Month: January 2012

Paradoxes of Illegal Immigration

Philosophers hate a contradiction, but love a paradox. There are paradoxes everywhere, in the precincts of the most abstruse as well as in the precincts of the prosaic. Here are eight paradoxes of illegal immigration suggested to me by Victor Davis Hanson. The titles and formulations are my own. For good measure, I add a ninth, of my own invention.

The Paradox of Profiling. Racial profiling is supposed to be verboten. And yet it is employed by American border guards when they nab and deport thousands of illegal border crossers. Otherwise, how could they pick out illegals from citizens who are merely in the vicinity of the border? How can what is permissible near the border be impermissible far from it in, say, Phoenix? At what distance does permissibility transmogrify into impermissibility? If a border patrolman may profile why may not a highway patrolman? Is legal permissibility within a state indexed to spatiotemporal position and variable with variations in the latter?

The Paradox of Encroachment. The Federal government sues the state of Arizona for upholding Federal immigration law on the ground that it is an encroachment upon Federal jurisdiction. But sanctuary cities flout Federal law by not allowing the enforcement of Federal immigration statutes. Clearly, impeding the enforcement of Federal laws is far worse than duplicating and perhaps interfering with Federal law enforcement efforts. And yet the Feds go after Arizona while ignoring sanctuary cities. Paradoxical, eh?

The Paradox of Blaming the Benefactor. Millions flee Mexico for the U.S. because of the desirability of living and working here and the undesirability of living in a crime-ridden, corrupt, and impoverished country. So what does Mexican president Felipe Calderon do? Why, he criticizes the U.S. even though the U.S. provides to his citizens what he and his government cannot! And what do many Mexicans do? They wave the Mexican flag in a country whose laws they violate and from whose toleration they benefit.

The Paradox of Differential Sovereignty and Variable Border Violability. Apparently, some states are more sovereign than others. The U.S., for some reason, is less sovereign than Mexico, which is highly intolerant of invaders from Central America. Paradoxically, the violability of a border is a function of the countries between which the border falls.

The Paradox of Los Locos Gringos. The gringos are crazy, and racist xenophobes to boot, inasmuch as 70% of them demand border security and support AZ SB 1070. Why then do so many Mexicans want to live among the crazy gringos?

The Paradox of Supporting While Stiffing the Working Stiff. Liberals have traditionally been for the working man. But by being soft on illegal immigration they help drive down the hourly wages of the working poor north of the Rio Grande. (As I have said in other posts, there are liberal arguments against illegal immigration, and here are the makings of one.)

The Paradox of Penalizing the Legal while Tolerating the Illegal. Legal immigrants face hurdles and long waits while illegals are tolerated. But liberals are supposed to be big on fairness. How fair is this?

The Paradox of Subsidizing a Country Whose Citizens Violate our Laws. "America extends housing, food and education subsidies to illegal aliens in need. But Mexico receives more than $20 billion in American remittances a year — its second-highest source of foreign exchange, and almost all of it from its own nationals living in the United States." So the U.S. takes care of illegal aliens from a failed state while subsidizing that state, making it more dependent, and less likely to clean up its act.

The Paradox of the Reconquista. Some Hispanics claim that the Southwest and California were 'stolen' from Mexico by the gringos. Well, suppose that this vast chunk of real estate had not been 'stolen' and now belonged to Mexico. Then it would be as screwed up as the rest of Mexico: as economically indigent, as politically corrupt, as crime-ridden, as drug-infested. Illegal immigrants from southern Mexico would then, in that counterfactual scenario, have farther to travel to get to the U.S., and there would be less of the U.S. for their use and enjoyment. The U.S. would be able to take in fewer of them. They would be worse off. So if Mexico were to re-conquer the lands 'stolen' from it, then it would make itself worse off than it is now. Gaining territory it would lose ground — if I may put paradoxically the Paradox of the Reconquista.

Exercise for the reader: Find more paradoxes!

Reduction, Elimination, and Material Composition

Yesterday I wrote,  "And yet if particular a reduces to particular b, then a is nothing other than b, and is therefore identical to b." This was part of an argument that reduction collapses into elimination.  A reader objects: "I am not sure that this is an accurate definition of reduction." 

He gives an argument having to do with material composition.  I'll put the argument in my own way, so as to strengthen it and make it even more of a challenge for me.

1. Whether or not minds are physically reducible, physical reductionism is surely true of some things, statues for example.  A statue is reducible to the matter that composes it, a hunk of bronze, say.  No one is a statue-hunk dualist.  It is not as if there are two things in the same place, the statue and the hunk of bronze.  Nor is anyone an eliminativist when it comes to statues.There are such things, but what they are is just hunks of matter. We avoid both dualism and eliminativism by adopting reductionism.

2. But surely the matter of the statue might have been configured or worked in some other way to make a different statue or a non-statue.  Before the sculptor went to work on it, the hunk of bronze was just a hunk, and after it became a statue it could have reverted  back to being a mere hunk if it were melted down.

Therefore

3. The statue and the hunk differ property-wise:  the hunk, but not the statue, has the property of existing at times at which the statue does not exist.  And at every time at which both hunk and statue exist, the hunk, but not the statue, has the modal property of being possibly such as to be a non-statue. 

Therefore

4. By the indiscernibility of Identicals, statue and hunk are not identical.

Therefore

5. The statue is reducible to its constituent matter but not identical to it. (By 1, 4)

Therefore

6.  It is not the case that if particular a reduces to particular b, then a is identical to b.

This is an impressive argument, but I don't see that it shows that one can have reduction without identity of the reduced to the reducer.  I take the argument as further evidence of the incoherence of the notion of the reduction of one particular to another.  The first premise, though plausible, is not obviously true. What's more, it seems inconsistent with the second premise.  I have argued many times before that in cases like these, statue and lump, fist and hand, brick house and bricks, the thing and its matter differ property-wise and so cannot be identical.  They are both temporally and modally discernible.  If fist and hand cannot be numerically identical, then they must be numerically distinct.  When I take my hand and make a fist of it, the hand does not cease to exist, but something new comes into existence, a fist.  Hand and fist, as long as both exist, are two numerically different things occupying exactly the same spatiotemporal position.  Admittedly, that sounds strange.  Nevertheless, I claim here is just as much reason to be a hand-fist dualist as there is to be a fist-to-hand reductionist.

One could also be an eliminativist.  Amazingly, Peter van Inwagen — no slouch of a philosopher; you don't get a chair if you slouch — is an eliminativist about artifacts such as the house built by the Wise Pig.  See here. 

Perhaps I can drive the reductionist onto the horns of a dilemma.  Either fist and hand are identical or they are not.  They cannot  be identical because they differ property-wise.  If two things are not numerically identical, however, then they are numerically different.  But if fist and hand are numerically different, then the fist does not reduce to the hand.

So I persist in my view that reduction is an incoherent notion.  There is no viable via media between dualism and eliminativism.  

Jaegwon Kim on Reductionism and Eliminativism

I've been studying Jaegwon Kim's Physicalism, or Something Near Enough (Princeton UP, 2005).  Here are some notes and questions.

1. It's clear that mental causation must be saved.  If Kim is right that nonreductive physicalism is not viable, then by his lights our only hope of saving mental causation is via "physical reductionism." (159).  It is of course easy to see how such reductionism, if true, would save mental causation.  Surely my desire for a beer together with my belief that there is beer in the reefer are part of the etiology of my getting out of my chair and heading to the kitchen.  If beliefs and desires are physical states, then there is no in-principle difficulty in understanding the etiology of my behavior.  Reductionism insures the physical efficacy of the mental.  What was a thorny problem on dualist approaches is no problem at all for the physical reductionist. 

2. At this point some of us are going to wonder whether reductionism collapses into eliminativism.  I tend to think that it does.  Kim of course must disagree.  His project is to find safe passage between  nonreductive physicalism and eliminativism.  But first I want to concede something to Kim.

3. Kim rightly points out (160) that we cannot assume that the mental cannot be physical in virtue of the very meaning of 'mental.'  We cannot assume that 'mental' means 'nonphysical.'  The following argument is not compelling and begs the question against the physicalist:

Beliefs and desires are mental
Whatever is mental is nonphysical
Ergo
Beliefs and desires are not physical.

The physicalist finds nothing incoherent in the notion that what is mental could also be physical.  So he will either reject the second premise, or, if he accepts it, deny the first and maintain that beliefs and desires are not mental in the sense in which his opponents think they are.  It seems clear, then, that one cannot mount a merely semantic argument against the physicalist based on a preconceived  meaning of 'mental.'

4.  Is my present state of consciousness real and yet reducible to a pattern of electrical activity in a network of neurons?  Can we secure reduction without elimination?  Reductionist: there are Fs but what they are are Gs.  Eliminativist: There are no Fs.  There at least appears to be a difference in these two sorts of claims.  Kim claims that "There is an honest difference between elimination and conservative reduction."  (160) Phlogiston got eliminated; temperature and heat got reduced.  Witches got eliminated; the gene got reduced. The reductionist thinks he can secure or "conserve" the reality of the Fs while reducing them to the Gs.  In the present case, the physical reductionist in the philosophy of mind thinks that he can maintain both that mental states are real and that they reduce to physical states.

5.  Let's note two obvious logical points.  The first is that identity is a symmetrical relation.  The second is that reduction is asymmetrical.  Thus,

I.  Necessarily, for any x, y, if x = y, then y = x.
R. Necessarily, for any x, y, if x reduces to y, then it is not the case that y reduces to x.

It is clear, then, that identity and reduction are not the same relation.  And yet if particular a reduces to particular b, then a is nothing other than b, and is therefore identical to b.  If you think about it, reduction is a strange and perhaps incoherent notion.  For if a reduces to b, a is identical to b, but, since reduction is asymmetrical,  b is not identical to a!  Reduction is asymmetrical identity.  Amd that smacks of radical incoherence.   This is what inclines me to say that reduction collapses into elimination.  For if a reduces to b, and is therefore identical to b, while b is not identical to a, then it follows that there simply is no a.  And so if my present mental state reduces to a pattern of electrical activity in a network of neurons, then my mental state does not exist; all that exists is the electrical activity.

6.  Kim wants to have it both ways at once.  He wants mental states to be both real and reducible.  He wants to avoid both eliminativism and dualism. My claim is that it is impossible to have it both ways.  Kim thinks that reduction somehow "conserves" that which is reduced.  But how could it?  If my desire for a beer is nothing other than a brain state, then then it is a purely physical state and everything mental about it has vanished.  If 'two' things are identical, then there is only one thing, and if you insist that that one thing is physical, then it cannot also be mental.

7.  My present thinking about a dog is intrinsically intentional, intrinsically object-directed.  But no physical state is intrinsically object-directed.  So, by the Indiscernibility of Identicals, my present thinking about a dog simply cannot be identical to any brain state, and so cannot reduce to any brain state. Kim of course thinks that intentional properties are functionalizable.  I have already  argued against that view here.  Whatever causal role my thinking about a dog plays in terms of behavioral inputs and outputs, causal role occupancy cannot be make makes my thinking  intentional.  For it is intentional intrinsically, not in virtue of causal relations.

8. Kim speaks of the functional reducibility of intentional/cognitive properties.  But surely it is not properties that need reducing but particular meetal acts.  Properties are not conscious of anything.  Nor are causal roles.  It is the realizers of the roles that are bearers of intentionality, and it simply makes no sense to think of these as purely physical.

9. Once one starts down the reductive road there is no stopping short of eliminativism.  The latter, however, is surely a reductio ad absurdum of physicalism as I explain in this post on Rosenberg's eliminativism. 

Xavier Ortiz Monasterio (1926-2011): An Existentialist Remembered

My former colleague Xavier Monasterio died last year on this date.  Curiously, January 4th was also the date of death of his philosophical hero Albert Camus.  This being a weblog, and thus an online journal of the personal and the impersonal, I didn't want the day to pass without a brief remembrance of the man.  I'll say a little today and perhaps supplement it later on.

Continue reading “Xavier Ortiz Monasterio (1926-2011): An Existentialist Remembered”

Dragon NaturallySpeaking

I saw an advertisement for this voice-recognition software.  I was intrigued and was thinking of asking Mike V., a relatively young whippersnapper who is en rapport with the latest gadgetry.  (When he visits my house he makes fun of my Jurassic electronics.)  But then I wondered how useful such a speech recognition application could be to someone who writes about arcane topics and uses high-falutin words.  Would the spoken 'animadversion' display as 'animal diversion'?  Would 'transcendental deduction of the categories' appears as 'transcontinental deportation of catnip'?  Would 'inverted qualia objection' show as 'involuted quails of Omaha'?

This morning I was pleased to hear from our old friend Vlastimil Vohanka who is also wondering about the utility to philosophers of DNS.  He conveys a remark by Baylor philosopher Jon Kvanvig on the latter's Facebook page:

"newest writing venture: I'm now composing using Dragon Naturally Speaking. It is amazingly accurate, beginning by trolling through everything on my hard drive to find appropriate vocabulary. So it recognizes 'Chisholm', 'Fregean', 'Chisholmian', as well as all the standard vocabulary in epistemology. And writing is so much faster: 5000 words in about 2 hours."
This is amazing. It implies that, were I to speak my neologism 'paleologism,' it would recognize and reproduce it and not spit out something like 'pal of loggers.' 
 
Vlastimil wanted my opinion of the DNS software, but I haven't used it so cannot comment.  If any reader has used it and wants to comment the ComBox is open.  Comments are moderated and won't appear until I have approved them.  Any that are off-topic will be summarily nixed.

Ron Paul and Libertarian Extremism

Ron Paul made a strong showing in Iowa last night despite his coming in third behind Santorum (second) and Romney (first).  But there is no way that Paul will receive the Republican nomination. His irresponsible foreign policy positions alone disqualify him.  You may disagree with that, but most agree with me, and that includes the better pundits such as Krauthammer.  So Paul's electability is zero.  It is too bad because Paul and libertarians generally have many good ideas which serve as correctives to the socialist drift of the country and can help us move back in the right direction towards limited government, self-reliance, and individual responsibility.  But libertarians cannot seem to control their tendency towards extremism.  This is why the Libertarian Party will always be a losertarian party.  Paul had the good sense to join the GOP, but he hasn't had the good sense to rein in the extremism that seems bred-in-the-bone with libertarians.

Paul is right that the the U.S.  is overextended abroad, but he can't seem to make the point in a moderate and nuanced way.  He has to say, foolishly and irresponsibly, that Iran is no threat.  And so he comes across as a crazy old man who cannot be trusted with the power of the presidency.  His 19th century isolationism was already outmoded in the 19th century.

The extremism of libertarians is connected with their being doctrinaire.  It is good to be principled but bad to be doctrinaire.  It requires the subtlety of the conservative mind to understand the difference and the dialectic between the two, a subtlety that is often lost on the adolescent mind of the libertarian who wants nice clear exceptionless principles to cling to.

I'll give an example of how libertarians, most if not all, are extreme and doctrinaire.  Individual liberty  is a very high value.  One of the pillars of this liberty is the right to private property. The defense of private property against collectivists is essential to both libertarian and conservative positions.  So far, so good. The tendency of the libertarian, however, is to absolutize the right to private property.  He has a hard time grasping that principles and values often butt up against competing principles and values that also have a serious claim on our respect.  So he cannot see that well-crafted eminent domain laws are right and reasonable.  He cannot see that there is something we can call the common good which is in tension with the right to private property. 

A second example is how libertarians typically absolutize the value of liberty while ignoring the claims of such opposing values as security and equality.  For more see my post, Liberty and Security.

The Irreducibility of Intentionality: An Argument From the Indeterminacy of the Physical

If it could be made to work, materialism would be attractive simply on grounds of parsimony. We all agree that entities, or rather categories of entity, ought not be multiplied beyond necessity.  There are those who will intone this Ockhamite principle with great earnestness as if they are advancing the discussion when of course they are not: the real issue concerns what is needed (necessary) for explanatory purposes.  If you agree that philosophers are in the business of explanation, then I hope you will agree that a good explanation must be categorially parsimonious but not at the expense of explanatory adequacy.

So we ought not introduce irreducibly mental items and/or abstracta if we can  get by with just material items By 'get by' I mean explain in adequate fashion all that needs to be explained: consciousness, self-consciousness including self-reference via the first-person singular pronoun, qualia, intentionality, conscience,  mystical and religious experience, the applicability of mathematics to the physical world, the normativity of logic, normativity in general, the existence of anything in the first place, the emergence of life . . . .

My main interest is negative: in showing that materialism doesn't work. Please don't respond by saying that some other theory (substance dualism, say) doesn't work either. For the issue is precisely: Does   materialism work? If theory T1 is explanatorily inadequate, its deficiencies cannot be made good by pointing out that T2 is also inadequate. This is an invalid argument: "Every alternative to materialism is inadequate; therefore we should embrace materialism despite its inadequacies." Wouldn't it be more reasonable under those circumstances to embrace no theory?

One more preliminary point. If materialism is explanatorily adequate, then we ought to embrace it, and dispense with God, the soul, and the denizens of the Platonic menagerie. For if materialism were adequate, there would be no reason to posit anything beyond the material. But if materialism is not adequate, then we do have reason for such posits.

The following argument is my interpretation of remarks made by Edward Feser in his Philosophy of Mind: A Short Introduction (One World, 2005), pp. 156-159)

1. Consider a representation such as a picture. You draw a picture of your mother. The picture represents her: it is of or about her, and it would remain about her even were she to cease to exist. The picture is a physical object with physical properties: the paper is of a certain size and shape and texture, the ink of a certain chemical composition, the lines have a definite thickness, etc. Now I would insist that these physical features cannot be that in virtue of which the picture represents your mother: they cannot be that in virtue of which the physical item is a representation. For it makes no sense to ascribe intrinsic semantic or intentional properties to merely physical items.  But even if I am wrong about this, there remains a problem for a materialist theory of representation.

2. Suppose a 'copycat' comes along and makes an EXACT copy of your picture of your mother. The copycat's intention is not to represent your mother; his intention is merely to represent your representation of your mother. Now there are two pictorial representations, call them R (the original) and R' (the copy). The question arises: Is R' a  representation of your mother, or is R' a representation  of R? Suppose a second copycat comes along and produces a second copy R''.   Does R'' represent R' or R or your mother? The situation is obviously iterable ad infinitum.

3. Clearly, there is a difference between saying that R' represents your mother, a human being, and saying that R' represents R, a nonhuman drawing of your mother. The reference is different in the two cases. But the reference is indeterminate if we go by the physical properties of the representations alone. Suppose I hand you two drawings of your mother, one an exact copy of the other, but you do not know which is the orignal and which is the copy. You cannot, by inspection of these drawings, tell which is which. Thus you cannot  determine the reference from the physical properties.

4. The point is generalizable to other types of representations.  Suppose I say 'cat' to refer to a cat and my copycat brother says 'cat' simply to copy me. If my brother mimics me perfectly, then it will be impossible from the physical properties of the two word-sounds to tell which refers to a cat and which does not.

Please do not say that we are both referring to a cat. For my copycat brother is a mere copycat: his intention is merely to reproduce the word-sound I made. To make it even clearer, replace my brother with a parrot who happens to be a perfect mimic. No one will say that the 'cat'-token produced by the parrot refers to a cat. The parrot is just an animate copy machine.

The same goes for any physical representation. Suppose a pattern of neural firings is taken to be a representation of X. An exact copy of  that pattern needn't be a representation of X; it could be a
representation of the original pattern. In general, no material representation of X is such that its physical properties suffice to make it a representation of X as opposed to a representation of a
representation of X.

5. Here is the argument:

P1. All thoughts have determinate objects.
P2. No purely material representation has a determinate object.
 —–
C. No thought is a purely material representation.

6. Let's consider an objection. "Granted, material representations on their own lack determinate reference, but that can be supplied by bringing in causal relations. Thus what makes a tokening of 'cat' refer to a cat rather than to a word is the fact that there is a causal chain starting with a furry critter and terminating with an utterance of 'cat.'"

But causal connections cannot secure determinacy of reference, as Hilary Putnam appreciates (Renewing Philosophy, Harvard UP, 1992, p. 23):

     One cannot simply say that the word "cat" refers to cats because
     the word is causally connected to cats, for the word "cat," or
     rather my way of using the word "cat," is causally connected to
     many things. It is true that I wouldn't be using "cat" as I do if
     many other things were different. My present use of the word "cat"
     has a great many causes, not just one. The use of the word "cat" is
     causally connected to cats, but it is also causally connected to
   &#0
160; the behavior of Anglo-Saxon tribes, for example. Just mentioning
     "causal connection" does not explain how one thing can be a
     representation of another thing, as Kant was already aware.

Related Post:  Representation and Causation, With Some Help from Putnam

Good, Better, Best

From the mail bag:

Is the way you interpret Voltaire's saying the way it was originally intended? I'm probably wrong here, but I always took the saying to mean this: a willingness to settle for what is "better" makes it likely that one won't acquire what is "good".
 
Good, better, best.  Positive, comparative, superlative.  "The best/better is the enemy of the good" means that oftentimes, not always, the pursuit of the best/better will prevent one from attaining the good.  The point is that if one is not, oftentimes, willing to settle for what is merely good, one won't get anything of value.  So I suggest that my reader has not understood Monsieur Voltaire's aperçu.
 
Example.  It will come down to Romney versus Obama.  If libertarians and conservatives fail to vote for Romney, on account of his manifold defects, then they run the risk of four more years of the worthless Obama.  Those libertarians and conservatives will have let the better/best become the enemy of the good.  They will have shown a failure to understand the human predicament and the politics pertaining to it.  He who holds out for perfection in  an imperfect world may end up with nothing.
 
You give the example of a spouse: try to hold out for a perfect wife, and you'll never marry at all. An example that would fit my reading would be, if one settles for a wife who's merely better than most of the available options, then one's apt to settle for a wife who isn't good. Sometimes it's better to refuse all the available options.
 
I agree that it is sometimes better to refuse all the available options.  If the choice is between Hitler and Stalin, then one ought to abstain! 
 
Maybe a better example would be, imagine I need to install plumbing in my house. Crappy plumbing is almost always going to be better than no plumbing. But should I (say, out of laziness) really settle for that, on the grounds that 'well, it's better than the nothing I had'?
 
Of course not.  Voltaire's point is not that one should settle for what is inferior when something better is available.  The point is that one should not allow the pursuit of unattainable perfection to prevent the attainment of something good but within reach.  Suppose someone were to say: I won't have any faucets or fixtures in my house unless they are all made of solid gold!  You will agree that such an attitude would be eminently unreasonable.
 
The Voltairean principle as I read it is exceedingly important in both personal life and in politics.
 
Perhaps you know some perfectionists.  These types never accomplish anything because they are stymied by the conceit that anything less than perfection is worthless.  I knew a guy in graduate school who thought that a dissertation had to be a magnum opus.  He never finished and dropped out of sight.
 
In politics there are 'all or nothing' types who demand the whole enchilada or none.  Some years back, when it looked as if it would be Giuliani versus Hillary, some conservative extremists said they would withhold their support from the former on the ground that he is soft on abortion.  But that makes no bloody sense given that under Hillary things would have been worse.
 
The 'all or nothing' mentality is typical of adolescents of all ages.  "We want the world and we want it . .  NOW!"

Le Mieux est L’Ennemi du Bien

Attributed to Voltaire. "The better is the enemy of the good."  The thought is perhaps better captured by "The best is the enemy of the good."  In an imperfect world it is folly to predicate action upon perfection.  Will you hold out for the perfect spouse?  Then you will remain alone.  And if you yourself are less than perfect, how can you demand perfection in others? 

Meditation on this truth may help conservatives contain their revulsion at their lousy choices. Obama, who has proven that he is a disaster for the country, got in in part because of conservatives who could not abide McCain.

Politics is a practical business. It is always about the lesser of evils, except when it is about the least of evils. It is not about being ideologically pure. It is about accomplishing something in a concrete situation in which holding out for the best is tantamount to acquiescing in the bad. Political choices are forced options in roughly William James' sense: he who abstains chooses willy-nilly. Not choosing the better amounts to a choice of the worse.

Each of  the Republican contenders has drawbacks.  But any of them would be better than Obama.  Suppose Romney is nominated.  He's a wishy-washy, flip-flopping pretty boy.  But he's electable and better than Obama. 

Neologisms, Paleologisms, and Grelling’s Paradox

'Neologism' is not a new word, but an old word. Hence, 'neologism' is not a neologism. 'Paleologism' is not a word at all; or at least it is not listed in the Oxford English Dictionary. But it ought to be a word, so I hereby introduce it. Who is going to stop me? Having read it and understood it, you have willy-nilly validated its introduction and are complicit with me.

Now that we have 'paleologism' on the table, and an unvast conspiracy going, we are in a position to see that 'neologism' is a paleologism, while 'paleologism' is a neologism. Since the neologism/paleologism classification is both exclusive (every word is either one or the other )and exhaustive (no word is neither), it follows that 'neologism' is not a neologism, and 'paleologism' is not a paleologism.

Such words are called heterological: they are not instances of the properties they express. 'Useless' and 'monosyllabic' are other examples of  heterological expressions in that 'useless' is not useless and 'monosyllabic' is not monosyllabic. A term that is not heterological is called autological. Examples include 'short' and 'polysyllabic.'  'Short' is short and 'polysyllabic' is polysyllabic. Autological terms are instances of the properties they express.

Now ask yourself this question: Is 'heterological' heterological? Given that the heterological/autological classification is exhaustive, 'heterological' must be either heterological or else autological. Now if the former, then 'heterological' is not an instance of the property it expresses, namely, the property of not being an instance of the property it expresses. But this implies that 'heterological' is autological. On the other hand, if 'heterological' is autological, then it is an instance of the property it expresses, namely the property of not being an instance of the property it expresses. But this implies that 'heterological' is heterological.

Therefore, 'heterological' is heterological if and only if it is not. This contradiction is known in the trade as Grelling's Paradox. It is named after Kurt Grelling, who presented it in 1908.

A New Year’s Resolution

I make it every year and I break it every year: Handle each piece of paper only once!

Let's say you have just come in with the mail. Without pausing to pour coffee or stroke the cat, fire up the shredder and open the trash barrel. Shred the credit card applications, pay the bills, file the financial statements. Deal with each piece of paper on the spot. When in doubt, discard.