Category: Language Matters

‘We are All Dying’

In an interview a while back Christopher Hitchens said, "We are all dying."  The saying is not uncommon.  A friend over Sunday breakfast invoked it. The irony of it is that the friend in question in younger days was decisively influenced by the Ordinary Language philosophers.

Taken literally, the sentence is false: only some of us are dying.  What must the sentence be taken to mean to be true?  This: the life process in each human being issues eventually in death.  But then why don't people say what they mean rather than something literally false?

The short answer is that man is a metaphysical animal with an ineradicable urge to gain perspective so as to be able to reconnoitre the terrain of the human predicament.  The gaining of perspective requires the stretching of ordinary language.

When we say 'We are all dying' we forsake the lowlands of ordinary language and ascend to a higher point of view, a philosophical point of view. It is like someone who says, 'All is impermanent.' That too is literally false.  Some addresses are permanent and some are temporary.  To maintain that all is impermanent one must ascend to a higher point of view  relative to which what is permanent 'here below' is, from that point of view, impermanent.  And so one can say, without talking nonsense, that even a permanent address is impermanent. 

As for 'We are all dying,' it too, though literally false, is not nonsense.  When I look at my life as a whole, I see that it is temporally bounded, and that it must issue in death.  And so even the most robust among us are dying in the sense that we are launched on a trajectory the culmination of which  is death.

I once played chess master Jude Acers a series of games at his sidewalk hangout in New Orlean's French Quarter.  During one endame he pointed to one of his pawns and said, 'This pawn has already queened.'  But it hadn't; it was still several moves away from the queening square.  So why did Acers say something literally false?  His meaning was that I could not stop the pawn, and so, in that sense, it had already queened.  It's the same pattern as before.  I am not dying, but since I will inevitably die, I am now dying.  The pawn has not yet queened, but since it will inevitably queen, it has 'already' queened.  What is not yet the case, but will be the case, is in a higher sense, the case.

Or consider this Platonizing remark a variant of which one can find in St. Augustine:  'What once existed, but does not now exist, and what does exist but will in future not exist, never existed.'  Taken literally as a piece of ordinary English, this is nonsense.  If something did exist, then ex vi terminorum it is false that it never existed; and likewise if the thing now exists.

But only a philosophistine (a 'philosopher' who is a philistine) such as Carnap or David Stove could fail to appreciate that the Augustinian saying is meaningful, despite the stretching of ordinary language.  A theory of how this 'stretching' works is necessary if we are to have a full understanding of what we are doing when we do metaphysics.

There is no doubt that in metaphysics we violate ordinary usage.  But unless one is a benighted philosophistine chained and held fast in some dark corner of Plato's Cave, one will not dismiss metaphysics for this reason, but strive to work out a theory of how  the linguistic  stretching works. 

Word of the Day: ‘Pot-Valiant’

If you think I have a large vocabulary, you are right.  But despite my voracious reading I have never stumbled upon 'pot-valiant' until just now, in a piece by Mona Charen wherein I found the sentence, "And it's true that some Republicans, like Americans for Tax Reform's Grover Norquist, have fetishized their opposition to taxes to the point where they defend pot-valiantly even tax subsidies such as those for ethanol."

To be pot-valiant is to have the courage that comes from being drunk. Noah Webster puts it this way in his 1828 American Dictionary: "Courageous over the cup; heated to valor by strong drink." See here. 

The reason I have a large vocabulary is because I rarely allow myself the luxury of skipping over words I don't know.  With few exceptions I look them up and then write them down, either in my journal or on my calendar.  Or I 'blog' them.  It is no good merely to look them up.  You must write them down and then re-read what you have written.  Only then will they stick.

Trouble is, in a barely literate society of tweeting twits getting dumber by the minute, you will elicit incomprehension or worse from your fellow citizens if you put your vocabulary to use.  Of course,  catamite, louche, canaille, desuetude, animadversion, apotropaic and zetetic will be lost on them.  But yours will be the pleasure of reading high-grade literature with comprehension.

Hypostatization and Plural Reference

In Plural Reference, Franklin Mason writes that "Vallicella is often a delight, but upon occasion he annoys me to no end."  Apparently I remind him of a "philosophical pugilist," a former colleague perhaps, who is obnoxious in the manner of all-too-many analytic philosophers. (One such told me once that if one is not willing to become a bit of an asshole in a philosophical discussion one is not taking it seriously.)  Now I probably irritate Mason in a number of ways since I am an outspoken conservative while he is a liberal.  But the proximate source of his umbrage is a comment I made in a quick and polemical  entry entitled In Debt We Trust.  There I wrote:

One of the people interviewed [in the movie In Debt We Trust] states that "Society preaches the gospel of shopping." That is the sort of nonsense one expects to hear from libs and lefties. First of all, there is no such thing as society. To think otherwise is to commit the fallacy of hypostatization.

Mason protests:

When one begins a sentence with "society", one does not thereby assent to the existence of some bizarre, spatially disconnected entity whose parts are people. (Well, very few mean any such thing, and those who do are invariably deeply misguided philosophers. Plain folk never mean any such thing. Philosophers hardly ever mean such a thing. ) One uses "society" to refer plurally to, well, a plurality of people.

I sympathize with Mason's irritation.  I once wrote a post in which I approvingly quoted from Ralph Waldo Emerson's great essay "Self-Reliance" the line, "Society everywhere is in conspiracy against the manhood of every one of its members."  Tony Flood, the anarcho-capitalist, took me to task for presupposing that there is some  entity 'society' above and beyond its members.  But of course I presupposed  no such thing and I was annoyed by Flood's objection.  Clearly, what Emerson meant, and what I approved of, was the idea that the members of society engage in a sort of tacit conspiracy with one another to the end of enforcing conformity.

Our nominalist friend 'Ockham' pulled the same thing on me once.  I used a sentence featuring the word 'property' and he took my use of that term as committing me to properties in some realist acceptation of the term.  It annoyed me and struck me as a perverse refusal to take in the plain sense of what I wrote. Suppose I say, of a certain person, 'She has many fine attributes.'  That is an ontologically noncommittal form of words and as such neutral in respect of the issue that divides nominalists and realists.  

I submit, however, that Mason goes too far when he confidently asserts that "Plain folk never mean any such thing."  I strongly suspect that the lady I was quoting never in her life thought about the issue now under discussion.  She was most likely just repeating some liberal boilerplate she had picked up second-hand.  She was probably confused and meant nothing definite when she said, "Society preaches the gospel of shopping."  If she meant nothing definite, then Mason cannot confidently claim that "Plain folk never mean any such thing."  And precisely  because the lady meant nothing definite it is important to point out that one commits the fallacy of hypostatization if one assumes that for every substantive there is a corresponding substance.  If I pinned the lady down, she would probably deny that there is some entity distinct from every member of society, an entity that preaches the gospel of shopping.  But then I would ask her what she did mean.  Did she mean that every member of society preaches said gospel?  Or only that some do?  I would get her to accept the latter.  And then I would get her to admit that she was allowing those few people, advertisers, for example, to influence her.  By showing her that there was no such thing as 'society,' I would be 'empowering' her — to use a squishy liberal word — I would make her see that she was not confronting some irresistible Power, but that she had the power to resist the siren song of the advertisers.

The reason this is important is that liberals have a tendency to remove responsibility from the agent and displace it onto something  external to the agent such as 'society.'  Thus 'society' made the  punk kill the pharmacist, etc.

So, contra Mason, many people do confusedly think of society as some irresistible Power over against them to which blame can be assigned.  It would be a mistake to think that no one commits the fallacy of hypostatization. 

The topics of plural reference and plural predication are very difficult.  Probably my best post on these topics is Irreducibly Plural Predication: 'They Are Surrounding the Building.'  See also Collective Inconsistency and Plural Predication, A Problem with the Multiple Relations Approach to Plural Predication, The Hatfields and the McCoys, and I Need to Study Plural Predication.

‘X is the New Y’

We could call 'X is the new Y' a sentential template of laziness.  Are you sick of it yet?    (Snowclone has been introduced as a terminus technicus for the genus of which 'X is the new Y' is a species.)  If not, try these on for size:

1. Casey Anthony is the new O. J. Simpson.
2. Obama is the new Carter.
3. Yellow is the new green. (From an article urging the recycling of human urine.)
4. Michelle Bachmann is the new Sarah Palin. (The latest object of leftist sexism.)
5. Fifty is the new forty. 
6. Blue is the new pink. (Blue-staters are lefties.)
7. Blue is the new red. (Blue-staters are crypto-commies.)
8. Asians are the new Jews. 
9. Radical Muslims are the new Communists. (If Communism was the main threat to civilization in the 20th century, then radical Islam is the main threat in the 21st century.)
10. Gold is the new cash.
11. God is the new devil. 
12. Black is the new chrome. (As in the latest Harley-Davidson models.)
13. Flourescent is the new incandescent.
14. Romney is the new McCain. (A wishy-washy go-along-to-get-along Republican.)
15. Anthony Weiner is the new Eliot Spitzer. 
16. English is the new Latin. (The international language of scholarship and science.)   

On the Etymology of ‘Shyster’

I've often wondered about the etymology of 'shyster.' From German scheissen, to shit? That would fit well with the old joke, "What is the difference between a lawyer and a bucket of shit?' "The bucket." I am also put in mind of scheusslich: hideous, atrocious, abominable. Turning to the 'shyster' entry in my Webster's, I read, "prob. fr. Scheuster fl. 1840 Am. attorney frequently rebuked in a New York court for pettifoggery."

According to Robert Hendrickson, Encyclopedia of Word and Phrase Origins, p. 659:

Shyster, an American slang term for a shady disreputable lawyer, is first recorded in 1846. Various authorities list a real New York advocate as a possible source, but this theory has been disproved by Professor Gerald L. Cohen of the University of Missouri-Rolla, whose long paper on the etymology I had the pleasure of reading. Shakespeare's moneylender Shylock has also been suggested, as has a racetrack form of the word shy, i.e., to be shy money when betting. Some authorities trace shyster to the German Scheisse, "excrement," possibly through the word shicir, "a worthless person," but there is no absolute proof for any theory.

A little further research reveals that Professor Cohen's "long paper" is in fact a short book of 124 pages published in 1982 by Verlag Peter Lang. See here for a review. Cohen argues that the eponymous derivation from 'Scheuster' that I just cited from Webster's is a pseudo-etymology. 'Shyster' no more derives from 'Scheuster' than 'condom' from the fictious Dr. Condom. Nor does it come from 'Shylock.' It turns out my hunch was right. 'Shyster' is from the German Scheisser, one who defecates.

The estimable and erudite Dr. Michael Gilleland, self-styled antediluvian, bibliomaniac, and curmudgeon, who possesses an uncommonly lively interest in matters scatological, should find all of this interesting. I see that the Arizona State University  library has a copy of Gerald Leonard Cohen's Origin of the Term "Shyster." Within a few days it should be in my hands.

If You Are a Conservative, Don’t Talk Like a Liberal

I've made this point before but it bears repeating. We conservatives should never acquiesce in the Left's acts of linguistic vandalism. Battles in the culture war are often lost and won on linguistic   ground. So we ought to resolutely oppose the Left's attempts at linguistic corruption.

Take 'homophobia.'

A phobia is a fear, but not every fear is a phobia. A phobia is an  irrational fear. One who argues against the morality of homosexual practices, or gives reasons for opposing same-sex marriage is precisely — presenting arguments, and not expressing any phobia. The arguments  may or may not be cogent. But they are expressive of reason, and are intended to appeal to the reason of one's interlocutor. To dismiss them as an expression of a phobia show a lack of respect for reason and for the persons who proffer the arguments.

There are former meat-eaters who can make an impressive case against the eating of meat. Suppose that, instead of addressing their arguments, one denounces them as 'carniphobes.' Can you see what is wrong with that? These people have a reasoned position. Their reasoning may be more or less cogent, their premises more or less disputable. But the one thing they are not doing is expressing an irrational fear of eating meat. Many of them like the stuff and dead meat inspires no fear in them whatsoever.

The point should be obvious: 'homophobia' is just as objectionable as 'carniphobia.' People who use words like these are attempting to close off debate, to bury a legitimate issue beneath a crapload of PeeCee jargon. So it is not just that 'homophobe' and 'homophobia' are
question-begging epithets; they are question-burying epithets.

And of course 'Islamophobia'  and cognates are other prime examples.  Once again, a phobia is an irrational fear.  But fear of radical Islam is not at all irrational.  You are a dolt if us use these terms, and a double dolt if you are a conservative.

Language matters.

  

Socialist, Shmocialist

It is a tactical mistake for libertarians and conservatives to label Obama a socialist.  For what will happen, has happened: liberals will revert to a strict definition and point out that Obama is not a socialist by this definition.  Robert Heilbroner defines socialism in terms of "a centrally planned economy in which the government controls all means of production."  To my knowledge, Obama has never advocated such a thing.  So when the libertarian or conservative accuses Obama of socialism he lets himself in for a fruitless and wholly unnecessary verbal dispute from which he will emerge the loser.

It is enough to point out that the policies of Obama and the Democrat Party lead us toward bigger government and away from self-reliance, individual responsibility, and individual liberty.

It is even worse to label him a 'communist.'  Every communist is a socialist, but not every socialist is a communist.  If our president is not a socialist, then a fortiori he is not a communist.  It is intellectually irresponsible to take a word that has a definite meaning and turn it into a semantic bludgeon.  That's the sort of thing we expect from leftists, as witness their favorite 'F' word, 'fascist,' a word they apply as indiscriminately as 'racist.' 

"But haven't you yourself said, more than once, that politics is war conducted by other means?"  Yes, I have said it, and more than once.  In the end that's what politics is.  I call it the Converse Clausewitz Principle.  But we are not quite at the end.  Before we get there we should exhaust the possibilities of civil and reasonable debate.

"But what if the tactic of labeling Obama a socialist or even a communist would keep him from a second term.  Wouldn't that inaccurate labeling then be justified?"  That's a very tough question.  An affirmative answer would seem to commit one to the principle that the end justifies the means — in which case we are no better than liberals/leftists.  On the other hand, how can one play fair with those who will do anything to win?

Hyphenation and Other Punctilios of Grammar

Dear Bill,

Being someone who uses gerunds not only correctly but elegantly and bothers to hyphenate compound modifiers, you'll appreciate, I hope, my noting that '20 year old' should be '20 year-old' because it is a hyphenated noun. Were ;">we to make his age adjectival by the addition of an extra noun, though, an extra hypen would be required, as in 'the 20-year-old man'.

Best wishes,
Will. 

I accept the correction, Will.  But there is a residual puzzle. How can '20' modify the noun 'year-old'?  There is also the question whether I should have written 'twenty' instead of '20.'   This is clearly bad writing: 'He gave me 5 books.'  Correct is: 'He gave me five books.'  But few will write, 'He gave me five thousand four hundred and seventy seven books' instead of 'He gave me 5,477 books.'

There is no end to punctiliousness once you start down that road.  For example, I just used 'you' in a slightly nonstandard way.  And as for hyphens, should we follow the Teutonic tendency of letting them fall into desuetude? 'Nonstandard' or 'non-standard'?  'Truth maker' or 'truth-maker' or 'truthmaker'?

 Do you say, 'The engine whose plugs are fouled?' or 'The engine the plugs of which are fouled'?  I prefer the latter despite its stiltedness.  An engine is not a person.  And if you don't agree with me on this point, will you say it is acceptable to write, 'The man that was shot' rather than 'The man who was shot'?

'She hanged herself' is correct.  But few nowadays are observant of the 'hanged'/'hung' distinction.

But should a writer like me, who aspires to a certain muscular elegance in his style, be using a slightly quaint and archaic, and perhaps even obsolete word such as 'nowadays'?

I distinguish 'each other' from 'one another' and call down my anathema upon those who write like this:  'Due to  their almost exclusive association with each other, liberals reinforce their political correctness.'

And so it goes.  

On The Ground With G. E. Moore

(This is an entry from the old Powerblogs site.  It was written a few years ago.  It is just a bit of pedantry in which I wax peevish over pleonasm.)

‘On the ground’ is getting a bit too much use for my taste. What the devil does it mean? "Coming up, a live report from Geraldo Rivera, on the ground in Fallujah." Where else would he be if not on the ground? Hovering in mid-air? Burrowing underground? Why not just say that he is in Fallujah? Or does it mean that he is literally on the ground?

Of course, very few civilized mortals spend any appreciable time literally on the ground, i.e., in direct contact with the surface of the earth. I don’t reckon that Geraldo, tough guy that he is, has ever walked barefoot over the Iraqi sand. I am now sitting with my pants and underpants on in a chair which rests on a rug and a pad beneath which is a concrete slab. Thus my gluteal contact with the earth is subject to a six-fold mediation. And when I go backpacking and sleep in the wild, my contact with the ground is subject to a similar manifold mediation: clothes, sleeping bag, self-inflating ThermaRest mattress, tent floor, groundcloth. And yet that could be called sleeping on the ground as opposed to sleeping in a warm bed at home.

Thoughts such as these may have been at the back of G. E. Moore’s mind when he penned a passage in "A Defence of Common Sense" (1925) that some have found puzzling. Speaking of his body, he writes,

Ever since it was born, it has either been in contact with or not far from the surface of the earth . . .

What did Moore have in mind with "not far from the surface of the earth"? Did he do much jumping? Go up in planes or balloons? Or was he thinking that while sitting in his study, he was not in contact with the surface of the earth but also not far from it either?

Waterboarding Led to Bin Laden Capture

One question about waterboarding is whether it is torture.  Liberals, who are generally sloppy and inflationary in their use of language, say it is.  These are the same people who think that ID checks at polling places 'disenfranchise' those without identification. (See this contemptibly idiotic NYT editorial.)  But on any responsible use of terms, waterboarding cannot be called torture.  (If that is what you call it, what do you call a Saddam-style red-hot poker 'colonoscopy'?) 

Waterboarding led to the Bin Laden capture as Peter King (R-NY) revealed last night on the O' Reilly Factor. 

Suppose we acquiesce for a moment in the liberal-left misuse of 'torture' whereby it subsumes waterboarding.  Even under this concession, could anyone in his right mind think that it is always and everywhere wrong to use torture?  That is the kind of extremism that characterizes liberals and libertarians.  They cannot seem to realize that otherwise excellent principles often admit of exceptions.

Free speech is another example. 

 

Never Bullshit! Mitt Romney on Non Sequiturs and the Null Set

Thinking about the mendacity of Obama, Schumer, and Kyl, I was put in mind of a post of mine dated 6 June 2007 from the old Powerblogs site in which I expose some bullshitting by Mitt Romney.  Here it is again.  If you want to be taken seriously by intelligent people, you must never use words you do not understand in an attempt to impress.  The only people you will impress will be fools.  By the way, some feel Romney is a viable Republican pick for 2012.  I wonder.  His being Mormon may not be a problem, but how remove the albatross of RomneyCare about his neck?  We have moved too far in the socialist direction.  We need to move back the other way, toward liberty and self-reliance, and I rather doubt that Romney is the one to lead us.

…………..

Governor Mitt Romney was asked the following question during last night's debate:

     We've lost 3,400 troops; civilian casualties are even higher, and
     the Iraqi government does not appear ready to provide for the
     security of its own country. Knowing everything you know right now,
     was it a mistake for us to invade Iraq?

Romney replied:

     Well, the question is kind of a non sequitur, if you will, and what
     I mean by that — or a null set. And that is that if you're saying
     let's turn back the clock, and Saddam Hussein had opened up his
     country to IAEA inspectors, and they'd come in and they'd found
     that there were no weapons of mass destruction, had Saddam Hussein,
     therefore, not violated United Nations resolutions, we wouldn't be
     in the conflict we're in. But he didn't do those things, and we
     knew what we knew at the point we made the decision to get in. I
     supported the president's decision based on what we knew at that
     time. I think we were underprepared and underplanned for what came
     after we knocked down Saddam Hussein.

Romney's response was quite good especially given the pressure he was under. But why did he spoil it by inserting unnecessary terminology that he obviously doesn't understand? It makes no sense to refer to a question as a non sequitur. A non sequitur is a proposition that abbreviates or 'telescopes' an invalid argument. For example, 'If the war in Iraq were serious, then we wouldn't be trying to fight it with an all-volunteer force.' That is a non sequitur in that the consequent of the conditional proposition does not follow from the antecedent. Non sequitur just means 'It does not follow.' But an interrogative form of words does not express a proposition. (Possible exception: rhetorical questions; but the question posed to Romney was not  rhetorical.) So to refer to a question as a non sequitur show a serious lack of understanding.

Romney should have replied simply as follows. 'It was not a mistake to invade Iraq since at the time the decision was made, that was the right course of action given what we knew.'

It is also nonsensical to refer to a question as "a null set." For one thing, there is only one null set. Talk of 'a' null set suggests that there are or could be several. More importantly, a question is not a
set, let alone a set with no members. "But isn't a question a set of words?" Well, there is for any question the set of words in which it is formulated, but that set is not identical to the question. But I
 won't go any further into this since, although it leads into fascinating question in metaphysics and the philosophy of language, it  leads away from the point I want to make.

 
"And what point would that be?" Never bullshit! You make yourself look stupid to people who really know. Never pretend to know what you don't know. Don't try to impress people with fancy jargon unless you really  know how to use it. Concern for truth dictates concern for precision in the use of language.

Call me a pedant if you like, but language matters!