Month: June 2012

Stanislav Sousedik and the Circularity Objection to the Thin Theory

Daniel Novotny writes,

I have discovered (something like) the circularity objection in Sousedik's translation of Frege's "Dialog with Punjer on Existence" into Czech. It's about two pages; here are some snippets (very rough translation):

First we might find difficulties with the assertion that existence is a property of the second order, i.e. the property of "falling under a concept". This is not incorrect but we need to take notice of something that — as far as I know — has gone unnoticed, namely that this "property" is under closer scrutiny a relation. "To fall under" is evidently a two-place predicate expressing not the relation of the concept to the thing (as it seems from Frege's exposition) but rather of the thing to the concept.  …"

. . . If we accept that "falling under" (or more precisely: "to have under") is a name of the relation, a sentence [e.g., "Men exist"] speaks not only of the concept of "men" but also of something that falls under this concept. . . . .

In order to say truthfully that the concept  F has under itself the individual x, the condition of x's existence needs to be satisfied. This seems obvious but the question arises what does this word "exist" express in this case? … it cannot be the second-order property, since it is, as we have seen a relation; we ask here about existence which is presupposed by this second-order relational propery as its necessary condition.

Now I have never read anything by Professor Sousedik, and I would be very surprised if he has ever read anything by me.  So it is particularly gratifying to find that he is making points that are almost exactly the same as points I have made in published papers, my existence book, earlier posts and in a forthcoming manuscript, copies of which I sent to London Ed, Peter L., and a few others.  I will couch the points in my own preferred jargon.

1. The second-level property of being instantiated is a relational property, one logically  parasitic upon the  two-place relation  *___ instantiates —* or *___ falls under —*.  Being instantiated is like being married.  Necessarily, if a first-level concept is instantiated, then it is instantiated by an individual, just as, necessarily, if a person is married, then he is married to someone (distinct from himself), the Fargo, North Dakota woman who 'married' herself notwithstanding. (We won't speculate on the question how such a self-marriage is consummated.)

2. It follows from #1 that the grammatical form of a sentence like 'Men exist' is not the same as its logical form.  Grammatically, it has a subject-predicate form.  Logically, however, it is relational: the concept man is instantiated by one or more individuals.  So not only is the sentence not about men, but about a concept; it is also refers — with "studied ambiguity" to cop a phrase from Quine — to one or more individuals.

3.  Now if concept F is instantiated, then it is instantiated by an individual that exists.  This is obvious, as Sousedik remarks.  What is less obvious, but still quite clear, is that the instantiating individuals cannot exist in the sense of being instantiated.  Obviously, no individual is instantiable; only concepts are instantiable.  If you insist that existence is the second-level relational property of being instantiated, then you obviously cannot say that the existence of Socrates is the second-level relational property of being instantiated.

4.  What this shows is that the 'Fressellian' attempt to reduce existence to instantiation fails miserably.  It ends up presupposing as irreducible what it tries to reduce, namely, genuine (pound the lectern, stamp the foot!) existence.  Another way of saying that the account presupposes what it tries to reduce is by saying that it is circular.  We want to know what existence is.  We are told that existence is a  property of concepts, the property of being instantiated.  Reflection on this property, however, reveals it to be relational and thus parasitic upon the dyadic relation of instantiation.  For this relation to hold, however, its terms must exist, and not in the sense of being instantiated.  So we are brought back to what we were trying to reduce to instantiation, namely, the existence that belongs to individuals.

Despite the clarity of the above, Peter L. balks, and London Ed baulks.  It is high time for both of them to cry 'uncle' and admit that I am right about this. Or must I sic the Czech contingent on them? [grin]

My Position on Free Will

This from a Norwegian reader:
I have been enjoying your blog for a couple of years now, and I have to say that I like how your mind works. There are a lot of issues I am thinking about currently regarding philosophy and that didn't change after reading Angus Menuge's book Agents Under Fire. If you haven't read that, I strongly recommend you to. He has some very interesting arguments regarding reason, intentionality, agency, reductionism, materialism etc.  One issue is bugging me particularly these days, and it is the ever-lasting question of free will. I hope I am not asking too much, but would you be able to tell me what your position about free will is and briefly explain why you hold that position?
My position, bluntly stated, is that we are libertarianly free.  As far as I'm concerned the following argument is decisive:
 
1. We are morally responsible for at least some of our actions and omissions.
2. Moral responsibility entails libertarian freedom of the will.
Therefore
3. We are libertarianly free.
 
Is this a compelling argument?  By no means.  (But then no argument for any substantive philosophical thesis is compelling. Nothing substantive in philosophy has ever been proven to the satisfaction of all competent practioners.)  One could, with no breach of logical propriety, deny the conclusion and then deny one or both of the premises.  As we say in the trade, "One man's modus ponens is another's modus tollens."  Any valid argument can be thrown into 'inferential reverse,' the result being a valid argument.
 
I of course acccept both premises. That I am morally (as opposed to causally, and as opposed to legally) responsible for at least some of what I do and leave undone I take to be more evident than its negation.  And, like Kant, I see compatibilism as a shabby evasion, "the freedom of the turnspit." 
 
Some will say that free will and moral responsibility are illusions.  I find that incoherent for reasons supplied here.  Other posts in the Free Will category touch upon some of the more technical aspects of the problem.
 
There is a lot of utter rubbish being scribbled by scientists these days about philosophical questions.  Typically, these individuals, prominent in their fields, don't have a clue as to the nature, history, or proper exfoliation of these questions.  Recently, biologist Jerry Coyne has written a lot of crap about free will that I expose in these posts:
 
 
 
This stuff is crap in the same sense in which most of Ayn Rand's philosophical writings are crap.  The crappiness resides not so much in the theses themselves but in the way the theses are presented and argued, and the way  objections are dealt with.  But if I had to choose between the scientistic crapsters (Krauss, Coyne, Hawking & Mlodinow, et al.) and Rand, I would go with Rand.  At least she understands that what she is doing is philosophy and that philosophy is important and indispensable.  At least she avoids the monstrous self-deception of the scientistic crapsters who do philosophy while condemning it.

Nonsense about Descartes from the Science Page of the New York Times

This is an old post from the Powerblogs site.  Now seems an opportune time to give it a home here.  One of the purposes of this weblog is to combat scientism.
……………..

Here we read:

But as evolutionary biologists and cognitive neuroscientists peer ever deeper into the brain, they are discovering more and more genes, brain structures and other physical correlates to feelings like empathy, disgust and joy. That is, they are discovering physical bases for the feelings from which moral sense emerges — not just in people but in other animals as well.

The result is perhaps the strongest challenge yet to the worldview summed up by Descartes, the 17th-century philosopher who divided the creatures of the world between humanity and everything else. As biologists turn up evidence that animals can exhibit emotions and patterns of cognition once thought of as strictly human, Descartes’s dictum, “I think, therefore I am,” loses its force.

People often question the utility of philosophy. One use of philosophy is to protect us from bad philosophy, pseudo-philosophy, the 'philosophy' of those who denigrate philosophy yet cannot resist philosophizing themselves and as a result philosophize poorly. Man is a philosophical animal whether he likes it or not. Philosophize we will — the only question being whether we will do it poorly or well.

Saturday Night at the Oldies: Performers Who Ditched Their Italian Surnames, Part II

Part I is here.

But first one  who didn't.  An early manager suggested to Frank Sinatra that he adopt the stage name 'Frankie Satin.'  Sinatra would have none of that bullshit.  He did things his way.  That's Life. 

Joseph Di Nicola (Joey Dee and the Starlighters), Peppermint Twist, with an intro by Dwight D. Eisenhower!  This video shows what the dude looked like. Resembles a super short Joe Pesci.  What Kind of Love is This?

Margaret Battavio (Little Peggy March), I Will Follow Him.

Frank Castelluccio (Frankie Valli and the Four Seasons), Can't Take My Eyes Off of You. Deer Hunter version.  Dawn. Walk Like a Man.   

Anthony Dominic Benedetto (Tony Bennett), The Way You Look Tonight

Alfred Arnold Cocozza (Mario Lanza), O Sole Mio.  Here is what Elvis made of the tune.

Francis Thomas Avallone (Frankie Avalon), Venus.

Fabiona Forte Bonaparte (Fabian), his songs are too schlocky even for my catholic tastes.

Addendum 6/10):  London Ed repots that there is nothing too musically schlocky for his place, so go there to hear one of Fabian's numbers.

Farewell to Krauss, A Universe From Nothing

The book is due back at the library today, and good riddance.  A few parting shots to put this turkey to bed.  The book is a mishmash of bad philosophy, badly written, and popularization of contemporary cosmology.  I cannot comment on the accuracy of the popularization, but the philosophy is indeed bad and demonstrates why we need philosophy: to debunk bad philosophy, especially the scientistic nonsense our culture is now awash in.  I am tempted once more to quote some Kraussian passages and pick them apart.  But besides being a waste of time, that would be the literary equivalent of beating up a cripple or rolling a drunk.

In my post of 29 April I put my finger on the central problem with the book: the 'bait and switch.'  Krauss baits us with the old Leibniz question, 'Why is there something rather than nothing?' (See On the Ultimate Origin of Things, 1697.)  Having piqued our interest, he switches to a different question, actually to several different questions, one of which is: "Why is there ‘stuff’, instead of empty space?" (Click on above link for reference.)  Apparently our man forgot that empty space is not nothing.

Bait and switch.  I recall an old Tareyton cigarette commercial  from the '60s:  I'd rather fight than switch.  Apparently Krauss would rather switch than fight an intellectually honest fight.

Here are links to my more substantial, but no less polemical, Krauss posts.

Ed Feser picks up on the 'bait and switch' theme in his cleverly titled First Things review, Not Understanding Nothing.

Causation, Existence, and the Modified Leibniz Question

Letting 'CCB' abbreviate 'concrete contingent beings,' we may formulate the modified Leibniz question as follows: Why are there any CCBs at all?  We have been discussing whether this question is a pseudo-question.  To be precise, we have been discussing whether it is a pseudo-question on the assumption that it does not collapse into one or more naturalistically tractable questions: questions that can be answered by natural science.

My thesis is that the modified Leibniz question is a genuine question that does not collapse into one or more naturalistically tractable questions.

I

Consider a universe that consists of a beginningless actually infinite series of contingent beings. Let us assume that each CCB in this universe is (deterministically)  caused by a preceding CCB.  The beginninglessness of the series insures that every CCB has a cause.  Since every CCB has a cause, each has a causal explanation in terms of an earlier one. And since each has a causal explanation, the whole lot of them does. (Some may smell the fallacy of composition in this last sentence, but let's assume arguendo that no fallacy has been committed.)  Accordingly, the totality of CCBs, the universe, has an explanation in virtue of each CCB's having an explanation. 

Some will say that on this scenario the modified Leibniz question has received a naturalistic  answer.  Why are there CCBs as as opposed to no CCBs?  Because each CCB is causally explained by other CCBs, and because explaining each of them amounts to explaining the whole lot of them.  And since the question has this naturalistic or universe-immanent answer, the specifically philiosophical form of the question, the question as Leibniz intended it, is a pseudo-question.

Others, like me, will insist that on the scenario sketched the question has not been answered.  We will insist that a legitimate question remains:  why is there this whole infinite system of contingent beings?  After all, it is contingent, just as its parts are contingent whether taken distributively or collectively.  There might not have been any concrete contingent beings at all, in which case there would not have been any CCBs to cause other CCBs.  And nothing is changed by the fact that the series of CCBs is actually  infinite in the past direction.  The fact that the series always existed does not show that it could not have failed to exist.  The temporal 'always' does not get the length of the modal 'necessarily.'  If time is infinite in both directions, and the universe exists at every time, it does not follow that the universe necessarily exists.  But if it contingently exists, then we are entitled to ask why it exists.

It is no answer to be told that each member of the universe, each CCB, is caused by others.  I may cheerfully grant that but still sensibly ask: But what accounts for the whole causal system in the first place?

Please note that a possible answer here is: nothing does.  The existence of the universe is a brute fact.  Nothing I have said entails a theistic answer. My point is simply  that the modified Leibniz question is a genuine question that cannot be answered by invoking causal relations within the universe.

II

There another line of attack open to me, one that focuses on the connection between causation and existence.  It seems to me that the naturalist or 'immanentist' must assume that if x causes y, then x causes y to exist.  The assumption, in other words, is that causation is existentially productive, that the cause brings the effect into existence.  But on what theory of causation that the naturalist is likely to accept is  causation productive?

This is a huge topic and I can only begin to explore it in this post.  Suppose our naturalist, good empiricist that he is, subscribes to a Humean or regularity theory of causation along the following lines:

RT. x (directly) causes y =df (i) x and y are spatiotemporally contiguous; (ii) x occurs earlier than y; (iii) x and y are subsumed under event types X and Y that are related by the de facto empirical generalization that all events of type X are followed by events of type Y.

 If this is what causation is, it is is not existentially productive: the cause does not produce, bring about, bring into existence the effect.  On the contrary, the holding of the causal relation presupposes the existence of the cause-event and the effect-event.  It follows that causation as understood on (RT) merely orders already existent events and cannot account for the very existence of these events. 

Of course, the naturalist needn't be a Humean about causation.  But then he ought to tell us what theory of causation he accepts and how it can be pressed into service to explain the very existence of CCBs.

For details and a much more rigorous development, see my article "The Hume-Edwards Objection to the Cosmological Argument," Journal of Philosophical Research, vol. XXII, 1997, pp. 425-443.  

Jonathan Haidt on Why Working-Class People Vote Conservative

When a working-class person votes conservative, isn't he voting against his economic interests?  That's what many lefties think and it puzzles them.  Why would the workers do such a thing?  This gives rise to the duping hypothesis: "the Republican party dupes people into voting against their economic interests by triggering outrage on cultural issues."

Jonathan Haidt demolishes the hypothesis.

According to Haidt, conservatives have a broader "moral palate" than liberals.  Liberals have only three concerns to the conservative's six (emphasis added):

. . . we have identified six moral concerns as the best candidates for being the innate "taste buds" of the moral sense: care/harm, fairness/cheating, liberty/oppression, loyalty/betrayal, authority/subversion, and sanctity/degradation. Across many kinds of surveys, in the UK as well as in the USA, we find that people who self-identify as being on the left score higher on questions about care/harm. [. . .]

But on matters relating to group loyalty, respect for authority and sanctity (treating things as sacred and untouchable, not only in the context of religion), it sometimes seems that liberals lack the moral taste buds, or at least, their moral "cuisine" makes less use of them. [. . .]

In America, it is these three moral foundations that underlie most of the "cultural" issues that, according to duping theorists, are used to distract voters from their self-interest. But are voters really voting against their self-interest when they vote for candidates who share their values? Loyalty, respect for authority and some degree of sanctification create a more binding social order that places some limits on individualism and egoism. [. . .]

Despite being in the wake of a financial crisis that – if the duping theorists were correct – should have buried the cultural issues and pulled most voters to the left, we are finding in America and many European nations a stronger shift to the right. When people fear the collapse of their society, they want order and national greatness, not a more nurturing government.

Even on the two moral taste buds that both sides claim – fairness and liberty – the right can often outcook the left. The left typically thinks of equality as being central to fairness, and leftists are extremely sensitive about gross inequalities of outcome – particularly when they correspond along racial or ethnic lines. But the broader meaning of fairness is really proportionality – are people getting rewarded in proportion to the work they put into a common project? Equality of outcomes is only seen as fair by most people in the special case in which everyone has made equal contributions. [. . .]

Similarly for liberty. Americans and Britons all love liberty, yet when liberty and care conflict, the left is more likely to choose care. This is the crux of the US's monumental battle over Obama's healthcare plan. Can the federal government compel some people to buy a product (health insurance) in order to make a plan work that extends care to 30 million other people? The derogatory term "nanny state" is rarely used against the right (pastygate being perhaps an exception). Conservatives are more cautious about infringing on individual liberties (eg of gun owners in the US and small businessmen) in order to protect vulnerable populations (such as children, animals and immigrants).

In sum, the left has a tendency to place caring for the weak, sick and vulnerable above all other moral concerns. It is admirable and necessary that some political party stands up for victims of injustice, racism or bad luck. But in focusing so much on the needy, the left often fails to address – and sometimes violates – other moral needs, hopes and concerns. When working-class people vote conservative, as most do in the US, they are not voting against their self-interest; they are voting for their moral interest. They are voting for the party that serves to them a more satisfying moral cuisine. The left in the UK and USA should think hard about their recipe for success in the 21st century.

Mereological Criteria for Sortals and a Retraction

I said something yesterday that isn't right, as I realized this morning.  I said, ". . . a necessary condition of a term's being a sortal is that it be such that, if it applies to a thing, then it does not apply to the proper parts of the thing."

What I said works for some examples.  'Red thing,' 'physical object,' and 'entity' are not sortals.  A red thing can easily have proper parts that are red things.  The proper parts of a physical object are physical objects.  The proper parts of entities are themselves entities. And so on.

But isn't 'rope' a sortal?  If I have a ten foot rope and cut into two equal pieces, then I have two ropes.  The same goes for 'rubber hose,' 'cloud,' 'amoeba.'  (These latter examples from Nicholas Griffin, Relative Identity, Oxford, 1977, p. 38.)  So it cannot be true that, if 'T' is a sortal, then you cannot divide T into two parts and get two  Ts.

And you thought I never admitted mistakes?

The Modified Leibniz Question, Maitzen’s Critique of its Meaningfulness, and My Response

It is the thesis of Stephen Maitzen's Stop Asking Why There's Anything that the Leibniz question, 'Why is there anything, rather than nothing at all?' is ill-posed as it stands and unanswerable.  Maitzen's point is intended to apply not only to the 'wide-open' formulation just mentioned but also to such other formulations as 'Why are there any concrete contingent beings at all?'  I will discuss only the latter formulation.  It is defensible in ways that the wide-open question is not.  Call it the modified Leibniz question.  For Maitzen it is a pseudo-question.  For me it is a genuine question.  On my classificatory scheme, Maitzen is a rejectionist concerning the modified Leibniz question.  The question is not to be answered but  rejected as senseless, because of an internal semantic defect that renders it necessarily unanswerable and therefore illegitimate as a question.

My defense of the meaningfulness of the modified Leibniz question does not commit me to any particular answer to the question such as the theistic answer.  For there are several possible types of answer, one of them being the 'brutal' answer:  it is simply a brute fact that concrete contingent beings (CCBs) exist.  When Russell, in his famous BBC debate with the Jesuit Copleston, said that the the universe is just there and that is all, he was answering the question, not rejecting it.  His answer presupposed the meaningfulness of the question.

1. Getting a Sense of What the Dispute is About

Maitzen's paper is in the context of a defense of naturalism and an attack on theism.  So I have to be careful not to assume theism or anything that entails or presupposes theism.  Defining 'naturalism' is a tricky business but it suffices for present purposes to say that naturalism entails the nonexistence of God as classically conceived, and the nonexistence of immortal souls, but does not entail the nonexistence of abstracta, many of which are necessary beings. 

To make things hard on theists let us assume (contrary to current cosmology)  that the universe has an actually infinite past. Hence it always existed. Let us also assume that the each total state of the universe at a time is (deterministically) caused to exist by an earlier such state of the universe. A third assumption is that the universe is nothing over and above the sum of its states. The third assumption implies that if each state has a causal explanation in terms of earlier states (in accordance with the laws of nature), then all of the states have an explanation, in which case the universe itself has a causal explanation. This in turn implies that there is no need to posit anything external to the universe, such as God, to explain why the universe exists. The idea, then, is that the universe exists because it causes itself to exist in that later states are caused to exist by earlier states, there being no earliest, uncaused, state. We thereby explain why the universe exists via an infinite regress of universe-immanent causes and in so doing obviate the need for a transcendent cause.

If this could be made to work, then we would have a nice neat self-contained universe whose existence was not a brute fact but also not dependent on anything external to the universe.  We would also have an answer to the modified Leibniz question.  Why are there any CCBs given the (broadly logical) possibility that there not be any?  Because each is caused to exist by other CCBs.

The five or so assumptions behind this reasoning can all be questioned. But even if they are all true, the argument is still no good for a fairly obvious (to me!) reason. The whole collection of states, despite its being beginningless and endless, is (modally) contingent: it might not have existed at all.  So, despite every state's having a cause, we can still ask why there are any states in the first place.

The fact that U always existed, if it is a fact, does not entail that U must exist. If I want to know why this universe of ours exists as opposed to there being some other universe or no universe at all, it does no good to tell me that it always existed. For what I want to know is why it exists at all, or 'in the first place.'   I am not asking about its temporal duration but about its very existence. Why it exists at all is a legitimate question since there is no necessity that there be a universe in the first place.  There might have been no universe, where 'universe' stands for the sum-total of concrete contingent beings all of which, on the assumption of naturalism, are physical or material beings.  And it seems obvious that the fact, if it is a fact, that every state has a cause in earlier states does not explain why there is the whole system of states.

The dispute between Maitzen and me can now be formulated.

BV:  The question 'Why are there any CCBs at all? is a legitimate question ( a meaningful question) that cannot be answered in a universe-immanent or naturalistic way as above where every CCB is causally explained by other CCBs. 

SM:  The question 'Why are there any CCBs at all?' is not a legitimate question (not a meaningful question) except insofar as it can be reformulated as a question whose answer can take a universe-immanent or naturalistic form.

2. Maitzen's Argument For the Meaninglessness of the Modified Leibniz Question

The argument begins with considerations about counting.  Maitzen arrives at a result that I do not question.  We can counts pens, plums and penguins, but we cannot count things, entities, or concrete contingent beings.  Or at least we cannot count them under those heads.  The reason is quite simple.  The first trio of terms is a trio of sortals, the second of dummy sortals. Sortals encapsulate individuative criteria that make possible the counting of the items to which the sortals apply.  Thus it makes sense to ask how many cats are on my desk.  The answer at the moment is two.  But it makes no sense to ask how many CCBs are on my desk at the moment. For to answer the question I would have to  be able to count the CCBs, and that is something I cannot do because of the semantic indeterminacy of 'CCB.'  When one counts cats one does not count the proper parts of cats for the simple reason that the proper parts of cats are not cats. (Pre-born babies inside a mother are not proper parts of the mother.)  In fact, it occurs to me now that a necessary condition of a term's being a sortal is that it be such that, if it applies to a thing, then it does not apply to the proper parts of the thing.  When I set out to count CCBs, however, I get no guidance from the term: I don't know whether to count the proper parts of the cat as CCBs or not.  It is not that I or we contingently lack the ability to count them, but that the semantic indeterminateness of 'CCB' makes it impossible to count them.  Things get even hairier — you will forgive the pun — when we ask about undetached arbitrary parts (e.g., Manny minus his tail) and mereological sums (e.g., Manny + the cigar in the ashtray).

All of this was discussed in greater detail in earlier posts. For now the point is simply that the question 'How many CCBs are there?' cannot be answered due to the semantic indeterminateness of 'CCB.'  And since it cannot be answered for this semantic reason, the question is senseless, a pseudo-question.

So far, so good.  But then on p. 56  of Maitzen's paper we find the following sudden but crucial move: "These considerations, I believe, also show that the question ‘Why is there anything?' (i.e., ‘Why is there any thing?’) confuses grammatical and logical function and hence necessarily lacks an answer . . . . "  The main weakness of Maitzen's paper, as I see it, is that he doesn't adequately explain the inferential connection between the counting question and the explanation question, between the 'How many?' question and the 'Why any?' question.  I cheerfully concede that it is senseless to ask how many CCBs there are if all we have to go on is 'CCB' as it is commonly understood.  (Of course there is a difference between 'thing,' say, and 'concrete contingent being.'  The first is a bit of ordinary English while the second is a term of art (terminus technicus).  But this difference does not make a difference for present purposes.)  But why should the fact that 'CCB' is a dummy sortal also make the 'Why any?' question senseless?  For that is precisely what Maitzen is claiming.  'Why is there anything?' is senseless because "the question's reliance on the dummy sortal 'thing' leaves it indeterminate what's being asked." (p. 56)

But wait a minute.  What is being asked about CCBs in the second question is not how many, but why they exist at all.  Why should the fact that we cannot assign a precise number to them render the second question senseless?  I know that there are at least two CCBs.  Here is one cat, here is another (he said Mooreanly).  Each is a concrete contingent being.  So there are at least two.  If there are at least two, then there are some. If there are some, then 'CCBs exist' is true.  Since it is true, it is meaningful. (Not every meaningful proposition is true, but every true proposition is meaningful.) 

To put it another way, 'CCBs exist' is a (closed) sentence.  It expresses a complete thought, a proposition.  It is not an open sentence like 'Xs exist.'  The latter is no more a sentence than a dummy sortal is a sortal.  Unlike 'CCBs exist,' it cannot be evaluated as either true or false.  So, while 'CCB' lacks the semantic determinacy of a sortal, it is not wholly semantically indeterminate like the variable 'X.'  It makes a semantic contribution to the sentence 'CCBs exist.'

Now if it is meaningful to assert that CCBs exist, despite their number being indeterminate, then it is also meaningful to ask why CCBs exist, despite their number being indeterminate.  Now it is meaningful to assert that CCBs exist.  Therefore, it is meaningful to ask why they exist, despite their number being indeterminate.

Although the uncountability of CCBs is a good reason to think that 'How many CCBs are there?' is senseless, it is not a good reason to think that 'Why are there any CCBs?' is also senseless.

My point is that it is a non sequitur for Maitzen to move from

a. 'How many CCBs are there?' is  a senseless question

to

b. 'Why are there any CCBs?' is a senseless question.

(a) is true.  But one can hold (a) consistently with holding the negation of (b).

How might Maitzen respond?

3. 'Concrete Contingent Being' as a Mere Covering Term

For Maitzen, 'CCB' is "only a covering term for pens, plums, penguins . . . ." (p. 57)  and other instances of sorts.  It doesn't refer to anything distinct from pens, plums, penguins, cats, human births, explosions, and so on. In other words, 'CCB' does not pick out a special sort — an uber-sort, if you will — the instances of which are distinct from the instances of genuine sorts.  And so 'CCB' does not pick out a sort whose instances elude natural-scientific explanation and therefore EITHER require some special explanation by God or some other entity transcendent of the physical universe OR are such that their existence is a brute fact.  As Maitzen puts it, "there aren't any contingent things whose explanations outstrip the explanations available for the individuals covered by the covering term 'contingent things.'" (p. 58)  The 'Why any?' question "has no content until we replace referentially indeterminate words with genuine sortals." (p. 59) 

If Maitzen is telling us that CCBs are not a sort of thing distinct  from ordinary sorts, then he is right, and I agree.      Suppose we we have a complete list of all the sorts of thing in the universe: pens, plums, pussycats, penguins, and so on.  It would be absurd if someone were to object: "But you forgot to list the concrete contingent beings!"  That would be absurd since each pen, plum etc. is a CCB, and there is no CCB that is not either a pen or a plum or, etc. But it doesn't follow that a sentence in which 'CCB' occurs is without content. 

It is simply false to say that the 'Why any?' question "has no content until we replace referentially indeterminate words with genuine sortals." (p. 59)   Right here is where Maitzen makes the mistake that invalidates the move from (a) to (b).  He conflates the partial semantic indeterminacy of dummy sortals with the total semantic indeterminacy of variables. Compare:

  • Why are there any penguins?
  • Why are there any concrete contingent beings?
  • Why are there any Xs?

 The first two questions are genuine, despte the fact we can count only penguins.  The third question is pseudo since it has no definite sense.

Note finally that we cannot replace the second question with a long disjunctive question like 'Why are there either penguins or plums or pussycats or pens, or . . . ?'  For suppose you had a complete naturalistic answer to the latter question.  You could still meaningfully ask why there are any CCBs at all as opposed to none at all, and why these rather than some other possible set.

There is more to say, but tomorrow's another day, and brevity is the soul of blog.

Jerry Fodor’s Idiosyncratic Understanding of ‘Scientism’

Jerry Fodor's "Is Science Biologically Possible?" (in Beilby, ed. Naturalism Defeated? Cornell UP 2002, pp. 30-42) begins like this:

I hold to a philosophical view that, for want of a better term, I'll call by one that is usually taken to be pejorative: Scientism.  Scientism claims, on the one hand, that the goals of scientific inquiry include the discovery of objective empirical truths; and, on the other hand, that science has come pretty close to achieving this goal at least  from time to time.  The molecular theory of gasses is, I suppose, a plausible example of achieving it in physics; so is the cell theory in biology; the theory, in geology, that the earth is very old; and the theory, in astronomy,that the stars are very far away . . . .

I'm inclined to think that Scientism, so construed, is not just true but obviously and certainly true; it's something that nobody in the late twentieth  century who has a claim to an adequate education and a minimum of common sense should doubt.

Up to this point one might get the impression that Fodor is simply stipulating that he will use 'scientism' in his own perverse and idiosyncratic way.  But then he goes on to say that scientism is under attack from the left and from the right: "on the left, from a spectrum of relativists and pragmatists, and on the right, from a spectrum of Idealists and a priorists."

At this point I threw down the article in disgust and went on to something worthwhile.

If you want to take a term in widespread use, a term the meaning of which is more or less agreed upon by hundreds of philosophers, and use it in our own crazy-headed way, that, perhaps, may be forgiven.  But it is utterly unforgivable to  use one and same term with both the received meaning and your crazy-headed arbitrarily stipulated meaning.

What is scientism?  I expect some bickering over the particulars of the following definition, but I believe the following captures in at least broad outline what most competent practioners understand by 'scientism.'

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 (hard) 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.

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.
b. All genuine knowledge is scientific knowledge.
Therefore
c. The philosophical thesis of strong scientism is not an item of genuine knowledge.

Hence one cannot claim to know that scientism is true if it is true.  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.

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 is not an item of scientific knowledge.

Back to Fodor.  His definition of scientism has nothing to so with scientism as commonly understood.  The latter is a highly dubious philosophical thesis as I have just demonstrated.  But what he calls scientism is but a platitude that most of us will accept while rejectiong scientism as commonly understood.

Could the Universe Cause Itself to Exist?

I recently considered and rejected the suggestion that a universe with a metrically infinite past has the resources to explain its own existence.  But what if, as the cosmologists tell us, the universe is only finitely old? Could a variant of the first argument be nonetheless mounted?  Surprisingly, yes.  Unsurprisingly, it fails.

The following also fleshes out a version of what I called Cosmologism and listed recently as one possible type of response to the Leibniz question, 'Why is there something rather than nothing?'

BACKGROUND INFORMATION: Written in the summer of 1999. Submitted to The Royal Institute of Philosophy, 25 January 2000. The acceptance letter is dated 14 February 2000. Published in Philosophy 75 (2000), pp. 604-612. Copyright held by The Royal Society of Philosophy,  London.  Philosophy pagination is provided  in brackets, e.g., [P 604]. Endnote numbers are also given in brackets, e.g., [1].

ABSTRACT: This article responds to Quentin Smith's, "The Reason the Universe Exists is that it Caused Itself to Exist," Philosophy 74 (1999), 579-586. My rejoinder makes three main points. The first is that Smith's argument for a finitely old, but causally self-explanatory, universe fails from probative overkill: if sound, it also shows that all manner of paltry event-sequences are causally self-explanatory. The second point is that the refutation of Smith's  argument extends to Hume's argument for an infinitely old causally self-explanatory universe, as well as to Smith's two 'causal loop'  arguments. The problem with all four arguments is their reliance on Hume's principle that to explain the members of a collection is ipso facto to explain the collection. This principle succumbs to counterexamples. The third point is that, even if Hume's principle were true, Smith's argument could not succeed without the aid of a theory of causation according to which causation is production (causation of existence).

Continue reading “Could the Universe Cause Itself to Exist?”

New PC Expression: ‘Customers of Size’

Or at least it was new when I first ran an ancestorof  this post on the old blog back in 2008 (26 July).

……………..

No doubt you have heard of 'people of color' not to be confused with 'colored people.' (But what exactly is the difference in reality?) Just this morning I discovered that some airlines are now referring to fat passengers as 'customers of size.' I am not making this up.

A 'customer of size' is defined by Southwest Airlines as one who is "unable to lower the armrests  (the definitive boundary between seats) and/or who compromise[s] any portion of adjacent seating . . . ."

As one who has been 'compromised' by obese flyers on more than one occasion, I can only applaud the policy if not the PC expression.

The tort against the English language is similar to that of dropping qualifiers. Thus a high quality journal is referred to as a 'quality' journal. But  since every journal has some quality, high, low, or middling, why should 'quality' get to stand in for 'high quality'? Why should 'intercourse' get to go proxy for 'sexual intercourse'?  Similarly for 'chauvinism' and 'male chauvinism.'  Since we all have some color or other, why are only some of us 'people of color'?  And since all of us have some size or other, why do some bear the distinction of being 'customers of size'?  Just because I'm not fat, I don't have a size?

Just because my body is not misshapen, I don't have a shape?

'Fat' is perhaps rude. But what is wrong with 'obese'? 

It is interesting to note the difference between 'sexual intercourse' and 'male chauvinism.'  'Male' here functions as an alienans adjective: it shifts or 'alienates' the sense of the term it qualifies: a male chauvinist is not a chauvinist.  'Sexual,' by contrast, in this context is a specifying adjective: sexual intercourse is a species of intercourse in the way that male chauvinism is not a species of chauvinism.

Recent talk of dummy sortals occasions the observation that 'dummy' here is an alienans adjective.  It is not as if sortals come in two kinds, dummy and non-dummy.

If I were to write a book, Sortals for Dummies, that would be a point I'd make early on.

For more fun with alienans adjectives see my Adjectives category.

A Prime Instance of Political Correctness: The Blackballing of Nat Hentoff

Nat Hentoff  is a civil libertarian and a liberal in an older and respectable sense of the term.  He thinks for himself and follows the arguments and evidence where they lead.  So what do contemporary politically correct liberals do?  They attack him.  His coming out against abortion particularly infuriated them.  Mark Judge comments:

Hentoff's liberal friends didn't appreciate his conversion: "They were saying, 'What's the big fuss about? If the parents had known she was going to come in this way, they would have had an abortion. So why don't you consider it a late abortion and go on to something else?' Here were liberals, decent people, fully convinced themselves that they were for individual rights and liberties but willing to send into eternity these infants because they were imperfect, inconvenient, costly. I saw the same attitude on the part of the same kinds of people toward abortion, and I thought it was pretty horrifying."

The reaction from America's corrupt fourth estate was instant. Hentoff, a Guggenheim fellow and author of dozens of books, was a pariah. Several of his colleagues at the Village Voice, which had run his column since the 1950s, stopped talking to him. When the National Press Foundation wanted to give him a lifetime achievement award, there was a bitter debate amongst members whether Hentoff should even be honored (he was). Then they stopped running his columns. You heard his name less and less. In December 2008, the Village Voice officially let him go.

When journalist Dan Rather was revealed to have poor news judgment, if not outright malice, for using fake documents to try and change the course of a presidential election, he was given a new TV show and a book deal — not to mention a guest spot on The Daily Show. The media has even attempted a resuscitation of anti-Semite Helen Thomas, who was recently interviewed in Playboy.

By accepting the truth about abortion, and telling that truth, Nat Hentoff may be met with silence by his peers when he goes to his reward. The shame will be theirs, not his.

HentoffRelated posts:

Hats Off to Hentoff: Abortion and Obama

Hats Off to Hentoff: "Pols Clueless on Ground Zero Mosque"

Nat Hentoff on 'Hate Crime' Laws

Helen Thomas Disgraces Herself

Hentoff thinks that one cannot consistently oppose abortion and support capital punishment.  I believe he is quite mistaken about that.

Fetal Rights and the Death Penalty: Consistent or Inconsistent?

The ‘How Many?’ and the ‘Why Any?’ Questions and Their Connection

This post continues the ruminations begun here which were inspired by Stephen Maitzen's intriguing paper Stop Asking Why There's Anything (Erkenntnis 77:1 (2012), 51-63).

Let 'CCB' abbreviate 'concrete contingent being.'  For present purposes, the 'How many?' question is this: How many CCBs are there?  And for present purposes the 'Why any?' question is this: Why are there any CCBs?  There might have been none, but there are some, so why are there some?  (I take that to be equivalent to asking why there are any.)

What I want to get clear about is the connection between these two questions.  In particular,  I want to see if the senselessness of the first, if it is senseless, entails the senselessness of the second.

I think it is clear that 'CCB,' like 'thing,' 'entity,' 'existent,' object,' etc. is not a sortal expression.  There are different ways of explaining what a sortal is, but for present purposes a sortal

  • supplies a criterion for counting the items to which the term applies
  • provides a criterion of identity and non-identity among the items to which the term applies
  • gives a criterion for the continued existence of the items to which the term applies.

'Pen' and 'penguin' are examples of sortals.  I can count the pens and penguins on my desk.  There are five pens and zero penguins. (It's a tad warm for penguins here in the Sonoran desert.)  The penguins in Antartica are countable as well, in principle if not in practice.  (This use of 'countable' is not to be confused with its use in set theory.  A countable (uncountable) set is an infinite set the members of which can be (cannot be) placed in one-to-one correspondence with the natural numbers.)

'CCB' is not a sortal because it does not provide a criterion for counting the items to which it applies, say, the things on my desk.  Is a pen together with its cap one CCB  or two?  And what about the particular blackness of the cap?  Presumably it too is a CCB. Are we now up to three CCBs?  And so on.

Maitzen concludes that the 'How many?' question is a pseudo-question because ill-formed, and its is ill-formed because   it features a dummy sortal, a term that functions grammatically like a sortal, but is not a sortal.  As senseless, the question is to be rejected, not answered.

From this result Maitzen straightaway (without any intermediate steps) infers that the 'Why any?'' question is also senseless and for the same reason, namely, that it harbors a dummy sortal.  It is not clear, however, why the fact that the second question features the dummy sortal 'CCB' should render the second question senseless.  We need an argument to forge a link between the two questions.  Perhaps the following will do the trick.

1. If it makes sense to claim that penguins exist, then it makes sense to claim that there is in reality some definite number of penguins.  (It cannot  be true both that there are penguins and that there is no definite number of penguins.) Therefore:
2. If it makes sense to claim that CCBs exist, then it makes sense to claim that there is in reality some definite number of CCBs.  But:
3. It makes no sense to claim that there is in reality some definite number of CCBs. Therefore:
4. It makes no sense to claim that CCBs exist. (2, 3, Modus Tollens)
5. If it makes no sense to claim that CCBs exist, then it makes no sense to ask why CCBs exist.  Therefore:
6. It makes no sense to ask why CCBs exist. (4, 5 Modus Ponens)

I suspect that some such argument as the foregoing is running behind the scenes of Maitzen's text.  The crucial premise is (3).  But has Maitzen established (3)?  I agree that WE cannot count CCBs.  We cannot count them because 'CCB' is not a sortal.  And so FOR US the number of CCBs must remain indeterminate.  But from a God's Eye point of view — which does not presuppose the actual existence of God –  there could easily be a definite number (finite or transfinite) that is the number of CCBs.

On can conceive of an ideally rational spectator (IRS) who knows the true ontology and so knows what all the categories of entity are and knows the members of each category.  What is to stop the IRS from computing the number of CCBs?  We can't do the computation because we are at sea when it comes to the true ontology.  All we have are a bunch of competing theories, and the English language is no help: 'CCB' does not supply us with a criterion for counting.

In short, we must distinguish the question whether the number of CCBs is indeterminate in reality or only indeterminate for us.  If the latter, then we cannot move from the senselessness of the 'How many?' question to the senselessness of the 'Why any?' question.  If the former, the move is valid, but as far as I can see, Maitzen has not given any reason to think that the former is the case.