Month: January 2017

58 Most Commonly Misused Words and Phrases

A list by Steven Pinker. Refreshingly prescriptivist. I agree with every example. For instance,

• Begs the question means assumes what it should be proving and does not mean raises the question.

Correct: "When I asked the dealer why I should pay more for the German car, he said I would be getting 'German quality,' but that just begs the question."

The MavPhil trinity of editors, me, myself, and I heartily agree. But if you disagree with me or the trinity I won't draw my weapon. I won't even give you a lecture or refer you to one of my erudite entries on the topic. Meaning is tied to use. So if enough people come to use 'begs the question' to mean raises the question, then that is what it will mean. The meaning of a word or phrase is not an intrinsic property of it. If you want to communicate using the phrase in question after the ignorant have their way with it, then you will have to acquiesce in the semantic corruption.

But why call it corruption? Because of the destruction of a very useful phrase with a specific meaning.  We already have 'raises the question.'

When Trump was asked by Hugh Hewitt whether the former meant it literally when he called Obama the founder of ISIS, the Orange Man said yes, literally.  Now there are degrees of descriptivism.  Will you take it to the mad dog extreme of tolerating this use of 'literally'?  Or will you dig in your heels?  Not every prescriptivism is schoolmarmish. I have been known to split an infinite when the cadence of a well-crafted sentence dictated it.  (Memo to self: write an entire entry on 'literally.')

The fact that we have the leisure to ponder these bagatelles is testimony to how good we have it.  So be grateful for what you have while you have it.  

Numerical and Qualitative Identity and Radical Flux

Philosophers often use 'numerically' in contrast with 'qualitatively' when speaking of identity or sameness.  If I tell you that I drive the same car as Jane, that is ambiguous: it could mean that Jane and I drive one and the same car, or it could mean that Jane and I drive the same make and model of car, but not one and the same car. To take a second example, six bottles of beer in a typical six-pack are numerically distinct but qualitatively identical. Suppose you want a beer from the six-pack. It won't matter which bottle of the six I hand you since they are all qualitatively the same (qualitatively identical) in respect of both bottle and contents, at least with regard to the properties that you would find relevant such as quantity, taste, inebriatory potential, etc. If I hand you a beer and you say you want a different beer from the same six-pack, you mean a numerically different one. If I reply by saying that they are all the same, I mean they are all qualitatively the same.

If A and B are numerically identical, it follows that they are one and the same. A and B are one, not two.  If A and B are qualitatively identical, it does not follow that they are one and the same. But they might be.  For if A and B are numerically identical, then they share all properties, in which case they are qualitatively identical.  Furthermore, if A and B are qualitatively identical, it does not follow that they share every property: it suffices that they share some properties.

To see this, suppose that you and I both order the 'monster chimichanga' at the local Mexican eatery. We have ordered the same item, qualitatively speaking.  But it turns out that the one served to you is slightly more 'monstrous' (a wee bit bigger) than mine. That doesn't change the fact that they are qualitatively the same or qualitatively identical as I use these phrases.  The chimis are two, not one, hence numerically different.  They are the same in that they share most properties.

I suppose we could nuance this by distinguishing strict from loose qualitative identity.  Strict implies indiscernibility; loose does not. 

Can One Step Twice into the Same River?

Stephen Law (HT: Sed Contra) thinks one can make short work of a Heraclitean puzzle if one observes the numerical-qualitative distinction:

If you jump into a river and then jump in again, the river will have changed in the interim. So it won't be the same. But if it's not the same river, then the number of rivers that you jump into is two, not one. It seems we're forced to accept the paradoxical – indeed, absurd – conclusion that you can't jump into one and the same river twice. Being forced into such a paradox by a seemingly cogent argument is a common philosophical predicament.

This particular puzzle is fairly easily solved: the paradoxical conclusion that the number of rivers jumped into is two not one is generated by a faulty inference. Philosophers distinguish at least two kinds of identity or sameness. Numerical identity holds where the number of objects is one, not two (as when we discover that Hesperus, the evening star, is identical with Phosphorus, the morning star). Qualitative identity holds where two objects share the same qualities (e.g. two billiard balls that are molecule-for molecule duplicates of each other, for example). We use the expression 'the same' to refer to both sorts of identity. Having made this conceptual clarification, we can now see that the argument that generates our paradox trades on an ambiguity. It involves a slide from the true premise that the river jumped in the second time isn't qualitatively 'the same' to the conclusion that it is not numerically 'the same'. We fail to spot the flaw in the reasoning because the words 'the same' are used in each case. But now the paradox is resolved: we don't have to accept that absurd conclusion. Here's an example of how, by unpacking and clarifying concepts, it is possible to solve a classical philosophical puzzle. Perhaps not all philosophical puzzles can be solved by such means, but at least one can. 

Problem Solved?

Not so fast.  Although superficially plausible, the above solution/dissolution of the puzzle begs the question against the doctrine of Heraclitean flux. Law goes at Heraclitus with the numerical-qualitative identity distinction.  But this distinction presupposes a distinction between individuals and qualities.  Given this distinction one can say that one and the same individual has different qualities at different times.  Thus one and the same river is stepped into at different times. But on a doctrine of Heraclitean flux, there are no individuals that remain self-same over time.  There is no substrate of change.  Change cuts so deep that it cannot be confined to the properties of a thing leaving the thing, as the substrate of change, relatively unchanged.  For Heracliteans as for Buddhists, it's flux all the way down.

Law taxes Heraclitus with an illicit inferential slide from

The river jumped into the second time is not qualitatively the same

to

The river jumped into the second time is not numerically the same.

But there is no equivocation on 'same' unless we can sustain a distinction between the thing and its properties.  Is this distinction unproblematic?  Of course not. It reeks with problems. Just what is a thing in distinction from its properties?  A Bergmannian bare particular? An Armstrongian thin particular? An Aristotelian primary substance? There are problems galore with these conceptions. Has anyone ever really clarified the notion of prote ousia in Aristotle? Nope. Is a thing a bundle of its properties? More problems. And what is a property? An abstract object? In what sense of 'abstract'? A universal? A trope?  Will you say that there are no properties at all, only predicates?  And what about the thing's HAVING of properties? What is that? Instantiation? Is instantiation a relation? If yes, does it sire Bradley's Regress?  Are properties/concepts perhaps unsaturated in Frege's sense?  Can sense be made of that?  Is HAVING some sort of containment relation? Are the properties of a thing ontological constituents of it? And what could that mean? And so it goes.

We are presented with a puzzle and a seeming absurdity: There is no stepping twice into the same river. The Moorean rebuttal comes quickly: Of course, there is! Common sense, convinced that it is  right, attempts to dissolve the puzzle by making a simple distinction between numerical and qualitative identity.  The dissolution seems to work — but only if we remain on the surface of the troubled waters. Think a little more and you realize that the distinction presupposes a deeper distinction between thing and properties. But now we are launched into a labyrinth of ontological problems for which there is no accepted solution. The unclarity of the individual-property distinction percolates back upwards to disturb the numerical-qualitative distinction. 

Law has not definitively solved the Heraclitean puzzle.

The Numerical-Qualitative Distinction is Valid at the Level of Ordinary Language

We need to make the distinction, of course: it is fallout from, and exegesis of, ordinary usage.  'Same' is indeed ambiguous in ordinary English. The distinction does useful work at the level of ordinary language. The Heraclitean, however, need not be taken as contesting, at that level, the truth that one can step twice into the same river.  He is making a metaphysical claim: there is in reality, below the level of conventional talk and understanding, radical flux. If so, there is nothing that remains self-same over time, such as a river,  into which one can step twice.

Summary

To think clearly and avoid confusion one must observe the distinction between numerical and qualitative identity. But this distinction, which is serviceable enough for ordinary purposes, rests on a distinction, that of individual and property, which is metaphysically murky. Therefore, the common sense distinction cannot be used to dispatch the Heracliteans' metaphysical claim.

The deep metaphilosophical issue here concerns the role and status of Moorean rebuttals to seemingly crazy metaphysical claims. The illustrious Peter van Inwagen famously denies the existence of artifacts.  But he is not crazy, and you won't be able to blow him out of the water with some simple-minded distinction.

See Peter van Inwagen, Artifacts, and Moorean Rebuttals 

Plagiarism

How could you, Monica Crowley?  Well, at least you are in good company. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. plagiarized portions of his Boston University dissertation:

A committee of scholars appointed by Boston University concluded today [10 October 1991] that the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. plagiarized passages in his dissertation for a doctoral degree at the university 36 years ago.

[. . .]

"There is no question," the committee said in a report to the university's provost, "but that Dr. King plagiarized in the dissertation by appropriating material from sources not explicitly credited in notes, or mistakenly credited, or credited generally and at some distance in the text from a close paraphrase or verbatim quotation."

[. . .]

The dissertation at issue is "A Comparison of the Conceptions of God in the Thinking of Paul Tillich and Henry Nelson Wieman." Dr. King wrote it in 1955 as part of his requirements for a doctor of philosophy degree, which he subsequently received from the university's Division of Religious and Theological Studies.

Does King's plagiarism disqualify him from being honored?  No. He was a great civil rights leader and he died in the service of his cause.  

Crowley's plagiarism appears to have been much worse than King's.

Every man has his 'wobble' as I like to say, and every woman too. If we honored only those who are in all respects honorable we would honor no mortal. 

If truth be told, no one of us is all that admirable, although some of us are more admirable than others.

The Urbanites and the Rustics

Here is Victor Davis Hanson in yet another penetrating column, Trump and the American Divide:

Is there something about the land itself that promotes conservatism? The answer is as old as Western civilization. For the classical Greeks, the asteios (“astute”; astu: city) was the sophisticated “city-like” man, while the agroikos(“agrarian”; agros: farm/field) was synonymous with roughness. And yet there was ambiguity as well in the Greek city/country dichotomy: city folk were also laughed at in the comedies of Aristophanes as too impractical and too clever for their own good, while the unpolished often displayed a more grounded sensibility. In the Roman world, the urbanus (“urbane”; urbs: city) was sometimes too sophisticated, while the rusticus (“rustic”; rus: countryside) was often balanced and pragmatic.

The maverick ideal as I envisage it is to be able to relate both to the urbanites and to the 'deplorable' rustics, rough, blunt, and practical among the latter, sophisticated and refined among the former.  Among the urbanites, but not among the rustics, I might justify the maverick ideal by invoking Terence. Homo sum: humani nihil a me alienum puto. "I am a man: I consider nothing human foreign to me." 

Among the rusticos and urban blue-collar types any show of learning will often be taken as 'putting on airs.'  And any display of refinement will often be read as preciosity, not that the workers will know this word.  The word has an interesting property: it often applies to those who know it. A good maxim is to tailor one's discourse and comportment to one's audience, being vulgar among the vulgar and refined among the refined.

Hanson's piece is just jam-packed with insight:

Language is also different in the countryside. Rural speech serves, by its very brevity and directness, as an enhancement to action. Verbosity and rhetoric, associated with urbanites, were always rural targets in classical literature, precisely because they were seen as ways to disguise reality so as to advance impractical or subversive political agendas. Thucydides, nearly 2,500 years before George Orwell’s warnings about linguistic distortion, feared how, in times of strife, words changed their meanings, with the more polished and urbane subverting the truth by masking it in rhetoric that didn’t reflect reality. In the countryside, by contrast, crops either grow or wither; olive trees either yield or remain barren; rain either arrives or is scarce. Words can’t change these existential facts, upon which living even one more day often depends. For the rural mind, language must convey what is seen and heard; it is less likely to indulge adornment.

Things haven't changed. Leftists are masters of linguistic distortion as I have been pointing out since 2004 in these pages.

To the rural mind, verbal gymnastics reveal dishonest politicians, biased journalists, and conniving bureaucrats, who must hide what they really do and who they really are. Think of the arrogant condescension of Jonathan Gruber, one of the architects of the disastrous Obamacare law, who admitted that the bill was written deliberately in a “tortured way” to mislead the “stupid” American voter. To paraphrase Cicero on his preference for the direct Plato over the obscure Pythagoreans, rural Americans would have preferred to be wrong with the blunt-talking Trump than to be right with the mush-mouthed Hillary Clinton. One reason that Trump may have outperformed both McCain and Romney with minority voters was that they appreciated how much the way he spoke rankled condescending white urban liberals. 

Political Oikophobia and Trump Derangement Syndrome

Oikophobia is an irrational fear of household items, surroundings, and the like.  Political oikophobia is an irrational aversion to one's own country, culture, traditions, and countrymen.  I suggest we call the opposite political oikophilia, an irrational love of one's own country, culture, traditions, and countrymen.  This distinction 'cuts perpendicular' to the xenophobia-xenophilia distinction. Thus,

Political oikophobia: irrational aversion to one's own country, etc.
Political oikophilia: irrational love of one's own country, etc.
Xenophobia: an irrational fear of foreigners and the foreign.
Xenophilia: an irrational love of foeigners and the foreign.

Clearly, one can be an oikophobe without being a xenophile, and an oikophile without being a xenophobe.

Trump Derangment Syndrome takes the form of political oikophobia in many.  Glenn Reynolds supplies examples. Here is one:

Ned Resnikoff, a “senior editor” at the  liberal website ThinkProgress, wrote on Facebook that he’d called a plumber to fix a clogged drain. The plumber showed up, did the job and left, but Resnikoff was left shaken, though with a functioning drain. Wrote Resnikoff, “He was a perfectly nice guy and a consummate professional. But he was also a middle-aged white man with a Southern accent who seemed unperturbed by this week’s news.”

This created fear: “While I had him in the apartment, I couldn’t stop thinking about whether he had voted for Trump, whether he knew my last name is Jewish, and how that knowledge might change the interaction we were having inside my own home.”

When it was all over, Resnikoff reported that he was “rattled” at the thought that a Trump supporter might have been in his home. “I couldn’t shake the sense of potential danger.”

Here is a second example:

In fact, another piece on reacting to the election, by Tim Kreider in The Week, is titled "I love America. It's Americans I hate." Writes Kreider, “The public is a swarm of hostile morons, I told her. You don't need to make them understand you; you just need to defeat them, or wait for them die. . . .  A few of us are talking, after a couple drinks, about buying guns; if it comes to a fascist state or civil war, we figure, we don't want the red states to be the only ones armed.”

“A vote for Trump,” Kreider continues, “is kind of like a murder.”  Though his piece concludes on a (slightly) more hopeful note, the point is clear:  Americans, at least Trump-voting Americans, are “pathetically dumb and gullible, uncritical consumers of any disinformation that confirms their biases.”

And a third:

And in a notorious Yale Law Journal article, feminist law professor Wendy Brown wrote about an experience in which, after a wilderness hike, she returned to her car to find it wouldn’t start. A man in an NRA hat spent a couple of hours helping her get it going, but rather than display appreciation for this act of unselfishness, Brown wrote that she was lucky she had friends along, as a guy like that was probably a rapist.

Clearly, these three people are topically deranged: they lose their mental balance and the boat of brain capsizes into irrationality when the topic of Trump obtrudes.  This is not to say that they cannot negotiate the world sensibly in other ways: they are not globally deranged.  Nor is it to say that everyone with objections to Trump the man or Trump's policies and appointments is deranged topically or globally.

The phrase 'Trump Derangement Syndrome' refers to a real phenomenon and is justified by this fact.

Why Do Intellectuals Oppose Capitalism?

An important essay by Robert Nozik. (HT: C. Cathcart) Teaser quotation:

Intellectuals now expect to be the most highly valued people in a society, those with the most prestige and power, those with the greatest rewards. Intellectuals feel entitled to this. But, by and large, a capitalist society does not honor its intellectuals. Ludwig von Mises explains the special resentment of intellectuals, in contrast to workers, by saying they mix socially with successful capitalists and so have them as a salient comparison group and are humiliated by their lesser status.

Yet Another Accomplishment of the President-Elect

Add this to the ever-lengthening list:

Lockheed Martin Corp.’s chief told President-elect Donald Trump it’s close to a deal with the Pentagon to lower costs “significantly’’ for the next production lot of its F-35 fighter jet and will boost hiring at the Texas factory where the advanced aircraft is made.

People have been complaining about defense contractors' bilking of the government for decades.  Should a screw cost $37? What's it made out of, gold? A coffee maker $7,622?  A toilet seat $640?  (See here.)

Finally, some action.  But for action you need a man of action. A man who can't be bought.  Not another lawyer turned career politician. Not another member of the cozy political class who goes along to get along.  Someone with the wherewithal to be independent, a maverick politician, if you will.

You lefties ought to like that Trump is sticking it to yuge corporations and saving American jobs.  So to you nattering nabobs of negativism I say: give the man a chance, a year or two.  If he goes fascist we'll take of him.  

Otherwise: STFU.

A Bias of the Intellectual

Robert Paul Wolff:

A rich, complex vocabulary properly deployed is one evidence of a strong mind endowed with a wealth of knowledge.  As I was watching portions of Trump’s press conference yesterday, despite being made physically ill by the man, I somewhat reflexively noticed the extraordinary paucity of his linguistic resources.  Even when he is talking about something he has prepared himself on, he seems utterly unable to use more than the most primitive vocabulary, inaccurately and banally.

Professor Wolff is down with a bad case of TDS if he is made physically ill by Trump's speech.  And yes, the paucity of the Orange Man's linguistic resources cannot be gainsaid.  But might it be that we intellectuals have an inordinate respect for verbal intelligence?  And  an unjustified contempt for those who don't read books?

Among many, myself included, verbal facility is a touchstone of intelligence, or rather of one sort of intelligence, verbal intelligence. Barack Obama has it.  He is a master of soaring rhetoric and empty phraseology.  By way of exaggerated contrast, George W. Bush couldn't rub a subject and a verb together and come up with a clean sentence in his mother tongue.  But there is more to intelligence than the ability to sling words while avoiding syntactic howlers.  And when it comes to this 'more,' Obama has proven to be sadly lacking.  Obama is an uncommonly good bullshitter and blather-mouth, but the net effect of his presidency has been negative.  He lost the Middle East. And to mention only one domestic disaster, his policies, appointments and interventions into local affairs have set back race relations and have led to a terrible spike in inner city violence.  The rule of law has been weakened under his administration.

Journalists: Please Proof-Read for Ambiguity

David French is a good writer.  But the following is from his January 11th NRO column, Shame on Buzzfeed:

So here’s what responsible people say when confronted with claims like that: What’s your evidence? If the answer is “an anonymously written and anonymously sourced series of memos that no one has yet been able to substantiate,” then you either pass on the story or — if you have the time and resources — try to substantiate the claims. If you can’t, then you pass. It’s that simple. Any other action isn’t “transparency.” It’s not “reporting.” It’s malice.

The intended meaning is clear, but only after two or more readings. The trouble is the ambiguous phrase 'pass on.'  

In one sense of 'pass on,' to pass on a story is to tell it to one or more people, to publish or broadcast it. French's intended meaning is the opposite: to refuse to tell the story by 'taking a pass' on one's option of so doing.

The careful writer is sensitive to ambiguity, both semantic, as in the above case, and syntactic.  We philoso-pedants call the latter amphiboly.  

"The foolish fear that God is dead."  This sentence is amphibolous because its ambiguity does not have a semantic origin in the multiplicity of meaning of any constituent word, but derives from the ambiguous way the words are put together.  On one reading, the construction is a sentence: 'The foolish/ fear that God is dead.'  On the other reading, it is not a sentence, does not express a compete thought, but is a sentence-fragment: ' The foolish fear/that God is dead.'

A good writer avoids ambiguity except when he intends it.

I got my quarterly haircut the other day.  A neighbor remarked, "I see you got a haircut," to which I responded with the old joke, "I got 'em all cut."  

What about  'pretty bad girls.' Are they pretty and bad, or pretty bad?  Is the ambiguity here both syntactic and semantic?  After all, if something is pretty bad, it is not pretty. 

Ain't English fun?  And why  is 'pretty' pronounced like 'pity' and not like 'petty'?  It is because of history, toward which we conservatives feel a sort of natural piety.

Could I Pass an Ideological Turing Test?

Could I present liberal-left ideas in such a way that the reader could not tell that I was not a liberal?  Let me take a stab at this with respect to a few 'hot' topics.  This won't be easy.  I will have to present liberal-left ideas as plausible while avoiding all mention of their flaws.  And all of this without sarcasm, parody, or irony.  Each of these subheadings could be expanded into a separate essay.  And of course there are many more subheadings that could be added.  

Abortion.  We liberals believe that a women's right to choose to terminate a pregnancy is a very important right that must be upheld.  We are not pro abortion but pro choice, believing that decisions concerning a woman's reproductive health are ultimately her decisions, in consultation with physicians and family members and clergy, but are not the business of lawmakers and politicians.  Every woman has a right to do what she wants with her body and its contents.  While we respect those who oppose abortion on religious grounds, these grounds are of a merely private nature and cannot be made the basis of public policy.  Religious people do not have the right to impose their views on the rest of us using the coercive power of the state.

Voting Rights.  We liberals can take pride in the role our predecessors played in the struggle for universal suffrage.  Let us not forget that until the ratification of the 19th Amendment to the U. S. Constitution on 18 August 1920, women were not allowed to vote.  We liberals seek to preserve and deepen the progress that has been made.  For this reason we oppose  voter identification laws that have the effect of disenfranchising American citizens by disproportionately burdening  young voters, people of color, the elderly , low-income families, and people with disabilities.

Gun Control.  We live in a society awash in gun violence.  While we respect the Second Amendment and  the rights of hunters and sport shooters, we also believe in reasonable regulations  such as a ban on all assault weapons and high-capacity magazines.

Marriage. We liberals believe in equality and oppose discrimination in all its forms, whether on the basis of race, national origin, religion, gender, or sexual orientation.  For this reason we support marriage equality and same-sex marriage.  Opposition to same-sex marriage is discriminatory.  As we become more enlightened and shed ancient superstitions, we extend the realm of freedom and equality to include more and more of the hitherto persecuted and marginalized.  The recognition of same-sex marriage is but one more step toward a truly inclusive and egalitarian society.

Taxation and Wealth Redistribution.  We liberals want justice for all.  Now justice is fairness, and fairness requires equality.  We therefore maintain that a legitimate function of government is wealth redistribution to reduce economic inequality. 

Size and Scope of Government.  As liberals we believe in robust and energetic government.  Government has a major role to play in the promotion of the common good.  It is not the people's adversary, but their benefactor.  The government is not a power opposed to us; the government is us.  It should provide for the welfare of all of us.  Its legitimate functions cannot be restricted to the protection of life, liberty, and property (Locke) or to the securing of the negative rights of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness (Jefferson).  Nor can it be restricted to the securing of these and a few others: people have positive rights and it is a legitimate function of government to ensure that people received the goods and services to which they have a positive right.

Health and Human Services.  A decent society takes care of its members and provides for their welfare.  The provision of welfare cannot be left to such institutions of civil society as private charities.  It is a legitimate state function.  People have positive rights to food, water, shelter, clothing, and health services.  These rights generate in those capable of satisfying them the duty to provide the things in question.  It is therefore a legitimate function of government to make sure that people get what they need. 

Capital Punishment.  We liberals are enlightened and progressive people.  Now as humankind has progressed morally, there has been a corresponding progress in penology.  The cruel and unusual punishments of the past have been outlawed.  The outlawing of capital punishment is but one more step in the direction of progress and humanity and indeed the final step in  implementing the Eight Amendment's proscription of "cruel and unusual punishments."  There is no moral justification for capital punishment when life in prison without the possibility of parole is available.

The Role of Religion.  As liberals, we are tolerant.  We respect the First Amendment right of religious people to a "free exercise" of their various religions.  But religious beliefs and practices and symbols and documents are private matters that ought to be kept out of the public square.  When a justice of the peace, for example, posts a copy of the Ten Commandments, the provenience of which is the Old Testament, in his chambers or in his court, he violates the separation of church and state.

Immigration.  We are a nation of immigrants.  As liberals we embrace immigration: it enriches us and contributes to diversity.  We therefore oppose the nativist and xenophobic immigration policies of conservatives while also condemning the hypocrisy of  those who oppose immigration when their own ancestors came here from elsewhere.

Belief, Designation, and Substitution

Suppose it is true that Sam believes that Hesperus is a planet.  One cannot substitute 'Phosphorus' for 'Hesperus' in 'Sam believes that Hesperus is a planet' and be assured that the resulting sentence will also be true.  And this despite the fact that Hesperus is Phosphorus. The reason is that Sam may be ignorant of the fact that Hesperus is Phosphorus.  So here we have a context, that of belief de dicto, in which the substitution of one co-referential expression for another fails to preserve truth.

Valid: Hesperus is a planet; Hesperus is Phosphorus; ergo, Phosphorus is a planet.

Invalid: Sam believes that Hesperus is a planet; Hesperus is Phosphorus; ergo, Sam believes that Phosphorus is a planet.

The difference in Quinean jargon is that in the valid argument, each name is in a referentially transparent position, while in the invalid argument the first occurrence of 'Hesperus' and the second occurrence of 'Phosphorous' are in referentially opaque positions. (Cf. Word and Object, sec. 30)

So far the Opponent will agree.  But he has a question for me.

Why does substitution succeed for the ‘designates’ relation, but fail for the ‘believes’ relation? The two arguments below are of exactly the same logical form:

A. ‘H’ designates H; H = P, therefore ‘H’ designates P.
B.  Sam believes that H is a planet; H = P, therefore S believes that P is a planet.

My answer is that substitution succeeds for the 'designates' relation because there is no referential opacity in (A).  'H' in (A) — I am mentioning the third word in (A) — is referentially transparent.  Let's not forget that we are assuming that names are rigid designators that refer directly to their designata, not via a Fregean sense or a Russellian description.

LassoA directly referential term 'lassoes' its object, or you could say it 'harpoons' it or 'grabs' it. If I grab my cat I don't grab him under a description or via a Fregean "mode of presentation."  I grab the cat himself, all 25 lbs of him with all his parts and properties. Analogously, successful reference on Kripke's scheme get us right to the thing itself.  

I am maintaining against the Opponent that if names are rigid designators that target their designata directly and not via any sort of semantic intermediary, then the (A) and (B) cases are very different.  (B)-type cases are counterexamples to universal substitutivity salva veritate; (A)-type cases are not.  He is maintaining that the cases are parallel and that both generate referential opacity.

The Opponent's view might make sense if we add to the dialectic the Opponent's surprising thesis that all reference is intralinguistic reference, but this thesis cannot be brought into a discussion of Kripke who holds no such view.  My view is that while there is of course intralinguistic reference, it is a derivative phenomenon:  the paradigm cases are of extralinguistic reference.  Reference to a massive planet is nothing like a pronoun's back-reference to its antecedent.

But I don't endorse Kripke's views.  I incline toward a descriptivist theory of names.  Names don't refer; people or rather their minds refer using names that need not be publicly expressed.  Linguistic reference is built upon, and nothing without, thinking reference, or intentionality. The primacy of the intentional! (Chisholm would be proud of me.) The intentionality of finite mind, however, never presents us with the thing itself, Venus say, in all its infinitely-propertied glory.  Mental reference in never direct but mediated by a semantic intermediary, whether a Fregean sense, an Husserlian noema, a Castanedan guise, or something of that order.

Thinking about my cat is quite unlike picking him up.  When I pick him up I get the whole cat including stomach contents into my hand.  But I can't get the whole cat into my mind when I think about him.  I can only think of him under a description which doesn't begin to exhaust his full kitty-kat kwiddity. 

Kripke's scheme is crude, especially when he tries to explain via causation how a name acquires its reference.  The causal theory of reference quite hopeless for reasons canvassed in other posts.

Finally, if 'a' and 'b' are rigid designators that directly target their objects, and a = b, then surely there is no possible world in which the referents of these names both exist and are numerically different.  If substitution comes into this at all, it cannot fail to preserve truth. For if the meaning of 'a' is exhausted by a, and the meaning of 'b' exhausted by b, and a = b, then there is no additional factor that could induce referential opacity.

If a = b, it does not follow that necessarily, a = b, for if a/b is contingent, there there are worlds in which the identity does not hold.  But we can say this: if a = b, then essentially, a = b.  This rules out the contingency of their identity across all worlds in which a/b exists.

What Exactly is Trumpism?

Another excellent column by VDH.  Excerpt:

Trump admires people who make money. He doesn’t buy that those, to take one example, with Ph.D.s and academic titles could have made money if only they had wished—but for lots of reasons (most of them supposedly noble) chose not to. For Trump, credentialed academic expertise in anything is in no way comparable to achievement in the jungle of business.

Instead, in Trump’s dog-eat-dog world, only a few bruisers make it to the top and the real, big money — the ultimate barometer of competence. He sees the “winners” as knights to be enlisted in behalf of the weaker others. He might not quite say that a Greek professor [a professor of Greek] is inherently useless, and he might not worry much about preserving the ancient strands of Western civilization. But he might remind us that such pursuits are esoteric and depend on stronger, more cunning and instinctual sorts, whose success alone can pay for such indulgences. Without Greek professors, the world can still find shelter and fuel; without builders and drillers, there can be no Greek professors. Brain surgery and guided missiles both require lots of money without which decline is inevitable.

……………………

There is an important truth here.  The life of the mind is a noble and magnificent thing, and philosophy is the noblest pursuit of them all.  The vita contemplativa is an end in itself and the vita activa its handmaiden.  

But the spaces of serenity and contemplative repose must be secured by "cunning and instinctual sorts," the rude men who enforce the law and defend us from the barbarians within and the warriors who defend us from the barbarians without.  And none of this is possible without the "builders and the drillers."

We intellectuals have a certain amount of justified contempt for the businessmen who know the price of everything  and the value of nothing.  We are disgusted by the vulgarity, ostentation, and ignorance of types like Trump.  And they return the 'compliment.' The truth is that we need each other's virtues.

We need a man like Trump in the White House now after the disasters both foreign and domestic perpetrated by an adjunct law professor and community organizer with no experience of the real world whose only credentials are a gift of gab and a dark skin pigmentation.