According to Wikipedia, the argumentum ad lapidem, or appeal to the stone, "consists in dismissing a statement as absurd without giving a proof of its absurdity."
This supposed fallacy takes its name from the following incident reported in Boswell's Life of Samuel Johnson:
57. Refutation of Bishop Berkeley After we came out of the church, we stood talking for some time together of Bishop Berkeley's ingenious sophistry to prove the nonexistence of matter, and that every thing in the universe is merely ideal. I observed, that though we are satisfied his doctrine is not true, it is impossible to refute it. I never shall forget the alacrity with which Johnson answered, striking his foot with mighty force against a large stone, till he rebounded from it — "I refute it thus." Boswell: Life
But where is the fallacy? If the good bishop really did maintain the nonexistence of material objects such as stones, then Johnson really did refute him by drawing Boswell's attention to a massive stone and the resistance it offered to Johnson's foot. But of course Berkeley was not an eliminativist about material objects. He did not maintain that rocks and trees do not exist; he did not question WHETHER they are; he offered an unusual ontological account of WHAT they are, namely ideas in the divine mind. If you know your Berkeley you know that what I just wrote is true and that the bishop cannot be refuted by kicking a stone.
Johnson's mistake, therefore, was not that he simply dismissed Berkeley's thesis without argument; his mistake was that he took Berkeley to be maintaining something other than what he in fact maintained, and then went on, stupidly, to refute this other proposition.
Johnson's fallacy was the ignoratio elenchi, not the ad lapidem. The very name 'ad lapidem' shows misunderstanding.
I suggest that there is something fallacious in the very notion of the ad lapidem fallacy. I rather doubt that we have any need to add this so-called fallacy to the grab-bag list of informal fallacies. Surely it cannot be the case that it is always wrong to dismiss a statement as false or even absurd without proof. Some claims are refutable by kicking. Suppose you maintain that there are no pains. Without saying anything, I kick you in the shins with steel-tipped boots, or perhaps I kick you a bit higher up. I will have brought home to you the plain falsehood of your claim. The fallacy behind ad lapidem is the notion that no assertion can be legitimately dismissed, that every assertion, no matter what, must be paid the respect of an explicit discursive rebuttal.
Or suppose sophomore Sam says that there is no truth. I would be fully within my epistemic rights to respond, 'Is that so?' and then walk away.
David Horowitz is a national treasure. The following is so important and so right that I reproduce the whole of it here. From National Review.
Is the Left Even on America’s Side Anymore?
The progressives have undermined American security and damaged race relations.
By David Horowitz — January 8, 2016
The Bolshevik leader Leon Trotsky once described Stalinism as “the perfect theory for glueing up the brain.” What he meant was that a regime as monstrous as Stalin’s, which murdered 40 million people and enslaved many times more, was nonetheless able to persuade progressives and “social justice” advocates all over the world to act as its supporters and defenders. These enlightened enablers of Stalin’s crimes included leading intellectuals of the day, even Nobel Prize winners in the sciences and the arts such as Frederic Joliot-Curie and Andre Gide. But brilliant as they were, they were blind to the realities of the Stalinist regime and, therefore, to the virtues of the free societies they lived in.
What glued up their brains was the belief that a brave new world of social justice — a world governed by progressive principles — existed in embryo in Soviet Russia and had to be defended by any means necessary. As a result of this illusion, they put their talents and prestige at the service of the totalitarian enemies of democracy, acting, in Trotsky’s words, as “frontier guards” for the Stalinist empire. And they continued their efforts even after the Soviets conquered Eastern Europe, acquired nuclear weapons, and initiated a “cold war” with the West. To the progressives seduced by Stalinism, democratic America represented a greater evil than the barbaric police states of the Soviet bloc. Even half a century later a progressive culture still refers to the formative phase of the Cold War as the “Red Scare” — as though the fifth column of American progressives whose loyalties were to the Soviet enemy, whose members included Soviet spies, was not a matter of serious concern, and as though a nuclear-armed, rapacious Soviet empire did not pose a credible threat.
How were these delusions of otherwise intelligent and well-intentioned people possible? How were otherwise informed individuals able to deny the obvious and support one of the most brutal and oppressive dictatorships in history? How did they come to view a relatively humane, decent, and democratic society like the United States as evil, while regarding the barbarous Communist regime as the victim of America? The answer lies in the identification of Marxism with the promise of social justice and the institution of progressive values ( to take place in a magical socialist future). Defense of the progressive idea trumped recognition of the reactionary fact.
To Western progressives, once the Stalinist regime was identified with the imaginary progressive future, everything followed — its status as a persecuted victim and America’s role as a reactionary force standing in the way of the noble leftist aspiration. Every fault of Stalin’s regime, every crime it committed — if not denied outright by progressives — was attributed to the nefarious actions of its enemies, most glaringly the United States. And once the promise of progressive redemption was juxtaposed to an imperfect real-world actor, all of their responses became virtually inevitable. Hence, the glueing of the brain.
The Soviet Union is gone, and history has moved on. But the Stalin-apologist dynamic endures as the heritage of a post-Communist Left, which remains wedded to fantasies of an impossibly beautiful future that collides with the flawed American present. The Left is now the dominant force in the American Democratic party. Its extreme disconnect from realities is encapsulated in the support for the transparently racist movement called “Black Lives Matter,” which attacks law enforcement and defends street predators, excusing their crimes with the alibi that “white supremacists” created the circumstances that make some commit criminal acts. This extremist movement has the “strong support” of the entire spectrum of the “progressive” Left (including 46 percent of the Democratic party, according to a Wall Street Journal/NBC news poll).
Black Lives Matter is a movement built on the fiction that police have declared open season on innocent black Americans. According to progressive fictions, police are the agents of a “white supremacist society” — a claim alone that should make one wary of the sanity of those who advance it. The facts belie the very basis of the claim that African Americans are being indiscriminately gunned down by police: African-American males, accounting for 6 percent of the population are responsible for more than 40 percent of violent crimes. But a Washington Post report on all 980 police shootings of 2015 reveals that only 4 percent of fatal police shootings involved white officers and black victims, while in “three-quarters of the incidents, cops were either under attack themselves or defending civilians,” or, as Michael Walsh observed in the New York Post, police officers were “in other words, doing their jobs.”
One incident in the St. Louis suburb of Ferguson, Mo., became the launching point for the Black Lives Matter movement and its malicious claim that innocent blacks were being wantonly gunned down by racist police. The alleged “victim,” Michael Brown, had just committed a strong-armed robbery and refused to comply with Officer Darren Wilson’s order to surrender. Instead the 300-pound street thug attacked Wilson in his vehicle, tried to wrest his gun from him, and then walked away before turning and charging him. Several shots failed to stop Brown, until one killed him.
Ignoring the facts, Black Lives Matter promoted the lie, invented by Brown’s robbery accomplice, that Brown had his hands up and was attempting to surrender when he was shot. “Hands Up, Don’t Shoot” quickly became the anthem of the movement. But this lie was refuted not only by black eyewitnesses testifying before the grand jury convened for the case and by forensic evidence, but by a review conducted by former attorney general Eric Holder’s Justice Department, otherwise bent on demonstrating the existence of bigotry in the Ferguson police department. Meanwhile “protesters” went about setting fire to Ferguson, causing millions of dollars of damage, because if there was no justice — no hanging of Wilson — there would be no peace, as the now familiar mob slogan framed it.
Black Lives Matter then set about taking its crusade to other cities, most prominently to Baltimore, where a career criminal named Freddie Gray became another cause célèbre. Gray had suffered fatal injuries inside a police van where only another captive was present. As the Black Lives Matter–inspired mobs began to gather in “protest,” Baltimore’s black Democratic mayor ordered police to stand down, allowing them to destroy millions of dollars of property. The state’s black Democratic prosecutor then indicted six police officers, three of them African American, on various ludicrous charges including first-degree murder.
The immediate result of Black Lives Matter’s war on law enforcement was an epidemic of crime, as police officers decided that aggressive law enforcement was dangerous to their lives and careers. Homicides in the Ferguson area and in Baltimore jumped 60 percent. Virtually all the victims were blacks, revealing the hypocrisy of a movement for which black lives didn’t really matter — attacks on the law enforcement and on the “power structure” did.
How could any reasonable citizen — let alone one with progressive aspirations — support a roving lynch mob like the one in Ferguson? How could half the Democratic party support a movement that condemns America as a white-supremacist society, disregarding the reality that the president and chief law-enforcement officer, and thousands of civil servants and elected officials, including the mayors and police chiefs of large urban centers, such as Memphis, Tenn., Atlanta, and Philadelphia are black? (In Detroit the new mayor is actually the first white mayor in 40 years, while its police chief is still black.)
One can embrace the absurdity that America is a white-supremacist society only if afflicted with the illusion that all statistical inequalities affecting African Americans, like high crime rates, are not reflections of culture and character but marks of racist oppression. (This particular absurdity — universal as it is among American progressives and the current U.S. Department of Justice — is easily refuted: If statistical disparities proved racism, the National Basketball Association in which 95 percent of the starting multimillionaires are black would be an association controlled by black racists, as would the National Football League, while the National Hockey League would be under the thumb of white racists.) Progressives are delusional about black racism and black crime because they are in thrall to the vision of an imaginary progressive future in which social justice will guarantee that every individual outcome is the same.
The Left is blind to the responsibility of inner-city populations for their off-the-charts violent-crime rates. The failure to embrace the responsibilities of parenthood is as characteristic of the progressive attitude as is its blindness to the betrayal of inner-city communities by Democrats, responsible almost entirely for the disgraceful condition of America’s cities. Chicago, Detroit, Baltimore, St. Louis, and numerous other centers of out-of-control black poverty, failed public-school systems, and black-on-black violence are 100 percent controlled by the Democratic party and have been so for 50 to 100 years. Yet 95 percent of the black vote and 100 percent of the progressive vote continues to go to Democrats who oppress African Americans.
Unfortunately, progressives’ sordid history of supporting criminals at home is accompanied by an equally dishonorable record of sympathy for America’s enemies abroad. The Iraqi dictator, Saddam Hussein, was one of the monsters of the 20th century, launching two aggressive wars, dropping poison gas on the Kurdish minority, and murdering 300,000 Iraqi citizens. But when America proposed deposing him, more than a million progressives poured into the streets in protest. At first, the Democratic leadership supported the Iraq invasion as a just and necessary war. But three months later, with American men and women still in harm’s way — and under pressure from the progressive Left — they turned against the very war they had voted to authorize and, for the next five years, conducted a malicious propaganda campaign, worthy of the enemy, to discredit America’s intentions and to obstruct our military mission.
Because the Bush administration chose not to defend itself by confronting the Left’s subversive actions — including the exposure of three national-security programs — leftist myths about the Iraq War persist to this day, even in some conservative circles. To set the record straight: Bush did not lie to seduce Democrats into supporting the war, and could not have done so, since the Democrats had access to the same intelligence reports he did. The war was not about extant stockpiles of weapons of mass destruction, as Democrats dishonestly claimed: It was about Saddam’s violation of 17 U.N. Security Council resolutions designed to prevent him from pursuing the WMD programs he was developing. The Democrats’ betrayal of their country’s war effort crippled its progress and, with the election to the presidency of an anti-war leftist in 2008, led directly to the explosion of terrorism and bloodshed that has since engulfed the Middle East.
But it wasn’t just the surrender mentality of the Obama administration that fueled these catastrophes. With the full support of the Democratic party, President Obama embraced the Muslim Brotherhood and America’s mortal enemy, Iran, providing its ayatollahs with a path to nuclear weapons and dominance of the region — causing Sunni Arab states to prepare for a Middle Eastern civil war.
Just as leftists acted as propagandists for the Soviet empire, discrediting America’s Cold War effort and conducting deceptive campaigns to hide Soviet crimes, so the Left today disparages the Islamist threat and opposes the security measures necessary to protect the homeland — most alarmingly the sealing of our southern border. Progressives have created seditious “sanctuary cities,” which refuse to cooperate with Homeland Security and the immigration laws in more than 300 outlaw municipalities under Democratic control. This betrayal has gone un-reversed for years and led to the needless deaths of numerous American citizens at the hands of illegal-alien criminals, of which there are more than 200,000 in our jails alone, and obviously many more inside our borders.
Leftists and Democrats have also joined the Islamist propaganda campaign to represent Muslims — whose co-religionists have killed hundreds of thousands of innocents since 9/11 in the name of their religion — as victims of anti-Muslim prejudice, denouncing critics of Islamist terror and proponents of security measures as “Islamophobes” and bigots. But in truth, 60 percent of religious hate crimes are directed at Jews, with a small minority directed a Muslims.
Exploiting the myth of Muslim persecution, progressives oppose scrutiny of the Muslim community, including terror-promoting imams and mosques. They immediately denounce proposals to screen Muslim immigrants as religious bigotry, and thus close off any rational discussion of the problem. Led by Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama, Democrats have enabled the Islamist assault on free speech, which is a central component of the Islamist campaign to create a worldwide religious theocracy. Most notoriously the president and his operatives cynically spread the lie that an obscure Internet video about Mohammed was behind the Benghazi terror attack. Speaking like an ayatollah before the U.N. General Assembly, shortly after the attack, Obama declared: “The future must not belong to those who slander the prophet of Islam.” What an American president should have said is: “The future must not belong to those who murder in the name of Islam.”
Our country is at a perilous crossroads, one that is made immeasurably more dangerous by a national party that blames its own country for the crimes of its enemies, and by a political opposition too feckless and timid to hold its fellow citizens accountable for their unconscionable acts.
Panayot Butchvarov, Anthropocentrism in Philosophy: Realism, Antirealism, Semirealism, Walter de Gruyter, 2015, p. 33:
As used in epistemology, "justified" is a technical term, of obscure meaning and uncertain reference, indeed often explicitly introduced as a primitive. In everyday talk, it is a deontic term, usually a synonym of 'just' or 'right,' and thus 'justified belief' is a solecism. For it is actions that are justified or unjustified, and beliefs are not actions.
The argument is this, assuming that moral justification is in question:
a. Actions alone are morally either justified or unjustified. b. No belief is an action. Therefore c. No belief is morally either justified or unjustified. Therefore d. 'Morally justified belief' is a solecism.
(b) is not evident. Aren't some beliefs actions or at least analogous to actions? I will argue that some beliefs are actions because they come under the direct control of the will. As coming under the direct control of the will, they are morally evaluable.
1. It makes sense to apply deontological predicates to actions. Thus it makes sense to say of a voluntary action that it is obligatory or permissible or impermissible. But does it make sense to apply such predicates to beliefs and related propositional attitudes? If I withhold my assent to proposition p, does it make sense to say that the withholding is obligatory or permissible or impermissible? Suppose someone passes on a nasty unsubstantiated rumor concerning a mutual acquaintance. Is believing it impermissible? Is disbelieving it obligatory? Is suspending judgment required? Or is deontological evaluation simply out of place in a case like this?
2. It makes sense to apply deontological predicates to actions because they are under voluntary control. Thus it makes sense to say that one ought to feed one's children because (apart from unusual circumstances) it is within one's power to feed one's children. So if it makes sense to apply deontological predicates to beliefs and related propositional attitudes, then they too must be under voluntary control. If I cannot help but believe what I believe, then I cannot be morally censured for believing, disbelieving, or suspending judgment.
3. This brings us to the question of doxastic voluntarism: Are any of our (occurrent) believings under our direct voluntary control as regards their coming into existence? To introduce some terminology:
Extreme doxastic voluntarism: ALL beliefs are such that their formation is under one's direct voluntary control. Limited doxastic voluntarism: There are only SOME beliefs over the formation of which one has direct voluntary control. Doxastic involuntarism: There are are NO beliefs over the formation of which one has direct voluntary control.
Note that the issue concerns the formation of beliefs, not their maintenance, and note the contrast between direct and indirect formation of beliefs. Roughly, I form a belief directly by just forming it, not by doing something else as a means to forming it.
4. I am a limited doxastic voluntarist.
a) Clearly, one cannot believe at will just anything. One cannot believe at will what is obviously false. It is obviously false that the Third Reich continues to exercise its brutal hegemony over Europe, and no one who is sane has the power to believe this falsehood at will, just by deciding to believe it.
b) One cannot not believe what is obviously the case. It is obviously the case that this thing in front of me is a computer monitor. Can I disbelieve this perceptual deliverance? No. Seeing is believing. It is a more subtle question whether I can suspend judgment in the manner of Husserl's phenomenological epoche. But this is a topic for a separate post. For now I am happy to concede that one cannot disbelieve at will what is obviously the case.
c) The matter becomes much more difficult when we turn to propositions from religion, philosophy, science and elsewhere that are neither obviously true nor obviously false. It is not obviously true that God exists, but neither is it obviously true that God does not exist. It is not obviously true that doxastic voluntarism is true, but neither is it obviously true that it is not true.
Suppose I am concerned with the freedom of the will, study the issue thoroughly, but am torn between libertarianism and compatibilism. It is surely not obvious that one or the other is true. If the positions strike me as equally well-supported, then nothing at the level of intellect inclines me one way or the other. Must not will come in to decide the matter, if the matter must be decided? Or consider the weightier question of the existence of God. Suppose the arguments pro et contra strike me as equally probative so that, at the level of intellect, I am not inclined one way or the other. If the issue is to be resolved, must I not simply decide to believe one way or the other? But William Alston, doxastic involuntarist, will have none of this: "How could we do that any more than, lacking any reasons at all for one alternative rather than another, we decide to believe that the number of ultimate particles in the universe is even rather than odd?" (Beyond "Justification," p. 65)
This response packaged in a rhetorical question strikes me as very weak. No one cares what the number of particles is let alone whether it is odd or even. Indeed, it is not clear that the question even makes sense. (How could one possibly count them?) The God question is toto caelo different. In Jamesian terms, the God question is live, forced, momentous, and not intellectually decidable. A live issue is one that matters to us and seems to need deciding. Whether the number of ultimate particles is odd or even is certainly not live. A forced issue is one that is compulsory in the sense that we cannot not take a stand on it: to remain agnostic or uncommitted on the God question is practically to live as an atheist. There is nothing forced about the particles question. A momentous issue is one about which it matters greatly which position we adopt. The particles question is clearly not momentous. An intellectually undecidable question is one which, if it is to be decided, must be decided by an act of will.
So what I would say to the doxastic involuntarist is that in some cases — those that fit the Jamesian criteria are clear but not the only examples — the will does in fact come into play in the formation of beliefs and indeed legitimately comes into play. To the extent that it does, a limited doxastic voluntarism is true.
If so, then some belief formation is under the control of the will and is morally evaluable, contra Butchvarov.
According to Heather Wilhelm, feminists are teetering on the brink of a "nervous breakdown":
Why, the chorus goes, is Bernie cast as the future, while Hillary gets painted as “the establishment”? Hillary Clinton is a woman, didn’t you notice? She is by her very nature oppressed; by definition, she cannot be the establishment. Never mind her questionable treatment of the many women who accused her husband of sexual assault; never mind her current classified e-mail quagmire, in which she may have put national security at risk. She is a woman, America. Everything else is chump change.
This lefty-feminist thinking is that women can no more belong to the establishment than blacks can be racists. Why? Because this is true by definition.
At this point I must plug my posts on the illicit use of 'by definition.' Here and here. ("Why must you?" Because it is my self-imposed task people to enlighten people.)
The problem here is that too many women, like too many blacks, are tribal, though not as tribal as blacks. Of course, women are not literally a tribe. Nor is it the case that all women are 'tribal' any more than all blacks are tribal. What do I mean when I say that women, many women, too many women, are 'tribal'? I mean that they place their self-identification as women at the top or near the top of more reasonable and less divisive self-identifications. Any woman who would vote for Hillary just because she is a woman or would place Hillary's being a woman near the top of her reasons for voting for the former Secretary of State is tribal in my sense.
You should vote for the candidate that you think best serves the common good. So if you support Hillary because you think she will best forward the 'progressive' agenda, and you believe in that agenda, then I won't call you 'tribal.' But I will question your judgment. If you really believe in the 'progressive' agenda, shouldn't you be supporting Sanders?
I'm no monarchist, neither am I mad, but the following from The Mad Monarchist is on target. (HT: London Karl)
You think you have free speech? Depends on your politics or your skin color or your religion. A French magazine can publish numerous cartoons mocking Christians, a few mocking Jews but one mocking Islam gets them all shot and western governments give cover to the murderers by self-censoring. One set of rules for them, another for us. If you are President Obama, or the mayor of any of the numerous “sanctuary cities” in these United States, you can refuse to enforce immigration laws and that’s perfectly fine but if you are a county clerk named Kim Davis in Kentucky who refuses to enforce a court ruling on granting gay “marriage” licenses, you go straight to jail, do not pass go and do not collect $200. They can do it, but you can’t. You have to follow the rules but they don’t. If you’re a socialist mp from Scotland you can be on a first-name basis with the most murderous dictators in the world, spout treason constantly while taking a paycheck from the Queen and be a national celebrity, a left-wing icon but if you’re name is Tommy Robinson and you say you are against the Islamization of Britain, even while French-kissing a Black, Jewish, homosexual you are going to be called a “Nazi” and have the police set on you until they find some reason to put you behind bars.
The point about self-censoring is important. A good recent example of it was Martin O'Malley's supine retraction of 'All lives matter' when confronted by Black Lives Matter idiots. By the way, it is this sort of disgusting grovelling before thugs and idiots that gives Trump traction. Probably the main thing animating his supporters is disgust at political correctness. Watch the entire clip; it is less than three minutes. Sanders at least had the cojones to stand his ground, and the black Kevin Jackson talks sense.
I read a book by Kevin Jackson recently, Race Pimping. He is one black dude with his head screwed on Right. To a leftard, that must make him a 'traitor to his race.'
By the way, how stupid a phrase! As if race is a political affiliation. But why not if race is a 'social construct'? One stupidity breeds another.
Here is an argument adapted from Peter van Inwagen for the univocity of 'exist(s)' across general and singular existentials.
a. Number-words are univocal.
b. 'Exist(s)' is a number-word.
Therefore
c. 'Exist(s)' is univocal.
(a) is plainly true. The words 'six' and 'forty-nine' have the same sense regardless of what we are counting. As van Inwagen puts it, "If you have written thirteen epics and I own thirteen cats, the number of your epics is the number of my cats."
(b) captures the Fregean claim that ". . . existence is analogous to number. Affirmation of existence is in fact nothing but denial of the number nought." (Foundations of Arithmetic, p. 65)
How so? Well, to say that unicorns do not exist is equivalent to saying that the number of unicorns is zero, and to say that horses exist is equivalent to saying that the number of horses is one or more. Surely that is true for both affirmative and negative general existentials. Whether it is true for singular existentials is a further question.
Van Inwagen maintains "The univocacy [univocity] of number and the the intimate connection between number and existence should convince us that existence is univocal."
I am not convinced.
Consider my cat Max Black. I exclaim, 'Max exists!' My exclamation expresses a truth. Contrast the singular 'Max exists' with the general 'Cats exist.' I agree with van Inwagen that the general 'Cats exist' is equivalent to 'The number of cats is one or more.' But it is perfectly plain that the singular 'Max exists' is not equivalent to 'The number of Max is one or more.' For the right-hand-side of the equivalence is nonsense, hence necessarily neither true nor false.
This question makes sense: 'How many cats are there in BV's house?' But this question makes no sense: 'How many Max are there in BV's house?' Why not? Well, 'Max' is a proper name (Eigenname in Frege's terminology) not a concept-word (Begriffswort in Frege's terminology). Of course, I could sensibly ask how many Maxes there are hereabouts, but then 'Max' is not being used as a proper name, but as a stand-in for 'person/cat named "Max" .' The latter phrase is obviously not a proper name.
And so I deny the univocity of 'exist(s)' across general and singular existentials.
Andrew Bailey lodges the following objection to what I maintain:
You note that "‘Max exists’ is not equivalent to ‘The number of Max is one or more’", and that seems right.
But why think "The number of Max is one or more" is the way to say of Max that he exists using number-words? Why not, instead, "At least one thing is Max"? My suggestion, note, would align closely with the way one would ordinarily translate "Max exists" into the predicate logic: — 'Ex(x=Max)' — a statement of logic one might render in English as "there is at least one thing that is identical to Max".
Dr. Bailey is of course right that 'Max exists' can be translated into standard first-order predicate logic in the way he indicates and that this is equivalent in 'canonical English' to 'There is at least one thing that is identical to Max.' Bailey's rebuttal seems to be the following: Just as we can express 'Cats exist' as 'At least one thing is a cat,' we can express 'Max exists' as 'At least one thing is Max.'
But this response is unavailing. Note that the 'is' in 'is a cat' is not the 'is' of identity, but the 'is' of predication, while the 'is' in 'is Max' is the 'is of identity. So if Bailey tries to secure the univocity of 'exist(s)' in this way, he does so by exploiting an equivocation on 'is.'
Another possible rebuttal would be by invoking haecceities. One might argue that there is no equivocation on 'is' because both of the following feature the 'is' of predication:
At least one thing is a cat
At least one thing is Max-identical.
On the second approach one secures the univocity of 'exist(s)' but at the expense of those metaphysical monstrosities known as haecceity properties. The haecceity H of x is a property x cannot fail to instantiate, alone instantiates in the actual world, and that nothing distinct from x instantiates in any possible world. If Max has such such a property — call it Maxity — then this property captures Max's haecceitas or thisness, where 'thisness' is to be understood as irreducible and nonqualitative. If there is such a property, then it is the property of identity-with-Max or Max-identity.
So if you want to maintain the univocity of 'exist(s)' across general and singular existentials, you must either conflate the 'is' of identity' with the 'is' of predication, or embrace haecceity properties.
You envy me? What a wretch you must be to feel diminished in your sense of self-worth by comparison with me! I have something you lack? Why isn't that compensated for by what you have that I lack? You feel bad that I have achieved something by my hard work? Don't you realize that you waste time and energy that could be used to improve your own lot?
You ought to feel bad, not because I do well, but because you are so foolish as to indulge envy. Vices vitiate, they weaken. You weaken yourself and make yourself even more of a wretch by succumbing to envy.
We'll start with murder. David Dalton (Who Is That Man? In Search of the Real Bob Dylan, Hyperion 2012, pp. 28-29, hyperlinks added!):
Most folk songs had grim, murderous content (and subtext). In Pretty Polly a man lures a young girl from her home with the promise of marriage,and then leads the pregnant girl to an already-dug grave and murders her. In Love Henry a woman poisons her unfaithful lover, observed by an alarmed parrot that she also tries to kill. So it was a bit bizarre that these songs should become part of the sweetened, homogenized new pop music.
[. . .]
The original folk songs were potent, possessed stuff, but the folk trios had figured out how to make this grisly stuff palatable, which only proved that practically anything could be homogenized. Clean-cut guys and girls in crinolines, dressed as if for prom night, sang ancient curse-and-doom tales. Their songs had sweet little melodies, but as in nursery rhymes, there was a dark gothic undercurrent to them — like Ring Around the Rosies, which happens to be a charming little plague song.
The most famous of these folk songs was the 1958 hit Tom Dooley, a track off a Kingston Trio album which set off the second folk revival [the first was in the early '40s with groups like the Weavers] and was Dylan's initial inspiration for getting involved in folk music. [I prefer Doc Watson's version.] And it was the very success of the syrupy folk trios that inspired Dylan's future manager to assemble one himself: Peter, Paul and Mary. They would make Dylan, the prophet of the folk protest movement, a star and lead to consequences that even he did not foresee. Their version of Blowin' in the Wind would become so successful that it would sound the death knell for the folk protest movement. Ultimately there would be more than sixty versions of it, "all performing the same function," as Michael Gray says, of "anesthetizing Dylan's message."
Be that as it may, it is a great song, one of the anthems of the Civil Rights movement. Its power in no small measure is due to the allusiveness of its lyrics which deliver the protest message without tying it to particular events. It's topical without being topical and marks a difference between Dylan, and say, Phil Ochs.
And now for some love songs.
Gloria Lynne, I Wish You Love. A great version from 1964. Lynne died at 83 in 2013. Here's what Marlene Dietrich does with it.
Ketty Lester, Love Letters. Another great old tune in a 1962 version. The best to my taste.
1. Keith Burgess-Jackson quotes Jamie Glazov on the hatred of Islamists and leftists for St. Valentine's Day. Another very interesting similarity between these two totalitarian movements. Recalling past inamorata of a Saturday night while listening to sentimental songs — is this not the height of bourgeois self-indulgence when you should be plotting ways to blow up the infidel or bring down capitalism? But we who defend the private life against totalitarian scum must be careful not to retreat too far into the private life. A certain amount of activism and engagement is necessary to keep the totalitarians in check.
2. On Thomas Merton: “All the love and all the death in me are at the moment wound up in Joan Baez’s ‘Silver Dagger,’” the man wrote to his lady love in 1966. “I can’t get it out of my head, day or night. I am obsessed with it. My whole being is saturated with it. The song is myself — and yourself for me, in a way.”
Don't sing love songs, you'll wake my mother She's sleeping here right by my side And in her right hand a silver dagger, She says that I can't be your bride.
All men are false, says my mother, They'll tell you wicked, lovin' lies. The very next evening, they'll court another, Leave you alone to pine and sigh.
My daddy is a handsome devil He's got a chain five miles long, And on every link a heart does dangle Of another maid he's loved and wronged.
Go court another tender maiden, And hope that she will be your wife, For I've been warned, and I've decided To sleep alone all of my life.
The American Philosophical Association has issued a statement that condemns bullying and harrassment. Who could disagree? But the following paragraph needs a little more work:
Abusive speech directed at philosophers is not limited to responses by the public to published op-eds. A look at some of the anonymous philosophy blogs also reveals a host of examples of abusive speech by philosophers directed against other philosophers. Disagreement is fine and is not the issue. But bullying and ad hominem harassment of philosophers by other philosophers undermines civil disagreement and discourse and has no place in our community. [. . .]
Two points. Why the restriction to anonymous philosophy blogs? There is a decidedly non-anonymous gossip site run by a philosophy adjunct that has featured numerous unprovoked attacks on fellow philosophers. Here is a prime example.
Now let's say you have been attacked out of the blue by this fellow, and you respond in kind with mockery and contumely, to give him a taste of his own medicine. Should it not be pointed out that the same types of actions can be justified as defense that cannot be justified as attack?
Civility is a good old conservative virtue. But it has limits. Civility is for the civil, not for those whose hypocritical calls for civility serve to mask their aggression.
I thought he would have 'flamed out' by now, but he is still going strong. Might The Donald be on the way to becoming il Duce of America? I ascribed Trump's traction to conservative inaction and Obama's overreach. But cultural factors need to be considered. And who better than Charles Murray to do the job? His WSJ piece begins like this:
If you are dismayed by Trumpism, don’t kid yourself that it will fade away if Donald Trump fails to win the Republican nomination. Trumpism is an expression of the legitimate anger that many Americans feel about the course that the country has taken, and its appearance was predictable. It is the endgame of a process that has been going on for a half-century: America’s divestment of its historic national identity.
For the eminent political scientist Samuel Huntington, writing in his last book, “Who Are We?” (2004), two components of that national identity stand out. One is our Anglo-Protestant heritage, which has inevitably faded in an America that is now home to many cultural and religious traditions. The other is the very idea of America, something unique to us. As the historian Richard Hofstadter once said, “It has been our fate as a nation not to have ideologies but to be one.”
What does this ideology—Huntington called it the “American creed”—consist of? Its three core values may be summarized as egalitarianism, liberty and individualism. From these flow other familiar aspects of the national creed that observers have long identified: equality before the law, equality of opportunity, freedom of speech and association, self-reliance, limited government, free-market economics, decentralized and devolved political authority.
As recently as 1960, the creed was our national consensus. Running that year for the Democratic nomination, candidates like John F. Kennedy, Lyndon B. Johnson and Hubert Humphrey genuinely embraced the creed, differing from Republicans only in how its elements should be realized.
Today, the creed has lost its authority and its substance. What happened?
I was purchasing shotgun ammo at a gun store a while back. The proprietor brought out a box of double-aught buckshot shells which he recommended as having "the power to separate the soul from the body." The proprietor was a 'good old boy,' not someone with whom a wise man initiates a philosophical discussion. But his colorful phraseology got me thinking.
The words 'soul' and 'spirit' carry a cargo of both religious and substance-dualist connotations. And that is the way I will use them. The soul is that in us which thinks in the broad Cartesian sense of 'think.' it is the subject of consciousness and self-consciousness and moral sense (conscience). It is the thinker of our thoughts and the agent of our actions. It is the ultimate reference of the first person singular pronoun 'I' in its indexical use. But I must add that the soul is these things construed as capable of independent existence, as having not only an immaterial nature, but also an immaterial nature capable of existing on its own apart from these gross physical bodies with which we are all too familiar. So 'soul' is a theoretical term; it is not datanic or theory-neutral. 'Consciousness,' by contrast, is theory neutral. If you deny that there are souls, you will be forgiven, and you may even be right. If you deny that there is consciousness, however, then you are either a sophist, a lunatic, or an eliminativist, which is to say, a lunatic. Sophists and lunatics are not to be debated; they are to be 'shown the door.'
A substance, among other things, is an entity metaphysically capable of independent existence. The soul is a substance. It does not require some other thing in which to exist. (Nulla res indiget ad existendum.) So it is capable of independent existence. We encounter it as 'attached' to the body, but it can 'separate' from the body. The question is what these words mean in this context. The problem is to ascribe some coherent sense to them. What is the nature of this strange attachment?
1. Only physical things can be physically separated and physically attached. (The toenail from the toe; the stamp to the envelope; the spark plug from the cylinder; the yolk from the white, etc.) The soul is not a physical thing; ergo, souls cannot be physically separated from or attached to anything. So in this context we are not to take 'separation' and 'attachment' in any physical or material sense, whether gross or subtle. So don't think of ghosts or spooks floating out of gross bodies. Spook-stuff is still stuff, while what we are talking about now is not 'stuffy' at all.
2. It follows from this that every physical model is inadequate and just as, or more, misleading than helpful. The soul is not like the pilot in the ship, the man in his house, the oyster in the shell, the prisoner in his cell. These analogies may capture certain aspects of the soul-body relation, but they occlude others so that on balance they are of little use. But they are of some use. The morally sensitive, for example, experience a tension between their higher nature and their animal inclinations. There is more to the moral life than a struggle against the lusts of the flesh, but that is part of it. Thus the resonance of the Socratic image of the body as the prison-house of the soul.
3. The soul-body relation cannot literally be an instance of a physical relation, nor could it be an instance of a logical or mathematical or mereological or set-theoretical relation. We can lump these last four together under the rubric 'abstract relations.' Presumably the soul-body relation is sui generis. It's its own thing. Just as it would be absurd to say that entailment is an instance of a physical relation, it is absurd to suppose that soul-body is an instance of a physical or a logico-mathematical relation. The soul is neither a physical entity nor an abstract entity.
4. It seems to follow that if the the soul-body relation is sui generis, then there can be no model for it borrowed from some more familiar realm. The relation can only be understood in 'soulic,' or as I will say, spiritual terms. It can only be understood in its own terms. So let's consider mental or spiritual attachment. I am attached to my cat in the sense that, were he to die, I would grieve. Clearly, this is not a physical relation. Whether he is on my lap or far away, the attachment is the same. Spiritual attachment is consistent with physical separation. And spiritual non-attachment (spiritual separation) is consistent with physical proximity and indeed contact.
We allow ourselves to become attached to all sorts of things, people, and ideas, especially our own ideas. Attachments wax and wane. Many are foolish and even delusional. We become attached to what cannot last as if it will last forever. We become attached to what has no value. We have trouble apportioning our degree of attachment to the reality and value of attachment's object. As has been appreciated in many religions and wisdom traditions, much of our misery arises from desire and attachment to the objects of desire. For Pali Buddhism it is desire as such that is the problem; on more moderate views inordinate and misdirected desire. We are also capable of non-attachment or detachment, and this has been recommended in different ways and to different degrees by the religions and the wisdom traditions. There can be no doubt that non-attachment is a major component in wisdom.
5. None of this attaching and detaching would be possible without intentionality. The spiritual self, by virtue of its intentionality, flees itself and loses itself among the objects of its attachment. Chief among these is the mundane self: the body, the personality, their pasts, and the myriad of objects that one takes to be one's own. My car, my house, my wife, my children, my brilliant insights . . . . And now I come to my speculation. The soul attaches itself to this body here in a manner similar to the way it attaches itself to everything else to which it attaches itself. So attaching itself, my soul makes this body here my body. I come to 'inhabit' this body here, thereby making it my body, by my having chosen this body as the material locus of my subjectivity, as the vehicle of my trajectory through space-time. But when" Where? How? I chose this fall into time?
I am telling a Platonic story. I am penning yet another footnote to Plato. Who can believe it? Well, consider the alternatives! You are not your body and yet you are attached to it. What is your theory as to the nature of this attachment? I know what you will say. And I will have no trouble poking holes in it.
What follows is largely a summary and restatement of points I make in "The Moreland-Willard-Lotze Thesis on Being," Philosophia Christi, vol. 6, no. 1, 2004, pp. 27-58. It is a 'popular' or 'bloggity-blog' version of a part of that lengthy technical article. First I summarize my agreements with J. P. Moreland. Then I explain and raise two objections to this theory. I post the following on account of hearing from a student of Moreland who is himself now a professor of philosophy. He has some criticisms to make. I should like to hear them in the ComBox. Another student of Moreland says he agrees with me. He may wish to chime in as well. The other day a third student of Moreland surfaced. The Moreland text I have under my logical microscope is pp. 134-139 of his 2001 Universals (McGill-Queen's University Press).
Common Ground with Moreland on Existence
We agree on the following five points (which is not to say that Moreland will agree with every detail of my explanation of these five points):
Existence is attributable to individuals. The cat that just jumped into my lap exists. This very cat, Manny, exists. Existence belongs to it and is meaningfully attributable to it. Pace Frege and Russell, 'Manny exists' is a meaningful sentence, and it is meaningful as it stands, as predicating existence of an individual. It is nothing like 'Manny is numerous.' To argue that since cats are numerous, and Manny is a cat, that therefore Manny is numerous is to commit the fallacy of division. Russell held that the same fallacy is committed by someone who thinks that since cats exist, and Manny is a cat, that therefore Manny exists. But Russell was mistaken: there is no fallacy of division; there is an equivocation on 'exists.' It has a general or second-level use and a singular or first-level use.
There are admissible first-level uses of '. . .exist(s).' It is not the case that only second-level uses are admissible. And it is only because Manny, or some other individual cat, exists that the concept cat is instantiated. The existence of an individual cannot be reduced to the being-instantiated of a property or concept. If you like, you can say that the existence of a concept is its being instantiated. We sometimes speak like that. A typical utterance of 'Beauty exists,' say, is not intended to convey that Beauty itself exists, but is intended to convey that Beauty is exemplified, that there are beautiful things. But then one is speaking of general existence, not of singular existence.
Clearly, general existence presupposes singular existence in the following sense: if a first-level concept or property is instantiated, then it is instantiated by an individual, and this individual must exist in order to stand in the instantiation nexus to a concept or property. From here on out, by 'existence' I mean 'singular existence.' There is really no need for 'general existence' inasmuch as we can speak of instantiation or of someness, as when we say that cats exist if and only something is a cat. The fundamental error of what Peter van Inwagen calls the 'thin theory' of existence is to imagine that existence can be reduced to the purely logical notion of someness. That would be to suppose, falsely, that singular existence can be dispensed with in favor of general existence. Existence is not a merely logical topic ; existence is a metaphysical topic.
Existence cannot be an ordinary property of individuals. While existence is attributable to individuals, it is no ordinary property of them. There are several reasons for this, but I will mention only one: you cannot add to a thing's description by saying of it that it exists. Nothing is added to the description of a tomato if one adds 'exists' to its descriptors: 'red,' round,' ripe,' etc. As Kant famously observed, "Being is not a real predicate," i.e., being or existence adds nothing to the realitas or whatness of a thing. Contrary to popular scholarly opinion, Kant did not anticipate the Frege-Russell theory. He does not deny that 'exist(s)' is an admissible first-level predicate. (See my "Existence: Two Dogmas of Analysis" in Novotny and Novak, eds. Neo-Aristotelian Perspectives in Metaphysics, Routledge 2014, pp. 45-75, esp. 48-50.)
Existence is not a classificatory concept or property. The reason is simple: there is no logically prior domain of items classifiable as either existent or nonexistent. Pace Meinong, everything exists. There are no nonexistent items. On Meinong's view, some items actually have properties despite having no Being at all.
Existence makes a real difference to a thing that exists. In one sense existence adds nothing to a thing. It adds nothing quidditative. In another sense it adds everything: if a thing does not exist, it is nothing at all! To be or not to be — not just a question, but the most 'abysmal' difference conceivable. In this connection, Moreland rightly speaks of a "real difference between existence and non-existence." (137)
Existence itself exists. This is not the trivial claim that existing things exist. It is the momentous claim that that in virtue of which existing things exist itself exists. It is a logical consequence of (4) in conjunction with (3). As Moreland puts it, "[i]f existence itself does not exist, then nothing else could exist in virtue of having existence." (135)
The above five points are criteria of adequacy for a theory of existence: any adequate theory must include or entail each of these points. Most philosophers nowadays will not agree, but I think Moreland will. So he and I stand on common ground. I should think that the only fruitful disputes are those that play out over a large chunk of common ground.
But these criteria of adequacy also pose a problem: How can existence belong to individuals without being a property of them? Existence belongs to individual as it would not belong to them if it were a property of properties or concepts; but it is not a property of individuals.
Moreland's Theory
Moreland's theory gets off to a good start: "existence is not a property which belongs, but is the belonging of a property." (137) This insight nicely accommodates points (1) and (2) above: existence is attributable to individuals without being an ordinary property of them. Indeed, it is not a property at all. I infer from this that existence is not the property of having properties. It is rather the mutual belongingness of a thing and its properties. Moreland continues:
Existence is the entering into the exemplification nexus . . . . In the case of Tony the tiger, the fact [that] the property of being a tiger belongs to something and that something has this property belonging to it is what confers existence. (137)
I take this to mean that existence is the mutual belonging together of individual and property. It is 'between' a thing and its properties as that which unifies them, thereby tying them into a concrete fact or state of affairs. The existence of Tony is not one of his properties; nor is it Tony. And of course the existence of Tony is not the being-exemplified of some such haecceity property as identity-with-Tony. Rather, the existence of Tony, of that very individual, is his exemplifying of his properties. The existence of a (thick) individual in general is then the exemplification relation itself insofar as this relation actually relates (thin) individual and properties.
Moreland implies as much. In answer to the question how existence itself exists, he explains that "The belonging-to (exemplification, predication) relation is itself exemplified . . ." (137) Thus the asymmetrical exemplification relation x exemplifies P is exemplified by Tony and the property of being a tiger (in that order). Existence itself exists because existence itself is the universal exemplification relation which is itself exemplified. It exists in that it is exemplified by a and F-ness, a and G-ness, a and H-ness, b and F-ness, b and G-ness, b and H-ness, and so on. An individual existent exists in that its ontological constituents (thin particular and properties) exemplify the exemplification relation which is existence itself.
The basic idea is this. The existence of a thick particular such as Tony, that is, a particular taken together with all its monadic properties, is the unity of its ontological constituents. (This is not just any old kind of unity, of course, but a type of unity that ties items that are not facts into a fact.) This unity is brought about by the exemplification relation within the thick particular. The terms of this relation are the thin particular on the one hand and the properties on the other.
Moreland's theory accommodates all five of the desiderata listed above which in my book is a strong point in its favor.
A Bradleyan Difficulty
A sentence such as 'Al is fat' is not a list of its constituent words. The sentence is either true or false, but neither the corresponding list, nor any item on the list, is either true or false. So there is something more to a declarative sentence than its constituent words. Something very similar holds for the fact that makes the sentence true, if it is true. I mean the extralinguistic fact of Al's being fat. The primary constituents of this fact, Al and fatness, can exist without the fact existing. The fact, therefore, cannot be identified with its primary constituents, taken either singly, or collectively. A fact is more than its primary constituents. But how are we to account for this 'more'?
On Moreland's theory, as I understand it, this problem is solved by adding a secondary constituent, the exemplification relation, call it EX, whose task is to connect the primary constituents. This relation ties the primary constituents into a fact. It is what makes a fact more than its primary constituents. Unfortunately, this proposal leads to Bradley's Regress. For if Al + fatness do not add up to the fact of Al's being fat, then Al + fatness + EX won't either. If Al and fatness can exist without forming the fact of Al's being fat, then Al and fatness and EX can all exist without forming the fact in question. How can adding a constituent to the primary constituents bring about the fact-constituting unity of all constituents? EX has not only to connect a and F-ness, but also to connect itself to a and to F-ness. How can it do the latter? The answer to this, presumably, will be that EX is a relation and the business of a relation is to relate. EX, relating itself to a and to F-ness, relates them to each other. EX is an active ingredient in the fact, not an inert ingredient. It is a relating relation, and not just one more constituent that needs relating to the others by something distinct from itself. For this reason, Bradley's regress can't get started.
The problem, however, is that EX can exist without relating the relata that it happens to relate in a given case. This is because EX is a universal. If it were a relation-instance as on D. W. Mertz's theory, then it would be a particular, an unrepeatable, and could not exist apart from the very items it relates. Bradley's regress could not then arise. But if EX is a universal, then it can exist without relating any specific relata that it does relate, even though, as an immanent universal, it must relate some relata or other. This implies that a relation's relating what it relates is contingent to its being the relation it is. For example, x loves y contingently relates Al and Barbara, which implies that the relation is distinct from its relating. The same goes for EX: it is distinct from its relating. It is more than just a constituent of any fact into which it enters; it is a constituent that does something to the other constituents, and in so doing does something to itself, namely, connect itself to the other constituents. Relating relations are active ingredients in facts, not inert ingredients. Or we could say that a relating relation is ontologically participial in addition to its being ontologically substantival. And since the relating is contingent in any given case, the relating in any given case requires a ground. What could this ground be?
My claim is that it cannot be any relation, including the relation, Exemplification. More generally, no constituent of a fact can serve as ontological ground of the unity of a fact's constituents. For any such putatively unifying constituent will either need a further really unifying constituent to connect it to what it connects, in which case Bradley's regress is up and running, or the unifying constituent will have to be ascribed a 'magical' power, a power no abstract object could possess, namely, the power to unify itself with what it unifies. Such an item would be a self-grounding ground: a ground of unity that grounds its unity with that which it unifies. The synthetic unity at the heart of each contingent fact needs to be grounded in an act of synthesis that cannot be brought about by any constituent of a fact, or by the fact itself.
My first objection to Moreland's theory may be put as follows. The existence of a thick particular (which we are assaying as a concrete fact along the lines of Gustav Bergmann and David Armstrong) cannot be the fact's constituents' standing in the exemplification relation. And existence itself, existence in its difference from existents, cannot be identified with the exemplification relation.
Can Existence Exist Without Being Uniquely Self-Existent?
I agree with Moreland that existence itself exists. One reason was supplied by Reinhardt Grossmann: "If existence did not exist, then nothing would exist." (Categorial Structure of the World, 405) But I have trouble with the notion that existence itself is the exemplification relation. Existence as that which is common to all that exists, and as that in virtue of which everything exists cannot be just one more thing that exists. Existence cannot be a member of an extant category that admits of multiple membership, such as the category of relations. For reasons like these such penetrating minds as Martin Heidegger, Roman Ingarden, and Panayot Butchvarov have denied that existence itself exists.
In my 2002 existence book I proposed a synthesis of these competing theses: Existence exists as a paradigm existent, one whose mode of existence is radically different from the mode of existence of the beings ontologically dependent on it. From this point of view, Moreland has a genuine insight, but he has not taken it far enough: he stops short at the dubious view that existence is the relation of exemplification. But if you drive all the way down the road with me you end up at Divine Simplicity, which Moreland has good reasons for rejecting.
Hillary took a shellacking yesterday in the New Hampshire primary, losing to Bernie Sanders by 20 or so points. Time to pull out the race card:
Clinton is set to campaign with the mothers of Trayvon Martin and Eric Garner, unarmed African-Americans who died in incidents involving law enforcement officers and a neighborhood watch representative, respectively. And the campaign, sources said, is expected to push a new focus on systematic racism, criminal justice reform, voting rights and gun violence that will mitigate concerns about her lack of an inspirational message.
Remember Trayvon Martin? He was the black child on the way to the candy store who was brutally murdered by the racist white Hispanic, George Zimmerman.
Bret Stephens applied it to Hillary in today's Wall Street Journal. The meaning, I take it, is that she can move either right or left in pursuit of her personal ambitions depending on the circumstances.
But we ought to consider whether 'ideologically ambisinistrous' might fit her better, given her being a two-fisted lefty.
