Author: Bill Vallicella

You Deny Truth-Makers? What Then is Your Theory?

Let us confine ourselves to true affirmative contingent nonrelational predications.  If you deny that there is any extralinguistic fact or state of affairs that makes it true that Tom is smoking, then what is your positive theory? Here are some possible views, 'possible' in the sense that they are possibly such as to be held by someone whether fool or sage or someone in between.

1.  A contingently true sentence like 'Tom is smoking' is just true; there is nothing external to the sentence, nothing at all, that plays any role in making it true.  There is no more to a true sentence than the sentence.  Thus no part of the sentence has a worldly correlate, not even the subject term.  On this view there is no extralinguistic reality — or at least no extralinguistic reality that bears upon the truth or falsity of our sentences — and thus no ontological ground of any kind for the truth of true contingent representations, whether declarative sentences, propositions, judgments, beliefs, whatever the truth-bearers are taken to be.

2. A rather less crazy view is that our sample sentence does have something corresponding to it in reality, and that that item is Tom, but nothing else.  On this view 'Tom is smoking' has a truth-maker, but the truth-maker is just Tom.  On this view the truth-maker role is a legitimate one, and something plays it, but there are no facts, and so no fact is a truth-maker.  Note carefully that the question whether there are facts is not the same as the question whether there are truth-makers.  It could be that the truth-making riole is played by non-facts, and it itr could be that there are facts but they have no role to play in truth-making.

3. On a variant of (2) it is admitted that besides Tom there is also an entity corresponding to the predicate, and the truth-maker of 'Tom is smoking' is the set or the mereological sum, or the ordered pair consting of Tom and the entity corresponding to the predicate.

4. A more radical view is that the truth-maker role is not a  legitimate role, hence does not need filling by the members of any category of entity.  On this view there are no truth-makers becsuae the very notion of a truth-maker is incoherent.  One who takes this line could even admit that there are facts, but he would deny that they play a truth-making role.

5. On a still more radical view, there is an extralinguistic reality, but we cannot say what categories of entity it contains.  On this view one abandons the notion that language mirrors reality, that there is any correspondence or matching between parts of speech and categories of entity.  Thus one would abandon the notion that truth is correspondence, that the 'Al is fat' is true just in case the referent of 'Al' exemplifies the property denoted by 'fat.'  One would be abandoning the notion that language is any guide at all to ontology.

First Question:  Are there other options?  What are they? 

Second Question:  Which option do you embrace if you deny that 'Tom is smoking' has a fact as its truth-maker?  

Saturday Night at the Oldies: Ambulo Ergo Sum

Dionne Warwick, Walk On By
Leroy Van Dyke, Walk On By.  Same title, different song.
Patsy Cline, Walkin' After Midnight
Rooftop Singers, Walk Right In
Everly Brothers, Walk Right Back
Four Seasons, Walk Like a Man
Ventures, Walk Don't Run
Johnny Cash, I Walk the Line
Ronnettes, Walkin' in the Rain
Left Banke, Walk Away Renee
Nancy Sinatra, These Boots are Made for Walkin'
Robert Johnson, Walkin' Blues.  Clapton's version.  Rory Gallagher's version.
Jimmy Rogers, Walkin' By Myself

On Philosophical ‘Trash-Talk’

Peter Lupu left the following comment which deserves to be separately posted.  I supplement Peter's thoughts with a quotation from Mary Midgley and some commentary.

In philosophical discourse the phrase "I do not understand" when stated about a philosophical position can mean either

(i) this position is so obscure that there is nothing in it to understand; or

(ii) this position is subject to several obvious objections (which I need not spell out) and therefore I fail to see how anyone can hold and/or propose it; or

(iii) this position is so difficult, abstract, and/or complex that I am unable to wrap my head around it.

Sense (iii) is not philosophical trash-talk. It is typically stated by a philosophical novice who really does not yet grasp the nature of philosophical positions or by a professional who is grappling with a genuinely difficult position and attempts to make sense of it.

Senses (i) and (ii), on the other hand, are too often used by opponents of a position as philosophical trash-talk. Their purpose is to intimidate the proponents of a position. The method goes something like this.

Example of Philosophical Trash-Talk:

"You and I agree that I am not a philosophical novice; given this assumption, if your position were not irreparably obscure, I would understand it; I do not understand it; therefore, it is irreparably obscure."

Now the proponent of the position so challenged has two options: he can defend the coherence of his position or else he must challenge the credentials of the opponent who uses a version of trash-talk exemplified above. Since many gentle souls would prefer not to opt for the later option, they are forced to defend the coherence of their position against challenges not yet stated. This achieves the intended purpose of the opponent to turn the burden on the proponent without having to do much except trash-talk.

Trash-talk has no place in philosophical discourse. A phrase such as "I do not understand" should be used only in sense (iii) either by a philosophical novice or by a professional who uses it to express their genuine effort to understand a difficult position and give it the most charitable reading. If a professional uses it in any other sense, they are trash-talking which, I hope we all agree, betrays the essence of philosophical inquiry.

Mary Midgley in The Owl of Minerva: A Memoir, Routledge, 2005, p. 13, reminisces about her headmistress, Miss Annie Bowden:

I also remember something striking that she had said when I had complained that I knew the answer to some question but I just couldn't say it clearly. 'If you can't say a thing clearly,' she replied, 'then you don't actually know what it is, do you?' This is a deep thought which I have often come back to, and it is in general a useful one. It lies at the heart of British empiricism. Though it is not by any means always true, I am glad to have had it put before me so early in life. It's a good thought to have when you are trying to clarify your own ideas, but a bad one when you are supposed to be understanding other people's. Philosophers are always complaining that other people's remarks are not clear when what they mean is that they are unwelcome. So they often cultivate the art of not understanding things — something which British analytic philosophers are particularly good at. (Bolding added.)

My added emphasis signals my approbation.

We owe it to ourselves and our readers to be as clear as we can. But the whole point of philosophy is to extend clarity beyond the 'clarity' of everyday life and everyday thinking. The pursuit of this higher clarity, the attempt to work our way out of Plato's Cave, results in a kind of talking and thinking that must appear obscure to the Cave dweller. Well, so much the worse for him and his values. To demand Cave clarity of the philosopher is vulgar and philistine.

Victor Davis Hanson

The guy is amazing.  Here is his latest.  He comments on Paterno, Cain, Wall Street, and illegal immigration. Excerpt:

Those accused of racism for wishing immigration law enforced can make the argument that they are racially blind and wish it applied without regard to specific individuals; those accusing others of racism wish to render immigration law null and void, only because of the shared race or ethnic background of those who break it.

The frightening thing about illegal immigration is that it is racially/ethnically driven; its advocates have little concern about extending their principles to others, and, in that sense, it is a sort of selfishness, designed to enhance one’s own political constituency within the United States while eroding the law, as if to say, “U.S. law must not apply to my ethnic group but should be enforced in all other cases.”

 

First Water to Canyon Lake

Here are some shots from last Sunday's Superstition Wilderness 7.6 mile point-to-point hike from First Water trailhead to Canyon Lake trailhead.  A delightful hike that starts out easy as one meanders out on the soft and flat Second Water trail though Garden Valley.  But then it gets rocky.  By the time you come to the junction  with the Boulder Canyon trail, you're in deep with plenty of ankle-busting rocks and lung-taxing upgrades.  This hike has a lot to offer: easy walking, challenging climbing, solitude, history (one passes right by the Indian Paint mine,) great views of Battleship Mountain and Weaver's Needle, and even a couple riparian areas.  The two young whippersnappers depicted, Larry and James,  acquitted themselves creditably.  I made 'em work.

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Right Side Bar Update

I've been slacking off when it comes to the right side bar.    I apologize for not linking to some of you who  link to me:  I'm a lazybones when it comes to 'housekeeping' and technical minutiae. Here's what's new:

  • On-site search engine added.  Try it with 'sex,' 'lust,' 'greed,' 'money.'
  • Ad Free Blog logo added. Click on it!
  • Off-site Google engine added.
  • Daily archives utility added.
  • TypePad People link added.
  • Typepad badge added.
  •  Blogroll expanded.

Pascal Again on the Immateriality of the Subject of Experience

BLAISE%20PASCAL%20PORTAIt is surprising what different people will read into and read out of a text.  A reader challenged me to find a valid argument in Blaise Pascal, Pensees #108 (Krailsheimer, p. 57): "What part of us feels pleasure? Is it our hand, our arm, our flesh, or our blood? It must obviously be something immaterial."

Rising to the challenge, I offered this:

1. We are sentient: we feel pleasure, pain, etc. (suppressed premise)
2. Nothing material could be sentient.
Therefore
3. As subjects of sentient states we are not material beings.

 

This is a valid argument, hence not a non-sequitur, as my correspondent had claimed.   (Non sequitur is Latin for 'it does not follow.')

There is no doubt that we have material bodies.  And there is no doubt that many physical pains and pleasures can be assigned more or less determinate bodily locations,  typically where some damage or stimulation has occurred or is occuring.  Those are 'Moorean facts.'  As data of the problem they are not in dispute.  The question, however, is whether that which feels pleasure and pain, etc., call it the subject of sentient states, is material or immaterial in nature.  Pascal thinks it obvious that it is not.  I don't think it is obvious one way or the other.  But I do maintain that there are very good reasons to hold that the subject of sentient states is immaterial.  To put it another way, I don't think it is obvious that materialism about the mind is false.  But I do think it is reasonably rejectable.

My correspondent subsequently suggested the following argumentative reconstruction of the above passage:
 
1. We feel pleasures, pains, etc.
2. We do not feel these sensations "in our hand or arm or flesh or blood."
3. Therefore, not in any part of our body or in our body as a whole.
4. So, if not in our body (the "material" part of us), then in an "immaterial" part of us (mind or spirit).
5. So, An immaterial part of us must exist as the only part of us in which pleasures, pains, etc can reside.
 
The trouble with this reconstruction is that it is uncharitable: it ascribes to the genius Pascal a premise he could not possibly maintain, namely, (2).  (2) is plainly false, and so not reasonably imputed to any half-way intelligent person, let alone to one of the most powerful minds of the 17th century.  "I take it that Pascal meant to suggest that we don't experience pains and pleasures as located in various parts of our body. But we do, all the time."
 
But surely Pascal in not denying the obvious, namely, that we say things like, 'Doc, I've got a pain on the left side of my left knee.'  It is a plain fact that we experience physical pains and pleasures as located in various part of our body: toothaches in a tooth, headaches in or at the head, etc. 
 
The point, however, is that the pleasures and pains as felt, as experienced, as data of consciousness, cannot be identified with anything physical.  It may sound paradoxical, but it is true: physical pains and pleasures are mental in nature.  My patella is not mental in nature, nor is my chondromalacia patellae, nor are it causes.  But the pain I feel is mental in nature.  And it is clearly  not literally in the knee, or literally in any part of my body or brain.  'In' is a spatial word.  You will not find my knee pain literally in my knee or literally in my brain.  What you will find are the physical causes of the pain.
 
That's one point.  Related to it is the point that the subject (that which feels them and that in which they inhere) of these sensory qualia is also irreducibly mental in nature.  (No doubt the transition from the first point to the second is subject to Humean scruples, but that is whole other post.)
 
Now it may not be obvious that Pascal is right to maintain that pains and their subjects are irreducibly mental in nature, and thus immaterial.  But I think it is perfectly obvious that this is what Pascal is maintaining., and that what he is maintaining is in no way ruled out by any obvious fact.   My judgment, of course, is not based on that one slender quoted passage but on having read the whole of Pascal's magnificent book of Thoughts.  

On Used Books, Marginalia, Underlining, and Teaching

My library extends through each room of my house, except the bathrooms. (I suspect that in the average household, where the only purpose of reading could be to inspire excretion, it is the other way around.) If I weren’t pro-Israel I would say that my library commits territorial aggression against my wife’s ‘Palestinian’ books; her few shelves are either occupied territories or under threat of occupation. My bibliomaniacal blogger-buddies  would turn green with envy if ever they laid eyes on my library. So I shall have to protect them from descent into this, arguably the deadliest, of the seven deadly sins.

Many of my books were acquired on the cheap from used bookstores in college towns such as Boston-Cambridge and Bloomington, Indiana. I used to really clean up when disgruntled graduate students packed it in, dumping costly libraries purchased with daddy’s money into the used book dens.

Among the used books I scored were plenty of copies of philosophical classics used in undergraduate courses. I always used to get a kick out of the marginalia, if you want to call them that. Mostly it was the absence of marginalia that caught my eye, an absence corresponding to the paucity of thought with which the reading was done. The rare marginalium was usually pathetic. Here is a passage from Thomas Paine, The Age of Reason (1794):

Revelation is a communication of something which the person to whom that thing is revealed did not know before. For if I have done a thing or seen it done, it needs no revelation to tell me I have done it or seen it, nor to enable me to tell it or to write it. (LLA, p. 13)

That’s not the best writing in the world, but the thought is clear enough. Our brilliant student’s comment? "Word Play!" ‘Word Play!’ is ever on the lips of boneheads who cannot or will not comprehend any piece of well-constructed prose. The litany of the blockhead: Word Play! Semantics! Hairsplitting!

One good thing about student marginalia was that it never extended very far since the reading never extended very far: the obscene magic marker underlining typically ceased three or four pages into the text.

One of the many drawbacks of teaching is that one could never get the little effers to do the reading especially if one used primary sources, refusing to dumb things down with comic books, audiovisual 'aids,' etc.: once they saw that genuine effort was demanded, they wimped out. All my preaching about being athletes of the mind availed nothing, falling on dead ears, like pearls before swine. Or am I being too harsh?

Harsh or not, it is blissful to repose in my Bradleyan reclusivity, far from the unreality of the classroom.