Month: August 2012

The Philosopher and the Conservative

One cannot be a philosopher without believing in the power of reason.  But one cannot be a conservative without doubting its power to order our affairs and ameliorate our condition.

Equally, one cannot be a philosopher without doubting — doubt being the engine of inquiry — and one cannot be a conservative without believing, that is, without accepting as true much that one cannot prove.

To live well we must somehow tread a razor's edge between unexamined belief and beliefless examination.

I Married an Animal!

You are and you marry both a person and a member of a zoological species.  And so you must be concerned not only with person-to-person compatibility but with  animal-to-animal as well.  Can she stand your smell, and you hers?

The Voter ID Controversy Continues

It amazes me that new articles and columns in high-class venues appear almost daily concerning what really ought to be a non-issue.  Of course, I blame the Left for this.  By maintaining preternaturally absurd positions, they force sensible writers to waste time and energy opposing their nonsense.  Here is how a 15 August NY Times editorial begins:

Judge Robert Simpson of the Commonwealth Court of Pennsylvania seems to assume that legislators have a high-minded public purpose for the laws they pass. That’s why, on Wednesday morning, he refused to grant an injunction to halt a Republican-backed voter ID law that could disenfranchise hundreds of thousands of poor and minority state residents in November.       

One thing you have to understand about leftists is that they regularly engage in semantic distortion: they will take a word that has an established meaning and misuse it for their ideological ends.  'Disenfranchise' is a case in point.

To disenfranchise is to deprive of a right, in particular, the right to vote.  But only some people in a given geographical area  have the right to vote.  Felons and children do not have the right to vote, nor do non-citizens.  You do not have the right to vote in a certain geographical area simply because you are a sentient being residing in that area.  Otherwise, cats and dogs and children and felons and illegal aliens would have the right to vote. Now a requirement that one prove that one has the right to vote is not to be confused with a denial of the right to vote.

My right to vote is one thing, my ability to prove that I have the right another.  If I cannot prove that I am who I claim to be on a given occasion, then I won't be able to exercise my right to vote on that occasion; but that is not to say that I have been disenfranchised.  For I haven't be deprived of my right to vote; I have merely been prevented from exercising my right due to my inability to prove
my identity.

That's one point.  The author of the NYT editorial begins by egregiously misusing 'disenfranchise.'  But note also the cynicism betrayed in the opening sentence.  Third, we are asked to believe the unbelievable, that "hundreds of thousands of poor and minority state residents" will be 'disenfranchised' come November.  Hundreds of thousands? Prove it!  In Pennsylvania, photo ID is free.  So even the 'poor' can afford it.  Our editorial writer continues:

He wrote in his ruling that requiring a government-issued photo ID card to vote “is a reasonable, nondiscriminatory, nonsevere burden when viewed in the broader context of the widespread use of photo ID in daily life,” as if voting were equivalent to buying a six-pack of beer or driving a car.       

At this point I stopped reading.  The writer is committing a grotesque straw man fallacy.  No one claims that voting is "equivalent" — whatever that is supposed to mean – " to buying a six-pack of beer or driving a car."  The point is that the photo ID requirement is a minimal one in that photo ID is necessary for all sorts of transactions in everyday life that ordinary people engage in.  And again, in PA you can acquire this ID for free. Our idiot editorialist also seems not to realize this issue has nothing to do with driving a car.  A photo ID is not the same as a driver's license.  The latter is a species of the former as genus.  You don't need to own a car, and you don't even need to have a driver's license.

Now if you want to read something intelligent on this issue, besides what I have written, I recommend this WSJ piece, and this article from Commentary.

Generation Screwed May Support Ryan

Gen-Xers (those born between 1965 and 1980) are the cohort sandwiched between the Boomers  and the Millennials.  Now they have one of their own in contention for high office.  And Paul Ryan, 42, is no slacker.  Romney's pick of the man for VP was a brilliant stroke and may gin up support for the Republican ticket as Kirsten Powers argues.

She quoted a word I had never seen before, 'athazagoraphobia':

Generation X chronicler Jeff Gordiner, has written that Gen-Xers suffer from “athazagoraphobia”—“an abnormal and persistent fear of being forgotten or ignored.” Except it’s not really a phobia; it’s been reality for a long time. Maybe that is about to change.

My Existence and My Possible Nonexistence

Leo Mollica made a good objection to my earlier argument, an objection I  need to sort out.  I exist, but I might not have existed.  How might a thin theorist translate this truth?

On the thin theory, my existence is my identity-with-something.  It follows that my nonexistence is my diversity-from-everything, and my merely possible nonexistence is my diversity from everything in one or more merely possible worlds.  But — and this I take it is Leo's point — I needn't exist in merely possible world w for it to be true in w that I am diverse from everything in w.  So w is not a world in which I am self-diverse, but simply a world in which I am diverse from everything in w.  Had w been actual, I would not have been self-diverse; I would not have existed at all, i.e., I would not have been identical to any of the things that would have existed had w been actual.

To put it another way, on the thin theory, my actual existence is my self-identity, my identity with me.  Opposing this reduction of singular existence to self-identity, I argued that if my existence is my self-identity, then the possibility of my nonexistence is the possibility of my being self-diverse — which is absurd.  Mollica's rejoinder in effect was that my possible nonexistence is not my possible self-diversity, but my possible diversity from everything distinct from me.

I could respond  by saying that this objection begs the question by assuming the thin theory.  But then Mollica could say that I am begging the question against him.  Let me try a different tack.

If I am diverse from everything in w, but I don't exist in w, then something must represent me there.  For part of what makes w w is that it lacks me.  It is essential to w that it not contain me. But how express this fact if there is no representative of me in w?  Now the only possible candifdate for a representative of me in possible worlds in which I do notr exist  is my haecceity-property: identity-with-BV.  If there is such a property, then it can go proxy for me in every possible world in which I do not exist, worlds which  in part are  defined by my nonexistence.

So it seems that Mollica's objection requires that there be haecceities such as identity-with-BV, and that these be properties that can exist unexemplified.  But now two points.

First, there are no such haecceity properties for reasons given elsewhere, for example, here.

Second,  if haecceities are brought into the picture, then we are back to the Fregean version of the thin theory according to which 'exists(s)' is a second-level property.  But what I have been pounding on is the latest and most sophisticated version of the thin theory, that of van Inwagen.  And we have seen that he rejects the view that 'exist(s)' is second-level.

Apology to a Fly

I regret having to kill you, but one of my thoughts is worth more than your entire life.

"But if the fly could speak, he would most assuredly disagree with your value assessment."

If the fly could speak, then I would consider him a spiritual being and accord him the respect I accord myself.

‘Something is Self-Identical’ Cannot Translate ‘There are Objects’: Another Argument Against the Thin Theory

At Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus 4.1271 we read: "So one cannot say, for example, 'There are objects', as one might say, 'There are books'."

In endnote 9, p. 194,  of "The Number of Things," Peter van Inwagen (Phil. Issues 12, 2002) writes:

Wittgenstein says that one cannot say " 'There are objects', as one might say, 'There are books'."  I have no idea what the words 'as one might say' ['wie man etwa sagt'] could mean so I will ignore them.

Is van Inwagen simply feigning incomprehension here?  How could he fail to understand what those words mean?  Wittgenstein's point is that object is a formal concept, unlike book.  One can say, meaningfully, that there are books.  One cannot say, meaningfully, that there are objects.  Whether Wittgenstein is right is a further question.  But what he is saying strikes me as clear enough, clear enough so that one ought to  have some idea of what he is saying rather than no idea.  By the way, van Inwagen is here engaging in a ploy of too many analytic philosophers.  In a situation in which it is tolerably, but not totally, clear what is being said, they say, 'I have no idea what you mean' when, to avoid churlishness, they ought to say, 'Would you please clarify exactly what you mean?'

Be this as it may.  Philosophers are a strange, in-bred breed of cat, and they acquire some strange tics.  My present topic is not the tics of philosophers, nor formal concepts either.

According to Wittgenstein, one cannot say (meaningfully) that there are objects.  Van Inwagen responds:

Why can one not say that there are objects?  Why not say it this way: '(Ex)(x = x)'? (p. 180)

Without endorsing Wittgenstein's claim, or trying to determine what exactly it means, my thesis is that van Inwagen's translation of 'There are objects' as 'Something is self-identical' is hopeless.

I do not deny the logical equivalence of the two sentences.   I do not claim that there are self-identical items that do not exist.  Everything exists.  My claim is that to exist is not to be self-identical.  They are not the very same 'property.'    If they were, then van Inwagen's translation would be unexceptionable.  But they are not.  Here is a reductio ad absurdum argument to show that existence and self-identity are distinct, that existence cannot be reduced to self-identity.

0. Existence and self-identity are the very same property. (Assumption for reductio)

1. If existence and self-identity are the very same property, then nonexistence and self-diversity are the very same property, and conversely. (Self-evident logical equivalence.)

2. Possibly, I do not exist.  (Self-evident premise: I am a contingent being.)

3. Possibly, I am not self-identical. (From 1, 2)

4. What is not self-identical is self-diverse.  (True by definition)

5. Possibly, I am self-diverse. (From 3, 4)

6. (5) is necessarily false.

7. (0) is false. Q.E.D.

The thin theory of existence is the theory that existence is exhaustively explicable in terms of the purely logical concepts of standard first-order predicate logic with identity.  Identity and quantification are such concepts.  Now the only way within this logic to translate 'There are objects' or 'Something exists' is the way van Inwagen suggests.  But what I have just shown is that 'Something is self-identical' does not say what 'Something exists' says.

If things exist, then of course they are self-identical.  What else would they be? Self-diverse?  But their existence is not their self-identity.  Their existence is their being there, their not being nothing, their  reality — however you want to put it.  If something is self-identical, it cannot be such unless it first exists.  It astonishes me that there are people, very intelligent people, who cannot see that.  What should we call this fallacy?  The essentialist fallacy?  The fallacy of thinking that being = what-being?  Or maybe it is not a fallacy of thinking, but a kind of blindness.  Some people are color-blind, some morally blind, some modally blind.  And others existence-blind. 

Obama’s Assault on the Institutions of Civil Society

Obama showed his true colors quite unmistakably in his 'You didn't build that" speech.  Yuval Steinitz has his number:

The president simply equates doing things together with doing things through government. He sees the citizen and the state, and nothing in between — and thus sees every political question as a choice between radical individualism and a federal program.

As I said before, it is a classic false alternative fallacy: either you pull yourself up by your own bootstraps or government helps you.  This goes together with a straw man fallacy: Obama imputes to his opponents an absurd 'rugged individualism' that they do not espouse.

But most of life is lived somewhere between those two extremes, and American life in particular has given rise to unprecedented human flourishing because we have allowed the institutions that occupy the middle ground — the family, civil society, and the private economy — to thrive in relative freedom. Obama’s remarks in Virginia shed a bright light on his attitude toward that middle ground, and in that light a great deal of what his administration has done in this three and a half years suddenly grows clearer and more coherent, and even more disconcerting.

Disconcerting is right.  It's an all-out, totalitarian assault on the institutions of civil society.  The Left is totalitarian by its very nature and it can brook no competitors: not religion, not the family, not private charities and associations.

This intolerance of nonconformity is even more powerfully evident in the administration’s attitude toward the institutions of civil society, especially religious institutions involved in the crucial work of helping the needy and vulnerable. In a number of instances, but most notably in the controversy surrounding the Department of Health and Human Services rule requiring religious employers to provide free abortive and contraceptive drugs to their employees under Obamacare, the administration has shown an appalling contempt for the basic right of religious institutions to pursue their ends in accordance with their convictions.

It is important to recall just what the administration did in that instance. The HHS rule did not assert that people should have the freedom to use contraceptive or abortive drugs — which of course they do have in our country. It did not even say that the government facilitate people’s access to these drugs — which it does today and has done for decades. Rather, the rule required that the Catholic Church and other religious entities should facilitate people’s access to contraceptive and abortive drugs. It aimed to turn the institutions of civil society into active agents of the government’s ends, even in violation of their fundamental religious convictions.

The idea is to hollow out the space  between the individual and the State, to clear it of the institutions of civil society that mediate between individual and state:

Indeed, the president and his administration don’t seem to have much use for that space at all. Even the family, which naturally stands between the individual and the community, is not essential. In May, the Obama campaign produced a Web slideshow called “The Life of Julia,” which follows a woman through the different stages of life and shows the many ways in which she benefits from public policies that the president advocates. It was an extraordinarily revealing work of propaganda, and what it revealed was just what the president showed us in Roanoke: a vision of society consisting entirely of the individual and the state. Julia’s life is the product of her individual choices enabled by public policies. She has an exceptional amount of direct contact with the federal government, yet we never meet her family. At the age of 31, we are told, “Julia decides to have a child” and “benefits from maternal checkups, prenatal care, and free screenings under health care reform.” She later benefits from all manner of educational, economic, and social programs, and seems to require and depend upon no one but the president.

[. . .]

The Left’s disdain for civil society is thus driven above all not by a desire to empower the state without limit, but by a deeply held concern that the mediating institutions in society — emphatically including the family, the church, and private enterprise — are instruments of prejudice, selfishness, backwardness, and resistance to change, and that in order to establish our national life on more rational grounds, the government needs to weaken and counteract them.

The Right’s high regard for civil society, meanwhile, is driven above all not by a disdain for government but by a deeply held belief in the importance of our diverse and evolved societal forms, without which we could not hope to secure our liberty. Conservatives seek mechanisms and institutions to bring implicit social knowledge to bear on our troubles, while progressives seek the authority and power to bring explicit technical knowledge to bear on them.

[. . .]

To ignore what stands between the state and the citizen is to disregard the essence of American life. To clear away what stands between the state and the citizen is to extinguish the sources of American freedom. The president is right to insist that America works best when Americans work together, but government is just one of the many things we do together, and it is only rarely the most important of them.

One of the problems with Romney is that he has no clue as to what the battle is really about.  He thinks solely in economic terms.  Paul Ryan or somebody should force the affable milque-toast to study Steinitz's piece and then give him a test on it.

ButI'll give Mitt this: his pick of Ryan as running mate was courageous and intelligent.