Author: Bill Vallicella

Professor Anderson and the Hyper-Inscrutability of the Trinitarian Doctrine (Peter Lupu)

(This gem is pulled up from the vasty deeps of the ComBox to where it may shine in a more fitting setting.  Minor editing, bolding, and comments in blue by BV.)

1). Let us say that a *real* contradiction is a sentence which comes out false according to every possible model (M): i.e., M = language-plus-domain-plus-interpretation, where an ‘interpretation’ is a complete and systematic assignment of extensions to the non-logical terms of the language (L). We assume that L is a well developed natural language such as English and we have a sufficiently rich domain that includes whatever entities are required to implement an interpretation that will suffice for theological purposes.

1.1) Note: We are assuming throughout classical logic in two sense: (a) the logical constants are interpreted classically; (b) there are no *real* true contradictions.

1.2) Sentence S is a *real* contradiction just in case there is no *normal model* M in which it comes out true. A normal model in this context is one which features an interpretation that assigns extensions to the non-logical terms in the usual way prior to resolving any potential ambiguities. On a realist conception of truth, S [if contradictory] has no truth-maker (T-maker) in any normal model or possible world.

2) Let us now define at least one sense of an *apparent contradiction* in model theoretic terms. Let S be a sentence expressible in L and suppose S comes out false in every normal model M. S appears to be a contradiction. Is it really a contradiction? Prof. Anderson maintains that there are sentences which are contradictory in every normal model, but are non-contradictory in some other models of L. How can that be? [Shouldn't Peter have 'false' for contradictory and 'true' for non-contradictory in the preceding sentence?  After all, in (1) we are told in effect that contradictoriness is falsehood in every model, which implies that noncontradictoriness is truth in some model.  'Contradictory in every model' is a pleonastic expression.]

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Was Descartes Poisoned by a Catholic Priest?

Descartes-rene As we have been learning, the conceivability of such theological doctrines as Trinity, Incarnation, and Transubstantiation depends on one's background ontology.  Erlangen University's Theodor Ebert, according to this Guardian account, argues that the father of modern philosophy was poisoned with an arsenic-laced communion wafer by a Catholic priest because his metaphysical position is inconsistent with the Transubstantiation doctrine.

This raises an interesting question:  Isn't a Catholic priest's commission of murder by desecration of the host far worse than a philosopher's holding of heretical views? 

Saturday Night at the Oldies: Running on St. Valentine’s Day

My training over and my carbo-loading done, I am now in the psych-up phase for tomorrow's Lost Dutchman marathon.  Will I be able to go the distance?  At the outset, I'll Take It Easy but then Take It to the Limit.  I will have no trouble with the first 20 miles, but the last 10 K I will be Running on Empty.  Question is whether I will be Willin' to keep on movin'?

And while we're on the running them, let's not forget Del Shannon's Runaway, Roy Orbison's Running Scared, and Dion DiMucci's Runaround Sue.  And then there's that Crystals number the refrain of which sounds like 'They do run, run.'

And tomorrow  being St Valentine's Day, three for my wife.  An old Sam Cooke number, a lovely Shirelles tune, and my favorite from the Seekers.

A Platonist at Breakfast

I head out early one morning with wifey in tow. I’m going to take her to a really fancy joint this time, the 5 and Diner, a greasy spoon just dripping with 1950s Americana. We belly up to the counter –where I can keep an eye on the waitresses — and order the $2. 98 special: two eggs any style, hashbrowns, toast and coffee. Meanwhile I punch the buttons of Floyd Cramer’s "Last Date" on the personal jukebox in front of me after feeding it with a quarter from wifey’s purse.

"How would you like your eggs, sir?"

More Fun With Alienans Adjectives and an Application

My bathroom sinks are made of faux marble, which is to say that they are not made of marble: false marble is not marble.  So faux and 'false' function here as alienans adjectives. Similar cases: false gold, falsies, false friend.  But 'false' in 'false teeth' is not an alienans adjective: false teeth are teeth just as an artificial hand is a hand.  Artificial leather, however, is not leather.

What about 'epistemic' in 'epistemic possibility'?  I'd say it is alienans.  I ask the secretary whether Professor Windbag is in his office.  She says, "It's possible."  Unbeknownst to both of us, however, old Windbag was cremated the night before.  So one cannot validly infer 'It is possible that p'  from 'It is epistemically possible that p.'

I saw a liberal on John Stossel's show the other night.  She said more than once that obesity is contagious.  When called on the absurdity of her assertion, she retreated to the claim that it is socially contagious.  Socially contagious?  I pronounce my 'bullshit' upon that: 'socially' here functions as an alienans adjective.  What is socially contagious is not contagious strictly speaking.

Liberals want to make of obesity a public health problem.  We ought not let them get away with it.  I have explained before why it is not a public health problem, and I'm not in the mood to repeat myself.  I'll just remind you that if we let the proponents of socialized medicine get their way, our liberty is near an end.  Once the government controls every aspect of health care, they will be in a position to dictate your behavior in almost every particular: what you must eat, what you must not eat, whether and how much you should exercise, whether you will be allowed to engage in such risky activities as riding motorcycles and so on.  And if high risk activities are allowed, then you can expect special taxes and restrictions galore.

So when I go on about language, it is not all just pedantry and scholarly nicety.  Attention to language is a prerequisite for critical thinking.  There is no semantic vehicle that some leftist will not try to hijack and pilot to a Left Coast destination; so sharpen your wits and be on guard.

For more on alienans adjectives, see Adjectives.

This Life

Too dream-like to be real, this life is too real to be a dream.  We cannot literally be "such stuff as dreams are made on" (The Tempest, Act IV, Scene 1), but the spiritually percipient will catch the Bard's drift.  "Our little life  rounded with a sleep" is not a candidate for plenary Reality.

More Christology: Freddoso on Supposita

To better understand the doctrine of supposita and the role it plays in the doctrines of Trinity and Incarnation, we turn to Alfred J. Freddoso, Human Nature, Potency and the Incarnation (bolding added):

According to the Christian faith, as defined in this instance by the great Christological Councils and mirrored in centuries of liturgical practice and theological reflection, Jesus Christ is truly God and truly man. More precisely, he is a single divine person, the eternal Word, in whom are united, whole and unmixed, a divine nature and a human nature–so that he is, to quote Chalcedon, "one with the Father in his divinity and one with us in his humanity."

In expounding this doctrine medieval theologians fashioned the technical metaphysical notion of a suppositum (or hypostasis), i.e. an independently existing ultimate subject of characteristics.4 The philosophically astute will detect at once that, so understood, the concept of a suppositum is remarkably akin to that of an Aristotelian primary substance or individual(ized) nature. Indeed, had it not been for the doctrines of the Trinity and the Incarnation, medieval Christian thinkers would never have been led to assert that suppositum and substance (or: individual nature) are distinct concepts. To speak now only of the Incarnation, Christ's individual human nature, i.e. the individual composed of a body and an intellective soul and united to the Son of God, is a paradigmatic Aristotelian [primary] substance . . . .Yet, because of its metaphysical union with and dependence upon the eternal Word, this nature is not the ultimate metaphysical subject of Christ's characteristics–not even of his "purely human" characteristics. So in this one instance, known to us only by divine revelation, we have a substance which is not a suppositum, a substance which is metaphysically "sustained" by something distinct from it. To complete the picture, a person is just a suppositum with an intellectual nature, i.e. a suppositum essentially endowed with intellect and free will.

In technical medieval terminology, then, Jesus Christ is a divine suppositum or person, the Son of God, who has freely "assumed" and now "sustains" an individual human nature. What's more, this human nature is united to the divine person "hypostatically," i.e. in such a way that properties had immediately by the human nature have the Son of God as their ultimate metaphysical subject–in a manner analogous to that in which many properties had immediately by a proper part of a whole have the whole itself as their ultimate metaphysical subject.

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Ernst Bloch on Law and the State

Bloch Ernst Bloch, like Theodor Adorno, is a leftie worth reading. But here are two passages replete with grotesque exaggeration and plain falsehood.  Later, perhaps, I will cite something from Bloch that I approve of. The offensive passages are from the essay, "Karl Marx, Death, and the Apocalypse" in Man on His Own: Essays in the Philosophy of Religion (Herder and Herder, 1970, p. 32. The translation is by E. B Ashton):  

. . . the law as a whole, and the greater part of the criminal law as well, is simply an instrument by which the ruling classes maintain the legal standards that protect their interests . . . If there were no property, there would be no law and no need for its sharp-edged though hollow categories.

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Does Inconceivability Entail Impossibility?

In an earlier thread James Anderson makes some observations that cast doubt on the standard entailment from inconceivability to impossibility.  (I had objected that his  theological mysterianism seems to break the inferential link connecting inconceivability and impossibility.) He writes,

But even though we have no direct epistemic access to any other inconceivability than our own, and despite the formidable historical pedigree of the idea, it still strikes me as implausible to maintain that inconceivability to us entails impossibility.  [. . .] For the principle in question is logically equivalent to the principle that possibility entails conceivability. But is it plausible to think that absolutely whatsoever happens to be possible in this mysterious universe and beyond must be conceivable to the human mind, at least in principle? Can this really be right?

I want to emphasize that I'm not advocating some form of modal skepticism, i.e., the view that our intuitions as to what is possible or impossible are generally unreliable. On the contrary, I think they're reliable. I just deny that they're infallible.

This does indeed give me pause.  Anderson is certainly right that if inconceivability entails impossibility, then, by contraposition, possibility entails conceivability.  These entailments stand or fall together.  But is it plausible to maintain that whatever is possible is conceivable?  Why couldn't there be possible states of affairs that are inconceivable to us?

But there may be an ambiguity here.  I grant that there are, or rather could be, possible states of affairs that we cannot bring before our minds.  These would be states of affairs that we cannot entertain due to our cognitive limitations.  But that is not to say that a state of affairs that I can bring before my mind and in which I find a logical contradiction is a possible state of affairs.  Thus we should distinguish two senses of inconceivable, where S is a state of affairs and A is any well-functioning finite cognitive agent:

S is inconceivable1 to A =df A entertains S and finds a contradiction in S.

S is inconceivable2 to A =df A is unable to entertain (bring before his mind) S.

Now it seems clear that inconceivability2 does not entail impossibility.  But I should think that inconceivability1 does entail impossibility.  For if S is contradictory, then that very state of affairs as the precise accusative of my thought that it is, cannot obtain.  Its possibility in reality is ruled out by the fact that it cannot be entertained without contradiction.

Now does possibility entail conceivability?  No, in that the possible need not be thinkable by us: there could be possibilities that lie beyond our mental horizon.  But possibility does entail conceivability if what we mean is that possible states of affairs that we can bring before our minds must be free of contradiction.

So, in apparent contradiction to what Anderson is claiming, I urge that we can be infallibly sure that a state of  affairs in which we detect a logical contradiction cannot obtain in reality.  There is more to reality, including the reality of the merely possible,  than what we can think of; but what we can think of must be free of contradiction if it is to be possible.

Conceivability without contradiction is no infallible guide to possibility.  But inconceivability1 is an infallible guide to impossibility.  Where Anderson apparently sees symmetry, I uphold the traditional asymmetry.

Rand Resurgent

Cathy Young's A Rand Revival offers a balanced appraisal.  Excerpts:

Politically, Rand wanted to provide liberal capitalism with a moral foundation, challenging the notion that communism was a noble but unrealistic ideal while the free market was a necessary evil best suited to humanity's flawed nature.

[. . .]

But Rand's work also has a darker, more disturbing aspect–one that, unfortunately, is all too good a fit for this moment in America's political life. That is her intellectual intolerance and her tendency to demonize her opponents. Speaking through her hero John Galt, Rand declared, There are two sides to every issue: one side is right and the other is wrong, but the middle is always evil.

For more on Rand, seen my Ayn Rand category.