March 2012 – Page 2 – Maverick Philosopher

A Universe From Nothing? Krauss Reviewed

I had fun back in January pilloring the scientistic nonsense Lawrence M. Krauss propagates in his recent book, A Universe From Nothing. Meanwhile the book has shown up at the local library and tomorrow I will borrow it. I would never buy a piece of crap like this, though, to be fair, I will first have to read it to be sure that it is crap. That it is crap is an excellent bet, however, given what I quoted Krauss as saying and given David Albert's New York Times review of a couple days ago.

I won't quote from Albert's review. Study it carefully and you will see why Krauss' book is junk.

One mistake many people make is to think that any opposition to scientistic nonsense of the sort that Krauss spouts can only be religiously motivated. Carefully pointing out the confusions to which Krauss and Co. succumb gets one labeled an 'apologist for religion.' Now an affirmative answer to the question whether contemporary physics has the resources to explain why the physical universe exists does of course have negative implications for those forms of theism that posit a transcendent divine creator. But the question itself is not a religious question but a metaphysical question. Every clear-thinking atheist should reject Krauss's specious reasoning. Rejecting it would not make our atheist an apologist for religion.

People sometimes question what philosophy is good for. Well, one thing it is good for is to debunk bad philosophy, Krauss' scientistic nonsense being a particular egregious example of bad philosophy.

Philosophize we must and philosophize we will. The only question is whether we will do it well.

You Win Again

Just now discovered this great Ralph Stanley and Melba Montgomery version of the old Hank Williams tune, You Win Again.

Regalia

Regalia, as its etymology suggests (from L. rex, regis), are the king's insignia. By a natural extension, anyone's insignia, colors, banners. We like to fly the colors to the point of identifying with them. We identify with flags and labels and logos and certain words. There is a stupid satisfaction one gets from flaunting logos like 'Trek' and 'Jeep.' See? Me ride Trek bike. Just like Lance Armstrong.

The name of my Bell bicycle helmet model is 'Paradox.' That clinched the purchase for me.

Philosophers hate a contradiction but love a paradox.

Things Not Worth Knowing

One's own genealogy, for example. What does it matter who begat whom in one's line? Most of us will discover the names and dates of insignificant people who have left nothing behind but their names
and dates.

Or is it just a philosopher's prejudice to be concerned more with timeless universals than with temporal particulars? To thrill to the Thoreauvian admonition, "Read not The Times, read the eternities"?

Would Ortega Have Been a Blogger?

Julian Marias on his master, Ortega y Gasset:

Throughout his life he wrote circumstantial, occasional, studies, in which he went straight to the point, to say something, to communicate to the reader — a very particular reader, whose figure gradually changed over the course of time — certain truths, certain warnings, certain very concrete exhortations. To do so he had to put into play the totality of his philosophical thought . . . . (Julian Marias, Jose Ortega y Gasset: Circumstance and Vocation, tr. Lopez-Marillas, University of Oklahoma Press, 1970, p. 235.)

Saturday Night at the Oldies: ‘Strange’ Songs

In three categories: Rock, Religion, Romanticism.

Cream, Strange Brew
Doors, People are Strange
Doors, Strange Days
Mickey and Sylvia, Love is Strange

Stanley Bros., Rank Strangers
Emmy Lou Harris, Wayfaring Stranger

Frank Sinatra, Strangers in the Night To be is to do (Socrates). To do is to be (Sartre). Do be do be do (Sinatra).
Barbara Lewis, Hello Stranger
Acker Bilk, Stranger on the Shore

Kenny, Geach, and the Perils of Reading Frege Back Into Aquinas

I have been studying Anthony Kenny, Aquinas on Being (Oxford 2002). I cannot report that I find it particularly illuminating. I am troubled by the reading back of Fregean doctrines into Aquinas, in particular in the appendix, "Frege and Aquinas on Existence and Number." (pp. 195-204) Since Kenny borrows heavily from Peter Geach, I will explain one of my misgivings in connection with a passage from Geach's important article, "Form and Existence" in God and the Soul. Geach writes,

Frege, like Aquinas, held that there was a fundamental distinction in rebus answering to the logical distinction between subject and predicate — the distinction between Gegenstand (object) and Begriff (concept). [. . .] And for Frege the Begriff, and it alone, admits of repetition and manyness; an object cannot be repeated — kommt nie wiederholdt vor. (45-46)

So far, so good. Geach continues:

Understood in this way, the distinction between individual and form is absolutely sharp and rigid; what can be sensibly said of one becomes nonsense if we try to say it of the other. [. . .] Just because of this sharp distinction, we must reject the Platonic doctrine that what a predicate stands for is is some single entity over against its many instances, hen epi pollon. On the contrary: the common nature that the predicate 'man' (say) stands for can be indifferently one or many, and neither oneness nor manyness is a mark or note of human nature itself. This point is made very clearly by Aquinas in De Ente et Essentia. Again we find Frege echoing Aquinas; Frege counts oneness or manyness (as the case may be) among the properties (Eigenschaften) of a concept, which means that it cannot at the same time be one of the marks or notes (Merkmalen) of that concept. (46)

I smell deep confusion here. But precisely because the confusion runs deep I will have a hard time explaining clearly wherein the confusion consists. I will begin by making a list of what Geach gets right.

1. Objects and individuals are unrepeatable.
2. Concepts and forms are repeatable.
3. Setting aside the special question of subsistent forms, no individual is a form, and no object is a concept.
4. Frege distinguishes between the marks of a concept and the properties of a concept. The concept man, for example, has the concept animal as one of its marks. But animal is not a property of man, and this for the simple reason that no concept is an animal. Man has the property of being instantiated. This property, however, is not a mark of man since it is not included within the latter's conceptual content: one cannot by sheer analysis of the concept man determine whether or not there are any men. So there is a sense in which "neither oneness nor manyness is a mark or note of human nature itself." This is true if taken in the following sense: neither being instantiated singly nor being instantiated multiply is a mark of the concept man.

But how do these points, taken singly or together, support Geach's rejection of "the Platonic doctrine that what the predicate stands for is some single entity over against its many instances"? They don't!

It seems obvious to me that Geach is confusing oneness/manyness as the relational property of single/multiple instantiation with oneness/manyness as the monadic property of being one or many. It is one thing to ask whether a concept is singly or multiply instantiated. It is quite another to ask whether the concept itself is one or many. It is also important to realize that a Fregean first-level concept, when instantiated, does not enter into the structure of the individuals that instantiate it. Aquinas is a constituent ontologist, but Frege is not. This difference is deep and causes a world of trouble for those who attempt to understand Aquinas in Fregean terms. For Frege, concepts are functions, and no function enters into the structure of its argument. The propositional function x is a man is not a constituent of Socrates. What's more, the value of the function for Socrates as argument is not a state of affairs with Socrates and the function as constituents. The value of the function for Socrates as argument is True; for Stromboli as argument, False. And now you know why philosophers speak of truth-values. It's mathematical jargon via Frege the mathematician.

The Fregean concept man is one, not many. It is one concept, not many concepts. Nor is it neither one nor many. It can have one instance, or many instances, or no instance. The Thomistic form man, however, is, considered in itself, neither one nor many. It is one in the intellect but (possibly) many in things. In itself, however, it is neither. And so it is true to say that the form is not "some single entity over against its many instances." It is not a single entity because, considered in itself, it is neither single nor multiple.

But this doesn't follow from point (3) above. And therein consists Geach's mistake. One cannot validly move from the "sharp distinction" between individuals/objects and forms/concepts to the conclusion that what a predicate stands for is not a single entity. Geach makes this mistake because of the confusion exposed two paragraphs supra. The mutual exclusion of objects and concepts does not entail that concepts cannot be single entities.

There is another huge problem with reading Frege back into Aquinas, and that concerns modes of existence (esse). A form in the intellect exists in a different way than it does in things. But if Frege is right about existence, there cannot be modes of existence. For if existence is instantiation, then there cannot be modes of existence for the simple reason that there cannot be any modes of instantiation.

I'll say more about this blunder in another post. It rests in turn on a failure to appreciate the radically different styles of ontology practiced by Aquinas and Frege. In my jargon, Aquinas is a constituent ontologist while Frege is a nonconstituent ontologist. In the jargon of Gustav Bergmann, Aquinas is a compex ontologist while Frege is a function ontologist.

Geach on the Real Distinction I

Oceans of ink have been spilled over the centuries on the celebrated distinctio realis between essence and existence (esse). You have no idea how much ink, and vitriol too, has flooded the scholastic backwaters and sometimes spilled over into mainstream precincts. Anyway, the distinction has long fascinated me and I hold to some version of it. I will first give a rough explanation of the distinction and then examine one of Peter Geach's arguments for it.

1. First of all, we can say that the real distinction is so-called because it is not a merely conceptual or notional distinction. It is not like the distinction between the Morning Star and the Evening Star. It is not a distinction parasitic upon how we view things or refer to them. It is more like the distinction between Venus and Mars. The MS and the ES are two "modes of presentation" (Fregean Darstellungsweisen) of one and the same chunk of extramental physical reality, the planet Venus. But Venus and Mars are not modes of presentation but entities in their own right. Venus and Mars are distinct in reality not merely in conception.

2. But although the Venus-Mars distinction is a real distinction, the distinction between essence and existence cannot be like this. For while each of the planets can exist without the other, essence and existence cannot each exist without the other. A thing's existence is nothing wthout the thing whose existence it is, and thus nothing without the thing's essence. I hope it is obvious that the existence of this particular coffee cup would be nothing without the cup and the cup's individual essence.

3. It is less obvious that the individual essence would be nothing without existence. But to make the problem more difficult I will assume that there are no nonexistent individuals, that nothing is an individual unless it exists. This implies that before Socrates came into existence there was no individual essence Socrateity. His coming into being was not the actualization of a pre-existent wholly determinate individual essence. (This has implications for the theory of creation: it imples that creation is out of nothing, not out of mere possibles.) It also implies that there is no individual essence corresponding to the name 'Vulcan' when this is used to denote an intra-Mercurial planet. My assumption is anti-Meinongian and (I believe) also anti-Avicennian. (There was a time, long ago, when the Muslims weren't total slouches when it came to philosophy. 'Avicenna' is the Latinization of 'Ibn Sina.')

4. The essence and the existence of a particular individual are thus each dependent on the other but nonetheless really, not merely notionally, distinct. Really distinct (like Venus and Mars, but unlike the Morning Star and the Evening Star) but inseparable (unlike Venus and Mars). They are really distinct like my eye glasses and my head but not separable in the manner of glasses and head. So an analogy mght be the convexity and concavity of one of the lenses. The convex surface cannot be without the concave surafce and vice versa, but they are really distinct. 'Convex' and 'concave' are not merely two different ways of referring to the same piece of glass. There is a real mind-independent difference. But it is only an analogy.

5. Now what reason could we have for accepting something like the the real distinction? Here is one of Geach's arguments, based on Aquinas, from "Form and Existence," reprinted in Peter Geach, God and the Soul (Thoemmes Press, 1994), pp. 42-64. Geach's argument is on p. 61. I'll put the argument in my own way. I find the argument convincing.

Suppose you have two numerically distinct instances of F-ness. They don't differ in point of F-ness, since each is an instance of F-ness. But they are numerically distinct. So some other factor must be brought in to account for the difference. That factor is existence. They differ in their very existence. Since they differ in existence and yet agree in essence, essence and existence are really distinct.

Max Black was famous for his iron spheres. (Geach does not mention Black.) He hypothesizes a world consisting of just two of them and nothing else, the spheres being alike in every relational and monadic respect. In Black's boring world, then, there are two numerically distinct instances of iron sphere. Since both exist, and since they differ solo numero, I conclude that they differ in their very existence. Since they differ in their existence, but agree in their iron sphericity, there is a real distinction between existence and nature or essence.

Suppose you deny that. Suppose you say that the spheres do not differ in their very existence and that they share existence. The consequence, should one cease to exist, would be that the other would cease to exist as well, which is absurd.

Pleonasm of the Day: ‘Negative Attack Ad’

I once heard John McCain use the phrase, 'negative attack ad.' As opposed to what? Positive attack ad? You may enjoy this Kant attack ad.

The Underground Grammarian

If you think that I am a language Nazi, then pay a visit to the Underground Grammarian. His stern visage reminds me of a passage near the beginning of Franz Kafka's Vor dem Gesetz, "Before the Law." The protagonist seeks entry into the Law, but at the door stands a guard who warns:

     Ich bin maechtig. Und ich bin nur der unterste Tuerhueter. Von Saal
     zu Saal stehn aber Tuerhueter, einer maechtiger als der andere.
     Schon den Anblick des dritten kann nicht einmal ich ertrage.

     I am powerful. And I am but the least of the gatekeepers. From room
     to room there are gatekeepers each stronger than the next. Not even
     I can bear so much as the glance of the third. (tr. BV)

Litotes

"His explanation of litotes, though not bad, was not very helpful."

On Taking Principles to Extremes

That a principle can be taken to an extreme is no argument against the principle so taken. It is rather an argument against extremism. The principle that one has the right to keep and bear arms, for example, is not refuted by the fact that some will take it to mean that one has the right to keep and 'bear' tactical nukes. Similarly in other cases.

Food Fascism Update

No Kugel for You!

Closure: Some Mathematical and Philosophical Examples

A reader asks, "What is meant by 'closure' or 'closed under'? I've heard the terms used in epistemic contexts, but I've not been able to completely understand them."

Let's start with some mathematical examples. The natural numbers are closed under the operation of addition. This means that the result of adding any two natural numbers is a natural number. What is a natural number? On one understanding of the term, the naturals are the positive integers, the counting numbers, the members of the set {1, 2, 3, 4, 5, . . .}. On a second understanding, the naturals are the positive integers and zero: {0, 1, 2, 3, 4 . . .}. Either way, it is easy to see that adding any two elements of either set yields an element of the same set. It is also easy to see that the naturals are also closed under multiplication. But they are not closed under subtraction. If you subtract 9 from 7, the result (-2) is not an element of the set of natural numbers.

Now consider the squaring operation. The square of any real number is a real number. So the reals are closed under the operation of squaring. But the reals are not closed under the square root operation. The square root of -4 cannot be 2 since 2 squared is 4; it cannot be -2 either since -2 squared is 4. The square root of -2 is the complex number 2i where the imaginary number i is the square root of -1. The square roots of negative numbers are complex; hence, the reals are not closed under the square root operation.

Generalizing, we can say that a set S is closed under a binary operation O just in case, for any elements x and y in S, xOy is an element of S. In Group Theory, a set S together with an operation O constitutes a group only if S is closed under O.

Now for some philosophical examples. Meinongian objects (M-objects) are not closed under entailment. The M-object, the yellow brick road, although yellow is not colored even though in reality nothing can be yellow without being colored. M-objects are incomplete objects. They have all and only the properties specified in their descriptions. So we say that the properties of M-objects are not closed under property-entailment. Property P entails property Q iff necessarily, if anything x has P, then x has Q.

What goes for M-objects goes for intentional objects. (On my reading of Meinong, an M-object is not the same as an intentional object: there are M-objects that are not the accusatives of any actual
intending.) Suppose I am gazing out my window at the purple majesty of Superstition Mountain. The intentional object of my perception has the property of being purple, but not the properties of being colored or being extended even though in reality nothing can be purple without being both colored and extended. Phenomenologically, what is before my mind is an instance of purple, but not an instance of colored item. What I see I see as purple but not as colored.

Now consider: If S knows that p, and S knows that p entails q, then S also knows that q. If you acquiesce in the bolded thesis, then you acquiesce in the closure of 'knows' under known entailment. For what you are then committing yourself to is the proposition that a proposition q entailed by a proposition p you know — assuming you know that p entails q — is a member of the set of propositions you know.