Category: Language Matters

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!

The Difference Between Me and You

I'm sensitive, you're touchy.  I'm firm,  you are pigheaded.  Frugality in me is cheapness in you.  I am open-minded, you are empty-headed.  I am careful, you are obsessive.  I am courageous while you are as reckless as a Kennedy.  I am polite while you are obsequious.  My speech is soothing, yours is unctuous.  I am earthy and brimming with vitality while you are crude and bestial.  I'm alive to necessary distinctions; you are a bloody hairsplitter.  I'm conservative, you're reactionary.  I know the human heart, but you are a misanthrope.  I love and honor my wife while you are uxorious.  I am focused; you are monomaniacal.

In me there is commitment, in you fanaticism.  I'm a peacemaker, you're an appeaser.  I'm spontaneous, you're just undisciplined.  I'm neat and clean; you are fastidious.  In me there is wit and style, in you mere preciosity.  I know the value of a dollar while you are just a miser.  I cross the Rubicons of life with resoluteness while you are a fool who burns his bridges behind him.  I do not hide my masculinity, but you flaunt yours.  I save, you hoard.  I am reserved, you are shy.

I have a hearty appetite; you are a glutton.  A civilized man, I enjoy an occasional drink; you, however, must teetotal to avoid becoming a drunkard.  I'm witty and urbane, you are precious.  I am bucolic, you are rustic.  I'm original, you are idiosyncratic.

And those are just some of the differences between me and you. 

Double Negatives, Intensifiers, and Double Affirmatives

If Mick Jagger can't get no satisfaction, then, from a logical point  of view, he can get some satisfaction. Logically, a double negative amounts to an affirmative.  But we all know what 'can't get no satisfaction' means. It means what 'can't get any satisfaction' means. So what reason do we have to classify the '___can't get no . . .'  construction as a double negative? Arguably, 'no' in this construction is not a logical particle signifying negation but an intensifier.

If that is right, then there is nothing illogical (contradictory) about 'I can't get no satisfaction' or 'I ain't got no money.'  It is bad English, no doubt, but not in point of illogicality.  What makes it ungrammatical is not its being logically contradictory, but its deviation from standard usage where this is the usage of the middle and upper classes.  If you say, without irony, 'I ain't got no money,' then you betray your low social status.  If you are extremely careful not to make grammatical mistakes then you are probably either low class aspiring to middle class status, middle class, or middle class anxious about class slippage. 

Furthermore, if what I am suggesting is right, then 'double negative' is a misnomer.  There are not two negation signs in 'I can't get no satisfaction,' only one: the first, the second being an intensifier.

Intensifiers are words like 'very,' 'really,' 'actually, 'extremely,' 'insanely,' and so on. They typically modify an adjective or adverb.  'That book is insanely expensive.' 'She talks extremely fast.' Some border on the oxymoronic: 'She is insanely intelligent.' In the three examples just given the adjective/adverb is genuinely modified by the intensifier. In some cases, however, the modification is wholly redundant. 'What she said is absolutely true' conveys no more than 'What she said is true.' Compare 'What she said is undoubtedly true.'  'Undoubtedly' is an intensifier that adds to the sense of 'true': 'undoubtedly true' convey a different content than 'true.' But 'absolutely true' and 'true' convey the same content.

Many different words can be used as intensifiers. On television a while back a pundit remarked, "John Kerry didn't respond to the Swift Boat ads and it literally sunk his campaign." 'Literally sunk' is   nonsense if 'literally' is being used as the antonym of 'figuratively.' Political campaigns, because they do not literally  float, cannot be literally sunk. If they are sunk, that is a figure of speech. So, being charitable, I will say that the pundit was using  'literally' as an intensifier. I will not accuse him of not knowing  what 'literally' means. Though I shrink from the Wittgensteinian exaggeration that meaning is use, meaning has  something to do, a lot to do, with use. Why can't a person use 'literally' as an intensifier? I don't recommend this nonstandard usage of course, being the linguistic prick that I am; but though  prickly I also try to be charitable and open-minded.

Catch my drift?  A teenage girl says of her mother "She literally had a cow when I told her I was dating Jack."  If you point out to the girl that a human being cannot literally have a cow, and she is very bright she might reasonably respond, 'I was using  'literally' as an intensifier, not as the antonym of 'figuratively'." 

I suggest that there are wholly redundant modifiers that appear to  entail, but do not entail, logical contradictions. I suggest that in  'I can't get no satisfaction' and 'I ain't got no money,' 'no'  functions as an intensifier and not as a sign for negation. If that is right, then these examples are not examples of double negatives. An  example of a double negative construction is 'It is not uncommon____.'  Here it is indeed the case that the two negation signs cancel with a  positive upshot. But this is not the case in the ungrammatical 'I don't know nothing,' 'I ain't got no money,' 'I can't get no satisfaction,' and the like.

The following, therefore, is just plain false: "A double negative is the nonstandard usage of two negatives used in the same sentence so that they cancel each other and create a positive." We are also told that 'I don't want nothing' means the same as 'I want something.' That is simply false. It means that same as 'I don't want anything.'

Now what about double affirmatives? Eddy Zemach once commented on a paper I read at the American Philosophical Association. A tough commenter, but a gentleman of the old school. Later he told me and some others a story about Sidney Morgenbesser and John Austin. Austin had claimed in a lecture that although many languages feature double  negatives that add up to an affirmative, no language features double affirmatives that amount to a negative. Morgenbesser's brilliant reply came quickly, "Yeah, yeah." To this we might add 'yeah, right,' and  'yeah, sure.' These are genuine double affirmatives that convey a  negative meaning.

  

‘He’s His Father’s Son’: More on Tautologies That Ain’t

Riding my bike the other afternoon, it occurred to me that 'He's his father's son' is yet another example of a phenomenon I have noted before, namely, a broadly tautological form of words which is standardly employed to express a decidedly nontautological proposition.  Taken literally, in accordance with sentence meaning (as opposed to speaker's meaning) our example expresses something that cannot be false.  For how could a man fail to be his father's son?  As opposed to what?  His father's daughter?  But that is not what speakers typically mean when they utter the sentence in question.  They mean something that could be reasonably questioned, something like:  He is like his father in significant ways.

I suppose the underlying phenomenon is the divergence, on some occasions, of sentence meaning from speaker's meaning.  Sentence meaning is the meaning a sentence has as part of the language system, English in our case.  Sentence meaning is at the level of sentence types.  Speaker's meaning comes in when a sentence type is tokened on a given occasion (whether in speech or writing, etc.).  by a speaker.  One then must consider what the speaker intended, and how he was using his words.

Consider 'beer is beer.'  Outside of a logic or metaphysics class no one would use this form of words to illustrate the Law of Identity.  The meaning is that all beer is the same.  For an extended discussion of this example, see my When is a Tautology Not a Tautology?  But what about 'Men are men and women are women'?  As Seldom Seen Slim pointed out to me, this does not express a conjunction of two formal identity claims.

Remember "Let Reagan be Reagan"?  Was there need for a special allowance that Reagan remain self-identical?  Was there any danger that he might suddenly become numerically self-diverse? 

Find more examples.

‘Booty’ and ‘Holocaust’ to be Removed from New Edition of Bible

Did they take the word 'ass' out too?  Or has that word already been removed?  Leave it to a liberal jackass to pander to the dumbest among us. 

We conservatives need to gird our loins, saddle our asses and and sally forth to smite these change-for-the-sake-of-change jackwagons, planting our boots in their 'booties' as needed.  (Figuratively speaking, of course.)

On Civility and the Recent Civility Initiatives

Civility is a good old conservative virtue and I'm all for it.  But like toleration, civility has limits.  If you call me a racist because I argue against Obamacare, then not only do I have no reason to be civil in my response to you, I morally ought not be civil to you.  For by being civil I only encourage more bad behavior on your part.  By slandering me, you have removed yourself from the sphere of the civil.  The slanderer does not deserve to be treated with civility; he deserves to be treated with hostility and stiff-necked opposition.  He is deserving of moral condemnation.

If you call me a xenophobe because I insist that the federal government do what it is constitutionally mandated to do, namely, secure the nation's borders, then you slander me and forfeit whatever right you have to be treated civilly.  For if you slander me, then you are moral scum and deserve to be morally condemned.  In issuing my moral condemnation, I exercise my constitutionally-protected First Amendment right to free speech.  But not only do I have a right to condemn you, I am morally obliged to do so lest your sort of evil behavior become even more prevalent.

Examples can be multiplied, but the point is clear.  Civility has limits.  One ought to be civil to the civil.  But one ought not be civil to the uncivil.  What they need is a taste of their own medicine.

One must also realize that 'civility' is a prime candidate for linguistic hijacking.  And so we must be on our guard that the promoters of 'civility' are not attaching to this fine word a Leftward-tilting connotation.    We must not let them get away with any suggestion that one is civil if and only if one is an espouser of liberal/left positions. 

The Left no more owns civility than it owns dissent.

The motto of the No Labels outfit is "Not Left. Not Right. Forward."  'No Labels' is itself a label and a silly one , implying as it does that there are no important differences between Left and Right which need identification and labeling.  It is also preposterous to suggest that we can 'move forward' without doing so along either broadly conservative or broadly liberal lines.  To 'move forward' along liberal lines is to move in the direction of less individual liberty and ever-greater control by the government.  This is simply unacceptable to libertarians and conservatives and must be stopped.  There is little room for compromise here.  How can one compromise with those whose fiscal irresponsibility will lead to a destruction of the currency?  Any compromise struck with them can only be a tactical stopgap on the way to their total defeat.  Fiscal responsibility and border security are two issues on which there can be no compromise.  For it is obviously absurd to suppose that a genuine solution lies somewhere in the middle.

Worst of all, however is to claim that one is neither Left nor Right but then take policy stances that are leftist.  This demonstrates a lack of intellectual honesty.  The 'No Labels' folks cite the following as a "Shared Purpose": 

  • Americans want a government that empowers people with the tools for success – from a world-class education to affordable healthcare – provided that it does so in a fiscally prudent way.

    • But that's not a shared purpose but a piece of pure leftism.  First of all, it is not the government that 'empowers' people — to acquiesce for the nonce in this specimen of PC lingo — government is a necessary evil as libertarians and conservatives see it, and any empowering that gets done is best done by individuals in the absence of governmental shackles.  It is also not the role of  the federal government, as libertarians ansd conservatives see it, to educate people or provide health care.  Only liberals with their socialist leanings believe that.

    What the No Labels bunch is serving up is mendacity.  First they paper over genuine differences of opinion and then they put forth their own opinion as neutral, as neither Left nor Right, when it is obviously leftist.  So what these people are saying to us is that we should put aside all labels while toeing the leftist party line.  And be civil too!  I say to hell with that.  Let's be honest and admit that there are deep differences.  For example, if you say that health care is a right and I say it is not a right but a good, or a commodity, then we have a very deep difference. 

    In the wake of the Tucson shootings, the University of Arizona has set up a National Institute for Civil Discourse.  And then there is the American Civility Tour. Just what we need: more wastage of tax dollars on feel-good liberal nonsense.

    I conclude by referring you to a very interesting Allegheny College survey, Nastiness, Name-Calling, and Negativity. 

    Auto-Antonyms

    An auto-antonym is a word that has two meanings, one the opposite of the other.  'Fearful' is an example.  According to Michael Gilleland, who inspired this copy-cat post,

    The Oxford English Dictionary defines fearful as both "causing fear; inspiring terror, reverence, or awe; dreadful, terrible, awful" and "frightened, timorous, timid, apprehensive."

    There is much more on this topic at Dr. Gilleland's site. 

    There must be some philosophical terms that exhibit the auto-antonymic property.  How about 'objective reality'?  Suppose someone were to start talking about the objective reality of the God-idea. You would naturally take him to be raising the question whether there exists anything corresponding to this idea.  But if a Descartes scholar were to speak of the objective reality (realitas objectiva) of the God-idea he would mean something nearly the opposite:  he would be speaking of the representative content of the idea itself,  a content that is what it is whether or not anything corresponds to the idea.

    Pseudo-Oxymorons

    Some are puzzled by 'civil war.' How can a war be civil? A drummer of a band I was in stumbled over 'monopoly.' How can many be one? Exercise: find more examples of pseudo-oxymorons, and explain why they  only appear to be oxymorons. Don't confuse a pseudo-oxymoron with such  attempts at humor as 'postal service' and 'President Obama.'

    Some consider 'jumbo shrimp' to be an oxymoron, but why? Can't there be big shrimp? I would classify 'jumbo shrimp' as a pseudo-oxymoron. Someone who considers this an oxymoron perhaps does not grasp that a big F can be a small G, just as a small H can be a big G. (A big shrimp is a small animal, while a small elephant is a big animal.)

    Now if I were serious about this post, I would essay a definition of 'oxymoron.' But I think I'll take a nap instead.

    ‘Broken’ and Other Examples of First-Grade English

    It is annoying when a senator says that such-and-such is a 'no-no.' Baby talk!   Closely related is the phenomenon of what might be called 'first grade English.' George Bush and others have spoken of  'growing the economy.' One grows tomatoes, not economies. But perhaps I am being peevish and pedantic.

    What about the current overuse of 'broken'?  Are you as sick of it as I am?  The El Lay Times  (20 December 2010) opines that California Isn't Broken.  No?  One hears that the Social Security admininstration and the Immigration and Nauralization Service are 'broken.' One breaks things like guitar strings, bicycle chains, and glasses. That which is broken no longer functions as it was intended to. A broken X is not a suboptimally functioning X but a nonfunctioning X.  Social Security checks are mailed to millions of recipients reliably month after month.Clearly, neither the SSA nor the INS are 'broken' strictly speaking. They just don't function very well and are in dire need of reform.

    So why call them 'broken'? Is your vocabulary so impoverished that no better word comes to mind?

     
     "President Obama has said plainly that America's health care system is broken." That from Peter Singer in "Why We Must Ration Health Care" (NYT Magazine, July 19, 2009, p. 40.)  I guess that is why Canadians and others come to the USA for medical treatment they cannot get under a socialized system.

    Why are people such linguistic lemmings? If some clown uses 'broken' inappropriately, why ape him? One has to be quite a lemming to ape a clown. (How's that for a triple mixed metaphor?) 

     
    People who employ baby talk and first grade English in contexts that demand careful thought demonstrate their thoughtlessness and unseriousness.  Precision in the use of language may not be sufficient for clear and productive thinking, but it is necessary. 
     
    Language matters.

    Again on “Muslims Attacked Us on 9/11”

    This just over the transom in response to a post from yesterday.

    Your terminology is technically correct, but what is incorrect with the statement "Muslim extremists attacked us on 911"?

    One does not have to be ‘politically correct’ to have a desire not to invite misunderstanding of a statement (that it equals: " Muslims-as-a-group attacked us" ) or to desire to avoid a perceived implication that there is something about the ‘essence’ of ‘Islam’ that is responsible for 911.

    Nothing is wrong with 'Muslim extremists attacked us on 9/11.'  But there is also nothing wrong with O'Reilly's statement, "Muslims attacked us on 9/11."  After all, the first entails the second.  No one maintains that every Muslim attacked us on 9/11 or that Muslims as a group attacked us on that day.

    My correspondent is missing the point, which is that inappropriate offense was taken by Joy Behar and Whoopi Goldberg when they stomped off the set in protest.  That inappropriate offense taken  at an objectively inoffensive remark is what shows that political correctness is at work.

    This is just one more example among hundreds.  Remember the man who was fired from his job for using the perfectly innocuous English word 'niggardly'?  And then there was the case of some fool taking umbrage at the use of 'black hole.'  See Of Black Holes and Political Correctness and Of Black Holes and Black Hos.

    And then there was the recent case of Dr. Laura who pointed out the obvious truth that some blacks apply 'nigger' to other blacks.  This got her in trouble, but it ought not have.  After all, what she said is true!  And let's recall that she had a reason for bringing up this truth: her remark was not unmotivated or inspired by nastiness.

    Please note that I am talking about the word 'nigger,' not using it.  This is the use-mention distinction familiar to (analytic) philosophers.  Is Boston disyllabic?  Obviously not: no city consists of syllables, let alone two syllables.  Is 'Boston' disyllabic?  Yes indeed.  Confusing words and their referents is the mark of a primitive mind. In the following sentence

    'Nigger' has nothing semantically or etymologically to do with 'niggardly'

    I am mentioning both words but using neither.  "But what if someone is offended by your mere mention of 'nigger'?"  Too bad.  That's his problem. He is in need of therapy not refutation.

    Armor Against Superlatives

    Howard Fast, Being Red: A Memoir (Houghton Mifflin, 1990), pp.  98-99:

    As we circled over Casablanca for landing, I saw below an enormous
    swimming pool or reservoir. I turned to the man sitting next to me,
    a grizzled old army colonel, and said to him, "That has to be the
    biggest swimming pool in the world."

    "The second biggest," he said.

    "And where's the biggest?"

    "Sonny," he said to me, "whatever it is, wherever it is, there's
    something bigger or something better."

    That stayed with me — one of several observations that cut into me
    and stayed — and I passed it on to my children as armor against
    superlatives.

    On ‘Spirituality’