Language Matters – Page 31 – Maverick Philosopher

Is There Such a Thing as Racial Profiling?

One of the tactics of leftists is to manipulate and misuse language for their own purposes. Thus they make up words and phrases and hijack existing ones. 'Racial profiling' is an example of the former. It is a meaningless phrase apart from its use as a semantic bludgeon. Race is an element in a profile; it cannot be a profile. A profile cannot consist of just one characteristic. I can profile you, but it makes no sense racially to profile you. Apparel is an element in a profile; it cannot be a profile. I can profile you, but it makes no sense sartorially to profile you.

Let's think about this.

I profile you if I subsume you under a profile. A profile is a list of several descriptors. You fit the profile if you satisfy all or most of the descriptors. Here is an example of a profile:

1. Race: black
2. Age: 16-21 years
3. Sex: male
4. Apparel: wearing a hoodie, with the hood pulled up over the head
5. Demeanor: sullen, alienated
6. Behavior: walking aimlessly, trespassing, cutting across yards, looking into windows and garages, hostile and disrespectful when questioned; uses racial epithets such as 'creepy-assed cracker.'
7. Physical condition: robust, muscular
8. Location: place where numerous burglaries and home invasions had occurred, the perpetrators being black
9. Resident status: not a resident.

Now suppose I spot someone who fits the above profile. Would I have reason to be suspicious of him? Of course. But that's not my point. My point is that I have not racially profiled the individual; I have profiled him, with race being one element in the profile.

Blacks are more criminally prone than whites.* But that fact means little by itself. It becomes important only in conjunction with the other characteristics. An 80-year-old black female is no threat to anyone. But someone who fits all or most of the above descriptors is someone I am justified in being suspicious of.

There is no such thing as racial profiling. The phrase is pure obfuscation manufactured by liberals to forward their destructive agenda. The leftist script requires that race be injected into everything. Hence 'profiling' becomes 'racial profiling.' If you are a conservative and you use the phrase, you are foolish, as foolish as if you were to use the phrase 'social justice.' Social justice is not justice. But that's a separate post.

Addendum. There is also the liberal-left tendency to drop qualifiers. Thus 'male' in 'male chauvinism' is dropped, and 'chauvinism' comes to mean male chauvinism, which is precisely what it doesn't mean. So one can expect the following to happen. 'Racial' in 'racial profiling' will be dropped, and 'profiling' will come to mean racial profiling, which, in reality, means nothing.

___________________

* See here:

Any candid debate on race and criminality in this country would have to start with the fact that blacks commit an astoundingly disproportionate number of crimes. African-Americans constitute about 13% of the population, yet between 1976 and 2005 blacks committed more than half of all murders in the U.S. The black arrest rate for most offenses—including robbery, aggravated assault and property crimes—is typically two to three times their representation in the population. [. . .]

"High rates of black violence in the late twentieth century are a matter of historical fact, not bigoted imagination," wrote the late Harvard Law professor William Stuntz in "The Collapse of American Criminal Justice." "The trends reached their peak not in the land of Jim Crow but in the more civilized North, and not in the age of segregation but in the decades that saw the rise of civil rights for African Americans—and of African American control of city governments."

Hate Thought

My man Hanson once again. Excerpt:

Apparently, racist, sexist or homophobic words themselves do not necessarily earn any rebuke. Nor is the race or gender of the speaker always a clue to the degree of outrage that follows.

Instead, the perceived ideology of the perpetrator is what matters most. Maher and Letterman, being good liberals, could hardly be crude sexists. But when the conservative Limbaugh uses similar terms, it must be a window into his dark heart.

It's apparently OK for whites or blacks to slur conservative Clarence Thomas in racist terms. Saying anything similar of the late liberal Justice Thurgood Marshall would have been blasphemous.

In short, we are dealing not with actual word crimes, but with supposed thought crimes.

The liberal media and popular culture have become our self-appointed thought police. Politics determines whether hate speech is a reflection of real hate or just an inadvertent slip, a risqué joke or an anguished reaction to years of oppression.

Retronyms

Keith Burgess-Jackson writes, "First there was a copy; then there was an electronic copy; then there was a physical copy."

To which I add: First I had a plain old address; then I acquired an e-mail address, so that now my plain old address is a physical address.

Should we speak of retronymic families? 'Physical address' and 'snail mail' belong together in one family, 'acoustic guitar' and 'acoustic set' in another.

Truth and Accuracy

I heard Paula Deen's son say that some statements made about his mother were not accurate. But I think what he should have said, and perhaps wanted to say, is that they were not true.

What is the difference between truth and accuracy as properties of statements and such cognate items as declarative sentences, propositions, beliefs, judgments, etc. ? I don't know, therefore I blog. Nescio ergo 'blogo.'

It seems obvious that 'false' and 'inaccurate' do not have the same meaning as is indicated by their differential usage by competent speakers of English. To say that JFK finished his first term in office in good health is to say something false, not inaccurate, while to say that he was assassinated on 23 November 1963 is to say something inaccurate (and also false). Suppose someone says that there are people now living on the Moon. No one competent in English would say, 'That's inaccurate!'

Intuitively, an inaccurate statement is near the truth (whatever exactly that means!). Kennedy was shot by Oswald on the 22nd of November, 1963. If I state that, then I make a statement that is both true and accurate. If I say he was shot on the 23rd, then I say something very near the truth but inaccurate. Similarly if I said that he was shot on the 22nd in Fort Worth rather than in Dallas. Inaccurate but near the truth.

If I simply say that Kennedy was assassinated, then I say something true. But is it also accurate? If every inaccurate statement is false, then, by contraposition, every true statement is accurate.

If I say that Kennedy was not assassinated, then I say something false. But is it also inaccurate?

Perhaps we should say the following. While every statement is either true or false, only some statements are either accurate or inaccurate. Which statements? Those that feature terms that admit of degrees or somehow imply numerical values. 'Tom is a smoker' would then be either true or false but not either accurate or inaccurate. But 'Tom is a pack-a-day smoker' would be either true or false and either accurate or inaccurate. Of course, if it is accurate, then it is true, and if it is inaccurate, then it is false.

It is plausible to maintain, though not self-evident, that while accuracy admits of degrees, truth does not. A statement is either true or not true. If bivalence holds and there are only two truth values, then, if a statement is not true, it is false. It does not seem to make sense to say that one statement is truer than another. But it does make sense to say that one statement is more accurate than another. 'The value of pi is 3.14159' is more accurate than 'the value of pi is 3.1415.' Neither statement is entirely accurate, and indeed no such statement is entirely accurate given the irrationality of pi. But I suggest that the following is both entirely true and entirely accurate: 'Pi is the mathematical constant whose value is equal to the circumference of a circle divided by its diameter.'

Here is something bordering on a paradox. Given its irrationality, pi is such that every statement that can be made in a finite time about its value is inaccurate. But if every inaccurate statement is false, then every statement that can be made in a finite time about the value of pi is false.

The blood libel is an outright lie perpetrated by many Muslims. It would be absurd to speak of it as 'inaccurate.'

Use and Mention

I am listening to Dennis Prager. According to Prager, Harry Truman once wrote on a postcard "I am now in kike town." And then Prager went on to make the correct observation that quoting a person's use of a word is not to use that word oneself.

Philosophers distinguish between use and mention. It is one thing to use a word to refer to a thing or a person; it is another thing to mention the word. One can quote someone's use of the word 'kike' without calling anyone a kike. Someone who grasps the distinction should not be squeamish about writing out the word 'kike' as I have just done. What's more, no one one I am aware of is squeamish in that way.

But people routinely speak of the N-word. They won't write out 'nigger,' but they will write out 'kike,' 'cracker,' ''wop,' 'guinea,' 'dago,' 'greaseball' . . . Why the double standard?

'Kike' and 'nigger' differ in that the first is monosyllabic while the second is disyllabic. I am talking about the words. 'Kike' and 'nigger' are not persons. No person is monosyllabic or disyllabic.

Make the distinction and avoid the double standard.

Would anything be left of the Left if leftists were forced to disembarrass themselves of their manifold double standards? (That is what we call a rhetorical question.)

Civil-Rights Generation Prisoner to its Fears

‘Not Sure’ and ‘Don’t Know’

They are not semantically equivalent.

Suppose you have no idea who Hitler's Minister of Propaganda was. If asked, you should say, 'I don't know,' not 'I'm not sure.' If, on the other hand, you think it was Joseph Goebbels on the basis of a history course taken long ago, then 'I'm not sure' is appropriate.

'Not sure' implies some knowledge of the subject matter but not enough to justify one's being, well, sure. 'Don't know' lacks this implication.

Copy Editors and Political Correctness

The Recent Referrers list pointed me to this old Feser post that links to a similar protest of mine. Excerpt:

At least the PC “non-sexist” stuff is not entirely the fault of copy editors, however. Many publishers of academic books and journals insist on this “inclusive language” nonsense, and it is an outrage. It is bad enough that one has to listen to PC-whipped academics at colloquia and the like gratuitously inserting “she” into their talks and comments wherever they can so as to prove their feminist bona fides. At least there one can just roll one’s eyes, say a quick prayer for the poor soul, and move on to the refreshments. But to have this ideological use of language foisted upon one by an editor is no more defensible than a requirement that all submissions reflect (say) a commitment to direct reference theory or four-dimensionalist metaphysics.

Ed outdid himself with the coinage 'PC-whipped.' I trust my astute readers will understand to which similar expression he is alluding.

Is ‘IRS’ Code for ‘Nigger’?

Here.

Makes sense, right? Certain conservative individuals and groups have been harassed by the Internal Revenue Service for their political views. The IRS is a a branch of the U. S. government whose president is Barack Obama, a man who is half-black and half-white, and therefore black. Those who criticize the targeting of conservatives by the IRS are criticizing the president. But to criticize a black president for anything is racist. It is the equivalent of applying 'nigger' to him. Therefore 'IRS' is a conservative 'dog whistle' for 'nigger.'

Thus 'reasons' the liberal.

Am I using 'nigger' or mentioning it? The latter. It is an important distinction. Philosophers are careful to observe it. It is one thing to use a word to refer to someone or something, and quite another to talk about, or mention, the word. Boston is a city; 'Boston' is not: no word is a city. 'Boston' is disyllabic; Boston is not: no city is composed of two syllables. Same with 'nigger.' It's a disyllabic word, an offensive word, a word that a decent person does not use. I am not using it; I am mentioning it, talking about it to make a serious point.

Those who refuse to write out 'nigger' but have no qualms about other such offensive epithets as 'kike' employ a double standard. It is also ironic that one should be squeamish about writing out 'nigger' when one has no qualms about slandering conservatives in the most malevolent and scurrilous ways.

A Good Translator

A good translator must not only know the language from which he is translating, but also the subject matter. Indeed, expertise in the latter is the more important of the two.

I have been re-reading Jean Piaget's Psychology and Epistemology: Toward a Theory of Knowledge (Viking, 1971, tr. Arnold Rosin). As a marginalium of mine from the autumn of 1972 indicates, the following sentence involves a mis-translation: "In the case of a priori forms, the analysis of facts is more delicate, for it is not enought to analyze the subjects' consciences but also their previous conditions." (p. 5, emphasis added)

In some languages, French being one of them, the word for conscience and the word for consciousness is the same: conscience (in French) Someone versed in philosophy or psychology would know from the context that Piaget is talking about consciousness, not conscience. A competent translator translates the sense, not the word. The sense, however, depends on the context: first the sentence, then the wider contexts (paragraph, etc.)

Translation requires understanding. The notion that translating machines understand anything is preposterous.

Oxymoron of the Day: ‘President Obama’

A president presides over something. To preside over it, however, he must know something about it. But 'President' Obama seems to know little or nothing about what is going on in his government. He puts me in mind of Sgt. Schulz of Hogan's Heroes: "I know nothing!" Check out this clip.

This cute comparison occurred to me this morning, but I now see that it has occurred to others too.

The despicably mendacious Eric Holder is another Sgt. Schulz.

Ich habe nichts gewusst!

Pseudo-Latin French Bullshit: The Cartesian Castle

In Misattributed to Socrates, I announced my opposition to "misquotation, misattribution, the retailing of unsourced quotations, the passing off of unchecked second-hand quotations, and sense-altering context suppression." But I left one out: the willful fabrication of 'quotations.' And yesterday I warned myself and others against pseudo-Latin.

Today I received from Claude Boisson an example of a willful fabrication of a 'quotation' in pseudo-Latin:

An anecdote on pseudo-Latin + French bullshit rolled into one.

A rather infamous but self-satisfied French sociologist, Michel Maffesoli (yes, some of our sociologists are as bad as some of our philosophers), recently gave an interview in one of the major weeklies, L'Express, in which he said "Everybody knows the Cartesian sentence Cogito ergo sum, but we tend to forget the rest: Cogito ergo sum in arcem meum."
[I think therefore I am in my castle.]

I ferociously answered that in an article of his, available on line, he had already committed the same sin, unforgettable for a university professor, of forging a quotation ("the Latin formula in its entirety is more interesting" he had stated). And this was in a development supposed to prove that the concept of the individual is ascribable to "the beginning of modernity", since, only "collective thought" was known to the benighted thinkers of the Dark Ages.
I then told him

(1) that the Discours de la méthode was written in French, and was translated into Latin seven years later by Etienne de Courcelles, so there was no real need for showing off Latin (Je pense donc je suis being the original Cartesian French);

(2) that the invention in arcem meum is, alas!, doubly mistaken since it piles a syntactic error ("in" with a local meaning must be followed by an ablative) onto a morphological error (the name "arx" is feminine), so the real Latin should read in arce mea; no scholar would have been guilty of these atrocious mistakes in Descartes' day;

(3) that the metaphor of the "citadel of the soul" was known to such people as John of Salisbury (who duly wrote in arce animae) in the 12th century, and long before him to the Stoics, including Epictetus and Marcus Aurelius;

(4) that for anybody desirous to meditate on "modernity", Saul Steinberg's jocular Cogito ergo Cartesius sum was perhaps of more interest than a forged quotation.

All this is easily accessible on the Internet.

Disgusting! Another example of the destruction of the universities and the decline of the humanities 'thanks' to leftism, post-modernism, and scientism.

On Throwing Latin, and a Jab at the ‘Analysts’

If you are going to throw Latin, then you ought to try to get it right. One of my correspondents sent me an offprint of a paper of his which had been published in American Philosophical Quarterly, a very good philosophical journal. The title read, Creation Ex Deus. The author's purpose was to develop a notion of creation out of God, as opposed to the traditional notion of creation out of nothing (ex nihilo). He knew that 'God' translates as Deus, and that 'out of' is rendered by ex. Hence, ex Deus. But this is bad Latin, since the preposition ex takes the ablative case. Deus being a second declension masculine noun, its ablative form is Deo. Ex Deo would have been correct. Mistakes like this are not as rare as they ought to be, and we can expect more of them in the future.

It says something that the error just mentioned was caught neither by the author, nor by the editor, nor by the referees, nor by the proofreader. It says something in particular about 'analytic' philosophers. I am sorry to report that many of them are ignoramuses (indeed, ignorabimuses) wholly innocent of foreign languages, knowledge of history (both 'real' history and the history of ideas), and of high culture generally. One name analyst implied in print that the music of John Lennon was on the level of that of Mozart. There are Ph.D.s in philosophy who have never read a Platonic dialogue, and whose dissertations are based solely on the latest ephemera in the journals. Here, as elsewhere, ignorance breeds arrogance. They think they know what they don't know. They think they know what key theses in Kant and Brentano and Meinong mean when they have never studied their texts. And, not knowing foreign languages, they cannot determine whether or not the available translations are accurate. Not knowing the sense of these theses, they read into them contemporary notions. And if you told them that this amounts to eisegesis, they wouldn't know what you are talking about.

Not all analytic philosophers are ignoramuses, of course. Hector-Neri Castañeda, for example, had a grounding in classics. When he founded Noûs, a top analytic journal, in 1967, he placed Nihil philosophicum a nobis alienum putamus on the masthead. It is a take-off on Terence, philosophicum replacing humanum. It is telling that the Latin motto was removed by Castañeda's successors after his untimely death in September, 1991. Princeton University, I understand, removed the language requirement for the Ph.D. in philosophy in 1980. An appalling development. It has been said that if you don't know a foreign language, you don't know your own.

The fact that many analytic philosophers lack historical sense, knowledge of foreign languages, and broad culture is of course no excuse to jump over to the opposite camp, that of the 'Continental' philosophers. For lack of historical sense, they substitute historicism, which is just as bad. For lack of linguistic competence, they substitute a bizarre linguisticism in which the world dissolves into a text, a text susceptible of endless interpretation and re-interpretation. For lack of broad culture, they substitute a super-sophistication that empties into a miasma of sophistry and relativism. Worse, much of Continental philosophy, especially much of what is written in French, is border-line bullshit. Indeed, to cop a line from John Searle, one he applied to Jacques Derrida, Continental philosophy gives bullshit a bad name. Some substantiation here. It is therefore no surprise that the Continental types jump to embrace every loony idea that emanates from the Left.

You can see that I am warming to my theme. I am also brushing in very broad strokes. But details and documentation are readily supplied and have been supplied elsewhere on this site. In short, a pox on both houses. Be a maverick.

What inspired this post was a query of a correspondent. He wanted to know how to render 'seize the world' into Latin. Well, we know that 'seize the day' goes into Latin as carpe diem. And we should have picked up by now that 'world' is mundus. 'Seize' takes the accusative, and since mundus is a second declension masculine noun, we get: Carpe mundum. If I am wrong about this, Michael Gilleland will correct me.

And another thing. I find it appalling that so many people nowadays, college 'educated' people, are completely innocent of grammatical terminology. Words like 'genitive,' 'dative,' 'ablative,' etc. elicit a blank stare. Grammar being a propaedeutic to logic, it is no wonder that there are so many illogical people adrift in the world.

Now have a nice day. Seize it and squeeze it.

The Unlawful Are not Silicon Carbide

I hope that is something we can all agree on.

My title is the literal translation of the fake-Latin Illegitimi non carborundum, often passed off jokingly or by the pseudo-erudite to mean "Don't let the bastards grind you down."

A good maxim when it comes to Latin is: If you don't know it, don't throw it.

Talk is Cheap

Talk is cheap, except when it isn't.

There are vows, oaths, and solemn promises the breaking of which can be costly. There are Nixonian and Clintonian lies and cover-ups that exact a high price in the end. There are verbal assaults that bring reprisals that don't always remain verbal. And there are other sorts of 'fighting words' and incendiary speech.

The Government Is Us?

Liberals like to say that the government is us. President Obama recently trotted out the line to quell the fears of gun owners:

You hear some of these quotes: ‘I need a gun to protect myself from the government.’ ‘We can’t do background checks because the government is going to come take my guns away,’ Obama said. “Well, the government is us. These officials are elected by you. They are elected by you. I am elected by you. I am constrained, as they are constrained, by a system that our Founders put in place. It’s a government of and by and for the people.

Liberals might want to think about the following.

If the government is us, and the government lies to us about Benghazi or anything else, then we must be lying to ourselves. Right?

If the government is us, and the government uses the IRS to harass certain groups of citizens whose political views the administration opposes, then we must be harassing ourselves.

I could continue in this vein, but you get the drift. "The government is us" is blather. It is on a par with Paul Krugman's silly notion that we owe the national debt to ourselves. (See Left, Right, and Debt.)

It is true that some, but not all, of those who have power over us are elected. But that truth cannot be expressed by the literally false, if not meaningless, 'The government is us.' Anyone who uses this sentence is mendacious or foolish.

The government is not us. It is an entity distinct from most of us, and opposed to many of us, run by a relatively small number of us. Among the latter are some decent people but also plenty of power-hungry individuals who may have started out with good intentions but who were soon suborned by the power, perquisites, and pelf of high office, people for whom a government position is a hustle like any hustle. Government, like any entity, likes power and likes to expand its power, and can be counted on to come up with plenty of rationalizations for the maintenance and extension of its power. It must be kept in check by us, who are not part of the government, just as big corporations need to be kept in check by government regulators.

If you value liberty you must cultivate a healthy skepticism about government. To do so is not anti-government. Certain scumbags of the Left love to slander us by saying that we are anti-government. It is a lie and they know it. They are not so stupid as not to know that to be for limited government is to be for government.

There are two extremes to avoid, the libertarian and the liberal. Libertarians often say that the government can do nothing right, and that the solution is to privatize everything including the
National Parks. Both halves of that assertion are patent nonsense. It is equal but opposite nonsense to think that Big Government will solve all our problems. Ronald Reagan had it right: "A government big enough to give you everything you want is powerful enough to take everything you have." Or something like that.

From a logical point of view, the ‘Government is us’ nonsense appears to be a pars pro toto fallacy: one identifies a proper part (the governing) with the whole of which it is a proper part (the governed).