Author: Bill Vallicella

Nominalism and Being

Ed Buckner is threatening to write a book on the history of philosophy from the perspective of nominalism. I encourage him to do so for his sake and ours. One of the things he will have to do early on is to define 'nominalism' as he will use the term given its varied use in the history of philosophy. The following redacted re-post from over ten years ago (7 March 2012) may help him focus his thoughts.

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Today I preach on an old text of long-time commenter and sparring partner, London Ed:

Nominalism is the doctrine that we should not multiply entities  according to the multiplicity of terms. I.e., we shouldn't  automatically assume that there is a thing corresponding to every  term. Das Seiende is a term, so we shouldn't automatically assume there is a thing corresponding to it. Further arguments are needed to show that there is or there isn't. A classic nominalist strategy is to rewrite the sentence in such a way that the term disappears.

My first concern is whether this definition of 'nominalism' is perhaps too broad, so broad that it pulls in almost all of us. Does anyone think that every term has a referent? (No) Don't we all hold that there can be no automatic assumption that every occurrence of a term in a stretch of discourse picks out an entity? (Yes) For example, one would be hard pressed to find a philosopher who holds that 'nothing' in

   1. Nothing is in the drawer

refers to something. (Carnapian slanders aside, Heidegger does not maintain this, but this is a separate topic about which I have written a long unpublished paper.) Following Ed's excellent advice, the apparently referential 'nothing' can be paraphrased away:

   2. It is not the case that there is something in the drawer.

This then goes into quasi-canonical notation as

   2*. ~(∃x)(x is in the drawer).

In (2*) the tilde and the particular quantifier are syncategorematic elements. On the face of it, then, there is no call to be anything other than a nominalist about 'nothing,' using 'nominalism' as per the suggestion above.

Whether there is call to be a nominalist about 'being' is another matter. Before proceeding to it, consider the following example:

   3. Peter and Paul are blond

which could be parsed as

   3*. Peter is blond and Paul is blond.

Now I rather doubt that anyone maintains that every word in (3*) — or rather every word in a tokening of this sentence-type whether via utterance or inscription or some other mode of encoding — has an entity corresponding to it. This suggests a taxonomy of nominalisms:

Mad Dog Nominalism: No word has an existing referent, not even 'Peter' and 'Paul.' (I write 'existing referent' to disallow Meinongian objects as referents. The waters are muddy enough without bringing Meinong into the picture — please pardon the mixed metaphors.)

Extreme Nominalism: The only words that have existing referents are names like 'Peter' and Paul'; nothing in reality corresponds to such predicates as 'blond.' And a fortiori nothing corresponds to copulae and logically connective words such as 'and' and 'or.'

Nominalism Proper: Particulars (unrepeatables) alone exist: there are no universals (repeatables). This view allows that something in reality corresponds to predicates such as 'blond.' It is just that what this predicate denotes is not a universal but a particular, a trope say, or an Aristotelian accident.  I am using particular to refer to any unrepeatable item, whether concrete or abstract. Thus Socrates is a particular while his whiteness is an abstract particular, where 'abstract' is being used in the traditional as opposed to the new-fangled Quinean way.  Both are particulars because neither is repeatable in the way in which a universal is repeatable.   Thus the whiteness of Socrates is numerically distinct from the whiteness of Plato. 

Methodological Nominalism: This is just Ed's suggestion that we not assume that for each word there is a corresponding entity.

I hope no one is crazy enough to be a mad-dog nominalist, and that everyone is sane enough to be a methodological nominalist. The two middle positions, however, are subject to reasonable controversy. What I am calling Extreme Nominalism has little to recommend it, but I think Nominalism Proper is quite a reasonable position.  There has to be something extralinguistic (and extramenal) corresponding to the predicate in 'Peter is blond,' but it is not obvious that it must be a universal.  

If I understand Ed's position, he holds that all reference is intra-linguistic.   That makes him a linguistic idealist. Is that a 'mad dog' position? 

Now let's think about whether we should be nominalists with respect to words like das Seiende, that-which-is, the existent, beings, and the like. Heidegger has been known to say such things as Das Seiende ist,  or

   4. That-which-is is. (Beings are.)

Now is there anything in reality corresponding to 'that-which-is' and 'beings'? Well of course: absolutely everything comes under 'that-which-is.' There is nothing that is named by 'Nothing.' And if I met nobody on the trail, that is not to say that I met someone named 'Nobody.' But absolutely everything falls under 'a being,' 'an existent,' ein Seiendes, das Seiende.

So I see no reason to have any nominalist scruples about the latter expressions. I don't see any problem with forming the substantive das Seiende from the present participle seiend.  But you will be forgiven if you balk at the transformation of the infinitive sein into the the substantive das Sein and take the latter to refer to Majuscule Being.

The Orwellian Abuse of Approbatives: ‘Democracy’

An approbative word or phrase is one the conventional use of which indicates an approving or appreciative attitude on the part of the speaker or writer.  The opposite is a pejorative.  'Democracy' and 'racism' as currently used  in the USA and elsewhere in the Anglosphere are examples of the former and the latter respectively. If we distinguish connotation from denotation, we can say that approbatives have an axiologically positive, and pejoratives an axiologically negative, connotation. 

Approbatives are like honorifics, except that the latter term is standardly used in reference to persons.

You will have noticed by now that the hard Left, which has come to dominate the once-respectable Democrat Party, has become infinitely abusive of the English language as part of their overall strategy of undermining what it has taken centuries to build. They understand that the subversion of language is the mother of all subversion.

And so these termitic Orwellians take the word 'democracy,' and while retaining its approbative connotation, (mis)use it to denote the opposite of its conventional referent. They use it to mean the opposite of what it standardly or conventionally means.  What they mean by it is either oligarchy or in the vicinity thereof. Hillary Clinton, for example, regularly goes on about "our democracy." But of course, in violation of the Inclusion plank in the Diversity, Equity, Inclusion  (DEI) platform, "our democracy" does not include what Hillary calls "deplorables" or what Barack Obama calls "clingers." Whom does it include? Well, her and her globalist pals.

A clever piece of linguistic chicanery. Take a word or phrase with a positive connotation and then apply the Orwellian inversion algorithm. Use 'democracy' in such a way that it excludes the people.

Crossposted at Substack.

Not Dark Yet

 Tomorrow, Bob Dylan turns 81.

Can one get tired of Dylan? That would be like getting tired of America. It would be like getting to the point where no passage in Kerouac brings a tingle to the spine or a tear to the eye, to the point where the earthly road ends and forever young must give way to knocking on heaven's door. The scrawny Jewish kid from Hibbing Minnesota, son of an appliance salesman, was an unlikely bard, but bard he became. He's been at it a long, long time, and his body of work is as vast and as variegated as America herself. We old fans from way back who were with him from the beginning are still finding gems unheard as we ourselves enter the twilight where it's not dark yet, but getting there. But it is a beautiful fade-out from a world that cannot last.

A tip of the hat to Bro Inky for sending me to Powerline where Scott Johnson has a couple of celebratory pieces with plenty of links to Dylan covers. Here's one and here's the other. An excerpt from the first:

In his illuminating City Journal essay on Pete Seeger — “America’s most successful Communist” — Howard Husock placed Dylan in the line of folk agitprop in which Seeger took pride of place. Husock’s essay is an important and entertaining piece. Dylan is only a small part of the story Husock has to tell, however, and Husock therefore does not pause long enough over Dylan to observe how quickly Dylan burst the confines of agitprop, found his voice, and tapped into his own vein of the Cosmic American Music. Looking back on his long career, one can discern his respect for the tradition as well as his ambition to take his place at its head.

Edward W. Farrell on Populism

An impressive essay by an old friend of this weblog. Excerpts:

Populists feel betrayed by the movers and shakers of the world who they faintly hoped were working in their best interests but were actually working in the interest of something else. What is this "something else?" Nothing less than a perfectly homogenous world untroubled by nationality or biology or religion, a world superficially diverse in ethnicity, race, and sexual orientation but lockstep in rigid ideology and hatred of dissent; a world, oddly enough, that's perfectly suited to fuel the engines of global commerce which feeds the global lust for feel-good distraction. The down payment for this perfect world is the perfect elimination of populists. Populists have discovered this by observing the inexorable erosion of their accustomed way of life over several decades along with the livelihoods that once supported their freedom of self-determination–all to the tune of "things are getting better all the time."  When they have the temerity to ask "getting better for whom?" and become too loud to be ignored, or God forbid they support a Trump, they receive a scornful lecture that they're working against their own best interests, which they are too stupid to understand. But they understand what this means: shut up and quit interfering with the best interests of your employers, their employers, all the government wonks that tirelessly work to support the wealth brokers to whom everyone grovels, and everyone else who knows nothing except that you and your kind are an albatross hung on civilization's neck.

[. . .]

Identity Politics and the Transformation of Civil Rights My discussion here is based largely on Christopher Caldwell's The Age of Enlightenment, though of course he cannot be blamed for any tangential interpretations or conclusions I've drawn from it.

The path of race relations since the Civil Rights Act of 1964 reveals the true depth of the chasm between progressives and traditionalists. The traditionally-minded American sees America as exceptional: a beacon, "the city on the hill," built on constitutional foundations that are wise, sound, and unprecedented. In this view civil rights was never intended to alter American exceptionalism or the foundations that supported it. Rather, civil rights was seen as an effort to bring blacks, oppressed first by slavery and then by discriminatory Jim Crow laws in the South, into full citizenship with the majority of US citizens with all their attendant privileges and opportunities. The ultimate goal here was "race neutrality," a concept whereby race would no longer be a factor that lead to discrimination or preferential treatment.

By 2020 it became obvious that many progressives had something entirely different in mind. They did not share the vision of America as a "city on a hill;" rather, they believed racism was central to America's ethos and that all of its institutions were racist. Racism had not so much to do with individuals and their treatment of other individuals. Racism was "built into" all of Americas laws and institutions; in fact, the notion of race neutrality was simply a dodge that perpetuated white power. And the progressive goal of racial equality (as opposed to neutrality) demanded that the institutions, laws, and cultural ethos that supported white power be destroyed or otherwise rendered harmless to its victims. Identity politics became the means of determining which group was the most oppressed and thus stood first in line for their share as white power was dismantled and redistributed.

How did this divide come about?

Read the rest.

Are We the Government?

"We the people are the government." (Joe Biden) Barack Obama used to spout that same falsehood. "The government is us."
 
It is a nice question whether they were lying or bullshitting.  The liar cares enough about the truth to want to hide it from us. The bullshitter doesn't care about the truth and will say anything. I borrow the distinction from Harry Frankfurt's On Bullshit, a book undoubtedly more purchased than read.  It is a fine piece of analysis, but probably beyond the grasp of those who have 'twitterized' their attention spans.
 
The government is not us. It is an entity distinct from most of us, and opposed to many if not most of us, run by a relatively small number of us. Among the latter are some decent people but also plenty of power-hungry individuals who may have started out with good intentions but who were soon suborned by the power, perquisites, and pelf of high office, people for whom a government position is a hustle like any hustle.
 
Government likes power and likes to expand its power, and can be counted on to come up with plenty of rationalizations for the maintenance and extension of its power. It must be kept in check by us, who are not part of the government, just as big corporations need to be kept in check by government regulators.  Not that proper regulation is likely now under 'woke' capitalism.  But this is a large and separate topic.
 
If you value liberty you must cultivate a healthy skepticism about government. To do so is not anti-government. Leftists love to slander us by saying that we are anti-government. It is a lie and they know it. They are not so stupid as not to know that to be for limited government is to be for government. But truth is not their concern; winning is. To their way of thinking the glorious end justifies the shabby means.

Hey Wokester!

You won't teach your students grammar, but you will 'teach' them the 'right' pronouns?

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J. E. comments:

Having fled to a tavern following the presentation at an academic conference of a paper on modal verbs, I found your recent remark about the woke approach to grammar and language indicative of my broad experience as an English teacher. I would point out only one thing: when you say the wokester won't teach his/her/xe students grammar, a reader might presume you are attributing to the wokester the ability to teach grammar but the willful refusal to do so. Not so. Most that I have encountered could not distinguish a participle from a particle, though whether cause or consequence of their enwokened state I can never tell. Thanks for your time in reading this missive.

And thank you for your well-written response.  I fear that you are right. But at least the wokester knows what a pronoun is. What hasn't dawned on him, however, is that his exiguous knowledge of grammar makes him partially racist since we all now know that grammar is racist and for the same reason that mathematics is.

I will add that grammar is propadeutic to logic, or, as I heard a German say, Grammatik ist logische Vorschule. But we all now know how utterly racist logic is, precisely because of its having been secreted by the brains of  dead old white racists.  Please forgive the pleonastic expression, 'white racist.' 

And if my employment of a German sentence isn't racist enough, here is a racist gloss on the foregoing:

"Propaedeutic" is from Greek paideuein, meaning "to teach," plus "pro-," which means "before." "Paideia" and "paideuein" both spring from the root "paid-," which means "child."

But you don't know that word, do you? You probably attended 'schools' run by leftists. Would it be an exaggeration to say that leftists specialize in the erasure of history and the erosion of standards? How much of an exaggeration?

Go Gray!

The car of a neighbor sports a bumper sticker: "I vote pro-gun!"

I say go gray.  Never advertise your political views when you are out and about in public.  These are dangerous times as polarization peaks and comity collapses. You must of course speak out, stand up, and prepare.  I am not advocating timid withdrawal from the fray. But there are more and less prudent ways to proceed. Prudence, you will recall, is one of the cardinal virtues.

I have more to say on this topic at Substack in Are You a Gray Man?

A False Religious Humility?

I wonder about the self-abasing humility of those at the extreme forward edge of the religious sensibility as personified by Simone Weil and others and as expressed in such locutions as "I am nothing" that one finds sprinkled about in devotional literature.   How could I be nothing given my divine origin? Is the creature nothing at all? That makes no sense. If the creature is nothing at all, then there is no creature and God is not creator.

From our inauspicious  debut in copulative slime to our end in ashes and dust, we are nothing much, but real nonetheless. The Weilian extreme with its false humility is best avoided, but better than the insane arrogance of a Russell or a Sartre.

To be arrogant is to arrogate to oneself attributes one does not possess. And so the mortal man puffs himself up as if he were an immortal god.  Russell and Sartre and Co. make idols of their petty, rebellious  egos. They've  got the direction right, but not the way to it. Theosis is indeed the goal, but it cannot be attained on one's own, by one's own power. Genesis has it that man alone is made in the image and likeness of God. I take that to mean that man alone is a spiritual animal, a personal animal.  Man alone has a higher origin and higher destiny, a destiny that Eastern Orthodox Christianity describes as theosis or deification.  The goal is to become god-like, a goal unattainable without  God and the divine initiative. 

Hard and Soft

You must become hard to protect what is soft in yourself and in others. Become too hard, however, and you lose the reason for becoming hard. Fail to become hard and you won't be long for this world whose via dolorosa  must be tread a life long to arrive at self-individuation.  Self-individuation is a task, not a given. 

Face Masks

Masks are a form of cultural appropriation. We have no right to adopt the apparel of criminals, thereby disrespecting by co-opting the accoutrement of their chosen lifestyle.  That lifestyle is who they are!  But not only that. Since criminals are disproportionately black, masks are also racist! 

Masks are also discriminatory and non-inclusive. Doesn't every pathogen have a right to migrate whithersoever it wants?  Nancy Pelosi, that shining star of political wisdom, taught us that walls are immoral using those very words; how then could masks be any less immoral? 

“The People are Supreme”

Thus read a protester's placard. Now that is rich!

The implication is that in a democracy the people decide, not nine black-robed elitists, when the whole point of overturning Roe v. Wade is to return the question of the legality of abortion to the states where — wait for it –  the people will decide.