Author: Bill Vallicella

Successful Explanation Again

Returning once again to the article by Tomas Bogardus, with a 'hat tip' to him for writing it and to Malcolm Pollack for bring it to my attention, let us reconsider his  premise (2), about which I raised some questions in earlier posts:

2. Any explanation can be successful only if it crucially involves no element that calls out for explanation but lacks one.

I suggested earlier that an explanation might count as successful even if it does contain one or more unexplained elements. Suppose a man is found dead. Why did he die? What was the salient cause of his death? (I  assume a distinction between a salient cause and circumambient causal factors.)* Did the man die from stroke, heart attack, gunshot, smoke inhalation while asleep?  Suppose the latter.  Why was there smoke in his bedroom? Because his house caught on fire. Why did it catch on fire? Because the house was hit by lightning. 

My question: Couldn't a successful explanation of the man's death stop right here? If we were to stop here would we not have achieved sufficient understanding of the man's death for practical purposes (purposes of ordinary life and the law). We would know why the man died and we would be able to rule out foul play. We would know that he did not die from ill health, suicide, or from such foolish behavior as smoking in bed. Bear in mind that the topic here is explanation, not causation, even in this case in which the explanation is a causal explanation.  

If I understand (2), it implies a negative answer to my question.  (2) seem to be telling us that one cannot provide a successful causal explanation of  any particular empirical fact unless (i) it is possible in principle to explain every temporally antecedent salient event and causal factor in the series of events  and factors culminating in the fact to be explained (the man's death in the example) subject to the proviso  that (ii) the explanation cannot 'bottom out' in brute  or unexplainable facts.

This amounts to saying that to explain successfully  any contingent thing or event it must be possible in principle — logically possible — to explain every contingent thing or event in the causal ancestry of the thing or event to be explained.  I say 'possible in principle' because no finite person has the ability to explain every thing or event in the causal ancestry of the thing or event to be explained.

In endnote 18 of his paper, Bogardus entertains something like my  objection  to his (2) and makes a reply:

Or suppose a meal appears before you, from nothing, with no explanation. You eat it, satisfying your hunger. Surely, you can now successfully explain your satiety by reference to the meal you ate, even if that meal itself has no explanation, yet calls out for one. [. . .]

Response: I deny that I would have a successful explanation of . . . the satiety.

The problem with this response is that I could not know that the meal appeared ex nihilo, and thus without a cause. If I were seated at table and a meal were suddenly to pop into existence before me, I would lose my appetite from fear! (No appetite, no sating thereof.) I would very reasonably believe that I was either hallucinating or losing my mind or that a preternatural event had occurred from a preternatural cause, and that either angelic or demonic  or divine or some other kind of paranormal agency was involved.  I would have no good reason to think that the meal sprang into existence out of nothing without cause.  The counterexample works only if I know or reasonably believe that the meal sprang into existence ex nihilo without cause.  But I do not know or reasonably believe that.  So how does the magic meal show that a successful explanation must regress back to an unexplained explainer? How does it show that there cannot be brute facts?  I do not see that TB's  response to my dead man  counterexample to (2) 'cuts the mustard' — to remain with the prandial theme.

______________

*For example, the salient cause of a forest fire is not the presence of oxygen in the atmosphere, which is merely a causal factor without which the fire could not have occurred.    A salient proximate cause might be lightning, the actions of an arsonist. or the carelessness of a camper who did not properly douse his campfire.)

Nile Gardiner on Trump, Eurosceptic

Key Takeaways

Trump is treating the European Union as a competitor and even an adversary, as a force that is actively undermining the U.S. economy and the American people.

Trump shares with Europe’s rising national conservative parties the view that far too much power is in the hands of Brussels.

Americans increasingly hold that the European Union does not advance their interests, and stands against the principles of liberty and sovereignty.

Here.

Saturday Night at the Oldies: The Gambler He Broke Even

Kenny Rogers died in 2020 at the age of 81.  

A few days after he died, on my way back from a traipse in the local hills, I encountered a couple the female half of which suffers from Parkinson's. Being the over-clever fellow that I am, I asked her what condition her condition was in, thereby alluding to a curious '60s number. Her husband caught the allusion and hipped me to a fact hitherto unknown to me, namely, that the band in question, The First Edition, was headed by Kenny Rogers before he went country.  He was quite the genre-hopper. Before the acid-rock tune. he sang with the New Christy Minstrels, a 'sanitized' and 'wholesome' collegiate folk outfit. Here is "Green Green" with upbeat Barry Maguire in the lead. This was before Maguire got all topical and protesty and dark with Eve of Destruction in the summer of '65.

I never listened to much Kenny Rogers, but of course I know and like his signature number, now a permanent bit of Americana that taps into the myths that move the red-blooded among us. I mean The Gambler:

And when he finished speakin'
He turned back toward the window
Crushed out his cigarette
And faded off to sleep
 
And somewhere in the darkness
The gambler he broke even
But in his final words
I found an ace that I could keep
 
You've got to know when to hold 'em
Know when to fold 'em
Know when to walk away
And know when to run
 
You never count your money
When you're sittin' at the table
There'll be time enough for countin'
When the dealin's done.
 
Bonus cuts:
 
Clancy Bros., Ramblin' Gamblin' Willie
 
Byrds, Eight Miles High.  Referenced in the 'condition' tune.

MACGA: Make the Continent Great Again!

Europe has lost its collective mind. The UK is especially troubling:

The University of Oxford, one of the most revered and historic institutions of higher learning in the world, has requested that Oxford city council officials add the names of five soldiers who fought against Great Britain in the First World War to a memorial honoring Britain’s war dead. You cannot make this up.

The five individuals – Oxford alumni all – include three individuals born on German territory, one born on Hungarian soil, and another born in Poland. They all fought against the Allied armies in World War I, but will nonetheless be "honored" alongside Britain’s war dead. Talk about losing the plot.

My maternal grandfather, of Hungarian birth, fought in the Austro-Hungarian army as a forward artillery observer in the First World War. He survived the war, but had he not, I would never expect his name to be added to a monument honoring the casualties of Britain in the Great War.

This bizarre news comes on the heels of real "progressive" depredations on European "values" – those old-fashioned things like freedom of speech, democratically elected officials and so on. In a case of political persecution via the judiciary, remarkably similar to what Donald Trump suffered at the hands of numerous U.S. courts, a French court sentenced the most popular French politician and likely future French President, Marine Le Pen, to four years in prison for alleged improper use of European Union funds. The case revolved around the conservative populist Le Pen and other members of her National Rally party using funds from the EU to allegedly improperly reimburse aides for political work. Le Pen and her colleagues denied all along that they did anything improper. Le Pen was sentenced to four years, with two years likely to be suspended and the other two years requiring an ankle bracelet and no incarceration.

Nancy Pelosi in 1996: A Pre-Trumper on Tariffs

You have probably seen this by now, but in case you haven't, here is Nancy Pelosi in 1996 talking sense! I didn't think she had it in her, given the inanities she has been spouting for the last quarter century. I don't see much if any difference between what she said then about  tariffs, trade imbalances, and trade reciprocity and what Trump is saying now.

Part of what enrages contemporary Dems about Trump is that he has (a) stolen their thunder, and (b) is actually doing things they only talked about doing, e. g,  curtailing waste, fraud, and abuse at the federal level, controlling the borders, and shrinking the size of the federal government.

Blinded by their mindless rage, they cannot assess policy proposals on their own merits, but only on whether or not they are supported by Trump. If Trump is for it, they are against it, no matter what it is, and vice versa.

Anti-Trump Dems cannot stand the man because he has transformed the fat-cat GOP into a people's party.  The Never-Trump Republicans cannot stand him because he gate-crashed their rich guy club and exposed the bow-tied Beltway/Bulwark boys and girls for the effete and epicene bunch they are.  Interestingly, Trump has won the sympathy, though not the full support, of the socialist outlet, The Militant. See here for a recent article in support of my assertion.

But he wins because he is loaded too, and more importantly, loves his country, its people, and has the biggest cojones of the toughest hombre on the world stage at present.  

Who Put the ‘Man’ in ‘Manufacture’?

A congresswoman asked the question recently. It is a  question from a fem-Dem that exposes her ignorance.

There is no 'man' in 'manufacture' in the way there is a 'bomp' in the "bomp bah bomp bah bomp" and a 'ram' in the "rama lama  ding dong."  

'Manufacture' is built out of two Latin words, manus, manus (fourth declension, feminine) meaning hand, and the verb facere, meaning to make.  Etymologically, to manufacture something it to make it by hand, which is something women can do and often do better than men.

It is also interesting to note that manus, manus (the singular and the plural are the same except that the 'u' is  short in the singular, long in the plural) is one of the few Latin nouns that is both feminine and ends in -us. Herewith, another reason why there is no 'man' in 'manufacture.'

I could easily go on, and you hope I won't.

But it does raise a question: why are Dems so ignorant? The person in question is a "white, educated female" like so many Never- and Anti-Trumpers. Educated?  Here is another word currently badly misused. Graduating with a degree from a leftist seminary doesn't make one educated in  any serious sense of the term.  We live in a time of inflation and not just of the monetary variety.

Why do Dems and 'liberals' generally have such low standards?  It is almost as if they have never met a standard they did not want  to erase, erode, eviscerate, eradicate.  

I have a lot to say on this topic, but it is time to get to work on more serious writing.  There is more to life than sanitizing the spaces befouled by leftists.  'Sanitize' in the sense of cleaning and making sane. 

MASA! Make America sane again! 

Vanity

This empty world obtrudes upon our senses so persistently and with such regularity of effect that thoughts about how real it could be hardly gain purchase. A material world has no trouble getting the attention of  a material man. It punches us hard in our eyes and ears. One must retreat from the multiplicity-positing diaspora of the senses by taking thought in order properly to doubt its ultimacy. But how gossamer is thought as compared to the rude impacts of sensory reality!

And so we impute to this passing scene more reality and importance than it has. Its reality is in part our projection. Teetering on the brink of eternity we take time and its fleeting blandishments to be the end all and the be all.

Here is an old man, a flight of stairs away from a major coronary event, lusting after more loot and land. Hanging by a thread, he is yet convinced that he is securely suspended.

Luigi Mangione and the Death Penalty

Justice demands the death penalty in certain cases. Anyone who opposes said penalty in principle I consider morally obtuse.  As for Mangione, he deserves it. The editors of the Boston Herald demur:

The death penalty should be off the table for Luigi Mangione, accused killer of UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson. And not for any reason sympathetic to Mangione.

Attaching the death penalty to Mangione’s trial would only make a martyr out of an accused killer who has already inspired zealous support among legions of fans.

Tell me what you think of this sort of moral reasoning. I don't have time to weigh in, or to lay out my arguments for the death penalty in general or for Mangione's execution in particular.  But I do have one Substack article on the topic that may be of interest:  Fetal Rights and the Death Penalty: Consistent or Inconsistent?

Let Them Eat Woke

Alex Castellanos:

Democrats, your party has a product problem, not a marketing problem. Don’t look around. Look in the mirror. Your problem is staring back. You’ve lost the ability to govern your country. That’s why your party expired in 2024 with Kamala Harris. That election was not a changing of the guard, it was the end of an era. The organizing principles that have defined the Democratic Party since the 1930s are now exhausted and near the grave.

Right. The Dems persist in thinking that their problem is one of 'messaging.' In a sense, it is: they have no message and they have no messenger.  I heard Jen "Circle Back" Psakis last night describe Kamala Harris as "brilliant." Truth is, she's a lazy, inauthentic know-nothing, and the opposite of brilliant. Just listen to her speak. She thinks the Cloud is a physical object up in the sky!

And you voted for her? What were you thinking? Were you thinking? Or were you emoting?  I understand that you don't like Trump.  Do you live your whole life on the basis  of likes and dislikes? Do you make major life decisions on the basis of knee-jerk reactions? Perhaps you are spending too much time on Facebook. Thumbs up! Thumbs down! Don't be a knee-jerk jerk off.

Addendum

My claim that the Dems have no message is not quite right. They have a message, a nefarious one that they wisely do not broadcast plainly, knowing that it would not sell well among the majority if honestly presented.  Hence all the vacuous and obfuscatory nonsense spouted by Kamala and Tampon Tim, together with merely performative clownish gyrations, pantomimed page-turnings, and expressions of unhinged hilarity and 'joyousness.' They must think we are idiots. But the joke is on them since expressions of contempt do not win votes.

As for their message, it is garbage from the git-go. Leading the cavalcade of Unsinn: the claim that there is no biological difference between men and women, a falsehood that underpins the morally offensive policy that biological males must be permitted to compete in women's sporting events. 

Explanation and Understanding: More on Bogardus

What follows are some further ruminations occasioned by the article by Tomas Bogardus first referenced and commented upon here. I will begin by explaining the distinction between personal and impersonal explanations.  The explanation I am about to give is itself a personal explanation, as should become clear after I define 'personal explanation.'

A lightning bolt hits a tree and it bursts into flame. A young child  coming on the scene sees a tree on fire and asks me why it is on fire. The child desires to understand why the tree is on fire. I seek to satisfy the child's desire by providing an explanation. I explain to the child that the tree is on fire because it was struck by a bolt of lightning.

Personal explanation

My explanation to the child  is an example of a personal as opposed to an impersonal explanation. One person explains something to another person,  or to a group of persons, or in the zero-case of personal explanation, to oneself.  Personal explanations of the first type — the only type I will consider here — have a triadic structure and involve a minimum of three terms: P1, P2, and E where E is a proposition. One person conveys a proposition to a second person. In the example, I convey the proposition A lightning strike caused the tree to explode into flame to the child. This communicative process or act of explaining is not itself a truth-bearer: it is neither true nor false.

Neither true nor false, it is either successful or unsuccessful.  The act of explaining is successful if  the recipient of the explanation 'gets it' and comes to understand something he did not understand before. It is unsuccessful if the recipient fails to 'get it.' Now I nuance the point with a further distinction.

Strongly successful versus weakly successful

Two conditions must be satisfied for a personal explanation to be what I will call strongly successful. First, the proposition conveyed must be true. Second, the proposition must be understandable and understood by the recipient of the explanation. If either condition goes unsatisfied, the personal explanation is not strongly successful. For a personal explanation to be what I will call weakly successful, it suffices that the recipient of the explanation be satisfied by the explanation, where satisfaction requires only that the recipient understand the proposition conveyed in the explanation, and find it believable, whether or not the proposition is true.

Although the act of explaining is not a truth-bearer and thus not a proposition, the act of explaining embeds a proposition. Call the latter the content of the act of explaining. Every act of personal explaining has a content which may or may not be true. But the explaining, although it includes a propositional content, is not itself a proposition.  As a performance of a concrete person it is itself concrete and thus not abstract as is a proposition. Note also that the performance as an individual event is categorially barred from being either true or false. 

Impersonal explanation

Impersonal explanations are two-termed, both terms being propositions that record events. For example Lightning struck the tree explains The tree burst into flame. Schematically, p explains q, where 'p' and 'q' are free variables the values of which can only be propositions. No person is a proposition, although of course there are plenty of (infinitely many) propositions about every person, some true, the others false. 

Now if two propositions are related by the impersonal explanation relation, then the result is itself a proposition. We could say that an impersonal explanation is a dyadic relational proposition.

I think it is obvious that the explains relation must not be confused with the causation relation, assuming that causation is in fact a relation. (To dilate further on whether causation is, strictly speaking, a relation would open up a can of worms that is best put on the back burner for the nonce, if you will forgive my highly unappetizing mixed metaphor).  What is the difference? Well, the impersonal explains relation relates propositions which are abstracta whereas the causal relation relates events which are concreta.  Roughly, explanation is at the level of thought; empirical causation is at the level of concrete reality.

Complete impersonal explanations

Now consider the second premise in Bogardus's main argument:

2) Any explanation can be successful only if it crucially involves no element that calls
out for explanation but lacks one.

In the simple example I gave, call the two events Strike and Ignition.  Strike is the salient cause of  Ignition. I won't pause to proffer a rigorous definition of 'salient cause,'  but you know what I mean. Salient cause as opposed to all the many causal factors that have to be in place for Ignition to occur.  If there is no oxygen in the atmosphere around the tree, for example, then there is no Ignition. Nobody will say that the cause of Ignition is the presence of oxygen even though its presence is a necessary condition of Ignition, a condition without which Ignition is nomologically impossible.  (The nomologically possible is that which is possible given the laws of nature.  These laws are themselves presumably broadly logically, i.e. metaphysically, contingent.)

I read "no element" in (2) as covering both salient causes and what I am calling causal factors. I also read (2) as telling us that one cannot provide a successful causal explanation of  any particular empirical fact unless (i) it is possible in principle to explain every temporally antecedent salient event and causal factor in the entire series of events  and factors culminating in the fact to be explained (Ignition in the example) subject to the proviso  that (ii) the explanation cannot 'bottom out' in brute  or unexplainable facts.

I am having trouble understanding (2): it strikes me as ambiguous as between

2a) Any personal explanation can be successful only if it crucially involves no element that calls out for explanation but lacks one

and

2b) Any impersonal explanation can be complete only if it crucially involves no element that calls out for explanation but lacks one.

It seems to me that (2a) is false, whereas (2b) is true.  (2a) is false because I can stop explaining right after citing the lightning strike.  I do not need to explain that lightning is an atmospheric  electrical discharge,  caused by  electrostatic activity occurring between two electrically charged regions, etc.  Same with the other example I gave. Kid asks, "Why did the crops fail, Grandpa?" Old man replies, "Because of the drought." The kid's desire to understand has been satisfied, and so the personal explanation is successful without being complete.  There is no need to regress further although one could, and in some context should.

To fully appreciate this, we must understand what Bogardus takes to be the link between explanation and understanding.  The following is from one of his endnotes:

Recall the link between explanation and understanding. A successful explanation can produce in us understanding of the phenomenon, an understanding of why or how it’s happening. But if there’s part of a proposed explanation that cannot be understood, because it’s brute – how can it produce in us understanding of why or how the phenomenon is happening? Yet if it cannot produce in us that understanding, then it isn’t a successful explanation. In each of these cases, there is a part of the proposed explanation that cannot be understood – in the first, the mare, in the second, the meal – and, so, in neither case do we have a successful explanation. To put it another way, to understand why (or how) is to understand an acceptable answer to the relevant ‘Why?’ (or ‘How?’) question. But if part of that answer is unintelligible, unable to be understood, totally mysterious, then one cannot understand the answer. And, in that case, one cannot understand why (or how) the phenomenon is happening. But, if so, then these answers cannot be successful explanations. In that case, they are not counterexamples to premise 2, despite appearances.

On the basis of this passage and other things Bogardus says in his article, I fear that he may be confusing personal with impersonal explanation.  He seems to be talking about personal explanation above. If so, how, given that our paltry minds are notoriously finite, could we grasp or understand any complete explanation? I am also wondering whether 'brutality,' brute-factuality is a red herring here.

Suppose I grant him arguendo that there are no brute facts.  I could then easily grant him that a complete impersonal explanation of an event such as Ignition must take the form of  proposition of the form X explains Y, where Y is the proposition Ignition occurs and X is a huge conjunction of propositions (and thus a conjunctive proposition) the conjuncts of which record all of the salient causes and causal factors involved at every step in the causal regress from Ignition back in time.

But as I said, our minds are finite. Being exceedingly finite, they cannot 'process,' i.e., understand an impersonal explanation given that an impersonal explanation is a proposition with a huge number of conjuncts, even if the number of conjuncts is itself finite.  An explanation we cannot understand may be, in itself, complete, but for us, must be unintelligible.  An unintelligible explanation, however, cannot count as either strongly or weakly successful as I defined these terms above.  To be either, it must be able to satisfy our desire for understanding.

Dilemma: Explanation is either personal or impersonal.  If the former, the explanation may be successful  in generating understanding,  but cannot be completely true.  If the latter, the explanation may be completely  true, but cannot be  successful in generating understanding in finite minds like ours.

I may take up the ex nihilo mare and meal examples in a separate post.

Why Do You Steal My Content?

Among my recent referrers I found Perplexity.AI which accessed McCann, God, and the Platonic Menagerie.  I clicked on the link and was asked: "What do you want to know?" I typed the above title into the box.  Answer:

I'm here to assist and provide information, not to steal content. My purpose is to help users by generating responses based on the input they provide. If you have concerns about content ownership or privacy, I can assure you that I do not store or use your content for personal gain. However, if you have specific concerns or questions about how AI systems handle user input, feel free to ask, and I'll do my best to clarify!

I asked the bot how it makes money, and then: "So you make money from my work without paying me?"  The answer was fragmentary and evasive, and I was required to sign up for more.  So I signed off.

Of course, I have long been aware that anything I put online can and will be vacuumed up by parties nefarious and non-nefarious.