental transformation," i.e., destruction, as long as his precious principles remain unsullied.

Our behavior ought to be guided by principles; but that is not to say that it ought to be dictated by them.

Rather than say that principles are like farts as my old colleague Xavier Monasterio used to say, I will try this comparison:  principles are like your lunch; keep it down if you can, but if it makes you sick, heave it up.

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Sloppy Liberal Thinking About Equality

Equality of opportunity is one thing, equality of outcome quite another.  The former is a necessary, but not a sufficient, condition of the latter.  Yet many liberals think that any lack of equality of outcome for a given group argues an antecedent lack of equality of opportunity for that group.  This is a non sequitur of the following form:

P is necessary for Q

Ergo

~Q is sufficient for ~P.

This is an invalid argument form since it is easy to find substitutions for ‘P’ and ‘Q’ that make the premise true and the conclusion false.  For example, being a citizen is necessary to be eligible to vote; ergo, not being eligible to vote is sufficient to show that one is not a citizen.  The conclusion is false, since there might be some other factor that disqualifies one from voting such as being a felon, or being under age.  Similarly, an unequal outcome is not sufficient to show discrimination or unequal opportunity for the simple reason that there might be some other factor that explains the unequal outcome, such as a lack of competitiveness, an inability to defer gratification, or a lack of ability.

God, Proof, and Desire

From a reader:

. . . I’m confused by some of your epistemic terms. You reject [in the first article referenced below] the view that we can “rigorously prove” the existence of God, and several times say that theistic arguments are not rationally compelling, by which you mean that there are no arguments “that will force every competent philosophical practitioner to accept their conclusions on pain of being irrational if he does not.“

Okay, so far I’m tracking with you. But then you go on to say that “[t]here are all kinds of evidence” for theism (not just non-naturalism), while the atheist “fails to account for obvious facts (consciousness, self-consciousness, conscience, intentionality, purposiveness, etc.) if he assumes that all that exists is in the space-time world. I will expose and question all his assumptions.  I will vigorously and rigorously drive him to dogmatism.  Having had all his arguments neutralized, if not refuted, he will be left with nothing better than the dogmatic assertion of his position."

So how is the atheist not irrational on your view, assuming he is apprised of your arguments? Perhaps the positive case for theism and the negative case against naturalism don’t count as demonstrations in a mathematical sense, but I’m not sure why they’re not supposed to be compelling according to your gloss on the term.

The term 'mathematical' muddies the waters  since it could lead to a side-wrangle over what mathematicians are doing when they construct proofs.  Let's not muddy the waters.  My claim is that we have no demonstrative knowledge of the truth of theism or of the falsity of naturalism.  Demonstrative knowledge is knowledge produced by a demonstration.  A demonstration in this context is an argument that satisfies all of the following conditions:

1. It is deductive
2. It is valid in point of logical form
3. It is free of such informal fallacies as petitio principii
4. It is such that all its premises are true
5. It is such that all its premises are known to be true
6. It is such that its conclusion is relevant to its premises.

To illustrate (6).  The following argument satisfies all of the conditions except the last and is therefore probatively worthless:

Snow is white
ergo
Either Obama is president or he is not.

On my use of terms, a demonstrative argument = a probative argument = a proof = a rationally compelling argument.  Now clearly there are good arguments (of different sorts) that are not demonstrative, probative, rationally compelling.  One type is the strong inductive argument. By definition, no such argument satisfies (1) or (2).  A second type is the argument that satisfies all the conditions except (5). 

Can one prove the existence of God?  That is, can one produce a proof (as above defined) of the existence of God?   I don't think so.  For how will you satisfy condition (5)?  Suppose you give argument A for the existence of God.  How do you know that the premises of A are true?  By argument?  Suppose A has premises P1, P2, P3.  Will you give arguments for these premises?  Then you need three more arguments, one for each of P1, P2, P3, each of which has its own premises.  A vicious infinite regress is in the offing.  Needless to say, moving in an argumentative circle is no better.

At some point you will have to invoke self-evidence.   You will have to say that, e.g., it is just self-evident that every event has a cause.  And you will have to mean objectively self-evident, not just subjectively self-evident.  But how can you prove, to yourself or anyone else, that what is subjectively self-evident is objectively self-evident?  You can't, at least not with respect to states of affairs transcending your consciousness. 

I conclude that no one can prove the existence of God.  But one can reasonably believe that God exists.  The same holds for the nonexistence of God.  No one can prove the nonexistence of God.  But one can reasonably believe that there is no God.

The same goes for naturalism.  I cannot prove that there is more to reality than the space-time system and its contents.  But I can reasonably believe it.  For I have a battery of arguments each of which satisfies conditions (1), (2), (3) and (6) and may even, as far as far as I know, satisfy  (4).

"So how is the atheist not irrational on your view, assuming he is apprised of your arguments?"

He is not irrational because none of my arguments are rationally compelling in the sense I supplied, namely, they are not such as to force every competent philosophical practitioner to accept their conclusions on pain of being irrational if he does not.  To illustrate, consider the following argument from Peter Kreeft (based on C. S. Lewis), an argument I consider good, but not rationally compelling.  I will argue (though I will not prove!) that one who rejects this argument is not irrational.

The Argument From Desire

• Premise 1: Every natural, innate desire in us corresponds to some real object that can satisfy that desire.
• Premise 2: But there exists in us a desire which nothing in time, nothing on earth, no creature can satisfy.
• Conclusion: Therefore there must exist something more than time, earth and creatures, which can satisfy this desire.

This something is what people call "God" and "life with God forever."

This is surely not a compelling argument.  In fact, as it stands, it is not even valid.  But it is easily repaired.  There is need of an additional premise, one to the effect that the desire that nothing in time can satisfy is a natural desire.  This supplementary  premise is needed for validity, but it is not obviously true.  For it might be -- it is epistemically possible that -- this desire that nothing in time can satisfy is artificially induced by one's religious upbringing or some other factor or factors.

Furthermore, is premise (1) true?  Not as it stands.  Suppose I am dying of thirst in the desert.  Does that  desire in me correspond to some real object that can satisfy it?  Does the existence of my token desire entail the existence of a token satisfier?  No!  For it may be that there is no potable water in the vicinity, when  only potable water in the immediate vicinity can satisfy my particular thirst.  At most, what the natural desire for water shows is  that water had to have existed at some time.  It doesn't even show that water exists now.  Suppose all the water on earth is suddenly rendered undrinkable.  That is consistent with the continuing existence of the natural desire/need for water.

But this is not a decisive objection since repairs can be made.  One could reformulate:

1* Every type of natural, innate desire in us corresponds to some real object that can satisfy some tokens of that type of desire.

But is (1*) obviously true?  It could be that our spiritual desires are not artificial, like the desire to play chess, but lacking in real objects nonetheless.  It could be that their objects are merely intentional.  Suppose our mental life (sentience, intentionality, self-awareness, the spiritual desires for meaning, for love, for lasting happiness, for an end to ignorance and delusion and enslavement to base desires) is just an evolutionary fluke.  Our spiritual desires would then be natural as opposed to artificial, but lacking in real objects. 

Why do we naturally desire, water, air, sunlight?  Because without them we wouldn't have come into material existence in the first place.  Speaking loosely, Nature implanted these desires in us.  This is what allows us to infer the reality of the object of the desire from the desire.  Now if God created us and implanted in us a desire for fellowship with him, then we could reliably infer the reality of God from the desire.  But we don't know whether God exists; so it may be that the natural desire for God lacks a real object.

Obviously, one cannot define 'natural desire' as a desire that has a real and not merely intentional object, and then take the non-artificiality of a desire as proof that it is natural.  That would be question-begging.

My point is that  (1) or (1*) is not known to be true and is therefore rationally rejectable.  The argument from desire, then, is not rationally compelling.

 As for premise (2), how do we know that it is true? Granting that it is true hitherto, how do we know that it will be true in the future?  The utopian dream of the progressives is precisely that we can achieve here on earth final satisfaction of our deepest desires.  Now I don't believe this for a second.  But I don't think one can reasonably claim to know that (2) is false.  What supports it is a very reasonable induction.  But inductive arguments don't prove anything.

In sum, the argument from desire, suitably deployed and rigorously articulated, helps render theistic belief rationally acceptable.  But it is not a rationally compelling argument.

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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.

Arguments Don't Have Testicles

The Supreme Court justices in the majority in the 5-4 Hobby Lobby decision are all male: Alito, Scalia, Thomas, Roberts, and Kennedy.  If someone seeks to discredit their decision on that ground, say this:

Arguments don't have testicles!

If the person persists, then point out that females dominated the minority in that decision.

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Undocumented Workers and Illegal Aliens

One of the purposes of this site is to combat the stupidity of Political Correctness, a stupidity that in many contemporary liberals, i.e., leftists, is willful and therefore morally censurable. The euphemism 'undocumented worker' is a good example of a PC expression. It does not require great logical acumen to see that 'undocumented worker' and 'illegal alien' are not coextensive expressions. The extension of a term is the class of things to which it applies. In the diagram below, let A be the class of illegal aliens, B the class of undocumented workers, and A^B the  intersection of these two classes. All three regions in the diagram are non-empty, which shows that A and B are not coextensive, and so are not the same class. Since A and B are not the same class, 'undocumented worker' and 'illegal alien' do not have the same intension or meaning. Differing in both extension and intension, these expressions are not intersubstitutable.

To see why, note first that there are illegal aliens who are not workers since they are either petty criminals, or members of organized criminal gangs e.g., MS-13, some of whose members are illegal aliens, or terrorists, or too young to work, or unable to work. Note second that there are illegal aliens who have documents all right -- forged documents. Note third that there are undocumented workers who  are not aliens: there are American citizens who work but without the legally requisite licenses and permits.

 So the correct term is 'illegal alien.' It is descriptive and accurate  and there is no reason why it should not be used.

Now will this little logical exercise convince a leftist to use language responsibly and stop obfuscating the issue? Of course not. Leftism in some of its forms is willfully embraced reality denial, and in other of its forms is a cognitive aberration, something like  a mental illness, in need of therapy rather than refutation.   In  a longer post I would finesse the point by discussing the cognitive therapy of Stoic and neo-Stoic schools, which does include some logical refutation of unhealthy views and attitudes, but my rough-and-ready point stands: one cannot refute the sick. They need treatment and quarantine and those who go near them should employ appropriate prophylactics.

So why did I bother writing the above? Because there are people who have not yet succumbed to the PC malady and might benefit from a bit of logical prophylaxis. One can hope.

Hope for the best.  But prepare for the worst.

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From 'Is' to 'Ought'? Help for Hodges

Our  expat friend, Seoul man, and professor of English, Jeff Hodges, has been puzzling over whether an 'ought' statement can be validly derived from an 'is' statement.  Here is his example, put in my own way:

1. Democratic regimes contribute more to human flourishing than do non-democratic ones.

Therefore

2. If we want to maximize human flourishing, then we ought to support democratic regimes.

(1) purports to state what is the case.  In this sense, it is a factual claim.  On this use of 'factual,' a factual claim need not be true. ('I live in New Mexico' is false but factual as opposed to normative.)  Factual claims on this use of 'factual' are opposed to claims as to what one ought to do or ought not to do, or what ought to be, or ought not to be, or what is better or worse or what is more valuable or less valuable.

It is worth noting that both (1) and (2) are in the indicative mood.  Thus we ought to distinguish (2) from the hypothetical (as opposed to categorical) imperative

2*.  To maximize human flourishing, support democratic regimes!

One difference is that while it makes sense to inquire whether (2) is true or false, it makes no sense to inquire  whether (2*) is either true or false.  It follows that our question is not whether an imperative can be validly inferred from an indicative.

Let us also note that (2) is a conditional.  It is a compound statement  consisting of two simple component  statements,  an antecedent (protasis) and and a consequent (apodosis).  To assert a conditional is not to assert either its antecedent or its consequent. It is to assert a connection between the two.  For example, if I assert that if the light is on, then current is flowing through the filament, I do not thereby assert that the light is on, or that current is flowing throught the filament; what I assert is a connection between the two, in this case a causal linkage.

Given this fact about conditionals, I do not consider Jeff's example to show that one can validily derive an 'ought' from an 'is,' a normative statement from a factual statement.  Both (1) and (2) are nonnormative statements.  The first is obviously nonnormative.  But the second is as well despite the fact the 'ought' occurs within it.  For all it asserts -- or, to be precise, all a person asserts who assertively utters a token of the sentence in question -- is a connection between two propositions, a connection that it nonnormative.

We could of course detach the consequent of (2) thusly:

1. Democratic regimes contribute more to human flourishing than do non-democratic ones.

2a. We want to promote human flourishing

Therefore

2c. We ought to support democratic regimes.

(2c) is unabashedly normative.  But it does not follow from the premises which are both of them nonnormative.

So Jeff has not given a counterexample to what philosophers claim when they claim that an 'ought' cannot be derived from an 'is.'

But I will irenically add that there is nothing wrong with Jeff's original argument.  It is just that it is not an example of the derivation of a normative statement from a nonnormative one.  It is an example of how a statement containing the word 'ought' can be validily derived from a statement not containing the word 'ought.'  If this is all that Jeff means to show, then he deserves the coveted MavPhil imprimatur and nihil obstat. 

Crucial here is the fact that not every statement containing 'ought' is a normative statement.  Besides (2), there is this example:  'I just replaced the battery, so my car ought to start.'  This is not a statement about  what anyone ought to do, or even about what ought to be; it is a prediction.  One could just as well say, 'I just replaced the battery in my car, so it is highly likely that the car will start.'

And now it occurs to me that 'ought' can be paraphrased away, salva significatione,  even in the case of (2).  Try this:

2p.  If we want to maximize human flourishing, then it is necessary that we support democratic regimes.

Related:  The Ought-to-Be, the Ought-to-Do, and the Aporetics of "Be Ye Perfect"

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Marriage, the State, and Slippery Slope Arguments: An Objection Considered

A Reader Objects

"First, if your justification of state involvement in marriage is the production and protection of children, then I think you open yourself to intervention of the state beyond what a limited government conservative should be comfortable with. If protection of marriage by the state for such a goal is the standard, many other activities should be outlawed. Adultery, divorce, pornography are all things that create a poor environment to raise and nurture children, but I don't see us banning said actions."

I Reply

Conservatives are committed to limited government, and I'm a conservative. It is obvious, I hope, that the state ought not be involved in every form of human association.  State involvement in any particular type of human association must therefore be justified.  We want as much government as we need, but no more.  The state is coercive by its very nature, as it must be if it is to be able to enforce its mandates and exercise its legitimate functions, and is therefore at odds with the liberty and autonomy of citizens.  It is not obvious that the government should be in the marriage business at all.  The burden is on the state to justify its intervention and regulation.  But there is a reason for the state to be involved.  The state has a legitimate interest in its own perpetuation  and maintenance via the production of children, their socializing, their protection, and their transformation into productive citizens who will contribute to the common good.  (My use of 'the state' needn't involve an illict hypostatization.)  It is this interest that justifies the state's recognition  and regulation of marriage as a union of exactly one man and exactly one woman. 

If one takes this view, does it follow that adultery, divorce, and pornography should be outlawed?  Not at all.  Slippery slope arguments are one and all invalid. (Side-issues I won't pursue:  (i) Adultery is a legitimate ground for divorce, so divorce cannot be outlawed. (ii) Another freason why divorce ought not be outlawed is that it is often good for offspring.)

Slippery Slope Arguments

But perhaps I should say something about slippery slope arguments.  They come up quite often, in the gun debate, for example.  "If citizens are allowed to own semi-automatic pistols and rifles, then they must be allowed to own other sorts of weaponry."  That is often heard.

There is, however, no logical necessity that if you allow citizens to own semi-automatic rifles, then you must also allow them to own machine guns, grenade launchers, chemical and biological weapons, tactical nukes . . . .  At some point a line is drawn. We draw lines  all the time.  Time was when the voting age was 21.  Those were the times when, in the words of Barry McGuire, "You're old enough to kill, but not for votin'."  The voting age  is now 18.  If anyone at the time had argued that reducing the age to 18 would logically necessitate its being reduced to 17,  then 16, and then 15, and so on unto the enfranchisement of infants and the prenatal,  that would have been dismissed as a silly argument.

If the above anti-gun slippery slope argument were valid, then the following pro-gun argument would be valid: "If the government has the right to ban civilian possession of fully automatic rifles, then it has the right to ban semi-automatic rifles, semi-autos generally, revolvers, single-shot derringers, BB guns,  . . . .  But it has no right to ban semi-autos, and so on. Ergo, etc.

I have been speaking of the 'logical' slippery slope.  Every such argument is invalid.  But there is also the 'causal' or 'probabilistic' slippery slope. Some of these have merit, some don't.  One must look at the individual cases.

Supposing all semi-auto weapons (pistols, rifles, and shotguns) to be banned, would this 'lead to' or 'pave the way for' the banning of revolvers and handguns generally?  'Lead to' is a vague phrase.  It might be taken to mean 'raise the probability of' or 'make it more likely that.'  Slippery slope arguments of this sort in some cases have merit.  If all semi-auto rifles are banned, then the liberals will be emboldened and will try to take the next step, the banning of semi-auto pistols.  The probability of that happening is very high. I would lay serious money on the proposition that Dianne Feinstein of San Bancisco, who refuses to use correct gun terminology, though she knows it, referring to semi-automatic long guns as 'assault rifles,' a phrase at once devoid of definite meaning and emotive,  would press to have all semi-autos banned if she could get a ban on semi-auto rifles.

But how high is the probability of the slide in the other direction?  Not high at all.  In fact very low, closing in on zero.   How many conservatives are agitating the right to buy (without special permits and fees) machine guns (fully automatic weapons)?  None that I know of.  How many conservatives are agitating for the right to keep and bear tactical nukes?

I return to my reader's claim.  He said in effect that if the State regulates marriage then we are on a slippery slope toward the regulation and in some cases banning of all sorts of things that are harmful to children.    But the argument is invalid if intended as a logical slippery slope (since all such arguments are invalid), and inductively extremely weak if intended as a causal or probabilistic slippery slope. The likelihood of, say, a clamp-down on the deleterious dreck emanating from our mass media outlets is extremely low.

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Logic, Hypocrisy, and Tobacco-Wackery

Ruth Marcus begins her piece, The Perils of Legalized Marijuana, as follows:

Marijuana legalization may be the same-sex marriage of 2014 -- a trend that reveals itself in the course of the year as obvious and inexorable. At the risk of exposing myself as the fuddy-duddy I seem to have become, I hope not.

This is, I confess, not entirely logical and a tad hypocritical. At the risk of exposing myself as not the total fuddy-duddy of my children's dismissive imaginings, I have done my share of inhaling, though back in the age of bell-bottoms and polyester.

I fail to see what  is illogical about Marcus's taking a position today that differs from the position she took back when she wore bell bottoms.  Logic enjoins logical consistency, not such other types as consistency of beliefs over time.  Here is a pair of logically contradictory propositions:

Marijuana ought to be legalized
Marijuana ought not be legalized.

Here is a pair of logically consistent propositions:

Marcus believed in 1970 that marijuana ought to be legalized
Marcus believes in 2014 that marijuana ought not be legalized.

There is nothing illogical about Marcus's change of views.

Related:  On Diachronic or 'Emersonian' Consistency.  (An outstanding entry!)

And surely there is nothing hypocritical about Marcus's wising up  up and changing her view.  To think otherwise is to fail to understand the concept of hypocrisy.

I once heard a radio advertisement by a group promoting a "drug-free America." A male voice announces that he is a hypocrite because he demands that his children not do what he once did, namely, use illegal drugs. The idea behind the ad is that it is sometimes good to be a hypocrite.

Surely this ad demonstrates a misunderstanding of the concept of hypocrisy. Hypocrisy is a moral defect. But one who preaches abstinence and is abstinent is morally praiseworthy regardless of what he did in his youth. Indeed, his change of behavior redounds to his moral credit.

A hypocrite is not someone who fails to live up to the ideals he espouses, but one who does not attempt to live up to the ideals he espouses. An adequate definition of hypocrisy must allow for moral failure. An adequate definition must also allow for moral change. One who did not attempt to live up to the ideals he now espouses cannot be called a hypocrite; the term applies to one who does not attempt to live up to the ideals he now espouses.

Companion post: Hypocrisy

Marcus embraces Pee-Cee lunacy  in the following passage (emphasis added):

I'm not arguing that marijuana is riskier than other, already legal substances, namely alcohol and tobacco. Indeed, pot is less addictive; an occasional joint strikes me as no worse than an occasional drink. If you had a choice of which of the three substances to ban, tobacco would have to top the list. Unlike pot and alcohol, tobacco has no socially redeeming value; used properly, it is a killer.

Well, I suppose one cannot expect clear and independent and critical thinking and proper use of language from a mere journalist.

What, pray tell, is the proper use of tobacco?  Smoked in pipes and in the form of cigars it is assuredly not a killer.  One does not inhale pipe or cigar smoke.  And while cigarette smoke is typically inhaled, no one ever killed himself by smoking a cigarette or a pack of cigarettes.  (People have died, however, from just one drinking binge.)  To contract a deadly disease such as lung cancer or emphysema, you must smoke many cigarettes daily over many years.  And even then there is no causation, strictly speaking. 

Smoking cigarettes is contraindicated if you desire to be optimally healthy: over the long haul it dramatically increases the probability that the smoker will contract a deadly disease.  But don't confuse 'x raises the probability of y' with 'x causes y.'   Cigarettes did not kill my aunts and uncles who smoked their heads off back in the day.  They lived to ripe old ages.  Aunt Ada to 90. I can see old Uncle Ray now, with his bald head and his pack of unfiltered Camels.

Why are liberals such suckers for misplaced moral enthusiasm?

Tobacco has no socially redeeming value?  What a stupid thing to say!  Miss Marcus ought to hang out with the boys at a high-end cigar emporium, or have breakfast with me and Peter and Mikey as we smoke and vape at a decidely low-end venue, Cindy's Greasy Spoon.  For the record: I do not smoke cigarettes.

Just as alcohol in moderation is a delightful adjunct to a civilized life, a social lubricant and an aid to conviviality, the same is true of tobacco. 

Which to ban if one of the three were to be banned?  Alcohol obviously!  Stop being a dumbassed liberal and try thinking for a change.  How many auto accidents have been caused by smokers of tobacco as compared with drinkers of alcohol?  Are you aware that the  ingestion of nicotine increaases alertness? How many men beat their women and children under the influence of tobacco?

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Arguments, Testicles, and Inside Knowledge

T. L. e-mails,

Here’s fodder for a follow-up MP post, if you care to pursue it. I do not endorse the following objection, but I wonder how you’d reply.

In “David Lewis on Religion” you say: "To be a good philosopher of X one ought to know both philosophy and X from the inside, by practice." But there is some prima facie tension between this claim and your insistence that arguments don’t have testicles (or skin color).

Objector: “You, Maverick Philosopher, can never know *from the inside* the relevant experiences of women (or racial minorities), so your arguments are not to be taken seriously.” Why not let Lewis’s arguments stand or fall on their merits? And if his arguments *are* defective in some way Lewis cannot see due to his irreligiousity, then mustn't you allow the same charge against your political/cultural arguments mutatis mutandis?

 "Arguments don't have testicles" is my preferred response to women (and men) who claim that men have no right to an opinion about the morality of abortion due to their inability to become pregnant.  An argument for or against abortion is good or bad regardless of the sex of the person giving the argument.  And similarly  for race. One doesn't have to be black to have a well-founded opinion about the causes and effects of black-on-black crime.  The point holds in general in all objective subject areas. For purposes of logical appraisal, arguments can and must be detached from their producers.

It is also clear that one can be a competent gynecologist without being a woman, and a competent specialist in male urology without being a man.  Only a fool would discount the advice of a female urologist on the treatment of erectile dysfunction on the ground that the good doctor is incapable of having an erection.  "You don't know what it's like, doc, you don't have a penis!"  In objective matters like these, the 'what it's like' is not relevant.  One needn't know what it's like to have morning sickness to be able to prescribe an effective palliative.  I know what it is like to be a man 'from the inside,' but my literal (spatial) insides can be better known by certain women.

But in other subject areas, the 'what it is like' is relevant indeed.  Consider Mary, a character in a rather well known piece of philosophy-of-mind boilerplate.

Mary is a brilliant neuroscientist who has spent her entire life in a visually impoverished state.  Pent up in a room from birth and sheltered from colors, her visual experience is restricted to black and white and shades of gray.  You are to imagine that she has come to know everything there is to know about the brain and its visual system.  Her access to the outer world is via black-and-white TV.  The neuroscience texts over which she so assiduously pores have beeen expurgated by the dreaded Color Censor.

Mary knows every third-person, objective fact about the physics of colors and the neurophysiology of color perception.  But there is plenty she dos not know:  what it is like to see a red rose or a blue sky.  That sort of thing.  In Chisholm-speak, she does not know what it is like to be appeared-to redly.

So let's say Mary knows everything there is to know about colors from the outside, but nothing about them from the inside.  She has no first-person, experiential, knowledge of colors.  Do you think she would be in a position to write about the phenomenology of color?  Obviously not.

Analogously, a philosopher of religion who has never had a religious experience, and indeed lacks a religious sensibility or disposition such as would incline one to have such experiences, is in no position to write about religion.  And this, even if he knows every objective fact about every religion.  Thus our imagined philosopher of religion knows the history of religions and their sociology, and can rattle off every doctrine of every religion.  He knows all about the Christological heresies  and the filioque clause and the anatta doctrine, etc. He is like Mary who knows all about colors from the outside but nothing about them from the inside.  He knows the externals and trappings,  but not the living essence.

He literally does not know, from the inside, what he is talking about just as Mary literally does not know, from the inside, what she is talking about.

Now no analogy is perfect (else it wouldn't be an analogy) but the foregoing analogy supports the following response to the above objection.  The objection is that one cannot consistently maintain both that

(i) some claims and arguments are such that their logical appraisal (their evaluation in terms of truth, validity, soundness, relevance etc.) can and must be conducted independently of inquiries into the natures and capacities and environments of  the persons who advance the claims and arguments

and

(ii) some claims and arguments are such that their logical appraisal can legitimately involve inquiry into the nature,  capacities, and environments of the persons who advance the claims and arguments.

My response is that one can, with no breach of logical propriety, maintain both (i) and (ii).  It depends on whether the subject matter is wholly objective or also necessarily involves elements of subjectivity.  If we are talking about the morality of abortion, then the arguments are good or bad independently of who is making them.  They are neither male nor female.   But if we are talking about the phenomenology of colors, then a person such as Mary is disqualified by her lack of experience should she advance the claim that there are no phenomenal colors or color qualia or that the whole reality of color perception is exhausted by the neurophysiology of such perception.

Can a man know what it is like to be a woman, or more specifically, what it is like to be a woman in philosophy?  (There is an entire website devoted to this variation on Nagel's question.)  Some women complain bitterly about their experiences as women in the male-dominated field of philosophy.   (And some of these women have legitimate grievances.)  Can a man know what it is like to be mocked or ridiculed or made to feel stupid?  Of course.  Who has never been mocked or ridiculed or made to feel stupid?   The point here is that men and women have the same types of experiences.  I can't feel your pain, only Bill Cinton with his special powers can do that.  But I feel pain and so I know what it is like for you to feel pain, whether you are male of female, human or feline. Since I know what it is like to be ridiculed, I know what it is like for a woman to be ridiculed.  But an irreligious person does not know what it is like to have a religious experience for the simple reasons that he does not have them.

I know fear and so does my cat.  But he has never experienced Heideggerian Angst.  So if he were, per impossibile, to say something about it, having read, per impossibile, the relevant sections of Sein und Zeit, we would be justified in ignoring his opinions.  Go take a car nap!  The irreligious person is like my cat: he lacks a certain range of experiences.

I am not saying that if one has religious experiences, then one will necessarily reject the view that religion is buncombe.  For it is possible to have a certain range of experiences and yet decide that they are non-veridical.  What I am saying is that religious experiences are a sine qua non for anyone who expects to be taken with full seriousness when he talks or writes about religion.  So given that David Lewis did not have a religious bone in his body, as his wife stated, that gives me an excellent reason not to take with full seriousness his asseverations on religion.  He literally does not know what he is talking about.

Ludwig Wittgenstein, by contrast, was clearly a religious man.  So I take his writings on religion with utmost seriousness, which is not to say that I endorse his philosophy of religion.

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Camille Paglia on Philosophy and Women in Philosophy

Here:

The term "female philosopher" doesn't even make sense to me. Simone de Beauvoir was a thinker rather than a philosopher. A philosopher for me is someone who is removed from everyday concerns and manipulates terms and concepts like counters on a grid or chessboard. Both Simone de Beauvoir and Ayn Rand, another favourite of mine, have their own highly influential system of thought, and therefore they belong on any list of great philosophers.

This paragraph illustrates a conversational move I find very annoying.  Characterizing the ploy in the abstract is not easy, but here goes.  One takes a word in use and arbitrarily assigns one's own pejorative meaning to it while opposing it to some other word in the semantic vicinity of the first to which one assigns a non-pejorative meaning.   Thus for Paglia 'philosopher' is a pejorative while 'thinker' is not, and no one can be both. 

Simone de Beauvoir therefore cannot be a philosopher (bad!) but must be a thinker (good!).  And because she cannot be a philosopher, 'female philosopher' makes no sense.  Of course, the distinction is bogus, and there is no justification for Paglia's idiosyncratic re-definition of 'philosophy.' 

Here is another example of the annoying move in question.

The trendy embrace the term 'spirituality' but shun its close cousin, ‘religion.’ I had a politically correct Jewish professor in my kitchen a few years ago whose husband had converted from Roman Catholicism to Judaism. I asked her why he had changed his religion. She objected to the term ‘religion,’ explaining that his change was a ‘spiritual’ one.  How typical.  Being a good host, I didn't lay into her as I probably should have for her  'spiritual' good.  The opposing of 'religion' to 'spirituality' is bogus, religion being a form of spirituality, and there is no justification for reading a pejorative meaning into the former.

To make matters worse, Paglia, in the paragraph cited, contradicts herself.  Having just gotten through telling us that de Beauvoir is not a philosopher but a thinker, she reverses course and tells us that she belongs on a list of great philosophers.

And Ayn Rand a great philosopher?  Mercy!

The rest of her piece is no better than the paragraph cited.

Financial Advice: Short Form and Long Form

Source.  Excellent advice, except for the last item.  But the advice is incomplete.  For a rather more complete analysis, see Some Principles of a Financial Conservative wherein I proffer advice that is rock-solid, absolutely free, and that also has the interesting property that few will follow it due to the social and moral decline of the nation.

The article from which I borrowed the above graphic sports this delightfully amphibolous construction: "It's really hard to be poor . . . ." 

Reading those words, I thought to myself, yes, of course, you really have to work at being poor in this, the greatest and most prosperous nation ever to exist, a country that needs walls to keep people out unlike the commie states that need walls to keep people in.   Anyone can avoid poverty if they practice he practices the old virtues and works hard.  But then I realized that that cannot be the meaning intended in a sentence to be found in the left-leaning Washington ComPost.

A textbook example of amphiboly, then.

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On the Misuse of Superlatives (the Brokaw Fallacy) and Two Other Fallacies

Adjectives admit of three degrees of comparison: positive, comparative, and superlative.  The first refers to the zero case of comparison: Tom is tall.  The second refers to a situation in which two things are compared: Tom is taller than Tim.  The third refers to a situation in which a thing is compared to all the other members of its reference class: Tom is the tallest man in Fargo.  It is easy to see that if Tom is the tallest man in Fargo, then (a) there cannot be a man taller than him in that reference class, and (b) he is unique in respect of tallness in that reference class.  (I.e., there cannot be two tallest men in the same reference class.) 

Therefore, if the WWII generation is the greatest generation (relative to some agreed-upon criteria of generational greatness), then (i) there is no greater generation, and (ii) the WWII generation is unique in respect of greatness.  Now does Tom Brokaw really want to affirm both (i) and (ii)?  Is the WWII generation the greatest generation of any country in the whole of recorded time?  Or is it merely the greatest generation in American history?  The latter is clearly dubious if not outright false: the generation of the founders is arguably the greatest generation of Americans.  A fortiori, for the former.

What Brokaw is doing when he speaks of the WWII generation as the greatest is misusing the superlative ‘greatest’ to mean the positive ‘great,’ or perhaps the comparative ‘greater.’  Perhaps what he really wants to say is that the WWII  generation is greater than the Baby Boomers.  But instead of saying what he means, he says something literally false or else meaningless.  One might think that a news anchor would have higher standards.

Perhaps the underlying problem is that people love to exaggerate for effect, and see nothing wrong with it.  Not content to say that Bush was wrong about WMDs, his opponents  say he lied – which is a misuse of ‘lie.’  Not content to say that she is hungry, my wife says she is starving. Not content to say that Christianity is more than a doctrine, Kierkegaard and fellow fideists say that Christianity is not a doctrine.  Not content to use particular quantifiers ‘Some’, ‘Most’),people reach for universal quantifiers such as ‘Every,’ ‘All,’ ‘No,’ and ‘Never.’  Thus instead of saying that one must be careful when one generalizes, one says, ‘Never generalize,’ which refutes itself.

I have exposed three mistakes that the truth-oriented will want to avoid.  We have the misuse of superlatives, the misuse of universal quantifiers, and the mistaken notion that if X is not identical to Y, then X and Y have nothing to do with each other. 

Let me expatiate a bit further on the last mentioned mistake.  If X is not identical to Y, it does not follow that X and Y are wholly diverse from each other.  A book is not identical to its cover, but the two are not wholly diverse in that the cover is proper part of the book. Regretting is not identical to remembering, but the two are not wholly diverse: Every regretting is a remembering, but not conversely.  A melody is not identical to the individual notes of which it is composed, but it is obviously not wholly diverse from them.

On Criticizing Something for Being What It Is

If a person or institution is essentially F, then to criticize it for being F  is equivalent to criticizing it for existing.  (If x is essentially F, then x cannot exist without being F.  If x is F, but not essentially, then x is accidentally F: capable of existing without being F.)  Let's test this thought against some examples.

1. Its core doctrines are essential to the Roman Catholic Church; to demand that it abandon one or more of them is to demand that it cease to exist.

2. The rejection of capitalism is essential to communism.  Therefore, to demand that a communist embrace capitalism is to demand that he cease to be a communist.

3. The moral legitimacy of killing the other side's combatants in times of war is an essential commitment of the miltary.  To demand that the military be pacifistic, that the Marine Corps become the Peace Corps, for example, is to demand that the military cease to exist.

4. If marriage is essentially between one man and one woman, then to demand same-sex marriage is to demand that marriage cease to exist.

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Liberals and Straw Men

Here is a particularly egregious example of a liberal straw man argument.  In a New Yorker piece, Margaret Talbot writes:

As a nation, we’re a little vague on what the Second Amendment’s protections of  a citizen militia mean for gun ownership today. The N.R.A. insists that they  mean virtually unlimited access to firearms for every American. . . .

Note the weasel word 'virtually' that pseudo-qualifies Talbot's falsehood, and allows her to pass it off with a show of plausibility.  Or is Talbot flat out lying?  A lie is not the same as a falsehood, the difference being the intention to deceive which is necessary for an utterance to count as a lie.  I am not in a position to peer into Talbot's soul, so I hesitate to impute a lie to her.  But if she is not lying, then she is ignorant, indeed culpably ignorant since on a minimal understanding of journalistic ethics one ought to become informed of the positions of an outfit such as the N.R.A. before confidently reporting on them.

 

How does the Straw Man fallacy come into this?  The fallacy is committed when one (mis)represents one's opponent as holding a position he does not in fact hold and then attacking the position he does not hold.  So Talbot falsely represents the N. R. A. has advocating the nonexistent right of all Americans, including felons, the mentally unstable, and the underaged, to keep and bear all types of firearms. Having set up the strawman, Talbot then earnestly argues against it.

 

I exposed another example the other day when I refuted the Wolff-Obama  "You didn't build that!" argument. 

A third example is the liberal complaint that conservatives are anti-government, as if advocating limited government makes one anti-government.  Such a willful misrepresentation speaks volumes about the moral character of the ones who make it.

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Nick Gillespie on Why Youth Favor Obama and Conservatism's Contradictions

Support for Obama among 18-29 year olds exceeds that of any other age cohort.  Reason Magazine's Nick Gillespie argues that Obama is in the process of "screwing them big time."  Gillespie is right.   What caught my eye, however, was Gillespie's  explanation of why conservatives fail to get the youth vote:

I'd argue that what makes "the conservative message"  resonate less among younger people is its, well, conservatism on things such as war, alternative lifestlyes, [sic] drug legalization, and immigration. Younger people are less hung up on the sorts of things that really twist conservatives' knickers. And young people then assume that many of the other things that conservatives espouse - such as generally free markets and open trade - are similarly warped. That conservatives are so inconsistent with their basic message - We want smaller government...except when we're talking about immigrants, the gays, and the ability to kill people overseas! - doesn't help matters, either. Most people surely don't prize consistency as much as libertarians do, but the obvious contradictions at the heart of conservative philosophy are off-putting to anyone with the smallest taste for consistency.

As a philosopher, logical consistency looms large for me.  And so you will get my attention 'big time' if you can lay out for me "the obvious contradictions at the heart of conservative philosophy."  But if they are obvious, then presumably all you need to do is draw my attention to them.

Unfortunately, public intellectuals, not being logically trained as most philosophers are, have an egregiously spongy notion of what a contradiction is.  This is true of even very good public intellectuals such as Nat Hentoff and Nick Gillespie.  (Hentoff, for whom I have a very high degree of respect, thinks one is being inconsistent if one is pro-life and yet supports capital punishment.  He is demonstrably wrong.)

Ignoring Gillespie's invective and hyperbole, his point seems to be that the following propositions are logically inconsistent:

1. The legitimate functions of government are limited.

2. Among the the legitimate functions of government are national defense, securing of the borders, and preservation of traditional marriage's privileged position.

Now it should be obvious that these propositions are logically consistent: they can both be true.  They are not logical contradictories of each other.

It is therefore foolish for Gillespie to accuse conservatives of inconsistency.  And to speak of obvious inconsistency is doubly foolish.  What he needs to do is argue that the governmental functions that conservatives deem necessary and legitimate are neither.  This will require a good deal of substantive argumentation and not a cheap accusation of  'inconsistency.' For example, he can mount an economic argument for open borders.  I wish him the best of luck with that. He will need it.

Curiously, Gillespie's own reasoning can be used against him.  Suppose an anarchist comes along.  Using Gillespie's own form of reasoning, he could argue that Gillespie the libertarian is being inconsistent.  For he wants smaller government . . . except when it comes to the protection of life, liberty, and property (the Lockean triad, I call it).    Then he wants coercive government to do its thing and come down hard on the malefactors.  He's inconsistent!  If he were consistent in his desire for limited government, he would favor no government.  His libertarianism would then collapse into anarchism.

So by his own understanding of consistency, Gillespie is not being consistent.  The same reasoning that he uses against conservatives can be used against him.  The reasoning is of course invalid in both applications.  It is invalid against the libertarian and equally so against the conservative.

But I like his black leather jacket schtick.    It is always a pleasure to see him on the O'Reilly Factor. 

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'The Wrong Side of History'

A Prime Instance of Political Correctness: The Blackballing of Nat Hentoff

Nick Gillespie: Will Obama Tell Young People How Much He's Screwing Them?

On the Obvious

As Hilary Putnam once said, "It ain't obvious what's obvious." Or as I like to say, "One man's datum is another man's theory."

But is it obvious that it ain't obvious what's obvious? 

It looks as if we have a little self-referential puzzle going here.  Does the Hilarian dictum apply to itself?  An absence of the particular quantifier may be read as a tacit endorsement of the universal quantifier.  Now if it is never obvious what is obvious, then we have self-reference and the Hilarian dictum by its own say-so is not obvious.

Is there a logical problem here?  I don't think so.  With no breach of logical consistency one can maintain that it is never obvious what is obvious, as long as one does not exempt one's very thesis.   In this case the self-referentiality issues not in self-refutation but in self-vitiation.  The Hilarian dictum is a self-weakening thesis.  Over the years I have given many examples of this.  (But I am now too lazy to dig them out of my vast archives.)

There is no logical problem, but there is a factual problem.  Surely some propositions are obviously true. Having toked on a good cigar in its end game, when a cigar is at its most nasty and rasty, I am am feeling mighty fine long about now.  My feeling of elation, just as such, taken in its phenomenological quiddity, under epoche of all transcendent positings -- this quale is obvious if anything is.

So let us modify the Hilarian dictum to bring it in line with the truth.

In philosophy, appeals to what is obvious, or self-evident, or plain to gesundes Menschenverstand, et cetera und so weiter are usually unavailing for purposes of convincing one's interlocutor. 

And yet we must take some things as given and non-negotiable.  Welcome to the human epistemic  predicament. 

Leftist First, Catholic Second

For too many Catholics and other Christians, their leftism is their real 'religion.'  This from The Thinking Housewife:

ANNY YENNY reports at the website Politichicks that her eighth-grade son was given extra credit by his Catholic school religion teacher for fasting on the first day of Ramadan. When the mother complained, the teacher objected and “lectured [her] on the superiority of Muslims to Christians.”

The principles of ecumenism put forth at Vatican II lead with irrevocable logic to teaching Catholics how to be good Muslims.

I agree with something in the vicinity of the point the Housewife makes here.  But her last sentence illustrates the slippery slope fallacy.  If the logic is "irrevocable," then it is deductively valid; but slippery slope argumentation, if intended to be deductive, is always invalid.  What should she have said?  Something like this: 'The ecumenism of Vatican II set the stage for, and made likely, the sort of absurdities that Anny Yenny complains of." 

Surely there was no logical necessity that the principles of Vatican II eventuate in the absurdity in question.

A Survey of Responses to the Three-In-One Paradox

Philosophers love a paradox, but hate a contradiction. Paradoxes drive inquiry while contradictions stop it dead in its tracks. The doctrine of the Trinity is a paradox threatening to collapse into one  or more contradictions. Put starkly, and abstracting from the complexity of the creedal formulations, the doctrine says that God is one, and yet God is three. Now this is, or rather entails, an apparent contradiction since if God is three, then God is not one, which contradicts God's being one. But not every apparent contradiction is a real one. Hence it is a mistake to reject the doctrine due to its  initial appearance of being self-contradictory. To put it another way, the doctrine is not obviously self-contradictory as some appear to believe. It is not obviously self-contradictory since it is not obvious that God is one and three in the same respect. To see contradictions that are not there is just as much of an intellectual mistake as to fail to see ones that are there.

I should say that I am interested in the general problem of apparent contradictions both in philosophy and out, what contradictions signify, and how we ought to deal with them. My interest in the Trinity is a special case of this general interest. Herewith, a preliminary attempt at cataloging some ways of dealing with apparent contradictions, taking the Trinity as my chief example.

The following catalog divides into two parts. The first five entries treat the three-in-one contradiction as merely apparent, unreal, unproblematic, while the remaining entries treat it as real or unavoidable. But what do I mean when I say that a contradiction is  unavoidable? Let us say that a contradiction has limbs. For example, I am sitting now and I am not sitting now is a contradiction assuming that 'now'  denotes the same time in both of its occurrences. I am sitting now is the first limb; I am not sitting now is the second  limb. A contradiction is unavoidable (avoidable) if we have (do not have) good reasons for accepting both limbs. The example just cited is an example of an avoidable contradiction since there is no good reason to accept both limbs.

But some contradictions seem unavoidable. For example, there is reason to think that a set exists if and only if it has members. But there is  also reason to think that a set -- the null set -- can exist without members. This apparent contradiction is quite different from the one concerning my being seated/unseated. It is not obviously avoidable if it is avoidable at all. I am not saying that this is genuine contradiction; I am saying that it is a plausible candidate for such status.

The Contradiction as Merely Apparent

1. Deny the first limb. In God is one and God is three, God is one is  the first limb. The contradiction is easily dismissed if we simply  deny this limb and embrace tri-theism. This is of course unacceptable to the Christian and indeed to any sophisticated theist. A defensible theism must be a monotheism.

2. Deny the second limb, and embrace radical monotheism along Jewish or Islamic lines.

3. Reject both limbs by rejecting the presupposition on which both rest, namely, that God exists, or that 'God' has a referent. If this presupposition is not satisfied, then the question lapses.

4. Make a distinction between the respect in which God is one and the respect in which God is three. Alphonse Gratry, for example,  distinguishing between nature and person says that God is one nature
 in three persons. (Logic, p. 336) Drawing a distinction between respects is the standard way to defuse a contradiction. But in the case of the Trinity it accomplishes little unless one can explain how the distinguished items are related. Suppose one is told that a certain ball is both red and green at the same time. This is easily  seen to be true if the ball is red in one hemisphere and green in the other. In this case it is clear without further ado how the two  hemispheres are related. Not so in the case of the Trinity.

5. A more sophisticated strategy is to locate an uncontroversial phenomenon in nature that exhibits a trinitarian or binitarian structure. Suppose there is a two-in-one ( binity) in nature. If   uncontroversially actual, then uncontroversially possible, even if we cannot understand how exactly it is possible. The possibility of a binitarian or trinitarian phenomenon in nature could then be used as a model to show, or begin to show, the possibility of the Trinity.

A putative example of a two-in-one is a statue. The statue S and the lump L of matter it is composed of are two things in that L can exist  without S. If S is made of bronze, and the bronze is melted down, then  L will exist without S existing. Even if the lump of bronze and the statue come into existence at the same time, and pass out of existence at the same later time, they are two.  For they are modally discernible: the lump has a property the statue lacks, the property of being possibly such as not to be a statue.  So, for both temporal and modal reasons, lump and statue are not strictly identical.  They are two.

But they are also one thing in that S  just is formed matter. If S and L come into existence at the same time, and pass out of existence at the same later time, then they are spatiotemporally coincident and composed of exactly the same matter arranged in exactly the same way.  That strongly suggests that S and L are the same. 

On the one hand, it seems we must say that S and L are two and not one.  On the other, it seems we must say that they are one and not two.

Perhaps we can say that what we have here is a binity, a two-in-one.  If binities are actual, then they are possible, even if it is not wholly clear how they are possible.  Assuming that the real cannot be contradictory, then the apparent contradiction of a two-in-one must be merely apparent.  If this fifth strategy works, one will come to see that the Trinitarian contradiction is merely apparent, even if one does not achieve full clarity as to how the Trinity is possible. (But of course the transcendence of God ought to insure that much about him will remain beyond the ken of our finite intellects both here below and in  the life to come, if there is one.)

The Contradiction as Unavoidable

6. Take the contradiction to be real or unavoidable -- since both limbs are justifiable -- and as proof that the triune God is impossible and hence   necessarily nonexistent. In other words, adopt the following stance:   (i) there is excellent reason to say that God must be one; (ii) there   is excellent reason to say that God must be three; (iii) it is a   contradiction to maintain that God is both one and three; (iv) therefore, God is impossible, hence nonexistent.

7. Take the contradiction to be unavoidable as in #6 and as proof that God is logically impossible. But instead of inferring from logical impossibility to necessary nonexistence, draw the conclusion that God  exists despite the contradiction. One is reminded of the phrase  attributed to Tertullian: Credo quia absurdum, I believe because it is absurd (logically contradictory). This also appears to be the position  of Kierkegaard. What distinguishes strategy #6 from #7 is that in the former one takes logic as having veto power over reality: one takes the logically impossible, that which cannot be thought without  contradiction, to be really impossible, impossible in reality apart from thought. That is, one takes the finite discursive intellect to be  at least negatively related to extramental reality: nothing can be  real unless it is thinkable by us without contradiction. Strategy #7, however, rests on the assumption that there can be a reality -- the  divine reality -- which is not subject to logical laws which, if this strategy is correct, can only be our laws. What is necessarily false for us can nonetheless be true in reality.

8. Take the contradiction to be real or unavoidable, but also to be true. In both #6 and #7, the contradiction is taken to to be false, indeed necessarily false, but on this dialetheist option, it is a true contradiction.  Accordingly, the Trinity doctrine is a true contradiction!

Are there any other options? Note that the relative identity approach falls under #4.

UPDATE.  Chad comments:

Regarding "are there any other options?" on approaches to the Trinity paradox.

Another option that falls under the 'apparent contradiction' category is mysterianism: the contradiction is apparent only, but the resolution is a mystery, either heretofore or in principle.

Another option, which might stand between the 'apparent contradiction' and 'contradiction' categories, is van Inwagen's relative identity approach: The Trinity is contradictory if the standard logic of identity is correct, apparently contradictory if not.

Yet another option that falls under the 'contradiction' category: To say that a father can beget a son without a mother is a parent [patent?] contradiction.

Chad is right about mysterianism.  That  is a further option under the first category.  I'm surprised I overlooked it.  As for the relative identity approach, this was Peter Geach's before it was van Inwagen's.  But doesn't this approach fall under #4?  I'm not sure why Chad calls his third point a third option.  Furthermore , isn't 'beget' a technical term in Trinitarian theology?  The Son is said to be "begotten not made."  The idea, I take it, is to avoid saying that the Son is created.  If created, then a creature, then not God.  If 'beget' has a technical meaning, why should it be a contradiction to say that the Father begets the Son?

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The Logical Problem of the Trinity

The Logical Problem of the Trinity

Our question concerns the logical consistency of the following septad, each limb of which is a commitment of orthodoxy.  See here for details.  How can the following propositions all be
true?

1. There is only one God.
2. The Father is God.
3. The Son is God.
4. The Holy Spirit is God.
5. The Father is not the Son.
6. The Son is not the Holy Spirit.
7. The Father is not the Holy Spirit.

If we assume that in (2)-(7), the 'is' expresses absolute numerical identity, then it is clear that the septad is inconsistent.  (Identity has the following properties: it is reflexive, symmetric, transitive, governed by the Indiscernibility of Identicals).  For example, from (2) and (3) taken together it follows that the Father is the Son by Transitivity of Identity.  But this contradicts (5).

So we have an inconsistent septad each limb of which is a commitment of orthodoxy.  The task is to remove the contradiction without abandoning orthodoxy.  There are different ways to proceed.

In a paper he sent me, Chad M. seems to adopt the following approach.  Distinguish between the 'is' of identity and the 'is' of predication, and construe (2), (3), and (4) as predications.  Well, suppose we do this.  We get:

2*. The Father is divine
3*. The Son is divine
4*. The Holy Spirit is divine.

But this implies that there are three Gods, which contradicts (1).  The trick is to retain real distinctness of Persons while avoiding tritheism.

Chad also blends the above strategy wth a mereological one. Following W. L. Craig, he thinks of the Persons as (proper) parts of God/Godhead.  Each is God in that each is a (proper) part of God/Godhead.  The idea, I take it, is that Persons are really distinct in virtue of being really distinct proper parts of God, but that there is only one God because there is only one whole of these parts.  Each Person is divine in that each is a part of the one God.  The parts of God are divine but not God in the way that the proper parts of a cat are not cats but are feline.  Thus the skeleton of a cat is not a cat but is feline.  The skeleton is feline without being a feline.

But I have a question for Chad.  On orthodoxy as I understand it, God is one, not merely in number, but in a deeper metaphysical sense.  Roughly, God is a unity whose unity is 'tighter' than the unity of other sorts of unity.  Indeed, as befits an absolute, his unity is that than which no tighter can be conceived.  The unity of mathematical sets and mereological sums is fairly loose, and the same goes for such concrete aggregates as Kerouac holding his cat.  Although we are not forced to take the whole-part relation in the strict sense of classical mereology, I think it remains the case that the unity of anything that could be called a  whole of parts will be too loose to capture the divine unity. 

For one thing, wholes depend on their parts for their existence, and not vice versa.  (Unless you thought of parts as abstractions from the whole, which the Persons could not be.)  Parts are ontologically prior to the wholes of which they are the parts.  This holds even in the cases in which the whole is a necessary being and each part is as well.  The mathematical set of all primes greater than 1 and less than 8 is a necessary being, but so is each element of this set: 3, 5, and 7 are each necessary beings.  Still, the existence of the set is metaphysically grounded in the existence of the elements, and not vice versa.  The divine aseity, however, rules out God's being dependent on anything.

So my question for Chad is this: does the view that God is a whole of parts do justice to the divine unity?

 

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The Stove 'Dilemma' and the Lewis 'Trilemma'

This from R. J. Stove, son of atheist and neo-positivist, David Stove:

When the possibility of converting to Catholicism became a real one, it was the immensity of the whole package that daunted me, rather than specific teachings. I therefore spent little time agonizing over the Assumption of Mary, justification by works as well as faith, the reverencing of statues, and other such concepts that traditionally irk the non-Catholic mind.

Rather, such anguish as I felt came from entirely the other direction. However dimly and inadequately, I had learnt enough Catholic history and Catholic dogma to know that either Catholicism was the greatest racket in human history, or it was what it said itself that it was. Such studying burned the phrase "By what authority?" into my  mind like acid. If the papacy was just an imposture, or an exercise in power mania, then how was doctrine to be transmitted from generation to generation? If the whole Catholic enchilada was a swindle, then why should its enemies have bestirred themselves to hate it so much? Why do they do so still?

 

 

This reminds me of the famous 'trilemma' popularized by C. S. Lewis:  Jesus is either the Son of God, or he is a lunatic, or he is the devil. This trilemma is also sometimes put as a three-way choice among lord, lunatic, or liar.  I quote Lewis and offer my critical remarks here.

Just as I cannot accept the Lewis 'trilemma' -- which is not strictly a trilemma inasmuch as not all three prongs are unacceptable -- I cannot accept the Stovian 'dilemma' which strikes me as a text-book case of the informal fallacy of False Alternative.  ". . . either Catholicism was the greatest racket in human history, or it was what it said itself that it was."  Why are these the only two alternatives?  The Roman Catholic church claims to be the one, true, holy, catholic (universal), and apostolic church.  One possibility is that the Roman church was all of these things before various linguistic, political, and theological tensions eventuated in the Great Schism of 1054 such that after that date the one, true, etc. church was the Orthodox church of the East.  After all, both can and do trace their lineage back to Peter, the 'rock' upon whom Christ founded his church.  That is at least a possibility.  If it is actual, then the present Roman church would be neither a racket nor what it claims to be.  It would be a church with many excellences that unfortunately diverged from the authentic Christian tradition.

Or it could be that that true church is not the Roman church but some Protestant denomination, or maybe no church is the true church: some are better than others, but none of the extant churches has 'cornered the market' on all religiously relevant  truth.  It might even be that it is impossible that any church be the true church and final repository of all religous truth.

I get the impression that Stove has a burning desire to belong to a community of Christian believers, is attracted to the Roman church for a variety of reasons, some of them good, and then concocts an   worthless argument to lend a veneer of rationality to his choice. That is not so say his choice was not a good one.  Better a Catholic than  a benighted positivist like his father.

My point is a purely logical one: his alternative is a false alternative. I am not taking sides in any theological controversy.  Not in this post anyway.

"Environmentalists are by Definition Extremists" More on the Misuse of 'By Definition'

Regular readers of this blog know that I respect and admire Dennis Prager: he is a font of wisdom and a source of insight.  And he is a real Mensch to boot. (If I were a Jew and he a rabbi, he'd be my choice.) But I just heard him say, "Environmentalists are by definition extremists."  That is another clear example of the illicit use of 'by definition' that I pointed out in an earlier entry.  Here are some examples of correct uses of 'by definition':

• Bachelors are by definition male
• Triangles are by definition three-sided
• In logic, sound arguments are by definition valid. (A sound argument is defined as one whose form is valid and all of whose premises are true.)
• In physics, work is defined as the product of force and distance moved: W= Fx.
• In set theory, a power set is defined to be the set of all subsets of a given set.
• By definition, no rifle is a shotgun.
• Semi-automatic firearms are by definition capable of firing exactly one round per trigger pull until the magazine (and the chamber!) is empty. 
• In metaphysics, an accident by definition is logically incapable of existing without a substance of which it is the accident.
• In astrophysics, a light-year is by definition a measure of distance, not of time: it is the distance light travels in one year. 
• By definition, the luminiferous either is a medium for the propagation of electromagnetic signals.

Incorrect uses of 'by definition':

• Joe Nocera: "anyone who goes into a school with a semiautomatic and kills 20 children and six
  adults is, by definition, mentally ill." 
• Donald Berwick: "Excellent health care is by definition redistributional."
• Illegal aliens are by definition Hispanic.
• Bill Maher, et al.: "Taxation is by definition redistributive."
• Dennis Prager: "Environmentalists are by definition extremists."
• Capitalists are by definition greedy.
• Socialists are by definition envious.
• Alpha Centauri is by definition 4.3 light-years from earth.
• The luminiferous ether exists by definition.
• By definition, the luminiferous ether cannot exist.

I hope it is clear why the incorrect uses are incorrect.  As for the Prager example, it is certainly true that some environmentalists are extremists.  But others are not.  So Prager's assertion is not even true.  Even if every environmentalist were an extremist, however, it would still not be true by definition that that is so.  By definition, what is true by definition is true; but what is true need not be true by definition.

So what game is Prager playing?  Is he using 'by definition' as an intensifier?   Is he purporting to make a factual claim to the effect that all environmentalists are extremists and then underlining (as it were) the claim by the use of 'by definition'?  Or is he assigning by stipulation his own idiosyncratic meaning to 'environmentalist'?  Is he serving notice that 'extremist' is part of the very meaning of 'environmentalist' in his idiolect?

Language matters! 

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On the Illicit Use of 'By Definition.' 2012 'Gun' Version

What follows is a reposting of an entry that first appeared in these pages on 19 July 2010.  The reposting  is prompted by the following surprising statement by Joe Nocera: "But it is equally true that anyone who goes into a school with a semiautomatic and kills 20 children and six adults is, by definition, mentally ill."  (Emphasis added.)  Well, maybe it isn't so surprising given that Mr. Nocera is a NYT op-ed writer.  Surprising or not, Nocera's claim is not only false, but illustrative of complete confusion about the meaning of 'by definition.' 

Suppose a Palestinian  Arab terrorist enters a yeshiva with a semi-automatic rifle and kills 20 children and six adults.  May you validly infer that the terrorist is mentally ill? Of course not.  He may or may not be.  Were the 9/11 hijackers mentally ill?  No.  They collectively committed an unspeakably evil act.  But only a liberal would confuse an evil act with an insane act.  Suppose a young SS soldier is ordered to shoot a group of 26 defenceless Jews, toppling them into a mass grave they were forced to dig.  He does so, acting sanely and rationally, knowing that if he does not commit mass murder he himself will be shot to death.

Conceptual confusion and emotive uses of language are trademarks of liberal feel-good 'thinking.'  To give one more example from Nocera's piece, he refers to semi-automatics as "killing machines."  Question: would a semi-auto pistol or rifle be a "killing machine" if it were used purely defensively or to stop a would-be mass murderer? Is an 'assault weapon' an assault weapon when used for defense? Is a liberal a liberal on the rare occasions when he talks sense?

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

What is wrong with the following sentence:  "Excellent health care is by definition redistributional"?  It is from a speech by Donald Berwick,  President Obama's nominee to head the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, speaking to a British audience about why he favors government-run health care.

I have no objection to someone arguing that health care ought to be redistributional.  Argue away, and
good luck! But I object strenuously to an argumentative procedure whereby one proves that X is Y by illict importation of the predicate Y into the definition of X.  But that is exactly what Berwick is doing.  Obviously, it is no part of the definition of 'health care' or 'excellent health care' that it should be redistributional.  Similarly, it is no part of the definition of 'illegal alien' that illegal aliens are Hispanic.  It is true that most of them are, but it does not fall out of the definition.

This is the sort of intellectual slovenliness (or is it mendacity?) that one finds not only in leftists but also in Randians like Leonard Peikoff.  In one place, he defines 'existence' in such a way that nothing supernatural exists, and then triumphantly 'proves' that God cannot exist! See here.

This has all the advantages of theft over honest toil as Bertrand Russell remarked in a different connection.

One more example.  Bill Maher was arguing with Bill O'Reilly one night on The O'Reilly Factor.  O'Reilly came out against wealth redistribution via taxation, to which Maher responded in effect that that is just what taxation is.  The benighted Maher apparently believes that taxation by definition is redistributional.  Now that is plainly idiotic: there is nothing in the nature of taxation to require that it redistribute wealth.  Taxation is the coercive taking of monies from citizens in order to fund the functions of government.  One can of course argue for progressive taxation and wealth redistribution via
taxation.  But those are further ideas not contained in the very notion of taxation.

Leftists are typically intellectual cheaters.  They will try to bamboozle you.  Listen carefully when they bandy about phrases like 'by definition.'  Don't let yourself be fooled.

"But are Berwick, Peikoff, and Maher really trying to fool people, or are they merely confused?"  I don't know and it doesn''t matter.  The main thing is not to be taken in by their linguistic sleight-of-hand whether intentional or unintentional.

 

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Bad Economic Reasoning About the National Debt

When I study the writings of professional economists I sometime have to shake my shaggy philosopher's head.  Try this passage on for size:

$16 trillion is the amount of Treasury debt outstanding at the moment. The more relevant figure is the amount of debt the federal government owes to people and institutions other than itself. If, for some reason, I lent money to my wife and she promised to pay it back to me, we wouldn’t count that as part of the debt owed by our household. The debt owed to the public is about $10 trillion these days.

What a brainless analogy!  Suppose I loan wifey 100 semolians.  She issues me a 'debt instrument,' an IOU.  Has the family debt increased by $100?  Of course not.  It is no different in principle than if I took $100 out of my left pocket, deposited an IOU there, and placed the cash in my right pocket.  If I started with exactly $100 cash on my person I would end the game with exactly the same amount. 

But I do not stand to the government in the same relation  that I stand to my family.  Suppose I buy 100 K worth of Treasury notes, thereby loaning the government that sum.  Has the Federal debt increased by $100 K?  Of course it has.  I am not part of the government.  Whether the government owes money to U. S. citizens or to the ChiComs makes no difference at all with respect to the amount of the debt.  The citizens plus the government do not form a "household" in the way my wife and I form a household.  Citizens and government are not all one big happy family.

The analogy is pathetic.

The author would have you think that "the more relevant figure" is $16 trillion minus $10 trillion = $6 trillion.  False, because based on a false analogy. 

This shows how ideologically infected the 'science' of economics is.  Only a leftist ideologue could make the collectivist assumption that I have just exposed.  The Marxian "From each according to his ability, to each according to his need" is a viable principle at the level of the family, but it is pernicious nonsense on stilts when applied to the state in its relation to the citizenry. 

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Same Old, Same Old

At the Supermarket: I Think of Hegel's Logic

I was cruising the booze aisle in the local supermarket yesterday in search of wines for Thursday's Thanksgiving feast.  I got into conversation with a friendly twenty-something dude who worked there.  I said I was looking for sweet vermouth.  He thought it was used to make  martinis and so I explained that martinis call for dry vermouth while the sweet stuff is an ingredient in manhattans.  He then enthused about some whisky he had been drinking.  I asked whether it was a scotch or a bourbon.  He replied, "It's whisky."  I then explained that whisky is to scotch, bourbon, rye, etc. as genus to species and that one couldn't drink whisky unless one drank scotch or bourbon, or . . . .  This didn't seem to register.

But it did remind me of another twenty-something dude whose comment about the church he attended prompted me to ask what Protestant denomination he belonged to.  He said. "I am a Presbyterian, not a Protestant."

These two incidents then put me in mind of a story Hegel tells somewhere, perhaps it's in the Lesser Logic.  A man goes to the grocer to buy fruit.  The grocer shows him apples, oranges, pears, cherries . . . .  Our man rejects each suggestion, insisting that he wants fruit.  He learns that fruit as such is not to be had.

Arguments Don't Have Testicles

If someone questions your right to have an opinion about abortion if you are man, say Arguments don't have testicles.

The Converse Does Not Hold

If you paid attention in Logic 101 you may remember that the immediate inference called 'conversion' is valid  for the I and E forms of the traditional square of opposition but not for the A and O forms.  Poetic illustration courtesy of Alexander Pope (1688-1744) where 'Every poet is a fool' is an A-proposition:

Sir, I admit your gen'ral rule
That every poet is a fool:
But you yourself may serve to show it,
That every fool is not a poet.

(Epigrams and Epitaphs, Faber & Faber, 1977, p. 82)

On the Word 'Racism' and Some of its Definitions

'Racism' and 'racist' are words used by liberals as all-purpose semantic bludgeons.  Proof of this is that the terms are never defined, and so can be used in wider or narrower senses depending on the polemical and ideological purposes at hand.  In common parlance 'racism' and 'racist'  are pejoratives, indeed, terms of abuse.  This is why it is foolish for conservatives such as John Derbyshire to describe themselves as racists while attempting to attach some non-pejorative connotation to the term.  It can't be done.  It would be a bit like describing oneself as as an asshole, 'but in the very best sense of the term.'  'Yeah, I'm an asshole  and proud of it; we need more assholes; it's a good thing to be.'  The word has no good senses, at least when applied to an entire human as opposed to an orifice thereof.  For words like 'asshole,' 'child molester,' and 'racist' semantic rehabilitation is simply not in the cards.  A conservative must never call himself a racist.  (And I don't see how calling himself a racialist is any better.)  What he must do is attack ridiculous definitions of the term, defend reasonable ones, and show how he is not a racist when the term is reasonably defined.

Let's run through some candidate definientia of 'racism':

1. The view that there are genetic or cultural differences between racial groups and that these differences have behavioral consequences.

Since this is indeed the case, (1) cannot be used to define 'racism.'  The term, as I said, is pejorative: it is morally bad to be a racist.  But it is not morally bad to be a truth-teller.  The underlying principle here is that it can't racism if it is true.  Is that not obvious?

Suppose I state that blacks are 11-13% of the U.S. population.  That cannot be a racist statement for the simple reason that it is true.  Nor can someone who makes such a statement be called a racist for making it.  A statement whose subject matter is racial is not a racist statement.  Or I inform you that blacks are more likely than whites to contract sickle-cell anemia.  That too is true.  But in this second example there is reference to an unpleasant truth.  Even more unpleasant are those truths about the differential rates of crime as between blacks and whites.  But pleasant or not, truth is truth, and there are no racist truths. (I apologize for hammering away at these platitudes, but in a Pee Cee world in which people have lost their minds, repetition of the obvious is necessary.)

2. The feeling of affinity for those of one's own racial and ethnic background.

It is entirely natural to feel more comfortable around people of one's own kind than around strangers.  And of course there is nothing morally objectionable in this. No racism here.

3. The view that it is morally justifiable  to put the interests of one's own race or ethnic group above those of another in situations of conflict or limited resources.  This is to be understood as the analog of the view that it it morally justifiable to put the interests of oneself and one's own family, friends, and neighbors above the interests of strangers in a situation of conflict or limited resources.

There is nothing morally objectionable in his, and nothing that could be legitimately called racism.

4. The view that the genetic and cultural differences between races or ethnic groups justifies genocide or slavery or the denial of political rights.

Now we arrive at an appropriate definiens of 'racism.'  This is one among several  legitimate ways of defining 'racism.'  Racism thus defined is morally offensive in the extreme.  I condemn it and you should to.  I condemn all who hold this. 

Derbyshire's 'Racism'

I got wind of Derb's defenestration, and the concomitant crapstorm of Internet commentary, a little late, but I've been making up for lost time.  I found this curious passage over at RedState, a self-professedly conservative website (emphasis added):

Derbyshire likes to pepper his racist rants with “facts” that generally consist of social studies that are subject to numerous interpretational biases. To me, the question as to whether these studies are accurate or correct is uninteresting and irrelevant – a central tenet of decency demands that every human being is entitled to be evaluated on his or her own merits regardless of what social science may say about any group (racial, cultural, religious or otherwise) to which he or she might belong. It is this very basis which Derbyshire rejects, and that is what makes him (and has always made him) a racist. He is not, as his defenders at the execrable Taki mag say, confronting the world with uncomfortable truths, he is proudly declaring himself to be a racist and arguing that it is correct to be racist. This, I submit, is something that all decent people should reject.

This is exceedingly curious because the author seems to be saying that Derb is a racist whether or not the facts he adduces in support of the advice he gives to his children are indeed facts. But surely there are no racist facts.  A racial fact is not a racist fact.  So if the facts Derb adduces are facts, then his adducing them cannot be racist.  It therefore cannot be irrelevant whether what Derb calls facts are indeed facts: that is rather the nub of issue.

Here is one of the facts he adduces:  Blacks are seven times more likely than people of other races to commit murder, and eight times more likely to commit robbery. Here is another: Blacks are an estimated 39 times more likely to commit a violent crime against a white than vice versa, and 136 times more likely to commit robbery.

Now suppose that these are indeed facts.  Do they justify the advice he gives his kids?  Part of the advice is:

(10) Thus, while always attentive to the particular qualities of individuals, on the many occasions where you have nothing to guide you but knowledge of those mean differences, use statistical common sense:

(10a) Avoid concentrations of blacks not all known to you personally.

It should be obvious that the facts do justify the advice.  Derb is a father and he is talking to his children.  Being children, they lack experience of the world and the degree of good judgment that comes from protracted encounter with the world and its ways. Caring about his children, he advises: If all you have to go on is knowledge of the mean differences, then avoid situations where there is a large number of blacks unknown to you.

There is nothing racist about this.  It is excellent paternal advice.  To be racist, the facts Derb adduces would have to be non-facts. It silly in excelsis to suppose that it is irrelevant whther the sociological facts Derb cites are indeed facts.  (Please avoid the pleonastic 'true facts.')

The author above speaks of a "central tenet of decency" according to which every human being is entitled to be evaluated on his own merits regardless of group affiliation and regardless of what we know about the group.  That too is silly.  Consider the Hells [no apostrophe!] Angels.  We know quite a lot about this motorcycle gang.  If we were to follow the "central tenet of decency" we would have to leave out of consideration this knowledge in our encounters with members of the gang.  But this would be very foolish indeed.  For example, suppose all I know about Tiny is that he is a Hells Angel and what I can know by observing him at the end of the bar. (E.g., he is covered with tattoos, muscular, about 220 lbs, 6' 2" in height, and about 35 years of age.)  Knowing just this, I know enough to avoid (eye or other) contact with him.  For I know that if an altercation should ensue, his fellow Angels would join in the fight (that's part of their code) and I would be lucky to escape with my life.

Now unless you are a very stupid liberal you will not misunderstand what I am saying.  I am not saying that blacks as a group are as criminally prone as Hells Angels as a group.  I'm showing that the above decency principle  is incoherent.  One cannot abstract from group characteristics when all you have to go on are group characteristics and immediate sensory data.

Racism?  What racism?  And what do you mean by 'racist' anyway?  Derb adduces some facts that bear upon race and you call him a racist?  Then please tell us what you mean by the term.