September 2017 – Page 6 – Maverick Philosopher

Lukáš Novák on Use and Mention

From a comment in a now fast-receding earlier thread:

An editor trying to impose a clear use-mention distinction on authors soon realises that most certainly words can be both used and mentioned, and that it is not inherently wrong. BTW, the Scholastics believed that in the case of the so-called material supposition it is regularly the case: cf. "man is a noun" (note the lack of quotes around "man"); and the apparatus of material supposition cannot be always equivalently "translated" into the "quoting" convention.

There are also some interesting cases involving quotes:

– Nietzsche said that "God is dead".

Here the phrase "God is dead" is both used to complete the sentence, and mentioned as that what Nietzsche literally said.

Scare quotes:

– I cannot wait to hear and refute Peter's "arguments".

"Arguments" is both used to refer disparagingly to what Peter presents as arguments, and mentioned as the word Peter actually uses.

To be clear, the issue is not whether words can be both used and mentioned, but whether some words can be both used and mentioned in the same sentence or clause or phrase. The answer, I think, is yes. The challenge is to find crystal-clear examples.

When I am quoting an actual person's words, I use double quotation marks. These are genuine quotation marks. When I am not quoting, but mentioning a word, phrase, clause, or sentence, I use single 'quotation' marks as in:

'Boston' is disyllabic.

Please note that the indentation, as just performed, serves a mentioning function but without the messiness of additional 'quotation' marks.

Besides quoting and mentioning there is also sneering/scaring. For sneering/scaring I use single 'quotation' marks as in

There is nothing liberal about contemporary 'liberals.'

and

I use single 'quotation' marks to show that a word is being misused or analogically extended.

You can begin to see from this what a punctilious pedant and language Nazi I am. There are other niceties and puzzles relating to all of this, but let's proceed to Dr. Novak's examples, starting with the last one. This is a very interesting case, but it doesn't seem to me to be a totally clear example of a word being both used and mentioned. Simplify the example:

Peter's 'arguments' are fallacious.

No doubt, 'arguments' is being used in this sentence. Or rather, " 'arguments' " is being used in this sentence. But I don't see that it is being mentioned. The inverted commas signal that the word is being used in an extended or improper way to refer to something that really ought not be called an argument. An extended use is not a mention.

Novak's second example is:

Nietzsche said that "God is dead."

But this is not a good English sentence, and so does not constitute a clear example. One must write either

(a) Nietzsche said that God is dead

(b) Nietzsche said, "God is dead."

In (a), 'that God is dead' is being used to refer to the content of Nietzsche's assertion, while in (b) the sentence Nietzsche wrote is mentioned.

Novak's first example is:

Man is a noun.

I'm sorry, but that is just false. 'Man' is a noun, not man. 'Man' is monosyllabic, but no man is monosyllabic. 'Man' is a word, but no man is a word.

Finally, an example that seems to work:

Big Bill Broonzy was so-called because of his size.

Clearly the name is being used to refer to a black bluesman. But that he was called 'Big Bill Broonzy' because of his size is also conveyed by the sentence. The name is therefore both used and (implicitly) mentioned in the same sentence.

Virtual Virtue

Yet another from the pen of Victor Davis Hanson. The concluding section:

Noble Lies

Noble lying helps to explain virtual virtue: repeating something publicly that is not true but is considered something that should be true, is seen as helping to make it eventually true.

If the Bay Area public has witnessed gangs of minority youth terrorizing those on its Bay Area Rapid Transit trains, and if the transit authority in response refuses to release to the public surveillance tapes of such assaults or even to issue specific warnings, then perhaps the problem will disappear. Or at least the attacks can be virtuously contextualized—by supposedly nobly wishing to deny the media sensational reporting or to protect the civil rights of as yet uncharged marauding youths. So the transit authority virtue signals a falsity, and the public lives a reality. The more hushed the crime, the more it becomes a non-crime?

In sum, the more prominent persons voice virtual virtue at no cost, the quieter ones know better and make the necessary adjustments that fit what they see and hear and conclude. The result of our two worlds is that the virtual virtue signalers grow ever louder only to reach deaf ears; while the quieter become even more cynical and detached in having to live what increasingly seems a charade.

What’s the Matter with Germany?

Argues that the trouble with Germany is that it is anti-Enlightenment. The author ignores, however, the German Enlightenment and its main exponent, the great philosopher Immanuel Kant (1724-1804).

It is not easy to play the history-of-ideas game well!

You are not a Racist if You Speak the Truth about Race

My title answers the question I posed in my post Are the Police Racist? I asked:

If a statement about race is true, is one a racist for making it? Is one a racist for reporting the following?

Homicide numbers from the Federal Bureau of Investigation Supplementary Homicide Reports, 1976–2005 indicate that young African-American males account for homicide victims at levels that are ten to 20 times greater than their proportion of the population and account for homicide offenders at levels that are 15 to 35 times greater than their proportion of the population.

I received two intelligent responses one in agreement, the other in disagreement. Here is the first:

[A leftist I am reading] argues, and this touches your point, that propaganda can consist of claims that are true and made sincerely. Such as ‘there are Muslims among us’, which is true, and does not even communicate something false (namely that Muslims are inherently dangerous to others), but rather is misleading. ‘It simply does not follow that the flawed ideological belief that makes some claim effective as propaganda is expressed or communicated in that claim’. I think he would treat the statement you quote in the same way.

Homicide numbers from the Federal Bureau of Investigation Supplementary Homicide Reports, 1976–2005 indicate that young African-American males account for homicide victims at levels that are ten to 20 times greater than their proportion of the population and account for homicide offenders at levels that are 15 to 35 times greater than their proportion of the population.

Is that true? Damned right. Is it made sincerely? Surely so. But it is effective propaganda because misleading, according to him. Bizarrely, he says that the word ‘welfare’ does not appear on any banned list, yet always conveys ‘a problematic social meaning’. Even a word like ‘mother’ is problematic (has a ‘harmful social meaning’) whenever it is used. F–k me.

BV: Leftists subscribe to the hermeneutics of suspicion. Thus they refuse to take what conservatives say at face value as expressing a sincerely held opinion based in empirical fact. If I cite the FBI statistic, I am speaking in a 'code' using 'dog whistles' that other conservatives can hear. So if I say that blacks as a group are more criminally prone than whites, what I am really saying is that blacks have to be kept in their place or hunted down. I am legitimating their alleged unjust 'mass incarceration.' I am condoning the alleged murder of the likes of Trayvon Martin and Michael Brown of Ferguson. (The truth, of course, is that these two youths were not murdered but brought about their own deaths by their immoral, illegal, and extremely foolish behavior.) Thus leftists ignore the manifest meaning of what the conservative says and seek out some latent 'ideological' meaning, where ideology has the Marxist sense of a legitimation of existing relations of power and domination.

It has been said, correctly in the main, that for a conservative, leftists are wrong, whereas for a leftist, conservatives are evil. It is because they regard us as evil that they refuse to accord us respect as rational interlocutors with a point of view worth examining. This is why they exclude conservative speakers and shout down those who somehow make it onto campus. This is why they pepper us with purely emotive epithets such as 'fascist' and the 'phobe' constructions which are designed to impugn our sanity.

So when I cite the FBI stat to explain why blacks are 'over-represented' in the prison system I am accused of retailing racist propaganda when I am simply speaking the truth.

I am one of those conservatives who think that leftists (including most contemporary liberals) are not merely wrong but morally defective people. They deny the plain truth and slander their opponents. They don't value free speech. They have no understanding of the values of the university. They enable and apologize for barbarians.

Part of what fuels their destructive worldview is the false empirical belief that every group is equally competent and qualified at everything so that if one group does worse than another the explanation has to be that they have been put upon, held back, oppressed, marginalized, victimized. So women and men are innately just as good at the STEM disciplines — which is false — and if you suggest otherwise as James Damore did, you lose your job at Google. Even more absurd is the belief that men and women as groups are equally competent in all combat roles in the military and that to suggest otherwise is to promote unjust discrimination.

My theory is that the Christian metaphysical belief that we are all equal before God as persons got secularized after the death of God (in Nietzsche's sense) into a false empirical belief that we are all equal in empirical fact, and that indications to the contrary can be explained away in terms of racism, sexism, ageism, etc.

The other response I got in effect points out that truths about race and ethnicity can be asserted with scurrilous intent. Now that of course is true. I've made the point myself more than once.

Suppose I encounter a man in a wheel chair, a man without legs. If I say, "You, sir, have no legs!" I speak the truth, but commit a low-level moral offense. There are truths the enunciation of which is morally contraindicated in certain circumstances.

So of course a racist could cite the FBI statistic in a scurrilous way.

But the issue is precisely this: if you speak the truth about race it does not follow that you are a racist. For your intentions may be good and what you say may be something that needs to be heard.

Reason to End Deferred Action on Childhood Arrivals (DACA) Act

Andrew C. McCarthy explains:

The problem is the substance of executive action. DACA is defective in two ways. First, it presumes to exercise legislative power by conferring positive legal benefits on a category of aliens (the “dreamers,” as concisely described in Yuval Levin’s Corner post). Second, it distorts the doctrine of prosecutorial discretion to rationalize this presidential legislating and to grant a de facto amnesty. These maneuvers violated core constitutional principles: separation of powers and the president’s duty to execute the laws faithfully.

There has never been a shred of honesty in the politics of DACA. Democrats have taken the constitutionally heretical position that a president must act if Congress “fails” to. They now claim that to vacate DACA would be a travesty, notwithstanding that the program is blatantly illegal and would be undone by the courts if President Trump does not withdraw it. For his part, candidate Trump loudly promised to repeal Obama’s lawless decree but, betraying the immigration-permissivist core that has always lurked beneath his restrictionist rhetoric, Trump has wrung his hands through the first eight months of his presidency. As for the Republican establishment, DACA is just another Obamacare: something that they were stridently against as long as their objections were futile, but that they never sincerely opposed and — now that they are accountable — cannot bring themselves to fight.

Trump is Flawed but Hillary Would Have Been Far Worse

Here:

Shall we rue his election, as “Never Trumpers” continue to do? Well, first of all — He’s what we’ve got for the next 41 or 89 months. Had we gotten Hillary instead, we would not have encountered fewer lies from the Oval Office, nor from whatever new bathroom she would have selected to store her next-generation stealth computer server. In a world where Benghazi was caused by a YouTube video that almost no one saw — and which no one conceivably viewed through its painfully not-soon-enough conclusion — and in which a Secretary of State had exchanged tens of thousands of emails regarding her yoga classes and daughter’s wedding dress, one need not fantasize to grasp how much public lying would have emanated from a new Clinton West Wing, Oval Office, and from under the President’s desk had we been Hillaried.

Hillary would have assured the Obama Revolution a prospective permanence, endangering the future of the Republic without slowing the rise of the seas or healing the planet. Would Michelle Obama by now be the ninth Supreme Court Justice casting tie-breaking votes? Or Barack? Or a kindred soul? If so, before we mourn an imperiled Second Amendment, what would have become of the First Amendment? In a world in which the politically deranged and morally challenged Southern Poverty Law Center can defame the most decent of Christian religious-freedom advocates, groups like Alliance Defending Freedom, as “Hate Groups,” what would have been left of religious freedom under a Hillary? And what of the embattled First Amendment right to speak one’s mind freely in an environment where there is no inducement to violence, no imminent lawless action, but a plethora of campus intolerance and university schemes aimed at taxing speech into silence by imposing exorbitant “security fees” and moving conservative groups and scholars to off-site inaccessible venues and to obscure dates when students are otherwise engaged?

The Relativity of Lived Time

Cesare Pavese (1908-1950), This Business of Living, Diaries 1935-1950, Transaction Publishers, 2009, p. 126, from the entry of 10 December 1939:

Idleness makes hours pass slowly and years swiftly. Activity makes the hours seem short and the years long.

A very sharp observation. Unfortunately, most of Pavese's diary is not at this level of objective insight. It is mostly self-therapy, a working though of his misery and maladjustment and self-loathing. For example,

And one can understand the innate, ravening loneliness in every man, seeing how the thought of another man consummating the act with a woman — any woman — becomes a nightmare, a disturbing awareness of a foul obscenity, an urge to stop him, or if possible destroy him. Can one really endure that another man — any man — should commit with any woman the act of shame? Noooo. Yet this is the central activity of life, beyond question. . . . However saintly we may be, it disgusts and offends us to know that another man is screwing. (p.64)

Has the poet come too much under the influence of Stile Nuovo? There is the tendency of romantics, and Italians are romantics, to put women on pedestals and make 'angels' of them. The thought of sexual intercourse, were it possible, with an angel or with a woman one has angelicized is admittedly repulsive.

Dark is the morning that passes without the light of your eyes.

Are the Police Racist?

A short video by Heather MacDonald. Can you spare five and one half minutes?

Question for liberals: If a statement about race is true, is one a racist for making it? Is one a racist for reporting the following?

Homicide numbers from the Federal Bureau of Investigation Supplementary Homicide Reports, 1976–2005 indicate that young African-American males account for homicide victims at levels that are ten to 20 times greater than their proportion of the population and account for homicide offenders at levels that are 15 to 35 times greater than their proportion of the population.

Logical Form, Equivocation, and Propositions

Ed Buckner wants to re-fight old battles. I'm game. The following post of his, reproduced verbatim, just appeared at Dale Tuggy's site:

The concept of logical form is essential to any discussion of identity, and hence to any discussion of the Trinity. Here is a puzzle I have been discussing with the famous Bill Vallicella for many years.

(Argument 1) ‘Cicero is a Roman, therefore Cicero is a Roman’

(Argument 2) ‘Cicero is a Roman, therefore Tully is a Roman’

My puzzle [is] that the first argument is clearly not valid if the first ‘Cicero’ means the Roman, the second the American town, yet the argument seems to instantiate a valid form. Bill objects that if there is equivocation, then the argument really has the form ‘a is F, therefore b is F’, which fails to instantiate a valid form.

I then ask what is the form of. Clearly not of the sentences, since the sentences do not include the meaning or the proposition. Is it the form of the proposition expressed by the sentences? But then we have the problem of the second argument, where both ‘Cicero’ and ‘Tully’ mean the same man. Then the man is contained in both propositions, and if the form is of the proposition, the argument has the true form ‘a is F, so a is F’, which is valid. But I think no one would agree that the second argument is valid.

So logical form does not belong to the sentences, nor to the propositions expressed by them. So what is it the form of?

My answer is that the logical form of the argument is the form of the Fregean propositions expressed by the sentences that make up the argument. Let me explain.

I agree with Ed that logical form is not the form of an array of sentence-tokens. It is rather the form of an array of propositions expressed by the sentences. (To be painfully precise: it is the form of an array of propositions expressed by the assertive utterance, and thus the tokening, of a series of sentence-types by a speaker or thinker on a given occasion. A sentence-token buried in a book does not express anything by itself!)

To solve Ed's puzzle we need to distinguish three views of propositions: the Aristotelian, the Fregean, and the Russellian. This would be a good topic for an extended post. Here I will be brief. Brevity is the soul of blog.

An Aristotelian proposition is an assertively uttered meaningful sentence in the indicative mood that expresses a complete thought. What makes such a proposition 'Aristotelian' as opposed to 'Platonic' is that the meaning of the sentence is not something that can subsist on its own apart from the assertive tokening of the sentence. The meaning of the sentence depends on its being expressed, whether in overt speech or in thought, by someone. If there were no minds there would be no Aristotelian propositions. And if there were no languages there would be no Aristotelian propositions. In this sense, Aristotelian propositions are linguistic entities.

In brief: An Aristotelian proposition is just a declarative sentence in use together with its dependent sense or meaning. Suppose I write a declarative sentence on a piece of paper. The Aristotelian proposition is not the string of physical marks on the paper, nor it is the producing of the marks; it is the marks as produced by a minded organism on a particular occasion together with the meaning those marks embody.

A Fregean proposition is a nonlinguistic entity that subsists independently of minds and language. It is the sense (Sinn) of a declarative sentence from which indexical elements have been extruded. For example, 'I am blogging' does not express a Fregean proposition because of the indexical 'I' and because of the present tense of the verb phrase. But 'BV blogs at 10:50 AM PST on 4 September 2017' expresses a Fregean proposition.

Fregean senses are extralinguistic and extramental 'abstract' or 'Platonic' items. They are not in time or space even when the objects they are about are in time and space. This is what makes Fregean propositions 'Platonic' rather than 'Aristotelian.' Fregean propositions are the primary truth-bearers; the sentences that express them are derivatively true or false.

A Russellian proposition is a blurry, hybrid entity that combines some of the features of a Fregean truth-bearer and some of the features of a truth-maker. A Russellian proposition does not reside at the level of sense (Sinn) but at the level of reference (Bedeutung). It is out there in the (natural) world. It is what some of us call a fact or 'concrete fact' (as in my existence book) and others a state of affairs.

Now consider a singular sentence such as 'Ed is happy.' For present purposes, the crucial difference between a Fregean proposition and a Russellian proposition is that, on the Fregean view, the subject constituent of Ed is happy is not Ed himself with skin and hair, but an abstract surrogate that represents him in the Fregean proposition, whereas in the Russellian proposition Ed himself is a constituent of the proposition!

We needn't consider why so many distinguished philosophers have opted for this (monstrous) view. But this is the view that seems to have Ed in its grip and that powers his puzzle above.

If we take the relatively saner (but nonetheless problematic) view that propositions are Fregean in nature, then the puzzle is easily solved.

Ed asks: What is the logical form the form of? He maintains, rightly, that it cannot be the form of an array of sentences. So it must be the form of an array of propositions. Right again. But then he falls into puzzlement:

. . . ‘Cicero’ and ‘Tully’ mean the same man. Then the man is contained in both propositions, and if the form is of the proposition, the argument has the true form ‘a is F, so a is F’, which is valid.

The puzzlement disappears if we reject the Russsellian theory of propositions. A man cannot be contained in a proposition. and so it cannot be the same man in both propositions.

‘Cicero is a Roman, therefore Tully is a Roman’ is plainly invalid. Its form is: Rc, ergo Rt, which is an invalid form. If we adopt either an Aristotelian or a Fregean view of propositions we will not be tempted to think otherwise.

‘Cicero is a Roman, therefore Cicero is a Roman’ is plainly valid. ‘Cicero is a Roman, therefore Tully is a Roman’ is plainly invalid. The logical forms are different! If, on a Russellian theory of propositions, the forms are the same, then so much the worse for a Russellian theory of propositions!

Philosophy, Religion, Mysticism

Philosophers contradict one another, but that is not the worst of it. The grandest philosophical conclusion is and can only be a proposition about reality and not reality itself. But it is reality itself that we want.

Can religion help? Its motor is belief. But belief is not knowledge, either propositional or direct. And if an appeal to divine revelation is made, then the question inevitably arises: how does one know that a putative revelation is genuine?

If you certify the revelation by appeal to the authority of your church, then I will ask how you know that your church is the true church. After all, not every Christian is Catholic. Are those stray dogs who refuse Rome recalcitrant rebels who simply reject the truth when it is plainly presented to them? I think not.

The motor of philosophy is discursive reason. The motor of religion is belief and obedient acquiescence in authority. Neither Athens nor Jerusalem seems to be a wholly satisfying destination. Nor is straddling them with a leg in each a comfortable posture.

That leaves Benares.

The motor of mysticism is meditation. Its goal is direct contact with ultimate truth. Direct: not discursive or round-about. Direct: not based on testimony.

So should we pack for Benares? Not so fast. It has its drawbacks. Later.

If I want to be read, I have to be brief.

See here for a richer development of these themes.

A Goal of Meditation

To bring the soul into the field of awareness and not merely believe in it like the religionist or reason about it like the philosopher.

Notes After a Meditation Session

The discursive mind loves the dust it kicks up. We love distraction, diversion, dissipation, and diremption, even as we sense their nullity and the need to attain interior silence. This is one reason why meditation is so hard. We love to ride the wild horse of the mind. It is much easier than swimming upstream to the Source.

Or to unmix the metaphors, it is much easier to ride than rein in that crazy horse. But we have the reins in our hands, and it is just a matter of having the will to yank back on them. (10 September 1997)

Saturday Night at the Oldies: Water High, Wide, Dirty, Troubled, and Moody

In Dispatch from Houston, our friend Patrick Kurp of Anecdotal Evidence reports:

Power out. Car flooded. Books dry.

So all is well. But I don't reckon Dean Martin will be returning to Houston for a spell even if he could, he being dead and all.

Not to make light of the suffering of those sorely afflicted. Pray, send benevolent thoughts, fork over some serious money for relief efforts, but don't blog about it. Your charitable contribution, that is.

Bob Dylan, High Water. This is a late-career Dylan gem from Love and Theft (2001). A tribute to Charley Patton. Demonstrates Dylan's mastery of the arcana of Americana. Our greatest and deepest singer-songwriter.

My favorite verse:

Well, George Lewis told the Englishman, the Italian and the Jew
You can't open up your mind, boys, to every conceivable point of view
They got Charles Darwin trapped out there on Highway 5
Judge says to the High Sheriff, "I want them dead or alive"
Either one, I don't care, high water everywhere.

Nosiree, Bob, you can't open up your mind to every conceivable point of view, especially when it's not dark yet, but getting there.

Charley Patton, High Water Everywhere. Nice slide show.

The Band, Up on Cripple Creek

Jimi Hendrix, May This Be Love. I had forgotten the wonderful guitar solo.

Karla Bonoff, The Water is Wide. I listened to a lot of Bonoff in the early '80s. She does a great job with this traditional song.

Bill Monroe and Doc Watson, Banks of the Ohio. Joan Baez's version from an obscure 1959 album, Folksingers 'Round Harvard Square.

Similar theme though not water-related: Doc Watson, Tom Dooley. Doc and family in a BBC clip.

Standells, Dirty Water. Boston and the River Charles. My mecca in the '70s, the Athens of America, the Hub of the Universe, etc. A great town to be young in. But when it comes time to own property and pay taxes, then a right-thinking man high tails it for the West.

Simon and Garfunkel, Bridge Over Troubled Water. A beautiful song.

Henry Mancini, Moon River. This was Jack Kerouac's favorite song. Ellis Amburn, Subterranean Kerouac (St. Martin's 1998), p. 324:

One night he [Kerouac, during a 1962 visit to Lowell, Mass.] left a bar called Chuck's with Huck Finneral, a reedy, behatted eccentric who carried a business card that read: "Professional killer . . . virgins fixed . . . orgies organized, dinosaurs neutered, contracts & leases broken." Huck's philosophy of life was: "Better a wise madness than a foolish sanity." They drove to a friend's house in Merrimack, New Hampshire, and on the way, Jack sang "Moon River," calling it his favorite song. Composed by Henry Mancini and Johnny Mercer, "Moon River" was the theme song of the popular Audrey Hepburn movie Breakfast at Tiffany's. Sobbed by a harmonica, later swelling with strings and chorus, the plaintive tune's gentle but epic-like lyrics describe a dreamer and roamer not unlike Kerouac.

Indeed they do. A restless dreamer, a lonesome traveller, a dharma seeker, a desolation angel passing through this vale of mist, a drifter on the river of samsara hoping one day to cross to the Far Shore. Here is another version of the tune with some beautiful images.

Doc Watson, Moody River. A moodier version than the Pat Boone hit which was based on the Chase Webster effort.

Clever YouTube comment: "It might be a little early in the day for an Am7." But this here's Saturday night and I'm working on my second wine spodiodi. Chords minor and melancholy go good 'long about now.

Academic Criminology Little More than Leftist Ideology that Gets Almost Everything Wrong

Here. Excerpts:

Evidence of the liberal tilt in criminology is widespread. Surveys show a 30:1 ratio of liberals to conservatives within the field, a spread comparable with that in other social sciences. The largest group of criminologists self-identify as radical or “critical.” These designations include many leftist intellectual orientations, from radical feminism to Marxism to postmodernism. Themes of injustice, oppression, disparity, marginalization, economic and social justice, racial discrimination, and state-sanctioned violence dominate criminological teaching and scholarship, as represented in books with titles like Search and Destroy: African American Males in the Criminal Justice System, The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness, and Imprisoning Communities: How Mass Incarceration Makes Disadvantaged Neighborhoods Worse.

[. . .]

When it comes to disciplinary biases, however, none is so strong or as corrupting as liberal views on race. Disproportionate black involvement in violent crime represents the elephant in the room amid the current controversy over policing in the United States. Homicide numbers from the Federal Bureau of Investigation Supplementary Homicide Reports, 1976–2005 indicate that young African-American males account for homicide victims at levels that are ten to 20 times greater than their proportion of the population and account for homicide offenders at levels that are 15 to 35 times greater than their proportion of the population. The black-white gap in armed-robbery offending has historically ranged between ten to one and 15 to one. Even in forms of crime that are allegedly the province of white males—such as serial murder—blacks are overrepresented as offenders by a factor of two. For all racial groups, violent crime is strongly intraracial, and the intraracial dynamic is most pronounced among blacks. In more than 90 percent of cases, the killer of a black victim is a black perpetrator. (emphasis added)

The Wise Live by the Probable, not the Possible

The worldly wise live by the probable and not by the merely possible. It is possible that you will reform the person you want to marry. But it is not probable.

Don't imagine that you can change a person in any significant way. What you see now in your partner is what you will get from here on out. People don't change. They are what they are. The few exceptions prove the rule. The wise live by rules, not exceptions, by probabilities, not possibilities. "Probability is the very guide to life." (Bishop Butler quoting Cicero, De Natura, 5, 12)

It is foolish to gamble with your happiness. We gamble with what is inconsequential, what we can afford to lose. So if there is anything about your potential spouse that is unacceptable, don't foolishly suppose that you will change her. You won't. You must take her as she is, warts and all, as she must take you.

The principle applies not only to marriage but across the board.