Author: Bill Vallicella

A Proof of Individual Concepts?

This just in from Edward:

Proof that singular concepts (aka individual concepts) exist.

1. Common terms (‘cat’) and singular terms (‘this cat’, ‘Max’) exist.

2. These terms are meaningful, i.e. their meanings exist.

3. A concept is the meaning of a term.

4. Thus (from 1,2, 3) singular concepts, aka singular meanings, exist.

QED

This argument equivocates on 'meaning.' There are of course general and singular terms and they both have meanings if the meaning of a term is its extension, the (set of) things to which it applies. Accordingly, the meaning/extension of 'cat' is (the set of)  cats, and the meaning/extension of 'Max' is Max, or his singleton.  General terms also have meaning in the sense of intension.  'Cordate' and 'renate' are general terms that have the same extension but differ in intension.  But the singular term 'Max,' while it has an extension, lacks an intension.

So for both (1) and (2) to be true, the meaning of a term must be its extension. But for (3) to be true, the meaning of a term must be its intension. So the argument trades on an equivocation and is for that reason invalid.

Here is a sound argument:

5. A concept is the intension of a term.

6. Singular terms lack intensions.

7. If a term lacks an intension, then there is no concept the term expresses.

Therefore

8. Singular terms do not express concepts. (From 5, 6, 7)

9. If a term does not express a concept, then there exists no concept the term expresses.

Therefore

10. There are no singular/individual concepts.

Just ask yourself: how could there be a concept of precisely Max and nothing actually or possibly different from Max? Suppose that there is a definite description that Max alone satisfies in the actual world.  That description would express a concept that only one thing could bear or instantiate. But such a concept would not be singular but general since something else might have satisfied the description.   For there to be an individual concept of Max, Max himself would somehow  have to be a constituent of the concept. But that is impossible and for two reasons.  First, concepts reside in the mind but no cat is a constituent of anything in my mind.  Second, a concept is distinct from its bearer and can exist whether or not its bearer exists.  But the concept MAX, if there were such a concept, would not be wholly distinct from its bearer and could not exist without its bearer.

The individual qua individual cannot be conceptualized. My conceptual grasp of an individual such as Max is always and necessarily by way of general concepts: cat, domestic cat, black cat, Tuxedo cat, black male Tuxedo cat five years old and weighing 20 lbs,  cat presently in my visual field, this cat to which I am now pointing.  Note that Max need not be this cat to which I am presently pointing, whence it follows that the haecceity of Max himself  cannot be reached or grasped or conceptualized in the concept this cat to which I am presently pointing.

Care of Soul and Body

To care properly for the first, live each day as if it will be your last. To care properly for the second, live each day as if your supply of days is infinite. (Adapted from Evagrius Ponticus.)

……………………….

The mortalist body-abuser is one puzzling hombre.

Christopher Hitchens loved to drink and he loved to smoke and he knew that the synergistic effects of drinking like a fish and smoking like a chimney could lead, as it did in the case of Humphrey Bogart, to an untimely shuffling off of the mortal coil.  (Hamlet's soliloquy, Act 3, Scene 1) You would think that someone who was utterly convinced that he was nothing more than an animated body, a clever land mammal, would want to take care of  his body. Hitchens was not suicidal. He loved to write and he had writing projects planned out. He died of cancer of the esophagus at age 62 in 2011. Those of us who champion  free speech miss him greatly and what he would have had to say about the current state of the world.  

People think they have plenty of time. But it's later than you think. The Reaper Man is sharpening his scythe as we scribblers sharpen our pencils.

Intentionality, Singularity, and Individual Concepts

Herewith, some notes on R. M. Sainsbury, Intentionality without Exotica.  (Exotica are those items  that are "nonexistent, nonconcrete, or nonactual." (303) Examples include Superman and Arcadia.)

'Jack wants a sloop' could mean three different things. (a) There is a particular sloop Jack wants.  In this case, Jack's desire is externally singular.  Desire is an object-directed mental state, and in this case the object exists and is singular.

(b) There is no particular sloop Jack wants; what he wants is "relief from slooplessness" in Quine's phrase. In this case the desire, being "wholly non-specific," is not externally singular.  In fact, it is not singular at all.  Jack wants some sloop or other, but no particular sloop whether one that exists at present or one that is to be built.

(c) Jack wants a sloop of a certain description, one that, at the time of the initial desire, no external object satisfies. He contracts with a ship builder to build a sloop to his exact specifications, a sloop he dubs The Mary Jane. It turns out, however, that the sloop is never built.  In this case, Sainsbury tells us, the desire is not externally singular as in case (a), but internally singular:

The concept The Mary Jane that features in the content of the desire is the kind of concept appropriate to external singularity, though that kind of singularity is absent, so the desire counts as internally singular. The kind of concept that makes for singularity in thought is one produced by a concept-producing mechanism whose functional role is to generate concepts fit for using to think about individual things. I call such a concept an ‘‘individual concept’’ (Sainsbury 2005: 217ff). Individual concepts are individuated by the event in which they are introduced. In typical cases, and when all goes well, an act of attention to an object accompanies, or perhaps is a constituent of, the introduction of an individual concept, which then has that object as its bearer. In cases in which all does not go well, for example in hallucination, an individual concept is used by the subject as if it had an object even though it does not; an act internally indistinguishable from an act of attending to an object occurs, and in that act an individual concept without a bearer comes into being. A concept so introduced can be used in thought; for example an individual concept C  can be a component in wondering whether C is real or merely hallucinated. In less typical cases, it is known to the subject that the concept has no bearer. An example would be a case in which I know I am hallucinating.     
    External singularity is relational: a subject is related to an object. Internal singularity is not relational in this way. (301, bolding added.)
 
What interests me here is the notion of an individual concept (IC). We are told above that an IC is distinct from its bearer and can exist without a bearer.  So the existence and identity of an IC does not depend on its having a bearer. We are also told that one and the same IC can figure in both a veridical and a non-veridical  (hallucinatory) experience, the seeing of a dagger, say.  So it is not the bearer that individuates the IC. What individuates it is the mental event by which it is introduced.
 
To these two points I add a third: it is built into the sense of 'individual concept' that if an individual concept C has a bearer, then it has exactly one bearer in the actual world, and the same bearer in every  possible world in which it has a bearer.  So if there is an individual concept SOCRATES, and it has a bearer, then it has exactly one bearer, Socrates, and not possibly anything distinct from Socrates.  This implies that individual concepts of externally singular items are as singular in content as the items of which they are the concepts. This in turn implies that no individual concept of an externally singular item is general:  no such concept is multiply instantiable or multiply 'bearable.'
 
I now add a fourth point: concepts are mental entities in the sense that they cannot exist apart from minds. Concepts are representations and therefore mental entities in the sense indicated.  A fifth point is that our minds are finite and our powers of conceptualization correspondingly limited. One obvious limit on our power to conceptualize is that no concept of ours can capture or grasp the haecceity (thisness) of any externally singular item.  We ectypal intellects cannot conceptually eff the ineffable, where what is ineffable is the individual in its individuality or singularity or haecceity, i.e.,  in that which makes it be this individual and no other actual or possible individual.  God, the archetypal intellect, may be able to grasp the haecceity of an individual, but this is clearly beyond our 'pay grade.' If God can do it, this is presumably because he creates the individual ex nihilo.
 
It follows from the fourth and fifth points that all of our concepts are general.  Suppose that the concept FASTEST MARATHONER (FM) applies to Jones. That concept is general despite the fact that at any given time t only one person can instantiate or bear it.   For at times earlier and later than t, some other runners were and will be the FM.  Therefore, FM does not capture Jones' haecceity. But even if Jones is the FM at every time in the actual world, there are possible worlds in which some other person is the FM at every time. What's more, at any time at which Jones is the FM, he might not have been the FM at that time.
 
Sainsbury's theory of individual concepts strikes me as incoherent.  The following cannot all be true:
 
1) There are individual concepts.
2) Concepts are representations in finite minds, and our minds are finite.
3) Individual concepts of externally singular items must be as singular in content as the items of which they are the concepts.
4) Every externally singular item exists. (There are no 'exotica.')
5) Every externally singular item is wholly determinate or complete where x is complete =df x  satisfies the property version of the Law of Excluded Middle (tertium non datur).
6) No concept in a finite mind of an externally singular item is singular in content in the sense of encoding every property of the wholly determinate or complete thing of which it is the concept.
7) One and the same individual concept can figure in both a veridical and a non-veridical  (hallucinatory) experience.
 
Sainsbury is committed to each of these seven propositions, and yet they cannot all be true. The first five propositions, taken in conjunction, entails the negation of (6).   Or if (6) is true, then (1) is false.  (6) and (7) cannot both be true.
 
I conclude that there are no individual concepts, and that the distinction between externally singular and internally singular object-directed mental states cannot be upheld.  

Two Related Political Mistakes

1) One is the idea that we can all live together and get along despite deep differences in language, race, religion, culture, political convictions and basic values.  This, the contemporary liberal position, either is or tends towards the idea that there are no limits on productive and mutually beneficial interaction among  very different types of people.   It  either is or tends toward the conceit that a viable One can be made out of any Many. This is e pluribus unum taken to an extreme and reduced to absurdity. The Latin dictum on our coinage has a rather more moderate meaning: it means that out of  many individuals and geographical regions and states one nation can arise, provided that there are deep commonalities of language, culture, religion, and values. Whose values? Well, not the values of sharia-supporting Muslims whose values are antithetical to traditional American values which are, in the main, the values of the Enlightenment.  The Founders, for example, were anti-theocratic but not anti-religious. 

2) The other mistake is the idea is that those who have, or believe they have,  a superior worldview are justified in imposing it on others, by force if necessary, for their own good.  Forced religious conversion is one form of this. A second is the ill-starred attempt at nation building which has played a central role in the current debacle in Afghanistan.  You cannot impose upon people whose backward culture is downstream from an inferior religion a way of life that cuts against their grain and for which they lack the prerequisites. They would have had to have gone through something like our Enlightenment to to be able to benefit from our tutelage when it comes to setting up a viable system of governance.  

3) The two mistakes may seem to pull in opposite directions. The first presupposes that we are all the same, have the same values, and want the same things.  The second presupposes that some need to be 'straightened out' and taught the right way of doing things. But the mistakes share a common element, that it would be good to bring people together and that it is possible to do so. This is a failure to understand that there are irreconcilable differences. There is no way we can straighten out the Taliban and teach them how to live, especially when we are collapsing under the weight of our own decadence.  'Woke' madness and Western decadence is no cure for Islamist fanaticism any more than National Socialism is the cure for Communism.

Saturday Night at the Oldies: September Songs

September already.  A transitional month leading from hot August to glorious October, Kerouac month in the MavPhil 'secular liturgy.'

Dinah Washington, September in the Rain

Rod Stewart, Maggie May. "Wake up Maggie, I think I got something to say to you/It's late September and I really should be back at school."

Carole King, It Might as Well Rain Until September

The 'sixties forever! We were young, raw, open, impressionable, experience-hungry; we lived intensely and sometimes foolishly.  We felt deeply, and suffered deeply. Youth has its truth. And our popular music put to shame the crap that came before and after. Or so we thought. Would I want to live though the 'sixties again? Hell no, I am having too good a time enjoying it memorially at a safe distance.  Youth has its truth, but if you can make it into old age with health and intellect intact, and a modicum of the lean green, you are winning the game. 

Django Reinhardt, September Song

George Shearing, September in the Rain

Walter Huston, September Song 

Van Morrison, September Night

Brothers Four, Try to Remember. I do remember when I was "a tender and callow fellow." 

Addendum

This from a London reader:

Thanks for linking to the George Shearing ‘September’. I had forgotten he grew up in London (in Battersea, just down the road from me). I love the Bird-like flights on the piano. Indeed I think he wrote ‘Lullaby of Birdland’. Another Londoner is Helen Shapiro who does a great version of ‘It might as well rain until September.’  Great alto voice, never made it in the US as far as I know. There is an  account of her conversion to Christianity here.

I was first hipped to Shearing by Kerouac who referred to him in On the Road.  I too love the 'Bird'-like flights on the piano. The allusion is to Charley 'Bird' Parker, also beloved of Kerouac.  Helen Shapiro is new to me, thanks. She does a great job with the Carole King composition.  Believe it or not, King's version is a demo. That's one hell of a demo. A YouTuber points out that Shapiro was not part of the 1964 'British Invasion.'  I wonder why.

Do You Value This Life? How Much?

Death bedIt is the hour of death.  You are informed by an utterly reliable source that you have exactly two options.  You can either accept death and with it utter annihilation of the self, or you can repeat your life with every last detail the same.  But if every last detail is to be the same, and you decide to sign up for another round on the wheel of becoming, you realize that you are signing up for an infinity of rounds.

So which will it be?  Has your life been so valuable that you would be willing to repeat it, and indeed repeat it endlessly? Noch einmal? If you say yes, you are at the upper limit of life affirmation. For me, once is enough. Up or out! This life has point only as prelude. The wheel of samsara is  the wheel of Ixion, and an eternity of re-turning is a shabby and indeed horrifying substitute for true eternity.

Nietzsche was a genuine instance of homo religiosus, but possessing as he did the bladed intellect of the skeptic, he could not bring himself to believe.

Nietzsche to his Friend Overbeck

"I am grieved by the transitoriness of things." So he preached the Eternal Recurrence of the Same,  letting an ersatz Absolute in through the back door. Becoming became enshrined as Being. Thus was an attempt made to fix the flux and assuage the metaphysical need. 

Addendum

After penning the above observation, I stumbled upon the following entry in Theodor Haecker's Journal in the Night (tr. Alexander Dru, Pantheon Books, 1950, p. 31, #127):

The most radical denial of need of redemption in this world seems to me to lie in the phrase, 'the eternal recurrence of the same' (Nietzsche). Logically it represents a fantastic confusion  thought, since quite evidently everything points in the very opposite direction. Theologically, it is at an infinite distance from God, and it turns everything upside down. At this point discussion is no longer possible.

Haecker is on the right track, The eternity of Recurrence is a paltry substitute for true eternity and in the end no true redemption.