A philosophical paper ought to record the results, not the genesis, of the author's thought about a topic. In this hyperkinetic age it is a good writerly maxim to state one's thesis succinctly at the outset and sketch one's overall argument before plunging into the dialectic.
Category: Language Matters
‘Whose’ and ‘Of Which’: How Punctilious is Too Punctilious?
Which of the following is correct? 'He presented an argument whose logical form is Modus Tollens.' 'He presented an argument the logical form of which is Modus Tollens.'
The second. But it would be absurd to insist on a punctilio such as this in a world going insane. Besides, you are not going to write, 'An idea the time of which has come' are you? No, you will write, 'An idea whose time has come' despite the fact that time is not a person.
For your goal is to communicate with your readers, not distract them with your schoolmarmish scruples.
From the Transgressive Left to the ‘Conservative’ Left
Perhaps you have noticed that radicals are rather less interested in speaking truth to power after they get power than before. Their transgressive speech and behavior becomes curiously 'conservative.' Giving umbrage gives way to taking umbrage.
What happened to shrugging at an opinion with which you disagree and leaving it at that? That notion is history, as communications executives seem to have convinced themselves that they are not censoring dissenting opinions but rather protecting the innocent from crude speech.
Twitter took that phony stance, too, when it announced a "Trust and Safety Council" in February. "Twitter stands for freedom of expression, speaking truth to power, and empowering dialogue. That starts with safety," CEO Jack Dorsey tweeted.
This is a good example of the sort of Orwellian mendacity we have come to expect from contemporary 'liberals.' War is peace. Slavery is freedom. A defense of religious liberty is a violation of religious liberty. Those who protest being forced by the government to violate their consciences and religious beliefs are imposing their religious beliefs. Curtailment of speech is free speech. 'Inclusion' is the exclusion of dissent.
The Orwellian template: X, which is not Y, is Y.
The open forum is a 'safe space' in which no one's feelings are hurt.
Freedom of speech is freedom from 'micro-aggressions.'
And notice that at bottom it's about money. Twitter and ESPN toe the party line because it is profitable to do so. A curious development: significant numbers of once anti-capitalist leftists are now driven by the profit motive to spread Pee Cee drivel.
A Leftist Assault on Grammar as Racist
The destructiveness of the Left extends even unto our alma mater, the English language. London Karl, who sent me the YouTube link, comments:
Guardian writer declares that those who like to use correct grammar are likely to be 'whiter' 'older' and 'wealthier' than those they correct. The irony of her being an editor on a major newspaper escapes her!
Tom owns fewer guns than Tim, not less guns. This is not just a matter of acceptable usage; it reflects a logico-semantic distinction between count nouns and mass terms. The typical leftist, however, is a leveller who cannot tolerate clarity of speech and thought. This is why we define the leftist or contemporary liberal as a person who never met a standard he didn't want to erode.
White Elites versus White America
My man Hanson. I can't touch him, so I quote him:
There are two characteristics common to popular uses of the term “white”: It is almost always used pejoratively, and it is mostly voiced by elites of all backgrounds — and usually as a slur against the white working and “clinger” classes. So “the Latino vote” reflects shared aspirations; “the white vote” merely crude resentment. Those who benefit from affirmative action are not privileged, but those who do not certainly are. Whites cling in Neanderthal fashion to their legal rifles; inner-city youth hardly at all to their illegal handguns. Buying a jet-ski on credit is typical redneck stupidity; borrowing $200,000 to send a kid to a tony private university from which he will graduate more ignorant and arrogant than when he enrolled is wise. White “evangelicals” are puzzling for their crude hypocrisies; not so the refined paradoxes of Congregationalists and Episcopalians. Smoking is self-destruction, while injecting a strain of botulism toxin into your face is not self-mutilation.
Is it Racist to Refuse to Rent to Criminals?
Contemporary liberals use 'racist' as an all-purpose semantic bludgeon. It can mean almost anything depending on what the lefty agenda is at the moment. For example, if you point out the dangers of radical Islam you may get yourself labeled a 'racist' even though Islam is not a race but a religion. Examples are legion. Here is one that just came to my attention thanks to Jeff Jacoby of the Boston Globe:
You’re a private landlord, renting apartments in a building you bought with your savings from years of hard work and modest living. You take pride in maintaining your property, keeping it clean, comfortable, and attractive. You charge a fair rent and treat your tenants with courtesy and respect. Your tenants, in turn, appreciate the care you put into the building. And they trust you to screen prospective tenants wisely, accepting only residents who won’t jeopardize the building’s safe and neighborly character. That’s why you only consider applications from individuals who are employed or in school, whose credit scores are strong, and who have no criminal record.
Most Americans would look at you and likely see a prudent, levelheaded property owner. Not the Obama administration. The Department of Housing and Urban Development warned last week that landlords who refuse to rent to anyone with a criminal record are in violation of the Fair Housing Act and can be prosecuted and fined for racial discrimination. (Emphasis added.)
Next stop: The Twilight Zone. I'll leave it to you to sort though the 'disparate impact' 'reasoning' of the ruling should you care to waste your time.
Obama has proven to be a disaster on all fronts and not just for the United States. And so you are going to vote for Hillary and a third Obama term? You ought to ask yourself what is in the long-term best interest of yourself, your country, and the world. Assuming, of course, that you are not a criminal, a member of Black Lives Matter, a pampered collegiate cry bully . . . .
Senses of ‘Abstract’ with a Little Help from Hegel
For Eric Levy, who 'inspired' me to dig deeper into this material.
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Keith Campbell and others call tropes abstract particulars. But what is it for something to be abstract? It may be useful to sort out the different senses of 'abstract' since this term and its opposite 'concrete' are thrown around quite a lot in philosophy. I propose that we distinguish between ontic and epistemic uses of the word.
Ontic Senses of 'Abstract'
a. Non-spatio-temporal. The prevalent sense of 'abstract' in the Anglosphere is: not located in space or in time. Candidates for abstract status in this sense: sets, numbers, propositions, unexemplified universals. The set of prime numbers less than 10 is nowhere to be found in space for the simple reason that it is not in space. If you say it is, then tell me where it is. The same holds for all sets as sets are understood in set theory. (My chess set is not a set in this sense.) Nor are sets in time, although this is less clear: one could argue that they, or rather some of them, are omnitemporal, that they exist at every time. That {1, 3, 5, 7, 9} should exist at some times but not others smacks of absurdity, but it doesn't sound absurd to say that this set exists at all times.
This wrinkle notwithstanding, sets are among the candidates for abstract status in the (a) sense.
The same goes for numbers. They are non-spatio-temporal.
If you understand a proposition to be the Fregean sense of a declarative sentence from which all indexical elements, including tenses of verbs, have been extruded, then propositions so understood are candidates for abstract status in sense (a).
Suppose perfect justice is a universal and suppose there is no God. Then perfect justice is an unexemplified universal. If there are unexemplified universals, then they are abstract in the (a) sense.
This (a) criterion implies that God is an abstract object. For God, as classically conceived, is not in space or in time, and this despite the divine omnipresence. But surely there is a huge different between God who acts, even if, as impassible, he cannot be acted upon, and sets, numbers, propositions and the like that are incapable of either acting or being acted upon. And so we are led to a second understanding of 'abstract' as that which is:
b. Causally inert. Much of what is abstract in the (a) sense will be causally inert and thus abstract in the (b) sense. And vice versa. My cat can bite me, but the set having him as its sole member cannot bite me. Nor can I bite this singleton or toss it across the room, as I can the cat. Sets are abstract in that they cannot act or be acted upon. A less robust way of putting it: Sets cannot be the terms of causal relations. This formulation is neutral on the question whether causation involves agency in any sense.
God and Kantian noumenal agents show that the first two criteria come apart. God is abstract in the (a) sense but not in the (b) sense. The same goes for noumenal agents which, as noumenal, are not in space or time, but which, as agents are capable of initiating causal event-sequences.
It may also be that there are items that are causally inert but located in space and time. (Spatio-temporal positions perhaps?)
So perhaps we should spring for a disjunctive criterion according to which the abstract is that which is:
c. Non-spatio-temporal or causally inert. This would imply that God and Socrates are both concrete.
d. On a fourth construal of 'abstract' an item is abstract just in case it is incomplete. To get a sense of what I am driving at, consider the following from Hegel's essay Who Thinks Abstractly?
A murderer is led to the place of execution. For the common populace he is nothing but a murderer. Ladies perhaps remark that he is a strong, handsome, interesting man. The populace finds this remark terrible: What? A murderer handsome? How can one think so wickedly and call a murderer handsome . . . .
This is abstract thinking: to see nothing in the murderer except the abstract fact that he is a murderer, and to annul all other human essence in him with this simple quality.
The murderer is not just a murderer; he is other things besides: a father, a son, a husband, a handsome devil, a lover of dogs, a strong chess player . . . . In general, the being of anything that actually exists cannot be reduced to one of its qualities. To acquiesce in such a reduction is to think abstractly: it is to abstract from the full reality of thing in order to focus on one of its determinations. But here we should distinguish between legitimate abstraction and vicious abstraction. What Hegel is railing against is vicious abstraction.
Now I am not interested here in explaining Hegel. I am using him for my purposes, one of which is to pin down a classical as opposed to a Quinean sense of 'abstract.' Accordingly, an abstract entity in the (d) sense is an entity that is got before the mind by an act of abstraction. But please note that if epistemic access to an entity is via abstraction, it does not follow that the entity is a merely intentional object. What I am trying to articulate is a fourth ontic sense of 'abstract,' not an epistemic/doxastic/intentional sense. It could well be that there are incomplete entities, where an entity is anything that exists. (As I use 'item,' an item may or may not exist, so as not to beg the question against the great Austrian philosopher Alexius von Meinong.)
We have now arrived at the sense of 'abstract' relevant to trope theory. Here is a red round spot on a white piece of paper. When I direct my eyes to the spot I see red, a particular shade of red. That is a datum. On the trope theory, the red that I see is a particular, an unrepeatable item. It is not a universal, a repeatable item. Thus on trope theory the red I see is numerically distinct from the red I see when I look at a numerically different spot of the same (exact shade of ) color.
It is important to realize that one cannot resolve the question whether properties are particulars or universals phenomenologically. That I see red here and also over there does not show that there are two rednesses. For the phenomenological datum is consistent with redness being a universal that is located into two different places and visible in two different places. Phenomenology alone won't cut it in philosophy; we need dialectics too. Husserl take note!
There are philosophers who are not bundle theorists who speak of tropes. C. B. Martin is one. I do not approve of their hijacking of 'trope,' a term introduced by D. C. Williams, bundle theorist. I am a bit of a prick when to comes to language. Technical words and phrases ought to be used with close attention to their provenience. It rankles me when 'bare particular' is used any old way when it is a terminus technicus introduced by Gustav Bergmann with a precise meaning. Read Bergmann, and then sling 'bare particular.'
On standard trope theory, trope bundle theory, the spot — a concrete item — is a system of compresent tropes. It is just a bundle of tropes. There is no substratum that supports the tropes: the spot just is compresent tropes. Furthermore, the existence of the spot is just the compresence of its tropes. Since the spot exists contingently, the tropes are compresent contingently. That implies that the compresent tropes can in some sense 'be' without being bundled. (Note that tropes are bundled iff they are compresent.) For if there were no sense in which the tropes could 'be' without being bundled, then how could one account for the contingency of a give trope bundle?
Now if tropes can be without being bundled, then they are not products of abstraction: they are not merely intentional items that arise before our minds when we abstract from the other features of a thing. When I consider the redness of the spot, I leave out of consideration the roundness. On trope theory this particular redness really exists whether or not I bring it before my mind by a process of abstraction. Tropes are thus incomplete entities, not incomplete intentional objects. They are in no way mind-dependent. They have to be entities if they are to be the ultimate ontological building blocks of ordinary concrete particulars such as our round, red spot.
An abstract item in the (d) sense, then, is an incomplete entity. It is not complete, i.e., completely determinate. For example, a redness trope is a a property assayed as a particular. It is the ontological ground of the datanic redness of our spot and it is this by being itself red. Our redness trope is itself red. But that is all it is: it is just red. This is why it is abstract in the (d) sense. Nothing can be concrete if it is just red. For if a concretum is red, then it is either sticky or non-sticky (by the Law of Excluded Middle) and either way a concrete red thing is either red sticky thing or a red non-sticky thing.
The Epistemic Sense of 'Abstract'
I have already alluded to this sense according to which an item is abstract iff it is brought before the mind by an act of abstraction and is only as a merely intentional object.
At this point I must take issue with my esteemed coworker in these ontological vineyards, J. P. Moreland. He writes, ". . . Campbell follows the moderate nominalist tendency of treating 'abstract' as an epistemic, and not ontological, notion." (Universals, p. 53) I don't think so. The process of abstracting is epistemic, but not that which is brought before the mind by this process. So I say that 'abstract' as Campbell uses it is an ontological or ontic notion. After all, tropes or abstract particulars as Campbell calls them are not mere products of mental abstraction: they are mind-independent building blocks of everything including things that existed long before minds made the scene.
A Waste of a Good Hyphen
A reader doesn't get the point of my earlier entry:
Use-Mention Confusion
Dennis Miller: "Melissa Harris-Perry is a waste of a good hyphen."
So let me explain it. Miller is a brilliant conservative comedian who appears regularly on The O'Reilly Factor. If you catch every one of Miller's allusions and can follow his rap you are very sharp indeed. He has contempt for flaming leftists like Harris-Perry. Realizing that the Left's Alinskyite tactics need to be turned against them, and that mockery and derision can be very effective political weapons, he took a nasty but brilliant jab at her in the above-quoted line.
What makes the jab comical is Miller's willful confusion of the use and mention of expressions, one class of which is the proper name. One USES the name 'Melissa Harris-Perry' to refer to the person in question. This person, the bearer of the name, is not a name or any type of expression. The person in question eats and drinks and fulminates; no name eats and drinks and fulminates. But if I point out that 'Melissa Harris-Perry' is a hyphenated expression, I MENTION the expression; I am talking about it, not about its referent or bearer. When I say that the name is hyphenated I say something obviously true; if I say or imply that the woman in question is hyphenated, then I say or imply something that is either necessarily false or else incoherent (because involving a Rylean category mistake) and thus lacking a truth value. Either way I am not saying anything true let alone obviously true.
But what makes Miller's jab funny? What in general makes a joke funny? This question belongs to the philosophy of humor, and I can tell you that it is no joke. (That itself is a joke, a meta-joke.) There are three or four going theories of humor. One of them, the Incongruity Theory, fits many instances of humor. Suppose you ask me what time it is and I reply: You mean now? If I say this in the right way you will laugh. (If you don't, then, like Achmed the Terrorist, I kill you!) Now what make the joke funny? It is an instance of incongruity, but I will leave the details for you to work out. And the same goes for the joke in parentheses.
It is the same with the Miller joke. Everybody understands implicitly that a name is not the same as its bearer, that some names are hyphenated, and that no human being is hyphenated. Normal people understand facts like these even if they have never explicitly formulated them. What Miller does to achieve his comic effect is to violate this implicit understanding. It is the incongruity of Miller's jab with our normal implicit understanding that generates the humorousness of the situation.
But WHY should it have this effect? Why should incongruity be perceived by us as funny? Perhaps I can get away with saying that this is just the way things are. Explanations must end somewhere.
Am I a pedant or what?
But I am not done.
There is also a moral question. Isn't there something morally shabby about mocking a person's name and making jokes at his expense? Some years back I was taken aback when Michael Reagan referred to George Stephanopolous on the air as George Step-on-all-of-us. A gratuitous cheap-shot, I thought.
But given how willfully stupid and destructive Harris-Perry is, and given that politics is war by another name, is there not a case for using the Left's Alinksyite tactics against them? (Is this a rhetorical question or am I really asking? I'm not sure myself.)
Here is a bit of evidence that Harris-Perry really is a a willfully stupid, destructive race-baiter. There is another in the first entry referenced below.
Zuhdi Jasser, Profile in Civil Courage
I have had the pleasure of hearing Dr. Jasser speak twice, a few days ago right in my own neighborhood. He is an outstanding American and a Muslim, one who demonstrates that it is possible to be a moderate Muslim who accepts American values including the separation of church/mosque and state. I have reproduced, below the fold, a recent statement of his so that you may read it without the distraction of advertisements and 'eye candy.'
Jasser tells us that monitoring Muslims is not "Islamophobic." I agree heartily with what he is saying but not with how he says it. It is absolutely essential not to acquiesce in the Left's linguistic obfuscation. 'Islamophobic' and cognates are coinages designed by liberals and leftists to discredit conservatives and their views. By definition, a phobia is an irrational fear. But fear of radical Muslims and the carnage they spread is not irrational: it it is entirely reasonable and prudent. To label a person an 'Islamophobe' is therefore to imply that the person is mentally deranged or otherwise beneath consideration. It is to display a profound disrespect for one's interlocutor and his right to be addressed as a rational being. Here you have the explanation of why radical Muslims and their liberal-left enablers engage in this linguistic distortion. They aim to win at all costs and by all means, including the fabrication of question-begging and self-serving epithets.
A conservative must never talk like a liberal. To do so is thoughtless and foolish. For he who controls the terms of the debate controls the debate. When a conservative uses words like 'Islamophobic' and 'homophobic' he willy-nilly legitimizes verbal constructions meant to denigrate conservatives. Now how stupid is that?
Language matters.
What should Jasser have said? He could have said something like, "The monitoring of Muslims is reasonable and prudent in current circumstances and in no way wrongly discriminatory." Why is this preferrable? Because such monitoring obviously does not express a phobia, an irrational fear of Muslims.
To understand liberals you must understand that theirs is a mind-set according to which a conservative is a bigot, one who reflexively and irrationally hates anyone different than he is. This is why conservatives who insist on securing the borders are routinely labelled 'xenophobes' by liberals and by some stupid 'conservatives' as well, an example being that foolish RINO Lindsey Graham who applied the epithet to Donald Trump when the latter quite reasonably proposed a moratorium on Muslim immigration into the U.S. Whatever you think of the proposal, and there are some reasonable arguments against it, it is not xenophobic.
There is also nothing xenophobic about border control since there are excellent reasons for it having to do with drug trafficking, public health, to mention just two. This is not to say that there aren't some xenophobes. It is true: there are a lot of bigots in the world and some of the worst call themselves 'liberals.'
Dr. Jasser is a man of great civil courage and an inspiration to me and plenty of others. If everyone were like him there would be no Muslim problem at all. One hopes and prays that no harm comes to him. Unfortunately, he is a member of a tiny minority, the minority of peaceful Muslims who respect Western values and denounce sharia, but also have the civil courage to stand up against the radicals.
To inform yourself further, see Dr. M. Zuhdi Jasser, A Battle for the Soul of Islam, Simon & Shuster, 2012.
Word of the Day: Levigate
To grind into a smooth powder.
Is There Any Place for Gentlemen in Post-Consensus Politics?
We are in the age of post-consensus politics. We Americans don't agree on much of anything any more. As our politics comes more and more to resemble warfare, the warrior comes more and more to replace the gentleman.
Here is the best description of a gentleman I have encountered:
The True Gentleman is the man whose conduct proceeds from good will and an acute sense of propriety, and whose self-control is equal to all emergencies; who does not make the poor man conscious of his poverty, the obscure man of his obscurity, or any man of his inferiority or deformity; who is himself humbled if necessity compels him to humble another; who does not flatter wealth, cringe before power, or boast of his own possessions or achievements; who speaks with frankness but always with sincerity and sympathy; whose deed follows his word; who thinks of the rights and feelings of others, rather than his own; and who appears well in any company, a man with whom honor is sacred and virtue safe. -– John Walter Wayland
By this definition, Trump is no gentleman; he is rather the anti-gentleman. But a gentleman among thugs is a loser. You cannot appeal to the higher nature of a thug; he has none. So you need someone who can repay the leftist in his own Alinskyite coin. You need a man who will get into the gutter and fight the leftist with his own weapons. You need a man who will not shrink from the politics of personal destruction preached by V. I. Lenin and used so effectively by his successors in the Democrat Party.
Herein an argument for Trump. I am beginning to think that he alone can defeat the evil Hillary. Ted Cruz is a brilliant man compared to whom Trump is a know-nothing when it comes to the law, the Constitution, and the affairs of state, and Cruz is a better man than Trump; but the Texan is a senator and thus part of the Republican establishment against which there is justified rebellion.
Personality-wise, too, Cruz is not that attractive to the average disgruntled voter. He is not enough of a regular guy. And being a better man than Trump he probably won't descend deep enough into the gutter to really annihilate Hillary as she so richly deserves. Trump can mobilize Joe Sixpack and Jane Lipstick. These types don't watch C-SPAN or read The Weekly Standard. They can't relate to the bow-tie brigade over at National Review. They are heartily sick and tired of the empty talk of the crapweasels* of the Republican establishment. They want action.
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*I borrow this delightful bit of invective from the fiery Michelle Malkin.
PC Claims Another Victim
One good thing about leftists is that they eat their own. So here is a leftist professor who is attempting to confess her 'white privilege.' She mentions the word 'nigger.' She is not using it any more than I just used it: she is not applying it to anyone. She is talking about the word. She is trying her damndest to toe the party line, but still she gets purged.
If you know the history of communism, you know the historical antecedents of this sort of insanity. The origins of PC are in the CP.
We students in the class began discussing possible ways to bring these issues up in our classes when COMS 930 instructor Dr. Andrea Quenette abruptly interjected with deeply disturbing remarks. Those remarks began with her admitted lack of knowledge of how to talk about racism with her students because she is white. “As a white woman I just never have seen the racism… It’s not like I see ‘Nigger’ spray-painted on walls…” she said.
You should read study my articles infra. Inform yourself and fight back against the forces of liberal-left scumbaggery. By the way, for those of you who went to public schools, infra means 'below.'
‘Dog Whistles’ and Liberal Scumbaggery
I need to bone up on my 'dog whistles.' I wasn't aware until now of most of the following:
For Obama backers, identifying racist “dog whistles” became a favored pastime in 2012. Words like “angry,” “golf,” “skinny,” “Chicago,” “food stamps,” “apartment,” and even “Constitution,” were ascribed some darker meaning that supposedly only white nationalists could hear (although liberal talk show hosts seemed rather attuned to them). Romney was allegedly racist toward African-Americans, toward Palestinians, toward Hispanics, and none of this let up even after he lost.
When, in the effort to address long-term urban poverty in 2014, then-Budget Committee Chairman Paul Ryan was accused of racism for using another one of those code words, “inner cities,” to describe one of the areas in America plagued by generational poverty. “Let’s be clear, when Mr. Ryan says ‘inner city,’ when he says ‘culture,’ these are simply code words for what he really means: ‘black,’” insisted Representative Barbara Lee, along with a host of finely tuned dog whistle decoders on the left. It is perhaps unsurprising that Barack Obama did not meet with the same criticism for making the same observation while using virtually the same language.
It's worse than I thought.
There are liberals who claim that 'thug' is code for 'nigger.' In truth 'thug' means thug. Look it up. Thugs come in all colors. I say we call a thug a thug and a spade a spade.
As contemporary 'liberals' become ever more extreme and illiberal, they increasingly assume what I will call the political burden of proof. The onus is now on them to defeat the presumption that they are so morally and intellectually obtuse as not to be worth talking to.
Speech
The existence of this god-like power elevates us above the rest of the animal kingdom. Would that the same could be said of our use of it.
Jeb Bush did not Suspend, he Ended his Campaign
In this Internet age the availability of accurate on-line dictionary definitions makes the misuse of language by so-called journalists inexcusable. The Merriam-Webster's definition of 'suspend' receives the coveted MavPhil nihil obstat. Suspensions are temporary. But we all know, and Jeb! knows, that he ain't coming back, leastways not in this election cycle.
Part of the problem, I suspect, is that in this Age of Feeling, people are afraid to speak plainly and label things accurately. What is manifestly an act of terrorism, for example, is labelled 'work-place violence.' People are afraid to call a spade a spade. Hell, they are afraid to use this very expression lest they be called a 'racist.'
And so, instead of stating bluntly that Mr. Bush quit, or gave up, one says euphemistically that he 'suspended' his campaign. As if he needs a 'breather.' It is on a par with saying, of Antonin Scalia, that he 'is no longer among us' as opposed to saying that he died. Finality is not something we like facing up to. One who is no longer among us may reappear; and he who suspends his campaign may soon be back in the race.
For reasons why it is good that Jeb Bush is out of the race, see here.
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Correction (23 February). I got off a wild shot above in my zeal to oppose the misuse of language by journalists. 'Suspend' in the context of an election can be used in a technical sense. A reader sends us here where we read:
Delegates:
Federal law plays no role in delegate selection rules. It's up to the party to decide how to treat delegates won by a candidate who has suspended his campaign. In general, candidates who suspend their campaigns get to keep any delegates they've won, while candidates who drop out have to forfeit certain delegates, usually statewide delegates.
Money:
"Suspending" a campaign allows a candidate to publicly withdraw from a race while preserving the ability to raise funds beyond what's needed to retire debt. This may include the ability to continue to receive federal matching funds, if the candidate has previously qualified for them.
When candidates announce they are dropping out or ending their campaigns, they may then only raise money to retire any remaining campaign debts or to pay for other costs related to shutting down a campaign committee. They may not continue to amass war chests beyond that if they drop out.
However, if a candidate "suspends" his campaign but doesn't officially end his candidacy, federal law does not specifically prohibit that candidate from continuing to raise funds for purposes other [than] debt retirement.
Candidates who "suspend" their campaigns as well as those who officially drop out must still continue to file disclosure reports, as long as they have an active campaign committee.