A fine jeremiad. And of course we cannot call Obama the Mendacious and his shills on their brazen lies for that would be discrimination! To discriminate between justifiable and unjustifiable discrimination is itself unjustifiably discriminatory.
Month: November 2013
Imagining X as Real versus Imagining X as Unreal and a Puzzle of Actualization
Peter and I discussed the following over Sunday breakfast.
Suppose I want a table, but there is no existing table that I want: I want a table with special features that no existing table possesses. So I decide to build a table with these features. My planning involves imagining a table having certain properties. It is rectangular, but not square, etc. How does this differ from imagining a table that I describe in a work of fiction? Suppose the two tables have all the same properties. We also assume that the properties form a logically consistent set. What is the difference between imagining a table I intend to build and imagining a table that I do not intend to build but intend merely to describe as part of the fictional furniture in a short story?
In the first case I imagine the table as real; in the second as fictional. Note that to imagine a table as real is not the same as imagining a real table, though that too occurs. Suppose I remember seeing Peter's nondescript writing table. To remember a table is not to imagine one; nonetheless I can imagine refurbishing Peter's table by stripping it, sanding it, and refinishing it. The imagined result of those operations is not a purely imagined object, any more than a piece of fiction I write in which Peter's table makes an appearance features a purely fictional table.
The two tables I am concerned with, however are both nonexistent. In both cases there is a merely intentional object before my mind. And in both cases the constitutive properties are the same. Moreover, the two are categorially the same: both are physical objects, and more specifically artifacts. Obviously, when I imagine a table, I am not imagining a nonphysical object or a natural physical object like a tree. So there is a clear sense in which what I am imagining is in both cases a physical object, albeit a nonexistent/not-yet-existent physical object.
So what distinguishes the two objects? Roman Ingarden maintains that they differ in "ontic character." In the first case, the ontic character is intended as real. In the second, intended as fictional. (The Literary Work of Art, p. 119).
Now I have already argued that purely fictional objects are impossible objects: they cannot be actualized, even if the constitutive properties form a logically consistent set. We can now say that the broadly logical impossibility of purely fictional objects is grounded in their ontic character of being intended as fictional. The table imagined as real, however, is possible due to its ontic character of being intended as real despite being otherwise indistinguishable from the table imagined as fictional.
Now here is the puzzle of actualization formulated as an aporetic triad
a. Every incomplete object is impossible.
b. The table imagined as real is an incomplete object.
c. The table imagined as real is possible, i.e. actualizable.
The limbs are collectively inconsistent, but each is very plausible. At any impasse again.
Saturday Night at the Oldies: Thanks, Gladness, Joy
Beatles, Thank You, Girl
Cream, I'm So Glad
Suzi Quatro, Glad All Over
Jeff Beck, Glad All Over, same title different song, cover of old Carl Perkin's rockabilly number
Billie Holiday, Glad to be Unhappy
Hoyt Axton, Joy to the World
Ludwig van B., Ode to Joy
Ode to Joy scene from Immortal Beloved
You can't say my tastes aren't eclectic.
More on Ficta and Impossibilia
As an ornery aporetician, I want ultimately to say that an equally strong case can be made both for and against the thesis that ficta are impossibilia. But here I only make (part of) the case for thinking that ficta are impossibilia.
Preliminaries
Every human being is either right-handed or not right-handed. (But if one is not right-handed, it doesn't follow that one is left-handed. One could be ambidexterous or ambisinistrous.) What about the fictional character Hamlet? Is he right-handed or not right-handed? I say he is neither: he is indeterminate with respect to the property of righthandedness. That makes him an incomplete object, one that violates the law of Excluded Middle (LEM), or rather one to which LEM does not apply.
Hamlet (the character, not the play) is incomplete because he has all and only the properties ascribed to him by the author of the play, and the author left Hamlet's handedness unspecified. It is worth noting that Hamlet the play is complete and this holds for each written token of the play, the type of which they are tokens, and each enactment of the play. This is because the play and its enactments are actualia.
But don't we say that Hamlet the play is fictional? We do, but what we mean is not that the play is an object of fiction, but that the people and events depicted therein are fictional. The play is not fictional but entirely real. Of course, there could be a play that is a mere object of fiction: a play within a play. The same holds for novels. My copies of Moby Dick are each of them complete and actual, hence full-fledged citizens of the real, with all the rights and privileges pertaining thereunto; but Ishmael, Queequeg, and Ahab are not. They are objects of fiction; those books are not. And presumably the type of which they are tokens, though an abstract object, is also actual and complete. A person's reading or 'enactment' of the novel is typically a long, interrupted process; but it too is complete and actual and resident in the real order.
Back to the character Hamlet: he is an incomplete object, having all and only the properties ascribed to him in the play (together with, perhaps, entailments of these properties). London Ed balks at this:
I don't follow this at all. I don't agree with the second sentence "He has all and only ….". Of course Shakespeare said that there was a person called ‘Hamlet’ who had certain properties (e.g. he said that Hamlet was a prince of Denmark. It doesn’t follow that there is someone who has or had such a property. For example, legend says that there was a horse called ‘Pegasus’ that flew. It doesn’t follow that there are or were flying horses.
This objection shows misunderstanding. I did not say or imply that there exists in actuality, outside the mind, a man named 'Hamlet.' The point is rather that when I read the play there appears before my mind a merely intentional object, one that I know is fictional, and therefore, one that I know is merely intentional. If Ed denies this, then he denies what is phenomenologically evident. And, as a matter of method, we must begin with the phenomenology of the situation.
Suppose I write a two-sentence novel:
It was a dark and rainy night. Shakey Jake, life-long insomniac, deciding he needed a nightcap, grabbed his flashlight and his raincoat and headed for the Glass Crutch bar and grill, a local watering hole a half a mile from his house.
Now I couldn't have written that, and you can't understand it, without thinking about various intentional objects that do not exist. Am I saying that there exist objects that do not exist? No, that would be a contradiction. Nor am I committed to saying that there are objects that have mind-independent being but not existence. Furthermore, I am not committed to Meinong's doctrine of Aussersein.
All I am doing is holding fast to a phenomenological datum: when I create a fictional character as I just did when I created Shakey Jake the insomniac, I bring before my mind an intentional object. (The act-object schema strikes me as having pretty good phenomenological credentials, unlike the adverbial schema.) What can we say about this merely intentional object? First, it is no part of the acts through which I think it. My acts of thinking exist in reality, but Shakey Jake does not exist in reality. (This point goes back to Twardowski.) When I think about Hamlet or Don Quixote or Shakey Jake, I am not thinking about my own mind or any state of my mind. I am not thinking about anything real. But it doesn' t follow that I am not thinking of anything.
If Ed denies that there are merely intentional objects, then he is denying what is phenomenologically evident. I take my stand on the terra firma of phenomenological givenness. So for now, and to get on with it, I simply dismiss Ed's objection. To pursue it further would involve us a in a metaphilosophical discussion of the role of phenomenological appeals in philosophical inquiry.
Ficta are Impossibilia
Let us confine ourselves to purely fictional objects and leave out of consideration real individuals who are partially fictionalized in fables, legends, apocryphal stories, so-called historical novels that blend fact and fiction, and the like. One of my theses is that purely fictional objects cannot exist and thus are broadly logically impossible. They are necessarily nonexistent, where the modality in question is broadly logical. It does not follow, however, that pure ficta have no ontological status whatsoever. They have a mode of being that could be called existential heteronomy. On this point I agree with Roman Ingarden, a philosopher who deserves more attention in the Anglosphere than he receives here.
Earlier I gave an argument from incompleteness: the incomplete cannot exist and so are impossible. But now I take a different tack.
Purely fictional objects are most plausibly viewed as made up, or constructed, by novelists, playwrights, et al. It may be that they are constructed from elements that are not themselves constructed, elements such as properties or Castaneda's ontological guises. Or perhaps fictional objects are constructed ex nihilo. Either way, they have no being at all prior to their creation or construction. There was no Captain Ahab before Melville 'cooked him up.' But if Ahab were a merely possible individual, then one could not temporally index his coming to be; he would not come to be, but be before, during, and after Melvlle's writing down his description.
The issue could be framed as follows. Are novels, plays, etc. which feature logically consistent pure ficta, something like telescopes that allow us to peer from the realm of the actual into the realm of the merely possible, both realms being realms of the real? Or are novels, etc. more like mixing bowls or ovens in which ficta are 'cooked up'? I say the latter. If you want, you can say that Melville is describing something when he writes about Ahab, but what he is describing is something he has made up: a merely intentional object that cannot exist apart from the acts of mind trained upon it. He is not describing something that has ontological status apart from his mind and the minds of his readers. He is also not descrbing some real feature or part of himself as subject. So we could say that in describing Ahab he is describing an item that is objectively but not subjectvely mind-dependent.
Here is an Argument from Origin:
1. Pure ficta are made up or constructed via the mental acts and actions of novelists, playwrights, et al.
2. Ahab is a pure fictum.
Therefore
3. Ahab came into being via the mental activity of a novelist or playwright. (from 1,2)
4. No human being comes into being via the mental activity of novelists, et al., but via the uniting of human sperm and human egg.
5. Ahab is not a human being. (from 3, 4)
6. A merely possible human being is a human being, indeed a flesh-and-blood human being, though not an actual flesh-and-blood human being.
Therefore
7. Ahab is not a merely possible human being, but a fictional human being where 'fictional' unlike 'merely possible' functions as an alienans adjective.
This argument does not settle the matter, however, since it is not compelling. A Meinongian or quasi-Meinongian could, with no breach of logical propriety, run the argument in reverse, denying (7) and denying (1). One man's modus ponens, etc.
JFK: A Beautiful Mediocrity
There is much that is right in this piece by the editors of NRO. But I am sure glad that Kennedy was in charge back in October, 1962 as opposed to Bill Clinton or, God forbid, the feckless Obama. The Irishman was a resolute commie-fighter who stood tall against Krushchev, the shoe-banging butcher of the Ukraine.
What do John F. Kennedy, Aldous Huxley, and C. S. Lewis Have in Common?
All three exited the mundus sensibilis 50 years ago, today. Whither? The Whither like the Whence remain in suspense.
The three illustrate the truth that "The pen is mightier than the sword" (Bulwer-Lytton).
A Brit's take on 22 November.
He Was a Friend of Mine
John F. Kennedy was assassinated 50 years ago today. Here is The Byrds' tribute to the slain leader. They took a traditional song and redid the lyrics. The young Bob Dylan here offers an outstanding interpretation of the old song. And Dave van Ronk's version is not to be missed.
He was a friend of mine, he was a friend of mine
His killing had no purpose, no reason or rhyme
Oh, he was a friend of mineHe was in Dallas town, he was in Dallas town
From a sixth floor window a gunner shot him down
Oh, he died in Dallas townHe never knew my name, he never knew my name
Though I never met him I knew him just the same
Oh, he was a friend of mineLeader of a nation for such a precious time
Oh, he was a friend of mine
I was in the eighth grade when Kennedy was gunned down. We were assembled in an auditorium for some reason when the principal came in and announced that the president had been shot. The date was November 22, 1963. I remember it like it was yesterday. I was seated behind my quondam inamorata, Christine W. My love for her was from afar, like that of Don Quixote for the fair Dulcinea, but at that moment I was in close physical proximity to her, studying the back of her blouse through which I could make out the strap of her training bra . . . .
By the way, if you want to read a thorough (1,612 pages with notes on a separate CD!) takedown of all the JFK conspiracy speculation, I recommend Vincent Bugliosi, Reclaiming History: The Assassination of John F. Kennedy.
It was a tale of two nonentities, Lee Harvey Oswald and Jack Ruby. Both were little men who wanted to be big men. Oswald, acting alone, shot Kennedy. Ruby, acting alone, shot Oswald. That is the long and the short of it. For details, I refer you to Bugliosi.
If I’m a Racist, then You are a Tribalist!
Suppose you present careful arguments against Obama's policies and ideas, foreign or domestic or both. Some black is sure to jump up and shout, "Racist! You hate him because he's black!" Oprah Winfrey is the latest example. There is no point in arguing with such an idiot, argument being fruitful only with those who inhabit the plane of reason; but you must respond. I suggest "If I'm a racist, then you are a tribalist."
If I oppose Obama's policies because he is black,then you support them because he is black. If I'm a racist, then you are a tribalist! If his being black is no reason to oppose his policies, then his being black is no reason to support them either. If racism is bad, then so is your knee-jerk tribalism.
One of the sad facts about blacks is that many if not most of them cannot seem to transcend their tribal identification. They identify, not as human beings or as rational animals or as Americans, but as blacks. That tribal identification so dominates their consciousness that even the calmest and most polite arguments against Obama's ideas cannot be comprehended except as personal attacks on their man who is, first and foremost, a black man, even though he is half-white. That tribal identification was also at play in the O. J. Simpson trial. The prosecution presented a mountain of evidence of his guilt and yet the black dominated jury acquitted him of double homicide.
My advice to blacks: if you want to be judged by "the content of your character and not the color of your skin," to adapt the words of Martin Luther King, Jr., then drop the tribal identification. if you want to be treated as individuals, then stop identifying as members of a racial group. Why is your race so important to you? Are you perhaps raaacists?
Another Example of Metaphysical Impossibility without Internal Inconsistency
John e-mails:
I wanted to say as well that I enjoyed your recent post on fictional vs. possible objects. You point out that being internally contradictory is not a necessary condition on being metaphysically impossible. This seems to me exactly right. Another way to make this point is to think about, for example, a necessarily existing unicorn. There is nothing internally contradictory about the idea that a unicorn might exist in every possible world. Yet such a being is surely impossible. Otherwise, if it were possible, then there would actually exist a necessarily existing unicorn. This follows by the modal reasoning we find in Plantinga's modal ontological argument and, in particular, the distinctive axiom of S5 modal logic. In order to avoid Gaunilo-style parodies of the modal ontological argument, we must deny that being internally contradictory is a necessary condition on being metaphysically impossible.
I accept John's example and his reasoning. Ain't agreement grand? We philosophers must enjoy it when it comes and while it lasts. And so we can add the necessarily existent unicorn and his colleagues to the list of metaphysical impossibilia whose impossibility does not derive from internal contradictoriness along with internally consistent fictional objects such as Hamlet. Are there any other categories of metaphysical impossibilia?
Many scholastics would add extramental universals and privations to the list of metaphysical impossibilia despite their lack of internal contradictoriness. Thus humanity cannot exist outside the mind. Nor can blindness.
The Essence of ObamaCare
It is important not to lose sight of the big picture:
Americans are beginning to understand that the essence of the Affordable Care Act is that millions of people are being conscripted to buy overpriced insurance they would never choose for themselves in order to afford Mr. Obama monies to spend on the poor and those who are medically uninsurable due to pre-existing conditions. Both Mr. Obama and Republicans are blowing smoke in claiming that the damage done to the individual market by the forced cancellation of "substandard" plans (i.e., those that don't meet the purposes of ObamaCare) can somehow be reversed at this point. It can't be.
And:
The basic idea behind Mr. Obama’s scheme is that government can better handle the complexities of medical care than the market can. Government scientists, technocrats and regulators think they have the collective brainpower to fairly manage a complicated, interconnected health care system and do it for less than businessmen could.
The planners got everything they wanted. They got to write the law without a single Republican looking over their shoulders. They had three years to do it with an essentially unlimited budget. The might of the entire federal government was called in to build HealthCare.gov. With all that, the Obamacare rollout was an epic failure of big government that was worthy of the old Soviet Union.
Obamacare is objectionable both morally and economically. It violates the liberty of the individual and central planning doesn't work.
There is no one top-down Solution. Solutions must be piecemeal and market-based. For starters: tort reform and direct payment by individuals for minor procedures and preventative care (check-ups, blood work, colonoscopies, etc.) Costs will come down just as automotive maintenance costs would skyrocket if oil changes and such were paid by automotive care insurance. Imagine taking your car in for an oil change, paying a $10 copay with the insurance company being billed $200, for what now costs the individual $20.
Don’t Retreat into Your Private Life
The temptation is great. If you give in and let the Left have free reign you may wake up one day with no private life left.
Plenty more on this topic in the Activism and Quietism category.
The Bigger the Government . . .
. . . the more to fight over.
The best proof of this to date is the bitter wrangling and the wastage of time, effort, and money over Obamacare. This fight will continue until Obamacare is repealed or gutted. In the long and nasty process, the political climate in this country is bound to become ever more toxic. Way to go, liberals, way to go!
Big government leads to big trouble as we fight endlessly, acrimoniously, and fruitlessly over all sorts of issues that we really ought not be fighting over. The final clause of the First Amendment of the U. S. Constitution enshrines the right "to petition the Government for a redress of grievances." So the more the government does things that grieve us, by intruding into our lives and limiting our liberties, the more we will petition, lobby, and generally raise hell with the government and with our political opponents.
If you try to tell me how much soda I can buy at a pop, or how capacious my ammo mags must be, or how I must speak to assuage the tender sensitivities of the Pee Cee, or if you try to stop me from home-schooling my kids, or force me to buy health insurance, then you are spoiling for a fight and you will get it. Think of how much time, energy, and money we waste battling our political enemies, working to undo what we take to be their damage, the damage of Obamacare being the example du jour.
So if you want less contention, work for smaller government. The smaller the government, the less to fight over.
Amphiboly of the Day: ‘Pretty Bad Girls’
An amphiboly is a syntactic ambiguity. Are they pretty and bad, or pretty bad?
Liberal Complains of Obama’s Incompetence
A good read about one liberal's Obamacare cancellation. Excerpt:
Last week the frustration of people like Peter and me—Obamacare supporters who lost their current plans—was heard by the White House, which promptly panicked. On Thursday, President Obama announced a policy change that would allow insurance companies like Regence to keep customers like me on the old Wood plan for one more year. To that I say: Hah! Thanks for nothing.
The idea that an insurer like Regence can, or will, spin on a dime and revive our ol’ $587 Woody within the next six weeks is absurd. It skews the market and undermines the entire premise of the Affordable Care Act – which is that by balancing the halt (allowing pre-existing conditions) and the hale (forcing robust young adults to get in the pool), the exchanges will over time produce a system that offers quality health care at a price my family can afford.
Our liberal finally wakes up when Obama's incompetence affects him personally. But apparently he still doesn't care that Obama and the Dems lied brazenly, lied about their lies, continue to lie, bullshit, and prevaricate, and that when pushed to the wall, Obama tampered 'extra-legally' as pundits delicately put it with what his team referred to as "settled law." But deeper than all this is the crazy assumption that central planning by incompetent bureaucrats can be made to work when experience abundantly teaches that it doesn't.
The Fictional and the Merely Possible
"To be or not to be, that is the question." Or at least that is one question. Another is whether Hamlet, that very individual, might have been actual.
It is a mistake to conflate the fictional and the merely possible. Hamlet, for example, is a fictional individual, the central character and eponym of the Shakespearean play. Being fictional, he does not actually exist. But one might be tempted to suppose that while there is no man Hamlet in actuality, there could have been, that Hamlet is a possible individual. But far from being possible, Hamlet is impossible. Or so I shall argue.
First we need to agree on some definitions.
D1. x is impossible =df x cannot exist, i.e., x is necessarily nonexistent.
D2. x is incomplete =df there is a property P such that x is indeterminate with respect to P, i.e., it is not the case that x instantiates P and it is not the case that x does not instantiate P.
The Main Argument
1. Hamlet is an incomplete object. He has all and only the properties ascribed to him in the play that bears his name. It is neither the case that he eats his eggs with hot sauce nor that he doesn't.
2. Necessarily, for any x, if x is an incomplete object, then x does not exist.
Therefore
3. Necessarily, Hamlet does not exist. (from 1, 2)
Therefore
4. Hamlet is an impossible object. (from 3, D1)
The reasoning is correct and premise (1) is surely true. If you are inclined to reject (2), claiming that it does not hold for quantum phenomena, I will simply sidestep that whole can of worms by inserting 'macroscopic' or 'mesoscopic' or some other suitable qualifier between 'an' and 'incomplete.'
Note that Hamlet is impossible even if the properties he is ascribed in the play are members of a logically consistent set. One could say, with a whiff of paradox, that Hamlet is impossible despite the fact that his properties are compossible. His impossibility follows from his incompleteness. What this shows is that not every impossible object harbors internal contradiction. So there there are at least two types of impossibilia, those whose impossibility derives from inconsistency and those whose impossibility derives from incompleteness. To be admitted to the elite corps of the actual, one must satisfy both LNC and LEM. That the impossible needn't be internally contradictory is an insight I owe to Daniel Novotny who kindly sent me a free copy of his excellent book on the scholasticism of the Baroque era entitled, Ens Rationis from Suarez to Caramuel (Fordham 2013). I am indebted in particular to his discussion on p. 108.
Objection: "Hamlet is possible; it is just that his actualization would have to consist in his completion. Surely God could actualize Shakespeare's Hamlet (the prince, not the play) by appropriately supplementing his property set."
Reply: Suppose God were to try to actualize Hamlet, the very same individual encountered in the play. To do so, God would have to supplement Hamlet's property set, bringing it to completeness. For only that which is wholly determinate can exist in (macroscopic) actuality. But there is more than one way to effect this supplementation. For example, if the fictional Hamlet is indeterminate with respect to whether or not he takes his eggs with hot sauce, an actual Hamlet cannot be. He either eats egggs or he doesn't, and he either takes them with hot sauce or he doesn't.
Let AH1 be hot-sauce Hamlet and AH2 non-hot-sauce Hamlet. Both are complete. Let FH be the incomplete fictional individual in the play.
We may now argue as follows.
If God brings about the actuality of both AH1 and AH2, then, since they are numerically distinct, neither of them can be identical to FH. But God must actualize one or the other if FH is to become actual. If God actualizes one but not the other, then it is possible that he actualize the other but not the the one. But then the actualization of either is contingent. Thus if God actualizes FH as AH1, then, since he could just as well have actualized AH2 as FH, the identity of FH with AH1 is contingent. But identity cannot be contingent: if x = y, then necessarily x = y. Therefore, God can actualize neither and fictional Hamlet is impossibly actual, i.e., impossible.
Here is a third consideration. It seems to be part of the very sense of the phrase 'fictional individual' that such individuals be, well, fictional, that is, irreal or unreal. Now the real includes not only the actual and the necessary, but that which is really possible albeit unactual. Thus real possibilities cannot be made up by minds and so cannot be fictional. Therefore Hamlet, as a fictional being, is not a possible being.
According to Novotny, "Suarez and other Baroque scholastic authors seem to assume without question that consistent fictions, such as Hamlet, might become real beings. This implies that Hamlet is a possible being and that therefore he is a real being. [. . .] For several reasons I do not think that a consistent fiction as such is a real possible being." (108)
I agree, and the arguments above are my way of fleshing out Novotny's misgivings.
Addendum (21 November)
The original main argument above is invalid as a commenter points out. Here is
The Main Argument Repaired
0. Necessarily, for every x, if x is a fictum of a finite mind, then x is incomplete.
0*. Necessarily, Hamlet is a fictum of a finite mind, Shakespeare's. (That very fictional individual could not have been the fictum of any other mind.)
Therefore
1. Necessarily, Hamlet is an incomplete object. He has all and only the properties ascribed to him in the play that bears his name. It is neither the case that he eats his eggs with hot sauce nor that he doesn't. (from 0, 0*)
2. Necessarily, for any x, if x is an incomplete object, then x does not exist.
Therefore
3. Necessarily, Hamlet does not exist. (from 1, 2)
Therefore
4. Hamlet is an impossible object. (from 3, D1)