On this Day in Duluth in 1959, Buddy Holly and the Crickets, Richie Valens, Jiles Perry “the Big Bopper” Richardson, Dion and the Bellmonts [sic], and others played to a sell-out crowd at the Duluth Armory for a “Winter Dance Party” promoted by Duluth’s Lew Latto—three days before Holly, Valens, and Richardson perished in a plane crash. In the audience, as the famous story goes, was a young Robert Zimmerman, who became so inspired he picked up a guitar and changed his name to Bob Dylan.
I saw someone on TV who claimed that comparing a deeply indebted household with the deeply indebted U.S. government is a false analogy. Why? Because the government, unlike the citizen, has the power legally to print money. No doubt that is true and a point of disanalogy, but what surprised me was that neither the speaker nor his listeners seemed to see any problem with printing money in response to a debt crisis. The problem, of course, is that when a government does this it in effect counterfeits its own currency and reduces the buying power of existing dollars.
This got me thinking about counterfeiting. Why can't I engage in my own private stimulus program? I acquire the requisite equipment, print up a batch of C-notes and then spend them in parts of town that I deem need economic stimulus. Better yet, I simply give out grants gaining no benefits for myself. Is there a difference in principle between illegal counterfeiting and the legal 'counterfeiting' that the government engages in? If they can 'stimulate,' why can't I?
But I'm no economist, so I may be missing something. I guess I don't understand how real value can be conjured out of thin air. In this electronic age, you don't even need paper and there needn't be any actual printing. Suppose the Benevolent Hacker breaks into your bank account, not to transfer funds out or to transfer funds in from a legitimate source, but simply to add zeros to your account. You are suddenly richer 'on paper.' You convert this new found wealth into new cars and houses for yourself. Wouldn't that stimulate the economy to some extent?
And then this morning I saw Krazy Krugman on C-Span, a.k.a Paul Krugman, writer of crappy op-eds for Gotham's Gray Lady, his worst and most vile being this outburst re: the Tucson shooting. Krugman is not at all concerned that the national debt approaches 17 trillion. After all, as he brilliantly observed, the U.S. has its own currency, and it can print money! Not one of the C-Span callers called Krugman out on the consequences of inflating one's way out of debt. Obama, said Krugman, "got cold feet." He didn't stimulate enough!
Meanwhile conservatives stock up on grub, gold, guns, and 'lead.'
I left my native state of California in 1973 and headed for Boston. Back in the day, California drivers were very good. So I was appalled to experience the awful driving habits of Bostonians. Not as bad as Turks who perform such stunts as driving on sidewalks and backing up in heavy traffic on account of missing a turn, but still very bad. California is catching up, however, as the once great Golden State becomes the Greece of America, thanks to stupid liberals and their stupid policies.
This from that resolute and near-quotidian chronicler of Californication, Victor Davis Hanson (emphasis added):
Stagecoach Trails
Little need be said about infrastructure other than it is fossilized. The lunacy of high-speed rail is not just the cost, but that a few miles from its proposed route are at present a parallel but underused Amtrak track and the 99 Highway, where thousands each day risk their lives in crowded two lanes, often unchanged since the 1960s.
The 99, I-5, and 101 are potholed two-lane highways with narrow ramps, and a few vestigial cross-traffic death zones. But we, Californian drivers, are not just double the numbers of those 30 years ago, but — despite far safer autos and traffic science — far less careful as well. There are thousands of drivers without licenses, insurance, registration, and elementary knowledge of road courtesy. Half of all accidents in Los Angeles are hit-and-runs.
My favorite is the ubiquitous semi-truck and trailer swerving in and out of the far left lane with a 20-something Phaethon behind the wheel — texting away as he barrels along at 70 mph with a fishtailing 20 tons. The right lane used to be for trucks; now all lanes are open range for trucking — no law in the arena! The dotted lane lines are recommendations, not regulations. (Will young truck drivers be hired to become our new high-speed rail state employee engineers?)
When I drive over the Grapevine, I play a sick game of counting the number of mattresses I’ll spot in the road over the next 100 miles into L.A. (usually three to four). Lumber, yard clippings, tools, and junk — all that is thrown into the back of trucks without tarps. To paraphrase Hillary: what does it matter whether we are killed by a mattress or a 2 x 4? In places like Visalia or Madera, almost daily debris ends up shutting down one of the only two lanes on the 99.
Wrecks so far? It is not the number, but rather the scary pattern that counts. I’ve had three in the last 10 years: a would-be hit-and-run driver (the three “no”s: no license, no registration, no insurance) went through a stop sign in Selma, collided with my truck, and tried to take off on foot, leaving behind his ruined Civic; a speeder (80 m.p.h.) in L.A. hit a huge box-spring on the 101 near the 405, slammed on his brakes, skidded into a U-turn in the middle lane, reversed direction, and hit me going 40 m.p.h. head-on (saved by Honda Accord’s front and side air-bags and passive restraint seat harnesses; the injured perpetrator’s first call was to family, not 911); and a young woman last year, while texting, rear-ended me at 50 m.p.h. while I was at a complete stop in stalled traffic in Fresno (thank God for a dual-cab Tundra with a long trailer hitch). She too first called her family to try to help her flee the scene of her wrecked car, but my call apparently reached the Highway Patrol first.
Drive enough in California, and you too, reader, will have a ‘”rendezvous with Death, at some disputed barricade.”
Constituent ontologists would seem to have a serious problem accounting for accidental change. Suppose an avocado goes from unripe to ripe over a two day period. That counts as an accidental change: one and the same substance (the avocado) alters in respect of the accidental property of being unripe. It has become different qualitatively while remaining the same numerically.
This is a problem for constituent ontologists if C-ontologists are committed to what Michael J. Loux calls "Constituent Essentialism." ("What is Constituent Ontology?" Metaphysics: Aristotelian, Scholastic, Analytic, Ontos Verlag 2012, Novak et al. eds., p. 52) Undoubtedly, many of them are, if not all. Constituent Essentialism is the C-ontological analog of mereological essentialism. We can put it like this:
Constituent Essentialism: A thing has each of its ontological parts necessarily. This implies that a thing cannot gain or lose an ontological part without ceasing to be same thing.
Mereological Essentialism: A thing has each of its commonsense parts necessarily. This implies that a thing cannot gain or lose a commonsense part without ceasing to be the same thing.
To illustrate, suppose an ordinary particular (OP) such as our avocado is a bundle of compresent universals. The universals are the ontological parts of the OP as a whole. The first of the two principles entails that ordinary particulars cannot change. For accidental (alterational as opposed to existential) change is change in respect of properties under preservation of numerical diachronic identity. But preservation of identity is not possible on Constituent Essentialism. The simple bundle-of-universals theory is incompatible with the fact of change. But of course there are other types of C-ontology.
I agree with Loux that Constituent Essentialism is a "framework principle" (p. 52) of C-ontology. It cannot be abandoned without abandoning C-ontology. If an item (of whatever category) has ontological parts at all, then it is difficult to see how it could fail to have each and all of these parts essentially. And of course the fact of accidental change and what it entails, namely, persistence of the same thing over time, cannot be denied. So the 'argument from change' does seem to score against primitive versions of the bundle-of-universals theory.
I don't want to discuss whether more sophisticated C-ontological theories such as Hector Castaneda's Guise Theory escape this objection. I want to consider whether relational ontology does any better. I take relational ontology to imply that no item of any category has ontological parts. Thus R-ontology implies that no type of particular has ontological parts. A particular is just an unrepeatable. My cat Max is a particular and so are each of his material parts, and their material parts. If Max's blackness is an accident of him as substance, then this accident is a particular. The Armstrongian state of affairs of Max's being black is a particular. Mathematical sets are particulars. Particulars need not be concrete. Sets are abstract particulars in one sense of 'abstract.' Tropes are abstract particulars in another sense of 'abstract.' If an entity is not a particular, an unrepeatable, then it is a universal, a repeatable.
My question is whether we can explain real (as opposed to 'Cambridge') accidental change without positing particulars having ontological constituents. I will argue that we cannot, and that therefore R-ontology is untenable.
Lukas Novak presents an argument to the conclusion that the fact of accidental change requires the positing of particulars that have ontological constituents. Here is my take on Novak's argument:
Peter goes from being ignorant of the theorem of Pythagoras to being knowledgeable about it. This is an accidental change: one and the same concrete particular, Peter, has different properties at different times. Now a necessary condition of accidental change is that one and the same item have different properties at different times. But is it a sufficient condition? Suppose Peter is F at time t and not F at time t* (t* later than t). Suppose that F-ness is a universal but not a constituent of Peter and that Peter is F by exemplifying F-ness. Universals so construed are transcendent in the sense that they are not denizens of the world of space and time. They belong in a realm apart and are related, if they are related, to spatiotemporal particulars by the external relation of exemplification.
It follows on these assumptions that if Peter undergoes real accidental change that Peter goes from exemplifying the transcendent universal F-ness at t to not exemplifying it at t*. That is: he stands in the exemplification relation to F-ness at t, but ceases so to stand to t*. But there has to be more to the change than this. For, as Novak points out, the change is in Peter. It is intrinsic to him and cannot consist merely in a change in a relation to a universal in a realm apart. After all, transcendent universals do not undergo real change. Any change in such a universal is 'merely Cambridge' as we say in the trade. In other words, the change in F-ness when it 'goes' from being exemplified by Peter to not being exemplified by Peter is not a real change in the universal but a merely relational change. The real change in this situation must therefore be in or at Peter. For a real, not merely Cambridge, change has taken place.
Thus it seems to Novak and to me that, even if there are transcendent universals and ordinary concrete particulars, we need another category of entity to account for accidental change, a category that that I will call that of property-exemplifications. (We could also call them accidents. But we must not, pace Novak, call them tropes.) Thus Peter's being cold at t is a property-exemplification and so is Peter's not being cold at t*. Peter's change in respect of temperature involves Peter as the diachronically persisting substratum of the change, the universal coldness, and two property-exemplifications, Peter's being cold at t and Peter's being not cold at t*.
These property-exemplifications, however, are particulars, not universals even though each has a universal as a constituent. This is a special case of what Armstrong calls the Victory of Particularity: the result of a particular exemplifying a universal is a particular. Moreover, these items have natures or essences: it is essential to Peter's being cold that it have coldness as a constituent. (Thus Constituent Essentialism holds for these items. ) Hence property- exemplifications are particulars, but not bare particulars. They are not bare because they have natures or essences. Further, these property-exemplifications are abstract particulars in that they do not exhaust the whole concrete reality of Peter at a time. Thus Peter is not merely cold at a time, but has other properties besides.
It seems that the argument shows that there have to be these abstract particulars — we could call them accidents instead of property-exemplifications — if we are to account for real accidental change. But these partculars have constituents. Peter's coldness, for example, has Peter and coldness as constituents. It is a complex, not a simple. (If it were a simple, there would be nothing about it to tie it necessarily to Peter. Tropes are simples, so accidents are not tropes.) So it seems to me that what Novak has provided us with is an argument for C-ontology, for the view that the members of at least one category of entity have ontological constituents.
Loux's argument notwithstanding, a version of C-ontology seems to be required if we are to make sense of accidental change.
But how are accidents such as Peter's coldness connected or tied — to avoid the word 'related' — to a substance such as Peter?
First of all, an accident A of a substance S does not stand in an external relation to S — otherwise a Bradleyan regress arises. (Exercise for the reader: prove it.)
Second, A is not identical to S. Peter's coldness is not identical to Peter. For there is more to Peter than his being cold. So what we need is a tie or connection that is less intimate than identity but more intimate than an external relation. The part-whole tie seems to fit the bill. A proper part of a whole is not identical to the whole, but it is not externally related to it either inasmuch as wholes depend for their identity and existence on their parts.
Can we say that Peter's accidents are ontological parts of Peter? No. This would put the cart before the horse. Peter's coldness is identity- and existence-dependent on Peter. Peter is ontologically prior to his accidents. No whole, however, is ontologically prior to its parts: wholes are identity and existence-dependent on their parts. So the accidents of a substance are not ontological parts of it. But they have ontological parts. Strangely enough, if A is an accident of substance S, then S is an ontological part of A. Substances are ontological parts of their accidents! Brentano came to a view like this.
More on Brentano later. For now, my thesis is just that the fact of real accidental change requires the positing of particulars that have ontological constituents and that, in consequence, R-ontology is to be rejected. Constituent ontology vindicatus est.
A thousand times you do the right thing and receive no praise. But the one time you do the wrong thing you are harshly blamed. This is the way it ought to be. Praise should be reserved for the supererogatory. To praise people for doing what it is their duty to do shows that moral decline has set in. If memory serves, Kant makes this point somewhere in his vast corpus.
Dennis Prager once said that wives should praise their husbands for their fidelity. I don't think so. Being married entails certain moral requirements, and fidelity is one of them. One should not be praised for doing what one morally must do; one should be blamed for failing to do what one morally must do.
And yet we do feel inclined to praise people for doing the obligatory.
A related point has to do with expressing gratitude to someone for doing his job. I took my wife in for a minor medical procedure this morning. As we were leaving I thanked the nurse. I would have been slightly annoyed had she said, "I'm just doing my job." Was my thanking her out of place? Maybe not. Maybe my thanking was not for her doing her job, but for her doing it in a 'perky' and friendly way.
When I lived in Cleveland Heights, Ohio, I was within walking distance of the old Arabica coffee house on Coventry Road. The Coventry district was quite a scene in those days and there I met numerous interesting characters of the sort one expects to find in coffee houses: would-be poets and novelists, pseudo-intellectual bullshitters of every stripe, and a wide range of chess players from patzers to masters. It was there that I became acquainted with International Master Calvin Blocker. Observing a game of mine one day, he kibitzed, "You'd be lucky to be mated."
A reasonable person advocates both, but limited versions of both. Liberals, however, tend not to be reasonable. If they interpreted the Second Amendment in as extreme fashion as they do the First, gun ownership would be mandatory.
I just beat a guy in a five-minute game who rejoices under the handle 'noblitz-oblige.' I guess that counts as an inaptronym given that he was playing blitz.
3:22 PM. Just beat 'keresmatic' whose play was neither reminsicent of Paul Keres nor charismatic. Cute handle, though.
I've prepared a line to use next time I hike with James L., a fanatical hiker of near master strength in chess. Should I lag, I will complain of feeling weaker than f7.
Courage is not fearlessness. The courageous feel fear, but master it, unlike the cowardly who are mastered by it. To feel no fear in any of life's situations is to fail to perceive real dangers. The fearless are foolish. It is therefore inept to praise the courageous as fearless: their virtue, which one presumably intends to praise, consists in the mastery of precisely that the absence of which would render them foolish.
Ketty Lester, 1962, Love Letters, with images from David Lynch's Blue Velvet. If you think the Lynch twist spoils a beautiful song, here it is straight. Often covered, never surpassed. E.P.'s version.
The Marvelettes, 1961, Please, Mr. Postman. The summer of '69 found me delivering mail out of the Vermont Avenue Station, Hollywood 29. One day two girls came up to me and started singing this song. Something this U. S. Male won't forget.
I've recently been contemplating practising meditation. I decided to look up what you had to say on the subject, and I was happy to discover the "how to meditate" post. I was just wondering though, how long should a person meditate, and what should a first timer like myself expect to think or feel during the first few meditations?
How long? Between 15 and 30 minutes at first, working up gradually to an hour or more. What to expect? Not much at first. Mind control is extremely difficult and our minds are mostly out of control serving up an endless parade of pointless memories, useless worries, and negative thoughts of all sorts. In the beginning meditation is mostly hard work. So you can expect to work hard at first for meager results.
At a deeper level, expectation and striving to accomplish something are out of place. Meditation is an interior listening that can occur only when the discursive mind with its thoughts, judgements, intentions, expectations, and the like has been silenced. Meditation is not an inner discourse but an inner listening.
Of course, there is a bit of a paradox here: at first one must intend resolutely to take up this practice, one must work at it every morning with no exceptions, one must strive to quiet the mind — but all in quest of an effortless abiding in mental quiet wherein there is no intending, working, or striving.
Logic greatly aids, though is not necessary for, disciplined thinking. Meditation greatly aids, though is not necessary for, disciplined non-thinking.
Meditation is a battle against the mind's centrifugal tendency. In virtue of its intentionality, mind is ever in flight from its center, so much so that some have denied that there is a center or a self. The aim of meditation is centering. To switch metaphors, the aim is to swim upstream to the thought-free source of thoughts. Compare Emerson: "Man is a stream whose source is hidden." Arrival at that hidden source is the ultimate goal of meditation.
Swimming upstream against a powerful current is not easy and for some impossible. So this is a good metaphor of the difficulty of meditation. The more extroverted you are, the more difficult it will be. Why engage in this hard work? Either you sense that your surface self has a depth dimension that calls to you or you don't. If you do, then this is the way to explore it.
Meditation reduced to three steps:
First, drive out all useless thoughts. Then get rid of all useful but worldly thoughts. Finally, achieve the cessation of all thoughts, including spiritual ones. Now you are at the threshhold of meditation proper. Unfortunately, a lifetime of work may not suffice to complete even these baby steps. You may not even make it to the threshhold. But if you can achieve even the first step, you will have done yourself a world of good.
The idea behind Step One is to cultivate the ability to suppress, at will, every useless, negative, weakening thought as soon as it arises. Not easy!
Meditation won't bear fruits unless one lives in a way that is compatible with it and its goals. So a certain amount of withdrawal from the world is needed. One needs to 'unplug.'
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.
Thanks, California! Thanks for your monstrous spending and absurd regulatory overreach! America needs you. We need Connecticut and Illinois, too! We need you the way we needed the Soviet Union, as models of failure, to warn us what happens if we believe those who say, "Government can."
Moving to California was once the dream for many Americans. Its population grew at almost triple the national average — until 1990. Then big government, in the form of endless regulation and taxes, killed much of the dream. In the last decade, 2 million people left California.
[. . .]
Dan Mitchell of the Cato Institute summed up California's situation for me. "The politicians want to get re-elected, and the state government workers want to get as much as they can before the whole house of cards comes tumbling down. California is Greece — the Greece of America."
I hope all Americans watch and learn from states like California. But if we don't, and if people keep electing big-government politicians, at least Americans, unlike the Greeks, can hop around between 50 states, trying to stay one step ahead of bad laws and ruin.
My tendency has long been to use 'reification' and 'hypostatization' interchangeably. But a remark by E. J. Lowe has caused me to see the error of my ways. He writes, "Reification is not the same as hypostatisation, but is merely the acknowledgement of some putative entity's real existence." ("Essence and Ontology," in Novak et al. eds, Metaphysics: Aristotelian, Analytic, Scholastic, Ontos Verlag, 2012, p. 95) I agree with the first half of Lowe's sentence, but not the second.
Lowe's is a good distinction and I take it on board. I will explain it in my own way. Something can be real without being a substance, without being an entity logically capable of independent existence. An accident, for example, is real but is not a substance. 'Real' from L. res, rei. Same goes for the form of a hylomorphic compound. A statue is a substance but its form, though real, is not. The smile on a face and the bulge in a carpet are both real but incapable of independent existence. So reification is not the same as hypostatization. To consider or treat x as real is not thereby to consider or treat x as a substance.
Lowe seems to ignore that 'reification' and 'hypostatization' name logico-philosophical fallacies, where a fallacy is a typical mistake in reasoning, one that occurs often enough and is seductive enough to be given a label. On this point I diverge from him. For me, reification is the illict imputation of ontological status to something that does not have such status. For example, to treat 'nothing' as a name for something is to reify nothing. If I say that nothing is in the drawer I am not naming something that is in the drawer. Nothing is precisely no thing. As I see it, reification is not acknowledgment of real existence, but an illict imputation of real existence to something that lacks it. I do not reify the bulge in a carpet when I acknowledge its reality.
Or consider the internal relation being the same color as. If two balls are (the same shade of) red, then they stand in this relation to each other. But this relation is an "ontological free lunch" not "an addition to being" to borrow some phaseology from David Armstrong. Internal relations have no ontological status. They reduce to their monadic foundations. The putatively relational fact Rab reduces to the conjunction of two monadic facts: Fa & Fb. To bring it about that two balls are the same color as each other it suffices that I paint them both red (or blue, etc.) I needn't do anything else. If this is right, then to treat internal relations as real is to commit the fallacy of reification. Presumably someone who reifies internal relations will not be tempted to hypostatize them.
To treat external relations as real, however, is not to reify them. On my use of terms, one cannot reify what is already real, any more than one can politicize what is already political. To bring it about that two red balls are two feet from each other, it does not suffice that I create two red balls: I must place them two feet from each other. The relation of being two feet from is therefore real, though presumably not a substance.
To hypostatize is is to treat as a substance what is not a substance. So the relation I just mentioned would be hypostatized were one to consider it as an entity capable of existing even if it didn't relate anything. Liberals who blame society for crime are often guilty of the fallacy of hypostatization. Society, though real, is not a substance, let alone an agent to which blame can be imputed.
If I am right then this is mistaken:
First, I have given good reasons for distinguishing the two terms. Second, the mistake of treating what is abstract as material is not the same as reification or hypostatization. For example, if someone were to regard the null set as a material thing, he would be making a mistake, but he would not be reifying or hypostatizing the the null set unless there were no null set.
Or consider the proposition expressed by 'Snow is white' and 'Schnee ist weiss.' This proposition is an abstact object. If one were to regardit as a material thing one would be making a mistake, but one would not be reifying it because it is already real. Nor would one be hypostatizing it since (arguably) it exists independently.
