Category: Logica Utens

Why Lie When You Have Good Arguments?

Last week I pointed out Senator Charles Schumer's blatant lie about Tea Partiers.  Apparently, Senator Jon Kyl has also lied and then gone on to justify his lie in a  manner most creative:

. . . Arizona senator Jon Kyl used his time on the Senate floor during a budget debate to claim that abortions make up "well over 90 percent of what Planned Parenthood does." When it was pointed out that, in fact, abortion funding constitutes about 3 percent of the organization's budget, Kyl shrugged it off. "It wasn't intended to be a factual statement," he said.

One question is why anyone would lie when they have he has decent arguments.  The use of tax dollars to fund abortion is morally wrong whatever one thinks of the morality of abortion itself.  It doesn't matter how many or how few tax dollars are used.  That's one argument.  A second is that funding outfits like Planned Parenthood is not among the essential functions of government, and that in a time of dire fiscal crisis, government must be pared back to its essential functions.  That's a second argument.  Properly exfoliated, they are powerful arguments.  They won't convince leftists, but then no conservative argument will.  But they will reinforce conservatives in their view and bring some fence-sitters over to our side.

Arguments appeal to our better nature, our rational, truth-seeking nature.

So what does Kyl do? He tells a lie thereby badly injuring his credibility.  Even if Kyl doesn't care about the truth, he ought to care about his credibility, and he must know that to be caught in a lie is to harm it.

So why lie when you have good arguments?

Perhaps it is like this.  "All's fair in love and war" and one of war's casualties is truth.  Politics has nothing to do with truth; it has everything to do with defeating your enemies and gaining or maintaining power.  Politics is about power, not truth.  Politics is war conducted by other means. (I call this the 'Converse Clausewitz principle.')

So perhaps when Schumer and Kyl et al. lie, they make a calculation:  the positive propaganda effect of the lie will offset the negative effect of being caught in a lie, and so lying is conducive to the end in view, namely, defeating the enemy.  Also to be considered is that when politicians  lie they are primarily addressing their constituencies many of the members of which do not care about truth either.  Proof of this is the crap that people forward via e-mail: scurrilous and unsourced allegations about Obama, Pelois and whoever.  When you point out to them that it is drivel, they are unfazed.  For again, it is about winning by any means, and truth doesn't come into it.

Mendacity pays.  Perhaps that is why politicians are so practiced in the arts of deception and prevarication.  They get away with their mendacity and we let them.  They don't care about truth because the people don't and they represent the people.  Maybe we get what we deserve.

Gratuitous Evil and Begging the Question: Does LAFE Beg the Question?

What is it for an argument to beg the question? I suggest that an argument begs the question if it is impossible to know one of the premises to be true without knowing that the conclusion is true. The simplest question-begging arguments are of the form

p
—
p.

Clearly, every argument of this form is valid, and some arguments of this form are sound. It follows that an argument can be sound and yet probatively worthless. In plain English, no argument of the above form proves its conclusion in the sense of giving a 'consumer' of the argument any reason to accept the conclusion; it rather presupposes its conclusion. One cannot know the premise to be true without knowing that the conclusion is true.

Now consider a richer example: (P1) We are creatures; (P2) There is no creature without a creator; therefore, (C) A creator exists. This argument begs the question in that it is impossible to know that (P1) is true without knowing that (C) is true. For only if I know that a creator exists can I know that I am a creature. The argument is not probative because it presupposes in (P1) what it needs to prove. (Of course, I am assuming that one is not equivocating on 'creature' and that one is using it in the sense in which it must be used for (P2) to be true; if one is equivocating, then naturally the argument is worthless for this reason.)

Conservative Activism, The Left’s Incomprehension, and the Genetic Fallacy (2010 Version)

'Conservative activism' has an oxymoronic ring to it.  Political activism does not come naturally to conservatives, as I point out in The Conservative Disadvantage.   But the times they are a 'changin' and so I concluded that piece by saying that  we now need to become active. "Not in the manner of the leftist who seeks meaning in activism for its own sake, but to defend ourselves and our values so that we can protect the private sphere from the Left's totalitarian encroachment.   The conservative values of liberty and self-reliance and fiscal responsibility are under massive assault by the Obama administration . . . ."

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Of Haircuts, Amphibolies, and Maxims

I got my quarterly haircut the other day.  A neighbor remarked, "I see you got a haircut," to which I responded with the old joke, "I got 'em all cut."

In this as in so many other cases the humor derives from ambiguity, in this case amphiboly (syntactic ambiguity.)  The spoken 'I see you got a haircut' can be heard as 'I see you got a hair cut.'

The neighbor laughed at the joke, but I spared him the analysis, not to mention my theory of humor, both of which would have bored him.

Two relevant maxims: 'Tailor your discourse to your audience' and 'Among regular guys be a regular guy.'  And a meta-maxim: 'Step out of your house only with maxims at the ready.'

The Ground Zero Mosque: The Controversy Continues

And it seems to be heating up as the anniversary of 9/11 approaches.  I suspect dialogue with liberals on this topic is impossible due to what I call the 'two planets problem':  conservatives and liberals live on different planets.  You could cash out the metaphor by saying  that we differ radically in temperament, sense of life, values, and assumptions. But I am getting e-mail from decent and well-intentioned left-leaners who disagree with me about the GZM, so here goes one more time. 

Let's be clear about what the issue is.  To put it as crisply as possible, it is about propriety, not legality.  No one denies that Imam Rauf et al. have the legal right to build their structure on the land they have purchased.  The point is rather that the construction in that place is improper, unwise, provocative, insensitive, not conducive to comity.  To put it aphoristically, what one has a right to do is not always right to do.  But that is to put it too mildly:  the construction of a mosque on that hallowed ground is an outrage to the memories of those who died horrendous deaths on 9/11 because of the acts of Muslim terrorists, terrorists who didn't just happen to be Muslims, but whose terrorist deeds were a direct consequence of their Islamist beliefs. 

Now at this point you either get it or you don't.  A majority of the American people get it, but Obama doesn't.   Lacking the spine to address the real issue — the issue of propriety, not legality — he gave us a lecture on freedom of religion and the First Amendment.  Besides being b-o-r-i-n-g, his pathetic homily amounted to the logical fallacy of ignoratio elenchi.  This fallacy is committed when, mistaking the thesis your interlocutor is advancing, you respond to a distinct thesis that he is not advancing.  We who oppose the GZ mosque do not maintain that its construction is illegal; and because we do not maintain this, Obama and his leftist cohort commit ignoratio elenchi when they insist that it is legal.

Here again we note the 'two planets' problem.'  Leftists just cannot grasp what the issue is as conservatives see it.  Since they do not feel the impropriety of a mosque's being built near Ground Zero, they cannot believe that conservatives feel it either; and so they must interpret the conservative response in some sinister way: as an expression of xenophobia or 'Islamophobia' or nativism or a desire to strip Muslim citizens of their First Amendment rights. 

Supposedly, a major motive behind the construction is to advance interfaith dialogue, to build a bridge between the Muslim and non-Muslim communities.  But this reason is so patently bogus, so obviously insincere, that no intelligent person can credit it.  For it is a well-known fact that a majority of the American people vehemently oppose the GZM.  Given this fact, the construction cannot possibly achieve its stated end of advancing mutual understanding.  So if Rauf and Co. were sincere, they would move to another site.

Here is a little analogy.  Suppose you and I have a falling out, and then I make an attempt at conciliation. I extend my hand to you.  But you have no desire for reconciliation and you refuse to shake hands with me.  So I grab your hand and force you to shake hands with me.  Have I thereby patched things up with you?  Obviously not: I have made them worse.  Same with the GZM.  Once it became clear that the the American people opposed the GZM, Rauf and Co. either should have nixed the project or else had the cojones to say:  we have a legal right to build here and we will do so no matter what you say or how offended you are.

As it is, we have reason to suspect Rauf et al. of deception.

 

On the Illicit Use of ‘By Definition’

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 illict 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 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 don't know and it doesn''t matter.  The main thing is not to be taken in by their linguistic sleight-of-hand whether intentional or unintentional.

 

‘No News is Good News’

Spencer Case, 'on the ground' in Afghanistan, writes:

Try translating the following sentence into logic:  "No news is good news."

Whenever I try it, I end up saying that there isn't any good news and that's not what I mean to say. If you're not too terribly busy, I'd like to see how the trick is done.

Also, the Idaho State Journal has been publishing my blog online. It is available here.

Clearly, the translation cannot be: (x)(Nx –> ~Gx).  For what the sentence means is not that no news report is a good news report.  What it means is that it is good not to receive news reports. (For if one receives no news, one will not receive any bad news.)  But even this  is not quite right.  To be precise, what the target sentence expresses in standard contexts of use is that every report that there is nothing to report is a good report.  For any x and y, if x is a first-order report of recent events, and x expresses the proposition *There is nothing to report*, then x is a good report.  In symbols: (x)(y)(Rx & Exy & y = *There is nothing to report* –>Gx).

But there may be a better parsing.

 

De Trinitate: The Statue/Lump Analogy and the ‘Is’ of Composition

Thanks to Bill Clinton, it is now widely appreciated that much rides on what the meaning of ‘is’ is. Time was, when only philosophers were aware of this. In our Trinitarian explorations with the help of our Jewish atheist friend Peter we have discussed the ‘is’ of identity and the ‘is’ of predication. We saw that ‘The Father is God’ could be construed as

1. The Father is identical to God

or as

2. The Father is divine.

Both construals left us with logical trouble. If each of the Persons is identical to God, and there is exactly one God, then (given the transitivity and symmetry of identity) there is exactly one Person. On the other hand, if each of the Persons is divine, where ‘is’ functions as copula, then tri-theism is the upshot. Either way, we end up contradicting a central Trinitarian tenet.

But there is also the ‘is’ of composition as when we say, ‘This countertop is marble,’ or in my house, ‘This countertop is faux marble.’ ‘Is’ here is elliptical for ‘is composed of.’ Compare: ‘That jacket is leather,’ and ‘This beverage is whisky.’ To say that a jacket is leather is not to say that it is identical to leather – otherwise it would be an extremely large jacket – or that it has leather as a property: leather is not a property. A jacket is leather by being made out of leather.

Suppose you have a statue S made out for some lump L of material, whether marble, bronze, clay, or whatever. How is S related to L? It seems clear that L can exist without S existing. Thus one could melt the bronze down, or re-shape the clay. In either case, the statue would cease to exist, while the quantity of matter would continue to exist. It follows that S is not identical to L. They are not identical because something is true of L that is not true of S: it is true of L that it can exist without S existing, but it is not true of S that it can exist without S existing.   I am assuming the following principle, one that seems utterly beyond reproach:

(InId)  If x = y, whatever is true of x is true of y, and vice versa.

(This is a rough formulation of the Indiscenibility of Identicals.  A more careful formulation would block  such apparent counterexamples  as:  Maynard G. Krebs believes that the morning star is a planet but does not believe that the evening star is a planet.)

Returning to the statue and the lump, although S is not identical to L, S is not wholly distinct, or wholly diverse, from L either. This is because S cannot exist unless L exists. This suggests the following analogy: The Father is to God as the statue is to the lump of matter out of which it is sculpted. And the same goes for the other Persons. Schematically, P is to G as S to L. The Persons are like hylomorphic compounds where the hyle in question is the divine substance. Thus the Persons are not each identical to God, which would have the consequence that they are identical to one another. Nor are the persons instances of divinity which would entail tri-theism. It is rather than the persons are composed of God as of a common material substance. Thus we avoid a unitarianism in which there is no room for distinctness of Persons, and we avoid tri-theism. So far, so good.

Something like this approach is advocated by Jeffrey Brower and Michael Rea, here.

But does the statue/lump analogy avoid the problems we faced with the water analogy? Aren’t the two analogies so closely analogous that they share the same problems? Liquid, solid, and gaseous are states of water. Similarly, a statue is a state of a lump of matter. Modalism is not avoided. If the Persons are like states, then they are not sufficiently independent. But a statue is even worse off than a state of water. Water can be in one of its states whether or not we exist. But a hunk of matter cannot be a statue unless beings like us are on the scene to interpret it as a statue. Thus my little ceramic bust of Beethoven represents Beethoven only because we take it as representing the great composer. In a world without minds, it would not represent anything. The Persons of the Trinity, however, are in no way dependent on us for their being Persons of the Trinity.

It might be counterargued that water is not to its states as lump to statue. Water must be in one of its three states, but a lump of bronze need not be in any statue-state. That is indeed a point of disanalogy between the two analogies. But notice that God and the Persons are necessarily related: God cannot exist without the Persons. A lump of bronze can exist without being a statue. In this respect, the water analogy is better: water must be in one its three states just as God must be composed of the three Persons.

Besides the threat of modalism, there is also the fact that God is not a substance in the sense in which clay and water are substances. Thus God is not a stuff or hyle, but a substance in the sense of a hypostasis or hypokeimenon. And it does no good to say that God is an immaterial or nonphysical stuff since what must be accommodated is the divine unity. The ground of divine unity cannot be matter whether physical or nonphysical. We saw that one and the same quantity of H20 cannot be simultaneously and throughout liquid, solid, and gaseous. Similarly, one and the same quantity of bronze cannot be simultaneously and throughout three different statues. Connected with this is how God could be a hylomorphic compound, or any sort of compound, given the divine simplicity which rules out all composition in God.

In sum, the statue/lump analogy is not better than the water/state analogy. Neither explains how we can secure both unity of the divine nature and distinctness of Persons.

Is The Doctrine of the Trinity Logically Coherent? (Peter Lupu)

In this installment, Peter Lupu, atheist, defends the logical coherence of the doctrine of the Trinity.  My critical comments follow in blue.

It may be somewhat of an astonishment to those who know me well that I should venture to defend the doctrine of the Trinity. I am not a Christian; I am not religious; I am an atheist; and I have at least on one occasion privately expressed to Bill my reservations about the coherence of the Trinity doctrine. Nevertheless, there is a question here that deserves exploring. What is the question?

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A Common Liberal Fallacy: The Diachronic Red Herring

Much opposition to contemporary political conservatism involves a curious argumentative fallacy that I shall dub the Diachronic Red Herring. A liberal succumbs to this fallacy when he (i) appeals to the past accomplishments of liberalism to justify contemporary liberalism while ignoring the ways in which contemporary liberalism has come to occupy extreme positions; and (ii) criticizes contemporary conservatism by bringing up past failings of conservatives while ignoring the fact that contemporary conservatism accepts many of the advances of paleo-liberalism.


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The Woman’s Body Argument

The following is an abortion argument one often hears.  It is sometimes called  the Woman's Body Argument.  I will argue that it is not rationally compelling.

1. The fetus is a part of a woman's body.
2. A woman has the right to do whatever she wants with any part of her body.
Therefore
3. A woman has the right to do whatever she wants with the fetus, including having it killed.

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Fetal Rights and the Death Penalty: Consistent or Inconsistent?

Is it consistent to support both fetal rights and the moral acceptability of capital punishment? That depends on what is meant by 'consistent.' Let us begin by asking whether the following propositions are logically consistent.

P1. A living human fetus has a right to life which cannot be overridden except in rare cases (e.g. threat to the life of the mother).

P2. Capital punishment for certain offences is morally justified.

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The Potentiality Universality Principle and Feinberg’s “Logical Point”

I have already introduced  PIP, PEP, and PAP as three principles governing potentiality in the precise sense relevant to the Potentiality Argument. Now I introduce a fourth principle for your inspection which I will call the Potentiality Universality Principle:

PUP: Necessarily, if a normal F has the potentiality to become a G, then every normal F has the potentiality to become a G.

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The Potentiality Argument Against Abortion and Feinberg’s Logical Point About Potentiality

I claim that the standard objections to the Potentiality Argument (PA) are very weak and can be answered. This is especially so with respect to Joel Feinberg's "logical point about potentiality," which alone I will discuss in this post. This often-made objection is extremely weak and should persuade no rational person. But first a guideline for the discussion.

The issue is solely whether Feinberg's objection is probative, that and nothing else. Thus one may not introduce any consideration or demand extraneous to this one issue. One may not demand of me a proof of the Potentiality Principle (PP), to be set forth in a moment. I have an argument for PP, but that is not the issue currently under discussion. Again the issue is solely whether Feinberg's "logical point about potentiality" refutes the PA. Progress is out of the question unless we 'focus like a laser' on the precise issue under consideration.

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