The Stromboli Puzzle

Stromboli_0607

Here is another puzzle London Ed may enjoy.  Is the following argument valid or invalid:

An island volcano exists.
Stromboli is an island volcano.
Ergo
Stromboli exists.

The argument appears valid, does it not?  But it can't be valid if it falls afoul of the dreaded quaternio terminorum, or 'four-term fallacy.'  And it looks like it does.  On the standard Frege-Russell analysis, 'exists' in the major is a second-level predicate: it predicates of the concept island volcano the property of being instantiated, of having one or more instances.  'Exists' in the conclusion, however, cannot possibly be taken as a second-level predicate: it cannot possibly be taken to predicate instantiation of  Stromboli.  "Exists' in the conclusion is a first-level predicate.  Since 'exists' is used in two different senses, the argument is invalid.  And yet it certainly appears valid.  How solve this?

(Addendum, Sunday morning: this is not a good example for reasons mentioned in the ComBox.  But my second example does the trick.)

The same problem arise with this argument:

Stromboli exists.
Stromboli is an island volcano.
Ergo
An island volcano exists.

This looks to be an instance of Existential Generalization.  How can it fail to be valid?  But how can it be valid given the equivocation on 'exists'?  Please don't say the the first premise is redundant.  If Stromboli did not exist, if it were a Meinongian nonexistent object, then Existential Generalization could not be performed, given, as Quine says, that "Existence is what existential quantification expresses."

Can Every General Existential be Expressed as an Instantiation Claim?

Here are some general existentials:

An island volcano exists.
There are uninhabited planets.
Faithful husbands exist.
Unicorns do not exist.
There aren't many chess players in Bagdad, Arizona.

Each of these is expressible salva significatione et veritate (without loss of meaning or truth) by a corresponding instantiation claim:

The concept island volcano is instantiated. 
The concept uninhabited planet is instantiated.
The property of being a faithful husband is exemplified.
The property of being a unicorn is not exemplified.
The concept Bagdad, Arizona chess player has only a few instances.

Should we conclude that every general existential is expressible as an instantiation claim?  No.  'Everything exists' is a true general existential.  It affirms existence and is not singular.  But it does not make an instantiation claim.  If you think it does, tell me which property it says is instantiated. 

Please note that it cannot be the property of existence.  For there is no first-level property of existence, and the whole point of translations such as the above is to disabuse people of the very notion that existence is a first-level property.

Addendum, 4:40 PM.  The problem arises also for 'Something exists,' 'Something does not exist,' and 'Nothing exists.'  Consider the latter.  It is not true but it is (narrowly-logically) possibly true.  In any case it is meaningful.  Can it be expressed as an instantiation claim?  If I want to deny the existence of unicorns I say that the concept unicorn has no instances.  What if I want to deny the existence of everything?  Which concept is it whose non-instantiation is the nonexistence of everything?

Why Do Progressives Love Criminals?

A symposium with Theodore Dalrymple et al. Excerpt:

Dalrymple: That leftists regard the criminal justice system as criminal and therefore regard criminals as “primitive rebels” against an unjust system is, I suppose, right, though few of them would openly admit it. They tend to see the proper function of the criminal justice system as being the promotion of what they call social justice, by which they mean equality – and not equality under the law, but equality of outcome between identifiable groups. (Equity and equality they almost always assume to be the same.) And they think that if there were justice, equality would result, naturally and inevitably; there is no equality, therefore there is no justice. I think you can read for quite a long time before you find an unequivocal statement that there could be no greater injustice than equality of outcome.

Their approach to the criminal justice system is not that its faults should be corrected, and individual instances of injustice righted (there does seem much to criticize); but rather that the whole of society must be transformed into something completely different from what it is now.

'Social justice' is one of those obfuscatory pieces of leftist jargon which ought never to be used by conservatives.  It sounds good, doesn't it?  But as Dalrymple points out what it means is equality of outcome, equality of result. It has nothing to do with justice in any legitimate sense of the term.  In fact, the implementation of 'social justice,' i.e., equality of outcome, requires massive injustice in the form of affirmative action, wealth redistribution, race-norming, and the like. 

 

Chess Banned in the Heartland

Here are further examples of liberal stupidity that we shouldn't forget.  A repost from the old Powerblogs site.   Written 1 September 2005.

 You might expect chess to be banned in a Left coast place like Berserkley.  Unfortunately, chess   actually has been banned in a couple of places in fly-over country, places where one would not expect to find a high concentration of either PeeCee-heads or Taliban. (As I recall, the Taliban's beef was that the Royal Game is one of chance; they also took a dim view of kite-flying for reasons that escape me.)

Grandmaster Larry Evans, in his column "Evans on Chess" (Chess Life, September 2005, pp. 46-47), reproduces a letter from an anonymous high school science teacher from Northwest Louisiana. It seems that this fellow introduced his students to chess and that they responded enthusiastically. The administration, however, issued a policy forbidding all board games. In justification of this idiocy, one of the PC-heads argued that in chess there are definite winners and losers whereas educators need to see that everyone succeeds.

GM Evans points out that this lunacy has surfaced elsewhere. "In 1998, for example, Oak Mountain Intermediate School in Shelby County, Alabama (a suburb of Birmingham) banned chess (because it is too competitive!) but had two baseball stadiums with night-lights for evening play." (CL p. 47)

One of the things that liberals have a hard time understanding is that competition is good. It breeds excellence. Another thing that is not understood is that competition is consistent with cooperation. They are not mutually exclusive. We cannot compete without cooperating within a broad context of shared assumptions and values. Competition need not be inimical to cooperation. 'Competition is good' is a normative claim. But competition is also a fact of life, one not likely to disappear. A school that bans competitive activities cannot be said to be preparing students for extramural reality.

Competition not only breeds excellence, it breeds humility.  When you compete you become better, but you also come to know your limits.  You come to learn that life is hierarchical.  It puts you in your place.

Part of the problem is that libs and lefties make a fetish of equality. Now I'm all for equality of opportunity, equality before the law, treating like cases in a like manner, and all the rest of what may be subsumed under the broad rubric of formal or procedural equality. I am opposed to discrimination on the basis of race, sex, and creed. I want people judged, not by the color of their skin, but  by the content of their character. (And precisely for that reason I judge your typical rapper and your typical race hustler to be a contemptible lout.)

But as a matter of fact, people are not equal materially viewed, and making them equal is not a value. In fact, it involves injustice. It is unjust to give the same grade to a student who masters algebra and to a student who barely understands it. People differ in ability, and they differ in application. Some make use of their abilities, some let them lie fallow. That is their free choice. If a person makes use of his abilities and prospers, then he is entitled to the outcome, and it is unjust to deny it to him. I don't deserve my intelligence, but I am entitled to what I gain from its legitimate use. Or is that a difficult distinction to understand?

There will never be equality of outcome, and it is fallacious to argue as many liberals do that inequality of outcome proves inequality of opportunity. Thus one cannot validly infer

1. There is no equality of opportunity
from
2. There is no equality of outcome
except in the presence of some such false assumption as
3. People are equal in their abilities and in their desire to use them.

People are not equal in their abilities and they are not equal in their desire to use them.  That is a fact.  Liberals will not accept this fact because it conflicts with their ideology.  When they look at the world, they do not see it as it is, but as they want it to be. 

Tip-Skimming: Say it Ain’t So, Mario

If Mario Batali was really involved in tip-skimming, then he's a bum.  I enjoy waiting on the occasional guest I allow into my house, but to have to make a living from such work is not an appetizing prospect.  So I always tip properly when I am out.  For some reason, pretty girls bring out my avuncular and paternal and generous side.  You have just spent an hour giving this old man a massage and listening to his persiflage?  Then you deserve a $10 tip, $20 at Christmas.

Here are my maxims on tipping.

Why are Conservatives Inarticulate?

From the mail:

My two cents on why so many people who hold conservative views come across as inarticulate: most of the values that ordinary, conservative people live by do not require much reflection or explanation. After all, how much justification does a man need for being loyal to his friends, not cheating his customers, and being kind to his neighbors? It is the man who seeks to undermine those values who needs the rhetorical dodges and obfuscations. It takes little mental skill to tell a lie, but it takes quite a bit of deviousness to construct a justification for abolishing the principle of honesty altogether . . . .

My correspondent supplies part of the explanation.  For those with a conservative bent there is a defeasible presumption in favor of traditional practices, beliefs, and values.  They place the burden of proof on those who would question the traditional practices, beliefs, and values.  For the conservatively inclined there is no need to justify that loyalty is good, cheating is wrong, being kind is better than being cruel, and that killing infants is murder.  Feeling, with some justification, no need to justify his practices, beliefs, and values,  the conservative rarely acquires the skills to do so, and so comes across as inarticulate and unreflective to those skilled in the verbal arts.  Of course, I am talking not about conservative intellectuals but about ordinary conservative folk and their political and talk-show representatives.

What my correspondent may not appreciate, however, is that it is not enough to have the right views and values; one must also know how to articulate and defend them when they come under attack.  And this is where conservatives are woefully inadequate.  How many conservatives could say what I said in the preceding paragraph?  Can you imagine George W. Bush speaking of "a defeasible presumption in favor of traditional practices, beliefs, and values"?  Even if he could get the words out without stumbling, could he explain what they mean? His defense of marriage consisted of the repetition of the flat-footed, "Marriage is between a man and a woman."  A gratuitous assertion, however, calls forth a gratuitous counter-assertion. His mere assertion, unexplained and unjustified, makes him appear a bigot to those who find opposition to same-sex marriage 'discriminatory.'  What he ought to have done is provide a brief justification of why the state is involved in marriage in the first place and why same-sex 'marriage' is not something the state should support.  But could he do that off the top of his head?  I doubt it.  He's got the right view, but he can't defend it.  And that's the problem.

Or consider Charlie Sykes the talk-show host I mentioned the other day.  He claimed that the reasoning in support of the moral acceptability of infanticide was "academic gobbledygook."  When you say something like that about careful and clear reasoning, you make yourself out to be a dumbass, allergic to distinctions and nuances.  You come across as a rube, a redneck, a hick, a yahoo, an anti-intellectual, an Archie Bunker, a beer-swilling, sports-watching, tobacco-chewing ignoramus, a benighted denizen of fly-over country.  Many others who got worked up over that infanticide article claimed that it was 'illogical,' thereby betraying a failure to understand what logic is.  They thought that since the conclusion is morally outrageous, which of course it is, the reasoning to it had to be incorrect.  But that's an elementary mistake since one can reason correctly to a false conclusion.

A local talk show guy, Mike Gallagher I think it was, was fulminating againt the article in question and came out with the remark that 'medical ethics' is an oxymoron.  Well of course it isn't.  What he was trying to say was that a medical ethicist who argues that infanticide is morally permissible cannot be an ethicist . . . .

Or consider my man O'Reilly.  He often points out that we live in a capitalist country.  It's true, more or less.  But citing a fact does not amount to a justification of the fact.  What O'Reilly may be incapable of doing is to provide arguments including moral arguments in favor of capitalism.  That is what is needed in the face of libs and lefties who, when told that we live in a capitalist country, will respond, "Well then, let's change it!" 

But having a nasty streak of anti-intellectualism in him, O'Reilly would probably dismiss such arguments as mere 'theory' in his Joe Sixpack sense of the term.

Conservatives, by and large, are doers not thinkers, builders,  not scribblers.  They are at home on the terra firma of the concrete particular but at sea in the realm of abstraction.  The know in their dumb inarticulate way that killing infants is a moral outrage but they cannot argue it out with sophistication and nuance in a manner to command the respect of their opponents.  And that's a serious problem

To beat the Left we must out-argue them in the ivory towers and out-slug them in the trenches.  Since by Converse Clausewitz  politics is war conducted by other means, the trench-fighters need to employ the same tactics that lefties do: slanders, lies, smears, name-calling, shout-downs, pie-throwing, mockery, derision.  And now I hand off to Robert Spencer commenting on Andrew Breitbart. 

Politics is war and war is ugly.  We could avoid a lot of this nastiness if we adopted federalism and voluntary Balkanization.  But that is not likely to happen: the totalitarian Left won't allow it.  So I predict things are going to get hot in the coming years.

The Problem with Conservatism

Here:

The problem with conservatism is that it is a school of political activity based almost completely on nonconfrontation. It is quietist, scholarly, and unassuming, acting very much in the mode of the upper-class William F. Buckley and the reclusive Russell Kirk. This is not altogether a bad thing. Conservatives have always argued — with some justice — that a major goal of the movement is to maintain standards, to avoid descending to the level of the opposition. But like anything else, it becomes a bad thing when it is taken too far, when conservatives allow themselves — as they so often do — to be bullied out of the arena and on to the sidelines and irrelevance. (Buckley, to his credit, and as Gore Vidal well knows, never allowed it to go quite this far.) This is so common that it shocks both sides when it occurs otherwise. Recall the "blue-blazer riot" at the 2000 Florida election recount, with all the staid, Brooks-wearing paleos banging on the windows and shouting, "I say there," at the vote-counters. Nobody ever saw that before. The problem is, we haven't seen it since, either.

This is not meant as an attack on the bow-tie brigade. We need those types. We need the WASP ethos and the civilized behavior that it promotes. But we also need the hard boys in their black t-shirts and shades who can jump into the trenches and give as good as they get — the kind of cadre that conservatism has for many years lacked.

Nominalism and Being

Today I preach on an old text of long-time commenter and sparring partner, London Ed:

Nominalism is the doctrine that we should not multiply entities  according to the multiplicity of terms. I.e., we shouldn't  automatically assume that there is a thing corresponding to every  term. Das Seiende is a term, so we shouldnât automatically assume there is a thing corresponding to it. Further arguments are needed to show that there is or there isnât. A classic nominalist strategy is to rewrite the sentence in such a way that the term disappears.

 My first concern is whether this definition of 'nominalism' is perhaps too broad, so broad that it pulls in almost all of us. Does anyone think that every term has a referent? Don't we all hold that there can be no automatic assumption that every occurrence of a term in a stretch of discourse picks out an entity? For example, one would be hard pressed to find a philosopher who holds that 'nothing' in

   1. Nothing is in the drawer

refers to something. (Carnapian slanders aside, Heidegger does not maintain this, but this is a separate topic about which I have written a long unpublished paper.) Following Ed's excellent advice, the
apparently referential 'nothing' can be paraphrased away:

   2. It is not the case that there is something in the drawer.

This then goes into quasi-canonical notation as

   2*. ~(Ex)(x is in the drawer).

In (2*) the tilde and the particular quantifier are syncategorematic elements. On the face of it, then, there is no call to be anything other than a nominalist about 'nothing,' using 'nominalism' as per the
suggestion above.

Whether there is call to be a nominalist about 'being' is another matter. Before proceeding to it, consider the following example:

   3. Peter and Paul are blond

which could be parsed as

   3*. Peter is blond and Paul is blond.

Now I rather doubt that anyone maintains that every word in (3*) — or rather every word in a tokening of this sentence-type whether via utterance or inscription or some other mode of encoding — has an entity corresponding to it. This suggests a taxonomy of nominalisms:

Mad-Dog Nominalism: No word has an existing referent, not even 'Peter' and 'Paul.' (I write 'existing referent' to disallow Meinongian objects as referents. The waters are muddy enough without bringing Meinong into the picture — please pardon the mixed metaphor.)

Extreme Nominalism: The only words that have existing referents are names like 'Peter' and Paul'; nothing in reality corresponds to such predicates as 'blond.' And a fortiori nothing corresponds to copulae and logically connective words like 'and' and 'or.'

Nominalism Proper: Particulars (unrepeatables) alone exist: there are no universals (repeatables). This view allows that something in reality corresponds to predicates such as 'blond.' It is just that what this predicate denotes is not a universal but a particular, a trope say, or an Aristotelian accident.

Methodological Nominalism: This is just Ed's suggestion that we not assume that for each word there is a corresponding entity.

I hope no one is crazy enough to be a mad-dog nominalist, and that everyone is sane enough to be a methodological nominalist. The two middle positions, however, are subject to reasonable controversy. What I am calling Extreme Nominalism has little to recommend it, but I think Nominalism Proper is quite a reasonable position.  There has to be something extralinguistic (and extramenal) corresponding to the predicate in 'Peter is blond,' but it is not obvious that it must be a universal.  

Now let's think about whether we should be nominalists with respect to words like das Seiende, that-which-is, the existent, beings, and the like. Heidegger has been known to say such things as Das Seiende ist,  or

   4. That-which-is is. (Beings are.)

Now is there anything in reality corrresponding to 'that-which-is' and 'beings'? Well of course: absolutely everything comes under 'that-which-is.' There is nothing that is named by 'Nothing.' And if I met nobody on the trail, that is not to say that I met someone named 'Nobody.' But absolutely everything falls under 'a being,' 'an existent,' ein Seiendes, das Seiende.

So I see no reason to have any nominalist scruples about the latter expressions. I don't see any problem with forming the substantive das Seiende from the present participle seiend.  But you will be forgiven if you balk at the transformation of the infinitive sein into the the substantive das Sein and take the latter to refer to Majuscule Being.

An Ideal Spouse

My opinion of Maureen Dodd went up a notch when I read this NYT column in which she quotes a Catholic priest.  He proffers good advice about marriage one piece of which is:

     Don't marry a problem character thinking you will change him.
 
Excellent advice, Schopenhauerian advice. You will remember his riff on the unalterability of character. It is true as a general rule: people do not change. What you are characterologically at twenty you are for life. If you catch your inamorata lying to you or engaging in any sort of duplicity, know that you have been vouchsafed an insight into an underlying mendacity that will manifest itself time and time again. If one time she racks up a credit card bill that she cannot pay in full at the end of the month, she will do it a thousand times. And so on down the line. Enter into matrimony with such a person if you must, but do it with eyes open and thoughts clear.

My wife has a wide range of virtues and no vices to speak of. But in point of punctuality, she falls down. I am by contrast punctual to a fault. So 29 years ago I tried to change her, to make her punctual like me, but soon realized my folly and changed myself instead. I simply gave up making precise dates with her, rather than courting vexation at her nonshowing at appointed exact times. Instead of: Meet me at the corner of Fifth and Vermouth at the stroke of high noon, this: I'll be at the Sufficient Grounds coffee house from 2 PM on writing and playing chess; fall by when you get a chance.

I also realized that part of her being such a sweet and agreeable person is her not being hung up on precision.  And I furthermore bore in mind Plato's point in the Symposium, namely, and to put it in my own way, that a partner should be a complement, not a copy.

As a rule of thumb: You can't change others, but you can change yourself. And you should. A bit more precisely: character is largely invariant but attitude admits of adjustment.  

Koran Jihad and Advanced Dhimmitude

By Diana West.  Excerpt, emphas is added:

Behold what is perhaps the most advanced state of dhimmitude. Here we see the dhimmi — Jan Kubis and the UN hierarchy — mimic perfectly the perpetual aggrievement of Islam. Islam's aggrievement becomes their own aggrievement, indeed, becomes even more important than any by now atavistic concept of Western justice and reason, as they draw power from the obviously more kinetic Islamic position. Because this whole affair is, and must be understood as, a barely concealed power play. It is a power play thinly disguised by the Islamic pose of victimhood. Such feigned victimhood becomes a trap for the " perpetrator" of the perceived aggrievement — in this case, the US military. Falling for the trap, as we in the West do time and time again, means accepting these intemperate, immoral and murderous manifestations of Islamic dementia in the same way that a "co-dependent" family member accepts and accommodates a mentally sick relative's manifestations of dementia in the home in order to create or preserve some measure of family peace or quiet; in order to stop the outburst, to tamp down the rage and violence, to make it all better — even if "better" is always just a lull before the next demented power play.

Hocus Pocus

Here we find, "The magical spell of common parlance, 'hocus pocus,' derives from the words of consecration in the Latin Mass, “hoc est enim corpus”–this is my very body."

True or false?  I don't know.  I do know that one ought not believe everything one reads.

Addendum:  I was fishing of course, my OED and other relevant reference works being packed away at the moment, and I did indeed quickly snag a juicy morsel from the blogosphere's vasty deeps.  The following  courtesy of Jonathan Watson:

We have, it seems, at least this from the OED:

hocus-pocus, n., adj., and adv.
Pronunciation: /ˈhəʊkəsˈpəʊkəs/
Forms:  hocas pocas, hokos pokos, hokus pokus.
Etymology: Appears early in 17th cent., as the appellation of a juggler (and, apparently, as the assumed name of a particular conjuror) derived from the sham Latin formula employed by him: see below, and compare Grimm, Hokuspokus .
 
The notion that hocus pocus was a parody of the Latin words used in the Eucharist, rests merely on a conjecture thrown out by Tillotson: see below.

1655 T. Ady Candle in Dark 29, I will speak of one man‥that went about in King James his time‥who called himself, The Kings Majesties most excellent Hocus Pocus, and so was called, because that at the playing of every Trick, he used to say, Hocus pocus, tontus talontus, vade celeriter jubeo, a dark composure of words, to blinde the eyes of the beholders, to make his Trick pass the more currantly without discovery.

1694 J. Tillotson Serm. (1742) II. xxvi. 237 In all probability those common juggling words of hocus pocus are nothing else but a corruption of hoc est corpus, by way of ridiculous imitation of the priests of the Church of Rome in their trick of Transubstantiation.