Is Anything Real Self-Identical?

I am sometimes tempted by the following line of thought.  But I am also deeply suspicious of it.

Are the 'laws of thought' 'laws of reality' as well? Since such laws are necessities of thought, the question can also be put by asking whether or not the necessities of thought are also necessities of being. It is surely not self-evident that principles that govern how we must think if we are to make sense to ourselves and to others must also apply to mind-independent reality. One cannot invoke self-evidence since such philosophers as Nagarjuna and Hegel and Nietzsche have denied (in different ways) that the laws of thought apply to the real.

Consider, for example, the Law of Identity:

Id. Necessarily, for any x, x = x.

(Id) seems harmless enough and indisputable. Everything, absolutely everything, is identical to itself, and this doesn't just happen to be the case.  But what does 'x' range over? Thought-accusatives? Or reals? Or both? What I single out in an act of mind, as so singled out, cannot be thought of as self-diverse. No object of thought, qua object of thought, is self-diverse. And no object of thought, as such, is both F and not F at the same time, in the same respect, and in the same sense. So there is no question but that Identity and Non-Contradiction apply to objects of thought, and are aptly described as laws of thought.  (Excluded Middle is trickier and so I leave it to one side.) What's more, these laws of thought hold for all possible finite, discursive, ectypal intellects.  Thus what we have here is a transcendental principle, at least, not one grounded in the contingent empirical psychology or physiology of the type of animals we happen to be.  Transcendentalism maybe, but no psychologism or physiologism!

But do Identity and Non-Contradiction apply to 'reals,' i.e., to entities  whose existence is independent of their being objects of thought?  Are these transcendental principles also ontological principles?  Is the necessity of such principles as (Id) grounded in the transcendental structure of the finite intellect, or in being itself?  Are the principles merely transcendental or are they also transcendent? (It goes without saying that I am using these 't' words in the Kantian way.)

The answer is not obvious. 

Consider a pile of leaves. If I refer to something using the phrase, 'that pile of leaves,' I thereby refer to one self-identical pile; as so referred to, the pile cannot be self-diverse. But is the pile self-identical in itself (apart from my referring to it, whether in thought or in overt  speech)?

In itself, in its full concrete extramental reality, the pile is not self-identical in that it is composed of many numerically different leaves, and has many different properties. In itself, the pile is both one and many. As both one and many, it is both self-identical and self-diverse. It is self-identical in that it is one pile; it is self-diverse in that this one pile is composed of many numerically different parts and has many different properties. Since the parts and properties are diverse from each other, and these parts and properties make up the pile, the pile is just as much self-diverse as it is self-identical. The pile is of course not a pure diversity; it is a diversity that constitutes one thing. So, in concrete reality, the pile of leaves is both self-identical and self-diverse.

If you insist that the pile's being self-identical excludes its being self-diverse, then you are abstracting from its having many parts and properties. So abstracting, you are no longer viewing the pile as it is in concrete mind-independent reality, but considering it as an object of thought merely. You are simply leaving out of consideration its plurality of parts and of properties. For the pile to be self-identical in a manner to exclude self-diversity, the pile would have to be simple as opposed to complex. But it is not simple in that it has many parts and many properties.

The upshot is that the pile of leaves, in concrete reality, is both one and many and therefore both self-identical and self-diverse. But this is a contradiction. Or is the contradiction merely apparent? Now the time-honored way to defuse a contradiction is by making a distinction.

One will be tempted to say that the respect in which the pile is self-identical is distinct from the respect in which it is self-diverse. The pile is self-identical in that it is one pile; the pile is self-diverse in that it has many parts and properties. No doubt.

But 'it has many parts and properties' already contains a contradiction. For what does 'it' refer to? 'It' refers to the pile which does not have parts and properties, but is its parts and properties. The pile is not something distinct from its parts and properties. The pile is a unity in and through a diversity of parts and properties. As such, the pile is both self-identical and self-diverse.

What the above reasoning suggests is that such 'laws of thought' as Identity and Non-Contradiction do not apply to extramental reality. No partite thing, such as a pile of leaves, is self-identical in a manner to exclude self-diversity. Such things are as self-diverse as they are self-identical. So partite things are self-contradictory.

From here we can proceed in two ways.

The contradictoriness of partite entities can be taken to argue their relative unreality. For nothing that truly exists can be self-contradictory. This is the way of   F. H. Bradley. One takes the laws of thought as criterial for what is ultimately real, shows that partite entities are not up to this exacting standard, and concludes that partite entities belong to Appearance.

The other way takes the lack of fit between logic and reality as reflecting poorly on logic: partite entities are taken to be fully real, and logic as a falsification. One can find this theme in Nietzsche and in Hegel.

Christology, Reduplicatives, and Qua-Entities

For Dave Bagwill, who is trying to understand the Chalcedonian definition.

…………….

Consider this triad, and whether it is logically consistent:

1. The man Jesus = the 2nd Person of the Trinity.
2. The 2nd Person of the Trinity exists necessarily.
3. The man Jesus does not exist necessarily.

Each of these propositions is one that a Christian who understands his doctrine ought to accept.   But how can they all be true? In the presence of the Indiscernibility of Identicals, according to which, roughly, if two things are identical, then they share all properties, the above triad appears inconsistent: The conjunction of (1) and (2) entails the negation of (3). Can this apparent inconsistency be shown to be merely apparent?

Reduplicatives to the rescue. Say this:

4. Jesus qua 2nd Person exists necessarily while Jesus qua man does not exist necessarily.

(The stylistically elegant ‘while’ may be replaced for truth-functional purposes with the logician's ampersand.) Now one might object that reduplicative formulations are not helpful unto salvation from inconsistency since in the crucial cases they entail outright contradictions. They merely hide and postpone the difficulty.   Thus, given that being a Person of the Trinity entails existing necessarily, and being a human animal  entails existing contingently, (4) entails

5. Jesus exists necessarily & Jesus does not exist necessarily.

And that is a plain contradiction. But this assumes that reduplicative constructions need not be taken with full ontological seriousness as requiring reduplicative truth-makers. It assumes that what we say with reduplicatives can be said without them, and that, out in the world, there is nothing that corresponds to them, or at least that we have no compelling reason to commit ourselves to reduplicative entities, qua-entities, one might call them. That assumption now needs to be examined. Suppose we parse (4) as

6. Jesus-qua-2nd Person exists necessarily & Jesus-qua-man does not exist necessarily

where the hyphenated expressions function as nouns, qua-nouns (to give them a name) that denote qua-entities. It is easy to see that (6) avoids contradiction for the simple reason that the two qua-entities are non-identical. But what is non-identical may nonetheless be the same if we have a principled way of distinguishing between identity and sameness.  (Hector-Neri Castaneda is one philosopher who distinguishes between identity and a number of sameness relations.) Essentially what I have just done is made a distinction in respects while taking respects with full ontological seriousness. This sort of move is nothing new. Consider a cognate case.

Suppose I have a red boat that I paint blue. Then we can say that there are distinct times, t1 and t2, such that b is red at t1 and blue at t2. That can be formulated as a reduplicative: b qua existing at t1 is red and b qua existing at t2 is blue. One could take that as just a funny way of talking, or one could take it as a perspicuous representation of the ontological structure of the world. Suppose the latter.  Then, adding hyphens, one could take oneself to be ontologically committed to temporal parts, which are a species of qua-entity. Thus b-at-t1 is a temporal part that is distinct from b-at-t2. These temporal parts are distinct since they differ property-wise: one is red the other blue. Nevertheless, they are the same in that they are parts of the same whole, the temporally extended boat.

The conceptual move we are making here is analogous to the move we make when we say that a ball is green in its northern hemisphere and red in its southern hemisphere in order to defuse the apparent contradiction of saying that it is red and green at the same time. Here different spatial parts have different properties, whereas in the boat example, different temporal parts have different properties.

Can we apply this to the Incarnation and say that Jesus-qua-God is F (immortal, impassible, necessarily existent, etc.) while Jesus-qua-man is not F? That would avoid the contradiction while upholding such obvious truths as that divinity entails immortality while humanity entails mortality. We could then say, borrowing a term from the late Hector-Neri Castaneda (1924-1991), that Jesus-qua-God is consubstantiated with Jesus-qua-man. (Hector the atheist is now rolling around in his grave.) The two are the same, contingently the same. They are ontological parts of the same substance, and are, in that sense, consubstantiated.  Jesus is God the Son where ‘is’ expresses a contingent sameness relation, rather than strict identity (which is governed by the Indiscernibility of Identicals and the Necessity of Identity).

The idea is that God the Son and Jesus are, or are analogous to, ontological parts of one and the same whole. This is an admittedly bizarre idea, and probably cannot be made to work. But it is useful to canvass all theoretical possibilities.

Mail Voting and Civic Ritual

The latest NRO column from Spencer Case, our man 'on the ground' in Boulder.  Excerpt:

A voter, no less than a judge or a juror, has the ability and obligation to transcend personal desires and to think in terms of the general good when he votes. There is thus a distinction between the private citizens who are voting and the public office of voter which each individual voter briefly occupies on Election Day. The distinction between the two is psychologically reinforced when citizens are expected to cast their ballots in a public space as opposed to from their living-room sofa.

First-Order and Second-Order Voter Fraud

Here:

One of the biggest voter frauds may be the idea promoted by Attorney General Eric Holder and others that there is no voter fraud, that laws requiring voters to have a photo identification are just attempts to suppress black voting.

Upon leaving the polling place this morning I joked that there ought to be two receptacles for ballots, the usual one for Republican and Libertarian ballots, and a second one for Democrat ballots — a shredder.  This elicited a hearty laugh.  That would be real vote suppression.
 
But be careful with the jokes in these politically correct times.  What you can get away with depends on your precinct.  Mine, though populated with plenty of geezers who cherish an irrational and wholly sentimental attachment to the Dems, as if the year is still 1960, is essentially conservative and right-thinking.  Besides, I was in full hiking regalia  and armed with a big stick.
 
Peralta Canyon 17Aug13
 
 
 
 

Vote the Party, Not the Candidate

Here’s why. Whatever party takes over the Senate will not only be able to appoint the body’s Majority Leader, it will control the committee chairmanships, which in turn will determine what types of legislation will be entertained by the Senate. Because the Senate has the power of advise and consent when the president appoints judges and justices to the federal bench, the partisan composition of the Senate will shape the development of the courts’ jurisprudence for many decades to come. Thus, it is of little consequence what one or two dissenting Senators may have said on the campaign trail.

Those who utter the “vote for the man, not the party” slogan, though undoubtedly offering it as a sincere call to “rise above” partisan politics, do not really understand that partisanship is embedded in the very nature of our political institutions. To lament partisanship is to lament one of the consequences of being a free people. So, if you don’t like partisanship, you should move to Cuba.

One Person, Two Natures

A reader inquires,

The Creed of Chalcedon (A.D 451) set forth the following dogma, among others: (my emphasis)

".. one and the same Christ ….to be acknowledged in two natures, inconfusedly, unchangeably, indivisibly, inseparably; the distinction of natures being by no means taken away by the union, but rather the property of each nature being preserved, and concurring in one Person and one Subsistence, not parted or divided into two persons, but one and the same Son . . ."

The deliberate  language of 'two natures' in 'one Person' is really remarkable. When you find some time, can you give me a bit of direction in determining, first – what it is for a person to 'have a human nature' and second – depending on that answer, is there any way to explain the concept of a person having two 'natures'? I even find the statement that human persons have both an 'animal nature' and a 'human nature' troublesome. There is a category mistake  that I sense but cannot yet explain.

The reader poses three questions.  After answering them,  I will pose a fourth question that the reader doesn't explicitly ask.

Q1. How can a human person have both an animal nature and a human nature?  I don't see much of a difficulty here.  If man is a rational animal (Aristotle), then Socrates, in virtue of being human, is an animal.  Now he is both animal and human essentially as opposed to accidentally.  Thus Socrates could not have existed without being an animal: he could not have been inanimate, say a statue or a valve-lifter in a '57 Chevy. And he could not have existed without being human: he could not have been nonhuman like a cat or a jelly fish.  Whether or not every essential feature of a thing is part of its nature, every nature is essential to a thing that has it.  So I see no problem in saying that Socrates has both an animal nature and human nature, where the latter includes the former, though not conversely.  Nature N1 includes nature N2 just in case it is impossible that something have N1 but not have N2.

Q2. How can a person have two natures?   This is answered above.  Humanity and animality are distinct — the first includes the second, but not conversely — but there is nothing to prevent one and the same individual substance from having both of them. 

Q3. What is it for a person to have a human nature?  On the Boethian definition, a person is an individual substance of a rational nature.  So the question might be: How can a rational individual — an individual being that has the capacity to reason — also be human?  Well, I don't see much difficulty here.    Not every person is a human being, but every human being is a person.  So humanity includes personhood. 

Q4. How can one and the same person have two seemingly incompatible natures? I suspect that this is the question the reader really wants to pose.  There is no obvious problem about one person having two natures if they are logically compatible as they are if one includes the other.  The problem is that while humanity includes animality, humanity appears to exclude divinity.  Among the marks of humanity: animality, mortality, mutability, passibility; among the marks of divinity: spirituality (non-animality), immortality, immutability, impassibility. 

According to Chalcedon, one and the same person is both fully human and fully divine.  Now, necessarily, anything human is passible, thus capable of suffering.  But, necessarily, nothing divine is passible; hence nothing divine is capable of suffering.  So if one and the same person is both human and divine, then one and the same person is both capable of suffering and not capable of suffering.  This is a contradiction. Herein lies the difficulty.

The reader needs to tell me whether this is the problem that is exercising him.  (Note that the problem can be developed using attributes other than passibility.)

I wonder whether the reader would be satisfied with the following strategy and the following analogy.  Christ qua human is capable of suffering, but Christ qua divine is not.  This removes the contradiction.  Analogy:  Obama qua president is commander-in-chief of the armed forces, but Obama qua citizen is not.

I am not endorsing either the reduplicative strategy or the analogy.

Ad Ignorantiam and the Law

The day before yesterday I wrote,

In a criminal case the probative bar is set very high: the accused has to be shown guilty beyond a reasonable doubt.  Here too there seems to be a legitimate appeal to ignorance: if it has not been shown that the defendant is guilty beyond a reasonable doubt, the conclusion to be drawn is that he is not guilty.

We will have to examine this more carefully in a separate post.

Herewith, the separate post.  Plainly, the following is an invalid argument:

1. It was not proven beyond a reasonable doubt that it was Smith who killed Jones.

ergo

2. Smith did not kill Jones.

Examples like this appear to support the idea that some appeals to ignorance (or arguments from ignorance) are reasonable and non-fallacious.  According to Douglas N. Walton,

. . . the criminal law presumes that a person is not guilty if he has not been shown to be guilty.  This is an ad ignorantiam form of argument, but it can be reasonable in the context of the rules of argument in the criminal law.  (Informal Logic: A Handbook for Critical Argumentation, Cambridge UP, 2007, 20th ed., p. 47)

I wonder if this is right. Which better represents a criminal process that terminates in an acquittal?  Is it the above argument or the following argument?

1. It was not proven beyond a reasonable doubt that it was Smith who killed Jones.

ergo

3. The presumption of Jones' innocence has not been defeated and Jones is in the eyes of the law not guilty.

I now think it is the second argument.  But note that (i) the second argument is valid, and (ii) there is no appeal to ignorance in the second argument.  The validity of the second, enthymematic, argument is obvious when we make explicit the tacit assumption, namely, that

4. If the accused in a criminal proceeding has not been proven to be guilty of the crime with which he is charged beyond a reasonable doubt, then the presumption of innocence has not been defeated and the accused is in the eyes of the law not guilty.

So the second argument is (formally) valid.  It also does not represent an appeal to ignorance.  One is not arguing that:  Jones is not guilty in reality (as opposed to in the eyes of the law) because it has not been proven that he is not guilty.  One is arguing  that the presumption of innocence has not been defeated.  The following are different propositions:

a. Jones is not guilty

b. Jones' presumption of innocence (POI) has not been defeated.

It ought to be obvious that they are different.  They are logically independent.  Each is consistent with the negation of the other.  Thus the following sets are consistent dyads: {Jones is guilty; Jones' POI has not been defeated}, {Jones is not guilty; Jones' POI has been defeated}.

Conclusion

According to Walton, ". . . the criminal law presumes that a person is not guilty if he has not been shown to be guilty.  This is an ad ignorantiam form of argument . . ."  I think this betrays a misunderstanding of the notion of presumption, and in particular, presumption of innocence. 

The presumption is not that a person is not guilty if he has not be shown to be guilty; the presumption is that he is to be treated as if not guilty, if he has not been shown to be guilty.  In the case of O. J. Simpson, almost everyone agrees that he is guilty of murdering Nicole Brown Simpson and Ronald Goldman.  Yet he was found not guilty.  Obviously, there is a difference between being not guilty (being not guilty in fact) and being found not guilty (being not guilty in the eyes of the law).  The presumption of innocence was not defeated in that trial.  But that is consistent, as I argued above, with the accused's being guilty.

It is therefore a mistake to think that the POI procedural rule embodies an appeal to ignorance. And since there is no appeal to ignorance here, there is no reasonable or non-fallacious appeal to ignorance.

UPDATE:  Dave Bagwill writes,

 

My grand-dad did not mince words, nor did he suffer fools. When I tried to trick him with verbal technicalities, he would accuse me of "trying to pick the fly shit out of the pepper".

 He would have said that about your latest post 'On Ad Ignorantiam and the Law', but he would have been wrong. You made some very fine, fine distinctions in that post that really cut to the heart of the matter. Thanks, and well done. (I've used that book by Walton for years and generally found it useful.)

You're welcome, Dave.  My response to your grandfather would be to make yet another distinction, one between hairsplitting and the drawing of necessary distinctions, and then distinguish different kinds of hairsplitting.

One sort of hairsplitting is  to make distinctions that correspond to nothing real, distinctions that are merely verbal. The 'distinction' between a glow bug and a fire fly, for example, is merely verbal: there is no distinction in reality. A glow bug just is a firefly. Similarly there is no distinction in reality between a bottle's being half-full and being half-empty. The only possible difference is in the attitude of someone, a drunk perhaps, who is elated at the bottle's being half-full and depressed at its being half-empty.

But this is not what people usually mean by the charge of hairsplitting. What they seem to mean is the drawing of distinctions that don't make a practical difference. But whether a distinction makes a practical difference depends on the context and on one's purposes. The truth of the matter is that there are very few occasions on which the charge of hairsplitting is justly made. On almost all occasions, the accuser is simply advertising his inability to grasp a distinction that the subject-matter requires.

Walton may be the premier writer on informal logic.  His book is apparently well-thought-of.  2007 saw the 20th edition.  I'd guess there have been editions since then.

 

Saturday Night at the Oldies: The First-Person Singular Pronoun

Before we get on to songs with 'I' in the title — the word, not the letter or the Roman numeral — we pause to note the passing of Jack Bruce, bass player for Cream who died a week ago.  It is appropriate, therefore, that we should begin with

Cream, I Feel Free

Cream, I'm So Glad

Simon and Garfunkel, I Am a Rock

Beatles, I'm a Loser

Beatles, I Feel Fine

Beatles, I am the Walrus

Beatles, I Call Your Name.  Nice cowbell.  Mamas and Papas' version.

Who, I Can See for Miles

Muddy Waters, I'm a Man

Peggy Lee, I'm a Woman

Patsy Cline, I Fall to Pieces

Country Joe and the Fish, I Feel Like I'm Fixin' to Die Rag

Beatles, I Don't Want to Spoil the Party

Sarah Vaughan, I Got Rythm

Sonny and Cher, I Got You, Babe

Petula Clark, I Know a Place

Barbara George, I Know

Dusty Springfield, I Only Want to be With You

Petula Clark, I Couldn't Live Without Your Love

Peggy March, I Will Follow Him

Ivory Joe Hunter, Since I Met You Baby

Lenny Welch, Since I Fell for You

Skyliners, Since I Don't Have You

Flamingos, I Only Have Eyes for You

Beatles, If I Fell

Beach Boys, When I Grow Up to Be a Man

Beach Boys, I Can Hear Music

Beach Boys, Then I Kissed Her.  The answer to, and no match for, the Crystals' Then He Kissed Me.

Band, When I Paint My Masterpiece

Timi Yuro, I'm So Hurt

Brenda Lee, Alone Am I

Eddie Rabbit, I Love a Rainy Night

Dylan, The Band, et al., I Shall Be Released

Tom Petty, I Won't Back Down

U2, I Still Haven't Found What I'm Looking For. Read the lyrics.

Arlo Guthrie, I Want to be Around

Bob Dylan, I Want You

Brenda Lee, I'm Sorry

Pter, Paul, and Mary, If I Had a Hammer

and these are only some of them.