Maverick Philosopher – Page 370 – Footnotes to Plato from the foothills of the Superstition Mountains

Which is More Certain, God or My Hands?

A reader inquires, "I'm curious, if someone asked you what you were more certain of, your hands or belief in the existence of God, how would you respond?"

The first thing a philosopher does when asked a question is examine the question. (Would that ordinary folk, including TV pundits, would do likewise before launching into gaseous answers to ill-formed questions.) Now what exactly am I being asked? The question is ambiguous as between:

Q1. Are you more certain of the existence of your hand or of the existence of God?

Q2. Are you more certain of the existence of your hand or of your belief in the existence of God?

My reader probably intends (Q1). If (Q1) is the question, then the answer is that I am more certain of the existence of my hands than of the existence of God. My hands are given in sense perception throughout the day, every day. Here is one, and here is the other (he said with a sidelong glance in the direction of G. E. Moore). It is not perfectly certain that I have hands, or even that I have a body – can I prove that I am not a brain in a vat? — but it is practically certain, certain for all practical purposes.

By the way, it borders on a bad joke to think that one can prove the external world by waving one's hands around as Moore famously did. Still, if I don't know basic facts such as these 'handy' facts, then I know very little, things of the order of 'I now seem to see a hand' but not 'I now see a hand.' (I am using 'see' as a verb of success: If S sees an F, there there exists an x such that x is F and S sees x.)

So, for practical purposes, I am certain that my hands exist. But I am not certain in the same sense and to the same degree that God exists. The evidence is a lot slimmer. This is not to say that there is no evidence. There is plenty of evidence, it is just that it is not compelling. There is the evidence of conscience, of mystical and religious experience, the consensus gentium; there is the 'evidence' of the dozens and dozens of arguments for the existence of God, there is the testimony of prophets. But none of this evidence, even taking the whole lot of it together, gets the length of the evidence of my hands that I get from seeing them, touching them, clapping them, manipulating things with them.

When I fall down and feel my hands slam into the hard hot rock of a desert canyon, then I know beyond any practical doubt that hands exist and rock exists. Then I say with 'Cactus Ed' Abbey, "I believe in rock and sun." In that vulnerable moment, alone in a desolate desert canyon, it is very easy to doubt that there is any providential order, that there is any ultimate intelligibility, that there is any Sense beyond the flimsy and fragmented sense we make of things. But it is practically impossible to doubt hands and rock and sun.

The difference could be put like this. The existence and the nonexistence of God are both of them epistemic possibilities: for all I can claim to know, there is no God; but also: there is a God. Both states of affairs are consistent with what I can claim to know. But it is not an epistemic possibility that these hands of mine do not exist unless one takes knowledge to require an objective certainty impervious to hyperbolic doubt.

In the case of my hands there is really no counter evidence to their existence apart from Cartesian hyperbolic doubt. But in the case of God, not only is the evidence spotty and inconclusive, but there is also counter evidence, the main piece of which is the existence of evil. It is worth noting, however, that if one would be skeptical, one ought to doubt also the existence of evil, and with it, arguments to the nonexistence of God from the putative fact of evil. How do you know there is evil? No doubt there is pain, excruciating pain. But is pain evil? Maybe pain is just a sensation that an organism feeling it doesn't like, and the organism's not liking it is just an attitude of that organism, so that in reality there is no good or evil. Pain is given. But is evil given? Pain is undeniable. But one can easily deny the existence of evil. Perhaps the all is just a totality of value-indifferent facts.

As for (Q2), it makes reference to my belief in God. Whether you take the belief as a disposition or as an occurrent state, the belief as a feature of my mental life must be distinguished from its truth-value. I am not certain of the truth of my belief that God exists, but I am certain of the existence of my belief (my believing) that God exists. As certain as I am that I have hands? More certain. I can doubt that I have hands in the usual Cartesian way. But how can I doubt that fact that I have a belief if in fact I have it?

Do You Live to Eat?

One who lives to eat is almost as ridiculous as one who drives a car to pump gas into its tank. In both cases a vehicle; in both cases fuel; in both cases means-end confusion.

So Much to be Grateful For

An Aristotelian on Earth, a Platonist in Heaven

It's been said of Aquinas.

On Aristotle's hylomorphic ontology, form and matter are 'principles' or ontological factors involved in the analysis of sublunary primary substances. These factors are not substances in their own right. Now Thomas is an Aristotelian in ontology. But when it comes to God and the soul he goes Platonist. God is forma formarum, the form of all forms, and yet self-subsistent. The soul after death is capable of existing in separation from matter while it awaits the resurrection of the body. Anima forma corporis: the soul is the form of the body. But in the human case the soulic form is more than a principle invoked in hylomorphic analysis. It is capable of existence independent of matter.

The sublunary Aristotelianism and the superlunary Platonism exist together in a certain tension. Whether this tension gets the length of a contradiction is a further question.

"Get the length of" is a classy phrase which has long languished in desuetude. I resurrect it from the writings of F. H. Bradley.

Distasteful Slang

A Battle of Titans: Plato Versus Aristotle

Potentiality and the Substance View of Persons

Is God Beyond All Being?

Is the Left Playing with Fire Again?

Pitchfork Pat gives us a history lesson.

The Liberal

Concerned as he rightly is with the pollution of the physical environment, the liberal yet cannot seem to muster much moral enthusiasm over the pollution of the cultural environment, if he's even aware of it. Hillary, you will recall, cozied up to Jay Z. If you don't know who he is, good.

How Little They Remember

A man hereabouts with a passion for chess got my number. We've become friends.

He told me he took a course in the philosophy of religion way back when. I pressed him on details. All he remembers is the old professor walking into the room, flipping a switch, and intoning "Let there be light!"

The chess player's forgetfulness reminds me of a story.

An eager young nun and a wise old nun were discussing teaching. The young nun was waxing enthusiastic over the privilege, but also the responsibility, of forming young minds. The old nun took a glass of water, inserted her forefinger, and agitated the water. Suddenly she removed her finger and the water immediately returned to its quiescent state.

"So much for the forming of young minds," said the older and wiser one.

The Uses of Populism

My man Hanson:

The spark that ignites populist movements is not so much disparities in wealth and status (they are not always French Revolution or Bolshevik-like class-driven attempts to grab power) as rank hypocrisies: Elites condescendingly prescribe nostrums to hoi polloi, but always on the dual premise that those who are dictating will be immune from the ramifications of their own sometimes burdensome edicts, and those who are dictated to are supposedly too dense to know what is good for them. (Think Steven Chu, the former energy secretary, who either did not commute by car or had a short drive to work, while he hoped that gas prices for the nation’s clueless drivers might climb to European levels of $9–$10 a gallon.)

We’ve already seen Trump’s anti-doctrinaire approach to jobs, trade, and the economy: his notion that the free-market in reality can often became a rhetorical construct, not a two-way street when it comes to trading blocs. Free-market purists might see the outsourcing of jobs and unbridled importation of foreign subsidized products as a way to toughen up the competitiveness of American companies and trim off their fat; but people who take this view are usually the ones who benefit from globalism and who are in little danger of having their own job downsized, eliminated, or shipped overseas. Few of us often ask whether full professors are very productive, whether op-ed writers are industrious and cogent, whether Hollywood actors are worth millions per picture, whether politicians are improving the nation’s lot, or whether journalists are disinterested and competent. Instead, we assume that because they all have well-compensated jobs, they are qualified, essential, and invaluable to the economy.

Platonism in One Case

The Christian is a Platonist about one man, Christ: he pre-exists both his conception and his birth. But there is no Platonism about any other human. The rest of us enjoy no Platonic pre-existence. We are literally nothing until we are conceived. One could say that orthodox Christians are anthropological exceptionalists with respect to one man. And he is indeed a man. If he is fully God and fully man, then he is fully man.

Leftist Thuggery and Abdication of Authority

Leftists complain that President Trump is 'authoritarian.' But given the abdication of authority on the part of university administrators who refuse to stand up to leftist thugs and refuse to defend such ideals of the university as free speech and free inquiry, a little 'authoritarianism' looks to be exactly what is needed. It is the surrender of the university admins to the know-nothing and 'transgressive' rabble that would justify Trump's withholding of federal funds from institutions such as Cal Berkeley and NYU. In fact, that is exactly what he should do.

'Progressives' have an Orwellian understanding of tolerance. There is nothing (classically) liberal about them.

Conservatives are the new liberals.

Metaphysical Grounding and the Euthyphro Dilemma

The locus classicus of the Euthyphro Dilemma (if you want to call it that) is Stephanus 9-10 in the early Platonic dialog, Euthyphro. This aporetic dialog is about the nature of piety, and Socrates, as usual, is in quest of a definition. Euthyphro proposes three definitions, with each of which Socrates has no trouble finding fault. According to the second, "piety is what all the gods love, and impiety is what all the gods hate." To this Socrates famously responds, "Do the gods love piety because it is pious, or is it pious because they love it?" In clearer terms, do the gods love pious acts because they are pious, or are pious acts pious because the gods love them?

What interests me at the moment is the notion of metaphysical grounding which I want to defend against the Noble Ostrich and other anti-metaphysical types. (For it is his failure to understand metaphysical grounding that accounts for the Ostrich's failure to understand my animadversions against ostrich nominalism as well as his failure to appreciate the force of my circularity objection to the thin theory of existence.) In all fairness, though, we must be open to the possibility that there is nothing to understand or appreciate here.

In any case, I will not try to answer a question beyond my pay grade, namely:

Q. Does God command X because it is morally obligatory, or is X morally obligatory because God commands it?

My concern is with the preliminary question whether (Q) is so much as intelligible. It is intelligible only if we can make sense of the 'because' in it. Let' s start with something that we should all be able to agree on (if we assume the existence of God and the existence of objective moral obligations), namely:

1. Necessarily, God commands X iff X is morally obligatory.

(1) expresses a broadly logical equivalence and equivalence is symmetrical: if p is equivalent to q, then q is equivalent to p. But metaphysical grounding is asymmetrical: if M metaphysically grounds N, then it is not the case that N metaphysically grounds M. For example, if fact F is the truth-maker of sentence s, then it is not the case that s is the truth-maker of F. Truth-making is a type of metaphysical grounding: it is not a causal relation and its is not a logical relation (where a logical relation is one that relates propositions, examples of logical relations being consistency, inconsistency, entailment, and logical independence.)

(1) leaves wide open whether God is the source of the obligatoriness of moral obligations, or whether such obligations are obligatory independently of divine commands. Thus the truth of (1) does not entail an answer to (Q).

The 'because' in (Q) cannot be taken in a causal sense if causation is understood as a relation that connects physical or mental events, states, or changes with other physical or mental events, states, or changes. Nor can the 'because' be taken in a logical sense. Logical relations connect propositions, and a divine command is not a proposition. Nor is the obligatoriness of the content of a command a proposition.

So I say this: if the content of a command is morally obligatory because God issued the command, then the issuing of the command is the metaphysical ground of the the moral obligatoriness of the content of the command. If, on the other hand, the content of the command is morally obligatory independently of the issuing of the divine command, then the moral obligatoriness of the command is the metaphysical ground of the correctness of the divine command.

Either way, there is a relation of metaphysical grounding.

My argument in summary:

1. (Q) is an intelligible question.

2. (Q) is not a question about a causal relation.

3. (Q) is not a question about a logical relation.

4. There is no other ordinary (nonmetaphysical) candidate relation such as a temporal relation or an epistemic relation for (Q) to be about.

5. (Q) is an intelligible question if and only if 'because' in (Q) expresses metaphysical grounding.

Therefore

6. 'Because' in (Q) expresses metaphysical grounding.

Therefore

7. There is a relation of metaphysical grounding.

OK, Noble Ostrich, which premise will you reject and why?

Time and Tense: Remarks on the B-Theory

What is time? Don't ask me, and I know. Ask me, and I don't know. (St. Augustine) This post sketches, without defending, one theory of time.

On the B-Theory of time, real or objective time is exhausted by what J. M. E. McTaggart called the B-series, the series of times, events, and individuals ordered by the B-relations (earlier than, later than, simultaneous with). If the B-theory is correct, then our ordinary sense that events approach us from the future, arrive at the present, and then recede into the past is at best a mind-dependent phenomenon, at worst an illusuion. Either way, not something that really occurs. For on the B-theory, there are no such irreducible monadic A-properties as futurity, presentness and pastness. There is just a manifold of tenselessly existing events ordered by the B-relations. Time does not pass or flow, let alone fly. There is no temporal becoming. My birth is not sinking into the past, becoming ever more past, nor is my death approaching from the future, getting closer and closer. Tempus fugit does not express a truth about reality. At best, it picks out a truth about our experience of reality.

The B-theorist does not deny that there is time. He does not hold that time is an illusion or mere appearance. What he denies is that the sense we all have that time passes or flows is an ingredient in real time. His claim is that real or objective time is exhausted by the B-series and that temporal becoming is at best subjective.

If there is no temporal becoming in reality, then change is not a becoming different or a passing away or a coming into being. When a tomato ripens, it does not become ripe: it simply is unripe at certain times and is ripe at certain later times. And when it ceases to exist, it doesn't pass away: it simply is at certain times and is not at certain later times.

You could say that that the B-theorist has a static view of time that strips way its 'dynamism.'

Employing a political metaphor, one could say that a B-theorist is an egalitarian about times and the events at times: they are all equal in point of reality. Accordingly, my blogging now is no more real (but also no less real) than Socrates' drinking the hemlock millenia ago. Nor is it more real than my death which, needless to say, lies in the future. (But this future event is not approaching or getting closer.) Each time is present at itself, but no time is present, period. And each time (and the events at it) exists relative to itself, but no time exists absolutely.

This is to say that the present moment enjoys no privilege. There is nothing special about it. So you can't say that the present alone exists.

This is not to say that the B-theorist does not have uses for 'past,' 'present,' and 'future.' He can speak with the vulgar while thinking with the learned. Thus a B-theorist can hold that an utterance at time t of 'E is past' expresses the fact that E is earlier than t. An old objection is that this does not capture the meaning of 'E is past.' For the fact that E is earlier than t, if true, is always true; while 'E is past' is true only after E. This difference in truth conditions shows a difference in meaning. The B-theorist can respond by saying that his concern is not with semantics but with ontology. His concern is with the reality, or rather the lack of reality, of tense, and not with the meanings of tensed sentences or sentences featuring A-expressions. The B-theorist can say that, regardless of meaning, what makes it true that E is past at t is that E is earlier than t, and that, in mind-independent reality, nothing else is needed to make 'E is past' uttered at t true.

Compare 'BV is hungry' and 'I am hungry' said by BV. The one is true if and only if the other is. But the two sentences differ in meaning. The first, if true, is true no matter who says it; but the second is true only if asserted by someone who is hungry. Despite the difference in meaning, what makes it true that I am hungry (assertively uttered by BV) is that BV is hungry. In sum, the B-theorist need not be committed to the insupportable contention that A-statements are translatable salva significatione into B-statements.

The B-theorist, then, denies that the present moment enjoys any temporal or existential privilege. Every time is temporally present to itself such that no time is temporally present simpliciter. This temporal egalitarianism entails a decoupling of existence and temporal presentness. There just is no irreducible monadic property of temporal presentness; hence existence cannot be identified with it. To exist is to exist tenselessly. The B-theory excludes presentism according to which there is a genuine, irreducible, property of temporal presentness and existence is either identical or logically equivalent to this property. Presentism implies that only the temporally present is real or existent. If to exist is to exist now, then the past and future do not exist, not just now (which is trivial) but at all.

Please note that the B-theory is incompatible not only with presentism, but with any theory that is committed to irreducible A-properties. Thus the B-theory rules out 'pastism,' the crazy theory that only the past exists and 'futurism,' the crazy view that only the future exists. It also rules out the sane view that only the past and the present exist.

Why be a B-theorist? McTaggart has a famous argument according to which the monadic A-properties lead to contradiction. We should examine that argument in a separate post. The argument is endorsed by Hugh Mellor in his Real Time.

Another consideration is that the physics of Einstein & Co, has no need of temporal becoming. So if physics gets at the world as it is in itself apart from our subjective additions, then real time is exhausted by the B-series.

A Physicist’s Petitio Principii

One of my self-appointed tasks is to beat up on physicists when they play at philosophy and makes fools of themselves. The following is from an interview with Richard Muller in Physics Today:

PT: You mention in your introduction that some physicists have concluded that the flow of time is an illusion. Why do you think that’s not the case?

MULLER: The flow of time does not exist in the usual spacetime diagram of physics. Time is mysterious; in any relativistic coordinate system, it is linked to space. And yet time is different—and I mean much more than simply a sign in the metric. Time flows. Choose any coordinate system and you can stand still in space but not in time. That different behavior breaks the otherwise glorious spacetime symmetry. Moreover, there is a special moment in time we call “now.” No such special location exists in the dimensions of space.

Is this guy serious? His argument boils down to: The flow of time is not an illusion because time flows! There is no spacetime symmetry because there is a special moment in time called 'NOW.' Well thank you very much for resolving this thorny question at long last. The 'diameter' of this circular reasoning is embarrassingly short. Both interviewee and interviewer need a course in Logic 101.

The following entry will give you some idea of the theory that our physicist thinks he has refuted.

‘Understand’ is a Verb of Success

Here I encountered the following sentence:

However, most people understand their side is good and the opposing side is bad, so it’s much easier for them to form these emotional opinions of political parties.

This sentence features a misuse of 'understand.' 'Understand' is a verb of success. If you understand something, then it is the case. For example, if you understand that both 2 and -2 are square roots of 4, then this is the case. Otherwise there is a failure to understand. 'Understand' in this respect is like 'know' and unlike 'believe' or 'think'. My knowing that p entails that p is true. My believing or thinking that p does not entail that p is true. My understanding that my side is good entails that it is. The above sentence should read as follows:

However, most people THINK their side is good and the opposing side is bad, so it’s much easier for them to form these emotional opinions of political parties.

A second example:

Not necessarily, says Taubes, who suggests that the ad hoc societal test of the low-carb solution lacks certainty. “If you understand beyond a shadow of a doubt that your disease is caused by sugar and flour and refined carbohydrates,” he says, “you are more likely to adhere to a diet that cuts them out.”

Some will say that usage changes, to which I will reply: no doubt, but not all change is change for the better.

Call me a prescriptivist if you like, but don't confuse me with a school-marm prescriptivist. If you end a sentence with a preposition, I won't draw my weapon. For that is a piece of pedantry up with which I shall not put!

Saturday Night at the Oldies: Some 1940’s Proto-Rock

Freddie Slack and Will Bradley Trio (1940), Down the Road A Piece.

If you like to boogie woogie, I know the place.
It's just an old piano and a knocked out bass.
The drummer man's a guy they call Eight Beat Mack.
And you remember Doc and old "Beat Me Daddy" Slack.

Man it's better than chicken fried in bacon grease
Come along with me, boys, it's just down the road a piece.

Ella Mae Morse (1945), The House of Blue Lights. Shows that 'square' and 'daddy-o' and 'dig' were already in use in the '40s. I had been laboring under the misapprehension that this patois first surfaced in Beat/Beatnik circles in the '50s.