They occupy, but they themselves are vacant.
Author: Bill Vallicella
Against Irrationalism
The problem is not that we conceptualize things, but that we conceptualize them wrongly, hastily, superficially. The problem is not that we draw distinctions, but that we draw too few distinctions or improper distinctions. Perhaps in the end one must learn to trace all distinctions back to the ONE whence they spring; but that is in the end. In the beginning people must be taught to conceptualize, discriminate, and distinguish.
A superficial Zen training that attacks the discursive intellect in those who have never properly developed it does a great disservice.
Against Functionalism in the Philosophy of Mind: Argument One
In my last philosophy of mind post on property dualism I posed a problem:
My problem, roughly, is that I don't understand how a physical particular (a brain, a region of a brain, a brain event, or state, or process) can instantiate one or more irreducibly mental properties. Why should there be a problem? Well, if a physical particular is exhaustively understandable in terms of physics (and the sciences based on it) then there is just nothing irreducibly mental about it, in which case it cannot instantiate an irreducibly mental property.
At the end of that post I provided an answer to that question:
Mental properties are functional properties. So when we say that x, a brain event say, has a mental property, all we mean is that it stands in certain causal relations to sensory inputs, behavioral outputs, and intervening brain events. So what makes the brain event mental is simply the relations in which it stands to inputs, outputs and other brain events. Once you grasp this, then you grasp that the brain event can be wholly physical in nature despite its having a mental property. Mental properties are not intrinsic but relational.
The answer, in short, is that mental properties are not intrinsic properties. But then I wrote,
Unfortunately, this won't do. Felt sadness has an intrinsically mental nature that cannot be functionally characterized. A subsequent post will spell this out in detail.
This is the subsequent post.
Suppose Socrates Jones is in some such state as that of perceiving a tree. The state is classifiable as mental as opposed to a physical state like that of his lying beneath a tree. What makes a mental state
mental? That is the question.
The functionalist answer is that what makes a mental state mental is just the causal role it plays in mediating between the sensory inputs, behavioral outputs, and other internal states of the subject in question. The idea is not the banality that mental states typically (or even always) have causes and effects, but that it is causal role occupancy, nothing more and nothing less, that constitutes the
mentality of a mental state. The intrinsic nature of what plays the role is relevant only to its fitness for instantiating mental causal roles, but not at all relevant to its being a mental state.
Consider a piston in an engine. You can't make a piston out of chewing gum, but being made of steel is no part of what makes a piston a piston. A piston is what it does within the 'economy' of the engine. Similarly, on functionalism, a mental state is what it does. This allows, but does not entail, that a mental state be a brain or CNS state. It also allows, but does not entail, that a mental state be a state of a computing machine.
To illustrate, suppose my cat Zeno and I are startled out of our respective reveries by a loud noise at time t. Given the differences between human and feline brains, presumably man and cat are not in type-identical brain states at t. (One of the motivations for functionalism was the breakdown of the old type-type identity theory of Herbert Feigl, U. T. Place. J. J. C. Smart, et al.) Yet both man and cat are startled: both are in some sense in the same mental state, even though the states they are in are neither token- nor type-identical. The functionalist will hold that we are in functionally the same mental state in virtue of the fact that Zeno's brain state plays the same role in him as my brain state plays in me. It does the same mediatorial job vis-a-vis sensory inputs, other internal states, and behavioral outputs in me as the cat's brain state does in him.
On functionalism, then, the mentality of the mental is wholly relational. And as David Armstrong points out, "If the essence of the mental is purely relational, purely a matter of what causal role is played, then the logical possibility remains that whatever in fact plays the causal role is not material." This implies that "Mental states might be states of a spiritual substance." Thus the very feature of functionalism that allows mentality to be realized in computers and nonhuman brains generally, also allows it to be realized in spiritual substances if there are any.
Whether this latitudinarianism is thought to be good or bad, functionalism is a monumentally implausible theory of mind. There are the technical objections that have spawned a pelagic literature: absent qualia, inverted qualia, the 'Chinese nation,' etc. Thrusting these aside, I go for the throat, Searle-style.
Functionalism is threatened by a fundamental incoherence. The theory states that what makes a state mental is nothing intrinsic to the state, but purely relational: a matter of its causes and effects. In us, these happen to be neural. (I am assuming physicalism for the time being.) Now every mental state is a neural state, but not every neural state is a mental state. So the distinction between mental and nonmental neural states must be accounted for in terms of a distinction between two different sets of causes and effects, those that contribute to mentality and those that do not. But how make this distinction? How do the causes/effects of mental neural events differ from the causes/effects of nonmental neural events? Equivalently, how do psychologically salient input/output events differ from those that lack such salience?
Suppose the display on my monitor is too bright for comfort and I decide to do something about it. Why is it that photons entering my retina are psychologically salient inputs but those striking the back of my head are not? Why is it that the moving of my hand to to adjust the brightness and contrast controls is a salient output event, while unnoticed perspiration is not?
One may be tempted to say that the psychologically salient inputs are those that contribute to the production of the uncomfortable glare sensation, and the psychologically salient outputs are those that manifest the concomitant intention to make an adjustment. But then the salient input/output events are being picked out by reference to mental events taken precisely NOT as causal role occupants, but as exhibiting intrinsic features that are neither causal nor neural: the glare quale has an intrinsic nature that cannot be resolved into relations to other items, and cannot be identified with any brain state. The functionalist would then be invoking the very thing he is at pains to deny, namely, mental events as having more than neural and causal features.
Clearly, one moves in a circle of embarrassingly short diameter if one says: (i) mental events are mental because of the mental causal roles they play; and (ii) mental causal roles are those whose occupants are mental events.
The failure of functionalism is particularly evident in the case of qualia. Examples of qualia: felt pain, a twinge of nostalgia, the smell of burnt garlic, the taste of avocado. Is it plausible to say that such qualia can be exhaustively factored into a neural component and a causal/functional component? It is the exact opposite of plausible. It is not as loony as the eliminativist denial of quali, but it is close. The intrinsic nature of qualitative mental states is essential to them. It is that intrinsic qualitative nature that dooms functionalism.
I conclude that if the only way to render property dualism coherent is by construing mental properties as functional properties, then property dualism is untenable.
Saturday Night at the Oldies: Tim Hardin
What ever happened to Tim Hardin? Well, he died, in 1980, of a heroin overdose. But he left us some memorable songs. These are my favorites.
Black Sheep Boy If you love me, let me live in peace/Please understand/ That the black sheep can wear the golden fleece/And hold a winning hand.
Red Balloon This is a Small Faces cover, but good.
Justifying ‘No Problem of Philosophy is Soluble’
Earlier, I presented the following antilogism:
1. All genuine problems are soluble.
2. No problem of philosophy is soluble.
3. Some problems of philosophy are genuine.
I claimed that "(2) is a good induction based on two and one half millenia of philosophical experience." The inductive inference, which I am claiming is good, is not merely from 'No problem has been solved' to 'No problem will be solved'; but from the former to the modal 'No problem can be solved.' From a deductive point of view, this is of course doubly invalid. I use 'valid' and 'invalid' only in connection with deductive arguments. No inductive argument is valid. No news there.
Peter Lupu's objection, which he elaborated as best he could after I stuffed him with L-tryptophan-rich turkey and fixin's, was along the following lines. If the problems of philosophy are insoluble, then so is the problem of induction. This is the problem of justifying induction, of showing it to be rational. So if all the problems are insoluble, then we cannot ever know that inductive inference is rational. But if we cannot ever know this, then we cannot ever know that the inductive inference to (2) is rational. Peter concludes that this is fatal to my metaphilosophical argument which proceeds from (2) and (3) to the negation of (1). What he is maintaining, I believe, is that my argument is not rationally acceptable, contrary to what I stated, because (2) is not rationally acceptable.
Perhaps Peter's objection can be given the following sharper formulation.
(2) is either true or false. If (2) is true, then (2) is not rationally justifiable, hence not rationally acceptable, in which case the argument one of whose premises it is is not rationally acceptable. If, on the other hand, (2) is false, then the argument is unsound. So my metaphilosophical argument is either rationally unacceptable or unsound. Ouch!
I concede that my position implies that we cannot know that the inductive inference to (2) is rationally justified. But it might be rationally justified nonetheless. Induction can be a rational procedure even if we cannot know that it is or prove that it is. Induction is not the same as the problem of induction. If I am right, the latter is insoluble. But surely failure to solve the problem of induction does not show that induction is not rationally justified. Peter seems to be assuming the following principle:
If S comes to believe that p on the basis of some cognitive procedure CP, then S is rationally justified in believing that p on the basis of CP only if S has solved all the philosophical problems pertaining to CP.
I don't see why one must accept the italicized principle. It seems to me that I am rationally justified in believing that Peter is an Other Mind on the basis of my social interaction with him despite my not having solved the problem of Other Minds. It seems to me that I am rationally justified, on the basis of memory, that he ate at my table on Thursday night despite my not having solved all the problems thrown up by memory. And so on.
Property Dualism and Supervenience
A reader asked why I didn't mention supervenience in my recent posts on property dualism. He opines that "the notion was invented to make sense of the position you are arguing against." Let's see.
My Problem With Property Dualism Roughly Stated
I take a property dualist to be one who maintains all of the following propositions:
1. There are irreducibly mental properties.
2. There are irreducibly physical properties.
3. All particulars are physical particulars.
4. Some but not all particulars instantiate both irreducibly mental and irreducibly physical properties.
My problem, roughly, is that I don't understand how a physical particular (a brain, a region of a brain, a brain event, or state, or process) can instantiate one or more irreducibly mental properties. Why should there be a problem? Well, if a physical particular is exhaustively understandable in terms of physics (and the sciences based on it) then there is just nothing irreducibly mental about it, in which case it cannot instantiate an irreducibly mental property. I am making the following assumption:
A. If a nonrelational predicate P is true of a particular x, then there must be something in or about x that grounds P's applicability to x.
So if 'feels pain' is true of a physical particular, and 'feels pain' picks out an irreducibly mental property, then there must be something irreducibly mental about that physical particular. Otherwise there would be nothing in or about the particular that could render the predicate true of the particular. But if there is something irreducibly mental about a physical particular, then that particular is not physical in the sense of being exhaustively understandable in terms of physics.
I find (A) to be self-evident. For suppose you were to deny it. Then you would be countenancing the following: there is some particular x that instantiates a property P-ness even though the nature of x excludes P-ness. You would be countenancing, for example, an electron (which is course a negatively charged particle) which yet instantiates the property of being positively charged. If a particular has a an intrinsic (non-relational) property, then that property expresses what the particular is, its nature (in a broad sense of this term).
Now we have to see whether the notion of supervenience can help me with my problem.
Strong Supervenience
The problem for the nonreductive physicalist is that he must avoid both eliminativism and reductionism but without falling into epiphenomenalism, emergentism, or (of course) substance dualism. Epiphenomenalism cannot accommodate the fact that mental phenomena sometimes enter into the etiology of physical events, while emergentism and substance dualism leave physicalism behind. The problem is to somehow secure the reality, the causal efficacy, and the irreducibility of the mental while maintaining the dependence of the mental on the physical. Nice work if you can get it! What the physicalist needs, it seems, is a dualism of properties together with the idea that the mental properties somehow nonreductively depend on the physical ones. But how articulate this dependency relation?
Enter supervenience. The basic idea is that mental properties are not identical with, but merely supervene upon, physical properties in the way in which ethical properties have been thought (by G. E. Moore, R. M. Hare, and others) to supervene upon natural properties. Suppose A and B are both ethically good. It does not follow that there is any one natural, non-disjunctive, property with which goodness can be identified. Perhaps A is good in virtue of being brave and trustworthy, whereas B is good in virtue of being temperate and just. Goodness is in this sense "multiply realizable." A and B are both good despite the fact that their goodness is realized by different natural properties.
Nevertheless, (i) a person cannot be good unless there is some natural property in virtue of whose possession he is good, and (ii) if a person is good in virtue of possessing certain natural properties, then anyone possessing the same natural properties must also be good. Given that A-properties supervene upon B-properties, the "supervenience T-shirt" might read: "No A-property without a B-property" on the front; "same B-properties, same A-properties" on the back. As Jaegwon Kim puts it, "The core idea of supervenience as a relation between two families of properties is that the supervenient properties are in some sense determined by, or dependent upon, the properties on which they supervene." (Jaegwon Kim, "Epiphenomenal and Supervenient Causation," in Supervenience and Mind: Selected Philosophical Essays, Cambridge University Press, 1995, p. 98.)
Kim's preferred way of cashing this out is in terms of strong supervenience. Let A and B be families of properties closed under such Boolean operations as complementation, conjunction and disjunction. A strongly supervenes on B just in case:
(SS) Necessarily, for any property F in A, if any object x has F, then there exists a property G in B such that x has G, and necessarily anything having G has F.
Applying (SS) to physicalism, we may define the determination thesis of strong supervenience physicalism as the view that, necessarily, (i) for any mental property M, if x has M, then there is physical property P such that x has P, and (ii) necessarily, anything having P has M.
But how does this help me with my problem? If x has M and M is an irreducibly mental property, then, by assumption (A) above, x is at least in part mental, and not wholly physical where 'wholly physical' means 'exhaustively understandable in terms of physics and the sciences based on it.' This problem is not solved by telling me that x cannot have a mental property without having a physical property, and that anything having that physical property must have the mental property. For my problem is precisely how x, which is wholly physical, can have an irreducibly mental property in the first place.
One might respond along the following lines. "Look, the whole idea here is that mental properties are functional properties. So when we say that x, a brain event say, has a mental property, all we mean is that it stands in certain causal relations to sensory inputs, behavioral outputs, and intervening brain events. So what makes the brain event mental is simply the relations in which it stands to inputs, outputs and other brain events. Once you grasp this, then you grasp that the brain event can be wholly physical in nature despite its having a mental property. Mental properties are not intrinsic but relational."
Unfortunately, this won't do. Felt sadness has an intrinsically mental nature that cannot be functionally characterized. A subsequent post will spell this out in detail.
Besides, if the property dualist holds that mental properties are really relational, then, strictly speaking, he is not a property dualist. He is not maintaining that there are two sorts of properties, but that mentality consists of relations and that there are no monadic mental properties. Furthermore, his talk of irreducibility must mean only that that type-type identities fail, that for every mental property there is not one unique physical property with which it is identical. Irreducibility boils down to multiple realizability. Mental 'properties' are irreducible in that they are multiply realizable.
Kerouac’s ‘Lost’ First Novel Published
Being a 'completist,' I will of course secure a copy sooner or later. But I suspect that biographer Nicosia's literary judgment of The Sea is My Brother (reported in the linked story) is just.
Poor Jack barely scraped by while entangled in the mortal coil. But now that he is "free of that slaving meat wheel, safe in heaven, dead," his literary executors grow fat peddling every last remnant of his literary remains.
When fame comes, its sun shines equally on all of one's productions throwing their differential values into the shade.
Story here.
They Pay So Much for So Little
Update (11/27): I am told the sign is a fake. I suspected as much. Fake or not it makes an important point. The point being that (i) the Left has done much to destroy the universities, and (ii) government programs, e.g., federally insured loan programs, have done much to cause an education bubble. The cost of education nowadays is shockingly out of proportion to the value of what the student receives. This shows what happens when government interferes with the market. (This is not to say that I am opposed to all government regulation as so many liberals think. They think that if you are a conservative you must be a laissez-faire capitalist. That's just plain stupid, but par for the course for the typical liberal who is apparently unequipped to make a simple distinction between conservative and libertarian.)
Compare the education sector with the electronics sector. I paid a paltry $800 over a year ago for my current Hewlett-Packard computer with huge flat-screen montor . It's an amazing piece of equipment and unbelievably cheap given what I am getting. ( I paid around $2000 in less-inflated dollars in 1985 for an Apple II-c which was a piece of junk compared to this machine. No hard drive, a mere 128 kilobytes of RAM.) Why so cheap? Because of competition and market discipline.
It is not that big-government liberals intend to make things worse; the worsening is an unintended consequence of their foolish and ill-thought-out policies, policies that fail to take into consideration the realities of human nature. One such reality is that if you make it easy for people to borrow monstrous sums of money, they will follow the path of least resistance and do so. Another such reality is that the educational institutions will raise their tuitions and fees to absorb as much as they can of this easy money without any concern for what they are doing to the students' long-term financial health or to the country's.
In I Too am a Debt-Peon, Justin Smith reports that his first year in the graduate program at Columbia cost him $45,000 which he financed using federally-insured loans. $45 K! I don't know which is harder to believe, that any institution could get away with charging such an outrageous amount for a year's worth of courses in a subject which, noble and magnificent as it is, notoriously bakes no bread, or that anyone could be so stupid as to go $45 K into debt in pursuit of a degree in a subject which, magnificent and noble as it is, notoriously bakes no bread. Luckily for him, Smith managed to get funding for the rest of his graduate study, and even luckier, got a job.
But now he complains about having to pay back the debt that he freely and foolishly assumed, and says that he will do what he can to avoid repaying it, thereby stiffing the taxpayers that financed his foolish adventure.
The Policy of Stealing from the Productive
Family Dies When Small Craft Fails to Clear Superstition Mountain
These mountains I love are rugged and beautiful but unforgiving. A small craft departing from Mesa and heading east failed to gain sufficient altitude and slammed into the Flatiron part of Superstition Mountain on Wednesday evening, killing all aboard. Story here.
Property Dualism, the Red Ball Analogy, and Emergence
This post advances the discussion in the ComBox attached to Could Brains Have Mental Properties?
It would be very easy to be a property dualist in the philosophy of mind if one were also a substance dualist. What I am having trouble understanding is how a property dualist can be a substance monist. In contemporary discussions, the one category of substances is that of material substances. 'Property dualism,' then, is an abbreviated name for the position in the philosophy of mind according to which mental and physical properties are mutually irreducible — hence the dualism — but had by the only kind of substances there are, material substances. Hence the monism. But having employed the traditional jargon, I'll now drop the irridescent word 'substance' which will undoubtedly cause many to stumble and use 'particular' instead. A particular is an unrepeatable entity. It needn't be a continuant. Events and processes count as particulars.
To come directly to my difficulty. How can an irreducibly mental property be instantiated by a physical particular? An irreducibly mental property is one that is not identical with, or reducible to, any physical property. Examples of mental properties: being in pain; thinking about Thanksgiving dinner; having a blue sensation; wanting a cup of coffee. This post assumes that at least some mental properties are irreducibly mental. Various arguments have been given; this is not the place to rehearse them. An irreducibly physical property is one that is not identical with, or reducible to, any mental property. Examples of physical properties: impedance, ductility, motion, solubility, weighing 10 kg. I will assume that all physical properties are irreducibly physical. (It is not that I rule out idealism; it's that the goddess of blogging reminds me that brevity is the soul of blog.)
To further focus the question we need to exclude relational properties. Weaver's Needle has the property of being thought about by me now. So a physical particular has now an irreducibly mental property. But this is unproblematic because the property in question is relational: it does not affect the Needle in its intrinsic nature. But if my brain is what does the thinking in me, and I am thinking about Weaver's Needle, it is not so easy to understand how my brain, a physical thing, can have the irreducibly mental intrinsic property, thinking about Weaver's Needle. (If you think that is not an intrinsic property, substitute wanting a sloop, given that there is no particular sloop in existence that I want.)
So in what follows by 'irreducibly mental properties' I mean 'irreducibly mental intrinsic properties.'
My question is whether the following tetrad is consistent:
1. There are irreducibly mental properties.
2. There are irreducibly physical properties.
3. All particulars are physical particulars.
4. Some but not all particulars instantiate irreducibly mental and irreducibly physical properties.
You might think there is no problem. Color and shape properties are mutually irreducible. Yet some physical particulars instantiate both color and shape properties. A red ball is both red and spherical despite the mutual irreducibility of redness and sphericity. Imagine that the red ball is red all the way through and not red merely on its surface. This will preempt one from saying that the ball is red in virtue of a proper part of it being red.
So why can't mental and physical properties be had by one and the same physical particular? Doesn't the analogy show that the tetrad is consistent? Mental properties are to physical properties as color properties are to shape properties. Just as one and the same physical particular, a ball say, can be both red and spherical, one and the same particular, a brain (or a portion of a brain or an event or process in a brain) can be both located in a region of space and thinking about Boston or feeling nostalgic.
I will now argue that the analogy is hopeless.
A Point of Disanalogy
Colors and shapes are mutually irreducible, but they are also such that color properties cannot be instantiated without shape properties being instantiated, and vice versa. I am talking about colors and shapes in Sellars' "manifest image," colors and shapes as they appear to normal visual perceivers. No color is a shape; but it is also true that there are no colored particulars without shapes, and no shaped particulars without colors. This is a point of phenomenology. One cannot see a colored particular without seeing something that has some shape or other, and vice versa. (And this is so even if the particular is an after-image.) But only some material things are minds. So we have a disanalogy. Wherever a color property is instantiated, a shape property is instantiated, and wherever a shape property is instantiated, a color property is instantiated. But it is not the case that wherever a physical property is instantiated a mental property instantiated. There are plenty of physical particulars that lack mental features even if it is true that everything with mental features also has physical features. Why the asymmetry? This needs to be explained.
Mental Properties as Emergent Properties
Assuming that all particulars are physical particulars — that there are no unembodied or disembodied or possibly disembodied minds — why do only some particulars have mental properties? Probably the most plausible thing to say is that only some physical systems are sufficiently complex to 'give rise' to mentality. This implies that mental properties are emergent: they are system features that are not reducible to or explicable in terms of the properties of the parts of the system even when their causal interactions are taken into account.
Bear in mind that not every system feature is emergent. Suppose a wall is made of 1000 piled stones and nothing else, each stone weighing one lb. It follows that the system — the wall — weighs 1000 lbs. But the property of weighing 1000 lbs., though a property of the whole and not of any part, is not an emergent property. For it is determined by the properties of the parts. In a more complicated system, the parts causally interact in significant ways. (The stones in the wall interact too, but in insignificant ways.) Think of a wrist watch. The property of showing high noon, though a system property, is not an emergent property because it is determined by the properties and causal interactions of the parts.
An emergent property is one that is irreducible to the properties and causal interactions of the items in its emergence base, but somehow emerges from that emergence base and remains tied to it. The notion of emergence is a curious and possibly incoherent one, combining as it does the notions of irreducibility and dependency. An emergent property is dependent in that (i) it cannot exist uninstantiated, and (ii) it cannot exist unless the emergence base is sufficiently complex, and will continue to exist only as long as the emergence base retains its 'sufficient complexity.' An emergent property is irreducible in that it cannot be accounted for in terms of the properties and interactions of the items in the emergence base. This suggests that emergent properties are real iff they induce causal powers in their possessors above and beyond the causal powers that are explicable in terms of the items in the emergence base.
My point is that if only some physical systems exhibit mentality, namely, those systems that manifest a high degree of (biological) complexity, then the mental properties of these systems must be emergent properties, properties that induce special causal powers in their possessors. But then we must ask what are the possessors of these emergent mental properties. The system as a whole, no doubt. But what does that mean? The mereological sum of the physical items that make up the system in question? But a mereological sum is too frail a reed to support a property. Indeed, some see no real distinction at all between a sum and its members. We need something more substantial to serve as support of mental properties. But I am at a loss to say what that more substantial something is.
The argument so far is as follows. The red ball analogy fails because only some physical particulars instantiate irreducibly mental properties. This is readily explainable if irreducibly mental properties are emergent properties. Emergent properties are system properties, properties of complex (biological) systems. But then the question arises as to what these emergent properties are properties of. They can't be properties of the parts of a system taken distributively any more than the property of weighing 1000 lbs. can be taken to be a property of the stones composing a wall taken distributively. So emergent properties are properties of wholes or collections of some sort. But this seems problematic.
For one thing, there are many mental properties had by one minded organism. I see a javelina; I hear it; I smell it. All in the unity of one consciousness. The mental properties are not just instantiated; they are co-instantiated, instantiated in or by one thing. If Manny sees, Moe hears, and Jack smells, it does not follow that there is one minded organism that does all three. So if mental properties are emergent system properties we need to know which one item it is that instantiates them and unifies them. The brain as a whole? What does that mean? No matter how we construe wholes, whether as mereological sums, mathematical sets ordered or unordered, aggregates, what-have-you, no whole is 'substantiatial' enough to unify the various mental properties that minded organisms exhibit.
It is also unclear how a mere collection could be the subject of experience. The subject of experience is not merely the support and unifier of mental properties; it is also that which is aware (whether intentionally or non-intentionally) in virtue of the instantiation of the mental propertiers. How could the subject of experience be a collection of objects?
So I remain in the dark as to what exactly property dualism could be if it is supposed to be a coherent position. What is it exactly that instantiates mental properties on this view?
Don’t Say ‘Turkey Day’
Say 'Thanksgiving' and give thanks. You don't need to eat turkey to be thankful. Gratitude is a good old conservative virtue. I'd expatiate further, but I've got a race to run. You guessed it: a 'turkey trot.' In Mesa, Arizona, 10 kilometers = 6.2 miles.
With only a couple of exceptions I've run this race every year since 1991. And now it's 2011. May the Grim Reaper, the Ultimate Repo Man, impart a spring to my step, and a glide to my stride. We take it to the limit. One more time.
Gratitude: A Thanksgiving Homily
We need spiritual exercises just as we need physical, mental, and moral exercises. A good spiritual exercise, and easy to boot, is daily recollection of just how good one has it, just how rich and full one's life is, just how much is going right despite annoyances and setbacks which for the most part are so petty as not to merit consideration.
Start with the physical side of your life. You slept well, and a beautiful new day is dawning. Your breath comes easy, your intestines are in order. Your mind is clear, and so are your eyes. Move every moving part of your body and note how wonderfully it works, without any pain to speak of.
Brew up some java and enjoy its rich taste, all the while rejoicing over the regularity of nature that allows the water to boil one more time, at the same temperature, and the caffeine to be absorbed once more by those greedy intercranial receptors that activate the adrenalin that makes you eager to grab a notebook and jot down all the new ideas that are beginning to percolate up from who knows where.
Finished with your body, move to your mind and its wonderful workings. Then to the house and its appliances including your trusty old computer that reliably, day after day, connects you to the sphere of Nous, the noosphere, to hijack a term of Teilhard de Chardin. And don't forget the country that allows you to live your own kind of life in your own kind of way and say and write whatever you think in peace and safety.
A quotidian enactment of something like the foregoing meditation should do wonders for you.
Absolute Truth and Necessary Truth
Absolute truth and necessary truth are not the same.
Let our example be the proposition p expressed by 'Julius Caesar crossed the Rubicon in 44 B.C.' Given that p is true, it is true in all actual circumstances. That is, its truth-value does not vary from time to time, place to place, person to person, or relative to any other parameter in the actual world. P is true now, was true yesterday, and will be true tomorrow. P is true in Los Angeles, in Bangkok, and on Alpha Centauri. It is true whether Joe Blow affirms it, denies it, or has never even thought about it. And what goes for Blow goes for Jane Schmoe.
In this sense, p is absolutely or nonrelatively true. But that is not to say that p is necessarily true. A proposition q is necessarily true if and only if q is true in all possible worlds, to use a Leibnizian expression. To avoid 'world' I can say: in all possible circumstances. (A world could be thought of as a maximal circumstance.) A proposition q is contingently true iff (i) q is true in the actual circumstances, but (ii) not true in all possible circumstances. Now our proposition p concerning Caesar is obviously only contingently true: there is no broadly logical or metaphysical necessity that he cross the Rubicon in 44 BC. He might have crossed it earlier or later, or not at all. Or said river might never have existed for him to cross.
Note that contingent is not the same as contingently true. If a proposition is contingently true, then it is actually true. But if a proposition is contingent it may or may not be actually true. I was born by Caesarean section but I might not have been. So the proposition *BV was not born by Caesarean section* though false is contingent: it is true in some but not all possible worlds and false in the actual world.
Here are some theses I am fairly sure of:
1. There are no relative truths: every truth is absolute.
2. An absolute truth need not be a necessary truth: some absolute truths are contingent.
3. Every truth, whether necessary or contingent, is true in all actual circumstances.
4. The ontological property of absoluteness is not to be confused with any epistemological property such as that of being known with certainty.
Are All Genuine Problems Soluble? A Metaphilosophical Antilogism
The old questions are still debated. The problems remain unsolved after millenia: there is no consensus among the competent. But what does interminable debate and lack of consensus show? That philosophical problems are genuine but insoluble or that they are not genuine because insoluble? Or something else?
Our metaphilosophical problem may be cast in the mold of an antilogism:
1. All genuine problems are soluble.
2. No problem of philosophy is soluble.
3. Some problems of philosophy are genuine.
Each limb of this aporetic triad lays serious claim to our acceptance. (1) will strike many as self-evident, especially if soluble means 'soluble eventually' or perhaps 'soluble in principle.' (2) is a good induction based on two and one half millenia of philosophical experience. Or can you point to a central or core problem that has been solved to the satisfaction of all able practioners? Give me an example if you think you have one, and I will blow it clean out of the water. (3) certainly seems to be true, does it not? The main problems of philosophy when carefully and rigorously formulated are as genuine as any problem. And yet the triad's limbs cannot all be true. The first two limbs, taken together, entail the negation of the third. So one of them must be rejected.
Think about this metaproblem. Is it not genuine and important?
For every antilogism there are three corresponding syllogisms, and so our antilogism gives rise to the following three syllogistic arguments:
1. All genuine problems are soluble.
2. No problem of philosophy is soluble.
—–
~3. No problem of philosophy is genuine.
1. All genuine problems are soluble.
3. Some problems of philosophy are genuine.
—–
~2. Some problems of philosophy are soluble.
2. No problem of philosophy is soluble.
3. Some problems of philosophy are genuine.
—–
~1. Some genuine problems are not soluble.
Each of these syllogisms is valid. But only one can be sound. Which one? Is there any rational way to decide? The first syllogism encapsulates the view of the logical positivist Moritz Schlick as expressed in his "The Turning Point in Philosophy." His thesis is that the problems of philosophy are pseudo-problems. But if so, then the metaproblem we have been discussing, which of course is a philosophical problem, is a also a pseudo-problem. But if it is a pseudo-problem, then it has no solution. But it does have a solution for Schlick, one that consists in denying (3). So the Schlick solution is incoherent. On the one hand, he maintains that the problems of philosophy are pseudo-problems. On the other hand, he thinks that the metaproblem of whether philosophical problems are pseudoproblems has a solution. Thus his position leads to a contradiction.
Many will plump for the second syllogism. They will be forgiven for so plumping. They are the optimists who fancy that in the fullness of time solutions will be upon us.
I put my money on the third syllogism. I reject (1), thereby maintaining that some genuine problems are insoluble. Indeed, I want to go further. I want to maintain that all genuine philosophical problems are insoluble. I consider the above metaphilosophical problem to be an example of a genuine but insoluble problem. So I am not claiming that my rejection of (1) solves the metaphilosophical problem. If I made that claim then I would be contradicting myself. I would be claiming that philosophical problems are insoluble but that the metaproblem (which is a philosophical problem) is soluble. So what am I saying?
Perhaps what I am saying is that I have no compelling reason to prefer the third syllogism to the other two, but that my preferring of the third is rationally acceptable, rationally supportable, and may well lay bare the truth of the matter.