Climate Bluster

A redacted version of a Facebook entry from about a year ago. 
 
………………………………..
 
He who does not know is inclined to pretend. A world of ignorance is a world of bluster. One species thereof is climate bluster. "The science is settled!" It is not. What is settled, but only among leftists, is climate ideology. An ideology is a system of action-guiding beliefs. Beliefs needn't be true to guide and misguide action. 
 
What drives climate ideology is hostility to individual liberty and its sine qua non, private property and free markets. Climate alarmism is part of the Left's socialist and totalitarian agenda. The ideological nature of the alarmism is betrayed in more than one way. One way is by the refusal of leftists to proffer an honest characterization of what they mean by 'climate change.' That there is climate change is a truism. But they are pushing either a falsehood or an extremely dubious thesis.  Objective truth and its subjective correlate, truthfulness, are not their concerns: leftists are out for power.  Their aims are practical, not theoretical: to change the world, not to understand it. (Marx) Ameliorative change presupposes understanding. The truth must take the lead. Leftists have it backwards: the truth is whatever empowers the agents of the agenda who aim to impose their will on reality (Nietzsche).
 
Note the obfuscatory tactic: smuggle a substantive but extremely dubious claim under cover of the truism that climate changes.  Intellectual honesty is not a mark of ideologues.  It cannot be since 'truth' is whatever  is dictated by the needs of power. Another intellectually dishonest tactic employed by leftists is to accuse doubters of being deniers with such smears as 'climate denialism' when it is clear that to doubt a proposition is not to deny it. But the truth I just enunciated will be ignored by those for whom truth is not a binding norm. 
 
Leftists mean by 'climate change' the conjunction of the following distinct claims. The Earth's climate is changing. The change is irreversibly in the direction of higher and higher temperatures of the Earth's oceans and land masses. The change is catastrophic for life on Earth. It is so catastrophic that extreme measures must be taken immediately, for example, the measures outlined in "The Green New Deal." The catastrophic change is imminent or near-imminent: such as to occur in 10-15 years. The etiology of this catastrophic change is well-understood. It is largely man-made: the anthropogenic causal factors are not minor, but major: they dwarf non-anthropogenic factors such as solar activity. The specific cause of anthropogenic climate change is also well-understood: carbon emissions.
 
Now ask yourself: Are each of these claims individually plausible? No. Only the first is. And how plausible is this conjunction of claims? It is bound to be less plausible than the least plausible of them.  I humbly suggest that the Left's climate bluster is a lot of hot air.
 
Should we reduce carbon emissions? Yes. And explore alternative sources of energy? Absolutely.
 
What you have to understand is that for the Left, the (apparent) issue is never or hardly ever  the (real) issue. Leftists will make a crisis out of anything if it can be used to attack individual liberty and the private property and free markets that are its foundation. The real issue and goal is a "fundamental transformation" (Obama) of the USA into a socialist state. 

Questions about a Lukasiewicz Passage

E. B. sent this:

http://www.logicmuseum.com/wiki/Logical_form_(Lukasiewicz)

“When, for instance, asserting the implication 'If all philosophers are men, then all philosophers are mortal' you would also assert as second premiss the sentence 'Every philosopher is a man', you could not get from these premisses the conclusion 'All philosophers are mortal', because you would have no guarantee that the sentence 'Every philosopher is a man' represents the same thought as the sentence 'All philosophers are men'. It would be necessary to confirm by means of a definition that 'Every A is B' means the same as 'All A's are B's'; on the ground of this definition replace the sentence 'Every philosopher is a man' by the sentence 'All philosophers are men', and only then will it be possible to get the conclusion. By this example you can easily comprehend the meaning of formalism. Formalism requires that exactly the same thought should always be expressed by means of exactly the same series of words ordered in exactly the same manner.”

My emphasis.

Suppose we compare the following two argument displays:

If all philosophers are men, then all philosophers are mortal
All philosophers are men
—-
All philosophers are mortal.

If every philosopher is a man, then all philosophers are mortal
All philosophers are men
—-
All philosophers are mortal.

Are they both valid, or is only the first valid? Lukasiewicz is telling us in effect that only the first is valid. No doubt the first is valid: it instantiates the valid argument form, modus ponendo ponens.  But then, by my lights, so does the second. So both arguments are valid.

But it all depends on what we take an argument to be.  I hold that  an argument is not the same as an argument display. A necessary but not sufficient condition of anything's being an argument is that it be a sequence of propositions. A proposition is not the same as a sentence in the indicative mood. Die Sonne scheint and 'The sun shines' are two different indicative sentence tokens in two different  languages. And yet they 'say the same thing' or rather can be used by the same or different speakers to  say the same thing. We accommodate this fact by introducing a species of abstract object we call propositions or thoughts, the latter word used by L. above.  The sentences cited express one and the same proposition or thought.  Similarly with 'All philosophers are men' and 'Every man is a philosopher.' They express the same proposition.

So above what we have are two different ways of displaying one and the same argument.  Since that argument instantiates a valid argument form, the argument is valid.

Consider now these two argument displays:

Omnis homo mortalis est
Sokrates homo est
——-
Sockrates mortalis est.

Every man is mortal
Socrates is a man
—–
Socrates is mortal.

How many arguments? One or two? One. One and the same argument is expressed in two different languages.  I conclude that an argument is not the same a collection of sentences. Sentences are physical (marks on paper, pixels on a screen, acoustic disturbances); propositions are not. They are not seen with the eyes or heard with the ears or felt (as in Braille) with the fingers; they are understood by the mind. 

Finally, L. speaks of  exactly the same series of words ordered in exactly the same manner.  Same words in the same order? But how do we know that the words are the same? Is it because they have the same letters in the same order?  By that criterion, 'war' in the following two sentences is the same word:

Ich war ein Soldat.
I went to war.

But the two series of letters in the same order are not the same word. 

Now consider this array:

All philosophers are men.
Philosophers are, all of them, men.
Every philosopher is a man.

These sentences 'say the same thing,' i.e., they express the same proposition or thought. I know that because I understand English.  To understand English is to understand the meanings of English words and sentences.  Meanings are understood by the mind not perceived by the sense organs.

Robert Lewis Dabney on Conservatism

Dabney Robert LewisIt may be inferred again that the present movement for women’s rights will certainly prevail from the history of its only opponent: Northern conservatism. This is a party which never conserves anything. Its history has been that it demurs to each aggression of the progressive party, and aims to save its credit by a respectable amount of growling, but always acquiesces at last in the innovation. What was the resisted novelty of yesterday is today one of the accepted principles of conservatism; it is now conservative only in affecting to resist the next innovation, which will tomorrow be forced upon its timidity and will be succeeded by some third revolution; to be denounced and then adopted in its turn. American conservatism is merely the shadow that follows Radicalism as it moves forward towards perdition. It remains behind it, but never retards it, and always advances near its leader. . . . Its impotency is not hard, indeed, to explain. It is worthless because it is the conservatism of expediency only, and not of sturdy principle. It intends to risk nothing serious for the sake of the truth, and has no idea of being guilty of the folly of martyrdom. It always when about to enter a protest very blandly informs the wild beast whose path it essays to stop, that its “bark is worse than its bite,” and that it only means to save its manners by enacting its decent role of resistance: The only practical purpose which it now serves in American politics is to give enough exercise to Radicalism to keep it “in wind,” and to prevent its becoming pursy and lazy, from having nothing to whip. No doubt, after a few years, when women’s suffrage shall have become an accomplished fact, conservatism will tacitly admit it into its creed, and thenceforward plume itself upon its wise firmness in opposing with similar weapons the extreme of baby suffrage; and when that too shall have been won, it will be heard declaring that the integrity of the American Constitution requires at least the refusal of suffrage to asses. There it will assume, with great dignity, its final position.

1897

Source: https://mildcolonialboy.wordpress.com/category/robert-lewis-dabney/

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."

Zap diddy wah diddy

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.

Vito Caiati on David Brooks

I solicited Dr Caiati's comments on David Brooks' Atlantic piece, What Happened to American Conservatism?  The lede reads: "The rich philosophical tradition I fell in love with has been reduced to Fox News and voter suppression." That is a good tip-off to the quality of the article. Here is what Vito said, and I agree:

I am not the right person to write a response, since I have nothing but contempt for Brooks, whom I regard as a miserable opportunist at the service of the Left. (He is precisely the sort of creature that makes an ad hominem attack, usually best avoided, entirely appropriate.)  Any man who writes,

I’m content, as my hero Isaiah Berlin put it, to plant myself instead on the rightward edge of the leftward tendency—in the more promising soil of the moderate wing of the Democratic Party. If its progressive wing sometimes seems to have learned nothing from the failures of government and to promote cultural stances that divide Americans, at least the party as a whole knows what year it is

is either delusional for thinking that such a “moderate wing” actually exists and that “the party as a whole” is an entity that fosters national comity and is actually concerned for the welfare of the citizenry or, in my view, is simply acting in bad faith.  No true conservative of whatever stripe can have anything to do with this intellectually and morally bankrupt party, which is entirely dominated by the Left and which wages an unceasing war against the very traditions, customs, and legal system that Brooks supposedly values so highly. 

…………………..

Now for my two cents. Useful idiots such as Brooks are worse than hard leftists. They live in the past, blind to the present, and unwittingly advance the very causes that they, as conservatives, are supposed to be opposing.   Here is what I had to say four years ago. The passage of time has only reinforced my points:

The Op-Ed pages of The New York Times are plenty poor to be sure, but Ross Douthat and David Brooks are sometimes worth reading.  But the following from Brooks (28 October 2016) is singularly boneheaded although the opening sentence is exactly right:

The very essence of conservatism is the belief that politics is a limited activity, and that the most important realms are pre-­political: conscience, faith, culture, family and community. But recently conservatism has become more the talking arm of the Republican Party. Among social conservatives, for example, faith sometimes seems to come in second behind politics, Scripture behind voting guides. Today, most white evangelicals are willing to put aside the Christian virtues of humility, charity and grace for the sake of a Trump political victory.

Come on, man.  Don't be stupid.  The Left is out to suppress religious liberty.  This didn't start yesterday.  You yourself mention conscience, but you must be aware that bakers and florists have been forced by the state to violate their consciences by catering homosexual 'marriage' ceremonies.  Is that a legitimate use of state power?  And if the wielders of state power can get away with that outrage, where will they stop? Plenty of other examples can be adduced, e.g., the Obama administration's assault on the Little Sisters of the Poor.

The reason evangelicals and other Christians support Trump is that they know what that destructive and deeply mendacious stealth ideologue  Hillary will do if she gets power. It is not because they think the Gotham sybarite lives the Christian life, but despite his not living it.  They understand that ideas and policies trump character issues especially when Trump's opponent is even worse on the character plane.  What's worse: compromising national security, using high public office to enrich oneself, and then endlessly lying about it all, or forcing oneself on a handful of women?

The practice of the Christian virtues and the living of the Christian life require freedom of religion. Our freedoms are under vicious assault by leftists  like Hillary. This is why Trump garners the support of Christians.  

The threat from the Left is very real indeed.  See here and read the chilling remarks of Martin Castro of the U. S. Commission on Civil Rights.  Given Castro's comments the name of the commission counts as Orwellian. 

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.

_______________

*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.

“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.  

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.

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?

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.

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
   —–
   Ga

where '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.'