Month: April 2020

Good Societies and Good Lives: On State-Run Lotteries

Good societies are those that make it easy to live good lives. A society that erects numerous obstacles to good living, however, cannot count as a good society. By this criterion, present day American society cannot be considered good. It has too many institutionalized features that impede human flourishing. Here I discuss just one such feature, state-sponsored lotteries.

Tenselessness as Disjunctive Omnitemporality?

There is presentism about existence and presentism about what exists. We have been discussing the latter.

The presentist about what exists seems forced to agree with the eternalist that existence by its very nature is tenseless and not tense-dependent. It seems that he must so agree if his thesis is not to be a tautology. For if the presentist holds that all and only what exists now exists now, then he asserts a merely logical truth, one to which the eternalist will readily assent. So he has to say that all and only what exists simpliciter exists now.

To exist simpliciter is to exist actually, not merely possibly, in a non-tense-dependent way, that is, to exist tenselessly. But what is it for a temporal item to exist tenselessly? It cannot be to exist timelessly for the simple reason that temporal items, items in time, are not timeless items, items outside of time. 

(That the number 9, a timeless item, tenselessly exists and tenselessly instantiates such properties as being odd, is not particularly problematic, if you grant that numbers are denizens of the Platonic menagerie. And the same goes for the property of being odd.)

A natural suggestion is to say that a temporal item exists tenselessly just in case it either existed, or exists now, or will exist. But on this disjunctively omnitemporal analysis of tenselessness, presentism about what exists comes out false! Our presentist is then saying that all and only what existed, or exists now, or will exist, exists now. But this is false because, for example, Kepler existed but does not exist now.

I have made two main points.

First, the very formulation of a non-tautological version of presentism about what exists requires that the second occurrence of  'exists' in the formula 'Only what exists now exists' be read tenselessly.

Second, tenselessness cannot be understood as disjunctive omnitemporality.

So what is it for a temporal item to exist tenselessly?  If no good answer can be given, then we won't know what we are affirming when we affirm either presentism or one of its competitors.

I hope the reader appreciates that I am not attacking presentism in defense of one its competitors.   I am not a partisan in the 'time wars.' I stand above the fray like a good aporetician in keeping with the Maverick method. My aim is to lend credence (though not to prove) that, while the underlying problems are genuine, and important, they are insoluble. None of the extant theories, and indeed no possible theory our minds can construct, is a solution.

Saturday Night at the Oldies: Marie/Maria/Mary

Beautiful names celebrated in song.

Elvis Presley, Marie's the Name of His Latest Flame

George Harrison and friends, Absolutely Sweet Marie.  By the way, this self-certified Dylanologist can attest that in the first line it is 'railroad GAUGE,' not 'railroad gate.'  'Gauge' is a measure of the width of the track; that's what our boy can't jump.  This one goes out to Marie Benson, from the summer of '65. Where are you tonight, sweet Marie?  

Bachelors, Marie

R. B. Greaves, Take a Letter, Maria

Placido Domingo, Ave Maria (Schubert)

Jimi Hendrix, The Wind Cries 'Mary'

Association, Along Comes Mary.  Back in '66 I didn't appreciate how good the lyrics are. 

And finally Mary takes Marty Robbins back after his tryst with the Devil Woman.

Do Past-Tensed Truths Need Truthmakers?

Cyrus wrote in an earlier thread,

In the linked article, you write:

That (some) truths refer us to the world as to that which makes them true is so obvious and commonsensical and indeed 'Australian' that one ought to hesitate to reject the idea because of the undeniable puzzles that it engenders. Motion is puzzling too but presumably not to be denied on the ground of its being puzzling.

But I question whether the scope of the “some” (that is, the scope of the obviousness and commonsensicality) extends to past tensed truths. I don't find it obvious that past tensed truths have truthmakers. Presumably presentists who reject it also don't find it obvious. (Some find it obvious that the past doesn't exist.) I guess what I'm asking is: Is there an objective way to measure obviousness? If there isn't, how much should we really be relying on it in our arguments?

That's a good comment and a good challenge. As Hilary Putnam once said, "It ain't obvious what's obvious."  So I don't think there is any objective way to measure obviousness, or, to use a better term, objective self-evidence. Nevertheless, I will die in the ditch for the first of my italicized sentences above. Surely there is at least one truth that cannot just be true, but needs a truth-ground that exists and indeed exists extramentally and extralinguistically. For example, 'BV is seated.'  That cannot just be true. It cannot be a brute truth. I have gone over this so many times I'm sick of it.  So let's move on.

Cyrus supra is not questioning whether there are truthmakers, nor is he raising the question as to the nature of truthmakers, i.e., the question of the category of entity to which they belong (Armstrongian states of affairs? tropes? etc.); he is raising the question whether past-tensed truths need truthmakers. I grant that the answer is not obvious.

One thing we should be clear about is that presentists needn't deny that past-tensed truths need or have truthmakers.  For they could hold, as some have held, that these truthmakers exist at present.  On presentism, whatever exists in time exists at the present time.  This is not the tautology that whatever exists (present tense) exists (present tense). This trivial truth is contested by no one. What the presentist is maintaining is that only what exists (present tense) exists tenselessly.  Presentism about what exists  in time is a restrictionist thesis: it restricts what tenselessly exists in time to what presently exists, i.e. what exists at present, or now.  (Note the ambiguity of 'presently' in ordinary English: if I say that I will visit you presently, that means in ordinary contexts that I will visit you soon, but not now.)

So we can divide presentists who accept truthmakers in general into two groups. Group One is composed of those who hold both that some past-tensed and some present-tensed truths have truthmakers, and Group Two is composed of those who accept that there are past-tensed truths but hold that they are all brute truths.

This is the view that I will try to argue against.  But first we need to lay another assumption on the table

I assume that there are past-tensed truths. For example, I assume that it is true, and indeed true now, that JFK was assassinated and that Socrates taught Plato.  (But don't get hung up on these examples: I could use different ones.) One might deny these (datanic) points in two ways. One could assert that all past-tensed truth-bearers are false. Or one could assert that no past-tensed truth-bearer is either true or false. For now we set these (lunatic) views aside.

The assumption, then, is that there are past-tensed truths.  The question is whether any of them need truthmakers given that present-tensed truths need truthmakers.

It is contingently true that I am alive. This is not a brute truth. Its truth requires, at a minimum, the existence of the living animal that wears my clothes. It is also true that after I am dead it will be true that I was alive today. If the first truth is not brute, how could the second truth be brute? The first truth is about me. It says that BV is alive. The second truth is also about me. It says that it will be the case that BV was alive. Now a proposition cannot be about a thing unless the thing exists. So in both cases the thing, me, exists. So both truths are grounded by my existence. If <I  am alive> asserted by me today has an ontological ground, and it clearly does, then <BV was alive> asserted after I am dead by a descendant also has an ontological ground. The two propositions differ merely in tense. Does that difference make a difference with respect to truth-making? It is not clear that it does. It is plausible to hold, with T. Merricks, that if presentism is true, then all truths about wholly past items are brute truths. Should we affirm the antecedent and infer the consequent by modus ponens? Or should we deny the consequent and deny the antecedent by modus tollens? It is not clear. The arguments appear to be equally good and cancel out. This is so given that the truth-makers of past-tensed truths about wholly past items cannot be located in the present. Perhaps some can be so located, but not all.

My interim conclusion is that presentism  is open to serious objection.  The fact that 'eternalism' is also is no good reason to accept presentism.

Praeparatio Mortis

Living long is a kind of low-grade preparation for death: the longer one lives, the more obvious the vanity of life becomes. An old soul can discern it at a young age, but even he will see it more clearly as his body ages. Paradoxically, vanity will be better appreciated if one in younger days fancies life full and rich and equal to its promises. For then the disillusionment  will be all the greater.  Or as one of my aphorisms has it:

Live life to the full to perceive that it is empty.

Truthmakers and Truth Conditions

The following is an excerpt from an old entry that makes a distinction we need to keep in mind in present discussions.

………………..

Dan offers

(*) The sentence 'Al is fat' is true because Al is fat

to show that a truthmaker need not be an entity.

It seems to me, though, that Dan is confusing a truthmaker with a truth condition.  A truthmaker is concrete chunk of extralinguistic and extramental reality whereas a truth condition is just another sentence, proposition, or cognate item. Our old friend Alan Rhoda in an old blog post does a good job of explaining the distinction:

. . .truthmakers are parcels of reality . . . .

Not so with truth conditions. Truth conditions are semantic explications of the meaning of statements. They tell us in very precise terms what has to be true for a particular statement to be true. For example, a B-theorist like Nathan Oaklander will say that the truth conditions of the sentence "The 2006 Winter Olympics are over" is given by the sentence "The 2006 Winter Olympics end earlier than the date of this utterance". Thus truth conditions are meaning entities like statements that are used to spell out or analyze the meaning of other statements.
 

Dan's (*) merely sets forth a truth condition. It doesn't get us off the level of propositions and down to the level of truthmakers.

Another important point has to do with the asymmetry of truthmaking: if T makes true p, it does not follow that p makes true T.  It's an asymmetry of explanation. If one thing explains another, it does not follow that the other explains the one. The truthmaker theorist takes seriously the project of metaphysical explanation. Truthmakers explain why true truthbearers are true, but not vice versa.  Dan's (*), however, entails the following non-explanatory biconditional:

(**) The sentence 'Al is fat' is true iff Al is fat.

But (**) has nothing to do with truthmaking; it is but an instance of Quine's disquotational schema according to which the truth predicate is but a device of disquotation. We remain on the level of sentences (propositions, etc.)

In sum, I see no merit in Dan's suggestion that there are truthmakers but they needn't be entities. That shows a failure to grasp the notion of a truthmaker. What Dan should say is that there is no need for truthmakers. He might also try arguing that the truthmaking relation is bogus or unintelligible since it is neither a logical relation nor a causal one.

Back on Facebook

I gave up Facebook for Lent, but now I'm back. 

I offer daily punch-back against leftist loons on a wide variety of topics. Culture critique in the bowels of the Zuckerbergian beast.  No lefties need apply. I am looking for a few good men and women to join me in the fight for sense and sanity and the defense of the Republic. 

Most linkage and political commentary is now over at Facebook.  The idea behind the FB offload is to keep this site free of the polemics necessary in political warfare. As I see it, polemics has no place in philosophy, including political philosophy. The latter is theoretical; politics is practical. Politics is a form of warfare in which polemic and invective have their place.  The philosophical opponent is a friend to whom one is tied by a philiatic bond.  Theirs is a cooperation under the aegis of a truth that belongs to neither and is above both: amicus Plato sed amica magis veritas. The political opponent is an enemy whose opposition is 'existential.'  Must it be so? No, but it is so at the present time. A politics based on mutual respect conducted under an umbrella of common principles and values is unlikely but not impossible.

The Left has to be battled in multiple ways from multiple platforms. So occasionally polemical material will appear here.

I received 'friend' requests from a couple of hotties the other day who proudly strut their stuff and sport their 'racks' on pages including links to their 'nude pics.'  Sorry girls, you are not MavPhil material.  

A Reader has a Request. Suggestions Solicited

I hope you are doing well. I am a regular reader of your blog for quite a few years and I thank you for doing this.
 
When you have time, could you recommend books/articles written by thinking people who became believers (were not born into religious setting) and describe the processes that led them to change their worldview?
 
I've read a couple like God and the Philosophers edited by Thomas Morris and Belief: Readings on the reason for faith edited by Francis Collins, but — simplifying for sake of brevity — these books do not contain the personal accounts I am looking for. Collins' book come closest to what I am looking for, but still falls a bit short as it is too literary and short on personal & sincere accounts.
 
Thank you in advance,
 
Dmitri
 
I am well and I hope the same is true for you and yours. I have read the T. V. Morris volume and I am surprised that you don't find it helpful. It contains several outstanding essays, in particular the one by Peter van Inwagen. Other than that, I can't think of any others in this genre off the top of my head.
 
Perhaps my readers have some suggestions.

Presentism and the Determinacy of the Past

On presentism, the present alone exists, and not in the trivial sense that the present alone exists at present, but in the substantive sense that the present alone exists simpliciter.  But if so, then the past is nothing, a realm of sheer nonbeing. But surely the past is not nothing: it happened, and is in some sense 'there' to be investigated by historians and archeologists and paleontologists. 

If our presentist cannot accommodate the reality of the past, then his position is hopeless. He might say this:  the past is real, but its reality is wholly contained in the present.  The causal traces of past events in the present constitutes the entire reality of the past.  Will this work? No. There simply aren't enough causal traces!

On the principle of bivalence, every proposition is either true, or if not true, then false. Given that bivalence holds for what presently exists, it is difficult to see how it could fail to hold for what did exist. Why should the present, which is wholly determinate, become less than wholly determinate when it becomes past? However things stand with the future, one reasonably views the past as a realm of reality and thus as wholly determinate.

Our knowledge of the past is spotty, but not the past itself. It was, and I would add: it actually was. When a thing passes away it does not pass from actuality to mere possibility; it remains actual, though no longer temporally present. Or so it would seem if we are realists about the past. The historian studies past actualities, not past possibilities.

Compare Kierkegaard's engagement to Regine Olsen to his marriage to her. There is a loose sense in which both events belong to the past. It is clear that he was engaged to Olsen. We also know that he did not marry her. But he might have. This possible event belongs to the past in the sense that, had it been actual, it would have belonged to the actual past. The crucial difference is that the first event actually occurred while the second was a mere possibility. This is a difference that an adequate philosophy of time must be able to accommodate.

To make a slogan out of it: the past is fact, not fiction; actuality not possibility.

One point to keep in mind is that if the past is wholly determinate, as determinate as the present, this is the case whether or not determinism is true. The determinate is not to be confused with the determined. (Bourne 2006, 50 f.)

Consider the proposition that my grandfather Alfonso drank a glass of dago red on New Year's Day, 1940. Bivalence ensures that the proposition is either true or false but not both. If the proposition is true and the event occurred, it doesn't matter whether the event was caused by prior events under the aegis of the laws of nature, or not. To say that the past is determinate is not to say that past events are determined; it is to say that, e.g., the past individual Alfonso V. cannot be such that he neither drank nor did not drink red wine on the date in question. It had to be one or the other if bivalence holds for the past.

Of course, no one now remembers whether or not this event occurred, and there is no written record or other evidence of the event's having occurred. If the event occurred, nothing in the present points back to it as to its cause. Some past events, states, individuals, and property-instantiations leave causal traces in the present, but not all do. My grandfather's gravestone and the dessicated bones lying beneath it are causal traces in the present of a long-dead and wholly past individual. But there is nothing in the present that bears upon the truth of the proposition that Big Al drank a glass of vino rosso on New Year's Day, 1940, assuming it is true. If true, it is true now but lacks a present truth-maker.

So it looks as if our presentist is in a serious bind. The following cannot all be true:

1) Presentism is true: whatever exists at all, exists at present.

2) The past is real.

3) The past is determinate.

4) There are countless events that really happened that no one remembers and for which there is not a shred of evidence in the present.

It seems to me that the obvious solution to this aporetic tetrad is to deny (1).

Comments enabled, but no comment will be allowed to appear that does not address the above argument.

Word of the Day: Recusant

Merriam-Webster:

1: an English Roman Catholic of the time from about 1570 to 1791 who refused to attend services of the Church of England and thereby committed a statutory offense.
2: one who refuses to accept or obey established authority.
Example:
So, like atheists in a theocracy, or recusants in Elizabethan England, we go underground. We are a secret society — brave rebels against the epidemiocracy.

Saturday Night at the Oldies: Decoupling Rock and Roll from Sex and Drugs

Five examples:

Norman Greenbaum, Spirit in the Sky

Johnny Cash, Personal Jesus. This is one powerful song.

Clapton and Winwood, Presence of the Lord. Why is Clapton such a great guitarist? Not because of his technical virtuosity, his 'chops,' but because he has something to say.

George Harrison, My Sweet Lord

George Harrison, All Things Must Pass. Harrison was the Beatle with depth.  Lennon was the radical, McCartney the romantic, and Ringo the regular guy.

Good YouTuber comment: "Immortal song, even if all things must pass . . . " 

Presentism and Regret

I have done things I regret having done.  Regret is a past-directed emotion by its very nature. One cannot regret present or future actions or omissions.  So if I regret action A, A is wholly past.  What's more, I cannot regret a non-existent action.  But on presentism, all items in time are such that they exist at present.  Therefore, presentism is false.  

1) There exist states of regret.

2) Every such state has as its accusative an event that exists.

3) Every such state has as its accusative an event that is wholly past.

Therefore

4) There exist wholly past events.

5) If presentism is true, then there exist no wholly past events.

Therefore

6) Presentism is false.

Doesn't this argument blow presentism clean out of the water?  It is plainly valid in point of logical form. Which premise will you deny?

"You're begging the question! You are using 'exist(s)' tenselessly.  But on presentism, the only legitimate uses of 'exist(s)' are present-tensed."

Reply:  Please note that you too must use 'exist(s)' tenselessly to formulate your presentist thesis on pain of your thesis collapsing into the miserable tautology, 'Whatever in time exists (present-tense) exists (present-tense).'  That's fake news. To advance a substantive claim you must say, 'Whatever in time exists simpliciter exists at present' where 'simpliciter' is cashed out by 'tenselessly.'

Comments enabled, but no comment will be allowed to appear that does not address the above argument.