Maverick Philosopher – Page 421 – Footnotes to Plato from the foothills of the Superstition Mountains

What Exactly is Kripke’s Puzzle About Belief?

I will try to explain it as clearly and succinctly as I can. I will explain the simplest version of the puzzle, the 'monoglot' version. We shall cleave to English as to our dear mother.

The puzzle is generated by the collision of two principles, one concerning reference, the other concerning disquotation. Call them MILL and DISQ.

MILL: The reference of a proper name is direct: not routed through sense as in Frege. The meaning of a name is exhausted by its reference. The semantic value of a name is just the object to which it refers. (Gareth Evans plausibly recommends 'semantic value' as the best translation of Frege's Bedeutung.)

DISQ: If a normal English speaker S sincerely assents, upon reflection, to 'p,' and 'p' is a sentence in English free of indexical elements, pronominal devices, and ambiguities, then S believes that p.

The puzzle is interesting, and not easily solved, because there are good reasons for accepting both principles. The puzzle is puzzling because the collision of the two principles takes the form of a flat-out logical contradiction.

And as we all know, philosophers, while they love paradoxes, hate contradictions.

(DISQ) strikes this philosopher as a principle than which no more luminous can be conceived. How could one who is competent in English and familiar with current events sincerely and reflectively assent to 'Hillary is a liar' and not believe that Hillary is a liar? The intellectual luminosity of (MILL), however, leaves something to be desired. And yet it is plausible, and to many experts, extremely plausible. Brevity being the soul of blog, I cannot now trot out the arguments in support of (MILL).

The collision of (MILL) and (DISQ) occurs at the intersection of Mind and World. It comes about like this. S may assent to

a. Cicero was a Roman

while failing to assent to

b. Tully was a Roman

even though

c. Cicero = Tully.

Given (DISQ), S believes that Cicero was a Roman, but may or may not believe that Tully was a Roman. But how is this possible given the truth of (c)? Given (c), there is no semantic difference between (a) and (b): the predicates are the same, and the names are semantically the same under (MILL). For on the latter principle, the meaning of a name is its referent. So sameness of referent entails sameness of meaning, which is to say: the semantic content of (a) and (b) is the same given the truth of (c).

How can S believe that Cicero was a Roman while neither believing nor disbelieving that Tully was a Roman when the sentences express the very same proposition? This is (an instance of) the puzzle. Here is another form of it. Suppose S assents to (a) but also assents to

d. Tully was not a Roman.

On (DISQ), S believes that Tully is not a Roman. So S believes both that Cicero was a Roman and that Tully was not a Roman. But Cicero = Tully. Therefore, S believes that Cicero was a Roman and S believes that Cicero was not a Roman. This certainly looks like a contradiction.

It seems that our governing principles, (MILL) and (DISQ), when applied to an ordinary example, generate a contradiction, the worst sort of intellectual collision one can have.

The Paderewski case is similar. On different occasions, Peter assents to 'Paderewski is musical' and 'Paderewski is not musical.' He has no qualms about assenting to both since he supposes that this is a case of two men with the same name. But in reality he is referring to one and the same man. By (DISQ), Peter believes both that Paderewski is musical and that Paderewski is not musical. Given (MILL), Peter believes contradictory propositions. How is this possible given that Peter is rational?

Given the luminosity of (DISQ), one might think the solution to Kripke's puzzle about belief is simply to jettison (MILL).

Not so fast. There are powerful arguments for (MILL).

Oakeshott on the Conservative Temperament

Before one is a conservative or a liberal ideologically, one is a conservative or a liberal temperamentally, or by disposition. Or at least this is a thesis with which I am seriously toying, to put it oxymoronically. The idea is that temperament is a major if not the main determinant of political commitments. First comes the disposition, then come the theoretical articulation, the arguments, and the examination and refutation of the arguments of adversaries. Conservatism and liberalism are bred in the bone before they are born in the brain.

If this is so, it helps explain the bitter and intractable nature of political disagreement, the hatreds that politics excites, the visceral oppositions thinly veiled under a mask of mock civility, the mutual repugnance that goes so deep as to be unlikely to be ascribable to mere differences in thinking. For how does one argue against another's temperament or disposition or sensibility? I can't argue you out of an innate disposition, any more than I can argue you out of being yourself; and if your theoretical framework is little more than a reflection at the level of ideas of an ineradicable temperamental bias, then my arguments cannot be expected to have much influence. A certain skepticism about the role and reach of reason in human affairs may well be the Oakeshottian upshot.

But rather than pursue the question whether temperament is a major if not the main determinant of political commitments, let us address, with the help of Michael Oakeshott, the logically preliminary question of what it is to be conservatively disposed. Here are some passages from his "On Being Conservative" (from Rationalism in Politics and Other Essays, Basic Books, 1962, pp. 168-196, bolding added):

The general characteristics of this [conservative] disposition are not difficult to discern, although they have often been mistaken. They centre upon a propensity to use and to enjoy what is available rather than to wish for or to look for something else; to delight in what is present rather than what was or what may be. Reflection may bring to light an appropriate gratefulness for what is available, and consequently the acknowledgment of a gift or an inheritance from the past; but there is no mere idolizing of what is past and gone. What is esteemed is the present; and it is esteemed not on account of its connections with a remote antiquity, nor because it is recognized to be more admirable than any possible alternative, but on account of its familiarity: not, Verweile doch, du bist so schoen, but Stay with me because I am attached to you.

[. . .]

To be conservative, then, is to prefer the familiar to the unknown, to prefer the tried to the untried, fact to mystery, the actual to the possible, the limited to the unbounded, the near to the distant, the sufficient to the superabundant, the convenient to the perfect, present laughter to utopian bliss. Familiar relationships and loyalties will be preferred to the allure of more profitable attachments; to acquire and to enlarge will be less important than to keep, to cultivate and to enjoy; the grief of loss will be more acute than the excitement of novelty or promise. It is to be equal to one's own fortune, to live at the level of one's own means, to be content with the want of greater perfection which belongs alike to oneself and one's circumstances.

[. . .]

The disposition to be conservative is, then, warm and positive in respect of enjoyment, and correspondingly cool and critical in respect of change and innovation: these two inclinations support and elucidate one another. The man of conservative temperament believes that a known good is not lightly to be surrendered for an unknown better. He is not in love with what is dangerous and difficult; he is unadventurous; he has no impulse to sail uncharted seas; for him there is no magic in being lost, bewildered, or shipwrecked. If forced to navigate the unknown, he sees virtue in heaving the lead every inch of the way. What others plausibly identify as timidity, he recognizes in himself as rational prudence; what others interpret as inactivity, he recognizes as a disposition to enjoy rather than to exploit. He is cautious, and he is disposed to indicate assent or dissent, not in absolute, but in graduated terms. He eyes the situation in terms of its propensity to disrupt the familiarity of the features of his world.

[. . .]

. . . what makes a conservative disposition in politics intelligible is nothing to do with natural law or a providential order, nothing to do with morals or religion; it is the observation of our current manner of living combined with the belief (which from our point of view need be regarded as no more than an hypothesis) that governing is a specific and limited activity, namely the provision and custody of general rules of conduct, which are understood, not as plans for imposing substantive activities, but as instruments enabling people to pursue the activities of their own choice with the minimum frustration, and therefore something which it is appropriate to be conservative about.

[. . .]

And the office of government is not to impose other beliefs and activities upon its subjects, not to tutor or to educate them, not to make them better or happier in another way, not to direct them, to galvanize them into action, to lead them or to coordinate their activities so that no occasion of conflict shall occur; the office of government is merely to rule. This is a specific and limited activity, easily corrupted when it is combined with any other, and, in the circumstances, indispensable. The image of the ruler is the umpire whose business is to administer the rules of the game, or the chairman who governs the debate according to known rules but does not himself participate in it.

[. . .]

. . . the office he attributes to government is to resolve some of the collisions which this variety of beliefs and activities generates; to preserve peace, not by placing an interdict upon choice and upon the diversity that springs from the exercise of preference, not by imposing substantive uniformity, but by enforcing general rules of procedure upon all subjects alike.

Government, then, as the conservative in this matter understands it, does not begin with a vision of another, different, and better world, but with the observation of the self-government practised even by men of passion in the conduct of their enterprises; it begins in the informal adjustments of interests to one another which are designed to release those who are apt to collide from the mutual frustration of a collision. Sometimes these adjustments are no more than agreements between two parties to keep out of each other's way; sometimes they are of wider application and more durable character, such as the International Rules for the prevention of collisions at sea. In short, the intimations of government are to be found in ritual, not in religion or philosophy; in the enjoyment of orderly and peaceable behaviour, not in the search for truth or perfection.

[. . .]

. . . politics is an activity unsuited to the young, not on account of their vices but on account of what I at least consider to be their virtues.

Nobody pretends that it is easy to acquire or to sustain the mood of indifference which this manner of politics calls for. To rein-in one's own beliefs and desires, to acknowledge the current shape of things, to feel the balance of things in one's hand, to tolerate what is abominable, to distinguish between crime and sin, to respect formality even when it appears to be leading to error, these are difficult achievements; and they are achievements not to be looked for in the young. Everybody's young days are a dream, a delightful insanity, a sweet solipsism. Nothing in them has a fixed shape, nothing a fixed price; everything is a possibility, and we live happily on credit. There are no obligations to be observed; there are no accounts to be kept. Nothing is specified in advance; everything is what can be made of it. The world is a mirror in which we seek the reflection of our own desires. The allure of violent emotions is irresistible. When we are young we are not disposed to make concessions to the world; we never feel the balance of a thing in our hands – unless it be a cricket bat. [Jim Morrison: "We wnat the world, and we want it now!"] We are not apt to distinguish between our liking and our esteem; urgency is our criterion of importance; and we do not easily understand that what is humdrum need not be despicable. We are impatient of restraint; and we readily believe, like Shelley, that to have contracted a habit is to have failed. These, in my opinion, are among our virtues when we are young; but how remote they are from the disposition appropriate for participating in the style of government I have been describing. Since life is a dream, we argue (with plausible but erroneous logic) that politics must be an encounter of dreams, in which we hope to impose our own. Some unfortunate people, like Pitt (laughably called "the Younger"), are born old, and are eligible to engage in politics almost in their cradles; others, perhaps more fortunate, belie the saying that one is young only once, they never grow up. But these are exceptions. For most there is what Conrad called the "shadow line" which, when we pass it, discloses a solid world of things, each with its fixed shape, each with its own point of balance, each with its price; a world of fact, not poetic image, in which what we have spent on one thing we cannot spend on another; a world inhabited by others besides ourselves who cannot be reduced to mere reflections of our own emotions. And coming to be at home in this commonplace world qualifies us (as no knowledge of "political science" can ever qualify us), if we are so inclined and have nothing better to think about, to engage in what the man of conservative disposition understands to be political activity.

Ortcutt and Paderewski: Against the Millian Theory of Proper Names

Saul Kripke's Paderewski puzzle put me in mind of a rather similar puzzle — call it the Ortcutt puzzle — from W.V. Quine's seminal 1956 J. Phil. paper, "Quantifiers and Propositional Attitudes" (in The Ways of Paradox, Harvard UP, 1976, pp. 185-196). Back to Ortcutt!

The ordinary language 'Ralph believes that someone is a spy' is ambiguous as between the de dicto

a. Ralph believes that (∃x)(x is a spy)

and the de re

b. (∃x)(Ralph believes that x is a spy).

To believe that someone is a spy is very different from believing, of a particular person, that he is a spy. Most of us believe the former, but few of us believe the latter.

Despite Quine's queasiness about quantifying into belief contexts, and intensional contexts generally, (b) is intelligible. Suppose (b) is true: someone is believed by Ralph to be a spy. This existentially general sentence cannot be true unless some particular person is believed by Ralph to be a spy. Let that person be Bernard J. Ortcutt.

Now suppose Ralph has several times seen a man in a brown hat hanging around dubious venues, a man Ralph takes to be a spy. There is also a man that Ralph has seen once on the beach, an elderly gray-haired gent who Ralph takes to be a pillar of the community. (Assume that, in Ralph's mind at least, no pillar of a community is a spy.) Unbeknownst to Ralph, the 'two' men are one and the same man, Ortcutt.

Does Ralph believe, of Ortcutt, that he is a spy or not?

Suppose de re belief is irreducible to de dicto belief. What we then have is a relation (possibly triadic) that connects Ralph to the concrete individual Ortcutt himself and not to a name or description or a Fregean sense or any doxastic intermediary in the mind of Ralph such as a concept or idea, or to any incomplete object that is an ontological constituent of Ralph such as one of Hector-Neri Castaneda's ontological guises, or to anything else other than Ortcutt himself, that completely determinate chunk of extramental and extralinguistic reality.

It would seem to follow on the above supposition that Ralph believes, of Ortcutt, that he is both a spy and not a spy. It seems to follow that Ralph has contradictory beliefs. How so? Well, if there is de re belief, and it is irreducible to de dicto belief, then there is a genuine relation, not merely an intentional 'relation' or a notional 'relation' that connects Ralph to Ortcutt himself who exists. (A relation is genuine just in case its holding between or among its relata entails that each relatum exists.) Under the description 'the man in the brown hat,' Ralph believes, of Ortcutt, that he is a spy. But under the description 'the man on the beach,' he believes, of Ortcutt, that he is not a spy. So Ralph believes, of one and the same man, that he is a spy and not a spy. Of course, Ralph does not know or suspect that the 'two' men are the same man. But he doesn't need to know or suspect that for the de re belief relation to hold.

A Solution?

The above seems to amount to a reductio ad absurdum of the notion of irreducible de re belief. For if we accept it, then it seems we must accept the possibility of a rational person's having contradictory beliefs about one and the same item. Why not then try to reduce de re belief to de dicto belief? Roderick Chisholm, following Quine, attempts a reduction in Appendix C of Person and Object (Open Court, 1976, pp. 168-172)

A Reductio ad Absurdum Argument Against a Millian Theory of Proper Names

c. If a normal English speaker S, on reflection, sincerely assents to a sentence 'a is F,' then S believes that a is F. (Kripke's disquotational principle)
d. If a Millian theory of proper names is correct, then the linguistic function of a name is exhausted by the fact that it names its bearer.
e. Peter sincerely assents to both 'Paderewski is musical' and 'Paderewski is not musical.' (Kripke's Paderewski example)
Therefore
f. Peter believes both that Paderewsi is musical and that Paderewski is not musical. (From c)
Therefore
g. Peter believes, of one and the same man, Paderewski, that he is both musical and not musical. (From f, d)
h. Peter believes a contradiction. (From g)
i. Peter is rational, and no rational person believes a contradiction.
Therefore
j. Peter is rational and Peter is not rational. (From h,i)
Therefore
k. (d) is false: Millianism about proper names is incorrect.

Interim Tentative Conclusion

Millianism about proper names entails that there are cases of de re belief that are irreducible to cases of de dicto belief. This is turn entails contradictions, as in Paderewski-type cases. Therefore, Millianism about proper names entails contradictions. So we have here a powerful argument against Millianism. But there are also poweful arguments against the alternatives to Millianism. So I conjecture that we are in the presence of a genuine aporia, an insoluble problem (insoluble by us), that is yet genuine, i.e., not a pseudo-problem.

Veiling Statues to Please the Mullahs

Not a pretty sight: the representatives of a superior culture abasing themselves before the representatives of an inferior one.

Decadent Europe may already be lost. But we still have time to learn.

Do you think Italy might contain a few cultural treasures worth preserving? Then you may want to inform yourself of the fact that Muslims are not known for their preservation of antiquities. See The Destruction of the Middle East for starters.

There is a deep paradox here that would require a lot of writing to set forth properly. Roughly, it is the very superiority of our culture with its philosophy, science, free speech, open inquiry, toleration of dissent, freedom of religion, and the whole panoply of Enlightenment values together with the advanced technology and prosperity that they make possible that has led and is leading us into decadence. Our superiority is thus breeding inferiority so that we become easy marks for an inferior culture that believes in itself and its benighted values and is, insofar forth, superior to us in its will to dominate us by any and all methods.

UPDATE (2/1): Malcolm Pollack (HT: Bill Keezer) writes:

I meant to comment on this when it happened a few days ago:

Rome’s nude statues covered up ahead of Rouhani visit

In further concession to Iranian president, official dinner with Italian PM does not include wine on the menu

What a craven, flabby, neutered thing our civilization has become. This is what ACID syndrome does to its victims: it sickens and enervates them with doubt; it destroys and disables their confidence, potency, and virility; it paralyzes them in the face of peril; it turns their bones and sinews to jelly.

In contrast: Winston Churchill, who was to host a dinner attended by ibn Saud, was told by the Arabian king that those attending must not drink or smoke in his presence. His response?

I said that if it was his religion that made him say such things, my religion prescribed as an absolute sacred ritual smoking cigars and drinking alcohol before, after and if need be during, all meals and the intervals between them. Complete surrender.

The Dead Smokers' Society hereby registers its opposition to this anti-tobacco Islamo-wackery. Carpe fumam!

Background for a Discussion of Kripke’s “A Puzzle About Belief”

London Ed wants to discuss the Paderewski example in Saul Kripke's "A Puzzle About Belief." But before doing so we should see if we agree on some preliminary points. Knowing Ed, he will probably find a way to disagree with a good chunk what I am about to say. So I expect we will get bogged down in preliminaries and never proceed to Paderewski. We shall see. Kripke references are to Philosophical Troubles, Oxford 2011.

Belief de re and belief de dicto

Kripke makes it clear that he is concerned only with belief de dicto in the paper in question (128). So we need to understand the restriction. The following I take to be constructions expressive of belief de re.

Cicero is believed by Tom to be a Roman
Cicero is believed to be a Roman by Tom
Cicero is such that Tom believes him to be a Roman
Tom believes, of Cicero, that he is a Roman

De re means: of or pertaining to the res, the thing, where 'of' is an objective genitive. De dicto means: of or pertaining to the dictum, that which is said (dico, dicere, dixi, dictum), where the 'of' is again an objective genitive. A dictum is the content of an assertive utterance. It is a proposition, what Frege called a thought (ein Gedanke), not a thinking, but the accusative of a thinking. I am not assuming a Fregean as opposed to a Russellian theory of propositions. But we do need to speak of propositions. And Kripke does. For the time being we can say that propositions are the objects/accusatives/contents of such propositional attitudes as belief. Of course they have other roles to play as well.

What makes the above sentences de re is that they ascribe a property to Cicero as he is in himself, and not as he appears before the mind of Tom. Or at least that is the way I would put it. Because of this the following argument is valid:

Cicero is believed by Tom to be a Roman
Cicero = Tully
Ergo
Tully is believed by Tom to be a Roman.

The presiding principle is the Indiscernibility of Identicals: if x = y, then whatever is true of x is true of y and vice versa. So if Cicero = Tully, and the former is believed by Tom to be a Roman, then Tully is also believed by Tom to be a Roman. This is so even if Tom has never heard of Tully, or has heard of him but has no opinion as to his identity or non-identity with Cicero. But the following argument, whose initial premise is expressive of belief de dicto, is invalid:

Tom believes that: Cicero is a Roman.
Cicero = Tully
Ergo
Tom believes that: Tully is a Roman.

The conclusion does not follow in the de dicto case because (i) Tom may never have heard of Tully and neither believes nor disbelieves anything about him, (ii) or Tom has heard of Tully but has no opinion about his identity or non-identity with Cicero. What this example suggests is that codesignative singular terms are not everywhere intersubstitutable salva veritate. The Latin phrase means: in a truth-preserving manner. De dicto belief contexts are thus contexts in which intersubstitutability of coreferential names appears to fail. Thus if we substitute 'Tully' for 'Cicero' in the initial premise, we turn a truth into a falsehood despite the fact that the two names refer to the same man.

What this suggests, in turn, is that there is more to the semantics of a proper name than its reference. It suggests that names have both sense and reference. It suggests that what Tom has before his mind, the proposition toward which he takes up the propositional attitude of belief, does not have as subject-constituent Cicero himself, warts and all, but a mode of presentation (Frege: Darstellungsweise) of the man himself, a sense (Sinn) that determines the reference to the man himself.

Before proceeding, we note the difference between the de re

There is someone Tom believes to be a faithful husband

and the de dicto

Tom believes that: there are faithful husbands.

The first entails the second, but the second does not entail the first. For if one believes that there are faithful husbands, one needn't believe, of any particular man, that he is a faithful husband. What one believes is that some man or other is a faithful husband. Tom: "I'm sure there are faithful husbands; I just can't name one."

A problem for a Millian theory of proper names

Kripke tells us that on a "strict Millian view . . . the linguistic function of a proper name is completely exhausted by the fact that it names its bearer . . . ." (127) Whether or not this is the view of the historical J. S. Mill is of no present concern. The Millian view contrasts with the Fregean view according to which names have reference-determining senses. The problem posed for Millian names by de dicto belief may be set forth as an aporetic tetrad:

a. There is no semantic difference between codesignative Millian proper names.
b. If (a), then 'a is F' and 'b is F' express the same proposition where 'a' and 'b' are both Millian and codesignative.
c. A person who believes a proposition cannot doubt or disbelieve that same proposition.
d. There are countless cases in which a person believes a proposition of the form a is F while doubting or disbelieving a proposition of the form b is F even when a = b.

This foursome is clearly inconsistent. But each of the limbs, with the exception of the first, is extremely plausible if not undeniable. So the natural solution is to jettison (a) and with it Millian semantics for proper names. But this is what the Millian Kripke is loath to do. He has already convinced himself that ordinary proper names are rigid designators whose designation does not depend on reference-determining senses.

Bernie for President

I support the superannuated socialist Sanders for president — of Sweden.

(Adapted from a Rubio riff from last night's Republican debate. Always give credit where credit is due. Thou shalt not steal.)

Sanders is a decent human being as far as I can tell. He is not a stealth ideologue like the disgusting Hillary who hides her actual views behind a tsunami of blather. And unlike Hillary the Mendacious, he is not just out for his own advancement. Sanders is sincerely concerned for the welfare of working men and women. But while he has the courage of his convictions, he has the wrong convictions. Like so many leftists, he will not learn from experience. Socialism has proven to be a miserable failure, and worse than that: in many places it has led to mass murder and the gulag. But the Left is utopian in addition to being totalitarian, and so you cannot expect leftists to learn from experience.

Experience is of the present and the past; leftists live in and for the future. Incapable of appreciating a genuine Transcendence, they believe is an ersatz transcendence to be attained by 'progressive' politics. It's an illusion, but one definatory of the leftist worldview.

Britannia Once Ruled the Waves . . .

. . . now it waives the rules — for Muslims.

Michael Bloomberg?

The former mayor of New York City threatens to run on a third-party ticket. I just now heard Hugh Hewitt on the Charlie Rose show encourage him on the ground that he would siphon votes from Hillary. Hewitt might be right given Bloomberg's leftist views. Herewith, an edited re-post from 18 June 2012.

Michael Bloomberg on the Purpose of Government

(CBS News) New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg shrugged off criticism of his controversial public health initiatives, saying that "if government's purpose isn't to improve the health and longevity of its citizens, I don't know what its purpose is." [emphasis added.]

Bloomberg most recently put forth a plan to ban the sale of sugary drinks larger than 16 ounces from the city's eateries, street carts and stadiums. The proposal has been sharply criticized, in some cases by beverage and fast food companies as a case of government overreach.

He's also been criticized for previous efforts to, among other things, ban smoking in public places and the use of trans-fats in restaurant foods. Some have gone so far as to mock has as being like a "nanny."

But on "CBS This Morning," Bloomberg fired back, saying, "We're not here to tell anybody what to do. But we certainly have an obligation to tell them what's the best science and best medicine says is in their interest.

In this startlingly incoherent outburst, Bloomberg betrays the liberal nanny-state mentality in as direct a way as one could wish. And it is incoherent. He wants to ban large drinks, pop corn, milk shakes and what all else while assuring us that "we're not here to tell anybody what to do." He blatantly contradicts himself. Does the man think before he speaks?

But the deeper problem is that he has no notion of the legitimate functions of government. Apparently he has never heard of limited government. Border control is a legitimate constitutionally-grounded function of government. One reason the borders must be controlled is to impede the spread of contagious diseases. So government does have some role to play in the health and longevity of citizens. Defense of the country against foreign aggressors is also a legitimate function of government and it too bears upon health and longevity: it is hard to live a long and healthy life when bombs are raining down.

Beyond this, it is up to the individual to live in ways that insure health and longevity if those are values for him. But they might not be. Some value intensity of life over longevity of life. Rod Serling, for example, lived an extremely intense and productive life. Born in 1925, he died in 1975 at age 50. His Type A behavior and four-pack a day cigarette habit did him in, but was also quite possibly a necessary condition of his productivity. That was his free choice. No government has the right to dictate that one value longevity over intensity.

A government big enough and powerful enough to provide one with ‘free’ health care will be in an excellent position to demand ‘appropriate’ behavior from its citizens – and to enforce its demand. Suppose you enjoy risky sports such as motorcycling, hang gliding, mountain climbing and the like. Or perhaps you just like to drink or smoke or eat red meat. A government that pays for the treatment of your injuries and ailments can easily decide, on economic grounds alone, to forbid such activities under the bogus justification, ‘for your own good.’

But even if the government does not outlaw motorcycling, say, they can put a severe dent in your liberty to enjoy such a sport, say, by demanding that a 30% sales tax be slapped on all motorcycle purchases, or by outlawing bikes whose engines exceed a certain displacement, say 250 cc. In the same way that governments levy arbitrary punitive taxes on tobacco products, they can do the same for anything they deem risky or unhealthy.

The situation is analogous to living with one’s parents. It is entirely appropriate for parents to say to a child: ‘As long as you live under our roof, eat at our table, and we pay the bills, then you must abide by our rules. When you are on your own, you may do as you please.’ The difference, of course, is that it is relatively easy to move out on one’s own, but difficult to forsake one’s homeland.

This is why we shouldn't surrender our country to nanny-state, gun-grabbing, liberty-bashing soda jerks like Bloomberg and Hillary.

The nub of the issue is liberty. Do you value it or not? How much? Over nanny-state security?

Does Bloomberg even see the issue?

James V. Schall on the “True” Islam

Here. Excerpts:

Lumen Gentium, the Dogmatic Constitution on the Church of Vatican II, states that the Mohammedans “profess their faith as the faith of Abraham, and with us they worship the one, merciful God who will judge men on the last day” (par 16). At first sight, that statement appears friendly and matter-of-fact; the “faith” of Muslims is evidently thought to be the same “with us”. We “agree” about a last judgment and a merciful God who is one. This mutual understanding apparently comes from Abraham. This way of putting the issue argues to a common origin of Judaism, Christianity, and Islam, each of which “appeared” in history at different times—the New Testament some twelve hundred years after Abraham and Islam some seven hundred years after the time of Christ.

[. . .]

In the West, Islam refers to the religion preached in Arabia by Mohammed beginning in the seventh century. But the Muslims themselves consider their religion to be much older than Mohammed. Indeed, it is said to go directly to Allah, passing through nothing, not even the interpretation of Mohammed. In this sense, Mohammed was in no sense an “author” of the Qur’an as the evangelists were said to be “authors” of their respective Gospels, or as the prophet Samuel was said to be the author of the Books of Samuel.

[. . .]

The Qur’an also relativizes the Old and New Testaments as faulty documents that have stolen or mis-interpreted the original Qur’an text properly located in the mind of Allah. The most obvious comment on this understanding is that the opposite is what happened. The Qur’an was itself a selection and interpretation from earlier Jewish and Christian sources. When this became obvious, a theory developed of a prior revelation in the mind of Allah that was only later spoken through Mohammed. This view became the device to save Islam from incoherence.

This is relevant to the question whether Christians and Muslims worship the same God.

Some seem to think that the common Abrahamic origin of Christianity and Islam shows that one and the same God is worshiped, albeit in different ways, by the two religions. But this is not the Muslim understanding of things given that they hold that the Old and New Testaments are based on theft and misinterpretation of the original Qu'ranic texts in the mind of God . The common origin for Muslims is in the eternal, pre-existent Qu'ran with Judaism and Christianity being falsifications.

It is not as if God progressively reveals himself in Judaism, Christinaity, and Islam. For Muslims, the Qur'an pre-exists eternally in the mind of Allah. Muhammad merely takes dictation. The eternal Word of God is not a person but a book — in Arabic, no less. God does not freely reveal himself to man as in Judaism and Christinaity: the divine revelation is already there in final form in the mind of God.

These considerations seem to put considerable stress on the notion that Christians and Muslims worship the same God.

Sadness at the Transience of the World

"I am grieved by the transitoriness of things," wrote Friedrich Nietzsche in a letter to Franz Overbeck, dated 24 March 1887. (Quoted in R. Hayman, Nietzsche: A Critical Life, Penguin, 1982, p. 304)

What is the appropriate measure of grief at impermanence?

While we are saddened by the transience of things, that they are transient shows that their passing is not worthy of the full measure of our sadness. You are saddened by loss, but what exactly did you lose? Something that was meant to last forever? Something that could last forever? Something that was worth lasting forever?

Sadness at the passing of what must pass often indicates an inordinate love of the finite, when an ordinate love loves it as finite and no more. But sadness also bespeaks a sense that there is more than the finite. For if we had no sense of the Infinite why would we bestow upon the finite a value and reality it cannot bear?

Sadness thus points down to the relative unreality and unimportance of the world of time and change while pointing up to the absolute reality and importance of its Source.

But Nietzsche, of the tribe of Heraclitus, could not bring himself to believe in the Source. His bladed intellect would not allow it. But his heart was that of homo religiosus. So he had resort to a desperate and absurd measure in reconciliation of heart and head: the Eternal Recurrence of the Same, as if the redemption of time could be secured by making it cyclical and endless.

This is no solution at all.

The problem with time is not that it will end, but that its very mode of Being is deficient. The problem is not that our time is short, but that we are in time in the first place. For this reason, more time is no solution. Not even endlessly recurring time is any solution. Even if time were unending and I were omnitemporal, existing at every time, my life would still be strung out in moments outside of each other, with the diachronic identifications of memory and expectation no substitute for a true unity.

To the moment I say, with Faust, Verweile doch, du bist so schön (Goethe, Faust) but the beautiful moment will not abide, and abidance-in-memory is a sorry substitute, and a self diachronically constituted by such makeshifts is arguably no true self. Existing as we do temporally, we are never at one with ourselves: the past is no longer, the future not yet, and the present fleeting. We exist outside ourselves in temporal ec-stasis. We are strung out in temporal diaspora. The only Now we know is the nunc movens.

But we sense and can conceive a nunc stans, a standing now. This conception of a standing now, empty here below except for the rare and partial mystic fulfillments vouchsafed only to some, is the standard relative to which the moving now is judged ontologically deficient. Time is but a moving and inadequate image of eternity.

So we of the tribe of Plato conceive of the divine life as the eternal life, not as the omnitemporal or everlasting life.

We too weep with Heraclitus, but our weeping is ordinate, adjusted to the grade of reality of that over which we weep. And our weeping is tempered by joy as we look beyond this scene of flux. For as Nietzsche says in Zarathustra, "all joy/desire wants eternity, wants deep, deep, eternity." All Lust will Ewigkeit, will tiefe, tiefe, Ewigkeit!

This longing joy, this joyful longing, is it evidence of the reality of its Object? Great minds have thought so. But you won't be able to prove it one way or the other. So in the end you must decide how you will live and what you will believe.

Anti-Chessism not Confined to Muslim Lands and Why Competition is Good

It is not just crazed Islamists who condemn chess.

Grandmaster Larry Evans, in his column "Evans on Chess" (Chess Life, September 2005, pp. 46-47), reproduces a letter from an anonymous high school science teacher from Northwest Louisiana. It seems that this fellow introduced his students to chess and that they responded enthusiastically. The administration, however, issued a policy forbidding all board games. In justification of this idiocy, one of the PC-heads argued that in chess there are definite winners and losers whereas educators need to see that everyone succeeds.

Please note that it is bad preparation for a world in which there are definite winners and losers to ban games in which there are definite winners and losers.

GM Evans points out that this lunacy has surfaced elsewhere. "In 1998, for example, Oak Mountain Intermediate School in Shelby County, Alabama (a suburb of Birmingham) banned chess (because it is too competitive!) but had two baseball stadiums with night-lights for evening play." (CL p. 47)

One of the things that liberals have a hard time understanding is that competition is good. It breeds excellence. Another thing that is not understood is that competition is consistent with cooperation. They are not mutually exclusive. We cannot compete without cooperating within a broad context of shared assumptions and values. Competition need not be inimical to cooperation. 'Competition is good' is a normative claim. But competition is also a fact of life, one not likely to disappear. A school that bans competitive activities cannot be said to be preparing students for extramural reality.

Competition not only breeds excellence, it breeds humility. When you compete you become better, but you also come to know your limits. You come to learn that life is hierarchical. Competition puts you in your place.

Part of the problem is that liberals and leftists (is there any difference nowadays?) make a fetish of equality. Now I'm all for equality of opportunity, equality before the law, treating like cases in a like manner, and all the rest of what may be subsumed under the broad rubric of formal or procedural equality. I am opposed to discrimination on the basis of race, sex, and creed. I want people judged, not by the color of their skin, but by the content of their character. (And precisely for that reason I judge your typical rapper and your typical race hustler to be a contemptible lout.)

But as a matter of fact, people are not equal materially viewed, and making them equal is not a value. In fact, it involves injustice. It is unjust to give the same grade to a student who masters algebra and to a student who barely understands it. People differ in ability, and they differ in application. Some make use of their abilities, some let them lie fallow. That is their free choice. If a person makes use of his abilities and prospers, then he is entitled to the outcome, and it is unjust to deny it to him. I don't deserve my intelligence, but I am entitled to what I gain from its legitimate use. Or is that a difficult distinction to understand?

There will never be equality of outcome, and it is fallacious to argue as many liberals do that inequality of outcome proves inequality of opportunity. Thus one cannot validly infer

1. There is no equality of opportunity
from
2. There is no equality of outcome
except in the presence of some such false assumption as
3. People are equal in their abilities and in their desire to use them.

People are not equal in their abilities and they are not equal in their desire to use them. That is a fact. Liberals will not accept this fact because it conflicts with their ideology. When they look at the world, they do not see it as it is, but as they want it to be.

Further Proof of the Inanition of the Muslim World

Chess is evil according to Saudi Arabia's Grand Mufti.

“It causes enmity and hatred between people,” he declared.

For your people, perhaps. Just as women who are not dressed up like nuns cause Muslim men to go berserk with lust.

Negative Existentials, Causal Theory, and God: Notes on Donnellan

Causal theories of reference strike me as hopeless, which is not to say that descriptivist theories are in the clear. (There are also hybrid theories that we ought to discuss.) For now let's see how causal theories fare with the problem of negative existentials. Not well, I shall argue. In particular, how might a causal theorist makes sense of the negative existential, 'God does not exist'?

There are clear cases in which 'exist(s)' functions as a second-level predicate, a predicate of properties or concepts or propositional functions or cognate items, and not as a predicate of individuals. The affirmative general existential 'Horses exist,' for example, can be understood as making an instantiation claim: 'The concept horse is instantiated.' Accordingly, the sentence does not predicate existence of individual horses; it predicates instantiation of the concept horse.

This sort of analysis is well-nigh mandatory in the case of negative general existentials such as 'Flying horses do not exist.' Here we have a true sentence that cannot possibly be about flying horses for the simple reason that there aren't any. (One can make a move into Meinong's jungle here, but there are good reasons for not going there.) On a reasonable parsing the negative existential in question is about the concept flying horse, and says of this concept that it has no instances.

The same analysis works for negative singular existentials like 'Pegasus does not exist.' Pace Meinong, everything exists. So, given the truth of 'Pegasus does not exist,' 'Pegasus' cannot be taken as naming Pegasus. Since 'Pegasus' has meaning, contributing as it does to the meaning of the true sentence, 'Pegasus does not exist,' and since 'Pegasus' lacks a referent, a natural conclusion to draw is that the meaning of 'Pegasus' is not exhausted by its reference: it has a sense whether or not it has a referent. So, along Russellian lines, we may analyze 'Pegasus does not exist' as, 'It is not the case that there exists an x such that x is the winged horse of Greek mythology.' Or we can take a page from Quine and say that nothing pegasizes. What we have done in effect is to treat the singular term 'Pegasus' as a predicate and read the sentence as a denial that this predicate applies to anything.

In this way the paradox attaching to singular negative existentials is removed. But the Russell-Quine analysis is based on the assumption that names are definite descriptions in disguise (Russell) or else transformable into predicates (Quine). But how does one deal with the problem of negative existentials if one denies the Russell-Quine approach to proper names, holding instead that they refer directly to their nominata, and not via the sense of a definite description or Searlean disjunction of definite descriptions?

Keith Donnellan tackles this problem in "Speaking of Nothing" (reprinted in S. P. Schwarz, ed., Naming, Necessity, and Natural Kinds, Cornell UP, 1977, pp. 216-244).

Consider 'Santa Claus does not exist.' What does a child come to learn when he learns this truth? He does not learn, as a Russellian would have it, that nothing in reality answers to (satisfies) a certain description; what he learns is that the historical chain leading back from his use of 'Santa Claus' ends in a 'block':

     When the historical explanation of the use of a name (with the
     intention to refer) ends in this way with events that preclude any
     referent being identified, I will call it a "block" in the history.
     In this [Santa Claus] example, the block is the introduction of the
     name into the child's speech via a fiction told to him as reality
     by his parents. (237)

Having defined 'block,' Donnellan supplies a rule for negative existence statements, a rule which he says does not purport to supply the meaning of negative existentials but their truth-conditions:

     If N is a proper name that has been used in predicative statements
     with the intention to refer to some individual, then 'N does not
     exist' is true if and only if the history of those uses ends in a
     block. (239)

'God' would appear to satisfy the antecedent of this conditional, so Donnellan's theory implies that 'God does not exist' is true if and only if the history of the uses of 'God' ends in a block.

There is something wrong with this theory. If 'God does not exist' is true, then we may ask: what makes it true? What is the truth-maker of this truth? The most natural answer is that extralinguistic reality makes it true, more precisely, the fact that reality contains nothing that could be referred to as God. Reality is godless. There is nothing linguistic about this truth-maker. Of course, if 'God does not exist' is true, then 'God' does not refer to anything, and if 'God' does not refer to anything then the sentence 'God does not exist' is true. But the wholly nonlinguistic fact of God's nonexistence is not identical to the partially linguistic fact of 'God''s not referring to anything. Why not? Consider the following modal argument:

   1. God's nonexistence, if it obtains, obtains in every possible world.
   2. The fact of 'God''s not referring to anything obtains in only some
   possible worlds. (Because the English language exists in only some
   worlds.)
   Therefore
   3. The two facts are distinct.

The argument just given assumes in its initial premise Anselm's Insight: if God exists, then he necessarily exists, and if he does not, then he is impossible. But I don't need this assumption. I can argue as follows:

   5. God's nonexistence, if it obtains, obtains in some possible worlds.
   6. Among these possible worlds, some are worlds in which English does not exist.
   Therefore
   7. There is at least one world in which neither God nor the English language exists, which implies that God's nonexistence in that world
   cannot have as truthmaker any fact involving the name 'God.'

Let me put it another way. If 'God does not exist' is true, then the same fact can be expressed in German: 'Gott existiert nicht.' This is one fact expressible in two different languages. But the fact of 'God''s not referring to anything is a different fact from the fact of 'Gott''s not referring to anything. The facts are different because they involve different word-types. Therefore, neither fact can be identical to the fact of God's nonexistence.

Since the two facts are different, the wholly nonlinguistic fact of God's nonexistence cannot have as a truth-condition the partially linguistic fact of the history of uses of 'God' ending in a block, contrary to what Donnellan says. If one assertively utters 'God does not exist,' and if what one says is true, then extralinguistic reality must be a certain way: it must be godless. This godlessness of reality, if it indeed obtains, cannot be tied to the existence of any contingent language like English.

Note that the descriptivist need not fall into Donnellan's trap. When he assertively utters 'God does not exist' he says in effect that all or most of the properties associated with the use of 'God' — such properties as omniscience, etc. — are not instantiated: nothing in extralinguistic reality has them. Since these properties can be viewed as having an objective, extralinguistic existence, the descriptivist needn't tie the existence/nonexistence of God to the existence of any contingent language.

Saturday Night at the Oldies: Songs Suggestive of Chess

Bob Dylan, Queen Jane Approximately

Bob Seger, Night Moves

Jerry Lee Lewis, You Win Again

Beatles, I'm a Loser

Bob Dylan, Only a Pawn in Their Game

Frank Sinatra, The Tender Trap

Los Bravos, Black is Black

Jefferson Airplane, White Rabbit

When the men on the chessboard
Get up and tell you where to go
And you've just had some kind of mushroom
And your mind is moving low.
Go ask Alice
I think she'll know.
When logic and proportion
Have fallen sloppy dead,
And the White Knight is talking backwards
And the Red Queen's "off with her head!"
Remember what the dormouse said:
"Feed your head. Feed your head. Feed your head"

Beatles, When I'm 64

Stanley Brothers, Rank Strangers

Megadeth, Endgame. This one goes out to Dale Tuggy who likes this stuff.

Tommy Edwards, It's All in the Game

Yes, Your Move

. . . Make the white queen run so fast she hasn't got time
to make you a wife

'Cause it's time, it's time in time with your time and
it's news is captured for the queen to use
Move me on to any black square
Use me anytime you want
Just remember that the goal
Is for us all to capture all we want, anywhere

Don't surround yourself with yourself
Move on back two squares
Send an instant karma to me
Initial it with loving care
Don't surround yourself

'Cause it's time, it's time in time with your time and
it's news is captured for the queen to use . . .