Logica Utens – Page 3 – Maverick Philosopher

Marriage, the State, and Slippery Slope Arguments: An Objection Considered

A Reader Objects

"First, if your justification of state involvement in marriage is the production and protection of children, then I think you open yourself to intervention of the state beyond what a limited government conservative should be comfortable with. If protection of marriage by the state for such a goal is the standard, many other activities should be outlawed. Adultery, divorce, pornography are all things that create a poor environment to raise and nurture children, but I don't see us banning said actions."

I Reply

Conservatives are committed to limited government, and I'm a conservative. It is obvious, I hope, that the state ought not be involved in every form of human association. State involvement in any particular type of human association must therefore be justified. We want as much government as we need, but no more. The state is coercive by its very nature, as it must be if it is to be able to enforce its mandates and exercise its legitimate functions, and is therefore at odds with the liberty and autonomy of citizens. It is not obvious that the government should be in the marriage business at all. The burden is on the state to justify its intervention and regulation. But there is a reason for the state to be involved. The state has a legitimate interest in its own perpetuation and maintenance via the production of children, their socializing, their protection, and their transformation into productive citizens who will contribute to the common good. (My use of 'the state' needn't involve an illict hypostatization.) It is this interest that justifies the state's recognition and regulation of marriage as a union of exactly one man and exactly one woman.

If one takes this view, does it follow that adultery, divorce, and pornography should be outlawed? Not at all. Slippery slope arguments are one and all invalid. (Side-issues I won't pursue: (i) Adultery is a legitimate ground for divorce, so divorce cannot be outlawed. (ii) Another freason why divorce ought not be outlawed is that it is often good for offspring.)

Slippery Slope Arguments

But perhaps I should say something about slippery slope arguments. They come up quite often, in the gun debate, for example. "If citizens are allowed to own semi-automatic pistols and rifles, then they must be allowed to own other sorts of weaponry." That is often heard.

There is, however, no logical necessity that if you allow citizens to own semi-automatic rifles, then you must also allow them to own machine guns, grenade launchers, chemical and biological weapons, tactical nukes . . . . At some point a line is drawn. We draw lines all the time. Time was when the voting age was 21. Those were the times when, in the words of Barry McGuire, "You're old enough to kill, but not for votin'." The voting age is now 18. If anyone at the time had argued that reducing the age to 18 would logically necessitate its being reduced to 17, then 16, and then 15, and so on unto the enfranchisement of infants and the prenatal, that would have been dismissed as a silly argument.

If the above anti-gun slippery slope argument were valid, then the following pro-gun argument would be valid: "If the government has the right to ban civilian possession of fully automatic rifles, then it has the right to ban semi-automatic rifles, semi-autos generally, revolvers, single-shot derringers, BB guns, . . . . But it has no right to ban semi-autos, and so on. Ergo, etc.

I have been speaking of the 'logical' slippery slope. Every such argument is invalid. But there is also the 'causal' or 'probabilistic' slippery slope. Some of these have merit, some don't. One must look at the individual cases.

Supposing all semi-auto weapons (pistols, rifles, and shotguns) to be banned, would this 'lead to' or 'pave the way for' the banning of revolvers and handguns generally? 'Lead to' is a vague phrase. It might be taken to mean 'raise the probability of' or 'make it more likely that.' Slippery slope arguments of this sort in some cases have merit. If all semi-auto rifles are banned, then the liberals will be emboldened and will try to take the next step, the banning of semi-auto pistols. The probability of that happening is very high. I would lay serious money on the proposition that Dianne Feinstein of San Bancisco, who refuses to use correct gun terminology, though she knows it, referring to semi-automatic long guns as 'assault rifles,' a phrase at once devoid of definite meaning and emotive, would press to have all semi-autos banned if she could get a ban on semi-auto rifles.

But how high is the probability of the slide in the other direction? Not high at all. In fact very low, closing in on zero. How many conservatives are agitating the right to buy (without special permits and fees) machine guns (fully automatic weapons)? None that I know of. How many conservatives are agitating for the right to keep and bear tactical nukes?

I return to my reader's claim. He said in effect that if the State regulates marriage then we are on a slippery slope toward the regulation and in some cases banning of all sorts of things that are harmful to children. But the argument is invalid if intended as a logical slippery slope (since all such arguments are invalid), and inductively extremely weak if intended as a causal or probabilistic slippery slope. The likelihood of, say, a clamp-down on the deleterious dreck emanating from our mass media outlets is extremely low.

Logic, Hypocrisy, and Tobacco-Wackery

Ruth Marcus begins her piece, The Perils of Legalized Marijuana, as follows:

Marijuana legalization may be the same-sex marriage of 2014 — a trend that reveals itself in the course of the year as obvious and inexorable. At the risk of exposing myself as the fuddy-duddy I seem to have become, I hope not.

This is, I confess, not entirely logical and a tad hypocritical. At the risk of exposing myself as not the total fuddy-duddy of my children's dismissive imaginings, I have done my share of inhaling, though back in the age of bell-bottoms and polyester.

I fail to see what is illogical about Marcus's taking a position today that differs from the position she took back when she wore bell bottoms. Logic enjoins logical consistency, not such other types as consistency of beliefs over time. Here is a pair of logically contradictory propositions:

Marijuana ought to be legalized
Marijuana ought not be legalized.

Here is a pair of logically consistent propositions:

Marcus believed in 1970 that marijuana ought to be legalized
Marcus believes in 2014 that marijuana ought not be legalized.

There is nothing illogical about Marcus's change of views.

Related: On Diachronic or 'Emersonian' Consistency. (An outstanding entry!)

And surely there is nothing hypocritical about Marcus's wising up up and changing her view. To think otherwise is to fail to understand the concept of hypocrisy.

I once heard a radio advertisement by a group promoting a "drug-free America." A male voice announces that he is a hypocrite because he demands that his children not do what he once did, namely, use illegal drugs. The idea behind the ad is that it is sometimes good to be a hypocrite.

Surely this ad demonstrates a misunderstanding of the concept of hypocrisy. Hypocrisy is a moral defect. But one who preaches abstinence and is abstinent is morally praiseworthy regardless of what he did in his youth. Indeed, his change of behavior redounds to his moral credit.

A hypocrite is not someone who fails to live up to the ideals he espouses, but one who does not attempt to live up to the ideals he espouses. An adequate definition of hypocrisy must allow for moral failure. An adequate definition must also allow for moral change. One who did not attempt to live up to the ideals he now espouses cannot be called a hypocrite; the term applies to one who does not attempt to live up to the ideals he now espouses.

Companion post: Hypocrisy

Marcus embraces Pee-Cee lunacy in the following passage (emphasis added):

I'm not arguing that marijuana is riskier than other, already legal substances, namely alcohol and tobacco. Indeed, pot is less addictive; an occasional joint strikes me as no worse than an occasional drink. If you had a choice of which of the three substances to ban, tobacco would have to top the list. Unlike pot and alcohol, tobacco has no socially redeeming value; used properly, it is a killer.

Well, I suppose one cannot expect clear and independent and critical thinking and proper use of language from a mere journalist.

What, pray tell, is the proper use of tobacco? Smoked in pipes and in the form of cigars it is assuredly not a killer. One does not inhale pipe or cigar smoke. And while cigarette smoke is typically inhaled, no one ever killed himself by smoking a cigarette or a pack of cigarettes. (People have died, however, from just one drinking binge.) To contract a deadly disease such as lung cancer or emphysema, you must smoke many cigarettes daily over many years. And even then there is no causation, strictly speaking.

Smoking cigarettes is contraindicated if you desire to be optimally healthy: over the long haul it dramatically increases the probability that the smoker will contract a deadly disease. But don't confuse 'x raises the probability of y' with 'x causes y.' Cigarettes did not kill my aunts and uncles who smoked their heads off back in the day. They lived to ripe old ages. Aunt Ada to 90. I can see old Uncle Ray now, with his bald head and his pack of unfiltered Camels.

Why are liberals such suckers for misplaced moral enthusiasm?

Tobacco has no socially redeeming value? What a stupid thing to say! Miss Marcus ought to hang out with the boys at a high-end cigar emporium, or have breakfast with me and Peter and Mikey as we smoke and vape at a decidely low-end venue, Cindy's Greasy Spoon. For the record: I do not smoke cigarettes.

Just as alcohol in moderation is a delightful adjunct to a civilized life, a social lubricant and an aid to conviviality, the same is true of tobacco.

Which to ban if one of the three were to be banned? Alcohol obviously! Stop being a dumbassed liberal and try thinking for a change. How many auto accidents have been caused by smokers of tobacco as compared with drinkers of alcohol? Are you aware that the ingestion of nicotine increaases alertness? How many men beat their women and children under the influence of tobacco?

Arguments, Testicles, and Inside Knowledge

T. L. e-mails,

Here’s fodder for a follow-up MP post, if you care to pursue it. I do not endorse the following objection, but I wonder how you’d reply.

In “David Lewis on Religion” you say: "To be a good philosopher of X one ought to know both philosophy and X from the inside, by practice." But there is some prima facie tension between this claim and your insistence that arguments don’t have testicles (or skin color).

Objector: “You, Maverick Philosopher, can never know *from the inside* the relevant experiences of women (or racial minorities), so your arguments are not to be taken seriously.” Why not let Lewis’s arguments stand or fall on their merits? And if his arguments *are* defective in some way Lewis cannot see due to his irreligiousity, then mustn't you allow the same charge against your political/cultural arguments mutatis mutandis?

"Arguments don't have testicles" is my preferred response to women (and men) who claim that men have no right to an opinion about the morality of abortion due to their inability to become pregnant. An argument for or against abortion is good or bad regardless of the sex of the person giving the argument. And similarly for race. One doesn't have to be black to have a well-founded opinion about the causes and effects of black-on-black crime. The point holds in general in all objective subject areas. For purposes of logical appraisal, arguments can and must be detached from their producers.

It is also clear that one can be a competent gynecologist without being a woman, and a competent specialist in male urology without being a man. Only a fool would discount the advice of a female urologist on the treatment of erectile dysfunction on the ground that the good doctor is incapable of having an erection. "You don't know what it's like, doc, you don't have a penis!" In objective matters like these, the 'what it's like' is not relevant. One needn't know what it's like to have morning sickness to be able to prescribe an effective palliative. I know what it is like to be a man 'from the inside,' but my literal (spatial) insides can be better known by certain women.

But in other subject areas, the 'what it is like' is relevant indeed. Consider Mary, a character in a rather well known piece of philosophy-of-mind boilerplate.

Mary is a brilliant neuroscientist who has spent her entire life in a visually impoverished state. Pent up in a room from birth and sheltered from colors, her visual experience is restricted to black and white and shades of gray. You are to imagine that she has come to know everything there is to know about the brain and its visual system. Her access to the outer world is via black-and-white TV. The neuroscience texts over which she so assiduously pores have beeen expurgated by the dreaded Color Censor.

Mary knows every third-person, objective fact about the physics of colors and the neurophysiology of color perception. But there is plenty she dos not know: what it is like to see a red rose or a blue sky. That sort of thing. In Chisholm-speak, she does not know what it is like to be appeared-to redly.

So let's say Mary knows everything there is to know about colors from the outside, but nothing about them from the inside. She has no first-person, experiential, knowledge of colors. Do you think she would be in a position to write about the phenomenology of color? Obviously not.

Analogously, a philosopher of religion who has never had a religious experience, and indeed lacks a religious sensibility or disposition such as would incline one to have such experiences, is in no position to write about religion. And this, even if he knows every objective fact about every religion. Thus our imagined philosopher of religion knows the history of religions and their sociology, and can rattle off every doctrine of every religion. He knows all about the Christological heresies and the filioque clause and the anatta doctrine, etc. He is like Mary who knows all about colors from the outside but nothing about them from the inside. He knows the externals and trappings, but not the living essence.

He literally does not know, from the inside, what he is talking about just as Mary literally does not know, from the inside, what she is talking about.

Now no analogy is perfect (else it wouldn't be an analogy) but the foregoing analogy supports the following response to the above objection. The objection is that one cannot consistently maintain both that

(i) some claims and arguments are such that their logical appraisal (their evaluation in terms of truth, validity, soundness, relevance etc.) can and must be conducted independently of inquiries into the natures and capacities and environments of the persons who advance the claims and arguments

and

(ii) some claims and arguments are such that their logical appraisal can legitimately involve inquiry into the nature, capacities, and environments of the persons who advance the claims and arguments.

My response is that one can, with no breach of logical propriety, maintain both (i) and (ii). It depends on whether the subject matter is wholly objective or also necessarily involves elements of subjectivity. If we are talking about the morality of abortion, then the arguments are good or bad independently of who is making them. They are neither male nor female. But if we are talking about the phenomenology of colors, then a person such as Mary is disqualified by her lack of experience should she advance the claim that there are no phenomenal colors or color qualia or that the whole reality of color perception is exhausted by the neurophysiology of such perception.

Can a man know what it is like to be a woman, or more specifically, what it is like to be a woman in philosophy? (There is an entire website devoted to this variation on Nagel's question.) Some women complain bitterly about their experiences as women in the male-dominated field of philosophy. (And some of these women have legitimate grievances.) Can a man know what it is like to be mocked or ridiculed or made to feel stupid? Of course. Who has never been mocked or ridiculed or made to feel stupid? The point here is that men and women have the same types of experiences. I can't feel your pain, only Bill Cinton with his special powers can do that. But I feel pain and so I know what it is like for you to feel pain, whether you are male of female, human or feline. Since I know what it is like to be ridiculed, I know what it is like for a woman to be ridiculed. But an irreligious person does not know what it is like to have a religious experience for the simple reasons that he does not have them.

I know fear and so does my cat. But he has never experienced Heideggerian Angst. So if he were, per impossibile, to say something about it, having read, per impossibile, the relevant sections of Sein und Zeit, we would be justified in ignoring his opinions. Go take a car nap! The irreligious person is like my cat: he lacks a certain range of experiences.

I am not saying that if one has religious experiences, then one will necessarily reject the view that religion is buncombe. For it is possible to have a certain range of experiences and yet decide that they are non-veridical. What I am saying is that religious experiences are a sine qua non for anyone who expects to be taken with full seriousness when he talks or writes about religion. So given that David Lewis did not have a religious bone in his body, as his wife stated, that gives me an excellent reason not to take with full seriousness his asseverations on religion. He literally does not know what he is talking about.

Ludwig Wittgenstein, by contrast, was clearly a religious man. So I take his writings on religion with utmost seriousness, which is not to say that I endorse his philosophy of religion.

Camille Paglia on Philosophy and Women in Philosophy

Here:

The term "female philosopher" doesn't even make sense to me. Simone de Beauvoir was a thinker rather than a philosopher. A philosopher for me is someone who is removed from everyday concerns and manipulates terms and concepts like counters on a grid or chessboard. Both Simone de Beauvoir and Ayn Rand, another favourite of mine, have their own highly influential system of thought, and therefore they belong on any list of great philosophers.

This paragraph illustrates a conversational move I find very annoying. Characterizing the ploy in the abstract is not easy, but here goes. One takes a word in use and arbitrarily assigns one's own pejorative meaning to it while opposing it to some other word in the semantic vicinity of the first to which one assigns a non-pejorative meaning. Thus for Paglia 'philosopher' is a pejorative while 'thinker' is not, and no one can be both.

Simone de Beauvoir therefore cannot be a philosopher (bad!) but must be a thinker (good!). And because she cannot be a philosopher, 'female philosopher' makes no sense. Of course, the distinction is bogus, and there is no justification for Paglia's idiosyncratic re-definition of 'philosophy.'

Here is another example of the annoying move in question.

To make matters worse, Paglia, in the paragraph cited, contradicts herself. Having just gotten through telling us that de Beauvoir is not a philosopher but a thinker, she reverses course and tells us that she belongs on a list of great philosophers.

And Ayn Rand a great philosopher? Mercy!

The rest of her piece is no better than the paragraph cited.

Financial Advice: Short Form and Long Form

Source. Excellent advice, except for the last item. But the advice is incomplete. For a rather more complete analysis, see Some Principles of a Financial Conservative wherein I proffer advice that is rock-solid, absolutely free, and that also has the interesting property that few will follow it due to the social and moral decline of the nation.

The article from which I borrowed the above graphic sports this delightfully amphibolous construction: "It's really hard to be poor . . . ."

Reading those words, I thought to myself, yes, of course, you really have to work at being poor in this, the greatest and most prosperous nation ever to exist, a country that needs walls to keep people out unlike the commie states that need walls to keep people in. Anyone can avoid poverty if they practice he practices the old virtues and works hard. But then I realized that that cannot be the meaning intended in a sentence to be found in the left-leaning Washington ComPost.

A textbook example of amphiboly, then.

On the Misuse of Superlatives (the Brokaw Fallacy) and Two Other Fallacies

Adjectives admit of three degrees of comparison: positive, comparative, and superlative. The first refers to the zero case of comparison: Tom is tall. The second refers to a situation in which two things are compared: Tom is taller than Tim. The third refers to a situation in which a thing is compared to all the other members of its reference class: Tom is the tallest man in Fargo. It is easy to see that if Tom is the tallest man in Fargo, then (a) there cannot be a man taller than him in that reference class, and (b) he is unique in respect of tallness in that reference class. (I.e., there cannot be two tallest men in the same reference class.)

Therefore, if the WWII generation is the greatest generation (relative to some agreed-upon criteria of generational greatness), then (i) there is no greater generation, and (ii) the WWII generation is unique in respect of greatness. Now does Tom Brokaw really want to affirm both (i) and (ii)? Is the WWII generation the greatest generation of any country in the whole of recorded time? Or is it merely the greatest generation in American history? The latter is clearly dubious if not outright false: the generation of the founders is arguably the greatest generation of Americans. A fortiori, for the former.

What Brokaw is doing when he speaks of the WWII generation as the greatest is misusing the superlative ‘greatest’ to mean the positive ‘great,’ or perhaps the comparative ‘greater.’ Perhaps what he really wants to say is that the WWII generation is greater than the Baby Boomers. But instead of saying what he means, he says something literally false or else meaningless. One might think that a news anchor would have higher standards.

Perhaps the underlying problem is that people love to exaggerate for effect, and see nothing wrong with it. Not content to say that Bush was wrong about WMDs, his opponents say he lied – which is a misuse of ‘lie.’ Not content to say that she is hungry, my wife says she is starving. Not content to say that Christianity is more than a doctrine, Kierkegaard and fellow fideists say that Christianity is not a doctrine. Not content to use particular quantifiers ‘Some’, ‘Most’),people reach for universal quantifiers such as ‘Every,’ ‘All,’ ‘No,’ and ‘Never.’ Thus instead of saying that one must be careful when one generalizes, one says, ‘Never generalize,’ which refutes itself.

I have exposed three mistakes that the truth-oriented will want to avoid. We have the misuse of superlatives, the misuse of universal quantifiers, and the mistaken notion that if X is not identical to Y, then X and Y have nothing to do with each other.

Let me expatiate a bit further on the last mentioned mistake. If X is not identical to Y, it does not follow that X and Y are wholly diverse from each other. A book is not identical to its cover, but the two are not wholly diverse in that the cover is proper part of the book. Regretting is not identical to remembering, but the two are not wholly diverse: Every regretting is a remembering, but not conversely. A melody is not identical to the individual notes of which it is composed, but it is obviously not wholly diverse from them.

On Criticizing Something for Being What It Is

If a person or institution is essentially F, then to criticize it for being F is equivalent to criticizing it for existing. (If x is essentially F, then x cannot exist without being F. If x is F, but not essentially, then x is accidentally F: capable of existing without being F.) Let's test this thought against some examples.

1. Its core doctrines are essential to the Roman Catholic Church; to demand that it abandon one or more of them is to demand that it cease to exist.

2. The rejection of capitalism is essential to communism. Therefore, to demand that a communist embrace capitalism is to demand that he cease to be a communist.

3. The moral legitimacy of killing the other side's combatants in times of war is an essential commitment of the miltary. To demand that the military be pacifistic, that the Marine Corps become the Peace Corps, for example, is to demand that the military cease to exist.

4. If marriage is essentially between one man and one woman, then to demand same-sex marriage is to demand that marriage cease to exist.

Liberals and Straw Men

Here is a particularly egregious example of a liberal straw man argument. In a New Yorker piece, Margaret Talbot writes:

As a nation, we’re a little vague on what the Second Amendment’s protections of a citizen militia mean for gun ownership today. The N.R.A. insists that they mean virtually unlimited access to firearms for every American. . . .

Note the weasel word 'virtually' that pseudo-qualifies Talbot's falsehood, and allows her to pass it off with a show of plausibility. Or is Talbot flat out lying? A lie is not the same as a falsehood, the difference being the intention to deceive which is necessary for an utterance to count as a lie. I am not in a position to peer into Talbot's soul, so I hesitate to impute a lie to her. But if she is not lying, then she is ignorant, indeed culpably ignorant since on a minimal understanding of journalistic ethics one ought to become informed of the positions of an outfit such as the N.R.A. before confidently reporting on them.

How does the Straw Man fallacy come into this? The fallacy is committed when one (mis)represents one's opponent as holding a position he does not in fact hold and then attacking the position he does not hold. So Talbot falsely represents the N. R. A. has advocating the nonexistent right of all Americans, including felons, the mentally unstable, and the underaged, to keep and bear all types of firearms. Having set up the strawman, Talbot then earnestly argues against it.

I exposed another example the other day when I refuted the Wolff-Obama "You didn't build that!" argument.

A third example is the liberal complaint that conservatives are anti-government, as if advocating limited government makes one anti-government. Such a willful misrepresentation speaks volumes about the moral character of the ones who make it.

Nick Gillespie on Why Youth Favor Obama and Conservatism’s Contradictions

Support for Obama among 18-29 year olds exceeds that of any other age cohort. Reason Magazine's Nick Gillespie argues that Obama is in the process of "screwing them big time." Gillespie is right. What caught my eye, however, was Gillespie's explanation of why conservatives fail to get the youth vote:

I'd argue that what makes "the conservative message" resonate less among younger people is its, well, conservatism on things such as war, alternative lifestlyes, [sic] drug legalization, and immigration. Younger people are less hung up on the sorts of things that really twist conservatives' knickers. And young people then assume that many of the other things that conservatives espouse – such as generally free markets and open trade – are similarly warped. That conservatives are so inconsistent with their basic message – We want smaller government…except when we're talking about immigrants, the gays, and the ability to kill people overseas! – doesn't help matters, either. Most people surely don't prize consistency as much as libertarians do, but the obvious contradictions at the heart of conservative philosophy are off-putting to anyone with the smallest taste for consistency.

As a philosopher, logical consistency looms large for me. And so you will get my attention 'big time' if you can lay out for me "the obvious contradictions at the heart of conservative philosophy." But if they are obvious, then presumably all you need to do is draw my attention to them.

Unfortunately, public intellectuals, not being logically trained as most philosophers are, have an egregiously spongy notion of what a contradiction is. This is true of even very good public intellectuals such as Nat Hentoff and Nick Gillespie. (Hentoff, for whom I have a very high degree of respect, thinks one is being inconsistent if one is pro-life and yet supports capital punishment. He is demonstrably wrong.)

Ignoring Gillespie's invective and hyperbole, his point seems to be that the following propositions are logically inconsistent:

1. The legitimate functions of government are limited.

2. Among the the legitimate functions of government are national defense, securing of the borders, and preservation of traditional marriage's privileged position.

Now it should be obvious that these propositions are logically consistent: they can both be true. They are not logical contradictories of each other.

It is therefore foolish for Gillespie to accuse conservatives of inconsistency. And to speak of obvious inconsistency is doubly foolish. What he needs to do is argue that the governmental functions that conservatives deem necessary and legitimate are neither. This will require a good deal of substantive argumentation and not a cheap accusation of 'inconsistency.' For example, he can mount an economic argument for open borders. I wish him the best of luck with that. He will need it.

Curiously, Gillespie's own reasoning can be used against him. Suppose an anarchist comes along. Using Gillespie's own form of reasoning, he could argue that Gillespie the libertarian is being inconsistent. For he wants smaller government . . . except when it comes to the protection of life, liberty, and property (the Lockean triad, I call it). Then he wants coercive government to do its thing and come down hard on the malefactors. He's inconsistent! If he were consistent in his desire for limited government, he would favor no government. His libertarianism would then collapse into anarchism.

So by his own understanding of consistency, Gillespie is not being consistent. The same reasoning that he uses against conservatives can be used against him. The reasoning is of course invalid in both applications. It is invalid against the libertarian and equally so against the conservative.

But I like his black leather jacket schtick. It is always a pleasure to see him on the O'Reilly Factor.

On the Obvious

As Hilary Putnam once said, "It ain't obvious what's obvious." Or as I like to say, "One man's datum is another man's theory."

But is it obvious that it ain't obvious what's obvious?

It looks as if we have a little self-referential puzzle going here. Does the Hilarian dictum apply to itself? An absence of the particular quantifier may be read as a tacit endorsement of the universal quantifier. Now if it is never obvious what is obvious, then we have self-reference and the Hilarian dictum by its own say-so is not obvious.

Is there a logical problem here? I don't think so. With no breach of logical consistency one can maintain that it is never obvious what is obvious, as long as one does not exempt one's very thesis. In this case the self-referentiality issues not in self-refutation but in self-vitiation. The Hilarian dictum is a self-weakening thesis. Over the years I have given many examples of this. (But I am now too lazy to dig them out of my vast archives.)

There is no logical problem, but there is a factual problem. Surely some propositions are obviously true. Having toked on a good cigar in its end game, when a cigar is at its most nasty and rasty, I am am feeling mighty fine long about now. My feeling of elation, just as such, taken in its phenomenological quiddity, under epoche of all transcendent positings — this quale is obvious if anything is.

So let us modify the Hilarian dictum to bring it in line with the truth.

In philosophy, appeals to what is obvious, or self-evident, or plain to gesundes Menschenverstand, et cetera und so weiter are usually unavailing for purposes of convincing one's interlocutor.

And yet we must take some things as given and non-negotiable. Welcome to the human epistemic predicament.

Leftist First, Catholic Second

For too many Catholics and other Christians, their leftism is their real 'religion.' This from The Thinking Housewife:

ANNY YENNY reports at the website Politichicks that her eighth-grade son was given extra credit by his Catholic school religion teacher for fasting on the first day of Ramadan. When the mother complained, the teacher objected and “lectured [her] on the superiority of Muslims to Christians.”

The principles of ecumenism put forth at Vatican II lead with irrevocable logic to teaching Catholics how to be good Muslims.

I agree with something in the vicinity of the point the Housewife makes here. But her last sentence illustrates the slippery slope fallacy. If the logic is "irrevocable," then it is deductively valid; but slippery slope argumentation, if intended to be deductive, is always invalid. What should she have said? Something like this: 'The ecumenism of Vatican II set the stage for, and made likely, the sort of absurdities that Anny Yenny complains of."

Surely there was no logical necessity that the principles of Vatican II eventuate in the absurdity in question.

A Survey of Responses to the Three-In-One Paradox

Philosophers love a paradox, but hate a contradiction. Paradoxes drive inquiry while contradictions stop it dead in its tracks. The doctrine of the Trinity is a paradox threatening to collapse into one or more contradictions. Put starkly, and abstracting from the complexity of the creedal formulations, the doctrine says that God is one, and yet God is three. Now this is, or rather entails, an apparent contradiction since if God is three, then God is not one, which contradicts God's being one. But not every apparent contradiction is a real one. Hence it is a mistake to reject the doctrine due to its initial appearance of being self-contradictory. To put it another way, the doctrine is not obviously self-contradictory as some appear to believe. It is not obviously self-contradictory since it is not obvious that God is one and three in the same respect. To see contradictions that are not there is just as much of an intellectual mistake as to fail to see ones that are there.

I should say that I am interested in the general problem of apparent contradictions both in philosophy and out, what contradictions signify, and how we ought to deal with them. My interest in the Trinity is a special case of this general interest. Herewith, a preliminary attempt at cataloging some ways of dealing with apparent contradictions, taking the Trinity as my chief example.

The following catalog divides into two parts. The first five entries treat the three-in-one contradiction as merely apparent, unreal, unproblematic, while the remaining entries treat it as real or unavoidable. But what do I mean when I say that a contradiction is unavoidable? Let us say that a contradiction has limbs. For example, I am sitting now and I am not sitting now is a contradiction assuming that 'now' denotes the same time in both of its occurrences. I am sitting now is the first limb; I am not sitting now is the second limb. A contradiction is unavoidable (avoidable) if we have (do not have) good reasons for accepting both limbs. The example just cited is an example of an avoidable contradiction since there is no good reason to accept both limbs.

But some contradictions seem unavoidable. For example, there is reason to think that a set exists if and only if it has members. But there is also reason to think that a set — the null set – can exist without members. This apparent contradiction is quite different from the one concerning my being seated/unseated. It is not obviously avoidable if it is avoidable at all. I am not saying that this is genuine contradiction; I am saying that it is a plausible candidate for such status.

The Contradiction as Merely Apparent

1. Deny the first limb. In God is one and God is three, God is one is the first limb. The contradiction is easily dismissed if we simply deny this limb and embrace tri-theism. This is of course unacceptable to the Christian and indeed to any sophisticated theist. A defensible theism must be a monotheism.

2. Deny the second limb, and embrace radical monotheism along Jewish or Islamic lines.

3. Reject both limbs by rejecting the presupposition on which both rest, namely, that God exists, or that 'God' has a referent. If this presupposition is not satisfied, then the question lapses.

4. Make a distinction between the respect in which God is one and the respect in which God is three. Alphonse Gratry, for example, distinguishing between nature and person says that God is one nature
in three persons. (Logic, p. 336) Drawing a distinction between respects is the standard way to defuse a contradiction. But in the case of the Trinity it accomplishes little unless one can explain how the distinguished items are related. Suppose one is told that a certain ball is both red and green at the same time. This is easily seen to be true if the ball is red in one hemisphere and green in the other. In this case it is clear without further ado how the two hemispheres are related. Not so in the case of the Trinity.

5. A more sophisticated strategy is to locate an uncontroversial phenomenon in nature that exhibits a trinitarian or binitarian structure. Suppose there is a two-in-one ( binity) in nature. If uncontroversially actual, then uncontroversially possible, even if we cannot understand how exactly it is possible. The possibility of a binitarian or trinitarian phenomenon in nature could then be used as a model to show, or begin to show, the possibility of the Trinity.

A putative example of a two-in-one is a statue. The statue S and the lump L of matter it is composed of are two things in that L can exist without S. If S is made of bronze, and the bronze is melted down, then L will exist without S existing. Even if the lump of bronze and the statue come into existence at the same time, and pass out of existence at the same later time, they are two. For they are modally discernible: the lump has a property the statue lacks, the property of being possibly such as not to be a statue. So, for both temporal and modal reasons, lump and statue are not strictly identical. They are two.

But they are also one thing in that S just is formed matter. If S and L come into existence at the same time, and pass out of existence at the same later time, then they are spatiotemporally coincident and composed of exactly the same matter arranged in exactly the same way. That strongly suggests that S and L are the same.

On the one hand, it seems we must say that S and L are two and not one. On the other, it seems we must say that they are one and not two.

Perhaps we can say that what we have here is a binity, a two-in-one. If binities are actual, then they are possible, even if it is not wholly clear how they are possible. Assuming that the real cannot be contradictory, then the apparent contradiction of a two-in-one must be merely apparent. If this fifth strategy works, one will come to see that the Trinitarian contradiction is merely apparent, even if one does not achieve full clarity as to how the Trinity is possible. (But of course the transcendence of God ought to insure that much about him will remain beyond the ken of our finite intellects both here below and in the life to come, if there is one.)

The Contradiction as Unavoidable

6. Take the contradiction to be real or unavoidable — since both limbs are justifiable – and as proof that the triune God is impossible and hence necessarily nonexistent. In other words, adopt the following stance: (i) there is excellent reason to say that God must be one; (ii) there is excellent reason to say that God must be three; (iii) it is a contradiction to maintain that God is both one and three; (iv) therefore, God is impossible, hence nonexistent.

7. Take the contradiction to be unavoidable as in #6 and as proof that God is logically impossible. But instead of inferring from logical impossibility to necessary nonexistence, draw the conclusion that God exists despite the contradiction. One is reminded of the phrase attributed to Tertullian: Credo quia absurdum, I believe because it is absurd (logically contradictory). This also appears to be the position of Kierkegaard. What distinguishes strategy #6 from #7 is that in the former one takes logic as having veto power over reality: one takes the logically impossible, that which cannot be thought without contradiction, to be really impossible, impossible in reality apart from thought. That is, one takes the finite discursive intellect to be at least negatively related to extramental reality: nothing can be real unless it is thinkable by us without contradiction. Strategy #7, however, rests on the assumption that there can be a reality — the divine reality – which is not subject to logical laws which, if this strategy is correct, can only be our laws. What is necessarily false for us can nonetheless be true in reality.

8. Take the contradiction to be real or unavoidable, but also to be true. In both #6 and #7, the contradiction is taken to to be false, indeed necessarily false, but on this dialetheist option, it is a true contradiction. Accordingly, the Trinity doctrine is a true contradiction!

Are there any other options? Note that the relative identity approach falls under #4.

UPDATE. Chad comments:

Regarding "are there any other options?" on approaches to the Trinity paradox.

Another option that falls under the 'apparent contradiction' category is mysterianism: the contradiction is apparent only, but the resolution is a mystery, either heretofore or in principle.

Another option, which might stand between the 'apparent contradiction' and 'contradiction' categories, is van Inwagen's relative identity approach: The Trinity is contradictory if the standard logic of identity is correct, apparently contradictory if not.

Yet another option that falls under the 'contradiction' category: To say that a father can beget a son without a mother is a parent [patent?] contradiction.

Chad is right about mysterianism. That is a further option under the first category. I'm surprised I overlooked it. As for the relative identity approach, this was Peter Geach's before it was van Inwagen's. But doesn't this approach fall under #4? I'm not sure why Chad calls his third point a third option. Furthermore , isn't 'beget' a technical term in Trinitarian theology? The Son is said to be "begotten not made." The idea, I take it, is to avoid saying that the Son is created. If created, then a creature, then not God. If 'beget' has a technical meaning, why should it be a contradiction to say that the Father begets the Son?

The Logical Problem of the Trinity

Our question concerns the logical consistency of the following septad, each limb of which is a commitment of orthodoxy. See here for details. How can the following propositions all be
true?

1. There is only one God.
2. The Father is God.
3. The Son is God.
4. The Holy Spirit is God.
5. The Father is not the Son.
6. The Son is not the Holy Spirit.
7. The Father is not the Holy Spirit.

If we assume that in (2)-(7), the 'is' expresses absolute numerical identity, then it is clear that the septad is inconsistent. (Identity has the following properties: it is reflexive, symmetric, transitive, governed by the Indiscernibility of Identicals). For example, from (2) and (3) taken together it follows that the Father is the Son by Transitivity of Identity. But this contradicts (5).

So we have an inconsistent septad each limb of which is a commitment of orthodoxy. The task is to remove the contradiction without abandoning orthodoxy. There are different ways to proceed.

In a paper he sent me, Chad M. seems to adopt the following approach. Distinguish between the 'is' of identity and the 'is' of predication, and construe (2), (3), and (4) as predications. Well, suppose we do this. We get:

2*. The Father is divine
3*. The Son is divine
4*. The Holy Spirit is divine.

But this implies that there are three Gods, which contradicts (1). The trick is to retain real distinctness of Persons while avoiding tritheism.

Chad also blends the above strategy wth a mereological one. Following W. L. Craig, he thinks of the Persons as (proper) parts of God/Godhead. Each is God in that each is a (proper) part of God/Godhead. The idea, I take it, is that Persons are really distinct in virtue of being really distinct proper parts of God, but that there is only one God because there is only one whole of these parts. Each Person is divine in that each is a part of the one God. The parts of God are divine but not God in the way that the proper parts of a cat are not cats but are feline. Thus the skeleton of a cat is not a cat but is feline. The skeleton is feline without being a feline.

But I have a question for Chad. On orthodoxy as I understand it, God is one, not merely in number, but in a deeper metaphysical sense. Roughly, God is a unity whose unity is 'tighter' than the unity of other sorts of unity. Indeed, as befits an absolute, his unity is that than which no tighter can be conceived. The unity of mathematical sets and mereological sums is fairly loose, and the same goes for such concrete aggregates as Kerouac holding his cat. Although we are not forced to take the whole-part relation in the strict sense of classical mereology, I think it remains the case that the unity of anything that could be called a whole of parts will be too loose to capture the divine unity.

For one thing, wholes depend on their parts for their existence, and not vice versa. (Unless you thought of parts as abstractions from the whole, which the Persons could not be.) Parts are ontologically prior to the wholes of which they are the parts. This holds even in the cases in which the whole is a necessary being and each part is as well. The mathematical set of all primes greater than 1 and less than 8 is a necessary being, but so is each element of this set: 3, 5, and 7 are each necessary beings. Still, the existence of the set is metaphysically grounded in the existence of the elements, and not vice versa. The divine aseity, however, rules out God's being dependent on anything.

So my question for Chad is this: does the view that God is a whole of parts do justice to the divine unity?

The Stove ‘Dilemma’ and the Lewis ‘Trilemma’

This from R. J. Stove, son of atheist and neo-positivist, David Stove:

When the possibility of converting to Catholicism became a real one, it was the immensity of the whole package that daunted me, rather than specific teachings. I therefore spent little time agonizing over the Assumption of Mary, justification by works as well as faith, the reverencing of statues, and other such concepts that traditionally irk the non-Catholic mind.

Rather, such anguish as I felt came from entirely the other direction. However dimly and inadequately, I had learnt enough Catholic history and Catholic dogma to know that either Catholicism was the greatest racket in human history, or it was what it said itself that it was. Such studying burned the phrase "By what authority?" into my mind like acid. If the papacy was just an imposture, or an exercise in power mania, then how was doctrine to be transmitted from generation to generation? If the whole Catholic enchilada was a swindle, then why should its enemies have bestirred themselves to hate it so much? Why do they do so still?

This reminds me of the famous 'trilemma' popularized by C. S. Lewis: Jesus is either the Son of God, or he is a lunatic, or he is the devil. This trilemma is also sometimes put as a three-way choice among lord, lunatic, or liar. I quote Lewis and offer my critical remarks here.

Just as I cannot accept the Lewis 'trilemma' — which is not strictly a trilemma inasmuch as not all three prongs are unacceptable — I cannot accept the Stovian 'dilemma' which strikes me as a text-book case of the informal fallacy of False Alternative. ". . . either Catholicism was the greatest racket in human history, or it was what it said itself that it was." Why are these the only two alternatives? The Roman Catholic church claims to be the one, true, holy, catholic (universal), and apostolic church. One possibility is that the Roman church was all of these things before various linguistic, political, and theological tensions eventuated in the Great Schism of 1054 such that after that date the one, true, etc. church was the Orthodox church of the East. After all, both can and do trace their lineage back to Peter, the 'rock' upon whom Christ founded his church. That is at least a possibility. If it is actual, then the present Roman church would be neither a racket nor what it claims to be. It would be a church with many excellences that unfortunately diverged from the authentic Christian tradition.

Or it could be that that true church is not the Roman church but some Protestant denomination, or maybe no church is the true church: some are better than others, but none of the extant churches has 'cornered the market' on all religiously relevant truth. It might even be that it is impossible that any church be the true church and final repository of all religous truth.

I get the impression that Stove has a burning desire to belong to a community of Christian believers, is attracted to the Roman church for a variety of reasons, some of them good, and then concocts an worthless argument to lend a veneer of rationality to his choice. That is not so say his choice was not a good one. Better a Catholic than a benighted positivist like his father.

My point is a purely logical one: his alternative is a false alternative. I am not taking sides in any theological controversy. Not in this post anyway.

“Environmentalists are by Definition Extremists” More on the Misuse of ‘By Definition’

Regular readers of this blog know that I respect and admire Dennis Prager: he is a font of wisdom and a source of insight. And he is a real Mensch to boot. (If I were a Jew and he a rabbi, he'd be my choice.) But I just heard him say, "Environmentalists are by definition extremists." That is another clear example of the illicit use of 'by definition' that I pointed out in an earlier entry. Here are some examples of correct uses of 'by definition':

Bachelors are by definition male
Triangles are by definition three-sided
In logic, sound arguments are by definition valid. (A sound argument is defined as one whose form is valid and all of whose premises are true.)
In physics, work is defined as the product of force and distance moved: W= Fx.
In set theory, a power set is defined to be the set of all subsets of a given set.
By definition, no rifle is a shotgun.
Semi-automatic firearms are by definition capable of firing exactly one round per trigger pull until the magazine (and the chamber!) is empty.
In metaphysics, an accident by definition is logically incapable of existing without a substance of which it is the accident.
In astrophysics, a light-year is by definition a measure of distance, not of time: it is the distance light travels in one year.
By definition, the luminiferous either is a medium for the propagation of electromagnetic signals.

Incorrect uses of 'by definition':

Joe Nocera: "anyone who goes into a school with a semiautomatic and kills 20 children and six
adults is, by definition, mentally ill."
Donald Berwick: "Excellent health care is by definition redistributional."
Illegal aliens are by definition Hispanic.
Bill Maher, et al.: "Taxation is by definition redistributive."
Dennis Prager: "Environmentalists are by definition extremists."
Capitalists are by definition greedy.
Socialists are by definition envious.
Alpha Centauri is by definition 4.3 light-years from earth.
The luminiferous ether exists by definition.
By definition, the luminiferous ether cannot exist.

I hope it is clear why the incorrect uses are incorrect. As for the Prager example, it is certainly true that some environmentalists are extremists. But others are not. So Prager's assertion is not even true. Even if every environmentalist were an extremist, however, it would still not be true by definition that that is so. By definition, what is true by definition is true; but what is true need not be true by definition.

So what game is Prager playing? Is he using 'by definition' as an intensifier? Is he purporting to make a factual claim to the effect that all environmentalists are extremists and then underlining (as it were) the claim by the use of 'by definition'? Or is he assigning by stipulation his own idiosyncratic meaning to 'environmentalist'? Is he serving notice that 'extremist' is part of the very meaning of 'environmentalist' in his idiolect?

Language matters!