[Senator Joseph] McCarthy in the 1950s became infamous for smearing his opponents with lurid allegations that he could not prove, while questioning their patriotism. Reid has brought back to the Senate that exact same McCarthy style of six decades ago — and trumped it.
During the 2012 presidential campaign, Reid libeled candidate Mitt Romney with the unsubstantiated and later-refuted charge that Romney was a tax cheat. "The word's out that he [Romney] hasn't paid any taxes for 10 years," Reid said.
Later, when asked for proof, Reid offered a pathetic rejoinder: "I have had a number of people tell me that." One wonders how many names were on Reid's McCarthyite "tell" list — were there, as McCarthy used to bluster, 205 names, or perhaps just 57?
When asked again to document the slur, Reid echoed McCarthy perfectly: "The burden should be on him. He's the one I've alleged has not paid any taxes."
Call this the Reid Principle: The maker of scurrilous and unsubstantiated allegations is presumed veracious. The burden of rebutting the charges is borne by the victim of the smear.
Reid's behavior in this and in other cases makes it clear that Democrats see politics as a form of warfare. Conservatives need to wise up.
Following Chisholm, et al. and as against Sellars, et al. I subscribe to the broadly logical primacy of the intentional over the linguistic.
But before we can discuss the primacy of the intentional, we must have some idea of (i) what intentionality is and (ii) what the problem of intentionality is. Very simply, (mental) intentionality is object-directedness, a feature of some (if not all) of our mental states. (The qualifier 'mental' leaves open the epistemic possibility of what George Molnar calls physical intentionality which transpires, if it does transpire, below the level of mind. I take no position on it at the moment.)
Suppose a neighbor asks me about Max Black, a stray cat of our mutual acquaintance, who we haven't seen in a few weeks. The asking occasions in me a thought of Max, with or without accompanying imagery. The problem of intentionality is to provide an adequate account of what it is for my thought of Max to be a thought of Max, and of nothing else. Simply put, what makes my thought of Max a thought of Max? How is object-directedness (intentionality, the objective reference of episodes of thinking) possible?
Why should there be a problem about this? Well, an episode of thinking is a datable event in my mental life. But a cat is not. No cat is a content of consciousness. Cats ain't in the head or in the mind. Obviously, no cat is spatially inside my mind, let alone my head, and it is only a little less obvious that no cat depends for its existence on my mind: it's nothing to Max, ontologically speaking, if me and my mind cease to exist. He needs my thinking of him to exist as little as my thinking needs to be about him. Cats are physical things out there in the physical world. And yet my thinking of Max 'reaches' beyond my mind and targets — not some cat or other, but a particular cat. How is this possible? What must the world be like for it to be possible?
To get the full flavor of the problem, please observe that my thinking of Max would be unaffected if Max were, unbeknownst to me, to pass out of existence while I was thinking of him. (He's out on the prowl and a hungry coyote kills him while I am thinking of him.) It would be the very same thought with the very same content and the very same directedness. But if Max were to cease to exist while a flea was biting him, then the relation of biting would cease to obtain. So if the obtaining of a relation requires the existence of all its relata, it follows that intentionality is not a relation between a thinker (or his thought) and an external object. But if intentionality is not a relation, then how are we to account for the fact that intentional states refer beyond themselves to objects that are (typically) transcendent of the mind?
Now it seems to me that any viable solution must respect the primacy of the intentional over the linguistic. This thesis consists of the following subtheses:
1. Words, phrases, clauses, sentences, paragraphs and the like, considered in their physical being as marks on paper or sounds in the air or carvings in stone (etc.) are entirely lacking in any intrinsic referential, representative, semantic, or intentional character. There is nothing in the nature of the mark 'red' that makes it mean red. After all, it doesn't mean red to a speaker of German. It doesn't mean anything to a speaker of German qua speaker of German. In German 'rot' means red while in English the same sign is in use but has a different meaning. Clearly, then, marks on paper, pixels on a computer screen, etc. have no intrinsic sense or reference grounded in their very nature. It is a matter of convention that they mean what they mean. And that brings minds into the picture.
Mind is king. Mind is the source of meaning. No mind, no meaning.
2. So any sense or reference linguistic signs have must be derivative and relational as opposed to intrinsic: whatever intentionality they have they get from minds that are intrinsically intentional. Mind is the source of all intelligibility. Linguistic signs in and of themselves as mere marks and sounds (etc.) are unintelligible.
3. There can be mind without language, but no language without mind. Laird Addis puts it like this:
Conscious states can and do occur in beings with no language, and in us with no apparent connection to the fact that we are beings with language. Thus we may say that "mind explains language" in a logical or philosophical sense: that while it is perfectly intelligible to suppose the existence of beings who have no language but have much the same kinds of conscious states that we have, including introspections of other conscious states, it is unintelligible to suppose the existence of beings who are using language in all of its representative functions and who are also lacking in conscious states. The very notion of language as a representational system presupposes the notion of mind, but not vice versa. (Natural Signs: A Theory of Intentionality, Temple University Press, 1989, pp. 64-65)
This parcel of land on the Thames is a bank. A bank contains money. *This parcel of land on the Thames contains money.
The two tokens of ‘bank’ are tokens of the same type, if I understand you correctly. So does the Thames argument above instantiate the following valid form?
This is an F Every F is G This F is G
Let's start with a Moorean fact: the argument is bad! But why is it bad? (Now we begin to philosophize.) Is it because one of the premises is false? Or because the reasoning is incorrect? That distinction, the one between truth/falsity of propositions and correctness/incorrectness of reasoning, would also seem to be Moorean, or damned near.
There are two approaches. One is to say that the Thames argument is valid because it it instantiates the valid form depicted, but that it is nevertheless unsound because the first premise is false. The other approach is to say that the argument involves an equivocation on 'bank' such that the argument falls afoul of quaternio terminorum, which is of course a formal fallacy. Thus on the second approach, the argument is invalid (because it instantiates an invalid form), but both premises are true.
Either way, the Thames argument is unsound. On the first approach it is unsound because it sports a false premise; on the second, because it has an invalid form.
'Unsound' is a terminus technicus; a term of the logician's art. 'Bad' is from ordinary language. But if we are talking about deductive arguments, the former term is a very close exegesis or exfoliation if you will of the Joe Sixpack word.
You seem to hold that if we substitute concrete tokens of the same type, then the resulting argument instantiates the form. And you also hold that to be a token of the same type means having the same spelling, and no more than that.
It’s the ‘and no more than that’ that I am having a problem with. I hold, and this is hardly an extreme or unorthodox position, that identically-spelled tokens can have (and often do have) different meanings, because meaning is a matter of convention. Sameness of spelling is never enough.
This forces me to think hard. We enter deep and troubled waters below the Moorean surface. Suppose Poindexter's (weak!) password at the money bank is kzw9*. Now consider this array:
kzw9* kzw9* kzw9*
How many passwords? One or three? A simple solution to this puzzle is to say that there are three tokens of the same type. (Note that a password need not be a word, though it can be ('password' is one dumbassed password): the above passwords are not words of any natural language.) The type in question here is not a word-type: it has no linguistic meaning. No token of this type has sense or reference.
It is like a key that unlocks a door. A token of a key-type has neither sense nor reference. it is just a little piece of metal that fits into the lock, etc. It has no semantic properties. Its properties are geometrical, metallurgical, and the like.
Now a word-token has a physical side, a body if you will. Thus 'bank' — that particular string of marks — has geometrical properties, color, etc. But it is not a word in virtue of being a physical item. It is a word only when animated by sense. Perhaps we could say that the sense is the soul of the word whose body is the physical sign.
So we need to distinguish two types. There is the physical type a token of which is the string of marks, 'bank.' And there is the word-type a token of which is the word, 'bank.'
Now I can answer Ed. He wrote,
You seem to hold that if we substitute concrete tokens of the same type, then the resulting argument instantiates the form. And you also hold that to be a token of the same type means having the same spelling, and no more than that.
That is not my view. For two words to be tokens of the same word-type it does not suffice that they have the same spelling. In fact, it is not even necessary: 'tire' and 'tyre' are (arguably) tokens of the same English word-type even though they are spelled differently.
Spelling pertains to the physical side of a word. For two tokens to be of the same word-type they must be animated by the same meaning.
Returning to the Thames argument, it is clear that there are two tokens of the 'bank' string-of-marks type. But whether there are two tokens of the same word-type or not depends on what the speaker intended.
We cannot extract the logical form of an argument be examining its physical features. We have to understand what the constituent sentences mean, and to understand what they mean, we have to understand what their constituent terms mean.
Meaning cannot be reduced to anything physical or to anything merely syntactical. Meaning brings mind into the picture. No mind, no meaning. This is why I insist that linguistic reference cannot be understood unless we understand what underlies it, mental reference, i.e., intentionality.
A tip of the hat to Karl White for bringing to our attention a 2012 issue of South African Journal of Philosophy devoted entirely to the above-captioned topic. Free online access!
It is a well-known and puzzling fact that proper names are ambiguous. According to the US telephone directory, Frodo Baggins is a real person (who lives in Ohio). But according to LOTR, Frodo Baggins is a hobbit. Not a problem. The name ‘Frodo Baggins’ as used in LOTR, clearly has a different meaning from when used to talk about the person in Ohio. So the argument below is invalid:
Frodo Baggins is a hobbit Frodo Baggins is not a hobbit Some hobbit is not a hobbit.
This is because both premisses could be true, but the conclusion could not be true. So your claim that the validity of arguments using fictional names has ‘nothing to do with any semantic property’ is incorrect.
Well, ex contradictione quodlibet. Since anything follows from a contradiction, the conclusion of the above syllogism follows from the premises. So the above argument is valid in that it instantiates a valid argument-form, namely:
p ~p — q
Obviously, there is no argument of the above form that has true premises and a false conclusion. So every argument of that form is valid or truth-preserving.
You invoke a Moorean fact. But we have to be very clear as to the identity of this fact.
It is a Moorean fact that proper names, taken in abstraction from the circumstances of their thoughtful use, are not, well, proper. They are common, or ambiguous as you say. It is no surprise that some dude in Ohio rejoices under the name 'Frodo Baggins.'
But so taken, a name has no semantic properties: it doesn't mean anything. It is just a physical phenomenon, whether marks on paper or a sequence of sounds, etc. Pronounce the sounds corresponding to 'bill,' 'john, 'dick.' Is 'dick' a name or a common noun, and for what? How many dicks in this room? How many detectives? How many penises? How many disagreeable males, 'pricks'? How many men named 'Dick'? Consider the multiple ambiguity of 'There are more dicks than johns in the room but the same number of bills.'
A name that has meaning (whether or not it refers to anything) is always a name used by a mind (not a voice synthesizing machine) in definite circumstances. For example, if the context is a discussion of LOTR, then my use and yours of 'Frodo' has meaning: it means a character in that work, despite the fact that in reality there is no individual named. And as long as we stay in that context, the name has the same meaning.
And the same holds in the context of argument. In your argument above 'Frodo Baggins' has the same meaning in both premises.
You can't have it both ways: you can't maintain that 'Frodo Baggins' is a meaningless string that could mean anything in any occurrence (a fictional character, a real man, his dog, a rock group, a town, etc.) AND that it figures as a term in an argument.
To sum up. Whether a deductive argument is valid or not depends on its logcal form. If there is a valid form it instantiates, then it is valid. The validity of the form is inherited by the argument having that form. But form abstracts from semantic content. So the specific meaning of a name is irrelevant to the evaluation of the validity of an argument in which the name figures. But of course it is always assumed that names are used in the same sense in all of their occurrences in an argument. So only in this very abstract sense is meaning relevant to the assessment of validity.
Cicero was a Roman Tully was a philosopher —– Some Roman was a philosopher.
Quite simply, there is no middle term. The example is an instance of the dreaded quaternio terminorum. But of course we learned at Uncle Willard's knee that Cicero = Tully. Add that fact as a premise and the above argument becomes valid. As a general rule, any invalid argument can be rendered valid by adding one or more premises.
So sameness of reference is not sufficient for sameness of name. 'Cicero' and 'Tully' have the same reference, but they are different names. They are both token- and type-different. Since they are different names, that fact must be accommodated in the form diagram, which looks like this:
Fa Gb — (Ex)(Fx & Gx).
This form is clearly invalid. The most one can squeeze out of these premises using Existential Generalization is '(Ex)Fx & (Ex)Gx.'
It is worth pointing out that the use of the different signs 'a' and 'b' does not entail that a is not identical to b; it leaves open both the possibility that a = b and the possibility that ~(a = b). It is because of the second of these possibilities that the argument-form is invalid.
Commenter Edward Ockham in a comment on the old blog wanted to know why, given that we had to add a premise to make the Cicero argument valid, we don't have to add a premise to make the Alexander argument valid. That argument, from the days when men were men and went around 'seizing' women, proceeds thusly:
Alexander seized Helen Alexander did not seize Helen —– Someone seized and did not seize Helen.
Ockham wants to know why we don't have to add an identity premise to secure the validity of this argument. But what premise would he have us add? It can't be 'Alexander is Alexander' for that is necessarily true and therefore true whether or not both occurrences of 'Alexander' in the original argument are coreferential. Presumably, Ockham wants us to supply '"Alexander" is coreferential in both of its occurrences.' But this goes without saying. There in no need to affirm this in a separate premise since it is implied by the fact that 'Alexander' in both occurrences is a token of the same word-type. We needn't say what is plainly shown. (He said with a sidelong glance in old Ludwig's direction.)
Ockham is bothered by the possibility of equivocation. Well, either there is an equivocation on 'Alexander' or there isn't. If there is an equivocation, then the argument instantiates an invalid form, and Ockham's contention collapses. If there is no equivocation, then the argument instantiates a valid form but it is not the case that both premises are true; so again Ockham's contention collapses. Either way, his contention collapses.
Either we capture the reference [of a name] in the form, and my objection collapses. Or you concede that the form covers only the visible or audible outward form of the word. In which case, my specious Alexander argument really does have the right form, and we have to add on the condition about reference, and my point stands.
I grasp something like the first horn. If 'a' occurs two or more times in a form diagram, then no argument of that form has an equivocation on a term whose place is held by 'a.' This is to say that the form diagram enforces coreferentiality on any terms whose place is held by 'a' in the form schema. Otherwise, the argument would not be of the form in question.
Ockham wants to have it both ways at once. He wants his argument A to be of valid form F without F enforcing coreferentiality on the occurrences of 'a' in A. This is just impossible. If there is an equivocation on 'a,' then A does not instantiate F. But if A does instantiate F, then there cannot be any equivocation of 'a.' Why? Because the form does not permit it. The form enforces coreferentiality.
Now look back at the Cicero argument. It is invalid because its form (depicted above) is invalid and the argument has no valid form. But I don't say that the invalid form enforces lack of coreferentiality on the singular terms whose place is held in the diagram by 'a' and 'b.' I say instead that the invalid form permits coreferentiality of these terms. Thus there is an asymmetry between the Alexander and Cicero cases.
1. Another claim which is nearly Moorean. I claim that the following argument is valid:
Frodo is a hobbit Frodo has large feet Some hobbit has large feet
I am not saying that the premisses are true. Clearly if there are no such things as hobbits, the first sentence has to be false. But it [the argument] is valid. The premisses can't be true and the conclusion false. If there were such a thing as Frodo, and if he was a hobbit, and if he had large feet, it has to be the cases that some hobbit (him) has large feet. So the argument is valid.
[. . .]
2. Assuming the argument above is valid, what fact makes it valid? I claim that it is a purely semantic property of the proper name 'Frodo'. I.e. it is in virtue of the meaning of 'Frodo' that the premisses cannot be true with the conclusion false. By 'purely semantic', I mean a feature of the term that it continues to possess even though it has no extension, i.e. there is nothing it refers to or denotes.
Stylistic comment: I would strike “continues to possess” and substitute “possesses.” After all it can't be your view that purely fictional names go from having extensions to not having them.
Substantive comment: What you say in #1 above seems correct. But now you take a turn that is reasonably resisted. You want to know what makes the Frodo argument valid. I say it is valid because it has a valid form:
a is F a is G ergo Some F is G.
It is this form that makes it impossible for an argument having this form to have true premises and a false conclusion. It has nothing to do with any semantic property of a substituend of the arbitrary individual constant, 'a.' Whether the subject matter of an argument is fiction or fact makes no difference to its validity or to the explanation of its validity. Logic abstracts from content; hence it treats 'Frodo,' 'Noah,' 'Churchhill' and 'Obama' the same, as substituends of an arbitrary individual constant.
It is not clear what you are claiming. Are you saying that there is a semantic property that only (purely) fictional names have? And what is this semantic property? Does 'Noah' have it as well?
Here is one guess at what you might mean. Purely fictional names, as such, do not and cannot have existing referents. Otherwise they wouldn't be purely fictional. Given, as you believe, that (a) the only referents are existing referents, and that (b) there are no modes of existence/being, you seem to be saying that purely fictional names, qua purely fictional names, do not and cannot have referents, full stop. Now if every sentence in which such a name figures is false (as you seem to believe), then there is no argument featuring purely fictional names that has true premises and a false conclusion. Therefore every such argument is by default valid (given the technical definition of validity that we both accept).
Is that what you mean?
If yes, then perhaps the semantic property you are talking about is the propery of necessarily not having a referent. Call this property 'P.' Now is P an intrinsic property of a name like 'Frodo' or is it a relational property? But surely there is no intrinsic property of a name that makes it a purely fictional name, and thus a name necessarily extensionless. What makes a name purely fictional is primarily the intention of the author, and secondarily the intentions of the readers (listeners, etc) who are complicit with the author in the fictional enterprise.
This is not Moorean. Someone could claim that the argument is valid because 'Frodo', if meaningful, refers to a non-existing thing, and because it refers to the same non-existing thing in both premisses. Some arguments against:
Comment: Why do you ignore the simplest and most obvious explanation of validity, the one I gave above?
(i) The Razor: why posit non-existing things in order to explain a matter of logic, when a semantic explanation would suffice? E.g. we don't need weird entities to explain the validity of 'every bachelor is unmarried, some people are bachelors, some people are unmarried'.
Comment: One problem is that I don't understand what you mean by a semantic explanation of validity. I grant you that the Frodo argument is valid: anyone who argues in accordance with the pattern embodied in that argument argues correctly. But I don't see that this has anything to do with whether the terms in the argument have non-null extensions. A Meinongian will say that 'Frodo is a hobbit' is true. But I am prepared to grant you that the sentence is false. But it doesn't matter since we know from Logic 101 that a valid argument can have false premises and a false conclusion.
(ii) "Frodo is a hobbit, he has large feet, some hobbit has large feet" is also valid. Do we need strange entities to explain the validity of arguments containing pronouns?
(iii) "Frodo is a hobbit who has large feet, some hobbit has large feet" is also valid. Do we need strange entities to explain the validity of arguments containing the word 'who'?
(iv) "Frodo is a hobbit with large feet, some hobbit has large feet" is also valid. Do we need strange entities to explain this? (My hunch is that the Meinongian will give up on this point. The onus is then on him to explain the difference between this one and any of the previous ones).
Comment: The validity of each of the variant arguments can be explained in the manner I indicated.
3. Now for the radical claim: the inferential property above is both necessary and sufficient to explain fictional individuation. Necessary is obvious. If we don't accept the validity, we could suppose that each token of the term 'Frodo' referred to a different character, and thus no two sentences in LOTR was ever about the same character. Clearly no one could understand the story if that were so. Sufficient is not so obvious, I will not defend that here.
Comment: Now you have really lost me. First of all, what is the inferential property? Presumably you mean that empty names have a property that explains the validity of (all? Some?) of the arguments in which they figure. What property is that? The property of being necessarily extensionless? Then why don't you say that?
And what is fictional individuation? You don't think that Frodo is a genuine individual. If he were, he would be a nonexistent individual and you reject such individuals. So there is no individual, Frodo. But if there is no individual, then there is no question of individuation in either the epistemological or the ontological sense of this term. Presumably, you mean by 'individuate' pick out, single out, identify in a way that supports cross-referencing? You need to explain this.
If this is what you mean, then on your view there is no Frodo to pick out or single out in thought. On your nominalism, all there is is the name. And you can't eke by with that alone. When I think about Frodo, I am not thinking about 'Frodo.' In fact, I can think about Frodo even if I have temporarily forgotten what his name is. Suppose I am thinking about the corpulent side-kick of Don Quixote, but have forgotten his name. I am thinking about Sancho Panza despite my not remembering that his name is 'Sancho Panza.'
Any adequate theory has to distinguish among: empty names, tokenings thereof, and tokenings thereof with understanding. If a voice synthesizer makes the sound associated with 'Frodo,' then the name is tokened, but nothing semantic is going on.
4. The really really radical claim: the semantic feature that explains individuation in fiction also explains individuation 'in reality'. So radical I won't try to defend it here. The defence would be roughly on the lines of: the same phenomenon cannot have two different causes. Same effect = same cause, which is a well accepted principle of scientific explanation. Obviously this would require defending that the effect is the same: I won't go into that here. The main pillars of the theory are (1) and (2) above. Inferences involving fictional names are valid, even though the premisses are never true. And the explanation of their validity does not involve Meinongian objects.
Comment: Once again, you haven't told us what individuation is. That word is a piece of philosophical jargon, not of ordinary language. No sentence containing it could count as Moorean. So you have to explain the term. And you have to meet my objection that there cannot be individuation in either the epistemological/semantic or ontological sense if there is no individual. How do you avoid embracing this inconsistent triad:
There are no fictional individuals. Questions about individuation makes sense only if there are individuals. Fictional names individuate.
I should think that your “really really radical claim” is hopeless. There is a huge difference between a genuine individual such as Obama and Frodo. You won't be able to paper over this difference especially since you reject Meinongian individuals and Plantingian haecceity properties.
This has been going on since Thursday. There is nothing wrong at my end: the Typepad server is under DDoS attack: Distributed Denial of Service.
Could the malevolence abroad in this world be a merely natural phenomenon? I rather doubt it. But I'd better post this while I have a window of opportunity.
Immanuel Kant was born on this date in 1724. He died in 1804. My dissertation on Kant, which now lies 36 years in the past, is dated 22 April 1978. But if, per impossibile, my present self were Doktorvater to my self of 36 years ago, my doctoral thesis might not have been approved! As one's standards rise higher and higher with age and experience one becomes more and more reluctant to submit anything to evaluation let alone publication. One may scribble as before, and even more than before, but with less conviction that one's outpourings deserve being embalmed in printer's ink. (Herein lies a reason to blog.)
So finish the bloody thing now while you are young and cocky and energetic. Give yourself a year, say, do your absolute best and crank it out. Think of it as a union card. It might not get you a job but then it just might. Don't think of it as a magnum opus or you will never finish. Get it done by age 30 and before accepting a full-time appointment. And all of this before getting married. That, in my opinion, is the optimal order. Dissertation before 30, marriage after 30. Now raise your glass with me in a toast to Manny on this, his 290th birthday. Sapere aude!
According to Charles Krauthammer (Things That Matter, Crown Forum, 2013, p. 64),
To understand the workings of American politics, you have to understand this fundamental law: Conservatives think liberals are stupid. Liberals think conservatives are evil.
Robert Paul Wolff unwittingly provides corroboration:
On Easter Sunday, it is only fitting that the reliably despicable Ross Douthat should once again rise from the dead with an incoherently dreadful column on Piketty. I will not try to summarize it. As Aristotle observed [I think], shit has no form, and hence cannot easily be apprehended by reason. You may read it for yourself. I take Douthat's column as a good sign, a harbinger of Spring. When the rats on the sinking ship of capitalism pause in their scramble down the hawsers to acknowledge the reemergence of Marx from the dustbin of history [how's that for a mixed metaphor?], there is hope on this annual celebration of resurrection.
Note that Wolff does not address the content of Douthat's essay, though he does have the decency to link to it. What he does is portray Douthat as a reliably despicable zombie and rat, a shill for capitalism, who has penned an incoherently dreadful column, a piece of shit beneath the apprehension of reason.
Well thank you Professor Wolff for this wonderful Easter Sunday illustration of the Central Axiom and for reminding us once again of how dangerous you leftists are, and, indirectly, how important our Second Amendment rights are.
Sorry if you couldn't get through at various times over the last few days. The following from the Typepad geeks:
What happened? Beginning Thursday evening, Typepad was hit with a distributed denial of service (DDoS) off and on through today. A DDoS attack is an attempt to make services unavailable . . . . The attack on Typepad was similar to an attack on Basecamp which you can read about here.
Suppose you are an atheist who considers life to be worth living. You deny God, but affirm life, this life, as it is, here and now. Suppose you take the fact of evil to tell against the existence of God. Do you also take the fact of evil to tell against the affirmability of life? If not, why not?
In this entry I will explain what I take to be one sort of problem of evil for atheists, or rather, for naturalists. (One can be an atheist without being a naturalist, but not vice versa.) For present purposes, an atheist is one who affirms the nonexistence of God, as God is traditionally conceived, and a naturalist is one who affirms that reality, with the possible exception of so-called abstract objects, is exhausted by space-time-matter. Naturalism entails atheism, but atheism does not entail naturalism.
Are the following propositions logically consistent?
a. Life is affirmable.
b. Naturalism is true.
c. Evil objectively exists.
1. What it means for life to be affirmable
To claim that life is affirmable is to claim that it is reasonable to say 'yes' to it. Life is affirmed by the vast majority blindly and instinctually, and so can be; in this trivial sense life is of course affirmable. But I mean 'affirmable' in a non-trivial sense as signifying that life is worthy of affirmation. This is of course not obvious. Otherwise there wouldn't be pessimists and anti-natalists. Let me make this a bit more precise.
To claim that life is affirmable is to maintain that human life has an overall positive value that outweighs the inevitable negatives. Note the restriction to human life. I am glad that there are cats, but I am in no position to affirm feline life in the relevant sense of 'affirm': I am not a cat and so I do not know what it is like 'from the inside' to be a cat.
'Human life' is not to be understood biologically but existentially. What we are concerned with is not an objective phenomenon in nature, but life as lived and experienced from a subjective center. So the question is not whether it is better or worse for the physical universe to contain specimens of a certain zoological species, the species h. sapiens. The question is whether it is on balance a good thing that there is human life as it is subjectively lived from a personal center toward a meaning- and value-laden world of persons and things. The question is whether it is on balance a good thing that there is human subjectivity.
Now it may be that over the course of a particular human life a preponderance of positive noninstrumental good is realized. But that is consistent with human life in general not being worth living. If my life turns out to have been worth living, if I can reasonably affirm it on my death bed and pronounce it good on balance, it doesn't follow that human life in general is worth living. Let us agree that a particular human life is worth living if, over the course of that life, a preponderance of positive noninstrumental value is realized. To say that positive value preponderates is to say that it outweighs the negative.
The question, then, is whether human life, human subjectivity, in general is affirmable. To make the question a bit more concrete, and to bring home the point that the question does not concern oneself alone, consider the question of procreation. To procreate consciously and thoughtfully is to affirm life other than one's own.
Suppose that one's life has been on balance good up to the point of one's procreating. Should one be party to the coming-into-existence of additional centers of consciousness and self-consciousness when there is no guarantee that their lives will be on balance good, and some chance that their lives will be on balance horrendous? Would you have children if you knew that they would be tortured to death in the equivalent of Auschwitz? Note that if a couple has children, then they are directly responsible for the existence of those children; but they are also indirectly responsible in ever diminishing measure for the existence of grandchildren, great grandchildren, etc. If life is not affirmable, then it is arguable that it is morally wrong to have children, life being a mistake that ought not be perpetuated. If on the other hand life is affirmable, then, while there might be particular reasons for some people not to have children, there would be no general reason rooted in the nature of things.
2. Is life affirmable in the face of evil?
More precisely: Is life affirmable by naturalists given the fact of evil? There is a problem here if you grant, as I hope you will for the sake of this discussion at least, that natural and moral evils are objective realities. Thus evil exists and it exists objectively. It is not an illusion, nor is it subjective.
The question could be put as follows: Is it rational to ascribe to human life in general an overall positive value, a value sufficient to justify procreation, given that (i) evil exists and that (ii) naturalism is true?
If naturalism is true, then there are unredeemed evils. Let us say that an unredeemed evil is an evil that does not serve a greater good for the person who experiences the evil and is not compensated for or made good in this life or in an afterlife. Thus the countless lives of those who were born and who died in slavery were lives containing unredeemed evils. In many of these countless cases, there were not only unredeemed evils, but a preponderance of unredeemed evil. Whatever these sufferers believed, their lives were not worth living. It would have been better had they never been born. If naturalism is true, then those sufferers who believed that they would be compensated in the hereafter were just wrong. Their false beliefs helped them get through their worthless existence but did nothing to make it worthwhile.
Here is an argument from evil for the nonaffirmability of life:
1. Human life in general is affirmable, i.e., possesses an overall positive value sufficient to justify procreation, only if the majority of human subjects led, lead, and will lead, lives which are on balance good.
2. It is not the case (or it is highly improbably that) that the majority of human subjects led, lead, or will lead such lives: the majority of lives are lives in which unredeemed evil predominates.
Therefore
3. Human life in general is not affirmable, i.e., does not (or probably does not) possess an overall positive value sufficient to justify procreation.
It seems to me that a naturalist who squarely and in full awareness faces the fact of evil ought to be a pessimist and an anti-natalist. If he is not, then I suspect him of being in denial or else of believing in some progressive 'pie in the future.' But even if, per impossibile, some progressive utopia were attained in the distant future, it would not redeem the countless injustices of the past.
Long-time friend of and commenter at MavPhil sends me the very good news that he is on board at NRO. Congratulations, Spencer! We definitely need more philosophically-trained journalists, and given the corruption and ever-worsening decline of the academic world 'thanks' to leftists, young philosophers like Case do well to consider alternative careers in which they can write and think and preserve their liberty far from the hothouses of political correctness.
Spencer's debut article is Polemics and Philosophy from a British Contrarian, a review of two new books by Roger Scruton, the novel Notes from Underground, and the philosophical work, The Soul of the World. Case's description of the novel make me want to read it, especially given my visit to Prague last September:
Notes from Underground is mainly set in 1985 in Communist-occupied Prague. Earlier in his career, Scruton covertly visited Prague behind the Iron Curtain, traveling as a lecturer, so the harsh descriptions have an authentic ring to them. Such descriptions allow Scruton to argue against leftist collectivism merely by describing its effects. Sometimes the storyline is coupled with searing polemics, which are most effective when they catch the reader off-guard. For instance, his protagonist observes, “Defenestration is a Czech tradition, the only one that the Communists had retained.”
The story is told in the first person by Jan Reichl, a Czech academic in the United States, who recounts his youth under Communism. Once valued for his past as a dissident writer, he now finds his worth diminishing in the eyes of the academy. Jan writes about his experiences from a meditative distance, full of references to the literature of Kafka, Dostoyevsky, and Zweig, as well as to the music of Schubert and Mahler. The book’s title itself is a reference to Dostoyevsky, whose novella Notes from the Underground is considered one of the first works of existentialist literature. The narrator’s distance from events reduces the emotional immediacy of some scenes, but it also gives the whole story a thoughtful melancholy.
Spencer has some meaty things to say in criticism of Scruton, so I suggest you all head over to the former's ComBox to register your approbation, disapprobation, congratulations, whatever. My guess is that he will be evaluated by the NRO editors in part by the length and quality of the comment threads he generates.
