In Omnibus of Fallacies, Ed Feser applies his formidable analytic and polemical skills to that sorry specimen of scientism, Jerry Coyne. The First Things review begins like this:
Faith versus Fact is some kind of achievement. Biologist Jerry Coyne has managed to write what might be the worst book yet published in the New Atheist genre. True, the competition for that particular distinction is fierce. But among other volumes in this metastasizing literature, each has at least some small redeeming feature. For example, though Lawrence Krauss’s A Universe from Nothing is bad as philosophy, it is middling as pop science. Christopher Hitchens’s God Is Not Great was at least written by someone who could write like Christopher Hitchens. Though devoid of interest, Sam Harris’s Letter to a Christian Nation is brief. Even PZ Myers’s book The Happy Atheist has at least one advantage over Coyne’s book: It came out first.
Why do I refer to Coyne as a "sorry specimen of scientism?" Is that a nice thing to say? See here, for starters.
An easy-to-read power point presentation with plenty of pictures.
Haack rightly laments hyperprofessionalization and overspecialization in philosophy as well as the detachment of philosophy from its own history. Compare my Kripke's Misrepresentation of Meinong. Fragmentation leads to hermeticism and ahistoricism. True enough. But then she claims that the cause of fragmentation is academic opportunism. This is not quite right since it ignores a legitimate motive for professionalization and specialization, namely, the realization that a necessary but insufficient condition for progress in philosophy is very careful and rigorous work on well-defined issues, with all the preliminary spadework that that requires.
The main problem with what she proposes is that it is naive. She thinks that interdisciplinary work will lead to progress in philosophy. That won't happen. All that will happen is a proliferation of wild and woolly syntheses and "fusions" at odds with one another.
And we should not forget that Haack's metaphilosophical proposals are themselves just more philosophy, just more fodder for controversy. Her colleagues won't (most of them) say, "You're right Professor Haack, let's get going on some interdisciplinary projects." They will ague with her as I am doing now, and some of them with arguments different from mine.
Serious work in philosophy as in other disciplines must be technical: careful, precise, rigorous, respectful of logical niceties and subtle distinctions. It is not done well in isolation but with the help and criticism of epistemic peers. This is what leads to professionalization and the institutionalization of philosophy which are obviously good up to a point and a necessary but not sufficient condition for philosophical progress.
Unfortunately, the incredible proliferation of journals, conferences, philosophy departments along with the intense efforts of the best and the brightest have failed to place philosophy on the "sure path of science" to borrow Kant's phrase. Intellectual honesty demands that we admit that no real progress has been made in philosophy hitherto and that is an excellent induction that none will be made in the future.
This is the bind we are in. I don't see how an interdisciplinary turn could help.
Suppose the true God is the triune God. Then two possibilities. One is that Muslims worship the true God, but not as triune, indeed as non-triune; they worship the true God all right, the same one the Christians worship; it is just that the Muslims have one or more false beliefs about the true God. The other possibility is that Muslims do not worship the true God; they worship a nonexistent God, an idol. We are assuming the truth of monotheism: there is a God, but only one.
Now worship entails reference in the following sense: Necessarily, if I worship the true God, then I successfully refer to the true God. (The converse does not hold). So either (A) the (normative) Muslim successfully refers to the true God under one or more false descriptions, or else (B) he does not successfully refer to the true God at all.
Now which is it, (A) or (B)?
The answer depends on your theory of reference.
Consider this 'Kripkean' scenario. God presents himself to Abraham in person. All of Abraham's experiences on this marvellous occasion are veridical. Abraham 'baptizes God' with the name Yahweh or YHWH. The same name (though in different transliterations and translations) is passed on to people who use it with the intention of preserving the direct reference the name got when Abraham first baptized God with it. The name passes down eventually to Christians and Muslims. Of course the conceptions of God are different for Abraham, St. Paul, and Muhammad. To mention one striking difference: for Paul God became man in Jesus of Nazareth; not so for Muhammad, for whom such a thing is impossible.
If you accept a broadly Millian-Kripkean theory of reference, then it is reasonable to hold that (A) is true. For if the reference of 'God' is determined by an initial baptism or tagging and a causal chain of name transmission, then the reference of 'God' will remain the same even under rather wild variation in the concept of God. The Christian concept includes triunity; the Muslim conception excludes it. That is a radical difference in the conceptions. And yet this radical difference is consistent with sameness of referent. This is because the reference is not routed though the conception: it is not determined by the conception. The reference is determined by the initial tagging and the subsequent name transmission.
Now consider a 'Fressellian' scenario. The meaning of a proper name is not exhausted by its reference. Names are more than Millian tags. It is not just that proper names have senses: they have reference-determining senses. On a descriptivist or 'Fressellian' semantics, a thoughtful tokening by a person P of a proper name N successfully refers to an individual x just in case there exists an x such that x uniquely satisfies the definite descriptions associated with N by P and the members of his linguistic community.
So when a Christian assertively utters a token of 'God is almighty,' his use of 'God' successfully refers to God only if there is something that satisfies the sense the Christian qua Christian associates with 'God.' Now that sense must include being triune. The same goes for the Muslim except that the sense that must be satisfied for the Muslim reference to be successful must include being non-triune.
It should now be clear that, despite the considerable overlap in the Christian and Muslim conceptions of God, they cannot be referring to the same being on the 'Fressellian' theory of reference. For on this theory, sense determines reference, and no one thing can satisfy two senses one of which includes while the other excludes being triune. So we have to conclude, given the assumption of monotheism, that the Christian and Muslim do not refer to one and the same God. Given that the true God is triune, the Christian succeeds in referring to the true God while the Muslim fails. The Muslim does not succeed in referring to anything.
So I continue to maintain that whether Christians and Muslims worship the same God depends on one's theory of reference. This is why the question has no easy answer.
Those who simple-mindedly insist that Christians and Muslims worship numerically the same God are uncritically presupposing a dubious Millian-Kripkean theory of reference.
Exercise for the reader: explain what is wrong with Juan Cole's article below.
Georg Christoph Lichtenberg, The Waste Books, tr. R. J. Hollingdale, New York Review Books, 1990, p. 101:
Certain rash people have asserted that, just as there are no mice where there are no cats, so no one is possessed where there are no exorcists.
That puts me in mind of anarchists who say that where there are no laws there are no criminals. That is not much better than saying that where there are no chemists there are no chemicals.
Just as there are chemicals whether or not there are any chemists, there are moral wrongs whether or not there are any positive laws prohibiting them. What makes murder wrong is not that there are positive laws prohibiting it; murder is wrong antecedently of the positive law. It is morally wrong before (logically speaking) it is legally wrong. And it is precisely the moral wrongness of murder that justifies having laws against it.
And yet there is a sense in which criminals are legislated into existence: one cannot be a criminal in the eyes of the law unless there is the law. And it is certainly true that to be a criminal in the eyes of the law does not entail being guilty of any moral wrong-doing. But the anarchist goes off the deep end if he thinks that there is no moral justification for any legal prohibitions, or that the wrongness of every act is but an artifact of the law's prohibiting it.
The paradigms of direct reference are the indexicals and the demonstratives. The English letter 'I' is not the English word 'I,' and the word 'I' — the first-person singular pronoun — has non-indexical uses. But let's consider a standard indexical use of this pronoun. Tom says to Tina,
I am hungry.
Tom refers to himself directly using 'I.' That means: Tom refers to himself, but not via a description that he uniquely satisfies. The reference is not routed through a reference-determining sense. If you think it is so routed, tell me what the reference-determining sense of your indexical uses of the first person singular pronoun is. I wish you the best of luck.
As I understand it, to say of a singular term that it is directly referential is not to say that it lacks sense, but that it lacks a reference-determining sense. The indexical 'now' does have a sense in that whatever it picks out must be a time, indeed, a time that is present. But this very general sense does not make a use of 'now' refer to the precise time to which it refers. So 'now' is directly referential despite its having a sense.
Consider the demonstrative 'this.' Pointing to a red-hot poker poker, I say 'This is hot!' You agree and say 'This is hot!' We point to the same thing and we say the same thing. The same thing we say is the proposition. The proposition is true. Neither the poker nor its degree of heat are true. The reference of 'this' is direct. It seems to follow that the poker itself is a constituent of the proposition that is before both of our minds and that we agree is true. The poker itself, not an abstract and immaterial surrogate or representative of the material poker. But then propositions are Russellian as opposed to Fregean. The poker itself, the whole infinitely-propertied nasty metallic rod, not an abstract surrogate such as a Fregean sense, is a constituent of the proposition.
How can this be? I grasp the proposition expressed by 'This is hot!' So I grasp its constituents. (Assumption: I cannot grasp or understand a proposition unless I understand its logical parts.) But how is it possible for my poor little finite mind to grasp the hot poker in all its infinitely-propertied reality? Here is an aporetic triad for your consideration:
The proposition is in or before my mind. The hot poker itself is a constituent of the proposition. The hot poker itself is not in or before my mind.
How will you solve this bad boy? Each limb is highly plausible but they cannot all be true.
The first limb is well-nigh datanic. Since I understand the proposition expressed by 'This is hot' asserted while pointing to a hot poker, the proposition is before my mind.
The second limb is plausible because the meaning of 'this' is exhausted by its referent. Surely 'this' lacks a reference-determining or Fregean sense. Since no Fregean sense is the subject-constituent of the proposition, it must be the Fregean referent that is the subject-constituent. That implies that the proposition is not Fregean but Russellian.
The third limb is extremely plausible because a finite intellect cannot have present to it an infinitely-propertied object. For example, the poker is hot and perceived to be hot and is therefore determinate with respect to being hot or not hot; but as perceived by me it is indeterminate with respect to the exact degree of being hot, even though in reality it must have some definite degree of being hot or other.
So that's the puzzle. How do we solve it? Note to London Ed: Tell me whether you think the problem as set forth is genuine as opposed to pseudo. If genuine, how would you solve it?
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My tendency is to reject the second limb and affirm that all propositions are Fregean. If all propositions are Fregean, then no proposition has as a constituent an infinitely-propertied material object such as a red-hot poker.
But if I say this, then it seems that I cannot say that the reference of 'this' is direct. But if not direct, then mediated by a Fregean sense. What then is the sense of 'this'? It seems obvious that it cannot have a Fregean sense.
Perhaps the solution is to say that the reference of 'this' is direct all right, but not to an infinitely-propertied chunk of physical reality, but to an incomplete object, something like what Hector-Neri Castaneda calls an "ontological guise" or what Husserl calls a noema. But if these incomplete objects are not to be mediating items standing between the mind and the infinitely-propertied massive chunk of physical reality, then these incomplete objects or ontological guises must be constituents, ontological parts of the massive chunk, "consubstantiated" guises that constitute a complete mind-independent existent.
In "Vacuous Names and Fictional Entities" (in Philosophical Troubles, Oxford UP, 2011, pp. 52-74) Saul Kripke distances himself from the following view that he ascribes to Alexius Meinong:
Many people have gotten confused about these matters because they have said, 'Surely there are fictional characters who fictionally do such-and-such things; but fictional characters don't exist; therefore some view like Meinong's with a first-class existence and a second-class existence, or a broad existence and a narrow existence, must be the case'.23 This is not what I am saying here. (p. 64)
Footnote 23 reads as follows:
At any rate, this is how Meinong is characterized by Russell in 'On Denoting'. I confess that I have never read Meinong and I don't know whether the characterization is accurate. It should be remembered that Meinong is a philosopher whom Russell (at least originally) respected; the characterization is unlikely to be a caricature.
But it is a caricature and at this late date it is well known to be a caricature. What is astonishing about all this is that Kripke had 38 years to learn a few basic facts about Meinong's views from the time he read (or talked) his paper in March of 1973 to its publication in 2011 in Philosophical Troubles. But instead he chose to repeat Russell's caricature of Meinong in his 2011 publication. Here is what Kripke could have quickly learned about Meinong's views from a conversation with a well-informed colleague or by reading a competent article:
Some objects exist and some do not. Thus horses exist while unicorns do not. Among the objects that do not exist, some subsist and some do not. Subsistents include properties, mathematical objects and states of affairs. Thus there are two modes of being, existence and subsistence. Spatiotemporal items exist while ideal/abstract objects subsist.
Now what is distinctive about Meinong is his surprising claim that some objects neither exist nor subsist. The objects that neither exist nor subsist are those that have no being at all. Examples of such objects are the round square, the golden mountain, and purely fictional objects. These items have properties — actually not possibly — but they have no being. They are ausserseiend. Aussersein, however, is not a third mode of being.
Meinong's fundamental idea, whether right or wrong, coherent or incoherent, is that there are subjects of true predications that have no being whatsoever. Thus an item can have a nature, a Sosein, without having being, wihout Sein. This is the characteristic Meinongian principle of the independence of Sosein from Sein.
Kripke's mistake is to ascribe to Meinong the view that purely fictional items are subsistents when for Meinong they have no being whatsoever. He repeats Russell's mistake of conflating the ausserseiend with the subsistent.
The cavalier attitude displayed by Kripke in the above footnote is not uncommon among analytic philosophers. They think one can philosophize responsibly without bothering to attend carefully to what great thinkers of the tradition have actually maintained, while at the same time dropping their names: Aristotle, Leibniz, Kant, Brentano, Meinong. For each of the foregoing I could give an example of a thesis attributed to them that has little or nothing to do with what they actually maintained.
I suppose what really irks me here is not so much the ignoring of the greats, but the ignoring in tandem with the dropping of their names. There is something intellectually dishonest about wanting to avoid the work of studying the great philosophers while also either invoking their authority, or else using them as whipping boys, by dropping their names.
Does the cavalier attitude of most analytic philosophers to the history of philosophy matter? In particular, does it matter that Kripke and plenty of others continue to ignore and misrepresent Meinong? And are not embarrassed to confess their ignorance? This depends on how one views philosophy in relation to its history.
The monastery, called Dair Mar Elia, is named for the Assyrian Christian monk — St. Elijah — who built it between 582 and 590 A.C. It was a holy site for Iraqi Christians for centuries, part of the Mideast's Chaldean Catholic community.
In 1743, tragedy struck when as many as 150 monks who refused to convert to Islam were massacred under orders of a Persian general, and the monastery was damaged. For the next two centuries it remained a place of pilgrimage, even after it was incorporated into an Iraqi military training base and later a U.S. base.
But of course, Islam is the religion of peace and no true Muslim would have been involved in such destruction.
An excellent article by Walter Russell Meade. Study it, muchachos. Yes, this will be on the final.
A revenant is one who has returned from the dead or from a long absence.
Has Old Hickory come back as Donald Trump?
Though I despise contemporary liberalism and leftism (any difference?), that doesn't quite put me on the Jacksonian right. Meade:
Lynch law and Jim Crow were manifestations of Jacksonian communalism, and there are few examples of race, religious or ethnic prejudice in which Jacksonian America hasn’t indulged.
[. . .]
Jacksonians are neither liberal nor conservative in the ways that political elites use those terms; they are radically egalitarian, radically pro-middle class, radically patriotic, radically pro-Social Security.
I am too much of an intellectual, and too much of an old-time liberal, to be a Jacksonian. At the bottom of the Jacksonian bucket are the rednecks and know-nothings. You know the type. The guy who shoots out the windows of a convenience store because he thinks the proprietor is a Muslim when in fact he is a Sikh. He doesn't know the difference between a Muslim and a Hindu because he doesn't read books. He is too busy swilling Budweiser at NASCAR events and tractor-pulls. (He had hisself a coupla Buds but he was none the wiser.)
At the bottom of that same Jacksonian bucket are the jingoists who confuse jingoism with patriotism. "My country right or wrong." And while I believe that "all men are created equal" in the Declaration of Independence sense, and all deserve equal treatment before the law, I am no radical egalitarian. I am an elitist, but in the best possible sense of that word. People are obviously not equal in respect of any empirical attribute. You could put it like this: we are all equal before God, equally wretched, but among one another plainly unequal spiritually, mentally, morally, and physically. But my elitism has nothing to do with inherited privilege or blood lines and the like. It is an elitism grounded in talent and ability and the individual's free development of his talents and abilities. True, you did nothing to deserve your God- or nature-given talent, but you have nonetheless a right to its possession and development. If you develop your talents in accordance with the old virtues and become unequal to others in respect of the three Ps (position, power, and pelf), then so be it. Material equality, as such, is not a value.
And I am certainly not radically pro-Social Security.
But if comes down to a fight with vile and destructive leftists, you can bet I will be on the side of the Jacksonian good old boys, locked and loaded. Meade concludes:
Whatever happens to the Trump candidacy, it now seems clear that Jacksonian America is rousing itself to fight for its identity, its culture and its primacy in a country that it believes it should own. Its cultural values have been traduced, its economic interests disregarded, and its future as the center of gravity of American political life is under attack. Overseas, it sees traditional rivals like Russia, China, North Korea and Iran making headway against a President that it distrusts; more troubling still, in ISIS and jihadi terror it sees the rapid spread of a movement aiming at the mass murder of Americans. Jacksonian America has lost all confidence in the will or the ability of the political establishment to fight the threats it sees abroad and at home. It wants what it has always wanted: to take its future into its own hands.The biggest story in American politics today is this: Andrew Jackson is mad as hell, and he’s not going to take it anymore.
Do you want to comment on the following post? Here is how to do it properly. You must address head-on what I say. For example, in (A) below I make a distinction between referring and non-referring terms. Tell me whether you agree or not. If you don't, tell me why. Or you can ask me a question.
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Preliminary point on sound philosophical method. Make all the distinctions one can think to make, assuming that they have some fundamentum in re and are not merely verbal, like the 'distinction' between a firefly and a glow bug. Later we can decide which distinctions are ultimately sustainable.
To think clearly about reference we must make at least the following distinctions. A philosopher's motto: Distinguo ergo sum.
A. Referring terms versus non-referring terms. 'London' is presumably a referring term as is 'Scollay Square.' 'And,' 'or' and other logical words are presumably not referring terms. Surely not every bit of language plays a referential role. Some terms are syncategorematical or synsemantic.
B. Purported reference versus successful reference. Asserting 'Scollay Square is in Boston,' I purport to refer to Scollay Square. But I fail: the square no longer exists. But if I say 'Trafalgar Square is in London,' I succeed in referring to Trafalgar Square.
C. Guaranteed successful reference versus contingent successful reference. It is not obvious that the first-personal singular pronoun is a referring term. Elizabeth Anscombe, following Wittgenstein, denies that it is. But I say that 'I' is a referring term. Suppose it is. Then it is guaranteed against reference failure: a correct use of 'I' cannot fail to have a referent and it cannot fail to have the right referent. The cooperation of the world is not needed for success in this instance. If I try to make a reference using 'I' I will succeed every time. But the cooperation of the world is needed for successful reference via proper names such as 'Scollay Square.' If I try to make a reference using a proper name I can fail if the name has no (existing) bearer, or if I get hold of the wrong (existing) bearer.
D. Reference versus referents. The referent of a term is not to be confused with its reference. 'Scollay Square' is a referring term and it has a reference, but it has no referent. Not all reference is successful reference.
E. Mental reference versus linguistic reference. Necessarily, to think is to think of or about. Thinking is object-directed. Thinking is essentially and intrinsically referential. It can occur wordlessly. It is arguably at the basis of all reference, including reference via language. Just as guns don't kill people, but people kill people using guns; words don't refer to things, but people refer to things using words. The referentiality of language is derivative from the intrinsic, non-derivative, referentiality of mind.
F. Extralinguistic versus purely intralinguistic reference. Consider the following sentence from a piece of pure fiction: 'Tom's wife left him.' The antecedent of the pronoun 'him' is Tom.' This back reference is purely intralinguistic. It is plajusible to maintain that the only reference exhibited by 'him' is back reference, and that 'him' does not pick up the extralinguistic reference of 'Tom,' there being no such reference to pick up. Then we would have case of purely intralinguistic reference.
G. Extralinguistic per se reference versus extralinguistic per alium reference. 'Max' names (is the name of) one of my two black cats; 'Manny' names (is the name of) the other. These are cases of extralinguistic per se reference. But 'he' in the following sentence, while it refers extralinguistically, refers per alium, 'through another':
Max is sick because he ate too much.
The extralinguistic reference of the pronoun piggy-backs on the the extralinguistic reference of its antecedent. The pronoun has no extralinguistic referential contribution of its own to make.
H. Grammatical pronouns can function pronominally, indexically, and quantificationally. Consider first a sentence featuring a pronoun that has an antecedent:
Peter always calls before he visits.
In this sentence, 'Peter' is the antecedent of the third-person singular pronoun 'he.' It is worth noting that an antecedent needn't come before the term for which it is the antecedent:
After he got home, Peter poured himself a drink.
In this sentence 'Peter' is the antecedent of 'he' despite occurring after 'he' in the order of reading. The antecedency is referential rather than temporal. In both of these cases, the reference of 'he' is supplied by the antecedent. The burden of reference is borne by the antecedent. So there is a clear sense in which the reference of 'he' in both cases is not direct, but mediated by the antecedent. The antecedent is referentially prior to to the pronoun for which it is the antecedent. But suppose I point to Peter and say
He smokes cigarettes.
This is an indexical use of 'he.' Part of what makes it an indexical use is that its reference depends on the context of utterance: I utter a token of 'he' while pointing at Peter, or nodding in his direction. Another part of what makes it an indexical is that it refers directly, not just in the sense that the reference is not routed through a description or sense associated with the use of the pronoun, but also in that there is no need for an antecedent to secure the reference. Now suppose I say
I smoke cigars.
This use of 'I' is clearly indexical, although it is a purely indexical (D. Kaplan) inasmuch as there is no need for a demonstration: I don't need to point to myself when I say 'I smoke cigars.' And like the immediately preceding example, there is no need for an antecedent to nail down the reference of 'I.' Not every pronoun needs an antecedent to do a referential job.
In fact, it seems that no indexical expression, used indexically, has or could have an antecedent. Hector-Neri Castaneda puts it like this:
Whether in oratio recta or in oratio obliqua, (genuine) indicators have no antecedents. ("Indicators and Quasi-Indicators" reprinted in The Phenomeno-Logic of the I, p. 67)
For a quantificational use of a grammatical pronoun, consider
He who hesitates is lost.
(One can imagine Yogi Berra asking, 'You mean Peter?') Clearly, 'he' does not function here pronominally — there is no antecedent — not does it function indexically. It functions like the bound variable in
For any person x, if x hesitates, then x is lost.
I. Reference via names, via definite descriptions, via indefinite descriptions. 'Socrates,' 'the wisest Greek philosopher,' 'a famous Greek philosopher of antiquity.' Do they all refer? Or only the first two? Or only the first?
J. Successful reference to the nonexistent versus failed reference to the existent. Does 'Pegasus' fail to refer to something that exists or succeed in referring to what does not exist? Meinongian semantics cannot be dismissed out of hand!
K. Speaker's reference versus semantic reference. 'The man in the corner drinking champagne is the new dean.' Suppose there is exactly one man in the corner drinking water out of a champagne glass. Has the speaker of the mentioned sentence succeeded in referring to the man in the corner? Presumably yes despite the man's not satisfying the definite description in subject position. Here speaker's reference and semantic reference come apart. This connects up with distinction (E) above.
Like many conservatives, I didn't start out as one. My background is working class, my parents were Democrats, and so was I until the age of 41. I came of age in the '60s. One of my heroes was John F. Kennedy, "the intrepid skipper of the PT 109" as I described him in a school essay written in the fifth grade. I was all for the Civil Rights movement. Musically my heroes were Bob Dylan and Joan Baez. I thrilled to his Blowin' in the Wind and other civil rights anthems.
As I see it, those civil rights battles were fought and they were won. But then the rot set in as the the party of JFK liberals became the extremists and the destructive leftists that they are today. For example, Affirmative Action in its original sense gave way to reverse discrimination, race-norming, minority set-asides, identity politics and the betrayal of Martin Luther King's dream that people be judged "not by the color of their skin but by the content of their character."
As liberals have become extremists, people with moderate views such as myself have become conservatives. These days I am a registered Independent.
She says that it is too important to be left to philosophers. She is right that the debate is important and has practical consequences, although I don't think any of the philosophers who have 'piped up' recently (Beckwith, Tuggy, Feser, Rea, Vallicella, et al.) want to take the debate merely as a point of entry into technical questions about reference and identity.
One of the points McGrew makes is one I have repeatedly made as well, namely, that the sorts of examples proffered by Francis Beckwith, Dale Tuggy, and Edward Feser beg the question. If the question is whether Christians and Muslims worship and refer to the same God, one cannot just assume that they do and then take one's task to be one of explaining how it is possible. Of course it is possible to refer to one and the same thing under different descriptions. But how does that show that in the case before us there is one and the same thing?
Another point that McGrew makes that I have also made is that one cannot show that the Christian and Muslim God are the same because their respective conceptions significantly overlap. No doubt they do: for both religions there is exactly one God, transcendent of his creation, who is himself uncreated, etc. But the overlap is insufficient to show numerical identity because of the highly important differences. Could one reasonably claim that classical theists and Spinozists worship the same God? I don't think so. The difference in attributes is too great. The reasonable thing to say is that if classical theism is true, then Spinozists worship a nonexistent God. Similarly, the difference between a triune God who entered the material realm to share our life and misery for our salvation and a non-triune God whose radical transcendence renders Incarnation impossible is such a huge difference that it is reasonable to take it as showing that the Christian and Muslim Gods cannot be the same.
McGrew and I also agree in rejecting what I will call the 'symmetry argument': since Jews and Christian worship the same God, the Christians and Muslims also worship the same God. It doesn't follow. Roughly, the Christian revelation does not contradict the Jewish revelation on the matter of the Trinity, since the Jews took no stand on this question before the time of Jesus. The Christian revelation supplements the Jewish revelation. The Islamic 'revelation,' however, contradicts the Christian one by explicitly specifying that God cannot be triune and must be disincarnate.
McGrew is certainly right that the 'same God' question ". . . can’t be decided by a flick of the philosophical wrist." And this needed to be said. Where I may be differing from her, though, is that on my view a really satisfactory resolution of the questions cannot be achieved unless and until we achieve real clarity about the underlying questions about reference, identity, existence, property-possession, and so on. It is highly unlikely, however, that these questions will ever be answered to the satisfaction of all competent practioners.
Where does this leave the ordinary Christian believer? Should he accept the same God thesis? It is not clear to me that he needs to take any position on it at all. But if he feels the need to take a stand, I say to him that he can rest assured that his non-acceptance of it is rationally justifiable.
Jimmy Elledge, Funny How Time Slips Away. Born January 8, 1943 in Nashville, Elledge died June 10, 2012 after complications following a stroke. The song, written by Willie Nelson, made the #22 slot on Billboard Hot 100 in 1961, and sold over one million copies. Elledge never had another hit. As a YouTube commenter pointed out, that does sound like Floyd Cramer tickling the ivories. A great song. I always thought it was a female singing.
Rosie and the Originals, Angel Baby, 1960. Perfect for cruising Whittier Boulevard in your '57 Chevy on a Saturday Night.
Norma Tanega, Walkin' My Cat Named 'Dog,' 1966. A forgotten oldie if ever there was one. If you remember this bit of vintage vinyl, one of the strangest songs of the '60s, I'll buy you a beer or a cat named 'dog.' One.
And now a couple more forgotten one-hit wonders who get almost no play on the oldies stations which is exactly why you need Uncle Wild Bill's Saturday Night at the Oldies:
Bob Luman, Let's Think About Livin' Trivia question: The song contains references to three contemporary songs. Name them. And how quaint the reference to the fellow with the switch-blade knife.
UPDATE 1/17: Dave B. tells me that I owe his wife Ronda a beer:
Yeah she remembered that song from the opening riff.
What a waste of a nice Gibson SG…
You are quite right, Dave: the girl is flailing at a Gibson SG standard. Clapton, a.k.a 'God,' played them before switching over to Fender Strats. I wanted an SG back around '67 or '68 but they were too much in demand. So I 'settled' for a Gibson ES 335TD. But then I did the dumbest thing I ever did a few years later.
London Ed propounds a difficulty for our delectation and possible solution:
Clearly the difficulty with the intralinguistic theory is its apparent absurdity, but I am trying to turn this around. What can we say about extralinguistic reference? What actually is the extralinguistic theory? You argue that the pronoun ‘he’ inherits a reference from its antecedent, so that the pronoun does refer extralinguistically, but only per alium, not per se.
Mark 14:51 And there followed him [Jesus] a certain young man (νεανίσκος τις) , having a linen cloth (σινδόνα) cast about his naked body; and the young men laid hold on him. 14:52 And he left the linen cloth, and fled from them naked.
So the pronoun ‘he’ inherits its reference through its antecedent. But the antecedent is the noun phrase ‘a certain young man’. On your theory, does this refer extralinguistically? That’s a problem, because indefinite noun phrases traditionally do not refer, indeed that’s the whole point of them. ‘a certain young man’ translates the Latin ‘adulescens quidam’ which in turn translates the Greek ‘νεανίσκος τις’. Here ‘certain’ (Latin quidam, Greek τις) signifies that the speaker knows who he is talking about, but declines to tell the audience who this is. Many commentators have speculated that the man was Mark himself, the author of the gospel, which if true means that ‘a certain young man’ and the pronouns, could be replaced with ‘I’, salva veritate. But Mark deliberately does not tell us.
So, question 1, in what sense does the indefinite noun phrase refer, given that, on the extralinguistic theory, it has to be the primary referring phrase, from which all subsequent back-reference inherits its reference?
A. First of all, it is not clear why Ed says, ". . . indefinite noun phrases traditionally do not refer, indeed that’s the whole point of them." Following Fred Sommers, in traditional formal logic (TFL) as opposed to modern predicate logic (MPL), indefinite noun phrases do refer. (See Chapter 3, "Indefinite Reference" of The Logic of Natural Language.) Thus the subject terms in 'Some senator is a physician' and 'A physician is running for president' refer, traditionally, to some senator and to a physician. This may be logically objectionable by Fregean lights but it is surely traditional. That's one quibble. A second is that it is not clear why Ed says "that's the whole point of them."
So the whole point of a tokening of 'a certain young man' is to avoid making an extralinguistic reference? I don't understand.
B. Ed says there is a problem on my view. A lover of aporetic polyads, I shall try to massage it into one. I submit for your solution the following inconsistent pentad:
a. There are only two kinds of extralinguistic reference: via logically proper names, including demonstratives and indexicals, and via definite descriptions. b. The extralinguistic reference of a grammatical pronoun used pronominally (as opposed to quantificationally or indexically) piggy-backs on the extralinguistic reference of its antecedent. It is per alium not per se. c. 'His,' 'him,' and 'he' in the verse from Mark are pronouns used pronominally the antecedent of which is 'a certain young man.' d. 'A certain young man' in the verse from Mark is neither a logically proper name nor a definite description. e. 'A certain young man' in the verse from Mark refers extralinguistically on pain of the sentence of which it is a part being not true.
The pentad is inconsistent.
The middle three limbs strike me as datanic. So there are two possible solutions.
One is (a)-rejection. Maintain as Sommers does that indefinite descriptions can refer. This 'solution' bangs up against the critique of Peter Geach and other Fregeans.
The other is (e)-rejection. Deny that there is any extralinguistic reference at all. This, I think, is Ed's line. Makes no sense to me, though.
I wonder: could Ed be toying with the idea of using the first four limbs as premises in an argument to the conclusion that all reference is intralinguistic? I hope not.
Suppose I point out a certain tree in the distance to Dale and remark upon its strange shape. I say, "That tree has a strange shape." Dale responds, "That's not a tree; that's a scarecrow!" Suppose we are looking at the same thing, a physical thing that exists in the external world independently of us. But what I take to be a tree, Dale takes to be a scarecrow. Suppose further that the thing in the external world, whatever it is, is the salient cause of our having our respective visual experiences. Are we referring to the same thing? The cause of the visual experiences is the same, but are the referents of our demonstrative phrases the same? Could we say that the referents are the same because the cause is the same?
If this makes sense, then perhaps we can apply it to the 'same God?' problem.
'Same cause, same referent' implies that the cause of my tokening of 'That tree' is its referent. It implies that we can account for successful reference in terms of physical causation. The idea is that what makes my use of 'that tree' successfully refer to an existing tree, this particular tree, and not to anything else is the tree's causing of my use of the phrase, and if not the tree itself, then some physical events involving the tree.
But the notion of salience causes trouble for this causal account of reference. What make a causal factor salient? What makes it jump out from all the other causal factors to assume the status of 'the cause'? (Salire, Latin, to jump.) After all, there are many causal factors involved in any instance of causation. Can we account for reference causally without surreptitiously presupposing irreducibly intentional and referential notions? Successful reference picks out its object from others. It gets to an existing object, and to the right object. Causation might not be up to this task. I shall argue that it is not.
We often in ordinary English speak of 'the cause' of some event, a myocardial infarction say, even though there are many contributing factors: bad diet, lack of exercise, hypertension, cigarette smoking, high stress job, an episode of snow-shoveling. Which of these will be adjudged 'the cause' is context- and interest-relative. A physician who gets a kick-back from a pharmaceutical concern will point to hypertension, perhaps, so that he can prescribe anangiotensin-converting enzyme inhibitor, while the man's wife might say that it was the snow shoveling that did him in. A liberal might say that the heart attack was caused by smoking.
Or suppose a short-circuit is cited as 'the cause' of a fire. In terms of fundamental physics, the whole state of the world at time determines its state at subsequent times. At this level, a short-circuit and the power's being on are equally causal in respect of a fire. Our saying that the short-circuit caused the fire, not the power's being on, simply advertises the fact that for us the latter is the normal and desired state of things, the state we have an interest in maintaining, and that the former is the opposite. Desire and interest are of course intentional notions: to desire is to desire something; to be interested is to be interested in something.
What these examples show is that there is an ordinary-language use of 'cause' which is context-sensitive and interest-relative. The ordinary notion of cause, then, resting as it does on our interests and desires, presupposes intentional notions. I cannot be interested in or desire something unless I am conscious of it. And I cannot adjudge one state of affairs as normal and the other as abnormal unless I have interests and desires.
In the case of my tokening of 'that tree,' what justifies us in saying that it is the tree that causes the tokening as opposed the total set of causal conditions including sunlight, my corrective lenses, my not having ingested LSD, the absence of smoke and fog, the proper functioning of my visual cortex, etc.? How is it that we select the tree as 'the cause'? And what about this selecting? It cannot be accounted for in terms of physical causation. The tree does not select itself as salient cause. We select it. But then selecting is an intentional performance. So intentionality, which underpins both mental and linguistic reference, comes back in through the back door.
The upshot is that an account of successful reference in terms of causation is viciously circular. What makes 'that tree' as tokened by me here and now refer to the tree in front of me? It cannot be the total cause of the tokening which includes all sorts of causal factors other than tree such as light and the absence of fog. It must be the salient cause. To select this salient cause from the among the various casual factors is to engage in an intentional performance. So reference presupposes intentionality and cannot be accounted for in non-intentional, purely causal, terms. Otherwise you move in an explanatory cricle of embarrassingly short diameter.
The point could be put as follows: I must already (logically speaking) have achieved reference to the tree in a noncausal way if I am then to single out the tree as the physical cause of my successful mental and linguistic reference.
Of course, I am not denying that various material and causal factors underpin mental and linguistic reference. What I am maintaining is that these factors are useless when it comes to providing a noncircular account of reference.
Now if causation cannot account for reference, then it cannot account for sameness of reference.
Dale and I are both in perceptual states. These two perceptual states have a common cause. But this common cause cannot be what makes one of our references successful and the other unsuccessful.
Christ and Allah
The above questions are analogs of the 'Same God?' question. Suppose a Christian and a Muslim each has a mystical or religious experience of the same type, that of the Inner Locution. Each cries out in prayer and each 'hears' the inner locution, "I am with you," and a deep peace descends upon him. Each is thankful and expresses his thanks. Suppose God exists and is the source of both of these locutions. But while the Christian may interpret the source of his experience in Trinitarian terms, the Muslim will not. Suppose the Christian takes the One who is answering to be a Person of the Trinity, Christ, while the Muslim takes it to be Allah who is answering. In expressing his thankfulness, the Christian prayerfully addresses Christ while the Muslim prayerfully addresses Allah.
Are Christian and Muslim referring to one and the same divine being? Yes, if the referent is the source/cause of the inner locutions. But this common cause does not select as between Christ and Allah, and so the common cause does not suffice to establish that Christian and Muslim are referring to one and the same divine being.
