April 2014 – Maverick Philosopher

On Whether Some Arguments from Evil Beg the Question

Thesis for consideration: It can reasonably be maintained that some arguments from evil beg the question against theism.

Suppose we consider the following passage from J. J. C. Smart:

It looks as though the theistic hypothesis is an empirically refutable one, so that theism becomes a refuted scientific theory. The argument goes: (1) If God exists then there is no evil, (2) There is evil, therefore (3) It is not the case that God exists. Premiss (1) seems to follow from our characterization of God as an omnipotent, omnsicient and benevolent being. (2) is empirical. We can hardly reject (2). It seems therefore that the theist has to find something wrong with (1) and this is not easy. (J. J. C. Smart and J. J. Haldane, Atheism and Theism, Blackwell 2003, 2nd ed, p. 60)

Smart's argument from evil is plainly valid, being of the form modus tollens. But for an argument to be probative, other conditions must be met. One of these conditions is that the premises be true. Another is that the argument involve no 'informal fallacy' such as equivocation.

So let us ask: how would 'evil' in (1) have to be construed so that (1) comes out true? I suggest that 'evil' must be short for 'gratuitous evil.' But then, to avoid equivocation, we would have to replace 'evil' in (2) with 'gratuitous evil.' The result would be:

1*. If God exists, then there is no gratuitous evil.
2*. There is gratuitous evil.
—
3. It is not the case that God exists.

The resulting argument is valid, and (1*) is plainly true, unlike (1) which is not plainly true, but false. That (1) is false can be seen from the fact that an omniqualified God could easily permit the existence of an evil that was necessary for the attainment of a greater good. So it is just false to say, 'If God exists, then there is no evil.'

But (1*) is plainly true. Now it may be — it is epistemically possible that –(2*) is also true. The reformulated argument would then be sound. A sound argument, by definition, is a deductive argument that is both valid in point of logical form and whose premises are all of them true. And for the record, a proposition p is epistemically (doxastically) possible for a subject S if and only if p is logically consistent with what S knows (believes).

But note that a sound argument will be probatively worthless if it begs the question, if it is such that one cannot know a premise to be true without already knowing the conclusion to be true. So let us ask a very simple question: How does one know that (2*) is true? Smart tells us that (2) is empirical. 'Empirical' is a term of epistemology. It is applied to those propositions that are known from experience, by observation via the senses and their instrumental extensions (microscopes, telescopes, etc.) Now I am willing to grant that (2) — There is evil — is an empirical truth. (2), however, is not what Smart needs to make his argument work. He needs (2*). But is (2*) an empirical truth? Can one know from experience (whether inner or outer) that there is gratuitous evil? Is gratuitousness an empirical attribute of the evils one experiences?

Consider the evil of intense pain. I am acquainted with pain by 'inner sense.' And I am willing to grant arguendo, though it is not quite obvious, that I am acquainted empirically with the evil of intense pain. But I am surely not acquainted empirically with the gratuitousness of experienced evils. Gratuitousness is no more an empirical attribute than the createdness of the natural world. It is not evident to the senses that nature is a divine creation. Similarly, it is not evident to the senses that instances of evil are gratuitous. Is it not epistemically possible that they are all non-gratuitous?

To say that an evil is gratuitous is to say in effect that it is an evil inconsistent with the existence of the omniqualified God. It is to say that it is an evil that no such God could have a morally sufficient reason for permitting. Clearly, one cannot 'read off' such a complex relational attribute from any instance of evil.

The conclusion I am driving towards is that Smart's argument supra is question-begging. For in order to know that premise (2*) is true, I must know that the conclusion is true. That is, to know that there are gratuitous evils, I must know that God does not exist. For if God exists, then then there are no gratuitous evils.

Smart tells us above that the theistic hypothesis is empirically refutable. But I say Smart is mistaken: he needs (2*) for his argument to work, but this proposition — There is gratuitous evil — is not empirical. It may be true for all that, but it is not knowable by experience. You may be convinced that it is true, and I won't blame you if you find it much more plausible than the truth of 'God exists'; but it is not an empirical truth, if it is a truth. It is an interpretation imposed upon the data. It is as metaphysical as 'God exists.'

More on Sensible Properties and Constituent Ontology

A reader asks:

Suppose I said that blue is not a Peter-van-Inwagen property, but a sensible property. Suppose also that I said that we see 1) substances and we see 2) their colors, and we see 3) the fact that substances are colored (and this last point amounts to not much more, if anything at all more, than the claim that we see both substances and their colors). I take it you would agree with these points.

There are some difficult questions here. No doubt we see material meso-particulars. I see a cat, a keyboard, a lamp. But do we see substances? 'Substance' is a theoretical term, of Aristotelian provenience, not what I call a 'datanic' term. If a cat is a bundle of universals, or a bundle of tropes, or a diachronic bundle of synchronic bundles of Castanedan guises, then a cat is not a substance. It is a Moorean fact that there are cats and that we see them; it is not Moorean fact that there are substances and that we see them. But let's set this problem aside.

A black cat sleeps on my desk. I see the cat and I see black (or blackness if you will) at the cat: I see black where the cat is. Contrary to what you suggest, there is more to a cat's being black than a cat and blackness even if the blackness is seen exactly where the cat is and nowhere else. For a cat's being black involves, in addition to the cat and black, the first's BEING the second. Note that a cat's being black is a fact, but neither a cat nor blackness is a fact.

This give rise to a puzzle. I see the cat, and I see black where the cat is. But do I see the cat's BEING black? Do I literally see (with my eyes) the fact of the cat's being black? And if I don't, how do I know that the cat IS black?

But let's set this vexing cluster of problems aside as well.

But then suppose that you discover that I think that colors are per se nowhere. They are not located in space in the way that substances are. When you turn your eye to something colored, geometrically speaking, you turn your eye only to the thing that is colored, but not the color of the thing, for this has no per se spatial location and therefore has nothing to do with the geometry of space beyond being the sensible property of something that has something to do with the geometry of space. Nonetheless, we see colors and we see the things that are colored. Would you find this view problematic? If so, why? Would you think that in making color only accidentally spatial that I depart from constituent ontology? I would like to think that I do not, for I say that both being an ox and being blue are parts of what it is to be a blue ox.

The view you sketch strikes me as incoherent. You cannot coherently maintain both that blue (of some definite shade) is a sensible property and that blue is nowhere. If blue is sensible, then it is sensible at some location or other. Therefore, blue cannot be nowhere.

Note that if there is a PVI-property of blueness, it could not itself be blue. Abstract objcts don't come in colors. So what good is it? What work does it do? You are still going to need the blueness of the blue cup. PVI-blueness is ontologically otiose, a metaphysical fifth wheel if you will. The blueness at the cup, by contrast, is blue! Right? If you deny that there is any blue blueness at the cup, are you then prepared to say that the cup is devoid of sensible properties?

Will you say that the blue cup is sensibly bluein virtue of instantiating PVI-blueness? How would that work? PVI-blueness is not a Platonic exemplar. It is not itself blue. How can a particular's instantiating it explain the particular's being sensibly blue?

Could blueness be accidentally spatial? I don't see how. Either it is necessary spatial, and in consequence thereof, sense-perceivable, or it is necessarily nonspatial in the manner of an abstract object. A blue wall is accidentally blue, but blueness, I should think, is necessarily spatial. And I do think you would be departing from constituent ontology if you were to hold that blueness is accidentally spatial.

From Racists to Sexists

Image credit. (HT: Bill Keezer) By the way, I am grateful to all my correspondents. Don't take it amiss if I forget to credit you by name. And of course some of you I do not mention by name for your own protection.

If you send me something, but don't want it posted, just say so and I will honor your request. Otherwise, everything you send me is potential blog fodder.

In these "times that try mens' souls" one has to be very careful. But there is also such a thing as civil courage.

A Question About Constituent Ontology: Sensible Properties as ‘Parts’

The following from a reader. I've edited it for clarity.

Here is a quick question for you: suppose someone were to grant you that there is the sensible character blue that you say that there is, a character of your coffee cup, but then still wanted to know why it is "in" or a "constituent" of a substance such as a cup. So, take this person to have read and understood your argument about nude particulars and to have said: "Indeed, whatever red is, it cannot be an abstractum, for certainly something of the sort could never enter into visual experience. Nor could "the fact that" some sensible particular stands in an instantiation relation to such an abstract object enter into visual experience, for we theorize such metaphysical facts, we do not see them. So I grant that blue is a visible property, but why should we say that blue, so characterized is "in" or is a "constituent" of a sensible particular item?"

Well, one assumption I am making is that a certain form of nominalism is untenable. Suppose someone said that what makes a blue object blue is that English speakers apply the predicate 'blue' to it. Nelson Goodman actually maintains something as crazy as this in one of his books. (Intellectual brilliance and teaching at Harvard are not prophylactic against silliness.) Why is it crazy? Because it is the metaphysically antecedent blueness of the thing in question, my trusty coffee cup, for example, that grounds the correctness of the application of 'blue' to the cup. I am tempted to say that this realism is just Moorean common sense.

In other words, 'blue' is true of the cup because the cup is blue. And not the other way around. It is false that the cup is blue because 'blue' is true of it. Obviously, this use of 'because' is not causal, as causation is understood by most contemporary philosophers. But neither is it logical. It is not logical because it does not express a relation that connects a proposition to a proposition. It expresses an asymmetrical relation of metaphysical grounding. This relation is a relation between what is at most a proposition-like entity such as a concrete fact or state of affairs and a proposition.

The truthmaker of 'This cup is blue' cannot be anything of a linguistic nature. (More generally, it cannot be anything of a representational nature.) And yet something makes our sample sentence true. There must be a truthmaker. It would be silly to say that the sentence is "just true." Given that there must be a truthmaker, it is going to involve the cup and the property, both construed as 'real,' i.e., extramental and extralinguistic. There is more a truthmaker than this, but we don't need to go into this 'more.'

My reader grants that blue is a visible property. One literally sees the blueness of the cup. This is not a Platonic visio intellectualis. It is not a seeing with the 'eyes' of the mind, but a seeing with the eyes of the head. Now if this is the case, then the property I see when I see a blue cup as blue cannot be an item off in a realm apart. It cannot be a denizen of a Platonic topos ouranos, and I am not peering into such a heavenly place when I see blue. Blueness cannot be an abstract object as many contemporary philosophers use this phrase.

Now if I see the blueness where the cup is, and when the cup is (although only at times at which the cup is in fact blue), then the pressure is on to say that blueness is some sort of 'proper part' of the cup, albeit in an extended, unmereological sense of 'part.' It can't be the whole of the cup because the cup has other empirically detectable properties such as being hot and smooth and of such-and-such weight and electrical conductivity. What other options are there?

Reflecting on the data of the problem, I come to the following conclusions: The blueness is real: it is extramental and extralinguistic. It is empirically detectable; hence it cannot be an abstract object. The blueness is detectable at the cup, not at some other place. The blueness is not identical to the cup.

We can account for the data by saying say that the blueness of the cup is an ontological constituent of the cup. Is there a better theory?

Saturday Night at the Oldies: Two ‘Sentimental’ Songs

Fleetwood Mac, Sentimental Lady

Thelonious Monk, I'm Getting Sentimental Over You. Wow!

There are of course others with 'sentimental' in the title, but I post only what I like.

The Politics of Impassibility

This just over the transom:

I hope you don’t mind my seeking your help on an issue related to the history of philosophy. I and a few friends are have a disagreement re: the origin of belief in divine apatheia.

In Manana: Christian Theology from a Hispanic Perspective, Justo Gonzalez discusses the political motivations behind the origin and development of the concept. His claim is that belief in divine impassibility merely reflects the desire for permanence (of power) on the part of the ruling class so that Athenian politics is responsible for the philosophical development of the belief, a projection onto God of the political aspirations of the elite.

The question of how apatheia got adopted/revised by Christians isn’t so much my concern at this point (as legitimate a question as it is). I’m interested in Gonzalez’s history and whether and to what extent he’s right in supposing apatheia was a projection onto the divine being of the political aspirations for the permanence of the city and its ruling class.

Does that ring true with your understanding? Thoughts?

Well, if it serves my political interests to believe that p, that leaves open the question whether p is true or false. Suppose I am a member of the royal court. Then it would serve my earthly interests if the masses were to believe that the king rules by divine right. But one cannot show that the king does not rule by divine right by showing that the interests of the ruling class are served by that belief's being widespread.

So there are two logically independent questions. Does the holding of a belief serve interests? Is the belief true? To say that the questions are logically independent is to say that both an affirmative and a negative answer to the first is consistent with both an affrmative and a negative answer to the second.

If God exists, then he is either impassible or not. This question cannot be decided by showing, assuming that it could be shown, that widespread belief that God is impassible would help legitimate the dominance of the ruling class. (I am having a hard time imagining how such an abstruse doctrine could get a grip on the popular mind. Does Joe Sixpack think about such things?)

The bolded thesis supra is a 'weasel' thesis. Gonzalez does not state unambiguously that the impassibility doctrine is nothing other than an expression of class interests, and therefore either false or unsupportable by reasons. But that is probably what he means.

If that is what he means, then he is guilty of the logical/epistemological error of confusing the holding of a belief with the propositional content of a belief. It is a concern of the sociology of knowledge to study the incidence of beliefs as states of people, their causes and effects and modes of transmission. But the evaluation of belief contents as to truth, falsehood, consistency, inconsistency, rationality, etc., does not belong to the sociology of knowledge.

There is nothing new about the move Gonzalez appears to be making. It's old hat. It is the standard Marxist rubbish of reducing belief systems to systems of ideology in the service of class interests. But if all is ideology in the service of class interests, then so is the system of Marxist beliefs. In which case it is a self-vitiating system of beliefs if not outright self-refuting.

Islam versus Chess

Holy moly! Perhaps Brandeis University ought to ban chess playing on campus lest some adherent of the 'religion of peace' take offense.

Jews dominate chess. I wonder if that is part of the explanation of the irrational animosity of Islamists to the game of kings and the king of games.

Lukasiewicz on Logical Form

London Ed writes,

I read and excerpted the chapter. I am not mistaken. Also, what he says seems correct to me.

He claims that logic is not formal, insofar as it is concerned with the 'laws of thought'. He says "Thought is a psychical phenomenon, and psychical phenomena have no extension. What is meant by the form of an object that has no extension?" I can't fault this.

I take it that the argument is this:

1. Only spatially extended objects have forms.
2. Neither acts of thinking, nor such objects of thought as propositions, are spatially extended.
Therefore
3. If logic studies either acts of thinking or objects of thought, then logic is not a formal study, a study of forms.

If this is the argument, I am not impressed. Premise (1) is false. L.'s notion of form is unduly restrictive. There are forms other than shapes. Consider a chord and an arpeggio consisting of the same notes. The 'matter' is the same, the 'form' is different. In a chord the notes sound at the same time; in an arpeggio at different times. The arrangement of the notes is different. Arrangement and structure are forms. Examples are easily multiplied.

Nor, he says, is it the object of logic to investigate how we are thinking or how we ought to think. "The first task belongs to psychology, the second to a practical art of a similar kind to mnemonics". And then he says "Logic has no more to do with thinking than mathematics has". Isn't that correct?

We can agree that logic is not a branch of psychology: it is not an empirical study and its laws are not empirical generalizations. LNC, for example, is not an empirical generalization. But a case can be made for logic's being normative. It does not describe how we do think, but it does prescribe how we ought to think if we are to arrive at truth. If so, then logic does have a practical side and issues hypothetical imperatives, e.g., "If you want truth, avoid contradictions!"

In a similar vein he notes the formalism of Aristotelian logic. The whole Aristotelian theory of the syllogism is built up on the four expressions 'every' (A), 'no' (E), 'some' (I) and 'not every' (O). "It is obvious that such a theory has nothing more in common with our thinking than, for instance, the theory of the relations of greater and less in the field of numbers". Brilliant.

Why do you call it "brilliant"? Husserl and Frege said similar things. It's old hat, isn't it? Psychologism died with the 19th century at least in the mainstream. Given propositions p, q, logic is concerned with such questions as: Does p entail q? Are they consistent? Are they inconsistent? We could say that logic studies certain relations between and among propositions, which are the possible contents of judgings, but are not themselves judgings or entertainings or supposings or anything else that is mental or psychological.

Again, on the need for logic and science to focus on the expression of thought rather than 'thought', he says "Modern formal logic strives to attain the greatest possible exactness. This aim can be reached only by means of a precise language built up of stable, visually perceptible signs. Such a language is indispensable for any science. Our own thoughts not formed in words are for ourselves almost inapprehensible and the thoughts of other people, when not bearing an external shape [my emphasis] could be accessible only to a clairvoyant. Every scientific truth in order to be perceived and verified, must be put into an external form [my emphasis] intelligible to everybody."

I can't fault any of this. What do you think?

Sorry, but I am not impressed. It is fundamentally wrongheaded. First of all this is a howling non sequitur:

1. Logic does not study mental processes;
Therefore
2. Logic studies visually perceptive signs.

Surely it is a False Alternative to suppose that logic must either study mental processes or else physical squiggles and such. There is an easy way between the horns: logic studies propositions, which are neither mental nor physical.

In my last post I can gave two powerful arguments why a perceptible string of marks is not identical to the proposition those marks are used to express.

L. speaks of an external form intelligible to everybody. But what is intelligible (understandable) is not the physical marks, but the proposition they express. We both can see this string:

Yash yetmis ish bitmish

but only I know what it means. (Assuming you don't know any Turkish.) Therefore, the meaning (the proposition), is not identical to the physical string.

There is also an equivocation on 'thought' to beware of, as between thinking and object of thought. As you well know, in his seminal essay Der Gedanke Frege was not referring to anything psychological.

I will grant L. this much, however. Until one has expressed a thought, it is not fully clear what that thought is. But I insist that the thought — the proposition — must not be confused with its expression.

The real problem here is that you wrongly think that one is multiplying entities beyond necessity if one makes the sorts of elementary distinctions that I am making.

Logical Form, Instantiation, and Pattern-Matching

David Brightly comments:

We can't say that an argument is invalid because it instantiates an invalid form. The argument Socrates is a man; all men are mortal; ergo Socrates is mortal instantiates the invalid form a is F; all Hs are G; ergo a is G, but modulo equivocation, it is truth-preserving. Instantiation of form is just pattern-matching, and the argument does match the pattern of the invalid form.

I reject this of course.The sample argument is an example of correct reasoning. But anyone who argues in accordance with the schema argues incorrectly. Why? Because the schema is not truth-preserving. Therefore the sample argument does not instantiate the invalid form.

I don't think Brightly understands 'truth-preserving.' This is a predicate of argument forms, primarily, and the same goes for 'valid' and 'invalid.' Here are some definitions:

D1. An argument form is truth-preserving =df no argument of that form has true premises and a false conclusion.

D2. An argument form F is valid =df F is truth-preserving.

D3. A particular argument A is valid =df A instantiates a valid form. (This allows for the few cases in which an argument has two forms, one valid and one invalid.)

D4. A particular argument A is invalid =df there is no valid form that it instantiates.

Now what is it for an argument to instantiate an argument form? To answer this question we need to know what an argument is. Since deductive arguments alone are under consideration, I define:

D5. A deductive argument is a sequence of propositions together with the claim that one of them, the conclusion, follows from the others, the premises, taken together.

If the claim holds, the argument is valid; if not, invalid.

Now the main point for present purposes is that an argument is composed of propositions. A proposition is not a complex physical object such as a string of marks on paper. Thus what you literally SEE when you see this:

7 + 5 = 12

is not a proposition, but a spatiotemporal particular, a physical item subject to change: it can be deleted. But the proposition it expresses cannot be deleted by deleting what you just literally SAW. That suffices to show that the proposition expressed by what you saw is not identical to what you saw. Whatever propositions are (and there are different theories), they are not physical items.

What's more, you did not SEE (with your eyes) the proposition, or that it is true, but you UNDERSTOOD the proposition and that it is true. (A proposition and its being true are not the same even if the proposition is true.) So this is a second reason why a proposition is not identical to its physical expression.

Now what holds for propositions also holds for arguments: you cannot delete an argument by deleting physical marks, and you cannot understand an argument merely by seeing a sequence of strings of physical marks.

An argument is not a pattern of physical marks. So there is no question of matching this physical pattern with some other physical pattern. Instantiation of logical form is not just pattern-matching.

If a sentence contains a sign like 'bank' susceptible of two or more readings, then no one definite proposition is expressed by the sentence. Until that ambiguity is resolved one does not have a definite proposition, and without definite propositions no definite argument. But once one has a definite argument then one can assess its validity. If it instantiates a valid form, then it is valid; if it instantiates an invalid form, then it is invalid.

It is as simple as that. But one has to avoid the nominalist mistake of thinking that arguments are just collections of physical items.

My Internet Chess Club Finger Notes

The ICC is the premier Internet venue for playing chess. I've been a member since 2002 at least. It's not cheap, but it is worth it. But while the site is fabulous, unfortunately some of the people who show up there leave a lot to be desired. Hence the acerbic tone of some of these notes.

1: In life there are no takebacks. "Chess is life." (R. Fischer) Ergo, etc.

2: You say your mouse slipped? That's no different than a Fingerfehler in OTB chess. And if a man cannot control his mousie, is he a man or a mouse?

3: In an unrated game, I may allow a takeback, but I will never ask for one, and you have no right to one.

4: Actions have consequences. Take responsibility for the former; learn from the latter.

5: Be kind to your opponent; you need him to have a game. Don't whine if you lose. If you are paired with me then you are a patzer and can expect to lose many a game.

6: Play hard, but with detachment from the outcome. Apply this principle to your life as a whole. Don't blame others for your stupidity. If you are a snivelling crybaby who can't stand to lose, find another pastime, or else play your computer at its lowest setting.

7: Thus spoke the Sage of the Superstitions.

8: Favorite command: set busy 2. Second favorite: +censor [name of offending party]

9: All churlish rascals will be forthwith zapped into the outer precincts of cyber-obscurity there to languish with rest of their scrofulous ilk for all eternity.

10: If you wish to be removed from my censor list, I charge a nominal fee of 100 USD. Take advantage of this offer now before prices go up.

Harry Reid, Latter-Day McCarthyite

Here:

[Senator Joseph] McCarthy in the 1950s became infamous for smearing his opponents with lurid allegations that he could not prove, while questioning their patriotism. Reid has brought back to the Senate that exact same McCarthy style of six decades ago — and trumped it.

During the 2012 presidential campaign, Reid libeled candidate Mitt Romney with the unsubstantiated and later-refuted charge that Romney was a tax cheat. "The word's out that he [Romney] hasn't paid any taxes for 10 years," Reid said.

Later, when asked for proof, Reid offered a pathetic rejoinder: "I have had a number of people tell me that." One wonders how many names were on Reid's McCarthyite "tell" list — were there, as McCarthy used to bluster, 205 names, or perhaps just 57?

When asked again to document the slur, Reid echoed McCarthy perfectly: "The burden should be on him. He's the one I've alleged has not paid any taxes."

Call this the Reid Principle: The maker of scurrilous and unsubstantiated allegations is presumed veracious. The burden of rebutting the charges is borne by the victim of the smear.

Reid's behavior in this and in other cases makes it clear that Democrats see politics as a form of warfare. Conservatives need to wise up.

On the Primacy of the Intentional Over the Linguistic

Following Chisholm, et al. and as against Sellars, et al. I subscribe to the broadly logical primacy of the intentional over the linguistic.

But before we can discuss the primacy of the intentional, we must have some idea of (i) what intentionality is and (ii) what the problem of intentionality is. Very simply, (mental) intentionality is object-directedness, a feature of some (if not all) of our mental states. (The qualifier 'mental' leaves open the epistemic possibility of what George Molnar calls physical intentionality which transpires, if it does transpire, below the level of mind. I take no position on it at the moment.)

Suppose a neighbor asks me about Max Black, a stray cat of our mutual acquaintance, who we haven't seen in a few weeks. The asking occasions in me a thought of Max, with or without accompanying imagery. The problem of intentionality is to provide an adequate account of what it is for my thought of Max to be a thought of Max, and of nothing else. Simply put, what makes my thought of Max a thought of Max? How is object-directedness (intentionality, the objective reference of episodes of thinking) possible?

Why should there be a problem about this? Well, an episode of thinking is a datable event in my mental life. But a cat is not. No cat is a content of consciousness. Cats ain't in the head or in the mind. Obviously, no cat is spatially inside my mind, let alone my head, and it is only a little less obvious that no cat depends for its existence on my mind: it's nothing to Max, ontologically speaking, if me and my mind cease to exist. He needs my thinking of him to exist as little as my thinking needs to be about him. Cats are physical things out there in the physical world. And yet my thinking of Max 'reaches' beyond my mind and targets — not some cat or other, but a particular cat. How is this possible? What must the world be like for it to be possible?

To get the full flavor of the problem, please observe that my thinking of Max would be unaffected if Max were, unbeknownst to me, to pass out of existence while I was thinking of him. (He's out on the prowl and a hungry coyote kills him while I am thinking of him.) It would be the very same thought with the very same content and the very same directedness. But if Max were to cease to exist while a flea was biting him, then the relation of biting would cease to obtain. So if the obtaining of a relation requires the existence of all its relata, it follows that intentionality is not a relation between a thinker (or his thought) and an external object. But if intentionality is not a relation, then how are we to account for the fact that intentional states refer beyond themselves to objects that are (typically) transcendent of the mind?

Now it seems to me that any viable solution must respect the primacy of the intentional over the linguistic. This thesis consists of the following subtheses:

1. Words, phrases, clauses, sentences, paragraphs and the like, considered in their physical being as marks on paper or sounds in the air or carvings in stone (etc.) are entirely lacking in any intrinsic referential, representative, semantic, or intentional character. There is nothing in the nature of the mark 'red' that makes it mean red. After all, it doesn't mean red to a speaker of German. It doesn't mean anything to a speaker of German qua speaker of German. In German 'rot' means red while in English the same sign is in use but has a different meaning. Clearly, then, marks on paper, pixels on a computer screen, etc. have no intrinsic sense or reference grounded in their very nature. It is a matter of convention that they mean what they mean. And that brings minds into the picture.

Mind is king. Mind is the source of meaning. No mind, no meaning.

2. So any sense or reference linguistic signs have must be derivative and relational as opposed to intrinsic: whatever intentionality they have they get from minds that are intrinsically intentional. Mind is the source of all intelligibility. Linguistic signs in and of themselves as mere marks and sounds (etc.) are unintelligible.

3. There can be mind without language, but no language without mind. Laird Addis puts it like this:

Conscious states can and do occur in beings with no language, and in us with no apparent connection to the fact that we are beings with language. Thus we may say that "mind explains language" in a logical or philosophical sense: that while it is perfectly intelligible to suppose the existence of beings who have no language but have much the same kinds of conscious states that we have, including introspections of other conscious states, it is unintelligible to suppose the existence of beings who are using language in all of its representative functions and who are also lacking in conscious states. The very notion of language as a representational system presupposes the notion of mind, but not vice versa. (Natural Signs: A Theory of Intentionality, Temple University Press, 1989, pp. 64-65)

Types, Tokens, and Logical Form

Black text by London Ed; my comments in blue.

Consider:

This parcel of land on the Thames is a bank.
A bank contains money.
*This parcel of land on the Thames contains money.

The two tokens of ‘bank’ are tokens of the same type, if I understand you correctly. So does the Thames argument above instantiate the following valid form?

This is an F
Every F is G
This F is G

Let's start with a Moorean fact: the argument is bad! But why is it bad? (Now we begin to philosophize.) Is it because one of the premises is false? Or because the reasoning is incorrect? That distinction, the one between truth/falsity of propositions and correctness/incorrectness of reasoning, would also seem to be Moorean, or damned near.

There are two approaches. One is to say that the Thames argument is valid because it it instantiates the valid form depicted, but that it is nevertheless unsound because the first premise is false. The other approach is to say that the argument involves an equivocation on 'bank' such that the argument falls afoul of quaternio terminorum, which is of course a formal fallacy. Thus on the second approach, the argument is invalid (because it instantiates an invalid form), but both premises are true.

Either way, the Thames argument is unsound. On the first approach it is unsound because it sports a false premise; on the second, because it has an invalid form.

'Unsound' is a terminus technicus; a term of the logician's art. 'Bad' is from ordinary language. But if we are talking about deductive arguments, the former term is a very close exegesis or exfoliation if you will of the Joe Sixpack word.

You seem to hold that if we substitute concrete tokens of the same type, then the resulting argument instantiates the form. And you also hold that to be a token of the same type means having the same spelling, and no more than that.

It’s the ‘and no more than that’ that I am having a problem with. I hold, and this is hardly an extreme or unorthodox position, that identically-spelled tokens can have (and often do have) different meanings, because meaning is a matter of convention. Sameness of spelling is never enough.

This forces me to think hard. We enter deep and troubled waters below the Moorean surface. Suppose Poindexter's (weak!) password at the money bank is kzw9*. Now consider this array:

kzw9*
kzw9*
kzw9*

How many passwords? One or three? A simple solution to this puzzle is to say that there are three tokens of the same type. (Note that a password need not be a word, though it can be ('password' is one dumbassed password): the above passwords are not words of any natural language.) The type in question here is not a word-type: it has no linguistic meaning. No token of this type has sense or reference.

It is like a key that unlocks a door. A token of a key-type has neither sense nor reference. it is just a little piece of metal that fits into the lock, etc. It has no semantic properties. Its properties are geometrical, metallurgical, and the like.

Now a word-token has a physical side, a body if you will. Thus 'bank' — that particular string of marks — has geometrical properties, color, etc. But it is not a word in virtue of being a physical item. It is a word only when animated by sense. Perhaps we could say that the sense is the soul of the word whose body is the physical sign.

So we need to distinguish two types. There is the physical type a token of which is the string of marks, 'bank.' And there is the word-type a token of which is the word, 'bank.'

Now I can answer Ed. He wrote,

You seem to hold that if we substitute concrete tokens of the same type, then the resulting argument instantiates the form. And you also hold that to be a token of the same type means having the same spelling, and no more than that.

That is not my view. For two words to be tokens of the same word-type it does not suffice that they have the same spelling. In fact, it is not even necessary: 'tire' and 'tyre' are (arguably) tokens of the same English word-type even though they are spelled differently.

Spelling pertains to the physical side of a word. For two tokens to be of the same word-type they must be animated by the same meaning.

Returning to the Thames argument, it is clear that there are two tokens of the 'bank' string-of-marks type. But whether there are two tokens of the same word-type or not depends on what the speaker intended.

We cannot extract the logical form of an argument be examining its physical features. We have to understand what the constituent sentences mean, and to understand what they mean, we have to understand what their constituent terms mean.

Meaning cannot be reduced to anything physical or to anything merely syntactical. Meaning brings mind into the picture. No mind, no meaning. This is why I insist that linguistic reference cannot be understood unless we understand what underlies it, mental reference, i.e., intentionality.

Contemporary Anti-Natalism

A tip of the hat to Karl White for bringing to our attention a 2012 issue of South African Journal of Philosophy devoted entirely to the above-captioned topic. Free online access!

Validity and Semantics: Will the Real Frodo Baggins Please Stand Up?

London Ed writes,

It is a well-known and puzzling fact that proper names are ambiguous. According to the US telephone directory, Frodo Baggins is a real person (who lives in Ohio). But according to LOTR, Frodo Baggins is a hobbit. Not a problem. The name ‘Frodo Baggins’ as used in LOTR, clearly has a different meaning from when used to talk about the person in Ohio. So the argument below is invalid:

Frodo Baggins is a hobbit
Frodo Baggins is not a hobbit
Some hobbit is not a hobbit.

This is because both premisses could be true, but the conclusion could not be true. So your claim that the validity of arguments using fictional names has ‘nothing to do with any semantic property’ is incorrect.

Well, ex contradictione quodlibet. Since anything follows from a contradiction, the conclusion of the above syllogism follows from the premises. So the above argument is valid in that it instantiates a valid argument-form, namely:

p
~p
—
q

Obviously, there is no argument of the above form that has true premises and a false conclusion. So every argument of that form is valid or truth-preserving.

You invoke a Moorean fact. But we have to be very clear as to the identity of this fact.

It is a Moorean fact that proper names, taken in abstraction from the circumstances of their thoughtful use, are not, well, proper. They are common, or ambiguous as you say. It is no surprise that some dude in Ohio rejoices under the name 'Frodo Baggins.'

But so taken, a name has no semantic properties: it doesn't mean anything. It is just a physical phenomenon, whether marks on paper or a sequence of sounds, etc. Pronounce the sounds corresponding to 'bill,' 'john, 'dick.' Is 'dick' a name or a common noun, and for what? How many dicks in this room? How many detectives? How many penises? How many disagreeable males, 'pricks'? How many men named 'Dick'? Consider the multiple ambiguity of 'There are more dicks than johns in the room but the same number of bills.'

A name that has meaning (whether or not it refers to anything) is always a name used by a mind (not a voice synthesizing machine) in definite circumstances. For example, if the context is a discussion of LOTR, then my use and yours of 'Frodo' has meaning: it means a character in that work, despite the fact that in reality there is no individual named. And as long as we stay in that context, the name has the same meaning.

And the same holds in the context of argument. In your argument above 'Frodo Baggins' has the same meaning in both premises.

You can't have it both ways: you can't maintain that 'Frodo Baggins' is a meaningless string that could mean anything in any occurrence (a fictional character, a real man, his dog, a rock group, a town, etc.) AND that it figures as a term in an argument.

To sum up. Whether a deductive argument is valid or not depends on its logcal form. If there is a valid form it instantiates, then it is valid. The validity of the form is inherited by the argument having that form. But form abstracts from semantic content. So the specific meaning of a name is irrelevant to the evaluation of the validity of an argument in which the name figures. But of course it is always assumed that names are used in the same sense in all of their occurrences in an argument. So only in this very abstract sense is meaning relevant to the assessment of validity.