Month: June 2013

Saturday Night at the Oldies: Captain Beefheart and Buck Owens

Don Van Vliet, better known as Captain Beefheart, died of complications of multiple sclerosis at age 69 in December, 2010.  Obituary  here.  Apparently, hanging out in the Mojave desert can do strange things to your head.  Here is a taste of desert strangeness from the 1969 Trout Mask Replica album.  Far out, man.  Here is something rather more accessible from the 1967 debut Safe as Milk album.  And I think I remember hearing  Abba Zabba from that same album back in the day.  (Which reminds of the saying, 'If you remember the '60s, you weren't there.')

From Lancaster-Palmdale to Bakersfield and the 'Bakersfield sound' of Buck Owens and his Buckaroos.   I once had a girlfriend, half Italian, half Irish.  Volatile combo, not recommended.  I had me a Tiger by the Tail.  My wife's half Italian, but the phlegmaticity of her Polish half mitigates, moderates, and modulates her latent Italianate volcanicity, which remains blessedly latent, if it exists at all.

Truck Drivin' Man.  Act Naturally.

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Sam Harris on Rational Mysticism and Whether the Self is an Illusion

London Karl brings to my attention an article by Sam Harris touching upon themes dear to my heart. Harris is an impressive fellow, an excellent public speaker, a crusader of sorts who has some important and true things to say, but who is sometimes out beyond his depth, like many public intellectuals who make bold to speak about philosophical topics.  (But Harris is surely right clearly and courageously to point out that, among the ideologies extant at the present time, radical Islam is the most dangerous.)

In Rational Mysticism, Harris responds to critic Tom Flynn and in doing so offers characterizations of secularism, religion, and rational mysticism:


I used the words spirituality and mysticism affirmatively, in an attempt to put the range of human experience signified by these terms on a rational footing. It seems to me that the difficulty Flynn had with this enterprise is not a problem with my book, or merely with Flynn, but a larger problem with secularism itself.

As a worldview, secularism has defined itself in opposition to the whirling absurdity of religion. Like atheism (with which it is more or less interchangeable), secularism is a negative dispensation. Being secular is not a positive virtue like being reasonable, wise, or loving. To be secular, one need do nothing more than live in perpetual opposition to the unsubstantiated claims of religious dogmatists. Consequently, secularism has negligible appeal to the culture at large (a practical concern) and negligible content (an intellectual concern). There is, in fact, not much to secularism that should be of interest to anyone, apart from the fact that it is all that stands between sensible people like ourselves and the mad hordes of religious imbeciles who have balkanized our world, impeded the progress of science, and now place civilization itself in jeopardy. Criticizing religious irrationality is absolutely essential. But secularism, being nothing more than the totality of such criticism, can lead its practitioners to reject important features of human experience simply because they have been traditionally associated with religious practice.

The above can be distilled into three propositions:

1. Secularism is wholly defined by what it opposes, religion.

2. Religion is irrational, anti-science, and anti-civilization.

3. It would be a mistake to dismiss mysticism because of its traditional association with religious practice.

Harris continues:

The final chapter of my book, which gave Flynn the most trouble, is devoted to the subject of meditation. Meditation, in the sense that I use the term, is nothing more than a method of paying extraordinarily close attention to one’s moment-to-moment experience of the world. There is nothing irrational about doing this (and Flynn admits as much). In fact, such a practice constitutes the only rational basis for making detailed (first-person) claims about the nature of human subjectivity. Difficulties arise for secularists like Flynn, however, once we begin speaking about the kinds of experiences that diligent practitioners of meditation are apt to have. It is an empirical fact that sustained meditation can result in a variety of insights that intelligent people regularly find intellectually credible and personally transformative. The problem, however, is that these insights are almost always sought and expressed in a religious context. One such insight is that the feeling we call “I”—the sense that there is a thinker giving rise to our thoughts, an experiencer distinct from the mere flow of experience—can disappear when looked for in a rigorous way. Our conventional sense of “self” is, in fact, nothing more than a cognitive illusion, and dispelling this illusion opens the mind to extraordinary experiences of happiness. This is not a proposition to be accepted on faith; it is an empirical observation, analogous to the discovery of one’s optic blind spots.

To continue with the distillation:

4. Meditation, defined as careful attention to conscious experience, is the only basis for sustainable claims about subjectivity.  There is nothing irrational about it.

5. Deep meditation gives rise to unusual, and sometimes personally transformative, experiences or "insights."

6.  One such "insight" is that the "sense of self" or the "feeling called 'I'" can disappear when carefully searched for.

7. The sense of "self" is a cognitive illusion, and can be seen to be such by empirical observation: it is not a proposition to be accepted on faith.

There is much to agree with here.  Indeed, I wholeheartedly accept propositions (1), (3), (4), and (5).  Of course, I don't accept (2), but that is not what I want to discuss.  My present concerns are (6) and (7).

Let me say first that, for me, 'insight' is a noun of success, and in this regard it is like 'knowledge.' There cannot be false knowledge; there cannot be false insights.  Now does deep meditation disclose that there is, in truth, no self, no ego, no I, no subject of experience?  Harris does not say flat-out that the self is an illusion; he says that the "sense of self" is an illusion.  But I don't think he means that there is a self but that there is no sense of it in deep meditation.  I take him to be saying something quite familiar from (the religion?) Pali Buddhism, namely, that there is no self, period.  Anatta, you will recall, is one of the pillars of Pali and later Buddhism, along with anicca and dukkha.

So I will assume that Harris means to deny the the existence of the self as the subject of experience and to deny it on empirical grounds:  there is no self because no self is encountered when we carefully examine, in deep meditation, our conscious experience.

It seems to me, however, that the nonexistence of what I fail to find does not logically follow from my failing to find it. 

It may be that the self is the sort of thing that cannot turn up as an object of experience precisely because it is the subject of experience.

Here is an analogy.  An absent-minded old man went in search of his eyeglasses.  He searched  high and low, from morning til night.  Failing to find them after such a protracted effort, he concluded that he never had any in the first place.  His search, however, was made possible by the glasses sitting upon his nose!

The analogy works with the eyes as well.  From the fact that my eyes do not appear in my visual field (apart from mirrors), it does not follow that I have no eyes.  My eyes are a necessary condition of my having a visual field in the first place.  Their nonappearance in said field is no argument against them.

It could be something like that (though not exactly like that) with the self.  It could be that the self cannot, by its very nature, turn up as an object of experience, for the simple reason that it is the subject of experience, that which is experiencing.

It is simply false to say what Harris says in (7), namely that one empirically observes that there is no self.  That is not an observation but an inference from the failure to encounter the self as an object of experience.  It is an inference that is valid only in the presence of an auxiliary premise:

Only that which can be experienced as an object exists.
The self cannot be experienced as an object.
Therefore
The self does not exist.

This argument is valid, but is it sound?  The second premise is empirical: nothing we encounter in experience (inner or outer) counts as the subject of experience.  True for the standard Humean and Buddhist reasons.  But we cannot validly move from the second premise to the conclusion.  We need the help of the auxiliary premise, which is not empirical.  How then do we know that it is true? Must we take it on faith?  Whose faith? Harris's?

My point, then, is that (7) is false and that Harris is operating with a dogmatic, non-empirical assumption, the just-mentioned auxiliary premise.

Harris needs to be careful that in his war against "absurd religious certainties" he does not rely on absurd dogmatic certainties of his own. 

For a more detailed and rigiorous presentation, see Can the Chariot Take Us to the Land of No Self?

 

 

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Kolakowski on Catholicism

London Karl points us to this interview, some of which I reproduce here:

It would be silly, foolish, to object to the Church on the grounds that it is "traditionalist". The whole strength of the Church is that it is faithful to its tradition – otherwise, what is the Church for? If the Church is going to become a political party which merely adapts its beliefs to changing opinions, it can be safely dismissed altogether, because there are political parties doing such things. If the Church is there to sanctify and bless in advance every change in intellectual and moral fashion in our civilisation, then again – what is the Church for? The Church is strong because it has a traditional teaching, a spiritual kernel, which it considers its immutable essence. It cannot just yield to any pressure from people who think that whatever is in fashion at the present moment should immediately be adopted by the Church as its own teaching, whether in the field of political ideas or of daily life.

I think the Church is not only right in keeping its historically shaped, traditional identity. Its very role, its very mission on earth would become unclear if it did not do that. And so I would not be afraid at all, and I would not take it as an insult, that critics describe the Church as traditionalist or conservative.

There must be forces of conservatism in society, in spiritual life, by which I mean the forces of conservation. Without such forces, the entire fabric of society would fall apart.

[. . .]

In my view, there is no way in which Marxist teaching could be reconciled with Christianity. Marxism is anti-Christian, not contingently, not by accident, but in its very core. You cannot reconcile it.

There is no Christianity where no distinction is made between temporal and eternal values. There is no Christianity where [the word 'where' is wrong; should be UNLESS] one accepts that all earthly values, however important, however crucial to human life, are nevertheless secondary. What the Church is about essentially is the salvation of human souls, and the human soul is never reducible to social conditions.

There is an absolute value in the human person. The Church believes that the world – the social world, the physical world – is merely an expression of the divine, and as such it can only have instrumental or secondary value. Without this, there is no point in speaking about Christianity.

Kolakowski is absolutely right about this.  His is an exceedingly penetrating mind.  I recommend his work.  See my Kolakowski category.

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Gandolfini

The encomia continue to pour in on the occasion of the passing of James Gandolfini.  'Tony Soprano' died young at 51, apparently of a heart attack, while vacationing in Italy.  Given the subtlety of The Sopranos it would be unfair to say that Gandolfini wasted his talent portraying  a scumbag  and glorifying criminality, and leave it at that.    But I wonder if people like him and De Niro and so many others give any thought to the proper use of their brief time on earth. 

It's at least a question: if you have the talents of an actor or a novelist or a screen writer or a musician, should you have any moral scruples about playing to the basest sides of human nature?  Are we so corrupted now that this is the only way to turn a buck in the arts?

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How Will America Hold Together?

Another great column by classicist and historian, Victor Davis Hanson. (HT: Bill Keezer)

The short answer is that, while we are running on fumes, they are rich and voluminous and long-lasting.  It will take some time before they and we peter out.  So there is still time to take action.  Decline is not inevitable.  But do we have the will?

So why is the United States not experiencing something like the rioting in Turkey or Brazil, or the murder of thousands in Mexico? How are we able to avoid the bloody chaos in Syria, the harsh dictatorships of Russia and China, the implosion of Egypt or the economic hopelessness now endemic in Southern Europe?

About half of America and many of its institutions operate as they always have. Caltech and MIT are still serious. Neither interjects race, class and gender studies into its engineering or physics curricula. Most in the IRS, unlike some of their bosses, are not corrupt. For the well driller, the power plant operator and the wheat farmer, the lies in Washington are still mostly an abstraction.

Get up at 5:30 a.m. and you'll see that most of the nation's urban freeways are jammed with hard-working commuters. Every day they go to work, support their families, pay their taxes and avoid arrest — so that millions of others do not have to do the same. The U.S. military still more closely resembles our heroes from World War II than the culture of the Kardashians.

[. . .]

If Rome quieted the people with public spectacles and cheap grain from the provinces, so too Americans of all classes keep glued to favorite video games and reality-TV shows. Fast food is both cheap and tasty. All that for now is preferable to rioting and revolt.

Like Rome, America apparently can coast for a long time on the fumes of its wonderful political heritage and economic dynamism — even if both are little understood or appreciated by most who still benefit from them.

More on Knowledge and Belief

Here is yesterday's aporetic triad:

1. Knowledge entails belief.

2. Belief is essentially tied to action.

3. There are items of knowledge that are not essentially tied to action.

Daniel K comments and I respond in blue:

First, as to your aporetic triad: I would like to reject (3) in one sense that I describe below,  and reject (1) absolutely. Not sure where that leaves the triad. But I'd be interested in whether you think I've clarified or merely muddied the waters.

In one sense I think all knowledge is action guiding. In another sense I think it is not essentially action guiding. All pure water is drinkable (at the right temperature etc.), but drinkability is not an essential feature of water (I wonder if this works).

BV:  I don't think it works.  I should think that in every possible world in which there is water, it is potable by humans.  Therefore, drinkability is an essential feature of water.  (An essential property of x is a property x has in every possible world in which x exists.)  Of course, there are worlds in which there is water but no human beings.  In those worlds, none of the water is drunk by humans.  But in those worlds too water is drinkable.  Compare the temporal case.  Before humans evolved, there was water on earth.  That water, some of it anyway, was potable by humans even though there were no humans.  Water did not become potable when the first humans arose.

Rejecting (3): The having of knowledge always contributes to how one acts. You give examples of a priori knowledge as counterexamples. My response: it seems to me a priori knowledge is "hinge" knowledge that opens the door for action and cannot possibly not inform action. In other words we won't find circumstances where such knowledge is not action guiding in the presuppositional sense. So, I disagree that we will find knowledge that doesn't inform action. A priori knowledge is presuppositionally necessary and occasionally practically useful (math for engineering). Empirical knowledge will be used when it is available. So, I don't think defending (3) is necessary to defend (2).

BV:  Willard maintains that one can have propositional knowledge without belief, and that belief is essentially tied to action.  The conjunction of these two claims  suggests to me that there can be knowledge that is not essentially tied to action.  And so I looked for examples of items of knowledge that are not essentially tied to action, either by not being tied to action at all, or by not being essentially tied to action.   If there are such items, then we can say that the difference between belief and knowledge is that every belief, by its very nature, can be acted upon, while it is not the case that every item of knowledge can be acted upon.

Much depends on what exactly is meant by 'acting upon a proposition,' and I confess to not having a really clear notion of this.

While I grant that much a priori knowledge is 'hinge' knowledge in your sense, consider the proposition that there is no transfinite cardinal lying between aleph-nought and 2 raised to the power, alepth-nought.  Does that have any engineering application?  (This is not a rhetorical question.)

Now consider philosophical knowledge (assuming there is some).  If I know that there are no bare particulars (in Gustav Bergmann's sense), this is a piece of knowledge that would seem to have no behavioral consequences.  The overt, nonlinguistic, behavior of a man who maintains a bundle-theoretic position with respect to ordinary partiulars will be no different from that of a man who maintains that ordinary particulars have bare particulars at their ontological cores.  They could grow, handle, slice, and eat tomatoes in the very same way.

(Anecdote that I am pretty sure is not apocryphal:  when Rudolf Carnap heard that fellow Vienna Circle member Gustav Bergmann had published a book under the title, The Metaphysics of Logical Positivism, he refused to speak to Bergmann ever again.)

It seems we should say that some, though not all, philosophical knowledge (assuming there is philosophical knowledge) consists of propositions upon which we cannot act.  Here is another example.  Suppose I know that the properties of ordinary particulars are tropes.  Thus I know that the redness of a tomato is not a universal but a particular.  Is that knowledge action-guiding?  How would it guide action differently than the knowledge that properties are universals?  Is the difference in ontological views a difference that could show up at the level of overt, nonlinguistic, behavior?

Admittedly, some philosophical knowledge is action-guiding.  If I know that the soul is immortal, then I will behave differently than one who lacks this knowledge.

Now consider the knowledge of insignificant contingent facts.  I know from my journal that on 27 April 1977 I ate hummus. Is that item of knowledge action-guiding?  I think not.  Suppose you learn the boring fact and infer that I like hummus.  You might then make me a present of some.  But if I am the only one privy to the information, it is difficult to see how that item of knowledge could be action-guiding for me.  Recall that by action I mean overt, nonlinguistic behavior.

There is also modal knowledge to consider.  I might have been sleeping now.  I might not have been alive now.  I might never have existed at all.  These are modal truths that, arguably, I know. Suppose I know them.  How could I act upon them?  I am not sleeping now, and nothing I do could bring it about that I am sleeping now.  Some modal knowledge would seem to without behavioral consequences.  Of course, some modal knowledge does have such consequences, e.g. the knowledge that it is possible to grow tomatoes in Arizona.

It seemed to me in your post that you took the truth of (2) as giving support to (3). If belief is essentially action guiding and knowledge is not essentially believing, then there should be knowledge that is not action guiding.

But again, I would like to affirm that in the sense you mean it in the post all knowledge is action guiding: either presuppositionally or consciously/empirically. For instance, the law of noncontradiction is action guiding in the sense that I cannot act if essential to that action is that the object has characteristic X, but I affirm that the object is both X and not-X. [. . .]

BV:  Consider an example.  I cannot eat a bananna unless it is peeled. My affirming that it is both peeled and unpeeled (at the same time, all over, and in the same sense of 'peeled') would not, however, seem to stand in the way of my performing the action.  Clearly, I know that nothing is both peeled and unpeeled.  It is not clear to me how one could act upon that proposition.  If I want to eat the bananna, I can act upon the proposition that it is unpeeled by peeling the bananna.  But how do I act upon the proposition that the bananna is either peeled or unpeeled?  What do I do? 

Rejecting (1): So, what if both knowledge and belief are in one sense "action guiding" (rejecting 3)? Does it imply that we have no reason to think that belief is not an essential component of knowledge (accepting 2 and rejecting 1)? I think we still do have a good reason for thinking belief is not essentially a component of knowledge. When Willard says that belief is not essential to knowledge I take him to be distinguishing between the irrelevance of being concerned with action in the act of knowing and the universal appeal of knowledge for action.

Forget the terms "knowledge" and "belief" for a moment. Distinguish between the
following states:

One is in a state (intentional?) (Y) to object (X) iff one has a true representation of X that was achieved in an appropriate way (Willard's account of knowledge). Notice that there is nothing in the description that essentially involves a readiness to act. That is not a part of its intentional character or directedness of state (Y). It is directed purely at unity, period.

Alternatively, one is in an intentional state (Z) to object (X) iff one has a representation of reality that is essentially identified by its being a ground for action. Here, essential to (Z) is its providing a ground for action.

(Y) is not a state that essentially involves action guidance but (Z) is. So, the achievement of (Y) does not involve essentially the achievement of (Z). That is, the achievement of (Y) is the achievement of a kind of theoretical unity with (X) while the achievement of (Z) is the achievement of a motivator for acting in certain ways regarding (X). Response: but Daniel, you've already said that all knowledge is action guiding! Yes, but it is not an essential feature of the state of knowing. Analogy: all water is drinkable. But drinkability is not an essential feature of water.

I'm going to stop there. I'd appreciate any comments you have. That is my effort, thus far, to make sense of both Willard's suggestion and your aporetic triad.

BV:  I do appreciate the comments and discussion.  Let's see if I understand you.  You reject (1), the orthodox view that knowledge entails belief.  Your reason seems to be that, while belief is essentially action-guiding, knowledge is not essentially action-guiding, but only accidentally action-guiding.  You deny what I maintain, namely, that some items of knowledge (some known propositions qua known) are not action-guiding.  You maintain that all such items are action-guiding, but only accidentally so. Perhaps your argument is this:

4. Every believing-that-p is essentially action-guiding.

5. No knowing-that-p is essentially action-guiding.

Ergo

6. It is not the case that, necessarily, every knowing-that-p is a believing-that-p.

But (6) — the negation of (1) — doesn't follow from (4) and (5).  (6) is equivalent to

6*. Possibly, some knowings-that-p are not believings-that-p.

What follows from (4) and (5) is

7. No knowing-that-p is a believing-that-p.

(7) is the thesis I am tentatively proposing.

This is a very difficult topic and we may be falling into de dicto/de re confusion.

Well, at least I am in the state that Plato says is characteristic of the philosopher: perplexity!

The Devirilization of Priest and Liturgy in the Novus Ordo Mass

I  would like to return to the practice of the religion of my youth, I really would.  Nothing of the usual sort holds me back: not the sex monkey, not illicit loves or addictions, not worldly ambition or the demands of career,  not the thoughtlessness of the worldling mesmerized by the play of transient phenomena, not the Luciferian pride of a Russell or a Sartre or a Hitchens, not the opposition of a wife: mine is a good old-fashioned Catholic girl who attends mass on Sundays, ministers to the sick, and embodies the old-time virtues. 

Philosophical and theological questions and doubts are the main impediments to my return.

But the trashy Vatican II 'reforms' run a close second.  These are well-documented in Fr. Cipolla's erudite The Devirilization of the Liturgy in the Novus Ordo Mass.  Excerpt:

. . . in the Novus Ordo rite of Mass the Liturgy has been effeminized.  There is a famous passage in Caesar’s De bello Gallico where he explains why the Belgae tribe were such good soldiers.  He attributes this to their lack of contact with the centers of culture like the cities. Caesar believed that such contact contributes ad effeminandos animos, to the effeminizing of their spirits.

[. . .]

In its Novus Ordo form . . . the Liturgy has been devirilized.  One must recall the meaning of the word, vir, in Latin. Both vir and homo mean “man”, but it is vir alone that has the connotation of the man-hero and is the word that is often used for “husband”.  The Aeneid begins with the famous words:  arma virumque cano. (“ I sing of arms and the man-hero.”)  What Cardinal Heenan presciently and correctly saw in 1967 was the virtual elimination of the virile nature of the Liturgy, the replacement of masculine objectivity, necessary for the public worship of the Church, with softness, sentimentality and personalization centered on the motherly person of the priest.

But not only the Liturgy has been devirilized; the priests have been too.  The priests of my youth were manly men.  But this soon changed in ways that are well known.

There was something profoundly stupid about the Vatican II 'reforms' even if we view matters from a purely immanent 'sociological' point of view. Suppose Roman Catholicism is, metaphysically, buncombe to its core, nothing but an elaborate  human construction in the face of a meaningless universe, a construction  kept going by human needs and desires noble and base.  Suppose there is no God, no soul, no post-mortem reward or punishment, no moral world order.  Suppose we are nothing but a species of clever land mammal thrown up on the shores of life by blind evolutionary processes, and that everything that makes us normatively human and thus persons (consciousness, self-consciousness, conscience, reason, and the rest) are nothing but cosmic accidents.  Suppose all that.

Still, religion has its immanent life-enhancing  role to play, whether true or false, and one would have to be as superficial and ignorant of the human heart as a New Atheist to think it will ever wither away: it inspires and guides, comforts and consoles; it provides our noble impulses with an outlet while giving suffering a meaning.  Suffering can be borne, Nietzsche says somewhere, if it has a meaning; what is unbearable is meaningless suffering.  Now the deep meaning that the Roman church provides is tied to its profundity, mystery, and reference to the Transcendent.  Anything that degrades it into a namby-pamby secular humanism, just another brand of liberal feel-goodism and do-goodism, destroys it, making of it just another piece of dubious cultural junk.  Degrading factors: switching from Latin to the vernacular; the introduction of sappy pseudo-folk music sung by pimply-faced adolescents strumming gut-stringed guitars; leftist politics and political correctness; the priest facing the congregation; the '60s obsession with 'relevance.'

People who take religion seriously tend to be conservatives and traditionalists; they are not change-for-the-sake-of-change leftist utopians.  The stupidity of the Vatican II 'reforms,' therefore, consists in estranging its very clienetele, the conservatives and traditionalists.  The church should be a liberal-free zone.

Now go read Cipolla's outstanding article.

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It’s a Dry Heat

It's hot and dry in these parts this time of year, the candy-assed snowbirds have all flown back to their humid nests, and we desert rats like it plenty.  That's why we live here.  You Californians stay put in your gun-grabbing, liberty-bashing, People's Republic of Political Correctness.

It may reach 121 Fahrenheit this week in some places.  Excessive Heat Warning. 

There's a rattlenake-infested wilderness right outside my door.  Up for a hike?

Risks of Desert Hiking

On Roasting Oneself: The Five Ways

Should the U. S. Intervene in Syria?

Didn't we learn anything from Viet Nam, Iraq, Afghanistan?  Prudence dictates that we stay out of Syria, or at least that we look very carefully before we leap.  Here is a balanced treatment of the pros and cons by Ron Radosh.  And this guest post by William Polk at Robert Paul Wolff's place is well worth reading. 

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Knowledge and Belief: An Aporetic Triad

Here is a trio of propositions that are jointly inconsistent but individually plausible:

1. Knowledge entails belief.

2. Belief is essentially tied to action.

3. There are items of knowledge that are not essentially tied to action.

Clearly, any two of these propositions is logically inconsistent with the remaining one.  Thus the conjunction of (1) and (2) entails the negation of (3).

And yet each limb of the triad is very plausible, though perhaps not equally plausible. 

(1) is part of the classical definition of knowledge as justified true belief, an analysis traceable to Plato's Theaetetus.  (1) says that, necessarily, if a person S knows that p, then S believes that p.  Knowledge logically includes belief.  What one knows one believes, though not conversely.  For example, if I know that my wife is sitting across from me, then I believe that she is sitting across from me.  (At issue here is propositional knowledge, not know-how, or carnal knowledge, or knowledge by acquaintance.)

(2) is perhaps the least plausible of the three, but it is still plausible and accepted by (a minority of) distinguished thinkers.  According to Dallas Willard,

Belief I understand to be some degree of readiness to act as if such and such (the content believed) were the case. Everyone concedes that one can believe where one does not know. But it is now widely assumed that you cannot know what you do not believe. Hence the well known analysis of knowledge as "justified, true belief." But this seems to me, as it has to numerous others, to be a mistake. Belief is, as Hume correctly held, a passion. It is something that happens to us. Thought, observation and testing, even knowledge itself, can be sources of belief, and indeed should be. But one may actually know (dispositionally, occurrently) without believing what one knows.

[. . .] belief has an essential tie to action . . . .

Although I am not exactly sure what Willard's thesis is, he seems to be maintaining that the propositions one believes are precisely those one is prepared to act upon.  S believes that p iff S is prepared to act upon p.  Beliefs are manifested in actions, and actions are evidence of beliefs.  To determine what a person really believes, we look to his actions, not to his words, although the words provide context for understanding the actions.  If I want to get to the roof, and tell you that the ladder is stable, but refuse to ascend it, then that is very good evidence that I don't really believe that the ladder is stable.  I don't believe it because I am not prepared to act upon it.  So far, so good.

But if belief is essentially tied to action, as Willard maintains, then it is not possible that one believe a proposition one cannot act upon.  Is this right?  Consider the proposition *Everything is self-identical.*  This is an item of knowledge.  But is it also an item of belief?  We can show that this item of knowledge is not an item of belief if we can show that one cannot act upon it.  But what is it to act upon a proposition?  I don't know precisely, but here's an idea:

A proposition p is such that it can be acted upon iff there is some subject S and some circumstances C such that S's acceptance of p  in C makes a difference to S's overt, nonlinguistic behavior. 

For example, *It is raining* can be acted upon because there are circumstances in which my acceptance of it versus my nonacceptance of it (either by rejecting it or just entertaining it) makes a difference to what I do such as going for a run.  Accepting the proposition, and not wanting to get wet, I postpone the run.  Rjecting the proposition, I go for the run as planned.

In the case of *Everything is self-identical,* is there any behavior that could count as a manifestation of an agent's acceptance/nonacceptance of the proposition in question?  Suppose I come to know (occurrently) for the first time that everything is self-identical.  Suppose I had never thought of this before, never 'realized it.'  Would the realization or 'epiphany' make a difference to my overt, nonlingusitic behavior?  It seems not.  Would I do anything differently?   

Consider characteristic truths of transfinite set theory.  They are items of knowledge that have no bearing on any actual or possible action.  For example, I know that, while the natural numbers and the reals are both infinite sets, the cardinality of the latter is strictly greater than that of the former.  Can I take that to the streets?

(3) therefore seems true:  there are items of knowledge that are not items of belief because not essentially tied to action.

I have shown that each limb of our inconsistent triad has some plausibility.  So it is an interesting problem.  How solve it?  Reject one of the limbs!  But which one?  And how do you show that the rejection of one is more reasonable than the rejection of one of the other two?  And why is it more reasonable to hold that the problem has a solution than to hold that it is insoluble and thus a genuine aporia?

I'm just asking.

Why Not Stick to Philosophy?

I ask myself this question.

Why not stick to one's stoa and cultivate one's specialist garden in peace and quiet, neither involving oneself in, nor forming opinions about, the wider world of politics and strife? Why risk one's ataraxia in the noxious arena of contention? Why not remain within the serene precincts of theoria? For those of us of a certain age the chances are  good that death will arrive before the barbarians do.

So why bother one's head with the issues of the day? We will collapse before the culture that sustains us does. We enter the arena of contention because the gardens of  tranquillity and the spaces of reason are worth defending, with blood  and iron if need be, against the barbarians and their leftist enablers. Others have fought and bled so that we can live this life of beatitude. And so though we are not warriors of the body we can and   should do our tiny bit as warriors of the mind to preserve for future generations this culture which allows us to pursue otium liberale in  peace, quiet, and safety.

Fiction

A fictional character can be believed by some to be real, known by others to be fictional, and an object of uncertainty to still others.  Some young children believe Santa Claus to be real;  adults know him to be purely fictional; and some children are unsure whether he is real or fictional.  It seems to follow that such sentences as 'Santa Claus is jolly' need not be understood as prefixed by a story operator to be understood. A child who asserts 'Santa Claus is jolly' needn't be asserting 'In the Santa Claus legend, Santa Claus is jolly.'  For the child might be unsure whether S. C. is real or fictional.

Does this reflection give aid and comfort to Meinongians?