Logica Utens – Maverick Philosopher

Another Transparently Worthless Argument that Justifies the Questioning of Motives

From my Facebook page, three years ago, today.

Dick Durbin (D-IL): “I’m going to take you back in history for a moment. When that Second Amendment was written, we were talking about the likelihood a person could purchase a muzzle-loading musket.” The implied conclusion, of course, is that the Second Amendment does not protect the right of a citizen to own a semi-automatic rifle such as an AR-15.

If Durbin's argument were any good, then, by parity of reasoning, the free speech clause of the First Amendment would not protect speech transmitted by telegraphy, telephony, radio, any RF device, television, e-mail, text message, you get the picture. But of course no one in his right mind who upholds the right of free speech could conceivably restrict its exercise to such media as were available at the time of the Founders.

So Durbin's argument is worthless. You tell me what his motive is in giving such a specious argument. Let's be charitable and assume that he is not just plain stupid.

I go deeper into this topic over at Substack in Geraldo Rivera and the Musket Canard.

Reader Requests Advice re: Learning Basics of Philosophical Argumentation

A New Zealand reader writes,

I was hoping if you are able to provide me with some guidance regarding where to begin learning the basics of philosophical arguments. I’ve been trying to understand how to evaluate political and theological debates for awhile, but despite my interest I often find them go away over my head. I found your Substack a couple of weeks ago and was delighted to find your articles not only quite easy to follow but made plenty of sense. So I thought why not give it a try and ask you for help in getting better critical thinking. It would be wonderful if you are able to help with this.

Many thanks,

Cameron

I am happy to be of assistance, Cameron. Jay F. Rosenberg's The Practice of Philosophy: A Handbook for Beginners comes to mind.

Your question has been put to me before. Here is a post from 2011 in which I make a few other suggestions. You will also find the comment thread to that post useful.

If anyone wants to help Cameron in his quest, comments are enabled below.

Are There Any Arguments for an Afterlife in the New Testament?

Philoponus writes,

Is there anywhere in the NT where they argue for an afterlife, or is it an assumption shared by all the authors of the NT? Passages?

Before I answer this question, there are a couple of logically prior questions of considerable interest. First, is there any argumentation at all in the NT? Second, does Jesus argue for anything, or does he just make gratuitous (unsupported) assertions? (If he was, and eternally is, God, that would be his prerogative, right?) The answer to both questions is in the affirmative, as you can see from the following quotation from Dallas Willard's essay, Jesus as Logician:

(2). Another illustrative case is found in Luke 20:27-40. Here it is the Sadducees, not the Pharisees, who are challenging Jesus. They are famous for rejecting the resurrection (vs. 27), and accordingly they propose a situation that, they think, is a reductio ad absurdum of resurrection. (vss. 28-33) The law of Moses said that if a married man died without children, the next eldest brother should make the widow his wife, and any children they had would inherit in the line of the older brother. In the 'thought experiment' of the Sadducees, the elder of seven sons died without children from his wife, the next eldest married her and also died without children from her, and the next eldest did the same, and so on though all seven brothers. Then the wife died (Small wonder!). The presumed absurdity in the case was that in the resurrection she would be the wife of all of them, which was assumed to be an impossibility in the nature of marriage.

Jesus' reply is to point out that those resurrected will not have mortal bodies suited for sexual relations, marriage and reproduction. They will have bodies like angels do now, bodies of undying stuff. The idea of resurrection must not be taken crudely. Thus he undermines the assumption of the Sadducees that any 'resurrection' must involve the body and its life continuing exactly as it does now. So the supposed impossibility of the woman being in conjugal relations with all seven brothers is not required by resurrection.

Then he proceeds, once again, to develop a teaching about the nature of God–which was always his main concern. Taking a premiss that the Sadducees accepted, he draws the conclusion that they did not want. That the dead are raised, he says, follows from God's self-description to Moses at the burning bush. God described himself in that incident as "the God of Abraham, the God of Isaac, and the God of Jacob." (Luke 20:35 ) The Sadducees accepted this. But at the time of the burning bush incident, Abraham, Isaac and Jacob had been long 'dead', as Jesus points out. But God is not the God of the dead. That is, a dead person cannot sustain a relation of devotion and service to God, nor can God keep covenant faith with one who no longer exists. In covenant relationship to God one lives. (vs. 38) One cannot very well imagine the living God communing with a dead body or a non-existent person and keeping covenant faithfulness with them.

(Incidentally, those Christian thinkers who nowadays suggest that the Godly do not exist or are without conscious life, at least, from the time their body dies to the time it is resurrected, might want to provide us with an interpretation of this passage.)

Luke 20: 27-40 shows three things: there is argumentation in the NT; there is argumentation by Jesus in the NT; and to Phil's query, there is argument about the afterlife in the NT, in the form of argument against and for the resurrection of the dead.

It is now my turn to ask questions inasmuch as I am no scholar of the NT, nor do I play one in the blogosphere.

Q1: Did the Sadducees, in rejecting the resurrection of the body, equate that rejection with the rejection of personal immortality tout court? My guess is yes.

Q2. Did any of the rabbis hold to a personal immortality along Platonic lines? My guess is no.

Nescio ergo blogo.

Finally, was it true that Jesus was a logician? Well he certainly was a not a theorist of logic along the lines of Aristotle or Frege. Nor is Dallas Willard claiming that he was. But Willard succeeds in showing that Jesus did argue and make typical logical moves. The difference is that between logica docens and logica utens if I understand that distinction. It is the difference between logical theory and logical practice.

I first discovered Dallas Willard (1935-2013) as an undergraduate fascinated with Edmund Husserl and his quest to make of philosophy strenge Wissenschaft. Willard was a Husserl man, and a good one. Only much later did I discover that this USC professor was a Christian apologist. May he rest in peace.

Here is my tribute to him.

No Person is Illegal!

That's true. No person is illegal. But who ever said that any person was?

'Woke' knuckleheads of the sort who recently criticized Joey B's SOTU reference to Lincoln Laken Riley's murderer as 'an illegal' regularly give something like the following lame argument:

1) No person is illegal.

2) If any person is justifiably labelled an 'illegal alien,' then some persons are illegal.

Therefore

3) No person is justifiably labelled an 'illegal alien.'

Therefore

4) The expression 'illegal alien' and such related expressions as 'illegal immigrant' must be banned.

There is no need to concern ourselves with the inferential move from (3) to (4). The argument is unsound because (2) is plainly false.

To see that it is false you have to be able to distinguish between agent and action, between doer and deed. 'Illegals' are so-called because of their illegal action, namely their illegal entry into the country, and not because they themselves, as agents, are illegal.

Of course, an appeal to sweet reason will get you nowhere with a leftist; what they understand is the hard fist of unreason.

As I have said many times, it is unreasonable to expect that all disputes can be settled reasonably.

And yet we have to have reasons at the ready for the reasonable.

That is why I wrote the above. Besides, I'm a natural-born scribbler who just loves to write, and loves to read what he has written. The life of the mind is its own reward.

Bare Assertion and Circularity

"There is no evidence because there is no evidence." Thus some shyster defending Hunter Biden against charges of wrongdoing. I am tempted to call this a presuppositional approach to political apologetics.

A circular argument is an argument, but because the 'diameter' of the circle is zero, it is no better than a bare assertion. It is a bare assertion dressed up as an argument. You could say that it is a bare assertion in argumentative drag.

You know about bare assertion: quod gratis asseritur, gratis negatur. How delightful the pithy punch of this Latin tag! Unpacked, and replacing the indicative mood with the permissive, the point is that whatever may be gratuitously asserted may be gratuitously denied. Thus, with no breach of logical propriety, I am allowed to meet your bare assertion with a bare counter-assertion. From a logical point of view, there is nothing to choose between the two. Or as Hegel writes in the Introduction to the Phenomenology of Spirit, ein trockenes Versichern gilt gerade so viel als ein anderes. (Felix Meiner Ausgabe, 66) ". . . one dry assurance counts exactly as much as any other."

So why did the shyster give a circular argument in defense of Joe Biden's scumbag son? Was he so embarrassed to make a palpably false bare assertion that he felt the need to smuggle it in under argumentative cover? "See? I'm not just asserting; I'm arguing."

By the way, "The apple doesn't fall far from the tree," as the old folk saying has it.

Is it Ever Legitimate to Question Motives?

Of course it is. If it weren't I wouldn't do it! You must question the motives of those who give worthless arguments.

A very short Stack topper.

The No True Scotsman or No True Muslim Fallacy

Substack latest.

In logic a fallacy is not a false belief but a pattern of reasoning that is both typical and in some way specious. Specious reasoning, by the very etymology of the term, appears correct but is not. Thus a logical fallacy is not just any old mistake in reasoning, but a typical or recurrent mistake that has some tendency to seduce or mislead our thinking. A taxonomy of fallacies is useful insofar as it helps prevent one from seducing oneself or being seduced by others.

By the way, the study of logic won't get you very far, but it is fun and of some use, especially at a time when shockingly mendacious and dimwitted people have taken over the government of the greatest nation on Earth. Examples are legion from the top down. You know their names.

Is it Ever Legitimate to Question Motives?

Absolutely. Suppose someone 'argues' that a photo ID requirement disenfranchises blacks because blacks don't have photo ID. That is a transparently worthless argument, based as it is on a plainly false premise. Once an argument has been refuted it is perfectly legitimate to inquire into the motives of the one giving it. People who give this and similar 'arguments' are out to make the polling places safe for voter fraud. Their 'arguments' are merely a smokescreen to mask their fraudulent intent.

What is NOT legitimate is to think that one can bypass the evaluation phase. Arguments stand and fall on their own merits quite apart from the psychology of their producers. Only after an argument has been show to be unsound is one justified in psychologizing the producer of it.

Logical Barbarity

One encounters it in leftists for whom what is not a mere opinion is a 'checkable fact' — hence 'fact-checking.' These chucklewits lack the category of the considered opinion. Considered opinions lie between mere opinions and known facts.

It Ain’t Necessarily So: On Not Confusing the Modal with the Temporal

If someone says, ‘Houses sell above the asking price around here,’ it is idiomatically correct, if not quite grammatical, to respond, ‘Not necessarily’ or 'It ain't necessarily so.' ‘Not necessarily’ in this context means not always. Its meaning is not modal, but temporal: there are times when the houses sell above asking price, and times when they do not.

In ordinary English, the confusion of the temporal ‘always’ with the modal ‘necessarily’ is not often a problem. But in more abstruse contexts, the distinction must be made. Suppose A asks, ‘Why does the universe exist?’ and receives the reply from B, ‘Because it always existed.’ This does not constitute a good reply even if it is true that the universe always existed. The reason is because a thing’s having existed at every past time gives no good answer to the question as to why it exists at all. Even if the past is infinite, the reply is defective. For even if (i) there is no past time at which the universe does not exist, and (ii) no metrically first moment of time, one can still reasonably ask: ‘But why does the universe exist at all?’ ‘Why not no universe?’

Intellectual Hygiene Matters!

Didn't I tell you to be skeptical? Motorcycle fatality counted as Covid-19 death.

Elementary point of logic: if an F is counted as a G, it does not follow that the F in question is a G.

About Whataboutism

Here at Maverick Philosopher: Strictly Philosophical.

“If it saves just one life, it will have been worth it.”

This is a popular but highly dubious pattern of reasoning. Heather Mac Donald:

Less than 24 hours after California governor Gavin Newsom closed ‘non-essential’ businesses and ordered Californians to stay inside to avoid spreading the coronavirus, New York governor Andrew Cuomo followed suit. ‘This is about saving lives,’ Cuomo said during a press conference on Friday. ‘If everything we do saves just one life, I’ll be happy.’

Heather Mac goes on to raise serious questions about such knee-jerk responses.

Around 40,000 Americans die each year in traffic deaths. We could save not just one life but tens of thousands by lowering the speed limit to 25 miles per hour on all highways and roads. We tolerate the highway carnage because we value the time saved from driving fast more. Another estimated 40,000 Americans have died from the flu this flu season. Social distancing policies would have reduced that toll as well, but until now we have preferred freedom of association and movement.

On the Illicit Use of ‘By Definition’

This is an old entry from 2010. It makes a very important point well worth repeating. The battle against language abusers is never-ending.

…………………………………….

What is wrong with the following sentence: "Excellent health care is by definition redistributional"? It is from a speech by Donald Berwick, President Obama's nominee to head the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, speaking to a British audience about why he favors government-run health care.

I have no objection to someone arguing that health care ought to be redistributional. Argue away, and good luck! But I object strenuously to an argumentative procedure whereby one proves that X is Y by illicit importation of the predicate Y into the definition of X. But that is exactly what Berwick is doing. Obviously, it is no part of the definition of 'health care' or 'excellent health care' that it should be redistributional. Similarly, it is no part of the definition of 'illegal alien' that illegal aliens are Hispanic. It is true that most of them are, but it does not fall out of the definition.

This is the sort of intellectual slovenliness (or is it mendacity?) that one finds not only in leftists but also in Randians like Leonard Peikoff. In one place, he defines 'existence' in such a way that nothing supernatural exists, and then triumphantly 'proves' that God cannot exist! See here.

This has all the advantages of theft over honest toil as Bertrand Russell remarked in a different connection.

One more example. Bill Maher was arguing with Bill O'Reilly one night on The O'Reilly Factor. O'Reilly came out against wealth redistribution via taxation, to which Maher responded in effect that that is just what taxation is. The benighted Maher apparently believes that taxation by definition is redistributional.

Now that is plainly idiotic: there is nothing in the nature of taxation to require that it redistribute wealth. Taxation is the coercive taking of monies from citizens in order to fund the functions of government. One can of course argue for progressive taxation and wealth redistribution via taxation. But those are further ideas not contained in the very notion of taxation.

Leftists are intellectual cheaters. They will try to bamboozle you. Listen carefully when they bandy about phrases like 'by definition.' Don't let yourself be fooled.

"But are Berwick, Peikoff, and Maher really trying to fool people, or are they merely confused?" I cannot be sure about those specific individuals, but it doesn't much matter. The main thing is not to be taken in by their linguistic sleight-of-hand whether intentional or unintentional.