Language Matters – Page 23 – Maverick Philosopher

Profiling, Prejudice, and Discrimination

Everybody profiles. Liberals are no exception. Liberals reveal their prejudices by where they live, shop, send their kids to school, and with whom they associate.

The word 'prejudice' needs analysis.

It could refer to blind prejudice: unreasoning, reflexive (as opposed to reflective) aversion to what is other just because it is other, or to an unreasoning pro-attitude toward the familiar just because it is familiar. We should all condemn blind prejudice. It is execrable to hate a person just because he is of a different color, for example. No doubt, but how many people do that? How many people who are averse to blacks are averse because of their skin color as opposed to their behavior patterns? Racial prejudice is not, in the main, prejudice based on skin color, but on behavior.

'Prejudice' could also mean 'prejudgment.' Although blind prejudice is bad, prejudgment is generally good. We cannot begin our cognitive lives anew at every instant. We rely upon the 'sedimentation' of past experience. Changing the metaphor, we can think of prejudgments as distillations from experience. The first time I 'serve' my cats whisky they are curious. After that, they cannot be tempted to come near a shot glass of Jim Beam. They distill from their unpleasant olfactory experiences a well-grounded prejudice against the products of the distillery.

My prejudgments about rattlesnakes are in place and have been for a long time. I don't need to learn about them afresh at each new encounter with one. I do not treat each new one encountered as a 'unique individual,' whatever that might mean. Prejudgments are not blind, but experience-based, and they are mostly true. The adult mind is not a tabula rasa. What experience has written, she retains, and that's all to the good.

So there is good prejudice and there is bad prejudice. The teenager thinks his father prejudiced in the bad sense when he warns the son not to go into certain parts of town after dark. Later the son learns that the old man was not such a bigot after all: the father's prejudice was not blind but had a fundamentum in re. The old man was justified in his prejudgment.

But if you stay away from certain parts of town are you not 'discriminating' against them? Well of course, but not all discrimination is bad. Everybody discriminates. Liberals are especially discriminating. The typical Scottsdale liberal would not be caught dead supping in some of the Apache Junction dives I have been found in. Liberals discriminate in all sorts of ways. That's why Scottsdale is Scottsdale and not Apache Junction.

Is the refusal to recognize same-sex 'marriage' as marriage discriminatory? Of course! But not all discrimination is bad. Indeed, some is morally obligatory. We discriminate against felons when we disallow their possession of firearms. Will you argue against that on the ground that it is discriminatory? If not, then you cannot cogently argue against the refusal to recognize same-sex 'marriage' on the ground that it is discriminatory. You need a better argument. And what would that be?

'Profiling,' like 'prejudice' and 'discrimination,' has come to acquire a wholly negative connotation. Unjustly. What's wrong with profiling? We all do it, and we are justified in doing it. Consider criminal profiling.

It is obvious that only certain kinds of people commit certain kinds of crimes. Suppose a rape has occurred at the corner of Fifth and Vermouth. Two males are moving away from the crime scene. One, the slower moving of the two, is a Jewish gentleman, 80 years of age, with a chess set under one arm and a copy of Maimonides'Guide for the Perplexed under the other. The other fellow, a vigorous twenty-year-old, is running from the scene.

Who is more likely to have committed the rape? If you can't answer this question, then you lack common sense. But just to spell it out for you liberals: octogenarians are not known for their sexual prowess: the geezer is lucky if he can get it up for a two-minute romp with a very cooperative partner. Add chess playing and an interest in Maimonides and you have one harmless dude.

Or let's say you are walking down a street in Mesa, Arizona. On one side of the street you spy some fresh-faced Mormon youths, dressed in their 1950s attire, looking like little Romneys, exiting a Bible studies class. On the other side of the street, Hells (no apostrophe!) Angels are coming out of their club house. Which side of the street would you feel safer on? On which side will your concealed semi-auto .45 be more likely to see some use?

The problem is not so much that liberals are stupid, as that they have allowed themselves to be stupefied by that cognitive aberration known as political correctness.

Their brains are addled by the equality fetish: everybody is equal, they think, in every way. So the vigorous 20-year-old is not more likely than the old man to have committed the rape. The Mormon and the Hells Angel are equally law-abiding. And the twenty-something Egyptian Muslim is no more likely to be a terrorist than the Mormon matron from Salt Lake City.

Clearly, what we need are more profiling, more prejudgment, and more discrimination (in the good sense). And fewer liberals.

A note on the above image. Suppose all you know about the two individuals is what you see. The point is that the likelihood of the old white lady's being a terrorist is much, much less than the likelihood of the man's being a terrorist. This is what justifies profiling and why it is insane to subject both individuals to the same level of scrutiny. For that would be to assume something obviously false, namely, that both individuals are equally likely to be terrorists.

Again we face the question why liberals are so preternaturally stupid. And again, the answer is that they have enstupidated themselves with their political correctness and their fetishization of equality.

Word of the Day: Razzia

Definition: A hostile raid for purposes of conquest, plunder, and capture of slaves, especially one carried out by Moors in North Africa.

Origin: Mid 19th century: via French from Algerian Arabic ġāziya 'raid'.

Example: "So by way of repetition, and in the face of paralyzing ennui, we affirm that this act of despicable treachery, this razzia in Orlando, arises out of the Islamic religion."

‘Homegrown Terrorist’

An obfuscatory leftist phrase. And therefore used by Obama the Mendacious. Why obfuscatory? Because it elides an important distinction between those terrorists who are truly homegrown such as Timothy McVeigh and those who, while born in the USA, such as Omar Mateen, derive their 'inspiration' from foreign sources. Mateen's terrorism comes from his understanding of what Islam requires, namely, the liquidation of homosexuals. There is nothing homegrown about Islam. This in stark contrast to the American sources of McVeigh's terrorism.

It is perfectly obvious why liberals and leftists use 'homegrown terrorist' in application to the likes of Mateen: they want to deflect attention from the real problem, which is radical Islam.

Language matters!

Libel?

Petula Dvorak, Washington Post, 13 June: "Omar Mateen despised gays in the same way that Donald Trump and too many of his supporters despise Muslims."

Why isn't this libel?

'Libel' as defined in the law:

1) n. to publish in print (including pictures), writing or broadcast through radio, television or film, an untruth about another which will do harm to that person or his/her reputation, by tending to bring the target into ridicule, hatred, scorn or contempt of others. Libel is the written or broadcast form of defamation, distinguished from slander, which is oral defamation. It is a tort (civil wrong) making the person or entity (like a newspaper, magazine or political organization) open to a lawsuit for damages by the person who can prove the statement about him/her was a lie. Read more.

Dvorak and her employers ought to be careful. Trump is a vindictive man with the will and the wherewithal to take legal action against his enemies. There are plenty of negative things she could say about the man that are true.

Whether or not Dvorak's outrageous statement counts as libel, she has no evidence for it. To call for a moratorium on Muslim immigration is perfectly reasonable in present circumstances and does not imply any hatred of Muslims.

Analogy. The law forbids the sale of firearms to felons. I think this provision of the law is wise and good and conducive unto law and order. Does that make me a hater of felons? I don't hate them; I merely hold that it would be unwise to allow them to purchase firearms. Similarly, I don't hate Muslims, I merely hold that in present circumstances it would be wise to vet carefully immigrants from Muslim lands.

On the Misuse of Religious Language

A massage parlor is given the name Nirvana, the implication being that after a well-executed massage one will be in the eponymous state. This betrays a misunderstanding of Nirvana, no doubt, but that is not the main thing, which is the perverse tendency to attach a religious or spiritual significance to a merely sensuous state of relaxation.

Why can’t the hedonist just enjoy his sensory states without glorifying them? Equivalently, why can’t he admit that there is something beyond him without attempting to drag it down to his level? But no! He wants to have it both ways: he wants both sensuous indulgence and spirituality. He wants sensuality to be a spiritual experience and spirituality to be as easy of access as sensuous enjoyment.

“When you buy gold you’re saying nothing is going to work and everything is going to stay ridiculous,” said Mackin Pulsifer, vice chairman and chief investment officer of Fiduciary Trust International in New York. “There is a fair cohort who believes this in a theological sense, but I believe it’s unreasonable given the history of the United States.”

So to believe something 'in a theological sense' is to believe it unreasonably. It follows that liberals have plenty of 'theological' beliefs. In the 'theology' of a liberal theology can be dismissed unread as irrational.

‘Again’ a Racist Dog Whistle? More Leftist Scumbaggery

Some liberal-left idiot is arguing that 'again' in Donald Trump's 'Make America Great Again' is a racist 'dog whistle.' The suggestion is that Trump wants to bring back slavery and Jim Crow. Yet another proof that there is nothing so vile and contemptible and fundamentally stupid that some liberal won't embrace it. If you think I go too far when I refer to contemporary liberals as moral scum, it is incidents like this that are part of my justification.

Mark Steyn supplies some other 'dog whistles' for your delectation:

On MSNBC, Chris Matthews declared this week that Republicans use "Chicago" as a racist code word. Not to be outdone, his colleague Lawrence O'Donnell pronounced "golf" a racist code word. When Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell observed that Obama was "working to earn a spot on the PGA tour," O'Donnell brilliantly perceived that subliminally associating Obama with golf is racist, because the word "golf" is subliminally associated with "Tiger Woods," and the word "Tiger" is not-so-subliminally associated with cocktail waitress Jamie Grubbs, nightclub hostess Rachel Uchitel, lingerie model Jamie Jungers, former porn star Holly Sampson, etc, etc. So by using the word "golf" you're sending a racist dog whistle that Obama is a sex addict who reverses over fire hydrants.

I must reiterate my principle of the Political Burden of Proof:

As contemporary 'liberals' become ever more extreme, 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.

‘Redskins’ Update

Apparently, nine out of ten American Indians are not offended by the Redskins name, thereby demonstrating that they have more sense than the typical liberal. This calls for a reposting of an entry from August 2013. Enjoy!

'Redskin' Offensive? What About 'Guinea Pig'?

Apparently, the online magazine Slate will no longer be referring to the Washington Redskins under that name lest some Indians take offense. By the way, I take offense at 'native American.' I am a native Californian, which fact makes me a native American, and I'm not now and never have been an Indian.

But what about 'guinea pig'? Surely this phrase too is a racial/ethnic slur inasmuch as it suggests that all people of Italian extraction are pigs, either literally or in their eating habits. Bill Loney takes this (meat) ball and runs with it.

And then there is 'coonskin cap.' 'Coon' is in the semantic vicinity of such words as: spade, blood, spear chucker, spook, and nigger. These are derogatory words used to refer to Eric Holder's people. In the '60s, southern racists expressed their contempt for Martin Luther King, Jr. by referring to him as Martin Luther Coon. Since a coonskin cap is a cap made of the skin of a coon, 'coonskin cap' is a code phrase used by creepy-assed crackers to signal that black folk ought to be, all of them, on the wrong end of a coon hunt.

'Coonskin cap' must therefore be struck from our vocabulary lest some black person take offense.

But then consistency demands that we get rid of 'southern racist.' The phrase suggests that all southerners are racists. And we must not cause offense to the half-dozen southerners who are not racists.

But why stop here? 'Doo wop' is so-called because many of its major exponents were wops such as Dion DiMucci who was apparently quite proud to be a wop inasmuch as he uses the term five times in succession starting at :58 of this version of 'I Wonder Why' (1958). The old greaseball still looks very good in this 2004 performance. Must be all that pasta he consumes.

'Wop' is from the sound pasta makes when thrown against a wall, something excitable greaseballs often do when tanked up on dago red. Either that, or it means With Out Papers.

I could go on — this is fun — but you get the drift, and the serious politically incorrect point of this exercise — unless you are a stupid liberal.

A Mistaken Definition of ‘Political Correctness’ and a ‘Correct’ Definition

One often reads the following definition of political correctness. "Someone who is politically correct believes that language and actions that could be offensive to others, especially those relating to sex and race, should be avoided." Here. Merriam-Webster, Wikipedia, and other sources offer similar definitions.

This is not at all what 'political correctness' means when used by people in the know. The above definition conflates being politically correct with being polite, civil, and respectful of others and it conflates being politically incorrect with being rude, offensive, and disrespectful of others. For example, Donald Trump was not being politically incorrect when he made his vile comments about Megan Kelly and Carly Fiorina. He was being rude and offensive in a politically foolish display of misogyny.

It is worth noting that in some cases rude and offensive speech is justified as a response to same. Justified or not, the politically incorrect and the rude/offensive/disrespectful are separate categories. A Venn diagram may help where the A region below contains politically incorrect statements and behaviors, the B region contains rude/offensive/disrespectful statements and behaviors, and the intersection of the two classes contains statements and behaviors that are both. For example, suppose someone says, 'Broads do not belong in the Navy SEALs or the Army Rangers.' This statement is both rude/offensive/disrespectful and politically incorrect while 'Women do not belong in Navy SEALs or the Army Rangers' is politically incorrect but not (objectively) offensive. Of course, one might take inappropriate offense at the second statement, but that is his or her problem. People, cry bullies and liberals especially, take offense at the damndest things!

One way to define a term is extensionally by giving a list of the items to which it applies. These are the items that fall within the extension of the term. I will now provide a list of some politically incorrect statements and then ask what they have in common. This will allow us to pin down the intension of the term 'politically incorrect,' and from there the intension of 'politically correct.' Here then are some politically incorrect statements:

Blacks are incarcerated in proportionally greater numbers than whites because they commit proportionally more crimes.
Not only do black lives matter; all lives matter including the lives of law enforcement agents and the lives of the unborn.
While Muslims qua Muslims ought not be barred from political office, Sharia-supporting Muslims ought to be.
The killing of innocent human beings is a grave moral evil, and this includes the killing of pre-natal human beings.
At the present time, the majority of terrorists in the world derive their ideological support from one religion, Islam.
The Crusades were defensive wars.
The purpose of taxation is to raise monies to cover the costs of governance, not to redistribute wealth.
Free market economies under the rule of law are more likely to lead to human flourishing than socialist economies.
There was no moral equivalence between the USA and the USSR.
Women are 'underrepresented' in philosophy, not because of 'sexism' or a male conspiracy to exclude them, but because of the following factors: women as a group are not as interested in philosophy as men are; the feminine nature is averse to the argumentative and occasionally 'blood sport' aspect of philosophy; women as a group are just not as good at philosophy as men, where exceptions such as Elizabeth Anscombe prove the rule.
Apart from the STEM disciplines, the universities of the land have become leftist seminaries, hotbeds of leftist indoctrination. They have lost touch with their noble ideals and traditions.
Equality of opportunity is no guarantee of equality of outcome, and it is fallacious to argue from inequality of outcome to sexism or racism as the cause.
Political correctness is a major threat to the values of the West including the West's commitment to open debate, toleration, and free inquiry.

So there you have a baker's dozen of politically incorrect statements. There are plenty more where those came from. I would say that each is true, though I will grant that some are rationally debatable. But whether true or false, rationally defensible or indefensible, they are all clear examples of politically incorrect statements.

Now what do they have in common in virtue of which they are all instances of political incorrectness? The most important common feature is that each opposes the contemporary liberal or leftist or 'progressive' worldview. To be politically correct, then, is to support the leftist worldview and the leftist agenda. It follows that a conservative cannot be politically correct. P.C. comes from the C.P. The P. C. mentality is a successor form of the Communist mentality. To be politically correct is to toe the party line. It is to support leftist positions and tactics, including the suppression of the free speech rights of opponents. Essential to leftism is the double standard. So while the politically correct insist on their own free speech rights, they deny them to their opponents, which is why they routinely shout them down.

The Narrative: The Origins of Political Correctness

Denying that There is Political Correctness . . .

Results, not Genesis

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.

‘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.

Debra Saunders:

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.