The more I know about Hillary, the gladder I am that Trump sent her packing. The cartoon appeared before the election, but proved to be prophetic. What is truly scary is that if she had won, all her recently-revealed greed-driven dirty dealings would never have come to light.
Month: October 2017
The Scariest Passage in the Critique of Pure Reason
With Halloween upon us, it is appropriate that I should present to my esteemed readers for their delectation if not horror the scariest passage in Kant's magnum opus:
Unconditioned necessity, which we so indispensably require as the last bearer of all things, is for human reason the veritable abyss. . . . We cannot put aside, and yet also cannot endure the thought, that a being, which we represent to ourselves as supreme among all possible beings, should, as it were, say to itself: 'I am from eternity to eternity, and outside of me there is nothing save what is through my will, but whence then am I? (A613 B641)
Interpretation later.
‘Liberals,’ Conservatives and Stereotypes
Yesterday I said that an infallible mark of a 'liberal' or 'progressive' is a refusal to distinguish legal and illegal immigration. Another infallible mark is the refusal of 'liberals' or so-called 'progressives' to admit that there is truth in some stereotypes, that some of them have a basis in reality, and are not the product of mindless bigotry. We conservatives, however, being fundamentally sane, admit the obvious: there are accurate stereotypes and inaccurate stereotypes. An example of an inaccurate stereotype is the black watermelon stereotype according to which black folk are disproportionately fond of watermelon. Examples of accurate stereotypes below.
It occurs to me that our 'liberal' pals can be taxed with swallowing a negative, inaccurate meta-stereotype: they falsely think that all stereotypes are inaccurate and of course 'racist'! What bigots these 'liberals' be!
Lee Jussim gets to the heart of the matter with the following quiz. I got every answer right. See how you do. Answers below the fold.
1. Which group is most likely to commit murder?
A. Men
B. Women2. Older people are generally more __________ and less __________ than adolescents.
A. Conscientious; open to new experiences
B. Neurotic; agreeable3. In which ethnic/racial group in the US are you likely to find the highest proportion of people who supported Democratic presidential candidates in 2008 and 2012?
A. Whites
B. African Americans4. People in the US strongly identifying themselves as ___________ are most likely to attend church on Sunday.
A. Conservative
B. Liberal5. On 24 December 2004, a father and his three kids wandered around New York City around 7pm, looking for a restaurant, but found most places closed or closing. At the same time, his wife performed a slew of chores around the house. This family is most likely:
A. Catholic
B. Baptist
C. Jewish
D. Pagan/Animist
Continue reading “‘Liberals,’ Conservatives and Stereotypes”
October Ends . . .
. . . and we say farewell once again to Jack Kerouac, cat man and mama's boy, as he prepares to "leave all San Francisco behind and go back home across autumn America" proving once again to his romantic predecessor Thomas Wolfe that one can go back home again where
it'll all be like it was in the beginning — Simple golden eternity blessing all . . . My mother'll be waiting for me glad — the corner of the yard where Tyke is buried will be a new and fragrant shrine making my home more homelike somehow — On soft Spring nights I'll stand in the yard under the stars — Something good will come out of all things yet — And it will be golden and eternal just like that – There's no need to say another word. (Big Sur, 1962, last lines, last page.)
It's a good last word: something good will come of it all: of all of the wandering, all of the searching, all of the pain, and misery, and drunken folly, and lonely nights, and broken dreams. The vanity will give way to vision. The beat will taste beatitude. The road will end and the restless will rest.
On the Reference of Proper Names
London Ed writes and I respond in blue:
Still thinking about how to frame the main argument, so please help me out here.
There is a woman called ‘Clinton’. Clinton is a politician.
I claim there is a semantic connection between the name ‘Clinton’ that is used in the second sentence, but mentioned in the first sentence. It is this connection which licenses the inference to ‘some woman is a politician’. My central claim is that this exhausts the semantics of the proper name. The function of the name is simply to connect the second sentence to the first.
My question is, what arguments best support my claim. Some ideas.
(1) It’s just obvious that ‘Clinton’ refers back to the first sentence. The meaning of the two sentences is unchanged whether we write ‘he’ or ‘the man’. But since ‘he’ is just a pronoun, whose only function is to back-refer, it follows that ‘Clinton’ here is no primary reference.
BV: Your second example, then, is this:
There is a man named 'Clinton.' He is a politician.
And so 'Clinton' in the second sentence of the first example is merely a device of back reference. Is that what you are maintaining?
We agree, of course, that 'he' is a pronoun the antecedent of which is 'Clinton.' And so 'he' refers back to 'Clinton.' Back reference is a word-word relation. The antecedent of a pronoun is a word, not the (extralinguistic) thing to which the word refers, assuming it refers to something. What I deny is that 'he' in this context merely back refers. I maintain that it also refers to Bill Clinton, a chunk of extralinguistic reality, where 'refers' picks out a word-WORLD relation.
Back reference is an intralinguistic relation; reference is an extralinguistic relation. The reference of 'he' piggybacks on the reference of 'Clinton.' It picks up the reference of 'Clinton.'
But it is more complicated than this. For there is reference, not back reference, within a language. For example,
" 'Red' " refers to 'red.'
There is nothing to stop us from naming words. This is a case of intralinguistic reference, not back reference. Therefore, one cannot identify intralinguistic reference with back reference. All back reference is intralinguistic, but not all intralinguistic reference is back reference. A fortiori, one cannot identify extralinguistic reference with back reference.
It is also worth noting that 'back' in 'back reference' is an alienans adjective.
It is not clear what your thesis is. Are you an eliminativist about extralinguistic reference? That is, do you deny that proper names refer extralinguistically? Or perhaps you are an identitarian. Perhaps you hold that there is extralinguistic reference of proper names but that it reduces to back reference. (Some say that there are mental states all right, but that what they are are brain states. This is an identitarian, not an eliminativist, position. Notionally they are different even if it can be shown that identitarianism collapses of necessity into eliminativism.)
Or perhaps you maintain neither of these theses. I'd guess you are an eliminativist from your opening statement. I take it that you accept that there is a real world of concrete things external to language. If language 'hooks on' to these things, then presumably not via proper names. How then? Via bound variables in the Quinean way? Or do you hold that language does not hook on to language-external things at all?
I suggest that you will never gain a hearing for your ideas unless you can answer convincingly questions such as the foregoing.
For most of us it is a datum that there is extralinguistic reference to existing concrete things in space and time. We take it as given that in the paradigm cases reference is a word-world relation. The theoretical problems, then, are to understand how reference is possible and how it is achieved. But you seem to be denying the datum: you seem to be denying that there is extralinguistic reference, or at least, extralinguistic reference via proper names.
A Mark of a ‘Liberal’
An infallible mark of a 'liberal' or 'progressive' is a refusal to distinguish legal and illegal immigration. Read their articles and see if I am not right.
One inference to draw is that they neither understand nor value the rule of law.
Dirty Hillary
Hoist by her own Russian petard.
The more we know about her, the better Trump looks by comparison.
Those of us who rolled the dice and voted for him have been vindicated in spades.
Which Side Are You On?
It is an appropriate question to ask in politics, though not in philosophy. Politics is warfare. If you call yourself conservative and don't support Trump, then you are helping the enemy. Which side are you on?
In philosophy we strive for objectivity. We take our time; we consider all points of view. We show respect for our interlocutors. We are civil. But one cannot be objective in a fight for one's life and way of life especially if one's way of life includes free speech, open inquiry, and resistance to the Left's totalitarian politicization and ideologization of everything, including pure mathematics! (More on this later.) One has to secure, with blood and iron if need be, the space of objective inquiry against the ideologues who, at the present time, are chiefly leftists and Islamists, and who wittingly or unwittingly, work together.
You don't like the vulgar Trump? Tough shit. He's all we've got. Face reality and its limitations. Don't let the best become the enemy of the good. The milque-toast McCains haven't done jack and won't do jack, except talk and obstruct. David Horowitz:
The movement galvanized by Trump can stop the progressive juggernaut and change the American future, but only if it emulates the strategy of the campaign: Be on the offense; take no prisoners; stay on the attack. To stop the Democrats and their societal transformation, Republicans must adhere to a strategy that begins with a punch in the mouth. That punch must pack an emotional wallop large enough to throw them off balance and neutralize their assaults. It must be framed as a moral indictment that stigmatizes them in the way their attacks stigmatize Republicans. It must expose them for their hypocrisy. It must hold them accountable for the divisions they sow and the suffering they cause. (Big Agenda, Humanix, 2017, p. 142)
Trump alone, an outsider who doesn't need a job, has the civil courage and is in a position to deliver the needed punches. That's why we like him. That's why we overlook his flaws. He punches back. And for other reasons given here.
Infinity and Mathematics Education
Time for a re-post. This first appeared in these pages on 18 August 2010.
…………………….
A reader writes,
Regarding your post about Cantor, Morris Kline, and potentially vs. actually infinite sets: I was a math major in college, so I do know a little about math (unlike philosophy where I'm a rank newbie); on the other hand, I didn't pursue math beyond my bachelor's degree so I don't claim to be an expert. However, I do know that we never used the terms "potentially infinite" vs. "actually infinite".
I am not surprised, but this indicates a problem with the way mathematics is taught: it is often taught in a manner that is both ahistorical and unphilosophical. If one does not have at least a rough idea of the development of thought about infinity from Aristotle on, one cannot properly appreciate the seminal contribution of Georg Cantor (1845-1918), the creator of transfinite set theory. Cantor sought to achieve an exact mathematics of the actually infinite. But one cannot possibly understand the import of this project if one is unfamiliar with the distinction between potential and actual infinity and the controversies surrounding it. As it seems to me, a proper mathematical education at the college level must include:
1. Some serious attention to the history of the subject.
2. Some study of primary texts such as Euclid's Elements, David Hilbert's Foundations of Geometry, Richard Dedekind's Continuity and Irrational Numbers, Cantor's Contributions to the Founding of the Theory of Transfinite Numbers, etc. Ideally, these would be studied in their original languages!
3. Some serious attention to the philosophical issues and controversies swirling around fundamental concepts such as set, limit, function, continuity, mathematical induction, etc. Textbooks give the wrong impression: that there is more agreement than there is; that mathematical ideas spring forth ahistorically; that there is only one way of doing things (e.g., only one way of constructing the naturals from sets); that all mathematicians agree.
Not that the foregoing ought to supplant a textbook-driven approach, but that the latter ought to be supplemented by the foregoing. I am not advocating a 'Great Books' approach to mathematical study.
Given what I know of Cantor's work, is it possible that by "potentially infinite" Kline means "countably infinite", i.e., 1 to 1 with the natural numbers?
No!
Such sets include the whole numbers and the rational numbers, all of which are "extensible" in the sense that you can put them into a 1 to 1 correspondence with the natural numbers; and given the Nth member, you can generate the N+1st member. The size of all such sets is the transfinite number "aleph null". The set of all real numbers, which includes the rationals and the irrationals, constitute a larger infinity denoted by the transfinite number C; it cannot be put into a 1 to 1 correspondence with the natural numbers, and hence is not generable in the same way as the rational numbers. This would seem to correspond to what Kline calls "actually infinite".
It is clear that you understand some of the basic ideas of transfinite set theory, but what you don't understand is that the distinction between the countably (denumerably) infinite and the uncountably (nondenumerably) infinite falls on the side of the actual infinite. The countably infinite has nothing to do with the potentially infinite. I suspect that you don't know this because your teachers taught you math in an ahistorical manner out of boring textbooks with no presentation of the philosophical issues surrounding the concept of infinity. In so doing they took a lot of the excitement and wonder out of it.
So what did you learn? You learned how to solve problems and pass tests. But how much actual understanding did you come away with?
A Simple Point of Logic Journalists Ought to be Aware Of
One often encounters sentences like this one:
There are many arenas in which all ideas are not considered equal.
This example is from a recent piece in Vox. I could give further recent examples, but one is enough. To simplify, consider just the core thought:
All ideas are not considered equal.
Unfortunately it is not entirely clear what the core thought is. For the sentence is ambiguous as between
1) No ideas are considered equal
and
2) Some ideas are not considered equal.
The thoughts (propositions) expressed are distinct since the first can be false while the second is true. Although it is fairly clear that the author intended (2), a good writer avoids ambiguous constructions unless for some reason he intends them. So don't write sentences of the form
3) All Fs are not Gs
if you intend say something of the form
4) Some Fs are not Gs.
Write instead sentences of the form
5) Not all Fs are Gs
which, by simple quantifier negation, is equivalent to (4).
Class dismissed.
Saturday Night at the Oldies: Midnight and Moonlight
J. J. Cale, After Midnight
Thelonious Monk, 'Round Midnight
Jack Kerouac, Old Angel Midnight
Brother Dege, Old Angel Midnight
Allman Bros., Midnight Rider
Rolling Stones, Midnight Rambler
B. B. King, et al., Midnight Hour
Maria Muldaur, Midnight at the Oasis (This one goes out to Mary Korzen and the Boston Spring of '74)
Patsy Cline, Walkin' After Midnight
Joey Powers, Midnight Mary. A one-hit wonder.
Kenny Ball, Midnight in Moscow One of many memorable instrumentals from the early '60s.
Rolling Stones, Moonlight Mile
Doors, Moonlight Drive
Anne Murray, Shadows in the Moonlight (This one goes out to K. P. and the Summer of '79)
Ludwig van Beethoven, Moonlight Sonata. A part of it anyway with scenes from the great Coen Bros. film, "The Man Who Wasn't There."
Addendum:
A reader comments:
If you are to include Beethoven, It would be perverse to omit Schumann’s Mondnacht (moonlit night), set to a poem by Eichendorff, supposedly the favourite poem of the Germans, when they are not invading other countries. “The image of death is tenderly and touchingly portrayed as the soul quietly returning home”. The progression at 2:23 is sublime.
Unusual version by Barbra Streisand here https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VcGtMEiVx_Y
Es war, als hätt' der Himmel,
Die Erde still geküßt,
Daß sie im Blütenschimmer
Von ihm nur träumen müßt.
Die Luft ging durch die Felder,
Die Ähren wogten sacht,
Es rauschten leis die Wälder,
So sternklar war die Nacht.
Und meine Seele spannte
Weit ihre Flügel aus,
Flog durch die stillen Lande,
Als flöge sie nach Haus.
Reading Now: Malcolm Lowry, Under the Volcano
Undoubtedly the most Joycean of the booze novels. This is not what one could call a 'page turner.' Not suitable for beach or bed reading. But it looks to be a deep work that will repay the close attention it demands. Under the Volcano was originally published in 1947. Two other booze novels from the '40s are rather more suited for entertainment: Charles Jackson's The Lost Weekend, 1944, and Patrick Hamilton's Hangover Square, 1941.
And then there is the grandpappy of them all, Jack London's John Barleycorn. My analysis: Jack London, John Barleycorn, and the Noseless One. (Perhaps an astute literary type will point me to a booze novel in English temporally antecedent to London's.)
It is interesting to note in these waning days of dear October, Kerouac month, that Lowry and Jack both died of drink and at the same age: 47. The difference seems to have have been that Lowry was deliberately out to off himself on the day of his death, his last binge fueled as it was with barbiturates, while Kerouac had not fixed upon 21 October 1969 as Todestag.
The mystery of self-destruction! Is there a natural explanation? Or is the booze monkey a real demon?
There follows an example of of a Lowry sentence that will slow down the serious reader, indeed bring him to a dead stop, as he tries to untangle the syntax. Lowry being a Cambridge man, we assume he knows how to write English. But then we come across this:
His love had brought a peace, for all too short a while, that was strangely like the enchantment, the spell, of Chartres itself, long ago, whose every sidestreet he had come to love and café where he could gaze at the Cathedral eternally sailing against the clouds, the spell not even the fact he was scandalously in debt there could break. (13)
As I said, this novel is not a 'page turner.'
Addendum (10/28)
London Ed writes,
If you mean a novel that is almost entirely about drunkenness, i.e. whose subject is just drunkenness, such as Lowry, then you won’t find much in 19thcentury literature. I recommend Lamb’s Confessions of a Drunkard, if you haven’t come across it already, but that is an essay, not a novel. (It has been questioned whether Lamb actually was a drunkard, but the evidence suggests he was).
In A Tale of Two Cities – as you surely know – a drunkard is the central character, and drunkenness is one of the themes, but the central theme is an unusual kind of redemption, not drink itself.
See also The Tenant of Wildfell Hall, where again drunkenness is a theme, but not central. Bronte may have modelled the drunken character on her alcoholic brother Bramwell, although she may have been influenced by The Anatomy of Drinking (Robert Macnish, 1835), which is worth a visit (‘Men of genius are often unfortunately addicted to drinking’).
For an interesting conspectus of modern ‘feminist’ writers who were no enemies to the bottle, see this Guardian article. ‘Not many writers manage to get sober and those who do often suffer a decline in output’. Is there a relation between the bottle and the writing? Macnish argues that genius is accompanied by ‘melancholy’, i.e. depression. ‘High talent has ever been distinguished for sadness and gloom’. So they drink to relieve the gloom. So the bottle, on his account, is more a property in the Aristotelian sense: it accompanies the phenomenon of genius, but is not essential to it. Or by contrast is it essential? It is hard to imagine Burroughs without junk. (Or Kerouac without the drink?).
Enjoy the volcano book. I have it in the attic somewhere, but didn’t get beyond the first chapter or two.
And let's not forget the role that benzedrine played in the composition of On the Road.
Addendum 2 (10/28, 5:08 AM MST)
Ed adds,
Sorry, some more. Macnish rightly says the the most ‘delightful’ state is when sobriety and inebriation briefly become neighbours. That’s right. There is a short episode, usually after the first glass, when the gods come down to the planet, and the world is blessed. Unfortunately the blessedness is so good you want to continue it, and have another, but this never works. For this reason, wise men (and women) never go beyond the third glass. Another alcoholic writer, (Chandler) cleverly said “Alcohol is like love. The first kiss is magic, the second is intimate, the third is routine. After that you take the girl's clothes off.” Perhaps you meant the same when you spoke (somewhere) about having a couple of Buds but being none the weiser).
I agree entirely. The wise man stops at the third when returns diminish bigly. But you and I are not alkies. They achieve some crazy bliss from continuing.
Raymond Chandler? Funny you should mention him. In the midst of his high-falutin' Joycean prose, Lowry uncorked a Chandleresque line: "Darkness had fallen like the House of Usher." (22-23) Here is my attempt at Chandler-style prose:
The stranger sat down and played his King's pawn to e4. I countered with the French Defense and in a few moves he was all over me like a cheap suit.
I wasn't thinking about taking any girl's clothes off when I repeated the old redneck line, in a blog post circa 2004, "Ah had me a coupla Buds, but I got none the wiser." 'Wiser' pronounced something like waah-zr.
Addendum 3 (10/28, 11:04)
Ed continues,
“Darkness had fallen like the House of Usher.”
“in a few moves he was all over me like a cheap suit.”
Love them both. I think the second is more Chandleresque. Hard to say why. The first contains a literary illusion. The second is just cheap suits. You have to remember that Chandler was brought up in London, quite near where I live, and he went to an English public school (Dulwich). So he carried an English snobbery with him to the US. When he says ‘Los Angeles has the personality of a paper cup’ you can hear that public school sneer under his voice. His work is almost entirely about the vulgar, but that is the point of it.
I mentioned the London thing to a hard core noir fan, who was astonished. He thought, not without reason, that Chandler was a quintessentially American writer. No more than Joseph Conrad (who did not speak fluent English until his twenties) was quintessentially English.
Math is Racist!
There is nothing so stupid, destructive, and inane that a 'liberal' won't embrace it.
The Paris Statement: A Europe We Can Believe In
Read it, study it, circulate it. Excerpts:
3. The patrons of the false Europe are bewitched by superstitions of inevitable progress. They believe that History is on their side, and this faith makes them haughty and disdainful, unable to acknowledge the defects in the post-national, post-cultural world they are constructing. Moreover, they are ignorant of the true sources of the humane decencies they themselves hold dear—as do we. They ignore, even repudiate the Christian roots of Europe. At the same time they take great care not to offend Muslims, who they imagine will cheerfully adopt their secular, multicultural outlook. Sunk in prejudice, superstition and ignorance, and blinded by vain, self-congratulating visions of a utopian future, the false Europe reflexively stifles dissent. This is done, of course, in the name of freedom and tolerance.
[. . .]
17. The false Europe also boasts of an unprecedented commitment to equality. It claims to promote non-discrimination and the inclusion of all races, religions and identities. Here, genuine progress has been made, but a utopian detachment from reality has taken hold. Over the past generation, Europe has pursued a grand project of multiculturalism. To demand or even promote the assimilation of Muslim newcomers to our manners and mores, much less to our religion, has been thought a gross injustice. A commitment to equality, we have been told, demands that we abjure any hint that we believe our culture superior. Paradoxically, Europe’s multicultural enterprise, which denies the Christian roots of Europe, trades on the Christian ideal of universal charity in an exaggerated and unsustainable form. It requires from the European peoples a saintly degree of self-abnegation. We are to affirm the very colonization of our homelands and the demise of our culture as Europe’s great twenty-first century glory—a collective act of self-sacrifice for the sake of some new global community of peace and prosperity that is being born.
[ . . .]
21. Europe’s intellectual classes are, alas, among the chief ideological partisans of the conceits of the false Europe. Without doubt, our universities are one of the glories of European civilization. But where once they sought to transmit to each new generation the wisdom of past ages, today most within the universities equate critical thinking with a simpleminded repudiation of the past. A lodestar of the European spirit has been the rigorous discipline of intellectual honesty and objectivity. But over the past two generations, this noble ideal has been transformed. The asceticism that once sought to free the mind of the tyranny of dominant opinion has become an often complacent and unreflective animus against everything that is our own. This stance of cultural repudiation functions as a cheap and easy way of being ‘critical.’ Over the last generation, it has been rehearsed in the lecture halls, becoming a doctrine, a dogma. And to join in professing this creed is taken to be the mark of ‘enlightenment,’ and of spiritual election. As a consequence, our universities are now active agents of ongoing cultural destruction.
[. . .]
33. Marriage is the foundation of civil society and the basis for harmony between men and women. It is the intimate bond organized around sustaining a household and raising children. We affirm that our most fundamental roles in society and as human beings are as fathers and mothers. Marriage and children are integral to any vision of human flourishing. Children require sacrifice from those who bring them into the world. This sacrifice is noble and must be honoured. We endorse prudent social policies to encourage and strengthen marriage, childbearing, and childrearing. A society that fails to welcome children has no future.
[. . .]
36. In this moment, we ask all Europeans to join us in rejecting the utopian fantasy of a multicultural world without borders. We rightly love our homelands, and we seek to hand on to our children every noble thing that we have ourselves received as our patrimony. As Europeans, we also share a common heritage, and this heritage asks us to live together in peace as a Europe of nations. Let us renew national sovereignty, and recover the dignity of a shared political responsibility for Europe’s future.
UPDATE:
The Paris Statement is too namby-pamby for Jacques who comments here. He may well be right. PS is a fine theoretical statement, but where are the concrete proposals?
Is Canada Committing Cultural Suicide?
William Kilpatrick is always good on the Islamist threat:
The good news is that ISIS has been defeated in Mosul and Raqqa, and may soon be driven entirely out of Iraq and Syria. The bad news is that Islamists continue to pile up victory after victory on the home front.
The home front war is basically a culture war. Islamists are winning it because they understand the nature of the war. The West is losing because its leaders have only the vaguest awareness that they are under attack. Let’s take Canada as a case in point.
And please read my anti-Trudeau post, Diversity Can Be Our Weakness.
Why is Canada so hopelessly P. C.? Are their lakes and streams filled with leftist Kool-Aid?
Filed under: Decline of the West