September 2012 – Page 4 – Maverick Philosopher

More Fun With Existential Generalization

Intuitively, if something is identical to Venus, it follows that something is identical to something. In the notation of MPL, the following is a correct application of the inference rule, Existential Generalization (EG):

1. (∃x)(x = Venus)
2. (∃y)(∃x)(x = y) 1, EG

(1) is contingently true: true, but possibly false. (2), however, is necessarily true. Ought we find this puzzling? That is one question. Now consider the negative existential, 'Vulcan does not exist.'

3. ~(∃x)( x = Vulcan)
4. (∃y)~(∃x)(x = y) 3, EG

(3) is contingently true while (4) is a logical contradiction, hence necessarily false. The inference is obviously invalid, having taken us from truth to falsehood. What went wrong?

Diagnosis A: "You can't existentially generalize on a vacuous term, and 'Vulcan' is a vacuous term."

The problem with this diagnosis is that whether a term is vacuous or not is an extralogical (extrasyntactic) question. Let 'a' be an arbitrary constant, and thus neither a place-holder nor a variable. Now if we substitute 'a' for 'Vulcan' we get:

3* ~(∃x)( x = a)
4. (∃y)~(∃x)(x = y) 3*, EG

The problem with this inference is with the conclusion: we don't know whether 'a' is vacuous or not. So I suggest

Diagnosis B: Singular existentials cannot be translated using the identity sign as in (1) and (3). This fact, pace van Inwagen, forces us to beat a retreat to the second-level analysis. We have to analyze 'Venus exists' in terms of

5. (∃x)(Vx)

where 'V' is a predicate constant standing for the haecceity property, Venusity. Accordingly, what (5) says is that Venusity is instantiated. Similarly, 'Vulcan does not exist' has to be interpreted as saying that Vulcanity is not instantiated. Thus

6. ~(∃x)(Wx)

where 'W' is a predicate constant denoting Vulcanity.

It is worth noting that we can existentially generalize (6) without reaching the absurdity of (4) by shifting to second-order logic and quantifying over properties:

7. (∃P)~(∃x)Px.

That says that some property is such that it is not instantiated. There is nothing self-contradictory about (7).

But of course beating a retreat to the second-level analysis brings back the old problem of haecceities. Not to mention the circularity problem.

The thin theory is 'cooked' no matter how you twist and turn.

Saturday Night at the Oldies: Torch Songs

"A torch song is a sentimental love song, typically one in which the singer laments an unrequited or lost love, where one party is either oblivious to the existence of the other, or where one party has moved on." (Wikipedia)

Sarah Vaughn, Broken-Hearted Melody. I loved this song when I was nine and I love it today. The guitar fills are just right: simple, tasteful and unobtrusive.

Ketty Lester, Love Letters

Roy Orbison, In Dreams

Lenny Welch, Since I Fell for You

Timi Yuro, Hurt

Billie Holliday, The Very Thought of You

Etta James, At Last

Gogi Grant, The Wayward Wind (1956). Made the #1 Billboard position. The tune has haunted me since I was six years old.

Toni Fisher, The Big Hurt (1959). Made the Billboard #3 slot. The first verse hints at the origin of 'torch song':

Now it begins,
now that you've gone
Needles and pins, twilight till dawn
Watching that
clock till you return
Lighting that torch and watching it burn.

Is this the first recording to use a phase shifter? Pretty far-out for the 'fifties. While we're on the topic
of special effects, the first fuzz tone occurs as far as I know in Marty Robbins' Don't Worry About Me (1961).

Eastwood on His ‘Empty Chair’ Performance at the Republican National Convention

Here is my take on Eastwood's unscripted talk. Here is Eastwood's.

“President Obama is the greatest hoax ever perpetrated on the American people,” Eastwood told The Pine Cone this week. “Romney and Ryan would do a much better job running the country, and that’s what everybody needs to know. I may have irritated a lot of the lefties, but I was aiming for people in the middle.”

Empty Chair, Empty Suit, Empty Speech

And the speech was indeed empty. But that is par for the course for Dems. Bare of content, full of bromides, vacuity piled upon vacuity. Gaseous, nebulous, nugatory.

But the mendacity of it all is that behind the flatulent phrases is a hard Left agenda that they will not avow but that comes out when their guard is down.

"You didn't build that!"

"Government is the only thing we all belong to."

If that isn't a totalitarian formula completely at odds with traditional American values, what would be?

And there you have the modern Democrat Party: totalitarianism wrapped in bullshit.

Dems: “Government is the Only Thing We All Belong To”

Some say that there is no real difference between the two major parties in the USA, the Republicans and the Democrats. The claim is breathtakingly false for so many reasons. The latest example of difference is provided by this DNC video. John Hayward's response is spot on:

Even this benign-sounding apologia for “government is the only thing we all belong to” is incredibly wrong-headed. We most certainly do not belong to the government. We are all members of the electorate, which is a very different thing. Each of us lives beneath several distinct governments – federal, state, city – empowered to protect our rights, not act as the almighty executor of some “collective will” that exists only in the totalitarian fantasies of liberals. There are very few areas of government action that command anything like overwhelming majority support from Americans, let alone nearly unanimous approval.

To which I add:

There are two extremes to avoid, the libertarian and the liberal. Libertarians often say that the government can do nothing right, and that the solution is to privatize everything including the National Parks. Both halves of that assertion are patent nonsense. It is equal but opposite nonsense to think that Big Government will solve all our problems. Ronald Reagan had it right: "A government big enough to give you everything you want is powerful enough to take everything you have."

The government is not us as liberals like to say. It is an entity over against most of us run by a relatively small number of us. Among the latter are some decent people but also plenty of power-hungry scoundrels, for whom a government position is a hustle like any hustle. Government, like any entity, likes power and likes to expand its power, and can be counted on to come up with plenty of rationalizations for the maintenance and extension of its power. It must be kept in check by us, just as big corporations need to be kept in check by government regulators.

If you value liberty you must cultivate a healthy skepticism about government. To do so is not anti-government. Too many leftists love to slander us by saying that we are anti-government. It is a lie and they know it. They are not so stupid as not to know that to be for limited government is to be for government.

From a logical point of view, the ‘Government is us’ nonsense appears to be a pars pro toto fallacy: one identifies a proper part (the governing) with the whole of which it is a proper part (the governed).

The Sound of Silence

Silence is a grating clangor to the unwhole man.

‘Porkulus’

'Pork' + 'stimulus' = 'porkulus.' Anti-Obama invective in use since 2009. Attributable to Rush Limbaugh. But I just got wind of it. Stinks like cooked bacon when you are not hungry.

The Aporetics of Existence and Self-Identity

Andrew B. made some powerful objections to a recent existence post. His remarks suggest the following argument:

Argument A

1. Existence is self-identity
2. My existence is contingent: (∃x)(x = I) & Poss ~(∃x) (x = I)
Therefore
3. My self-identity is contingent: I = I & Poss ~ (I = I)

Argument A may be supplemented by the following consideration. Since I am contingent, there are possible worlds in which I do not exist. Not being in those worlds, I cannot have properties in them, including the property of self-identity. So it is not the case that I am necessarily self-identical; I am self-identical only in those worlds in which I exist, which is to say: I am contingently self-identical. I am self-identical in some but not all worlds.

The argument can be rationally resisted.

Consider a possible world w in which I do not exist. In w, the proposition expressed by an utterance by me of 'I am not self-identical' is true. But if it is true in w, then the proposition exists in w. Now if the proposition exists in w, then so do its constituents. On a Russellian view of propositions, I am one of the proposition's constituents. So for the proposition *I am not self-identical* to be true in w, I must exist in w. But if I exist in w, then of course I am self-identical in w, and the proposition is false in w. But the same goes for every world in which I do not exist. It follows that I am self-identical in every world and I exist in every world.

Of course, one needn't take a Russellian line on propositions. One could take a Fregean view according to which propositions about me do not have me as a constituent but an abstract representative of me, a sense or mode of presentation. But the first-person singular pronoun 'I' has the peculiarity that it cannot be replaced salva significatione by any description; so even if there is an abstract representative of me in the Fregean proposition expressed by my utterance of 'I am not self-identical,' there still has to be a referent of the representative external to the proposition. So I have to exist in w for the proposition *I am not self-identical* to be true in w. But if I exist in w then I am self-identical in w. This in turn implies that the proposition is not true.

The cognoscenti will appreciate that what I have been doing in a rough and dirty way is reproducing some of the thoughts in Timothy Williamson's paper Necessary Existents. I am doing so to show that Argument A is not convincing. Making use of materials from Williamson's paper, we can 'throw Argument A into reverse':

Argument B

1. Existence is self-identity
~3. My self-identity is necessary: Nec (I = I)
Therefore
~2. My existence is necessary.

In point of validity, there is nothing to choose between A and B: both are valid. And both, I submit, have counterintuitive conclusions. It seems to me that the arguments cancel each other out. So I propose that we think very skeptically about the common premise that existence is self-identity, and the Quinean thin theory that commits us to it.

Pascal’s Wager: Minimalist Version

Believing in God and the soul incurs no costs and disbelieving brings no benefits.

Living in the Past: Is That Why You are Still a Dem?

To understand a person, it helps to consider what the world was like when the person was twenty years old. At twenty, give or take five years, the music of the day, the politics of the day, the language, mores, fashions, economic conditions and whatnot of the day make a very deep impression. It is an impression that lasts through life and functions as a sort of benchmark for the evaluation of what comes after, but also as a distorting lense that makes it difficult to see what is happening now.

The foregoing insight may help us understand why people remain in the Democrat Party. People born in the 'twenties are many of them still living in the 'forties. For them the Democrat Party is the party of FDR. They haven't noticed the changes, or haven't wanted to notice the changes. They haven't noticed that their interests are no longer served by the party of this name. Or perhaps they are just attached to the label, or in the grip of misplaced piety: they are attached to a family tradition. "My pappy was a Democrat and my grandpappy afore him was a Democrat; we McCoy's have always been Democrats, and we don't see no reason to change now."

People born in the early 'forties are many of them still living in the early 'sixties, those heady days of Camelot when the young and vigorous Jack Kennedy and his charming wife occupied the White House, and society was all in a ferment with necessary reforms being made or about to be made. They thrilled to Bob Dylan's "Blowin' in the Wind" and other anthems of the Civil Rights movement. Those worthy battles were fought, and they were won, and progress was made. But soon enough the rot set in: the legitimate struggle for civil rights gave way to affirmative action as we now know it, which involves reverse discrimination, race-norming, preferential hiring, minority set-asides. The noble Martin Luther King, Jr. was soon followed by such race-hustlers as Jesse Jackson and Al Sharpton who cleverly cashed in on white liberal guilt. People were precisely not judged by "the content of their character" but by the color of their skin. Equality of opportunity was confused with equality of outcome; the quota mentality replaced the concern for justice. Justice gave way to the unconcept 'social justice' which either means nothing or is code for socialism.

In the '60s , Democrats were progressive and liberal in respectable senses of these terms. But it is no longer the 'sixties, and if JFK were alive today and held the views he held then, he would be classed with conservatives. If you are living in the past, however, fixated on the glory days of youth, you may have missed the changes. You may not have noticed the difference between Jack and Teddy, the difference a brother can make.

So if you are still a Dem, you need to ask yourself: Are you living in the past? Watching Pat Cadell on the Glenn Beck show a while back I had to scratch my head. He was agreeing with Beck, and yet he remains a Dem. Is he just attached to the name? When the Dems become indistinguishable from the CPUSA will he still call himself a Dem?

You superannuated farts who are still Dems — tune into the Democratic National Convention going on this week in Charlotte. Listen carefully to the proceedings. Is that the stuff you believe in?

The Incompatibility of a Market Economy and a Socialist Welfare State

Janet Daly of The Telegraph has written a penetrating article. Excerpts (emphasis added)

What is being challenged is nothing less than the most basic premise of the politics of the centre ground: that you can have free market economics and a democratic socialist welfare system at the same time. The magic formula in which the wealth produced by the market economy is redistributed by the state – from those who produce it to those whom the government believes deserve it – has gone bust. The crash of 2008 exposed a devastating truth that went much deeper than the discovery of a generation of delinquent bankers, or a transitory property bubble. It has become apparent to anyone with a grip on economic reality that free markets simply cannot produce enough wealth to support the sort of universal entitlement programmes which the populations of democratic countries have been led to expect. The fantasy may be sustained for a while by the relentless production of phoney money to fund benefits and job-creation projects, until the economy is turned into a meaningless internal recycling mechanism in the style of the old Soviet Union.

[. . .]

Mitt Romney had been hinting, in an oblique, undeveloped way, at this line of argument as he moved tentatively toward finding a real message. Then he took the startling step of appointing Congressman Paul Ryan as his running mate, and the earth moved. If Romney was the embodiment of the spirit of a free market, Ryan was its prophet. His speech at the convention was so dangerous to the Obama
Democrats, with their aspirations toward European-style democratic socialism, that they unleashed their “fact checkers” to find mistakes (“lies”) in it. (Remember the old Yes Minister joke: “You can always accuse them of errors of detail, sir. There are always some errors of detail”.) When Romney and Ryan offer their arguments to the American people, they are, of course, at an advantage over almost any British or European politician. Contrary to what many know-nothing British observers seem to think, the message coming out of Tampa was not Tea Party extremism. It was just a reassertion of the basic values of American political culture: self-determination, individual aspiration and genuine community, as opposed to belief in the state as the fount of all social
virtue.

[. . .]

So it would be deeply misleading to imply that this campaign will be a contest between what Britain likes to call “progressive” politics and some atavistic longing for a return to frontier America where everybody made a success of his own life with no help from anybody but his kith and kin. In the midst of the impassioned and often nasty debate about the future of health care, in which Ryan was depicted as a granny-killer, there has been some serious Republican thinking about the universal provision of medical care for pensioners (or “seniors” as they are called in the US). Because, you see, the debate over there has gone way beyond welfare reform: the need to restrict benefit dependency among the underclass is an argument that has been won. What is at issue now is much more politically contentious: universal entitlements such as comprehensive Medicare and social security are known to be unaffordable in their present form. Ryan, the radical economic thinker, suggests a solution for Medicare in the form of a voucher system. Patients could choose from competing health providers, with a ceiling on the cost of procedures and treatments, instead of simply being given blanket no-choice care. Thus, the government would get better value for money, and individuals would have more say in their own treatment. Now why doesn’t anybody here think of applying that mechanism to the NHS? Oh, yes, some people have – but nobody in power will listen to them.

At the Zoo: The Aspiring Animal

And here we have an animal who aspires. Unfortunately, his aspirations arise from a material substratum that mocks them, and whose collapse will soon enough spell their end. Or so it seems. If the seeming is so, is not the life of these animals absurd?