Author: Bill Vallicella

Material Composition and Modal Discernibility

(For David Brightly, whom I hope either to convince or argue to a standoff.)

Suppose God creates ex nihilo a bunch of Tinker Toy pieces at time t suitable for assembly into various (toy) artifacts such as a house and a fort. A unique classical mereological sum — call it 'TTS' — comes into existence 'automatically' at the instant of the creation ex nihilo of the TT pieces. (God doesn't have to do anything in addition to creating the TT pieces to bring TTS into existence.) Suppose further that God at t assembles the TT pieces (adding nothing and subtracting nothing) into a house. Call this object 'TTH.' So far we have: the pieces, their sum, and the house. Now suppose that at t* (later than t) God annihilates all of the TT pieces. This of course annihilates TTS and TTH. During the interval from t to t* God maintains TTH in existence.

I set up the problem this way so as to exclude 'historical' and nonmodal considerations and thus to make the challenge tougher for my side. Note that TTH and TTS are spatially coincident, temporally coincident, and such that every nonmodal property of the one is also a nonmodal property of the other.  Thus they have the same size, the same shape, the same weight, etc. Surely the pressure is on to say that TTH = TTS? Surely my opponents will come at me with their battle-cry, 'No difference without a difference-maker!' There is no constituent of TTH that is not also a constituent of TTS. So what could distinguish them?

Here is an argument that TTH and TTS are not identical:

1. NecId: If x = y, then necessarily, x = y.

2. If it is possible that ~(x = y), then ~(x = y). (From 1 by Contraposition)

3. If it is possible that TTS is not TTH, then TTS is not TTH. (From 2, by Universal Instantiation)

4. It is possible that TTS is not TTH. (God might have assembled the parts into a fort instead of a house or might have left them unassembled.)

5. TTS is not TTH. (From 3, 4 by Modus Ponens)

If you are inclined to reject the argument, you must tell me which premise you reject. Will it be (1)? Or will it be (4)?

Your move, David.

Dale Tuggy Pays Me a Visit; Belief Versus Acceptance

Dale Tuggy was kind enough yesterday to drive all the way from Tucson to my place in the foothills of the Superstition Mountains.  He came on short notice and late in the day but we managed to pack in more than six hours of nonstop conversation on a wide range of philosophical and theological topics.  He was still going strong when, two hours after my bedtime, I had to send him on his way.

Talk got  on to mysterianism, of course, and his ongoing debate with James Anderson.  Dale made a distinction that I hadn't considered, namely, one between belief and acceptance.  My tendency up to now has been to identify believing that p with accepting that p.  Up to now I thought I should make a four-fold distinction: Accept, Reject, Suspend, Withhold. 

For the distinction between belief and acceptance, see Raimo Tuomela, Belief Versus Acceptance.

I repaid Dale for his gift of the belief vs. acceptance distinction by pointing out the distinction (or  putative distinction) between supension and withholding which I borrow from Benson Mates:

Benson Mates, The Skeptic Way, Oxford UP, 1996, p. 5: ". . . the characteristic attitude of the Pyrrhonists is one of aporia, of being at a a loss, puzzled, stumped, stymied." Aporia is not doubt. Doubt implies understanding, but aporia is a lack of understanding. The modern skeptic may doubt, but not the ancient skeptic.

Connected with this is a distinction between epoché as the withholding of assent and suspension of judgment. One can withhold assent from an assertion without granting that it makes sense; but if one suspends judgment then one has a clear propositional sense before one's mind which one neither affirms nor denies. See Mates, p. 32. A good distinction! Add it to the list.

So, strictly speaking, aporia is not doubt and epoché is not suspension of judgment. Close but not the same.

Chris Hedges on Pornography

Yesterday I said that there are some decent liberals.  Having listened to a good chunk of a three-hour C-SPAN 2 interview with Chris Hedges this morning, I would say he is a good example of one.  On some issues he agrees with conservatives, pornography being one of them.  Both liberals and libertarians have to lot to answer for on this score.  That the freedom of speech clause of the First Amendment could be so tortured as to justify pornography shows their lack of common sense and basic moral sense.  This is made worse by the absurd interpretation they put upon the Establishment Clause of the same amendment which they take as sanctioning the complete expulsion of religion from the public square when it is religion that delivers in popular form the morality the absence of which allows the spread of soul-destroying pornography. Hedges has the sense, uncommon on the Left, to understand that the spread of this rot is a major factor in our decline as a nation.

The Victims of Pornography is a an excerpt from his latest book, Empire of Illusion: The End of Literacy and the Triumph of Spectacle.  (What a great title!)

And another thing.  If liberals care about women, how can they defend pornography?  Apparently they care only up to the point where it would cost them some agreement with conservatives who they hate more than they love women.  Similarly, liberals are all for women, so long as they are not conservative women, as witness the unspeakably vicious attacks on Sarah Palin and Michelle Bachmann.  Ed Schultz,  prime-time scumbag, the other night was mocking Michelle Bachmann and gloating over her withdrawal from the presidential race.  If he had an ounce of decency he would have praised her for being in the arena and participating courageously in the grueling process while respectfully disagreeing with her positions.  But respect and decency are what you cannot expect from leftist scum of his ilk.  You think my calling him a scumbag is too harsh?  Then read this.

American Digest

A tip of the New Year's hat to the proprietor of American Digest for his link to my recent post on the paradoxes of illegal immigration.  Via his site I came to the Powerline post, A Week's Worth of Self-Defense.  For repelling a home invasion, and separating soul from body in a manner most efficient, there is nothing quite like a shot gun loaded with double aught buck shot.

Speaking of home invasions, there was one in Mesa, Arizona recently.  The invader shot to death a young mother who was alone except for her infant and her grandfather.  A reporter described it as a "home invasion gone badly."

As opposed to what, a home invasion that went well?  And what would that be, one in which there was only a rape, and terrorization of the occupants of the house, and property damage, and the stealing of property?

One more reason to oppose liberals is that they have a casual attitude towards criminal behavior, an attitude betrayed by the sort of egregious and widespread misuse of language just cited. 

For more on the casual attitude towards crime, with a link to the inimitable Dalrymple, see Britain and the Barbarians.

Paradoxes of Illegal Immigration

Philosophers hate a contradiction, but love a paradox. There are paradoxes everywhere, in the precincts of the most abstruse as well as in the precincts of the prosaic. Here are eight paradoxes of illegal immigration suggested to me by Victor Davis Hanson. The titles and formulations are my own. For good measure, I add a ninth, of my own invention.

The Paradox of Profiling. Racial profiling is supposed to be verboten. And yet it is employed by American border guards when they nab and deport thousands of illegal border crossers. Otherwise, how could they pick out illegals from citizens who are merely in the vicinity of the border? How can what is permissible near the border be impermissible far from it in, say, Phoenix? At what distance does permissibility transmogrify into impermissibility? If a border patrolman may profile why may not a highway patrolman? Is legal permissibility within a state indexed to spatiotemporal position and variable with variations in the latter?

The Paradox of Encroachment. The Federal government sues the state of Arizona for upholding Federal immigration law on the ground that it is an encroachment upon Federal jurisdiction. But sanctuary cities flout Federal law by not allowing the enforcement of Federal immigration statutes. Clearly, impeding the enforcement of Federal laws is far worse than duplicating and perhaps interfering with Federal law enforcement efforts. And yet the Feds go after Arizona while ignoring sanctuary cities. Paradoxical, eh?

The Paradox of Blaming the Benefactor. Millions flee Mexico for the U.S. because of the desirability of living and working here and the undesirability of living in a crime-ridden, corrupt, and impoverished country. So what does Mexican president Felipe Calderon do? Why, he criticizes the U.S. even though the U.S. provides to his citizens what he and his government cannot! And what do many Mexicans do? They wave the Mexican flag in a country whose laws they violate and from whose toleration they benefit.

The Paradox of Differential Sovereignty and Variable Border Violability. Apparently, some states are more sovereign than others. The U.S., for some reason, is less sovereign than Mexico, which is highly intolerant of invaders from Central America. Paradoxically, the violability of a border is a function of the countries between which the border falls.

The Paradox of Los Locos Gringos. The gringos are crazy, and racist xenophobes to boot, inasmuch as 70% of them demand border security and support AZ SB 1070. Why then do so many Mexicans want to live among the crazy gringos?

The Paradox of Supporting While Stiffing the Working Stiff. Liberals have traditionally been for the working man. But by being soft on illegal immigration they help drive down the hourly wages of the working poor north of the Rio Grande. (As I have said in other posts, there are liberal arguments against illegal immigration, and here are the makings of one.)

The Paradox of Penalizing the Legal while Tolerating the Illegal. Legal immigrants face hurdles and long waits while illegals are tolerated. But liberals are supposed to be big on fairness. How fair is this?

The Paradox of Subsidizing a Country Whose Citizens Violate our Laws. "America extends housing, food and education subsidies to illegal aliens in need. But Mexico receives more than $20 billion in American remittances a year — its second-highest source of foreign exchange, and almost all of it from its own nationals living in the United States." So the U.S. takes care of illegal aliens from a failed state while subsidizing that state, making it more dependent, and less likely to clean up its act.

The Paradox of the Reconquista. Some Hispanics claim that the Southwest and California were 'stolen' from Mexico by the gringos. Well, suppose that this vast chunk of real estate had not been 'stolen' and now belonged to Mexico. Then it would be as screwed up as the rest of Mexico: as economically indigent, as politically corrupt, as crime-ridden, as drug-infested. Illegal immigrants from southern Mexico would then, in that counterfactual scenario, have farther to travel to get to the U.S., and there would be less of the U.S. for their use and enjoyment. The U.S. would be able to take in fewer of them. They would be worse off. So if Mexico were to re-conquer the lands 'stolen' from it, then it would make itself worse off than it is now. Gaining territory it would lose ground — if I may put paradoxically the Paradox of the Reconquista.

Exercise for the reader: Find more paradoxes!

Reduction, Elimination, and Material Composition

Yesterday I wrote,  "And yet if particular a reduces to particular b, then a is nothing other than b, and is therefore identical to b." This was part of an argument that reduction collapses into elimination.  A reader objects: "I am not sure that this is an accurate definition of reduction." 

He gives an argument having to do with material composition.  I'll put the argument in my own way, so as to strengthen it and make it even more of a challenge for me.

1. Whether or not minds are physically reducible, physical reductionism is surely true of some things, statues for example.  A statue is reducible to the matter that composes it, a hunk of bronze, say.  No one is a statue-hunk dualist.  It is not as if there are two things in the same place, the statue and the hunk of bronze.  Nor is anyone an eliminativist when it comes to statues.There are such things, but what they are is just hunks of matter. We avoid both dualism and eliminativism by adopting reductionism.

2. But surely the matter of the statue might have been configured or worked in some other way to make a different statue or a non-statue.  Before the sculptor went to work on it, the hunk of bronze was just a hunk, and after it became a statue it could have reverted  back to being a mere hunk if it were melted down.

Therefore

3. The statue and the hunk differ property-wise:  the hunk, but not the statue, has the property of existing at times at which the statue does not exist.  And at every time at which both hunk and statue exist, the hunk, but not the statue, has the modal property of being possibly such as to be a non-statue. 

Therefore

4. By the indiscernibility of Identicals, statue and hunk are not identical.

Therefore

5. The statue is reducible to its constituent matter but not identical to it. (By 1, 4)

Therefore

6.  It is not the case that if particular a reduces to particular b, then a is identical to b.

This is an impressive argument, but I don't see that it shows that one can have reduction without identity of the reduced to the reducer.  I take the argument as further evidence of the incoherence of the notion of the reduction of one particular to another.  The first premise, though plausible, is not obviously true. What's more, it seems inconsistent with the second premise.  I have argued many times before that in cases like these, statue and lump, fist and hand, brick house and bricks, the thing and its matter differ property-wise and so cannot be identical.  They are both temporally and modally discernible.  If fist and hand cannot be numerically identical, then they must be numerically distinct.  When I take my hand and make a fist of it, the hand does not cease to exist, but something new comes into existence, a fist.  Hand and fist, as long as both exist, are two numerically different things occupying exactly the same spatiotemporal position.  Admittedly, that sounds strange.  Nevertheless, I claim here is just as much reason to be a hand-fist dualist as there is to be a fist-to-hand reductionist.

One could also be an eliminativist.  Amazingly, Peter van Inwagen — no slouch of a philosopher; you don't get a chair if you slouch — is an eliminativist about artifacts such as the house built by the Wise Pig.  See here. 

Perhaps I can drive the reductionist onto the horns of a dilemma.  Either fist and hand are identical or they are not.  They cannot  be identical because they differ property-wise.  If two things are not numerically identical, however, then they are numerically different.  But if fist and hand are numerically different, then the fist does not reduce to the hand.

So I persist in my view that reduction is an incoherent notion.  There is no viable via media between dualism and eliminativism.  

Jaegwon Kim on Reductionism and Eliminativism

I've been studying Jaegwon Kim's Physicalism, or Something Near Enough (Princeton UP, 2005).  Here are some notes and questions.

1. It's clear that mental causation must be saved.  If Kim is right that nonreductive physicalism is not viable, then by his lights our only hope of saving mental causation is via "physical reductionism." (159).  It is of course easy to see how such reductionism, if true, would save mental causation.  Surely my desire for a beer together with my belief that there is beer in the reefer are part of the etiology of my getting out of my chair and heading to the kitchen.  If beliefs and desires are physical states, then there is no in-principle difficulty in understanding the etiology of my behavior.  Reductionism insures the physical efficacy of the mental.  What was a thorny problem on dualist approaches is no problem at all for the physical reductionist. 

2. At this point some of us are going to wonder whether reductionism collapses into eliminativism.  I tend to think that it does.  Kim of course must disagree.  His project is to find safe passage between  nonreductive physicalism and eliminativism.  But first I want to concede something to Kim.

3. Kim rightly points out (160) that we cannot assume that the mental cannot be physical in virtue of the very meaning of 'mental.'  We cannot assume that 'mental' means 'nonphysical.'  The following argument is not compelling and begs the question against the physicalist:

Beliefs and desires are mental
Whatever is mental is nonphysical
Ergo
Beliefs and desires are not physical.

The physicalist finds nothing incoherent in the notion that what is mental could also be physical.  So he will either reject the second premise, or, if he accepts it, deny the first and maintain that beliefs and desires are not mental in the sense in which his opponents think they are.  It seems clear, then, that one cannot mount a merely semantic argument against the physicalist based on a preconceived  meaning of 'mental.'

4.  Is my present state of consciousness real and yet reducible to a pattern of electrical activity in a network of neurons?  Can we secure reduction without elimination?  Reductionist: there are Fs but what they are are Gs.  Eliminativist: There are no Fs.  There at least appears to be a difference in these two sorts of claims.  Kim claims that "There is an honest difference between elimination and conservative reduction."  (160) Phlogiston got eliminated; temperature and heat got reduced.  Witches got eliminated; the gene got reduced. The reductionist thinks he can secure or "conserve" the reality of the Fs while reducing them to the Gs.  In the present case, the physical reductionist in the philosophy of mind thinks that he can maintain both that mental states are real and that they reduce to physical states.

5.  Let's note two obvious logical points.  The first is that identity is a symmetrical relation.  The second is that reduction is asymmetrical.  Thus,

I.  Necessarily, for any x, y, if x = y, then y = x.
R. Necessarily, for any x, y, if x reduces to y, then it is not the case that y reduces to x.

It is clear, then, that identity and reduction are not the same relation.  And yet if particular a reduces to particular b, then a is nothing other than b, and is therefore identical to b.  If you think about it, reduction is a strange and perhaps incoherent notion.  For if a reduces to b, a is identical to b, but, since reduction is asymmetrical,  b is not identical to a!  Reduction is asymmetrical identity.  Amd that smacks of radical incoherence.   This is what inclines me to say that reduction collapses into elimination.  For if a reduces to b, and is therefore identical to b, while b is not identical to a, then it follows that there simply is no a.  And so if my present mental state reduces to a pattern of electrical activity in a network of neurons, then my mental state does not exist; all that exists is the electrical activity.

6.  Kim wants to have it both ways at once.  He wants mental states to be both real and reducible.  He wants to avoid both eliminativism and dualism. My claim is that it is impossible to have it both ways.  Kim thinks that reduction somehow "conserves" that which is reduced.  But how could it?  If my desire for a beer is nothing other than a brain state, then then it is a purely physical state and everything mental about it has vanished.  If 'two' things are identical, then there is only one thing, and if you insist that that one thing is physical, then it cannot also be mental.

7.  My present thinking about a dog is intrinsically intentional, intrinsically object-directed.  But no physical state is intrinsically object-directed.  So, by the Indiscernibility of Identicals, my present thinking about a dog simply cannot be identical to any brain state, and so cannot reduce to any brain state. Kim of course thinks that intentional properties are functionalizable.  I have already  argued against that view here.  Whatever causal role my thinking about a dog plays in terms of behavioral inputs and outputs, causal role occupancy cannot be make makes my thinking  intentional.  For it is intentional intrinsically, not in virtue of causal relations.

8. Kim speaks of the functional reducibility of intentional/cognitive properties.  But surely it is not properties that need reducing but particular meetal acts.  Properties are not conscious of anything.  Nor are causal roles.  It is the realizers of the roles that are bearers of intentionality, and it simply makes no sense to think of these as purely physical.

9. Once one starts down the reductive road there is no stopping short of eliminativism.  The latter, however, is surely a reductio ad absurdum of physicalism as I explain in this post on Rosenberg's eliminativism. 

Xavier Ortiz Monasterio (1926-2011): An Existentialist Remembered

My former colleague Xavier Monasterio died last year on this date.  Curiously, January 4th was also the date of death of his philosophical hero Albert Camus.  This being a weblog, and thus an online journal of the personal and the impersonal, I didn't want the day to pass without a brief remembrance of the man.  I'll say a little today and perhaps supplement it later on.

Continue reading “Xavier Ortiz Monasterio (1926-2011): An Existentialist Remembered”

Dragon NaturallySpeaking

I saw an advertisement for this voice-recognition software.  I was intrigued and was thinking of asking Mike V., a relatively young whippersnapper who is en rapport with the latest gadgetry.  (When he visits my house he makes fun of my Jurassic electronics.)  But then I wondered how useful such a speech recognition application could be to someone who writes about arcane topics and uses high-falutin words.  Would the spoken 'animadversion' display as 'animal diversion'?  Would 'transcendental deduction of the categories' appears as 'transcontinental deportation of catnip'?  Would 'inverted qualia objection' show as 'involuted quails of Omaha'?

This morning I was pleased to hear from our old friend Vlastimil Vohanka who is also wondering about the utility to philosophers of DNS.  He conveys a remark by Baylor philosopher Jon Kvanvig on the latter's Facebook page:

"newest writing venture: I'm now composing using Dragon Naturally Speaking. It is amazingly accurate, beginning by trolling through everything on my hard drive to find appropriate vocabulary. So it recognizes 'Chisholm', 'Fregean', 'Chisholmian', as well as all the standard vocabulary in epistemology. And writing is so much faster: 5000 words in about 2 hours."
This is amazing. It implies that, were I to speak my neologism 'paleologism,' it would recognize and reproduce it and not spit out something like 'pal of loggers.' 
 
Vlastimil wanted my opinion of the DNS software, but I haven't used it so cannot comment.  If any reader has used it and wants to comment the ComBox is open.  Comments are moderated and won't appear until I have approved them.  Any that are off-topic will be summarily nixed.