Footnotes to Plato from the foothills of the Superstition Mountains
For my commentary on the passing scene, go to my FB page. Friend requests are welcome from those with a broadly conservative outlook.
A valued correspondent offers,
I'm 70 years old, but I feel like I'm just getting started. Maybe that's a common experience.
I follow not far behind, and I can relate to the sentiment. I am just getting started as I near the end of the trail. The clock is running and I feel like a chess player in time trouble. I am working on a book that I hope will sum it all up for me and bring my life to a rounded completion. Will I have time before the flag falls?
Death is the muse of philosophy and one of her great themes. Now death is Janus-faced. One of her faces is that of the Grim Reaper, the other that of the Benign Releaser.
How bad can death be if it releases us from this obviously unsatisfactory and bewildering predicament? Only the spiritually insensate could be blind to the horror of this life, a horror mitigated but not outweighed by the beauty in the world and goodness in some people.
You live in a charnel house that is on fire and you pronounce it a wonderful abode? How could escape from it not be good? On the other side of the question, that persons cease to exist utterly seems to be a very great evil, something intolerable barely conceivable. To appreciate this one must not think abstractly and objectively — one dies, all men are mortal — but concretely and subjectively: I will die. You, dear heart, will die.
When we think concretely and personally about death, our own death, and the deaths of those we love, we find ourselves agreeing with Arthur Schopenhauer: "The heart rebels against this, and feels that it cannot be true." ("The Vanity of Existence" in The Will to Live, ed. R. Taylor, p. 229) Let us assume that you love and cherish your wife. Your loving her has conferred upon her uniqueness, at least relative to you. (Josiah Royce) Now imagine her lovable and loving unique personality blotted out of existence forever. Or consider your own case. You have devoted a lifetime to becoming who you are. You have worked steadily at the task of self-individuation. Only to become nothing? Could things be arranged so badly for us? But then the whole thing would be a bad joke.
Is death evil or not? No one knows. That we remain in the dark on a question so close to the heart and mind is yet another reason why our condition is a predicament. Should we therefore conclude that the good of escaping it outweighs the bad of personal cessation? No one knows.
The Epicurean reasoning strikes many as sophistical. And maybe it is, though it is not obvious that it is. "When I am, death is not; when death is; I am not."
Dying is the end of trail, the last step on the via dolorosa. It is indisputably evil, the only good thing about it being that it will force jokers finally to become serious. Will you be cracking jokes as you gasp for breath and feel yourself helplessly sliding into the abyss? Death, however, is not the last step; it is beyond the trail and its trials and beyond dying, a transcendent 'state' shrouded in mystery, or maybe not even a state: just mystery.
Companion post: On the 'Inconceivability' of Death
Cornelius Van Til, The Defense of the Faith, 4th ed., p. 381:
The best, the only, the absolutely certain proof of the truth of Christianity is that unless its truth be presupposed,there is no proof of anything.
Van Til's claim, to employ some Kantian jargon, is that the truth of Christianity is a condition of the possibility of proving anything. That's quite a claim. Let's put it to the test.
One can prove that the null set is unique by reductio ad absurdum. We begin the reductio by assuming that the null set is not unique, that there are two or more null sets. By the Axiom of Extensionality, two sets differ numerically only if one has a member the other doesn't have, or vice versa. But the null set, by definition, has no members. So the assumption leads to a contradiction. Therefore there cannot be two or more null sets. Hence the null set is unique.
The proof presupposes the Law of Non-Contradiction (LNC), and I am willing to grant that LNC and the other laws of logic can be argued to presuppose in their turn the existence of an omniscient necessary being. One argument to this conclusion is the Anderson-Welty argument which I critically examine here. I conclude that, while the argument is not rationally compelling, it does contribute to the rationality of belief in God. In other words, the Anderson-Welty argument is a good reason to believe in the existence of God. It does not, however, establish the existence of God in a definitive manner. It does not show that the existence of God is absolutely certain.
At the very most, then, one can plausibly argue to, but not prove, the existence of an omniscient necessary being whose existence is a presupposition of our rational operations in accordance with the laws of logic. But this is a far cry from what Van Til asserts above, namely, that the truth of Christianity with all its very specific claims is a condition of the possibility of proving anything. Trinity and Incarnation are among these specific claims. How are these doctrines supposed to bear upon the laws of logic? Perhaps the Van Tilians have an answer to this. If they do, I would like to know what it is. But not only is Van Til's conception of God Christian, it is also Calvinist so that all the characteristic claims of Calvinism are also packed into the conception of a God that is supposed to be a condition of the possibility of all proof. How does predestination, for example, bear upon the laws of logic?
Previous versions were long-winded. Herewith, an approach to the lapidary.
1) If nothing exists, then something exists.
2) If something exists, then something exists.
3) Either nothing exists or something exists.
Therefore
4) Necessarily, something exists.
The argument is valid. The second two premises are tautologies. The conclusion is interesting, to put it mildly: it is equivalent to the proposition that it is impossible that there be nothing at all. But why accept (1)?
Argument for (1)
5) If p, then the proposition expressed by 'p' is true.
Therefore
6) If nothing exists, then nothing exists is true.
7) The consequent of (6) commits us to the existence of at least one proposition.
Therefore
1) If nothing exists, then something exists.
Surely (5) is unproblematic, being one half of the disquotational schema,
DS. P iff the proposition expressed by 'p' is true.
For example, snow is white if and only if snow is white is true. The semantic ascent on the right-hand side of the biconditional involves the application of the predicate 'true' to a proposition. So it is not the case that the left and right hand sides of the biconditional say the same thing or express the same proposition. The LHS says that snow is white; the RHS says something different, namely, that the proposition expressed by 'snow is white' is true. The RHS has an ontological commitment that the LHS does not have: the RHS commits us to a proposition. Since the RHS is true, the proposition exists. (Cf. Colin McGinn, Logical Properties, Oxford UP 2000, 92-93. I am taking from McGinn only the insight that the LHS and RHS of (DS) do not say the same thing.)
But what about the inference from (5) to (6)? Can it be questioned? Yes, if we are willing to countenance counterexamples to (5) and thereby call into question Bivalence, the semantic principle that every proposition is either true or false, but not both. I'll pursue this in a later post. If, however, one accepts Bivalence and its syntactic counterpart, Excluded Middle, then it looks as if I've got me a rigorous a priori argument for the necessity of something and the impossibility of there being nothing at all.
The Opponent writes,
The alarm means 'there is a fire in the building'. An assertion has taken place, that there is a fire. But it is triggered by a sensor in the building. So asserting is not just something people do.
This is a loose way of talking quite in order in ordinary life, but false if taken literally and strictly. I have no objection to people in ordinary life saying things like, 'The fire alarm is telling us that there's a fire in the building.' But people don't talk like that. You tell me, "There's a fire!" I ask, "How do you know?" You reply, "The fire alarm went off." You DON"T say, "The fire alarm told me so,"or "The fire alarm made an assertion to that effect." You COULD say, "A fireman told me so."
But let's not get hung up in Ordinary Language analysis. The 1950s are long gone.
My claim is that a mechanical contraption cannot make an assertion any more than a 'sensor' can sense anything. Thermostats don't feel heat and smoke detectors do not smell smoke. Oscilloscopes do not detect sine waves; an engineer detects a sine wave by the instrumentality of the oscilloscope. Neither my dipstick nor the oil on my dipstick asserts that there is sufficient oil in the crankcase; I infer that there is from the oil I observe on the dipstick. Inferring, like asserting, is something people do.
All meaning traces back ultimately to Original Meaners, Original Sinn-ers. Am I being too clever for clarity?
A green light means proceed. A red light means stop. But how did those signals come to acquire their conventional meanings? From us, from minds whose intentionality is original, not derived. Surely you don't believe that green, or a green light, intrinsically means that one may proceed.
Let us see if the Opponent and I can find some common ground. I concede that there is a clear sense in which the sounding of a fire alarm means that there is a fire in the building. But this meaning is an instance of derivative, as opposed to original, intentionality. The intentionality derives from us. The sounding of the alarm means what it means only because we have assigned it that meaning. Its intentionality or meaning is thus not intrinsic to it. After all, a fire alarm could be constructed for deaf people that emits a smell instead of a sound, perhaps the awful smell of burnt hair. Obviously, such a smell is not intrinsically significative of anything.
So: if the Opponent concedes that the intentionality of a fire alarm is merely derivative, then we have agreement. If he holds that it is original, then the disagreement continues.
There is a similar pattern with sentences and propositions. I will allow you to say that a sentence is true or false in a secondary or derivative sense so long as you admit that it is propositions that are the primary truth-bearers. Do we have a deal? A declarative sentence is true in virtue of expressing a true proposition.
This entry, at Maverick Philosopher: Strictly Philosophical, probably best exposes the deepest root of my disagreement with Dr. Buckner.
Alexander Pope advises that we drink deep of the Pierian spring, for a little learning is a dangerous thing. A little knowledge, like a little learning, is indeed a dangerous thing except in the case of persons, where a lot of knowledge endangers love, respect, and admiration. Propinquity breeds familiarity, and familiarity contempt. Distance preserves and augments what propinquity diminishes. In matters sartorial this holds as well, as witness the robes of the judge which add an aura of dignity and majesty to a poor mortal who, under the aspect of eternity, and under the distancing attire, is as wretched as the man in the dock.
The sentimentalist clings to his petty coins of memory, playing the miser, loathe to make donation of them to oblivion; all the while mocking himself from the heights of a magnanimity which is as much his as his pettiness.
Tony Flood has gone though many changes in his long search for truth. He seems to have finally settled down in Van Til's presuppositionalism. Tony writes,
God, the cosmos, and a plurality of minds other than one’s own are in the same epistemological boat. [. . .] To be skeptical about one but not the other two is arbitrary. Our innate predisposition to be realistic about all three is divinely written “software” that informs our cerebral “wetware.”
I wish I could accept this, but I don't, and I believe I have good reasons for my non-acceptance.
By "in the same epistemological boat," Flood means that God, the physical universe, and other minds are all on a par in respect of dubitability. No one of them is more open to reasonable doubt than the other two, and none of them is open to reasonable doubt. Therefore, one can no more reasonably doubt the existence of God than one can doubt the existence of other minds. Atheism is on a par with solipsism in point of plausibility.
And bear in mind that by 'God' here is meant something very specific, the triune God of Christian theism, the God of the Bible as understood by Van Til and Co. It is one thing to argue — and it can be done with some plausibility — that the validity of all reasoning about any subject presupposes the existence of an omniscient necessary being. It is quite another to argue that the presuppositum must be the God of Christian theism as the latter is expounded by a Calvinist!
Now I concede that doubts about the external world and the the reality of other minds are hyperbolic, and if taken as genuine doubts, as opposed to thought experiments deployed in an epistemology seminar, unreasonable. No one really doubts the existence of rocks or other minds. Not even Bishop Berkeley doubts, let alone denies, the existence of rocks, the tree in the quad, and suchlike. This is why it is perfectly lame to think that Berkeley's idealism can be refuted by kicking a stone. (See Of Berkeley's Stones and the Eliminativist's Beliefs and Argumentum ad Lapidem?)
The hyperbolic skepticism of Descartes' dream argument and its latter-day brain-in-the-vat incarnations are methodological tools of the epistemologist who seeks to understand how we know what we know, and what it is to know what we know. A philosopher who wonders how knowledge is possible may, but need not, and typically does not, deny or have any real doubt THAT knowledge is possible. For example, I may be firmly convinced of the existence of so-called abstract objects (numbers, sets, propositions, uninstantiated properties, etc.) but be puzzled about how knowledge of such entities is possible given that there is no causal interaction with them. That puzzlement does not get the length of doubt or denial. The same holds, mutatis mutandis, for knowledge of the past, knowledge of other minds, and knowledge of the external world.
My point, then, is that (i) practically no one has real doubts about the existence of the external world or the existence of other minds, and that (ii) it would not be reasonable to have such doubts. But (iii) people do have real doubts about the existence of the God of Christian theism, and (iv) it is not unreasonable to have such doubts. The various arguments from evil, and not just these, cast reasonable doubt on Christian theism.
One type of real doubt is an 'existential' doubt, one that grips a person who succumbs to it, and induces fear and perhaps horror. There are those who lose their faith in God and suffer in consequence. They experience a terrible sense of loss, or perhaps they fear that they have been duped by crafty priests who exploited their youthful innocence and gullibility to infect them with superstitious nonsense in order to keep the priestly hustle going. One can lose one's faith in God, and many do. No one loses his faith in the external world or in other minds. And this for the simple reason that there was no need for faith in the first place.
I believe I have said enough to cast serious doubt on, if not refute, the idea that God, the the cosmos, and other minds are are in the same epistemological boat. That's a boat that won't float.
The Ostrich reports that he gave up on my transcendental argument from assertion to truth when he came to this paragraph:
To further unpack the concept of assertion, we note that whatever is asserted is asserted to be true independently of one's asserting it. Of course, it does not follow from one's asserting that p that p is true independently of one's asserting it. That's a further question. The point is rather that the act of assertion purports to get at reality as it is in itself. This is a matter of conceptual necessity: the act of assertion would not be what it is if it did have a built-in nisus or directedness toward truth.
He grants that " it can be true that p even though no one asserts that p, or believes that p, or thinks that p." But he has trouble with "reality as it is in itself."
But ‘the act of assertion purports to get at reality as it is in itself’? And I still don’t really understand the ‘act’ involved in asserting. I agree that uttering the utterance ‘grass is green’ is an act. Definitely an act. Is it an ‘act of assertion’? Well the utterance-act is performed against the backdrop of conventional meaning and so forth. The conventional or literal meaning of the English sentence ‘grass is green’ is that grass is green. So the utterer is aiming to communicate the proposition (in your sense of ‘proposition’) that grass is green.
To assert that grass is green I must produce a token of a sentence (sentence-type) in some language that has the meaning that 'grass is green' has in English. So I can assert that grass is green by the assertive utterance of 'das Gras ist grün': I don't need to be speaking English. But let's stick to our mother tongue.
We can use 'sentence' and 'sentence type' interchangeably. But we must scrupulously distinguish sentences/sentence types from sentence tokens. I use 'token' both as a noun and as a verb. One way to token a sentence is by uttering it. Another way is by writing it on a piece of paper. A third is by carving it into stone. And of course there are other more sophisticated ways of tokening or encoding a sentence. To utter a sentence is to say it, whether sotto voce, or loudly. But you have to use your tongue and vocal cords, etc. An utterance is the act of an agent. The speaker is the agent; the saying or speaking of the words composing a sentence is the act. We can use 'inscribe' to covering tokenings that do not require speech, as when I write 'Sally is drunk' on a piece of paper and hand it to you to convey to you the proposition that — wait for it — Sally is drunk! I can do that in such away that it constitutes an assertion and is taken by you to be one. And let's be clear that by sentences in this discussion we mean sentences in the indicative mood. I discern no difference between such a sentence and a declarative sentence.
Are you with me so far?
Now suppose I assert that grass is green and I do so in English. To do this I must produce a token of 'Grass is green' either by utterance or by inscription or in some other way such as sign language. I produce this token with the intention of (i) expressing a proposition or thought and (ii) conveying it to my hearer or reader. I intend by my act of communication to convey to my hearer or reader what I take to be a truth, where a truth is a true proposition.
To assert is to assert something. We must distinguish the asserting from that which is asserted. That which is asserted is the proposition. Now what I assert, I assert to be true. That's analytic: I am merely unpacking (analyzing) the concept of assertion.
Now stop and think about that. It would make no sense to say that what one asserts, one asserts to be false. Of course, one can assert that a certain proposition is false. For example, I can assert that the proposition Trafalgar Square is in Brighton is false. But this is no counterexample to my claim since I assert it to be true that the proposition in question is false.
Of course, not everything I assert to be true IS true in reality. But that does not alter the fact that whenever one makes an assertion, the proposition one asserts is asserted to be true. Every sincere assertion aims at truth whether or not it hits the target. Every sincere assertion is truth-directed as a matter of conceptual necessity.
To assert, then, is to assert to be true. But not only that. What I assert to be true I assert to be true independently of my asserting it or anyone's asserting it. What is true independently of anyone's asserting it is true in itself. What is true in itself is true in reality. What is true in reality is true extramentally and extralinguistically.
We can therefore say that anyone who makes an assertion purports to say something true about reality as it is in itself.
Alles klar?
Mose Allison, The Song is Ended
Punch Bros., Dink's Song
Dave van Ronk, Dink's Song
Arlo Guthrie, Percy's Song
Fairport Convention, Percy's Song
Doors, Alabama Song
Roberta Flack, Killing Me Softly with his Song
Bob Dylan, Song to Woody
Chad and Jeremy, Summer Song
Simon and Garfunkel, 59th Street Bridge Song
Brook Benton, The Boll Weevil Song
UPDATE 1/20. A reader asks:
A black dude singing a hillbilly song? Where do you find these things?
That was a big hit when I was a boy, and I never forgot it. It was played on the rock stations. Another great Brook Benton tune is It's Just a Matter of Time.
Charley Pride is another black guy who sang country songs. Is Anybody Going to San Antone?
We start with a fact: we make assertions. The fact is actual, so it must be possible. What are the conditions of its possibility? What has to be the case for assertion to be possible? I will argue that there has to be truth for assertion to be possible.
We proceed by unpacking the concept of assertion.
By 'assertion' I mean the speech act of asserting a proposition, not the proposition asserted taken in abstraction from the act of assertion. Clearly, the asserting and the proposition asserted — the content of the assertion — must be distinguished despite the fact that there is no act of assertion without a content. To assert is to assert something.
If one asserts that p, then one asserts it to be true that p. There is a conceptual link between assertion and truth. Whatever is asserted is presented as true by the one who makes the assertion. And it doesn't matter whether the proposition asserted is true or false. Suppose that, unbeknownst to me, the proposition I assert is false; it is still the case that I assert it to be true.
Assertion is the overt verbal expression of belief, and believing a proposition to be true is logically consistent with the proposition's being false. To believe a proposition is to believe it to be true, and to assert a proposition is to assert it to be true.
To further unpack the concept of assertion, we note that whatever is asserted is asserted to be true independently of one's asserting it. Of course, it does not follow from one's asserting that p that p is true independently of one's asserting it. That's a further question. The point is rather that the act of assertion purports to get at reality as it is in itself. This is a matter of conceptual necessity: the act of assertion would not be what it is if it did have a built-in nisus or directedness toward truth.
We take a step further by noting that to assert a proposition is to affirm it as true independently of anyone's asserting of it. This follows because a proposition such as The Moon is a natural satellite of Earth can be asserted by anyone. If so, then to assert a proposition is to assert it as intersubjectively true, true for all assertors. But if a proposition is asserted to be true independently of anyone's asserting it, then it is asserted to be true not just intersubjectively, but absolutely (non-relatively). But there is no need to speak, pleonastically, of absolute truth; it suffices to speak of truth. Truth is absolute by its very nature.
The main point here is that when one makes an assertion one purports to state what is true in itself independently of any of us. The presupposition of truth is built into the concept of assertion. Now could this presupposition fail in every case of assertion? Granted, it fails in some cases. There are false assertions. Could every assertion be false? Well, if every assertion is false, then it is true that every assertion is false, and if I assert that this is so, then I make a true assertion, one that is true independently of my assertion. Therefore, it cannot be that every assertion is false. So some assertions are true, absolutely true.
Therefore, for assertion to be possible, there must be some (absolute) truths even if we do not know which propositions are the true ones.
In sum: assertion is actual, hence possible. But it cannot be possible unless there are truths that are true independently of anyone's assertions. This is because, as a matter of conceptual necessity, assertion is linked to truth. Therefore, given that assertions are made as a matter of fact, there are truths.
I have just argued from the fact that we make assertions to the existence of truth (truths) as a transcendental presupposition of assertion.
But the following question disturbs me: Is truth merely a transcendental presupposition, or is it also an absolute presupposition?
A Merely Transcendental Presupposition?
Have I really proven the existence of truths that subsist independently of our acts of assertion (and independently of all our other discursive operations), truths that would subsist even if if we did not exist; or have I merely proven that we cannot make assertions without presupposing truth?
I have argued that the fact of assertion presupposes the existence of truths: if there are true assertions, then there is truth. But also: if there are false assertions, then there is truth. But it doesn't follow that necessarily there are truths. For the fact of assertion entails the existence of assertors who are the agents of the various acts of assertion. But these agents are contingent beings. We who assert might not have existed. It follows that the fact of assertion, the starting point of my transcendental argument, is a contingent fact.
What this seems to entail is that the necessity that there be truths is a conditional, as opposed to an absolute, necessity. I would like to be able to conclude that it is is absolutely necessary that there be truth. But the contingency of my starting point seems to spread to my conclusion, relativizing it.
Removal to a distance, withdrawal.
Eloignment has fallen into desuetude, as has 'desuetude.' Archaic. Quite useless for communication with deplorables, or with anyone except me and Dave Bagwill who hipped me to the word.
I tip my hat to David Bagwill for recommending that I read Cornelius Van Til. So I sprang for the fourth edition of The Defense of the Faith, with Oliphint's annotations, P & R Publishing, 2008. Van Til's presuppositionalism is intriguing even if in places preposterous. Having discussed Romans 1:18 a couple of time before in these pages, I looked to see what Van Til had to say about it. But first my take, one that Van Til & Co. might dismiss as 'Romanist' or worse.
Rather than quote the whole of the Pauline passage at Romans 1: 18-20, I'll summarize it. Men are godless and wicked and suppress the truth. What may be known about God is plain to them because God has made it plain to them. Human beings have no excuse for their unbelief. "For since the creation of the world, God's invisible qualities — his eternal power and divine nature — have been clearly seen, being understood from what has been made . . . ."
Paul's claim here is that the existence and nature of God are evident from creation and that unbelief is a result of a willful turning away from the truth. There is no excuse for unbelief because it is a plain fact that the natural world is divine handiwork. Now I am a theist and I am sympathetic to Christianity. But although I have one foot in Jerusalem, the other is planted firmly in Athens. It therefore strikes me that to characterize the natural world as 'made' or 'created' begs the question in favor of theism. As begging the question, the Pauline claim about the evidentness of the world's being created offers no support for theism. It is an analytic proposition that there is no creation without a creator. So if the heavens and the earth are a creation, then it follows straightaway that a creator exists.
But is the world a divine creation? This is the question, and the answer is not obvious. That the natural world is a divine artifact is not evident to the senses, or to the heart, or to reason. Of course, one can argue for the existence of God from the existence and order of the natural world. I have done it myself. But those who reject theistic arguments, and construct anti-theistic arguments, have their reasons too, and it cannot fairly be said that what animates the best of them is a stubborn and prideful refusal to submit to a truth that is evident. It is simply not objectively evident to the senses or the intellect or the heart that the natural world is a divine artifact. If it were objectively evident, then there would be no explanation of the existence of so many intellectually penetrating, morally upright, and sincere atheists. Even if the atheisms of Nietzsche, Russell, Sartre, and Hitchens could be dismissed as originating in pride, stubborness, and a willful refusal to recognize any power or authority beyond oneself, or beyond the human, as may well be the case with the foregoing luminaries, it does not follow that the atheism of all has this origin.
I am moved to marvel at "the starry skies above me." This was one of two things that filled Kant with wonder, the other being "the moral law within me." But seeing as is not seeing. If you see the starry skies as divine handiwork, then this is an interpretation from within a theistic framework. But the datum seen can just as easily be given a non-theistic interpretation.
It is all-too-human to suspect in our opponents moral depravity when we cannot convince them. The Pauline passage smacks of that all-too-humanity. There are sincere and decent atheists, and they have plenty of excuse for their unbelief. The fact of evil being perhaps the best excuse. The best of them, if wrong in the end, are excusably wrong.
Or so I tend to think. But I am open to a change of view and a change of heart (metanoia).
I suppose I will be told that I am falsely assuming that there are some neutral data that we can access via reason unaided by revelation, data that will supply premises for arguments to the existence of God, arguments that would constitute a philosophically neutral, theologically uncommitted preambulum fidei in Thomas's sense, when such a neutral method can only in the end issue in the conclusion that Christian theism is not true. The correct method, I will be told, is to start with and adhere to the presupposition that Christianity is true, lock, stock, and barrel, and to see everything in its light:
Roman Catholics and Arminians, appealing to the 'reason' of the natural man as the natural man himself interprets his reason, namely as autonomous, are bound to use the direct method of approach to the natural man, the method that assumes the essential correctness of a non-Christian and nontheistic conception of reality. The Reformed apologist, on the other hand, appealing to that knowledge of the true God in the natural man which the natural man suppresses by means of his assumption of ultimacy, will also appeal to the knowledge of the true method which the natural man knows but suppresses. The natural man at bottom knows that he is the creature of God. He knows also that he is responsible to God. He knows that he should live to the glory of God. He knows that in all that he does he should stress that the field of reality which he investigates has the stamp of God's ownership upon it. But he suppresses his knowledge of himself as he truly is. (123-124)
At this point in the text comes a footnote referencing Romans 1: 18 ff.
Above I suggested that Paul begs the question. Now to beg a question is to assume what one needs to prove. But there is no need to prove what one presupposes. So one who presupposes the truth of Christian theism cannot be accused of begging the question. There just is no question that can be neutrally engaged by the reason of the natural man if the truth of Christian theism is presupposed.
The ultimate principle of all proof is the Law of Non-Contradiction. It therefore cannot be proved, but only presupposed. One who affirms it cannot therefore be reasonably accused of begging the question: there simply is no question here that can reasonably be disputed.
But this leaves unanswered the question why we ought to presuppose the truth of Christian theism. For the latter, with all of its very specific claims about Trinity, Incarnation, etc. is rather unlike the logical law just mentioned — to put it in the form of an understatement. Why not presuppose atheism as many today do? They too can and do make claims about what we 'know' and what we 'suppress.' We all know deep down that we are nothing but clever land mammals slated for extinction, with no higher origin or higher destiny, but we suppress this ugly truth because we are unwilling to face the dreadful facts.
If a gratuitous assertion can be met with a gratuitous counter assertion, the same goes for a gratuitous presupposition.
More later.
The Ostrich tells me that Frege has no copula. That's not wrong, but there is a nuance that muddies the waters. Suppose Al is fat. The symbolization as Fa suggests the absence of a copula and thus the absence of a syncategorematic element. There appears to be only two categorematic elements, a and F. Well, let's see.
………………………………..
According to Fred Sommers (The Logic of Natural Language, Oxford UP, 1982, 166), ". . . one way of saying what an atomic sentence is is to say that it is the kind of sentence that contains only categorematic expressions." Earlier in the same book, Sommers says this:
In Frege, the distinction between subjects and predicates is not due to any difference of syncategorematic elements since the basic subject-predicate propositions are devoid of such elements. In Frege, the difference between subject and predicate is a primitive difference between two kinds of categorematic expressions. (p. 17)
Examples of categorematic (non-logical) expressions are 'Socrates' and 'mammal.' Examples of syncategorematic (logical) expressions are 'not,' 'every,' and 'and.' As 'syn' suggests, the latter expressions are not semantic stand-alones, but have their meaning only together with categorematic expressions. Sommers puts it this way: "Categorematic expressions apply to things and states of affairs; syncategorematic expressions do not." (164)
At first I found it perfectly obvious that atomic sentences have only categorematic elements, but now I have doubts. Consider the atomic sentence 'Al is fat.' It is symbolized thusly: Fa. 'F' is a predicate expression the reference (Bedeutung) of which is a Fregean concept (Begriff) while 'a' is a subject-expression or name the reference of which is a Fregean object (Gegenstand). Both expressions are categorematic or 'non-logical.' Neither is syncategorematic. And there are supposed to be no syncategorematic elements in the sentence: there is just 'F' and 'a.'
But wait a minute! What about the immediate juxtaposition of 'F' and 'a' in that order? That juxtaposition is not nothing. It conveys something. It conveys that the referent of 'a' falls under the referent of 'F'. It conveys that the object a instantiates the concept F. I suggest that the juxtaposition of the two signs is a syncategorematic element. If this is right, then it is false that atomic sentences lack all syncategorematic elements.
Of course, there is no special sign for the immediate juxtaposition of 'F' and 'a' in 'Fa.' So I grant that there is no syncategorematic element if such an element must have its own separate and isolable sign. But there is no need for a separate sign; the immediate juxtaposition does the trick. The syncategorematic element is precisely the juxtaposition.
Please note that if there were no syncategorematic element in 'Fa' there would not be any sentence at all. A sentence is not a list. The sentence 'Fa' is not the list 'F, a.' A (declarative) sentence expresses a thought (Gedanke) which is its sense (Sinn). And it has a reference (Bedeutung), namely a truth value (Wahrheitswert). No list of words (or of anything else) expresses a thought or has a truth value. So a sentence is not a list of its constituent words. A sentence depends on its constituent words, but it is more than them. It is their unity.
We here touch upon the ancient problem of the unity of the proposition first descried by the immortal Plato.
So I say there must be a syncategorematic element in 'Fa' if it is to be a sentence. There is need of a copulative element to tie together subject and predicate. It follows that, pace Sommers, it is false that atomic sentences are devoid of syntagorematic elements.
Note what I am NOT saying. I am not saying that the copulative element in a sentence must be a separate sign such as 'is.' There is no need for the copulative 'is.' In standard English we say 'The sea is blue' not 'The sea blue.' But in Turkish one can say Deniz mavi and it is correct and intelligible. My point is not that we need the copulative 'is' as a separate sign but that we need a copulative element which, though it does not refer to anything, yet ties together subject and predicate. There must be some feature of the atomic sentence that functions as the copulative element, if not immediate juxtaposition then something else such as a font difference or color difference.
At his point I will be reminded that Frege's concepts (Begriffe) are unsaturated (ungesaettigt). They are 'gappy' or incomplete unlike objects. The incompleteness of concepts is reflected in the incompleteness of predicate expressions. Thus '. . . is fat' has a gap in it, a gap fit to accept a name such as 'Al' which has no gap. We can thus say that for Frege the copula is imported into the predicate. It might be thought that the gappiness of concepts and predicate expressions obviates the need for a copulative element in the sentence and in the corresponding Thought (Gedanke) or proposition.
But this would be a mistake. For even if predicate expressions and concepts are unsaturated, there is still a difference between a list and a sentence. The unsaturatedness of a concept merely means that it combines with an object without the need of a tertium quid. (If there were a third thing, then Bradley's regress would be up and running.) But to express that a concept is in fact instantiated by an object requires more than a listing of a concept-word (Begriffswort) and a name. There is need of a syncategorematical element in the sentence.
So I conclude that if there are any atomic sentences, then they cannot contain only categorematic expressions.
Lotte Lenya sings September song, very smokily: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rdc4oBnu_fw&list=RDrdc4oBnu_fw&start_radio=1
Yes, and I think I’m using in roughly the same sense that Jaspers means, which is why reading a work…
And then there is the Sermon on the Mount. Here is a list of 12 different interpretations: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sermon_on_the_Mount
Vito, The monastery in question is located in a canyon accessible only by a 13-mile dirt road. Unsecured, anyone could…
Vito, Very stimulating comments, but I am pressed for time. The trouble with the scriptures is that you can find…
Your use of ‘cipher’ struck me. It is a key term in Karl Jaspers.
Bill, Gravity’s Rainbow was fascinating. I read it at a time when I was preeminently fascinated by works that had…
Hi Bill, Thanks so much for the references to work by Cheever’s daughter and the Lucas Thorpe article on Kant…
Excellent comments, Vito. Will try to respond tomorrow.
Bill, One final complicating observation: The pacifist interpretation of Matt 5:38-42 has been contested in light of Lk 22: 36-38…
6 responses to “Van Til on an Absolutely Certain Proof of Christianity”