'Liberals' seem to think it is. The rule of law fades as one approaches the southern border, fading out entirely at the border. And then there are those pockets where it holds selectively. These are known as sanctuary jurisdictions. Some are as large as California. But to whom do they provide sanctuary?
Month: March 2018
‘Studies’
As common sense declines, the demand for 'studies' to prove the obvious increases.
Mona Charen
I love the high-minded Mona Charen, I applaud the civil courage it took for her to make her CPAC speech, and I condemn any thugs who may have threatened her physically for speaking her mind and heart. (According to reports, she was quickly escorted from the venue.) But people like her have no effect on what actually happens and are useless when it comes to defeating the Left. She doesn't understand the nature of politics. It is war, not gentlewomanly debate. I wish it were the latter, and it could be if we all agreed on fundamentals; but we manifestly don't.
You don't like the vulgar Trump? Too bad. 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, just as the Dems overlook the flaws of their candidates. He punches back. And for other reasons given here.
Charles Kesler on Never Trumpers
I predict that in a year or two we will hear no more about or from the Never Trumpers. They all will have changed their tune or slunk away. Kesler:
As for the Right’s reassessments, every conservative publication has been forced to admit, however grudgingly, that President Trump had significant accomplishments in his first year. The Weekly Standard called his record “reasonably impressive.” But this bombshell appears alongside their default position: “Trump’s character and temperament made him unfit for office.” How to reconcile these?
Partly through wishful counterfactuals. “[S]imilar ends,” the editors assure us, “would have come from almost any Republican president given a Republican Congress.” Really? That seems far from inevitable.
Here is the counterfactual conditional I accept:
If anyone other than Trump had received the Republican nomination, he would not have beaten Hillary.
Why Do You Need a Fire Extinguisher or a Smoke Detector?
I have functioning smoke detectors in my house and two, count 'em, two well-maintained fire extinguishers in my kitchen. One's a backup in case the other fails. But of course I don't need any of this stuff since if a fire broke out in the middle of the night I would certainly wake up in time to call the fire department.
Is a Dead Man Mortal?
An Inconsistent Tetrad
a. Socrates is mortal.
b. Socrates is dead.
c. A man is mortal only if there is a future time at which he dies.
d. A man cannot die twice.
If all men are mortal, and Socrates is a man, then Socrates is mortal. But Socrates is dead. Now a man is mortal only if there is a future time at which he dies. But a man cannot die twice, and so there is no future time at which Socrates dies.
The limbs of the tetrad cannot all be true, yet each seems true.
Should we conclude that the dead are not mortal?
First question: Is the tetrad a genuine aporia, or is it soluble?
Second question: If soluble, what is the most plausible solution?
Innumeracy
Innumeracy is the mathematical counterpart of illiteracy. Here is an example that caught my eye this morning:
Curiously, there is little attempt by the GHSA to grapple with the very obvious and long-term problem—the conflict that occurs when one attempts to combine pedestrian accessibility with roads that support highway speeds. Even with smartphones locked away and all drivers drug free, there are bound to be incidents in which the operator of a two-ton object barrelling down the road does incredible damage to a defenseless human being of one-tenth the weight.
A U. S. ton = 2,000 lbs. So a two-ton vehicle weighs 2 x 2,000 = 4,000 lbs. One-tenth of 4,000 lbs = 400 lbs. Now while Americans are among the fattest hombres on the planet, weighing in at around 181 lbs on average, that's a far cry from 400 lbs.
It is always a good idea to be skeptical and run the numbers.
Ideologues love to engage in numerical inflation. A good recent example is the bogus claim that there have been 18 school shootings so far this year.
Do you remember Mitch Snyder the homeless advocate? He would make wild claims about the number of homeless in the U.S. One day he spouted some figure, I divided it into the population of the U. S. and 'learned' that something like 20% of the U. S. was homeless. Then I knew he was a bullshitter.
Innumerate people are suckers for fake statistics.
Thomas Sowell, Lying Statistics:
"Every year since 1950, the number of American children gunned down has doubled." Did you know that? It is just as well if you did not, because it is not true.
It takes no research to prove that it is not true. If there had been just two children in America gunned down in 1950, then doubling that number every year would have meant that, by 1980, there would have been one billion American children gunned down — more than four times the total population of the United States at that time.
Yet the claim that was quoted did not come from some supermarket tabloid. It appeared in a reputable academic journal. It is one of innumerable erroneous statistical claims generated by advocates of one cause or another. Too often, those in the media who are sympathetic to these causes repeat such claims uncritically until they become "well-known facts" by sheer repetition.
A Budding Thomist Seeks Advice
This from a reader:
I'm a junior year theology major. I recently found your blog and it's now one of my favorites. You are a voice of reason in this dark postmodern era.
As someone pursuing a BA in theology and considering grad school, I love learning, reading, and writing. I've always wanted to be the person to have ideas and spend my life thinking and writing about them.
Since you are someone who does this exact thing, I'm curious as to what it takes. How much time did you devote to studying theology or philosophy outside of classes and assignments? Did you ever write theological or philosophical essays for fun?
Any advice, especially in light of your personal experience, would be greatly appreciated. I eagerly await your response.
One question is whether one should go to graduate school in the humanities. I have addressed this question on several occasions. Here are some links:
Should You Go to Graduate School in Philosophy?
Graduate School and Self-Confidence
Thinking of Graduate School in the Humanities?
Is Graduate School Really That Bad?
Another question concerns the life of an academically unaffiliated philosopher. This is what I have been for over a quarter century now after resigning from a tenured position at age 41. So I don't conduct classes, give assignments, or waste time on the absurd chore of grading papers by students who could not care less about the life of the mind or about becoming truly educated.
To be perfectly blunt, I found teaching philosophy to undergraduates to be a meaningless activity in the main. Philosophy is a magnificent thing, but to teach it to bored undergraduates with no intellectual eros is like trying to feed people who aren't hungry. Depressing and absurd. Of course I did have some great students and some memorable classes. But my experience was similar to Paul Gottfried's:
Having been a professor for over 40 years at a number of academic institutions, I find Caplan’s main argument to be indisputable. The vast majority of my students, particularly those towards the end of my career, had little interest in the material I was trying to transmit, whether classical Greek, European history, or modern political theory. [ . . . ] Caplan also rolls out statistics showing most college students spend shockingly little time studying, and when polled express utter boredom with most of their courses. The overwhelming majority who graduate admit to having forgotten most of what they learned even before graduation.
It's a bit of a paradox: I would never have had the opportunity to enjoy the comfortable and relatively stress-free life of a professor for all those years if it were not for the fact that all sort of kids were attending college who had no business doing so. It is a paradox of plenty in the sense of Quine's great essay, Paradoxes of Plenty. The explosion of higher education in the 1960s, together with the Viet Nam war and other factors led to a glut of students which led to a need for more professors. So the good news is that guys like me got to be professors, but the bad news was that we had to teach people not worth teaching for the most part.
More on this in The Academic Job Market in the 'Sixties.
Things get worse and worse thanks to the Left's ever-increasing destruction of the universities, STEM disciplines excepted. Higher Education has become Higher Infantilization what with 'safe spaces,' 'trigger warnings,' and other incomprehensibly idiotic innovations.
I say this so that my young reader has some idea of what he is in for if he is aiming at academic career. The universities have become leftist seminaries. No conservatives need apply. Express heterodox opinions and you will be hounded and doxxed. Of course, it is not just leftists that do these things.
How much time do I spend on philosophy? Most of the day, every day. Do I write for fun? That is not a word I would use in this connection. Let's just say that I find wrestling with the big questions to be deeply satisfying and the meaning of my life. I see philosophy as a vocation in the deepest sense and a spiritual quest and something best pursued outside of the precincts of the politically correct present-day university.
Disagreement Runs Deep
Chris Hedges on Guns and Liberty.
Harry Kazianis, The NRA Doesn't Kill People; It Saves Lives.
The Concept of ‘Standoff’ in Philosophy
The following two propositions are collectively logically inconsistent and yet each is very plausible:
1. Being dead is not an evil for any dead person at any time.
2. Being dead at a young age is an evil for some dead persons.
Obviously, the limbs of the dyad cannot both be true. Each entails the negation of the other. And yet each limb lays serious claim to our acceptance. If you have been following the recent Epicurean discussions in these pages, you know that very plausible arguments can be given for both members of this pair of contradictories.
If philosopher A urges (1) and philosopher B urges (2), and neither can convince the other, then I say that A and B are in a standoff.
On the other hand, there cannot be sound arguments for both limbs. This is because there are no true contradictions. A plausible argument needn't be sound. And a sound argument needn't be plausible. A sound argument, by commonly accepted definition, is a valid deductive argument all of the premises of which are true. It is easy to see that every such argument must have a true conclusion.
So I say that the above standoff is dialectical, not logical.
This means that what generates the standoff or impasse are not logical norms and notions taken in abstracto and applied to propositions taken in abstracto, but logic embedded and applied in a concrete dialogue situation playing out between two or more finite and fallible agents who are trying to arrive at a rational resolution of a difficult question. I will assume that the interlocutors are sincere truth seekers possessing the intellectual virtues. There is thus nothing polemical about their conflict. Of course, some standoffs are polemical, most political ones for example, but at the moment I am not worrying about polemical standoffs. Nor am I concerned with physical standoffs or the sort of standoff that occurs in a game of chess when neither side has sufficient mating material.
A second example.
3. God by his very nature as divine is a concrete being who exists of metaphysical necessity.
4. Nothing concrete could exist of metaphysical necessity.
By 'concrete' I mean causally active/passive. The God in question is not a causally inert abstract object like a number or a set-theoretical set. Clearly, (3) and (4) form a contradictory pair and so cannot both be true. And yet one can argue plausibly for each.
This is not the place for detailed arguments, but in support of (3) there are the standard Anselmian considerations. God is ens perfectissimum; nothing perfect could be modally contingent; ergo, etc. God is "that than which no greater can be conceived"; if God were a merely contingent being, then a greater could be conceived; ergo, etc.
In support of (4), there is the difficulty of understanding how any concrete individual could exist necessarily. For such a being, possibility suffices for actuality: if God is possible, then he is actual. But this possibility is not mere possibility; it is the possibility of an actual being. (God is at no time or in any possible world merely possible, if he is possible at all.) The divine possibility — if it is a possibility at all and not an impossibility — is a possibility that is fully actualized. Possibility and actuality in God are one and the same in reality even though they remain notionally distinct for us. (In classical jargon, God is pure act, actus purus.) Equivalently, essence and existence in God are one and the same in reality even if they must remain notionally distinct for our discursive intellects. It is God's nature to exist. God is an existing essence in virtue of his very essence. God's existence is in no way subsequent to his essence, not temporally, of course, but also not logically or ontologically. So it is not quite right to say, as many do, that God's nature entails his existence; God's nature is his existence, and his existence is his nature.
If you think this through very carefully, you will realize that the ground of the divine necessity is the divine simplicity. It is because God is an ontologically simple being that he is a necessary being. If you deny that God is simple but affirm that he is necessary, then I will challenge you to state what makes him necessary as opposed to impossible. If you say that God is necessary in virtue of existing in all possible worlds, then I will point out that that gets us nowhere: it is simply an extensional way of saying that God is necessary.
Divine simplicity implies no real distinctions in God, and thus no real distinction between essence and existence. It is the identity of essence and existence in God that is the root, source, ground of the divine necessity. The problem is that we, with our discursive intellects, cannot understand how this could be. Anything we conceive as existent, we can also conceive as nonexistent. (Hume) The discursive intellect cannot grasp the possibility of a simple being, and so it cannot grasp the possibility of a necessary concretum. Here then we have the makings of an argument that, in reality, every concretum is contingent, which is equivalent to the negation of (4).
So if one philosopher urges (3) and his interlocutor (4), and neither can convince the other, then the two are in a standoff.
Now you may quibble with my examples, but there are fifty more I could give (and you hope I won't).
Philosophy is its problems and these are in canonical form when cast in the mold of aporetic polyads. The typical outcome, however, is not a solution but a standoff.
The Inquirer, the Dogmatist, the Theoretical and the Practical
I have so far characterized in a preliminary way what a standoff in philosophy is, and I have given a couple of examples in support of the claim that there are standoffs in philosophy. But there are those who are loathe to accept that there are such standoffs. These are people with overpowering doxastic security needs: they have an irresistible need to be secure in their beliefs. They don't cotton to the idea that many of the deepest problems are insoluble by us. These are people in whom the dogmatic tendency wins out over the inquiring/skeptical tendency. Among these are people who think one can PROVE the existence of God, or prove the opposite. Among them are those who are CERTAIN that there are substances in the Aristotelian sense of the term. It would be easy to multiply examples.
As I see it, the spirit of genuine philosophy is anti-dogmatic. A real philosopher does not bluster. He does not claim to know what he does not know, and in some cases, cannot know. A real philosopher does not confuse subjective conviction with objective certainty. He has time and he takes time. He can tolerate suspense and open questions. But his suspension is not a Pyrrhonian abandonment of inquiry, but is in the service of it. His happiness is not a porcine ataraxia, but the happiness of the hunt. Unlike the dogmatist, however, he has high standards with the result that is hunt is long and perhaps endless as long as he remains in statu viae wandering among the charms and horrors of the sublunary.
And yet we are participants in life's parade and not mere spectators of it. Curiously, we are both part of the passing scene and observers of it. To us as participants in the flux and shove of the real order a certain amount of bluster has proven to be life-enhancing and practically necessary. To live is to maneuver, to position oneself, to take a position, to adopt a stance, to grab one's piece of the action and defend it, and in the clinch to shoot first and philosophize later.
As so we are torn. It is a broken world and we are broken on its samsaric wheel. To put it grandly, the human condition is a tragic predicament. We must act in conditions of poor lighting, maintaining ourselves in the Cave's chiaroscuro, with little more than faith and hope to keep us going. At the same time we seek light, light, more light and the transformation of faith into knowledge and hope into having.
Faith, Reason, and Steven Pinker
John Gray's review of Pinker's latest book starts like this:
"Opposing reason is, by definition, unreasonable.” Steven Pinker is fond of definitions. Early on in this monumental apologia for a currently fashionable version of Enlightenment thinking, he writes: “To take something on faith means to believe it without good reason, so by definition a faith in the existence of supernatural entities clashes with reason.”
Why are scientists so silly when they stray from their specialties?
Let's think about the second quotation. The first independent clause is plainly false. Suppose my belief that Jones shot Smith is based solely on the testimony of a number of reliable witnesses all of whom agree. My belief is reasonable despite its being based on faith in the veracity of the witnesses.
Most of us have a justified true belief about our birth dates. How did we acquire these beliefs? Did we glance at a calendar as we emerged from the birth canal? No. I reasonably believe that I was born on such and such a date because I remember my mother telling me so, a telling never contradicted by anyone, and because I have an official-looking birth certificate in my possession. My belief is reasonable despite being based on the testimony of others.
There are reliable authorities in all fields. What I believe on the basis of their testimony and what they have recorded in books I believe reasonably.
I could go on, but this is boring, so enough. Pinker has done very good work, but when he tries to play the philosopher he makes a fool of himself. Another example: Pinker on Scientism.
Gray's review here.
Why I Carry a Gun
Mirabile dictu, not everything The Atlantic publishes these days is left-wing crap. Never-Trumper David French explains why he carries. (HT: Bill Keezer)
It is rather curious, though. Here is a guy who not only supports Second Amendment rights, but also exercises them by keeping firearms in his home and bearing them on his person. And yet he either voted for Hillary the gun-grabber or refused to vote for Trump whose conservative accomplishments have been stellar in just one year. What bloody sense does that make? You support the person who opposes your values?
Another thing that angers me about French is that before the election he published an anti-Trump piece in which he referred to the Wall of Trump as a "pipe dream." That is the kind of disgusting, supine defeatism that you would expect from a pseudo-conservative like Jeb! Bush.
'Liberals' need to understand what they are up against in their crusade to strip Americans of their Constitutional rights.
You 'liberals' are profoundly stupid and lazy. If you want fewer guns in civilian hands, stop your screeching and emoting. Study the issues. Learn the terminology. Take a course in logic. Read the Constitution. Open your minds. Shut your lying mouths. The more you lie and slander, the more you galvanize the opposition.
Proper Names
The Ostrich maintains:
1. Proper names have a (context dependent) sense. Context dependent, because ‘Mars’ can mean the god, or the planet, depending on context.
BV: Agreed.
2. The object itself cannot be part of the sense, although the mainstream view is that it is.
BV: What is being called the mainstream view, I take it, is the direct reference view according to which the semantics of a proper name is exhausted by its reference. That is, there is nothing more to the meaning of a proper name than its referent. There is not, in addition to the referent, a (reference-mediating) sense that the name has whether or not it has a referent. This implies that an empty (vacuous) name has no meaning.
The formulation of (2) leaves something to be desired. If we distinguish sense from reference/referent, as we must, then it is trivially true that the object, the planet Mars say, cannot be part of the sense. What's more, (2) misrepresents the mainstream view. No direct reference theorist holds that proper names have reference-mediating senses. No such theorist can be maintaining that the object itself is part of a reference-mediating sense. So (2) might be read like this:
2*. The object itself cannot be part of the MEANING of the name, although the mainstream view is that it is.
The trouble with (2*) is that it is false. Surely Mars is part of the MEANING of 'Mars' inasmuch as Mars is the referent of 'Mars.'
The Ostrich's argument seems to perish at this point of an equivocation on 'sense' as between 'sense' in the sense of Frege's Sinn and MEANING where the latter embraces both Sinn und Bedeutung, both sense and reference in Fregean jargon.
3. Nor can the sense signify some property, or collection of properties. Not a collection, for the reasons Kripke has cogently argued. Not a single ‘haecceity’, for the reasons you have argued.
BV: Right, if you mean sense as opposed to reference/referent.
4. The only remaining candidate (in my view) is that a proper name acquires its meaning via anaphora (i.e. ‘back reference’). In all cases.
BV: What do you mean by 'meaning'? Do you mean sense as opposed to reference/referent? My verdict is that your argument is still too murky to be evaluated.