Author: Bill Vallicella

Referring to Two Things

Ed writes,

Does ‘these two things’ refer to two things, or not? (Suppose the things are shoes.)

Perhaps not. For there are the two things, but also the plurality of them. The plurality is one thing, identical with neither the first thing, nor the second.

So the phrase ‘these two things’ actually refers to three things? Makes no sense to me.

BV:  Perhaps it makes no sense to you because  you think that 'thing' can only mean 'material thing.'  We agree that 'these two shoes' refers to exactly two shoes, each of which is a material thing, and that there is no third material thing of which they are members.  So if that is what our nominalist means when he denies that the two shoes form a plurality, then we agree.

Here is a slightly more complicated example. You have a bolt B and a nut N that fits the bolt, i.e., N can be screwed onto B.  Now there is clearly a difference between B, N unconnected and B, N connected. But even here I will grant that there is no third material thing wholly distinct from B and wholly distinct from N when B, N are connected.  There is no third material thing 'over and above' the connected bolt and nut.  Here is exactly what you have and no material third thing in addition:

Nut on bolt

Disagreement may begin to set in when I point out that the weight of the object depicted above is strictly greater that the weights of the bolt and the nut taken separately.  The total weight is additive such that if the nut weighs 2 ounces and the bolt 16 ounces, then the weight of the object depicted is equal to 2 + 16 = 18 ounces. The predicate '___weighs 18 ounces' is not true of the nut, and it is not true of the bolt, and it is not true of any material third thing 'over and above' the object depicted, and this  for the simple reason that there is no such third material thing.

So what is the predicate '___ weighs 18 ounces' true of?  I say that it is true of the plurality the sole members of which are N and B.  I am not further specifying the nature of this plurality. Thus I am not saying that it is a mathematical set, nor am I saying that it is a mereological sum.  I am saying that there is a distinction to be made between a plurality of items and the items.

Note that if our nominalist were to say that a plurality is exhausted by, or reduces to, its members, then will have given up the game by his use of 'its.'  So he has to somehow avoid that locution.

Our nominalist will grant that the predicate '___weighs 18 ounces' is not true of the nut, not true of the bolt, and not true of any third material thing  wholly distinct from the bolt and the nut.  But he might say that it is not true of anything. The predicate is flatus vocis, a mere word, phrase or sound to which nothing extramental and extralinguistic corresponds.  I reject this view. It implies that the nut threaded onto the bolt has in objective reality no weight that is the sum of the objective weights of the nut and bolt taken separately.

Our nominalist seems committed to an intolerable linguistic idealism. Suppose all language users were to cease to exist. It would remain that case that the weight of our nut-bolt combo would equal 18 ounces. It would remain the case that Earth is spheroid in shape and has exactly one natural satellite.

But why is he a nominalist in the first place? Is it because he thinks that only material particulars exist? If that is true then of course there cannot be a plurality of two material particulars.  Hilary Putnam: "Nominalists must at heart be materialists . . . otherwise their scruples are unintelligible." (Phil Papers, vol. I, 338)

Is he a nominalist because he is an empiricist who thinks that only sensible particulars exist?  I see the nut, I see the bolt, I see the nut threaded onto the bolt; but I don't see any plurality of material particulars. Is our man restricting what exists to that which is empirically detectable via our senses and their instrumental extensions (e.g., microscopes, telescopes, etc.)? 

Is he both a materialist and an empiricist? How do those two positions cohere?

‘Equity’ Can be Deadly

Words of 'woke' from Oceangate CEO. Surely qualifications and experience can't matter much.  Surely. Might there be some hubris in naming  a submersible Titan? 

I dilate further at Substack.

In other news, armed IRS agents seize gun purchase records from Montana gun shop. Some say we are now living in a police state. I recommend that you read Stephen P. Holbrook, Gun Control in the Third Reich: Disarming the Jews and Other Enemies of the State.  Three brief reviews here.

My Pronouns?

Up yours!

The point, of course, is to not validate, by answering, the stupid question.

This can be done in more or less polite ways.

You might say, politely, "Your question rests on a presupposition that I reject, namely, that the DEI agenda is a good thing. Now move along and have a nice day."

Yesterday I received a solicitation for funds from an alma mater. I wrote back, "I am in a position to make a substantial contribution, and will do so, but only on condition that you publicly renounce the DEI agenda and return to the true purposes of the university." 

Why Shouldn’t the Vatican Go ‘Woke’?

The RCC is already a joke with a clown at its head; why then should it not go 'woke'?  It has needed defunding for a long time now. It is up to us to make it true that 'go woke, go broke.' Story here:

VATICAN CITY — An unprecedented global canvassing of Catholics has called for the church to take concrete steps to promote women to decision-making roles, for a "radical inclusion" of the LGBTQ+ community . . . .

The document also asked what concrete steps the church can take to better welcome LGBTQ+ people and others who have felt marginalized and unrecognized by the church so that they don't feel judged: the poor, migrants, the elderly and disabled, as well as those who by tribal or caste feel excluded.

Perhaps most significantly, the document used the terminology "LGBTQ+ persons" rather than the Vatican's traditional "persons with homosexual tendencies," suggesting a level of acceptance that Francis ushered in a decade ago with his famous "Who am I to judge" comment.

Satanists must feel terribly marginalized by the RCC even at this late date. They need to be recognized so that they don't feel judged.  'Catholic' means universal; so shouldn't everyone be included?  Diversity, equity, inclusion!  In fact, Satanists are more worthy of inclusion than New Atheists (Dawkins, Dennett, Hitchens, Harris, et al.) because the former, unlike the latter, believe in the super-natural, the meta-physical.  In any case, the New Atheism is so passé! Hell, nobody knows what it is is anymore. Satanism is the current thing and must be honored as such. Diversity demands the inclusion of Satanists! And (superlunary) equity, equality of soteriological outcome, for all, regardless of merit or demerit!

Moral judgment must be avoided at all costs since, as we all know now, there is no difference between making moral judgments and being judgmental, and no bien-pensant wokester wants to be perceived as judgmental.

"LGBTQ+ persons" absolutely must replace the Vatican's traditional "persons with homosexual tendencies," because of the latter's implied distinction of tendency/disposition and exercise.  It was traditionally held that there is no sin in having the innate homosexual tendency or disposition; the sin consists in exercising or acting upon it. But this distinction is quite obviously homophobic and hateful because it marginalizes those who act upon their inherent homosexual desires. Besides, it's a bogus distinction; it sounds like some dusty punctilio from some superannuated scholastic manual of the sort the beatific Bergoglio rightly excoriated.   Both disposition and exercise are to be, not tolerated, but celebrated.  By her own astute admission, Karine Jean-Pierre, as the first black, female, lesbian WH press secretary, is a historic figure.  No doubt about it, and qualifications for the job have nothing to do with it.

Pope Buffoon

See? I'm a clown! Who am I to judge?

What me worry

A Little Learning

by Alexander Pope

A little learning is a dangerous thing ;
Drink deep, or taste not the Pierian spring :
There shallow draughts intoxicate the brain,
And drinking largely sobers us again.
Fired at first sight with what the Muse imparts,
In fearless youth we tempt the heights of Arts ;
While from the bounded level of our mind
Short views we take, nor see the lengths behind,
But, more advanced, behold with strange surprise
New distant scenes of endless science rise !
So pleased at first the towering Alps we try,
Mount o’er the vales, and seem to tread the sky ;
The eternal snows appear already past,
And the first clouds and mountains seem the last ;
But those attained, we tremble to survey
The growing labours of the lengthened way ;
The increasing prospect tires our wandering eyes,
Hills peep o’er hills, and Alps on Alps arise !

Is Nothing Sacred?

The Los Angeles Dodgers, in 'go woke, go broke' mode, have foolishly breathed new life into the late Christopher Hitchens and the  blasphemy question.

Substack latest.  

But will the 'woke' go broke?  That depends on us.  

As our institutions continue to shove deviancy and degeneracy into our faces, the meaningful question is: Will the Right pledge to fundamentally transform the country? Unless a dramatic realignment takes place—unless Americans as a people reassert their sovereignty and discover the morality that must be present for republican government to have success—the sinews of civil society will snap.

Stunts like what the Dodgers pulled off (and Target tried to do) will continue save for the Right offering a long-term, systematic plan of resistance that changes the behavior of those sitting atop the state-corporatist power structures.

Why Do We Tolerate Crime?

WE don't tolerate it; our political enemies do.  Check this out. The miscreant is black, no? If yes, then he enjoys carte blanche to be just as baaad a badass dude as he wants to be. The incident also begs raises the secondary question: why are there so many Somalis in the Twin Cities? Might those girls have been safer in Somalia?

We are warned that the video is "disturbing." Really? Are you disturbed by it? It's par for the course! Are we not all by now inured to such 'disturbance'? Or are you a Rip van Winkle who just 'woke' up?

You want disturbance? That comes later.

Debate, Disagreement, and the Limits of Rational Discourse

I wrote a few months back,

. . . the wisest policy is not to debate leftists. Generally speaking and admitting exceptions, leftists need to be defeated, not debated. Debate is worthwhile only with open-minded truth seekers. Truth, however, is not a leftist value. At the apex of the leftist's value hierarchy stands POWER. That is not to say that a leftist will never speak the truth; he will sometimes, but only if it serves his agenda. 

Tony Flood replied that the above quotation reminded him "of [Eric] Voegelin's stance on this very issue, about which I blogged a few years ago."  In that post Tony reproduces the first paragraph of Voegelin's Debate and Existence as follows. [note to AGF: your hyperlink is busted: 404 error]  Tony breaks Voegelin's one paragraph into four.

 

Continue reading “Debate, Disagreement, and the Limits of Rational Discourse”

Saturday Night at the Oldies: Monterey Pop Festival June 16-18, 1967

Monterey PopIt transpired 56 summers ago, this June, the granddaddy of rock festivals, two years before Woodstock, in what is known as the Summer of Love. Your humble correspondent was on the scene. Some high school friends and I drove up from Los Angeles along Pacific Coast Highway. I can still call up olfactory memories of patchouli, sandalwood incense, not to mention the aroma of what was variously known as cannabis sativa, marijuana, reefer, tea, Miss Green, mary jane, pot, weed, grass, pacalolo (Hawaiian term), loco weed, and just plain dope. But my friends and I, students at an all-boys Catholic high school that enforced a strict dress code, were fairly straight: we partook of no orgies, smoked no dope, and slept in a motel. The wild stuff came later in our lives, when we were better able to handle it.

I have in my hand the program book of the Festival, in mint condition. Do I hear $1,000? On the first page there is a quotation from Shakespeare, The Merchant of Venice:

How sweet the moonlight sleeps upon this bank! Here we sit and let the sounds of music creep in our ears; soft stillness and the night, become the touches of sweet harmony.

Hendrix MontereyAh yes, I remember it well, the "sweet harmony" of the whining feedback of Jimi Hendrix's Fender Stratocaster plugged into his towering Marshall amps and the "soft stillness" of the The Who smashing their instruments to pieces. Not to be outdone, Jimi lit his Strat on fire with lighter fluid. The image is burned into my memory. It shocked my working-class frugality. I used to baby my Fender Mustang and I once got mad at a girl for placing a coke can on my Fender Deluxe Reverb amp.

On the last page of the program book, a more fitting quotation: the lyrics of Dylan's The Times They Are A'Changin', perhaps the numero uno '60s anthem to youth and social ferment. (Click on the link; great piano version. Live 1964 guitar version.) Were the utopian fantasies of the '60s just a load of rubbish? Mostly, but not entirely.

"Lately it occurs to me, what a long strange trip it's been."

Tunes and Footage:

The Who, My Generation. "I hope I die before I get old."

Mamas and Papas, California Dreamin'

Mamas and Papas, I Call Your Name

Canned Heat, Rollin' and Tumblin'

Byrds, Chimes of Freedom

Otis Redding, Try a Little Tenderness

Scott MacKenzie, San Francisco

Jefferson Airplane, Embryonic Journey

YouTuber comment: 

For all the people getting sad nostalgia from this, whether it’s from missing friends or missing the good days, please don’t be sad, be happy that you got to live through this time and experience it with your friends, I’m 16 and feel so out of place in this generation, yes I have lots friends but for them fun is crammed in someone’s basement blasting dubstep and fighting over games of pong, you guys did well, be proud of it.

Thanks. We're proud. Perhaps too proud.

The hipster-monk Tom Merton would have found good things to say about the festival. He was 52 in '67.

Do Not Underestimate Russia’s Resolve

An American Thinker article by our friend, James Soriano.   

The two camps differ not only on the cause of war, they have completely different world views as to how a system of sovereign states works.   Russian war policy is the epitome of a broader realist approach to international affairs:  states have interests, not friends, and they must rely on self-help to do what is necessary to protect themselves.  Accordingly, Russia went to war not to conquer, but from a no-nonsense threat assessment.  By contrast, the United States entered the fray with an ideologically charged missionary spirit.  The U.S. has long seen itself as the savior of the world, the “indispensable nation,”  Its diplomatic discourse often lapses into moralizing rhetoric.  It believes that a world filled with more democracies would be a safer and better place than it is today.  It is disdainful of traditional balance of power politics and favors a “rules based” world order.  The Russian view of power politics is “bottom up” and conservative.  It insists that a state’s historical and geographic circumstances must be taken into account.  It grapples with the question, “What is there?”  The American view of the world is “top-down” and revolutionary.  It is less concerned with historical contexts than with hypothetical theorizing about how people and states ought to behave.  It grapples with the question, “What should be there?”

[. . .]

One side is saying that world peace is served when the great powers exercise self-restraint and are respectful of other powers’ security.  The other side is saying that maintaining a sphere of influence is implicitly an aggressive act.  One side is saying that tension between the great powers is not the result of the particular character of their regimes, but rather is built into the international system whenever a great power veers out of its lane.  The other side is saying that a regime’s character is exactly the point, because different characters affect the relations among the states in different ways.  One side emphasizes historical and geographic circumstances as a constant in world affairs.  The other side de-emphasizes these in favor of an overlay of law and ethical precepts.

Many Russians believe that U.S. talk about “spheres of influence,” and respect for Ukraine’s sovereignty, and the need for a “rules-based” international order is only a moralizing cover for what the United States really wants — which is regime change in Moscow.  Russia has suspected this all along.  Ironically, it sees the United States pretty much as the United States sees itself:  as a messianic power spreading the good news of democracy around the world.  Russia knows that if it had acquiesced to Ukraine’s joining NATO, if it had been passive in allowing an opposing military alliance to push itself right up against its fence, then Russia would permanently lose its freedom of action and any claim to great power status.  It would have to fit pliantly into an American-designed world order.  It would have to go along with the U.S., rather than to present itself as an alternative to it.  Going back to Napoleon, Russia has a history of opposing hegemonic power bidders.  If it had gone along with NATO-on-the-Dneiper it would have prostrated itself to one.   It would become like Europe, another American appendage. 

The Russian people get this.  They sense that the battle in Ukraine is not just about Ukraine.  It in an existential fight, a struggle of life or death, between them and the West.  To them a challenge originating in the West has once again reared up to put Russia under overwhelming pressure.  They believe that losing this fight would not amount to just a setback from which Russia could later recover; it would be tantamount to Russia’s losing its historical identity, not merely as a country but as a civilization, for Russia is a civilization culturally distinct from that of the West, and not, as many Westerners mistakenly believe, an un-democratized expanse on Europe’s eastern edge.

Extremism and Leftist Projection: Capital Punishment

This is the second in a series.  (The first is here.) You will have noticed that leftists call us extremists though there is nothing extreme about our views. They are all of them moderate. What our political enemies do is to project their extremism into us. Projection is a well-known psychological defense mechanism. What I am doing in this series is cataloging political forms of projection as practiced by hard-leftists, 'wokesters,' 'progressives,' whatever you want to call them.

So consider capital punishment. At the one extreme are those who deem  it always and everywhere wrong. This bunch includes every Democrat politician at the present time.  (I am open to correction if you can prove me mistaken.) At the opposite extreme, or in the vicinity of the opposite extreme, are those who readily employ capital punishment for all manner of supposed 'crimes.' There are of course plenty of historical examples, but at the present day the Iranians have distinguished themselves in this regard, which is not to say that other Muslim countries are much better.

Under Iran's penal code, people can be executed for crimes that are not considered among "the most serious" under international law, such as drug trafficking.

The UN expert said vague charges, such as "enmity against God" and "corruption on Earth", were meanwhile used to sentence individuals to death for participation in protests, for other forms of dissent or where there was a lack of evidence for the accusations.

Judges trying capital and other cases also relied heavily on forced confessions extracted through torture and other forms of duress to prove guilt, he added.

[. . .]

At least 17 women were executed in total, eight more than in 2020, it adds. They included Zahra Esmaili and Maryam Karimi, who were convicted of murdering abusive husbands. Esmaili's lawyer is cited as saying that she suffered a heart attack as she watched several men being executed in front of her, and that officials still hanged her lifeless body.

Two men convicted of crimes committed when they were children were also put to death, according to the report. One of them, Arman Abdolali, found guilty of murdering his girlfriend in 2013 when he was 17, was taken to the gallows seven times in the months prior to his execution, it says.

In Iran, homosexuals are executed. By contrast, here in the decadent USA and elsewhere in the decadent West, homosexuals are not merely tolerated  but officially celebrated, celebrated by the government, as if their 'lifestyle' were on a moral par with every other 'lifestyle.'  

And so again we see that the position of  what I call the American conservative is moderate, sane, and reasonable. As an American conservative rooted in the principles and values of the Founding documents, I  say you are morally obtuse if you think that there is no conceivable circumstance in which capital punishment would be justified. And I say that you are both morally and intellectually obtuse if you agree with Roman, Nazi, or Iranian penology. This American conservatism itself avoids two extremes, that of throne-and-altar reaction (and its close cousin 'post-liberalism') and an extreme laissez-faire libertarianism-libertinism that overvalues the economic while undervaluing if not suppressing the cultural.  It takes on board the best of classical liberalism while avoiding the noxious extremes.