Man, who boasts of his knowledge, does not even know what knowledge is.
…………………….
The thought is from Michel de Montaigne (1533-1592), Apology for Raymond Sebond, trs. Roger Ariew and Marjorie Grene, Hackett Publishing, 2003, p. 12. The Apology first saw the light of day in 1580.
In Catholic thought there is what is called vincible ignorance. Here is a definition:
Lack of knowledge for which a person is morally responsible. It is culpable ignorance because it could be cleared up if the person used sufficient diligence. One is said to be simply (but culpably) ignorant if one fails to make enough effort to learn what should be known; guilt then depends on one's lack of effort to clear up the ignorance.
For present purposes, it suffices to say that 'God' refers to the supreme being of the Judeo-Christian tradition, and that an atheist is one who denies the existence of God.
I hold that there is vincible ignorance on various matters. But I deny that atheists qua atheists are vincibly ignorant. Whether or not God exists, one is not morally culpable for denying the existence of God.* Nor do I think one is morally culpable if one doubts the existence of God.
If God exists, and one is an atheist, then one is ignorant of God, but it does not follow that one is culpably ignorant. This commits me to saying that the atheist is invincibly ignorant of God. He is invincibly ignorant of God because God cannot be known to exist. If I cannot know that such-and-such, then I cannot be morally culpable for not knowing it. If I ought to X, then I am capable of X-ing. And so, by contraposition, if I am not capable of X-ing, then I am not morally obliged to X, whence it follows that I am not morally culpable for not X-ing.
If the atheist is invincibly ignorant of God, then so is the theist, whence it follows that I am not morally praiseworthy for being a theist.
This puts me at odds with St. Paul, at least on one interpretation of what he is saying at Romans 1: 18-20.
_______________
*Why not? Because it is not clear that God exists. There are powerful albeit uncompelling arguments against the existence of God, chiefly, arguments from natural and moral evil, and, while there is plenty of evidence of the existence of God, the evidence does not entail the existence of God. Will you tell me that the evidence renders the existence of God more probable than not? I will respond by asking what probability has to do with it. Either God exists or he does not. If he does, then he is a necessary being. If he does not, then he is impossible. I will demand of you that you attach sense to the claim that such a being — one that is either necessary or impossible– can have its probability raised or lowered by evidence. This is a huge and controversial topic. No more can be said about it now.
AN EMINENTLY REASONABLE PRINCIPLE, but only if the law can be known by the average citizen who exercises appropriate diligence. For that exercise of due diligence to be possible, however, laws must be relatively few in number, rational in content, and plainly stated. If that were the case, then ignorance of the law would be vincible ignorance and thus no excuse or defense. But it is not now the case.
Michael Anton says here what many of us have been saying for years, but no one that I know of has ever said it better. One question that has been exercising me of late is: How long can a nation last that erects monuments to the worthless while destroying the memorials of the worthy? Here is Anton on George Floyd:
But in terms of what we choose to elevate, nothing illustrates the perversity of present America more than the deification of George Floyd. There are now monuments to him all over the country that are treated as sacred. In a rare instance when one is defaced, the resultant outcry resembles the Athenian people’s reaction to the desecration of the Hermai. One may insist that George Floyd did not deserve to die the way he did and still see that neither did he live his life so as to make the possibility remote. He was convicted of eight crimes and charged with or detained for at least nineteen (though one must here concede the difficulty of finding reliable relevant information, since unflattering facts about Floyd’s life are effectively suppressed and are taboo to discuss). The worst of his crimes was an armed robbery in which he pointed a gun at the belly of a woman who may (or may not) have been pregnant. Floyd’s admirers insist she wasn’t, but more careful sources assert only that no one has ever definitively proved she was. Floyd was the father of five children, from whose lives he was by all accounts absent, and none of whose mothers he ever married. At the time of his death, Floyd was in the process of being arrested for yet another crime and was not cooperating with the arresting officers. A serial drug abuser, he had in his system not just methamphetamine but a potentially lethal dose of fentanyl—an extremely dangerous synthetic opioid—which may well have contributed to his death. Even if one fully accepts the trial court’s finding that the drugs played no role, one must still admit that had Floyd only gotten into the back of the police vehicle as officers instructed, he could not have died in the way prosecutors (and the media) alleged. Above all, we must confront the painful fact that Floyd did not, according to moral standards that for centuries were taken for granted, live a life worthy of admiration, much less of veneration. Yet our society treats him as a saint, if not something higher. The pagan gods were not always well-behaved, to say the least. But has any people ever chosen such an undeserving object of worship?
I urge you all to study Anton's erudite essay. Comments enabled.
Edward sends this interesting example:
Omnis homo est mortalis
Socrates is a man
Sokrates ist sterblich
Semantically valid, but not syntactically?
No, syntactically valid because the argument instantiates a valid argument-form, to wit:
Every F is a G
a is an F
Therefore
a is a G.
Validity is a matter of form. An argument is valid if it instantiates a valid argument-form. It is the form that is valid or invalid in the primary senses of these terms. The argument itself is valid or invalid in secondary senses. The argument inherits its validity from the form, so to speak. Or you could say that it is the validity of the form that is the ground of, and accounts for, the validity of the argument.
For me, and here is where Ed will disagree, a valid deductive argument such as the 'Socrates' syllogism above, is a sequence of propositions, not of sentences, that instantiates a valid argument-form.
A proposition is what a sentence in the indicative mood expresses. To be precise, a proposition is what is expressed by the tokening (whether by utterance, writing, or in some other way) of a sentence in the indicative mood. The following three sentences, each from a different language, can be used to express one and the same proposition or Fregean Gedanke (thought) :
Sokrates mortalis est.
Sokrates ist sterblich.
Socrates is mortal.
These three numerically different sentence tokens from three different languages express the same proposition when they are used to express a proposition. Sentences are linguistic entities. Propositions are extra-linguistic, and therefore not tied to particular languages as sentences are. Not tied in the sense that the same proposition can be expressed in different languages. Suppose that every English speaker is exterminated. Could it then be said that Socrates is mortal? Yes, though not in those words. One could say the same thing by uttering the corresponding German or French or Turkish sentence.
This is a reason to distinguish propositions from sentences.
Now glance back at Ed's example. It is linguistically hybrid. But logically it expresses the very same argument (sequence of propositions) that the following does:
Every man is mortal
Socrates is a man
Ergo
Socrates is mortal.
The argument expressed is syntactically valid because it is an instance of a valid argument-form.
Consider the argument:
Bill is a brother
—–
Bill is a sibling.
Is this little argument valid or invalid? It depends on what we mean by 'valid.' Intuitively, the argument is valid in the following sense:
D1. An argument is valid if and only if it is impossible that its premise(s) be true and its conclusion false.
(D1) may be glossed by saying that there are no possible circumstances in which the premises are true and the conclusion false. Equivalently, in every possible circumstance in which the premises are true, the conclusion is true. Since it is impossible that Bill be a brother without his being a sibling, the opening argument is valid by (D1).
(D1), though correct as far as it goes, leaves unspecified the source or ground of a valid argument's validity. This is the philosophically interesting question. What makes a valid argument valid? What is the ground of the impossibility of the premises' being true and the conclusion's being false? One answer is that the source of validity is narrowly logical or purely syntactic: the validity of a valid argument derives from its instantiation of valid argument-forms.
Now it is obvious that the validity of the above argument does not derive from its logical form. The logical form is
Fa
—–
Ga
where 'a' is an arbitrary individual constant and 'F' an arbitrary predicate constant. The above argument-form is invalid since it is easy to interpret the place-holders so as to make the premise true and the conclusion false: let 'a' stand for Al, 'F' for fat and 'G' for gay.
Valid arguments are either syntactically valid or semantically valid. The opening argument is not syntactically valid but it is semantically valid.
D2. An argument is syntactically valid iff it is narrowly-logically impossible that there be an argument of that form having true premises and a false conclusion.
According to (D2), a valid argument inherits its validity from the validity of its form, or logical syntax. So on (D2) it is primarily argument-forms that are valid or invalid; arguments are valid or invalid only in virtue of their instantiation of valid or invalid argument-forms. (D2) is thus a specification of the generic (D1).
But there is a second specification of (D1) according to which validity/invalidity has its source in the constituent propositions of the arguments themselves and so depends on their extra-syntactic content:
D3. An argument is extra-syntactically valid iff (i) it is impossible that its premises be true and its conclusion false; (ii) this impossibility is grounded neither in any contingent matter of fact nor
in formal logic proper, but in some necessary connection between the senses or the referents of the extra-logical terms of the argument.
A specification of (D3) is
D4. An argument is semantically valid iff (i) if it is impossible that its premises be true and its conclusion false; and (ii) this impossibility is grounded in the senses of the extra-logical terms of
the argument.
Thus to explain the semantic validity of the opening argument we can say that the sense of 'brother' includes the sense of 'sibling.' There is a necessary connection between the two senses, one that does not rest on any contingent matter of fact and is also not mediated by any purely formal law of logic. Note that logic allows (does not rule out) a brother who is not a sibling. Logic would rule out a non-sibling brother only if 'x is F & x is not G' had only false substitution-instances — which is not the case. To put it another way, a brother that is not a sibling is a narrowly-logical possibility. But it is not a broadly-logical possibility due to the necesssary connection of the two senses.
So it looks as if analytic entailments like Bill is a brother, ergo, Bill is a sibling show that subsumability under purely formal logical laws is not necessary for (generically) valid inference. Sufficient, but not necessary. Analytic entailments appear to be counterexamples to the thesis that inferences in natural language can be validated only by subsumption under logical laws.
One might wonder what philosophers typically have in mind when they speak of validity. I would say that most philosophers today have in mind (D1) as specified by (D2). Only a minority have in mind (D3) and its specification (D4). I could easily be wrong about that. Is there a sociologist of philosophers in the house?
Consider the Quineans and all who reject the analytic/synthetic distinction. They of course will have no truck with analytic entailments and talk of semantic validity. Carnapians, on the other hand, will uphold the analytic/synthetic distinction but validate all entailments in the standard (derivational) way by importing all analytic truths as meaning postulates into the widened category of L-truths.
Along broadly Carnapian lines one could argue that the above argument is an enthymeme which when spelled out is
Every brother is a sibling
Bill is a brother
—–
Bill is a sibling.
Since this expanded argument is
syntactically valid, the original argument — construed as an enthymeme — is also syntactically valid. When I say that it is syntactically valid I just mean that the
conclusion can be derived from the premises using the resources of standard logic, i.e. the Frege-inspired predicate calculus one finds in logic textbooks such as I. Copi's Symbolic Logic. In the above example, one uses two inference rules, Universal Instantiation and Modus Ponens, to derive the conclusion.
If this is right, then the source of the expanded argument's validity is not in a necessary connection between the senses of the 'brother' and 'sibling' but in logical laws. The question, however, was whether the opening argument as stated is valid or invaid. I say it is semantically, but not syntactically valid.
A juicier example is the Cartesian cogito:
I think
—–
I am.
This looks to be semantically valid and thus valid without the need of an auxiliary premise to mediate the inferential transition from premise to conclusion. It is valid absent an auxiliary major premise such as 'Whatever thinks, is.'
There is something to be said in favor of an all-voluntary military, but on the debit side there is this: only those with 'skin in the game' — either their own or that of their loved ones — properly appreciate the costs of foreign military interventions. I say that as a conservative, not a libertarian.
There is also this to consider: In the bad old days of the draft, people of different stations – to use a good old word that will not be allowed to fall into desuetude, leastways not on my watch — were forced to associate with one another — with some good effects. It is 'broadening' to mingle and have to get along with different sorts of people. And when the veteran of foreign wars returns and takes up a profession in, say, academe, he brings with him precious hard-won experience of all sorts of people in different lands in trying circumstances. He is then more likely to exhibit the sense of a Winston Churchill as opposed to the nonsense of a Ward Churchill.
At the moment, Vladimir Putin is threatening to send his troops into the Ukraine. There are those with no skin in the game who are willing to expend American blood and treasure should the Ukraine be invaded. I humbly suggest that we secure our own borders before we worry about the borders of foreign countries. I have no skin in this game, but also no prospect of profiting from yet another foreign adventure.
Donald Trump has it right: America first!
Click on the link to learn what the slogan means.
With half-apologies to overly sensitive feministas. Look, real men love and respect women and they use these words as terms of endearment. Take a powder!
Sonny and Cher, I Got You Babe, 1965. Don't let them say your hair's too long!
Bob Dylan and Joan Baez, It Ain't Me Babe, 1964. Note how Joan mothers the young Bob. Turtles' 1965 cover. Baez solo version.
Bob Dylan, It's All Over Now, Baby Blue, 1965. This one goes out to Charaine H.
Beatles, Baby's in Black
Ronettes, Be My Baby, 1963.
Bob Dylan, Baby Let Me Follow You Down, 1962. The surging harmonica near the beginning does it for me every time.
Traveling Wilburys, She's My Baby, 2007.
Charles Brown, Merry Christmas, Baby
Dion Dimucci with John Hammond, My Baby Loves to Boogie, 2020.
Beach Boys, Don't Worry Baby, 1964.
Bob Dylan, I'll Be Your Baby Tonight, 1968.
Them, Baby Please Don't Go. Muddy Waters, 1953.
Bruce Channel, Hey Baby! Date? Early '60s.
Ronettes, Baby, I Love You.
Drifters, There Goes My Baby, 1959.
Shirelles, Baby it's You, 1961.
Turtles, You Baby, 1966.
Dino Paul Crocetti, better known as Dean Martin, Melancholy Baby. From Steubenville, Ohio, if memory serves, as it usually does.
Dave Bagwill, my favorite Oregon luthier, recommends:
Surface all the way down. Centerlessly peripheral. All fringe, no focus. Spiritually centrifugal. Swallowed by the social. Dis-tracted. Unaware without a care. Swamped by the flesh. Oblivious. Vain, vacant, vacillating. Thoughtlessly full of useless thoughts. Incontinent in every way except micturition.
Too many of us are like this.
London Ed writes,
Early on I commented on the following ‘Brentano’ inference, with the question of whether it is valid or not.
(1) Jake is thinking of something, therefore Jake’s thinking contains something as object.
I think you said it was valid.
It is not a question easy to answer properly, and my impression is that Ed does not appreciate the depth of the issue or the complexity of its ramifications. You cannot just return a 'valid' or 'invalid' answer; the question has to be explicated. The explication may be expected to turn up points of disagreement. We might, however, be able to agree on some of the following. Perhaps only the first.
a) If Jake is thinking of something, it does not follow that there exists (in reality) something such that Jake is thinking of it. I am sure that we will agree on this most basic point.
b) If Jake is thinking of something, a distinction must be made between the occurrent episode of Jake's thinking (a datable event or process in Jake's mental life) and what the thinking purports to be of or about. Typically, this will be something of a non-mental nature. And given (a), what the episode purports to be of or about may or may not exist without prejudice to the episode's being the very episode it is.
c) That the episode is occurrent as opposed to dispositional Ed will surely grant. Jake may be disposed to think of London when he is not thinking of it, but if he is thinking of the city, then his thinking is a mental act — 'act' connoting actuality, not activity — and thus a particular occurrence.
d) Now if Jake is thinking about London, his act of thinking purports to be about London which, of course, cannot be internal to anyone's mind or mental state. London with all its buildings and monuments is and remains in the external world whether or not anyone thinks about it. 'Cannot be internal' means that London herself cannot be a constituent of anyone's thinking about London. It cannot be 'in Jake's head,' not even if that phrase is taken figuratively to mean: in Jake's mind. London cannot be a part of Jake's psychic state when he thinks about London. And yet Jake and the rest of us can think about London and many of our thoughts are veridical.
e) Although London is not a constituent of anyone's thinking about London, there must be some factor internal to the mental state, a factor epistemically accessible to the subject of the state, that somehow represents or perhaps presents London to the subject of the state. This factor is a feature of the mental state whether or not the external thing (the city of London in our example) exists. This internal factor does not depend on the existence of the external thing. If Jake in Arizona is thinking about London, and the city goes the the way of Sodom and Gomorrah, i.e., ceases to exist, and if this event occurs while Jake is thinking about the English city, nothing changes in Jake's mental state: the thinking remains and so does its particular outer-directedness, its directedness to London and to nothing else. In other words, if Jake is thinking about London and, unbeknownst to Jake, the city ceases to exist while he is thinking about it, Jake remains thinking and his thinking retains the same specific aboutness that it had before the city ceased to exist. Thus neither the thinking nor its aboutness, depend on the existence of London. This aboutness or outer-directedness to a particular external thing — I am studiously avoiding for the moment the polyvalent term 'intentional object' — is or is closely related to the internal factor I mentioned above. What should we call it? If the act is the noesis, the internal factor responsible for the particular outer-directedness can be called the noema.
f) Much more can be said, but enough has been said to answer Ed's question. He wants to know whether the inference encapsulated in the following sentence is valid or invalid:
(1) Jake is thinking of something, therefore Jake’s thinking contains something as object.
The question cannot be answered as it stands. (1) needs disambiguation.
(1a) Jake is thinking of something in the external world; therefore, this thing, if it exists, is contained in Jake's thinking of it.
INVALID.
(1b) Jake is thinking of something in the external world; therefore, there is something internal to Jake's thinking in virtue of which his act of thinking has the precise directedness that it has, and this item — the noema — is 'contained in' in the sense of dependent upon Jake's act of thinking.
VALID.
Further questions arise at this point. How are we to understand the 'relation' of this noema to the external thing that it presents or represents? And what exactly is the status of the noema?
I caught a glimpse of an intriguing title the other day, "Our Souls at Night." What a great title, I thought. So I picked up the novel whose title it is, by an author I had never heard of, and began to read. I was not impressed at first, but put off by the spare writing, overly simple and flat-footed and awkward as if by intention. If some writing is 'mannered,' this, the second paragraph, struck me as 'anti-mannered':
They lived a block apart on Cedar Street in the oldest part of town with elm trees and hackberry and a single maple grown up along the curb and green lawns running back from the sidewalk to the two-story houses. It had been warm in the day but it had turned off cool now in the evening. She went along the sidewalk under the the trees and turned in at Louis's house.
Turned off cool? Next sentence: turned in?
Perhaps my preciosity is showing. Or I am just quibbling. But I read on, and was sucked in. A good novelist has the power to draw the reader into his world and keep him there, page after page. But I am only 30 pages in, so no more commentary from me. Let the author speak. He tells his story in The Making of a Writer. A fine piece of writing. A couple of passages struck me. The first helps explain Haruf's simple style.
During that period of my life out on the high plains, I was more or less a happy kid, I think, and I survived childhood with only a few hard lessons that I still remember. One was: don’t you be a show-off, and I have tried to abide by that injunction ever since, with all its contradictions and complications.
And here he makes a point I have often made:
If I had learned anything over those years of work and persistence, it was that you had to believe in yourself even when no one else did. And later I often said something like that to my graduate students. You have to believe in yourself despite the evidence. I felt as though I had a little flame of talent, not a big talent, but a little pilot-light-sized flame of talent, and I had to tend to it regularly, religiously, with care and discipline, like a kind of monk or acolyte, and not to ever let the little flame go out.
I would put it like this: You have to believe in yourself beyond the evidence, evidence which, in the beginning, is insufficient to justify belief in one's powers. Take that, W. K. Clifford.
"It [divine revelation] is the opening of a door that can only be unlocked from the inside." Quoted by Thomas Merton in Conjectures of a Guilty Bystander (Image Books, 1965, p. 10) from a Christmas sermon preached by Karl Barth in 1931. I am going to take this ball and run with it.
Imagine someone who would pass through only those doors that he could open himself whether by hand, by key, by picking the lock, or by brute force. Imagine him declaring, "The only permissible passages are those initiated by me and controlled by me at every step." Such a one would never knock or ring a bell. To knock or ring would be to rely on another for entry and thus to sacrifice one's ingressive self-reliance, to give it a name. It would be the heteronomy of help in violation of the autonomy of self-entry. "The only fully responsible entry is self-entry!" "It is wrong always and everywhere to rely on another for entry." "The only doors worth opening are those one can open by oneself!"
The person I am imagining would be like the modern (post-Cartesian) man who accepts as true only that for which he has sufficient evidence, only that which he can verify for himself by internal criteria and methods. Such a one, if he were standing before the portals of saving truth that can only be unlocked from the inside, would deny himself access to such truth out of a refusal to accept help. His fear of error would prevent his contact with truth.
Would that be a prideful, and thus a morally censurable, refusal? Would it be the rebellious refusal of a miserable creature who, though dependent on God for everything, absurdly privileges his own petty ego and sets it up as epistemic arbiter?
Or would the refusal to accept divine revelation be a laudable refusal that bespeaks a cautious and critical love of truth? "I so love the truth that I will accept no substitutes!"
The question is not easy to answer. It is not even easy to formulate. The question concerns the very possibility of divine revelation, and the possibility of its acceptance, not the content of any particular putative revelation.
Trust or verify? The child is trusting, but gullible; he learns to be critical. Having come of age, and having been repeatedly fooled, he trusts as little as possible. The adult is wary, as he must be to negotiate a world of snares and delusions and evil doers.
I had an unforgettable mystical experience at the age of 28. I was tormented by a torrent of deep doubts as to the ultimate sense of things. Around and around I went like a Zen man in the grip of his koan. Striding along, alone, in the early pre-dawn of a Spring day in Chestnut Hill, Massachusetts, I came to a point where I caught a glimpse of the rising sun just as it appeared over the horizon. Suddenly all my doubts vanished and I was flooded with a deep intuition of the ultimate sense and rightness of things. The solar glimpse triggered a mystical Glimpse into the intrinsic intelligibility of the universe. All my doubts vanished. The Last Word was sense, not absurdity! I bowed my head and was suffused with peace, and Metaphysical Trust, as I later described it in my journal. Not a trust in this thing or that, or in any human person, or in oneself and one's powers of understanding, but trust in the Unseen Order in which this transient bubble of space-time is suspended and rendered meaningful.
But of course that remarkable experience was only an experience, and no experience proves the veridicality, the reality, of its intentional object. That's Modern Philosophy 101 and only an unthinking dogmatist could think it easily dismissed.
The dialectic proceeds beyond this point, of course, but weblog entries are best kept succinct. So I leave you with the alternative: Trust or Verify? Finite reason is not equipped to solve this conundrum. You will have to de-cide. That involves a leap of faith. You can put your faith in the Unseen or in your own powers.
Still 'jacking off' in December? Well, when I find something relevant I snag it for my files. The bit about Jack's saintly & sickly older brother Gerard in this chapter of a book by Barry Miles caught my eye re: my response to Vito C. , so here it is, below the fold.
