Author: Bill Vallicella

Atomic Sentences and Syncategorematic Elements

According to Fred Sommers (The Logic of Natural Language, p. 166), ". . . one way of saying what an atomic sentence is is to say that it is the kind of sentence that contains only categorematic expressions." Earlier in the same book, Sommers says this:

In Frege, the distinction between subjects and predicates is not due to any difference of syncategorematic elements since the basic subject-predicate propositions are devoid of such elements.  In Frege, the difference between subject and predicate is a primitive difference between two kinds of categorematic expressions. (p. 17)

Examples of categorematic (non-logical) expressions are 'Socrates' and 'mammal.'  Examples of syncategorematic (logical) expressions are 'not,' 'every,' and  'and.'  As 'syn' suggests, the latter expressions are not semantic stand-alones, but have their meaning only together with categorematic expressions.  Sommers puts it this way: "Categorematic expressions apply to things and states of affairs; syncategorematic expressions do not." (164) 

At first I found it perfectly obvious that atomic sentences have only categorematic elements, but now I have doubts.  Consider the atomic sentence  'Al is fat.' It is symbolized thusly: Fa.  'F' is a predicate expression the reference (Bedeutung) of which is a Fregean concept (Begriff) while 'a' is a subject-expression or name the reference of which is a Fregean object (Gegenstand).  Both expressions are categorematic or 'non-logical.'  Neither is syncategorematic.  And there are supposed to be no syncategorematic elements in the sentence:  there is just 'F' and 'a.'

But wait a minute!  What about the immediate juxtaposition of 'F' and 'a' in that order? That juxtaposition is not nothing.  It conveys something.  It conveys that the referent of 'a' falls under the referent of 'F'.  It conveys that the object a instantiates the concept F. I suggest that the juxtaposition of the two signs is a syncategorematic element.  If this is right, then it is false that atomic sentence lack all syncategorematic elements.

Of course, there is no special sign for the immediate juxtaposition of 'F' and 'a' in 'Fa.'  So I grant that there is no syncategorematic element if such an element must have its own separate and isolable sign. But there is no need for a separate sign; the immediate juxtaposition does the trick.  The syncategorematic element is precisely the juxtaposition.

Please note that if there were no syncategorematic element in 'Fa' there would not be any sentence at all.  A sentence is not a list.  The sentence 'Fa' is not the list 'F, a.'  A (declarative) sentence expresses a thought (Gedanke) which is its sense (Sinn).  And its has a reference (Bedeutung), namely a truth value (Wahrheitswert).  No list of words (or of anything else) expresses a thought or has a truth value.  So a sentence is not a list of its constituent words.  A sentence depends on its constituent words, but it is more than them.  It is their unity. 

So I say there must be a syncategorematic element in 'Fa' if it is to be a sentence.  There is need of a copulative element to tie together subject and predicate.  It follows that, pace Sommers, it is false that atomic sentences are devoid of syntagorematic elements.

Note what I am NOT saying.  I am not saying that the copulative element in a sentence must be a separate sign such as 'is.'  There is no need for the copulative  'is.'  In standard English we say 'The sea is blue' not 'The sea blue.' But in Turkish one can say Deniz mavi and it is correct and intelligible.  My point is not that we need the copulative 'is' as a separate sign but that we need a copulative element which, though it does not refer to anything, yet ties together subject and predicate.  There must be some feature of the atomic sentence that functions as the copulative element, if not immediate juxtaposition then something else such as a font difference or color difference.

At his point I will be reminded that Frege's concepts (Begriffe) are unsaturated (ungesaettigt).  They are 'gappy' or incomplete unlike objects.  The incompleteness of concepts is reflected in the incompleteness of predicate expressions.  Thus '. . . is fat' has a gap in it, a gap fit to accept a name such as 'Al' which has no gap.  We can thus say that for Frege the copula is imported into the predicate.  It might be thought that the gappiness of concepts and predicate expressions obviates the need for a copulative element in the sentence and in the corresponding Thought (Gedanke) or proposition.

But this would be a mistake.  For even if predicate expressions and concepts are unsaturated, there is still a difference between a list and a sentence.  The unsaturatedness of a concept merely means that it combines with an object without the need of a tertium quid.  (If there were a third thing, then Bradley's regress would be up and running.)  But to express that a concept is in fact instantiated by an object requires more than a listing of a concept-word (Begriffswort) and a name.  There is need of a syncategorical element in the sentence.

So I conclude that if there are any atomic sentences, then they cannot contain only categorematic expressions.

Bill Clinton, the Race Card, and Voter ID

Race Card - Bill Clinton Say it ain't so, Bill.  This from the The Wall Street Journal:

The last time Bill Clinton tried to play the race card, it blew up his wife's primary campaign in South Carolina. Well, the Voice is back, this time portraying the nationwide movement to pass voter ID laws as the return of Jim Crow.

"There has never been in my lifetime, since we got rid of the poll tax and all the other Jim Crow burdens on voting, the determined effort to limit the franchise that we see today," the former President warned a student group last month.

I find this simply astonishing.  How can any reasonable person find the Voter ID question worthy of debate? 

Anyone with common sense must be able to appreciate that voting must be conducted in an orderly manner, and that only citizens who have registered to vote and have satisfied the minimal requirements of age, etc. are to be allowed into the voting booth. Given the propensity to fraud, it is therefore necessary to verify the identities of those who present themselves at the polling place. To do this, voters must be required to present a government-issued photo ID card, a driver's license being only one example of such. It is a reasonable requirement and any reasonable person should be able to see it as such.

Why are liberals so stupid?  The darker surmise, of course, is that they are not stupid but cunning and unprincipled: they want voter fraud.  They want to win at all costs, fraud or no fraud.

And please notice how leftists like Clinton will not hesitate to commit a tort on the English language  if it serves their purpose.  Clinton implies that an identity check would limit the franchise of blacks.  Preposterous. There is also the slam against blacks.  Those of my acquaintance don't live under bridges and they do manage to do things like cash checks.

Clinton famously stumbled over the meaning of 'is.'  Apparently he is equally challenged by the meaning of  'franchise.'

Ernest Gellner on Ordinary Language Philosophy: Moore as Wittgensteinian Man

The following quotations from Ernest Gellner's Words and Things  are borrowed from Kieran Setiya's site.

Academic environments are generally characterised by the presence of people who claim to understand more than in fact they do. Linguistic Philosophy has produced a great revolution, generating people who claim not to understand what in fact they do. Some achieve great virtuosity at it. Any beginner in philosophy can manage not to understand, say, Hegel, but I have heard people who were so advanced that they knew how not to understand writers of such limpid clarity as Bertrand Russell or A. J. Ayer.

It is not clear whether Moore should be called a philosopher or a pedant of such outstanding ability as to push pedantry and literal-mindedness to a point where it became a philosophy. [. . .] One might say that Moore is the one and only known example of Wittgensteinian man: unpuzzled by the world or science, puzzled only by the oddity of the sayings of philosophers, and sensibly reacting to that alleged oddity by very carefully, painstakingly and interminably examining their use of words. . . .

Absolutely brilliant!  When I first read Moore and his remark to the effect that he would never have done philosophy if it hadn't been for the puzzling things he found in books by men like Bradley, I took that as almost the definition of an inauthentic philosopher: one who gets his problems, not from life, but from books.  I should say, though, that over the years I have come to appreciate Moore as a master of analysis.  But I can't shake the thought that there is something deeply perverse about finding the impetus to philosophizing in philosophical claims and theories rather than in the realities attendance to which gave rise to the claims and theories in the first place.  Imagine a scientist or an historian or even a theologian  who proceeded in that way.

In this passage Gellner explains the appeal of the later Wittgenstein:

The linguistic naturalism, the reduction of the basis of our  thought to linguistic etiquette, ensures that there is no appeal  whatever to Extraneous Authority for the manner in which we speak and think. Naturalism, this-worldliness, is thus pushed to its final limit. But at the very same time, and for that very reason (language and custom being their own masters, beholden and accountable to no Outside norm), the diversified content of language and custom is indiscriminately endorsed. Thus the     transcendent, if and when required, slips back ambiguously, in virtue of being the object of natural practices, customs, modes of speech.

I take the Gellnerian ball and run with it in What is the Appeal of Ordinary Language Philosophy?  and How Ordinary Language Philosophy Rests on Logical Positivism.
  

A Problem for the Hylomorphic Dualist

A position in the philosophy of mind that is currently under-represented and under-discussed is Thomistic or hylomorphic dualism.  Whereas the tendency of the substance dualist is to identify the person with his soul or mind, the hylomorphic approach identifies the person with a soul-body composite in which soul stands to body as form (morphe) stands to matter (hyle). In a slogan: anima forma corporis: the soul is the form of the body. To be a bit more precise, the soul is the substantial form of the body, a form that makes of the matter it informs a human substance. 

 

Conservatives in the Lead

According to a Gallup Poll dated 1 August, 41% of Americans self-identify as conservatives, 36% as moderate, and 21% as liberal.

Liberals have only themselves to blame for their poor showing.  Their extremism and reckless deviation from common sense condemn them in the eyes of most of us.  The op-ed columnists of the once-great New York Times, for example, are an extremist lot.  Have you ever read a Krugman column?  Or this morning's bit of hyperventilation from Joe Nocera in which he likens Tea Partiers to terrorists? 

Pee Cee Christians

Do some Christians have a death wish?  Campus Crusade for Christ has changed its name, dropping 'crusade' and 'Christ.' 

And then they have the chutzpah to say they are not bowing to political correctness.

There is nothing wrong with unintentionally causing offense to people who take offense inappropriately.  If 'crusade' and 'Christ' are offensive to you, then that is your problem.  This thought is developed in Of Black Holes and Political Correctness.

And besides, Christianity is offensive to the natural man.  It is supposed to be.

The Aporetics of Singular Sentences

I should issue a partial retraction.  I wrote earlier,"The TFL representation of singular sentences as quantified sentences does not capture their logical form, and this is an inadequacy of TFL, and a point in favor of MPL."  ('TFL' is short for 'traditional formal logic'; 'MPL' for 'modern predicate logic with identity.' )

The animadversions of Edward the Nominalist have made me see that my assertion is by no means obvious, and may in the end be just a dogma of analytic philosophy which has prevailed because endlessly repeated and rarely questioned.  Consider again this obviously valid argument:

1. Pittacus is a good man
2. Pittacus is a wise man
—–
3. Some wise man is a good man.

The traditional syllogistic renders the argument as follows: 

Every Pittacus is a wise man
Some Pittacus is a good man
—–
Some wise man is a good man.

This has the form:

Every P is a W
Some P is a G
—–
Some W is a G.

This form is easily shown to be valid by the application of the syllogistic rules. 

In my earlier post I then repeated a stock objection which I got from Peter Geach:

But is it logically acceptable to attach a quantifier to a singular term? How could a proper name have a sign of logical quantity prefixed to it? 'Pittacus' denotes or names exactly one individual. 'Every Pittacus' denotes the very same individual. So we should expect 'Every Pittacus is wise' and 'Pittacus is wise' to exhibit the same logical behavior. But they behave differently under negation.

The negation of 'Pittacus is wise' is 'Pittacus is not wise.' So, given that 'Pittacus' and 'every Pittacus' denote the same individual, we should expect that the negation of 'Every Pittacus is wise' will be 'Every Pittacus is not wise.' But that is not the negation (contradictory) of 'Every Pittacus is wise'; it is its contrary. So 'Pittacus is wise' and 'Every Pittacus is wise' behave differently under negation, which shows that their logical form is different.

My objection, in nuce, was that 'Pittacus is wise' and 'Pittacus is not wise' are contradictories, not contraries, while 'Every Pittacus is wise' and 'Every Pittacus is not wise' ('No Pittacus is wise') are contraries.  Therefore, TFL does not capture or render perspicuous the logical form of 'Pittacus is wise.'

To this, Edward plausibly objected:

As I have argued here before, ‘Pittacus is wise’ and ‘Pittacus is not wise’ are in fact contraries. For the first implies that someone (Pittacus) is wise. The second implies that someone (Pittacus again) is not wise. Both imply the existence of Pittacus (or at least – to silence impudent quibblers – that someone is Pittacus). Thus they are contraries. Both are false when no one is Pittacus.

I now concede that this is a very good point.  A little later Edward writes,

The thing is, you really have a problem otherwise. If 'Socrates is wise' and 'Socrates is not wise' are contradictories, and if 'Socrates is not wise' implies 'someone (Socrates) is not wise', as standard MPC holds, you are committed to the thesis that the sentence is not meaningful when Socrates ceases to exist (or if he never existed because Plato made him up). Which (on my definition) is Direct Reference.

So you have this horrible choice:  Direct reference or Traditional Logic.

But must we choose?  Consider 'Vulcan is uninhabited.'  Why can't I, without jettisoning any of the characteristic tenets of MPL, just say that this sentence, though it appears singular is really general because 'Vulcan' is not a logically proper name but a definite description in disguise?  Accordingly, what the sentence says is that a certain concept — the concept planet between Mercury and the Sun — has as a Fregean mark (Merkmal) the concept uninhabited.

Now consider the pair 'Socrates is dead' – 'Socrates is not dead.'  Are these contraries or contradictories?  If contraries, then they can both be false.  Arguably, they are both false since Socrates does not exist, given that presentism is true. Since both are false, both are meaningful.  But then 'Socrates ' has meaning despite its not referring to anything.  So 'Socrates' has something like a Fregean sense.  But what on earth could this be, given that 'Socrates' unlike 'Vulcan'  names an individual that existed, and so has a nonqualitative thisnsess incommunicable to any other individual?

If, on the other hand, the meaning of 'Socrates' is its referent, then, given that presentism is  true and Socrates does not exist, there is no referent in which case both sentences are meaningless.

So once again we are in deep aporetic trouble.  The proper name of a past individual cannot have a reference-determining sense.  This is because any such sense would have to be a Plantingian haecceity-property, and I have already shown that these cannot exist.  But if we say that 'Socrates' does not have a reference-determining sense but refers directly in such a way as to require Socrates to exist if 'Socrates' is to have meaning, then, given presentism,  'Socrates' and the sentence of which it is a part is meaningless. 

A Big Victory for the Tea Party

Call it Schadenfreude, but it was certainly a pleasure to wake up this morning to the gnashing of leftist teeth over last night's Tea Party triumph.  The howling of the lefties is as music to my ears.  In his latest outburst, Paul Krugman speaks of "extortion."  Others speak of 'hostage-taking,' 'terrorism,' 'Taliban tactics,' 'arson.'  One commentator likened the Tea Partiers to Hezbollah.

This absurdly extremist rhetoric lets us know that for the Left this is a war.  But then how can we treat it as a civil debate?  They are lying about us blatantly and brazenly.  (Bernie Sanders, the Vermont socialist said on C-Span the other night that Republicans want to destroy Social Security.)  So we must tell the truth about them and gird our loins for the next round.  Meanwhile a bit of celebration is in order.

Never Say Die

Susan Jacoby's new book fell into my hands the other day.  It is entitled Never Say Die: The Myth and Marketing of the New Old Age (Pantheon, 2011).  Although I noticed some things in the first chapter that are clearly true and worth pointing out, the preface raised my critical eyebrows a bit.  But I agree with Jacoby's realism:

. . . to suggest that ninety may soon become the new fifty — the premise of a panel at the widely publicized annual World Science Festival held in New York City in 2008 — is to engage in magical thinking. (5)

Surely she is right about that.  In the preface she writes,

I hope that this book about the genuine battles of growing old will provide support for all who draw their strength and courage from reality, however daunting that reality may be, rather than from platitudes about “defying old age.” This commonly used phrase in the annals of the so-called new old age fills me with rage, because the proximity of old age to death is not only undefiable but undeniable. Anger, by the way, is another emotion considered inappropriate in the old; the dubious notion of the “wisdom of old age” rests on the belief that elders can, and should, transcend the passions, vaulting ambition, and competitiveness of their younger adult lives and arrive at some sort of peace that passeth all understanding.

It is no doubt silly to speak of 'defying old age,' but why should this phrase elicit rage in the 63 year old Boomer?  And then, half-perceiving the inappropriateness of rage over such a thing, especially in a 63 year old, she opines that it is dubious that as we age we can and should transcend the passions, give up ambition, and set aside our youthful competitiveness.  Finally, making matters worse, she adduces a religious phrase that she doesn't understand.

On the contrary, I say

1. To live enslaved to one's passions is obviously bad and has been seen as bad in all the major wisdom traditions. It is precisely one of the compensations of old age, which I take to begin at 60, that it is easier and easier to free oneself from the grip of passion.  The fire down below  begins to subside, to mention the central and most delusive passion. The Buddhist injunction, "Conquer desire and aversion," is much easier to implement once the fires of lust have damped down.  Self-mastery is something within our power and something we ought to pursue. As I see it, Jacoby rightly opposes one form of contemporary nonsense, the Forever Young nonsense, only to succumb to another form of contemporary nonsense, namely, that passion is good.

2.  As for ambition, lack of ambition in the young is rightly seen as a defect. But when the old are still driven by their old ambitions, none of which were of too lofty a nature, are they not fools?  For the old ambitions, appropriate as they were in youth, have become absurd in old age.  Life is, or at least ought to be, progressive disillusionment, a growing insight into the ultimate nullity of name and fame, status and position, loot and lucre.  Or, as I put it in an aphorism:

The young, astride their steeds of ambition, should gallop boldly into the fray. But the old should know when to quit the game and dismount into dis-illusion. Homo ludens, when sapient, knows when to become de-luded.

 3. The same goes for competitiveness.  You waste your old age if you don't use it to see through "finite competitive selfhood"  to borrow a fine phrase from A. E. Taylor.  What baubles and trinkets are you competing for, old man?  What are they worth?  You were once a child but then you put aside childish things.  Why do you cling still to the toys of adulthood?

4. At the end of the above-quoted passage Jacoby adduces a New Testament phrase that she obviously does not understand.  At Philippians 4:7 in the King James Version, we read "And the peace of God, which passeth all understanding, shall keep your hearts and minds through Christ Jesus."  So typical of a secularist to mock religion and then twist a line of religious provenience around to her own purposes!  This misuse of religious language is something that ought to be opposed.

And particularly block-headed is her reference to William Wordsworth at the end of her preface:

Anyone who has outlived his or her passions has lived too long. Wordsworth got it exactly right, at the tender age of thirty-seven, in his “Ode: Intimations of Immortality from Recollections of Early Childhood”: O joy! That in our embers / Is something that doth live, / That nature yet remembers / What was so fugitive!

If she had read the Ode carefully she would have known that it is deeply otherworldly and Platonic in inspiration.  It is about experiences that some of us had as children, experiences in which hints of our higher origin were vouchsafed to us.  It has nothing to do with "The search for new, earthbound ways to express lifelong passions . . . ."

I am reminded of Georg Lichtenberg's aphorism, Ein Buch ist ein Spiegel, wenn ein Affe hineinguckt, so kann freilich kein Apostel heraus sehen.  "A book is a mirror: if an ape looks in, no apostle will look out."