Month: August 2017
Is It Epistemically Certain That There are Substances?
Herewith, another episode in my ongoing discussion with Lukas Novak. Here again is his list of propositions that he claims are not only true, but knowable with (epistemic as opposed to psychological) certainty:
a) God exists.
b) There are substances.
c) There are some necessary truths, even some de re necessary truths.
d) Human cognition is capable of truth and certainty.
e) There are no contradictions in reality.
I have already explained why I do not consider God exists to be certainly knowable. I now consider whether it is certainly knowable that there are (Aristotelian primary) substances.
We begin with the Moorean fact that there are tables and chairs, rocks and trees, cats and dogs. We may refer to such things generally as spatiotemporal meso-particulars. My work table, for example, is at a definite location in space; it has existed uninterruptedly for a long time; and it is a middle-sized object. Our question is not whether there are things like my table; our question is whether things like my table must be 'assayed' — this useful term is from Gustav Bergmann — as substances in the Aristotelian sense of the term. Thus I am not using 'substance' as a stylistic variant of 'spatiotemporal meso-particular.' Such a use would be a misuse by my standards of rigor and would paper over the legitimate question whether tables and cats and such must be understood in terms of an ontology of substances.
It might be that there are tables and cats, but no substances. But if there are substances, then tables and cats are paradigm examples of them.
My thesis is not that there are no substances, but that it is not epistemically certain that there are. Here is one consideration among several.
Persistence
My beautiful oak table has been around a long time. I reckon it came into existence in the early '80s. It will surely outlast me before passing out of existence. Numerical sameness over the temporal interval of its existence is a Moorean fact. Its diachronic identity is a datum. Let us say that the table has persisted for a long time. This word is 'datanic' as I like to say and thus theoretically neutral. I use it simply to record the datum, the Moorean fact, about which there can be no reasonable dispute, that the table has remained in existence, numerically one and the same, over a long period of time.
So far, I have been doing 'proto-philosophy.' I have been collecting and commenting upon some obvious data. I have not yet asked a specifically philosophical question or made a specifically philosophical assertion.
Perdurance or Endurance?
We get to philosophical questions when we ask: In what way does my table persist? How exactly is persistence to be understood? What is the nature of persistence? The question is not whether tables and cats persist; the question is what it is to persist. The question is not whether there are persistents; of course there are. The question is: What is persistence?
Now we come to a fork in the road. Two very different theories obtrude themselves upon our attention. Does a thing persist by being wholly present at each time at which it exists, or does a thing persist by merely having a proper part that is present at each time at which the thing exists?
Perdurance
Suppose the latter. Then we say that the table persists by perduring, where the latter term is theoretical unlike the pre-theoretical or datanic persists. If the table persists by perduring, then it is a whole of temporal parts with different such parts at different times. This implies that at no time during its existence is the whole table temporally present. On the perdurance scheme, tables and cats and such are four-dimensional entities, space-time worms if you will. If this is right, then the difference between a table and a process such as a fire is not categorially deep but superficial and a matter of how we conceptualize things.
Our natural tendency is to think of a house and a fire that consumes a house as very different, so different as to constitute a categorial difference. We are not inclined to call a house a process or an extended event; but we do not hesitate to call a fire a process or an extended event. A fire has a beginning, a middle, and an end. It unfolds over time and can be said to have temporal parts. It is not wholly present at each time at which it exists. It becomes present bit by bit. It is spread out in time as well as in space. When we observe a fire we are not observing the whole of it but only its present phase. It is natural to speak of fires and storms and wars and plays as having phases. It is not natural to speak of houses and soldiers as having phases.
On the perdurance view, however, there is no fundamental categorial difference between the house and the fire. Both persist in the same way, by perduring with different temporal parts present at different times. Both have both spatial and temporal parts. Both are 4-D objects.
Endurance
On the other theory, the table persists by enduring, where the latter term is also theoretical. If my table is an endurant, then it is not a whole of temporal parts. It does not have temporal parts at all. It is wholly present at each time at which it exists. It is nothing like a process. When I look at my table I see the whole of it, not the current phase of it.
What is it for a thing to be wholly present at each moment of its existence? One can understand it negatively: it means that the thing is not a whole of temporal parts. What does it mean positively?
Persons may provide a clue. I regret things I did long ago, things that I did, not things some earlier self or earlier person-slice of me did. I cannot shake the thought that I am numerically the same as the person who did those regrettable things. Connected with this is my conviction that my guilt is in no way diminished by the passage of time as it would be if I were a diachronic collection of person-slices as on a perdurantist view. My conviction is that I have persisted by enduring, not by perduring.
Of course, my psychological conviction does not prove that endurantism is true of persons, but it does help explain what it means for persons to be endurants as opposed to perdurants.
In the case of persons we can say that to be wholly present at every time at which the person exists is to be a substance that is 'there' at every moment beneath the flux of experiences and the flux of bodily changes as the self-same substrate of these psychological and physical changes.
If there are substances, then perdurantism is false, and endurantism is true
I have just sketched two theories of the persistence of material meso-particulars. Both theories go well beyond the Moorean fact of persistence. Each has its arguments pro et contra. We needn't worry about these arguments here. The fact of persistence is such that if you deny it then you are legitimately labelled 'crazy.' But there is nothing crazy about questioning the perdurance and endurance theories.
The important point for present purposes is that theose who claim that there are Aristotelian primary substance are opting for endurantism. Finally, my argument against Dr. Novak.
My Argument
a) It is epistemically certain that there are substances if and only if it is epistemically certain that endurantism is true.
b) It is not epistemically certain that endurantism is true.
Therefore
c) It is not epistemically certain that there are substances.
Welcome to the Age of Feeling
A Question about Use and Mention
Here is a curious sentence suggested to me by London Ed:
1) The last word in this sentence refers to cats.
(1) is part of a larger puzzle the discussion which we leave for later.
My question is this: Can a word be both used and mentioned in the same sentence? It would seem so. (1) is no doubt an unusual sentence. But it is grammatical, makes sense, and is true.
It seems that the last word in (1) is being both used and mentioned. (Assume someone is uttering a token of (1).) The last word in the sentence is 'cats' and 'cats' refers to cats. So the last word in (1) is being used. But it is also being mentioned. It is mentioned by 'the last word in this sentence.'
So it seems that one and the same word can be both used and mentioned in one and the same sentence.
What say you, London Ed?
Trump Haters, Supporters, Neither, and Both
Another brilliant column by VDH. I am tempted to quote, but it's all good.
Scandal Erupts over Promotion of ‘Bourgeois’ Behavior
More proof that 'liberals' are insane:
Were you planning to instruct your child about the value of hard work and civility? Not so fast! According to a current uproar at the University of Pennsylvania, advocacy of such bourgeois virtues is “hate speech.” The controversy, sparked by an op-ed written by two law professors, illustrates the rapidly shrinking boundaries of acceptable thought on college campuses and the use of racial victimology to police those boundaries.
A Plea to Conservative Bloggers
Please join me in promoting Prager U videos. They teach what isn't taught in the leftist seminaries that our so-called universities have become. And they are mercifully short, around five minutes in length. Do your bit.
Here is the man himself in Why Isn't Communism as Hated as Nazism?
Full Disclosure: I don't know Prager personally; I criticize him when he needs criticizing as for example here; he has not asked me to promote his efforts; everything I do on this site is pro bono in two senses: I am working for the Good, and I am working without pay.
Do Black Lives Matter?
FULL DISCLOSURE: I am not now, and never have been, a Southerner, a redneck, a plantation owner, slave holder, apologist for slavery, Civil War re-enactor on the Confederate (or Union) side, racist, or white supremacist.
I condemn slavery as a grave moral evil. I also condemn abortion as a grave moral evil.
Holding that all lives matter, I hold that black lives matter, including unborn black lives.
The Left’s Biggest Challenge at the Moment . . .
. . . is to figure out a way to politicize Hurricane Harvey and blame Trump for it. Either him or the deplorable racist bigots who support him. I'm sure the race-baiting, totalitarian bastards will come up with something.
Maybe they can take a leaf from that great black leader Louis Farrakhan on Katrina:
In comments in 2005, Farrakhan stated that there was a 25-foot (7.6 m) hole under one of the key levees that failed in New Orleans following Hurricane Katrina. He implied that the levee's destruction was a deliberate attempt to wipe out the population of the largely black sections within the city. Farrakhan later said that New Orleans Mayor Ray Nagin told him of the crater during a meeting in Dallas, Texas.[24] Farrakhan further claimed that the fact the levee broke the day after Hurricane Katrina is proof that the destruction of the levee was not a natural occurrence.
Why the Left Can’t Let Go of Racism
Shelby Steele on the racism racket.
After actual racist oppression of blacks was eliminated, the Left invented 'structural,' 'systemic,' or 'institutional' racism to keep the race hustle going. It was plain to objective investigators that the deaths of Trayvon Martin and Michael Brown had nothing to do with race hatred. Those two brought about their own deaths by their own bad behavior. But since they happened to be black, the Left seized on their deaths as examples of the imaginary construct, 'structural racism.'
To Understand the Religious Sensibility . . .
. . . two books are essential: Augustine's Confessions and Pascal's Pensées. If you read these books and they do not speak to you, if they do not move you, then it is a good bet that you don't have a religious bone in your body. It is not matter of intelligence but of sensibility.
"He didn't have a religious bone in his body." I recall that line from Stephanie Lewis' obituary for her husband David, perhaps the most brilliant American philosopher of the postwar period. He was highly intelligent and irreligious. Others are highly intelligent and religious. Among contemporary philosophers one could mention Alvin Plantinga, Peter van Inwagen, and Richard Swinburne. The belief that being intelligent rules out being religious casts doubt on the intelligence of those who hold it.
Let us suppose that you do not have the time or the stamina or the education to read Augustine's great book itself. Then I recommend to you on this, the feast day of St. Augustine, Peter Kreeft's I Burned for Your Peace: Augustine's Confessions Unpacked (Ignatius Press, 2016). It consists of key quotations with commentary by Kreeft.
But don't expect a high level of philosophical rigor. It is a work of popular apologetics by a master of that genre.
Kreeft's lack of philosophical rigor is illustrated by his view that "The refutation of this materialism is simple." (147)
For a long time Augustine struggled with the question of how there could be purely spiritual realities such as God and the soul. He was in the grip of a materialism according to which everything that is real must have a bodily nature and occupy space. But then he noticed that the mental acts by which we form bodily images are not themselves bodily images. My image of a cat, for example, has shape and color, but the mental act of imagination does not have shape and color. As Kreeft puts it:
The imagination cannot imagine itself. The understanding, however, can understand itself. We can have a concept of the act of conceiving, and we can also have a concept of the act of imagining. [. . .] The light of the projection machine must transcend the images it projects on the machine. A material image cannot create an image; only an immaterial soul can.
It is exceedingly strange that many otherwise intelligent philosophers today simply cannot see this point when they embrace a materialist "solution" to the mind-body problem." (148)
Now I reject materialism about the mind, but surely this is a dubious argument.
It is not obvious that there are mental acts, but let us suppose there are. So we distinguish the act of imagining a cat, from the object imagined, the cat. Now it must be granted that phenomenological reflection fails to note any physical or spatial feature in the act of imagining or in any act of any type. When we introspect the operations of our minds we find no evidence that they are brain processes. But lack of evidence is not evidence of lack. The lack of evidence that mental acts are material is not evidence that they are not material. It might be that mental acts are brain processes, but that we are unable to cognize them in their true nature. That they do not appear to be material does not prove that they are immaterial.
That's one problem. Second is that Kreeft moves immediately from the immateriality of mental acts to an immaterial soul substance as subject of these acts. That move needs to be mediated by argument.
How Did We Get to be So Proud?
Recalling our miserably indigent origin in the wombs of our mothers and the subsequent helplessness of infancy, how did we get to be so arrogant and self-important?
In a line often (mis)attributed to St. Augustine, but apparently from Bernard of Clairvaux, Inter faeces et urinam nascimur: "We are born between feces and urine."
So inauspicious a beginning for so proud a strut upon life's stage.
Pride, result of the Fall, comes before a fall — into the grave.
Leftists Eat Their Own
That they eat each other alive is the only thing I like about them. Buon appetito! Here:
Even the ACLU has run afoul of the thought police. They are taking enormous heat for a tweet featuring a cute little girl with an American flag and a shirt bearing the message “Free Speech.” They’re guilty of promoting “white supremacy” because the girl is deplorably white. Naturally, they apologized profusely. (emphasis added.)
So the ACLU is not just a bunch of leftist shysters. They are a bunch of pussy-wussy leftist shysters. Michael Medved has referred to them as the "American Criminal Liars Union."
Related:
The Real Threat is the Orwellian Antifa
Please read this important article. Excerpt:
Yet, the media would have us believe that it is the white supremacist movement that is the real threat to our republic. Consider that most media estimates put the Antifa movement, largely built out of the “Occupy” movement of 2008-2010, at more than 200,000 members. The Southern Poverty Law Center, on the other hand, puts the number of Klu Klux Klan members at about 6,000 KKK …in a country of almost 330 million. But actions speak volumes compared to mere numbers.
The vandalized statue of Christopher Columbus? Antifa. The statue torn down in Charlotte, N.C.? Antifa. The violence in Charlottesville? Antifa. The violence in Seattle? Antifa. Not excusing the vile nature of the white supremacist protest, but it was a licensed march that remained comparatively nonviolent, albeit troubling, until, as one eyewitness described it, “It started raining balloons filled with urine, feces, paint, burning chemicals & boards with nails driven into them.”
[. . .]
Increasingly, the violence we are seeing on the streets is not the result of the alt-right movement, but of the Antifa movement imposing their views on our society: tearing down statues, burning the American flag, shutting down town hall meetings, destroying private property and looting. All of it tactical toward achieving the goals of destroying the American culture, society and economy. Never mind that the tactics are themselves the tactics of the fascist.
Yet, the likes of CNN and the New York Times and Washington Post spend much of their time touting the alt-right threat. Why? A couple of reasons. First, most mainstream media types are philosophically inclined toward anti-establishment organizations from the start; they see little wrong with crypto-fascist violence if the stated goals are in line with their own values systems.
A Christian Koan
Man is godlike and therefore proud. He becomes even more godlike when he humbles himself.
The central thought of Christianity, true or not, is one so repellent to the natural human pride of life that one ought at least to entertain the unlikelihood of its having a merely human origin. The thought is that God humbled himself to the point of entering the world in the miserably helpless and indigent way we in fact do, inter faeces et urinam, and to the point of leaving it in the most horrendous, shameful, and excruciating way the brutal Romans could devise, and from a most undistinguished spot, a hill in an obscure desert outpost of their empire.