An ugly word for an ugly thing. Either one.
The Obamacare provision which allows children to remain covered by their parents' health care insurance until the age of 26 promotes wussification. Do I need to explain this? Not to a conservative, for whom the old virtue of self-reliance is indeed a virtue and therefore something to be encouraged and not undermined.
1. Materialism would be very attractive if only it could be made to work. Unfortunately, there are a number of phenomena for which it has no satisfactory explanation. One such is the phenomenon of
representation, whether mental or linguistic. Some mental states are of or about worldly individuals and states of affairs. This fact comes under the rubric 'Intentionality.' How is this intentional directedness possible given materialist constraints? Following Chisholm and Searle, I subscribe to the primacy of the intentional over the linguistic. But let's approach the problem of representation from the side of linguistic reference. How is it that words and sentences mean things? How does language hook onto reality? In virtue of what does my tokening (in overt speech, in writing, or in any other way) of the English word-type 'cat' refer to cats? What makes 'cat' refer to cats rather than to pictures of cats or statues of cats or the meowing of cats? This, in linguistic dress, is the question, What makes my thought of a cat, a thought of a cat? And how is all this possible in the materialist's world?
2. The materialist has more than one option, but a very tempting one is to reduce reference to causation. The idea is roughly that the referent of a word is what causes its tokening. Thus 'cat'-tokenings refer to cats because cats cause these tokenings. Suppose I walk into your house and see a cat. I say: "I see you have cat." My use of 'cat' on this occasion — my tokening of the word-type — refers to cats because the critter in front of me causes my 'cat'-tokening. That's the idea.
3. Unfortunately, this is only a crude gesture in the direction of a theory. For it is obvious, as Hilary Putnam points out (Renewing Philosophy, Harveard UP, 1992,p. 37), that pictures of cats cause 'cat'-tokenings, but pictures of cats are not cats. Cats are typically furry and cover their feces. Pictures, however, are rarely furry and never cover their (nonexistent) feces. Yet I might say, seeing a picture of a cat over your fireplace, "I see you like cats." In that sentence, 'cat' is used to refer to cats even though what caused my 'cat'-tokening was not a cat but a non-cat, namely, a picture of a cat.
Indeed, practically anything can cause a 'cat'-tokening: cat feces, cat hair, cat caterwauling. Suppose I see Ann Coulter engaged in a 'cat-fight' with Susan Estrich on one of the shout shows. I say, "They are fighting like cats." Nota Bene: my use of 'cat' in this sentence is literal, but it is not caused by a cat! (My example, not Putnam's).
4. Our problem is this: what determines the reference of a word like 'cat'? What makes this bit of language represent something extralinguistic? 'Cat' is a linguistic item; a cat is not. (French 'philosophers' take note.) In virtue of what does the former target the latter? If both a cat and a pile of cat scat can cause a 'cat'-tokening, then the causal theory of reference is worthless unless it can exclude these extraneous (excremental?) cases.
The problem is that 'cat' refers to something quite specific, cats, whereas 'cat'-tokenings can be caused by practically anything. To solve this problem, a notion of causation must be invoked that is also quite selective. It turns out, however, that this selective notion of causation presupposes intentionality, and so cannot be used in a noncircular account of intentionality. Let me explain.
4. Context-Sensitive versus Context-Independent Concepts of Causation. We often in ordinary English speak of 'the cause' of some event, a myocardial infarction say, even though there are many contributing factors: bad diet, lack of exercise, hypertension, cigarette smoking, high stress job, an episode of snow-shoveling. Which of these will be adjudged 'the cause' is context- and interest-relative. A physician who gets a kick-back from a pharmaceutical concern will point to hypertension, perhaps, so that he can prescribe a massive dose of angiotensin-converting enzyme inhibitor, while the man's wife might say that it was the snow shoveling that did him in.
To take a more extreme example, suppose a man dies in a fire while in bed. The salient cause might be determined to be smoking in bed. No one will say that the flammability of the bedsheets and other room
furnishings is the cause of the man's incineration. Nevertheless, had the room and its furnishings not been flammable, the fire would not have occurred! The flammability is not merely a logical, but also a causal, condition of the fire. It is part of the total cause, but no one will consider it salient. The word is from the Latin salire to leap, whence our word 'sally' as when one sallies forth to do battle at a
chess tournament, say. A salient cause, then, is one that jumps out at you, grabbing you by your epistemic shorthairs as it were, as opposed to being a mere background condition.
Putnam cites the example of the pressure cooker that exploded (p. 48). No one will say that it was a lack of holes in the pressure cooker's vessel that caused the explosion. A stuck safety valve caused the explosion. Nevertheless, had the vessel been perforated, the contraption would not have exploded!
What these examples show is that there is an ordinary-language use of 'cause' which is context-sensitive and interest-relative and (if I may) point-of-view-ish. A wholly objective view of nature, a Nagelian view from nowhere, would not be able to discriminate the salient from the nonsalient in matters causal. In terms of fundamental physics, the whole state of the world at time t determines its state at subsequent times. At this level, a short-circuit and the current's being on are equally causal in respect of the effect of a fire. Our saying that the short-circuit caused the fire, not the current's being on, simply advertises the fact that for us the latter is the normal and desired state of things, the state we have an interest in maintaining, and that the former is the opposite.
The ordinary notion of cause, then, resting as it does on our interests and desires, presupposes intentional notions. I cannot be interested in or desire something unless I am conscious of it. And I cannot adjudge one state of affairs as normal and the other as abnormal unless I have interests and desires.
5. Recall what the problem was. The materialist needs to explain reference in physicalist terms. He thinks to do so by invoking physical causation. The idea is that the referents of a word W cause W-tokenings. The reference of a word is determined by the causal influence of the word's referents. So it must be cats, and not pictures of cats, or the past behavior or English speakers that causes 'cat'-tokenings. But surely the past behavior of English speakers is part of the total cause of p
resent 'cat'-tokenings. (See Putnam, pp. 48-49.) 'Cat' does not refer to this behavior, however. To exclude the behavior as non-salient requires use of the ordinary interest-relative notion of causation. But this notion, we have seen, presupposes intentionality.
6. The upshot is that the above causal account of representation – which is close to a theory proposed by Jerry Fodor — is viciously circular: it presupposes the very notion that it is supposed to be reductively accounting for, namely, intentionality.
Well of course. In reality every cube has 12 edges. But one could think of a cube without thinking of something that has 12 edges, and indeed without thinking of something that lacks 12 edges. If you know what a cube is, and I ask you, "How many edges does a cube have," you might reply, "I don't know." During this exchange you are most assuredly thinking of a cube, but a cube indeterminate in respect of the property of having 12 edges. What you have before your mind is an incomplete object, one that, because incomplete, cannot exist. Your thought has an intentional object, but it is an object that does not exist.
Another example. Peter shows up at my door. I note that he is wearing a brown leather vest. Now anything made of leather must be made of cow leather or horse leather or alligator leather or . . . . But the leather vest that is before my mind as the object of my visual experience is indeterminate with respect to type of leather. What is before my mind is an intentional object.
Peter's vest is brown, and in reality everything brown is colored. But the intentional object of my visual experiencing is brown but not colored. Extracting the principle, we may erect the following thesis:
Non-Closure Under Property-Entailment: Intentional objects, reflecting as they do the finitude of the human mind, are not closed under property-entailment.
It follows from this principle that no merely intentional object exists. (For everything that exists is complete.) But that is not to say that they are denizens of Meinong's realm of Aussersein. Talk of merely intentional objects does not commit one to Meinongianism. One could take the line that merely intentional objects are "ontically heteronomous" to borrow a phrase from Roman Ingarden: their existence is parasitic upon the existence of the mental acts whose intentional objects they are.
Now there are problems with this sketch of a theory of intentional objects, but it is not an obviously senseless or incoherent theory. So I suspect Edward of London feigns incomprehension when he says he doesn't understand it. Does he have a better theory?
Sitting in back of my house the other day, in a T-shirt, reading A. N. Prior’s Objects of Thought, this is what I had to look at.
Here is a puzzle that may be thought to motivate a distinction between intentional and real objects, a distinction that turns out to be problematic indeed.
Puzzle. One cannot think without thinking of something, but if one is thinking of something, it does not follow that something is such that one is thinking of it.
Example. Tom is thinking of the fountain of youth. So he is thinking of something. But there is no fountain of youth. So from the fact that Tom is thinking of the fountain of youth, it does not follow that something is such that Tom is thinking of it.
The puzzle expressed as an aporetic dyad:
1. One cannot think without thinking of something.
2. If one is thinking of something, it does not follow that something is such that one is thinking of it.
Both limbs make a strong claim on our acceptance. The first is utterly datanic. The second, though exceedingly plausible, and indeed true as far as I can see, is not datanic. It is reasonably denied by Meinong and the Meinongians. For if some items have no being at all, and if the fountain of youth counts as a beingless item (as it does for Meinong & Co.), and if Tom is thinking of the fountain of youth, then it does follow that something is such that Tom is thinking of it. This shows that our puzzle rests on a presupposition which ought to be added to our dyad so as to sire the following aporetic triad or antilogism:
1. One cannot think without thinking of something.
2. If one is thinking of something, it does not follow that something is such that one is thinking of it.
3. There are no beingless items.
Though the limbs are individually plausible, they appear collectively inconsistent. If they really are inconsistent, then we face a genuine aporia, an intellectual impasse: we have three propositions each of which we have excellent reason to think is true, but which cannot all be true on pain of logical contradiction.
There is at least the appearance of contradiction. For if Tom is thinking of a mermaid, and there are no mermaids, then Tom is both thinking of something and not thinking of something. Tom's thought has an object and it does not have an object. It has an object because no one can think without thinking of something. It does not have an object because there are no mermaids. So we have at least an apparent contradiction.
To dispel the appearance of contradiction, one could make a distinction. So let us distinguish the intentional object from the real object and see what happens. Every intentional state is a directedness to an object, and the intentional object is simply that to which the intentional state is directed precisely as it is intended in the mental act with all and only the properties it is intended as having. So when Tom thinks of a mermaid, a mermaid is his intentional object. For it is that to which his thought is directed. But there is no 'corresponding' real object because there are no mermaids in reality. Accordingly, 'Tom's thought has an object and it does not have an object' is only apparently a contradiction since what it boils down to is 'Tom's thought has an intentional object but it does not have a real object' — which is not a contradiction.
Unfortunately, this solution brings with it its own difficulties. In this post I will mention just one.
The putative solution says that if I am thinking about Pegasus or Atlantis or the fountain of youth, my thinking has an intentional object, but that there is no corresponding real object. But what if I am thinking of Peter, who exists? In this case the theory will have to maintain that there is a real object corresponding to the intentional object. It will have to maintain this because every intentional state has an intentional object. The theory, then, says that when we intend the nonexistent, there is only an intentional object. But when we intend the existent, there is both an intentional object and a corresponding real object. There is a decisive objection to this theory.
Clearly, if I am thinking about Peter, I am thinking about him and not about some surrogate intentional object, immanent to the mental act, which somehow mediates between the act and Peter himself. The mental act terminates at Peter and not at an intentional object. Intentionality, after all, is that feature of mental states whereby they refer beyond themselves to items that are neither parts of the mental act nor existentially dependent on the mental act. Clearly, it is intrinsic to the intentionality of my thinking of Peter that my thinking intends something that exists whether or not I am thinking of it.
This objection puts paid to the notion that intentionality relates a mind (or a state of a mind) to a merely intentional object which functions as an epistemic intermediary or epistemic surrogate. This scheme fails to accommodate the fact that intentionality by its very nature involves a transcending of the mind and its contents towards the transcendent. Suppose I am thinking about a mountain. Whether it exists or not, what I intend is (i) something whose nature is physical and not mental; and (ii) something that exists whether or not I am thinking about it.
The point I just made is that when I think of Peter, it is Peter himself that my thought reaches: my thought does not terminate at a merely intentional object, immanent to the act, which merely stands for or goes proxy for or represents Peter. This point is well-nigh datanic. If you don't understand it, you don't understand intentionality. One will be tempted to accommodate this point by saying that when one thinks of what exists, the IO = the RO. But this can't be right either. For the intentional object is always an incomplete object, a fact that reflects the finitude of the human mind. But Peter in reality is a complete object. Now identity is governed by the Indiscernibility of Identicals which states, roughly, that if x = y, then x and y share all properties. But the IO and the RO do not share all properties: The IO is indeterminate with respect to some properties while the RO is wholly determinate. Therefore, the IO is never identical to the RO.
So the point I made cannot be accommodated by saying that the IO = the RO in the case when one thinks of the existent.
Where does this leave us? I argued that our initial puzzle codified first as a dyad and then as a triad motivates a distinction between intentional and real objects. The distinction was introduced in alleviation of inconsistency. But then we noted a serious difficulty with the distinction. But if the distinction cannot be upheld, how do we solve the aporetic triad? It looks as if the distinction is one we need to make, but cannot make.
The following statements in boldface are taken verbatim from Dennis Prager's Are You a Liberal? I comment briefly on each in turn. Mirabile dictu, it turns out I am not a liberal! I could make of each of these items a separate post. (And you hope I won't.) I don't want to hear anyone complain that I am not arguing my points. I argue plenty elsewhere on this site. In any case, that is not my present purpose.
The following quotations from Rand can be found here, together with references.
An embryo has no rights. Rights do not pertain to a potential, only to an actual being. A child cannot acquire any rights until it is born. The living take precedence over the not-yet-living (or the unborn).
Abortion is a moral right—which should be left to the sole discretion of the woman involved; morally, nothing other than her wish in the matter is to be considered. Who can conceivably have the right to dictate to her what disposition she is to make of the functions of her own body?
If Ayn Rand weren't so popular among adolescents of all ages, if she were an unknown as opposed to a well-known hack, I wouldn't be wasting time refuting this nonsense. But she is very influential, so it is worthwhile exposing her incoherence. If you complain that my tone is harsh and disrespectful, my reply will be that it is no more harsh and disrespectful than hers is: read the quotations on the page to which I have linked. He who is strident and polemical will receive stridency and polemic in return. You reap what you sow.
In the first paragraph above Rand equates the unborn with the not-yet living. This implies that a third trimester fetus is not living. What is it then? Dead? Or is it perhaps neither living nor dead like an inanimate artifact? Obviously, a human fetus is a living biologically human individual. Obviously, one cannot arbitrarily exclude the pre-natal from the class of the living — unless one is a hack or an ideologue.
Let me expand on this just a bit. One cannot answer philosophical questions by terminological fiat, by arbitrarily rigging your terminology in such a way that the answer you want falls out of the rigging. Would that Rand and her followers understood this. My post Peikoff on the Supernatural carefully exposes another egregious example of the shabby trick of answering philosophical questions by terminological fiat.
Now consider the enthymematic argument of the first two sentences of the first paragraph above. Made explicit, it goes like this. (1) Rights do not pertain to a potential, only to an actual being. (2) An embryo is a potential being. Therefore, (3) An embryo has no rights.
A being is anything that is or exists. So if x is a merely potential being, then of course it cannot have any rights. A merely potential being is either nothing or next-to-nothing. But a human embryo is not a merely potential being; it is an actual human (not canine, not lupine, not bovine, . . .) embryo. Indeed it is an actual biologically human member of the species homo sapiens. That is a plain fact of biology. So the second premise is spectacularly false.
If Rand were to say something intelligent, she would have to argue like this:
(1*) Rights do not pertain to potential persons, only to actual persons. (2*) An embryo is a potential person. Therefore, (3) An embyo has no rights. Unlike Rand's argument, this argument is worth discussing. But it is not the argument Rand gives. I have countered it elsewhere. See Abortion category.
The second paragraph quoted above is as sophomoric as the first — if that's not an insult to sophomores. It is a clumsy gesture in the direction of what is often called the Woman's Body Argument. Follow the link for the refutation.
Dear Dr. Vallicella,
I am of the understanding that one of your post-graduate degrees focussed on Kant. With your knowledge of said philosopher I wonder if I might trouble you to answer a few questions for me?
These questions pertain to Kant's criticism's of the cosmological argument for God's existence. I know that this argument comes in three basic forms: Leibnizian, Thomistic, and Kalam. Did Kant direct criticism to all three versions? Brian Magee has stated, "The fact simply is that Kant has demolished the traditional 'proofs' of God." (Confessions of A Philosopher, p.198) Many other credentialed philosophers make similar claims. In your view, is Magee's strident assertion justified? Do any of Kant's criticism's of the cosmological argument still have force today, or are you of the opinion that the work of recent philosophers has blunted the arguments of the Prussian?
Of course, I don't expect you to provide any counter-arguments to Kant. I am merely curious as to your take on the questions I have asked and I am quite happy for your answer to be brief. Thank you for your time.
Regards,
Stephen Lewin
Dear Mr. Lewin,
Thank you for writing and for reminding me of that delightful book by Bryan Magee. Unfortunately, the sentence you quote I do not find on p. 198. But on p. 156, we read that Kant's philosophy ". . . demolishes many of the most important religious and theological claims . . . ." On the same page Magee bestows upon Kant the highest praise. He is "the supreme understander of the problem of human experience," "the supreme clarifier," and "the supreme liberator." For Magee, Manny is the man!
A little farther down on the same page we find your quotation: "The fact simply is that Kant has demolished the traditional 'proofs' of God."
You ask whether Magee's confident claim is justified. No, but first a comment on 'demolishes' as it occurs in the above quotations. Magee uses it in connection both with claims and with arguments. But to demolish a claim is not the same as to demolish an argument. Presumably, to demolish a claim such as the claim that God exists would be to show that it is obviously false because ruled out on broadly logical grounds, or else ruled out on the ground that it is inconsistent with some well-known empirical fact or set of empirical facts. Clearly, Kant does not demolish the claim that God exists in this sense of 'demolish.' Ditto for the claim that the soul is a simple substance. Nor is it his intention to demolish these claims. At most he shows them to be unknowable or unprovable. And he thinks that is a salutary thing to have shown. "I have found it necessary to deny knowledge in order to make room for faith," Kant famously remarks in the preface to the 2nd edition of the Critique of Pure Reason (Bxxx). I suggest that Magee is being sloppy when he speaks of demolishing theological claims. He may be confusing 'show to be false' with 'show to be unknowable or unprovable.' I receommend a careful reading of the 1787 preface as a counterbalance to Magee's Kant interpretation as der Alles-Zermalmer, the all-pulverizer.
Now what would it be to demolish an argument? To demolish an argument is to expose a clear mistake in it such as a formal fallacy or a plainly false premise. I believe that Kant demolished the ontological argument "from mere concepts" which is essentially Descartes' Meditation V ontological argument. Kant did this by isolating a presupposition of the argument which is plainly false, namely, the proposition that some concepts are such that, by sheer analysis of their content, one can show that they are instantiated. Surely Kant is right that no concept, not even the concept of God, includes existence. Interestingly, Aquinas would agree with this.
But there are modal versions of the ontological argument that are immune to the Kantian critique. See my "Has the Ontological Argument Been Refuted?" Religious Studies 29 (1993), pp. 97-110. As for the cosmological argument, Kant thinks that it depends on the ontological argument and collapses with it. This is an intricate matter that I cannot go into now. If you are interested, see my article, "Does the Cosmological Argument Depend on the Ontological?" Faith and Philosophy, vol. 17, no. 4 (October 2000), pp. 441-458.
Another idea of Kant's is that there cannot be a First Cause because the category of causality has no cognitive employment beyond the realm of phenomena. Schopenhauer borrows this notion and pushes it for all its worth. Relevant here is my post, On the Very Idea of a Cause of Existence: Schopenhauer on the Cosmological Argument. But it cannot be said that either Kant or Schopenhauer demolished the cosmological argument because their critiques rest on their own questionable metaphysical systems.
And as you suggest above, there are Kalam and Thomist versions of the CA that Kant doesn't even consider. Kant's knowledge of the history of philosophy was meager and the metaphysics he criticized was that of the Wolffian school which derives from Leibniz.
Finally, I refer you to my article, "From Facts to God: An Onto-Cosmological Argument," International Journal for the Philosophy of Religion 48 (2000), pp. 157-181.
To philosophize without dogma is like sewing without a knot at the end of the thread. (Kierkegaard) But to philosophize with dogma is not to philosophize at all.
I cannot be reasonably disappointed if I fail to achieve what was never in my power to achieve.
Most people are basically decent. Just don't put them under too much moral pressure.
They say that love is blind. But if love blinds, is it love? Or is it rather infatuation? "Where there is love, there is sight." I found this fine Latin aphorism in Josef Pieper, Death and Immortality (Herder and Herder, 1969, p. 21). The translation is mine. Pieper credits Thomas Aquinas, Commentary on the Sentences 3 d. 35, I, 21. Pieper adds that "The dictum comes from Richard of St. Victor." (Pieper, p. 133, n. 29.)
Only to the eye of love is the ipseity and haecceity of the beloved revealed, and only the eye of love can descry the true nature and true horror of death. That is my gloss on the aphorism and its context. I should arrange a confrontation between Pieper and Epicurus who Pieper views as a sophist. (p. 29)
"OK," says the Buddhist, "But what's to know?"
NYT account here. "Vladimir Markin, a spokesman for Russia’s Investigative Committee, said the attack was probably carried out by a male suicide bomber, and that authorities were trying to identify him."
Was he a Confucian perhaps, a Buddhist, or a Christian? The Gray Lady provides no clue. Maybe he was a generic faith-based bomber. After all, everyone knows that all religions are equal and so equally likely to inspire terrorist acts.
An inspiration. Brother Jackass will carry you over many a pons asinorum for many a year if properly fueled and disciplined. Reform your diet and set aside two to three hours per day for vigorous exercise. Lalanne swam an hour a day and lifted weights for two. Right up until the end. And he always 'went to failure' doing his reps until he could do no more.
