Author: Bill Vallicella

Israel and the Blockade

From Charles Krauthammer, Israel Refuses to Commit Suicide:

. . . the blockade is not just perfectly rational, it is perfectly legal. Gaza under Hamas is a self-declared enemy of Israel — a declaration backed up by more than 4,000 rockets fired at Israeli civilian territory. Yet having pledged itself to unceasing belligerency, Hamas claims victimhood when Israel imposes a blockade to prevent Hamas from arming itself with still more rockets.

[. . .]

The world is tired of these troublesome Jews, six million — that number again — hard by the Mediterranean, refusing every invitation to national suicide. For which they are relentlessly demonized, ghettoized and constrained from defending themselves, even as the more committed anti-Zionists — Iranian in particular — openly prepare a more final solution.

 

The Essence of Progressivism

From George F. Will, The Limits of the Welfare State:

Lack of "a limiting principle" is the essence of progressivism, according to William Voegeli, contributing editor of the Claremont Review of Books, in his new book "Never Enough: America's Limitless Welfare State." The Founders, he writes, believed that free government's purpose, and the threats to it, is found in nature. The threats are desires for untrammeled power, desires which, Madison said, are "sown in the nature of man." Government's limited purpose is to protect the exercise of natural rights that pre-exist government, rights that human reason can ascertain in unchanging principles of conduct and that are essential to the pursuit of happiness.

An excellent article.  Read it all.

Deflationism: Ramsey and Redundancy

I am using 'deflationism' as an umbrella term subsuming several different deflationary theories of truth, among them Ramsey's redundancy theory, Quine's disquotationalism, Horwich's minimalist theory, and others. Deflationary theories contrast with what might be called 'robust' or substantive' theories of truth. It is not easy to focus the issue that divides these two types of theory. One way to get a feel for the issue is by considering the traditional-sounding question, What is the nature of truth? This 'Platonic' question — compare What is the nature of knowledge? (Theaetetus); What is the nature of justice? (Republic) — presupposes that truth has a nature, a nature that can be analyzed or otherwise explicated in terms of correspondence, or coherence, or 'what conduces to human flourishing,' or what would be accepted at the Peircean limit of inquiry, or something else. 

The deflationist questions the presupposition. He suspects that truth has no nature. He suspects that there is no one property that all truths have, a property the having of which constitutes them as truths. His project is to try to account for our truth-talk in ways that do not commit us to truth's having a nature, or to truth's being a genuine property. Of course, we English speakers have and use the word 'true.'  But the mere fact that we have and use the predicate 'true' does not suffice to show that there is a property corresponding to the predicate. (Exercise for the reader: find predicates to which no properties correspond.)

So if we can analyze our various uses of 'true' in ways that do not commit us to a property of truth, then we will have succeeded in deflating the topic of truth and showing it to be metaphysically insubstantial or 'lightweight.' The most radical approach would be one that tries to dispense with the predicate 'true' by showing that everything we say with its help can be said without its help (and without the help of any obvious synonym such as 'correct.') The idea here is not merely that truth is not a genuine property, but that 'true' is not even a genuine predicate.

Consider two assertions. I first assert that snow is white, and then I assert that it is true that snow is white. The two assertions have the same content. They convey the same meaning to the audience. This suggests that the sentential operator  'It is true that ___' adds nothing to the content of what is asserted. And the same goes for the predicate '___ is true.' Whether we think of 'true' as an operator or as a predicate, it seems redundant, or logically superfluous. In "Facts and Propositions" (1927), Frank Ramsey sketches a redundancy or logical superfluity theory of truth. This may be the first such theory in the Anglosphere. (Is there an historian in the house?)

For Ramsey, "there really is no separate problem of truth but merely a linguistic muddle." Ramsey tells us that ". . . 'It is true that Caesar was murdered' means no more than that Caesar was murdered, and 'It is false that Caesar was murdered' means that Caesar was not murdered." (F. P. Ramsey, Philosophical Papers, Cambridge UP, 1990, ed. D. H. Mellor, p. 38) But what about a case in which a proposition is not explicitly given, but is merely described, as in 'He is always right'? In this example, 'right' has the sense of 'true.' 'He is always' right means that whatever he asserts is true. As a means of getting rid of 'true' in this sort of case, Ramsey suggests:

1. For all p, if he asserts p, then p is true.

But since "the propositional function p is true is the same as p, as e.g., its value 'Caesar was murdered is true' is the same as 'Caesar was murdered,'" Ramsey thinks he can move from (1) to

2. For all p, if he asserts p, then p.

If the move to (2) is kosher, then 'true' will have been eliminated. Unfortunately, (2) is unintelligible. To see this, try to apply Universal Instantiation to (2). If the variable 'p' ranges over sentences, we get

3. If he asserts 'Snow is white,' then 'Snow is white.'

This is nonsense, because "'Snow is white'" in both occurrences is a name, whence it follows that the consequent of the conditional is not a proposition, as it must be if the conditional is to be well-formed. If, on the other hand, the variable 'p' is taken to range over propositions, then we get the same result:

4. If he asserts the proposition that snow is white, then the proposition that snow is white

which is also nonsense. Unless I am missing something, it looks as if Ramsey's redundancy theory cannot succeed in eliminating 'true.' It looks as if 'true' is an indispensable predicate, and thus a genuine predicate. This does not, however, show that truth is a genuine property.   It merely shows that we cannot get rid of 'true.'

Geach on Assertion

The main point of Peter Geach's paper, "Assertion" (Logic Matters, Basil Blackwell, 1972, pp. 254-269) is what he calls the Frege point: A thought may have just the same content whether you assent to its truth or not; a proposition may occur in discourse now asserted, now unasserted; and yet be recognizably the same proposition. This seems unassailably correct. One will fail to get the Frege point, however, if one confuses statements and propositions. An unstated statement is a contradiction in terms, but an unasserted proposition is not. The need for unasserted propositions can be seen from the fact that many of our compound assertions (a compound assertion being one whose content is propositionally compound) have components that are unasserted.

To assert a conditional, for example, is not to assert its antecedent or its consequent. If I assert that if Tom is drunk, then he is unfit to drive, I do not thereby assert that he is drunk, nor do I assert that he is unfit to drive.  I assert a compound proposition the components of which I do not assert.  The same goes for disjunctive propositions. To assert a disjunction is not to assert its disjuncts. Neither propositional component of Either Tom is sober or he is unfit to drive is asserted by one who merely asserts the compound disjunctive proposition.

What bearing does this have on recent discussions?  I am not sure I understand William of Woking's position, but he seems to be denying something that Geach plausibly maintains, namely, that "there is no expression in ordinary language that regularly conveys assertoric force." (261)  Suppose I want to assert that Tom is drunk.  Then I would use the indicative sentence 'Tom is drunk.'  But there is nothing intrinsically assertoric about that sentence.  If there were, then prefixing 'if' to it would not remove its assertoric force as it does.    As I have already explained, an assertive utterance of 'If Tom is drunk, then he is unfit to drive'  does not amount to an assertive utterance of 'Tom is drunk.'  'If' cancels the assertoric force.  And yet the same proposition occurs in both assertions, the assertion that Tom is drunk and the assertion that if Tom is drunk, then he is unfit to drive.  I conclude that there is nothing intrinsically assertoric about indicative sentences.  If so, there is no semantic component of an indicative sentence that can be called the assertoric component.

'If' prefixed to an indicative sentence does not alter its content: it neither augments it nor diminishes it.  But it does subtract assertoric force.  Given that the meaning of an indicative sentence is its content, and the semantics has to do with meaning, then there is no semantic assertoric component of an indicative sentence or of the proposition it expresses.  Assertion and assertoric force do not belong in semantics; they belong in pragmatics.  Or so it seems to me.

Sentence, Linguistic Meaning, Proposition

I maintain that we must distinguish among declarative sentences, their linguistic meanings, and the propositions expressed by tokenings of declarative sentences by speakers in definite contexts. Furthermore, I maintain that propositions, not linguistic meanings, are the vehicles of the truth-values. Here are four declarative sentences in four different languages, English, German, Turkish, and Latin:  I love you; Ich liebe dich; Seni seviyorum; Te amo. 

Clearly, each of these sentences can be used to express many different thoughts or propositions. If Jack says 'I love you' to Jill, the proposition expressed is different from the proposition expressed if Bill says 'I love you' to Hill. Since one and the same sentence type can be used to express different propositions, it follows that sentence types are distinct from propositions.

We must also distinguish between a sentence type and its linguistic meaning, the meaning it has in virtue of the conventions of the language to which the sentence type belongs. The four sentences displayed above have the same meaning. Since one and the same meaning is possessed by these four different sentence types, it follows that linguistic meanings are distinct from sentence types. It follows from the two points just made that linguistic meanings are distinct from propositions. One proof of this is that one can have a complete understanding of the linguistic meaning of a sentence without knowing any proposition that the sentence has ever expressed. Let me explain.

Suppose a Spanish speaker learning English learns that 'Mary loves Carl' means the same as 'Mary ama a Carl.' The Spanish speaker then fully understands the linguistic meaning of 'Mary loves Carl' but without needing to know any proposition, any truth or falsehood, that the English sentence has ever expressed. (See Castaneda, Thinking and Doing, p. 35) Therefore, the linguistic meaning of a declarative sentence is distinct from the proposition expressed by the sentence on some occasion of the sentence's use. Some, blinded by the nominalist fear of reification, cannot admit this obvious distinction between linguistic meaning and proposition. One nominalist writes, "In summary, the meaning of a sentence is what it says, what it says is true or false, ergo the meaning of a sentence is a 'truth bearer'." The argument is this:

1. The meaning of a sentence is what it says.

2. What a sentence says is either true or false. Therefore,

3. The meaning of a sentence is either true or false.

The argument equivocates on 'what it says.' If premise (2) is true, then what a declarative sentence says is identical to the proposition it expresses. It is important to realize that I am not assuming any particular theory of propositions. Thus I am not assuming that they are Platonic entities. I am simply insisting that we need to distinguish between the linguistic meaning of a sentence (the meaning it has in virtue of the conventions of the language to which it belongs) and the proposition a sentence expresses when the sentence is uttered or otherwise tokened by a person in a definite situation. But in premise (1), the linguistic meaning of a sentence is identified with what it says. Thus 'what it says' is being used in two different ways, which fact destroys the validity of the argument. If a proponent of the argument says I am begging the question against him, I reply that he is failing to admit an obvious distinction. The distinction is not original with me. It ought to be visible to anyone. If an a priori commitment to nominalism blinds one to so obvious a distinction, then so much the worse for an a priori commitment to nominalism.

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 bandwagons.

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 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.'   But honest dissent you label as 'hate speech' and you shout down those who disagree with you.

The Misrepresentations of Arizona SB 1070 Continue

People from whom one would expect intellectual honesty continue to misrepresent SB 1070.  Yet another example surfaced in this morning's Arizona Republic in a letter to the editor from Clara M. Lovett, president emerita of Northern Arizona University.  She writes:

A statute that allows police to stop people on the basis of "reasonable suspicion" that they are undocumented aliens turns on its head one of the most sacred principles of American law. Anyone stopped and questioned by police is presumed guilty until proved innocent.

This is an egregious misrepresentation.  The statute does not allow police to stop people on the basis of reasonable suspicion that they are illegal aliens.  The 1070 statute as amended by HB 2162 disallows this.  The following are the conditions under which an immigration inquiry may proceed.  Each must be satisfied.  See here for links and quotations.

1.  There must be a lawful stop, detention, or arrest.

2. The stop, detention, or arrest must be made in the enforcement of a law other than 1070.

3.  There must be reasonable suspicion that the person is an illegal alien.

4.  The immigration inquiry must be practicable.

5.  The immigration inquiry must not hinder or obstruct an investigation.

Lovett ignores  (1), (2), (4), and (5).  Lovett joints Eric Holder, Janet Napolitano, and the others who presume to criticize what they haven't read.  And this woman is a former NAU president? 

What Is the Appeal of Ordinary Language Philosophy?

One source of its appeal is that it reinstates much of what was ruled out as cognitively meaningless by logical positivism but without rehabilitating the commitments of old-time metaphysics. Permit me to explain. (My ruminations are in part inspired by Ernest Gellner, to give credit where credit is due.) 

Crudely put, as befits a crude philosophy, logical positivism is just Hume warmed over. The LPs take his famous two-pronged fork and sharpen the tines. Hume spoke of relations of ideas and matters of fact, and consigned to the flames anything thing that was not one or the other. In the Treatise of Human Nature, he spoke of "school metaphysics and divinity" as deserving of such rude treatment. Since Hume's day, old-time metaphysics and theology have had a forking hard time of it.

The LPs spoke of two disjoint classes of statements and maintained that every cognitively meaningful statement must be a member of the one or the other. The one class contains the truths of logic and mathematics and such analytic statements as 'Every cygnet is a swan' all interpreted as true by convention. The other class consists of statements empirically verifiable in principle. Any statement not in one of these two disjoint classes is adjudged by the LPs to be cognitive meaningless. Thus the aesthetic statement, 'The adagio movement of Beethoven's Ninth exceeds in beauty anything Bruckner wrote' is by their lights not false, but cognitively meaningless, though they generously grant it some purely subjective emotive meaning. And the same goes for the characteristic statements one finds in theology, metaphysics, and ethics. Such statements are not false, but meaningless, i.e., neither true nor false.

Imagine a debate between a Muslim and a Christian. Muslim: "God is one! There is no god but God (Allah)!" Christian: "God is triune (three-in-one)." For an LP, the debate is meaningless since theological assertion and counter-assertion are meaningless. The assertions are neither analytic nor empirically verifiable. Or consider a debate between two Christians. They are both Trinitarians: there is one God in three divine Persons. But the man from Rome maintains that the Holy Ghost proceeds from the Father and the Son (filioque) while the man from Constantinople maintains that the Holy Ghost proceeds directly from the Father. For an LP, this debate about the procession of Persons is cognitively meaningless. I chose these examples to show how attractive LP is. For many of you will be inclined to think of these debates as in some sense meaningless. "How could one know one way or the other?" Many of you will be inclined to want to tie meaningfulness to empirical verifiability. Nevertheless, Logical Positivism  is untenable. But that is not my present point.

My present point concerns the appeal of OLP. The OL boys weren't out to resurrect metaphysics. They took on board the anti-metaphysical animus of the LPs. But their approach allowed the salvaging of ways of talking that the LPs had no interest in preserving. Religious language is a key example. So what I am contending is that one source of the appeal of OL philosophy was that it allowed religious talk and thus religion itself to be saved from the forking accusation of meaninglessness. But it did this without crediting old-time metaphysics. You can see why that would appeal to a lot of people. To explain this properly would take a lot of scribbling.

But the central idea is that religion is a form of life and a language game, a self-contained language game that needs no justification ab extra. Hence it needs no justification from metaphysics or philosophy generally. It is in order as it is — to use a characteristically Wittgensteinian turn of phrase. By the same token, religion cannot be attacked from the side of philosophy. It is an island of meaning unto itself, and is insofar forth insulated from criticism. (L. insula, ae = island.) Nor can it come into conflict with science or be debunked by science. Within the religious language game there are valid and invalid moves, things it is correct and incorrect to say; but the langauge game itself is neither correct nor incorrect. It just is. Religion is a groundless system of belief, a system of belief that neither needs nor is capable of justification. Since I reject both LP and OLP, I am not endorsing this view of religion. I am merely explaining one of the reasons why people are attracted to OLP: it allows them to practice a religion while ignoring both the threat from traditional philosophy (which demands the justification of key religious tenets) and the the threat of positivism which makes positive science the ultimate arbiter of reality.

This post truncates a larger discussion to be found in What is Right and What is Wrong in Wittgenstein's Philosophy of Religion.

Wittgenstein on Time and Flux

Ludwig Wittgenstein, Philosophical Remarks, ed. Rush Rhees, trs. Hargreaves and White, Chicago 1975, p. 83:

52. It's strange that in ordinary life we are not troubled by the feeling that the phenomenon is slipping away from us, the constant flux of appearance, but only when we philosophize. This indicates that what is in question here is an idea suggested by a misapplication of our language. 

This indicates to me that Wittgenstein lacked a metaphysical sensibility. It is precisely in ordinary life, and prior to his occupation with technical metaphysics, that the metaphysician feels and is saddened by the transitoriness of things, the flux of phenomena, the passage of time. That feeling is part of what sets him on the path of technical metaphysics in the first place. It is the fundamental sense of the transience and unreality of this world that disposes him to take seriously metaphysical writings when he first encounters them. And it is the lack of this sense in G. E. Moore and in Wittgenstein which disposes them to be puzzled by the writings of metaphysicians like Bradley and McTaggart and to set out to debunk them either by defending common sense (as if the metaphysician were simply denying it) or by bringing us back to ordinary language used in ordinary ways.

Wittgenstein says that "only when we philosophize" are we troubled by the flux of phenomena. Not only is this plainly false, it suggests that there is something aberrant rather than natural about philosophizing, as if philosophy were a disease of cognition needing treatment rather than refutation. I simply deny this.  If there is a cognitive defect, it is in those who fail to perceive the relative unreality of the transient.

Philosophy arises quite naturally in people of a reflective disposition who have a sense of the relative unreality, the ontological non-ultimacy, of the world of time and change. Philosophy is not a disease, but a response to the inherent questionableness of the world and our lives in it.   In the Theaetetus, Plato speaks of wonder as the "feeling of the philosopher." This wonder is not mere puzzlement induced by linguistic confusion but a questioning elicited by the nature of things, a questioning that is a transcending of this world, a transcending that issues in attempts to put into language the essence of the world.

It is the possibility of this transcending that Wittgenstein questions. He questions it by questioning the meaningfulness of the sorts of extended uses of ordinary words that the metaphysician employs. The metaphysician takes a word like 'present' from ordinary usage and then says something extraordinary like, 'The present alone is real,' or 'Only the present experience has reality.' Wittgenstein objects to this with a sort of Contrast Argument:

We are tempted to say: only the experience of the present moment has reality. And then the first reply must be: As opposed to what? Does it imply that I didn't get up this morning? (For if so, it would be dubious.) But this is not what we mean. Does it mean that an event that I'm not remembering at this instant didn't occur? Not that either. (85)

Wittgenstein's point is that when one says that the present alone is real, one is using 'present' in an extended sense, one in which it no longer contrasts with 'past' and 'future.' He seems to think that the presentist metaphysician is saying something that conflicts with such obvious facts as that one got up in the morning. But here is where Wittgenstein's Contrast Argument becomes hard to credit. Wittgenstein's mistake is to think that when the presentist, saying that the present alone is real, implies that the past is unreal, he is implying that the past is nothing at all in a way that would render it false that we got up this morning. But of course the presentist does not deny the gross facts; what he does is reinterpret them. His point is something like this: the reality of the past is relative to, or derivative from, the (absolute) reality of the present.

The Elusive Assertoric Component

William of Woking comments:

 Consider again

(1) Tom runs

(2) that Tom runs

(3) It is true that Tom runs

We have agreed that (1) and (3) are semantically identical. Yes, they express the very same propositional content or thought. They have the very same meaning (Sinn).   We also agree that (2) is verbally more complex than (1), likewise (3) is verbally more complex than (2). Yes, that's obvious. 

Do you agree that it logically follows that in some cases, increasing the verbal complexity can reduce the semantic complexity? I argue as follows. Either (2) is semantically more complex than (1) or less complex. If more complex, then it follows that (2) is semantically more complex than (3), because of the semantic identity we agreed. In which case it logically follows that increasing the verbal complexity (in the move from (2) to (3)) reduces the semantic complexity. Therefore &c. Or (2) is semantically less complex than (1). In which case it logically follows that increasing the verbal complexity (from (1) to (2)) reduces the semantic complexity.

Your argument seems correct: in some cases increasing verbal complexity reduces semantic complexity.  But what exactly do you mean by 'semantic complexity'?  Verbal complexity seems clear: if one expression contains more words than another, then the first expression is verbally more complex.  But you need to explain to us exactly what you mean when you say that one expression is semantically more complex than another.  For example, (1) and (2) are semantically distinct.  The first has a truth-value, the second doesn't.  But which is semantically more complex?  What criterion do you use to decide that?  I don't see that (2) is semantically more complex than (1).  If you think of 'that' as a sentential operator, then you can say that (2) results from (1) when 'that' operates upon (1).  But that is not to say that (2) is semantically more complex than (1).  For 'that' by itself carries no meaning.  It is syncategorematical as opposed to autocaregorematical to use some Medieval lingo.

If you agree to this, then I have a large part of what I propose, for nearly all your negative arguments rest on the observation that a token of the same verbal expression (i.e. with the same verbal complexity) may appear to lack the assertoric component that the other has. My reply here is that this is consistent with 'semantic subtraction' operators. The token of the expression (1) above ('Tom runs') is identical to the token included in the that-clause in (2).   No, they are distinct tokens; they are only type-identical. Yet (2) as a whole appears not to be an assertion. To be precise: (2), by itself, cannot be used to make an assertion.  You would argue, in general, that this is because there is no such thing as a semantic component of assertion. I reply, in general, that this is because of the 'negative effect' of the 'that operator'.

I'm afraid this is still very unclear.  Consider the sentence 'Tom sucks.'  Now consider two tokens of this sentence type.  (T1)  'Tom sucks' uttered by Tanya to express contempt for Tom. (T2) 'Tom sucks' uttered by Tony to describe how Tom is ingesting his cola.  From the point of view of grammar, both tokens are in the indicative mood.  But only one is being used to make an assertion.  Therefore, there cannot be an assertoric component in indicative sentence types.  And whether there is anything assertoric about a token depends on how it is used in a concrete situation.

In any case, what is the wider relevance of all this?  What's at stake here?  Where are you going with this?