When I hear it said that some text is untranslatable, my stock response is that in that case the text is not worth translating. If it cannot be translated out of Sanskrit or Turkish or German, then what universal human interest could it have?
The truth is one, universal, and absolute. If you have something to say that makes a claim to being true, then it better be translatable. Otherwise it has no claim on our attention.
A malcontent liberal suffers from an abnormal intellect.
This is an addendum to my post On the Misuse of Religious Language.
In that left-wing rag, the NYT, we find:
“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.
Is the Social Security system a Ponzi scheme? Many conservatives so label it. But obviously it is not a Ponzi scheme. The intent behind such schemes is fraud. Not so with the SS system. If your point is that the SS system as currently configured is unsustainable in the long run, and is to that extent like a Ponzi scheme, then say that. You will then be saying something that, in my opinion, is true. But don't say something that is literally and obviously false if you expect to convince fair-minded people.
You may accuse me of not understanding the purpose of political rhetoric. "The purpose is not to convince thoughtful and fair-minded people; the purpose is to fire up the lazy and largely thoughtless masses. The purpose is to 'energize the base.' You naively think that others share your abhorrence of loose and irresponsible talk. They don't."
Flannery O'Connor, The Habit of Being, p. 227: "I doubtless hate pious language worse than you because I believe the realities it hides."
Pedant and quibbler that I am, it annoys me when I hear professional philosophers use the phrase 'Leibniz's Law.' My reason is that it is used by said philosophers in three mutually incompatible ways. That makes it a junk phrase, a wastebasket expression, one to be avoided. Some use it as Dale Tuggy does, here, to refer to the Indiscernibility of Identicals, a principle than which no more luminous can be conceived. (Roughly, if a = b, then whatever is true of a is true of b, and vice versa.) Fred Sommers, referencing Benson Mates, also uses it in this way. (See The Logic of Natural Language, p. 127)
Others, such as the distinguished Australian philosopher Peter Forrest, use it to refer to the Identity of Indiscernibles, a principle rather less luminous to the intellect and, in my humble opinion, false. (Roughly, if whatever is true of a is true of b and vice versa, then a = b.) And there are those who use it as to refer to the conjunction of the Indiscernibility of Identicals and the Identity of Indiscernibles.
So 'Leibniz's Law' has no standardly accepted usage and is insofar forth useless. And unnecessary. You mean 'Indiscernibility of Identicals'? Then say that. If you mean its converse, say that. Ditto for their conjunction.
There is also the problem of using a great philosopher's name to label a principle that the philosopher may not even have held. Analytic philosophers are notorious for being lousy historians. Not all of them, of course, but the run-of-the-mill. If Sommers is right, Leibniz was a traditional logician who did not think of identity as a relation as Frege and Russell do. (p. 127) Accordingly, 'a = b' as this formula is understood in modern predicate logic does not occur in Leibniz.
A reader inquires:
Is 'prima facie' evidence something with self-evident contextual
significance or a evidence that constitutes some sort of
transcendental first principle? I am having some trouble with this
concept.
The Latin phrase means 'on the face of it,' or 'at first glance.' Prima facie evidence, then, is evidence that makes a strong claim on our credence but can perhaps be rebutted or overturned. The term is used in the law to refer to evidence which, if uncontested, would establish a fact or raise a presumption of a fact. If you have the victim's blood on your hands, and you are acting nervous, and are seen running from the crime scene with passport in pocket, and have been recently overheard threatening the life of the victim, then that adds up to a strong prima facie case for your having committed the crime. But these bits of evidence, even taken together, are not conclusive.
Philosophers use the term in roughly the same way. For example, a prima facie duty is a duty which, in the absence of conflicting duties, is our actual obligation. If I promise to meet you tomorrow at noon at the corner of Fifth and Vermouth to discuss epistemology, then, so promising, I incur the duty to meet you then and there. But if my wife becomes ill in the meantime then my duty reverts to her care. The prima facie duty to meet you is defeated or overridden by the duty to care for my wife.
Or a philosopher might speak of the prima facie evidence of memory. My seeming to remember having mailed my tax return to the Infernal Revenue Service is good prima facie evidence of my having mailed it, but it is defeasible evidence.
Prima facie evidence should not be confused with self-evidence. Prima facie evidence is defeasible while (objective) self-evidence is not.
James Lesher explains key words and phrases. Yes, kiddies, this will be on the final. (One of 927 reasons I hated (most, not all) teaching was that 'students' would ask: Will this be on the final?)
If you classicists out there find any mistakes, please let me know.
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.
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.
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.
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.)
Abdur-Rahman Muhammad has it right: "This loathsome term is nothing more than a thought-terminating cliche conceived in the bowels of Muslim think tanks for the purpose of beating down critics."
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.
