Bill Vallicella – Page 468 – Maverick Philosopher

Are Most Terrorists Muslims? And What is a Terrorist?

This recently over the transom:

I was reading your recent post on religious profiling in which you said, "Not all Muslims are terrorists, but most terrorists are Muslims." I totally agree, but it's something I've been thinking about lately. I saw someone else make the same claim just last week on another blog, and a liberal vehemently objected, claiming that the reason "most terrorists are Muslims" is that we don't use the word 'terrorist' for all the Catholic murderers in the South American cities with the highest murder rates in the world.

The idea behind this objection, it seems, is that if we were consistent, we'd call Christian murderers (such as baptized Catholics in South America who work for drug cartels and perhaps occasionally visit a Catholic church) terrorists too, and once we did that, we would no longer end up with the result that most terrorists are Muslims. Furthermore, once we did that, we wouldn't think Islam had a problem with violence any more than Christianity does, so we shouldn't pick on Islam.

I think this line of thought has multiple mistakes, but it does bring to the surface an interesting question. How do we define 'terrorist'?

One obvious thing that distinguishes Islamic extremists, such as the perpetrators of the Charlie Hebdo attack, is that they are motivated to murder in the name of their religion, whereas the South American drug cartel members do not murder in the name of Catholicism.

My reader is exactly right. Muslim terrorists murder in the name of their religion. And please note that this is so even if it could be shown that there is nothing in Islam when properly interpreted to justify terrorism. Even if you think, incorrectly, that Muslim terrorists have 'hijacked' true Islam, they are still Muslim terrorists and must be counted when we tally up the number of Muslim terrorists in the world. Can someone give me an example of a Jesuit terrorist who in recent years has slaughtered human beings to the tune of ad majorem dei gloriam? Or the name of a Buddhist terrorist who has murdered while shouting a Buddhist precept?

There are two important related distinctions we need to make.

There is first of all a distinction between committing murder because one's ideology, whether religious or non-religious, enjoins or justifies murder, and committing murder for non-ideological reasons or from non-ideological motives. For example, in the Charlie Hebdo attack, the murders were committed to avenge the blasphemy against Muhammad, the man Muslims call 'The Prophet' and consider Allah's messenger. And that is according to the terrorists themselves. Clearly, the terrorist acts were rooted in Muslim religious ideology in the same way that Communist and Nazi atrocities were rooted in Communist and Nazi political ideology, respectively. Compare that to a mafioso killing an innocent person who happens to have witnessed a crime the mafioso has committed. The latter's a mere criminal whose motives are crass and non-ideological: he just wanted to score some swag and wasn't about to be inconvenienced by a witness to his crime. "Dead men tell no tales."

The other distinction is between sociological and doctrinal uses of terms such as 'Mormon,' 'Catholic,' Buddhist,' and 'Muslim.' I know a man who is a Mormon in the sense that he was born and raised in a practicing Mormon family, was himself a practicing Mormon in his early youth, hails from a Mormon state, but then 'got philosophy,' went atheist, and now rejects all of the metaphysics of Mormonism. Is he now a Mormon or not? I say he is a Mormon sociologically but not doctrinally. He is a Mormon by upbringing but not by current belief and practice. This is a distinction that absolutely must be made, though I won't hold it against you if you think my terminology less than felicitous. Perhaps you can do better. Couch the distinction in any terms you like, but couch it.

Examples abound. An aquaintance of mine rejoices under the surname 'Anastasio.' He is Roman Catholic by upbringing, but currently a committed Buddhist by belief and practice. Or consider the notorious gangster, 'Whitey' Bulger who is fortunately not an acquaintance of mine. Biographies of this criminal refer to him as Irish-Catholic, which is not wrong. But surely none of his unspeakably evil deeds sprang from Catholic moral teaching. Nor did they spring from Bulger's 'hijacking' of Catholicism. You could call him, with some justification, a Catholic criminal. But a Catholic who firebombs an abortion clinic to protest the evil of abortion is a Catholic criminal in an entirely different sense. The difference is between the sociological and the doctrinal.

As for the South American drug cartel members, they may be sociologically Catholic but they are not doctrinally Catholic. That's my second distinction. And they operate not from Catholic doctrine rightly interpreted or interrpreted in a twisted way, but from crass motives. That's my first distinction.

Anyone whose head is clear enought to grasp these distinctions has a head clear enough to appreciate that most terrorists at the present time are Muslims, and that the existence of sociologically Catholic mafiosi and drug cartel members is irrelevant.

My reader continues:

So, you might think that the definition of 'terrorist' has something to do with religious motivation. But, this sort of definition does not catch terrorists who are motivated by power or greed.

You could go with a definition that sticks more closely to the word 'terrorist', defining it as someone who uses extremely violent acts to create fear and terror to accomplish political goals, but this sort of definition is pretty broad, and it isn't as obvious that "most terrorists are Muslims" when we define it that way, is it? I'd be curious to hear your thoughts about this.

Although it is true that Muslim terrorists are religiously motivated, it would be a mistake to define 'terrorism' in such a way that it could have only religious motivations. Terrorism could have purely political motivations: purely secular separatists might resort to terrorism to achieve their goal. It is worth adding that Islam is not a pure religion, but a blend of religion and political ideology; hence the roots of Muslim terrorism are religious-cum-political. Islam is as much a political ideology as it is a religion. So even if one defines a terrorist as one who uses violence indiscriminately, against comabatants and non-combatants alike, to achieve political goals, it would still be obvious that most terrorists at the present time are Muslims. Theocracy is both a political and a religious concept, and its instantiation, world-wide, is what Islamists want.

This brings us to the important question as to what a terrorist is. One cannot count Xs unless one knows what counts as an X. To evaluate the truth of the quantified statement, 'Most terrorists are Muslims,' we need to have at least a working definition of 'terrorist.' It is not easy to say what exactly a terrorist is in general terms — which are the only terms in which one could give a viable definition — easy at it is to identify terrorism in specific cases. I suggested the following in an earlier post from November 2009. It is not without its difficulties which are for me to know and you to discover.

I suggest that the following are all essential marks of a terrorist. I claim they are all individually necessary conditions for a combatant's being a terrorist; whether they are jointly sufficient I leave undecided. 'Terrorist' is used by different people in different ways. That is not my concern. My concern is how we ought to use the term if we intend to think clearly about the phenomenon of terrorism and keep it distinct from other phenomena in the vicinity.

1. A terrorist aims at a political objective. This distinguishes terrorists from criminals. No good purpose is served by lumping John Gotti and 'Whitey' Bulger among terrorists. Criminals may 'terrorize' as when a loanshark microwaves a delinquent's cat, but criminals who terrorize are not terrorists. This is because their aim is personal, not political. It is not impersonal ideals that motivate them but base personal desires. And although terrorists commit crimes, they are best not classified as criminals for the same reason. Treating the 1993 and 2001 attacks on the World Trade Center as criminal matters showed a lack of understanding of the nature of terrorism.

2. A terrorist does not discriminate between combatants and noncombatants. This distinguishes terrorists from the warriors of a legitimate state. All are fair game, which is not to say that in a particular situation a terrorist might not have a reason not to target some combatants or some noncombatants. This distinguishes a terrorist organization such as Hezbollah from the Israeli Defense Forces. As a matter of policy, the IDF does not target noncombatants, whereas as a matter of policy Hezbollah and other terrorist outfuts such as Hamas target anyone on the enemy side. The deliberate targeting of civilians also distinguishes terrorists from guerilla fighters.

3. A terrorist is not an agent of a legitimate state but of a nonstate or substate entity. A terrorist is neither a criminal (see #1 above) nor a warrior (see #2) ; a terrorist act is neither a criminal act nor an act of war; a terrorist organization is neither a criminal gang nor a state. Strictly speaking, only states make war.

Of course, a state (e.g. Iran) can arm and support and make use of a terrorist outfit (e.g. Hezbollah) in pursuit of a political objective (e.g., the destruction of Israel). But that does not elide the distinction between states and terrorist organizations. It is also clear that states sometimes 'terrorize'; but this is not a good reason to think of states as terrorist organizations, or some or all of their combatants as terrorists or of any of their acts as terrorist acts. The Allied firebombing of Dresden in February of 1945 was a deliberate targeting of combatants and noncombatants alike in clear violation of 'just war' doctrine. But whatever one's moral judgment of the Dresden attack or the nuclear attacks on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, none of these acts count as terrorist for the simple reason that they were the acts of states, not terrorist organizations. Some will bristle at this, but if one wants to think clearly about terrorism one must not confuse it with other things.

But what about the 'Islamic State' or ISIS or ISIL or whatever you want to call it? The short answer: it is not a legitimate state. What makes a state legitimate? With this question we are deep in, and the going gets tough. At this point I invoke blogospheric privilege and my maxim, "Brevity is the soul of blog."

4. A terrorist is not a saboteur. Sabotage is one thing, terrorism another. Analytical clariy demands a distinction. Infecting computer networks with malware or attacking the power grid are acts of sabotage, but they are not strictly speaking acts of terrorism. An act is not terrorist unless it involves the killing or maiming of human beings or the threat thereof.

I am indebted to the discussion in Louise Richardson, What Terrorists Want, Random House, 2006, Ch. 1

‘Religious Profiling’

I heard Nicholas Kristof use the phrase the other night. But is there such a thing as religious profiling?

I have argued that there is no such thing as racial profiling. The gist of my argument is that while race can be an element in a profile, it cannot itself be a profile. A profile cannot consist of just one characteristic. I can profile you, but it makes no sense racially to profile you. Similarly, apparel can be an element in a profile; it cannot be a profile. I can profile you, but it makes no sense sartorially to profile you.

The same holds for so-called religious profiling. There is no such thing. Religious affiliation can be an element in a profile but it cannot itself be a profile. A profile cannot consist of just one characteristic. I can profile you, but it makes no sense religiously to profile you, or to profile you in respect of your religion.

There are 1.6 billion or so Muslims. They are not all terrorists. That is perfectly obvious, so obvious in fact that it doesn't need to be said. After all, no one maintains that all Muslims are terrorists. But it is equally obvious, or at least should be, that the vast majority of the terrorists in the world at the present time are Muslims. To put it as tersely as possible: Not all Muslims are terrorists, but most terrorists are Muslims.

It is this fact that justifies using religion as one element in a terrorist profile. For given the fact that most terrorists are Muslims, the probability that a Muslim trying to get through airport security is a terrorist is higher than the the probability that a Buddhist trying to get through airport security is a terrorist.

Or consider the sweet little old Mormon matron from Salt Lake City headed to Omaha to visit her grandkiddies. Compare her to the twenty-something Egyptian male from Cairo bound for New York City. Who is more likely to be a terrorist? Clearly, the probability is going to be very low in both cases, but in which case will it be lower? You know the answer. Liberals know it too, but they don't want to admit it. The answer doesn't fit their 'narrative.' According to the narrative, we are all the same despite our wonderful diversity. We are all equally inclined to commit terrorist acts. Well, I wish it were true. But it is not true. Liberals know it is not true just as well as we conservatives do. But they can't admit that it is true because it would upset their 'narrative.' And that narrative is what they live for and — may well die for. A terrorist 'event' may well be coming to a theater near them, especially if they live in New York City.

It is the same with Muslims as with blacks. Blacks, proportionally, are much more criminally prone than whites. That is a well-known fact. And as I have said more than once, a fact about race is not a racist fact. There are facts about race but no racist facts. There are truths about race, but no racist truths. The truth that blacks as a group are more criminally prone than whites as a group is what justifies criminal profiling with race being one element in the profile.

Again, there is no such thing as racial profiling; what there is is criminal profiling with race being one element in the profile.

There are two mistakes that Kristof makes. He uses the unmeaning phrase 'religious profiling.' Worse, he think there is something wrong with terrorist and criminal profiling, when it is clear that there isn't.

But Kristof's heart is in the right place. He doesn't want innocent Muslims to suffer reprisals because of the actions of a few. Well, I don't either. I have Turkish Muslim friends. I met Zuhdi Jasser a while back. (The sentence I just wrote is logically independent of the one immediately preceding it.) Perhaps you have seen him on The O'Reilly Factor. An outstanding man, a most admirable Muslim man. May peace be upon him and no harm come to him. I mean that sincerely.

Tsa-baggage

The Pot Belly

The pot belly is an outer sign of an inner lack of self-discipline. We should be grateful that our sexual excesses do not have a corresponding physical manifestation.

Comment Policy

A reader asked about my comment policy. It is more of an anti-comment policy. I look askance at comments. Ten years of quotidian toil in the 'sphere have supplied me with many arguments. To put it aphoristically,

The best arguments against an open combox are the contents of one.

Scribbler that I am, I have a lot more to say on this and cognate topics under the rubric, Blogging.

How Long May One Say ‘Happy New Year’?

Until the end of January, but no longer. This is the rule. If you violate it, then, like ACHmed the Terrorist, I kill you! Happy New Year!

“I disapprove of what you say, but will defend to the death your right to say it.”

Misattributed to Voltaire, the above saying yet captures his attitude. The parroting of the saying in the wake of the terrorist attack by Muslim fanatics on Charlie Hebdo is becoming tiresome. It is high time we take a squinty-eyed look at it. I will be arguing that it does not bear up well under examination.

Suppose you are talking with someone who publically asserts with a straight face, "No Jews were killed at Auschwitz by the Nazis." Will you defend your interlocutor's right to say it? And will you defend it to the death? I hope not. The right to free speech cannot reasonably be taken to include the right to state what is false, known to be false, and such that its broadcasting or public expression could be expected to cause social harm. (The characteristic claim of the Flat Earthers is false and known to be false, but not such that its broadcasting or public expression could be expected to cause social harm, and this for a couple of reasons: whether or not the earth is flat is not a 'hot button' issue; the vast majority consider Flat Earthers to be utter loons.)

Generalizing, will you defend to the death anyone's right to say, seriously and publically, whatever he wants to say? If you answer in the affirmative, then I will label you a free speech extremist, that is, one who holds that the right to free (public) speech is absolute. But what is it for a right to be absolute? And could the right to free speech be an absolute right?

There is a distinction between moral and legal rights. I will consider only whether there is an absolute moral right to free speech. Some rights are exercisable, other are not. The right to free speech is exercisable whereas the rights not to be killed and not to be spied upon are non-exercisable. Some rights are general, others are specific. The right to free speech is general: if any person has it, then every person has it.

To say that an exercisable right is absolute is to say that its exercise is not subject to any restriction or limitation or exception. This implies that an absolute right cannot be infringed under any circumstances. And if an absolute right is general, then it cannot be restricted to some persons only. So if the right to free speech is absolute, then everyone always in every circumstance has a right to free speech.

I believe I have clarified sufficiently — for the purposes of a weblog entry — the sense of ' The right of free speech is absolute.'

My thesis is that the right of free speech is not absolute. It is no more absolute than the other rights mentioned in (but not thereby granted to us in or by) the First and Second and other Amendments to the U. S. Constitution.

Consider gun rights. Is the right to keep and bear arms reasonably regarded as absolute, i.e., subject to no limitations or restrictions? No. I would put you down as a fool if you said otherwise. Felons are not allowed to own guns, and for good reason. Ditto for children and the mentally incomeptent. The right to keep and bear arms does not extend to nuclear arms or biological weapons. The firing of guns is subject to various restrictions, etc. In this case it should be perfectly obvious that the right to keep and bear arms cannot be an absolute right.

Is the right to own real property absolute? If it were, no use of eminent domain would ever be justified, when surely some uses are. Eminent domain laws are sometimes abused to benefit special interest. We cnservatives protest that absue. But the abuse of eminent domain is no argument against its judicious and limited use for purposes that truly serve the common good. Suppose there is a dangerous mountain road on which hundreds of people have lost their lives. The state engineers propose a bypass, but building it would involve the coercive taking, albeit with monetary compensation, of a little land from a fat cat who owns a parcel the size of Rhode Island, the coercive taking of a strip of land occupied only by a few prarie dogs. A rational and morally decent person would say that here the right to property must be limited for the common good. (And let's assume that the good really is common: the owner of the land himself must travel the dangerous mountain road.)

Third example. Congress shall make no law prohibiting the free exercise of religion. That is a near-quotation from the First Amendment to the U. S. Constitution. But what if the free exercise of some religion includes not having one's children immunized for measles or other highly infectious diseases? Would a reasonable person maintain that under no conceivable circmustances would the government ever be justified in forcing a parent to have a child immunized in contravention of a religious precept? I don't think so. There are some truly loony 'religions' out there.

I could go on, and you hope I won't. In the three cases just mentioned it ought to be clear that the rights in question cannot be absolute. Now is there something about the right to free speech that makes it different from the ones mentioned above in a way that justifies saying that free speech is an absolute right when the others are not? Not that I can see.

I have heard it said that speech is just speech; it not like discharging a firearm in a residential area or seizing a man's property or forcing parents to immunize a child. But this is a lame response because speech is not 'just speech.' Not only does public speaking and publishing involve all sorts of actions, it can and does reliably lead to actions both good and evil. People are susceptible of exhortation. One can fire up a lynch mob with well-chosen words. I don't need to belabor this: it is obvious. Speech is not 'just speech.'

The right to free speech meets a limit in the moral obligation to not inflame murderous passions. There is no absolute moral right to free speech. Whether certain forms of speech should be legally prohibited is of course a further question.

Freedom of Speech and Freedom After Speech

What is the difference between the USSR and the USA?

In the former there is freedom of speech; in the latter, freedom after speech.

An old joke, but new to me. I just now heard Dennis Prager tell it.

He also mentioned Richard Dawkins and Christopher Hitchens. How long would Muslim equivalents of them have lasted?

Michael Sudduth Hard at Work . . .

. . . on book on post-mortem survival. (HT: Dave Lull. Happy New Year, Dave!)

Toleration Extremism: Notes on John Stuart Mill

In the wake of the murderous rampage by Muslim terrorists at Charlie Hebdo in Paris on 7 January, many have embraced a form of extremism according to which any and all (public) expression must be tolerated. This entry questions this extremism as we find it in John Stuart Mill.

Here are two passages from Chapter Two of John Stuart Mill's magnificent On Liberty (emphases added):

But the peculiar evil of silencing the expression of an opinion is, that it is robbing the human race; posterity as well as the existing generation; those who dissent from the opinion, still more than those who hold it. If the opinion is right, they are deprived of the opportunity of exchanging error for truth: if wrong, they lose, what is almost as great a benefit, the clearer perception and livelier impression of truth, produced by its collision with error. [. . .] We can never be sure that the opinion we are endeavouring to stifle is a false opinion; and if we were sure, stifling it would be an evil still.

[. . .]

Strange it is, that men should admit the validity of the arguments for free discussion, but object to their being "pushed to an extreme;" not seeing that unless the reasons are good for an extreme case, they are not good for any case. Strange that they should imagine that they are not assuming infallibility when they acknowledge that there should be free discussion on all subjects which can possibly be doubtful, but think that some particular principle or doctrine should be forbidden to be questioned because it is so certain, that is, because they are certain that it is certain. To call any proposition certain, while there is any one who would deny its certainty if permitted, but who is not permitted, is to assume that we ourselves, and those who agree with us, are the judges of certainty, and judges without hearing the other side.

Evaluation of the First Passage

As sympathetic as I am to Mill, I am puzzled (and you ought to be too) by the last sentence of the first quoted passage. It consists of two claims. The first is that " We can never be sure that the opinion we are endeavouring to stifle is a false opinion . . . ." This is plainly false! The opinion of some Holocaust deniers that no Jews were gassed at Auschwitz is an opinion we can be sure is false. We are as sure of this as we are sure of any empirical fact about the past. Or suppose some fool denies that JFK died by assasination or maintains that McCain won the last presidential election. Those are fools' opinions we know to be wrong. There is no lack of examples. What was Mill thinking? "We can never be sure," he writes. A modal auxiliary married to a negative universal quantifier! To refute a 'can never' statement all you need is one merely possible counterexample. I have given three actual counterexamples. Pace Mill, we can be sure in some cases that certain opinions are wrong.

Mill's second claim is that even if we are sure that an opinion we are trying to stifle is false, stifling it would nevertheless be an evil. Mill is here maintaining something so embarrassingly extreme that it borders on the preposterous. Consider again an actual or possible Holocaust denier who makes some outrageously false assertion that we know (if we know anything about the past) to be false. Suppose this individual has the means to spread his lies far and wide and suppose that his doing so is likely to incite a horde of radical Islamists to engage in an Islamist equivalent of Kristallnacht. Would it be evil to 'stifle' the individual in question? By no means. Indeed it could be reasonably argued that it is morally imperative that such an individual not be permitted to broadcast his lies.

How could anyone fail to see this? Perhaps because he harbors the notion that free expression is unconditionally worthwhile, worthwhile regardless of the content of what is being expressed, whether true or false, meaningful or meaningless, harmful or innocuous, and regardless of the context in which the opinions are expressed. Now I grant that freedom of expression, of discussion, of inquiry and the like are very high values. That goes without saying. I have utter contempt for Islamists and other totalitarians. I'm an Enlightenment man after all, a student of Kant, an American, and a philosopher. Argument and dialectic are the lifeblood of philosophy. Philosophy is free and open inquiry. But why do we value the freedom to speak, discuss, publish, and inquire? That is a question that must be asked and answered.

I say that we value them and ought to value them mainly because we value truth and because the freedom to speak, publish, discuss, and inquire are means conducive to the acquisition of truth and the rooting out of falsehood. We ought to accord them a high value, a value that trumps other values, only on condition that they, on balance, lead us to truth and away from falsehood. We value them, and ought to value them, mainly as means, not as ends in themselves. This is consistent with holding that some public expression that is not truth-conducive has a value in itself.

So the Holocaust denier, who abuses the right to free speech to spread what we all know (if we know anything about the past) to be falsehoods, has no claim on our toleration. For again, there is no unconditional or abolute right to free expression. That right is limited by competing values, the value of truth being one of them. The value of social order is another.

Two arguments, then.

The first is that free expression while it may have some value in itself has a high value only as a means to an end, where the end is the acquisition and dissemination of truth. The second is that the value of socila order far outweighs the extremely limited value of someone's spouting falsehoods about, say, the genocide of the Jews by the Nazis. Those we abuse the right to free speech by spreading pernicious falsehoods have no claim on our toleration.

As I see it, then, Mill makes two mistakes in his first passage. He fails to see that some opinions are known to be false. Now there may not be many such opinions, but all I need is one to refute him since he makes a universal claim. I will of course agree with Mill that many of the doctrines that people denounce as false, and will not examine, are not known to be false. The second mistake is to think that even if we know an opinion to be false we have no right to suppress its propagation.

Now of course I am not claiming that all, or even most, known falsehoods are such that their propagation ought to be suppressed. Let the Flat Earth Society propagate its falsehoods to its heart's content. For few take them seriously, and their falsehoods, though known to be falsehoods, are not sufficiently pernicious to warrant suppression. Obviously, government censorship or suppression of the expression of opinions must be employed only in very serious cases. This is because government, though it is practically necessary and does do some good, does much evil and has a tremendous capacity for unspeakable evils. It was communist governments that murdered 100 million in the 20th century. And when the Nazis stripped Jews of their property and sent them to the Vernichtungslager, it was legal. (Think about that and about whether you want to persist in conflating the legal and the moral.)

Mill's mistake, as it seems to me, is that he allows NO cases where such suppression would be justified. And that is a position whose extremism condemns it. Toleration extremism, to give it a name.

Evaluation of the Second Passage

Mill only digs his hole deeper in the second passage. "Strange it is, that men should admit the validity of the arguments for free discussion, but object to their being "pushed to an extreme;" not seeing that unless the reasons are good for an extreme case, they are not good for any case." Surely the bolded principle is a bizarre one. Consider respect for human life. Respecting human life, we uphold a general prohibition against homicide. But it is not plausibly maintained there are no exceptions to this 'general' prohibition where the term does not mean 'exceptionless' but 'holding in most cases.' There are at least five putative classes of exceptions: killing in self-defence, killing in just war, capital punishment, abortion, and suicide. Now suppose someone were to apply Mill's principle (the one I bolded) and argues as follows: "Unless the reasons against killing humans are good for an extreme case, they are not good for any case." Would you not put such a person down as a doctrinaire fool? He holds that if it is wrong to kill human beings 'in general,' then it is wrong to kill any human being in any circumstance whatsoever. It would then follow that it is wrong to kill a home invader who has just murdered your wife and is about to do the same to you and your children. The mistake here is to take an otherwise excellent principle or precept (Do not kill human beings) and remove all restrictions on its application.

There are plenty of counterexamples to Mill's bizarre principle that "unless reasons are good for an extreme case, they are not good for any case."

We conservatives are lovers of liberty and we share common ground with our libertarian brethren, but here we must part company with them.

General Terms, Singular Terms, and Direct Reference

London Ed sends another batch of 'philolang' ruminations. My responses are in blue.

Bill's comment that the general/singular distinction should not be confused with the indirect/direct distinction brings us back to my original question about how we could get from one to the other. I think I have finally cracked it.

Define a general term as one which applies, or can apply, in the same sense or meaning, to more than one object. The Latin phrase is dicibilis de pluribus. Even when [a term] can apply to only one individual at one time (e.g., 'prime minister of England'), a general term is transferable: it could still apply to a different individual (after the next election) and even if it has always applied to the same individual ('the moon'), it still could apply, counterfactually, to a different heavenly object, or to more than one.

BV: So far, so good. I agree completely.

By contrast, a genuine singular term can only apply in the same sense or meaning to one individual. There are many people called 'John Smith', but this is not the same as them all being called ‘man’. The term 'man' applies to them all in the same sense or meaning, whereas the proper name applies to each of them with only one specific meaning, proper to each alone. Moreover, if we say "John Smith is prime minister", meaning a particular Smith, and then say "John Smith might not have been prime minister" or "John Smith will not be prime minister next year", then the same person is meant.

BV: This implies that 'the winner of the Boston Marathon in 1979' is not a genuine singular term despite the fact that it picks out exactly one individual, Bill Rodgers. (Someone other than Rodgers could have won it.) I am simply noting this implication.

Now ask about the relation 'applies to' which holds between a general term and several individuals, and between the singular term and a unique individual. Why should this hold? What makes the term and the individual(s) so related?

In the case of the general term, it is clearly the possession of an attribute corresponding to the term. E.g. if the term is 'F', then the statement 'this is F' is true or false for any individual signified by 'this', and the term 'applies to' the individual by definition if the statement is true, otherwise it does not apply.

BV: I would put it as follows. The general term 'F' applies to an individual x only if the attribute expressed by 'F' is instantiated by x. For example, the general term 'cat' applies to Max only if Max instantiates the property or attribute of being a cat.

So in the case of general terms the relation is 'accidental' or indirect, mediated either by the possession of the attribute – if being F is accidental, or by the existence of the individual, if being F is essential. (I.e. it is accidental that David Cameron falls under 'man' not because David Cameron could exist without being a man, which is impossible, but rather because Cameron could cease to exist. Indeed, all men, i.e. all humans, could cease to exist, yet the term 'man' would still have a meaning).

BV: This seems right although you are using 'accidental' in two different senses which is inelegant at the very least and could be misleading. The thought, though, is clear. The (general) reference of 'man' to Cameron is mediated by the property expressed by 'man.' Hence this general reference cannot be direct.

But in the case of singular terms, there is no attribute that an individual could possess, in virtue of which the term applies to them [to it]. Such an attribute would be untransferable, i.e. no other individual could possibly possess it, which is absurd. (I will omit other arguments which Bill has given – he is the main 'owner' of these arguments). Therefore the relation is not indirect via the possession of any attribute and (in the absence of any other candidate for the intermediary) the meaning of the singular term must be the object itself.

BV: This definitely seems to follow. My claim for a long time has been that there are no haecceity properties. There is no property H of x such that: (i) x instantiates H; (ii) nothing distinct from x instantiates H; (iii) nothing distinct from x could instantiate H. Given that there are no haecceity properties, no term can express one. Ergo, genuine singular reference is not routed through, mediated by, haecceities.

It follows that if a relation between a [genuinely] singular term and its bearer exists at all, i.e. if there is such a thing as a [genuine singular] reference relation, then it must be direct.

BV: I don't think this follows. What follows is a disjunctive proposition: either there are no genuinely singular terms or their reference is direct.

Note that while it is a datum that there are proper names, and a datum that there are grammatically singular terms, it is not a datum that there are genuinely singular terms as defined above. Suppose there are no genuinely singular terms. There would still be proper names such as 'David Cameron.' It is just that they would have to be understood in some other way, as, say, definite descriptions in disguise. But then they are not genuinely singular.

I think Ed has established nolens volens the above disjunctive proposition. Now consider this argument:

1. Either there are no genuinely singular terms or singular reference is direct.

2. If singular reference is direct, then any associated propositions must be Russellian as opposed to Fregean. For example, if 'Tom' in the sentence 'Tom is tall' refers directly, then the proposition *Tom is tall* is Russellian, i. e., it contains Tom himself as subject constituent and not a Fregean sense or mode of presentation of Tom.

3. There are no Russellian propositions.

Therefore

4. Singular reference is not direct.

Therefore

5. There are no genuinely singular terms.

Argument for (3):

6. If a proposition is Russellian, then its truth supervenes upon that unity of its constituents that makes it a proposition as opposed to a mere aggregate of its constituents. (Just as a sentence is not a list of its terms, a proposition is not an aggregate of its constituents.)

7. If truth supervenes upon proposition-making unity of constituents, then there are no false propositions.

Therefore

8. If a proposition is Russellian, then it cannot be false.

9. There are false propositions.

Therefore

3. There are no Russellian propositions.

Plantinga Reviews Philip Kitcher, Life After Faith: The Case for Secular Humanism

Here.

The wild diversity of religious doctrines suggests to Kitcher that they are all almost certainly false. Plantinga makes an interesting response:

But even for whole systems: there is certainly wide variety here, but how does it follow that they are all almost certainly false? Or even that any particular one is almost false? Kitcher's book is an exercise in philosophy. The variety of philosophical belief rivals that of religion: there are Platonists, nominalists, Aristotelians, Thomists, pragmatists, naturalists, theists, continental philosophers, existentialists, analytic philosophers (who also come in many varieties), and many other philosophical positions. Should we conclude that philosophical positions, including Kitcher's low opinion of religious belief, are all almost certainly false? I should think not. But then wouldn't the same be true for religious beliefs? The fact that others hold religious opinions incompatible with mine is not a good reason, just in itself, for supposing my beliefs false. After all, if I were to suppose my views false, I would once more be in the very same position: there would be very many others who held views incompatible with mine.

To put it my own way: a philosopher discrediting religion on the ground of doctrinal diversity is a case of the pot calling the kettle black. Philosophers notoriously contradict one another on anything and everything. Everything is up for grabs. What then gives philosophy the right to judge religion?

Is Paris a ‘No Go’ Zone?

Apparently it is for Obama.

Dereliction of duty and abdication of authority characterize the man.

Commentary from Commentary by Jonathan S. Tobin:

But, of course, there’s more here than mere tone deafness to public opinion. The president’s flat line response to the Charley Hebdo massacre and then the terrorist attack on the kosher market in Paris (which he failed to characterize as an act of anti-Semitism in his public statement after it happened) illustrated his lack of comfort on this terrain. This is a president that has spent his time in office trying desperately to reach out to the Arab and Muslim worlds to change their perception of the United States. That he has failed in this respect is no longer in question but his disinterest in taking part in a symbolic response to extremist Islam stands in direct contrast to his eagerness for détente with an Iran that is the world’s leading state sponsor of terrorism. The cold shoulder he gave the Paris march resonates not so much because of the odd and very conspicuous absence of an American representative of any stature, but because it fits with the perception of his attitudes.

Report from London

London Karl is a young Irishman living in London. I had heard that Birmingham is a 'no go' zone, so I asked London Ed about it. Ed told me that it is 80% 'no go' but that nobody would want to go there anyway: it is rainy and like Detroit. When I mentioned this to London Karl, he wrote back:

Funny you mention Birmingham. I went there for the first time on Saturday. It has a reputation for having a large Asian, Black, and Muslim population, and this was certainly very noticeable on the streets. I also saw the usual table on the main thoroughfare with Muslims handing out free Korans and Islamic literature, with a few Whites availing. One could say this was insensitive, given what was going on in Paris, or one could say that it was non-violent Muslims trying to ensure their faith was not being confounded with that of the terrorists.

Actually, the real ghettos in England are further north. An acquaintance of mine lectured in the University at Bradford, and told me it was a nightmare, as large numbers of the undergrad intake couldn't even speak, let alone write, English! He was instructed by the admins to pass them anyway, as if he didn't, there would be the inevitable 'racist' outcry. Unfortunately the press are so soft and PC in the UK that anyone who even raises legitimate fears is immediately slapped with the 'racist' tag, as indeed is the case in Ireland.

I think one thing people are underestimating is that it only takes small bands of dedicated elitists to change the course of history and certainly the history of ideas and religion. Think of Christians in the first three centuries, Protestants in the 16th, French revolutionaries, Nazis, Bolsheviks etc.

Karl is quite right and wise beyond his years: it only takes a few to bring about huge changes some of which eventuate in disaster. This is why decent people ought not sit back and do nothing. You must do your bit. Speak out. Vote. Blog.

It doesn't take much to shut down a great city such as Paris or Boston. A pressure-cooker bomb, an armed assault of an editorial office by a few Muslim fanatics. What are you PC-ers waiting for? A nuclear event in Manhattan? Do you think that might make a dent in your precious 'lifestyle.'

You say it is "unimaginable"? Then I suggest your powers of imagination are weak. People said the same about 9/11 before 9/11 became 9/11.

Je Suis Charlie?

In reaction to the murderous attack by Muslim terrorists on Charbonnier and Co. at the offices of Charlie Hebdo in Paris, many have jumped on the "I am Charlie" bandwagon. It is quite understandable. But perhaps a little thought should be given to the question whether one ought to endorse a political pornographer who publishes stuff like the following. Might there be something called toleration extremism? Might it be that while one has a legal right to publish almost anything, one has a moral obligation to exercise restraint? Why do we value freedom of speech? Is it valuable as an end in itself or only as a means to valuable ends? Is it reasonable to maintain that any and all public self-expression is a good just in virtue of its being self-expression? I hope to say something about these questions in the next few days. Meanwhile, please think a bit before trumpeting your identity or rather solidarity with 'Charlie.'

My point in posting the following, needless to say, is not to mock the Christian Trinity but to raise in a graphic manner some very serious questions that require careful thought.

John Passmore on Entity-Monism and Existence-Monism

The Australian philosopher John Passmore (1914 – 2004) is described in his Telegraph obituary as "an Andersonian radical, swept away, though not to the point of unquestioning devotion, by his Scottish-born philosophy professor, John Anderson . . . ." The influence of Anderson on Passmore is very clear from the latter's Philosophical Reasoning (Basic Books, 1969; orig. publ. 1961). The Andersonian Chapter Three, "The Two-Worlds Argument," is the cynosure of my current interest, in particular, the distinction Passmore makes between what he calls entity-monism and what he calls existence-monism. (Anderson, as far as I know does not use these terms and, as far as I know, they have found no resonance among the epigoni. The terms are not found in the index of A. J. Baker's Australian Realism: The Systematic Philosophy of John Anderson, Cambridge UP, 1986. And Quentin Gibson, The Existence Principle, Kluwer, 1998, p. 14, dismisses 'existence-monism' as a misleading label for Anderson's view.)

In this entry I will present the distinction and then comment critically upon it.

Passmore tells us that

Entity-monism is the doctrine that 'ultimately' there is only one real entity. What we normally regard as distinct things — whether they be chairs, or musical compositions, or human being — are, all of them, appearances of this one entity. (38)

[. . .]

Existence-monism is difficult to define in general terms. But we might put it thus: when we say that something exists, or that things of a certain kind exist, this exist or exists has an invariant meaning whatever the 'something' or the 'kind' may be, i.e. there are not sorts, or levels, or orders of existence. More accurately, what is asserted by 'X exists' can always be asserted by a proposition which contains an 'is' which has, in this sense, an invariant meaning. Existence-monism, unlike entity-monism, does admit of varieties. Philosophers might say, and have said, that to exist is to be perceived, or to be in process, or to be spatiotemporal, or to be a possible subject for physical investigation, or to be a thing with properties, and do on. (39, bolding added)

I have two criticisms.

1. There is first of all a slide from a semantic thesis, a thesis about meaning, to an ontological thesis, a thesis about being. Passmore conflates the semantic claim that 'exists' and cognates have an invariant meaning or sense with the ontological claim that there are no sorts or kinds or levels or orders or modes or ways of being/existence. But as I see it, one can consistently maintain both that (i) 'exists' and cognates is univocal in sense across all its uses and that (ii) there are different modes of existence. For this reason, (i) and (ii) are distinct theses.

Let me give a quick illustration. Carpets exist and bulges in carpets exist. In the sentence immediately preceding 'exist' is invariant in sense across both occurrences (both tokenings). And yet it makes good sense to say that carpets and bulges exist in different ways. A carpet can exist with or without a bulge; but no carpet bulge can exist without a carpet whose bulge it is. If a substance is defined as an entity logically capable of independent existence, then a carpet is a substance. But surely no bulge in a carpet is a substance. For no carpet bulge is logically capable of independent existence. It is rather an accident of the carpet as substance. Carpet and bulge exist in different ways: the carpet exists in itself; the bulge in another. Or: the carpet exists independently; the bulge dependently. To think of carpet and bulge as Humean "distinct existences" strains credulity. What we have here are not two Hume-distinct items that stand in a causal relation. Nor do they stand in a logical relation if such relationsd are defined over propositions. What we have here is irreducible existential dependence: the bulge depends in its existence upon the carpet, but not vice versa. To make sense of this example we need to speak of two different modes of existence.

Suppose you accept this. Surely the acceptance is logically consistent with saying that both carpets and bulges exist in the same sense of 'exist.' And what sense is that? It is the sense expressed by the so-called existential quantifier. A better name for it is 'particular quantifier.' In 'Some items are carpets' and 'Some items are bulges,' the predicate 'Some items are ___' has the same sense. And yet carpets and bulges, like faces and smiles, exist in different ways. Or at least one can with no breach of logical consistency maintain this ontological thesis while also holding to the semantic univocity of 'exists' and cognates. Just don't confuse the ontological with the semantic. Don't confuse ways of existing with senses of 'exists.'

Well, I hope you followed that. Now on to the second criticism where the going gets tougher.

2. Passmore clearly sees that one could not sensibly maintain that to be = to be water. "Nobody could now win credence who asserted that to be is to be a quantity of water, however plausible that doctrine might have looked to Thales." (39) And the reason would not be that we now know that water is not an element, or that there are stuffs other than water. The reason lies deeper. If to exist is to be water, then 'Water exists' would be equivalent to the tautology 'Water is water,' when it obviously isn't.

It seems clear that there is no kind of thing or kind of stuff that we could invoke to give descriptive content to existence in general. There is no K such that it will come out true that to be = to be a K or a quantity of K. No one will maintain that to be is to be a lump of coal or to be a cat or to be a quantity of hydrogen. There are two problems here. First, if to be = to be a K, then only Ks could exist. If to be is to be a cat, then only cats could exist: everything would be a cat. Not good! Second, even if there is some K that everything is, being K and existing are not the same. For to say that Ks exist is not to say that Ks are Ks.

What about: to be is to be spatiotemporal? One problem with this naturalist proposal is that it is circular. A thing cannot be spatiotemporal unless it exists in space-time. But then the proposal comes to this: for x to exist is for x to be spatiotemporal and exist. This point about circularity is equivalent to the second point I just made. To say of a spatiotemporal thing that exists is not to say that it is spatiotemporal. To give it a modal twist: it is necessary that spatiotemporal items be spatiotemporal, but contingent that any exist.

So it comes as a surprise when Passmore says, with respect to "To be is to have a place in Space-Time," that "this sort of difficulty does not arise," namely the difficulty in the water example. Why not? Because, "Space-Time is not the sort of thing to which existence is ascribed or which is used to distinguish one thing from another." (39) But surely we do ascribe existence to spacetime. And it is question-begging to say that spatiotemporality does not distinguish one thing from another: it distinguishes concrete things from abstract things. Granted, it does not distinguish items in space time, but neither does being a cat distinguish cats from one another.

So is seems to me that 'To be is to be water' and 'To be is to be spatiotemporal' are on a par. The only difference is that 'water' picks out a natural stuff-kind while 'spatiotemporal pickls out a mode of being.

Pace Anderson and Passmore, being cannot be identified with being spatiotemporal.

What then becomes of existence-monism? Existence-monism amounts to the claim that there is a single way of being or existence as opposed to two or more ways. Thus existence-monism is taken by Andersonians to rule out Plato's two-world theory according to which Forms exist atemporally while the phenomenal particulars that participate in them exist in a temporal way. But as I pointed out in my first criticism, one cannot validly infer a single way of being from a single use of 'exists.' Univocity at the level of sense doesn't entail modal sngleness at the level of being.

What reason, then, do we have to think that there is a single way of being? Well, you might say that it is evident to the senses that there are things in space and time. Fine, but that doesn't show that there is a way of being that is their way of being, even with the addition of the premise that everything that exists exists in space and time. That is, it does not show that we must distinguish between nature, existence, and mode of existence. Why can't we eke by with just nature and existence?

Besides, if there is exactly one way of being, and spatiotemporal items, which we know to exist, exist in that way, does it not follow that to be = to be spatiotemporal, that existence reduces to spatiotemporality? But we saw above under #2 that that can't be right: there is no F such that to exist = to be F. (Wel, there is one case, but it is a very specila one idneed!)

I suspect that we cannot speak of a way of being at all unless we speak of two or more ways of being. For what could motivate the tripartite distinction among nature, existence, and mode, if not examples like that of the carpet and the bulge where it is highly plausible to say that the items distinguished exist in diferent ways? I am assuming that one has not made the mistake exposed in #1 above, namely, the mistake of confusing senses and modes and sliding illicitly from the univocity of 'exists' to the singleness of mode of being.

There are three positions that want distinguishing:

Existence-Monism: There is exactly one mode of being.

Existence-Pluralism: There are two or more modes of being.

Existence-Nihilism: There are no modes of being.

The real debate is between the pluralists and the nihilists. The monist position of the Andersonians is the result of confusion. Or at least that is the way it looks at the moment. But we press on.