Dallas Willard (1935-2013)

I met Dallas Willard only once, at an A. P. A. meeting in San Francisco in the early '90s.  I had sent him a paper on Husserl and Heidegger and we had plans to get together over dinner to discuss it.  Unfortunately, the plans fell through when a son of Willard showed up.  But we did speak briefly and I still recall his kindness and his words, "I'll help you any way I can."  In the few minutes I was with him I became aware of his depth and his goodness.

My only serious engagement with Professor Willard's work was via a long and intricate paper I published in Philosophia Christi, "The Moreland-Willard-Lotze Thesis on Being," vol. 6, no. 1 (2004), pp. 27-58.

A search of this site turns up only one post on Willard, Knowledge Without Belief: a Dallas Willard-Josef Pieper Connection.

We have it on good authority that death is the muse of philosophy. The muse reminds us that our time is short and to be well used.  I expect Willard would approve of the following lines from St Augustine's Confessions, Book VI, Chapter 11, Ryan trans.:

Let us put away these vain and empty concerns.  Let us turn ourselves only to a search for truth.  Life is hard, and death is uncertain.  It may carry us away suddenly.  In what state shall we leave this world?  Where must we learn what we have neglected here?  Or rather, must we not endure punishment for our negligence?  What if death itself should cut off and put an end to all care, along with sensation itself?  This too must be investigated. 

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Are Propositions Counterexamples to Brentano’s Thesis?

Franz Brentano, for whom intentionality is the mark of the mental, is committed to the thesis that all instances of (intrinsic) intentionality are instances of mentality.  Propositions and dispositions are apparent counterexamples. For they are nonmental yet intrinsically object-directed. Whether they are also real counterexamples is something we should discuss. This post discusses (Fregean) propositions. Later, dispositions — if I am so disposed.

On one approach, propositions are abstract objects. Since abstracta are categorially barred from being mental, it is clear that if intrinsic intentionality is ascribed to abstract propositions, then the thesis that all instances of intentionality are instances of mentality must be rejected. For specificity, we consider Frege's theory of propositions. He called them Gedanken, thoughts, which is a strangely pyschologistic terminological choice for so anti-psychologistic a logician, but so be it.

 A proposition is the sense (Sinn) of a certain sort of sentence in the indicative mood, namely, an indicative sentence from which all indexical elements, if any, such as the tenses of verbs, have been extruded. Consider the following sentence-tokens each of which features a tenseless copula:

1. The sea is blue
2. The sea is blue
3. Die See ist blau
4. Deniz mavidir.

(Since Turkish is an agglutinative language,  the copula in the Turkish sentence is the suffix 'dir.')

The (1)-(4) array depicts four sentence-tokens of three sentence-types expressing exactly one proposition. Intuitively, the four sentences say the same thing, or to be precise, can be used by people to say the same thing. That same thing is the proposition they express, or to be precise, that people express by uttering them. The proposition is one to their many. And unlike the sentence-tokens, it is nonphysical, which has the epistemological consequence that it, unlike the sentence-tokens, cannot be seen with the eyes. It is 'seen' (understood) with the mind. Frege is a sort of latter-day Platonist.

So one reason to introduce propositions is to account for the fact that the same meaning-content can be expressed by different people using different sentences of different languages. Another reason to posit propositions is to have a stable entity to serve as vehicle of the truth-values. The idea is that it is the proposition that is primarily either true or false. Given that a proposition is true, then any sentence expressing it is derivatively true.

There is quite a lot to be said for the view that a sentence-token cannot be a primary truth-bearer. For how could a string of marks on paper, or pixels on a screen, be either true or false? Nothing can be either true or false unless it has meaning, but how could mere physical marks (intrinsically) mean anything? Merely physical marks, as such, are meaningless. You can't get blood from a stone, or meaning from meat, no matter how hard you squeeze, and no matter how wondrously organized the meat.

Fregean propositions are especially useful when it comes to the necessary truths expressed by such sentences as '7 is prime.' A necessary truth is true in all possible worlds, including those worlds in which there is nothing physical and so no means of physically expressing truths. If truth is taken to be a property of physical items or any contingent item, then it might be difficult to account for the existence of necessary truths. The Fregean can handle this problem by saying that propositions, as abstract objects, exist in all possible worlds, and that true ones have the property of being true in all possible worlds.  The Fregean can also explain how there can be necessary truths in worlds in which there is nothing physical and nothing mental either.

 

Propositions also function as the accusatives of the so-called 'propositional attitudes' such as belief. To believe is to believe something. One way to construe this is de dicto: to believe is to stand in a relation to a proposition. Thus if I believe that the river Charles is polluted, then the intentional object of the belief is the proposition expressed by 'The river Charles is polluted.' (Of course, there is also a de re way of construing the belief in question: To believe that the Charles is polluted is to believe, of the river Charles, that is is polluted.)

Well, suppose one endorses a theory of propositions such as the one just sketched. You have these necessarily existent Platonic entities called propositions some of which are true and some of which are false. My believing that p is an intentional state directed upon p; but is it not also the case that p is directed upon the world, or upon a truth-making state of affairs in the world in the case in which p is true?

But now it looks as if we have two sorts of intentionality, call them noetic and noematic, to borrow some terminology from Husserl.   Noetic intentionality connects a mental state (in Frege's Second Reich) to a proposition (in Frege's Third Reich), and noematic intentionality connects, or purports to connect, a proposition to an object in Frege's First Reich. Frege wouldn't think of this object as a state of affairs or concrete fact, of course, but we might. (The peculiarities of Frege's actual views don't matter for this discussion.)

The problem for Brentano's thesis above is that propositions — which are abstract objects — seem to display intrinsic aboutness: they are about the concrete world or states of affairs in the world. Thus the proposition expressed by 'The Charles is polluted' is intrinsically about either the river Charles or else about the state of affairs, The Charles River's being polluted. Intrinsically, because the proposition's being about what it is about does not depend on anyone's interpretation.

If this is right, then some instances of intentionality are not only not conscious but not possibly conscious. Does this refute Brentano's thesis? Brentano himself denied that there were such irrealia as propositions and so he would not take propositions as posing any threat to his thesis. But if there are (Fregean) propositions, then I think they would count as counterexamples to Brentano's thesis about intentionality.

Is there a way to uphold Brentano's thesis that only the mental is intrinsically intentional?  Yes, if there is a way to identify propositions with thoughts or rather content-laden thinkings.  My thinking that 7 is prime is intrinsically intentional.  Unfortunately, my thinking is contingent whereas the content of my thinking is necessarily true and hence necessarily existent. To identify propositions with content-laden thinkings one would have to take the thinkings to inhere in a necessarily existent mind such as the mind of God.

 

So I end on an aporetic note.  Intentionality cannot be the mark of the mental if there are Fregean propositions.  But given that there are necessary truths and that truth-bearers cannot be physical items, then only way to avoid Fregean propositions is by identifying propositions with divine thoughts, in which case they are Gedanken after all.

The Madness of Liberal Moralizing

Heather Mac Donald's piece starts off like this:

The paradoxes of liberal morality were on glaring display last week. The Obama administration OK’d the sale of “Plan B” post-coital emergency contraception over the counter without prescription (or parental consent) to girls as young as 15. At the same time, the City Council moved a step closer to banning anyone under the age of 21 from buying cigarettes (the legal age is now 18).

Holy smoke! (Or as my boyhood pal Joe Odegaard used to say, fumus sanctus!)

The church of liberalism must have its demon, and his name is 'tobacco.'

For more on the antics of the 'tobacco wackos,' see my Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms category.  There is plenty there to get you libruls 'up in arms.'

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The Essence of Religion

There is more to a religion than its beliefs and doctrines; there are also its practices.  They, however, are informed and guided by certain constitutive beliefs.  So the importance of the latter cannot be denied. Religion is not practice alone.  It is not a mere form of life or language game.  It rests, pace Wittgenstein, on claims about the nature of reality, claims which, if false, render bogus the practices resting upon them.  In this post I present some characteristic beliefs/convictions that provide the scaffolding for what I take to be religion.  As scaffolding they are necessarily abstract so as to cover a variety of different religions.

Anything that does not fit this schema I am not inclined  to call a religion in any serious sense.  I may be willing to negotiate on (4) and (6).  (If Buddhism is a religion, it is a religion of self-help, at least in its purest forms.)

1. The belief that there is what William James calls an "unseen order." (Varieties of Religious Exerience, p. 53)  This is a realm of absolute reality that lies beyond the perception of the five outer senses and their instrumental extensions.  It is also inaccessible to inner sense or introspection.  It is also not a realm of mere abstracta or thought-contents.  So it lies beyond the discursive intellect.  It is accessible from our side via mystical and religious experience.  An initiative from its side is not to be ruled out in the form of revelation.

2. The  belief that there is a supreme good for humans and that "our supreme good lies in harmoniously adjusting ourselves" to the "unseen order." (Varieties, p. 53)

3. The conviction that we are morally deficient, and that this deficiency impedes our adjustment to the unseen order.  Man is in some some sense fallen from the moral height at which he would have ready access to the unseen order.  His moral corruption, however it came about, has noetic consequences. 

4. The conviction  that our moral deficiency cannot be made sufficiently good by our own efforts to afford us ready access to the unseen order.

5.  The conviction that adjustment to the unseen order requires moral purification/transformation.

6. The conviction that help from the side of the unseen order is available to bring about this purification and adjustment.

7. The conviction that the sensible order is not plenary in point of reality or value, that it is ontologically and axiologically derivative.  It is a manifestation or emanation or creation of the unseen order.

Believing on Insufficient Evidence

The notion that we should always and everywhere apportion belief to evidence in such a way that we affirm only that for which we have sufficient evidence ignores the fact that belief for beings like us subserves action. If one acted only on those beliefs for which one had sufficient evidence one  would not act as one must to live well.

When a young person believes that he or she can do such-and-such, it is almost always on the basis of insufficient evidence.  And yet such belief beyond the evidence is a sine qua non of success.  There are two necessary conditions of success in life: one must believe that what one proposes to do is worth doing, and one must believe that one is capable of doing it.  In both cases one believes and acts on evidence that could hardly be called sufficient. 

This strikes me as a good maxim:  Don't let insufficient evidence prevent you from believing what you are better off believing than not believing. 

The related article below provides a more rigorous treatment.

 

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The New Atheism is Old Hat

Dawkins has lost.  Hitchens is dead.  And the prognosis is not good for the rest of the strident crew.  But an atheism chastened and temperate will remain with us.  As I have said many times, atheism is intellectually respectable and rationally defensible.  But so is theism.

In the end you must decide for yourself what to believe and how to live.

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Psychological Projection and its Dangers

I have found that it is dangerous to assume that others are essentially like oneself.

Psychologists speak of projection. As I understand it, it involves projecting into others one's own attitudes, beliefs, motivations, fears, emotions, desires, values, and the like.  It is classified as a defense mechanism.  To avoid confronting an unsavory attitude or trait in oneself, one projects it into another.  Suppose one is stingy, considers stinginess an undesirable trait, but doesn't want to own up to one's stinginess.  As a defense against the admission of one's own stinginess, one projects it into others.  "I'm not stingy; you're stingy!"

I once had a superficial colleague who published a lot.  He was motivated more by a neurotic need to advance himself socially and economically, a need based in low self-esteem, rather than by a drive to get at the truth or make a contribution to his subject.   He was at some level aware that his motives were less than noble.  Once, when he found out that I had published an article, he told me that my motive was to see my name in print. It was a classic case of projection: he could not understand me except as being driven by the same paltry motives that drove him.  By projecting his motives into me, he warded off the awareness of their presence in him, or else excused their presence in him on the spurious ground that everyone has the same paltry motivations.

Most of the definitions of projection I have read imply that it is only undesirable attitudes, beliefs and the like that  are the contents of acts of projection.  But it seems to me that the notion of projection could and perhaps should be widened to include desirable ones as well. 

The desire for peace and social harmony, for example, is obviously good.  But it too can be the content of an act of psychological projection.  A pacifist, for example, may assume that others deep down are really like he is: peace-loving to such an extent as to avoid war at all costs. A pacifist might reason as follows: since everyone deep down wants peace, and abhors war, if I throw down my weapon, my adversary will do likewise. By unilaterally disarming, I show my good will, and he will reciprocate. But if you throw down your weapon before Hitler, he will take that precisely as justification for killing you: since might makes right on his neo-Thrasymachian scheme, you have shown by your pacific deed that you are unfit for the struggle for existence and therefore deserve to die, and indeed must die to keep from polluting the gene pool.

Projection in cases like these can be dangerous.  One oftens hears the sentiment expressed that we human beings are at bottom all the same and  all want the same things.  Not so!  You and I may want

Harmony and understanding
Sympathy and trust abounding
No more falsehoods or derisions
Golden living dreams of visions
Mystic crystal revelation
And the mind's true liberation

as expressed in that characteristic '60s song, Aquarius, but others have belligerence and bellicosity hard-wired into them.  They like fighting and dominating and they only come alive when they are bashing your skull in either literally or figuratively.  People are not the same and it is a big mistake to think otherwise and project your decency into them.

I'll say it again: people are not the same.  We are not 'equal.'  Or do you consider yourself the moral equal of Chechen Muslim ingrates who come to our shores, exploit our hospitality, go on welfare, rip us off, and then detonate explosives at the finish line of a great American event that celebrates life and self-reliance?

I said that the psychologists classify projection as a defense mechanism.  But how could the projection of good traits count as a defense mechanism?  Well, suppose that by engaging in such projections one defends oneself against the painful realization that the people in the world are much worse than one would have liked to believe.  Many of us have a strong psychological need to see good in other people, and this can give rise to illusions.  There is good and evil in each person, and one must train oneself to accurately discern how much of each is present in each person one encounters.

One mistake I have made, more than once, is to assume that since I value truth above many other things, others do as well. But there are plenty of people who do not value truth at all, or else assign it a rather low priority. There are many, for example, who value human feelings over truth. Truth is nothing to them; feelings everything.  That makes no sense to me; to me it is self-evident that, although both are values (to be precise: things that ought to be valued), truth is a higher value, if not the highest value.  But reality forces me to accept that others hold to the opposite value-prioritization.  It is folly to project one's own values into others.

There are other people for whom truth counts for nothing, but power for everything. They interpret every type of interpersonal transaction as a power struggle. Thus if you calmly try to persuade such a person of the truth of some proposition by appealing to facts and reasoning correctly from them, he will interpret that as nothing but an attempt to dominate him psychologically. Such people are utterly blind to the value of truth and to the fact that truth can sometimes be attained by dialectical means. They project their own lust for power into everyone else interpreting everything that is manifestly not a power-move as latently a power-move.

There are plenty of leftists like this. Taking their cue from Nietzsche, they assume that everything is power at bottom. Die Welt ist der Wille zur Macht und nichts anders! "The world is the will to power and nothing besides!" Supported by this assumption, they set out to unmask (deconstruct) phenomena that manifestly are not power-driven, for example, attempts to state what is the case. Power-mad themselves, these leftists project lust for power into everyone and everything. It is a curious pars pro toto fallacy: one takes a phenomenon one finds in oneself, lust for power, and then interprets everything
else in terms of it.   The idea might be worth exploring that Nietzsche's doctrine of the Will to Power arose by projection.  He saw the lust for power within himself and excused its presence there by projecting it outward thus transforming a psychological peculiarity into a fundamental trait of beings qua beings.

You say I'm psychologizing. True enough.  But false views are legitimately psychologized.  It would be the genetic fallacy to dismiss as false a proposition just because it arose from a need or serves a need or results from projection.  But once a proposition has been shown to be false, it is legitimate to inquire into the genesis of the belief.

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Another Example of Awful Science Journalism

My first example is here.  Read it for context and for some necessary distinctions.  Now for a second example.  Adam Frank writes,

For Smolin there is no timeless world and there are no timeless laws. Time, he says, is real and nothing can escape it.

Time, of course, seems real to us. We live in and through time. But to physicists, time's fundamental reality is an illusion.

Ever since Newton, physicists have been developing ever-more exact laws describing the behavior of the world. These laws live outside of time because they don't change.

That means these laws are more real than time.

First of all, it can be true both that time is real and that not everything is in time.

Second, if you want to tell us that time is an illusion, just say that, don't say, oxymoronically, that its fundamental reality is an illusion.  Obviously, if something has reality, let alone fundamental reality, then it cannot be an illusion.

Third, as I argued earlier, it is impossible to maintain both that time is an illusion and that, e.g., the Big Bang occurred 12-13 billion years ago.  If you want to say that temporal becoming or temporal passage is an illusion, then say that; but don't confuse the rejection of temporal becoming with the rejection of time altogether.  For it could well be that time is real, but exhausted by the B-series, as I explained in the earlier post.  And this, I take it, is what most physicists maintain.  They think of time as the fourth dimension of a four-dimensional space-time manifold.  That is not a denial of the reality of time; it is a theory of what time is.

Fourth, it is intolerably sloppy to say that "to physicists," time is an illusion when, as is obvious, Smolin is a physicist who denies this!

Fifth, If the laws of physics don't change, how is it supposed to follow or "mean" (!) that "these laws are more real than time."   What on earth is this guy getting at?  Is he suggesting that time is an illusion because the laws of physics are real?  The laws of physics are real and they 'govern' what happens in the changing physical world which is also real. 

Frank, I take it, is a physicist.  So he must be capable of precise thinking and clear writing.  Why then does he write such slop as the above in his off-hours?  Why can't he write something clear and coherent that is helpful to the interested layman?

I fear that a lot of our contemporary scientists are hopelessly bereft of general culture.  They are brilliant in their specialties but otherwise uneducated.  But that does not stop the likes of Dawkins and Krauss and Coyne and Hawking and Mlodinow from spouting off about God and time and the meaning of life . . . .  They want to play the philosopher without doing any 'homework.'  They think it's easy: you just shoot your mouth off.

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Year Ten Begins: In Praise of Blogosophy

Today I begin my tenth year as a 'blogosopher.'  Traffic is good: rare is the day when the page view count drops below 1200, and there are numerous surge days above 2000. I'm in this game 'for the duration,' as they say: as long as health and eyesight hold out.

In Praise of Blogosophy

Philosophy is primarily an activity, not a body of doctrine. If you were to think of it as a body of doctrine, then you would have to say there is no philosophy, but only philosophies. For there is no one universally recognized body of doctrine called philosophy. The truth of course is one not many. And that is what the philosopher aims at: the one ultimate truth about the ultimate matters, including the ultimate truth about how we ought to live. But aiming at a target and hitting it are two different things. The target is one, but our many arrows have fallen short and in different places. And if you think that your favorite philosopher has hit the target of truth, why can't you convince the rest of us
of that? 

Disagreement does not of course prove the nonexistence of truth, but it does cast reasonable doubt on all claims to its possession. Philosophy aspires to sound, indeed incontrovertible, doctrine. But the quest for it has proven tough indeed. For all we know it may lie beyond our powers. Not that this gives us reason to abandon the quest. But it does give us reason to be modest and undogmatic.

Philosophy, then, is primarily an activity, a search, a quest. Somewhere deep in the bowels of the Kritik der reinen Vernunft, Kant remarks that "Philosophy cannot be taught, we can at most learn to philosophize." I agree. It cannot be taught because it does not exist as teachable doctrine. Philosophy is not something we profess, except perhaps secondarily; it is something we do. The best professors of philosophy are doers of philosophy.  A professor, obviously, need not be a paid professor, an academic functionary.

How then should we do philosophy? Conversation face-to-face with the like-minded, intelligent, and sincere is useful but ephemeral and often hard to arrange. Jetting off to conferences can be fun especially if the venue is exotic and the tab is picked up your department. But reading and listening to papers at conferences is pretty much a waste of time when it comes to actually doing productive philosophy. Can you follow a technical paper simply by listening to it? If you can you're smarter than me.

So we ought to consider the idea that philosophy in its purest form, its most productive form, is 'blogosophy,' philosophy pursued by weblog. And there is this in favor of it: blogging takes pressure off the journals. Working out my half-baked ideas here, I am less likely to submit material that is not yet ready for embalming in printer's ink.

Related: Should One Stoop to a Defense of Philosophy or the Humanities?