Some of us are old enough to remember Mario Savio and the 1964 Free Speech Movement. But then the young radicals of those days, many of whom had a legitimate point or two against the Establishment, began the "long march through the institutions" and are now the Establishment, still fancying that they are "speaking truth to power" even as they control the levers of power. Unfortunately, power has corrupted them. Former radicals have hardened into dogmatic apparatchiks of political correctness and unbending authoritarians. What began as a free speech movement has transmogrified into a no speech movement, as Ron Radosh shows:
At the very start of the early New Left — circa the 1964-65 academic year — students in Berkeley, California, started what was called the Free Speech Movement (FSM). Back in those days, university administrators did not allow early supporters of the civil rights movement to try to gather support on campus or solicit donations to various civil rights organizations. The police were called in to arrest the offenders, mass arrests were made, and giant rallies surrounding the Sproul Hall steps had nationwide repercussions, including a backlash to the protests from California residents who backed Ronald Reagan’s campaign for governor of California a few years later. Reagan emphasized his opposition to the actions of the student radicals.
It also led to a speech by a young student named Mario Savio, whose following words sound today like a clarion call by a libertarian:
But we’re a bunch of raw materials that don’t mean to be — have any process upon us. Don’t mean to be made into any product! Don’t mean — Don’t mean to end up being bought by some clients of the University, be they the government, be they industry, be they organized labor, be they anyone! We’re human beings! … There’s a time when the operation of the machine becomes so odious — makes you so sick at heart — that you can’t take part. You can’t even passively take part. And you’ve got to put your bodies upon the gears and upon the wheels, upon the levers, upon all the apparatus, and you’ve got to make it stop. And you’ve got to indicate to the people who run it, to the people who own it, that unless you’re free, the machine will be prevented from working at all.
How times have changed. The very New Left students of that era — so many of whom now run the universities against which they once protested — have moved from support of free speech to what might be termed the “No Speech Movement.” Or, perhaps more accurately, speech for which only those whom they approve should be allowed. Nowhere has this been clearer than in the various incidents surrounding invited graduation speakers at some of the most well-known private liberal arts colleges as well as one state university.
This is a repost, slightly redacted, from 2012 to help stem the tsunami of folderol sure to wash over us from the orifices of the mindless gun-grabbing Left in the wake of the Isla Vista rampage.
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Without wanting to deny that there is a 'gun culture' in the USA, especially in the so-called red states, I would insist that the real problem is our liberal culture. Here are four characteristics of liberal culture that contribute to violence of all kinds, including gun violence.
1. Liberals tend to have a casual attitude toward crime.
It is interesting to note that Connecticut, the state in which the Newtown massacre occurred, has recently repealed the death penalty, and this after the unspeakably brutal Hayes-Komisarjevsky home invasion in the same state.
One of the strongest voices against repealing the death penalty has been Dr. William Petit Jr., the lone survivor of a 2007 Cheshire home invasion that resulted in the murders of his wife and two daughters.
The wife was raped and strangled, one of the daughters was molested and both girls were left tied to their beds as the house was set on fire.
The two men convicted of the crime, Joshua Komisarjevsky and Steven Hayes, are currently on death row.
Anyone who cannot appreciate that a crime like this deserves the death penalty is morally obtuse. But not only are liberals morally obtuse, they are contemptibly stupid in failing to understand that one of the main reasons people buy guns is to protect themselves from the criminal element, the criminal element that liberals coddle. If liberals were serious about wanting to reduce the numbers of guns in civilian hands, they would insist on swift and sure punishment in accordance with the self-evident moral principle, "The punishment must fit the crime," which is of course not to be confused with lex talionis, "an eye for an eye." Many guns are purchased not for hunting or sport shooting but for protection against criminals. Keeping and bearing arms carries with it a grave responsibility and many if not most gun owners would rather not be so burdened. Gun ownership among women is on the upswing, and it is a safe bet that they don't want guns to shoot Bambi.
2. Liberals tend to undermine morality with their opposition to religion.
Many of us internalized the ethical norms that guide our lives via our childhood religious training. We were taught the Ten Commandments, for example. We were not just taught about them, we were taught them. We learned them by heart, and we took them to heart. This early training, far from being the child abuse that A. C. Grayling and other militant atheists think it is, had a very positive effect on us in forming our consciences and making us the basically decent human beings we are. I am not saying that moral formation is possible only within a religion; I am saying that some religions do an excellent job of transmitting and inculcating life-guiding and life-enhancing ethical standards, that moral formation outside of a religion is unlikely for the average person, and that it is nearly impossible if children are simply handed over to the pernicious influences of secular society as these influences are transmitted through television, Internet, video games, and other media. Anyone with moral sense can see that the mass media have become an open sewer in which every manner of cultural polluter is not only tolerated but promoted. Those of use who were properly educated way back when can dip into this cesspool without too much moral damage. But to deliver our children over to it is the real child abuse, pace the benighted Professor Grayling.
The shysters of the ACLU, to take one particularly egregious bunch of destructive leftists, seek to remove every vestige of our Judeo-Christian ethical traditiion from the public square. I can't begin to catalog all of their antics. But recently there was the Mojave cross incident. It is absurd that there has been any fight at all over it. The ACLU, whose radical lawyers brought the original law suit, deserve contempt and resolute opposition. Of course, I wholeheartedly endorse the initial clause of the First Amendment, to wit, "Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion . . . ." But it is hate-America leftist extremism on stilts to think that the presence of that very old memorial cross on a hill in the middle of nowhere does anything to establish Christianity as the state religion. I consider anyone who believes that to be intellectually obtuse and morally repellent. One has to be highly unbalanced in his thinking to torture such extremist nonsense out of the First Amendment, while missing the plain sense of the Second Amendment, one that even SCOTUS eventually got right, namely, the the right to keep and bear arms is an individual, not a collective, right.
And then there was the business of the tiny cross on the city seal of Los Angeles, a symbol that the ACLU agitated to have removed. I could continue with the examples, and you hope I won't.
3. Liberals tend to have low standards, glorify the worthless, and fail to present exemplary human types.
Our contemporary media dreckmeisters apparently think that the purpose of art is to degrade sensibility, impede critical thinking, glorify scumbags, and rub our noses ever deeper into sex and violence. It seems obvious that the liberal fetishization of freedom of expression without constraint or sense of responsibility is part of the problem. But I can't let a certain sort of libertarian or economic conservative off the hook. Their lust for profit is also involved.
What is is that characterizes contemporary media dreck? Among other things, the incessant presentation of defective human beings as if there are more of them than there are, and as if there is nothing at all wrong with their way of life. Deviant behavior is presented as if it is mainstream and acceptable, if not desirable. And then lame justifications are provided for the presentation: 'this is what life is like now; we are simply telling it like it is.' It doesn't occur to the dreckmeisters that art might have an ennobling function.
The tendency of liberals and leftists is to think that any presentation of choice-worthy goals or admirable styles of life could only be hypocritical preaching. And to libs and lefties, nothing is worse than hypocrisy. Indeed, a good indicator of whether someone belongs to this class of the terminally benighted is whether the person obsesses over hypocrisy and thinks it the very worst thing in the world. See my category Hypocrisy for elaboration of this theme.
4. Liberals tend to deny or downplay free will, individual responsibility, and the reality of evil.
This is connected with point 2 above, leftist hostility to religion. Key to our Judeo-Christian tradition is the belief that man is made in the image and likeness of God. This image is that mysterious power in us called free will. The secular extremist assault on religion is at the same time an assault on this mysterious power, through which evil comes into the world.
This is a large topic. Suffice it to say for now that one clear indication of this denial is the bizarre liberal displacement of responsibility for crime onto inaminate objects, guns, as if the weapon, not the wielder, is the source of the evil for which the weapon can be only the instrument.
America's greatest songwriter, Bob Dylan, turns 73 today. We celebrate with some outstanding covers of some of his best songs. There are two reasons for sending you to the covers: Dylan's own renditions tend to get removed from YouTube very shortly after they've been posted; many cannot stand Dylan's voice. If you are among the latter, these renditions may change your mind about his music.
No reason to get excited The thief he kindly spoke There are many here among us Who feel that life is but a joke But you and I we've been through that And this is not our fate So let us not talk falsely now The hour is getting late.
Laurence Auster comments: This Dylan song can seem amorphous and mystical in the negative sense, especially as it became a kind of countercultural anthem and meaningless through overuse. But the lyrics are coherent and profound, especially the first verse:
They say everything can be replaced They say every distance is not near But I remember every face Of every man who put me here.
The modern world tells us that everything is fungible, nothing is of real value, everything can and should be replaced—our spouse, our culture, our religion, our history, our sexual nature, our race, everything. It is the view of atomistic liberal man, forever creating himself out of his preferences, not dependent on any larger world of which he is a part. The singer is saying, No, this isn’t true. Things have real and particular values and they cannot be cast off and replaced by other things. And, though we seem to be distant, we are connected. I am connected to all the men, the creators and builders and poets and philosophers, and my own relatives and friends, who have come before me or influenced me, who created the world in which I live.
Finally, one by the master himself, Not Dark Yet. Thanks, Bob, for over 50 years of music, memories, and inspiration. May the Never Ending Tour roll on, and may you die with your boots on.
Addendum: I just now discovered this great version of Visions of Johanna by Marianne Faithful. Not that it comes close to the surreal magic of the best Dylan versions. . . .
Addendum 5/25: Having listened to Faithful's Visions a few more times, it impresses me even more. But it still does not come close to the surreal magic, et cetera.
The Left's race-baiting just won't stop. Here Jay Rockefeller plays the race card against Ron Johnson in a manner so egregious that it would in the early 19th century get the Democrat scumbag challenged to a duel. There are so many recent incidents of race-baiting that the thought of laying in the links is a dreary one indeed. So I'll just remind you of the John Derbyshire case which now lies about two years in the past. Around that time I wrote the following. Very instructive, in part about NRO's need to 'go along to get along.'
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In case you are not familiar with the word, 'defenestration' is from the Latin fenestra, window. Defenestration is thus the act of literally or figuratively throwing something or someone out of a window, or the state of having been ejected through such an aperture. In plain English, John Derbyshire, 'Derb,' got the boot from NRO's Rich Lowry. (Pardon the mixed metaphors.) Derb's free-lance contributions are no longer wanted there. And all because of Derb's The Talk: Nonblack Version.
Go ahead, click on the link and read the piece. If nothing else, it will hold your interest. It is also a good litmus test of your political affiliation. If it enrages you and strikes you as a racist screed, then you are a (contemporary) liberal. If you accept its advice as sound, though perhaps in need of minor qualification or correction here and there, then you are a person as sane and reasonable and moderate as your humble correspondent. If you think Derb didn't go far enough, then chances are you are an extreme right-wing crazy.
I have just read Derb's talk, very carefully, a second time. What is so offensive about it? Facts are facts. What's true is true. The criterion of truth is not agreement with liberal ideology. Consider this piece of advice:
(10h) Do not act the Good Samaritan to blacks in apparent distress, e.g., on the highway.
That could use some qualification. If a well-dressed black, alone, were in automotive distress, I might stop to render aid. But if it were a carload of teenaged gangsta rapper types, I'd accelerate. I wouldn't want to catch a stray round in what could be termed an inverse drive-by shooting. But if you are giving advice to your kids, you might say something like the above sans qualification, in the same way you would advise them to avoid biker bars at midnight in bad parts of town without feeling the need to point out the obvious, e.g., that not every biker is a brute out to rape and pillage.
Bill Plaschke of the L. A. Timeslays into Mark Cuban, owner of the Dallas Mavericks, for statements like these:
“I mean, we’re all prejudiced in one way or another,” he said. “If I see a black kid in a hoodie and it’s late at night, I’m walking to the other side of the street. And if on that side of the street there’s a guy that has tattoos all over his face – white guy, bald head, tattoos everywhere – I’m walking back to the other side of the street. And the list goes on of stereotypes we all live up to and are fearful of.”
The word 'prejudice' needs analysis. At a bare minimum, two senses of the term ought to be distinguished.
'Prejudice' could refer to blind prejudice: unreasoning, reflexive (as opposed to reflective) aversion to what is other just because it is other, or an unreasoning pro-attitude toward the familiar just because it is familiar. We should all condemn blind prejudice, or at least blind prejudice of the aversive sort. It is execrable to hate a person just because he is of a different color, for example. No doubt, but how many people do that? How many people who are averse to blacks are averse because of their skin color as opposed to their behavior patterns? Racial prejudice is not, in the main, prejudice based on skin color, but on behavior.
'Prejudice' could also mean 'prejudgment.' Although blind aversive prejudice is bad, prejudgment is generally good. We cannot begin our cognitive lives anew at every instant. We rely upon the 'sedimentation' of past exerience. Changing the metaphor, we can think of prejudgments as distillations from experience. The first time I 'serve' my cats whisky they are curious. After that, they cannot be tempted to come near a shot glass of Jim Beam. They distill from their unpleasant olfactory experiences a well-grounded prejudice against the products of the distillery.
My prejudgments about rattlesnakes are in place and have been for a long time. I don't need to learn about them afresh at each new encounter with one. I do not treat each new one encountered as a 'unique individual,' whatever that might mean. Prejudgments are not blind, but experience-based, and they are mostly true. The adult mind is not a tabula rasa. What experience has written, she retains, and that's all to the good.
So there is good prejudice and there is bad prejudice. The teenager thinks his father prejudiced in the bad sense when he warns the son not to go into certain parts of town after dark. Later the son learns that the old man was not such a bigot after all: the father's prejudice was not blind but had a fundamentum in re.
But if you stay away from certain parts of town are you not 'discriminating' against them? Well of course, but not all discrimination is bad. Everybody discriminates. Liberals are especially discriminating. The typical Scottsdale liberal would not be caught dead supping in some of the Apache Junction dives I have been found in. Liberals discriminate in all sorts of ways. That's why Scottsdale is Scottsdale and not Apache Junction.
Is the refusal to recognize same-sex 'marriage' as marriage discriminatory? Of course! But not all discrimination is bad. Indeed, some is morally obligatory. We discriminate against felons when we disallow their possession of firearms. Will you argue against that on the ground that it is discriminatory? If not, then you cannot cogently argue against the refusal to recognize same-sex 'marriage' on the ground that it is discriminatory. You need a better argument. And what would that be?
'Profiling,' like 'prejudice' and 'discrimination,' has come to acquire a wholly negative connotation. Unjustly. What's wrong with profiling? We all do it, and we are justified in doing it. Consider criminal profiling.
It is obvious that only certain kinds of people commit certain kinds of crimes. Suppose a rape has occurred at the corner of Fifth and Vermouth. Two males are moving away from the crime scene. One, the slower moving of the two, is a Jewish gentleman, 80 years of age, with a chess set under one arm and a copy of Maimonides' Guide for the Perplexed under the other. The other fellow, a vigorous twenty-year-old, is running from the scene.
Who is more likely to have committed the rape? If you can't answer this question, then you lack common sense. But just to spell it out for you liberals: octogenarians are not known for their sexual prowess: the geezer is lucky if he can get it up for a three-minute romp. Add chess playing and an interest in Maimonides and you have one harmless dude.
Or let's say you are walking down a street in Mesa, Arizona. On one side of the street you spy some fresh-faced Mormon youths, dressed in their 1950s attire, looking like little Romneys, exiting a Bible studies class. On the other side of the street, Hells (no apostrophe!) Angels are coming out of their club house. Which side of the street would you feel safer on? On which side will your concealed semi-auto .45 be more likely to see some use?
Do you struggle over this question?
The problem is not so much that liberals are stupid, as that they have allowed themselves to be stupefied by that cognitive aberration known as political correctness.
Their brains are addled by the equality fetish: everybody is equal, they think, in every way. So the vigorous 20-year-old is not more likely than the old man to have committed the rape. The Mormon and the Hells Angel are equally law-abiding. And the twenty-something Egyptian Muslim is no more likely to be a terrorist than the Mormon matron from Salt Lake City.
Getting back to Mark Cuban, what he is quoted as saying above makes perfect sense. His prejudices are reasonable prejudgments.
If you walk like a thug, and talk like a thug, and dress like a thug, and are plastered with tattoos and facial hardware like a thug, then don't be surprised if people give you a wide berth.
It is the willful self-enstupidation of liberals that unfits them for the appreciation of such commonsensical points as I have just reiterated.
Unable to contain her curiosity, Pandora opened her box and a multitude of evils escaped into the world. The blogger, unable to contain his curiosity as to the comments he might receive, opens his combox and a multitude of evils _________________. (You finish the sentence.)
I am regular reader of your blog from Serbia. I have an plea for you – if you find it inappropriate just skip it.
You may know that my country and its neighbors was hit by terrible floods last few days. I will be very grateful if you can share a call for help on your blog. I must clarify that I am aware that this is very unusual appeal for blog dedicated to philosophy and I will continue to follow in good faith whatever be your decision.
In this life the body that begins as a vehicle ends as a cross. It carries us until such time as we carry it — and are nailed to it, and expire on it and of it.
May a linguistic conservative such as your humble correspondent coin new expressions? Of course. A conservative is not one opposed to change as such, or linguistic change as such. A conservative is one who is opposed to unnecessary, or idiotic, or deleterious changes –- the kind our dear liberal friends love to introduce. An example of a change that was unnecessary was the renaming of the Western Division of the American Philosophical Association to ‘Central Division’ some years back. I couldn't care less about the useless and politically correct A. P. A. nowadays, but at the time the change rankled this curmudgeon for two reasons. First, the change is wholly unnecessary: given that there is a Pacific Division and a Western Division, one would have to be consummately stupid indeed not to realize that the former is to the west of the latter.
Second, this wholly unnecessary change obliterates an interesting piece of history, namely, that the A.P. A. once had only two divisions. Should Case Western Reserve University change its name because the Western Reserve region of Ohio is practically in the East nowadays?
By the way, that strange name is an amalgam of 'Case Institute of Technology' and 'Western Reserve University.' Case Institute of Technology was where Michelson and Morley in 1881 conducted the famous experiment that put the ether hypothesis out of commission. When I was a Visiting Assoc Prof of Phil there in 1989-1991, I got a thrill out of conducting some of my classes in Morley Hall.
True, ‘Western Division,’ was a misnomer – but only if one takes it as a description in disguise as opposed to a logically proper name the meaning of which is exhausted by its reference. Recall Saul Kripke’s old example of ‘Holy Roman Empire’ from Naming and Necessity. The entity denoted was neither holy, nor Roman, nor an empire. But that did not prevent the phrase in question from functioning as a proper name. Similarly with ‘Western Division.’
My posting of the graphic to the left indicates that I am a skeptic about global warming (GW). To be precise, I am skeptical about some, not all, of the claims made by the GW activists. See below for some necessary distinctions. Skepticism is good. Doubt is the engine of inquiry and a key partner in the pursuit of truth.
A skeptic is a doubter, not a denier. To doubt or inquire or question whether such-and-such is the case is not to deny that it is the case. It is a cheap rhetorical trick of GW alarmists when they speak of GW denial and posture as if it is in the ball park of Holocaust denial.
What can a philosopher say about global warming? The first thing he can and ought to say is that, although not all questions are empirical, at the heart of the global warming debate are a set of empirical questions. These are not questions for philosophers qua philosophers, let alone for political ideologues. For the resolution of these questions we must turn to reputable climatologists whose roster does not sport such names as 'Al Gore,' 'Barbra Streisand,' or 'Ann Coulter.' Unfortunately, the global warming question is one that is readily 'ideologized' and the ideological gas bags of both the Right and the Left have a lot to answer for in this regard.
I have not investigated the matter with any thoroughness, and I have no firm opinion. It is difficult to form an opinion because it is difficult to know whom to trust: reputable scientists have their ideological biases too, and if they work in universities, the leftish climate in these hotbeds of political correctness is some reason to be skeptical of anything they say.
For example, let's say scientist X teaches at Cal Berkeley and is a registered Democrat. One would have some reason to question his credibility. He may well tilt toward socialism and away from capitalism and be tempted to beat down capitalism with the cudgel of global warming. Equally, a climatologist on the payroll of the American Enterprise Institute would be suspect. I am not suggesting that objectivity is impossible to attain; I am making the simple point that it is difficult to attain and that scientists have worldview biases like everyone else. And like everyone else, they are swayed by such less-than-noble motives as the desire to advance their careers and be accepted by their peers. And who funds global warming research? What are their biases? And who gets the grants? And what conclusions do you need to aim at to get funded? It can't be a bad idea to "follow the money" as the saying goes.
Off the top of my head I think we ought to distinguish among the following questions:
1. Is global warming (GW) occurring?
2. If yes to (1), is it naturally irreversible, or is it likely to reverse itself on its own?
3. If GW is occurring, and will not reverse itself on its own, to what extent is it anthropogenic, i.e., caused by human activity?
(3) is the crucial empirical question. It is obviously distinct from (1) and (2). If there is naturally irreversible global warming, this is not to say that it is caused by human activity. It may or may not be. One has to be aware of the post hoc ergo propter hoc fallacy. Suppose there is a close correlation between global warming and man-made carbon emissions. It doesn't straightaway follow that the the human activity causes the warming. But again, this is not a question that can be settled a priori; it is a question for climatologists.
4. If anthropogenic, is global warming caused by humans to a degree that warrants action, assuming that action can be taken to stop it?
5. If GW is caused by humans to an extent that it warrants action, what sorts of action would be needed to stop the warming process?
6. How much curtailment of economic growth would we be willing to accept to stop global warming?
The first three of these six questions are empirical and are reserved for climatologists. They are very difficult questions to answer. And it is worth pointing out that climatology, while an empirical science, falls short of truly strict science. This useful article lists the following five characteristics of science in the strict and eminent sense:
1. Clearly defined terminology. 2. Quantifiability. 3. Highly controlled conditions. "A scientifically rigorous study maintains direct control over as many of the factors that influence the outcome as possible. The experiment is then performed with such precision that any other person in the world, using identical materials and methods, should achieve the exact same result." 4. Reproducibility. "A rigorous science is able to reproduce the same result over and over again. Multiple researchers on different continents, cities, or even planets should find the exact same results if they precisely duplicated the experimental conditions." 5. Predictability and Testability. "A rigorous science is able to make testable predictions."
These characteristics set the bar for strict science very high, and rightly so. Is climate science science according to these criteria? No, it falls short on #s 3 and 4. At the hardest hard core of the hard sciences lies the physics of meso-phenomena. Climatology does not come close to this level of 'hardness.' So don't be bamboozled: don't imagine that the prestige of physics transfers undiminished onto climatology. It is pretty speculative stuff and much of it is ideologically infected.
Our first three questions are empirical.But the last three are not, being questions of public policy. So although the core issues are empirical, philosophers have some role to play: they can help in the formulation and clarification of the various questions; they can help with the normative questions that arise in conjunction with (4)-(5), and they can examine the cogency of the arguments given on either side. Last but not least, they can drive home the importance of being clear about the distinction between empirical and conceptual questions.
Etienne Gilson famously remarked that "Philosophy always buries its undertakers." That is the first of his "laws of philosophical experience." (The Unity of Philosophical Experience, Scribners, 1937, p. 306) As a metaphilosophical pronunciamento it is hard to beat. It is equally true that philosophy always resurrects its dead. Let that be my first law. The history of natural science is littered with corpses, none of which is an actual or potential Lazarus. Not so in philosophy.
None of the classical problems has ever been demonstrated to be a pseudoproblem pace Wittgenstein, Carnap and such epigoni as Morris Lazerowitz; none of the major theories proposed in solution of them has ever been refuted once and for all; no school of thought has been finally discredited.
Thomism, to take an example, was once largely confined to the academic backwaters of Catholic colleges where sleepy Jesuits taught the ancient lore from dusty scholastic manuals to bored jocks. (I am not being entirely fair, but fair enough for a blog post.) But in the last twenty years an increasing number of sharp analytic heads have penetrated the scholastic arcana and have been serving up some fairly rigorous forward-looking stuff that engages with contemporary analytic work in a way that was simply beyond the abilities of (most) of the sleepy Jesuits and old-time scholastics.
Gilbert Ryle once predicted with absurd confidence, "Gegenstandstheorie . . . is dead, buried, and not going to be resurrected." (Quoted in G. Priest, Towards Non-Being, Oxford, 2005, p. vi, n. 1.) Ryle was wrong, dead wrong, and shown to be wrong just a few years after his cocky prediction. Variations on Meinong's Theory of Objects flourish like never before due to the efforts of such brilliant philosophers as Butchvarov, Castaneda, Lambert, Parsons, Priest, Routley/Sylvan, and Zalta, just to mention those that come first to mind. And the Rylean cockiness has had an ironic upshot: his logical behaviorism is temporarily dead while Meinongianism thrives. But Ryle too will be raised if my parallel law of philosophical experience — Philosophy always resurrects its dead — holds.
It may be worth noting that if philosophy resurrects its dead then it can be expected to raise the anti-philosophical (and therefore philosophical) positions of philosophy's would-be undertakers. Philosophy, she's a wily bitch: you can't outflank her and she always ends up on top.
How much time should one spend on philosophy? "A good chunk of the day," you say; assuming that one is above all else interested in truth (about ultimate issues) and/or in the Absolute. But should one be interested in either of these? That's a philosophical problem. And I guess that in your view philosophy can't settle it: philosophically, it is as reasonable to be interested as not to be.
Even assuming that kind of interest, why do philosophy a good chunk of the day? Once one has toiled through the central apories of philosophy, something like glancing at their concise list may be sufficient. I mean sufficient for what you want from philosophy: intellectual humility and appreciation of the question what, if anything, lies beyond the limits of the discursive intellect and how one may gain access to it.
Best,
V.
Dear V.,
Thank you for your comments which are both penetrating and very useful to me.
Response 1. Philosophers (the real ones, not mere academic functionaries) seek the ultimate truth about the ultimate matters. I take it we agree on that. But should one seek the ultimate truth about the ultimate matters? You rightly point out that whether one should or shouldn't (or neither) is itself a philosophical problem. And you also clearly see that if the problems of philosophy are insoluble, then this particular problem is insoluble. And if it is insoluble, then philosophy is no more reasonable to pursue than to eschew.
Well, I accept the consequence. But it is reasonable to pursue philosophy, and that suffices to justify my pursuit of it. And who knows? Perhaps I will definitively solve one or more philosophical problems to the satisfaction of all competent practioners. You understand that I do not claim to know (with certainty) that the insolubility thesis is true. My claim is merely that it is a reasonable conjecture based on some two and a half millenia of philosophical experience. It is reasonable to conjecture that no problem has ever been solved by us because no problem is soluble by us. I expect the future to be like the past. (But then so did Russell's chicken who expected to be fed on the day the farmer wrung his neck.)
Response 2. Let's assume that the pursuit of philosophy is reasonable and worthwhile for some of us as an end in itself (and not because we are paid to do it, or teach it.) But why continue with it day after day for many hours each day? As you put it so well, why does it not suffice to glance from time to time at a concise list of the central apories to gain the promised benefits of intellectual humility and the motivation to look beyond philosophy for routes to truth?
There are several considerations.
1. There is the sheer intellectual pleasure that people like us derive from thinking and writing about the problems of philosophy. The strangeness of the ordinary entrances us and we find disciplined wondering about it deeply satisfying. We humans like doing well what we have the power to do, and those of us who like thinking and writing and entering into dialog with the like-minded are made happy by these pursuits even if solutions are out of the reach of mortals. What Siegbert Tarrasch said of chess is also true of philosophy, "Like love, like music, it has the power to make men happy."
2. Then there is the humanizing effect of the study of the great problems. Bear in mind that for me the problems are genuine and deep and some of them are of great human importance. They are not artifacts of non-workaday uses of language, nor are they sired by erroneous empirical assumptions or remediable logical errors. I firmly reject their Wittgensteinian and 'Wittgenfreudian' dismissal, or any other sort of anti-philosophical dismissal or denigration. (Morris Lazerowitz was a 'Wittgenfreudian,' or, if you prefer, 'Freudensteinian.') So it is deeply humanizing to wrestle with the problems of philosophy. We are brought face to face with our predicament in this life. To change the metaphor, we are driven deep into it.
3. It is also important to grapple with the problems of philosophy and plumb their depths so that we can mount effective critiques against the scientistic junk solutions that are constantly being put forth in once good but now crappy publications such as Scientific American and peddled by sophists and philosophical know-nothings like Lawrence Krauss.
4. Since it is not the case that all solutions are equally good or equally bad, it is useful to know which are better and which worse. Even if the mind-body problem is ultimately insoluble, some 'solutions' can be known to be either worthless or highly unlikely to be true. Eliminative materialism is a prime candidate for the office of nonsense theory.
5. Since the insolubility thesis as I intend it is put forth tentatively and non-dogmatically, it must be continually tested. This is done by trying to solve the problems. The insolubility thesis is not an excuse for intellectual laziness.
6. But perhaps the most important point is that philosophy, pursued in the manner of the radical aporetician, can itself be a spiritual practice. This is a large topic, and brevity is the soul of blog; so I'll content myself with a brief indication.
The insolubilia of Western philosophy, if insoluble they are, could be likened to the koans of the Zen Buddhists. The point of working on a koan is to precipitate a break-through to satori or kensho by a transcending of the discursive intellect.
If you said to the Zen man that he is wasting his time puzzling over insoluble koans, he would reply that you are missing the point. "The point is not to solve them, but to break on through to the other side, to open the doors of perception beyond the discursive to the nondual."
Typepad bloggers were subjected to yet further outages yesterday, outages Typepad claims were caused by a Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attack. Every outage an outrage to the 'blogsessive.' Let's hope we don't see a repeat of April's fiasco.
So I managed to snag only 744 pageviews yesterday. But traffic is overall good. 15 May saw a surge of 2298. And a few days ago I passed the 2.5 million pageviews mark. Presently total page views for this third version of MavPhil, commenced on Halloween 2008, stand at 2,503,919.
That averages to 1,235.28 pageviews per day. Total posts including this one: 5098. Total comments: 7018.
While apparently conceding that empty proper names have an 'inferential role', rightly underscores the need for me to demonstrate that its meaning is just this role, i.e. to demonstrate that the 'inferential semantics' is a sufficient as well as a necessary explanation of (empty) proper names.
Here are some arguments to elucidate this inferential role, and to show that it is sufficient to explain everything we need to know about empty proper names (indeed, all proper names, but leave that aside for now).
Argument 1. Proper names are neither descriptive nor object-dependent.
Consider the meaning of the following two sentences:
There is a hobbit called 'Frodo'. Frodo has large feet.
I have argued that at least part of the semantics of the proper name 'Frodo' is to join the predicate 'hobbit' in the first sentence to the predicate 'has large feet' in the second. It allows us to infer 'some hobbit has large feet'. And by repeated use of this inference in successive propositions in a narrative, it allows us to connect an increasingly complex description to each character in the narrative. It tells us which character we are talking 'about' by telling us which description to increase. Does it have any further function than this? Is it descriptive? Does it mean something like "hobbit called 'Frodo'"? No, for consider
There is a hobbit called 'Frodo'. There is another hobbit called 'Frodo'.
Clearly if there can be two characters in a narrative with the same name (as sometimes there are), the indefinite description 'called N' is not sufficient to individuate the character. Or consider
There is a hobbit called 'Frodo'. Frodo might not have been called 'Frodo'
This implies 'some hobbit called Frodo might not have been called Frodo', which is not inconsistent, so long as 'some hobbit' is read with wide scope. I won't argue this at length here, but it is easy to show that all the arguments which Kripke levels at the description theory of names can be reused or reinterpreted in the case of empty names. But if an empty proper name is non-descriptive and if there is no object that it corresponds to (either real or intentional), the simplest explanation is that its meaning is its inferential properties.
BV Comment 1. I take it that your view is that no indefinite or definite description supplies the meaning (sense) of any empty name. You rely on Kripke-type arguments. But distinguish:
a. Reference is not routed through sense, but direct
and
b. Names lack sense entirely.
It might be that while the reference of a name is not routed through an associated sense, the name nevertheless has a sense. Your view, however, rules that out. And doesn't Kripke speak of a sense that "fixes the reference" of a name without being part of the mechanism by which reference is achieved? But let's not get sidetracked into Kripke exegesis!
If I understand you, you want to maintain that names and other singular referring devices such as indexicals and demonstratives are purely syntactical devices. I honestly don't see how that could be true. I gave the example earlier of the first-person singular pronoun. Assume that when Frodo says 'I am hungry' he refers directly to Frodo and not via a special reference-mediating I-sense. Still, any use of 'I' has as part of its meaning that a producer of such a linguistic token is a person or a (potentially) self-conscious being, a being that can speak or think.
In this connection, David Kaplan speaks of character as opposed to content. "The character of an expression is set by linguistic conventions and, in turn, determines the content of the expression in every context." (Themes from Kaplan, p. 505) The character of the pure indexical 'I' is given by the rule:
'I' refers to the speaker or writer. (505)
My criticism, then, is that if the semantics of singular referring devices reduces to the inferential roles these words play, then there is no accounting for Kaplanian content since that does not vary with context or inferential role.
Leaving aside idexicals and demonstratives, all or most names seem to have associated with them a semantic content which cannot be reduced to the purely syntactical. Consider the song Carmelita about an apparently purely fictional character named 'Carmelita.' That name carries the sense 'female.' And the same goes for the wicked Felina in Marty Robbins' El Paso. There are male names, female names, and unisex names. If Carl is married to Carla, then you know the marriage is not same-sex.
Argument 2. Referential insulation
Consider the first sentence above: "There is a hobbit called 'Frodo'". This is indefinite, i.e. it does not tell us which hobbit is called 'Frodo'. Specifically, even if hobbits are mentioned in some earlier part of the narrative, this sentence on its own does not generate any further inferences about hobbits. It is a 'referential insulator', it does not 'refer backwards' to any previous sentence.The second sentence "Frodo has large feet", by contrast, does refer back. But only to the first sentence. Any third sentence can refer back to this one, and a fourth sentence to the third, and we can construct a whole referential chain, each of which refers back to the previous link. But the chain stops at the first sentence, the insulating sentence. This suggests that the second definite sentence, or back-referring sentence, has meaning only insofar as it refers back. But its back-reference is exhausted by its inferential properties. Ergo etc.
BV Comment 2. Suppose I grant the the meaning of 'Frodo' in the second sentence is exhausted by its back reference to 'Frodo' in the first sentence. This back reference is entirely intralinguistic: it is a word-word relation, not a word-world relation. So far, so good. Consider this quantified sentence:
(Ex) (x is a hobbit called 'Frodo' & x has large feet).
'Frodo' in the second sentence — 'Frodo has large feet' — plays the role of the second bound variable in the above quantified sentence, and that role is purely syntactical. The second sentence is synonomous with 'He has large feet' in the context in question.
So perhaps what you are up to is this: You want to construe names as pronouns used anaphorically as opposed to demonstratively. You are of course aware of the ambiguity of a sentence like 'Feser inscribed his book.' That could mean that Feser inscribed Feser's book, in which case 'his' is being used anaphorically, or it could mean that Feser inscribed some other person's book, in which case 'his' is being used demonstratively. Suppose I say 'Feser inscribed his book' while pointing to Peter. Then 'his' refers to an extralingusitc item, Peter. On the first disambiguation, however, 'his' is syntactically bound to 'Feser' and the reference is an intralinguistic back reference.
Here is the problem. 'Frodo' in the first sentence cannot be construed as a pronoun used anaphorically. You cannot introduce 'Frodo' without packing some meaning into it. And that is exactly what you do when you say that Frodo is a hobbit. Surely you don't think that 'hobbit' is a purely syntactical device. We agree of course that 'hobbit' has a null extension, but it must have some intension, and that intension cannot be reduced to syntax. Hence 'Frodo' when first introduced has to have some meaning that is irreducible to syntax or inferential role.
Even if back reference is exhausted by inferential properties, and the meaning of a back-referring term reduces to its syntactic role, surely the meaning of a name — even if it is empty — cannot on its first introduction be reduced to its syntactic role.
In short, your "ergo, etc." is a non sequitur.
Argument 3. Definition not object-dependent.
The definition of the name 'Frodo' occurs in the first sentence ("There is a hobbit called 'Frodo'"). This tells us that any subsequent usage of 'Frodo' refers back to this sentence. But it is a general existential proposition. On the assumption that general existential propositions aren't object-dependent, it follows that we can define a proper name without requiring an object. Given that we can define its meaning without having an object, it follows that its meaning is not object-dependent.
BV Comment 3: This argument seems OK in relation to empty names. Do you mean it to apply to non-empty names as well?
Argument 4. Pronouns are not object-dependent.
Consider
There is a hobbit called 'Frodo'. He has large feet.
Clearly the pronoun 'he' refers back to the first sentence, not to any object. But the two sentences together do not signify any more than the two 'Frodo' sentences above. But if the two 'Frodo' sentences have the same meaning as two object-independent sentences, it follows that the two 'Frodo' sentences are object-independent also.
BV Comment 4. To be true, your thesis has to be modified: Pronouns used anaphorically are not object-dependent.
Suppose you don't know that prosciutto is called 'prosciutto.' But you want some anyway and you know what it looks like. You belly up to the deli counter, point to the delectable item, and say 'I want some of this!' Surely the meaning of the demonstrative pronoun 'this' in this context is object-dependent.
But the same goes for the pure indexical 'I.' The indexical reference is achieved without a demonstration — there is no need to point to oneself when saying 'I' — but 'I' is secure against reference failure. One cannot token 'I' without referring to something. So 'I' used indexically — not as a Roman numeral say — is object-dependent for its meaning.
