Author: Bill Vallicella

Self-Censorship Among the Politically Correct

There is no chicken like a liberal chicken.  Here.  Prager's comment: "Secular + Liberal = Wimp."

UPDATE 10/14.  Reason magazine weighs in.  Just Admit it, Newspapers: You're Scared of Muslims.

Of course.  The self-censorship is motivated by fear.  And it is a rational fear, which is why 'Islamophobia' and cognates are idiotic constructions that ought to be shunned by the intelligent.  Must I point out once again that a phobia is an irrational fear? So why do our leftist pals sling this word?

Some leftists sincerely believe that the concern over radical Islam is alarmist.  But most leftists know that it is not alarmist.  It is just that they hate conservatives more than they hate the threat to their own values.  They hate conservatives so much that they cannot or will not admit that they have more in common with contemporary American conservatives than they do with radical Muslims.  Astonishing, but true.  Apparently, they think they can use the Islamists, as a species of 'useful idiot,' to help destroy capitalism and usher in the socialist worker's paradise, dismissing or converting the Islamists when their services are no longer needed.  It's a bad bet.  It is more likely that they will lose their heads before any dismissal or conversion or mollification or other normalization of Islamists occurs.

Kerouac October Quotation #12: Our Boy Gives the Hinayana the Nod

From Some of the Dharma, pp. 174-175:

Hit the makeless null. Whether or not individuality is destroyed now, it will be complelely destroyed in death.  For all things that are made fade back to the unmade.   What's all the return-vow hassle, but a final metaphysical clinging to eternal ego-life by Mahayana Thinkers.  An intellectualized ego-attachment to taskhood.  Hinayana, nay Ecclesiastes, is best.

Companion posts:  A Philosopher's Notes on Ecclesiastes, Chapters 1-2.  A Philosopher's Notes on Ecclesiastes, Chapter 3. 

Bundling is Symmetrical But not Transitive

Over the phone the other day, Peter L. suggested the following objection to the bundle-of-universals theory of ordinary particulars, 'BT' hereafter.  (I leave out of consideration for the nonce bundle-of-tropes bundle theories.)  I am not sure I understood what Peter was driving at.  But here is the gist of what I thought he was saying. 

1. Suppose x is a proper (spatial) part of y, y being a physical thing.  On BT, both y and x are bundles of universals.  Now it often happens that a whole has a property that is not had by all its parts.  Think of a rubber ball.  The ball is spherical (or spheroid, if you  insist).  But it has proper parts that are not spherical.  For example, its hemispheres are not spherical.  Nor are the cubes of rubber internal to it spherical.  (They too are proper parts of it on classical mereology. These cubes could be 'liberated' by appropriate cutting of the ball.) The ball is red, let us say, but beneath the surface it is black.  And so on.  in sum, wholes often have properties that their parts do not have.

2.  On BT, property-possession is understood, not in terms of the asymmetrical relation of exemplification, but in terms of the symmetrical relation of bundling.  Accordingly, for a property to be possessed by something is not for it to be exemplified by this thing, but for it to be bundled with other logically and nomologically compossible properties.  Exemplification, the asymmetrical relation that connects a substratum to a first-level property is replaced by bundling  which is a symmetrical relation that connects sufficiently many properties (which we are assuming to be universals) so as to form a particular.  When the universals are bundled, the result is a whole of which the universals are ontological constituents, with the bundling relation taking over the unifying job of the substratum.  While bundling is symmetrical — if U1 is bundled with U2, then U2 is bundled with U1– ontological constituency is asymmetrical:  if U is an ontological constituent of B, then B is not an ontological constituent of U.

3.  Given that the  ball is a bundle of universals, and that the ball is spherical, it follows that the ball has as one of its ontological 'parts' the universal, sphericality.  Now sphericality and cubicality are not broadly-logically compossible.  Hence they cannot be bundled together to form an individual.  But our ball has a proper part internal to it which is a cube.  That proper part has cubicality as a constituent universal.  So it seems a broadly-logical contradiction ensues:  the ball has as constituents both sphericality and cubicality, universals that are not compossible.

4. An interesting objection!  But note that it assumes Transitivity of Bundling:  it assumes that if sphericality is bundled  with sufficiently many other Us to form a complete individual, and cubicality is bundled with one of these Us — say being made of rubber — then sphericality is bundled with cubicality. But it is well-known that bundling is not transitive.  Suppose roundness and redness are bundled in our ball, and redness and stickiness are bundled in a numerically distinct disk, but there is nothing that is both round and sticky. That's a possible scenario which shows that Transitivity of Bundling fails. From the fact that U1 is bundled with U2, and U2 with U3, one cannot infer that U1 is bundled with U3.  So from the fact that sphericality is bundled with rubberness, and rubberness with cubicality, it does not follow that sphericality is bundled with cubicality.

The  bundle theory can accommodate the fact that a property of a whole needn't be a property of all its proper parts.  Or am I missing something?

 

Krauthammer on Obama’s Policies

Read it.  Excerpt:

For the first time since modern budgeting was introduced with the Budget Act of 1974, the House failed to even write a budget. This in a year of extraordinary deficits, rising uncertainty and jittery financial markets. Gold is going through the roof. Confidence in the dollar and the American economy is falling – largely because of massive overhanging debt. Yet no budget emerged from Congress to give guidance, let alone reassurance, about future U.S. revenues and spending.

The day of reckoning approacheth. 

Can a Bundle Theory Accommodate Change?

0.  Peter L. has been peppering me with objections to bundle theories.  This post considers the objection from change.

1. Distinguish existential change (coming into being and passing out of being) from alterational change, or alteration.  Let us think about ordinary meso-particulars such as avocados and coffee cups.  If an avocado is unripe on Monday but ripe on Friday, it has undergone alterational change: it has changed in respect of the property of being ripe.  One and the same thing has become different in respect of one or more properties. (An avocado cannot ripen without becoming softer, tastier, etc.)  Can a bundle theory make sense of an obvious instance of change such as this?  It depends on what the bundle theory (BT) amounts to.

2. At a first approximation, a bundle theorist maintains that a thing is nothing more than a complex of properties contingently related by  a bundling relation, Russellian compresence say.    'Nothing more' signals that on BT there is nothing in the thing that exemplifies the properties: there is no substratum (bare particular, thin particular) that supports and unifies them. This is not to say that on BT a thing is just its properties: it is obviously more, namely, these properties contingently bundled.  A bundle is not a mathematical set, a mereological sum, or a conjunction of its properties.  These entities exist 'automatically' given the existence of the properties.  A bundle does not. 

3.  Properties are either universals or property-instance (tropes).  For present purposes, BT is a bundle-of-universals theory.  Accordingly, my avocado is a bundle of universals.  Although a bundle is not a whole in the strict sense of classical mereology, it is a whole in an analogous sense, a sense sufficiently robust to be governed by a principle of extensionality: two bundles are the same iff they have all the same property-constituents.  It follows that the unripe avocado on Monday cannot be numerically the same as the ripe avocado on Friday.  And therein lies the rub.  For they must be the same if it is the case that an alteration in the avocado has occurred. 

So far, then, it appears that the bundle theory cannot accommodate alterational change.  Such change, however, is a plain fact of experience.  Ergo, the bundle theory in its first approximation is untenable.

4.  This, objection, however, can be easily met by sophisticating the bundle theory and adopting a bundle-bundle theory.  Call this BBT.  Accordingly, a thing that persists over time such as an avocado is a diachronic bundle of synchronic or momentary bundles.  The theory then has two stages.  First, there is the construction of momentary bundles from universals.  Then there is the construction of a diachronic bundle from these bundles. The momentary bundles have properties as constituents while the diachronic bundles do not have properties as constituents, but individuals.  At both stages the bundling is contingent: the properties are contingently bundled to form momentary bundles and these resulting bundles are contingently bundled to form the persisting thing.

Accordingly, the unripe avocado is numerically the same as the ripe avocado in virtue of the fact that the earlier momentary bundles which have unripeness as a constituent  are ontological parts of the same diachronic whole as the later momentary bundles which have ripeness as a constituent.

5. A sophisticated bundle theory does not, therefore, claim that a persisting thing is a bundle of properties; the claim is that a persisting thing is a bundle of individuals which are themselves bundles of properties.  This disposes of the objection from change at least as formulated in #3 above.

6. BBT also allows us to accommodate the intuition  that things have accidental properties.  On the proto-theory BT according to which a persisting thing is a bundle of properties, it would seem that all properties must be essential, where an essential property is one a thing has in every possible world in which it exists.    For if wholes have their parts essentially, and if bundles are wholes in this sense, and things are bundles of properties, then things have their properties essentially.  But surely our avocado is not essentially ripe or unripe but accidentally one or the other.  On BBT, however, it is a contingent fact that a momentary bundle MB1 having ripeness as a constituent is bundled with other momentary bundles.  This implies that the diachronic bundle of bundles could have existed without MB1 and without other momentary bundles having ripeness as a constituent.  It therefore seems to follow that BBT can accommodate accidental properties.

7. That is, BBT can accommodate the modal intuition that our avocado might never have been ripe.  But what about the modal intuition that, given that the avocado is ripe at t, it might not have been ripe at t?  This is a thornier question and the basis of a different objection that is is not defused by what I have said above.  And so we reserve this objection for a separate post.

The History of Philosophy as Akin to an Intellectual Arms Race

Nicholas Rescher, The Strife of Systems: An Essay on the Grounds and Implications of Philosophical Diversity (University of Pittsburg Press, 1985), pp. 205-206:

The history of philosophy is akin to an intellectual arms race where all sides escalate the technical bases for their positions.  As realists sophisticate their side of the argument, idealists sophisticate their counterarguments; as materialists become more subtle, so do phenomenalists, and so on.  At the level of basics, the same old positions continue to contest the field — albeit that ever more powerful weapons are used to defend increasingly sophisticated positions.

The context is an argument for the thesis that philosophy is susceptible of technical but not doctrinal progress.  The nature of philosophy precludes consensus.  Resolution of "the substantive issues in such as way as to secure general approbation and assent" (206) is out of the question. Such consensus is impossible and therefore not even an ideal.

Strife of Systems is essential reading for anyone interested in metaphilosophy.

Too Many Laws

You've heard me say it before.  Laws should be few in number, rational in content, enforceable, and enforced.  As it is, we have too many laws, indeed, too many 'Ls':  too many laws, lawyers, legislators (most of whom are lawyers), and liberals.  How can a government claim to be representative of the people when it is top-heavy with lawyers?  That is a question that ought to be asked.  While you're at it, ask whether it might not be a good idea to have some de-legislators in among the legislators.

America is Drowning in Law.

Kerouac October Quotation #11: For the Sake of Absolute Freedom

It's October 11th today, Columbus Day.  This is a month to be savored day by day, hour by hour.  To aid in the savoring, here is today's Kerouac quotation, from "The Vanishing American Hobo" in Lonesome Traveler, p. 173 of the 1970 Black Cat edition.  (Purchased my copy in a shop on Bourbon Street in New Orleans on 12 April 1973, while on the road, enroute to Boston from Los Angeles.  From that point of the trip on I had two Kerouac books in my rucksack, the just mentioned and, you guessed it, On the Road.)

There is nothing nobler than to put up with a few incoveniences like snakes and dust for the sake of absolute freedom.

Saturday Night at the Oldies: Two Sorts of One-Hit Wonders

There are one-hit wonders whose hits have endured and one hit wonders whose hits have pretty much sunk into oblivion, which is why you need me to prowl the musty mausoleum of moldy oldies for these moth-eaten memories.   Norma Tanega and her  Walkin' My Cat Named Dog belong to the latter category.  If you remember this curious tune from 1966  I'll buy you a beer.  An example of a one-hit wonder whose hit gets plenty of play is Curtis Lee's Pretty Little Angel Eyes.

Land of a Thousand Dances was Cannibal and the Head Hunters' one hit.  Its obscurity lies perhaps midway between the Tanega and Lee efforts.  This one goes out to my old friend Tom Coleman whose hometown is Whittier, California.  He most likely listened to this song some Saturday night while cruising Whittier Blvd, or else while enroute to a dance at the El Monte Stadium.  "Be there or be square."

Notes on Chapter One of Stephen Hawking, The Grand Design

Many thanks to reader David Parker for sending me a copy of Stephen Hawking and Leonard Mlodinow, The Grand Design (Bantam, 2010).  Not a book worth buying, but graciously accepted gratis! When physicists need money, they scribble books for popular consumption.  But who can blame them: doing physics is hard while writing bad philosophy is easy.

 Numbers in parentheses are page references.

The first chapter, "The Mystery of Being," gets off to a rocky start with a curious bit of anthropomorphism: the universe is described as "by turns kind and cruel," (5) when it is obviously neither.  Imputing human attitudes to nature is unscientific last time I checked.  And then there is the chapter's title.  I would have thought that the purpose of science is to dispel mystery.  But let that pass.  The authors remind us that we humans ask Big Questions about the nature of reality and the origin of the universe, e.g., "Did the universe need a creator?" (5)  True, but the past tense of that question betrays a curious bias, as if a creator is a mere cosmic starter-upper as opposed to a being ongoingly involved in the existence of the world at each instant.  It is the latter that sophisticated theists maintain.

The Big Questions traditionally belong to philosophy, but we are told that  "philosophy is dead." (5)  Unfortunately for the authors, "Philosophy always buries its undertakers," as Etienne Gilson famously observed in The Unity of Philosophical Experience (Charles Scribner's Sons, 1937, p. 306) He calls this the first law of philosophical experience.  Memorize it, and have it at the ready the next time someone says something silly like "philosophy is dead." As a codicil to the Gilsonian dictum, I suggest "and presides over their oblivion."

Philosophy is dead, the authors opine, because she "has not kept up with modern developments in the sciences, particularly physics." (5) To get answers to such questions as Why is there something rather than nothing? Why do we exist? and Why this particular set of laws and not some other?  we must turn to physics. (These three questions are listed on p. 10)  It will be very surprising if physics — physics alone without any smuggled-in philosophical additions — can answer the first and third questions.  But it will never answer the second question.  For we are conscious and self-conscious moral agents, and no purely physical explanation of consciousness, self-consciousness and all it entails can be derived from physics alone.

What I expect the authors to do is to smuggle in various philosophical theses along with their physics.  But if they do so — if they stray the least bit from pure physics — then they prove that philosophy is alive after all, in their musings.  What they will then be doing is not opposing philosophy as such, but urging their philosophy on us, all the while hiding from us the fact that it is indeed philosophy.

That's a pretty shabby tactic, if you want my opinion. (And there you have it, even if you don't want it.)  You posture as if you are opposing all philosophy which you claim is "dead," which presumably means 'cognitively worthless,' and then you go on to make blatantly philosophical assertions which are neither properly clarified as to their sense, nor supported by anything that could count as rigorous argumentation. For example, in Chapter 2, the authors opine that "free will is just an illusion."  (32)  The sloppy  'reasoning'  laden with rhetorical questions that leads up to this obviously philosophical assertion is nothing that could be justified by pure physics.  I will come back to this when I discuss Chapter 2.

Quantum theory is brought up and the suggestion is floated that "the universe itself has no single history, nor even an independent existence." (6) It has "every possible history."  A little later we are introduced to M-theory:

. . . M-theory predicts that a great many universes were created out of nothing.  Their creation does not require the intervention of some supernatural being or god.  Rather,these multiple universes arise naturally from physical law. (8-9)

The writing here is quite inept.  If the authors want to say that these universes came into being out of nothing, they should say that, and not say that they were created out of nothing.  Creation, whether out of nothing or out of something,  implies a creator.  It is also inept to speak of 'intervention.'  If God creates a universe, he does not intervene in it; he causes it to exist in the first place.  One can intervene only in what already exists.  Such sloppy writing does not inspire confidence, and suggests that the thinking behind the writing is equally sloppy.  But even ignoring these infelicities of expression, it is a plain contradiciton to say that these universes comes into being out of nothing and that they arise naturally from physical law.  Whatever physical law is, it is not nothing!  That's clear, I hope.  So why don't our physicists say what they mean, namely that these multiple universes came into being , not from nothing, but from physical law.  That would be noncontradictory although it would prompt the question as to the nature and existence of physical law or laws. 

Another apparent contradiction worth noting: After mentioning quantum theory in the Chapter 1, the authjors assure us in Chpater 2  that "scientific determinism" is "the basis of all modern science." (30) How this is supposed to jive, I have no idea.  But hey, when the idea is to make a fast buck, who cares about such niceties as logical consistency?

Not only did many universes come into existence out of physical law (or is it out of nothing?), but "Each universe has many possible histories and many possible states at later times, that is at times like the present . . . ." (9)  Most of these states are unsuitable for the existence of any form of life.  It is our presence that "selects out from this vast array only those universes that are compatible with our existence." (9)  That's a neat trick given that universes "have no independent existence." (6)  If so, then we have no independent existence and cannot function as the "lords of creation" (9) who select among the vast array of universes.

But I want to be fair.  Perhaps later chapters will remove some of the murk.  There is also this consideration:  Even bad books are good if they stimulate thought. But don't buy it.  Borrow it from a library.

As I always say, "Never buy a book you haven't read."