Rigor and Cognitivity

Some say philosophy lacks rigor.  Well, some does, but the best doesn't.  People who bemoan a lack of rigor in philosophy are typically unacquainted with its best authors.  The problem with philosophy is not lack of rigor but lack of cognitivity.  The lack of cognitivity, however, does not detract from philosophy's value.  Is there no value in the Socratic docta ignorantia?

Could a Universe of Contingent Beings be Necessary?

If everything in the universe is contingent, does it follow that the universe is contingent?  No it doesn't, and to think otherwise would be to commit the fallacy of composition.  If the parts of a whole have a certain property, it does not follow that the whole has that property.  But it is a simple point of logic that a proposition's not following from another is consistent with the proposition's being true.

And so while one cannot straightaway infer the contingency of the universe from the contingency of its parts, it is nevertheless true that the universe is contingent.  Or so I shall argue.

The folowing tripartition is mutually exclusive and mutually exhaustive:   necessary, impossible, contingent.  A necessary (impossible, contingent) being is one that exists in all (none, some but not all) possible worlds.  I will assume an understanding of possible worlds talk.  See my Modal Matters category for details.

Our question is whether the universe U, all of whose members are contingent, is itself contingent.  I say it is, and argue as follows.

1. Necessarily, if U has no members, then U does not exist. (This is because U is just the totality of its members: it is not something in addition to them.  If U has three members, a, b, and c, then U is just those three members taken collectively: it is not a fourth thing distinct from each of the members.  U depends for its existence on the existence of its members.)

2. There is a possible world w in which there are no concrete contingent beings.  (One can support this premise with a subtraction argument.  If a world having n members is possible, then surely a world having  n-1 members is possible.  For example, take the actual world, which is one of the possible worlds, and substract me from it.  Surely the result, though  sadly impoverished,  is a possible world.  Subtract London Ed from the result.  That too is a possible world.   Iterate the subtraction procedure until you arrive at a world with n minus n ( = 0) concrete contingent members.   One could also support the premise with a conceivability argument.  It is surely conceivable that there be no concrete contingent beings.  This does not entail, but is arguably evidence for, the proposition that it is possible that there be no concrete contingent beings.)

Therefore

3. W is a world in which U has no members.  (This follows from (2) given that U is the totality of concrete contingent beings.)

Therefore

4. W is a world in which U does not exist. (From (1) and (3))

Therefore

5. U is a contingent being.  (This follows from (4) and the definition of 'contingent being.')

Therefore

6. The totality of contingent beings is itself contingent, hence not necessary.

What is the relevance of this to cosmological arguments?  If the universe is necessary, then one cannot sensibly ask why it exists.  What must exist has the ground of its existence in itself.  So, by showing that the universe is not necessary, one removes an obstacle to cosmological argumentation.

Now since my metaphilosophy holds that nothing of real importance  can be strictly proven in philosophy, the above argument – which deals with a matter of real importance — does not strictly prove its conclusion. But it renders the conclusion rationally acceptable, which is all that we can hope for, and is enough.

Michelle Malkin on Racial Code Words

Here are her recent additions to the list.   By the logic of the Left, cosmologists are racists because they study, among other things, black holes.

The willful stupidity of liberals is evidenced by the umbrage they take at the apt description of Obama as the food stamp president:

At the dawn of the modern federal food stamp program, one in 50 Americans was enrolled. This year, one in seven Americans is on the food stamp rolls. The majority of them are white. Obama’s loosening of eligibility requirements combined with the stagnant economy fueled the rise in dependency. “Food stamp president” is pithy shorthand for the very real entitlement explosion.

Democrats fumed when former GOP candidate Newt Gingrich bestowed the title on Obama and decried its purportedly racist implications. But who are the racists? As Gingrich scolded the aforementioned race troll Chris Matthews last week: “Why do you assume food stamp refers to blacks? What kind of racist thinking do you have? You’re being a racist because you assume they’re black!” Time to find a new code word.

You have to ask yourself whether you want a culture of dependency or a culture of self-reliance.  What is so offensive about Obama and his ilk is their undermining of such traditional American values as self-reliance.

And as I said yesterday, many of these same liberals such as the "race troll' Chris Mathews got where they did in life precisely because of such virtues as self-reliance.  And yet they refuse to promote them and pass them on.  It shows the contempt they have for their clients such as blacks who keep them in power.

If it hasn't happened already, some liberal will now besmirch the beautiful word 'self-reliance' as racial code.  There is just no level of scumbaggery to which a leftist will not descend.

Preach What You Practice!

Liberals who have amounted to something in life through advanced study, hard work, deferral of   gratification, self-control, accepting responsibility for their actions and the rest of the old-fashioned virtues are often strangely  hesitant to preach these conservative virtues to those most in need of them. These liberals  live Right and garner the benefits, but think Left. They do not make excuses for themselves, but they do for others. And what has worked for them they do not think will work for others. Their attitude is curiously condescending.  If we conservatives used 'racist' as loosely and irresponsibly as they do, we might even tag their attitude 'racist.'

It is not enough to practice what you preach; you must also preach what you practice.

Saturday Night at the Oldies: September Songs

September again.  A lovely transitional month leading from hot August to glorious October.

Lotte Lenya sings Kurt Weill, September Song.  A Liberace-Jack Benny spoof.

Dinah Washington, September in the Rain

The Tempos, See You in September

Carole King, It Might as Well Rain Until September

Antonio Vivaldi, "The Four Seasons," Autumn.  Newcomers to classical music — some will say 'real music' — are well-advised to start with Vivaldi and with Pachelbel's Canon in D major.

Clint Eastwood Speaks Truth to Power at the RNC

There were some fabulous but conventional speeches at the Republican National Convention.  The best were by Condoleeza Rice, Paul Ryan, and Marco Rubio.  But the performance that may prove to be the most effective in securing votes, not to mention rankling liberals, was that of Clint Eastwood.

Here is this  aging superstar who introduces himself self-deprecatingly as a "movie tradesman" with hair slightly out of place sporting what the late Paul Fussell referred to in his hilarious 1983 Class as a "prole gap," a class indicator often displayed by working class types on the rare and uncomfortable occasions when they don a suit. (“Here, the collar of the jacket separates itself from the collar of the shirt and backs off and up an inch or so:  the effect is that of a man coming apart.") Eastwood looked like he had blown in from a session with cronies  at a bar and grill.

He then launches into a 'conversation' with a chair whose absent occupant is none other than Barack Obama.  The dialogue is rambling and in places incoherent, but funny as hell.  Here it is in full, for your enjoyment.

An actor in an ill-fitting suit addresses an empty suit, a man as vacant as the chair he does not occupy.

The money quote and standing ovation come at 8:54: "You, we, own this country."  Here, in the guise of a regular guy, Eastwood speaks truth to power, to use that darling phrase of leftists, a phrase they (absurdly) continue to deploy even when they possess power. Eastwood continued with, "Politicians are employees of ours" and "When somebody does not do the job, we've got to let them go."

Was the person who shouted out "Make my day!" a plant?  Plant or not, the Eastwood performance ended on an appropriate "Dirty Harry" note. Dirty Harry, after all, cut through bullshit and did not suffer punks gladly.

Deterrence Will Not Work Against Iran

Charles Krauthammer gives three reasons:

(1) The nature of the regime.

Did the Soviet Union in its 70 years ever deploy a suicide bomber? For Iran, as for other jihadists, suicide bombing is routine. Hence the trail of self-immolation, from the 1983 Marine barracks attack in Beirut to the Bulgaria bombing of July 2012.  Iran’s clerical regime rules in the name of a fundamentalist religion for whom the hereafter offers the ultimate rewards. For Soviet communists — thoroughly, militantly atheistic — such thinking was an opiate-laced fairy tale.

For all its global aspirations, the Soviet Union was intensely nationalist. The Islamic Republic sees itself as an instrument of its own brand of Shiite millenarianism — the messianic return of the “hidden Imam.”

It’s one thing to live in a state of mutual assured destruction with Stalin or Brezhnev, leaders of a philosophically materialist, historically grounded, deeply here-and-now regime. It’s quite another to be in a situation of mutual destruction with apocalyptic clerics who believe in the imminent advent of the Mahdi, the supremacy of the afterlife and holy war as the ultimate avenue to achieving it.

The classic formulation comes from Tehran’s fellow (and rival Sunni) jihadist al-Qaeda: “You love life and we love death.” Try deterring that.

(2) The nature of the grievance.

The Soviet quarrel with America was ideological. Iran’s quarrel with Israel is existential. The Soviets never proclaimed a desire to annihilate the American people. For Iran, the very existence of a Jewish state on Muslim land is a crime, an abomination, a cancer with which no negotiation, no coexistence, no accommodation is possible.

(3) The nature of the target.

America is a nation of 300 million; Israel, 8 million. America is a continental nation; Israel, a speck on the map, at one point eight miles wide. Israel is a “one-bomb country.” Its territory is so tiny, its population so concentrated that, as Iran’s former president Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani has famously said, “Application of an atomic bomb would not leave anything in Israel but the same thing would just produce damages in the Muslim world.” A tiny nuclear arsenal would do the job.

In U.S.-Soviet deterrence, both sides knew that a nuclear war would destroy them mutually. The mullahs have thought the unthinkable to a different conclusion. They know about the Israeli arsenal. They also know, as Rafsanjani said, that in any exchange Israel would be destroyed instantly and forever, whereas the ummah — the Muslim world of 1.8 billion people whose redemption is the ultimate purpose of the Iranian revolution — would survive damaged but almost entirely intact.