Maverick Philosopher

Footnotes to Plato from the foothills of the Superstition Mountains

Category: Generic Statements

  • Norms in Nature? Some Doubts

    Substack latest. It opens like this: Our friend Malcolm Pollack, riffing on some complaints of mine about Michael Anton's talk of natural rights, wrote the following: Rights are normative in their essence, while Nature simply is. Therefore, I see only two possibilities: 1) “Natural” rights flow from an intrinsic source of normative authority. Since brute and indifferent Nature…

  • Generic Statements

    Substack latest. Can 'Birds fly' be fit into the Square of Opposition?  Is it an A, an I, an E, or an O?

  • Counterexamples and Outliers

    An exception to a universal generalization is a counterexample that refutes the generalization. All you need is one. Generic statements cannot, however, be similarly refuted. 'Nuns don't smoke cigars' is a generic statement. If you turn up a nun who smokes cigars I won't take you to have refuted the generic statement. I'll dismiss the…

  • A Groundless Stereotype about Stereotypes

    Not all stereotypes are negative; some are positive. And not all stereotypes lack a fundamentum in re; some are based in reality. I just made two distinctions.  It is a stereotype both negative and without a foundation in reality that all stereotypes lack a foundation in reality.

  • ‘Liberals,’ Conservatives and Stereotypes

    Yesterday I said that an infallible mark of a 'liberal' or 'progressive' is a refusal to distinguish legal and illegal immigration. Another infallible mark is the refusal of 'liberals' or so-called 'progressives' to admit that there is truth in some stereotypes, that some of them have a basis in reality, and are not the product…

  • Aristotelian Categoricals and Natural Norms

     Here are some notes on Chapter Two, "Natural Norms,"  of Philippa Foot's Natural Goodness, Oxford UP, 2001.   As I mentioned previously, Foot essays "a naturalistic theory of ethics: to break really radically both with G. E. Moore's anti-naturalism and with the subjectivist theories such as emotivism and prescriptivism that have been seen as clarifications…

  • Is Beef Food?

    Beef is the flesh of a formerly sentient being, a dead cow.  And of course beef is edible.  For present purposes, to be edible is to be ingestible by mastication, swallowing, etc., non-poisonous,  and sufficiently nutritious to sustain human life. But is everything that is edible food?  Obviously not: your pets and your children are…

  • Generic Statements

    Statements divide into the singular and the general.  General statements divide into the universal, the particular, and the generic. Generic statements are interesting not only to the logician and linguist and philosopher but also to critics of ideology and conservative critics of leftist ideology critique.  For example, leftists will find something 'ideological' about the generic…