Bill Vallicella – Page 670 – Maverick Philosopher

Ayn Rand on “Existence Exists”

Whether one calls it a renaissance or a recrudescence, Rand is on a roll. The Randian resurgence doesn't please David Bentley Hart whose First Things attack piece contains the following:

And, really, what can one say about Objectivism? It isn’t so much a philosophy as what someone who has never actually encountered philosophy imagines a philosophy might look like: good hard axiomatic absolutes, a bluff attitude of intellectual superiority, lots of simple atomic premises supposedly immune to doubt, immense and inflexible conclusions, and plenty of assertions about what is “rational” or “objective” or “real.” Oh, and of course an imposing brand name ending with an “-ism.” Rand was so eerily ignorant of all the interesting problems of ontology, epistemology, or logic that she believed she could construct an irrefutable system around a collection of simple maxims like “existence is identity” and “consciousness is identification,” all gathered from the damp fenlands between vacuous tautology and catastrophic category error.

Pleonasm and bombast aside, "Maxims . . . gathered from the damp fenlands of vacuous tautology and catastrophic category error" is on the mark. I will illustrate with the famous Randianism, "Existence exists."

1. There are at least two sensible ways of construing 'Existence exists.' (a) That in virtue of which existing things exist itself exists. For example, if one thought of existence as a property of existing things, and one were a realist about properties, then it would make sense for that person to say that existence exists. He would mean by it that the property of existence exists. (b) Existing things exist. Instead of taking 'existence' as denoting that in virtue of which existing things exist, one could take it as a term that applies to whatever exists. Accordingly, existence is whatever exists. To say that existence exists would then mean that existing things exist, or whatever exists exists. But then the dictum would be a tautology. Of course existing things exist, what else would they be 'doing'? Breathing things breath. Running things run. Whatever is in orbit is in orbit.

2. From Rand's texts it is clear that she intends neither the (a) nor the (b) construal. What she is trying to say is something non-tautological: that the things that exist exist and have the attributes they have independently of us. Here we read, "The primacy of existence (of reality) is the axiom that existence exists, i.e., that the universe exists independent of consciousness (of any consciousness), that things are what they are, that they possess a specific nature, an identity." Rand is advancing a version of metaphysical realism. Existence EXISTS! (Pound the lectern, stamp the foot, flare the nostrils.) In other words, the things that exist — yonder mountain, the setting sun — EXIST! where that means that they are real in sublime independence of our thinking and doing and talking, and indeed of any being's thinking and doing. The problem, of course, is that Rand chooses to express herself in an inept and idiosyncratic way using the ambiguous sentence, 'Existence exists.' A careful writer does not package non-tautological claims in sentences the form of which is tautological.

That whatever exists exists independently of any consciousness, including a divine consciousness if there is one, is a substantive metaphysical claim, as can be seen from the fact that it rules out every form of idealism. 'Existing things exist,' however, is a barefaced tautology that rules out nothing.

3. But the problem is not merely infelicity of expression. Even though Rand wants to advance a substantive non-tautological thesis, a thesis of metaphysical realism, she thinks she can accomplish this by either inferring it from or conflating it with the Law of Identity. The law states that for any x, x = x. As Rand puts it, "A =A." Well of course. There is nothing controversial here. But Rand thinks that one can straightaway move to a substantive thesis that is controversial, namely, metaphysical realism according to which things exist and have the natures they have independently of any consciousness. My point is not that metaphysical realism is false; my point is that denying it is not equivalent to denying the Law of Identity. The problem is that Rand packs a hell of a lot into the the law in question, a lot of stuff that doesn't belong there. She puts the following in the mouth of Galt:

To exist is to be something, as distinguished from the nothing of nonexistence, it is to be an entity of a specific nature made of specific attributes. Centuries ago, the man who was—no matter what his errors —the greatest of your philosophers, has stated the formula defining the concept of existence and the rule of all knowledge: A is A. A thing is itself. You have never grasped the meaning of his statement. I am here to complete it: Existence is Identity, Consciousness is Identification.

[. . .]

Are you seeking to know what is wrong with the world? All the disasters that have wrecked your world, came from your leaders’ attempt to evade the fact that A is A. All the secret evil you dread to face within you and all the pain you have ever endured, came from your own attempt to evade the fact that A is A. The purpose of those who taught you to evade it, was to make you forget that Man is Man.

So the disasters of the 20th century originated in the evasion by people like Hitler and Stalin of the fact that A is A! This is just silly. How can the disasters of the 2oth century be laid at the door step of a miserable tautology? Suppose we grant that everything that exists is self-identical and that everything that is self-identical exists. (The first half of the assertion is uncontroversial, but the second half is not and will be contested by followers of Alexius von Meionong.) But suppose we grant it. I myself believe it is true. By what process of reasoning does one arrive at such substantive Randian claims as that (1) Whatever exists exists independently of any consciousness and (2) There is nothing antecedent to existence, nothing apart from it—and no alternative to it?

The denials of these two propositions are consistent with the Law of Identity and Rand's explication of existence in terms of this law. So the propositions cannot be validly inferred from the law.

Note finally that if there is no alternative to existence, then it is necessarily the case that something exists. For to say that there is no alternative to existence is to say that it is impossible that there be nothing at all. But 'to exist = to be self-identical' is consistent with each thing's existence being contingent, and the whole lot of them being contingent. Therefore, one cannot validly infer 'There is no alternative to existence' from 'To exist = to be self-identical.'

From this we see how slovenly the Randian/Peikoffian 'reasoning' is. The game they play is the following. They advance substantive metaphysical claims in the guise of tautologies. The self-evidence of the latter they illicitly ascribe to the former. This allows them to pass off their sayings as axioms that every rational person must accept. If you patiently expose their confusions as I just did, they resort to invective and name-calling.

Confessions of a Former Anti-TV Elitist

When I lived with my parents, I watched a television, theirs. But when I got out on my own, I owned no TV, first for reasons of poverty, and later, after nailing down a philosophy teaching gig, for reasons of inertia and elitism. The life of the mind is a magnificent thing, but it can breed a certain arrogance: one fancies oneself vastly superior to the ordinary boob who doesn't read books, can't write or think beyond the utilitarian, and sucks on the glass tit for the little cognitive pablum his impoverished pate can absorb. It's not called the boob tube for nothing. You will have noticed the dual sense of 'boob.'

My period of tubelessness included the whole of the 1970s and roughly the first third of the 1980s. Once I got the teaching job, I was able to afford a stereo system. (I still have the tuner, a Pioneer SX-880. The Technics turntable doesn't see much use, though, despite my holding on to all my albums from the '60s and beyond.) I gave myself a classical music education and listened to the FM band. My tuner was usually set to WYSO, Yellow Springs, Ohio, an ultraliberal enclave and home to Antioch College. WYSO was an NPR affiliate and that is where I got most of my news and commentary. That and The New York Review of Books and The New Republic, to both of which I subscribed. In those days I wouldn't have been caught dead listening to the AM band. As you can see, I was a bit of a liberal. But experience and hard thinking have a way of making conservatives out of liberals.

But then a lovely creature entered my life. She came without a dowry but with a TV. Thus the tube entered my life and I joined the booboisie, to extend a neologism introduced by H. L. Mencken. But it was now the mid-80s and cable was the thing. Brian Lamb and the cable providers made possible C-Span, and this brings me to my main point.

No TV, no C-Span. Therein lies the main reason for owning a TV.

There are several other reasons, of course, but that is the main one. I suppose I am still an elitist, but an elitist of a different sort. Before, my elitism was manifested by a rejection of TV tout court; now by a selection of perhaps 20 out of 200 channels as worth viewing. The Hitler Channel, more commonly know as the History Channel, is worth a visit. I recently discovered the Documentary Channel which, despite its leftist leanings, is a source of some outstanding documentaries. I'm not talking about docu-drama bullshit, such as one might find on MSM networks, but hard-core documentaries containing lengthy interviews with interesting characters.

And then there are those Twilight Zone marathons, on New Year's Eve and the Fourth of July. It is a good time to be alive.

Robert Paul Wolff on Anarchism and Marxism

I see that R. P. Wolff has a blog, The Philosopher's Stone. His post Anarchism and Marxism caught my eye. In it he addresses the question of the logical consistency of his anarchism and his Marxism. The answer of course depends on how Wolff employs these terms.

First of all, when I call myself an anarchist, I mean just exactly what I explained in my little book In Defense of Anarchism. I deny that there is or could be a de jure legitimate state. That is the sum and substance of what I call in that book my "philosophical anarchism." This is a limited claim, but not at all a trivial one. [. . .]

My Marxism, as I have many times explained, is not a form of secular religious faith, but a conviction that Marx was correct when he argued that capitalism rests essentially on the exploitation of the working class.

Clearly, *A de jure legitimate state is impossible* and *Capitalism rests essentially on the exploitation of the working class* are logically consistent propositions. So if these propositions capture what is meant by 'anarchism' and 'Marxism,' then one can be both an anarchist and a Marxist.

So far, so good. But suppose one accepts the second proposition. Wouldn't one naturally want to bring about political change and eliminate capitalism and with it the exploitation of the working class? (As Marx wrote in his Theses on Feuerbach, "The philosophers have variously interpreted the world, but the point is to change it.") Now the implementation of this change and the maintenance of a a socialist order requires the coercive power of the state and with it the violation of the autonomy of all those who resist.

This fact brings us to a much more interesting consistency question: How could an anarchist (in Wolff's sense), consistently with his anarchism, be a Marxist in any full-blooded sense of the term? In a full-blooded sense, a Marxist is not one who merely maintains the thesis that capitalism by its very nature exploits workers, but one who works to seize control of the state apparatus for the purpose of implementing the elimination of capitalism. The following two propositions are plainly inconsistent: *The state as such lacks moral justification* and *The state possess moral justification when its coercive power is employed to eliminate capitalism and usher in socialism.*

Now that is the inconsistency that bothers me. Wolff appears to address it at the end of his post:

I can see no conflict whatsoever between philosophical anarchism and Marxian socialism. The citizens of a socialist society, were one ever to come into existence [Gott sei dank!], would have no more obligation to obey the laws of that state, merely because it was socialist, than they have now to obey the laws of the United States, merely because America is (let us grant for the sake of argument) democratic. Both groups of citizens would stand under the universal duty of judging for themselves whether what the laws command is something that on independent grounds it is good to do. There is no duty, prima facie or otherwise, to obey the law simply because it is the law.

There is something unsatisfactory about this answer. Wolff obviously wants a socialist society. But good Kantian that he is, Wolff must appreciate that to will the end is to will the means. The end is a socialist order; the means is the imposition of socialism and the eradication of capitalism by means of the coercive power of the state. (You would have to be quite the utopian off in Cloud Cuckoo Land to suppose that socialism could be brought about in any other way. And of course once the socialist state has total control, it won't "wither away.") So it seems Wolff must will and thus find morally acceptable the state apparatus that enforces and maintains socialism. But then his Marxism contradicts his anarchism. For these two propositions are logically inconsistent: *No state is morally justified* and *States that enforce and maintain socialism are morally justified.*

The bit about there being no duty to obey the law simply because it is the law seems not to the point. The point is that if socialism is morally superior to capitalism, and the only route to socialism is via the state's exercise of its coercive power, then one who wills and works for the implementation of socialism must will and work for and find morally acceptable the existence of a socialist state.

Or maybe Wolff's position just boils down to the triviality that whatever order comes about, whether capitalist, socialist, mixed, or anything else, there would be no duty to obey the law simply because it is the law. But then he hasn't shown the consistency of anarchism and Marxism in any full-blooded sense of these terms.

I summarize Wolff's In Defense of Anarchism here , here, and here.

Why the Collapse of Philosophical Studies in the Islamic World?

Leo Strauss sketches an answer in his "How to Begin to Study Medieval Philosophy" in The Rebirth of Classical Political Rationalism, ed. T. L. Pangle, University of Chicago Press, 1989, pp. 221-222, bolding added:

For the Jew and the Moslem, religion is primarily not, as it is for the Christian, a faith formulated in dogmas, but a law, a code of divine origin. Accordingly, the religious science, the sacra doctrina, is not dogmatic theology, theologia revelata, but the science of the law, halaka or fiqh. The science of the law, thus understood has much less in common with philosophy than has dogmatic theology. Hence the status of philosophy is, as a matter of principle, much more precarious in the Islamic-Jewish world than it is in the Christian world. No one could become a competent Christian theologian without having studied at least a substantial part of philosophy; philosophy was an integral part of the officially authorized and even required training. On the other hand, one could become an absolutely competent halakist or faqih without having the slightest knowledge of philosophy. This fundamental difference doubtless explains the possibility of the later complete collapse of philosophical studies in the Islamic world, a collapse which has no parallel in the West in spite of Luther.

I like the "in spite of Luther."

Leo Strauss on Reading and Writing

Leo Strauss, Persecution and the Art of Writing:

     It is a general observation that people write as they read. As a
     rule, careful writers are careful readers and vice versa. A careful
     writer wants to be read carefully. He cannot know what it means to
     be read carefully but by having done careful reading himself.
     Reading precedes writing. We read before we write. We learn to
     write by reading. A man learns to write well by reading well good
     books, by reading most carefully books which are most carefully
     written. (Quoted from Edwin Curley, Behind the Geometrical Method:
     A Reading of Spinoza's Ethics, Princeton University Press, 1988,
     p. ii.)

"We learn to write by reading." This is why reading good books is
essential to becoming a good writer.

A Reader Needs Advice on Assembling a Philosophical Toolkit

I'm an avid reader of your blog and have really enjoyed the in-depth analysis of a myriad of issues and assorted ideas. It really is one of a kind!

That being said, I'm emailing to get some advice on how I should further my philosophical studies. I've decided on political science as a major and philosophy as a minor. I hope to pursue my studies far beyond the undergraduate level, mostly in political philosophy. The problem I'm starting to have is when I really try to dissect some of your posts for their technical content, I find that I am unfamiliar with a lot of the philosophical tools that you use in your writings, tools that we undergraduates are not really acquainted with, and so I was wondering if you'd be able to direct me to some resources that would enable me to get to the next level.

So far I've looked far and wide for introductory books that would house something similar to what I've described above, perhaps a compilation of commonly used analytical techniques (if that's what you would call them), but I have come up with virtually nothing.

For some reason, I have this feeling that you're going to tell me that there aren't any such resources, and that the job of the philosopher is to comb through analytic philosophy (or even before) from its inception and pick out strategies that philosophers have introduced, often in ambiguous ways, over a large span of time, and refine them so they are somewhat usable. Is the creation of a toolkit a matter of hitting the books (something I don't mind) or is it really a bottom-up, creative endeavor?

P.S. Your posts regarding politics are a breath of fresh air.

I'm hoping that my readers can be of some assistance here. There are probably some recent handbooks of which I am not aware. But I know of some older books that should be useful. One is Richard L. Purtill, A Logical Introduction to Philosophy. Another is Jay F. Rosenberg, The Practice of Philosophy: A Handbook for Beginners. And you may want to take a look at John Passmore, Philosophical Reasoning and Douglas N. Walton, Informal Logic: A Handbook for Critical Argumentation.

Are Atheists Theologians?

This from a reader:

I’m e-mailing you with this question because it’s bothered me for a while and I think you are more than capable of giving me a better understand of it. “Can atheists rationally ignore theology? Further, if they do need to study it, quite how much should they study, and which aspect(s) of it?” Many atheists think that studying theology would simply waste their time, whereas I now think that no rational person’s atheism is complete without engaging with the best theology on offer.

Well of course you are right: any atheist who does not engage with a sophisticated conception of God is simply attacking a straw man and may be ignored for that very reason. I see little point is discussions with atheists who liken God to a flying spaghetti monster or a celestial teapot. Let them first show that they have mastered the complexities of a sophisticated God conception, and that they have respect for, and some understanding of, the religious sensibility, and then we will talk with them. If they polemicize, or are disrespectful or dismissive, then they are best ignored.

My own position is that atheism is a kind of rival theology (atheology?), just as every disbelief is a kind of rival belief, and that no atheist can rationally afford to ignore theology.

Here you have to be careful. Suppose S disbelieves that p. (For example, Jones disbelieves that Osama is dead.) It does not follow that Jones believes that ~p. For it may be that S neither believes that p nor believes that ~p. If one neither accepts nor rejects the proposition that Osama is dead, then one could be said to disbelieve that Osama is dead without believing that he is alive. So there are two modes of disbelief with respect to a proposition p. Either one believes that ~p or one suspends judgment with respect to p. So I don't agree that every disbelief is a kind of rival belief.

In fact, every atheist is implicitly a theologian. For instance, Thomas Aquinas believes that God is simple, and Richard Dawkins believes that God is complex. Dawkins and Aquinas seem to compete in the same arena and talk on the same subject, so aren’t they both theologians, albeit rival ones? Further, every informed atheist must hold that the arguments that are meant to establish the existence of God fail. To think this is to engage positively with theology. Not to think this is to fail to rationally found one’s atheism. An atheist who is ignorant of theology, in my view, is rather like someone who disbelieves in the planets but is ignorant of astronomy. Atheists who do not take God and theology seriously do not take their own atheism seriously either.

Here again you have to be careful. It is not as if there exists an x such that x = God and that Aquinas and Dawkins have contradictory beliefs about this one entity, x. They are not disagreeing in the way two theologians might disagree over say, divine foreknowledge or the filioque, or divine simplicity. These theologians disagree, not about the existence of God, but about his exact nature. By contrast, Aquinas and Dawkins are not presupposing a common subject matter about whose attributes they disagree. So it is highly misleading if not outright wrong to say that Aquinas and Dawkins are rival theologians. For Aquinas, theology has a subject matter; for Dawkins it does not. So they do not "talk on the same subject."

It helps if you distinguish concepts of God from God. For Aquinas, there really is an entity which some of those concepts are concepts of, even though no concept could be adequate to the divine reality. For Dawkins, however, nothing that could reasonably count as a God concept is a concept of anything.

I think you have the right idea, but you are putting it in the wrong way. You are right that serious and intellectually responsible atheists must address themselves to the most sophisticated conceptions of theists. In this sense they must "engage positively with theology." But that is not to say that "every atheist is implicitly a theologian." Atheists deny the existence of God. So for them there cannot be any theology, any study of God, as a legitimate inquiry into a domain of reality. And please note that one can deny the existence of God without in any obvious way presupposing the existence of God. How? In the same way one denies the existence of Pegasus without presupposing the existence of Pegasus. One cannot predicate nonexistence of Pegasus without presupposing the existence of Pegasus. But one can predicate noninstantiation of the concept winged horse of such and such a description without presupposing the existence of Pegasus, And so it is with the denial of God. The atheist simply claims that no God concept is instantiated. So I deny that atheism is a species of theology. It is a rejection of all theology.

I also deny here and here that atheism is a religion, though I grant that it is like a religion in some ways.

Moonsets and Microclimates

One advantage the early riser has over his opposite number is that he is better placed to enjoy certain celestial and atmospheric phenomena. One morning the moonset over the hills behind my house was unusually entrancing. The moon was at its fullest and the sky at it clearest. The Morning Star, that overworked example of so many philosophy of language dissertations, was in the vicinity of the moon, at least phenomenologically. The conjunction put me in mind of the Turkish flag which depicts Venus and a crescent moon in similar proximity. It was on such a crescent-mooned night that Mustafa Kemal Ataturk (1881-1938) began the Kurtulus Savasi (the War of Independence) that brought into being the Republic of Turkey. Or so I was once told by a Turkish girl.

And then a day or two later I was out hiking at first light. The trail took me down into a chilly streambed. Climbing out of the drainage was like walking into a warm house: the temperature differential was twenty degrees Fahrhenheit if it was two. It takes a hiker, one accompanied only by his shadow, to appreciate such phenomena properly. The trail runner and the mountain biker are working too hard and are too much claimed by the hazards under foot and wheel to attend to the subtle. And the hiker who brings company along will be snubbed by Nature who jealously hides her charms from the unworthy and the inattentive. Nature: "You bring society into my serene precincts? Then enjoy your society, you can't have me."

As for the windshield tourist — he may as well be on another planet.

Saturday Night at the Oldies: John Fahey

Layla.

Requiem for Mississippi John Hurt.

Candy Man.

Desperate Man Blues.

Bio.

Bluff Spring Loop, Superstition Wilderness, 6 May 2011

This is a 9.3 mile hike out of the Peralta Trailhead, Superstition Wilderness, Arizona. I have done it countless times in both the clockwise and counterclockwise directions. The route sports about 1260 feet of elevation gain according to David Mazel (Arizona Trails, Wilderness Press 1991, p. 47) We commenced hiking at 6 AM on the dot and finished at 11:35. The dialectics slowed down the peripatetics. Clockwise takes the hiker up rather than down what the locals call "Heart Attack Hill" when they are not calling it "Cardiac Hill." I much prefer the uphill to the downhill, heart stress to knee strain, though we have it on the authority of Heraclitus the Obscure of Ephesus that "The way up and the way down are the same." (Fragment 60) A second advantage of the clockwise route is that fewer fellow hikers are encountered. Human nature being what it is, the path of least resistance is preferred by the many. The fewer of the many encountered the better, or so say I. Here is the elevation profile in the easy counterclockwise direction:

Eschewing the Peripatetic approach to philosophy, Peter L. deemed us "crazy" for hiking in the desert in summer. (High was near 100 Fahrenheit on the day in question.) Hiking is a "delectable madness" as I seem to recall Colin Fletcher saying. The first shot depicts the young philosopher Spencer Case at Miner's Summit standing before Miner's Needle while the second shows what the locals call "Cathedral Rock."

Ladderman Revisited

This post dated 17 November 2004 is from Ladderman and ought to be preserved. So I reproduce it here.

Maverick Philosopher posted a short sharp reply to the now common leftist claim that America is becoming a "theocracy" under President Bush. Excerpt:

"Hostility to religion, especially institutionalized religion, is a defining characteristic of the Left. We've known that since 1789. What is surprising, and truly bizarre, is the Left's going soft on militant Islam, the most virulent strain of religious bigotry ever to appear. It threatens all of their values. But their obsession with dissent is so great, dissent at all costs and against everything established, that they simply must denounce Bush and Co. as potential theocrats, all the while cozying up to militant Islam."

That must have had an awful lot of truth in it as it even got a bite from Ladderman, who was paranoid (or egotistical) enough to think that the post referred to him, even though he was not mentioned in it.

Ladderman's only substantial point in reply, however, is that some Christians WANT to have their values (such as opposition to abortion) enshrined in legislation. Wow! What news! You can certainly rely on Ladderman for the scoops! Many Christians have wanted that from the year dot but it does NOT mean that they are getting it or are going to get it. Wanting isn't getting and Bush's policy as given in the Presidential debates is thoroughly centrist: He wants to make alternatives to abortion more attractive but he certainly has no policy of getting abortion banned.

And in fact American law generally has undoubtedly been becoming more secular with every passing year. The Christian fundamentalists have LOST the battle on things like abortion, public prayer, public display of religious symbols and prohibition of homosexuality. But Ladderman (Leiter) is only a Law professor so I guess he hasn't noticed.

If he went to Saudi Arabia or Iran he would find out what a real theocracy is like. Ladderman's bile has totally cut him off from reality.

Still More on the Morality of Celebrating the Death of Evildoers

It is not just some Christians who feel the moral dubiousness of joy and celebration at the death of evildoers. Here is Rabbi Shmuel Herzfeld. "So our tradition is clear: Public rejoicing about the death of an enemy is entirely inappropriate." Here is a delightfully equivocal statement by Rabbi Tzvi Freeman.

Interestingly, Dennis Prager is still pounding on this theme. About twenty minutes ago I heard him repeat his argument against me and others. The argument could be put like this:

1. The Israelites rejoiced when the Red Sea closed around the Egyptians, drowning them. (Exodus 15)
2. This rejoicing was pleasing to God.
Therefore
3. To rejoice over the death of evildoers is morally permissible.

This argument is only as good as its second premise. Two questions. First, does the Bible depict God as being pleased at the rejoicing? Not unequivocally. Prager could argue from Ex 15: 22-25 that God was indeed pleased because he showed Moses a tree with which he rendered the bitter waters of Marah sweet and potable. The Israelites were mighty thirsty after three days of traipsing around in the wilderness of Shur after emerging from the Red Sea. Unfortunately, Prager provided no support for (2).

But more important is the second question. Why should we take the fact that God is depicted as being pleased at the rejoicing — if it is a fact — as evidence that God is pleased? I grant that if God is pleased at some behavior then that behavior is morally acceptable. But the fact that God is depicted as being pleased does not entail that God is pleased.

And so, as a philosopher, I cannot credit the (1)-(3) argument. It assumes that the Bible is the inerrant word of God. But this is not to be assumed; this is to be tested. The Bible has to satisfy reason's criteria before it can be accepted as true. If the Bible violates the deliverances of practical reason (as it quite clearly does in the Abraham and Isaac story, see my Kant on Abraham and Isaac) then it cannot be accepted in those passages in which the violation occurs as the word of God.

We who have one foot in Athens and the other in Jerusalem face the problem of how we can avoid being torn asunder. On the one hand, philosophy can bring us to the realization that we need revelation; on the other hand, nothing can count as genuine revelation unless it passes muster by reason's own theoretical and practical lights. This is not to demand that the content of revelation be derivable from reason; it is to demand that nothing that purports to be revelation can be credited as genuine revelation if it violates the clearest principles of theoretical and practical reason, for example, the Law of Non-Contradiction and the principles that one may not kill the innocent or rejoice over another man's evil fate.

The problem is to reconcile divine authority with human reason and autonomy. Two nonsolutions may be immediately dismissed: fideism which denigrates reason, and rationalism which denigrates faith.

Maverick Philosopher 7th Blogiversary

I began this weblog seven years ago today in 2004. My seventh year ended well yesterday with 1717 pageviews for the day and with Dennis Prager reading from one of my posts on his nationally syndicated radio show.

Some say that blogging is dead. Read or unread, whether by sages or fools, I shall blog on. A post beats a twit tweet any day, and no day without a post. Nulla dies sine linea. It is too early to say of blogging what Etienne Gilson said of philosophy, namely, that it always buries its undertakers, but I am hopeful. After all, a weblog is just an online journal, and journal scribbling has flourished most interestingly for centuries.

To put it romantically, blogging is a vehicle for the relentless quotidian sifting, seeking, and questing for sense and truth and reality without which some of us would find life meaningless.

This, the fourth version of Maverick Philosopher, was begun on 31 October 2008. I thank you for your patronage.

The Reference Relation: Internal or External?

What is (linguistic) reference? Is it a relation? Edward the Ockhamist assumes that it is and issues the following request: "To clarify, could I ask both you and Bill whether you think the reference relation is ‘internal’ or ‘external’?"

Here is an inconsistent tetrad:

1. 'Frodo' refers to Frodo
2. 'Frodo' exists while Frodo does not.
3. Reference is a relation.
4. Relations are existence-symmetrical: the terms (relata) of a relation are such that either all exist or none exist.

Since the members of this quartet cannot all be true, which one will Edward reject? Given what he has said already, he must reject (4). But (4) is exceedingly plausible, more plausible by my lights than (1). I myself would reject (1) by maintaining that there is no linguistic reference to the nonexistent. It is not there to be referred to!

For me, reference is a relation. Is it internal or external? Being the same color as is an example of an internal relation. If a and b are both red, then that logically suffices for a and b to stand in the same color as relation. Suppose I paint ball a red and then paint ball b (the same shade of) red; I don't have to do anything else to bring them into the aforementioned relation. You could say that an internal relation supervenes upon the intrinsic properties of its relata.

But to bring the two balls into the relation of being two feet from each other, I will most likely have to do more than alter their intrinsic properties. So being two feet from is an external relation. If the balls fall out of that relation they needn't change in any intrinsic respect. But if the balls cease to stand in the same color as relation, then they must alter in some intrinsic respect.

In sum, internal relations supervene on the intrinsic properties of their relata while external relations do not.

Suppose 'Max' is the name of my cat. Then 'Max' as I use it has a definite meaning. The sound I make when I say 'Max' and the cat are both physical items. Surely they do not stand in a semantic relation. No physical item by itself means anything. So the semantic relation must connect a meaningful word (a physical item such as a sound or marks on paper 'animated' by a meaning) with the physical referent, the cat in our example. Suppose the meaning (sense, connotation) of 'Max' is given by a definite description: the only black male feline that enjoys linguine in clam sauce. Then the relation between the meaningful word 'Max' and the cat will be external since that meaning (sense, connotation) is what it is whether or not the cat exists.

If, on the other hand, the meaning of 'Max' = Max, then the semantic relation of reference is internal. For then the relation is identity, and identity is an internal relation.

So it seems that whether reference is external or internal depends on whether reference is routed through sense or is direct. I incline toward the view that reference, since routed through sense, is an external relation.

Geach on Proper Names: Mental Acts Chapter 16

Peter Geach, Mental Acts, Chapter 16 (RKP, 1957) is eminently relevant to present concerns and quite sensible. Herewith, an interpretive summary. Per usual, I take the ball and run with it.

Geach rejects the Russellian view that ordinary proper names are definite descriptions in disguise, but he also rejects the notion that proper names have no connotation at all. As for the disguised description view, it is "palpably false" since " . . . when I refer to a person by a proper name, I need not either think of him explicitly in a form expressible by a definite description, or even be prepared to supply such a description on demand. . ." (pp. 66-67)

This seems correct. Thomas Aquinas once came up in a conversation I had with my unlettered brother-in-law. The latter said something like, "Aquinas was a big name in Catholic theology." My brother-in-law was undoubtedly referring to the same person I was referring to even though he would not have been able to supply even one definite description. Recall that to be definite a description must be of the form, the unique x such that [insert description]. 'A big name in Catholic theology' is an indefinite description.

Geach also provides an interesting critique of Quine's "intransigent" extension of the Russellian line whereby names are transformed into predicates. Thus for Quine 'Pegasus is winged' goes over into something like 'There is exactly one x such x pegasizes, and x is winged.' Perhaps we will discuss Geach's Quine critique in a separate post.

Geach also rejects the view that ordinary proper names — which, nota bene, are to be distinguished from logically proper names — are devoid of connotation. On this view, "no attributes logically follow from a thing's being given a proper name." (67) Proper names are bestowed by fiat, whence it follows that there is no right or wrong about the application of a name: there is no property possession of which by a thing is a necessary condition of the name's being attached to it. It is different in the case of a general term. If 'fat' is true of Al, it follows that there is a property in virtue of whose possession by Al the term is correctly applied to him. By contrast, on the view under consideration, we cannot speak of a name being true of its nominatum, or not true of it.

As I said, Geach rejects this theory of names according to which the meaning of a name is exhausted by its reference. In the typical case, the same name applies to a person throughout his life from infancy to dotage. Geach takes this to imply that "the baby, the youth, the adult, are one and the same man." (69) They are not the same absolutely, or the same thing, but the same man. Here Geach sounds his theme of the sortal-relativity of identity. One cannot say sensibly of two things that they are the same absolutely; what one can say is that they are the same relative to some sortal under which both fall. If so,

   . . . my application of the proper name is justified only if (e.g.)
     its meaning includes its being applicable to a man and I keep on
     applying it to one and the same man. On this account of proper
     names, there can be a right and wrong about the use of proper
     names. (69)

This jives with what I was saying earlier about 'God.' The notion that 'God' could denote anything at all, whether a sense of fear, a bolt of lightning, or what have you, strikes me as absurd. But that is the consequence one must swallow if one thinks of names as mere external tags devoid of sense. Geach now considers an objection:

     It has often been argued that it cannot be part of the meaning of a
     proper name that its bearer should be a man, because we cannot tell
     this by hearing the name, and because there is nothing to stop us
     from giving the same name to a dog or a mountain. You might as well
     argue that it cannot be part of the meaning of 'beetle' that what
     it is applied to must be an insect, because we cannot learn this
     meaning just from the sound of the words, and because 'beetle' is
     also used for a sort of mallet. In a given context, the sense of
     'beetle' does include: being an insect, and the sense of
     'Churchill' does include: being a man. (70)

What Geach is saying here contradicts what our friend Edward maintains, namely, that ordinary proper names are tags whose meaning is exhausted by their reference. Suppose a one-eared rabbit wanders into my yard and I give it the name 'Gulky.' Just before the moment of baptism, the arbitrary sound 'Gulky' has no meaning at all. At the moment of baptism, it acquires a meaning which is its referent. Now suppose the rabbit wanders off and a coyote comes into the yard and I say, 'There's Gulky again.' You say,'That's not Gulky, Gulky's a rabbit!' The point here is that once 'Gulky' is introduced as a name for a particular rabbit, it acquires not only a referent but also the connotation rabbit-name, a connotation that prevents me from applying that name to anything other than a rabbit.

And then one day the coyote kills Gulky. Does 'Gulky' cease to be a rabbit-name and go back to being a meaningless sound?

As Geach says, there can be a right and wrong about the use of a proper name. Having introduced 'Gulky' as the name of a rabbit, I misuse that name if I apply it to a coyote. But if proper names are tags whose meaning is exhausted by their reference, then this would not be a misuse at all. Ergo, etc.

My point is that this is a non sequitur:

1. Reference of proper names is direct, i.e., not routed through sense.
Therefore
2. The meaning of a proper name is exhausted by its reference.