Retreat ever and again into the citadel of the Here and Now, and the dragons of elsewhere and elsewhen will turn to chimeras.
Author: Bill Vallicella
Conceivability, Possibility, Self, and Body
A reader sent me the following argument which he considers a good one:
1. It is conceivable that I exist without my present body (or any part of it).
2. Therefore, it is possible that I exist without my present body (or any part of it).
3. Therefore, I have a property P that my body does not, namely, being such that possibly, I exist when my body (or any part of it) doesn't.
4. Therefore, I am not my body (or any part of it).
The argument as it stands is enthymematic. The inferential move from (3) to (4) requires an auxiliary premise, one which is easily supplied. It is the contrapositive of the Identity of Indiscernibles, and so we can call it the Discernibility of the Diverse, to wit: If two things differ in respect of a property, then they are numerically diverse (not numerically identical). That is a rough formulation, but it is good enough for present purposes. With the assistance of DD, the move from (3) to (4) is unproblematic.
I should think the move from (2) to (3) is also unproblematic. The inference from (1) to (2), however, puzzles me and troubles me. I accept the conclusion: I cannot for the life of me see how I could be strictly and numerically identical to my body or any part of it. So I would like the above argument, or a reasonable facsimile, to be valid. But I stumble over the move from (1) to (2). To validate this inference we need some such principle as
CEP. For any proposition p, conceivably p entails possibly p.
CEP is what I want to discuss. The possibility in question is not epistemic but real, and is that species of real possibility called broadly logical or metaphysical. Now here is a reason why I have doubts about CEP. I accept that there is an Absolute. Now any decent Absolute (the One of Plotinus is a good candidate as is the God of Aquinas) will be a necessary being, one whose possibility entails its actuality. An Absolute, then, cannot not exist if it exists: it either exists in every possible world or in no world. To prove that an Absolute exists all I need is the premise, Possibly an Absolute exists. I may think to infer this proposition from Conceivably an Absolute exists, by way of CEP. Unfortunately, it seems I can just as easily conceive of the nonexistence of a an Absolute. To paraphrase Hume, whatever I can conceive as existent I can just as easily conceive as nonexistent. We can call that Hume's Existence Principle:
HEP. Everything (concrete) is such that its nonexistence is conceivable.
If HEP is true, then every being is contingent. But if CEP is true, then at least one being is noncontingent. This shows that either CEP is false or HEP is false. Since I am strongly inclined to accept HEP, I have doubts about CEP.
Clearly, much depends on what we mean by 'conceivable.' Trading Latin for Anglo-Saxon, to be conceivable is to be thinkable. But since there is a sense in which logical contradictions are thinkable, we must add: thinkable without broadly logical contradiction. By whom? The average schmuck? Or the ideally penetrative intellect? If an ideally penetrative intellect examines a proposition and detects no broadly logical contradiction, then there will be no gap between conceivability in this sense and possibility. But our intellects are not ideally penetrative. Suppose a person reads and understands Zorn's Lemma, reads and understands the Axiom of Choice, and then is asked whether it is possible that the first be true and the second false. He examines the conjunction of Zorn's Lemma with the negation of the Axiom of Choice and discerns no contradiction. So he concludes that it is possible that the Lemma be true and the Axiom false. He would be wrong since the two are provably equivalent. This shows, I think, that for intellects like ours one cannot in general validly infer possibility from conceivability.
Returning to our opening argument, I would say that it is plausible and renders dualism rationally acceptable. But it doesn't establish dualism. For the move from (1) to (2) is questionable.
What is to stop a materialist from running the argument in reverse? He denies the conclusion and then denies (2). If you insist that your non-identity with your body is conceivable and therefore possible, he tells you that it only seems so to you, and that seeming is not being. Or else he rejects CEP
Three Senses of ‘Fact’
Ed Feser has a very useful post which clears up some unfortunately common confusions with respect to talk about facts and opinions. I agree with what he says but would like to add a nuance. Feser distinguishes two senses of 'fact,' one metaphysical (I prefer the term 'ontological') the other epistemological:
Fact (1): an objective state of affairsFact (2): a state of affairs known via conclusive arguments, airtight evidence, etc.I suggest that we distinguish within the metaphysical Fact(1) between facts-that, which are true propositions, and facts-of, which are worldly states of affairs that function as the truth-makers of true propositions. If I say that table salt is NaCl, what I say is a fact in the epistemological sense of being something known to be the case, but it is also a fact in two further senses. Uttering 'Table salt is NaCl' I express a true proposition. (I take a Fregean line on propositions: they are the senses of context-free declarative sentences.) Clearly, the proposition expressed by my utterance is true whether or not anyone knows it. So this is an ontological use of 'fact.' But it is arguable that (contingent) propositions, which are truth-bearers, have need of truth-makers. Truth-makers are plausibly taken to be worldly (concrete) states of affairs. (Not to be confused with the abstract states of affairs of Chisholm and Plantinga.) Thus the proposition expressed by 'Table salt is NaCl' is made-true by the concrete state of affairs, the fact-of, table salt's being sodium chloride.
One way to see the difference between a proposition, a truth-bearer, and its truth-maker is by noting that Tom himself, all 200 lbs of him, is not a constituent of the Fregean proposition expressed by 'Tom is tired,' whereas Tom himself is a constituent of the fact-of Tom' s being tired. More fundamentally, if you have realist intuitions, it should seem self-evident that a true proposition cannot just be true; it is in need of an ontological ground of its truth. It is true that my desk is littered with books, but this truth (true proposition) doesn''t hang in the air so to speak, it is grounded in a truth-making fact involving concrete books and a desk.
Many, many questions can be raised about truth-bearers, truth-makers, and so on, but all that comes later. For now, the point is merely to sketch a prima facie three-fold distinction that one ought to be aware of even if, later down the theoretical road one decides that facts-that can be identified with facts-of, or that a conflation of facts in the epistemological sense with facts-that can be justified, or whatever. Such theoretical identifications and conflations presuppose for their very sense such preliminary prima facie distinctions as I have just made.
Saturday Night at the Oldies: The Woman as Devil Theme
The question is posed in this 1955 Clovers number. But perhaps you are more familiar with the Bobby Vee cover. Elvis Presley learns that appearances can deceive. Marty Robbins succumbs to temptation and begs his Mary for forgiveness. An aging Mitch Ryder gets it up one more time in this rousing version of Devil with the Blue Dress.
I Get a Rise Out of Aristotle
Michael Gilleland, the Laudator Temporis Acti, in his part-time capacity as 'channel' of Aristotle, submits this delightful missive:
Dear Dr. Vallicella:
You wrote:
"Society and its various coercive and noncoercive arrangements exist for the sake of the individual and not the other way around. Given that the individual is the locus of value and the reason for the being of state and society, the latter cannot be ends in themselves, whence it follows that the political life, useful as it is, cannot be the highest life."
I once argued otherwise, in my Nicomachaean Ethics 1.2.8 (tr. H. Rackham):
"For even though it be the case that the Good is the same for the individual and for the state, nevertheless, the good of the state is manifestly a greater and more perfect good, both to attain and to preserve. To secure the good of one person only is better than nothing; but to secure the good of a nation or a state is a nobler and more divine achievement."
Regards,
Aristotle the Stagirite
Dear Aristotle,
I will begin by thanking your for your interest in my humble weblog. If it were not for you and your teacher Plato — to whom, if I may say so, you do not accord sufficient respect in your otherwise outstanding writings — none of us epigoni would be so much as thinkable. But now to the matter at hand.
You do indeed argue that politics is the master science of the good in Book I, Chapter 2 of your excellent Nicomachean Ethics, and you do indeed state at 1094b8 that the good of the state is nobler than the good of the individual. But I must remind you of what you say in the tenth and last Book of Eth. Nic. beginning in Chapter 6 and continuing until the concluding Chapter Nine. May I be so bold as to summarize the immortal thought of these inspiring chapters?
Chapter Six: Happiness and Activity. Happiness is a an active state, not one of passivity or amusement. Happiness, as the ultimate goal of human striving, cannot be identified with pleasure as certain 19th century English blockheads thought, and certainly not with bodily pleasures. (The German philosopher Nietzsche, whom you may have heard of, once quipped, "Man does not seek pleasure, only the Englishman does." I think you would approve of that line.) Happiness is an activity of the soul, not the body, in accordance with virtue.
Chapter Seven: Happiness, Intelligence, and the Contemplative Life. Now if happiness, eudaimonia, is an activity of the soul, an ergon of the psyche, in accordance with virtue or excellence, then it ought to be an activity in accordance with the highest virtue or excellence. You wisely distinguished the moral from the intellectual virtues and gave precedence to the latter. But among the intellectual virtues theoretical knowledge or contemplation, what you call theoria, stands in first place. Thus the highest life is the bios theoretikos, the life of theory, of contemplation, of philosophy. This is what your students in the Middle Ages called the vita contemplativa.
One of the arguments you give for the superiority of the theoretical life is the argument from sufficiency (1176b25 ff.) One who practices such virtues as justice, courage, and self-control needs other people. Thus a just legislator, a just judge, and a just executive requires other people as a condition of his virtuous behavior, a fact which brings in its train a lack of self-sufficiency. But he who follows the bios theoretikos needs little beyond the necessities of life. As you put it, "a wise man is able to study even by himself, and the wiser he is the more he is able to do so."
You go on to point out that the theoretical life is legitimately regarded as an end in itself and is a life of true leisure. By contrast, those who engage in military and political pursuits live in unleisurely and servile fashion, and insofar forth can do little to advance the cause of culture. As you point out, we are busy in order to have leisure just as we wage war for the sake of peace. The vita activa is for the sake of the vita contemplativa. Have you read Josef Pieper's Leisure The Basis of Culture? He does an excellent job of expounding this idea of yours. All neg-otiation, whether econonomic or political, is for the sake of otium, leisure. Sorry to employ the inferior language, Latin, but it is nearer to me and my readers than Greek.
Your view, then, is that the contemplative life stands higher than the political life. As the first to investigate logic systematically, you will not take it amiss if I set forth your view in a syllogism:
1. The highest activity is self-sufficient, an end in itself, and productive of the highest pleasure attainable.
2. Only theoretical, but not political, activity is self-sufficient, an end in itself, and productive of the highest pleasure attainable.
Therefore
3. The highest activity is theoretical, not political, activity.
Chapter Eight: The Advantages of the Contemplative Life. The contemplative life is the happiest life since it is the life in accordance with the best in us, nous or intelligence, that in us which make us godlike and self-sufficient.
Chapter Nine: Ethics and Politics. If I may say so, this chapter, something of a grab bag of tentative considerations, does not attain the level of the chapters I have just summarized, and indeed leaves unresolved a tension that you must have felt while composing the various parts of your excellent book.
Is politics the master science of the good, as you say in Book One, so that ethics is a branch of politics? That would seem to suggest that the good of the polis is superior to the good of the individual, and that the happiness and self-realization of the individual must be subordinated to the welfare of the state. But this conflicts with your plain commitment to the thesis that the theoretical life is superior to the political life, not to mention the economic life and the pleasure-seeking life.
I don't need to point out to you that the theoretical life is the individual life par excellence. Indeed, you underscore its solitariness and self-sufficiency as key advantages of it. It is not a group life. And its thinking is not group-think. Indeed, your god, the primum mobile (pardon the Latin!) is noesis noeseos, thought thinking itself, in your beautiful phrase. And you would be the first to admit that no group of thinkers is a thinker.
So I think there is a bit of a tension here. Is politics the master science of the good, or is ethics? Which is subordinated to which? You can't have it both ways, and I would resolve the tension by giving the palm to ethics and to the happiness of the individual. And I would do so invoking your authority!
If over the centuries you have come to any further conclusions on this weighty matter, I should like to hear them, either directly, or via the good graces of your acolyte the estimable Dr. Gilleland.
Yours in the love of wisdom,
MP
Catitude
You talkin' to me?
Freud on Illusion, Delusion, Error, and Religion
I found the discussion in the thread appended to Is There a 'No God' Delusion? very stimulating and useful. My man Peter is the 'rock' upon which good discussions are built. (I shall expatiate later on the sense in which Lupu is also a 'wolf.') The thread got me thinking about what exactly a delusion is. It is important that I have an explicit theory of this inasmuch as I routinely tag leftist beliefs as delusional.
If belief is our genus, the task is to demarcate the delusional from the illusory species and both species from beliefs in general. In this context, and as a matter of terminology, a delusion is a delusional belief, and an illusion is an illusory belief. (I won't consider the questions whether there are illusions or delusions that do not belong to the genus belief.) Let us push forward by way of commentary on some claims in Sigmund Freud's The Future of an Illusion (tr. Strachey, Norton, 1961).
1. Freud distinguishes between illusions and errors. (p.30) Eine Illusion ist nicht dasselbe wie ein Irrtum . . . . There are errors that are not illusions and there are illusions that are not errors. Given that our genus is belief, an error is an erroneous or mistaken belief. So now we have three species of belief to contend with: the erroneous, the illusory, and the delusional. "Aristotle's belief that vermin are developed out of dung . . . was an error." (30) But "it was an illusion of Columbus's that he had discovered a new sea-route to the Indies." (30) What's the difference? The difference is that illusions are wish-driven while errors are not. "What is characteristic of illusions is that they are derived from human wishes." (31) Für die Illusion bleibt charakteristisch die Ableitung aus menschlichen Wünschen . . .
2. Every erroneous belief is false, but no erroneous belief is derived from human wishes. Every illusory belief is derived from human wishes, and may be either true or false. So if a belief is illusory one cannot infer that it is false. It may be false or it may be true. By 'false' Freud means "in contradiction to reality." (31) Suppose that a middle-class girl cherishes the belief that a prince will come and marry her. And suppose the unlikely occurs: a prince does come and marry her. The belief is an illusion despite the fact that it is true, i.e., in agreement with reality. The belief is illusory because its formation and maintenance have their origin in her intense wish. The example is Freud's.
3. The difference between an illusory belief and a delusional belief is that, while both are wish-driven, every delusional belief is false whereas some illusory beliefs are true and others false. "In the case of delusions we emphasize as essential their being in contradiction with reality." (31) An der Wahnidee heben wir als wesentlich den Widerspruch gegen die Wirklichkeit hervor, die Illusion muß nicht notwendig falsch, d. h. unrealisierbar oder im Widerspruch mit der Realität sein. To sum up:
Errors: All of them false, none of them wish-driven.
Delusions: All of them false, all of them wish-driven.
Illusions: Some of them false, some of them true, all of them wish-driven.
4. Now that we understand what an illusion is, we are in a position to understand Freud's central claim about religious ideas and doctrines: "they are illusions, fulfillments of the oldest, strongest, and most urgent wishes of mankind." (30) ". . . all of them are illusions and insusceptible of proof." (31) Sie sind sämtlich Illusionen, unbeweisbar, . . ..
To say of a belief that it is an illusion is to say something about its psychological genesis or origin: it arises as the fulfillment of a wish. It is not to say anything about the belief's truth-value (Wahrheitswert). So even if some religious doctrines were susceptible of proof, they would still be illusions. For again, what makes a belief an illusion is its stemming from a wish. Since Freud admits that there are true illusions, he must also admit at least the possibility of there being some provably true illusions. It could therefore turn out that the belief that God exists is both demonstrably true and an illusion.
But although this follows from what Freud says, he does not explicitly say it. Indeed, he says something that seems inconsistent with it. After telling us that "the truth-value of religious doctrines does not lie within the scope of the present inquiry," he goes on to say that "It is enough for us that we have recognized them as being, in their psychological nature, illusions. But we do not have to conceal the fact that this discovery also strongly influences our attitude to the question which must appear to many to be the most important of all." (33) That question, of course, is the question of truth or falsity.
So the good Doktor appears to be waffling and perhaps teetering on the brink of the genetic fallacy. On the one hand he tells us that a belief's being an illusion does not entail that it is false. He himself gives an example of a true illusion. On the other hand, from what I have just quoted him as saying it follows that showing that a belief arose in a certain way, in satisfaction of certain psychological needs or wishes, can be used to cast doubt on its truth. But the latter is the genetic fallacy. If a third-grader comes to believe the truths of the multiplication table solely on the strength of her teacher's say-so, this fact has no tendency to show that the beliefs formed in this way are false.
Jabez Clapp: A ‘Philosopher’ of the Superstitions
The mountains attract misfits, oddballs, outcasts, outlaws, questers of various stripes, and even a few 'philosophers.' Here is the story of one of them, one of many who found his way into the mountains but never found his way out. He who marches to the beat of a different drummer, in the famous phrase of Henry David Thoreau, runs certain risks. He may march himself right into Kingdom Come. But the very same Thoreau also observed that a man sits as many risks as he runs.
Which risks to sit and which to run is for the individual to decide. There is no algorithm.
Richard Peck, Seeker of Lost Gold
Living as I do in the foothills of the Superstition Mountains, I am familiar with the legends and lore of the Lost Dutchman Gold Mine. And out on the trails or around town I sometimes run into those characters called Dutchman Hunters. One I came close to meeting was Richard Peck, but by the time I found out about his passion from his wife, Joan, he had passed away. Sadly enough, Joan unexpectedly died recently.
Joan had me and my wife over for dinner on Easter Sunday a few years years ago, and my journal (vol. XXI, pp. 34-35, 28 March 2005) reports the following:
Joan's dead husband Rick was a true believer in the Dutchman mine, and thought he knew where it was: in the vicinity of Weaver's Needle, and accessible via the Terrapin trail. A few days before he died he wanted Joan to accompany his pal Bruce, an unbeliever, to a digging operation which Bruce, a man who knows something about mining, did not perform. Rick to Joan, "I want you to be there when he digs up the gold."
Via the wonders of the Internet I found a Time Magazine article, "Adventure and the American Individualist," dated 19 November 1965. On p. 4, we read about Richard Peck:
Richard Peck, 44, is a Princeton graduate, the father of three children and the owner of a Cincinnati advertising agency. He has spent the past 16 months trying to find the famed Lost Dutchman gold mine in Arizona's barren Superstition Mountain range. "The more I read about the Lost Dutchman," he recalls, "the more I kept coming back to it. Finally, I was sure I knew where the Lost Dutchman was. I was going to tear this thing open. I thought I was going to have it wrapped up in two weeks." So far his search has cost him $80,000. "I had to try something like this because it was so impossible. But if this mine is ever found it's still going to hurt in a lot of ways. Something is going to be lost out of this world."
What a story! A successful, educated, 44 year old man, possibly in the grip of a midlife crisis, spends 16 months and $80,000 grubbing around in wild and unforgiving (but not "barren"!) country searching for an almost certainly nonexistent mine. Unlike Adolph Ruth, another white-collar type who sought adventure in them thar hills, Peck came out of the mountains alive. And that was back in the '60s. Peck, whose name was shortened from 'Peckstein' according to Joan, lived on for another 40 years or so. It thus appears that the quest for the lost gold was the main passion of his life. He believed in its existence until the end of his life.
As I write this, I look out my window at Superstition mountain wreathed mysteriously in low-lying clouds and reflect that to live well, a man needs a quest. Without a quest, a life lacks the invigorating "strenuosity" that William James preached. But if he quests for something paltry such as lost treasure, it is perhaps best that he never find it. For on a finite quest, the 'gold' is in the seeking, not in the finding. A quest worthy of us, however, cannot be for gold or silver or anything finite and transitory. A quest worthy of us must aim beyond the ephemeral, towards something whose finding would complete rather than debilitate us. Nevertheless, every quest has something in it of the ultimate quest, and can be respected in some measure for that reason.
Seldom Seen Slim on ‘Tautologies’ That Ain’t
Seldom Seen Slim in a characteristic back-to-the-camera pose evaluates the shooting skills of the man we call 'Doc' (in allusion to Doc Holliday). Slim writes:
Whilst I'm mulling over your thoughts on souls and salvation, here's a trifle you might agree with.
You write "There are many examples of the use of tautological sentences to express non-tautological propositions."
Indeed, my favorite ordinary language example is the use of the double identity "a=a and b=b" to assert that a and b are quite different (in some salient respect under discussion), and to imply that the listener is rashly ignoring this obvious fact!
"Why did she do that?" Men are men and women are women.
"The hell they are!" does not reject the identities, but the salient difference.
An exercise I used to give to my (brighter) logic students was to formalize what "men are men and women are women" is trying to assert in the Predicate Calculus.
……………
'Men are men and women are women,' which appears to be a conjunction of two tautologies and thus a tautology, is, however, typically used to express the non-tautological proposition that men and women are different as Slim suggests. The idea is not that each man is numerically different from each woman, but that there are properties had by men, but not by women, which render men and women qualitatively different. So perhaps we can symbolize the intended non-tautological proposition as follows using second-order predicate logic:
There is a property P such that for every x and every y, if x is a man, then x has P, and if y is a woman, then y does not have P. Symbolically:
(EP)(x)(y)[(Mx –>Px) & (Wy –>~Px)]
where 'E' is the existential quantifier, 'x' and 'y' are individual variables, 'M' and 'W' are predicate constants, 'P' is a predicate variable, '&' is the sign for truth-functional conjunction, and '–>' denotes the material or Philonian conditional.
But on second thought, this doesn't seem right. For when we say that men are men and women women, we do not mean that there is one particular property that all men have and all women lack that renders them qualitatively different; what we we mean is that there are some properties which render them different, allowing that these could be different properties for different men and women. To illustrate: consider a universe consisting of just two men and two women: Al, Bill, Carla, and Diana. The property of having lousy social skills might be had by both Al and Bill and lacked by both Carla and Diana. But it might also be that there are two properties, the property of being ornery and the property of being highly unemotional such that Al is highly unemotional but not ornery and Bill is ornery but not highly unemotional while neither of the ladies has either. In that case there would be no one propery that distinguishes the men from the women.
So let's try:
(x)(y)[(Mx & Wy –> (EP) (Px & ~Py)]
What say you, Slim?
Lycan, Rationality, and Apportioning Belief to Evidence
Is William G. Lycan rational? I would say so. And yet, by his own admission, he does not apportion his (materialist) belief to the evidence. This is an interesting illustration of what I have suggested (with no particular originality) on various occasions, namely, that it is rational in some cases for agents like us to believe beyond the evidence. (Note the two qualifications: 'in some cases' and 'for agents like us.' If and only if we were disembodied theoretical spectators whose sole concern was to 'get things right,' then an ethics of belief premised upon austere Cliffordian evidentialism might well be mandatory. But we aren't and it isn't.)
In Giving Dualism Its Due, we read:
Being a philosopher, of course I would like to think that my [materialist]stance is rational, held not just instinctively and scientistically and in the mainstream but because the arguments do indeed favor materialism over dualism. But I do not think that, though I used to. My position may be rational, broadly speaking, but not because the arguments favor it: Though the arguments for dualism do (indeed) fail, so do the arguments for materialism. And the standard objections to dualism are not very convincing; if one really manages to be a dualist in the first place, one should not be much impressed by them. My purpose in this paper is to hold my own feet to the fire and admit that I do not proportion my belief to the evidence.
In sum:
1. The arguments for dualism and the arguments for materialism both fail.
2. The standard objections to dualism are not very convincing.
3. It is rational to be a materialist.
In my opinion (1)-(3) is a consistent triad. If so, what does 'rational' mean? It cannot have the Cliffordian meaning according to which one apportions one's belief to the evidence. For that would require suspension of belief on the issues that divide dualists and materialists given the truth of (1) and (2). But Lycan does not suspend belief; he remains a committed materialist. He believes beyond the evidence in that he believes on insufficient evidence. The evidence is insufficient because it is counterbalanced by the evidence for the position he disbelieves. However we define 'insufficient evidence,' it seems clear that if the evidence for p and the evidence for ~p are equal, then the evidence for either is insufficient.
Lycan's is an interesting case because it doesn't display all of the Jamesian marks. The issue is live for Lycan and for the people here present, but is it forced and momentous? An issue is forced in the sense of William James if it is such that one's remaining theoretically agnostic about it is tantamount to deciding it in a particular way. James gives the example of a man who hesitates to get married. "It is as if a man should hesitate indefinitely to ask a certain woman to marry him because he was not perfectly sure that she would prove an angel after he brought her home. Would he not cut himself off from that particular angel-possibility as decisively as if he went and married someone else?" (Will to Believe, p. 26) The man who refuses to commit himself to marriage commits himself to bachelorhood nolens volens.
But surely dualism versus materialism is not a forced option in the Jamesian sense. For one thing, one might reject both in the manner of the idealist. The positions are not logical contradictories of each other but logical contraries: they can't both be true, but they can both be false. Second, it is not the case that a suspension of judgment is tantamount to an opting for one side. If you take no position on dualism versus materialism, how does that commit you to one side or the other? On the God question, if one takes no position on whether or not God exists, then it it strongly arguable that one is a practical atheist: the agnostic lives as if God does not exist. And similarly for the immortality of the soul: to take no position is to live as if the soul is mortal. Or at least this is plausibly arguable. But the dualist need not be a substance dualist, and if he is not a substance dualist, then it is very difficult to see how the dualism versus materialism option is forced. And even if the dualist is a substance dualist, one might be a substance dualist without being committed to the immortality of the soul or mind.
A momentous option is one in which "We are supposed to gain, even now, by our belief, and lose by our nonbelief a certain vital good." (WB, 26) But I think it would be a stretch to think that the rather technical and abstruse issues that divide materialists and dualists are momentous in James' sense.
All this notwithstanding, the Lycan quotation above illustrates how rationality needn't require apportioning one's belief to the evidence. Or will you argue that Lycan is irrational in remaining a materialist despite his newfound insight that the arguments for it are not compelling?
More on Alienans Adjectives: Relative Truth and Derived Intentionality
I am sitting by a pond with a child. The child says, "Look, there are three ducks." I say, "No, there are two ducks, one female, the other male, and a decoy."
The point is that a decoy duck is not a duck, but a piece of wood shaped and painted to appear (to a duck) like a duck so as to entice ducks into range of the hunters' shotguns. Since a decoy duck is not a duck, 'decoy' in 'decoy duck' does not function in the way 'male' and 'female' function in 'male duck' and 'female duck,' respectively. A male duck is a duck and a female duck is a duck. But a decoy duck is not a duck.
'Decoy' is an alienans adjective unlike 'male' and 'female' which are specifying adjectives. 'Decoy' shifts or alienates the sense of 'duck' rather than adding a specification to it. The same goes for 'roasted' in 'We are having roasted duck for dinner.' A roasted duck is not a duck but the cooked carcass of a duck. Getting hungry?
Continue reading “More on Alienans Adjectives: Relative Truth and Derived Intentionality”
How Bob Dylan Got Unpoliticized
The story is told in My Back Pages. "Ah, but I was so much older then, I'm younger than that now."
How Joan Baez Got Politicized
David Hajdu, Positively 4th Street: The Lives and Times of Joan Baez, Bob Dylan, Mimi Baez Farina and Richard Farina, 2001, p. 147:
Dylan nestled his guitar on his lap and began strumming a C chord in three-quarter time. He repeated it until the small room hushed, then he slid into the opening of "With God on Our Side." By the end of the song's nine verses, Joan Baez was no longer indifferent to Bob Dylan or irked by his crush on her sister Mimi. She was startled by the music she heard and fascinated with the fact that the enigma in the filthy jeans had created it. "When I heard him sing 'With God on Our Side,' I took him seriously," said Joan. "I was bowled over. I never thought anything so powerful could come out of that little toad. It was devastating. 'With God on Our Side' is a very mature song. It's a beautiful song. When I hear that, it changed the way I thought of Bob. I realize that he was more mature than I thought. He even looked a little better." Social consciousness as an aphrodisiac? [. . .]
Dylan played a few more of his topical songs, including "The Death of Emmett Till," "A Hard Rain's a-Gonna Fall," and "Masters of War." They astounded Spoelstra, who had not kept up with his old Village cohort's development as a songwriter, and they seemed to overwhelm Baez. (In one interview, Baez recalled "The Death of Emmett Till," not "With God on Our Side," as the Dylan song that changed her view of him and prompted her to take up protest music; "I was basically a traditional folksinger," she said. "I was not 'political' at that time. When I heard 'Emmett Till' I was knocked out. It was my first political song. That song turned me into a political folksinger."
Analogies, Souls, Harm to Souls, and Murder
Peter Lupu comments:
Bill has argued that my murder-argument relies upon a faulty analogy. I have a very general response to this charge: while the murder-argument indeed relies upon an analogy, the analogy upon which it relies is one employed by the soul-theorists themselves. Thus, I contend that if the soul-theorists are entitled to a certain analogy, then I am entitled to use the very same analogy in order to marshal an argument against this or that aspect of the soul-hypothesis. And conversely, if I am not entitled to use a certain analogy, then the soul-theorists are not entitled to it either. But, as I shall show, if the soul-theorists are not entitled to the relevant analogy, then there is an even more direct argument than the murder-argument I have given to the conclusion that according to soul-theorists murder is not a grave moral wrongdoing. [What Peter means to say is not that soul-theorists officially maintain as part of their theory that murder is not a grave moral wrongdoing, but that, whether or not soul theorists realize it, soul-theory entails that murder is not a grave moral wrongdoing.]
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