Author: Bill Vallicella

The ‘You Didn’t Build That’ Speech Revisited: Wieseltier Says Romney and Ryan are Lying

In His Grief and Ours: Paul Ryan's Nasty Ideal of Self-Reliance, Leon Wieseltier taxes Ryan and Mitt Romney with a simple lie (emphasis added):

It is no wonder that Ryan, and of course Romney, set out immediately to distort the president’s “you didn’t build that speech” in Roanoke, because in complicating the causes of economic achievement, and in giving a more correct picture of the conditions of entrepreneurial activity, Obama punctured the radical individualist mythology, the wild self-worship, at the heart of the conservative idea of capitalism. An honest reading of the speech shows that Romney and Ryan and their apologists are simply lying about it. The businessman builds his business, but he does not build the bridge without which he could not build his business. That is all. Is it everything? Surely it takes nothing away from the businessman, who retains his reason for his pride in his business. But it is not capitalist pride that Romney and Ryan are defending, it is capitalist pridefulness.

Here is the key passage from Obama's speech (emphasis added):

If you were successful, somebody along the line gave you some help. There was a great teacher somewhere in your life. Somebody helped to create this unbelievable American system that we have that allowed you to thrive. Somebody invested in roads and bridges. If you've got a business, you didn't build that. Somebody else made that happen. The Internet didn't get invented on its own. Government research created the Internet so that all the companies could make money off the Internet. The point is, is that when we succeed, we succeed because of our individual initiative, but also because we do things together.

What is the antecedent of the pronoun 'that' in the fifth sentence?  The general rule, one admitting of exceptions, is that the antecedent of a pronoun is the noun or noun phrase immediately preceding it in the context in question.  By that rule 'business' is the antecedent of 'that'  and Obama is saying that business owners did not build their businesses.  But since the rule allows exceptions, the context permits a   charitable reading: 'If you've got a business, you didn't build the roads and bridges and other infrastructuire without which your business would have been impossible.'

So there are two readings of Obama's words.  Both are permitted by the words themselves, but one is uncharitable and the other charitable.  On the first what he is saying is plainly false: no business person built his business.  On the second, what he is saying is trivially true and disputed by no one, namely, that no business could be built without various infrastructure already being in place. 

On either reading, there is a serious problem for Obama and his apologists.  Either Obama is is saying something that everyone, including Obama, knows is false, in which case he is lying, or he is saying something that goes without saying, something disputed by no one.  On the second reading Obama is commiting a straw man fallacy: he is portraying his opponents as holding a position that none of them holds. 

So if we are going to be charitable, then we ought to tax the president with a straw man fallacy.  But there is worse to come.  Behind the latter fallacy is a fallacy of false alternative.  Obama assumes, without justification, that if you didn't build the infrastructure without which your business could not exist, then government built it.  Or, to put it in the form of a disjunction: Either you as an individual built the the roads and bridges and tools or government built them for you.  But that is a false alternative.  Not everything that arises collectively is brought about by the government.  Obama confuses government with society.  Only some of what we achieve collectively is achieved by government agency.

Uncharitably read, Obama is lying.  Charitably read, his claim is doubly fallacious and doubly false.  It is false that conservatives maintain a rugged individualism according to which each of us creates himself ex nihilo.  And it is false that what is achieved collectively is achieved by government agency.

Now did Romney and Ryan lie about Obama's message?  No.  They interpreted his words in a way that the English language permits.  Their interpretation, of course, is uncharitable in the extreme.  After all, no one really believes that business people pull themselves up out of nothing by their own bootstraps. 

Is Wieseltier lying about Romney and Ryan? No, he is is just being stupid by failing to make an elementary distinction between sentence meaning and speaker's meaning.

Obama's gaffe will be and ought to be exploited to the hilt by the Republicans.  Politics is not dispassionate inquiry but war conducted by other means. 

Obama must be defeated.  Four more years of his collectivism  may harm the country irreparably.

Lanzetta Responds re: Kerouac

This is Danny Lanzetta. I saw your blog posting in response to my piece in the Huffington Post last week, "In Defense of Jack Kerouac…" Thanks for reading.
 
In your reaction, you wrote of my link to that famous OTR passage: "Lanzetta seems to be suggesting that this is a particularly bad specimen of  Kerouac's scrivening."
 
I went back and looked at the passage in question. Your reading of it could not be more correct. That is absolutely what I wrote. However, it is not what I meant. My point was supposed to be that Kerouac's "madness" sometimes led to the most beautiful and ecstatic writing one could ever read (thus, the link), while at other times it led to the mess that became his personal life (such as his terrible treatment of his daughter, Jan). After countless proofreadings and going through my piece with a fine-toothed comb, I simply missed the way that sentence read. A simple adjective, appropriately placed, could've saved me. Alas, I missed it. I apologize for the confusion.
 
I'd be grateful if you could pass along my apologies to your readers. Luckily, it was only a case of bad writing (my own) and not what would be an egregious denouncement of one of the most beautiful sentences ever put to paper.
 
Thanks again.
 
Well, Danny, there is certainly no need to apologize.  If you had meant that the famous OTR passage was the sort of purple prose an over-excited sophomore might write, that would have been a defensible claim.  But I am glad that is not what you meant.  In any case, it is very easy for a writer to fail to say what he means.
 
I must say I was very impressed at your willingness to accept criticism. 

Alypius and the Gladiators

The 28th of August is the Feast of St. Augustine in the Roman Catholic liturgy.  The following post from three years ago bears up well:

At the time of the Nicholas Berg beheading by al-Qaeda terrorists, a correspondent wrote to say that he watched the video only up to the point where the knife was applied to the neck, but refused to view the severing. He did right, for reasons given in Book Six, Chapter Eight of Augustine’s Confessions.


GladiatorAlypius was a student of Augustine, first in their hometown of Thagaste, and later in Carthage. In the previous chapter, Augustine writes that in “the maelstrom of Carthaginian customs” Alypius was “sucked down into a madness for the circus.” Later, when Alypius preceded Augustine to Rome to study law, some friends persuaded him against his will to attend a gladiatorial show. Alypius thought he could observe the scene calmly and resist the temptation to blood lust. But he was wrong. When a gladiator fell in combat, and a mighty roar went up from the crowd, Alypius, overcome by curiosity, opened his eyes, drank in the sight, “…and was wounded more deeply in his soul than the man whom he desired to look at was wounded in his body.” Augustine continues:

As he saw that blood, he drank in savageness at the same time. He did not turn away, but fixed his sight on it, and drank in madness without knowing it. He took delight in that evil struggle, and became drunk on blood and pleasure. He was no longer the man who entered
there, but only one of the crowd that he had joined, and a true comrade of those who had brought him there. (Tr. J. K. Ryan)

In our decadent culture, we are not yet at the nadir of Roman brutality. But we are at the point where vast numbers of people find entertainment in, and see nothing wrong with, blood lust by itself or in permutation with sexual lust. For such people, and the legal sophists who misuse the First Amendment, the story of Alypius and the Gladiators can mean nothing.

To borrow a line from a 1997 Dylan song, “It's not dark yet, but it’s gettin’ there.”

I Was Forced to Show My Papers!

Voting this morning in the AZ state primary I was put in mind of an old post from a couple of years ago that bears reposting and editing:


AZThings are really getting bad here in the fascist state of Arizona.  Why just this morning I was forced to show ID when I went to vote.  I strolled into the polling place looking a fright after several hours of hiking.  I introduced myself as 'King Blog' but that cut no ice with the  old ladies who 'manned' the place.  They asked to see my driver's license! What chutzpah!  What bigotry!  A bunch of damned Nazis, if you want my opinion.  What if I forgot it, or never had one? Then the Nazi bastards would have disenfranchised me!  The very act of requesting ID is an act of

 disenfrachisement and intimidation.  Besides, it prevents me from voting twice, which I have a right to do. 

I should have adapted a line from B. Traven's The Treasure of the Sierra Madre.  Papers?  I don't need no stinkin' papers!  I'm a human being.  You just hate me because I smell like I spent the night under a bridge.  I have the right to do whatever I want, wherever I want, and vote wherever I want and as many times as I want.
You Anglo bastards are raaacists because my skin isn't lily-white like yours and because my name ends in a vowel.

I'm gettin' the hell out of this rattlesnake-infested inferno of gun-totin' yahoos, rednecked racists, and xenophobic immigrant-bashers.  I'm going where a man can be free.  I'm headed for Castro's island paradise.  "Live free or die," as I always say.

2016: Obama’s America is a Must-See

Even-handed and extremely well-produced, 2016 exposes the anti-colonialist ideology that animates Obama's policy decisions.

According to NPR, "so far, 2016 has made more than nine million dollars. It's already the sixth highest grossing political documentary of all time."  It is even doing well in liberal New York City.  I saw it at 1:30 PM today, Monday, in a Mesa, Arizona, theater that was almost full.  That give me hope that change will come.

Here is a review.

To Call it an Exaggeration Would be an Understatement

There are statements so extreme that to call them exaggerations would be an understatement.  There are plenty of examples to be found in liberal precincts.

"The photo ID requirement is voter suppression. It disenfranchises minorities, the poor, the elderly.  It is an onerous barrier to voting."

Onerous?  In Pennsylvania a photo ID can be had free of charge.  In Arizona it costs a paltry $12 and is good for 12 years.  If you are 65 or older, or on SS disability, it is free.

Are our liberal pals exaggerating?  Actually it is more like lying.  It is the willful misuse of language to win at all costs.  Linguistic hijacking.

Academic Philosophy (with an addendum on Human Corruption)

Academic philosophy too often degenerates into a sterile intellectual game whose sole function is to inflate and deflate the egos of the participants.  But this is no surprise: everything human is either degenerate or will become degenerate.

……………………..

Addendum: 2:45 PM

Long-time blogger-buddy and supplier of high-quality links and comments, Bill Keezer, comments:

Academic anything eventually degenerates either into ego battles or battles for status as grant securers.  In addition to tuition inflation the big money-maker for universities is the administration overhead awarded within grants and the supplement to salaries in some cases that allow them to forego raises or to reduce their portion of the payroll.   

Government corrupts all that it touches.

I agree with Bill's first point, but not with his second.  The source of moral corruption is not government, but the human being, his ignorance, his inordinate and disordered desires, and his free but wayward will.  Everything human beings are involved in is either corrupt or corruptible, and government is no exception, not because government is the unique source of corruption, but because government is a human, all-too-human, enterprise.

On my view, government is practically necessary.  Anarchism is for adolescents.  Some of what government does is good, some bad.  Governments in the free world defeated the Nazis; communist governments murdered 100 million in the 20th century. (Source: Black Book of Communism.)  Some of what is bad are unintended consequences of programs that were set up with good intentions.  Federally-insured student loans made it possible (or at least easier) for many of us to finance our educations.  (It is of course a debatable point whether it is a legitimate function of government to insure student loans.)  But lack of oversight on the part of the Feds, and the greediness of university administrators coupled with the laziness and prodigality of too many students has led to the education bubble.

What has happened is truly disgusting.  The price of higher education has skyrocketed, increasing out of all proportion to general inflation, while the quality of the product delivered has plummeted in some fields and merely declined in others.   There are young people graduating from law schools today with $150 K in debt and little prospect of a job sufficiently remunerative to discharge the debt in a reasonable time.

Can we blame the federal government for the education bubble?  Of course, if there had been no federally-insured loan program the bubble would not have come about.  But there was no necessity that the program issue in a bubble.  So we are brought back to the real root of the problem, human beings, their ignorance, greed, prodigality, and general lack of moral and intellectual virtue.

Compare the housing bubble.  Government must bear some of the blame through its bad legislation.  But no bubble would have occurred if consumers weren't stupid and lazy and greedy.  What sort of fool signs up for a negative amortization loan?  Am I blaming the victim?  Of course.  Blaming the victim is, within limits and in some cases, a perfectly reasonable and indeed morally necessary thing to do.  If you are complicit in your own being ripped-off through your own self-induced intellectual and moral defectiveness, then you must hold yourself and be held by others partially responsible.  And then there are the morally corrupt lenders themselves who exploited the stupidity, laziness, greediness and general lack of moral and intellectual virtue of the consumers.  A fourth factor is the corruption of the rating agencies. 

So, contra my friend Keezer, we cannot assign all the blame to government.  We need government, limited government.

Saturday Night at the Oldies: Scott McKenzie, San Francisco, Summer of Love

Nostalgia time again.  Scott McKenzie, famous for the 1967 anthem "San Francisco" penned by John Phillips of The Mamas and the Papas, is dead at 73.  Gen-Xer Mick LaSalle gets it right in his commentary:

The thing about that song is that . . . however naive and even sanctimonious it might be, it is so clearly a true expression of a mindset, of a vision, of a moment in time, of a generation, of an aspiration that, even if it is singing about a San Francisco that never happened and a dream that never came true and never really had a chance of coming true, and that had only a scant relationship with reality . . . it’s a precious thing.  It’s a document of a moment, but more than that, a perfect poetic expression of that moment.

It was not MY youth, but I can recognize in that song and in the purity of McKenzie’s vocal something that is as unmistakably honest, in its way, as Gershwin playing the piano, or Fred Astaire dancing, or Artie Shaw playing the clarinet.  It is youth finding itself in the world and saying the most beautiful thing it can think of saying at that particular moment. You can’t laugh that away.  You have to treasure that.  Really, you have to love it.

Speaking of the Mamas and Papas, here are some of my favorites:  Dedicated to the One I Love (1967), a cover almost as good as the Shirelles original.  But it is hard to touch the Shirelles. 

Twelve Thirty.  Creeque Alley. California Dreamin'.

And then there's Eric Burdon and the Animals, San Franciscan Nights from '67.

The so-called Summer of Love transpired 45 years ago. (My reminiscences of the Monterey Pop Festival of that same summer of '67 are reported here.) Ted Nugent, the guru of kill and grill, and a rocker singularly without musical merit in my humble opinion,  offers some rather intemperate reflections in a WSJ piece, The Summer of Drugs. Excerpts:

The 1960s, a generation that wanted to hold hands, give peace a chance, smoke dope and change the world, changed it all right: for the worse. America is still suffering the horrible consequences of
hippies who thought utopia could be found in joints and intentional disconnect.

[. . .]

While I salute and commend the political and cultural activism of the 1960s that fueled the civil rights movement, other than that, the decade is barren of any positive cultural or social impact. Honest people will remember 1967 for what it truly was.

Although I am not inclined to disagree too strenuously with Nugent's indictment, especially when it comes to drug-fueled self-destruction, Nugent misses much that was positive in those days. For one thing, there was the amazing musical creativity of the period, as represented by Dylan and the Beatles above all. This in stark contrast to the vapidity of '50s popular music. Has there been anything before or since in popular music that has come up the level of the best of Dylan?

The '60s also offered welcome relief from the dreary materialism and social conformism of the '50s. My generation saw through the emptiness of a life devoted to social oneupsmanship, status-seeking, and the piling up of consumer goods. We were an idealistic generation. We wanted something more out of life than job security in suburbia. (Frank Zappa: "Do your job, do it right! Life's a ball, TV tonight!")

We were seekers and questers, though there is no denying that some of us were suckers for charlatans and pied pipers like Timothy Leary. We questioned the half-hearted pieties and platitudes and hypocrisies of our elders. Some of the questioning was puerile and dangerously utopian, but at least we were questioning. We wanted life and we wanted it in abundance in rebellion against the deadness we perceived around us. We experimented with psychedelics to open the doors of perception, not to get loaded.

We were a destructive generation as well, a fact documented in Peter Collier and David Horowitz, Destructive Generation: Second Thoughts About the '60s. But the picture Nugent paints is onesided. Here is Dylan's "Blowing in the Wind" which was one of the anthems of the Civil Rights movement. Or give a listen to the Youngblood's Let's Get Together.  This song captures the positive spirit of the '60s, a spirit not much in evidence nowadays.

My Argument That ‘Exist(s)’ is not Univocal Revisited: No ‘Is’ of Predication?

On August 11th I wrote:

Suppose we acquiesce for the space of this post in QuineSpeak. 

Then 'Horses exist' says no more and no less than that 'Something is a horse.'  And 'Harry exists' says no more and no less than that 'Something is Harry.'  But the 'is' does not have the same sense in both translations.  The first is the 'is' of predication while the second is the 'is' of identity.  The difference  is reflected in the standard notation.  The propositional function in the first case is Hx.  The propositional function in the second case is x = h.  Immediate juxtaposition of predicate constant and free variable [with the predicate constant coming first] is the sign for predication.  '=' is the sign for identity.  Different signs for different concepts.  Identity is irreducible to predication which is presumably why first-order predicate logic with identity is so-called.

Those heir to the 'Fressellian' position, such as Quine and his epigoni, dare not fudge the distinction between the two senses of 'is' lately noted. That, surely, is a cardinal tenet of their brand of analysis.

So even along Quinean lines, the strict univocity of 'exist(s)' across all its uses cannot [pace van Inwagen] be upheld.  It cannot be upheld across the divide that separates general from singular existentials.

But the next morning I had a doubt about what I had written.  Is there an 'is' of predication in MPL (modern predicate logic)? I argued (above) that 'exist(s)' is not univocal: it does not in MPL have the same sense in 'Fs exist' and 'a exists.' The former translates as 'Something is (predicatively) an F' while the latter translates as 'Something is (identically) a.'  Kicked out the front door, the equivocity returns through the back door disguised as  an equivocation on 'is' as between predication and identity.

But if the 'is' in 'Grass is green' or 'Something is green' is bundled into the predicate in the Fregean manner, then it could be argued that there is no 'is' of predication in MPL distinct from the 'is' of identity and the 'is' of existence.  If so, my equivocity argument above collapses, resting as it does on the unexpungeable distinction between the 'is' or identity and the 'is' of predication.

Yesterday a note from Spencer Case shows that he is on to the same (putative) difficulty with my argument:

Hey Bill, I have a professor whose pet peeve is the claim that there is an 'is' of identity and an 'is' of predication. I don't know his arguments for thinking so, but his view is that 'is' is univocal and what differs is the content of the copula. If he's right, that would be a problem for you here. Do you know more about this position than I do?           

To sort this out we need to distinguish several different questions:

Q1. Is there a predicative use of 'is' in English?  Yes, e.g., 'Al is fat.'  This use is distinct from the existential use and the identitative use (and others that I needn't mention).  So I hope Spencer's professor is not denying the plain linguistic fact that in English there is an 'is' of predication and an 'is' of identity and that they are distinct.

Q2. Must there be a separate sign for the predicative tie in a logically perspicuous artificial language such as MPL (modern predicate logic, i.e., first-order predicate logic with identity)?  No.  When we symbolize 'Al is fat' by Fa, there is no separate sign for the predicative tie.  But there is a sign for it, namely, the immediate juxtaposition of the predicate constant and the individual constant with the predicate constant to the left of the individual constant. So we shouldn't confuse a separate or stand-alone sign with a sign.  Other non-separate signs are conceivable exploiting different fonts and different colors, etc. 

Q3.  Must there be some sign or other for predication in a logically adequate language such as MPL? How could there fail to be?  If our logical language is adequate, then it has to be able to symbolize predications such as 'Al is fat.'  And note that existentials such as 'Fat cats exist' cannot be put into MPL without a sign for predication.  '(∃x)(Fx & Cx)' employs non-separate signs for predication.

Q4.  Is the predicative tie reducible or eliminable?  No.  For Frege, there is no need for a logical copula or connector to tie object a to concept F when a falls under F.  The concept is "unsaturated" (ungesaettigt).  Predicates and their referents (Bedeutungen) are inherently gappy or incomplete.   So the predicate 'wise' would be depicted as follows: '___ wise.'  What is thereby depicted is a sentential function or open sentence.  A (closed) sentence results when a name is placed in the gap. The concept to which this predicate or sentential function refers is gappy in an analogous sense. Hence there is no need for for an 'is' of predication in the logical language or for an instantiation relation. Object falls under concept without the need of a tertium quid to connect them.

I would imagine that Spencer Case's professor has some such scheme in mind.  One problem is that it is none too clear what could be meant by a gappy or incomplete or unsaturated entity.  That a predicate should be gappy is tolerably clear, but how could the referent of a predicate be gappy given that the referent of a predicate is a single item and not the manifold of things to which the predicate applies?  The idea is not that concepts exist only when instantiated, but that  their instantiation does not require the services of a nexus of predication: the concept has as it were a slot in it that accepts the object without the need of a connector to hold them together.  (Think of a plug and a socket: there is no need for a third thing to connect the plug to the socket: the 'female' receptacle just accepts the 'male' plug.)

There are other problems as well.

But here is the main point.  Frege cannot avoid speaking of objects falling under concepts, of a's falling under F but not under G.  If the notion of the unsaturatedness of concepts is defensible, then Frege can avoid speaking of a separate predicative tie that connects objects and concepts.  But he cannot get on without predication and without a sign for predication.

I conclude that my original argument is sound.  There is is and must be a sign for predication in any adequate logic, but it needn't be a stand-alone sign.  (Nor need its referent be a stand-alone entity.)   Compare '(∃x)Hx' to '(∃x)(x = h)' as translations of 'Horses exist' and 'Harry exists,' respectively.  The identity sign occurs in only one of the translations, the second.  And the sign for predication occurs only in the first.  There is no univocity of 'exist(s)' because there is no univocity of 'is' in the translations. 

Why Do Jews Do So Well and Arabs So Poorly?

I don't think much of Richard Cohen as a commentator on the passing scene, but his A Difference Beyond Question is right on target in his defense of Mitt Romney for pointing out the obvious:

The cultural difference between Israel and its Arab neighbors is so striking that you would think it beyond question. But when Mitt Romney attributed the gap between Israel's economic performance and the Palestinians' — "Culture makes all the difference," he said in Israel — the roof came down on him. PC police the world over raised a red card, giving him demerits for having the temerity to notice the obvious. Predictably, Saeb Erekat, chief Palestinian negotiator and a member of the executive committee of the Palestine Liberation Organization, denounced the statement as "racist." It was, of course, just the opposite.

But I want to take issue with the following sentence:  "I do know, though, that if you eliminate what would certainly be condemned as a racist explanation — Jews as inherently smarter than non-Jews — then you are left with culture . . . ."  What I object to is Cohen's apparent acquiescence in the false notion that a racial explanation must be a racist explanation.  I take no position on whether Jewish superiority is best explained racially or culturally.  I am objecting to the conflation of the racial with the racist.

There are two distinctions operative here and they ought not be conflated.  There is a distinction between the racial and the cultural, and a distinction between the racial and the racist.  The distinctions cut perpendicular to one another.  If some phenomenon has a racial explanation, as opposed to a cultural explantion, it doesn't follow that the explanation is racist or that the people advancing it are racist.

Suppose that Jews as a group are smarter than non-Jews.  If that is true, then it is true. (And what I just wrote is a tautology, hence logically true: it doesn't get any better than that.)  Now if a statement is true, how can it be racist?  This is what I don't understand.  Truth is truth. Facts are facts.  There are racial facts, facts about race, but no racist facts.  If blacks are 12-14% of the U. S. population, then that is a racial fact.  But it is not a racist fact.  Nor is someone who states it, just in virtue of his stating it, a racist.  A person who states it may be, accidentally, a racist; but he is not, just in virtue of stating it, a racist.  Similaarly, there are facts about sex, but such facts are not sexist facts, and there are the sorts of facts that gerontologists study, but they are not ageist facts.

There are racial explanations, explanations in terms of race, but a racial explanation is not a racist explanation.  Facts, propositions, explanations — these are not the sorts of item that could be racist or nonracist.  To think otherwise would appear to be a Rylean category mistake.  People are racist or not.