Author: Bill Vallicella

Two Kinds of Critical Caution

One person fears loss of contact with reality and is willing to take doxastic risks and believe beyond what he can claim strictly to know. The other, standing firm on the autonomy of human reason, refuses to accept anything that cannot be justified from within his own subjectivity. He fears error, and finds the first person uncritical, gullible, credulous, tender-minded in James' sense.  The first is cautious lest he miss out on the real.  The second is cautious lest he make a mistake.
 
The second, brandishing W. K. Clifford,  criticizes the first  for believing on insufficient evidence, for self-indulgently believing what he wants to believe, for believing what he has no right to believe. The second wants reality-contact only on his own terms: only if he can assure himself of it, perhaps by ‘constituting’ the object via ‘apodictic’ processes within his own consciousness. (Husserl) The first person, however, is willing to accept uncertainty for the sake of a reality-contact otherwise inaccessible.
 
What should we fear more, loss of contact with objective reality, or being wrong?
 
Analogy.  Some are gastronomically timorous: they refuse to eat in restaurants for fear of food poisoning.  Their critical abstention does indeed achieve its prophylactic end — but only at the expense of the  foregoing of a world of prandial delights.
 
Now suppose a man believes in God and afterlife but is mistaken.  He lives his life in the grip of what are in reality, but unbeknownst to him,  life-enhancing illusions.  And of course, since he is ex hypothesi wrong, death cannot set him straight: he is after dying  nothing and so cannot learn that he lived his life in illusion.  But then why is his being wrong such a big deal?  Wouldn't it be a much bigger deal if his fear of being wrong prevented his participation in an unsurpassably great good?
 
"But he lived his life in the grip of illusions!"
 
To this I would respond, first: how do you know that he lived his life in untruth?  You are always demanding evidence, so what is your evidence for this?  Second, in a godless universe could there even be truth? (No truth without mind; no objective truth without objective mind.)  Third, even if there is truth in a godless universe, why would it be a value?  Why care about truth if it has no bearing on human flourishing?  Doesn't your concern for evidence only make sense in the context of a quest for truth? 

Grief: Three Solutions

That we grieve over the loss of a finite good shows our wretchedness. But the cure for grief is not the substitution of attachment to another finite good. We should not distract ourselves from our grief, but experience it and try to grasp the root of it, which is our inner emptiness, rather than the loss of a particular finite good. The proximate cause of my grief, the death of a beloved companion, is not grief’s ultimate cause. The inner emptiness, infinite in that nothing finite can assuage it, has but one anodyne: the infinite good, God.

If God be denied, then either the inner emptiness must be extinguished, or we must learn to fill it with finite goods. The latter, common as it is, is a miserable stop-gap measure and no ultimate solution. But to extinguish the inner emptiness, we must extinguish desire itself. This, the solution of Pali Buddhism, cuts but does not untie the Gordian knot.

So I count three solutions to grief: seek God; Pascalian divertissement; Buddhist extinction.  Perhaps there are others.

The Stoic Ideal

The Stoic sage would be as impassible as God is impassible. But here's something to think about: Jesus on the cross died in agony like a man, even though, if he was God, he could have realized the Stoic ideal.

What is the lesson? Perhaps that to be impassible is for us impossible, and so no ideal at all.

Addendum 8/26:  Leo Mollica supplies this appropriate quotation  from Malebranche's The Search after Truth (Bk. II, Pt. iii, Ch. 4; tr. Lennon and Olscamp):

Epicurus was right in saying that offenses were bearable by a wise man. But Seneca was wrong in saying that wise men cannot even be offended…. Rather, let Christians learn from their Master that the impious are capable of hurting them, and that good men are sometimes subjected to these impious ones by the order of Providence. When one of the officers of the High Priest struck Jesus Christ, this wise man of the Christians, infinitely wise, and even as powerful as He is wise, confessed that this servant was capable of wounding him. He is not angered, He is not vengeful like Cato, He pardons, as having been truly wronged. He could have been vengeful and destroyed His enemies, but He suffered with a humble and modest patience injurious to no one, not even to this servant who had wronged Him.

I Stub My Toe

I just stubbed a bare toe on the oaken leg of my computer table. But it took a second or two after the moment of impact for the pain to 'register.' So I philosophized: if there was no pain at the moment of   impact when the (minor) damage was done, but there is pain now after the fact, then this pain is of no use to me. It's only a sensation. To hell with it. It has nothing to do with me.

"It's only a sensation." This little reminder is a handy addition to the Stoic's pharmacia, though it is admittedly no panacea. It can help us buck up under some of life's stresses and strains.  Stoicism may not take us very far, but where it does take us is a place worth  visiting.

Tea Party ‘Racism’ Again

This from an NPR interview of Julian Bond:

SIEGEL: Some people read into the Tea Party's almost neuralgic reaction to government spending, a sense that white people figure black people benefit disproportionately from federal programs. Do you suspect a racial subtext to that whole argument?

BOND: Absolutely. And I'm not saying that all of the Tea Party members are racist. Not at all. I don't think anybody says that. But I think there's an element of racial animus there and the feeling that some white people have that these black people are now getting something that I'm not getting and I should be getting it, too.

Yet another reason to defund NPR.  Neuralgic reaction to government spending? How obtuse can an obtuse liberal be?  Companion posts:

The Bigger the Government, the More to Fight Over: The NPR Case

National Public Radio Needs Your Support!

'The Tit ofthe State': Krauthammer versus NPR's Totenberg

Serious Reading and Bed Reading

There is serious reading and there is bed reading. Serious reading is for stretching the mind and improving the soul. It cannot be well done in bed but requires the alertness and seriousness provided by desk, hard chair, note taking and coffee drinking. It is a pleasure, but one stiffened with an alloy of discipline. Bed reading, however, is pure unalloyed pleasure. The mind is neither taxed nor stretched or much improved, but entertained.

Butchvarov Against Facts

In his essay, "Facts," (Studies in the Ontology of Reinhardt Grossmann, Javier Cumpa, ed., Ontos Verlag, 2010, p. 83) Panayot Butchvarov generously cites me as a defender of realism and a proponent of facts.  He credits me with doing something William P. Alston does not do in his theory of facts, namely, specifying their mode of reality:

However, William Vallicella, also a defender of realism, does.  He argues that true propositions require "truth-making facts." And he astutely points out that facts could be truth-making only if they are "proposition-like," "structured in a proposition-like way" — only f a fact has a structure that can mirror the the structure of a proposition." (A Paradigm Theory of Existence, 13, 166-7,192-3)  Vallicella's view is firmly in the spirit of Wittgenstein's account in the Tractatus of the notions of fact and correspondence to fact, but his formulation of it may invite deflationist attacks like Strawson's.

Butchvarov, however, is firmly against adding the category of facts to our ontological inventory. This post will consider one of his arguments.  Butchvarov tells us (p. 86) that

The metaphysical notion of fact is grounded in our use of declarative sentences, and the supposition that there are facts in the world depends at least in part on the assumption that sentences must correspond to something in the world, that somehow they must be names.  But this assumption seems absurd.  Sentences are not even nouns, much less names.  They cannot serve as grammatical subjects or objects of verbs, which is the mark of nouns. [. . .] Notoriously, "p is true," if taken literally, is gibberish.  "Snow is white is true" is just ill-formed. "'Snow is white' is true" is not, but its subject-term is not a sentence — it is the name of a sentence. 

Here is what I take to be Butchvarov's argument in the above passage and surrounding text:

1. If there are facts, then some declarative sentences are names.
2. Every name can serve as the grammatical subject of a verb.
3. No declarative sentence can serve as the grammatical subject of a verb.
Therefore
4. No declarative sentence is a name. (2, 3)
Therefore
5. There are no facts. (1, 4)

The friend of facts ought to concede (1).  If there are truth-making facts, then some declarative sentences refer to them, or have them as worldly correspondents.  The realist holds that if a contingent sentence such as  'Al is fat' is true, then that is not just a matter of language, but a matter of how the extralinguistic world is arranged.  The sentence is true because of Al's being fat.  Note that Al by himself cannot be the truth-maker of the sentence, nor can fatness by itself, nor can the set, sum, or ordered pair of the two do the job.  If {Al, fatness} is the truth-maker of 'Al is fat,' then it is also the truth-maker of 'Al is not fat' — which is absurd. 

As for (2), it is unproblematic.  So if the argument is to be neutralized — I prefer to speak of 'neutralizing' rather than 'refuting' arguments — we must give reasons for not accepting (3).  So consider this argument for the negation of (3).

6. 'Snow is white' is true.
7. No name is true or false.
Therefore
8. 'Snow is white' is not a name.
9. Anything either true or false is a declarative sentence.
Therefore
10. 'Snow is white' is a declarative sentence.
Therefore
11. 'Snow is white'  serves as the grammatical subject of the verb 'is a declarative sentence.'
Therefore
12. Some declarative sentences can serve as the grammatical subjects of a verb.
Therefore
~3. It is not the case that no declarative sentence can serve as the grammatical subject of a verb.

The argument just given seems to neutralize Butchvarov's argument.

The Paradox of the Horse and 'the Paradox of Snow'

Butchvarov's view is deeply paradoxical.  He holds that 'Snow is white ' in (6) is not a sentence but the name of a sentence.  The paradox is similar to the paradox of the horse in Frege.  Frege notoriously held that the concept horse is not a concept.  Butchvarov is maintaining  that the sentence 'Snow is white' is not a sentence. 

What is Frege's reasoning?  He operates with an absolute distinction between names and predicates (concept words).  Corresponding to this linguistic distinction there is the equally absolute ontological distinction between  objects and concepts.  Objects are nameable while concepts are not.  So if you try to name a concept you willy-nilly transform it into an object.  Since 'the concept horse' is a name, its referent is an object.  Hence the concept horse is not a concept but an object.

Similarly with Butchvarov.  To refer to a sentence, I must use a name for it.  To form the name of a sentence, I enclose it in quotation marks.  Thus the sentence 'snow is white' is not a sentence, but a name for a sentence.  

Butchvarov finds it "absurd" that a sentence should name a fact.  His reason is that a sentence is not a name.  But it strikes me as even more absurd to say that the sentence 'Snow is white' is not a sentence, but  a name.   

My tentative conclusion is that while realism about facts is dubious, so is anti-realism about them.  But there is also what Butchvarov calls "semi-realism" which I ought to discuss in a separate post.