Month: June 2010

Milan Kundera’s Misunderstanding of the Basic Thesis of Christian Anthropology: Imago Dei

In Giles Fraser's excellent Redeeming Nietzsche: On the Piety of Unbelief (Routledge 2002, p. 140) I came across the following quotation from Milan Kundera's Art of the Novel:

When I was small and would leaf through the Old Testament retold for children and illustrated in engravings by Gustave Dore, I saw the Lord God standing on a cloud. He was an old man with eyes, nose, and a long beard, and I would say to myself that if He had a mouth, He had to eat. And if He ate, He had intestines. But that thought always gave me fright, because even though I had come from a family that was not particularly religious, I felt the idea of a divine intestine to be sacrilegious. Spontaneously, without any theological training, I, as a child, grasped the incompatibility of God and shit and thus came to question the basic thesis of Christian anthropology, namely, that man was created in God’s image. Either/or: either man was created in God’s image – and God has intestines! – or God lacks intestines and man is not like Him.  The ancient Gnostics felt as I did at the age of five. In the second century, the great Gnostic master Valentinus resolved the damnable dilemma by claiming that Jesus “ate, drank, but did not defecate.” (emphasis added)

It is surprising that Kundera continues to endorse as an adult his childish misunderstanding of the imago dei doctrine.  Kundera's alternative rests on the false assumption that the only likeness between man and God could be a physical likeness.  

Kundera's reasoning appears to be like this:

1. Man is made in God’s image.
2. Man is a physical being with a digestive tract, etc.
Therefore
3. God is a physical being with a digestive tract, etc.

The incompatibility of God and excrement that the young Kundera rightly perceived is logically comptabile with the imago dei doctrine.  Now if Jesus Christ was wholly man, as orthodoxy maintains, then he did defecate.  But this presents no problem in addition to the problems already raised by the Incarnation doctrine itself.

Of Black Holes and Black Hos

Is 'black hole' code for black ho?  The NAACP seems to think so.  One wonders how many NAACP members could explain what a black hole is.  Hallmark caved and pulled the card.  Disgusting.  All decent people need to stand up against the politically correct lunacy of the race-baiting Left.

We've been around this block before.  For a fuller discussion see Of Black Holes and Political Correctness.

A Diversity Paradox for Immigration Expansionists

Liberals love 'diversity' even at the expense of such obvious goods as unity, assimilation, and comity.  So it is something  of a paradox that their refusal to take seriously the enforcement of immigration laws has led to a most undiverse stream of immigrants. "While espousing a fervent belief in diversity, immigrant advocates and their allies have presided over a policy regime that has produced one of the least diverse migration streams in our history." Here

Misgivings About Deflationary Theories of Truth

1. From my survey of the literature, there are four main types of truth theory being discussed: substantive theories, nihilist (for want of a better label) theories, deflationary theories, and identity theories.  Let me say just a little about the first two main types and then move on to deflationism. The Commenter (William Woking) will be sure to disagree with me about deflationism, which is good: by abrasion the pearl (of wisdom) is formed. Or as I read on a T-shirt at a road race recently: No pressure, no diamonds.

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

The latter is not a good proposal for reasons I won't go into now, but it illustrates the project of giving a substantive theory of truth.  One tries to analyze truth in more basic terms.  One tries to give an informative, noncircular answer to the  question, What is truth?  The sunbstantive approach is in the Granbd Tradition deriving from Plato wherein one asks What is X? for many values of 'X.'

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

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

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

C.  This substantive property is analyzable.

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

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

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

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

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

Note that such biconditionals express logical, not material, equivalences:  they are not just true but true across all metaphysically (broadly logically) possible worlds.  With respect to such biconditionals, there is no possible situation in which the RHS is true and the LHS false, or vice versa.  If asked for the ground of this necessity, I would say it resides in the mere logic of the truth predicate.  Saying this, I do not concede that there is nothing more to truth than the merely syntactic role played by 'true ' in equivalences like the above.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

E. *p* is true iff p.

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

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

You don't get it, do you?  Let me try an analogy with existence.  A deflationist about existence might offer this equivalence schema:

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

Squeezing this triviality hard, our deflationist announces that 'exist' plays a merely syntactic role and that there is no substantive property of existence.  But is it not obvious that if something is an F, then that thing must exist?  Are you quantifying over a domain of nonexistents?  If yes, then the equivalence fails.  But if you are quantifying over a domain of existents, then the existence of those existents is being presupposed.  So, even though 'exist' does not occur on the RHS of (F), existence is along for the ride.  Same with (E).  Even though 'true' does not occur on the RHS of (E), truth is along for the ride.  In both cases, existence and truth in meaty substantive senses are being presupposed.

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

Compare existence.  A thing and the same thing existing have exactly the same quidditative content.  The fastest runner and the existing fastest runner are numerically the same individual. Does it follow that existence is not a property?  No, what follows it that existence is not a quidditative property.  Same with truth.  There is no difference in content between p and true p.  But it makes a world of difference whether p is true or false just as it makes a world of difference whether an individual exists or not.

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

Saturday Night at the Oldies: Some Fine Guitar-Slingin’

I've never been able to find Lonnie Mack's Memphis on YouTube, but I just stumbled across this phenomenal Venture's version.  They never sounded that good in the '60s.  Here is what they sounded like back in the day.  Perfidia is an old song written in 1939 by Alberto Dominguez.   Xavier Cugat's version was the first.  Julie London does a good job with it. "While the gods of love look down and laugh at what romantic fools we mortals be."

A Most Amazing Time to be Alive

I am sitting in the air-conditioned comfort of my study before a magic box.  By means of this 'box,' and without stirring from my chair, I did the following this morning:  engaged in world-wide electronic correspondence; searched for, found,  downloaded and printed out an obscure 19th century article from the  JSTOR database; entered the 'card' catalogs of a couple of libraries; played and analyzed chess via the Internet Chess Club; viewed and listened to an old speech by Trotsky via YouTube; discovered and enjoyed an old tune I hadn't heard in 30 years via the same YouTube; published my thoughts to the world via my weblog; received and responded to comments from readers; got the directions to a local German restaurant; worked on an article.

And you don't think the Western culture that made and makes possible this marvellous technology is worth defending?

The Eternal Return of the Same Old Same Old

A redemption from transitoriness that consists of an endless repetition is no redemption at all.  An eternity of the same old crap is still crap.  It is actually worse than transient crap.  It is Crap Eternalized, nihilism on stilts.

Pious Nietzscheans will be shocked at my irreverence.  But wasn't it his irreverence that attracted their adolescent selves to him in the first place?

Nietzsche would restore the 'weight' to the world that the now absent God had supplied.  But his Eternal Recurrence is a makeshift not up to the task. 

Fulminate as he does against old Plato, he himself is a Platonist: he takes the world's impermanence to argue its unreality and unimportance. Which is why he posits Eternal Recurrence.  From within Becoming he would redeem Becoming.  But he should have seen that among the consequences of the death of God is not only the death of truth, but also the death of redemption.

Predicates and Properties

We are warming up to an examination of deflationary theories of truth according to which truth is either not a property or not a metaphysically substantive property.  (I oppose deflationary theories of truth just as I oppose deflationary theories of existence.) But first some clarification of 'predicate' and 'property.'

1. I begin by resisting the traditional conflation of predicates and properties, a conflation in evidence when we hear a philosopher claim that "existence is not a predicate."  That claim makes no sense unless a predicate is a property.  After all, 'existence,' as an abstract substantive, is not grammattically tuited to occupy predicate position.  If, however, a predicate is a bit of language used to express a property, then the claim should be that " '. . . exists' is not a predicate."  That's in order, as is "Existence is not a property."  As expressing properties, predicates are distinct from properties.  Predicates are linguistic while properties are extralinguistic.

To be a bit more precise, predicates (whether types or tokens) are tied to particular languages whereas the properties they express are not so tied.  Thus schwarz is tied to German in the way black is tied to English, but the property of being black is tied to neither.  Equally, the property of being disyllabic is tied to no one language even though it is a property that only linguistic items can have.  Thus 'Boston' but not Boston is disyllabic.

2. Some of you will question whether there are properties distinct from predicates.  Question away.  But just realize that in order to raise this very question you must first have distinguished predicates and properties.  You must already have made the distinction 'at the level of intension' if not 'at the level of extension.'  For you cannot maintain that there are no properties distinct from predicates unless you understand the term 'property' just as you cannot maintain that there are no unicorns distinct from horses unless you understand the term 'unicorn.'

3. By my lights, you are a very foolish philosopher if you deny properties, but not if you deny universals.  If you deny universals you are merely mistaken.  So let's be clear that 'property' and 'universal' are not to be used interchangeably.  It is a substantive question whether properties are universals or particulars (as trope theorists maintain).  Universals I define as repeatable entities, particulars as unrepeatable entities.

4. The predicate/property distinction under our belts, we need to note three views on their relation.

5. One view is that  no predicate expresses a property.  I rejected this view in #3.  To put it bluntly, there is a real world out there, and the things in it have properties whether or not there are any languages and language-users. Some of our predicates succeed more or less in expressing some of these properties.

6. A second view is that every predicate expresses or denotes a property.  The idea is that for every predicate 'P' there is a property P corresponding to 'P.'  But then, given that 'exists' and 'true' are predicates, it would follow straightaway that existence and truth are properties.  And that seems too easy.  Deflationists, after all, deny for reasons that cannot simply be dismissed that truth is a property.  They cannot be refuted by pointing out that 'true' is a predicate of English.  The following equivalence is undeniable but also not formulable unless 'true'  is a predicate:

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

The deflationist will take an equivalence like this to show that 'true' is a dispensable predicate and therefore one that does not pick out a property.  (On Quine's disquotationalism, for example, 'is true' is a device of disquotation: it merely undoes the semantic ascent displayed on the LHS of the biconditional.)  We should therefore be uneasy about the view that every predicate expresses or denotes a property.  The existence of a predicate does not show the existence of a corresponding property.  A predicate need not predicate a property.  It should not be a matter of terminological fallout that wherever there is a predicate there is a property.

7.  Determined to maintain  that every predicate expresses or denotes a property, a deflationist  could of course hold that existence and truth are properties, but not metaphysically substantive properties.  A deflationist could argue like this:

Every predicate expresses a property

'True' is a predicate

Ergo: Truth is a property, but not a substantive one.

But he could also argue like this:

Every genuine predicate expresses a substantive property

Truth is not a substantive property

Ergo: 'True' is not a genuine predicate.

8.  A third view about the predicate-property relation has it that some predicates pick out properties and some don't.  I suggest this is how we should use 'predicate.'  It then becomes a matter of investigation, not of terminology, whether or not there is a property for a given predicate.

On Writing for Money

From an NYT interview with Christopher Hitchens on the occasion of the publication of his memoir Hitch-22:

Did you write the book for money?
Of course, I do everything for money. Dr. Johnson is correct when he says that only a fool writes for anything but money. It would be useful to keep a diary, but I don’t like writing unpaid. I don’t like writing checks without getting paid.

The fool in excelsis, I suppose, would be he who not only writes what cannot sell, but uses his own blood for ink.  I am thinking of Nietzsche whose posthumous birth was due in no small measure to the  auto-vivisection which supplied the fluid which powered his pen.

Another Round on Assertoric Force

William Woking comments:

Logical argument is just like a chess game. We have a common understanding of the rules of inference. The game ends either in reaching disagreement about a principle that is demonstrably fundamental, i.e., it self-evidently admits of no proof or disproof (e.g., Bill hates carrots), in which case stalemate, or where both sides end in agreeing upon a set of fundamental principles from which the truth of the winner's thesis follows with logical certainty.

———————- The argument so far ————————-

(Woking Thesis) Expression types (e.g. declarative sentences) can have assertoric force.

[Vallicella objection]
(Major) If an expression-type has assertoric force, every token of it has assertoric force
(Minor) A token of any sentence may occur in a context where it has no assertoric force
(Conclusion) No expression-type has assertoric force.

(Proof of the minor) Take any declarative sentence-type such as 'Socrates runs'. But it has no assertoric force in the consequence 'If Socrates runs, Socrates moves'.

(Reply to objection)
I concede the argument of the objection is valid. I concede the major. I dispute the minor. Against the proof of the minor. 'Socrates runs' does have assertoric force in the 'If Socrates runs, Socrates moves'. However, its force is cancelled out by the 'if then' operator.

The minor is thus the bone of contention.  We agree that in 'If Socrates runs, then he moves' the protasis of the conditional lacks assertoric force.  (I note en passant that the apodosis also lacks assertoric force.) But we disagree as to why the protasis of the conditional lacks assertoric force.  I say it is because no sentence-type intrinsically and as such has assertoric force.  Woking say is it is because there are contexts in which semantic cancellation removes the assertoric force which all declarative sentence-types possess intrinsically and as such. 

One objection to semantic cancellation is that it is inconsistent with the thesis of the compositionality of meaning, a thesis which Woking accepts, together with the thesis that assertoric force is a semantic component.  According to compositionality of meaning, a sentence-type is a semantic whole composed of, and built up out of, semantic parts.  Now given that assertoric force is a semantic component, and that wholes have their parts essentially, then the meaning of a sentence-type has its assertoric meaning component essentially, which implies that no sentence-type can have its assertoric force removed by semantic cancellation.  So either no sentence-type has assertoric force, as I maintain, or every sentence-type has assertoric force, whence it follows, contrary to what Woking maintains, that it is not the case that some sentence-types do, and some do not, have their assertoric force removed by semantic cancellation.  The argument, then, is this:

1. Compositionality of Meaning: The meaning of a sentence-type is a whole of parts.

2. Assertoric force is a semantic component of the meaning of a sentence-type.

3. Mereological Essentialism: wholes have their parts essentially: if x is a part of W, then necessarily x is a part of W.

4. The assertoric force of the meaning of a sentence-type is essential to it. (from 1, 2, 3)

5. If x is essential to y, then y cannot exist without x.

6. The meaning of a sentence-type cannot exist without its assertoric component. (from 4, 5)

7. A sentence-type's assertoric component, if it has one, cannot be removed by semantic cancellation, or in any other way. (from 6)

8. Either no sentence-type or every sentence-type possesses assertoric force intrinsically and as such. (from 7)

9. Some sentence-types do not possess assertoric force.

10. No sentence-type possesses assertoric force intrinsically and as such. (from 8, 9)

It appears that only by rejecting Mereological Essentialism can Woking evade this argument.  For the inferences are valid and the other premises he accepts.  But I should think that ME is far more credible than his somewhat vague talk of semantic cancellation.