Author: Bill Vallicella

Toleration Extremism: Notes on John Stuart Mill

Here are two passages from Chapter Two of John Stuart Mill's magnificent On Liberty (emphases added):

But the peculiar evil of silencing the expression of an opinion is, that it is robbing the human race; posterity as well as the existing generation; those who dissent from the opinion, still more than those who hold it. If the opinion is right, they are deprived of the opportunity of exchanging error for truth: if wrong, they lose, what is almost as great a benefit, the clearer perception and livelier impression of truth, produced by its collision with error. [. . .]  We can never be sure that the opinion we are endeavouring to stifle is a false opinion; and if we were sure, stifling it would be an evil still.

[. . .]

Strange it is, that men should admit the validity of the arguments for free discussion, but object to their being "pushed to an extreme;" not seeing that unless the reasons are good for an extreme case, they are not good for any case. Strange that they should imagine that they are not assuming infallibility when they acknowledge that there should be free discussion on all subjects which can possibly be doubtful, but think that some particular principle or doctrine should be forbidden to be  questioned because it is so certain, that is, because they are certain that it is certain. To call any proposition certain, while there is any one who would deny its certainty if permitted, but who is not permitted, is to assume that we ourselves, and those who agree with us, are the judges of certainty, and judges without hearing the other side.

Evaluation of the First Passage

As sympathetic as I am to Mill, I am puzzled (and you ought to be too) by the last sentence of the first quoted passage.  It consists of two claims. The first is that  " We can never be sure that the opinion we are endeavouring to stifle is a false opinion . . . ."   This is plainly false!  The opinion of some Holocaust deniers that no Jews were gassed at Auschwitz is an opinion we can be sure is false.  We are as sure of this as we are sure of any empirical fact about the past.  Or suppose some fool denies that JFK died by assasination or maintains that McCain won the last presidential election.  Those are  fools' opinions we  know to be wrong. There is no lack of examples.   What was Mill thinking?  "We can never be sure," he writes.  A modal auxiliary married to a negative universal quantifier!  To refute a 'can never' statement all you need is one merely possible counterexample.  Think about it.

Mill's second claim is that even if we are sure that an opinion we are trying to stifle is false, stifling it would nevertheless be an evil.  Mill is here maintaining something so embarrassingly extreme that it borders on the preposterous.  Consider again an actual or possible Holocaust denier who makes some outrageously false assertion that we know (if we know anything about the past) to be false.  Suppose this individual has the means to spread his lies far and wide and suppose that his doing so is likely to incite a horde of radical Islamists to engage in an Islamist equivalent of Kristallnacht.  Would it be evil to 'stifle' the individual in question?  By no means.  Indeed it could be reasonably argued that it is morally imperative that such an individual not be permitted to broadcast his lies.

How could anyone fail to see this?  Perhaps because he harbors the notion that free expression is unconditionally worthwhile, worthwhile regardless of the content of what is being expressed, whether true or false, meaningful or meaningless, harmful or innocuous.  Now I grant that  freedom of expression, discussion, inquiry and the like are very high values.  I'm an Enlightenment man after all, an American, and a philosopher.  Argument and dialectic are the lifeblood of philosophy.  But why do we value the freedom to speak, discuss, publish, and inquire? 

I say that we value them because we value truth and because the freedom to speak, publish, discuss, and inquire are means conducive to the acquisition of truth and the rooting out of falsehood.  It follows that we do not value them, or rather ought not value them, for their own sakes or unconditionally.  We ought to accord them a high value only on condition that they, on balance, lead us to truth and away from falsehood.

So the Holocaust denier, who abuses the right to free speech to spread what we all know (if we know anything about the past) to be falsehoods, has no claim on our toleration.  For again, there is no unconditional right to free expression.  That right is limited by competing values, the value of truth being one of them.  The value of social order is another. 

As I see it, then, Mill makes two mistakes in his first passage.  He fails to see that some opinions are known to be false.  Now there may not be many such opinions, but all I need is one to refute him since he makes a universal claim.  I will of course agree with Mill that many of the doctrines that people denounce as false, and will not examine, are not known to be false.  The second mistake is to think that even if we know an opinion to be false we have no right to suppress its propagation. 

Now of course I am not claiming that all, or even most, known falsehoods are such that their propagation ought to be suppressed.  Let the Flat Earth Society propagate its falsehoods to its heart's content.  For few take them seriously, and their falsehoods, though known to be falsehoods,  are not sufficiently pernicious to warrant suppression.  Obviously, government censorship or suppression of the expression of opinions must be employed only in very serious cases.  This is because government, thought it is practically necessary and does do some good, does much evil and has a tremendous capacity for unspeakable evils.  It was communist governments that murdered 100 million in the 20th century.  And when the Nazis stripped Jews of their property and sent them to the Vernichtungslager, it was legal.  (Think about that and about whether you want to persist in conflating  the legal and the moral.)

Mill's mistake, as it seems to me, is that he allows NO cases where such suppression would be justified.  And that is a position whose extremism condemns it.  Toleration extremism, to give it a name.

Evaluation of the Second Passage

Mill only digs his hole deeper in the second passage.  "Strange it is, that men should admit the validity of the arguments for free discussion, but object to their being "pushed to an extreme;" not seeing that unless the reasons are good for an extreme case, they are not good for any case."  Surely the bolded principle is a bizarre one.  Consider respect for human life.  Respecting human life, we uphold a general prohibition against homicide.  But it is not plausibly maintained there are no exceptions to this 'general'  prohibition where the term does not mean 'exceptionless' but 'holding in most cases.'  There are at least five putative classes of exceptions: killing in self-defence, killing in just war, capital punishment,  abortion, and suicide.   Now suppose someone were to apply Mill's principle (the one I bolded) and argues as follows: "Unless the reasons against killing humans are good for an extreme case, they are not good for any case."  Would you not put such a person down as a doctrinaire fool?   He holds that if it is wrong to kill human beings 'in general,' then it is wrong to kill any human being in any circumstance whatsoever.  It would then follow that it is wrong to kill a home invader who has just murdered your wife and is about to do the same to you and your children.    The mistake here is to take an otherwise excellent principle or precept (Do not kill human beings) and remove all restrictions on its application.

There are plenty of counterexamples to Mill's bizarre principle that "unless reasons are good for an extreme case, they are not good for any case."

We conservatives are lovers of liberty  and we share common ground with our libertarian brethren, but here we must part company with them.

 

The God of Philosophy and the God of Religion

Steven Nemes by e-mail:
 
In posts of months past you claimed there was no distinction between the God of the philosophers and the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob; they're the same thing, if God can be called a thing at all; you asked for an argument that they were [not the same], if I am not mistaken. Here is my attempt to satisfy that request.
 
The God of the philosophers is immutable, as a result of his simplicity; this implies that he cannot be affected and respond to the goings on of the natural order, including us. Whatever happens in the natural order, God is [not] changed or affected in response to it. The God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, however, does seem to be so affected, on any reasonable reading of the relevant religious texts: in Christianity, he enters into the world to provide a means of salvation from sin, which presupposes his consciousness of sin freely committed by created agents; in Judaism, I would guess, he talks to and responds to the prayers of prophets and great leaders, destroys civilizations because of their sins (which again is an instance of responding to occurrences in the natural order), etc. I won't talk about Islam because I don't know enough. 
 
In short: the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob seems to be affected in various ways and acts in response to goings-on in the natural order, whereas the God of the philosophers, by his very nature as immutable, cannot be so affected. The God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob offers a way of salvation because of human sin, and promises judgment in the future for those who don't repent; the God of the philosophers, on the other hand, cannot be said to do anything in response to what goes on in the natural order.
 
[. . .]
 
Your argument is this:
 
1. The God of the philosophers is ontologically simple, and therefore immutable: he cannot change, and so cannot be affected by anything that occurs in the created realm.
2. The God of the monotheistic religions is not immutable: he affects and is affected by goings-on in the created realm.
3. If there is a property P such that x has P but y does not, then x is not identical to y. (Contrapositive of the Indiscernibility of Identicals)
Therefore
4. The God of the philosophers is not identical to the God of the monotheistic religions.
 
The argument is valid (correct in point of logical form) if 'God of the philosophers' means 'God as conceived by the philosophers' and 'God of the montheistic religions' means 'God as conceived within the monotheistic religions.'  And I do think that is what you mean by the phrases in question. (Correct me if I am wrong.) 
 
But whether or not the argument is valid, it is not probative because the first  premise is false and the second is dubious.
 
Ad (1).  Only some philosophers hold that God is ontologically simple; Alvin Plantinga is a prominent contemporary theist who does not.  One cannot therefore build ontological simplicity into the definition of 'God of the philosophers.'  As for immutability, some philosophers think of God as mutable, Charles Hartshorne, for example.  So one cannot pack immutability into the definition either.  And similarly for other attributes.  For some, there are broadly logical limits on divine power, for others there are no limits on divine power. There are different views about the omni-attributes.  There are different views about the divine modal status.  There are different views about how the causa prima is related to the realm of secondary causes, etc.
 
The point is that 'God of the philosophers' does not pick out some one definite conception of God.  There are many philosophical conceptions of God even within monotheism.  There is no God of the philosophers if the phrase means 'God as conceived by the philosophers.'  Premise (1) therefore rests on a false presupposition.
 
I read 'God of the philosophers' differently.  What the phrase refers to is an approach to the divine reality, the approach by way of discursive reason applied to the data of experience, the approach exemplified by Aquinas in the Five Ways, for instance.  Or the approach exemplified by Descartes in the theistic arguments of his Meditations on First Philosophy.  The God of the philosophers, then, is God approached by way of discursive reason.  It is essential to realize that what Aquinas, Descartes, and others were groping towards using their unaided discursive intellects was not a concept, an idea, an ens rationis, or anything merely immanent to their own thinking. It was nothing merely excogitated, or projected, or abtract, or merely immanent to their minds.  It was, instead, the real concrete God, transcendent of the mind and independent of all modes of approach thereto.
 
To think otherwise is to commit the mistake I expose in Pascal and Buber on the God of the Philosophers.
 
My claim is that what the philosopher seeks to know by discursive reason is the same as what the mystic seeks to know by direct, albeit nonsensible, experience, and is the same as what the religionist seeks to contact by way of belief on the basis of revelation.  They approach one and the same God, but in three different ways.  To employ a crude analogy: if there are three routes up K2, it does not follow  that there are three summits.  There is and can be only one summit.  Similarly, there is an can be only one God.  Reason, mystical intuition, and faith are three routes to the same 'summit.'
 
Ad (2).  It is certainly true that God is portrayed in many passages of the Bible as changing and thus as changeable.  But it doesn't follow straightaway that the God of religion is changeable.  For perhaps those passages can be taken in a merely figurative way and interpreted so as to be consistent with God's immutability.  Just as one must distinguish between philosophical conceptions of God and God, one must distinguish between Biblical portrayals of God and God.  The God of religion is God as approached via faith in revelation; but what exactly the content of revelation is is something to be worked out by hard theological work.  The Bible does not supply its own theology.  One cannot simply read it and know what it means.  One has toreason about what one reads.  But that is not to say that theology is philosophy.  Theology accepts revelation as data; philosophy does not.
 
Consider Genesis 3, 8:  "And they heard the sound of the Lord God walking in the garden in the cool of the day, and the man and his wife hid themselves from the presence of the Lord God among the trees of the garden."  Obviously, this passage cannot be taken literally, for if so taken, one would have to say that God, a purely spiritual being, has feet.  But if he was walking around on his feet, was he shod or not?  And what was his shoe size?  Were his toenails properly trimmed?  How many corns and calluses did he have, if any?  There must be answers to these questions and a thousand more  if God was literally walking through the garden and making noise as he did so.  And furthermore, he had to have physical eyes if Adam and Eve though they could hide from him behind trees.
 
Since we know that a purely spiritual being cannot have feet, and since we know that only a purely spiritual being could be the cause of the existence of the physical universe, we know that the passage in question cannot be taken literally.  So what exactly the content of revelation is in Genesis and elsewhere is not easy to discern.  But we can be sure that any portrayals of God that imply that he has physical attributes must be taken figuratively so as not to conflict with God's spiritual nature.  It may well be, though I am not prepared to argue it in detail, that portrayals of God as mutable must also be taken figuratively.  So I find your second premise doubtful.
 
So I persist in my view that the 'distinction' between the God of the philosophers and the God of the religionists is entirely bogus.  In fact my view strikes me as self-evident if one construes the relevant phrases in my way.  The God of the philosophers is the divine reality, if there is one, which is approached by discursive reason applied to the data of experience, with no use being made of the putative date of revelation.  The God of the religionists is the divine reality, if there is one, that is approached via faith on the basis of revelation.  Clearly, there can be only one divine reality.  For if there were two, neither would be divine given that only an absolute reality can be divine and given that the divine is that than which no greater can be conceived.  Since there can be only one divine reality, the God of the philosophers and the God of the religionists is the same.

The Wages of Appeasement

The_wages_of_appeasement

I am right now listening to Michael Medved interview Bruce S. Thornton, a colleague of Victor Davis Hanson, and author of The Wages of Appeasement.   Here is a Front Page interview with Thornton.  Excerpt:

MT: Could you talk a bit about one of the recurring themes among the three historical examples you write about in the book: a crippling failure of imagination “to see beyond the pretexts and professed aims of the adversary and recognize his true goals, no matter how bizarre or alien to our own way of thinking”?

BT: We in the West assume our ideals and goods are universal. They are, but only potentially: there are many alternatives to our way of living and governing ourselves, most obviously Islam and its totalizing social-political-economic order, sharia law. Suffering from this myopia, we fail to see those alternatives or take them seriously, usually dismissing them as compensations for material or political goods such as prosperity or democracy.

Worse yet, our enemies are aware of this weakness, and are adept at telling us what we want to hear, and using our own ideals as masks for their own agendas. Just look at the misinterpretations of the protestors in Egypt and the Muslim Brothers, not just from liberals but from many conservatives, who have been duped by the use of vague terms like “freedom” or “democracy.”

An important factor in this bad habit is our own inability to take religion seriously. Since religion is mainly a private affair, a lifestyle choice and source of private therapeutic solace, we can’t imagine that there are people so passionate about spiritual aims that they will murder and die in the pursuit of those aims.

I would add to these excellent points the observation that  the failure to take religion seriously is one of the worst mistakes of the New Atheists.  Being both atheists and leftists, they cannot take religion seriously.  (By contrast, most conservative atheists, though atheists, appreciate the value and importance of religion in human life.)  The New Atheists do not appreciate how deep reach the roots of religion into the human psyche.  And so, like the benighted John Lennon, they "imagine no religion" as if their imagining picks out a real possibility.  They fancy that a change in material conditions will cause religion to evaporate.  Pure Marxist folly, I say.  Man does not live by bread alone.  He wants more, whether or not there is anything more.  He wants meaning and purpose, whether there is meaning and purpose.  He is a metaphysical animal whether he likes it or not, a fact to which every mosque, temple, church and shrine testifies.

‘Material’ as *Alienans* in ‘Material Implication’

The topic of conditionals is ancient, not as ancient as Aristotle and logic itself, but damn near: hard thinking on this topic began with the Dialectical School which featured such worthies as Philo the   Logician and Diodorus Cronus, circa late 4th to mid-3rd centuries B.C. In nuce, those gentlemen had wrapped their minds around what much later came to be called material and strict implication, Philo around the former, Diodorus around the latter. The topic of conditionals is also deep and fascinating. But then no topic in philosophy lacks for fascination. The mansion of philosophy has countless rooms, each a labyrinth. Be sure to secure your thread of Ariadne before plunging on . . . .

The other day it occurred to me that 'material' in 'material implication' is best thought of as an alienans adjective. Normally, an FG is a G.  Thus a nagging wife is a wife, a female duck is a duck, cow's leather is leather, and a contingent truth is a truth. But if 'F' is alienans, then either an FG is not a G, or it does not follow from x's being an FG that x is a G. For example, your former wife is not your wife, your quondam lover is not your lover, a decoy duck is not a duck, artificial leather is not leather, negative growth is not growth, and a relative truth is not a truth. Is an apparent heart attack a heart attack? It may or may not be. One cannot infer from 'Jones had an apparent heart attack' to 'Jones had a heart attack.' So 'apparent' in 'apparent heart attack' is alienans.

Now if p materially implies q, does it follow that p implies q? Obviously not. I am breathing materially implies 7 + 5 = 12, but the first does not imply the second. Material implication is no more a kind or species of implication than former wives are a kind of wives, or artificial leather is a kind or species of leather. Just as 'artificial' shifts or alienates the sense of 'leather,' 'material' shifts or alienates the sense of 'implication.'

Material implication is rather a necessary condition any implication must satisfy if it is to be what it is, namely, a genuine implication. For all will agree that in no case does p imply q if p is true and q false. Thus material implication does capture something essential to every genuine implication. But if X is essential to Y, it does not follow that X is a kind of Y.

Once we appreciate that 'material' in 'material implication' is an alienans adjective, and that material implication is not a kind of implication, we are in a position to see that that the 'paradoxes' of   material implication are not paradoxes strictly speaking, but arise from foisting the ordinary sense of 'implication' upon 'material implication.'

Soul Food

People are generally aware of the importance of good nutrition, physical exercise and all things health-related. They understand that what they put into their bodies affects their physical health.  Underappreciated is a truth just as, if not more important: that what one puts into one's mind affects one's mental and spiritual health. The soul has its foods and its poisons just as the body does. This   simple truth, known for centuries, goes unheeded while liberals fall all over each other climbing aboard the various environmental and health bandwagons. 

Second-hand smoke the danger of which is negligible much exercises our leftist pals while the soul-destroying toxicity of the mass 'entertainment' media concerns them not at all.

Why are those so concerned with physical toxins so tolerant of cultural toxins? This is another example of what I call misplaced moral enthusiasm. You worry about global warming and sidestream smoke when you give no thought to the soul, its foods, and its poisons? You liberals are a strange breed of cat, crouching behind the First Amendment, quick to defend every form of cultural pollution under the rubric 'free speech.'

Levi Asher Writes Book on Ayn Rand

Levi Asher of Literary Kicks e-mails:
 
Your blog is just about my favorite philosophy blog on the web — not because I often agree with your political opinions (I don't) but because you write with clarity, humor and just the right amount of personal touch.  Salut!  I also write about philosophy on my blog Literary Kicks, and you may remember a cross-blog interchange between Litkicks and the Maverick Philosopher over the meaning of Buddhism late last year.
 
I'm writing you now to ask if I could send you a PDF or Kindle copy of my new book Why Ayn Rand Is Wrong (and Why It Matters), which is currently #21 on the Amazon Politics/Ideologies Kindle bestsellers list.  This book offers an unusual and original approach to Ayn Rand's ethical philosophy, and aims to present an alternative conception of practical ethics that cherishes individual freedom while allowing a greater regard for the important place of the collective soul in all our lives. Since you haven't paid much attention to Ayn Rand on your blog, I gather that she is not very present on your philosophical radar, but I hope you'll consider spending a few minutes checking out my short book regardless, because I think this book has wider value as an original approach to popular ethical philosophy.
 
Here is a brief explanation of why I wrote it.  Thanks for your time, and please let me know if I can send a PDF or Kindle version of "Why Ayn Rand is Wrong" for your consideration and/or review.  Have a great day!
Thanks for the kind words, Levi, and do send me the PDF file.  Actually, there has been a fair amount of discussion of Ayn Rand on this blog.  It is collected in the Ayn Rand category.  In early 2009 there was a heated debate here about Rand.  The posts with open comboxes drew over 200 comments.  There were numerous other comments that I deleted.  Rand attracts adolescents of all ages and they tend to be uncivilized.  I was doing a lot of deleting and blocking in early aught-nine.
 
But I agree with you: Rand's ideas ought to be discussed, not dismissed.

Eric Hoffer, Contentment, and the Paradox of Plenty

Eric Hoffer as quoted in James D. Koerner, Hoffer's America (Open Court, 1973), p. 25:

I need little to be contented. Two meals a day, tobacco, books that hold my interest, and a little writing each day. This to me is a full life.

And this after a full day at the San Francisco waterfront unloading ships.  And we're talking cheap tobacco smoked after a meal of Lipton soup and Vienna sausage in a humble apartment in a marginal part of town.  Hoffer, who had it tough indeed, had the wisdom to be satisfied with what he had. 

Call it the paradox of plenty: those who had to struggle in the face of adversity developed character and worth, while those with opportunities galore and an easy path became slackers and malcontents and 'revolutionaries.'   Adding to the paradox is that those who battled adversity learned gratitude while those who had it handed to them became ingrates.

Is College for Everyone?

When I was in the 7th grade my teacher told me I was 'college material,' the implication being that not everyone is.  She was right on both counts.  I was and not everyone is.  But times have changed, and pace Obama, change is not always for the better.  Part of the change for the worse is that the very phrase 'college material' has fallen into desuetude. 

The conceit that everyone can profit from a college education is of course foolish – which is perhaps why it is is so warmly embraced by liberals, those whose egalitarian instincts are rarely constrained by common sense.  It was foolish when college was affordable and it is multiply foolish now when it isn't.

I now hand off to 'Professor X' whose Atlantic piece, In the Basement of the Ivory Tower, is one of the best things I have read on this topic. 

Obama in Cloud Cuckoo Land

People say that Obama is intelligent.  I'll grant you that he is well-spoken: unlike Bush II he doesn't stumble over his words.  Trouble is, Obama's words are mainly  blather.  I fail to discern the substance of intelligence in them.  The man lives in a dream world. He's incoherent and irresponsible, an empty suit, a disaster.  The Anointed One has turned  out to be an emperor without clothes.  The audacity of hope has given way to the mendacity of empty hope and change rhetoric.

Part of the documentation for these assertions is provided by Victor Davis Hanson here.  Study it carefully.

Seneca on Books and the Library at Alexandria

De Tranquillitate Animi, IX, 4 (tr. Basore):

What is the use of having countless books and libraries, whose titles their owners can scarcely read through in a whole lifetime? The learner is not instructed, but burdened by the mass of them, and it is much better to surrender yourself to a few authors than to wander through many.

Well said. But Seneca continues with something that strikes some as dubious:

Forty thousand books were burned at Alexandria; let someone else praise this library as the most noble monument to the wealth of kings, as did Titus Livius, who says that it was the most distinguished achievement of the good taste and solicitude of kings. There was no "good taste" or "solicitude" about it, but only learned luxury — nay, not even "learned," since they had collected the books, not for the sake of learning, but to make a show, just as many who lack even a child's knowledge of letters use books, not as the tools of learning, but as decorations for the dining room.

It was only for learned luxury? The books were collected non in studium sed in spectaculum? And only forty thousand were burned? See here. Excerpt:

The actual number of books destroyed that Seneca gives is matter of some controversy that we will need to briefly address. In ancient manuscripts it is common for large numbers to be expressed as a dot placed above the numeral for each power of ten. Clearly in copying it is easy to make a mistake with the number of dots and errors by a factor of ten are frequent. That may have happened in the case of On the Tranquillity of the Mind. The manuscript from Monte Cassino actually reads 40,000 books but this is usually corrected to 400,000 by editors as other sources such as Orosius give this figure for the number of scrolls destroyed. I have not seen the manuscript, of course, so do not know if this way the number is expressed. However, even if it was given in words the difference between 40,000 and 400,000 is also pretty small. I propose therefore that the number given by Seneca, and indeed all other ancient sources, should be ruled as inadmissible as evidence because we cannot be sure of what it was originally.

On Comments

From the mail:

. . . I also wanted to thank you for hosting a blog where you disable comments half the time, and I mean that sincerely. I'm very tired of comment-culture, and it's nice to go to an interesting blog where the blogger seems focused on producing thoughtful and interesting things to read, rather than providing raw meat for comment-warriors to spar over.

Looking forward to more, as ever.

 

Never Bullshit! Mitt Romney on Non Sequiturs and the Null Set

Thinking about the mendacity of Obama, Schumer, and Kyl, I was put in mind of a post of mine dated 6 June 2007 from the old Powerblogs site in which I expose some bullshitting by Mitt Romney.  Here it is again.  If you want to be taken seriously by intelligent people, you must never use words you do not understand in an attempt to impress.  The only people you will impress will be fools.  By the way, some feel Romney is a viable Republican pick for 2012.  I wonder.  His being Mormon may not be a problem, but how remove the albatross of RomneyCare about his neck?  We have moved too far in the socialist direction.  We need to move back the other way, toward liberty and self-reliance, and I rather doubt that Romney is the one to lead us.

…………..

Governor Mitt Romney was asked the following question during last night's debate:

     We've lost 3,400 troops; civilian casualties are even higher, and
     the Iraqi government does not appear ready to provide for the
     security of its own country. Knowing everything you know right now,
     was it a mistake for us to invade Iraq?

Romney replied:

     Well, the question is kind of a non sequitur, if you will, and what
     I mean by that — or a null set. And that is that if you're saying
     let's turn back the clock, and Saddam Hussein had opened up his
     country to IAEA inspectors, and they'd come in and they'd found
     that there were no weapons of mass destruction, had Saddam Hussein,
     therefore, not violated United Nations resolutions, we wouldn't be
     in the conflict we're in. But he didn't do those things, and we
     knew what we knew at the point we made the decision to get in. I
     supported the president's decision based on what we knew at that
     time. I think we were underprepared and underplanned for what came
     after we knocked down Saddam Hussein.

Romney's response was quite good especially given the pressure he was under. But why did he spoil it by inserting unnecessary terminology that he obviously doesn't understand? It makes no sense to refer to a question as a non sequitur. A non sequitur is a proposition that abbreviates or 'telescopes' an invalid argument. For example, 'If the war in Iraq were serious, then we wouldn't be trying to fight it with an all-volunteer force.' That is a non sequitur in that the consequent of the conditional proposition does not follow from the antecedent. Non sequitur just means 'It does not follow.' But an interrogative form of words does not express a proposition. (Possible exception: rhetorical questions; but the question posed to Romney was not  rhetorical.) So to refer to a question as a non sequitur show a serious lack of understanding.

Romney should have replied simply as follows. 'It was not a mistake to invade Iraq since at the time the decision was made, that was the right course of action given what we knew.'

It is also nonsensical to refer to a question as "a null set." For one thing, there is only one null set. Talk of 'a' null set suggests that there are or could be several. More importantly, a question is not a
set, let alone a set with no members. "But isn't a question a set of words?" Well, there is for any question the set of words in which it is formulated, but that set is not identical to the question. But I
 won't go any further into this since, although it leads into fascinating question in metaphysics and the philosophy of language, it  leads away from the point I want to make.

 
"And what point would that be?" Never bullshit! You make yourself look stupid to people who really know. Never pretend to know what you don't know. Don't try to impress people with fancy jargon unless you really  know how to use it. Concern for truth dictates concern for precision in the use of language.

Call me a pedant if you like, but language matters!