May 2014 – Page 2 – Maverick Philosopher

Global Warming: Questions That Need Distinguishing

My posting of the graphic to the left indicates that I am a skeptic about global warming (GW). To be precise, I am skeptical about some, not all, of the claims made by the GW activists. See below for some necessary distinctions. Skepticism is good. Doubt is the engine of inquiry and a key partner in the pursuit of truth.

A skeptic is a doubter, not a denier. To doubt or inquire or question whether such-and-such is the case is not to deny that it is the case. It is a cheap rhetorical trick of GW alarmists when they speak of GW denial and posture as if it is in the ball park of Holocaust denial.

What can a philosopher say about global warming? The first thing he can and ought to say is that, although not all questions are empirical, at the heart of the global warming debate are a set of empirical questions. These are not questions for philosophers qua philosophers, let alone for political ideologues. For the resolution of these questions we must turn to reputable climatologists whose roster does not sport such names as 'Al Gore,' 'Barbra Streisand,' or 'Ann Coulter.' Unfortunately, the global warming question is one that is readily 'ideologized' and the ideological gas bags of both the Right and the Left have a lot to answer for in this regard.

I have not investigated the matter with any thoroughness, and I have no firm opinion. It is difficult to form an opinion because it is difficult to know whom to trust: reputable scientists have their ideological biases too, and if they work in universities, the leftish climate in these hotbeds of political correctness is some reason to be skeptical of anything they say.

For example, let's say scientist X teaches at Cal Berkeley and is a registered Democrat. One would have some reason to question his credibility. He may well tilt toward socialism and away from capitalism and be tempted to beat down capitalism with the cudgel of global warming. Equally, a climatologist on the payroll of the American Enterprise Institute would be suspect. I am not suggesting that objectivity is impossible to attain; I am making the simple point that it is difficult to attain and that scientists have worldview biases like everyone else. And like everyone else, they are swayed by such less-than-noble motives as the desire to advance their careers and be accepted by their peers. And who funds global warming research? What are their biases? And who gets the grants? And what conclusions do you need to aim at to get funded? It can't be a bad idea to "follow the money" as the saying goes.

1. Clearly defined terminology.
2. Quantifiability.
3. Highly controlled conditions. "A scientifically rigorous study maintains direct control over as many of the factors that influence the outcome as possible. The experiment is then performed with such precision that any other person in the world, using identical materials and methods, should achieve the exact same result."
4. Reproducibility. "A rigorous science is able to reproduce the same result over and over again. Multiple researchers on different continents, cities, or even planets should find the exact same results if they precisely duplicated the experimental conditions."
5. Predictability and Testability. "A rigorous science is able to make testable predictions."

These characteristics set the bar for strict science very high, and rightly so. Is climate science science according to these criteria? No, it falls short on #s 3 and 4. At the hardest hard core of the hard sciences lies the physics of meso-phenomena. Climatology does not come close to this level of 'hardness.' So don't be bamboozled: don't imagine that the prestige of physics transfers undiminished onto climatology. It is pretty speculative stuff and much of it is ideologically infected.

Philosophy Always Resurrects Its Dead

First posted 8 February 2011. Time for a re-run.

Etienne Gilson famously remarked that "Philosophy always buries its undertakers." That is the first of his "laws of philosophical experience." (The Unity of Philosophical Experience, Scribners, 1937, p. 306) As a metaphilosophical pronunciamento it is hard to beat. It is equally true that philosophy always resurrects its dead. Let that be my first law. The history of natural science is littered with corpses, none of which is an actual or potential Lazarus. Not so in philosophy.

None of the classical problems has ever been demonstrated to be a pseudoproblem pace Wittgenstein, Carnap and such epigoni as Morris Lazerowitz; none of the major theories proposed in solution of them has ever been refuted once and for all; no school of thought has been finally discredited.

Thomism, to take an example, was once largely confined to the academic backwaters of Catholic colleges where sleepy Jesuits taught the ancient lore from dusty scholastic manuals to bored jocks. (I am not being entirely fair, but fair enough for a blog post.) But in the last twenty years an increasing number of sharp analytic heads have penetrated the scholastic arcana and have been serving up some fairly rigorous forward-looking stuff that engages with contemporary analytic work in a way that was simply beyond the abilities of (most) of the sleepy Jesuits and old-time scholastics.

Gilbert Ryle once predicted with absurd confidence, "Gegenstandstheorie . . . is dead, buried, and not going to be resurrected." (Quoted in G. Priest, Towards Non-Being, Oxford, 2005, p. vi, n. 1.) Ryle was wrong, dead wrong, and shown to be wrong just a few years after his cocky prediction. Variations on Meinong's Theory of Objects flourish like never before due to the efforts of such brilliant philosophers as Butchvarov, Castaneda, Lambert, Parsons, Priest, Routley/Sylvan, and Zalta, just to mention those that come first to mind. And the Rylean cockiness has had an ironic upshot: his logical behaviorism is temporarily dead while Meinongianism thrives. But Ryle too will be raised if my parallel law of philosophical experience — Philosophy always resurrects its dead — holds.

It may be worth noting that if philosophy resurrects its dead then it can be expected to raise the anti-philosophical (and therefore philosophical) positions of philosophy's would-be undertakers. Philosophy, she's a wily bitch: you can't outflank her and she always ends up on top.

How Much Time for Philosophy? Part II

Dear Bill,

Thanks for that post!

Here are my two simple comments:

How much time should one spend on philosophy? "A good chunk of the day," you say; assuming that one is above all else interested in truth (about ultimate issues) and/or in the Absolute. But should one be interested in either of these? That's a philosophical problem. And I guess that in your view philosophy can't settle it: philosophically, it is as reasonable to be interested as not to be.

Even assuming that kind of interest, why do philosophy a good chunk of the day? Once one has toiled through the central apories of philosophy, something like glancing at their concise list may be sufficient. I mean sufficient for what you want from philosophy: intellectual humility and appreciation of the question what, if anything, lies beyond the limits of the discursive intellect and how one may gain access to it.

Best,

Dear V.,

Thank you for your comments which are both penetrating and very useful to me.

Response 1. Philosophers (the real ones, not mere academic functionaries) seek the ultimate truth about the ultimate matters. I take it we agree on that. But should one seek the ultimate truth about the ultimate matters? You rightly point out that whether one should or shouldn't (or neither) is itself a philosophical problem. And you also clearly see that if the problems of philosophy are insoluble, then this particular problem is insoluble. And if it is insoluble, then philosophy is no more reasonable to pursue than to eschew.

Well, I accept the consequence. But it is reasonable to pursue philosophy, and that suffices to justify my pursuit of it. And who knows? Perhaps I will definitively solve one or more philosophical problems to the satisfaction of all competent practioners. You understand that I do not claim to know (with certainty) that the insolubility thesis is true. My claim is merely that it is a reasonable conjecture based on some two and a half millenia of philosophical experience. It is reasonable to conjecture that no problem has ever been solved by us because no problem is soluble by us. I expect the future to be like the past. (But then so did Russell's chicken who expected to be fed on the day the farmer wrung his neck.)

Response 2. Let's assume that the pursuit of philosophy is reasonable and worthwhile for some of us as an end in itself (and not because we are paid to do it, or teach it.) But why continue with it day after day for many hours each day? As you put it so well, why does it not suffice to glance from time to time at a concise list of the central apories to gain the promised benefits of intellectual humility and the motivation to look beyond philosophy for routes to truth?

There are several considerations.

1. There is the sheer intellectual pleasure that people like us derive from thinking and writing about the problems of philosophy. The strangeness of the ordinary entrances us and we find disciplined wondering about it deeply satisfying. We humans like doing well what we have the power to do, and those of us who like thinking and writing and entering into dialog with the like-minded are made happy by these pursuits even if solutions are out of the reach of mortals. What Siegbert Tarrasch said of chess is also true of philosophy, "Like love, like music, it has the power to make men happy."

2. Then there is the humanizing effect of the study of the great problems. Bear in mind that for me the problems are genuine and deep and some of them are of great human importance. They are not artifacts of non-workaday uses of language, nor are they sired by erroneous empirical assumptions or remediable logical errors. I firmly reject their Wittgensteinian and 'Wittgenfreudian' dismissal, or any other sort of anti-philosophical dismissal or denigration. (Morris Lazerowitz was a 'Wittgenfreudian,' or, if you prefer, 'Freudensteinian.') So it is deeply humanizing to wrestle with the problems of philosophy. We are brought face to face with our predicament in this life. To change the metaphor, we are driven deep into it.

3. It is also important to grapple with the problems of philosophy and plumb their depths so that we can mount effective critiques against the scientistic junk solutions that are constantly being put forth in once good but now crappy publications such as Scientific American and peddled by sophists and philosophical know-nothings like Lawrence Krauss.

4. Since it is not the case that all solutions are equally good or equally bad, it is useful to know which are better and which worse. Even if the mind-body problem is ultimately insoluble, some 'solutions' can be known to be either worthless or highly unlikely to be true. Eliminative materialism is a prime candidate for the office of nonsense theory.

5. Since the insolubility thesis as I intend it is put forth tentatively and non-dogmatically, it must be continually tested. This is done by trying to solve the problems. The insolubility thesis is not an excuse for intellectual laziness.

6. But perhaps the most important point is that philosophy, pursued in the manner of the radical aporetician, can itself be a spiritual practice. This is a large topic, and brevity is the soul of blog; so I'll content myself with a brief indication.

The insolubilia of Western philosophy, if insoluble they are, could be likened to the koans of the Zen Buddhists. The point of working on a koan is to precipitate a break-through to satori or kensho by a transcending of the discursive intellect.

If you said to the Zen man that he is wasting his time puzzling over insoluble koans, he would reply that you are missing the point. "The point is not to solve them, but to break on through to the other side, to open the doors of perception beyond the discursive to the nondual."

We Were Under CyberAttack Yesterday

Typepad bloggers were subjected to yet further outages yesterday, outages Typepad claims were caused by a Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attack. Every outage an outrage to the 'blogsessive.' Let's hope we don't see a repeat of April's fiasco.

So I managed to snag only 744 pageviews yesterday. But traffic is overall good. 15 May saw a surge of 2298. And a few days ago I passed the 2.5 million pageviews mark. Presently total page views for this third version of MavPhil, commenced on Halloween 2008, stand at 2,503,919.

That averages to 1,235.28 pageviews per day. Total posts including this one: 5098. Total comments: 7018.

I thank you for your patronage.

An Inferential Semantics for Empty Names?

London Ed submits this for our evaluation:

While apparently conceding that empty proper names have an 'inferential role', rightly underscores the need for me to demonstrate that its meaning is just this role, i.e. to demonstrate that the 'inferential semantics' is a sufficient as well as a necessary explanation of (empty) proper names.

Here are some arguments to elucidate this inferential role, and to show that it is sufficient to explain everything we need to know about empty proper names (indeed, all proper names, but leave that aside for now).

Argument 1. Proper names are neither descriptive nor object-dependent.

Consider the meaning of the following two sentences:

There is a hobbit called 'Frodo'. Frodo has large feet.

I have argued that at least part of the semantics of the proper name 'Frodo' is to join the predicate 'hobbit' in the first sentence to the predicate 'has large feet' in the second. It allows us to infer 'some hobbit has large feet'. And by repeated use of this inference in successive propositions in a narrative, it allows us to connect an increasingly complex description to each character in the narrative. It tells us which character we are talking 'about' by telling us which description to increase. Does it have any further function than this? Is it descriptive? Does it mean something like "hobbit called 'Frodo'"? No, for consider

There is a hobbit called 'Frodo'. There is another hobbit called 'Frodo'.

Clearly if there can be two characters in a narrative with the same name (as sometimes there are), the indefinite description 'called N' is not sufficient to individuate the character. Or consider

There is a hobbit called 'Frodo'. Frodo might not have been called 'Frodo'

This implies 'some hobbit called Frodo might not have been called Frodo', which is not inconsistent, so long as 'some hobbit' is read with wide scope. I won't argue this at length here, but it is easy to show that all the arguments which Kripke levels at the description theory of names can be reused or reinterpreted in the case of empty names. But if an empty proper name is non-descriptive and if there is no object that it corresponds to (either real or intentional), the simplest explanation is that its meaning is its inferential properties.

BV Comment 1. I take it that your view is that no indefinite or definite description supplies the meaning (sense) of any empty name. You rely on Kripke-type arguments. But distinguish:

a. Reference is not routed through sense, but direct

and

b. Names lack sense entirely.

It might be that while the reference of a name is not routed through an associated sense, the name nevertheless has a sense. Your view, however, rules that out. And doesn't Kripke speak of a sense that "fixes the reference" of a name without being part of the mechanism by which reference is achieved? But let's not get sidetracked into Kripke exegesis!

If I understand you, you want to maintain that names and other singular referring devices such as indexicals and demonstratives are purely syntactical devices. I honestly don't see how that could be true. I gave the example earlier of the first-person singular pronoun. Assume that when Frodo says 'I am hungry' he refers directly to Frodo and not via a special reference-mediating I-sense. Still, any use of 'I' has as part of its meaning that a producer of such a linguistic token is a person or a (potentially) self-conscious being, a being that can speak or think.

In this connection, David Kaplan speaks of character as opposed to content. "The character of an expression is set by linguistic conventions and, in turn, determines the content of the expression in every context." (Themes from Kaplan, p. 505) The character of the pure indexical 'I' is given by the rule:

'I' refers to the speaker or writer. (505)

My criticism, then, is that if the semantics of singular referring devices reduces to the inferential roles these words play, then there is no accounting for Kaplanian content since that does not vary with context or inferential role.

Leaving aside idexicals and demonstratives, all or most names seem to have associated with them a semantic content which cannot be reduced to the purely syntactical. Consider the song Carmelita about an apparently purely fictional character named 'Carmelita.' That name carries the sense 'female.' And the same goes for the wicked Felina in Marty Robbins' El Paso. There are male names, female names, and unisex names. If Carl is married to Carla, then you know the marriage is not same-sex.

Argument 2. Referential insulation

Consider the first sentence above: "There is a hobbit called 'Frodo'". This is indefinite, i.e. it does not tell us which hobbit is called 'Frodo'. Specifically, even if hobbits are mentioned in some earlier part of the narrative, this sentence on its own does not generate any further inferences about hobbits. It is a 'referential insulator', it does not 'refer backwards' to any previous sentence.The second sentence "Frodo has large feet", by contrast, does refer back. But only to the first sentence. Any third sentence can refer back to this one, and a fourth sentence to the third, and we can construct a whole referential chain, each of which refers back to the previous link. But the chain stops at the first sentence, the insulating sentence. This suggests that the second definite sentence, or back-referring sentence, has meaning only insofar as it refers back. But its back-reference is exhausted by its inferential properties. Ergo etc.

BV Comment 2. Suppose I grant the the meaning of 'Frodo' in the second sentence is exhausted by its back reference to 'Frodo' in the first sentence. This back reference is entirely intralinguistic: it is a word-word relation, not a word-world relation. So far, so good. Consider this quantified sentence:

(Ex) (x is a hobbit called 'Frodo' & x has large feet).

'Frodo' in the second sentence — 'Frodo has large feet' — plays the role of the second bound variable in the above quantified sentence, and that role is purely syntactical. The second sentence is synonomous with 'He has large feet' in the context in question.

So perhaps what you are up to is this: You want to construe names as pronouns used anaphorically as opposed to demonstratively. You are of course aware of the ambiguity of a sentence like 'Feser inscribed his book.' That could mean that Feser inscribed Feser's book, in which case 'his' is being used anaphorically, or it could mean that Feser inscribed some other person's book, in which case 'his' is being used demonstratively. Suppose I say 'Feser inscribed his book' while pointing to Peter. Then 'his' refers to an extralingusitc item, Peter. On the first disambiguation, however, 'his' is syntactically bound to 'Feser' and the reference is an intralinguistic back reference.

Here is the problem. 'Frodo' in the first sentence cannot be construed as a pronoun used anaphorically. You cannot introduce 'Frodo' without packing some meaning into it. And that is exactly what you do when you say that Frodo is a hobbit. Surely you don't think that 'hobbit' is a purely syntactical device. We agree of course that 'hobbit' has a null extension, but it must have some intension, and that intension cannot be reduced to syntax. Hence 'Frodo' when first introduced has to have some meaning that is irreducible to syntax or inferential role.

Even if back reference is exhausted by inferential properties, and the meaning of a back-referring term reduces to its syntactic role, surely the meaning of a name — even if it is empty — cannot on its first introduction be reduced to its syntactic role.

In short, your "ergo, etc." is a non sequitur.

Argument 3. Definition not object-dependent.

The definition of the name 'Frodo' occurs in the first sentence ("There is a hobbit called 'Frodo'"). This tells us that any subsequent usage of 'Frodo' refers back to this sentence. But it is a general existential proposition. On the assumption that general existential propositions aren't object-dependent, it follows that we can define a proper name without requiring an object. Given that we can define its meaning without having an object, it follows that its meaning is not object-dependent.

BV Comment 3: This argument seems OK in relation to empty names. Do you mean it to apply to non-empty names as well?

Argument 4. Pronouns are not object-dependent.

Consider

There is a hobbit called 'Frodo'. He has large feet.

Clearly the pronoun 'he' refers back to the first sentence, not to any object. But the two sentences together do not signify any more than the two 'Frodo' sentences above. But if the two 'Frodo' sentences have the same meaning as two object-independent sentences, it follows that the two 'Frodo' sentences are object-independent also.

BV Comment 4. To be true, your thesis has to be modified: Pronouns used anaphorically are not object-dependent.

Suppose you don't know that prosciutto is called 'prosciutto.' But you want some anyway and you know what it looks like. You belly up to the deli counter, point to the delectable item, and say 'I want some of this!' Surely the meaning of the demonstrative pronoun 'this' in this context is object-dependent.

But the same goes for the pure indexical 'I.' The indexical reference is achieved without a demonstration — there is no need to point to oneself when saying 'I' — but 'I' is secure against reference failure. One cannot token 'I' without referring to something. So 'I' used indexically — not as a Roman numeral say — is object-dependent for its meaning.

Hylo- or Hylemorphic?

The first footnote to Patrick Toner's "Hylemorphic Animalism" (Phil. Studies, 2011, 155: 65-81) reads:

The more common spelling is "hylomorphic," but David Oderberg has convinced me to substitute this spelling. After all, the Greek term in question is hyle, not hylo.

By this reasoning we should write 'cruxade,' 'cruxiform,' and 'cruxial' instead of the standard 'crusade,' 'cruciform,' and 'crucial.' After all, the Latin term in question is crux, not crus or cruc.

Furthermore, why not write 'hylemorphec' rather than 'hylemorphic'? After all, the Greek term in question is morphe, not morphi.

Why don't we write 'polisology' and 'polisics' rather than 'politology' and 'politics'? After all, the Greek term in question is polis, not polit.

And why don't we write 'morphelogy,' and 'gelogy' and 'gemetry' rather than 'morphology,' 'geology,' and 'geometry'? After all, etc.

What am I missing?

For a conservative there is a defeasible presumption in favor of traditional ways of doing things. Note 'defeasible.' Conservatives are not opposed to change; they are opposed to unnecessary and foolish and deleterious and change-for-the-sake-of-change change. You could say that they are opposed to Obaminable change.

Addendum (18 May)

Ed Feser writes,

I had this debate with David years ago and initially defended "hylomorphism" precisely on the conservative grounds that that is the standard usage. (You'll notice that in my book Philosophy of Mind I use "hylomorphism.") However, "hylemorphism" is not David's invention, and when I was writing the Aquinas book I found that some (though of course not all) of the old manuals did indeed use "hylemorphism." So there hasn't in fact been uniformity on the spelling. Hence I decided "Fine, what the heck." I'm not committed to it the way David is, though.

I am aware that 'hylemorphism' is not Oderberg's invention and that this spelling has also been used. But unless I am badly mistaken, the 'hylo' forms occur more frequently that the 'hyle' forms. So while Oderberg's usage is not an innovation, it does go against standard usage. That's one consideration. Another is euphony. The 'hylo' compounds roll right off the tongue; the 'hyle' forms are slightly 'stickier.' But your tongue may vary. And then there are the considerations adduced above.

It just now occurs to me that there is one instance where the 'o' would be out of place. Edmund Husserl speaks of hyletische Daten, the translation being 'hyletic data.' Here the 'e' satisfies the exigencies of euphony quite nicely.

This is surely no earth-shaking matter. But on one way of looking at things it is wonderful that civilization has advanced to such a point that large numbers of people can spend time discussing such a scholarly punctilio.

Automotive Frugality

Keith Burgess-Jackson is one frugal dude:

I've had only three vehicles in the past 31 years: (1) a 1976 Oldsmobile Cutlass, purchased from my brother Glenn in May 1983; (2) a 1989 Pontiac Grand Am, purchased new in August 1989; and (3) a 2007 Honda Accord, purchased new in February 2007. How many vehicles have you had in the past 31 years?

In one sense old Keith has me beat. I've owned four cars during this time period: (1) a 1978 VW bus purchased used in spring '79; (2) a 1988 Jeep Cherokee bought new at Thanksgiving 1987; (3) a low-mileage, immaculate, 2005 Jeep Liberty Renegade 'stolen' used for a paltry $12 K on St. Valentine's Day, 2009; (4) a 2013 Jeep Wrangler Sport purchased new at Thanksgiving 2012.

So I've owned four vehicles during the period when Keith owned three.

But there is a sense in which I have him beat: I owned the Cherokee for over 21 years, whereas the longest he has owned a vehicle appears to be less than eight years.

The old Cherokee is celebrated in the first article below.

In my whole life I have owned only four cars, the ones mentioned and a 1963 Karmann Ghia convertible purchased for $650 from my half-brother in 1969. The license plate read: GOE 069. I kid you not. I sold it in 1973 when I headed east for grad school. I should have kept it. Just like I should never have sold that Gibson ES 335 TD. That was the dumbest thing I ever did.

Cat Blogging Friday! Tara the Cat Saves Boy from Dog Attack

Some say that cats are opportunistic and disloyal. A sterling counterinstance.

Are Problems in Applied Ethics Insoluble?

Long-time Pakistani reader A. A. presents me with a nice challenging question:

You hold the view that the central problems of philosophy are insoluble. I assume that also includes central questions of ethics and meta-ethics, such as the existence of objective moral values. What implication does this have, however, for the more peripheral and applied problems of ethics, such as the moral status of abortion? Does it imply that they are also essentially insoluble?

Consistency demands that I drive to the end of the road. So yes, my metaphilosophical thesis implies that the moral problem of abortion, for example, is insoluble. Does the fact that I must, on pain of inconsistency, draw this conclusion amount to an objection to my metaphilosophy? Let's see.

One objection might run as follows. "If you are a solubility skeptic, then you can't take a position for or against the morality of abortion. But you yourself have argued over many posts against the moral permissibility of abortion. You do take a position. Therefore, at the end of the day you are not a solubility skeptic."

I don't think this objection need cause me any trouble. For it is consistent with what I maintain that I also maintain that some arguments on a topic are better than others, and that some are good enough to win our tentative assent, an assent sufficient to justify action in support of our causes. One can be a solubility skeptic and also maintain that some arguments are very bad and bare of probative force. Consider the Woman's Body Argument:

1. The fetus is a part of a woman's body.
2. A woman has the right to do whatever she wants with any part of her body.
Therefore
3. A woman has the right to do whatever she wants with the fetus, including having it killed.

This is clearly a very bad argument, involving as it does an equivocation on the term 'part.' For an analysis in depth, see here.

The Potentiality Argument, however, is a good argument. It is not open to any obvious refutation, despite what some people erroneously think. But it is not an absolutely compelling argument. For one thing, its underlying nomenclature and conceptuality is broadly Aristotelian: there is talk of potency and act, substance and accident, and so on. The broadly Aristotelian metaphysical framework, though defensible and ably defended by many, is however not without its difficulties, some of which are explored in my Aristotle category. These age-old difficulties bleed into the Potentiality Argument, rendering it less than absolutely rationally compelling.

Any argument in applied ethics will rest on normative-ethical and meta-ethical presuppositions, with these in turn resting on metaphysical presuppositions. Starting at the periphery with the problems of applied ethics we are ineluctably drawn toward the center where the core problems live. For example, any discussion about the morality of abortion will lead to questions about rights and duties, the nature of persons, identity over time, the nature of change, and many others besides. The insolubility of the core problems extends to the peripheral problems. But this does not prevent us from taking definite rationally defensible stands on such issues as abortion.

The Illiberalism of Contemporary ‘Liberals’

Go Kirsten! Kirsten Powers has it all: beauty, brains, and the female equivalent of that which I was about to refer to using a word I decided not to use. I think I'm in love. And she stands up to Bill O'Reilly displaying grace under pressure when the pugnacious Irishman becomes obnoxious. She's smarter than O'Reilly and she knows it. Bill does too. But hats off to O'Reilly for giving the young whippersnappers a forum and for speaking truth to power lo these many years. He is an inspiring profile in civil courage.

"Speaking truth to power" is a lefty phrase that we need to co-opt. Leftards use the phrase even when they have power. You see, for a lefty, having power is supposedly bad and so they have to pretend that they don't have it even when they do. It's like money in that respect. They like to posture that they are anti-Establishment when they are the Establishment, and that they are dissenting when they are spouting and toeing the party line. They also think they somehow own dissent as if conservatives are somehow barred by the very meaning of the word from dissenting.

In any case, Miss Powers really hits the nail on the head in her column: Here is some of it and it ought to anger you with a righteous anger:

Don't bother trying to make sense of what beliefs are permitted and which ones will get you strung up in the town square. Our ideological overlords have created a minefield of inconsistency. While criticizing Islam is intolerant, insulting Christianity is sport. Ayaan Hirsi Ali is persona non grata at Brandeis University for attacking the prophet Mohammed. But Richard Dawkins describes the Old Testament God as "a misogynistic … sadomasochistic … malevolent bully" and the mob yawns. Bill Maher calls the same God a "psychotic mass murderer" and there are no boycott demands of the high-profile liberals who traffic his HBO show.

The self-serving capriciousness is crazy. In March, University of California-Santa Barbara women's studies professor Mireille Miller-Young attacked a 16-year-old holding an anti-abortion sign in the campus' "free speech zone" (formerly known as America). Though she was charged with theft, battery and vandalism, Miller-Young remains unrepentant and still has her job. But Mozilla's Brendan Eich gave a private donation to an anti-gay marriage initiative six years ago and was ordered to recant his beliefs. When he wouldn't, he was forced to resign from the company he helped found.

Got that? A college educator with the right opinions can attack a high school student and keep her job. A corporate executive with the wrong opinions loses his for making a campaign donation. Something is very wrong here.

As the mob gleefully destroys people's lives, its members haven't stopped to ask themselves a basic question: What happens when they come for me? If history is any guide, that's how these things usually end.

Powers is a Dem. But she's young; give her time.

Joachim Fest, Not I

One of the books I am reading is Joachim Fest's Not I: Memories of a German Childhood (orig. publ. in German in 2006 by Rowohlt, tr. Martin Chalmers, New York, Other Press, 2013).

The title alludes to Mark 14:29: "But Peter said unto him, Although all shall be offended, yet will not I."

WSJ review by T. J. Reed here. I reproduce a sizeable chunk of it in case it ends up behind a pay wall:

The [Fest] family lives under a shadow. Their dissent is no secret. Father had been a member of the Reichsbanner, the organization in which his Catholic Centre Party had joined with liberals and Social Democrats to defend the republic against Communists and Nazis. It's not every school headmaster who gets involved in street fights and comes home bloody, as Johannes Fest did. But after 1933 he was a headmaster no longer, suspended indefinitely by the new political masters. The family's status and income were lost, their lives transformed. Grandfather had to come out of retirement to earn a bit for them. Father never worked again. The Nazis did try to cajole him back into teaching, since any observable dissent was bad publicity. They even offered accelerated promotion if he would outwardly conform. He remained firm.

Family tension became palpable. Mother, bearing the brunt of straitened family circumstances, asks Father if he might not compromise. Weren't lies always the resort of the "little people"? He replies: "We aren't little people." It is one of the maxims that guided the conduct of Fest's father and a few friends. (The title of his son's memoir comes from a Gospel passage that he would often quote, Peter promising Jesus: "Even if all others fall away—not I.") There were some Germans who made sure that they were carrying something in both hands when they went out into the street, the only plausible ground for not giving the required "Heil Hitler" salute to anyone they met. But Fest's father goes out resolutely empty-handed.

"Keep your head down," Johannes [father of Joachim] told his family, "but don't let it make you smaller." Young Joachim didn't always listen. A classmate reports him for carving a Hitler caricature on his desk. (He has been scribbling them on surfaces all over town.) As a consequence, he is removed from the school; his brothers too. The episode is just one instance of an independence akin to his father's.

The friends of the Fests—they now became former friends—and many neighbors and acquaintances fell by the wayside, even without being keen Nazis. Only one of the 12 families in the apartment block was in the party. The rest merely went along as things changed, drifting deeper into acquiescence, making excuses even as stable social and political structures fell apart in the name of a new "people's community." The Nazis, after all, were formally the legitimate government, however brutal their conduct of affairs—from the realm of international diplomacy to the arbitrary laws that replaced justice down to the small changes in everyday life, the swindles and favoritism of party members.

By recording these small changes, Joachim Fest creates a picture of how the one-party state operated on an intimate level, and exerted its unbreakable grip. It recalls the bleak account of incremental misery in Victor Klemperer's diaries of the period. A woman sees a Jewish-looking man in the street not wearing a star, pursues and denounces him. There are first rumors and then reliable evidence of atrocities.

Anti-Semitism had considerably more popular resonance than many other Nazi policies, such as the campaign for "Lebensraum" in the east. How many Germans would have wanted to up sticks and resettle somewhere on the vast Russian plains? As for Jewish Germans themselves, even after Kristallnacht there were those who waited for the Nazi "phase" to pass. Their trust in a culture that had produced Kant, Goethe, Schiller, Lessing and Beethoven, a culture into which they felt they had assimilated, meant that they delayed escape too long.

But was it German culture that produced Kant, Goethe, et al.? Or was it the Graeco-Roman and Judeo-Christian culture that had its sources in Athens and Jerusalem? That is one question. A second question is whether talk of production is anywhere near adequate, whether any culture could produce such geniuses as opposed merely to providing a fertile soil in which they developed themselves.

A third question is whether we are not now drifting toward a totalitarian unculture in which the slightest deviations from politically correct modes of thought and speech bring down drastic punishments on those who think they can speak their minds in private and in public without fear of reprisal from illiberal 'liberals.'

How Much Time Should be Spent on Philosophy?

Our Czech friend Vlastimil Vohanka writes,

You blogged that doing philosophy has great value in itself; even if philosophy is aporetic. But how often, or how long per day or month, should one devote to it? Doing philosophy seems (to me at least) to have diminishing returns, if philosophy is aporetic. Or has your experience been different?

My approach to philosophy could be called radically aporetic. Thus I hold not only that philosophy is best approached aporetically, via its problems, but also that its central problems are insoluble. Thus I tend, tentatively and on the basis of inductive evidence, to the view that the central problems of philosophy, while genuine and thus not amenable to Wittgensteinian or other dissolution, are true aporiai, impasses. It is clear that one could take a broadly aporetic approach without subscribing to the insolubility thesis. But I go 'whole hog.' Hence radically aporetic.

I won't explain this any further, having done so elsewhere, but proceed to V.'s question.

I take our friend to be asking the following. How much time ought one devote to philosophy if philosophy is its problems and they are insoluble? But there is a deeper and logically prior question lurking in the background: Why do philosophy at all if its problems are insoluble? What good is philosophy aporetically pursued?

1. It is good in that it conduces to intellectual humility, to an appreciation of our actual predicament in this life, which is one of profound ignorance concerning what would be most worth knowing if we could know it. The aporetic philosopher is a Socratic philosopher, one who knows what he knows and knows what he does not know. The aporetic philosopher is a debunker of epistemic pretense. One sort of epistemic pretense is that of the positive scientists who, succumbing to the temptation to wax philosophical, overstep the bounds of their competence, proposing bogus solutions to philosophical problems, and making incoherent assertions. They often philosophize without knowing it, and they do it incompetently, without self-awareness and self-criticism. I have given many examples of this in these pages. Thus philosophy as I conceive it is an important antidote to scientism. Scientism is an enemy of the humanities and I am a defender of the humanities.

There is also the threat emanating from political ideologies such as communism and leftism and Islamism and their various offshoots. The critique of these and other pernicious worldviews is a task for philosophy. And who is better suited for debunking operations than the aporetician?

2. Beyond its important debunking use, philosophy aporetically pursued has a spiritual point and purpose. If there are indeed absolutely insoluble problems, they mark the boundary of the discursive intellect and point beyond it. Immersion in philosophical problems brings the discursive mind to an appreciation of its limits and raises the question of what, if anything, lies beyond the limits and how one may gain access to it.

I take the old-fashioned view that the ultimate purpose of human life, a purpose to which all others must be subordinated, is to search for, and if possible, participate in the Absolute. There are several approaches to the Absolute, the main ones being philosophy, religion, and mysticism.

The radical aporetician in philosophy goes as far as he can with philosophy, but hits a dead-end, and is intellectually hnest enough to admit that he is at his wit's end. This motivates him to explore other paths to the Absolute, paths via faith/revelation and mystical intuition. The denigration of the latter by most contemporary philosophers merely shows how spiritually benighted and shallow they are, how historically uniformed, and in some cases, how willfully stupid.

But once a philosopher always a philosopher. So the radical aporetician does not cease philosophizing while exploring the other paths; he uses philosophy to chasten the excess of those other paths. And so he denigrates reason as little as he denigrates faith/revelation and mystical intuition. He merely assigns to reason its proper place.

Now to V.'s actual question. How much time for philosophy? A good chunk of every day. Just how much depending on the particular circumstances of one's particular life. But time must also be set aside for prayer and meditation, the reading of the great scriptures, and other religious/ mystical practices.

For one ought to be a truth-seeker above else. But if one is serious about seeking truth, then one cannot thoughtlessly assume that the only access to ultimate truth is via philosophy. A person who refuses to explore other paths is like the churchmen who refused to look through Galileo's telescope. They 'knew' that Aristotle had 'proven' the 'quintessential' perfection of celestial bodies, a perfection that would disallow any such 'blemishes' as craters. So they refused to look and see.

One of my correspondents is a retired philosophy of professor and a Buddhist. He maintains that one ought to spend as much time meditating as one spends on philosophy. So if one philosophizes for five hours per day, then one ought to meditate for five hours per day! A hard saying indeed!

Black Privilege

In the Orwellian world of the leftist loon, black is white, so black privilege, which exists, becomes white privilege, which doesn't.

But there is no point in serious discussion with delusional leftards, so the best course of action is mockery and derision either in the moderate style of Kurt Schlichter or the take-no-prisoners style of Jim Goad.

In the interests of full disclosure, I am not now and never have been a redneck or a Southerner and I don't agree with everything Goad says. But I am heartily sick of lying liberal scum and their endless race-baiting, double-standards, and preternatural dumbassery.

More on Values and Variables and Logical Form: An Aporetic Hexad

David Brightly comments:

. . . my old copy of Alan Hamilton, Logic for Mathematicians, CUP 1978, uses 'statement variables' in his account of the 'statement calculus', as here. The justification for 'variable' is surely that statements have values, namely truth and falsehood. The truth value of a compound statement is calculated from the truth values of its component simple statements by composition of the truth functions corresponding to the logical connectives. This is analogous to the evaluation of an arithmetic expression by composition of arithmetic functions applied to the values of arithmetic variables.

I detect a possible conflation of two senses of 'value.' There is 'value' in the sense of truth value, and there is 'value' in the sense of the value of a variable.

If I am not mistaken, talk of truth values in the strict sense of this phrase enters the history of logic first with Gottlob Frege (1848-1925). Truth and Falsity for him are not properties of propositions, but values of propositional functions. Thus the propositional function denoted by 'x is wise' has True for its value with Socrates as argument, and False for its value with Nero as argument. Please note the ambiguity of 'argument.' We are now engaging in MathSpeak. The analogy with mathematics is obvious. The squaring function has 4 for its value with 2 or -2 as arguments. Propositional functions map their arguments onto the two truth values.

But we also speak in a different sense of the value of a variable. The bound variables in

(x)(x is a man –> x is mortal)

range over real items. These items are the values of the bound variables but they are not truth values. Therefore, one should not confuse 'value' in the sense of truth value with 'value' in the sense of value of a variable. When Quine famously stated that "To be is to be the value of a [bound] variable" he was not referring to truth values.

Brightly says that "The justification for 'variable' is surely that statements have values, namely truth and falsehood." I think that is a mistake that trades on the confusion just exposed. Agreed, statements have truth values. But it doesn't follow that that placeholders for statements are variables.

I was pleased to see that Hamilton observes the distinction I drew several times between an abbreviation and a placeholder. He uses 'label' for 'abbreviation,' but no matter. But I distinguish a placeholder from a variable while Hamilton doesn't.

To appreciate the distinction, first note that with respect to variables we ought to make a three-way distinction among the variable, say 'x,' the value, say Socrates, and the substituend, say 'Socrates.' Now consider the argument:

Tom is tall or Tom is fat
Tom is not tall
——-
Tom is fat

This argument has the form of the Disjunctive Syllogism:

P v Q
~P
——-
Q.

Obviously, 'P' and 'Q' are not abbreviations (labels); if they were then the second display would not display an argument form. It would be an abbreviated argument. But it doesn't follow that 'P' and 'Q' are variables. For if they were variables, then they would have both substituends andf values. But while they have substituends, e.g., the sentences 'Tom is tall' and 'Tom is fat,' they don't have values. Why not? Because we are not quantifying over propositions (or statements if you prefer). There are no quantifiers in the form diagram. (This is not to say that one cannot quantify over propositions.)

'Tom' is tall' is one of many possible substituends for 'P.' But 'Tom is tall' is not the value of 'P.' For we are not quantifying over sentences. We are not quantifying over propositions either. So *Tom is tall* is also not a value of 'P.'

My thesis is that placeholders in the propositional calculus are arbitrary propositional constants. Since they are constants, they are not variables. It is a subtle distinction, I'll grant you that, but it seems necessary if we are to think precisely about these matters. But then one man's necessary distinction is another man's hair-splitting.

You also argue that London must wrongly decide that 'if roses are red then roses are red' (RR) is a contingency, because we say it can be seen as having the form 'P–>Q' and in general statements of this form are contingencies. Indeed they are. But we don't so decide. We say this is a special case in which P and Q stand for the same simple sentence, 'roses are red', not different ones. P and Q are therefore either both true or both false and either way the truth function for –> returns true. Hence this special case is tautologous. We disagree that the move from RR to 'P–>Q' must be seen as an abstraction. We retain the information that P and Q stand for specific substatements within RR, which may themselves have internal structure. 'Form' is a device for making such structure explicit.

So you are saying that 'P –> Q' has a special case that is tautologous. But that makes no sense to me if RR has both forms. A sentence (understood to have one definite meaning) is tautologous if its logical form is tautologous, and if RR has the form 'P–> Q' then it it is not tautologous as an instance of that form. So you seem committed to saying that RR is both tautologous and not tautologous.

Isn't that obvious? If one and same sentence (understood to have one definite meaning) has two logical forms, one tautologous and the other non-tautologous, then one and the same sentence is both tautologous and non-tautologous — which is a contradiction.

One solution, as I have suggested several times already, is to say that, while 'P –> P' is a special case of 'P –>Q,' namely the case in which P = Q, the two forms are not both forms of 'If roses are red, then roses are red.' Only one of them is, the first one. The second is a form of the first form, not a form of the English sentence.

Putting the problem as an aporetic hexad:

1. 'P –>P' is a special case of 'P –> Q'
2. If a proposition s instantiates form F, and F is a special case of form G, then s instantiates G.
3. 'P –> P' is a tautologous form.
4. 'P –> Q' is a non-tautologous form.
5. No one proposition instantiates both a tautologous and a non-tautologous form.
6. 'If roses are red, then roses are red' instantiates the form 'P –> P.'

The hexad is inconsistent. Phoenix and London agree on (1), (3), (4), and (6). The Phoenician solution is to reject (2). The Londonian solution is reject (5).

But the Phoenicians have an argument for (5):

7. The logical form of a proposition is not an accidental feature of it but determines the very identity of the proposition.
Ergo
8. If s instantiates form F, then necessarily, s instantiates F.
ergo
5. No one proposition instantiates both a tautologous and a non-tautologous form.

On the Use and Abuse of Occam’s Razor

I am not historian enough to pronounce upon the relation of what is standardly called Occam's Razor to the writings of the 14th century William of Ockham. The different spellings of his name will serve as a reminder to be careful about reading contemporary concerns into the works of philosophers long dead. Setting aside historical concerns, Occam's Razor is standardly taken to be a principle of theoretical economy or parsimony that states:

OR. Do not multiply entities beyond necessity.

It is sometimes formulated in Latin: Entia non sunt multiplicanda praeter necessitatem. The principle is presumably to be interpreted qualitatively rather than quantitatively, thus:

OR*. Do not multiply TYPES of entity beyond necessity.

It is not individual entities that are not to be multiplied, but types or kinds or categories of entity. To illustrate. Some criticized David Lewis' extreme modal realism on the ground that it proliferates concreta: there are not only all the actual concreta , there are all those merely possible ones as well. He responded quite plausibly to the proliferation charge by pointing out that the Razor applies to categories of entity, not individual entities, and that category-wise his ontology is sparse indeed.

'Multiply' is a picturesque way of saying posit. (Obviously, there are as many categories of entity as there are, and one cannot cause them to 'multiply.') And let's not forget the crucial qualification: beyond necessity. That means: beyond what is needed for purposes of adequate explanation of the data that are to be explained. Hence:

OR** Do not posit types of entity in excess of what is needed for purposes of explanation.

So the principle enjoins us to refrain from positing more types of entity than we need to explain the phenomena that need to be explained. It is obvious that (OR**) does not tell us to prefer theory T1 over theory T2 if T1 posits fewer types of entity than T2. What it tells us is to prefer T1 over T2 if T1 posits fewer types of entity AND accounts adequately for all the data. So there is a trade-off between positing and accounting.

Our old pal London Ed sometimes seems to be unaware of this. He seems to think that simply brandishing the Razor suffices to refute a theory. Together with this he sometimes displays a tendency to think that whole categories of entity can be as it were shamed out of existence by labeling them 'queer.' I picked up that word from him. A nice, arch, donnish epithet. But that is just name-calling, a tactic best left to ideologues.

What is offensive about Razor brandishing is the apparent ignorance on the part of some brandishers of the fact that we all agree that one ought not posit types of entity in excess of the needs of explanation. What we don't agree on, however, is whether or not a given class of entities is needed for explanatory purposes. That is where the interesting questions and the real disagreements lie.

The Razor is a purely methodological principle. It does not dictate any particular ontology. Taken as such, and apart from its association with the nominalist Ockham, it does not favor nominalism (the view that everything is a particular) over realism (the view that there are both particulars and universals). It does not favor any ontology over any other.

Nor does it rule out so-called 'abstract objects' such as Fregean propositions. I gave an argument a while back (1 August 2010 to be precise) to the conclusion that there cannot, as a matter of metaphysical necessity, be nothing at all, that there must be at least one abstract object, a proposition. A fellow philosopher commented on that post, Thinking about Nothing, and made the objection that I was multipying entities. But again, the salient question is whether the entity-positing is necessary for explanatory purposes. If my argument was a good one, then it was. One cannot refute such an argument simply by claiming that it introduces a type of entity that is less familiar than one's favorite types.

To sum up. Philosophy is in large part, though not entirely, an explanatory enterprise. As such it ought to proceed according to the methodological principle formulated above as (OR**). This principle is not controversial. Hence it should not be presented to one's opponents as if it were controversial and denied by them. Nor is it a principle that takes sides on the substantive questions of ontology.

What I am objecting to is the idea is that by earnest asseverations of a wholly uncontroversial methodological principle one actually advances the substantive debate. After all, no one enjoins that we multiply entities beyond necessity.