A reader doesn't get the point of my earlier entry:
Use-Mention Confusion
Dennis Miller: "Melissa Harris-Perry is a waste of a good hyphen."
So let me explain it. Miller is a brilliant conservative comedian who appears regularly on The O'Reilly Factor. If you catch every one of Miller's allusions and can follow his rap you are very sharp indeed. He has contempt for flaming leftists like Harris-Perry. Realizing that the Left's Alinskyite tactics need to be turned against them, and that mockery and derision can be very effective political weapons, he took a nasty but brilliant jab at her in the above-quoted line.
What makes the jab comical is Miller's willful confusion of the use and mention of expressions, one class of which is the proper name. One USES the name 'Melissa Harris-Perry' to refer to the person in question. This person, the bearer of the name, is not a name or any type of expression. The person in question eats and drinks and fulminates; no name eats and drinks and fulminates. But if I point out that 'Melissa Harris-Perry' is a hyphenated expression, I MENTION the expression; I am talking about it, not about its referent or bearer. When I say that the name is hyphenated I say something obviously true; if I say or imply that the woman in question is hyphenated, then I say or imply something that is either necessarily false or else incoherent (because involving a Rylean category mistake) and thus lacking a truth value. Either way I am not saying anything true let alone obviously true.
But what makes Miller's jab funny? What in general makes a joke funny? This question belongs to the philosophy of humor, and I can tell you that it is no joke. (That itself is a joke, a meta-joke.) There are three or four going theories of humor. One of them, the Incongruity Theory, fits many instances of humor. Suppose you ask me what time it is and I reply: You mean now? If I say this in the right way you will laugh. (If you don't, then, like Achmed the Terrorist, I kill you!) Now what make the joke funny? It is an instance of incongruity, but I will leave the details for you to work out. And the same goes for the joke in parentheses.
It is the same with the Miller joke. Everybody understands implicitly that a name is not the same as its bearer, that some names are hyphenated, and that no human being is hyphenated. Normal people understand facts like these even if they have never explicitly formulated them. What Miller does to achieve his comic effect is to violate this implicit understanding. It is the incongruity of Miller's jab with our normal implicit understanding that generates the humorousness of the situation.
But WHY should it have this effect? Why should incongruity be perceived by us as funny? Perhaps I can get away with saying that this is just the way things are. Explanations must end somewhere.
Am I a pedant or what?
But I am not done.
There is also a moral question. Isn't there something morally shabby about mocking a person's name and making jokes at his expense? Some years back I was taken aback when Michael Reagan referred to George Stephanopolous on the air as George Step-on-all-of-us. A gratuitous cheap-shot, I thought.
But given how willfully stupid and destructive Harris-Perry is, and given that politics is war by another name, is there not a case for using the Left's Alinksyite tactics against them? (Is this a rhetorical question or am I really asking? I'm not sure myself.)
Here is a bit of evidence that Harris-Perry really is a a willfully stupid, destructive race-baiter. There is another in the first entry referenced below.
We should anchor our thought in that which is most certain: the fact of change, the nearness of death, that things exist, that one is conscious, that one can say 'I' and mean it, the fact of conscience. But man does not meditate on the certain; he chases after the uncertain and ephemeral: name and fame, power and position, longevity and progeny, loot and land, pleasure and comfort.
Wealth is not certain, but the grave is. So meditate on death, asking: Who dies? Who survives? What is death? Who am I? What am I?
Death is certain, but the when is uncertain. Do not try to make a certainty out of what is uncertain, or an uncertainty out of what is certain.
"What is your life? You are a mist that appears for a little while and then vanishes." (James 4:14)
Does it do any good to keep pointing out the obvious, namely, that liberal-left scum have taken over the country and are destroying it? We can't seem to do anything about it. Who will stop the rot? Not establishment Republicans who go along to get along.
Trump? Are you serious? There was a point at which I thought Trump might be the man, despite all his glaring defects. But no longer. He had a shot at the presidency. But he's blown it: his judgment is so bad, or his ego is so huge, that he cannot control his tongue. He possesses an excess of groundless self-confidence, just like Obama. (And like Obama, he is a liar and a bullshitter.) Trump thinks he can just 'wing it' without doing any real work or learning anything about the issues. Thus he thinks he can enter the snake pit with a slimy leftist like Chris Matthews and escape unharmed without having done any real preparation.
As for the existence of leftist rot, here (HT: Bill Keezer) is a taste of The Diplomad:
What follows are two posts written by Dennis Monokroussos from his first-rate chess weblog, The Chess Mind. For purposes of comparison, here are the United States Chess Federation ratings of four, actually five, chess playing philosopher friends. For detailed stats click on the names. Dennis Monokroussos: 2385. Timothy McGrew: 2196. Victor Reppert: 1912. Ed Yetman: 1800. Bill Vallicella: 1543. (My highest rating was 1726)
Part of my point is that life is unfair. Why should I have a trap named after me, when nothing chessic is named after my above-listed philosophizing chess betters? Perhaps it shows that even a patzer can have a good idea now and again. Why should I get to join Franz Brentano in the annals of chess? (The Brentano Defense in the Ruy Lopez is named after him: 1. e4 e5 2. Nf3 Nc6 3. Bb5 g5)
Am I comparing myself to Brentano? Well, yes: anything can be compared to anything.
If anyone has any idea as to Brentano's playing strength, shoot me an e-mail.
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The Famous Vallicella Trap?! (posted 8 May 2008)
I was browsing IM Jovanka Houska's 2007 book Play the Caro-Kann, and while looking through the introductory section on the Panov/Botvinnik Attack I read something incredible. In a subsection called 7th move sidelines, I came across this:
1 e4 c6 2 d4 d5 3 exd5 cxd5 4 c4 Nf6 5 Nc3
5 Nf3 is known as Vallicella's Caro-Kann trap – Black has to watch out for one big trick. Best is simply to play 5…Nc6, transposing to the main line after 6 Nc3, but 5…Bg4? would be a mistake after 6 c5! Nc6 7 Bb5. The point is that Black has big difficulties defending the c6 point; for example, 7…e6 8 Qa4 Qc7 9 Ne5 Rc8 10 Bf4 and White is winning! [p. 76]
There's nothing objectionable about the analysis*; rather, what struck me was the reference to Vallicella's Caro-Kann trap, as if this was standard lore in treatments of the Caro-Kann. How did Bill Vallicella, an outstanding philosophical blogger but a 1500-1700 club player not engaged in publicizing his games, suddenly achieve such fame? I had come across his trap either from an email by him or on a post on his predominantly philosophical blog, but when did a move he may have played but a single time turn into an idea requiring mention in a pretty major new theoretical work?
Houska doesn't cite a source, and I certainly didn't recall seeing it in any published materials, so naturally it was off to Google. Entering "Vallicella Caro-Kann", I discovered the main source, conveniently entitled "Vallicella's Caro-Kann Trap"…and you can, too – just click here. Then laugh.**
* Actually, while I wouldn't disagree with her positive suggestion, I don't believe 5…Bg4 is in fact a mistake; the real error comes later. After, e.g. 7…e5 I don't see a White advantage after 8.dxe5 Ne4 or 8.Qa4 Bxf3 9.Bxc6+ bxc6 10.Qxc6+ Nd7 11.gxf3 exd4, and even the arguably best 8.Nc3 promises little or nothing after 8…Nd7 9.dxe5 Bxf3 (10.Qxf3 d4; 10.gxf3 a6).
** If anyone knows IM Houska personally, please ask her to write me – I'd like to trace the path from Vallicella's idea to her book.
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Vallicella's Caro-Kann Trap (posted 27 August 2005)
After 1.e4 c6 2.d4 d5 3.exd5 cxd5 4.c4 Nf6, the usual follow-up is 5.Nc3, when Black has three standard replies:
(A) 5…e6, when White plays 6.Nf3, (B) 5…g6, when White plays 6.Qb3, and (C) 5…Nc6, when White can either accede to the pin after 6.Nf3 Bg4, or else play the sharper but less reliable 6.Bg5.
Instead, the Maverick Philosopher has been utilizing the tricky 5.Nf3. It looks slightly clumsy, welcoming the Black bishop to g4 right away, but his idea is revealed after 5…Bg4 6.c5 Nc6 7.Bb5 e6 8.Qa4 Qc7 9.Ne5 Rc8 10.Bf4, when between the pin on c6, the threat of various discoveries involving the Bf4/Ne5/Qc7, and other, lesser but still significant problems with the Black position, White is winning.
Where did Black go wrong? I've already addressed this to some extent in a post on my previous blog, but as the move order examined there was a bit different than what we find in this game, I'll offer some new comments.
First, on move 5, Black can respond with the three normal anti-5.Nc3 options: 5…e6, 5…Nc6, and 5…g6. Should he do so, I don't see any advantage to be had by 5.Nf3, and there is a possible disadvantage. After 5.Nc3 g6, White's best try for an advantage is 6.cxd5 Bg7 7.Qb3 O-O 8.Be2 Nbd7 9.Bf3 Nb6 10.Nge2, but this variation is obviously impossible once White has placed the knight on f3. After 5.Nf3 g6 6.Nc3 Bg7 7.cxd5 O-O 8.Bc4 Nbd7 9.O-O Nb6 10.Bb3 both 10…Nbxd5 and 10…Nfxd5 have scored very well for Black.
Second, after 5.Nf3 Bg4 6.c5 Nc6 7.Bb5, the confrontational 7…e5 seems to give Black equal chances after 8.dxe5 Ne4 9.b4 Be7 10.O-O O-O 11.Bxc6 bxc6 12.Qd3 a5 13.Nd4 Bd7.
Third, as mentioned in my earlier blog post (linked above), after 7…e6 8.Qa4, the pawn sac 8…Bxf3 9.Bxc6+ bxc6 10.Qxc6+ Nd7 11.gxf3 leaves Black some compensation for the pawn in the form of White's numerous pawn weaknesses and the lack of an obvious refuge for the White king.
In sum, I think 5.Nf3 is objectively inferior to 5.Nc3. However, it doesn't seem that much weaker, and it does come with a nice positional trap, making it a reasonable surprise weapon for the odd game.
The variations above, and a bit more, can be replayed here.
I may be a day late and a dollar short, but here for your auditory amusement are some tunes in celebration or bemoanment of human folly the chief instance of which is romantic love. Who has never been played for a fool by a charming member of the opposite sex? Old age is the sovereign cure for romantic folly and I sincerely recommend it to the young and foolish. Take care to get there.
In chess, the object of the game is clear, the rules are fixed and indisputable, and there is always a definite outcome (win, lose, or draw) about which no controversy can arise. In philosophy, the object and the rules are themselves part of what is in play, and there is never an incontrovertible result.
So I need both of these gifts of the gods. Chess to recuperate from the uncertainty of philosophy, and philosophy to recuperate from the sterility of chess.
Both can be utterly absorbing, and yet both can appear in a ridiculous light. Thus both can appear to be insignificant pursuits far removed from 'reality.' The difference is that only philosophy can tackle the inevitable question, What is reality?
The denigrator of philosophy himself philosophizes, unlike the denigrator of chess who remains outside chess.
But it usually does no good to point out to the denigrator of philosophy that he presupposes an understanding of reality and thus himself philosophizes in an inarticulate and uncritical way. For he is too lazy and unserious to profit from the remark: he does not want truth; he is content to wallow in the shallow opinions he happens to have — and that have him.
Both are deadly to the moral life but they push or pull in opposite directions. Lust leads to dispersion into sensuous multiplicity. Pride leads to fixation on the false unity of the ego. These are two different ways to lose your soul or true self.
To be neither poor nor rich is best for the truth seeker. The poor can think only of their poverty and its alleviation, the rich of their wealth and its preservation. The few exceptions 'prove' the rule.
A few days after the 2004 election, Gabriel Rossman went for a job interview with the UCLA sociology department. Rossman was finishing a doctorate at Princeton, and his research on how ownership affects mass-media content was a good fit for a school in the entertainment capital. He got the job as an assistant professor.
But he also got a warning about academic culture. At a dinner following his day on campus, two of his future colleagues started ranting about George W. Bush’s re-election. One called it “a referendum against the Enlightenment.” Rossman smiled and nodded, never letting on that he’d cast his ballot for Bush.
Rossman’s story appears anonymously in "Passing on the Right: Conservative Professors in the Progressive University," just published by Oxford University Press. He agreed to break cover because, he said, “I have tenure.” In an interview, he noted that staying in the intellectual closet doesn’t require actively lying, merely letting colleagues assume that everyone shares the same political views.
I have had the pleasure of hearing Dr. Jasser speak twice, a few days ago right in my own neighborhood. He is an outstanding American and a Muslim, one who demonstrates that it is possible to be a moderate Muslim who accepts American values including the separation of church/mosque and state. I have reproduced, below the fold, a recent statement of his so that you may read it without the distraction of advertisements and 'eye candy.'
Jasser tells us that monitoring Muslims is not "Islamophobic." I agree heartily with what he is saying but not with how he says it. It is absolutely essential not to acquiesce in the Left's linguistic obfuscation. 'Islamophobic' and cognates are coinages designed by liberals and leftists to discredit conservatives and their views. By definition, a phobia is an irrational fear. But fear of radical Muslims and the carnage they spread is not irrational: it it is entirely reasonable and prudent. To label a person an 'Islamophobe' is therefore to imply that the person is mentally deranged or otherwise beneath consideration. It is to display a profound disrespect for one's interlocutor and his right to be addressed as a rational being. Here you have the explanation of why radical Muslims and their liberal-left enablers engage in this linguistic distortion. They aim to win at all costs and by all means, including the fabrication of question-begging and self-serving epithets.
A conservative must never talk like a liberal. To do so is thoughtless and foolish. For he who controls the terms of the debate controls the debate. When a conservative uses words like 'Islamophobic' and 'homophobic' he willy-nilly legitimizes verbal constructions meant to denigrate conservatives. Now how stupid is that?
Language matters.
What should Jasser have said? He could have said something like, "The monitoring of Muslims is reasonable and prudent in current circumstances and in no way wrongly discriminatory." Why is this preferrable? Because such monitoring obviouslydoes not express a phobia, an irrational fear of Muslims.
To understand liberals you must understand that theirs is a mind-set according to which a conservative is a bigot, one who reflexively and irrationally hates anyone different than he is. This is why conservatives who insist on securing the borders are routinely labelled 'xenophobes' by liberals and by some stupid 'conservatives' as well, an example being that foolish RINO Lindsey Graham who applied the epithet to Donald Trump when the latter quite reasonably proposed a moratorium on Muslim immigration into the U.S. Whatever you think of the proposal, and there are some reasonable arguments against it, it is not xenophobic.
There is also nothing xenophobic about border control since there are excellent reasons for it having to do with drug trafficking, public health, to mention just two. This is not to say that there aren't some xenophobes. It is true: there are a lot of bigots in the world and some of the worst call themselves 'liberals.'
Dr. Jasser is a man of great civil courage and an inspiration to me and plenty of others. If everyone were like him there would be no Muslim problem at all. One hopes and prays that no harm comes to him. Unfortunately, he is a member of a tiny minority, the minority of peaceful Muslims who respect Western values and denounce sharia, but also have the civil courage to stand up against the radicals.
To inform yourself further, see Dr. M. Zuhdi Jasser, A Battle for the Soul of Islam, Simon & Shuster, 2012.
Eric P. Levy, an emeritus professor of English at the University of British Columbia, has been much exercised of late by trope theory and other questions in ontology. He has been sharing his enthusiasm with me. He espies
. . . an apparent antinomy at the heart of trope theory. On the one hand, tropes are logically prior to objects. But on the other hand, objects (or, more precisely, the trope-bundles constituting objects) are logically prior to tropes, because without objects tropes have nowhere to be – without objects (or the trope-bundles constituting objects) tropes cannot be. Moreover, as has I hope been shown, a trope cannot be in (or constitute) any object or trope-bundle other than that in which it already is.
How might a trope theorist plausibly respond to this? Can she?
What are tropes?
It is a 'Moorean fact,' a pre-analytic datum, that things have properties. This is a pre-philosophical observation. In making it we are not yet doing philosophy. If things have properties, then there are properties. This is a related pre-philosophical observation. We begin to do philosophy when we ask: given that there are properties, what exactly are they? What is their nature? How are we to understand them? This is not the question, what properties are there, but the question, what are properties? The philosophical question, then, is not whether there are properties, but what properties are.
On trope theory, properties are assayed not as universals but as particulars: the redness of a tomato is as particular, as unrepeatable, as the tomato. Thus a tomato is red, not in virtue of exemplifying a universal, but by having a redness trope as one of its constituents (on the standard bundle version of trope theory) or by being a substratum in which a redness trope inheres (on a nonstandard theory which I will not further discuss). A trope is a simple entity in that there is no distinction between it and the property it ‘has.’ 'Has' and cognates are words of ordinary English: they do not commit us to ontological theories of what the having consists in. So don't confuse 'a has F-ness' with 'a instantiates F-ness.' Instantiation is a term of art, a terminus technicus in ontology. Or at least that is what it is in my book. More on instantiation in a moment.
Thus a redness trope is red, but it is not red by instantiating redness, or by having redness as a constituent, but by being (a bit of) redness. So a trope is what it has. It has redness by being identical to (a bit of) redness.
It is therefore inaccurate to speak of tropes as property instances. A trope is not a property instance on one clear understanding of the latter. First-order instantiation is a dyadic asymmetrical relation: if a instantiates F-ness, then it is not the case that F-ness instantiates a. (Higher order instantiation is not asymmetrical but nonsymmetrical. Exercise for the reader: prove it!) Suppose the instantiation relation connects the individual Socrates here below to the universal wisdom in the realm of platonica. Then a further item comes into consideration, namely, the wisdom of Socrates. This is a property instance. It is a particular, an unrepeatable, since it is the wisdom of Socrates and of no one else. This distinguishes it from the universal, wisdom, which is repeated in each wise individual. On the other side, the wisdom of Socrates is distinct from Socrates since there is more to Socrates that his being wise. There is his being snubnosed, etc. Now why do I maintain that a trope is not a property instance? Two arguments.
Tropes are simple, not complex. (See Maurin, here.) They are not further analyzable. Property instances, however, are complex, not simple. 'The F-ness of a' – 'the wisdom of Socrates,' e.g. — picks out a complex item that is analyzable into F-ness, a, and the referent of 'of.' Therefore, tropes are not property instances.
A second, related, argument. Tropes are in no way proposition-like. Property instances are proposition-like as can be gathered from the phrases we use to refer to them. Ergo, tropes are not property instances.
One can see from this that tropes on standard trope theory, as ably presented by Maurin in her SEP entry, are very strange items, so strange indeed that one can wonder whether they are coherently conceivable at all by minds of our discursive constitution. Here is one problem.
How could anything be both predicable and impredicable?
Properties are predicable items. So if tropes are properties, then tropes are predicable items. If the redness of my tomato, call it 'Tom,' is a trope, then this trope is predicable of Tom. Suppose I assertively utter a token of 'Tom is red.' On one way of parsing this we have a subject term 'Tom' and a predicate term '___ is red.' Thus the parsing: Tom/is red. But then the trope would appear to have a proposition-like structure, the structure of what Russell calls a propositional function. Clearly, '___ is red' does not pick out a proposition, but it does pick out something proposition-like and thus something complex. But now we have trouble since tropes are supposed to be simple. Expressed as an aporetic triad or antilogism:
a. Tropes are simple. b. Tropes are predicable. c. Predicable items are complex.
The limbs of the antilogism are each of them rationally supportable, but they cannot all be true. The conjunction of any two limbs entails the negation of the remaining one. Thus the conjunction of (b) and (c) entails ~(a).
We might try to get around this difficulty by parsing 'Tom is red' differently, as: Tom/is/red. On this scheme, 'Tom' and 'red' are both names. 'Tom' names a concrete particular whereas 'red' names an abstract particular. ('Abstract' is here being used in the classical, not the Quinean, sense.) As Maurin relates, D. C. Williams, who introduced the term 'trope' in its present usage back in the '50s, thinks of the designators of tropes as akin to names and demonstratives, not as definite descriptions. But then it becomes difficult to see how tropes could be predicable entities.
A tomato is not a predicable entity. One cannot predicate a tomato of anything. The same goes for the parts of a tomato; the seeds, e.g., are not predicable of anything. Now if a tomato is a bundle of tropes, then it is a whole of ontological parts, these latter being tropes. If we think of the tomato as a (full-fledged) substance, then the tropes constituting it are "junior substances." (See D. M. Armstrong, 1989, 115) But now the problem is: how can one and the same item — a trope – be both a substance and a property, both an object and a concept (in Fregean jargon), both impredicable and predicable? Expressed as an aporetic dyad or antinomy:
d. Tropes are predicable items. e. Tropes are not predicable items.
Maurin seems to think that the limbs of the dyad can both be true: ". . . tropes are by their nature such that they can be adequately categorized both as a kind of property and as a kind of substance." If the limbs can both be true, then they are not contradictory despite appearances.
How can we defuse the apparent contradiction in the d-e dyad? Consider again Tom and the redness trope R. To say that R is predicable of Tom is to say that Tom is a trope bundle having R as an ontological (proper) part. To say that R us impredicable or a substance is to say that R is capable of independent existence.. Recall that Armstrong plausibly defines a substance as anything logically capable of independent existence.
It looks as if we have just rid ourselves of the contradiction. The sense in which tropes are predicable is not the sense in which they are impredicable. They are predicable as constituents of trope bundles; they are impredicable in themselves. Equivalently, tropes are properties when they are compresent with sufficiently many other tropes to form trope bundles (concrete particulars); but they are substances in themselves apart from trope bundles as the 'building blocks' out of which such bundles are (logically or rather ontologically) constructed.
Which came first: the whole or the parts?
But wait! This solution appears to have all the advantages of jumping from the fying pan into the fire, or from the toilet into the cesspool. (I apologize to the good professor for the mixture and crudity of my metaphors.) For now we bang up against Levy's Antinomy, or something like it, to wit:
f. Tropes as substances, as ontological building blocks, are logically prior to concrete particulars. g. Tropes as properties, as predicable items, are not logically prior to concrete particulars.
This looks like a genuine aporia. The limbs cannot both be true. And yet each is an entailment of standard trope theory. If tropes are the "alphabet of being" in a phrase from Williams, then they are are logically prior to what they spell out. But if tropes are unrepeatable properties, properties as particulars, then a trope cannot exist except as a proper ontological part of a trope bundle, the very one of which it is a part. For if a trope were not tied to the very bundle of which it is a part, it would be a universal, perhaps only an immanent universal, but a universal all the same.
Furthermore, what makes a trope abstract in the classical sense of the term is that it is abstracted from a concretum. But then the concretum comes first, ontologically speaking, and (g) is true.
Interim conclusion: Trope theory, pace Anna-Sofia [what a beautiful aptronym!] Maurin, is incoherent. But of course we have only scratched the surface.
Picture below, left-to-right: Anna-Sofia Maurin, your humble correspondent, Arianna Betti, Jan Willem Wieland. Geneva, Switzerland, December 2008. It was a cold night.
Perhaps it would be better to say that the view that Mr. Prager expresses coincides exactly with the view I have been developing over a number of posts. His piece therefore earns for him the coveted plenaryMavPhil STOA (stamp of approval).
There is a profoundly fascist element to the American left and the political party that it controls (the Democrats) — from the fascist students and faculty who violently take over college presidents’ and deans’ offices and shout down non-Left speakers to the left-wing thugs who disrupt Trump events by screaming obscenities, carrying obscenity-laden posters, and extending their middle fingers to, and in some cases, spitting on the overwhelmingly peaceful attendees, etc. Having said that, whenever I begin to hope that Trump, even if he continues to act indecently, will at least begin to act intelligently as the possibility of his being nominated approaches reality, he does something so stupid that my heart sinks again.
