Maverick Philosopher – Page 387 – Footnotes to Plato from the foothills of the Superstition Mountains

Generic Statements

Statements divide into the singular and the general. General statements divide into the universal, the particular, and the generic. Generic statements are interesting not only to the logician and linguist and philosopher but also to critics of ideology and conservative critics of leftist ideology critique. For example, leftists will find something 'ideological' about the generic 'Women are nurturing' whereas conservatives will hold that the sentence expresses the plain truth and that some sort of obfuscation and chicanery is involved when leftists deny this plain biologically-based truth and try to tie its very meaning to the legitimation and preservation of existing power relations in society.

In this entry, perhaps the first in a series, I confine myself to presenting examples of generic statements and to giving a preliminary exegesis of the linguistic data, noting some features of generic generalizations, and some philosophical questions that arise.

Examples of Generic Statements

Some of the examples are my own, some are culled from the literature. Some of the following are true, some false, and some politically incorrect. Trigger Warning! All girly girls and pajama boys out of the seminar room and into their safe spaces! Uncle Bill will visit you later with milk and cookies and cuddly animals.

Dutchmen are good sailors. (Arnauld)
Germans are industrious.
Jews are very intelligent.
Birds fly.
Chickens lay eggs.
Germans make better soldiers than Italians.
Cigars are what Bill smokes these days.
Men are taller than women.
Blacks are more criminally prone than whites.
Priests don't ride motorcycles.
Reducing taxes leads to increased economic growth.
Turks are hospitable.
Turks are very bad drivers.
Analytic philosophers do not know the history of philosophy very well.
Humanities departments are lousy with leftists.
The dodo is extinct.
Schockley invented the transistor.
The lion has a mane.
Blacks are not good at deferring gratification.
Conservatives are racists.
Women are nurturing and better with children.
Fred drinks wine with dinner.
The potato is highly digestible.

Some Features of Generic Statements

One obvious feature of generic statements is that they are not replaceable either salva veritate or salva significatione by either universal or particular quantified statements. It is true that Germans are industrious, but false that all are. That some are is true, but 'Some Germans are industrious' does not convey the sense of 'Germans are industrious.' The generic and the particular generalization agree in truth value but differ in sense.

In a vast number of cases, if I assert that the Fs are Gs I do not mean to endorse the corresponding universal generalization. No doubt birds fly, but it is false that all birds fly: the penguin is a bird, but it doesn't fly. And I know that. So if I say that birds fly, you can't refute me by bringing up the penguin. And if I say that Italians and those of Italian extraction are frugal and masters of personal finance, which is manifestly true, you cannot refute me by bringing up your cousin Vinny, the spendthrift of Hoboken. The same goes for 'Humanities departments are lousy with leftists.' 'Chickens lay eggs' has the interesting property that all the roosters strutting around in the world's barnyards cannot counterexample it into falsehood.

It is interesting to note that one can make a generic statement (express a generic proposition) using a sentence with 'all' or 'every.' My example: Omnis homo mendax. 'Every man is a liar.' An assertive utterance of this sentence in normal contexts expresses the proposition that people lie, not the proposition that all people lie. Or if someone says, unguardedly, or Trumpianly, 'All politicians are crooks,' he won't be fazed if you point out that the late Patrick Daniel Moynihan was no crook. The speaker may have engaged in a hasty generalization, but then again he may have intended a generic statement.

On the other hand, we sometimes omit the universal quantifier even though the proposition we intend to express is a universal quantification. An assertive utterance of 'Arguments have premises' intends Every argument has premises. The possibility of counterexamples is not countenanced. Contrast this with the generic 'Chickens lay eggs' which is plainly true even though only hens lay eggs.

'Arguments have premises' is non-generic and elliptical for 'All arguments have premises.' But what about 'Men are mortal'? Is it replaceable salva significatione with 'All men are mortal'? Perhaps not, perhaps it is a generic statement that admits of exceptions, as generics typically do. After all, Christ was a man but he was not mortal inasmuch as he was also God.

A clearer example is 'Man is bipedal.' This cannot be replaced salva veritate by 'All men are bipedal' since the latter is false. Nor can it be replaced salva significatione by 'Some man is bipedal, which, though plainly true, is not what 'Man is bipedal' means. And the same holds for translations using the quantifiers 'many' and 'most' and 'almost all.'

We are tempted to say that 'Man is bipedal' by its very sense cannot be about individual humans, whether all of them, most of them, many of them, or some of them, but must be about a common generic essence that normal, non-defective humans instantiate. But how could this be? No generic essence has two feet. It is always only an individual man that has or lacks two feet. Here, then, is one of the philosophical puzzles that arise when we think about generic statements. It is the problem of what generic statements are about, which is not to be confused with the question whether they have truth makers.

And then there is 'Man is a rational animal.' Let us agree that to be rational is either to possess the capacity to reason or to possess the second-order capacity to develop this first-order capacity. Aristotle's dictum is true, while 'All humans are rational animals' is false. So Aristotle's dictum is a generic sentence that cannot be replaced by a quantified sentence. It is false that all humans are rational animals because an anencephalic human fetus, while obviously human (not bovine, canine, etc.), having as it does human parents, is not rational in the sense defined.

And of course we cannot replace 'Man is a rational animal' with 'Most men are rational animals.' For the dictum plainly intends something like: it the nature or essence of man to be rational. What then is the dictum about? If you tell me that it is about the generic essence man, then I will point out the obvious: no abstract object reasons, is capable of reasoning, or has the potentiality to acquire the power to reason.

Some philosophers hold that every truth has a truth-maker. What then are the truth-makers for the vast class of true generics? Do they have any?

REFERENCE

Panayot Butchvarov, Anthropocentrism in Philosophy: Realism, Antirealism, Semirealism, de Gruyter, 2015, Chapter 8, "Generic Statements," pp. 151-168.

A Morally Justifiable Case of Late-Term Abortion

Is Suggestibility Always Bad?

Belonging to a community of believers reinforces one in one's belief. If the belief is true and good, then so is the suggestibility that sustains and reinforces it.

If we weren't suggestible, we wouldn't be teachable by that highest form of teaching, indirect teaching by example. As the Danish Socrates wrote,

The essential sermon is one's own existence. (Søren Kierkegaard, Journals, #1056)

Unnecessary Conversations

These include those with oneself. Limit the unproductive inner rants and rehearsals. There is no inner listening if one is talking to oneself.

A Righteous Form of Schadenfreude?

I posed the question in the aftermath of the election and because of the pleasure many of us are feeling at the Left's comeuppance:

Is there a righteous form of Schadenfreude or is it in every one of its forms as morally objectionable as I make it out to be here?

Edward Feser supplies an affirmative Thomistic answer. Ed concludes:

Putting the question of hell to one side, though, we can note that if schadenfreude can be legitimate even in that case, then a fortiori it can be legitimate in the case of lesser instances of someone getting his just deserts, in this life rather than the afterlife. For example – and to take the case Bill has in mind — suppose someone’s suffering is a consequence of anti-Catholic bigotry, brazen corruption, unbearable smugness, a sense of entitlement, groupthink, and in general from hubris virtually begging nemesis to pay a visit. When you’re really asking for it, you can’t blame others for enjoying seeing you get it.

No One Else Could Have Beaten Hillary

Publius Decius Mus makes a convincing case.

Who’s Deplorable Now?

Members of the party of 'tolerance' and 'inclusion' go on the rampage as captured in this collection of videos.

Trump won fair and square despite all the chicanery of the Dems. Now just as most Muslims are not terrorists, most Dems are not street anarchists. But the latter constitute a significant subset of Dems. What does it say about them that they breed elements who reject the very system of government that allowed for Obama's accession to power for two disastrous terms?

'Interesting' days up ahead. Hope for the best, but prepare for the worst.

Saturday Night at the Oldies: ‘Witch’ Songs

Ding Dong the Witch is Dead!

We 'deplorables' have much to be grateful for this Thanksgiving. My hat is off to every one of you who did his bit to defeat Hillary and "fundamentally transform' her into a political nonentity, thereby delivering a stinging rebuke to the destructive Obama and all he stands for. We conservatives now have to keep up the attack on the Left and hold Trump's feet to the fire so that he accomplishes at least some of what he has promised.

Donovan, Season of the Witch

Bloomfield, Kooper, Stills, Season of the Witch

Eagles, Witchy Woman

Carlos Santana, Black Magic Woman

Cream, Strange Brew

Now, to stretch a little,

Elmore James, Dust My Broom

Since 1992, the most beat-to-crap broom on my premises was always given the name, 'Hillary's Broom.' "Wifey, hand me Hillary's Broom. I got me a dirty job to do."

Canned Heat, Dust My Broom

Long Lines as ‘Voter Suppression’

On C-SPAN this morning I watched part of a re-run of a program from last Wednesday. A bunch of leftists were bemoaning Hillary's defeat. One Steve Cobble uncorked a real doozy to the effect that long lines at polling places are a form of 'voter suppression.'

This is too stupid to waste time refuting, but it's good for a laugh.

Turns out this Cobble character writes for the The Nation. Surprise!

For articles of mine on 'voter suppression,' see here.

Trump Wins, and the Left Goes Bonkers

Here is the delusional Paul Krugman soiling, once again, the already piss-poor Op-Ed pages of The New York Times. His title is the hyperventilatory "Thoughts for the Horrified."

The political damage will extend far into the future, too. The odds are that some terrible people will become Supreme Court justices. States will feel empowered to engage in even more voter suppression than they did this year. At worst, we could see a slightly covert form of Jim Crow become the norm all across America.

Terrible people? Voter suppression? Jim Crow? This is crazy stuff, beneath reply. And Krugman's outburst is no isolated incident. Lefties can't seem to grasp that we reject their ideas and policies and that we have good grounds for doing so.

And then we have the leftist punks clogging the highways and byways. What are they protesting? The proper functioning of a democratic republic in which a bloodless transfer of power has occurred? The brainwashed punks have no legitimate grounds for protest. They simply don't like the outcome.

But we conservatives didn't like the outcome when Obama beat Romney in 2012. I don't recall any right-wing gangs in the streets protesting. Yet another difference between the Left and the Right. Perhaps now you understand why I often refer to the Left as destructive.

The Left's long march through the institutions has been successful. We now have hordes of young people with no understanding of the greatness of America. The punks have been brainwashed, and we conservatives can blame ourselves for retreating into our private lives and not battling the Marxist cultural termites early on.

But the focus on what really matters, the private, is of the essence of conservatism, and so it is our conservative attitude that unfits us for battle with the totalitarians of the Left who work to destroy the institutions of civil society.

We are thus at a disadvantage dictated by our virtues, as I explain in the aptly appellated The Conservative Disadvantage.

After MacIntyre: Can a Normative Conclusion be Derived from Purely Factual Premises?

Are there any valid arguments that satisfy the following conditions: (i) The premises are all factual in the sense of purporting to state only what is the case; (ii) the conclusion is normative/evaluative? Alasdair MacIntyre gives the following example (After Virtue, U. of Notre Dame Press, 1981, p. 55):

1. This watch is inaccurate.

Therefore

2. This is a bad watch.

MacIntyre claims that the premise is factual, the conclusion evaluative, and the argument valid. The validity is supposed to hinge on the functional character of the concept watch. A watch is an artifact created by an artificer for a specific purpose: to tell time accurately. It therefore has a proper function, one assigned by the artificer. (Serving as a paperweight being an example of an improper function.) A good watch does its job, serves its purpose, fulfills its proper function. MacIntyre tells us that "the concept of a watch cannot be defined independently of the concept of a good watch . . ." and that "the criterion of something's being a watch and something's being a good watch . . . are not independent of each other." (Ibid.) MacIntyre goes on to say that both sets of criteria are factual and that for this reason arguments like the one above validly move from a factual premise to an evaluative conclusion.

Speaking as someone who has been more influenced by the moderns than by the ancients, I don't quite see it. It is not the case that both sets of criteria are factual. The criteria for something's being a good watch already contain evaluative criteria. For if a good watch is one that tells time accurately, then that criterion of chronometric goodness involves a standard of evaluation. If I say of a watch that it is inaccurate, I am not merely describing it, but also evaluating it. MacIntyre is playing the following game, to put it somewhat uncharitably.

He smuggles the evaluative attribute good into his definition of 'watch,' forgets that he has done so thereby generating the illusion that his definition is purely factual, and then pulls the evaluative rabbit out of the hat in his conclusion. It is an illusion since the rabbit was already there in the premise. In other words, both (1) and (2) are evaluative. So, while the argument is valid, it is not a valid argument from a purely factual premise to an evaluative conclusion.

So if the precise question is whether one can validly move from a purely factual or descriptive premise to an evaluative conclusion, then MacIntyre's example fails to show that this is possible.

I think what MacIntyre needs is the idea that some statements are both factual and evaluative. If (1) is both, then the argument is valid, but then it is not an argument from a purely factual premise to an evaluative conclusion.

‘Women are Better at Looking After Children’

The Opponent supplies the above-captioned sentence for analysis. He reports that a female family member was widely defriended (unfriended?) on Facebook for agreeing that it is true. Of course the sentence is true as anyone with common sense and experience of life knows.

It is an example of a generic statement or generic generalization. It obviously does not mean that all women are better at looking after children. The Opponent writes,

I think the PC brigade would claim that any utterance whatsoever of ‘women are better at looking after children’ has a separate implicature, i.e. ‘what is suggested in an utterance, even though neither expressed nor strictly implied.’ Something like ‘women belong in the home’, i.e. the normative 'women ought to be at home looking after the children.'

No?

The Opponent and I agree that the sentence under analysis is true. This leaves three questions.

First, does the non-normative sentence conventionally imply the normative one? Is there conventional implicature here? We of course agree that we are not in the presence of logical implication or entailment.

Second, is there conversational implicature here?

Third, is the normative sentence true?

As for the first question,I find no conventional implicature. A conventional implicature is a non-logical implication that is not context-sensitive but depends solely on the conventional meanings of the words in the relevant sentences. For example, 'Tom is poor but happy' implies that poverty and happiness are not usually found together. This is not a logical implication; it is a case of conventional implicature. Same with 'Mary had a baby and got married.' This is logically consistent with the birth's coming before the marriage and the marriage's coming before the birth. But it conventionally implies that Mary had a baby and then got married. This implicature is not sensitive to context of use but is inscribed in (as a Continental philosopher might say) the language system itself.

What about conversational implicature? This varies from context of use to context of use. Consider my kind of conservative, the traditional conservative that rejects both the conservatism of the neo-cons and the white-race-based identity-political conservatism of the Alternative Right. My brand of conservatism embraces certain classical liberal commitments, including: universal suffrage, the right of women to own property in their own names, and the right of women to pursue careers outside the home.

So if conservatives of my type are conversing and one says, 'Women are better at looking after children,' then this does not conversationally imply that women ought to be at home looking after the children. But among a different type of conservative, an ultra-traditional conservative who holds that woman's place is in the home, then we are in the presence of a conversational implicature.

Finally, is it true that women ought to be at home looking after children? I would say No in keeping with my brand of conservatism, which I warmly recommend as the best type there is, avoiding as it does the extremism of the ultra-traditional throne-and-altar, women-tied-to-the-stove conservatism (men are better cooks in any case), the namby-pamby libertarian-conservative fusionism of the Wall Streer Journal types, and the race-based identity-political extremism of the 'alties' and the neo-reactionaries.

Now if this were part of a journal article, I would not preen like this. But this ain't no journal article. This here's a blog post, bashed out quickly.

Blogging's a 'sport' like speed chess.

Your move, Opponent.

On the Abysmal Depth of Disagreement

Why do we disagree so fundamentally about so many things? And can anything be done about it? Jonathan Haidt offers a solution in terms of more proximity and interaction and less separation; if people in opposing camps just got to know each other they would find common ground. Really? Consider the following opposing views of Trump's election triumph. The first passage is the opening paragraph of An American Tragedy by David Remnick writing in The New Yorker:

The election of Donald Trump to the Presidency is nothing less than a tragedy for the American republic, a tragedy for the Constitution, and a triumph for the forces, at home and abroad, of nativism, authoritarianism, misogyny, and racism. Trump’s shocking victory, his ascension to the Presidency, is a sickening event in the history of the United States and liberal democracy. On January 20, 2017, we will bid farewell to the first African-American President—a man of integrity, dignity, and generous spirit—and witness the inauguration of a con who did little to spurn endorsement by forces of xenophobia and white supremacy. It is impossible to react to this moment with anything less than revulsion and profound anxiety.

Remnick continues in this vein, his stridency increasing as he proceeds, in a piece that is representative of the Left's reaction to Hillary's defeat. My second passage is from Goodnight, Mrs. Clinton (A Partial-Birth Campaign is Laid to Rest) by Michael Matt writing in The Remnant:

Had she been elected it would have said much more about us than about her. We would have shown ourselves a soulless and heartless people, beyond hope, beneath contempt.

There was so much at stake. Much of our work here at The Remnant, for example, would have been criminalized over the next four years. Our home schools would have become illegal enterprises in the village Mrs. Clinton had in mind. Even our ability to move about freely would have been exponentially undermined. (As the “leader of a hate group”, according to the infamous Southern Poverty Law Center, it isn’t difficult for this writer to imagine how enthusiastically President Hillary would have enforced hate crime legislation against Christian America.)

So, yes, like everyone else, we’re still trying to process the news of this truly awesome political and moral and even spiritual upset (if Trump repeals the Johnson Amendment, even the Catholic Church in this country might become relevant again). There’s much to learn from what we saw last night, not the least of which is that the mainstream media, far from omniscient, are in fact clueless ideologues never to be trusted again.

No matter what happens with a Trump presidency, we now know that a substantial percentage of the American people are not beyond hope—that they still have enough Christian sense to recognize and reject the demonic when they see it. And what’s the takeaway from that? Demons are not invincible. In fact, last night they had their tails handed to them by a “buffoon” they’d mercilessly mocked for 18 months, and who decided he’d be the first politician in decades to give God-fearing Americans a voice again—a comparative small concession that nevertheless silenced the left-half of this country for the first times in decades. Donald Trump let pro-life, pro-God, pro-family America loose from their shackles—and the demons scattered before them like roaches.

My thesis is that the differences exemplified above run so deep as to be irreconcilable. No amount of conversation, however well-intentioned and amicably conducted, could possibly lead to agreement on fundamentals.

What then is to be done?

I suggest that what we need to mitigate tribal hostility is not more proximity and interaction, pace Haidt, but less, fewer 'conversations' not more, a government restricted to essential functions, more toleration, voluntary segregation, a return to federalism, a total stoppage of illegal immigration, and a reform of current immigration law to favor people who share our values. (Sharia-supporting Muslims are an example of a group that does not share our values.)

Do you have a better idea?

Worldly Success: How Much is Enough?

You have enough worldly success if it enables you to advance the project of self-realization on the important fronts including the moral, the intellectual, and the spiritual. The vita contemplativa cannot be well lived by the grindingly poor, the sick, the politically and socially oppressed, the sorely afflicted and tormented. Boethius wrote his Consolations of Philosophy in prison, but you are not Boethius.

You have too much worldly success when it becomes a snare and a burden and a distraction.

We need some social acceptance and human contact, but fame is worse than obscurity. Reflect for a moment on the character of those who enjoy fame and the character of those whose fickle regard confers it.

We need a modicum of worldly wherewithal to live well, but more is not better. Only the terminally deluded could believe, as the saying goes, that "You can't be too thin or too rich." You could be anorexic or like unto the New Testament camel who couldn't pass through the eye of a needle.

We need health, but not hypertrophy.

We need power, but not the power over others that corrupts, but the power over oneself that does not.

Arizona Pot Prop 205 Defeated

I smoked my fair share of the stuff back in the day, and so I know whereof I speak: more potheads will only hasten the Decline of the West in its prime instance, the U. S. of A.

Libertarians often argue that drug legalization would not lead to increased drug use. I find that preposterous, and you should too. There are at least three groups of people who are dissuaded from drug use by its being illegal. See Libertarians and Drug Legalization.

I don't know how much dope Gary Johnson smokes but he seems to suffer from traces of amotivational syndrome as one might have gleaned from the collapse of his campaign. (The Aleppo business, the sticking-out-of-tongue incident, his general dopiness.) Even in dope-friendly Colorado, a good place to get Rocky Mountain high, he snagged only 4.9 % of the vote.

As for the AZ pot prop, 47.9% voted for legalization, and 52.1% against.