Author: Bill Vallicella

Another Silly Expression: ‘Junk Food’

There is no such thing as junk food. Food is food. When I go backpacking, I eat crud I would never eat at home, stuff loaded with fat, salt, and sugar. Dinner might consist of couscous with ‘Vienna’ sausages. If you are an American you know what the latter are: morsels of mystery meat laden with fat and sodium. But when you are schlepping 40-50 lb loads over 12,00 foot passes, all the while sweating like a pig, this is is exactly what you need. You need fat, sodium, sugar, and strong coffee laced with more sugar. The frou-frou salad and green tea can wait for later.

Tell the food fascists of San Bancisco and elsewhere to shove it.

The Manifesto of the Modern Protester

I found the following in the archives of my first weblog.  The hyperlink has long been dead.  The author is Nicholas Antongiavanni.  Curiously timely in light of the antics of the 'Occupy Wall Street' crowd.  This may  be only  an excerpt.  I cannot find the original document.

1. No ill is so trivial that it can be borne, even for a day; no grievance is so slight that its redress can wait, even for an hour.

2. Until the world is made perfect and justice reigns supreme, getting on with life or transacting any public business is immoral and selfish.

3. Therefore all means (up to and including violence) are justified–nay, obligatory–in stopping the movement of ordinary life until such time as all grievances are redressed.

4. One's moral worth is determined far more by one's social and political opinions than by one's actions or behavior toward others.

5. With one exception: The most noble, moral, and courageous thing one can ever do is participate in (or, better yet, organize) a protest.

6. Therefore, whatever a protest is ostensibly about, it is fundamentally about itself.

7. There are no such things as chance or fortune or bad luck or inherent, irreducible flaws or problems. If something–anything, anywhere–is wrong, unfair, unequal, tragic, inconvenient, annoying, vexatious, or merely perceived to be such, it is not only someone's fault, that someone is profiting unjustly at the expense of someone else. Which is to say, Lenin's "Who/Whom" question–"who" is sticking it to "whom"?–is fundamentally true regarding all human interaction.

7a. All peoples and individuals may therefore be categorized as either oppressors or oppressed.

7b. The oppressed as a whole are a coalition of various oppressed groups. Whatever their apparent differences, they share the same fundamental interests by dint of their all being oppressed.

7c. Whatever the oppressors say about standards of justice or morality is a priori wrong, since it must be presumed to be sophistry concocted for their selfish benefit. The most clever–and most pernicious–of these sophistries is the notion of natural right, i.e., that there is a permanent standard of justice not determined by human choice or opinion. But in truth every professed standard of natural right is a tool of those oppressors who devise and promote it. The only reliable information about justice comes from the oppressed, because they alone are public spirited and pure of heart. Also, because the oppressed alone suffer whereas the oppressed only cause suffering, the oppressed alone can judge what suffering is and how it affects the human soul. Since there is no permanent standard of justice, the response or reaction of the individual soul to any action or actions is the only dispositive factor in determining the justice or injustice of any action. Therefore, justice and injustice are whatever the oppressed say they are.

Vote ‘No’ on Mandatory Voting

The following, from the Powerblogs site, was written in August of 2006 and is here re-published in redacted form.

In a New York Times opinion piece, Norman Ornstein advocates mandatory voting:

     In the Australian system, registered voters who do not show up at
     the polls either have to provide a reason for not voting or pay a
     modest fine, the equivalent of about $15. The fine accelerates with
     subsequent offenses. The result, however, is a turnout rate of more
     than 95 percent. The fine, of course, is an incentive to vote. But
     the system has also instilled the idea that voting is a societal
     obligation.

There is, however, a reason not to go the way of the Aussies and make voting mandatory. As it is here in the USA, roughly only half of the eligible voters actually vote. This is arguably good inasmuch as voters filter themselves similarly as lottery players tax themselves. If I were a liberal, I would say that eligible voters who stay home 'disenfranchise' themselves, and to the benefit of the rest of us.  (But of course I am not a liberal and I don't misuse words like 'disenfranchise.')

What I mean is that, generally speaking, the people who can vote but do not are precisely the people one would not want voting in the first  place. To vote takes time, energy, and a bit of commitment. Careless, lazy, and uninformed people are not likely to do it. And that is good.   I don't want my thoughtful vote neutralized by the vote of some dolt who is merely at the polling place to avoid a fine. And if you force a  man to vote, he may rebel and vote randomly or in other ways that subvert the process.

Of course, many refuse to vote out of disgust at their choices. My advice for them would be to hold their noses and vote for the least or the lesser of the evils. Politics is always about choosing the least or the lesser of evils. The very fact that we need government at all  shows that we live in an imperfect world, one in which a perfect candidate is not to be found.  Government itself is a necessary evil:  it would be better if we didn't need it, but we do need it.

I support the right of those who think the system irremediably corrupt to protest by refusing to vote.  Government is coercive by its very nature, and mandatory voting is a form of coercion that belongs in a police state rather than in a free republic. 

If you think that a higher voter turnout is a good thing, that is happening anyway  as divisions deepen and our politics become more polarized.  The nastier our politics, the higher the turnout.  And it will get nastier still.  So why do we need mandatory voting? 

Fact is, we are awash in unnecessary laws.  We don't need more laws  and more government interference in our lives.  And will this law be enforced? How? At what expense?  Isn't it perfectly obvious to everyone with commonsense that  we need to move toward less government rather than more, toward more liberty rather than less?

If you think about it, 'One man, one vote' is a very dubious principle. I think about it here. Voluntary voting is one way of balancing the ill effects of 'One man, one vote.'  But isn't voting a civic duty?  I would say that it is.   But not every duty should be legally mandated.  

Addendum: Re-reading the quotation above, I notice that Ornstein reports that registered Aussie voters who do not vote are subject to a fine if they don't have an excuse for not voting. One wonders if those eligible to vote are also legally required to register. If not, their system is a joke: one could avoid voting by simply failing to register! It sounds like an expensive bureaucratic mess to me in which the negatives outweigh the positives.

References

  1.http://www.nytimes.com/2006/08/10/opinion/10ornstein.html?_r=2&oref=slogin&oref=slogin    

  2.http://www.nytimes.com/2011/11/06/opinion/sunday/telling-americans-to-vote-or-else.html?_r=1

Chess Players Commiserate on Their Failed Marriages

A: "We were bishops of opposite color." 

B:  "Sorry to hear that.  In our case the union ended when she discovered I had insufficient mating material."

C:  "We just couldn't get it together.  When ever she wanted to make love, I was busy making Luft."

D: "She blew her stack when I gingerly brought up the topic of back-rank mate."

E. "She got tired of my excuses,  especially 'Sorry, honey, not tonight. After a hard day at the office I'm weaker than f7.'"

F. "The bitch had a way of putting me in psychological Zugzwang: no matter what I said or did, I only dug my hole deeper."

G. "In bed one night she called me a perv when I muttered something about the Lucena position. 

H. "Her frigidity did us in.  She'd allow a check but never a mate."

I.  "She said  I lacked ambition citing my penchant for underpromotion."

J.  "We fought like knights and bishops."

The Difference Between a Truth-Bearer and a Truth-Maker

Frege makes the point that the being of a proposition cannot be identical to its being true.  This I find obvious.  There are true propositions and there are false propositions.  Therefore, for propositions (the senses of context-free declarative sentences) it cannot be the case that to be = to be true.  Furthermore, a given proposition that is contingently true is possibly such as not to be true, whence it follows that its being and its being true cannot be identical.  (Whether Frege does or would give the second argument, I don't know; but I think it is correct.)

As Frege puts its, "The being of a thought [Gedanke, proposition] thus does not consist in its being true." (Near the beginning of his essay, "Negation.")  One can grasp a proposition without knowing whether or not it is true. To grasp a proposition is not to accept it as true, to reject it as false, or to suspend judgment as to its truth-value.  To grasp a proposition is merely to have it before one's mind, to understand it.  A Fregean proposition is a sense, and no such propositional sense has as part of its sense its being true.  That's Frege's point and it strikes me as rock-solid.

Our London sparring-partner Ed now demonstrates that he still does not understand what a truth-maker is:

I wonder if a ‘truthmaker’ as understood by the advocates of truthmaking is the same sort of thing as Frege’s marvelous but impossible thought. Something that if we perceived it for what it was, would simultaneously communicate to us the truth of what it includes.

Ed is obviously confusing truth-bearers such as Fregean propositions with truth-makers.  Truth-bearers are representations; truth-makers are not.  That's one difference.  Truth-bearers are either true or false; truth-makers are not since, not being representations,  they cannot be said to be true, nor can they be said to be false.  That's a second difference.  Truth-bearers are 'bipolar,' either true or false; truth-makers are 'unipolar':  all of them obtain.  That's a third difference.  Truth-bearers are such that their being or existence does not entail their being true; truth-makers are such that their being or existence does entail their obtaining.  I am assuming that truth-makers are facts.  If a fact obtains then it exists; there are no non-obtaining facts.  That's a fourth difference.

There is no point in criticizing a doctrine one misrepresents.  First represent it fairly, then lodge objections.  And as I have said, there are reasonable objections one can bring.

So far Ed has not lodged one clear objection. 

Silly Expression: ‘The Government is Us’

Liberal talk show host Thom Hartmann made this idiotic remark on a C-Span panel once. I wonder if Hartman has ever had an encounter with an arrogant cop who has overstepped the bounds of his legitimate authority. Has he ever been audited by the IRS? I recommend the latter experience for its educational value. One quickly learns who the cat is and who the mouse. Liberals often employ this 'Government is us' line.  So it's worth a bit of commentary.

There are two extremes to avoid, the libertarian and the liberal. Libertarians often say that the government can do nothing right, and that the solution is to privatize everything including the National Parks. Both halves of that assertion are patent nonsense. It is equal but opposite nonsense to think that Big Government will solve all our problems. Ronnie Reagan had it right: "A government big enough to give you everything you want is powerful enough to take everything you have." Or something like that.

The government is not us. It is an entity over against most of us run by a relatively small number of us. Among the latter are some decent people but also plenty of power-hungry scoundrels, for whom a government position is a hustle like any hustle. Government, like any entity, likes power and likes to expand its power, and can be counted on to come up with plenty of rationalizations for the maintenance and  extension of its power. It must be kept in check by us, just as big corporations need to be kept in check by government regulators.

If you value liberty you must cultivate a healthy skepticism about government.  To do so is not anti-government.  Certain scumbags of the Left love to slander us by saying that we are anti-government.  It is a lie and they know it.  They are not so stupid as not to know that to be for limited government is to be for government.

From a logical point of view, the ‘Government is us’ nonsense appears to be a pars pro toto fallacy: one identifies a proper part (the governing) with the whole of which it is a proper part (the governed).

Bob Dylan Albums Ranked From Worst to Best

A plausible ranking!  Blonde on Blonde is numero uno as it should be.  Bob's debut album, Bob Dylan (1962), comes in at only 26th place.  Admittedly, this album was Dylan before he was Dylan, but I would have ranked it higher. 

In the '60s I argued that there was and could be no such thing as a bad Dylan album.  Then I was a fanatic, now I am but a fan. 

"Ah, but I was so much older then, I'm younger than that now."

Pascal on the Subject of Experience: A Non Sequitur?

I recently quoted 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."

 A reader comments, "Doesn't P. 108 strike you as a hopeless non-sequitur, if we take it as an argument at all? Just try to recast it as a valid inference."

If I thought that the aphorism embodied a non sequitur, I would not have approvingly quoted it.  So let me rise to the challenge and present Pascal's thought in the form of a valid argument.

But let's first note that  the first question in the Pascal quotation is genuine while the second is rhetorical.  The second, therefore, is a statement  in interrogative dress.  The second question expresses the proposition that nothing material is the subject of sentient states.  Needless to say, Pascal is not talking about just hand, arm, flesh, and blood.  They are but examples of any physical part of the body where 'body' covers brain as well.

But does the passage embody an argument?   The 'must' in the third sentence suggests that it does. So let's interpret the passage as expressing an enthymematic argument. The argument could be made explicit as follows:

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.

Clarificatory note: (2) is to be understood as saying that nothing material could be the ultimate subject of sentient states, the ultimate bearer or possessor of such states.  This is compatible with the admission that, in a secondary sense, the body of a sentient being is also sentient.  (Compare indicative sentences and the propositions they express.  That propositions are the primary truth-bearers does not prevent us from saying that sentences are in a secondary sense either true or false.) 

The above is a valid argument: the conclusion follows from the premises.  Hence the Pascal passage, interpreted as I have interpreted, does not embody a non sequitur, let alone a "hopeless" non sequitur.

Of course, a much more interesting question is whether we have good reason to accept the premises.  Since the first is self-evident, the soundness of the argument rides on the second.   Now some will say that the argument begs the question at the second premise.  But that depends on what exactly 'begging the question' amounts to.  Let's not go there.  And please note that begging the question is an informal fallacy, whereas accusations of non sequitur question the formal validity of arguments.  I will cheerfully concede, however, that the anti-materialist must support (2): he cannot just proclaim it obvious or self-evident as he can in the case of (1).

I will conclude by pointing out that although (2) is not self-evident, neither is its negation.  So this is a point on which reasonable dispute is possible.  This is a live issue.  (That some do not consider it such is not to the point.) Subsequent posts will examine the case for the immateriality of the subject of experience.   

How Did We Get to be so Arrogant?

Recalling our miserably indigent origin in the the wombs of our mothers and the subsequent helplessness of infancy, how did we get to be so arrogant and self-important?

In a line often (mis)attributed to Augustine, but apparently from Bernard of Clairvaux, Inter faeces et urinam nascimur: "We are born between feces and urine."  So inauspicious a beginning for so proud a strut upon life's stage.

A Memory of Teaching

I am enjoying teaching quite a bit now that I no longer do it. With some things it is not the doing of it that we like so much as the having done it.

One day in class I carefully explained the abbreviation ‘iff’ often employed by philosophers and mathematicians to avoid writing ‘if and only if.’ I explained the logical differences among ‘if,’ ‘only if,’ and ‘if and only if.’ I gave examples. I brought in necessary and sufficient conditions. The whole shot. But I wasn’t all that surprised when I later read a student comment to the effect that Dr. V. can’t spell ‘if.’

Saturday Night at the Oldies: Marie/Maria/Mary

Beautiful names celebrated in song.

Elvis Presley, Marie's the Name of His Latest Flame
Bob Dylan, Absolutely Sweet Marie  By the way, this certified Dylanologist can attest that in the first line it is 'railroad GAUGE,' not 'railroad gate.'  'Gauge' is a measure of the width of the track; that's what our boy can't jump.
Bachelors, Marie

R. B. Greaves, Take a Letter, Maria

Jimi Hendrix, The Wind Cries 'Mary'
The Association, Along Comes Mary  I only just now fully appreciated these amazing lyrics.
Stevie Ray Vaughan, Mary Had a Little Lamb

And finally Mary takes Marty Robbins back after his tryst with the Devil Woman.

Butchvarov on Semi-Realism about Facts

This post takes up where Butchvarov Against Facts left off.  See the latter post for bibliographical data concerning the essay "Facts" which I presently have under my logical microscope.  And if you are a fan of Butch's work, all of my Butchvarov posts are collected in the aptly entitled Butchvarov category.

(The following is also highly relevant to the discussion currently in progress with the Londonistas, David Brightly and Edward the Ockhamist in the combox to this post.)

Butch's position is a nuanced one as one would expect.  He appreciates the strengths and weaknesses of both realism and anti-realism.  For the realist, there are facts.  For the anti-realist, there are no facts.  Let us briefly review why both positions are both attractive yet problematic.  We will then turn to semi-realism as to a via media between Scylla and Charybdis.

1. Take some such contingently true affirmative singular sentence as  'Al is fat.'  Surely with respect to such sentences there is more to truth than the sentences that are true.  There must be something external to the sentence that contributes to its being true, and this external something is not plausibly taken to be another sentence or the say-so of some person, or anything like that.  'Al is fat' is true because there is something in extralinguistic and extramental reality that 'makes' it true.  There is this short slacker dude, Al, and the guy weighs 250 lbs.  There is nothing linguistic or mental about that.  Here is the sound core of correspondence theories of truth.  Our sample sentence is not just true; it is true because of the way the world outside the mind and outside the sentence is configured.  The 'because' is not a causal 'because.'  The question is not the empirical-causal one as to why Al is fat.  He is fat because he eats too much.  The question concerns the ontological ground of the truth of the sentential representation, 'Al is fat.'   Since it is obvious that the sentence cannot just be true — given that it is not true in virtue of its logical form or ex vi terminorum — we must posit something external to the sentence that 'makes' it true.  I don't see how this can be avoided even though I admit that 'makes true' is not perfectly clear.

2. Now what is the nature of this external truth-maker?  It can't be Al by himself, and it can't be fatness by itself.  Nor can it be the pair of the two.  For it could be that Al exists and fatness exists, but the first does not instantiate the second.  What's needed, apparently, is the fact of Al's being fat.  So it seems we must add the category of fact to our ontology, to our categorial inventory.  Veritas sequitur esse is not enough.  It is not enough that 'Al' and 'Fat' have worldly referents; the sentence as a whole needs a worldly referent. Truth-makers cannot be 'things' or collections of same, but must be entities of a different categorial sort.  (Or at least this is so for the simple predications we are now considering.)

3. The argument I have just  sketched, the truth-maker argument for facts, is very powerful, but it gives rises to puzzles and protests.  There is the Strawsonian protest that facts are merely hypostatized sentences, shadows genuine sentences cast upon the world.  Butchvarov quotes Strawson's seminal 1950 discussion: "If you prise the sentences off the world, you prise the facts off it too. . . ." ("Facts," 73-74)  Strawson again: "The only plausible candidate for what (in the world) makes a sentence true is the fact it states; but the fact it states is not something in the world."

Why aren't facts in the world? Consider the putative fact of my table's being two inches from the wall.  Obviously, this fact is not itself two inches from the wall or in any spatial position.  The table and the wall are in space; the fact is not.  One can drive a nail into the table or into the wall, but not into the fact, etc.  Considerations such as these suggest to the anti-realist that facts are not in the world and that they are but sentences reified.  After all, to distinguish a fact from a non-fact (whether a particular or a universal) we must have recourse to a sentence: a fact is introduced as the worldly correlate of a true sentence.  If there is no access to facts except via sentences, as the correlates of true sentences, then this will suggest to those of an anti-realist bent that facts are hypostatizations of true declarative sentences.

One might also cite the unperceivability of facts as a reason to deny their existence.  I see the table, and I see the wall.  It may also be granted that I see that the desk is about two inches from the wall.  But does it follow that I see a relational fact?  Not obviously.  If I see a relational fact, then presumably I see the relation two inches from.  But I don't see this relation.  And so, Butchvarov argues (84-85), one does not see the relational fact either.  Their invisibility is a strike against them.  A careful examination of this argument would make a nice separate post.  And indeed it did.

Another of the puzzles about facts concerns how a fact is related to its constituents.  Obviously a fact is not identical to its constituents.  This is because the constituents can exist without the fact existing.  Nor can a fact be an entity in addition to its constituents, something over and above them, for the simple reason that it is composed of them.  We can put this by saying that no fact is wholly distinct from its constituents.  The fact is more than its constituents, but apart from them it is nothing.  A third possibility is that a fact is the togetherness of its constituents, where this togetherness is grounded in a a special unifying constituent.  Thus the fact of a's being F consists of a, F-ness, and a nexus of exemplification.  But this leads to Bradley's regress. 

A fact is not something over and above its constituents but their contingent unity.  This unity, however, cannot be explained by positing a special unifying constituent, on pain of Bradley's regress. which is, pace Richard Gaskin, vicious.  So if a fact has a unifier, that unifier must be external to the fact.  But what could that be?  It would have to be something like Kant's transcendental unity of apperception.  I push this notion in an onto-theological direction in my book, A Paradigm Theory of Existence: Onto-Theology Vindicated.  But by taking this line, I move away from the realism that the positing of facts was supposed to secure.  Facts are supposed to be ontological grounds, extramental and extralinguistic.  If mind or Mind is brought in in any form to secure the unity of a truth-making fact, then we end up with some form of idealism, whether transcendental or onto-theological, or what have you.

4.  So we are in an aporetic pickle.  We have good reason to be realists and we have good reason to be anti-realists.  (The arguments above on both sides were mere sketches; they are stronger than they might appear. ) Since we cannot be both realists and anti-realists, we might try to mediate the positions and achieve a synthesis.   My book was one attempt at a synthesis.  Butchvarov's semi-realism is another.  I am having a hard time, though, understanding what exactly Butchvarov's semi-realism is supposed to be.

If the realist says that there are facts, and that anti-realist says that there aren't, the semi-realist maintains that 'There are facts' is an "Improper proposition" (87) so that both asserting it and denying it are improper.

Butchvarov relies crucially on Wittgenstein's distinction between formal and material concepts and his related distinction between saying and showing.  Object is an example of a formal concept, while book is  an example of a material concept.  That there are books can be said.  That there are objects cannot be said.  Instead, it is shown by the use of names.   

'This is an object,' unlike 'This is white,' is a pseudo-proposition.  This is because it attempts to say what can only be shown.  'This is an object' does not say anything. "It shows the logical category to which the item belongs." (75) 

Fact, like object, is a formal concept.  It follows that 'There are facts' and 'A sentence expresses a fact' are pseudo-propositions.  They are pseudo because they attempt to say what can only be shown.   But why , exactly, does 'A sentence expresses a fact' not say or state anything?  Presumably because ". . . it presupposes what it purports to say because 'fact' is the philosophical term for what sentences express." (76)

The following  cannot be said: 'This page is white is a fact.'  It cannot be said because it is ill-formed. (88)  We can of course say, 'That this page is white is a fact.'  But 'that this page is white' is not a sentence, but a noun phrase.  We cannot use this noun phrase to refer to the fact because what we end up referring to is an object, not a fact.  Though a fact is not a sentence or a proposition, it is proposition-like:  it has astructure that mirrors the structure of a proposition. No object, however, is proposition-like.  To express the fact we must use the sentence.  Using the sentence, we show what cannot be said.

Butchvarov's discussion from p. 88 to the end of his article is extremely murky and unsatisfactory.  His semi-realism is not a clear alternative to realism and anti-realism.  Butch sees the problem with crystal clarity, but I cannot see what exactly his solution is.

He tells us that semi-realism with respect to facts  differs from anti-realism by acknowledging that there is more to the truth of true sentences than the sentences that are true.  (88) Excellent!  This is a non-negotiable 'datanic' point.  If it is true that Jack loves Jill, then there must be something in the world that makes this true, and it cannot be Jack, or Jill, or loves, or the set or sum of all three.  If these three items are what the sentence 'Jack loves Jill' are about, then the truth-maker has to be distinct from each and from the set or sum of all. (88)

But Butch also tells us that semi-realism about facts differs from realism by refusing to countenance a special category of entity, the category of fact, the members of which are the referents of declarative sentences. What bothers Butchvarov is that "facts cannot be referred to or described independently of the sentences expressing them" (88)  a consideration which renders antirealim about facts plausible and the correspondence theory of truth implausible. (88)

So what is Butch's third way?  How does he get between realism and anti-realism.  He seems to be saying that there are facts but that they cannot be said, only shown.  But of course this cannot be what he is saying if one cannot say that there are facts!

If there is something that cannot be said but only shown, and what is shown are the referents of sentences, then he is saying that there are the referents of sentences in which case he is saying that there is what he says can only be shown.

This is highly unsatisfactory and barely coherent if coherent at all.  I am tempted to say to Butch, "Look, either there are facts or there aren't. Which is it?  Bringing in Wittgenstein's saying v. showing distinction only muddies already troubled waters."

So I don't see that semi-realism about facts is a viable position.  I suggest we admit that we are stuck with a genuine aporia.