Month: April 2010

The Racism Charge: The Left’s Attempt to Shut Down Debate

In The Faith of a Liberal, Morris Raphael Cohen writes that "The touchstone that enables us to recognize liberalism is the question of toleration . . . ." Now if toleration is the touchstone of liberalism, there is nothing liberal about contemporary liberals.  They should therefore not be called 'liberals' but leftists.  There is nothing tolerant about them.  They show no interest in open discussion, free inquiry and the traditional values of classical liberalism.  And they are poor winners to boot.  With the passage of the health care bill they scored a victory.  So why all the querulous fulmination against the Tea Party patriots to whom the  lefties love to refer as 'teabaggers'?  Why, in particular, the routinely repeated charge of 'racism'?

This is now the party line of the Dems and toe it they will as witness the otherwise somewhat reasonable and mild-mannered Alan Colmes in this segment, Political Hatred in America, from The O'Reilly Factor. Colmes begins his rant around 6:07 with the claim that "what is driving this [the Tea Party protests] is racism."  It looks as if Colmes is under party discipline; otherwise, how could so intelligent and apparently decent a man say something so blatantly false and scurrilous?  That something so silly and vicious should emerge from the mouth of a twit like Janeane Garofalo is of course nothing to wonder at. What idiocies won't HollyWeird liberals spout?  But Alan Colmes?  If we remember that for the Left the end justifies the means, however, things begin to fall in place.  The Left will do anything to win. Slanders, smears, shout-downs . . . all's fair in love and war.  Leftists understand and apply what I call the Converse Clausewitz Principle: Politics is war conducted by other means.

When leftists hurl their 'racism' charge, just what are they alleging?  Two possibilities.

A.  One is that the arguments brought against Obama's policies are not arguments at all but mere expressions of racism and bigotry.  But this 'possibility' is beneath refutation.  Make a simple distinction.  There is Obama and there are his policies.  Obama is black, or rather half-black and half-white, but his policies are not members of any race.  White leftists advocate the same policies. Arguments against the policies are not attacks against the man.  Need I say more?

B.  The other interpretive possibility is that the conservative arguments are genuine arguments, not mere expressions of racism and bigotry, but that the can be refuted by claiming that the people who advance them are all, or most of them, racists.  But of course it is egregiously FALSE that all or most or even many of these people are racists.  Only some of them are.  But then there are 'bad apples' in every bunch, so this fact is not significant.

But even if we suppose, contrary to fact,  that every single conservative who argues against Obama's policies is a flaming racist, that has no bearing on the validity or invalidity of the conservative arguments.  To think otherwise is to commit the genetic fallacy.  Again, need I say more?

In Support of the Intuition That Truths Need an Ontological Ground

That truth has something to do with correspondence to extralinguistic and extramental fact is a deeply entrenched intuition. One could call it the classical intuition about truth inasmuch as one can find formulations of it in Plato and Aristotle. When suppressed, it has a way of reasserting itself. Sent packing through the front  door, it returns through the back. Herewith, two brief demonstrations that this is so.

A. Truth as Idealized Rational Acceptability

One way of suppressing the classical intuition is by offering an epistemic definition of 'true.' One attempts to explicate truth in terms of mental states. Thus someone might suggest that a proposition is true just in case it is believed or accepted by someone. But this won't do, since there are truths that are not accepted by anyone. So one proposes that a proposition is true just when it is acceptable. This proposal, too, is defective inasmuch as what is acceptable to one person will not be acceptable to another. This defect can perhaps be handled by identifying truth with rational acceptability. But what it is rational to accept at one time or in one place may be different from what it is rational to accept at another time or in another  place. Much of what we find rationally acceptable would not have been found rationally acceptable by the ancient Greeks. (For example, that the same physics holds both for terrestrial and for celestial bodies.) So one advances to the notion that truth is rational acceptability at the ideal limit of inquiry. One can trace this notion back to C. S. Peirce. In Reason, Truth, and History, Hilary Putnam presents a version of it. Let's consider the theory in the following form:

1. *P* is true =df *p* would be accepted in cognitively ideal conditions.

Now we know that

2. Cognitive conditions are not ideal.

From (2) it follows via the trivial equivalence principle *p* is true iff p that

3. *Cognitive conditions are not ideal* is true.

It follows from (3) via (1) that

4. *Cognitive conditions are not ideal* would be accepted in cognitively ideal conditions.

But (4) is self-contradictory, whence it follows that

5. The definition of truth in terms of acceptability in cognitively ideal conditions is incorrect.

What I take this argument to show is that the notion of truth as correspondence to the way things are is primary and irreducible. For surely (2) is true. But its being true cannot be explicated in terms of what anyone would accept or assert under ideal epistemic  conditions. Therefore, (2) is true in a sense more basic than the  sense spelled out in (1).

This supports the 'truthmaker intuition':  some if not all truths require truthmakers.  Truths do not 'hang in the air.'  What is actually true cannot depend on what some merely possible subject would accept at the ideal limit of inquiry.

 B. Truth as Coherence

 We get a similar result if we try to construe truth as coherence.   Suppose

 6. P is true =df p would be accepted by a person whose set of beliefs is maximally consistent and coherent.

 But we know that

 7. No one's set of beliefs is maximally consistent and coherent.

 From (7) it follows via the above equivalence principle that

 8. No one's set of beliefs is maximally consistent and coherent is
  true.

 It follows from (8) via (6) that

 9. No one's set of beliefs is maximally consistent and coherent would  be accepted by a person whose set of beliefs is maximally consistent  and coherent.

 But (9) is self-contradictory, so

 10. (6) is incorrect.