Category: Distinctions

The Difference between Posing and Begging a Question

I found the nifty graphic below over at Flood's place.  It is a pithy and pictorial presentation of a point I have been hammering away at online for the last twenty years. Here is a Substack hammer-job. Some say we should give up the fight and let the forces of linguistic decadence obliterate the distinction between posing and begging a question. I am inclined to say that we should fight on against the anti-civilizational forces while well aware that fighting-on may be nothing more than a pointless rear-guard action.

What say you?

Begs the Question

 

Lee’s Lunar Lunacy

Another example of a dumb-as-dirt Dem.

No Sheila dear, the Moon is not a planet, but a natural satellite of the Earth, the only one in fact. Its singularity is why, in correct orthography, we write 'the Moon' and not 'the moon.'  Jupiter has a number of moons, whereas the Earth has exactly one. Our moon is therefore properly referred to as 'the Moon.' And as you may have just now noticed, our home planet is properly referred to as 'the Earth,' not 'the earth.'  And our sun, which the distinguished Congresswoman informs us is "a mighty powerful heat," is properly referred to as 'the Sun.' So-called 'journalists' take note. 

Contrary to what Sheila thinks, the Moon is not made up mostly of gases. Nor is it a "complete-rounded circle" only when it is full.  Does she perhaps think that the phases of the Moon are changes intrinsic to the Moon as opposed to changes in the way it appears to us? Does she think that the Moon is a two-dimensional object? Her talk of a circle suggests as much. May I suggest 'sphere' or even better 'spheroid'? Does she perhaps also think that the Moon is the source of its light? Is she aware that moonlight is reflected sunlight?

Please realize that when you vote for Democrats you are voting for people who, as a group, are not only morally inferior to Republicans, but also intellectually inferior as well. I am speaking of the contemporary Democrat party. 

Story here.

Finally, what was the name of that black male pol who, if memory serves,  opined that islands float and can sink?

Amendments or Addenda?

The Bill of Rights. Amendments or additions? A reasonable question and a good distinction.  Addenda. I owe the point and the distinction to James Soriano. It's obvious when you think about it, but the question hadn't occurred to me.

And always give credit where credit us due, else you'll end up like the Big Guy, a terminally unrepentant serial plagiarist and an 'inspiration' to such other 'presidents' as Claudine Gay.

Distinctions are the lifeblood of thought. 

No Labels? Label We Must!

"Not Right. Not Left. Forward." 

There are are real differences between Right and Left that cannot be ignored.  The positions must be carefully defined and appropriately labeled.  'No labels' is itself a label, an inept one.  Label we must.  We ought to do it carefully and thoughtfully.

The world is a plural world shot through with distinctions and differences and diversities. Aren't lefties big on 'diversity?' Diversity cannot be denied. But neither can unity.  Both are undeniable, both are valuable, and both, in their dialectical interplay, are world-constitutive. Since they go to a destructive and undialectical extreme that violates my syn- and pan-opticism I label lefties 'diversity mongers.'

May no peace be upon them.

Peter Geach on the Real Distinction I

GeachOceans of ink have been spilled over the centuries on the celebrated distinctio realis between essence (essentia) and existence (esse).  You have no idea how much ink, and vitriol too, has flooded  the scholastic backwaters and sometimes spilled over into mainstream precincts. Anyway, the distinction has long fascinated me and I hold to some version of it.  I will first give a rough explanation of the distinction and then examine one of Peter Geach's arguments for it.

1)  We can say first of all that the real distinction is so-called because it is not a merely conceptual or notional or logical distinction.  'Real' from the Latin res connotes something the existence of which is independent of finite minds such as ours. So the real distinction is not like the distinction between the Morning Star and the Evening Star. It is not a distinction parasitic upon how we view things, or when we view them, or how we refer to them or think about them.   The terms 'MS' and 'ES' express two different "modes of presentation" (Darstellungsweisen in Gottlob Frege's terminology) of one and the same massive chunk of extra-mental physical reality, the planet Venus.  So one might think that the real distinction between essentia and esse is like the distinction between Venus and Mars. Venus and Mars are not abstract modes of presentation but concrete entities in their own right.  Venus and Mars are distinct in concrete reality, not merely in conception, or distinct at the level of Fregean Sinn (sense).

2) But although the Venus-Mars distinction is a real distinction, the distinction between essence and existence cannot be like it.  For while each of the planets can exist without the other, essence and existence cannot each exist without the other in one and the same thing.  A thing's existence is nothing without the thing whose existence it is, and thus nothing without the thing's essence.  I hope it is obvious that the existence of this particular coffee cup from which I am now drinking would be nothing without the cup and thus without the cup's total or 'wide' essence.

3) A tripartite distinction has emerged: thing, existence of the thing, essence of the thing. A sentence ago I used the phrase 'wide essence.' Why?  Because 'essence' (quiddity, whatness) can be taken in two ways, one 'wide' the other 'narrow.' The wide essence encompasses all of a thing's quidditative determinations (Bestimmungen). We can think of wide essence as the conjunction of all of a thing's quidditative attributes. Socrates and Plato, for example, differ in their wide essences despite the fact that they are both essentially human and essentially rational, and univocally so, to mention just two of their essential, as opposed to accidental, attributes. For the one man is sunburned, let us say, while other is not.   So while they differ in their wide essences, they do not differ in their narrow essence: the two share their essential properties, being human, and being rational, and others as well.

4)  I said that it is obvious that the existence of a concrete individual  would be nothing at all apart from the wide essence of that very same concrete individual. How could the existence of Socrates, that very man, be anything at all apart from the ensemble of his attributes? The existence of a thing is not like the pit of an avocado that can be removed from the avocado and exist on its own.

It is rather less obvious, if at all obvious, that the wide essence of a concrete individual would be nothing without existence.  Why couldn't there be a wholly determinate individual essence that does not exist? Why couldn't it have been that before Socrates began to exist he was a wholly determinate individual essence?    His coming to exist would then be  the actualization of a pre-existent wholly determinate merely possible individual essence. On such a scheme when God creates, he does not create ex nihilo, out of nothing, but out of mere possibles.  He creates by conferring existence (actuality) upon  wholly determinate  individual essences which before their creation are merely possible items.

If, however, as Thomas maintains, creation is creatio ex nihilo, then the essence and the existence of a concrete individual are each nothing without the other. Here we take the Thomist line.

5) The essence and the existence of a particular individual are thus each dependent on the other but nonetheless really, not merely notionally or conceptually, distinct.  They are really distinct (like Venus and Mars, but unlike the Morning Star and the Evening Star) but inseparable (unlike Venus and Mars).  They are really distinct like my eye glasses and my head but not separable in the manner of glasses and head. So a good analogy might be the convexity and concavity of one of the lenses.  The convex surface of a particular lens cannot be without the concave surface of that very lens and vice versa, but they are really distinct.  'Convex' and 'concave' are not merely two different ways of referring to the same piece of glass. The distinction is not a matter of our projection, or imposition, or interpretation.  There is a real mind-independent difference.  But it is only  an analogy. If the distinctio realis is an essential structural determination of finite beings, it is presumably sui generis and only analogous to the distinction between convexity and concavity in a lens.

6) Now what reason could we have for accepting something like the real distinction?  Here is one of Geach's arguments, based on Thomas Aquinas, from "Form and Existence," reprinted in Peter Geach, God and the Soul (Thoemmes Press, 1994), pp. 42-64.  Geach's argument is on p. 61.  I'll put the argument in my own way.  In keeping with my distinction between the rationally acceptable and the rationally compelling,  I find the argument rationally acceptable, and I incline to accept it.  Unfortunately many others, including many distinguished Thomists, do not. And that fact gives me pause, as it must, given my commitment to intellectual honesty. (More fuel for my aporetic fire.)

Suppose you have two numerically distinct instances of F-ness.  They don't differ in point of F-ness, since each is an instance of F-ness.  But they are numerically distinct.  So some other factor must be brought in to account for the difference.  That factor is existence.  They differ in their very existence.  Since they differ in existence and yet agree in essence, essence and existence are really distinct. For illustration we turn to Max Black.

Max Black was famous for his iron spheres.  (Geach does not mention Black.) In a well-known article from way back, Black hypothesizes a world consisting of just two of them and nothing else, the spheres being alike in every relational and monadic respect.  In Black's boring world, then, there are two numerically distinct instances of iron sphere.  Since both exist, and since they differ solo numero, I conclude that they  differ in their very existence.  Since they differ in their existence, but agree in their iron sphericity, and in every other relational and non-relational feature, there is a real distinction between existence and essence in each sphere.

Suppose you deny that.  Suppose you say that the spheres do not differ in their very existence and that they share existence.  The consequence, should one cease to exist, would be that the other would cease to exist as well, which is absurd.

Masculinity

Out and about yesterday, I caught a bit of Dennis Prager's radio show. He defended Daniel Penny's behavior in his confrontation with Jordan Neely as masculine, using the word correctly. In our infantilized, feminized, and left-dominated and therefore crime-tolerant society, Penny's behavior will be called toxically masculine by our political enemies. But to anyone who can think straight, there is a difference between the masculine and the toxically masculine.

On the other hand, there are people to my right, politically speaking, who deny that there is any toxic masculinity.  I must oppose them too.  I say to them: Are you seriously going to maintain that there are no instances of machismo that are not reasonably described as 'toxic'?

Consider the sad case of Cynthia Garcia. This foolish middle-aged woman and mother thought it would be fun to party with the Hells (no apostrophe!) Angels in their Mesa, Arizona clubhouse of a Saturday night. The 'Angels' of course demanded sex; she showed disrespect, even after they stomped her, and so they brutally murdered her. There are differing accounts of the exact details.  But the upshot was indeed brutal. Two of them stabbed her to death and attempted to cut her head off,  dumping her remains in the desert proximal to the Rio Salado shooting range.
 
Of course, normal masculine behavior such as that displayed by Penny is not toxic, and the feminization of boys is a serious threat to social stability and the survival of the Republic. But just as a Nazi is no cure for a commie, a biker brute is no cure for a feminized boy.
 
The subversion of language is the mother of all subversion. 
 
You should no more allow the Left's theft of perfectly good English words than you should allow their question-begging and question-burying coinages such as 'Islamophobia' and 'homophobia' and 'transphobia.' I have gone over this many times and I am not in the mood to repeat myself.  Enough compromising with our political enemies; resist them on every front.
 
Addendum
 
William Voegli weighs in on the Penny-Neely encounter at City Journal: 

Are New York’s subways safer, its homeless population less dangerous, than is generally believed? Than Tarannum and, perhaps, Daniel Penny seemed to think? The Times pointed out in February that the rate of violent felonies on the subway system was twice as high in 2022 as it had been in 2019. The system saw ten people murdered in 2022, compared with an average of two per year from 2015 through 2019. On the other hand, the Times pointed out that even after this increase, there were 1.2 violent crimes for every 1 million subway rides, which works out to about the likelihood of being injured during a two-mile automobile trip. Readers deliberating how much reassurance to derive from such statistics may reflect on the Times’s utter lack of such restraint and sobriety following the death of George Floyd in 2020, when the paper made no attempt to caution against sweeping generalizations based on the anomalous death of an unarmed black man in police custody.

You might want to bear in mind that truth is not a leftist value, and that leftists have a strange propensity to celebrate the dysfunctional, the transgressive, the grotesque, and the socially worthless as part of their nihilist drive to normalize deviant behavior, all the while attacking the sane, the decent, the socially useful, including the subway commuters on their way to work.  

This brings up a second point raised by Rahnuma Tarannum, about how the authorities not doing their job puts civilians in a position where they either do it themselves or suffer the consequences of no one doing it. 

Abdication of authority has dire consequences. Leftists unwittingly (or is it wittingly?) promote vigilantism. Remember Bernie Goetz, the subway gunman? In the same way, leftists unwittingly (or is it wittingly?) promote increased gun ownership among civilians. Either unable or unwilling to distinguish weapon from wielder, lefties unrelentingly repeat that guns cause crime. But then demonstrating their lack of common sense, they agitate for the defunding of police, the ratcheting down of criminal penalties, etc. So the people arm themselves. Surprise! How stupid can a 'liberal' be?

I am a staunch supported of 2A rights, but being sane and reasonable I don't want more and more untrained civilians packing heat.

It is true, as Bouie says, that no one on Jordan Neely’s subway car had any way to know that he had been arrested 42 times, including at least four times for punching people, two of which occurred in the subway system. Nor could they have known that Neely was on “the ‘Top 50’ list,” which, the Times explained, is a “roster maintained by the city of . . . people living on the street whom officials consider most urgently in need of assistance and treatment.” Lacking such knowledge, Bouie contends, Neely’s fellow passengers were obligated to give him the benefit of the doubt. 

Consensus and Truth

Consensus is no guarantee of truth.  If all or most of the experts in some subject area agree that p, it does not follow that p is true. But that is not to say, or imply, that consensus has no bearing on truth. A consensus of unbiased and uncoerced experts in a field is a reliable guide to truth in that field, assuming that the consensus is real and not the fabrication of, say, climate hoaxers.

Buckner Clarifies his Terminology

Terminological fluidity is one of the banes of philosophy. What follows is an admirable exercise in terminological fixation by the Worthy Opponent.  My comments are in blue.

I have been discussing toothbrushes [mirror images] with David but it’s clear we are being held back by semantics. I am not clear what we respectively mean by “reflection” or “appearance”, or of the green colour of these things. So I will try to set out what I mean or understand by the different terms.

“Phenomenal green”, “green as we see it”, “green as it appears to us”, also David’s “sensation of green” I think all mean the same thing, namely what I mean by green(ness), but let me explain what I understand by “green”.

BV: So far, so good.

1) Greenness is a visible quality of certain objects such as leaves, avocados, algae, brussel sprouts, [some] toothbrushes etc.

BV: The point needs to be put more precisely. Green (greenness) is a determinable with a range of corresponding  determinates.  (See here for the distinction.) The latter are the specific shades of green. The determinable green is arguably not a visible quality; only the lowest determinates are, the infima species. 

2) It is extended. I mean that a green patch is composed of green patches, which are in turn composed of further green patches ad infinitum. i.e. The greenness is continuous, or consists of a set of green points.

BV: This is not quite right either. Yes, a visible green patch can be subdivided, but not to infinity, for soon enough we arrive at sub-patches that cannot be seen, and this long before we get to points. A point is dimensionless: it has a location but no extension. And surely it is true that no color-determinate is visible if unextended.

3) Only a surface, i.e. a two dimensional thing can be green. However the surface is extended in 3D space, because each point can be a different distance from me.

BV: This sounds right to me. Visible green is given only two-dimensionally, even if the 'green' thing in the external world is 'green' all the way through.

4) The green quality is mind-independent, for the following reasons. (i) It exists outside me, (ii) it is a quality of the object which is green, and not a quality of me. (iii) I can no longer see it when I shut my eyes, but it is still there.

BV: Here is where the going gets tough.  If 'exists outside me' just means 'mind-independent,' then the first reason begs the question, or is circular. If, however, 'exists outside me' means 'appears outside me,' then the visible need not be mind-independent. 

As for (ii), what is the object? 'Object' is notoriously ambiguous. The thing in the external world? But then it hasn't been shown that the visible quality is a property of the object. It might just be a property of the phenomenon in Kant's sense which, though empirically real, is transcendentally ideal.

As for (iii),  if the visible quality is still there when I close my eyes, then it would have to be part of the thing itself in the external world, right? But that seems to comport none too well with the visible quality's being a phenomenal item.

5) It is inert, namely unlike heat it has no causal power to affect my senses.

BV: Seem right.  The seen green has no causal power. But how can  the visible two-dimensional phenomenal quality be both causally inert, and yet still be there when I close my eyes, given that the latter implies that the quality is part and parcel of the thing itself in the external world?  

Unlike heat? But surely there is phenomenal heat in contradistinction to heat-scientifically-understood. The felt heat of the hot coffee when I take a sip is not the same as the mean molecular kinetic energy of the coffee-water molecules. 

6) Thus it is not equivalent to reflectance properties of leaves or algae, which are powers to affect my senses, as far as we know, but greenness is an inert, non-causal quality. The leaf just is green.

BV: Yes.  The reflectance properties are dispositional properties, but there is nothing dispositional about the seen green, the phenomenal sense quality (sensory quale).  It is wholly occurrent or actual. 

7) It follows that greenness cannot be a reflectance property of green objects, although there may be some unknown causal connection between the property and the quality.

BV: Seems so.  Seen green cannot be a reflectance property of 'green' things themselves in the external world, things we call 'green' because they have the power to cause in us sensory qualia that are phenomenally green.

If, as science suggests, the green quality ‘out there’ is caused by neural processes, the greenness of “green” objects is an illusion, for it cannot be a quality of the green object. The causation cannot work in reverse. There is no way that a neural process in the brain can change or affect the quality of any object outside the brain.

BV: So when I am outside looking at my green palo verde tree in the backyard I am under an illusion because the tree in nature (in the external world) cannot be phenomenally green: that visible quality cannot be a property of the tree itself. It is conjured up in my brain by neural processes.

Is there not something dubious in the view that our direct sensory perception (in optimal conditions of lighting, etc.) of things like trees is illusory? If the seen green is illusory, then so is the smelt scent of the blossoms (The Sonoran spring is in full swing.)  And so on for all the other so-called secondary qualities/properties.  Can we keep the illusoriness from spreading to the primary qualities?

Three Senses of ‘Peace’

There is the divine peace that "surpasseth all understanding." (Philippians 4:7) It is the most difficult to achieve.

There is peace among people who love, or at least tolerate, one another. It is moderately difficult to achieve.

There is finally the peace most easily achieved, that based on deterrence and mutual fear. (Our enemies do not respect us, but they can be made to fear us, and for most practical purposes fear suffices.) This is the peace guaranteed by the strength of a Reagan or a Trump but undermined by the weakness of a Carter, an Obama, or (worst of all) a Biden.  This is the peace about which it is wisely said, "If you want peace, prepare for war."  Si vis pacem, para bellum.

Credible deterrence assures peace between nations. Never forget: Nations are in the state of nature vis-à-vis one another, and nature is "red in tooth and claw."  This is not pessimism; it is realism.

A well-armed and well-trained populace assures peace  between it and the state apparatus which is ever lusting to increase its power. The will to power wills not merely its preservation but its continuous increase.

The peace purchased by credible deterrence is the foundation of the other, loftier, two. You will not be able to achieve the peace that "surpasseth all understanding,' or even peace with your brothers if your monastery is being bombed to smithereens.  This is why the Luftmensch must know how to fight, why the bookman must needs also be a rifleman. This is especially so at a time when those in control of the state apparatus have forgotten, or rather willfully ignore, the purposes that justify government in the first place, namely the tasks of securing the life, liberty and property of those governed. But the Orwellian wokesters now in charge invert these values in the Orwellian manner and aid and abet those who aim at the opposite. I trust my meaning is clear.

By the way, now you know why the 9mm pistol round is sometimes referred as the parabellum round. Also, and coincidentally, Pb is the designation on the Periodic Table for the element, lead, which I might add, nowadays counts as a 'precious metal.' A wise man in these trying times stocks up on such 'precious metals' as Au and Pb. 

Accidental or Negligent?

An important distinction:

. . . an accidental discharge is when lightning strikes your firearm in such a way as to cause it to fire. Just about anything else is a negligent discharge.

Any unintentional discharge of a firearm can usually be traced to negligence on some individual’s part. Not knowing the proper manual of arms for a certain gun. Not focusing on safety while handling it. Using the wrong ammunition. Failing to properly maintain a particular firearm. Leaving a firearm laying around where some unauthorized person might pick it up. And you can think of other examples of negligence that could lead to a discharge that often results in injury or death. Using the term “accident” sort of implies that it was really nobody’s fault, while “negligent” puts it right back on somebody who should have been more responsible.

Which 'somebody' might the author have in mind?