Author: Bill Vallicella

On Civility and the Recent Civility Initiatives

Civility is a good old conservative virtue and I'm all for it.  But like toleration, civility has limits.  If you call me a racist because I argue against Obamacare, then not only do I have no reason to be civil in my response to you, I morally ought not be civil to you.  For by being civil I only encourage more bad behavior on your part.  By slandering me, you have removed yourself from the sphere of the civil.  The slanderer does not deserve to be treated with civility; he deserves to be treated with hostility and stiff-necked opposition.  He is deserving of moral condemnation.

If you call me a xenophobe because I insist that the federal government do what it is constitutionally mandated to do, namely, secure the nation's borders, then you slander me and forfeit whatever right you have to be treated civilly.  For if you slander me, then you are moral scum and deserve to be morally condemned.  In issuing my moral condemnation, I exercise my constitutionally-protected First Amendment right to free speech.  But not only do I have a right to condemn you, I am morally obliged to do so lest your sort of evil behavior become even more prevalent.

Examples can be multiplied, but the point is clear.  Civility has limits.  One ought to be civil to the civil.  But one ought not be civil to the uncivil.  What they need is a taste of their own medicine.

One must also realize that 'civility' is a prime candidate for linguistic hijacking.  And so we must be on our guard that the promoters of 'civility' are not attaching to this fine word a Leftward-tilting connotation.    We must not let them get away with any suggestion that one is civil if and only if one is an espouser of liberal/left positions. 

The Left no more owns civility than it owns dissent.

The motto of the No Labels outfit is "Not Left. Not Right. Forward."  'No Labels' is itself a label and a silly one , implying as it does that there are no important differences between Left and Right which need identification and labeling.  It is also preposterous to suggest that we can 'move forward' without doing so along either broadly conservative or broadly liberal lines.  To 'move forward' along liberal lines is to move in the direction of less individual liberty and ever-greater control by the government.  This is simply unacceptable to libertarians and conservatives and must be stopped.  There is little room for compromise here.  How can one compromise with those whose fiscal irresponsibility will lead to a destruction of the currency?  Any compromise struck with them can only be a tactical stopgap on the way to their total defeat.  Fiscal responsibility and border security are two issues on which there can be no compromise.  For it is obviously absurd to suppose that a genuine solution lies somewhere in the middle.

Worst of all, however is to claim that one is neither Left nor Right but then take policy stances that are leftist.  This demonstrates a lack of intellectual honesty.  The 'No Labels' folks cite the following as a "Shared Purpose": 

  • Americans want a government that empowers people with the tools for success – from a world-class education to affordable healthcare – provided that it does so in a fiscally prudent way.

    • But that's not a shared purpose but a piece of pure leftism.  First of all, it is not the government that 'empowers' people — to acquiesce for the nonce in this specimen of PC lingo — government is a necessary evil as libertarians and conservatives see it, and any empowering that gets done is best done by individuals in the absence of governmental shackles.  It is also not the role of  the federal government, as libertarians ansd conservatives see it, to educate people or provide health care.  Only liberals with their socialist leanings believe that.

    What the No Labels bunch is serving up is mendacity.  First they paper over genuine differences of opinion and then they put forth their own opinion as neutral, as neither Left nor Right, when it is obviously leftist.  So what these people are saying to us is that we should put aside all labels while toeing the leftist party line.  And be civil too!  I say to hell with that.  Let's be honest and admit that there are deep differences.  For example, if you say that health care is a right and I say it is not a right but a good, or a commodity, then we have a very deep difference. 

    In the wake of the Tucson shootings, the University of Arizona has set up a National Institute for Civil Discourse.  And then there is the American Civility Tour. Just what we need: more wastage of tax dollars on feel-good liberal nonsense.

    I conclude by referring you to a very interesting Allegheny College survey, Nastiness, Name-Calling, and Negativity. 

    The ‘Religion of Peace’ Strikes Again

    A London man was viciously attacked (face slashed, skull fractured) "for teaching other religions to Muslim girls." 

    I guess the Brits haven't learned that toleration has limits and that allowing mass immigration of uncivilized and uncivilizable elements can't lead to anything good.  (Or do they perhaps have a death wish?)  One hopes that the Brits wise up in time.  England is the mother country.  Every true American feels a certain fondness for her, regardless of ethnic origin.

    And here  Alan West shows how to respond to an apologist for Islamism. 

    Frank Brady’s End Game Reviewed

    It is hard to believe that Bobby Fischer has been dead three years already.  He died on 17 January 2008.   Last night I saw Frank Brady on C-Span's Book Notes.  Brady was pitching his new book End Game which tells the rest of the Fischer story.  I will definitely be on the lookout for it in the used book bins.  Here is an NYT review.  And here is another.

    The Decline of Liberalism

    Conrad Black provides some historical perspective.  A balanced assessment as the following excerpt demonstrates:

    Roosevelt's social programs were left essentially unaltered for 20 years after he died, until President Lyndon Johnson cut taxes while expanding the social ambitions of the federal government with his Great Society War on Poverty, and massive job retraining efforts, coupled to great and long-delayed advances in civil rights. Kennedy and Johnson favored civil rights more actively than had their predecessors, and backed conservatives into pious humbug about the Constitution not allowing for federal imposition of voting rights and official social equality for African Americans. Johnson overcame that opposition and it was one of liberalism's finest hours. But the long Roosevelt-Truman-Eisenhower consensus frayed badly when Johnson, who had been a congressman during the New Deal years, determined to take it a long step further and proposed a policy extravaganza that promised to buy the end of poverty through social investment. As all the world knows, it was a disaster that destroyed the African American family and severely aggravated the welfare and entitlements crises.

     

    Toleration of Vandalism and the Difference Between Conservatives and Liberals

    I sometimes speak of the difference between conservatives and liberals as a 'planetary' one: conservatives and liberals 'live on different planets.'  This Dennis Prager column on graffiti and its toleration by the  tolerate-anything-except-common-sense-and-conservatives Left will help you understand the 'planetary' difference. 

    In Defense of Modes of Being: Substance and Accident

    The 'thin' conception of being or existence, lately explained, entails that there are no modes of being. Most analytic philosophers accept the thin conception and reject modes of being. Flying in the face of analytic orthodoxy, I maintain that the modes-of-being doctrine is defensible. Indeed, I should like to say something stronger, namely, that it is indispensable for metaphysics.

    My task in this series of posts is not to specify what the modes of being are, but the preliminary one of defending the very idea of there being different modes of being. So I plan to look at a range of   examples without necessarily endorsing the modes of being they  involve.  Against van Inwagen (see post linked above), I maintain that no mistake is made by partisans of the thick conception.  They do not, pace van Inwagen, illicitly transfer what properly belongs to the nature of a thing to its existence.

    This post focuses on substances and accidents and argues that an accident and a substance of which it is the accident differ in their very mode of being, and not merely in their respective natures.

    1. Intuitively, some items exist on their own while others are dependent in their existence on items that exist on their own. Smiles, grimaces, frowns, white caps, carpet bulges are items that exist, but
    not on their own. They need — as a matter of metaphysical necessity — faces, waves, and carpets to exist in. This suggests some definitions:

    D1. S is a (primary) substance =df S is metaphysically capable of independent existence.

    D2. A is an accident =df A is not metaphysically capable of independent existence, but exists, if it exists, in a substance.

    By 'metaphysically' I mean broadly logically in Plantinga's sense. So if a particular statue is a substance, then it is broadly logically possible that it exist even if nothing else exists. And if the smoothness or color of the statue are accidents, then it is broadly logically impossible that they exist (i) apart from some substance or other and indeed (ii) apart from the very substance of which they are the accidents.

    The second point implies that accidents are particulars, not universals. Accidents cannot be shared. They are not 'repeatable' in the manner of universals. Nor can they 'migrate' from one substance to   another. You can't catch my cold if my cold is an accident of me as substance. Your cold is your numerically distinct cold. Socrates' whiteness is his whiteness and is as such numerically distinct from   Plato's whiteness. The connection between a substance and its accidents is an intimate one.

    2. Now suppose there is a substance S and an accident A of S. I do not deny that there is a sense of 'exist' according to which both S and A  exist.  Suppose that S and A are the only two items that exist. Then of course there is a sense in which both items exist: each is something and not nothing. Both are there to be quantified over. We can say '(Ex)(x = S)' and '(Ex)(x = A)':  'Something is (identically) S' and 'Something is (identically) A.'

    3. Now the issue is this: Does what I said in #2 exhaust what there is to be said about the being or existence of S and A? On the thin conception, that is all there is to it. To be is to be something or   other. If there are substances and accidents then both are in the same sense and in the same mode. ('Sense' a semantic term; 'mode' an ontological term.) Since S and A both exist in the same way on the thin conception, they are not distinguished by their mode of being.  They are distinguished by their respective natures alone.

    4. In order to see what is wrong with the thin conception, let us ask how the two entities S and A are related. Indeed, can one speak of a relation at all? Traditionally, one speaks of inherence: A inheres in   S. Inherence cannot be an external relation since if a and b are externally related, then a and b can each exist apart from the relation. But A cannot exist apart from the inherence 'relation' to S. On the other hand, if S and A were internally related, then neither  could exist without the other. But S can exist without A. Since S can exist without A, but A cannot exist without S, A is existentially  dependent on S, dependent on S for its very existence, while S is capable of independent existence. But this is just to say that A  exists in a different way than S exists. Thus S and A differ in their  modes of being. One cannot make sense of inherence without  distinguishing substantial and accidental modes of being.

    5. In sum: Talk of substances and their accidents is intelligible. But it is intelligible only if there are two modes of being, substantial and accidental. Therefore, talk of modes of being is intelligible. Since the thin conception of being entails that there cannot be modes of being, that the very idea is unintelligible, the thin conception ought to be rejected.

    Truth and Consolation

    Nothing is true because it is consoling, but that does not preclude certain truths from being consoling.  So one cannot refute a position by showing that some derive consolation from it.  Equally, no support for a position is forthcoming from the fact that it thwarts our interests or dashes our hopes.

    We Get What We Deserve

    It is perhaps only fitting that fiscally irresponsible people should get a fiscally irresponsible government. Before blaming stupid legislators and greedy lenders, take a hard look into the mirror.  At least the person staring back at you is a person over whose behavior you have some control.

    Husserl, Knight of Reason

    Ich muss meinen Weg gehen so sicher, so fest entschlossen und so ernst wie Duerers Ritter, Tod und Teufel. (Edmund Husserl, "Persoenliche Aufzeichnungen" )  "I must go my way as surely, as seriously, and as resolutely as the knight in Duerer's Knight, Death, and Devil." (tr. MavPhil)  Note the castle on the hill, the hour glass in the devil's hand, the serpents entwined in his headpiece, and the human skull on the road. 

    Time is running out, death awaits, and a mighty task wants completion.

    Duerer_-_ritter2c_tod_und_teufel_28der_reuther294

    The Philosophizing Hiker: The Derivative Intentionality of Trail Markers

    IMG_0303 You are out hiking and the trail becomes faint and hard to follow. You peer into the distance and see what appear to be three stacked rocks. Looking a bit farther, you see another such stack. Now you are confident which way the trail goes. Your confidence increases as further cairns come into view. On what does this confidence rest?

    Your confidence is based on your taking the rock piles as other than merely natural formations. You take them as providing information about the trail's direction, which is to say that you to take them as trail markers, as meaning something, as about something distinct from themselves, as exhibiting intentionality, to use a philosopher's term of art.

    Of course, the rock piles might have come into existence via purely natural causes: a rainstorm might have dislodged some rocks with gravity plus other purely material factors accounting for their placement. Highly unlikely, but nomologically possible. But please note that if you believe that the cairns originated in that way, then you could not take them as embodying information about the direction of the trail. It would be irrational in excelsis to hold both that (i) these rock piles came about randomly; and that (ii) these rock piles inform us of the trail's direction.

    So if you take the rock piles as trail markers, then you take them as other than merely natural formations caused to exist by natural causes. You take the stacking and the placement as expressive of the purposes of a trail-blazer or trail-maintainer, an intelligent being who had it in mind to convey information to himself and others concerning the direction of the trail. This shows that any intentionality embodied in the cairns is derivative rather than intrinsic. The rock piles in and of themselves do not inform us of the trail's direction. They provide us this information only if we take them as embodying the purposes of an intelligent being. Of course, my taking of rock piles as embodying the purposes of an intelligent being does not entail that they do in fact embody the purposes of an intelligent being. But in most cases my ascription of a purpose corresponds to a purpose: I ascribe a purpose and the rock piles do in fact embody a purpose.

    Thus there are two streams of intrinsic intentionality converging on the same object, one emanating from me, the other from the trail-maintainer.  The latter's embodying of his purpose in the cairn construction is a case of intrinsic intentionality.  And when I take the rock piles as embodying the trail-maintainer's purpose thereby ascribing to the rock piles a purpose, that too is a case of intrinsic intentionality.

    The ascribing of a purpose and the embodying of a purpose are usually 'in sync.' There are rock piles that have no meaning and rock piles that have meaning. But no rock pile has intrinsic meaning. And the same goes for any material item or configuration of material items no matter how complex. No such system has intrinsic meaning; any meaning it has is derived. The meaning is derived either from an intelligent being who ascribes meaning to the material system, or from an intelligent being whose purposes are embodied in the material system, or both.

    Thus I am rejecting the view that meaning could inhere in material systems apart from relations to minds that are intrinsically intentional, minds who are original Sinn-ers, if you will, original mean-ers. We are all of us Sinn-ers, every man Jack of us, original Sinn-ers,  but our Sinn-ing is not mortal but vital.  Intentionality is our very lifeblood as spiritual beings.

    I am rejecting the view that any sort of isomorphism, no matter how abstract, could make the rock piles mean or represent the trail's direction. No doubt there is an isomorphism: the trail goes where the cairns go. No one cairn resembles the trail to any appreciable extent; but the cairns taken collectively do resemble the trail. Unfortunately, the trail also resembles the cairns. But the trail does not represent the cairns.

    Representation is most of the time asymmetrical; but resemblance is always symmetrical. I conclude that resemblance cannot constitute representation. Note also that the cairns might resemble things other than the trail. Thus the cairns taken collectively might resemble the path of a subterranean gopher tunnel directly below the trail and following it exactly. But obviously, the cairns do not mark this gopher tunnel. Note also that isomorphism is not sensitive to the difference between rocks whose stacking is artificial, i.e., an artifact of a purposive agent, and rocks whose stacking came about via random purely natural processes. But it is only if the stacking is artificial that the stacks would mean anything. And if the stacking is artificial/artifactual, then there is a purposive agent possessing intrinsic intentionality.

    Mind is king.  Naturalists need to wise up.

    Auto-Antonyms

    An auto-antonym is a word that has two meanings, one the opposite of the other.  'Fearful' is an example.  According to Michael Gilleland, who inspired this copy-cat post,

    The Oxford English Dictionary defines fearful as both "causing fear; inspiring terror, reverence, or awe; dreadful, terrible, awful" and "frightened, timorous, timid, apprehensive."

    There is much more on this topic at Dr. Gilleland's site. 

    There must be some philosophical terms that exhibit the auto-antonymic property.  How about 'objective reality'?  Suppose someone were to start talking about the objective reality of the God-idea. You would naturally take him to be raising the question whether there exists anything corresponding to this idea.  But if a Descartes scholar were to speak of the objective reality (realitas objectiva) of the God-idea he would mean something nearly the opposite:  he would be speaking of the representative content of the idea itself,  a content that is what it is whether or not anything corresponds to the idea.