Continence

The Catholic Church is in sad shape. Have you heard a good sermon lately? I could do better off the top of my head, and I am a very poor public speaker.

Here are some notes for a sermon I will never give, unless this weblog is my pulpit.

Remind people of the importance of continence both for their happiness here below, and for the good of their souls. Distinguish the following sorts of continence: mental (control of thoughts), emotional (control and custody of the heart), sensory-appetitive (custody of the eyes together with sexual restraint). Explain the importance of containing the outgoing flow, whether mental, emotional, or sensory-appetitive, and the misery consequent upon incontinence.

Illustrate by adducing the sad case of Bill Cosby.

Explain the key words and phrases. Don't use words like 'adduce.'  Attention spans in these hyperkinetic times are short, so keep it short.

The abdication of authorities has lead to the dumbing-down of the masses. Don't expect much.

The Antithesis of Obstruction

Andrew C. McCarthy:

The “collusion” narrative was a fraud, plain and simple. We know that now. Hopefully, it won’t take another six months to grasp a second plain and simple truth: Collusion’s successor, the “obstruction” narrative, is a perversion.

[ . . .] 

To be clear, the Russia investigation is not a fraud. The Trump collusion narrative is. Russia did try to interfere in our election, as it always does. And there were associates of Trump’s who had business with Russian interests. Nothing unusual about that either. No one had shadier business with Kremlin cronies than Bill and Hillary Clinton. The difference is that the Clintons did collude in the Russian regime’s acquisition of American uranium assets. There is no evidence that Trump colluded in Russia’s election meddling. To stoke suspicions to the contrary was fraudulent.

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Saturday Night at the Oldies: Varia

Punch Brothers, Rye Whisky

Lonely Heartstring Band, Ramblin' Gamblin' Willy

Bonnie Owens, Philadelphia Lawyer

Cowboy Jack Clement, A Girl I Used to Know

Bobby Bare, Lullabies, Legends, and Lies

Brewer and Shipley, One Toke Over Line. Forgot how good this song is!

The Flying Burrito Brothers, To Ramona.  A very nice cover of a song from Dylan's fourth album, Another Side of Bob Dylan.

John Fogerty and the Blue Ridge Rangers, You're the Reason

The Springfields, Silver Threads and Golden Needles

Ramblin' Jack Elliot, Roving Gambler.  'Ramblin' Charles Adnopoz' lacking the requisite resonance for a follower of Woody Guthrie, this Jewish son of a New York M.D. wisely changed his name. 

Joan Baez, Rock Salt and Nails 

Patsy Cline, She's Got You

Simon and Garfunkel, The Dangling Conversation.  A lovely song, if a bit pretentious.  Paul Simon was an English major.

And we spoke of things that matter
With words that must be said.
Can analysis be worthwhile?
Is the theater really dead?

Beatles, We Can Work It Out.  Listen for the time signature change from 4/4 to 3/4. Knowing a little music theory adds to one's enjoyment.

Smokey Robinson and the Miracles, You Really Got a Hold on Me

Barbara Lynn, You'll Lose a Good Thing.  Her moves and appearance are reminsicent of Jimi Hendrix — or the other way around.  Check out how she strums that left-handed Telecaster.

EmmyLou Harris, Save the Last Dance for Me.  That's one big guitar.

Marty Robbins, Blue Spanish Eyes.  What a wimpy guitar!

Dalida, O Sole Mio.  Das Ewig-Weibliche zieht uns hinan!  Che bella donna!

Melina Mercouri, Never on Sunday.  Ditto!

Nana Mouskouri, Farewell Angelina.  One of Bob Dylan's most haunting songs.  Hats off in homage to the angel-throated ladies such as Nana and Joan, but nothing touches the mood & magic of Dylan's spare mid-60s renditions such as this one.

Freddy Fender, Cielito Lindo.  Tex-Mex version of a very old song.

Marty Robbins, La Paloma.  Another old song dating back to 1861. 

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Votes by Non-Citizens May Have Cost Trump the 2016 Popular Vote

On 10 December of last year in an entry entitled 'Post-Truth' I wrote the following:

For the Left, Donald Trump is the prime post-truther, the post-truth poster boy if you will, the prima Donald of the practice of post-truth. Ruth Marcus of the Washington Post doesn't expect him to truth up anytime soon. "Indeed, all signs are to the contrary — most glaringly Trump’s chock-full-­of-­lies tweet that 'I won the popular vote if you deduct the millions of people who voted illegally.' "

A very stupid example, Ms. Marcus!  There is not even one lie in the tweet, let alone a bunch of them.  Although verifiable in principle, Trump's tweet is unverifiable in practice.  Trump had no solid evidence for the truth of his assertion.  Still, it could be true.  Don't forget the 'necro-vote' (a word I just coined) and the illegal vote. Trump's epistemic 'sin' was not that he stated what is not the case with the intention to deceive but that he confidently asserted something for which he had insufficient evidence.  He pretended to know something he could not know.  Very annoying, and possibly a violation of a Cliffordian ethics of belief, but not a lie.  

So he didn't lie.  What he did was close to what Harry Frankfurt defines as bullshitting in On Bullshit, a piece of close analysis, fine, not feculent, that was undoubtedly more often purchased than perused. The bullshitter doesn't care how things stand with reality. The liar, by contrast, must care: he must know (or at least attempt to know) how things are if he is to have any chance of deceiving his audience.  Think of it this way: the bullshitter doesn't care whether he gets things right or gets them wrong; the liar cares to get them right so he can deceive you about them. 

So you could fairly tax Trump in this instance with bullshitting.  He shot his mouth off in a self-serving way without much concern over whether what he said is true.  But why pick on Trump?

Because you are a leftist and thus a purveyor of double standards.

Obama bullshits with the best of them.  A prime example was his outrageous claim that 99.9% of Muslims reject radical Islam. It is false and known to be false. (You can check with PEW research if you care to.)   Now was Obama lying in this instance or bullshitting? A lie is not the same thing as a false statement.  Let us be perhaps excessively charitable: Obama made a false statement but he had no intention of deceiving us because he did not know the truth.  (Compare: G. W. Bush was wrong about the presence of WMDs in Iraq, but he did not lie about them:  he was basing himself on the best intelligence sources he had at the time.)

But that Obama is pretty clearly bullshitting is shown by the cliched and falsely precise 99.9% figure.  The whole context shows that Obama doesn't care whether what he is saying is true.  He said it because it fits his narrative: Islam is a religion of peace; we are not in a religious war with Islam; Muslims want all the same things we want, blah, blah, ad nauseam.  The difference between this case and the Trump tweet is that we know that Obama was wrong, whereas we don't know that Trump was wrong.

So once again we have a double standard.  Trump is 'post-truth'; but Obama and Hillary are not?

So that's what I said back in December. But now we have evidence that Trump was right:

We don't know the exact number of illegal votes. No one does. But the data that are available suggest that the number of illegal votes was substantial — probably in the millions, as Trump said — and likely had a significant impact on the election's outcome.

Even Democrats should find this troubling; every vote cast by a noncitizen voter negates the vote of a citizen voter. It's that simple. It's time the Democratic Party started living up to its name and stop encouraging noncitizens and illegal aliens to vote in our election.

But of course the Democrats will not live up to their name, being elitists and globalists; and of course they are not troubled by the votes of non-citizens. The best proof of this is their opposition to photo ID at polling places. Their intention is transparent: to win by any means, legal or illegal.

Mexican vote

 

Does Your Disagreement Give Me Good Reason to Question My Position?

In general, no. For you may be foolish or ignorant or otherwise incompetent with respect to the subject matter under discussion. Or you may be morally defective: a bully, a blowhard, a bullshitter, a quibbler, a sophist.  But suppose none of these predicates attach to you.  Suppose you are my moral and intellectual peer, and what's more, a competent practitioner in the discipline or subdiscipline which is home to the thesis we are disputing. Thus we are both competent, and we are equally competent. And suppose I believe you to be as intellectually honest and as competent as I am.

Suppose further that I have given careful thought to my thesis and have advanced it in respectable, peer-reviewed journals.

If you disagree with me, does this fact supply a good reason for me to question my thesis?  Ought I question it? Or would I be justified in ignoring your disagreement?

We note that this is a meta-question that sires a meta-disagreement.  This meta-disagreement is between the Conciliationist and the Steadfaster.

I am a Conciliationist. Thus I tend to think that your disagreement with me (given the stipulations above) ought to give me pause. It ought to cause me to re-examine my view and be open to the possibility of either rejecting it or withholding assent from it.  It ought to undermine my epistemic self-confidence. I tend to think I would be intellectually amiss, less than intellectually honest, were I simply to dismiss your disagreement. I tend to think I would be unjustifiably privileging my own point of view, preferring it over yours simply because is is mine. This seems wrong to me given that we are trying to arrive at the objective and impersonal truth.  Truth cannot be mine or yours.

The Steadfaster stands fast in the face of disagreement. Whereas the Conciliationist allows the fact of disagreement to undermine his epistemic self-confidence, the Steadfaster takes the fact of disagreement to undermine his prior conviction that his interlocutor is as morally and intellectually capable as he initially thought he was. So when you disagree with me, I question whether I am right. But when I disagree with you, you question my competence, rationality, probity, etc.

But now a puzzle arises. If I am a Conciliationist, then my position would seem to require that I question my Conciliationism due to the fact that the Steadfaster disagrees with me.  (Assume that the Steadfaster is as morally and intellectually well-endowed as I am and that I believe him to be such.)

It seems that the consistent Conciliationist cannot be steadfast in his Conciliationism given that there are Steadfasters out there who are, and whom he believes to be, his moral and intellectual equals.  So what should our Conciliationist do? Should he:

  • Suspend judgment and neither affirm nor deny Conciliationism?
  • Make an exception for the Conciliationst thesis itself by steadfastly adhering to it ar the meta-level while remaining otherwise a Conciliationist?
  • Reject Conciliationism and become a Steadfaster?
  • Do something else?
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Andrew M. Bailey’s Analytic Philosophy Generator and the ‘Scholasticism Charge’

The AnalPhilGen is a bit of humor from occasional MavPhil commenter Andrew Bailey.  I generated the following using Bailey's 'device': 

It is a consequence of proper functionalism that polyadic predicates reduce to non-human consciousness.

On the standard Kripkean modal semantics, trope theories supervene on something like Rawls' famous Difference Principle.

Intuitively it seems obvious that both definite descriptions and proper names always lead to zombie arguments.

I came to Bailey's Analytic Philosophy Generator by way of a crappy article that complains about the 'scholasticism' of contemporary philosophy "talking about itself to itself in its own jargon."  The article suggests that most of what analytic philosophers write is as meaningless as the above three sentences. The just-quoted phrase suggests that the problems of philosophy discussed by academic philosophers in their narrowly-focused, jargon-laden books and articles are not 'real,' but are merely artifacts of a highly ingrown way of talking.  

This is simply not the case. 

If you are a philosophy 'insider' you know this; if an 'outsider' then you probably cannot be 'reached.'  Or maybe you can. Let someone else try.

Here is the crappy article.

A Quasi-Pyrrhonian Metaphilosophical Puzzle

Some of us are tempted by the metathesis (MT) that every substantive philosophical thesis is such that the arguments for it and the arguments against it are equally plausible and thus 'cancel out.' But the metathesis is itself a philosophical thesis. So if the metathesis is true, then every argument in support of it is cancelled out by an equally plausible argument against it.  But then (MT), if true, is such that we cannot have any good reason to accept it.

Is there a genuine problem here for a latter-day quasi-Pyrrhonian who subscribes to the metathesis?

Definitions

D1. An argument A1 for a thesis T cancels out an argument A2 for the negation of T just in case both arguments are equally plausible to the producers(s)/consumers(s) of the arguments, assuming that these individuals are 'competent practitioners.'

Plausibility is relative to an arguer and his audience, if any.  Thus plausibility is unlike soundness, which is absolute, like truth herself.  Note that there cannot be sound arguments both for a thesis and its negation. For if there is a sound argument for T, then T is true. And if there is a sound argument for ~T, then ~T is true. This is 'fallout' from the definition of 'sound,' see D2 below. But then (T & ~T) is true which violates the Law of Non-Contradiction.

Canceling out is symmetrical: If A1 cancels A2, then A2 cancels A1. It seems to follow that canceling out is also conditionally reflexive, which is to say that if A1 cancels A2, then A1 cancels itself. Right? 

A competent practitioner is not the same as an epistemic peer.  A number of individuals may be epistemic peers, but all incompetent. I won't try for a crisp definition of 'competent practitioner,' but if Tom is a competent practitioner in the philosophy of religion, say, then he is a a sincere truth seeker, not a quibbler or a sophist; he knows logic and the empirical disciplines that bear upon the arguments he is discussing; he is familiar with the relevant literature; and so on.

D2. An argument is sound just in case it is valid and all of its premises are true.

D3. An argument for a thesis is unopposed just in case there is no argument for its negation plausible to all competent practitioners.

D4. A proposition is rationally acceptable just in case it involves no logical contradiction, and coheres with the rest of what we know or justifiably believe.

Rational acceptability, like plausibility, and unlike truth, is a relative property: That water is an element was rationally acceptable to the ancient Greeks, but not to us.

The Puzzle as an Aporetic Tetrad 

1) Every substantive philosophical thesis is such that the arguments pro et contra cancel out. (MT)

2) MT is a philosophical thesis.

3) A philosophical thesis is rationally acceptable only if there is at least one good unopposed argument for it.

4) MT is rationally acceptable.

Solutions

The quartet of propositions is inconsistent. Any three limbs, taken in conjunction, entail the negation of the remaining one. Which should we reject? (2) is not plausibly rejectable: metaphilosophy is a branch of philosophy.

One could hold that the first three propositions are true, but the fourth is false. This implies that a proposition could be true but not rationally acceptable.  But if MT is true but not rationally acceptable, what reason could we have for believing it?

A better solution of the tetrad is by rejection of (1). This is the position of the optimist about philosophical knowledge. He holds that some theses are supported by unopposed arguments and that we know what these arguments are.

I accept (1) on the basis of strong inductive evidence which renders it rationally acceptable. Accepting as I do (1), (2), and (4), I must reject (3).  Well, why not?

Why can't I say the following? 

3*) A philosophical thesis is rationally acceptable just in case there are some good arguments for it accepted by some competent practitioners.

Why Accept the Metathesis?

MT expresses a very bold claim; I imagine most philosophers would just deny it. To deny it is to affirm that there is at least one philosophical thesis that can be conclusively demonstrated.  Can anyone give me an example? It has to be a substantive thesis, though, not, for example the thesis that it is contradictory to hold that it is absolutely true that all truths are relative.  Here are some examples of substantive philosophical theses:

  • There are no nonexistent objects.
  • There are uninstantiated properties.
  • There are no modes of existence.
  • The properties of particulars are tropes, not universals.
  • God exists.
  • The soul is immortal.
  • The human will is libertarianly free.
  • Each of us is numerically identical to his living body.
  • I am not my living body; I merely have a living body.
  • Anima forma corporis.
  • Die Welt ist meine Vorstellung.
  • Laws of nature are just empirical regularities.
  • Truths need truth-makers.
  • Only facts could serve as truth-makers.
  • There are no facts.
  • Relations reduce to their monadic foundations.
  • There are no properties, only predicates.
  • The predicate 'true' serves only as a device for disquotation.
  • Race is a social construct.
  • Social and economic inequalities are justified only if they benefit the worst-off.
  • And so on.

Out of Power, the Left Resorts to Violence

In power, leftists denounce the politics of personal destruction and issue hypocritical calls for 'civility'; out of power, the end justifies the means, personal destruction is full on, and civility is out the window. George Neumayr:

Liberalism, philosophically speaking, is proudly unprincipled, insofar as it recognizes no divine law prior to man’s will. The arrogant humanism underpinning liberalism, combined with fallen human nature, makes the temptation to violence irresistible, especially in times of political exile. When safely ensconced in positions of power, liberals demand “civility” and the like (remember the ludicrous “civility” commissions set up during the Clinton era to counter Rush Limbaugh and company). But once out of power, liberals flirt with ends-justify-the-means radicalism.

That certainly seems to be what is going on as quisling 'conservatives,' i.e., Never-Trumpers, aid and abet Deep State operatives, the Democrat Party, and the liberal media in their attempt to destroy the Trump administration by any means.

For example, Trump is supposed to have colluded with the Russians to swing the election in his favor. No evidence of this has emerged despite months of searching. But we know all about the Clinton Foundation's role in the Russian uranium deal, and we know about it from The New York Times! So why isn't the former Secretary of State being investigated?  Because it is Trump who needs to be destroyed. 

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The Architecture of Regime Change

The 'architecture' is laid out in convincing detail by Victor Davis Hanson in yet another piece of penetrating analysis.

We are witnessing a desperate putsch to remove Trump before he can do any more damage to the Obama project. Political, journalistic, and cultural elites of a progressive coastal culture aim at destroying the Trump presidency before it can finish its full four-year term.

The branches of this insidious coup d’état are quite unlikely anything our generation has ever witnessed.