I heard Paula Deen's son say that some statements made about his mother were not accurate. But I think what he should have said, and perhaps wanted to say, is that they were not true.
What is the difference between truth and accuracy as properties of statements and such cognate items as declarative sentences, propositions, beliefs, judgments, etc. ? I don't know, therefore I blog. Nescio ergo 'blogo.'
It seems obvious that 'false' and 'inaccurate' do not have the same meaning as is indicated by their differential usage by competent speakers of English. To say that JFK finished his first term in office in good health is to say something false, not inaccurate, while to say that he was assassinated on 23 November 1963 is to say something inaccurate (and also false). Suppose someone says that there are people now living on the Moon. No one competent in English would say, 'That's inaccurate!'
Intuitively, an inaccurate statement is near the truth (whatever exactly that means!). Kennedy was shot by Oswald on the 22nd of November, 1963. If I state that, then I make a statement that is both true and accurate. If I say he was shot on the 23rd, then I say something very near the truth but inaccurate. Similarly if I said that he was shot on the 22nd in Fort Worth rather than in Dallas. Inaccurate but near the truth.
If I simply say that Kennedy was assassinated, then I say something true. But is it also accurate? If every inaccurate statement is false, then, by contraposition, every true statement is accurate.
If I say that Kennedy was not assassinated, then I say something false. But is it also inaccurate?
Perhaps we should say the following. While every statement is either true or false, only some statements are either accurate or inaccurate. Which statements? Those that feature terms that admit of degrees or somehow imply numerical values. 'Tom is a smoker' would then be either true or false but not either accurate or inaccurate. But 'Tom is a pack-a-day smoker' would be either true or false and either accurate or inaccurate. Of course, if it is accurate, then it is true, and if it is inaccurate, then it is false.
It is plausible to maintain, though not self-evident, that while accuracy admits of degrees, truth does not. A statement is either true or not true. If bivalence holds and there are only two truth values, then, if a statement is not true, it is false. It does not seem to make sense to say that one statement is truer than another. But it does make sense to say that one statement is more accurate than another. 'The value of pi is 3.14159' is more accurate than 'the value of pi is 3.1415.' Neither statement is entirely accurate, and indeed no such statement is entirely accurate given the irrationality of pi. But I suggest that the following is both entirely true and entirely accurate: 'Pi is the mathematical constant whose value is equal to the circumference of a circle divided by its diameter.'
Here is something bordering on a paradox. Given its irrationality, pi is such that every statement that can be made in a finite time about its value is inaccurate. But if every inaccurate statement is false, then every statement that can be made in a finite time about the value of pi is false.
The blood libel is an outright lie perpetrated by many Muslims. It would be absurd to speak of it as 'inaccurate.'
Del Shannon (Charles Weedon Westover), December 30, 1934 – February 8, 1990, known prmarily for his Billboard Hot 100 #1 hit, Runaway, 1961. "Suffering from depression, Shannon committed suicide on February 8, 1990, with a .22-caliber rifle at his home in Santa Clarita, California, while on a prescription dose of the anti-depressant drug Prozac. Following his death, The Traveling Wilburys honored him by recording a version of "Runaway"." (Wikipedia)
Dalida, O Sole Mio. I think I'm in love. "Dalida (17 January 1933 – 3 May 1987), birth name Iolanda Cristina Gigliotti, was a singer and actress who performed and recorded in more than 10 languages including: French, Arabic, Italian, Greek, German, English, Japanese, Hebrew, Dutch and Spanish." [. . .]On Saturday, 2 May 1987, Dalida committed suicide by overdosing on barbiturates.[7][8] She left behind a note which read, "La vie m'est insupportable… Pardonnez-moi." ("Life has become unbearable for me… Forgive me.")" (Wikipedia)
The Singing Nun, Dominique, 1963. "Jeanine Deckers (17 October 1933 – 29 March 1985) was a Belgian singer-songwriter and initially a member of the Dominican Order in Belgium (as Sister Luc Gabrielle). She acquired world fame in 1963 as Sœur Sourire (Sister Smile) when she scored a hit with the her French-language song "Dominique". She is sometimes credited as "The Singing Nun". [. . .]
Citing their financial difficulties in a note, she and her companion of ten years[8][9][10], Annie Pécher, both committed suicide by an overdose of barbiturates and alcohol on 29 March 1985.[11][12]
In their suicide note, Decker and Pécher stated they had not given up their faith and wished to be buried together after a church funeral.[7] They were buried together in Cheremont Cemetery in Wavre, Walloon Brabant, the town where they died.[13] The inscription on their tombstone reads "I saw her soul fly across the clouds", a line from Deckers' song "Sister Smile is dead". (Wikipedia)
Phil Ochs, Small Circle of Friends. There but for Fortune. "Philip David Ochs (/ˈoʊks/; December 19, 1940 – April 9, 1976) was an Americanprotest singer (or, as he preferred, a topical singer) and songwriter who was known for his sharp wit, sardonic humor, earnest humanism, political activism, insightful and alliterative lyrics, and distinctive voice. He wrote hundreds of songs in the 1960s and released eight albums in his lifetime." [. . .] "On April 9, 1976, Ochs hanged himself.[110]" (Wikipedia)
If a person or institution is essentially F, then to criticize it for being F is equivalent to criticizing it for existing. (If x is essentially F, then x cannot exist without being F. If x is F, but not essentially, then x is accidentally F: capable of existing without being F.) Let's test this thought against some examples.
1. Its core doctrines are essential to the Roman Catholic Church; to demand that it abandon one or more of them is to demand that it cease to exist.
2. The rejection of capitalism is essential to communism. Therefore, to demand that a communist embrace capitalism is to demand that he cease to be a communist.
3. The moral legitimacy of killing the other side's combatants in times of war is an essential commitment of the miltary. To demand that the military be pacifistic, that the Marine Corps become the Peace Corps, for example, is to demand that the military cease to exist.
4. If marriage is essentially between one man and one woman, then to demand same-sex marriage is to demand that marriage cease to exist.
In January and February of 2009 I wrote a number of posts critical of Ayn Rand. The Objectivists, as they call themselves, showed up in force to defend their master. I want to revisit one of the topics today to see if what I said then still holds up. The occasion for this exercise is my having found Allan Gotthelf's On Ayn Rand (Wadsworth 2000) in a used bookstore. Gotthelf is a professional philosopher who teaches at Rutgers. So I thought that if anyone is able to disabuse me of my extremely low opinion of Ayn Rand he would be the one to do it.
On p. 48 of Gotthelf's book, we find:
The "first cause" (or "cosmological") argument maintains that God is needed as the creator and sustainer of the material universe. But that is to say that existence needs consciousness to create or sustain it. It makes a consciousness — God's consciousness — metaphysically prior to existence. But existence exists. It can have no beginning, no end, no cause. It just is. And consciousness is a faculty of awareness, not of creation. The first cause argument violates both the axiom of existence and the axiom of consciousness.
Now axioms are self-evident truths needing no proof. (37) So if the cosmological argument violates the two axioms mentioned, it is in bad shape indeed! But what exactly are the axioms?
According to the axiom of existence, "Existence exists." Gotthelf takes this to mean that Something exists. (37) If that is what it means, then it is indeed a self-evident truth. For example, it is self-evident (to me) that I exist, which of course entails that something exists. But it is equally self-evident (to me) that I am conscious. For if I were not conscious then I would not be able to know that I exist and that something exists. "That one exists possessing consciousness is the axiom of consciousness, the second philosophic axiom." (38)
The first axiom is logically prior to the second. This is called the primacy of existence and it too is axiomatic though not a separate axiom. "The thesis that existence comes first — that things exist independent of consciousness and that consciousness is a faculty not for the creation of its objects but for the discovery of them — Ayn Rand call the primacy of existence." (39)
Now how does the cosmological argument (CA) violate these axioms? Gotthelf tells us that the argument makes God's consciousness metaphysically prior to existence, and therefore violates the axiom of consciousness. But it does no such thing.
'Existence' just means all existing things taken collectively, as Gotthelf points out. (p. 48, n. 6) So if the CA makes God's consciousness metaphysically prior to existence, then the CA makes God's consciousness metaphysically prior to all existing things. But this is just false: the CA does not make God's consciousness metaphysically prior to God's existence, nor does it make God's consciousness metaphysically prior to the existence of abstract objects. So the CA does not make the divine consciousness metaphysically prior to all existing things. What it does is make God's consciousness metaphysically prior to some existing things, to contingent beings, including all material beings.
One reason, and perhaps the main reason, why the vast majority of professional philosophers consider Ayn Rand to be a hack is that she argues in an intolerably slovenly way. She gives arguments so porous one could drive a Mack truck through them. It is surprising to me that a philosopher with Gotthelf's credentials could uncritically repeat these arguments in the same slovenly way. Surely he understands the difference between all and some. Surely he can see that the argument of his that I quoted is a bad argument trading as it does on an equivocation on 'existence' as between all existing things and some existing things.
A cosmological arguer could cheerfully grant that the following are self-evident truths: Things exist; consciousness exists; the existence of conscious beings is metaphysically prior to their being conscious. The existence of God is logically consistent with each of these truths and with the three of them taken in conjunction.
One of the problems with Rand is that she smuggles substantive, controversial content into what she calls her axioms. I grant that it is axiomatic that "existence exists" if that means that something exists. But how is it supposed to follow from this that the things that exist "have no beginning, no end, no cause"? My desk exists, but it obviously had a beginning, will have an end, and had a cause.
Or does she and Gotthelf mean that what has no beginning, end, or cause is that something or other exists? That is rather more plausible, but obviously doesn't following from the trivial truth that something exists.
Gotthelf uses retortion to show that it is undeniable that something exists. (37) For if you maintain that nothing exists, you succumb to performative inconsistency. The propositional content of the statement that nothing exists is shown to be false by the existence of the speech act of stating, the existence of the one who speaks, and the existence of the context in which he speaks. But please note that there is nothing performatively inconsistent in stating that the things that exist have a beginning, an end, and a cause.
There are similar 'smuggling' problems with respect to the axiom of consciousness. It is indeed axiomatic and self-evident that conscious beings exist. And it too can be proven retorsively. For if you maintain that no one is conscious, then your performance falsifies the content of your claim. (38) But how is it supposed to follow from conscious beings exist that every consciousness is a consciousness of something that exists independently of the consciousness? For this is what Rand and Gotthelf need to show that "The very concept of 'God' violates the axioms . . . ." (49) They need to show that "to postulate a God as creator of the universe is to postulate a consciousness that could exist without anything to be conscious of." (49)
Rand and Gotthelf are making two rather elementary mistakes. The first is to confuse
1. Every consciousness is a consciousness of something (objective genitive)
with
2. Every consciousness is a consciousness of something that exists. (objective genitive).
(1) may well be true; (2) is obviously false. One who consciously seeks the Fountain of Youth seeks something, but not something that exists. There can be no consciousness without an object, but it does not follow that every intentional object exists.
The second mistake is to think that (2) follows from conscious beings exist. One lands in performative inconsistency if one denies that conscious beings exist. One does not if one denies (2).
It is important not to confuse the subjective and objective genitive construals of (2). (2) is plainly false if the genitive is objective. (2) is trivially true if the genitive is subjective. For it is trivially true that every consciousness is some existing thing's consciousness.
One gets the distinct impression that Rand and Gotthelf are confusing the two construals of (2). They think that because consciousness is always grounded in the existence of something, that every object of consiousness must be an existent object.
Gotthelf's claim that "to postulate a God as creator of the universe is to postulate a consciousness that could exist without anything to be conscious of" (49) is plainly false and deeply confused. For one thing, God is conscious of himself and of all necessarily existent abstract objects. And 'after' the creation of the universe, he has that to be conscious of as well.
What Rand does is simply smuggle the impossibility of a universe-creating conscious being into her axioms. Gotthelf uncritically follows her in this. But that has all the benefits of theft over honest toil, as Russell remarked in a different connection.
The proprietor and author of the weblog After Aristotle writes,
Having retired after decades as an academician in various capacities, both administrative and professorial, at a small college in Massachusetts, I am dedicating the next three decades or so of my life to the fullest exploration possible of all that philosophy has to offer.
Bravo! Wise move. A human life should not be wasted on useless administrivia and teaching the unteachable in an age when so-called universities have forgotten their classical mission and have degenerated into leftist seminaries.
I get mail from people who are in a position to retire but hesitate out of fear of not having enough money. My advice to them is that since death can come without warning, "like a thief in the night," they ought to take the plunge. James Gandolfini died young at 51. When he woke up on the last morning of his life did he think it was to be his last?
The question to ask yourself is this: In what state will death find me? Grubbing for more loot? Or living the best life I can live pursuing the highest ends I am able to pursue?
"The trouble is, you think you have time." (attributed to Buddha)
Starts tomorrow, muchachos. Begins at 8 AM Eastern and runs until 6 AM July 5th. Schedule here.
My eyes glued to the set, my lovely wife invariably asks, "Haven't you seen that episode before?" She doesn't get it. I've seen 'em all numerous times each. Hell, I've been watching 'em since 1959 when the series first aired. But the best are inexhaustibly rich in content, delightful in execution, studded with young actors and actresses who went on to become famous alongside the now forgotten actors of yesteryear, replete with period costumes and lingo, and sprinkled with allusions to the politics of the day. Timeless and yet a nostalgia trip. A fine way to celebrate Independence Day.
Could popular art of this caliber have been produced in the Soviet Union? Of course not. So if you are an American, celebrate your freedom tomorrow while bemoaning how much of it we have lost 'thanks' to the liberal-left fascists.
To see how much philosophical juice can be squeezed out of a Twilight Zone episode, see here.
The original series ran from 1959 to 1964. In those days it was not uncommon to hear TV condemned as a vast wasteland. Rod Serling's work was a sterling counterexample.
The hard-driving Serling lived a short but intense life. Born in 1924, he was dead at age 50 in 1975. His four pack a day cigarette habit destroyed his heart. Imagine smoking 80 Lucky Strikes a day! Assuming 16 hours of smoking time per day, that averages to one cigarette every twelve minutes. He died on the operating table during an attempted bypass procedure.
But who is to say that a long, healthy life is better than a short, intense one fueled by the stimulants one enjoys? That is a question for the individual, not Hillary, to decide. To hell with you nanny-staters.
The race-baiting, delusional Left is completely out of control in this country as witness the Zimmerman prosecution, the Paula Deen shakedown, and the mindless uproar over the SCOTUS decision to strike down Article Four of the 1965 Voting Act.
Curious how so-called 'progressives' are stuck in the past, as if Jim Crow still exists.
In your recent post criticizing Harris' argument against the self (which is already present in Hume) you point out that the argument against the self is lacking. It is lacking, you argue, because from the mere fact that the self is not revealed in certain types of introspective experiences it does not follow that the self does not exist. I agree.
But a stronger complaint can be advanced. Harris (and Hume) must answer the following question: Who (what) is doing the introspection (meditation) which allegedly reveals no experience of the self? I suggest that there is no reasonable candidate for such a role other than the self. And so now an explanation can be given to the puzzle how come introspection does not reveal the self; it fails to do so because the self is inevitably absent from the introspective field in order to perform the introspective function. But the self leaves its own recognizable trail behind; it is the trail of a conscious subject which unifies the various experiences encountered by the introspective self as belonging to the same person. If it were not for this trail, the introspective self would have no reason to think that this toothache and that memory or desire belong to one and the same subject.
I think your searching-for-my-glasses-on-my-nose example illustrates well the point.
It is a pleasure to have Peter as a sort of philosophical alter ego who sees many matters as I do. Here are the main points and I think we agree on all of them.
1. The nonexistence of what one fails to find does not logically follow from one's failing to find it. So the failure to find in experience an object called 'self' does not entail the nonexistence of the self.
2. So failure to find the self as an object of experience is at least logically consistent with the existence of a self.
3. What's more, the positing of a self seems rationally required even though the self is not experienceable. For someone or something is doing the searching and coming up 'empty-handed.'
4. There are also considerations re: diachronic personal identity. Suppose I decide to investigate the question of the self. A moment later I begin the investigation by carefully examining the objects of inner and outer experience to see if any one of them is the self. After some searching I come to the conclusion that the self is not to be located among the objects of experience. I then entertain the thought that perhaps there is no self. But then it occurs to me that failure to find X is not proof of X's nonexistence. I then consider whether it is perhaps the very nature of the subject of experience to be unobjectifiable. And so I conclude that the self exists but is not objectifiable.
This reasoning may or may not be sound. The point, however, is that the reasoning, which plays out over a period of time, would not be possible at all if there were no one self — no one unity of consciousness and self-consciousness — that maintained its strict numerical identity over the period of time in question. For what we have in the reasoning process is not merely a succession of conscious states, but also a consciousness of their succession in one and the same conscious subject. Without the consciousness of succession, without the retention of the earlier states in the present state, no conclusion could be arrived at.
All reasoning presupposes the diachronic unity of consciousness. Or do you think that the task of thinking through a syllogism could be divided up? Suppose Manny says, All men are mortal! Moe then pipes up, Socrates is a man! Could Jack conclude that Socrates is mortal? No. He could say it but not conclude it. (This assumes that Jack does not hear what the other two Pep Boys say. Imagine each in a separate room.)
The hearing of a melody supplies a second example.
To hear the melody Do-Re-Mi, it does not suffice that there be a hearing of Do, followed by a hearing of Re, followed by a hearing of Mi. For those three acts of hearing could occur in that sequence in three distinct subjects, in which case they would not add up to the hearing of a melody. (Tom, Dick, and Harry can divide up the task of loading a truck, but not the ‘task’ of hearing a melody, or that of understanding a sentence, or that of inferring a conclusion from premises.) But now suppose the acts of hearing occur in the same subject, but that this subject is not a unitary and self-same individual but just the bundle of these three acts, call them A1, A2, and A3. When A1 ceases, A2 begins, and when A2 ceases, A3 begins: they do not overlap. In which act is the hearing of the melody? A3 is the only likely candidate, but surely it cannot be a hearing of the melody. For the awareness of a melody involves the awareness of the (musical not temporal) intervals between the notes, and to apprehend these intervals there must be a retention (to use Husserl’s term) in the present act A3 of the past acts A2 and A1. Without this phenomenological presence of the past acts in the present act, there would be no awareness in the present of the melody. But this implies that the self cannot be a mere bundle of perceptions externally related to each other, but must be a peculiarly intimate unity of perceptions in which the present perception A3 includes the immediately past ones A2 and A1 as temporally past but also as phenomenologically present in the mode of retention. The fact that we hear melodies thus shows that there must be a self-same and unitary self through the period of time between the onset of the melody and its completion. This unitary self is neither identical to the sum or collection of A1, A2, and A3, nor is it identical to something wholly distinct from them. Nor of course is it identical to any one of them or any two of them. This unitary self is given whenever one hears a melody.
The unitary self is phenomenologically given, but not as a separate object. Therein, perhaps, resides the error of Hume and some Buddhists: they think that if there is a self, it must exist as a separate object of experience.
I am listening to Dennis Prager. According to Prager, Harry Truman once wrote on a postcard "I am now in kike town." And then Prager went on to make the correct observation that quoting a person's use of a word is not to use that word oneself.
Philosophers distinguish between use and mention. It is one thing to use a word to refer to a thing or a person; it is another thing to mention the word. One can quote someone's use of the word 'kike' without calling anyone a kike. Someone who grasps the distinction should not be squeamish about writing out the word 'kike' as I have just done. What's more, no one one I am aware of is squeamish in that way.
But people routinely speak of the N-word. They won't write out 'nigger,' but they will write out 'kike,' 'cracker,' ''wop,' 'guinea,' 'dago,' 'greaseball' . . . Why the double standard?
'Kike' and 'nigger' differ in that the first is monosyllabic while the second is disyllabic. I am talking about the words. 'Kike' and 'nigger' are not persons. No person is monosyllabic or disyllabic.
Make the distinction and avoid the double standard.
Would anything be left of the Left if leftists were forced to disembarrass themselves of their manifold double standards? (That is what we call a rhetorical question.)
Don Van Vliet, better known as Captain Beefheart, died of complications of multiple sclerosis at age 69 in December, 2010. Obituary here. Apparently, hanging out in the Mojave desert can do strange things to your head. Here is a taste of desert strangeness from the 1969 Trout Mask Replica album. Far out, man. Here is something rather more accessible from the 1967 debut Safe as Milk album. And I think I remember hearing Abba Zabba from that same album back in the day. (Which reminds of the saying, 'If you remember the '60s, you weren't there.')
From Lancaster-Palmdale to Bakersfield and the 'Bakersfield sound' of Buck Owens and his Buckaroos. I once had a girlfriend, half Italian, half Irish. Volatile combo, not recommended. I had me a Tiger by the Tail. My wife's half Italian, but the phlegmaticity of her Polish half mitigates, moderates, and modulates her latent Italianate volcanicity, which remains blessedly latent, if it exists at all.
London Karl brings to my attention an article by Sam Harris touching upon themes dear to my heart. Harris is an impressive fellow, an excellent public speaker, a crusader of sorts who has some important and true things to say, but who is sometimes out beyond his depth, like many public intellectuals who make bold to speak about philosophical topics. (But Harris is surely right clearly and courageously to point out that, among the ideologies extant at the present time, radical Islam is the most dangerous.)
In Rational Mysticism, Harris responds to critic Tom Flynn and in doing so offers characterizations of secularism, religion, and rational mysticism:
I used the words spirituality and mysticism affirmatively, in an attempt to put the range of human experience signified by these terms on a rational footing. It seems to me that the difficulty Flynn had with this enterprise is not a problem with my book, or merely with Flynn, but a larger problem with secularism itself.
As a worldview, secularism has defined itself in opposition to the whirling absurdity of religion. Like atheism (with which it is more or less interchangeable), secularism is a negative dispensation. Being secular is not a positive virtue like being reasonable, wise, or loving. To be secular, one need do nothing more than live in perpetual opposition to the unsubstantiated claims of religious dogmatists. Consequently, secularism has negligible appeal to the culture at large (a practical concern) and negligible content (an intellectual concern). There is, in fact, not much to secularism that should be of interest to anyone, apart from the fact that it is all that stands between sensible people like ourselves and the mad hordes of religious imbeciles who have balkanized our world, impeded the progress of science, and now place civilization itself in jeopardy. Criticizing religious irrationality is absolutely essential. But secularism, being nothing more than the totality of such criticism, can lead its practitioners to reject important features of human experience simply because they have been traditionally associated with religious practice.
The above can be distilled into three propositions:
1. Secularism is wholly defined by what it opposes, religion.
2. Religion is irrational, anti-science, and anti-civilization.
3. It would be a mistake to dismiss mysticism because of its traditional association with religious practice.
Harris continues:
The final chapter of my book, which gave Flynn the most trouble, is devoted to the subject of meditation. Meditation, in the sense that I use the term, is nothing more than a method of paying extraordinarily close attention to one’s moment-to-moment experience of the world. There is nothing irrational about doing this (and Flynn admits as much). In fact, such a practice constitutes the only rational basis for making detailed (first-person) claims about the nature of human subjectivity. Difficulties arise for secularists like Flynn, however, once we begin speaking about the kinds of experiences that diligent practitioners of meditation are apt to have. It is an empirical fact that sustained meditation can result in a variety of insights that intelligent people regularly find intellectually credible and personally transformative. The problem, however, is that these insights are almost always sought and expressed in a religious context. One such insight is that the feeling we call “I”—the sense that there is a thinker giving rise to our thoughts, an experiencer distinct from the mere flow of experience—can disappear when looked for in a rigorous way. Our conventional sense of “self” is, in fact, nothing more than a cognitive illusion, and dispelling this illusion opens the mind to extraordinary experiences of happiness. This is not a proposition to be accepted on faith; it is an empirical observation, analogous to the discovery of one’s optic blind spots.
To continue with the distillation:
4. Meditation, defined as careful attention to conscious experience, is the only basis for sustainable claims about subjectivity. There is nothing irrational about it.
5. Deep meditation gives rise to unusual, and sometimes personally transformative, experiences or "insights."
6. One such "insight" is that the "sense of self" or the "feeling called 'I'" can disappear when carefully searched for.
7. The sense of "self" is a cognitive illusion, and can be seen to be such by empirical observation: it is not a proposition to be accepted on faith.
There is much to agree with here. Indeed, I wholeheartedly accept propositions (1), (3), (4), and (5). Of course, I don't accept (2), but that is not what I want to discuss. My present concerns are (6) and (7).
Let me say first that, for me, 'insight' is a noun of success, and in this regard it is like 'knowledge.' There cannot be false knowledge; there cannot be false insights. Now does deep meditation disclose that there is, in truth, no self, no ego, no I, no subject of experience? Harris does not say flat-out that the self is an illusion; he says that the "sense of self" is an illusion. But I don't think he means that there is a self but that there is no sense of it in deep meditation. I take him to be saying something quite familiar from (the religion?) Pali Buddhism, namely, that there is no self, period. Anatta, you will recall, is one of the pillars of Pali and later Buddhism, along with anicca and dukkha.
So I will assume that Harris means to deny the the existence of the self as the subject of experience and to deny it on empirical grounds: there is no self because no self is encountered when we carefully examine, in deep meditation, our conscious experience.
It seems to me, however, that the nonexistence of what I fail to find does not logically follow from my failing to find it.
It may be that the self is the sort of thing that cannot turn up as an object of experience precisely because it is the subject of experience.
Here is an analogy. An absent-minded old man went in search of his eyeglasses. He searched high and low, from morning til night. Failing to find them after such a protracted effort, he concluded that he never had any in the first place. His search, however, was made possible by the glasses sitting upon his nose!
The analogy works with the eyes as well. From the fact that my eyes do not appear in my visual field (apart from mirrors), it does not follow that I have no eyes. My eyes are a necessary condition of my having a visual field in the first place. Their nonappearance in said field is no argument against them.
It could be something like that (though not exactly like that) with the self. It could be that the self cannot, by its very nature, turn up as an object of experience, for the simple reason that it is the subject of experience, that which is experiencing.
It is simply false to say what Harris says in (7), namely that one empirically observes that there is no self. That is not an observation but an inference from the failure to encounter the self as an object of experience. It is an inference that is valid only in the presence of an auxiliary premise:
Only that which can be experienced as an object exists. The self cannot be experienced as an object. Therefore The self does not exist.
This argument is valid, but is it sound? The second premise is empirical: nothing we encounter in experience (inner or outer) counts as the subject of experience. True for the standard Humean and Buddhist reasons. But we cannot validly move from the second premise to the conclusion. We need the help of the auxiliary premise, which is not empirical. How then do we know that it is true? Must we take it on faith? Whose faith? Harris's?
My point, then, is that (7) is false and that Harris is operating with a dogmatic, non-empirical assumption, the just-mentioned auxiliary premise.
Harris needs to be careful that in his war against "absurd religious certainties" he does not rely on absurd dogmatic certainties of his own.
