Differences Between Wishing and Hoping

I wish, I wish, I wish in vain
That we could sit simply in that room again
Ten thousand dollars at the drop of a hat
I'd give it all gladly
If our lives could be like that.

Bob Dylan's Dream

Wishing and hoping are both intentional attitudes: they take an object.  One cannot just wish, or just hope, in the way one can just feel miserable or elated.  If I wish, I wish for something.  The same holds for hoping. How then do the two attitudes differ?  They differ in terms of time, modality, and justification.

1.  The object of hope lies in the future, of necessity.  One cannot hope for what was or what is.  In his dream, Dylan wished to be together again with his long lost friends.  But he didn't hope to be together with them again.  Coherent: 'I wish I had never been born.'  Incoherent: 'I hope I had never been born.'  Coherent: 'I wish I was with her right now.'  Incoherent: 'I hope I was with her right now.'

Although hope is always and of necessity future-directed, wishing is not temporally restricted.  'I wish I were 30 again.' 'I wish I were in Hawaii now.'  'I wish to live to be a hundred.'   I cannot hope to be 30 again or hope to be in Hawaii now.  But I can both wish and hope to live to be a hundred.

Can I hope to be young again?  That's ambiguous.  I could hope for a medical breakthrough that would rejuvenate  a person in the sense of making him physiologically young  and I could hope to undergo such a rejuvenation.  But I cannot hope to be calendrically young again.

2. One can hope only for what one considers to be possible.  (What one considers to be possible may or may be possible.)  But one can wish for both what one considers to be the possible and what one consider to be  impossible.  I can hope for a stay of execution, but not that I should continue to exist as a live animal after being hanged.  ('Hanged' not 'hung'!)  I can hope to survive my bodily death, but only if I consider it possible that I survive my bodily death. But I can wish for what I know to be impossible such as being young again, being able to run a 2:30 marathon, visiting  Mars next year.

3. There is no sense in demanding of one who wishes to be cured of cancer that he supply his grounds or justification for so wishing.  "Are you justified in wishing to be cancer-free?"  But if he hopes to beat his cancer, then one can appropriately request the grounds of the hope.

If I both wish and hope for something I consider possible that lies in the future, then the difference between wishing and hoping rests on the fact that one can appropriately request grounds for hoping but not grounds for wishing.

I'll end with my favorite counterfactual conditional:  'If wishes were horses, beggars would ride.' 

Saturday Night at the Oldies: Time Signatures

4/4 is the most common time signature, and 3/4 is fairly common.  James Ray's If You Gotta Make a Fool Of Somebody (1961) is a good example of 3/4 time.  Another beautiful example is Dylan's "Farewell Angelina," here sung by Joan Baez.

Dylan's Mr Tambourine Man is in 2/4 time  — 1-2, 1-2, 1-2 — but the Byrds cast it into a danceable 4/4.

The Beatles' A Little Help From My Friends is in 4/4 time, but Joe Cocker covered it in 3/4.

Probably the most popular tune in 5/4 time is Dave Bruebeck's aptronymic Take Five from 1959.  Jethro Tull's Living in the Past (1969) is also in 5/4 time.

You can guess the time signature of Cannonball Adderley's 74 Miles Away. I like McCoy Tyner's version of this even better, but couldn't find it.

Peter Gabriel's Solsbury Hill is also mainly in 7/4 time.

A Quick Proof that ‘Exist(s)’ is not Univocal

Suppose we acquiesce for the space of this post in QuineSpeak. 

Then 'Horses exist' says no more and no less than that 'Something is a horse.'  And 'Harry exists' says no more and no less than that 'Something is Harry.'  But the 'is' does not have the same sense in both translations.  The first is the 'is' of predication while the second is the 'is' of identity.  The difference  is reflected in the standard notation.  The propositional function in the first case is Hx.  The propositional function in the second case is x = h.  Immediate juxtaposition of predicate constant and free variable is the sign for predication.  '=' is the sign for identity.  Different signs for different concepts.  Identity is irreducible to predication which is presumably why first-order predicate logic with identity is so-called.

Those heir to the Fressellian position, such as Quine and his epigoni, dare not fudge the distinction between the two senses of 'is' lately noted. That, surely, is a cardinal tenet of their brand of analysis.

So even along Quinean lines, the strict univocity of 'exist(s)' across all its uses cannot be upheld.  It cannot be upheld across the divide that separates general from singular existentials.

Or have I gone wrong somewhere?

Did the State Make You Great?

Krauthammer 'nails it' brilliantly (emphasis added):

To say that all individuals are embedded in and the product of society is banal. Obama rises above banality by means of fallacy: equating society with government, the collectivity with the state. Of course we are shaped by our milieu. But the most formative, most important influence on the individual is not government. It is civil society, those elements of the collectivity that lie outside government: family, neighborhood, church, Rotary club, PTA, the voluntary associations that Tocqueville understood to be the genius of America and source of its energy and freedom.

Moreover, the greatest threat to a robust, autonomous civil society is the ever-growing Leviathan state and those like Obama who see it as the ultimate expression of the collective.

(One quibble: Krauthammer's "product of society" is too strong. But even the great stumble on occasion.)

How can Obama be so stupid that he doesn't understand the above?  And how could we be so(collectively) stupid as to have elected  the incompetent?  (Don't blame me: I held my nose and voted for the effete and superannuated McCain.)

Obama commits a grotesque straw man fallacy when he imputes to conservatives and libertarians the view that each of us pulled himself up by his own bootstraps ex nihilo.  That goes hand-in-glove with a fallacy of false alternative: either you did it all on your own, or government did it for you.  As Krauthammer in effect points out, the institutions of civil society are neither the creation of the individual nor government agencies. 

Obama Backs Race-Based Disciplinary Policies

Should we be surprised? 

President Barack Obama is backing a controversial campaign by progressives to regulate  schools’ disciplinary actions so that members of major racial and ethnic groups  are penalized at equal rates, regardless of individuals’ behavior.

"Regardless of individuals' behavior."  Think about that.

Yes, Vote Fraud’s Real

There is no need to play the 'numbers game.'  The photo ID requirement is a matter of principle. 

Anyone with common sense ought to be able to appreciate that voting must be conducted in an orderly manner, a manner to inspire confidence in the citizenry, and that only citizens who have registered to vote and have satisfied the minimal requirements of age, etc., are to be allowed into the voting booth. Given the possibility of fraud, it is therefore necessary to verify the identities of those who present themselves at the polling place. To do this, voters must be required to present a government-issued photo ID card, a driver's license being only one example of such. It is a reasonable requirement and any reasonable person should be able to see it as one.

But if you want to play the 'numbers game' voter fraud  does occur often enough to be a serious problem.

Et in Arcadia Ego

Et in arcadia egoDeath says, "I too am in Arcadia."

The contemplation of death, one's own in particular, cures one of the conceit that this life has a meaning absolute and self-contained.  Only those who live naively in this world, hiding from themselves the fact of death, flirting with transhumanist arcadian and other utopian fantasies, can accord to this life the ultimate in reality and importance.

If you deny a life beyond the grave, I won't consider you foolish or even unreasonable.  But if you anticipate a paradise on earth, I will consider you both.  And if you work to attain such a state in defiance of morality, then I will consider you evil, as evil as the Communists of the 20th century who murdered 100 million to realize their impossible fantasies. 

Guercino – Et in Arcadia Ego – 1618-22 – Roma, Galleria Nazionale d’Arte Antica di Palazzo Barberini

Voter ID Laws are Not Like a Poll Tax

Here we go again:

First, a voter restriction is like a poll tax when its authors use voting  fraud as a pretext for legislation that has little to do with voting fraud.

Second, it is like a poll tax when it creates only a small nuisance to some  voters, but for other groups it erects serious barriers to the ballot.

Third, it is like a poll tax when it has crude partisan advantage as its most  immediate aim.

1.  Presumably the issue concerns the requirement that voters produce government-issued photo ID at polling places.  Voting fraud is obviously not a 'pretext' for such a requirement but a good reason to put such a requirement in place.  The claim that photo ID legislation has little to do with voting fraud is ludicrous.  The whole point of it is to prevent fraud.

2.  It is just silly to claim that phtoto ID "erects a serious barrier to the ballot."  If you don't have a driver's license, you can easily acquire photo ID from a DMV office for a nominal sum.  You are going to need it anyway for all sorts of other purposes such as cashing checks.  In the state  of Arizona, the ID is free for those 65 and older and for those on Social Security disability.  For others the fee is nominal: $12 for an ID valid for 12 years. 

3.  Those who support photo ID are aiming at "crude partisan advantage?"  How is that supposed to work?  Do non-Democrats get such an advantage when they stop  voter fraud?  Is the idea that it it par for the course that Dems should cheat, and so, when they are prevented from cheating, their opponents secure a"crude partisan advantage?"

What we have is crude psychological projection.  Unable to own up to their own unsavory win-at-all-costs motivations, liberals impute to conservatives unsavory motives.  "You want to disenfranchise blaxcks and Hispanics!"  As if these minorities are so bereft of life skills that they lack, or cannot acquire, a simple photo ID.  Note also the trademark liberal misuse of language. 

To disenfranchise is to deprive of a right, in particular, the right to vote.  But only some people have the right to vote.  Felons and children do not have the right to vote, nor do non-citizens.  You do not have the right to vote in a certain geographical area simply because you are a sentient being residing in that area.  Otrherwise, my cats would have the right to vote. Now a requirement that one prove that one has the right to vote is not to be confused with a denial of the right to vote.

My right to vote is one thing, my ability to prove I have the right another.  If I cannot prove that I am who I claim to be on a given occasion, then I won't be able to exercise my right to vote on that occasion; but that is not to say that I have been 'disefranchised.'  For I haven't be deprived of my right to vote; I have merely been prevented from exercising my right due to my inability do prove my identity.

I am still looking for a decent argument against photo ID. 

The Double ‘L’

Marvellous, travelling, tranquillity.  Not that the single 'l' is wrong.  It could be argued that the extra 'l' does no work and just takes up space.  What's my rule?  Being a conservative across the board, I am a linguistic conservative, though  flexibly such and not hide-bound like some people I could mention.  So I may well split an infinitive if the forward momentum of the sentence demands it.  And the muscular elegance to which my prose style aspires often requires the use of contractions, as above, fourth sentence.  The  schoolmarms be damned.  And great writers too, such as George Orwell, when they presume to dictate iron-clad rules of good writing.  Here I show that Orwell falls into traps of his own setting.

The Latin tranquillitas sports two 'l's.  So to honor that fact I write 'tranquillity.'  You are free to drop the second 'l' — or the first. 

My rule, I suppose, is to favor the old way as long as the archaicism does not mount to the point of distraction.

One of the fruits of civilization is that it allows some of us to occupy ourselves with bagatelles such as this.

But don't forget that civilization is thin ice and that we must be prepared to defend it with blood and iron.  (A sentence slouching toward mixed metaphor?)

Cats Crepuscular

My wife observed last night that our young cats are very active at twilight.  No surprise there, said I.  Neither diurnal nor nocturnal in their hunting habits, housecats are a crepuscular species of critter.  The word derives from the Latin crepuscula, twilight.  But there is morning twilight and evening twilight.  And so critters crepuscular are either matinal or vespertine or both.  Matins are prayers said in the morning while vespers are prayers said in the evening.  Cats, however, prey rather than pray.  When not on the prowl or in play they sleep, having been made in the image and likeness of Sloth.

There is also an interesting etymological connection between Hesperus (Hesperos), the Evening Star, and vespers.  Hesperos/Hesperus became the Latin Vesperus.  Eosphoros/Phosphoros became the Latin Luciferus, Lucifer, light-bearer, from L. lux, lucis, light.  Interesting that the Bearer of Light in his later career became the Prince of Darkness.

Eosphoros and Hesperos in their later careers went from being gods to being mere Fregean senses, mere modes of representation, Darstellungsweisen,  and conduits of reference. 

Here a cool cat name of Thelonious Sphere Monk bangs out "Crepuscule with Nellie."  Was he on the prowl with her, or just hanging out in the gloaming?

A Test for Marital Compatibility: Travelling Together

DinerI just heard Dennis Prager say on his nationally syndicated radio show that travelling  together is a good test for marital compatibility. Sage advice.

Long before I had heard of Prager I subjected my bride-to-be to such a test.  I got the idea from the delightful 1982 movie The Diner.  One of the guys who hung out at the diner tested for marital suitability by administering a football quiz to his fiance.  That gave me the idea of taking my future wife on a cross-country trip from Cleveland, Ohio to Los Angeles, California in my Volkswagen bus.  This was not a camper bus, but a stripped-down model, so the amenities were meager-to-nonexistent.  I threw a mattress in the back, made some curtains, and hit the road.  That was in the summer of '82. The soundtrack from The Diner was one of the tapes we listened to on the way. I recall reading the Stephen King novel Cujo about the dog from hell when my inamorata drove.

We slept mainly at rest stops.  I had an old .38 Special with me for protection, which fortunately proved unnecessary.  What did we do for showers?  I don't think we took any.  We cleaned up at the rest stop facilities like true vagabundos and moved on.

One dark and starry night I pulled off Interstate 10 in  some desolate stretch of the Mojave desert. Wifey-to-be was scared but it was a memorable moonless star-studded night.  We made it to L. A., saw family and friends, then headed up old U. S. 395 along the eastern flank of the Sierra Nevada to Bishop, Cal,  where we visited some more of my people, then north to Reno, Nevada where we hooked up with I-80 and  pointed the old bus East.

Dear one took the rigors of that  trip 30 years ago like a trouper, and passed the test with flying colors.  We got married the following summer and remain happily married 29 summers later.

When I told the story to a feminazi some years back she gave me a hard and disapproving look.  She didn't like that I imposed a marital compatibility test upon my lady love.  Bitch!  So here's another bit of free and friendly advice. Marry an angel, never a bitch.  Life's enough of a bitch. You don't need to marry one.  Does your belllicosity need an outlet?  Fight outside the home.  Home should be an oasis of peace and tranquillity.

So once again I agree with Prager.  Check her or him out on the road before heading for the altar. 

Existence and Plural Predication: Could ‘Exist(s)’ be a First-Level Non-Distributive Predicate?

'Horses exist' is an example of an affirmative general existential sentence. What is the status of the predicate '___ exist' in such a sentence? One might maintain that 'exist(s)' is a second-level predicate; one might maintain that it is a first-level distributive predicate; one might maintain that it is a first-level non-distributive (collective) predicate. 

1. Frege famously maintained that 'exist(s)' is a second-level predicate, a predicate of concepts only, and never a first-level predicate, a predicate of objects.  Russell followed him in this.  A consequence of this view is that 'Horses exist' is not about what it seems to be about, and does not say what it seems to say.  It seems to be about horses, and seems to say of them that they exist.  But on Frege's analysis the sentence is about the concept horse and says of it, not that it exists, but that it has one or more instances.

Paradoxically, the sentence ''Horses exist'  on  Frege's  analysis says about a non-horse something that cannot be true of a horse or of any concrete thing!

For an interesting comparison, consider 'Horses surround my house.'  Since no horse could surround my house, it is clear that the sentence is not about each of the horses that surround my house.  What then is it about?  One will be tempted to reach for some such singularist analysis as: 'A set of horses surrounds my house.'  But this won't do since no such abstract object as a set could surround anything.  So if the sentence is really about a set of horses then it cannot say what it appears to say.  It must be taken to say something different from what it appears to say.  So what does 'Horses surround my house' say about a set if it is about a set? 

One might be tempted to offer this translation: 'A set of horses is such that its members are surrounding my house.' But this moves us in a circle, presupposing as it does that we already understand the irreducibly plural predication 'Horses surround my house.'  After all, if the members of a set of horses surround my house that is no different from horses surrounding my house.

The circularity here is structurally similar to that of the Fregean analysis.  If 'Horses exist' is about a concept, and says of that concept that it has instances, then of course those instances are horses that exist.  So the attempt to remove existence from individuals and make of it a property of concepts ends up reinstating  existence as a 'property' of individuals.

Pursuing the analogy a bit further, the refusal to grant that there are irreducibly plural predications such as 'Horses surround my house' is like the refusal to grant that there are irreducibly first-level existence sentences.

2.  Pursuing the analogy still further, is it possible to construe the predicate in 'Horses exist' as a non-distributive first-level predicate like the predicate in 'Horses surround my house'?  First some definitions.

A predicate F is distributive just in case it is analytic that whenever some things are F, then each is F.  Thus a distributive predicate is one the very meaning of which dictates that if it applies to some things, then it applies to each of them.  'Blue' is an example.  If some things are blue, then each of them is blue.

If a predicate is not distributive, then it is non-distributive (collective).  If some Occupy-X nimrods have the building surrounded, it does not follow that each such nimrod has the building surrounded.  If some students moved a grand piano into my living room, it does not follow that each student did.  If bald eagles are becoming extinct, it does not follow that each bald eagle is becoming extinct.  Individual animals die, but no individual animal ever becomes extinct. If the students come from many different countries, it does not follow that each comes from many different countries.  If horses have an interesting evolutionary history, it does not follow that each horse has an interesting evolutionary history.

I will assume for the purposes of this post that 'Horses surround my house' and 'Horses have an interesting evolutionary history' are irreducibly plural predications.  (That they are plural is obvious; that they are irreducibly plural is not.  For arguments see Thomas McKay, Plural Predication.)   And of course they are first-level as well: they are about horses, not about concepts or properties or propositional functions.  Now is 'Horses exist' assimilable to 'Horses surround my house' or is it assimilable to 'Horses are four-legged'? The predicate in the later is a distributive first-level predicate, whereas the predicate in 'Horses surround my house' is a non-distributive first-level predicate.

I am assuming that the 'Fressellian' second-level analysis is out, but I won't repeat the arguments I have given ad nauseam elsewhere.

I do not understand how 'exist(s)' could be construed as a non-distributive  predicate.  For if it is non-distributive, then it is possible that some things exist without it being the case that each of them exists.  And that I do not understand.  If horses exist, then each horse exsts.

Peter van Inwagen seems (though it not clear to me) to be saying that 'exists(s)' is a non-distributive first-level predicate. He compares 'Horses exist' to 'Horses have an interesting evolutionary history.'   'Horses exist,' he tells us, is equivalent to 'The number of horses is not zero.'  ("Being, Existence, and Ontological Commitment," p. 483)  But he denies that 'exists(s)' is second-level.  To say that the number of horses is not zero is to predicate of horses that they number more than zero. (483)  It is not to predicate of the concept horse that the cardinality of its extension is more than zero.

Now we cannot say of a horse that it surrounds a house or has an interesting evolutionary history.  We can say that of horses, but not of a horse.  Can we say of a horse that it numbers more than zero?  We can of course say of horses that they number more than zero. But I don't see how we can sensibly say of an individual horse that it numbers more than zero.  Perhaps Frege was wrong to think that number words can only be predicates of concepts which are ones-over-many.  Perhaps all one needs is the many, the plurality.  But it seems one needs at least that to swerve as logical subject.  If this is right, and to exist is to number more than zero, then we cannot sensibly say of an individual that it exists.  We can say this of individuals but not of an individual.  But surely we can say of an individual horse that it exists.  So I conclude that 'exist(s)' cannot be a first-level non-distributive predicate.

3.  And so one is driven  to the conclusion that 'exist(s)' is a first-level distributive predicate.  'Horses exist' says of each individual horse that it exists.  But isn't this equally objectionable?   The vast majority of horses are such that I have no acquaintance with them at all.  So how can my use of 'Horses exist' be about each horse? 

It is at this juncture that Frege gets his revenge:

We must not think that I mean to assert something of an African chieftain from darkest Africa who is wholly unknown to me, when I say 'All men are mortal.'  I am not saying anything about either this man or that man, but I am subordinating the concept man to the concept of what is mortal.  In the sentence 'Plato is mortal' we have an instance of subsumption, in the sentence 'All men are mortal' one of subordination.  What is being spoken about here is a concept, not an individual thing. (Posthumous Writings, p. 213)

Plato falls under the concept man; he does not fall within it.  The concept mortal does not fall under the concept man — no concept is a man — but falls within it.  When I say that all men are mortal I am not talking about individual men, but about the concept man, and I am saying that this concept has as part of its content the subconcept mortal. 

Similarly, my utterance of 'Horses exist' cannot be about each horse; it is about the concept horse, and says that it has instances — which is the view I began by rejecting and for god reason.

We seem to have painted ourselves into an aporetic corner.  No exit. Kein Ausgang. A-poria.