Author: Bill Vallicella

Ron Paul and Libertarian Extremism

Ron Paul made a strong showing in Iowa last night despite his coming in third behind Santorum (second) and Romney (first).  But there is no way that Paul will receive the Republican nomination. His irresponsible foreign policy positions alone disqualify him.  You may disagree with that, but most agree with me, and that includes the better pundits such as Krauthammer.  So Paul's electability is zero.  It is too bad because Paul and libertarians generally have many good ideas which serve as correctives to the socialist drift of the country and can help us move back in the right direction towards limited government, self-reliance, and individual responsibility.  But libertarians cannot seem to control their tendency towards extremism.  This is why the Libertarian Party will always be a losertarian party.  Paul had the good sense to join the GOP, but he hasn't had the good sense to rein in the extremism that seems bred-in-the-bone with libertarians.

Paul is right that the the U.S.  is overextended abroad, but he can't seem to make the point in a moderate and nuanced way.  He has to say, foolishly and irresponsibly, that Iran is no threat.  And so he comes across as a crazy old man who cannot be trusted with the power of the presidency.  His 19th century isolationism was already outmoded in the 19th century.

The extremism of libertarians is connected with their being doctrinaire.  It is good to be principled but bad to be doctrinaire.  It requires the subtlety of the conservative mind to understand the difference and the dialectic between the two, a subtlety that is often lost on the adolescent mind of the libertarian who wants nice clear exceptionless principles to cling to.

I'll give an example of how libertarians, most if not all, are extreme and doctrinaire.  Individual liberty  is a very high value.  One of the pillars of this liberty is the right to private property. The defense of private property against collectivists is essential to both libertarian and conservative positions.  So far, so good. The tendency of the libertarian, however, is to absolutize the right to private property.  He has a hard time grasping that principles and values often butt up against competing principles and values that also have a serious claim on our respect.  So he cannot see that well-crafted eminent domain laws are right and reasonable.  He cannot see that there is something we can call the common good which is in tension with the right to private property. 

A second example is how libertarians typically absolutize the value of liberty while ignoring the claims of such opposing values as security and equality.  For more see my post, Liberty and Security.

The Irreducibility of Intentionality: An Argument From the Indeterminacy of the Physical

If it could be made to work, materialism would be attractive simply on grounds of parsimony. We all agree that entities, or rather categories of entity, ought not be multiplied beyond necessity.  There are those who will intone this Ockhamite principle with great earnestness as if they are advancing the discussion when of course they are not: the real issue concerns what is needed (necessary) for explanatory purposes.  If you agree that philosophers are in the business of explanation, then I hope you will agree that a good explanation must be categorially parsimonious but not at the expense of explanatory adequacy.

So we ought not introduce irreducibly mental items and/or abstracta if we can  get by with just material items By 'get by' I mean explain in adequate fashion all that needs to be explained: consciousness, self-consciousness including self-reference via the first-person singular pronoun, qualia, intentionality, conscience,  mystical and religious experience, the applicability of mathematics to the physical world, the normativity of logic, normativity in general, the existence of anything in the first place, the emergence of life . . . .

My main interest is negative: in showing that materialism doesn't work. Please don't respond by saying that some other theory (substance dualism, say) doesn't work either. For the issue is precisely: Does   materialism work? If theory T1 is explanatorily inadequate, its deficiencies cannot be made good by pointing out that T2 is also inadequate. This is an invalid argument: "Every alternative to materialism is inadequate; therefore we should embrace materialism despite its inadequacies." Wouldn't it be more reasonable under those circumstances to embrace no theory?

One more preliminary point. If materialism is explanatorily adequate, then we ought to embrace it, and dispense with God, the soul, and the denizens of the Platonic menagerie. For if materialism were adequate, there would be no reason to posit anything beyond the material. But if materialism is not adequate, then we do have reason for such posits.

The following argument is my interpretation of remarks made by Edward Feser in his Philosophy of Mind: A Short Introduction (One World, 2005), pp. 156-159)

1. Consider a representation such as a picture. You draw a picture of your mother. The picture represents her: it is of or about her, and it would remain about her even were she to cease to exist. The picture is a physical object with physical properties: the paper is of a certain size and shape and texture, the ink of a certain chemical composition, the lines have a definite thickness, etc. Now I would insist that these physical features cannot be that in virtue of which the picture represents your mother: they cannot be that in virtue of which the physical item is a representation. For it makes no sense to ascribe intrinsic semantic or intentional properties to merely physical items.  But even if I am wrong about this, there remains a problem for a materialist theory of representation.

2. Suppose a 'copycat' comes along and makes an EXACT copy of your picture of your mother. The copycat's intention is not to represent your mother; his intention is merely to represent your representation of your mother. Now there are two pictorial representations, call them R (the original) and R' (the copy). The question arises: Is R' a  representation of your mother, or is R' a representation  of R? Suppose a second copycat comes along and produces a second copy R''.   Does R'' represent R' or R or your mother? The situation is obviously iterable ad infinitum.

3. Clearly, there is a difference between saying that R' represents your mother, a human being, and saying that R' represents R, a nonhuman drawing of your mother. The reference is different in the two cases. But the reference is indeterminate if we go by the physical properties of the representations alone. Suppose I hand you two drawings of your mother, one an exact copy of the other, but you do not know which is the orignal and which is the copy. You cannot, by inspection of these drawings, tell which is which. Thus you cannot  determine the reference from the physical properties.

4. The point is generalizable to other types of representations.  Suppose I say 'cat' to refer to a cat and my copycat brother says 'cat' simply to copy me. If my brother mimics me perfectly, then it will be impossible from the physical properties of the two word-sounds to tell which refers to a cat and which does not.

Please do not say that we are both referring to a cat. For my copycat brother is a mere copycat: his intention is merely to reproduce the word-sound I made. To make it even clearer, replace my brother with a parrot who happens to be a perfect mimic. No one will say that the 'cat'-token produced by the parrot refers to a cat. The parrot is just an animate copy machine.

The same goes for any physical representation. Suppose a pattern of neural firings is taken to be a representation of X. An exact copy of  that pattern needn't be a representation of X; it could be a
representation of the original pattern. In general, no material representation of X is such that its physical properties suffice to make it a representation of X as opposed to a representation of a
representation of X.

5. Here is the argument:

P1. All thoughts have determinate objects.
P2. No purely material representation has a determinate object.
 —–
C. No thought is a purely material representation.

6. Let's consider an objection. "Granted, material representations on their own lack determinate reference, but that can be supplied by bringing in causal relations. Thus what makes a tokening of 'cat' refer to a cat rather than to a word is the fact that there is a causal chain starting with a furry critter and terminating with an utterance of 'cat.'"

But causal connections cannot secure determinacy of reference, as Hilary Putnam appreciates (Renewing Philosophy, Harvard UP, 1992, p. 23):

     One cannot simply say that the word "cat" refers to cats because
     the word is causally connected to cats, for the word "cat," or
     rather my way of using the word "cat," is causally connected to
     many things. It is true that I wouldn't be using "cat" as I do if
     many other things were different. My present use of the word "cat"
     has a great many causes, not just one. The use of the word "cat" is
     causally connected to cats, but it is also causally connected to
   &#0
160; the behavior of Anglo-Saxon tribes, for example. Just mentioning
     "causal connection" does not explain how one thing can be a
     representation of another thing, as Kant was already aware.

Related Post:  Representation and Causation, With Some Help from Putnam

Good, Better, Best

From the mail bag:

Is the way you interpret Voltaire's saying the way it was originally intended? I'm probably wrong here, but I always took the saying to mean this: a willingness to settle for what is "better" makes it likely that one won't acquire what is "good".
 
Good, better, best.  Positive, comparative, superlative.  "The best/better is the enemy of the good" means that oftentimes, not always, the pursuit of the best/better will prevent one from attaining the good.  The point is that if one is not, oftentimes, willing to settle for what is merely good, one won't get anything of value.  So I suggest that my reader has not understood Monsieur Voltaire's aperçu.
 
Example.  It will come down to Romney versus Obama.  If libertarians and conservatives fail to vote for Romney, on account of his manifold defects, then they run the risk of four more years of the worthless Obama.  Those libertarians and conservatives will have let the better/best become the enemy of the good.  They will have shown a failure to understand the human predicament and the politics pertaining to it.  He who holds out for perfection in  an imperfect world may end up with nothing.
 
You give the example of a spouse: try to hold out for a perfect wife, and you'll never marry at all. An example that would fit my reading would be, if one settles for a wife who's merely better than most of the available options, then one's apt to settle for a wife who isn't good. Sometimes it's better to refuse all the available options.
 
I agree that it is sometimes better to refuse all the available options.  If the choice is between Hitler and Stalin, then one ought to abstain! 
 
Maybe a better example would be, imagine I need to install plumbing in my house. Crappy plumbing is almost always going to be better than no plumbing. But should I (say, out of laziness) really settle for that, on the grounds that 'well, it's better than the nothing I had'?
 
Of course not.  Voltaire's point is not that one should settle for what is inferior when something better is available.  The point is that one should not allow the pursuit of unattainable perfection to prevent the attainment of something good but within reach.  Suppose someone were to say: I won't have any faucets or fixtures in my house unless they are all made of solid gold!  You will agree that such an attitude would be eminently unreasonable.
 
The Voltairean principle as I read it is exceedingly important in both personal life and in politics.
 
Perhaps you know some perfectionists.  These types never accomplish anything because they are stymied by the conceit that anything less than perfection is worthless.  I knew a guy in graduate school who thought that a dissertation had to be a magnum opus.  He never finished and dropped out of sight.
 
In politics there are 'all or nothing' types who demand the whole enchilada or none.  Some years back, when it looked as if it would be Giuliani versus Hillary, some conservative extremists said they would withhold their support from the former on the ground that he is soft on abortion.  But that makes no bloody sense given that under Hillary things would have been worse.
 
The 'all or nothing' mentality is typical of adolescents of all ages.  "We want the world and we want it . .  NOW!"

Le Mieux est L’Ennemi du Bien

Attributed to Voltaire. "The better is the enemy of the good."  The thought is perhaps better captured by "The best is the enemy of the good."  In an imperfect world it is folly to predicate action upon perfection.  Will you hold out for the perfect spouse?  Then you will remain alone.  And if you yourself are less than perfect, how can you demand perfection in others? 

Meditation on this truth may help conservatives contain their revulsion at their lousy choices. Obama, who has proven that he is a disaster for the country, got in in part because of conservatives who could not abide McCain.

Politics is a practical business. It is always about the lesser of evils, except when it is about the least of evils. It is not about being ideologically pure. It is about accomplishing something in a concrete situation in which holding out for the best is tantamount to acquiescing in the bad. Political choices are forced options in roughly William James' sense: he who abstains chooses willy-nilly. Not choosing the better amounts to a choice of the worse.

Each of  the Republican contenders has drawbacks.  But any of them would be better than Obama.  Suppose Romney is nominated.  He's a wishy-washy, flip-flopping pretty boy.  But he's electable and better than Obama. 

Neologisms, Paleologisms, and Grelling’s Paradox

'Neologism' is not a new word, but an old word. Hence, 'neologism' is not a neologism. 'Paleologism' is not a word at all; or at least it is not listed in the Oxford English Dictionary. But it ought to be a word, so I hereby introduce it. Who is going to stop me? Having read it and understood it, you have willy-nilly validated its introduction and are complicit with me.

Now that we have 'paleologism' on the table, and an unvast conspiracy going, we are in a position to see that 'neologism' is a paleologism, while 'paleologism' is a neologism. Since the neologism/paleologism classification is both exclusive (every word is either one or the other )and exhaustive (no word is neither), it follows that 'neologism' is not a neologism, and 'paleologism' is not a paleologism.

Such words are called heterological: they are not instances of the properties they express. 'Useless' and 'monosyllabic' are other examples of  heterological expressions in that 'useless' is not useless and 'monosyllabic' is not monosyllabic. A term that is not heterological is called autological. Examples include 'short' and 'polysyllabic.'  'Short' is short and 'polysyllabic' is polysyllabic. Autological terms are instances of the properties they express.

Now ask yourself this question: Is 'heterological' heterological? Given that the heterological/autological classification is exhaustive, 'heterological' must be either heterological or else autological. Now if the former, then 'heterological' is not an instance of the property it expresses, namely, the property of not being an instance of the property it expresses. But this implies that 'heterological' is autological. On the other hand, if 'heterological' is autological, then it is an instance of the property it expresses, namely the property of not being an instance of the property it expresses. But this implies that 'heterological' is heterological.

Therefore, 'heterological' is heterological if and only if it is not. This contradiction is known in the trade as Grelling's Paradox. It is named after Kurt Grelling, who presented it in 1908.

A New Year’s Resolution

I make it every year and I break it every year: Handle each piece of paper only once!

Let's say you have just come in with the mail. Without pausing to pour coffee or stroke the cat, fire up the shredder and open the trash barrel. Shred the credit card applications, pay the bills, file the financial statements. Deal with each piece of paper on the spot. When in doubt, discard.

For the New Year

One of the elements in my personal liturgy is a reading of the following passage every January 1st. I must have begun the practice in the mid-70s. 

Friedrich Nietzsche, The Gay Science, Book Four, #276, tr. Kaufmann:

For the new year. — I still live, I still think: I still have to live, for I still have to think. Sum, ergo cogito: cogito, ergo sum. Today everybody permits himself the expression of his wish and his dearest thought: hence I, too, shall say what it is that I wish from myself today, and what was the first thought to run across my heart this year — what thought shall be for me the reason, warranty, and sweetness of my life henceforth. I want to learn to see more and more as beautiful what is necessary in things; then I shall be one of those who makes things beautiful. Amor fati: let that be my love henceforth! I do not want to wage war against what is ugly. I do not want to accuse. Looking away shall be my only negation. And all and all and on the whole: someday I wish to be only a Yes-sayer.

Nietzsche found it very difficult to let looking away be his only negation. And so shall I.

Gunfire Tonight!

One of the exciting things about living out here in rural Arizona is that all too many local hombres love to greet the the New Year with a hail of gunfire aimed heavenward. It adds a nice Middle Eastern touch to the Copper State.
 
Part of the problem is the sad state of science education in these United States. There are people who do not understand that a falling projectile poses a threat. (I have actually met such people.) They   understand that they cannot catch with their bare hands a round fired at them; but they don't understand that that same round, falling on a human head from a sufficient height, will kill the head's unlucky possessor.

Let's see if we can understand the physics. If I jump from a chair to the floor, no problem. Same if I jump from a table to the floor. But I shrink back from neighbor Bob's suggestion that I jump from my roof to the ground. "Just kick away the ladder, like Wittgenstein, and jump  down." Nosiree Bob! But why should it be any different? The mass of my body remains invariant across the three scenarios. And the gravitational field remains the same. But the longer I remain falling in that field, the faster I move.

A body falling in the earth's gravitational field falls at the rate of 32 feet per second PER SECOND. Thus the body ACCELERATES.*  Now the momentum of a moving object –  which is roughly a measure of the amount of effort it would take to stop it from moving — is the product of its velocity and its mass. So a small mass like a bullet, left falling for a long enough time, will attain a high velocity and thus a high momentum, and so do a lot of damage to anything it comes in contact with, a human skull for example.

____________________

*Velocity is a vector, hence has a scalar and a directional component.  So it is possible that an object accelerate without 'speeding up.'  Consider a satellite orbiting the earth.  The scalar component of the velocity stays constant (more or less) but the object accelerates.  This sort of falling toward the earth  is not relevant to the case I am considering.

Searle, Subjectivity, and Objectivity

John Searle is a marvellous critic of  theories in the philosophy of mind, perhaps the best.  He makes all sorts of excellent points in his muscular and surly way.  But his positive doctrine eludes me, assuming it is supposed to be a coherent doctrine.  The problem may reside with me, of course.  But I am not ready to give up.

So I take yet another stab at making sense of Searle. (The exegetical equivalent of squaring the circle?) His aim is to find a via media between the Scylla of dualism and the Charybdis of materialism.   Dualism, whether a dualism of (kinds of) substances or a dualism of (kinds of) properties, makes of mind something mysterious and supernatural and therefore intolerable to naturalists. But materialism, as Searle understands it, issues in the conclusion that "there really isn't such a thing as as consciousness with a first-person, subjective ontology." (Mind, Language, and Society, Basic Books, 1998, p. 45)

What Searle wants to say is that there can be a natural science of consciousness, but one that does not end up by denying its existence, a natural science that is adequate to consciousness in its very   subjectivity. But (1) science is objective: it aims at an underlying reality 'beneath' subjective appearances. (2) Consciousness, however, is essentially subjective. It seems, therefore, that (3) there can be no natural science of consciousness.

To defeat this argument, Searle makes a distinction between epistemic subjectivity and ontological subjectivity, and a distinction between epistemic objectivity and ontological objectivity. Compare a pain and  a mountain. A pain has a subjective mode of existence whereas a mountain has an objective mode of existence. The difference is that the appearing of the pain is identical to the being of the pain unlike the mountain whose appearing and being are distinct. A pain cannot exist unless it is experienced, whereas a mountain can exist without being experienced. So far, so good.  But then Searle maintains that what is ontologically subjective can be studied by a science that is epistemically objective. If this is right, then the argument above falls victim to a failure to distinguish the two senses of 'subjectivity' and the two senses of 'objectivity.'   Here is the argument again:

1. Science is objective:  it aims at an underlying reality 'beneath' subjective appearances.
2. Consciousness is essentially subjective.
Therefore
3. There can be no natural science of consciousness.

Searle's contention is that there is nothing to prevent a science that is epistemically objective from studying consciousness which is ontologically subjective. Here is the crucial passage (ML&S, pp. 44-45):

     The pain in my toe is ontologically subjective, but the statement
     "JRS now has a pain in his toe" is not epistemically subjective. It
     is a simple matter of (epistemically) objective fact, not a matter
     of (epistemically) subjective opinion. So the fact that
     consciousness has a subjective mode of existence does not prevent
     us from having an objective science of consciousness.

Searle's argument goes like this:

   4. The pain in JRS's toe is ontologically subjective.
   5. That JRS has a pain in his toe is a matter of epistemically
   objective fact.
   Therefore
   6. That consciousness has a subjective mode of existence is consistent
   with there being an epistemically objective science of it.

Although both premises are true, the conclusion does not follow from them. Searle is confusing the objective reality of his pain with its objective accessibility to science. This confusion is aided and
abetted by the ambiguity of 'object' and 'objective.' From the fact that the pain exists in itself and is in that sense objective, it does not follow that the pain is exhaustively knowable by science, that it
is an object of scientific knowledge.

Consider a different example. Mary says, "The room is cold!" Bill says, "The room is not cold." Clearly, there is no fact of the matter as to whether or not the room is cold or the opposite. It is a matter of perception: Mary feels cold, while hot-blooded Bill does not. The objective fact is that the room temperature is 68 degrees Fahrenheit, a fact  perceived differently by Bill and Mary.

Note that it is also an objective fact that Mary feels cold and that Bill does not. But how is it supposed to follow that Bill's sensation, or Mary's, are exhaustively understandable in natural-scientific terms? The fact that the sensations themselves exist in reality and not relative to perceivers does not show that they are wholly accessible to science.  It is precisely their "first-person ontology"  that keeps them from being wholly accessible to science. 

The mistake Searle is making is to think that what is objectively real (in the sense of that which exists in itself and not relative to perceivers) is exhausted by what is natural and therefore accessible to natural science. He mistakenly identifies reality with nature. It is undoubtedly true that sensations (and mental data generally) exist in observer-independent fashion: they are not mere appearances but   appearances in which appearance and reality coincide. Thus Searle is right to say that they are ontologically subjective. Searle is also right to say that this ontological subjectivity is consistent with mental data's existing in themselves and not merely for an observer.

But as far as I can see it is a howling non sequitur to conclude that mental data are objects of scientific knowledge. To be objectively real (in the sense of existing an sich and not merely for observers) is not the same as being an object of scientific knowledge. Beware the ambiguity of 'object'!  It appears that Searle has fallen victim to it.

But why does Searle mistakenly identify reality with the objects of scientific knowledge — especially given his clear insight into the ontological subjectivity of mental data? Because he is in the grip of
the IDEOLOGY of scientific naturalism. This prevents him from properly exploiting his insight. But to make this allegation stick will require further citations and considerations.

My Searle posts are in the aptly-named  Searle category.

Articles by Alvin Plantinga

Here are twenty articles by Alvin Plantinga, a philosopher who needs no introduction to the readers of this weblog. (HT: Mark Anderson) 

A Response To Pope John Paul II's Fides Et Ratio
Advice To Christian Philosophers
An Evolutionary Argument Against Naturalism
Augustinian Christian Philosophy
Christian Philosophy at the End of the 20th Century
Christian Scholarship: Nature
Christian Scholarship: Need
Darwin, Mind and Meaning
Evolution, Neutrality, and Antecedent Probability
Intellectual Sophistication and Basic Belief in God
Methodological Naturalism: Part 1
Methodological Naturalism: Part 2
Naturalism Defeated
On Christian Scholarship
On Rejecting the Theory of Common Ancestry
Theism, Atheism, and Rationality
Truth, Omniscience, and Cantorian Arguments
Two Dozen or so Theistic Arguments
Two (Or More) Kinds of Scripture Scholarship
When Faith and Reason Clash: Evolution and the Bible

More on Naturalism and Nihilism

A reader comments:

You say: "I would argue that a naturalist/physicalist/materialist ought to be a moral nihilist, and that when these types fight shy of moral nihilism that merely shows an inability or unwillingness on their part to appreciate the logical consequences of their own doctrine, or else some sort of psychological compartmentalization. "
 
I agree with you that the naturalist/materialist/physicalist ought – intellectually ought – to be a moral nihilist. Of course, that's not a very popular position. So aren't we left with the case where the naturalist/materialist/physicalist 'ought' to pretend to be otherwise? In other words, when we see someone like Hitchens talking about moral oughts, is this necessarily a case of either compartmentalization or contradiction? What about the other option: they're lying, because what's important is advancing an agenda. After all, moral nihilism doesn't compel one to be up front about one's moral nihilism.
The reader agrees that naturalism logically requires moral nihilism.  That it does is not obvious and requires argument. A naturalist might try to argue that objective values either supervene upon, or emerge from, pure natural facts.  A huge topic!  For one thing, it depends on exactly what sort of naturalism is under discussion.  A nonreductive naturalist might escape the entailment, assuming he can make sense of nonreductivism, and good luck with that.   But surely an eliminativist naturalist would not.  So it seems obvious that eliminativist naturalism does entail moral nihilism.  We can raise our question with respect to a naturalist of this stripe.
 
So, assuming that some versions of naturalism do entail moral nihilism, what ought we say about the naturalist proponent of one of these versions who refuses to accept the consequence?
 
I suggested that there are two options:  either he is simply being logically inconsistent, something I wouldn't put past a 'public intellectual,'  or he is compartmentalizing.  (I saw a show last night on TV about one 'Mad Dog' Sullivan, mafia hit man.  He was a good husband and father when he wasn't gunning people down in cold blood.  He'd walk into a bar, shoot his victim through the head, and calmly walk out.  He has about 20-30 murders to his 'credit.'  He pulled off the compartmentalization by telling himself that his crimes were just 'business.'  The most depressing bit came at the end when his wife and two sons insisted that Sullivan was "a good man.")
 
My reader suggests a third option: (some) naturalists are just lying. They see what their naturalism entails, and they are not compartmentalizing.  They are lying to forward their agenda.  After all, a fully self-aware moral nihilist would not consider truth to be a an objective value, and so could not have any moral scruples about lying.
 
I think my reader made a good point.  If you are an eliminativist naturalist, and do not accept  moral nihilism as a logical consequence of your naturalism, then you are either being logically inconsistent, or you are a self-deceived compartmentalizer, or you are a lousy no good liar!
 
You can guess what my strategy will be with respect to the other naturalisms.  I will test whether or not they collapse into eliminativism in the end.