Author: Bill Vallicella

Can it be Shown that Truth is More Than a Transcendental Presupposition?

Cyrus writes,

I've been thinking about Pyrrhonian arguments. I wonder if you could help with something:
 
i. Either there is truth or there is no truth.
ii. If there is truth, there is truth.
iii. If there is no truth, there is truth.
iv. Hence, there is truth.
 
(i) is an instance of the law of the excluded middle; (ii) is self-evident; (iii) follows from the fact that if the proposition that there is no truth is true, there is a truth; (iv) follows from (i) – (iii). I've always considered this a really secure argument.
 
But the skeptic is going to point out that we must assume there is truth in order to argue that there is truth (e.g. the premises need to be true for the conclusion to follow), and therefore fall into circularity. 
 
 It is worth noting that the above consequentia mirabilis argument seems to justify the stronger conclusion that necessarily there is truth. For if there is truth whether or not there is truth, then necessarily there is truth.
 
The above argument is both valid and sound. But the skeptic is within his rights in pointing out that the argument does not prove unconditionally that there is truth; it presupposes it. Of course, pointing this out, the skeptic also presupposes that there is truth. For to point something out is to point it out as true.
 
My reader wants to know whether  the argument succeeds. I think it succeeds in proving that  we cannot fail to presuppose truth, that we must presuppose it.  It succeeds in proving at least this much: that the existence of truth is a transcendental presupposition of all our epistemic operations. I am using 'transcendental' in a roughly Kantian way.
 
Things get really interesting when we ask whether truth could be shown to be more than a transcendental presupposition. I would like to be able to show that truth exists of metaphysical necessity independently of us and our need to presuppose it. The above argument, however, does not show this. 
 
And so the following doubt arises:  It might be that the necessity of truth is not an absolute or unconditional necessity, but a conditional necessity, one that depends on our contingent existence. So long as we exist, truth exists because we cannot help presupposing it.  But at times and in possible situations in which we do not exist, truth does not exist either. (Cf. Martin Heidegger, Sein und Zeit, sec. 44 c: Warheit 'gibt es' nur, sofern und solange Dasein ist.)
 
How do we know that this is not the case? How do we know that truth is more than a transcendental presupposition? How do we know that, apart from discursive intellects, that truth exists absolutely or unconditionally?
 
The situation with truth might be like that of the Cartesian cogito: Necessarily, if I think, then I exist; but it does not follow that I necessarily exist.  Necessarily, if discursive intellects exist, then truth exists; but it doesn't follow that truth necessarily exists. Could it be that in both cases we have but a conditional necessity?  In the Cartesian case it seems clear that the necessity is conditional: I cannot help but presuppose my existence as long as I am thinking even when the thinking is a doubting that I exist; but 'surely' the I that thinks might not have existed in the first place. 
 
And so if intellects of our type (whether biologically human or not) had never existed, truth (and falsehood) would never have existed either.
 
But now consider  the statement (S):
 
S. At times and in possible situations in which we do not exist, truth does not exist either.
 
(S) purports to be true. Would it be coherent to say that (S) is true only when we exist, and that when we don't it is neither true nor false?  If it is true that there were times when we didn't exist, then it is true only NOW when we exist that there were times when truth did not exist. Is this coherent? It seems not. For if it is true only NOW when we exist that there were times when truth did not exist, then it was neither true nor false THEN, and it could not have been the case that truth did not exist then.
 
The problem is that if we think of truth as merely a transcendental presupposition, then we break the link between truth and Being. There is no truth outside of a mind; but there is also no truth in a mind that is not in contact with reality (Being). Truth is the truth about what is.  This seems to imply that truth cannot be merely a transcendental presupposition of our epistemic operations.
 
Truth is not like a flashlight that we bring into the dark to reveal things that, apart from us, would remain in darkness.  Things glow by their own light, and our minds are sensitive to this light but not productive of it.
 
So if we supplement the above argument with analysis along these lines of the nature of truth, then perhaps we can argue cogently that truth exists, and must exist, independently of us.
 
This last stretch of argument, however, is not as clear as I would like it to be.  It is a deep topic!  If God exists, then truth exists of metaphysical necessity and independently of us. But in philosophy we cannot start with God, though we may end with him. 
 
Related articles
When Reasoned Faith No Longer Strikes One as Reasonable: What Then?

Kanye and the Democrats

Walter E. Williams:

The big difference between black libertarians/conservatives and West is that he has 28 million Twitter followers and a huge audience of listeners whereas few blacks have even heard of libertarian/conservative blacks outside of Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas. (I might add in passing that Dr. Thomas Sowell is one of the nation’s most distinguished and accomplished scholars alive today.)

The Kanye problem for the Democratic Party is that if the party doesn’t keep blacks in line and it loses even 20 to 25 percent of the black vote, it can kiss any hope of winning any presidential and many congressional elections goodbye. Democrats may have already seen that threat. That’s why they support illegal immigration and voting rights for non-citizens. Immigrants from south of the border who are here illegally may be seen as either a replacement for or a guarantee against the disaster of losing the black vote.

That's right. Illegal aliens are undocumented Democrats.  

And you are still a Democrat? Then you are clearly no patriot. A patriot loves his country. He does not seek its fundamental transformation.

Phrase of the Day: ‘Infra Dig’

I just came across the following sentence in Charles R. Kesler's Claremont Review of Books article, Thinking about Trump:

It is not entirely clear whether his liberal and conservative critics disapprove of Trump because he violates moral law or because he is infra dig.

The 'infra dig' threw me for a moment until I realized it was a popularization of infra dignitatem, 'beneath (one's) dignity.' According to this source, Sir Water Scott in 1825 was the first to use the abbreviation.

I was taught to italicize foreign expressions, which is precisely what the good professor did not do in the sentence quoted. Where's my red pen?

As for the content of the sentence quoted, it is tolerably clear to me that the Never Trumpers (who are of course conservatives of a sort by definition) despise Trump mainly because the man has no class and is therefore infra dignitatem. He is not one of them. He does not have the manners and breeding of a Bill Kristol or a George Will and the rest of the effete, yap-and-scribble, but do nothing, bow-tie brigade.  He is an outsider and an interloper who threatens their privileges and perquisites.  Better Hillary and the status quo than a shake-up and take-on of the Deep State and its enablers.

On the other hand, leftists, most of them anyway, don't give a damn about the moral law as it pertains to marital fidelity and sexual behavior with the possible exception of rape. These types don't object to Trump because of locker-room talk and affairs. After all, they tolerate it in themselves and their heroes such as the Kennedy's, Martin Luther King, Jr., and Bill Clinton. What they are doing is right out of Saul Alinksy's Rules for Radicals, in particular, #4: "Make the enemy live up to its own book of rules."  

Nor do Leftists much care that Trimp is infra dig. What leftists object to are his policies and programs, but instead of addressing them, they attack the man for failing to honor values that they themselves do not accept so as to discredit him among his supporters. 

The Childish Reactivity of the Trumpianly Deranged

Here:

No matter what Trump does, the Democratic reaction is the same: Outrage. When Democrats can't even praise Trump unreservedly for bringing American hostages home or show up when he fulfills a plank of the Democratic Party platform by moving our embassy to Jerusalem, it further convinces millions of Americans who abandoned the Democratic Party in 2016 that they made the right decision.

Let's hope the Dems keep up their puling. It can't help them in the mid-term elections, and it may hurt them bigly.  

A Quest for Transcendence Gone Wrong

We are spiritual animals in need of spiritual transcendence. It is an illusion of the age to suppose that the transcendence we need can be found by bodily means. 

Distance running has repaid me richly for the hours and years I devoted to it. In my late twenties I got pretty good at it and I experienced those unbelievable highs that, wonderful as they are, are but simulacra of the flights of the spirit.  I had the sense not to seek transcendence in the wrong places. And the sense not to abuse the mortal vehicle. Urinating blood after training runs and trashing my immune system by marathon training convinced me to take it easy on old fratello asino. 

He who pushes too hard invites a premature exit from the wheel of samsara. This from The Wisdom of Running a 2,189 Mile Marathon:

To hear Jurek tell it, forcing himself to the limit is purifying and transformational. “Though man’s soul finds solace in natural beauty, it is forged in the fire of pain,” he writes. But listen closely, and bodily transcendence is not exactly grist for motivational posters. Jurek’s pages are haunted by comrades who didn’t make it through the fire unscathed. He was joined for part of the trail by Aron Ralston, the hiker famous for amputating his own arm to free himself from a boulder. Jurek’s friend Dean Potter, a legendary climber and base jumper, died in a wing-suit accident days before Jurek began his trek. “I had known ultrarunners to finish races as their kidneys were shutting down and they were losing control of their bowels,” Jurek reports. He recalls a runner who fought through debilitating headaches to finish a 100-mile race and then died of a brain aneurysm.

How Not to Start a ‘Conversation’ About Guns

Lefties are big on 'conversations' about this and that.  We've had enough 'conversations.' But if you insist on starting one about guns, Fuck the NRA is not a good opener.

Tucker Carlson, whose verbal pugilism is improving with age and experience, tore Pat Davis to pieces last night. Tucker's reactions to the leftist loons he has on his show tend to be either expressions of astonishment or expressions of mild depression that anyone could believe the nonsense they believe.  But last night he vented a righteous anger, refreshingly both righteous and angry.

And yet his boyish good looks and natural charm kept his anger within bounds. He became angry without becoming ugly.

(Memo to self: write an entry on the moral justifiability of some forms of anger.)

Jerking Towards Social Collapse

Thanks to 'progressives,' our 'progress' toward social and cultural collapse seems not be proceeding at a constant speed, but to be accelerating.  But perhaps a better metaphor from the lexicon of physics is jerking.  After all, our 'progress' is jerkwad-driven.  No need to name names.  You know who they are.

From your college physics you may recall that the first derivative of position with respect to time is velocity, while the second derivative is acceleration.  Lesser known is the third derivative: jerk.  (I am not joking; look it up.)  If acceleration is the rate of change of velocity, jerk, also known as jolt, is the rate of change of acceleration.

If you were studying something in college, and not majoring in, say, Grievance Studies, then you probably know that all three, velocity, acceleration, and jerk are vectors, not scalars.  Each has a magnitude and a direction.  This is why a satellite orbiting the earth is constantly changing its velocity despite its constant speed.

The 'progressive' jerk too has his direction:  the end of civilization as we know it.

JerkwadImage credit: Frank J. Attanucci

The Problem of the Unity of the Proposition

Jacques writes,

I'm thinking about this problem and getting increasingly frustrated by the way in which it's discussed in philosophy.  I wonder if you have any ideas.  Let me explain what bothers me . . .

Typically, philosophers begin with the idea that 'the proposition' needs to be explained or characterized in some special way that will solve the alleged problem.  So Frege had his unsaturated concepts, Russell worried about the relating relation, etc.  And nowadays there is this vast literature about structured or unstructured propositions, acts of predication, etc.

I don't understand how anything of this kind could possibly help.  To explain, I take it that the most basic and intuitive problem here is really the problem of the nature of thought.  At least that is the most natural and paradigm case:  I think that a is F, and now we ask what is going on in my mental life that makes that happen.  How is it even possible?  But when we posit these mysterious entities, propositions, as the objects or contents of thoughts we're just pushing the question back.

I agree that introducing propositions only pushes the problem back. But what exactly is the problem?   The problem is to provide a satisfying answer to the following question: In virtue of what do some strings of words attract a truth-value? A truth-valued declarative sentence is more than a list of its constituent words, and (obviously) more than each item on the list. A list of words is neither true nor false. But an assertively uttered declarative sentence is either true or false.   For example,

Tom is tired

when assertively uttered or otherwise appropriately tokened is either true or false. But the list 

Tom, is, tired

is not either true or false. And yet we have the same words in the sentence and in the list in the same order. There is more to the sentence than its words whether these are taken distributively or collectively.  How shall we account for this 'more'?  

Some will say that the sentence is true or false in virtue of expressing a proposition that is true or false. On this account, the primary truth-bearer is not the (tokened) sentence, but the proposition it expresses.  Accordingly, the sentence is truth-valued because the proposition is truth-valued.  

But a similar problem arise with the proposition. It too is a complex, not of words, but of senses (on a roughly Fregean theory of propositions). If there was a problem about the unity of a sentence, then there will also be a problem about the unity of the proposition the sentence expresses on a given occasion of its use. What makes a proposition a truth-valued entity as opposed to a mere collection (set, mereological sum, whatever) of its constituents?

So here is one way the introduction of propositions "pushes the problem back."  So far, then I am in agreement with Jacques.

If some proposition p just inherently means that a is F, or is inherently true if a is F, regardless of any beliefs or concepts or mental activities of mine, then surely I could operate with proposition p while taking it to mean or represent some other situation–that a is not F, or that b is G, or whatever. 

This is not clear. Someone who introduces Fregean or quasi-Fregean propositions as the contents of such propositional attitudes as belief and desire will say that believing that whales are mammals involves no judgmental synthesis, no mental activity on the part of the believer, since this synthesis is already accomplished in the proposition.  (How this synthesis is accomplished is a very difficult question, an insoluble one in my opinion.)  So I could not take the proposition Whales are mammals  to mean Grass is green.  The Fregean proposition is part of the mechanism whereby I mean that whales are mammals.

The brute fact that it represents, if that even makes sense, seems to have no implications for my representational use of the proposition or relation to it (or whatever it is that I'm supposed to be doing with propositions). 

But you are not using the proposition to represent the fact.  Your intending the fact is routed through the proposition which is the sense of the corresponding declarative sentence.  (Frege of course has no truck with truth-making facts; he holds the bizarre view that the referent, Bedeutung, of the sentence is THE TRUE. I am sketching here, but not endorsing, a quasi-Fregean theory of propositions.)

Even if we could explain how it is unified, that would still seem to leave the basic problem of how I am able to think a unified thought by means of that entity.  (If I'm thinking that proposition p is true, or represents the world accurately, what is it about my activity or state of mind that somehow unifies the representational content p with the further property of being true or being-an-accurate-representation?)

I think you are missing the point that the proposition is a semantic and epistemic intermediary; it is not the direct object of a mental act. You are not thinking that Snow is white is true; you are thinking that snow is white via the propositional content Snow is white.

On the other hand, if p is such that, necessarily, in having p before my mind I entertain or grasp the thought that a is F, the basic mystery is just being described or reiterated.  What on earth am I doing when I somehow manage to think that a is F?  Postulating this thing that is supposed to enable me to think so doesn't seem like any kind of explanation.  What kind of thing is this, meaningful or representational in itself, yet also necessarily dictating my representational grasp of it?  Why not just say that I think that a is F, with no hint of any analysis or explanation of that fact about me?

Are you proposing a Wittgensteinian eschewal of theory and philosophical explanation?

Tom believes that Cicero is a Roman; Cicero is Tully. But Tom does not believe that Tully is a Roman.  Is there not a genuine puzzle here the solution to which will involve a theory of propositions? 

One view is that the ultimate truth-bearers are token acts of predication.  For example, the thing that is true is my act of predicating property F of object a, according to rules somehow determined by property F.  But this too seems hopeless as an explanation or analysis.  Phrases like 'predicating a property of an object' don't mean anything more than 'thinking that something is a certain way'.  No doubt, once I do that, I'm doing something that we might call 'correct' or 'true' depending on what the world is like.  But is there any real difference between predicating F to a, on the one hand, and just thinking that a is an F?  I have no idea what these people are talking about, or how they think this is explanatory.  Every theory seems ultimately to depend on the unexplained notion of someone having a propositional thought–that a certain proposition is true, that some possible world is actual, that a property is instantiated, or whatever.  And yet that seems to be the very notion that we want to understand here–the notion of propositional thought, thinking that something is the case.  Alternatively, they're positing these non-propositional events or activities–just the brute fact that someone 'predicates' or someone 'grasps' a proposition, without these things being taken to depend on thinking that things are thus-and-so.  But in that case, the theories are all obviously false; they just deny the phenomenon we want to explain.

Do you have a reference in the literature for me?

Suppose I say of Elliot that he is sober. That is a token act of predication: I apply the predicate 'sober' to Elliot.  But Karl can say the same thing by applying the predicate 'nuechtern' to Elliot.  So I don't see how token acts of predication could be the ultimate truth-bearers.  These acts are different. But the content expressed is the same. Besides, how can an act be true or false?

I get the impression that you are driving in a Wittgensteinian direction, We say things like 'Hillary is a liar' and we think the corresponding thoughts.  Apparently, you want to leave it at that and not seek any philosophical explanation on the ground that these explanations don't really explain anything.

Would you go so far as to say that the problem of the unity of the sentence, the problem of what makes a sentence different from a list of words, is a pseudo-problem?

Well, I don't know if that makes sense, but I'd appreciate any thoughts you might have.  I feel this is an absolutely fundamental set of problems, with important implications, but the philosophical literature just seems to confuse me . . .

It makes plenty of sense . . . 

We Are all ‘White Supremacists’ Now

Even the San Francisco lefty, Angela Alioto. She has been called the following names: white supremacist, Trumpian, fascist, Nazi, and racist.  For despite her leftist wobble, she retains some common sense: she proposes a reform of the S. F. sanctuary city law so that it no longer protects felons as she explains on the Tucker Carlson show.

How 'insensitive'! What a 'racist,' as if felons constitute a race. 

And if wanting to crack down on felons proves one a 'white supremacist,' does that not imply that all felons are 'people of 'color'?

There is no wisdom on the Left.  Dennis Prager:

The left in America is founded on the rejection of wisdom. It is possible to be on the left and be kind, honest in business, faithful to one’s spouse, etc. But it is not possible to be wise if one subscribes to leftist (as opposed to liberal) ideas.

Last year, Amy Wax, a professor at the University of Pennsylvania Law School, co-authored an opinion piece in the Philadelphia Inquirer with a professor from the University of San Diego School of Law in which they wrote that the “bourgeois culture” and “bourgeois norms” that governed America from the end of World War II until the mid-1960s were good for America, and that their rejection has caused much of the social dysfunction that has characterized this country since the 1960s.

Those values included, in their words: “Get married before you have children and strive to stay married for their sake. Get the education you need for gainful employment, work hard, and avoid idleness. Go the extra mile for your employer or client. Be a patriot, ready to serve the country. Be neighborly, civic-minded, and charitable. Avoid coarse language in public. Be respectful of authority. Eschew substance abuse and crime.”

Recognizing those norms as universally beneficial constitutes wisdom. Rejection of them constitutes a rejection of wisdom — i.e. foolishness.

Yet the left almost universally rejected the Wax piece, deeming it, as the left-wing National Lawyers Guild wrote, “an explicit and implicit endorsement of white supremacy,” and questioning whether professor Wax should be allowed to continue teaching a required first-year course at Penn Law.

To equate getting married before having children, working hard and eschewing substance abuse and crime with “white supremacy” is to betray an absence of wisdom that is as depressing as it breathtaking. It is obvious to anyone with a modicum of common sense that those values benefit anyone who adheres to them; they have nothing to do with race.

Exactly right, but not much is achieved by re-iterating these commonsensical points.

One has to defeat the destructive, slanderous  leftist swine. And let's hope to God we can do it without resorting to extra-political means. The milque-toast McCains and Romneys of the G. O. P. are manifestly not up to the job. What is needed is  an alpha male like Trump the Jacksonian who has already racked up an impressive series of accomplishments and has delivered stinging rebukes to the obstructionist crapweasels of the Jack Ass party. 

The Trump Paradox and Phenomenon

Solid analysis as usual from my man Hanson:

[Conrad] Black instinctively captures the essence of the Trump paradox: How did someone supposedly so crude, so mercantile, and so insensitive display a sensitivity to the forgotten people that was lost both on his Republican competitors and Hillary Clinton? Certainly, no one on stage at any of the debates worried much about 40 percent of the country written off as John McCain’s “crazies,” Hillary Clinton’s “deplorables” and “irredeemables,” and Barack Obama’s “clingers,” who were judged wanting for not capitalizing on the bicoastal dividends of American-led globalism.

Black notes the Trump-hinterland synergy. The country was looking for a third alternative to both free-market economics and neo-socialism, and yet again to both political correctness and the Republican often groveling surrender to it. Or as Black puts it, “Trump’s rise was an expression of sub-revolutionary anger by a wide swath of dissatisfied and mainly not overly prosperous or influential people.” But he adds that Trump was no third-party Ross Perot “charlatan” (or, for that matter, a Quixotic Ralph Nader), who came off quirky and without a workable agenda. Trump took a path that was far different from third-party would-be revolutionaries, in seeking to appropriate rather than to run against the apparatus of one of the two major political parties.

[. . .]

Black’s final third of the book is magisterial, as he recites nascent Trump achievements—tax reform, deregulation, the end of the Affordable Care Act individual mandate, superb judicial appointments, curbs on illegal immigration, expanded oil and gas production, a restoration of deterrence aboard—against a backdrop of nonstop venom and vituperation from the so-called “Resistance.” He is certainly unsparing of the Left’s desperate resort to discard the Electoral College, sue under the emoluments clause, invoke the 25th Amendment, introduce articles of impeachment, and embrace a sick assassination chic of threats to Trump’s person and family. Some element of such hysteria is due to Trump’s ostensible Republican credentials (the Left had devoured even their once beloved John McCain, as well as the gentlemanly and judicious Mitt Romney), but more is due to Trump’s far more conservative agenda and his take-no-prisoners style.

Identity-Political Infiltration of the Hard Sciences

More proof that leftists are destructive:

A scientist at UCLA reports: “All across the country the big question now in STEM is: how can we promote more women and minorities by ‘changing’ (i.e., lowering) the requirements we had previously set for graduate level study?” Mathematical problem-solving is being de-emphasized in favor of more qualitative group projects; the pace of undergraduate physics education is being slowed down so that no one gets left behind.

Politically correct physics? Is there no limit to leftist lunacy? A leftist is someone who never met a standard he didn't work to erode.

The Catholic Cave-In to Leftist Claptrap

This is getting boringly predictable, and predictably boring. Here is yet another example, St Mary's College of California.

. . . administrators encourage students to equate opinions with personal identity. Disagreement is not just disagreement—it is an attack. Staff in the Mission and Ministry Center, the Intercultural Center, and the New Student and Family Programs encourage students to use the “oops/ouch” method. If someone forgets to use politically correct language or says anything deemed offensive, these staff members encourage bystanders to interject “oops” as a corrective, and “ouch” if they have been personally harmed. One male friend recalls being chastised for saying “you guys” instead of “you all” to a group of men. Especially offensive opinions may be reported to our Bias Incident Reporting Team (BIRT). More than fifty such reports were filed last year. 

I am tempted to say that sending your kid to this leftist seminary is equivalent to child abuse. Save your money and for a lot less you can buy him or her a copy of Jordan B. Peterson's 12 Rules for Life: An Antidote to Chaos.

I'm reading it. Your kid will learn something. Peterson talks sense.

For more examples of 'academentia' see my Academia category. 

I 'appropriated' the cute coinage from Keith Burgess-Jackson.  Appropriate, but do it with gratitude giving credit where credit is due.