Author: Bill Vallicella

Saturday Night at the Oldies: Politically Incorrect Tunes

Ray Stevens, Ahab the Arab.  Here is the original from 1962.  In the lyrics there are references to two hits from the same era, Chubby Checker's The Twist (1960) and Lonnie Donegan's British skiffle number   Does Your Chewing Gum Lose its Flavor?  On second thought, the reference is to Checker's Le't's Twist Again Like We Did Last Summer (1960).

Larry Verne, Mr. Custer (1960). "What am I doin' here?"

And now a trio of feminist anthems. Marcie Blaine, Bobby's Girl.  "And if I was Bobby's girl, what a faithful, thankful girl I'd be."  Carol Deene, Johnny Get Angry.  Can't find the Joanie Sommers original, but this is an adequate cover.  "I want a cave man!"  k. d. Laing's parody.  Little Peggy March, I Will Follow Him.  "From now until forever."

Meanwhile the guys were bragging of having a girl in every port of call.  Dion, The Wanderer (1961). Ricky Nelson, Travelin' Man. (1961)

Addendum:  I forgot to link to two Ray Stevens numbers that are sure to rankle the sorry sensibilities of  our liberal pals: Come to the USA, God Save Arizona.

The Need for Logico-Philosophical Umpires

Tammy-bruce-snubnose-vertical

The following is from the Powerblogs archive.  Originally posted 5 November 2005.

Can't get a job teaching philosophy? Perhaps you can market yourself as a talk show umpire. There is a dire need for argumentative quality control on the shout circuit.

Last night I was pleased to see my favorite gun-totin' lesbian on Hannity and Colmes, the irrepressible Tammy Bruce. (That's her above with her pal 'Snubby.'  The gal needs a lesson in trigger discipline: 'Get yer booger-hooker off the bang switch!') At one point, Bruce came out against governmental wealth redistribution via the tax code. Colmes the liberal replied in effect: So you're opposed to taxation!

At this point, a competent umpire would have called a timeout and thrown Colmes into the penalty box. For he committed a truly grotesque conceptual mistake by gratuitously assuming that it is somehow built into the very concept of taxation that it should involve redistribution of wealth. Taxation is the process whereby monies are extracted from the populace to offset the costs of government. There is nothing in the nature of taxation as such to require a 'progressive' scheme of taxation. Otherwise, a flat tax would be a contradiction in terms.

Here is an analogy. Suppose I warn you not to confuse insurance with investment and advise you to buy a term life insurance policy. An insurance agent, eager to line his own pockets, objects: So you're
opposed to insurance! The counterresponse is that there is nothing in the concept of life insurance to require that it have any investment  features. An umpire on the scene would slap a penalty on the greedy agent.

Of course, my umpire proposal is utopian. Average viewers apparently like shouting and mindless contention. They wouldn't put up with any close analysis or careful argument assessment. Ratings would plummet.   Hannity and his sidekick would be out of a job.

This  begs raises the question: Are the masses inherently stupid, or have they been stupefied by the media? The answer, I suspect, is both: thinking is hard work and even people with an aptitude for it are not inclined to engage in it. But it is also the case that the media do not encourage thoughtfulness and are quite willing to pander to their audiences to turn a buck.

It is the ugly side of capitalism; but socialism and government control of the media would obviously be a disaster.

The solution? C-Span and cyberspace. (By the way, I apologize for my uses of 'masses'; I thereby violated my own rule that a conservative  should not talk like a leftist. So maybe I shouldn't have used   'capitalism' either.)

Logical Versus Metaphysical Modality

A Pakistani reader inquires:

This is a query which I hope you can answer. Is there such a distinction as 'logical contingency' vs 'metaphysical contingency', and 'logical necessity' vs 'metaphysical necessity'? And if there is, can you explain it? Thank you.

A short answer first.  Yes, there are these distinctions.  They amount to a distinction between logical modality and metaphysical modality.  The first is also  called called narrowly logical modality while the second is also called broadly logical modality.   Both contrast with nomological modality. 

Now a long answer.  The following nine paragraphs unpack the notion of broadly logical or metaphysical modality and contrast it with narrowly logical modality.

1. There are objects and states of affairs and propositions that can be known a priori to be impossible because they violate the Law of Non-Contradiction (LNC). Thus a plane figure that is both round and not round at the same time, in the same respect, and in the same sense of 'round,' is impossible, absolutely impossible, simply in virtue of its violation of LNC. I will say that such an object is narrowly logically (NL) impossible. Hereafter, to save keystrokes, I will not mention the 'same time, same respect, same sense' qualification which will be understood to be in force.

2. But what about a plane figure that is both round and square? Is it NL-impossible? No. For by logic alone one cannot know it to be impossible. One needs a supplementary premise, the necessary truth grounded in the meanings of 'round' and 'square' that nothing that is round is square. We say, therefore, that the round square is broadly logically (BL) impossible. It is not excluded from the realm of the possible by logic alone, which is purely formal, but by logic plus a 'material' truth, namely the necessary truth just mentioned.

3. If there are BL-impossible states of affairs such as There being a round square, then there are BL-necessary states of affairs such as There being no round square. Impossibility and necessity are interdefinable: a state of affairs is necessary iff  its negation is impossible. It doesn't matter whether the modality is NL, BL, or nomological (physical). It is clear, then, that there are BL-impossible and BL-necessary states of affairs.

4. We can now introduce the term 'BL-noncontingent' to cover the BL-impossible and the BL-necessary.

5. What is not noncontingent is contingent. (Surprise!) The contingent is that which is possible but not necessary. Thus a contingent proposition is one that is possibly true but not necessarily true, and a contingent state of affairs is one that possibly obtains but does not necessarily obtain. We can also say that a contingent proposition is one that is possibly true and such that its negation is possibly true. The BL-contingent is therefore that which is BL-possible and such that its negation is BL-possible.

6. Whatever is NL or BL or nomologically impossible, is impossible period. If an object, state of affairs, or proposition is excluded from the realm of possible being, possible obtaining, or possible truth by logic alone, logic plus necessary semantic truths, or the (BL-contingent) laws of nature, then that object, state of affairs or proposition is impossible, period, or impossible simpliciter.

7. Now comes something interesting and important. The NL or BL or nomologically possible may or may not be possible, period. For example, it is NL-possible that there be a round square, but not possible, period. It is BL-possible that some man run a 2-minute mile but not possible, period. And it is nomologically possible that I run a 4-minute mile, but not possible period. (I.e., the (BL-contingent) laws of anatomy and physiology do not bar me from running a 4-minute mile; it is peculiarities not referred to by these laws that bar me. Alas, alack, there is no law of nature that names BV.)

8. What #7 implies is that NL, BL, and nomological possibility are not species or kinds of possibility. If they were kinds of possibility then every item that came under one of these heads would be possible simpliciter, which we have just seen is not the case. A linguistic way of putting the point is by saying that 'NL,' 'BL,' and 'nomological' are alienans as opposed to specifying adjectives: they shift or 'alienate' ('other') the sense of the noun they modify. From the fact that x is NL or BL or nomologically possible, it does not follow that x is possible. This contrasts with impossibility. From the fact that x is NL or BL or nomologically impossible, it does follow that x is impossible. Accordingly, 'NL,' 'BL,' and 'nomological' do not shift or alienate the sense of 'impossible.'

9. To appreciate the foregoing, you must not confuse senses and kinds. 'Sense' is a semantic term; 'kind' is ontological. From the fact that 'possible' has several senses, it does not follow that there are several species or kinds of possibility. For x to be possible it must satisfy NL, BL, and nomological constraints; but this is not to say that these terms refer to species or kinds of possibility.

Insurance Profiling

A reader who wishes to remain anonymous writes:
I was reading your recent post on profiling and it moved me to share with you a point I've shared with others many times.  I worked a long time ago in insurance, and profiling in insurance is not only commonplace it is necessary and accepted by the public. Most adults know, for instance, that females receive better rates than males. It is no moral commentary on being a guy that males receive higher rates than women. It is simply a statistical fact that males cost more money to insure than females, and so insurance companies rate accordingly.

Further, insurance rates are based on credit score in part. It is not some moral judgment on companies' part. Insurance companies do not think that if you have bad credit you are inherently 'worse' than someone with good credit. It is simply a statistical fact that bad credit correlates  with higher accident ratios. And insurance companies set their rates accordingly.

Of course no one complains about men receiving higher rates than women. But I have little doubt that if women were the ones to receive the higher rates, it would be a big deal. It is the same reason race cannot be included in insurance calculations. Surely it is no more inherently 'sexist' to rate men differently than would be 'racist' to rate different races differently. It is simply facing statistical facts.

The truth is that profiling is fine for people on the left; it just matters who is being profiled. If a car full of white men in white hoods with a rebel flag on their vehicle entered a middle class black neighborhood, and they were pulled over for fear of hurting someone, nobody would complain about this (and rightly so). But if a group of black kids blasting gangster rap enters a middle class white neighborhood is pulled over for the same fear, it is the end of the world. The hypocrisy is apparent to anyone with a brain.

That's right, the hypocrisy of liberals is evident to anyone who can think clearly and objectively. Imagine the quandry they would be in if we didn't let them get away with their double standards. 
 
It also speaks volumes about what liberals and their political correctness have done to this country that my reader  must fear for his livelihood simply because he has spoken the plain truth above.  He states without malice what we all know to be true, and yet must request that I not reveal his name.  The political environment is becoming McCarthyite.  Time was, when a certain sort of right-wing crazy saw a commie under ever bed. Today's liberal crazies see a 'racist' under every bed.  I'm still waiting for these bums to define 'racist.'

The Ultimate Explanation-Seeking Why-Question and Contrastive Explanations

I argued yesterday that the following questions are distinct:

   Q1. Why does anything at all exist, rather than nothing?
  
   Q2. Why does anything at all exist?

Today I explore a little further  the difference between non-contrastive and contrastive explanations. Consider the difference between:

   1. Why is Mary walking rather than swimming?

   2. Why is Mary walking?

An answer to (2) might be: She exercises daily and her preferred form of exercise is walking. But this answer is no answer to (1). For here it is not the phenomenon of her walking that needs explaining, but the contrastive phenomenon of her walking instead of swimming. An answer to (1) might run: Mary is walking rather than swimming because she had an operation on her arm and she doesn't want to get the bandage wet.

So answering (2) does not answer (1). But it is also true that answering (1) does not answer (2). For if she is walking rather than swimming so as not to get her bandage wet, this does not explain why she is walking in the first place. It leaves open whether she walks to exercise, or to meet her neighbors, or for some other reason.

I conclude that (1) and (2) are distinct. They are distinct because their answers need not be the same.

Now let us consider the presuppositions of (1). It is obvious — isn't it? — that only what is the case can be explained. That there are leprechauns cavorting in my yard cannot be explained since it is not the case. I will allow you to say that there is a possible world in which leprechauns cavort in my yard; but since that world is merely possible, nothing in it needs to be explained. So (1) presupposes that Mary is walking. (1) also presupposes that Mary is not swimming. No one can both walk and swim at the same time; so a person who is  walking is not swimming.

A third presupposition of (1) is that it is possible that Mary be swimming. If I aim to explain why she is walking rather than swimming, then I presuppose that she is not swimming. But her not swimming is consistent with the possibility of her swimming. Her not swimming is also consistent with the impossibility of her swimming. Nevertheless, if I ask why walking rather than swimming, I presuppose that she might have been swimming. 'Rather than' means 'instead of' (in place of). So if she is walking instead of swimming, and walking is possible because actual, then swimming must also be possible if it is to be something that can be done instead of walking. It might help to consider

   3. Why is Mary walking rather than levitating?

   or

   4. Why is Mary walking rather than levitating and not levitating at
   the same time?

These two questions have presuppositions that are false. (3) presupposes that it is possible that Mary be doing something nomologically impossible, while (4) presupposes that it is possible that Mary being doing something that is narrowly-logically impossible.  Questions (3) and (4) are therefore not to be answered but to be rejected — by rejecting the false presuppositions upon which they rest.

The same holds for the rather more interesting (Q1) and (Q2). (Q1) presupposes that it is possible that nothing exist. For again it is a contrastive phenomenon that wants explaining: something rather than nothing. Either (Q1)'s presupposition is false, or it is such that, if it were true, then every being would be contingent, in which case there could be no ultimate regress-stopping explanation of why something rather than nothing exists.  That is the point I made yesterday.

So the correct response to (Q1) is either to reject it by rejecting the false presupposition upon which it is based, or to reject it by pointing out that, if said presupposition were true, no ultimate regress-stopping explantion would be possible. (Q2), however, does not presuppose that it is possible that nothing exist. It does not suffer from the internal defect that bedevils (Q1).
 

“Tookie” Williams Executed

From the Powerblogs archive.  Originally posted 13 December 2005.  

As you all know by now, Stanley "Tookie" Williams was executed at San Quentin, California at 12:35 AM PT. I take no pleasure in this man's or any man's death; but I do take satisfaction from justice's being served. I simply do not understand how anyone who is not morally obtuse can fail to see that justice demands capital punishment in cases like this.

 Not only did this fellow brutally murder four people, three of them members of a Chinese family, "Buddha-heads" in the miscreant's lingo, but he also helped found the Crips gang. So he is indirectly and partially responsible for hundreds and perhaps thousands of other crimes including rapes, carjackings, murders, you name it. Not only that, he failed to show any remorse, failed to take responsibility for his deeds, and played the predator right to the end, attempting to stare down the press there to witness his last moments.

But no fact and no argument I or anyone adduces will make any impression on liberal gush-heads like Bill Press, Ed Asner, Mike Farrell and their ilk. Bill Press the other day opined that capital punishment is "cruel and unusual." To say something so stupid, and so typical of a liberal, is to empty that phrase of all meaning. Williams died by lethal injection, painlessly. He wasn't broken on the wheel, drawn and quartered — or cut in half by a blast from a 12-gauge  shotgun, which is how he murdered one of his victims. 

So there is cause to celebrate: not the death of a man, nor the awesome power of the state, but that justice was done and the Left was  handed a stinging rebuke.

On Praise

We do not like to be praised if (a) the praiser is beneath us; (b) what is praised is something insignificant or common; (c) the praise is insincere, perhaps by having an ulterior motive; (d) the praise is mistaken in that we lack the excellence attributed to us.

Particularly annoying is to be praised for something insignificant while one's actual virtues go unappreciated. So be careful in your bestowal of praise: take care that you do not offend the one you hope to flatter.

Two Forms of the Ultimate Explanation-Seeking Why-Question

Why does anything at all exist? Someone could utter this interrogative form of words merely to express astonishment that anything should exist at all. But it is more natural to take the question as a request for an explanation: Why, for what reason or cause, does anything at all exist? What explains the sheer existence of things? Suppose we call this the ultimate explanation-seeking why-question.

Before attempting to answer this question, one ought to examine it carefully. One ought to question the question. If we do so, we soon realize that the question why anything at all exists can be formulated in two ways. One formulation is contrastive, the other non-contrastive:

Q1. Why does anything at all exist, rather than nothing?

Q2. Why does anything at all exist?

What this post argues is that Q1 suffers from a defect that makes it unanswerable, but that Q2 does not suffer from this defect. Failure to distinguish Q1 and Q2 may lead one to reject both questions as unanswerable. It appears that Paul Edwards makes this mistake in his entry "Why?" in the Encyclopedia of Philosophy. Anthony Flood may be repeating it here.

That these are distinct questions becomes apparent when we note that the questions rest on different presuppositions. Both questions presuppose that something exists. If that were not the case, there would be nothing to explain. But Q1 also presupposes that it is possible that nothing at all exist. Call this further presupposition P. P is no part of Q2, as I will explain in a moment.

Let us first think about P and what it entails. P may be expressed in several logically equivalent ways:

There might have been nothing at all
It is possible that nothing exist
Possibly, nothing exists
There is a possible world in which nothing exists

where ‘possible’ and cognates pick out broadly logical possibility.

No matter how P is formulated, it entails that everything that exists is contingent, equivalently, that nothing that exists is a necessary being. For if there might have been nothing at all, then any thing X that exists is such that it might not have existed. That is just to say that X is a contingent being. So given that Q1 presupposes P, and that P entails that there are no necessary beings, it follows that Q1 presupposes that there are no necessary beings. But this seems to imply that the question Q1 cannot be answered.

For if Q1 – or the asking of Q1 – presupposes that no being  is a necessary being, then the asking of Q1 presupposes that there is nothing in terms of which an ultimate explanation could be couched. This is because an ultimate explanation of why anything at all exists cannot be in terms of a contingent entity. A contingent explainer would need explanation just as much as any other entity. An ultimate explanation, if one is to be had, must invoke a noncontingent, but possible, entity: one that either explains itself or at least is not in need of an explanation by another. (I am assuming that there cannot be an actually infinite regress of contingent explainers. This assumption is quite easy to defend, but I won’t address that task here.)

The upshot is that Q1 entails its own unanswerability. This is not because we are unable to know the answer, but because the question itself by its very structure rules out an answer. In other words, Q1 is self-defeating in that it rests on a presupposition that rules out an answer. The proper procedure with respect to Q1, then, is to reject it, not try to answer it.

But the situation is different with Q2. Q2 does not presuppose that every being is contingent. It does not presuppose the opposite (some being is noncontingent) either. Q2 is neutral on the question whether every being is contingent. This is why Q2 is not just a truncated form of Q1. It is not as if ‘rather than nothing’ is implied but not stated in Q2. Q2, resting as it does on different presuppositions than Q1, is a different question. Q2 does not presuppose the possibility of there being nothing at all, hence, does not presuppose that only what is contingent can exist.

Thus Q2 allows the possibility of a necessary being. Nothing about Q2 entails its own unanswerability. Q2 allows the following answer: things exist because one of the things that exist is a necessary being whose existence is self-explanatory, while everything else is explained in terms of this necessary being.

Whether this answer is correct is a further question.  The present point is merely that Q2, unlike Q1, is answerable.

In Defense of Profiling

Even Jesse Jackson does it!  This following is excerpted from the NYT piece, The Color of Suspicion (emphasis added)

Why a Cop Profiles

This is what a cop might tell you in a moment of reckless candor: in crime fighting, race matters. When asked, most cops will declare themselves color blind. But watch them on the job for several months, and get them talking about the way policing is really done, and the truth will emerge, the truth being that cops, white and black, profile. Here's why, they say. African-Americans commit a disproportionate percentage of the types of crimes that draw the attention of the police. Blacks make up 12 percent of the population, but accounted for 58 percent of all carjackers between 1992 and 1996. (Whites accounted for 19 percent.) Victim surveys — and most victims of black criminals are black — indicate that blacks commit almost 50 percent of all robberies. Blacks and Hispanics are widely believed to be the blue-collar backbone of the country's heroin- and cocaine-distribution networks. Black males between the ages of 14 and 24 make up 1.1 percent of the country's population, yet commit more than 28 percent of its homicides. Reason, not racism, cops say, directs their attention.

Cops, white and black, know one other thing: they're not the only ones who profile. Civilians profile all the time — when they buy a house, or pick a school district, or walk down the street. Even civil rights leaders profile. ''There is nothing more painful for me at this stage in my life,'' Jesse Jackson said several years ago, ''than to walk down the street and hear footsteps and start thinking about robbery — and then look around and see somebody white and feel relieved.'' Jackson now says his quotation was ''taken out of context.'' The context, he said, is that violence is the inevitable byproduct of poor education and health care. But no amount of ''context'' matters when you fear that you are about to be mugged.

At a closed-door summit in Washington between police chiefs and black community leaders recently, the black chief of police of Charleston, S.C., Reuben Greenberg, argued that the problem facing black America is not racial profiling, but precisely the sort of black-on-black crime Jackson was talking about. ''I told them that the greatest problem in the black community is the tolerance for high levels of criminality,'' he recalled. ''Fifty percent of homicide victims are African-Americans. I asked what this meant about the value of life in this community.''

The police chief in Los Angeles, Bernard Parks, who is black, argues that racial profiling is rooted in statistical reality, not racism. ''It's not the fault of the police when they stop minority males or put them in jail,'' Parks told me. ''It's the fault of the minority males for committing the crime. In my mind it is not a great revelation that if officers are looking for criminal activity, they're going to look at the kind of people who are listed on crime reports.''

Chief Parks defends vigorously the idea that police can legitimately factor in race when building a profile of a criminal suspect.

''We have an issue of violent crime against jewelry salespeople,'' Parks says. ''The predominant suspects are Colombians. We don't find Mexican-Americans, or blacks or other immigrants. It's a collection of several hundred Colombians who commit this crime. If you see six in a car in front of the Jewelry Mart, and they're waiting and watching people with briefcases, should we play the percentages and follow them? It's common sense.''

Why Something Rather Than Nothing? The Debate Goes On

Ah yes, these big questions never get laid to rest, do they?  Man is indeed  a metaphysical animal as Schopenhauer said.  Here are some links courtesy of Alfred Centauri:

John Horton, Science Will Never Explain Why There is Something Rather Than Nothing.  Horgan and Krauss have at it in the ComBox.

Victor Stenger contributes a meatier piece, Nuthin' to Explain in which he replies to David Albert's NYT review of Krauss. One of the questions Albert raises is where the laws of quantum mechanics come from.  Strenger's thesis is that "the laws of physics arise naturally from the symmetries of the void."  So the void has symmetries and these symmetries give rise to the laws of physics.  I imagine Albert would simply reiterate his question: where do these symmetries come from?  Symmetries are not nothing.  And presumably they are symmetries in this respect or that, in which case one can ask what these respects are and where they come from.  And what about the void itself?  If it is nothing at all, then ex nihilo nihil fit.  And if it is something, then it is not nothing and one can ask about its origin.  Stenger opines:

Clearly, no academic consensus exists on how to define "nothing." It may be impossible. To define "nothing" you have to give it some defining property, but, then, if it has a property it is not nothing!

Maybe I can help Stenger out.  Nothing is the absence of everything.  Isn't that what everybody who understands English understands by 'nothing' is this context?  Have I just done the impossible?  Can one rationally  debate the sense of 'nothing'?  Is there need for an "academic consensus"?  Does Stenger understand English?  Stenger goes on:

The "nothing" that Krauss mainly talks about throughout the book is, in fact, precisely definable. It should perhaps be better termed as a "void," which is what you get when you apply quantum theory to space-time itself. It's about as nothing as nothing can be. This void can be described mathematically. It has an explicit wave function. This void is the quantum gravity equivalent of the quantum vacuum in quantum field theory.

Now Stenger is contradicting himself.  He just got done telling us that 'nothing' cannot be defined, but now he is telling us that it is precisely definable.  Which is it, my man?  The problem of course is that Krauss and Stenger want to have it two ways at once.  They want to use 'nothing' in the standard way to refer to the absence of everything while at the same time using it in violation of English usage to refer to something.

I have a suggestion.  What these boys need to do is introduce a terminus technicus, 'Nuthin' or 'Nathin' or 'Nothing*' where these terms refer to a physical something and then give us their theory about that.  But if they did this, then they wouldn't be able to play the silly-ass game they are playing, which is to waffle between 'nothing' as understood by everyone who is not a sophist and  who understands the question 'Why is there something rather than nothing?' and 'nothing' in their technical sense. If they stopped their waffling, however, they would not be able to extract any anti-theology out of their physics.  But that is the whole purpose of this scientistic nonsense, and the reason why Richard Dawkins absurdly compares Krauss' book to The Origin of the Species.

The latest on this topic seems to be Ross Andersen, Has Physics Made Philosophy and Religion Obsolete? This includes an interview with Krauss in which he responds to Albert. Some quotations from Krauss (which I may comment on tomorrow):

The religious question "why is there something rather than nothing," has been around since people have been around, and now we're actually reaching a point where science is beginning to address that question. [. . .]

 What's amazing to me is that we're now at a point where we can plausibly argue that a universe full of stuff came from a very simple beginning, the simplest of all beginnings: nothing. [. . .]

The fact that "nothing," namely empty space, is unstable is amazing. But I'll be the first to say that empty space as I'm describing it isn't necessarily nothing, although I will add that it was plenty good enough for Augustine and the people who wrote the Bible. For them an eternal empty void was the definition of nothing, and certainly I show that that kind of nothing ain't nothing anymore. [. . .]

What drove me to write this book was this discovery that the nature of "nothing" had changed, that we've discovered that "nothing" is almost everything and that it has properties. That to me is an amazing discovery. So how do I frame that? I frame it in terms of this question about something coming from nothing. And part of that is a reaction to these really pompous theologians who say, "out of nothing, nothing comes," because those are just empty words. [. . .]

 

Is Every Concrete Being Contingent?

A reader experiences intellectual discomfort at the idea of a being that is both concrete and necessary.  He maintains that included in the very concept concrete being is that every such being is concrete.  To put it another way, his claim is that it is an analytic or conceptual truth that every concrete being is contingent.  But I wonder what arguments he could have for such a view.  I also wonder if there are any positive arguments against it. 

1. We must first agree on some terminology.  I suggest the following definitions:

D1.  X is concrete =df x is possibly such that it is causally active/passive.  A concretum is thus any item of any category that can enter into causal relations broadly construed. 

D2. X is abstract =df X is not concrete.  An abstractum is thus any item that is causally inert.

D3. X is necessary =df X exists in all possible worlds. 

D4. X is contingent =df X exists in some but not all possible worlds.

The modality in question is broadly logical.

2. Now if this is what we mean by the relevant terms, then I do not see how it could be an analytic or conceptual  truth that every concrete being is contingent.   No amount of analysis of the definiens of (D1) yields the idea that a concrete being must be contingent.  God is concrete by (D1), but nothing in (D1) rules out God's being necessary.

3.  Off the top of my head, I can think of three arguments to the conclusion that everything concrete is contingent, none of which I consider compelling.

Everything concrete is physical
Nothing physical is necessary
Ergo
Nothing concrete is necessary
Ergo
Everything concrete is contingent.

The second premise is true, but what reason do we have to accept the first premise? 

Whatever we can conceive of as existent we can conceive of as nonexistent
Whatever we can conceive of is possible
Ergo
Everything is such that its nonexistence is possible
Ergo
Everything is contingent
Ergo
Everything concrete is contingent.

One can find the first premise in Hume.  I believe it is correct.  Everything, or at least everything concrete, is such that its nonexistence is thinkable, including God.  By 'thinkable' I mean 'thinkable without logical contradiction.' But what reason do I have to accept the second premise?  Why should my ability to conceive something determine what is possible in reality apart from me, my mind, and its conceptual powers?    If God is necessary, and exists, then he exists even if I can conceive him as not existing.

Nothing is such that its concept C entails C's being instantiated
A necessary being is one the concept C of which entails C's being instantiated
Ergo
Nothing  is necessary.

The first premise is true, or at least it is true for concrete beings.  But what reason do we have to accept the second premise?  I reject that definition.  A necessary being is one the nonexistence of which is possible.  The existence of God is not a Fregean mark (Merkmal) of the concept God. 

Is there some other argument? I would like to know about it.

Saturday Night at the Oldies: Levon Helm and Dick Clark

Both passed on this last week, Helm at 71, Clark at 82.  Here is part of a fine tribute to Helm:

He was a river of American popular music. Whatever you call it, roots music, Americana, R&B, rockabilly, gospel, country soul, he kept its rhythm and sang it as well as any American musician ever has. We heard all of it in that soulful howl of his lamenting the missing Ophelia and the soul-crushed Confederate soldier, and the temptations and ravages of the road.

[. . .] We’re a hell of a musical country. We’re a people with a soundtrack. The wind whistling through the pines and jackhammers tearing up concrete, guitars and fiddles in the subway, hip-hop on the corner, blues down the alley, “a saxophone in some far off place,” a flute in the desert.

Whatever levees we build between us, by color, class, creed or politics, the river overflows them. In the city, out in the country, on the plains or in the projects, we pine and dream and cry and love to some strain of American music that is connected to every other strain of American music. Levon showed us that, and made us want to sing along with him on his ramble.

Up on Cripple Creek
Chest Fever
The Weight
The Night They Drove Old Dixie Down.  A great piece of Americana.  "Like my father before me, I'm a working man/Like my brother before me, I took a rebel stand . . . ." Joan Baez's interpretation.
I Shall Be Released. With Dylan and a number of other luminaries.
Evangeline. With EmmyLou Harris.
When I Paint My Masterpiece.  Tune written by Dylan.

"They'll be rockin' on Bandstand, Philadelphia, PA" in Chuck Berry's Sweet Little Sixteen is a reference to Dick Clark's American Bandstand.