There must be no uncritical internalization of the norms and expectations of others. Internalize cautiously. Live your own life by your own lights from your own inner resources.
Month: June 2012
Is the Country Unraveling?
Another great column by Victor Davis Hanson.
Was Obama Himself the First Birther?
Amazing. Well, he's one cool dude, and how cool to be born in Kenya! No, I am not a 'birther' nor is the author of the article. Read it.
Is Political Science Science?
The answer depends on what counts as science. The so-called 'hard' sciences set the standard. This useful article lists the following five characteristics of science in the strict and eminent sense:
1. Clearly defined terminology.
2. Quantifiability.
3. Highly controlled conditions. "A scientifically rigorous study maintains direct control over as many of the factors that influence the outcome as possible. The experiment is then performed with such precision that any other person in the world, using identical materials and methods, should achieve the exact same result."
4. Reproducibility. "A rigorous science is able to reproduce the same result over and over again. Multiple researchers on different continents, cities, or even planets should find the exact same results if they precisely duplicated the experimental conditions."
5. Predictability and Testability. "A rigorous science is able to make testable predictions."
These characteristics set the bar for strict science very high. For example, is climate science science according to these criteria? I'll leave you to ponder that question. There are branches of physics that cannot satisfy all five criteria. But most of physics and chemistry meets the standard.
Is political science science according to these criteria? Obviously not. Political Scientists are Lousy Forecasters.
Am I suggesting that the only real knowledge is rigorously scientific knowledge? Of course not. Consider the knowledge we find in the first article to which I linked. There is no doubt in my mind that each of the five criteria the author mentions is a criterion of science in the strictest sense. (I leave open the question whether there are other criteria). Now how do we know that? By performing repeatable experiments in highly controlled conditions? No. By making testable predictions? No.
We know that (1)-(5) are criteria of genuine science by reflecting on scientific practice and isolating its characteristics. When we do that we engage in the philosophy of science. Since some of the philosophy of science gives us genuine knowledge about natural science, knowledge that it not itself scientific knowledge, it cannot be the case that all genuine knowledge is scientific knowledge.
That all genuine knowledge is scientific knowledge is the thesis of (strong) scientism. Therefore, (strong) scientism is false.
Related post: What is Scientism?
What is Scientism?
Alfred Centauri refers us to Scientism: Why Science is a Bad Philosopher, an article worth reading. The definitions of 'scientism' the author approvingly quotes suggest that he would accept my characterization:
Scientism is a philosophical thesis that belongs to the sub-discipline of epistemology. It is not a thesis in science, but a thesis about science. The thesis in its strongest form is that the only genuine knowledge is scientific knowledge, the knowledge generated by the natural sciences of physics, chemistry, biology and their offshoots. The thesis in a weaker form allows some cognitive value to the social sciences, the humanities, and other subjects, but insists that scientific knowledge is vastly superior and authoritative and is as it were the 'gold standard' when it comes to knowledge. On either strong or weak scientism, there is no room for first philosophy, according to which philosophy is an autonomous discipline, independent of natural science, and authoritative in respect to it. So on scientism, natural science sets the standard in matters epistemic, and philosophy’s role is at best ancillary. Not a handmaiden to theology in this day and age; a handmaiden to science.
The author appreciates that scientism enjoys no scientific support. He appreciates that it is not a scientific thesis that can be verified or falsified by scientific procedures. But he fails to give a sufficiently powerful argument against it.
One problem with strong scientism is that it is self-vitiating, as the following argument demonstrates:
a. The philosophical thesis of strong scientism is not an item of scientific knowledge.
Therefore
b. If all genuine knowledge is scientific knowledge, then the philosophical thesis of strong scientism is not an item of genuine knowledge.
Hence one cannot claim to know that strong scientism is true if it is true. For if it is true, then the only genuine knowledge is scientific knowledge. But strong scientism is not an item of scientific knowledge. So scientism, if true, is not knowable as true by the only methods of knowledge there are. How then could the proponent of strong scientism render rational his acceptance of strong scientism? Apparently, he can't, in which case his commitment to it is a matter of irrational ideology.
After all, he cannot appeal to rational insight as a source of knowledge. For that is precisely ruled out as a source of knowledge by scientism.
Scientism falls short of the very standard it enshrines. It is at most an optional philosophical belief unsupported by science. It also has unpalatable consequences which for many of us have the force of counterexamples. So here are some positive considerations against it.
If scientism is true, then none of the following can count as items of knowledge: That torturing children for fun is morally wrong; that setting afire a sleeping bum is morally worse than picking his pockets; that raping a woman is morally worse than merely threatening to rape her; that verbally threatening to commit rape is morally worse than entertaining (with pleasure) the thought of committing rape; that 'ought' implies 'can'; that moral goodness is a higher value than physical strength; that might does not make right; that the punishment must fit the crime; that a proposition and its negation cannot both be true; that what is past was once present; that if A remembers B's experience, then A = B; and so on.
In sum: if there are any purely rational insights into aesthetic, moral, logical, or metaphysical states of affairs, then scientism is false. For the knowledge I get when I see (with the eye of the mind) that the punishment must fit the crime or that a proposition and its negation cannot both be true is not an item of scientific knowledge.
Saturday Night at the Oldies: Rodney King and Henry Hill
Tonight I permit myself a bit of Schadenfreude (or is it righteous satisfaction?) at the passing of the 'motorist' Rodney King and the 'businessman' Henry Hill. Calling King a 'motorist' as so many knee-jerk liberal journalists did from 1991 on is like calling the mafioso Hill a 'business man.' In 'honor' of these two sorry specimens of (in)humanity, I propose the following for your listening pleasure.
Rodney 'Can We All Just Get Along?' King
Bobby Fuller Four, I Fought the Law and the Law Won
Andrew Sisters, Beat Me Daddy, Eight to the Bar
Beatles, I'm a Loser
Roger Miller, Dang Me
Johnny Bond, Hot Rod Lincoln
Roger Miller, King of the Road
Jackie DeShannon, What the World Needs Now
Henry Hill
Sam Cooke, Fool's Paradise. What a great song! Unfortunately Cooke did not take his own advice, and died young in consequence.
Hank Williams, Lost Highway
Byrds, Life in Prison
Merle Haggard, The Fugitive
Derek and the Dominoes, Layla (Piano Exit)
Atheist Blogger Swims the Tiber
Formerly atheist blogger Leah Libresco reports that she has converted to Catholicism.
That's quite a shift. Typically, the terminus a quo of Tiber swimmers is either generic theism or mere Christianity (in C. S. Lewis' sense) or some Protestant sect. Seismic is the shift from out-and-out God denial to acceptance of an extremely specific conception of God.
How specific?
The God of Catholicism is of course a Trinity: one God in three divine persons, the Father, the Son, and the Holy Ghost. (It was 'Holy Ghost' still in the 'fifties; the arguably ruinous Vatican II reforms of the 'sixties replaced 'Ghost' with 'Spirit.') The Second Person of the Trinity, the Son, or Logos (Word), entered human history at a particular time in a particular place in the person of Jesus of Nazareth. This is the doctrine of the Incarnation. God, or rather God the Son, became man. "The Word became flesh and dwelt among us." To do so, Jesus had to be born of a woman in that humble manner common to all of us, inter faeces et urinam, and yet without an earthly father. Thus arises the doctrine of the Virgin Birth. But since the God-Man is perfectly sinless, he canot be born of a woman bearing the taint of Original Sin. Hence the doctrine of the Immaculate Conception: Mary, the mother of God, was born without Original Sin. So far, five dogmas that go beyond generic Western monotheism: Trinity, Incarnation, Virgin Birth, Original Sin, Immaculate Conception. See Trinity and Incarnation and Original Sin categories for some details.
I have gone only a about a third of the way into the specificity of the Catholic God-conception, but far enough for one to see how dogmatically rich it is.
Now the more dogmatically rich a religion, the more specific its claims, the harder it will be to accept. To be an intellectually honest Roman Catholic, for example, one must accept not only the above dogmas but a number of others besides. These extremely specific dogmas are stumbling blocks to many thinking people. (Of course, the same problem arises with other doctrinally rich belief systems such as Communism.)
For some of us who were raised in the Roman church, the dogmas and their presuppositions beg give rise to questions that we simply must get clear about. (We cannot merely go along to get along, or participate in rites and rituals the theological foundations of which are murky. Example: to take communion when Transubstantiation beggars understanding.) And so some of us become philosophers. But any movement towards Athens is a movement away from Jerusalem . . . .
But it's Saturday night, time to punch the clock, time for my once-a-week ration of tequila, and time for Saturday Night at the Oldies. Tomorrow's another day.
Some Aphorisms and Observations of Thomas Sowell
Zuckerman Unbound
Philip Roth, Exit Ghost (Houghton Mifflin, 2007), p. 58:
All in all, being without any need to play a role was preferable to the friction and agitation and conflict and pointlessness and disgust that, as a person ages, can render less than desirable the manifold relations that make for a rich, full life. I stayed away because over the years I conquered a way of life that I (and not just I) would have thought impossible, and there's pride taken in that. I may have left New York because I was fearful, but by paring and paring and paring away, I found in my solitude a species of freedom that was to my liking much of the time. I shed the tyranny of my intensity — or, perhaps, by living apart for over a decade, merely reveled in its sternest mode.
Embarked as they are upon a life of exploration rather than representation, novelists, like philosophers, may find irksome, confining, and perhaps even impossible the playing of roles. Role-instantiation engenders a richness of relations, and with that comes fullness of life, but these relations are willingly renounced for a solitude austere, cold, but free.
Existence: A Contrast Argument Defeated
This is a post from the old blog. It originally appeared on 27 May 2008 and appears now slightly redacted.
***********
In this blogging game you throw out your line and damned if you don't snag a good catch now and again. I dredged up Peter Lupu from the Internet's vasty deeps long about January [2008] and I'm glad I did. He's smart and has an admirable passion for philosophy, that highest and most beautiful of all human pursuits. Even more remarkable, perhaps, is his ability to keep his passion alive in the midst of the mundane quest for the buck that keeps the wolf from the door, the lupus from the Lupu.
Enough of cleverness and encomium. Back to work.
In a comment [now lost in the ether], Peter mentions three points of difference between me and him on the topic of existence.
First, he denies my assertion that Frege and Russell are eliminativists about singular existence, though he agrees with me that for neither is existence attributable to individuals. Let's leave this topic for later. Second, Peter thinks that Kant denies that existence is a property of individuals and that Kant anticipates Frege and Russell on existence. This is a bad mistake that almost every analytic philosopher makes; Peter is in truly excellent company. It too deserves a separate discussion. [And receives it in a forthcoming article, "Existence: Two Dogmas of Analysis."]
Third, Peter seems to think that the fact that everything exists shows that existence cannot be a property of individuals. This is the question I propose to discuss in today's installment.
We agree: everything exists, which is to say: there are no nonexistent items, pace Alexius von Meinong. Existence, then, is not classificatory: it does not divide a sum-total of items into two mutually exclusive and jointly exhaustive subgroups, the existent items and the nonexistent items. There are no nonexistent items. Peter mentions rationality, weight, and temperature. Some things have weight, some things don't. And the same goes for the other properties. Because some things are rational and others are not, Peter suggests that it makes sense to inquire into what it is for something to be rational. But since absolutely everything exists, it makes no sense, Peter suggests, to inquire into what it is for something to exist. Existence lacks content due to a failure of contrast. Peter seems to be offering us a
Contrast Argument
1. If a term 'F' has an explicable content, then there must be items to
which 'F' does not apply.
2. There are no items to which 'being' or 'existent' does not apply.
Ergo
3. 'Being' or 'existent' does not have an explicable content..
In point of validity, this argument is unobjectionable: it is an instance of Modus Tollens. But it is unsound. The following consideration suffices to refute the first premise. Since everything is self-identical, it is true to say of any particular thing that it is self-identical. But 'self-identical' is not rendered either without sense or content by the plain fact that nothing is self-diverse. Or consider the proposition that every event has a cause. Suppose it is true. (And suppose that everything at bottom is an event.) Then every event has the property of being caused and no event lacks this property. But it does not follow that we cannot ask what it is for an event to be caused. The different theories of causation would be answers to this question.
I don't think we need to waste any more words on the first premise. It is obviously false.
But even if you insist that (1) is true, there is still a problem with the argument. Although (2) is true, it does not have the implication one might think it to have. One might think that if everything exists,
then it is unintelligible to suppose that there is a difference between existence and nonexistence. But this is a non sequitur. For although it is true that there is nothing that does not exist, a contingent being that does exist is possibly such that it does not exist. So there is a contrast after all. It is the contrast between existence and possible nonexistence. Each contingent individual faces the contrast: existence versus possible nonexistence. With apologies to the Bard, "To be or [possibly] not to be, that is the question."
It is quite clear that the difference between existence and nonexistence cannot be explained by giving examples of existents and examples of nonexistents. Pace Meinong and the Meinongians, there are no examples or instances of nonexistents. One could put this by saying that the existence/nonexistence contrast does not show up extensionally and indeed cannot. But how it is supposed to follow from this that there is nothing real in things that grounds the application of 'exists' to them? I exist. I am not nothing. But I might never have come to exist. And given that I do exist now, I might not have existed now. This 'property' of existing is of course no ordinary property. It is not like the properties of being red, or ripe, or spheroid. But I have it and I might not have. And so there is a contrast, situated at the level of each contingent individual, between its existence and its possible nonexistence.
Peter claimed that since absolutely everything exists, it makes no sense to inquire into what it is for something to exist. I just rebutted his claim by pointing out that Contrast Arguments are in in general unsound and by pointing out that, with respect to existence there is after all a contrast, the contrast between the existence of a contingent individual and its possible nonexistence.
It seems to me that there is a rather obvious mistake that one ought to avoid. And that is to assume that existence or Being is a highest what-determination. The mistake is to think of 'being' as a maximally general term which, due to its all-inclusive extension, is virtually nil in intension. Here is an example of how the mistake is made:
The distinction between 'being' and, for example, 'dog,' is then a
distinction between the more general and the less general. This is
a logical or cognitional distinction, which does not necessarily
reflect anything in the nature of things. Nor does it necessarily
point to any real composition within things. It is analogous to the
distinction made between 'animal' and 'dog' when it is said that
Rover is a dog and Rover is an animal, which distinction does not
point to two distinct principles within Rover: dog and animal.
Rover is a dog who is an animal, an animal who is a dog. His being
a dog and his being an animal are the same in him, even though
there are other animals. Similarly, Rover is both a being and a dog:
there are other beings, but this does not change the fact that
for him, to be a dog is to be a being, to be a being is to be a
dog. (John N. Deck, "Metaphysics or Logic?" The New Scholasticism,
Spring 1989, 232-233)
This passage shows that Deck is thinking of being as a highest genus. Rover is a dog, an animal, a living thing, a physical thing . . . a being. On this way of thinking, being is the most general
what-determination. You can arrive at it by climbing the tree of Porphyry to the very top. But if anything is clear, it should be that Being or existence is not a summum genus or genus generallisimum as Aristotle pointed out at 998b22 of the Metaphysics. And as Kant pointed out in his famous discussion, Being or existence is not a reales Praedikat: Being or existence is no part of what a thing is.
The Dalai Lama and the Self: An Anti-Buddhist Argument
A friend refers me to a rather poor article, "The Dalai Lama, the Pope, and Creation," in which the dubious claims of the Dalai Lama are ineptly rebutted by a Catholic journalist. We read:
Beyond the complex world of nature, Buddhism asserts a fundamental “nothingness.” Buddhist thought sees as illusory all distinction between beings. As the Dalai Lama writes in The Universe in a Single Atom, “According to the theory of emptiness, any belief in an objective reality grounded in the assumption of intrinsic, independent existence is untenable. All things and events, whether material, mental or even abstract concepts like time, are devoid of objective, independent existence.”
This is one of the central pillars of Buddhism, the doctrine of anatta (Pali), anatman (Sanskrit), 'no self.' The idea is that nothing, or at least nothing in the realm of samsara, has self-nature, substantiality, own-being, ontological independence, even relative ontological independence. And that includes persons (selves). You and I are not independent existents. The distinction between us is illusory. From the point of view of Christian metaphysics, this cannot be right. God is an uncreated self, and we are created selves. Although we depend for our existence on God, this fact is thought to be compatible with our genuine (though dependent) existence as self-same individuals numerically distinct from other such individuals.
It is not enough to pit worldviews against one another. You have to get down to the nitty-gritty of trying to resolve the dispute by careful analysis and argument. There is no reason to be sanguine about the success of such an enterprise, but you are no philosopher if you do not make the attempt.
I will now argue against the anatta doctrine by arguing that the conscious self cannot be a Heraclitean flux of instantaneous entities but must be an individual that remains self-same through the flux of its conscious states.
I
Suppose my mental state passes from one that is pleasurable to one that is painful. Observing a beautiful Arizona sunset, my reverie is suddenly broken by the piercing noise of a smoke detector. Not only is the painful state painful, the transition from the pleasurable state to the painful one is itself painful. The fact that the transition is painful shows that it is directly perceived. It is not as if
there is merely a succession of consciousnesses (conscious states); there is in addition a consciousness of their succession. For there is a consciousness of the transition from the pleasant state to the painful state, a consciousness that embraces both of the states, and so cannot be reductively analyzed into them. But a consciousness of their succession is a consciousness of their succession in one subject, in one unity of consciousness. It is a consciousness of the numerical identity of the self through the transition from the pleasurable state to the painful one. Passing from a pleasurable state to a painful one, there is not only an awareness of a pleasant state followed by an awareness of a painful one, but also an awareness that the one who was in a pleasurable state is strictly and numerically the same as the one who is now in a painful state. This sameness is phenomenologically given, although our access to this phenomenon is easily blocked by inappropriate models taken from the physical world. Without the consciousness of sameness, there would be no consciousness of transition.
What this argument shows is that the self cannot be a mere diachronic bundle or collection of states. The self is a transtemporal unity distinct from its states whether these are taken distributively or collectively.
II
Another example is provided by the hearing of a melody. To hear the melody Do-Re-Mi, it does not suffice that there be a hearing of Do, followed by a hearing of Re, followed by a hearing of
Mi. For those three acts of hearing could occur in that sequence in three distinct subjects, in which case they would not add up to the hearing of a melody. (Tom, Dick, and Harry can divide up the task of loading a truck, but not the ‘task’ of hearing a melody, or that of understanding a sentence.) But
now suppose the acts of hearing occur in the same subject, but that this subject is not a unitary and self-same individual but just the bundle of these three acts, call them A1, A2, and A3. When A1 ceases, A2 begins, and when A2 ceases, A3 begins: they do not overlap. In which act is the hearing of the melody? A3 is the only likely candidate, but surely it cannot be a hearing of the melody.
For the awareness of a melody involves the awareness of the (musical not temporal) intervals between the notes, and to apprehend these intervals there must be a retention (to use Husserl’s term) in the present act A3 of the past acts A2 and A1. Without this phenomenological presence of the past acts in the present act, there would be no awareness in the present of the melody. But this
implies that the self cannot be a mere bundle of perceptions externally related to each other, but must be a peculiarly intimate unity of perceptions in which the present perception A3 includes the immediately past ones A2 and A1 as temporally past but also as phenomenologically present in the mode of retention. The fact that we hear melodies thus shows that there must be a self-same and unitary self through the period of time between the onset of the melody and its completion. This unitary self is neither identical to the sum or collection of A1, A2, and A3, nor is it identical to something wholly distinct from them. Nor of course is it identical to any one of them or any two of
them. This unitary self is given whenever one hears a melody.
III
Now consider a synchronic example, the hearing of a chord. Hearing the major chord C-E-G, I hear that it is major, and hearing the minor chord C-E flat-G, I hear that it is minor. How is this possible? The hearing of the major chord cannot be analyzed without remainder into an act of hearing C, an act of hearing E, and an act of hearing G, even when all occur simultaneously. For to hear the three notes as a major chord, I must apprehend the 1-3-5 musical interval that they instantiate. But
this is possible only because the whole of my present consciousness is more than the sum of its parts. This whole is no doubt made up of the part-consciousnesses, but it is not exhausted by them. For it is also a consciousness of the relatedness of the notes. But this consciousness of relatedness is not something in addition to the other acts of consciousness: it includes them and embraces them without being reducible to them. Once again the unitary self is given: it is given whenever we hear a chord.
IV
There is also this consideration. Phenomenologically, mental change is not existential change, but
alterational change, or in a word, alteration. Existential change, as when something comes into being or passes away, is not a change in something, or at least it is not a change in the thing that suffers the change: a thing that ceases to exist is no longer available to be that in which this change occurs, and a thing that comes to exist is not available prior to its coming to exist to be that in which this change occurs. We express this by saying that there is no substratum of existential change. Alteration, however, requires a substratum: alteration occurs when numerically one and the same individual is in different states at different times.
Pali Buddhism, with its interconnected doctrines of radical impermanence and universal selflessness,
implies that that ultimately there is no alteration, that all change is existential change. For alteration requires substrata of alteration, and substrata are incompatible with anatta. But if mental change were existential change, there could be no consciousness of it. If the pleasant visual sensation simply passes out of existence to be replaced by the painful auditory sensation, then there is a change all right – a change in the way things are – but not a change of which there could be any consciousness in the one in whom the change occurs. Furthermore, there would be no awareness of
dukkha – the starting point of Buddhist soteriology – because there would be no possibility of a perceived contrast of the dukkha-state with the earlier sukha-state (the pleasant awareness of the sunset).
To be aware of the change from the pleasurable state to the painful one, I must endure through the change. Therefore, since there is consciousness of mental change, mental change is alteration and thus requires a substratum that is numerically identical across the change. The point was appreciated by Kant, who wrote that “A coming to be or a ceasing to be . . . can never be a possible [object of] perception.” (CPR A 188 = B 231)
What this shows is that there is direct awareness of the self as that in which the two distinct states are united. The fact of experienced mental change refutes the anatta doctrine. There is not just an awareness of one state followed by an awareness of a second; I am aware of myself as the transtemporal unity of the two states. Unity, of course, is not identity: so talk of the unity of the pleasurable and painful states is consistent with their numerical distinctness. The self, therefore, is directly given in the experience of mental change; but it is of course not given as a separate object wholly distinct from its states. It is given in and through these states as their transtemporal unity. The self is not one of its states, nor the sum of all of them, nor something wholly distinct from all of them; the self is their self-unifying unity. Thus one must not think of the substratum of mental change as wholly distinct from its states. It is not like a pin cushion into which pins are stuck. A pin cushion without pins is conceivable; a self without conscious states is not. The self is not an unconscious something that supports consciousness; it itself has the nature of consciousness. Consciousness/self-consciousness is a sui generis reality that cannot be understood in terms of crude models from the physical world.
George F. Will and the Beach Boys Meet Alexius Meinong
"The Beach Boys Still Get Around." Excellent sociocultural analysis by George Will. Opening paragraph:
Three hours before showtime, Brian Wilson says: “There is no Rhonda.” Sitting backstage at Merriweather Post Pavilion, gathering strength for the evening’s 48-song, 150-minute concert, Wilson was not asked about her, he just volunteered this fact. The other members of the Beach Boys seem mildly surprised to learn that the 1965 song “Help Me, Rhonda” was about no one in particular.
The philosopher of language in London Ed should find the above intriguing. The song was about no one in particular in that Brian Wilson had no actual person in mind as Rhonda. But surely the song was about three people, one named 'Rhonda,' another girl referred to only by an antecedent-less 'she,' and the singer. "Since she put me down, I was out doin' in my head." There is a sense in which these are three particular, numerically distinct, persons.
If you deny that, aren't you saying that the song is not about anybody? And wouldn't that be wrong?
Of course, the persons in question are incomplete objects. They violate the property version of the Law of Excluded Middle. We know some of Rhonda's properties but not all of them. We know that she looked "so fine" to the singer. And we know that she caught the singer's eye. But we don't know her height, the color of her eyes or her blood pressure. With respect to those properties she is indeterminate. Same with the other girl. We know she was going to be the singer's wife, and he was going to be her man, but not much else.
Now nothing incomplete can exist. So the three persons are three particular nonexistent objects, and the song is about three persons in particular.
I wrote this just to get London Ed's goat. The record will show that I myself eschew Meinongianism.
On Begging the Question
I just now heard Dennis Prager on his nationally-syndicated radio show use 'beg the question' when what he meant was 'raise the question.'
To raise a question is not to beg a question. 'Raise a question' and 'beg a question' ought not be used
interchangeably on pain of occluding a distinction essential to clear thought. To raise a question is just to pose it, to bring it before one's mind or before one's audience for consideration. To beg a question, however, is not to pose a question but to reason in a way that presupposes what one needs to prove.
Suppose A poses the question, 'Does Allah exist?' B responds by saying that Allah does exist because his
existence is attested in the Koran which Allah revealed to Muhammad. In this example, A raises a question, while B begs the question raised by A. The question is whether or not Allah exists; B's response begs the question by presupposing that Allah does exist. For Allah could not reveal anything to Muhammad unless Allah exists.
The phrase 'beg the question' is not as transparent as might be hoped. The Latin, petitio principii, is better: begging of the principle. Perhaps the simplest way to express the fallacy in English is by calling it circular reasoning. If I argue that The Los Angeles Times displays liberal bias because its reportage and editorializing show a left-of-center slant, then I reason in a circle, or beg the question. Fans of Greek may prefer hysteron proteron, literally, the later earlier. That is, what is logically posterior, namely, the conclusion, is taken to be logically prior, a premise.
Punchline: Never use 'beg the question' unless you are referring to an informal fallacy in reasoning. If
you are raising, asking, posing a question, then say that. Do your bit to preserve our alma mater, the English language. Honor thy mother! Matrix of our thoughts, she is deeper and higher than our thoughts, their sacred Enabler.
Of course, I am but a vox clamantis in deserto. The battle has already been lost. So why do I write
things like the above? Because I am a natural-born scribbler who takes pleasure in these largely pointless exercises.
SCOTUS Rules Against SEIU
Not all news is bad.
I have nothing against unions as such. My father was a rank-and-file member, all his working life, of the Boilermakers' Union. SEIU, however, is a public-sector union, a horse of a different color. So what's the problem with public-sector unions? Briefly, this.
You pay taxes. Some of your tax dollars go to pay the salaries of so-called 'civil servants.' Some of these 'civil servants' belong to unions that automatically deduct union dues from their salaries and funnel this cash to the union bosses and lobbyists who pressure Democrat Party legislators to do their bidding. Legislators, being human, love their power and perquisities, and do whatever they can to hold onto them. To stay in power they need votes which they get from the union members who vote as a block for the Dems to get as many goodies as they can.
So we the people are forced via taxation to support the fiscally irresponsible and unsustainable Democrat Big Government agenda. Would you say that that smacks of corruption?
Suppose you object that that the Dems are not fiscally irresponsible. Well, then you are wrong, but you have a right to your opinion. That's not the issue, however. The issue is whether it is legitimate to force people to support political parties whose ideas they oppose.
Mass Media and Spiritual Deterioration
Sardonicus here explains why he left Facebook. Briefly, he left it because it had become for him an impediment to spiritual growth. I concur and generalize: inordinate consumption of any and all mass communications media militates against spiritual health for all of us. Mass media content is a bit like whisky: a little, from time to time, will not hurt you, and my even do some good; but more is not better!
But why, exactly? Here is one answer. The attainment of mental quiet is a very high and choice-worthy goal of human striving. Anything that scatters or dis-tracts (literally: pulls apart) the mind makes it impossible to attain mental quiet as well as such lower attainments as ordinary concentration. Now the mass media have the tendency to scatter and distract. Therefore, if you value the attainment of mental quiet and such cognate states as tranquillitas animi, ataraxia, peace of mind, samadhi, concentration, 'personal presence,' etc., then you are well-advised to limit consumption of media dreck and cultivate the disciplines that lead to these states.
Of course, the quick answer I just gave presupposes a metaphysics, a philosophical anthopology and a soteriology that cannot be laid out briefly. So here are some links to related posts that fill in some of the details.
Modern Media and the Deterioration of Spiritual Life