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 cannot be such a source, then for such rights to exist in themselves, as opposed to being mere conventions and intuitions, requires the existence of God. They are therefore “natural” rights in virtue of our nature qua creations of a transcendent and normatively authoritative Deity.

2) There is in fact no such authoritative source, and so natural rights are nonsense. (Upon stilts.) It may be in our nature to have the intuitions we do about possessing such rights, but it is a category error to imagine that rights themselves can originate in the material world.

In response, I pointed out that this is far too quick inasmuch as there are Aristotelians who seek to ground norms in nature herself. These thinkers do not accept what to Pollack and the modern mind seems self-evident, namely, that there is a gap between the normative and the factual that disallows any derivation of normative claims from factual ones. One prominent Aristotelian is Philippa Foot. So let's see what she has to say.

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 exception as an 'outlier.'

Memo to self: develop this line of thinking and then apply it to 'hot button' issues such as race. Is Candace Owens representative of black females or is she an 'outlier'? And to which generic statements is she an outlier? You won't touch this question, will you? Not with an eleven-foot pole, which is the pole you use to touch questions you won't touch with a ten-foot pole.

See my aptly appellated entry, Generic Statements, for more on generic statements.

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 of mindless bigotry. We conservatives, however, being fundamentally sane, admit the obvious: there are accurate stereotypes and inaccurate stereotypes. An example of an inaccurate stereotype is the black watermelon stereotype according to which black folk are disproportionately fond of watermelon. Examples of accurate stereotypes below.

It occurs to me that our 'liberal' pals can be taxed with swallowing a negative, inaccurate meta-stereotype: they falsely think that all stereotypes are inaccurate and of course 'racist'! What bigots these 'liberals' be!

Lee Jussim gets to the heart of the matter with the following quiz. I got every answer right. See how you do. Answers below the fold.

1. Which group is most likely to commit murder?
A. Men
B. Women

2. Older people are generally more __________ and less __________ than adolescents.
A. Conscientious; open to new experiences
B. Neurotic; agreeable

3. In which ethnic/racial group in the US are you likely to find the highest proportion of people who supported Democratic presidential candidates in 2008 and 2012?
A. Whites
B. African Americans

4. People in the US strongly identifying themselves as ___________ are most likely to attend church on Sunday.
A. Conservative
B. Liberal

5. On 24 December 2004, a father and his three kids wandered around New York City around 7pm, looking for a restaurant, but found most places closed or closing. At the same time, his wife performed a slew of chores around the house. This family is most likely:
A. Catholic
B. Baptist
C. Jewish
D. Pagan/Animist

Continue reading “‘Liberals,’ Conservatives and Stereotypes”

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 and developments of Moore's original thought." (p. 5)

"The main thesis of this book is that propositions about goodness and defect in a human being – even those that have to do with goodness of character and action — are not to be understood in such psychological terms." (37) Her point is that when we evaluate living things, whether plants, animals, or humans, our uses of 'good' do not need to be explained in terms of commendation or any other speech act, or in terms of any psychological attitude. Goodness and defect in living things are intrinsic to them and not parasitic upon attitudes or stances we take up with respect to them.

On to the details.

Earlier we were discussing the peculiarities of generic statements. A generic statement is one that is neither singular nor logically quantifiable. 'The cat is four-legged,' unlike 'The cat is sleeping,' is typically used to express a general not a singular proposition. But 'The cat is four-legged,' typically used, is not equivalent to 'All cats are four-legged' or to any quantified statement. One three-legged cat suffices to falsify the universal quantification, but it does not falsify the generic generalization. The fact that many adult humans lack the full complement of 32 teeth does not falsify the generic 'Adult humans have 32 teeth.' 'Rabbits are herbivorous' is a further example. It would seem to entail 'Some rabbits are herbivorous.' Even so, one is saying much more with an utterance of the former than with the latter.

The following wrinkles now occur to me. If 'some' imports present existence, then the generic 'Velociraptors are carnivorous' does not entail 'Some velociraptors are carnivorous.' But let's not get hung up on this, or on the entailments of the presumably generic 'Unicorns are four-legged.' But we should note, en passant, the presumably different phenomenon of plural predication. 'Velociraptors are extinct' is not about individual velociraptors; it is not equivalent to 'Each velociraptor is extinct.' Presumably, it is the species that is extinct, whatever exactly species are. A species goes extinct when its last specimen expires; but one cannot say that the specimen goes extinct. Assuming that Obama is not a species unto himself, his death will not be his extinction. Compare 'Horses fill the field' with 'Horses are four-legged.' The first is a plural predication; the second is not. It is false that each horse fills the field, but true that each normal horse is four-legged. But both sentences have in common that they are not about each horse.

But I digress. Back to Foot.

Foot, following Michael Thompson, speaks of Aristotelian categoricals. "The deer is an animal whose form of defence is flight" is an example. (34) The sentence is "about a species at a given historical time . . . ." (29) Foot is not assuming the immutability of species. But species must have a "relative stability" if true Aristotelian categoricals are to be possible at all. (29) "They tell us how a kind of plant or animal , considered at a particular time, and in its natural habitat, develops, sustains itself, defends itself, and reproduces." (29)

Foot, stepping beyond Thompson, stresses the teleological aspect of Aristotelian categoricals. "There is an Aristotelian categorical about the species peacock to the effect that the male peacock displays his brilliant tail in order to attract a female during the mating season." (31) Not that the male strutting his stuff has any such telos in mind. The thought here is that there is a teleology in nature that works itself out below the level of conscious mind. The heliotropism in plants is a kind of teleology in nature below the level of conscious mind. Plants 'strive' to get into the light, but not consciously. Migrating birds are not trying to get somewhere warmer with better eats; they do not have this end in view. And yet the migratory operation is teleologically directed. Why do the birds head south? In order to survive the winter, find food, and reproduce.

Can we say of an individual plant or animal that it is intrinsically good or bad independently of our interests or desires? This is the crucial question that Foot answers in the affirmative. Norms are ingredient in nature herself; they are not projected by us or expressive of our psychological attitudes. Ingredient not in all of nature, but in all of living nature. Living things bear within them norms that ground the correctness of our evaluations. Evaluation occurs at "the intersection of two types of propositions: on the one hand, Aristotelian categoricals (life form descriptions relating to the species), and on the other, propositions about particular individuals that are the subject of evaluation." (33)

Foot is bravely resisting the fact-value dichotomy. Values and norms are neither ideal objects in a Platonic realm apart, nor are they psychological projections. They are intrinsically ingredient in natural facts. How does the resistance go? We start with an Aristotelian categorical such as 'The deer is an animal whose form of defence is flight.' The sentence is "about a species at a given historical time . . . ." (29) The individual as a member of its species is intrinsically or naturally good if it is able to serve its species by maintaining itself in existence and reproducing. Note that an individual organism does not reproduce itself; it reproduces (usually in conjunction with an opposite sexed partner) an organism distinct from itself, the offspring Thus an individual's reproduction is quite unlike an individual's self-maintenance. An individual needs ancestors but it doesn't need descendants. The species needs descendants. Now suppose a deer is born with deformed limbs that prevent its engaging in swift flight from predators. This fact about it makes it an intrinsically or naturally bad deer. For such a deer will not be able to serve its species by preserving itself in existence until it can reproduce. That's my gloss, anyway.

The idea, then, is that the species to which the individual organism belongs encapsulates norms of goodness/badness for its members which the individual either meets or fails to meet.

Interim Critical Remarks

A. This naturalistic scheme strikes me as obscure because the status of species has not been sufficiently clarified. Aristotelian categoricals are about species, but what exactly are species or the "life forms of species"? The species peacock presumably exists only in individual peacocks, but is not identical to any such individual or to the whole lot of them. (The species is not an extensional entity such as a mereological sum, or a set.) It looks to be an immanent universal, a one-in-many. But then it is not natural in the very same sense in which an individual peacock is natural, i.e., in space and time at a definite spatiotemporal location, and only there. (Universals are multiply located.) So Foot's natural norms are not natural in the same sense in which the organisms of which they are the norms are natural.

So there still is a fact-norm distinction in the form of the distinction between a member of a species and the species. This whole scheme will remain murky until it is explained what a species is and how it is present in its members. We are in the vicinity of the ancient problem of universals. Foot's norms are not outside of things in a realm apart, not in the mind; they are 'in' things. But what does this 'in' mean exactly?

B. My second remark concerns an individual organism that cannot serve its species such as an infertile human male, or a human female who cannot have children and is therefore biologically defective in this respect. Does her biological defect make her a bad human being? Foot would seem to have to say yes: the defective woman does not come up to the norm for her species. She is abnormal in a normative sense and not merely in a statistical sense. She is not a good woman! How is this any different from the case of the lame deer? A lame deer is a defective deer, hence not a good deer. It is not a good deer because it cannot flee from predators thereby maintaining its life so that it can go on to procreate and serve its species by so doing.

Foot wants to bring normativity down to earth from Plato's heaven; at the same time she wants to extrude it from the mind and install it in natural things outside the mind. This makes plenty of sense with respect to plants and non-human animals. But of course she want to extend her scheme to humans as well. This is where trouble starts.

Foot sees the individual organism in the light of the species: as a specimen of the species and not as an individual in its own right. This is not a problem for plants and non-human animals, with the possible exception of our pets. But Foot wants to extend her natural normativity scheme to humans as well. But how can what I ought to do, and what I ought not to do, and what I should be and how I should be be dictated by my species membership? Am I just an animal, a bit of the world's fauna? I am an animal, but I am also a person: not just a material object in a material world, but a conscious and self-conscious subject for whom there is a world.

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 edible but they are not food. People don't feed their pets and children to fatten them up for slaughter. So while all food is edible, not everything edible is food.

What then is the missing 'ingredient'? What must be added to the edible to make it food? We must move from merely biological concern with human animals and the nutrients necessary to keep them alive to the cultural and normative. Sally Haslanger: "Food, I submit, is a cultural and normative category." ("Ideology, Generics, and Common Ground," Chapter 11 of Feminist Metaphysics, 192)

This is surely on the right track, though I would add that food is not merely cultural and normative. Food, we can agree, is what it is socially acceptable to eat and/or morally permissible to eat. But food, to be food, must be material stuff ingestible by material beings, and so cannot be in toto a social or cultural construct. Or do you want to say that potatoes in the ground are social constructs? I hope not. Haslanger seems to accept my obvious point, as witness her remark to the effect that one cannot chow down on aluminum soda cans. As she puts it, "not just anything could count as food."(192) No construing of aluminum cans, social or otherwise, could make them edible to humans.

Could it be that certain food stuffs are by nature food, and not by convention? Could it be that the flesh of certain non-human animals such as cows is by nature food for humans? If beef is by nature food for humans, then it is normal in the normative sense for humans to eat beef, and thus morally acceptable that they eat it. Of course, what it is morally acceptable to eat need not be morally obligatory to eat.

Haslanger rejects the moral acceptability of eating beef but I don't quite find an argument against it, at least not in the article under examination. What she does is suggest how someone could come to accept the (to her) mistaken view that it is morally acceptable to eat meat. Given that 'Beef is food' is a generic statement, one will be tempted to accept the pragmatic or conversational implicature that "there is something about the nature of beef (or cows) that makes it food." (192)

For Haslanger, 'Beef is food' is in the close conceptual vicinity of 'Sagging pants are cool' and 'Women wear lipstick.'

Surely there is nothing intrinsic to sagging pants that makes them 'cool': 'coolness' is a relational property had by sagging pants in virtue of their being regarded as 'cool' by certain individuals. It is not in the nature of pants to sag such that non-sagging pants would count as sartorially defective. We can also easily agree that it is it not in the nature of women to wear lipstick such that non-lipstick-wearing women such as Haslanger are defective women in the way that a cat born with only three legs is a defective cat, an abnormal cat in both the normative and statistical senses of 'abnormal.' One can be a real woman, a good woman, a non-defective woman without wearing lipstick.

These fashion examples, which could be multiplied ad libitum (caps worn backward or sideways, high heels, etc.), are clear. What is not clear is why 'Beef is food' and 'Cows are food' are like the fashion examples rather than like such examples as 'Cats are four-legged' and 'Humans are rational.'

Cats are four-legged by nature, not by social construction. Accordingly, a three-legged cat is a defective cat. As such, it is no counterexample to the truth that cats are four-legged. 'Cats are four-legged' is presumably about a generic essence, one that has normative 'bite': a good cat, a normal cat has four legs. 'Cats are four-legged' is not replaceable salva veritate by 'All cats are four-legged.'

Why isn't 'Cows are food' assimilable to 'Cats are four-legged' rather than to 'Sagging pants are cool'? I am not finding an argument. Haslanger denies that "cows are for eating, that beef just is food":

Given that I believe this to be a pernicious and morally damaging assumption, it is reasonable for me to block the implicature by denying the claim: cows are not food. I would even be willing to say that beef is not food. (192)

Beef is not food for Haslanger because raising and slaughtering cows to eat their flesh is an "immoral human practice." But what exactly is the argument here? Where's the beef? Joking aside, what is the argument to the conclusion that eating beef is immoral?

There isn't one. She just assumes that eating beef is immoral. In lieu of an argument she provides a psycholinguistic explanation of how one might come to think that beef is food.

The explanation is that people believe that beef is food because they accept a certain pragmatic implicature, namely the one from 'Beef is food' to 'Beef has a nature that makes it food.' The inferential slide is structurally the same as the one from 'Sagging pants are cool' to 'There is something in the nature of sagging pants that grounds their intrinsic coolness.'

Now it is obvious that the pragmatic implicature is bogus is the fashion examples. To assume that it is also bogus in the beef example is to beg the question.

We noted that not everything edible is food. To be food, a stuff must not only be edible; it must also be socially acceptable to eat it. Food is "a cultural and normative category." (192) But Haslanger admits that "cows are food, given existing social practices." (193) So beef is, as a matter of fact, food. To have a reason to overturn the existing social practices, Haslanger need to give us a reason why eating beef is immoral — which she hasn't done.

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 'Women are nurturing' whereas conservatives will hold that the sentence expresses the plain truth and that some sort of obfuscation and chicanery is involved when leftists deny this plain biologically-based truth and try to tie its very meaning to the legitimation and preservation of existing power relations in society.

In this entry, perhaps the first in a series, I confine myself to presenting examples of generic statements and to giving a preliminary exegesis of the linguistic data, noting some features of generic generalizations, and some philosophical questions that arise.

Examples of Generic Statements

Some of the examples are my own, some are culled from the literature. Some of the following are true, some false, and some politically incorrect. Trigger Warning! All girly girls and pajama boys out of the seminar room and into their safe spaces! Uncle Bill will visit you later with milk and cookies and cuddly animals.

Dutchmen are good sailors. (Arnauld)
Germans are industrious.
Jews are very intelligent.
Birds fly.
Chickens lay eggs.
Germans make better soldiers than Italians.
Cigars are what Bill smokes these days.
Men are taller than women.
Blacks are more criminally prone than whites.
Priests don't ride motorcycles.
Reducing taxes leads to increased economic growth.
Turks are hospitable.
Turks are very bad drivers.
Analytic philosophers do not know the history of philosophy very well.
Humanities departments are lousy with leftists.
The dodo is extinct.
Schockley invented the transistor.
The lion has a mane.
Blacks are not good at deferring gratification.
Conservatives are racists.
Women are nurturing and better with children.
Fred drinks wine with dinner.
The potato is highly digestible.

Some Features of Generic Statements

One obvious feature of generic statements is that they are not replaceable either salva veritate or salva significatione by either universal or particular quantified statements. It is true that Germans are industrious, but false that all are. That some are is true, but 'Some Germans are industrious' does not convey the sense of 'Germans are industrious.' The generic and the particular generalization agree in truth value but differ in sense.

In a vast number of cases, if I assert that the Fs are Gs I do not mean to endorse the corresponding universal generalization. No doubt birds fly, but it is false that all birds fly: the penguin is a bird, but it doesn't fly. And I know that. So if I say that birds fly, you can't refute me by bringing up the penguin. And if I say that Italians and those of Italian extraction are frugal and masters of personal finance, which is manifestly true, you cannot refute me by bringing up your cousin Vinny, the spendthrift of Hoboken. The same goes for 'Humanities departments are lousy with leftists.' 'Chickens lay eggs' has the interesting property that all the roosters strutting around in the world's barnyards cannot counterexample it into falsehood.

It is interesting to note that one can make a generic statement (express a generic proposition) using a sentence with 'all' or 'every.' My example: Omnis homo mendax. 'Every man is a liar.' An assertive utterance of this sentence in normal contexts expresses the proposition that people lie, not the proposition that all people lie. Or if someone says, unguardedly, or Trumpianly, 'All politicians are crooks,' he won't be fazed if you point out that the late Patrick Daniel Moynihan was no crook. The speaker may have engaged in a hasty generalization, but then again he may have intended a generic statement.

On the other hand, we sometimes omit the universal quantifier even though the proposition we intend to express is a universal quantification. An assertive utterance of 'Arguments have premises' intends Every argument has premises. The possibility of counterexamples is not countenanced. Contrast this with the generic 'Chickens lay eggs' which is plainly true even though only hens lay eggs.

'Arguments have premises' is non-generic and elliptical for 'All arguments have premises.' But what about 'Men are mortal'? Is it replaceable salva significatione with 'All men are mortal'? Perhaps not, perhaps it is a generic statement that admits of exceptions, as generics typically do. After all, Christ was a man but he was not mortal inasmuch as he was also God.

A clearer example is 'Man is bipedal.' This cannot be replaced salva veritate by 'All men are bipedal' since the latter is false. Nor can it be replaced salva significatione by 'Some man is bipedal, which, though plainly true, is not what 'Man is bipedal' means. And the same holds for translations using the quantifiers 'many' and 'most' and 'almost all.'

We are tempted to say that 'Man is bipedal' by its very sense cannot be about individual humans, whether all of them, most of them, many of them, or some of them, but must be about a common generic essence that normal, non-defective humans instantiate. But how could this be? No generic essence has two feet. It is always only an individual man that has or lacks two feet. Here, then, is one of the philosophical puzzles that arise when we think about generic statements. It is the problem of what generic statements are about, which is not to be confused with the question whether they have truth makers.

And then there is 'Man is a rational animal.' Let us agree that to be rational is either to possess the capacity to reason or to possess the second-order capacity to develop this first-order capacity. Aristotle's dictum is true, while 'All humans are rational animals' is false. So Aristotle's dictum is a generic sentence that cannot be replaced by a quantified sentence. It is false that all humans are rational animals because an anencephalic human fetus, while obviously human (not bovine, canine, etc.), having as it does human parents, is not rational in the sense defined.

And of course we cannot replace 'Man is a rational animal' with 'Most men are rational animals.' For the dictum plainly intends something like: it the nature or essence of man to be rational. What then is the dictum about? If you tell me that it is about the generic essence man, then I will point out the obvious: no abstract object reasons, is capable of reasoning, or has the potentiality to acquire the power to reason.

Some philosophers hold that every truth has a truth-maker. What then are the truth-makers for the vast class of true generics? Do they have any?

REFERENCE

Panayot Butchvarov, Anthropocentrism in Philosophy: Realism, Antirealism, Semirealism, de Gruyter, 2015, Chapter 8, "Generic Statements," pp. 151-168.