Not discerptible : not subject to being separated into parts // simple and indiscerptible entities— James Ward. (Merriam-Webster)
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Word of the Day: Indiscerptible
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Saturday Night at the Oldies: Nonsense Titles and Lyrics
I'm a serious man, as serious as cancer some would say. But it's Saturday night, a night on which I allow myself a drink or two and some nostalgic indulgence. Tonight, the unseriousness of nonsense titles and lyrics.
The Rivingtons, Papa Oom Mow Mow
The Trashmen, The Bird is the Word. It is not about Bird's Opening. A partial rip-off of the Rivingtons. Cultural appropriation?
Shirley Ellis, The Nitty Gritty Is 'nitty gritty' a racist dog whistle?
Shirley Ellis, The Name Game, long version. You didn't know there was a long version? Another reason you need my blog.
The Crystals, Da Doo Ron Ron
Captain Beefheart, Abba Zaba. I'd like to see a transcription of these lyrics. California's Mojave desert can do some strange things to your head.
Manfred Mann, Doo Wah Diddy Diddy
Arthur "Blind" Blake, Diddy Wah Diddy, 1929. Very nice guitar work. "I wish someone would tell me what 'Diddy Wah Diddy' means."
Little Richard, Tutti Frutti
The Chips, Rubber Biscuit, 1956
Beatles, Ob-La-Di Ob-La-Da
Eric Clapton, Hootchie Kootchie Man. This one goes out to Ed Buckner. Solo starts at 2:45. Cultural appropriation at its finest.
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Alain on Keeping to the Present
Substack latest.
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Epistemic Bluster
Man, who boasts of his knowledge, does not even know what knowledge is.
…………………….
The thought is from Michel de Montaigne (1533-1592), Apology for Raymond Sebond, trs. Roger Ariew and Marjorie Grene, Hackett Publishing, 2003, p. 12. The Apology first saw the light of day in 1580.
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Are Atheists Vincibly Ignorant? (2021 Version)
In Catholic thought there is what is called vincible ignorance. Here is a definition:
Lack of knowledge for which a person is morally responsible. It is culpable ignorance because it could be cleared up if the person used sufficient diligence. One is said to be simply (but culpably) ignorant if one fails to make enough effort to learn what should be known; guilt then depends on one's lack of effort to clear up the ignorance.
For present purposes, it suffices to say that 'God' refers to the supreme being of the Judeo-Christian tradition, and that an atheist is one who denies the existence of God.
I hold that there is vincible ignorance on various matters. But I deny that atheists qua atheists are vincibly ignorant. Whether or not God exists, one is not morally culpable for denying the existence of God.* Nor do I think one is morally culpable if one doubts the existence of God.
If God exists, and one is an atheist, then one is ignorant of God, but it does not follow that one is culpably ignorant. This commits me to saying that the atheist is invincibly ignorant of God. He is invincibly ignorant of God because God cannot be known to exist. If I cannot know that such-and-such, then I cannot be morally culpable for not knowing it. If I ought to X, then I am capable of X-ing. And so, by contraposition, if I am not capable of X-ing, then I am not morally obliged to X, whence it follows that I am not morally culpable for not X-ing.
If the atheist is invincibly ignorant of God, then so is the theist, whence it follows that I am not morally praiseworthy for being a theist.
This puts me at odds with St. Paul, at least on one interpretation of what he is saying at Romans 1: 18-20.
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*Why not? Because it is not clear that God exists. There are powerful albeit uncompelling arguments against the existence of God, chiefly, arguments from natural and moral evil, and, while there is plenty of evidence of the existence of God, the evidence does not entail the existence of God. Will you tell me that the evidence renders the existence of God more probable than not? I will respond by asking what probability has to do with it. Either God exists or he does not. If he does, then he is a necessary being. If he does not, then he is impossible. I will demand of you that you attach sense to the claim that such a being — one that is either necessary or impossible– can have its probability raised or lowered by evidence. This is a huge and controversial topic. No more can be said about it now.
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“Ignorance of the Law is No Excuse”
AN EMINENTLY REASONABLE PRINCIPLE, but only if the law can be known by the average citizen who exercises appropriate diligence. For that exercise of due diligence to be possible, however, laws must be relatively few in number, rational in content, and plainly stated. If that were the case, then ignorance of the law would be vincible ignorance and thus no excuse or defense. But it is not now the case.
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Our Unprecedented Cultural Predicament
Michael Anton says here what many of us have been saying for years, but no one that I know of has ever said it better. One question that has been exercising me of late is: How long can a nation last that erects monuments to the worthless while destroying the memorials of the worthy? Here is Anton on George Floyd:
But in terms of what we choose to elevate, nothing illustrates the perversity of present America more than the deification of George Floyd. There are now monuments to him all over the country that are treated as sacred. In a rare instance when one is defaced, the resultant outcry resembles the Athenian people’s reaction to the desecration of the Hermai. One may insist that George Floyd did not deserve to die the way he did and still see that neither did he live his life so as to make the possibility remote. He was convicted of eight crimes and charged with or detained for at least nineteen (though one must here concede the difficulty of finding reliable relevant information, since unflattering facts about Floyd’s life are effectively suppressed and are taboo to discuss). The worst of his crimes was an armed robbery in which he pointed a gun at the belly of a woman who may (or may not) have been pregnant. Floyd’s admirers insist she wasn’t, but more careful sources assert only that no one has ever definitively proved she was. Floyd was the father of five children, from whose lives he was by all accounts absent, and none of whose mothers he ever married. At the time of his death, Floyd was in the process of being arrested for yet another crime and was not cooperating with the arresting officers. A serial drug abuser, he had in his system not just methamphetamine but a potentially lethal dose of fentanyl—an extremely dangerous synthetic opioid—which may well have contributed to his death. Even if one fully accepts the trial court’s finding that the drugs played no role, one must still admit that had Floyd only gotten into the back of the police vehicle as officers instructed, he could not have died in the way prosecutors (and the media) alleged. Above all, we must confront the painful fact that Floyd did not, according to moral standards that for centuries were taken for granted, live a life worthy of admiration, much less of veneration. Yet our society treats him as a saint, if not something higher. The pagan gods were not always well-behaved, to say the least. But has any people ever chosen such an undeserving object of worship?
I urge you all to study Anton's erudite essay. Comments enabled.
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Nancy Pelosi and the Divine Spark
Posted on my Facebook page, two years ago. I nailed it then, and it stays nailed down. Nancy has declined in the last two years. She seems on the verge of joining Sleepy Joe in the land of non compos mentis.………………Donald Trump famously referred to MS-13 gangsters as "animals." That's not the way I would put it inasmuch as it is an insult to animals who, unlike the gangbangers, are beneath good and evil. But Trump talks like a working stiff and we all know what he meant. Pelosi, however, took umbrage, protesting that the murderous bunch possesses "the divine spark" (her phrase) along with the rest of us. I don't disagree, but I do have a couple of questions for Madame Speaker.First, Nancy dear, do you think the pre-natal also have the divine spark? If not, why not? Isn't that what your Catholic religion, bits of which you regularly inject into your speeches, teaches? And if the horrific rapes, murders, beheadings, etc. of the MS-13 do not cause them to forfeit the "divine spark," then how it it that a human fetus' lack of development prevents it from having said spark?Second, as a leftist committed to driving every vestige of religion, or rather Christianity, from the public square, can't you see that it is inconsistent of you to use themes from your Catholic girlhood when it suits you and your obstructionist purposes? You come across as a silly goose of a dingbat. Or is that just an airhead act to mask your mendacity and subversiveness and Alinskyite disregard for double standards?
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Syntactic and Semantic Validity Again
Edward sends this interesting example:
Omnis homo est mortalis
Socrates is a man
Sokrates ist sterblich
Semantically valid, but not syntactically?
No, syntactically valid because the argument instantiates a valid argument-form, to wit:
Every F is a G
a is an F
Therefore
a is a G.Validity is a matter of form. An argument is valid if it instantiates a valid argument-form. It is the form that is valid or invalid in the primary senses of these terms. The argument itself is valid or invalid in secondary senses. The argument inherits its validity from the form, so to speak. Or you could say that it is the validity of the form that is the ground of, and accounts for, the validity of the argument.
For me, and here is where Ed will disagree, a valid deductive argument such as the 'Socrates' syllogism above, is a sequence of propositions, not of sentences, that instantiates a valid argument-form.
A proposition is what a sentence in the indicative mood expresses. To be precise, a proposition is what is expressed by the tokening (whether by utterance, writing, or in some other way) of a sentence in the indicative mood. The following three sentences, each from a different language, can be used to express one and the same proposition or Fregean Gedanke (thought) :
Sokrates mortalis est.
Sokrates ist sterblich.
Socrates is mortal.These three numerically different sentence tokens from three different languages express the same proposition when they are used to express a proposition. Sentences are linguistic entities. Propositions are extra-linguistic, and therefore not tied to particular languages as sentences are. Not tied in the sense that the same proposition can be expressed in different languages. Suppose that every English speaker is exterminated. Could it then be said that Socrates is mortal? Yes, though not in those words. One could say the same thing by uttering the corresponding German or French or Turkish sentence.
This is a reason to distinguish propositions from sentences.
Now glance back at Ed's example. It is linguistically hybrid. But logically it expresses the very same argument (sequence of propositions) that the following does:
Every man is mortal
Socrates is a man
Ergo
Socrates is mortal.The argument expressed is syntactically valid because it is an instance of a valid argument-form.
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Syntactic versus Semantic Validity
Consider the argument:
Bill is a brother
—–
Bill is a sibling.Is this little argument valid or invalid? It depends on what we mean by 'valid.' Intuitively, the argument is valid in the following sense:
D1. An argument is valid if and only if it is impossible that its premise(s) be true and its conclusion false.
(D1) may be glossed by saying that there are no possible circumstances in which the premises are true and the conclusion false. Equivalently, in every possible circumstance in which the premises are true, the conclusion is true. Since it is impossible that Bill be a brother without his being a sibling, the opening argument is valid by (D1).
(D1), though correct as far as it goes, leaves unspecified the source or ground of a valid argument's validity. This is the philosophically interesting question. What makes a valid argument valid? What is the ground of the impossibility of the premises' being true and the conclusion's being false? One answer is that the source of validity is narrowly logical or purely syntactic: the validity of a valid argument derives from its instantiation of valid argument-forms.
Now it is obvious that the validity of the above argument does not derive from its logical form. The logical form is
Fa
—–
Gawhere 'a' is an arbitrary individual constant and 'F' an arbitrary predicate constant. The above argument-form is invalid since it is easy to interpret the place-holders so as to make the premise true and the conclusion false: let 'a' stand for Al, 'F' for fat and 'G' for gay.
Valid arguments are either syntactically valid or semantically valid. The opening argument is not syntactically valid but it is semantically valid.
D2. An argument is syntactically valid iff it is narrowly-logically impossible that there be an argument of that form having true premises and a false conclusion.
According to (D2), a valid argument inherits its validity from the validity of its form, or logical syntax. So on (D2) it is primarily argument-forms that are valid or invalid; arguments are valid or invalid only in virtue of their instantiation of valid or invalid argument-forms. (D2) is thus a specification of the generic (D1).
But there is a second specification of (D1) according to which validity/invalidity has its source in the constituent propositions of the arguments themselves and so depends on their extra-syntactic content:
D3. An argument is extra-syntactically valid iff (i) it is impossible that its premises be true and its conclusion false; (ii) this impossibility is grounded neither in any contingent matter of fact nor
in formal logic proper, but in some necessary connection between the senses or the referents of the extra-logical terms of the argument.A specification of (D3) is
D4. An argument is semantically valid iff (i) if it is impossible that its premises be true and its conclusion false; and (ii) this impossibility is grounded in the senses of the extra-logical terms of
the argument.Thus to explain the semantic validity of the opening argument we can say that the sense of 'brother' includes the sense of 'sibling.' There is a necessary connection between the two senses, one that does not rest on any contingent matter of fact and is also not mediated by any purely formal law of logic. Note that logic allows (does not rule out) a brother who is not a sibling. Logic would rule out a non-sibling brother only if 'x is F & x is not G' had only false substitution-instances — which is not the case. To put it another way, a brother that is not a sibling is a narrowly-logical possibility. But it is not a broadly-logical possibility due to the necesssary connection of the two senses.
So it looks as if analytic entailments like Bill is a brother, ergo, Bill is a sibling show that subsumability under purely formal logical laws is not necessary for (generically) valid inference. Sufficient, but not necessary. Analytic entailments appear to be counterexamples to the thesis that inferences in natural language can be validated only by subsumption under logical laws.
One might wonder what philosophers typically have in mind when they speak of validity. I would say that most philosophers today have in mind (D1) as specified by (D2). Only a minority have in mind (D3) and its specification (D4). I could easily be wrong about that. Is there a sociologist of philosophers in the house?
Consider the Quineans and all who reject the analytic/synthetic distinction. They of course will have no truck with analytic entailments and talk of semantic validity. Carnapians, on the other hand, will uphold the analytic/synthetic distinction but validate all entailments in the standard (derivational) way by importing all analytic truths as meaning postulates into the widened category of L-truths.
Along broadly Carnapian lines one could argue that the above argument is an enthymeme which when spelled out is
Every brother is a sibling
Bill is a brother
—–
Bill is a sibling.Since this expanded argument is
syntactically valid, the original argument — construed as an enthymeme — is also syntactically valid. When I say that it is syntactically valid I just mean that the
conclusion can be derived from the premises using the resources of standard logic, i.e. the Frege-inspired predicate calculus one finds in logic textbooks such as I. Copi's Symbolic Logic. In the above example, one uses two inference rules, Universal Instantiation and Modus Ponens, to derive the conclusion.If this is right, then the source of the expanded argument's validity is not in a necessary connection between the senses of the 'brother' and 'sibling' but in logical laws. The question, however, was whether the opening argument as stated is valid or invaid. I say it is semantically, but not syntactically valid.
A juicier example is the Cartesian cogito:
I think
—–I am.
This looks to be semantically valid and thus valid without the need of an auxiliary premise to mediate the inferential transition from premise to conclusion. It is valid absent an auxiliary major premise such as 'Whatever thinks, is.'
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Military Service and ‘Skin in the Game’
There is something to be said in favor of an all-voluntary military, but on the debit side there is this: only those with 'skin in the game' — either their own or that of their loved ones — properly appreciate the costs of foreign military interventions. I say that as a conservative, not a libertarian.
There is also this to consider: In the bad old days of the draft, people of different stations – to use a good old word that will not be allowed to fall into desuetude, leastways not on my watch — were forced to associate with one another — with some good effects. It is 'broadening' to mingle and have to get along with different sorts of people. And when the veteran of foreign wars returns and takes up a profession in, say, academe, he brings with him precious hard-won experience of all sorts of people in different lands in trying circumstances. He is then more likely to exhibit the sense of a Winston Churchill as opposed to the nonsense of a Ward Churchill.
At the moment, Vladimir Putin is threatening to send his troops into the Ukraine. There are those with no skin in the game who are willing to expend American blood and treasure should the Ukraine be invaded. I humbly suggest that we secure our own borders before we worry about the borders of foreign countries. I have no skin in this game, but also no prospect of profiting from yet another foreign adventure.
Donald Trump has it right: America first!
Click on the link to learn what the slogan means.
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Saturday Night at the Oldies: ‘Babe’ and ‘Baby’ Songs
With half-apologies to overly sensitive feministas. Look, real men love and respect women and they use these words as terms of endearment. Take a powder!
Sonny and Cher, I Got You Babe, 1965. Don't let them say your hair's too long!
Bob Dylan and Joan Baez, It Ain't Me Babe, 1964. Note how Joan mothers the young Bob. Turtles' 1965 cover. Baez solo version.
Bob Dylan, It's All Over Now, Baby Blue, 1965. This one goes out to Charaine H.
Beatles, Baby's in Black
Ronettes, Be My Baby, 1963.
Bob Dylan, Baby Let Me Follow You Down, 1962. The surging harmonica near the beginning does it for me every time.
Traveling Wilburys, She's My Baby, 2007.
Charles Brown, Merry Christmas, Baby
Dion Dimucci with John Hammond, My Baby Loves to Boogie, 2020.
Beach Boys, Don't Worry Baby, 1964.
Bob Dylan, I'll Be Your Baby Tonight, 1968.
Them, Baby Please Don't Go. Muddy Waters, 1953.
Bruce Channel, Hey Baby! Date? Early '60s.
Ronettes, Baby, I Love You.
Drifters, There Goes My Baby, 1959.
Shirelles, Baby it's You, 1961.
Turtles, You Baby, 1966.
Dino Paul Crocetti, better known as Dean Martin, Melancholy Baby. From Steubenville, Ohio, if memory serves, as it usually does.
Dave Bagwill, my favorite Oregon luthier, recommends:
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From One Who Thinks that Consciousness is an Illusion
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Too Many of Us
Surface all the way down. Centerlessly peripheral. All fringe, no focus. Spiritually centrifugal. Swallowed by the social. Dis-tracted. Unaware without a care. Swamped by the flesh. Oblivious. Vain, vacant, vacillating. Thoughtlessly full of useless thoughts. Incontinent in every way except micturition.
Too many of us are like this.
Bill and Steven, I profited from what each of you has to say about Matt 5: 38-42, but I think…