On Hairsplitting

As a follow-up to Anti-Intellectualism in Conservatives, here is an old post from the Powerblogs site.  A surprising number still languish there in cyber-limbo awaiting their turn to be brought back to life. 

………………….

The charge of hairsplitting has always been one of the weapons in the arsenal of the anti-intellectual. One root of anti-intellectualism is a churlish hatred of all refinement. Another is laziness. Just as there are slugs who will not stray from their couches without the aid of motorized transport, there are mental slugs who will not engage in what Hegel calls die Anstrengung des Begriffs, the exertion of the   concept. Thinking is hard work. One has to be careful, one has to be precise; one has to carve the bird of reality at the joints. It is no surprise that people don't like thinking. It goes against our slothful grain. But surely any serious thinking about any topic issues in the making of distinctions that to the untutored may seem strained and  unnecessary.

Consider the question of when it is appropriate to praise a person.

Should we praise a person who has merely done his duty? Should we praise people who feed, clothe, house, and educate their children? Should wives praise their husbands for being faithful, as I once heard Dennis Prager recommend?  Of course not. For this is what they ought to do. We ought not praise them for doing such things; we ought to condemn them for not doing them. Praise is due only those actions that are above and beyond the call of duty. Such actions are called supererogatory. So we have a distinction between the obligatory and the supererogatory. The former pertains to those actions that must be done or else left undone, while the latter to those actions that are non-obligatory but such that if they are done they bring moral credit upon their agents.

Is that hairsplitting? Obviously not. We are in the presence of a genuine distinction. One would have to quite obtuse not to discern it. Clarity in moral matters demands the making of this distinction, and plenty of others besides.

A second example. The phrase, 'the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth,' will strike some as containing redundant verbiage. But there are three distinct notions here since one can tell the truth without telling the whole truth, and one can tell the whole truth without telling nothing but the truth. This is not hairsplitting, but the making of necessary distinctions. Necessary for what? Necessary for clarity of thought. Why is that a good thing? Because clarity of thought is required for ethical action and for prudent action.

So what is hairsplitting if this is supposed to be something objectionable? One idea is that it is to make distinctions that correspond to nothing real, distinctions that are merely verbal. The 'distinction' between a glow bug and a fire fly, for example, is merely verbal: there is no distinction in reality. A glow bug just is a firefly. Similarly there is no distinction in reality between a bottle's being half-full and being half-empty. The only possible difference is in the attitude of someone, a drunk perhaps, who is elated at the bottle's being half-full and depressed at its being half-empty.

But this is not what people usually mean by the charge of hairsplitting. What they seem to mean is the drawing of distinctions that don't make a practical difference. But whether a distinction makes a practical difference depends on the context and on one's purposes. A chess player must know when the game is drawn. One way to draw a chess game is by three-fold repetition of position. But there
is a distinction between a consecutive and a nonconsecutive three-fold repetition of position, a distinction many players do not appreciate. When it is explained to them, as it is here some react with hairsplitting!

The truth of the matter is that there are very few occasions on which the charge of hairsplitting is justly made. On almost all occasions, the accuser is simply advertising his inability to grasp a distinction that the subject-matter requires. He is parading before us his lack of culture and mental acuity and his churlish refusal to be instructed.

Too many conservatives are like this.

Anti-Intellectualism on the Right

As I write, the 'infanticide is just post-natal abortion' controversy is being discussed by Charlie Sykes who is sitting in for Dennis Prager on the latter's radio show.  Sykes is obviously intelligent, but he just did something that is not uncommon for conservatives to do but is harmful to the conservative cause, namely, display an anti-intellectual attitude.  He used the phrase "academic gobblydegook" to refer to the reasoning in After-Birth Abortion: Why Should the Baby Live?  (My discussion of the issues here.)

The article's reasoning, however,  is clear and free of unnecessary jargon.  For the anti-intellectual, however, any attempt to make necessary distinctions and couch them in a technical vocabulary is dismissed as 'gobbledegook,' 'hairsplitting,' 'semantics,' etc.  It's unfortunate but  it is the way too many conservatives are.  I am not talking about conservative intellectuals, but conservatives that have influence.  Bill O'Reilly is an example.  He does good work, and his influence is mainly salutary.  But when a guest begins to nuance the discussion with a distinction or two, O'Reilly dismisses it as 'theory' using the word in the way of Joe Sixpack.  (That would make a good separate post, "Joe Sixpack on 'Theory'")

Conservatives have the right views but are too often incapable of defending them. This makes them easy targets for leftists.  Liberals and leftists lack common sense including moral sense, but they possess verbal facility in spades.  So if you talk like George W. Bush or dismiss careful, albeit wrongheaded, reasoning as 'gobbledegook' you just make yourself look stupid, not just to liberals but to everyone who values careful thinking.

The Range of Light

John Muir (The Mountains of California, 1894, Ch. 1) on California's Sierra Nevada mountain range:

. . . the Sierra should be called not the Nevada, or Snowy Range, but the Range of Light. And after ten years spent in the heart of it, rejoicing and wondering, bathing in its glorious floods of light, seeing the sunbursts of morning among the icy peaks, the noonday radiance on the trees and rocks and snow, the flush of the alpenglow, and a thousand dashing waterfalls with their marvelous abundance of irised spray, it still seems to me above all others the Range of Light, the most divinely beautiful of all the mountain-chains I have ever seen.

Would we have this beautiful description if John Muir had heeded the injunction, Never hike alone!? Note his use of 'mountain-chains'  near the end of the passage. That is a term that has fallen into desuetude if it ever saw much use. It is an exact equivalent of the German Bergketten.

The best guide to that region of the Sierra Nevada known as the High Sierra is R. J. Secor, The High Sierra: Peaks, Passes and Trails  (The Mountaineers, 1992, 2nd ed. 1999). It is a beautifully written book. Here is a taste:

The High Sierra . . . is the best place in the world for the practice of mountains. By the practice of mountains, I am referring to to hiking, cross-country rambling, peak bagging, rock climbing, ice climbing and ski touring. One of my goals in life is to go around the world three times and visit every mountain range twice. But whenever I have wandered other mountains, I have been homesick for the High Sierra. I am a hopeless romantic, and therefore my opinions cannot be regarded as objective. But how can I be objective while discussing the mountains that I love? (p. 9)

My kind of guy. During one of my High Sierra backpacking trips I met a man who knew Secor. Secor the climber smokes cigarettes! To be a climber you have to be all legs and lungs. Take that, you tobacco-wackos!

The following photograph is from Edwin Farrell's Sierra Nevada Gallery:

Sierra-nevada-convict-lk-2005

Saturday Night at the Oldies: Guns and Gun Violence

Jr. Walker and the All Stars, Shotgun
Beatles, Revolver (the whole album!)
Hoyt Axton, Pistol Packin' Mama.  Al Dexter wrote the song and had a hit with it in '43.
Lloyd Price, Stagger Lee, 1959.  "Stagger Lee went home and got his .44 . . ."  Mississippi John Hurt's version.
The Leaves, Hey Joe.  "Hey Joe, where you going with that gun in your hand?"
Gene Pitney, The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance, 1962
Johnny Western, The Ballad of Palladin.  Theme song of "Have Gun Will Travel." Duane Eddy's cheesy version.
Tom Waits, Sixteen Shells from a Thirty-Aught Six
Phil Ochs, The Men Behind the Guns
Joan Baez, Rock Salt and Nails.  "If the ladies was squirrels with high bushy tails/I'd fill up my shotgun with rock salt and nails."
No, I will not link to Sonny and Cher's "Bang, Bang"!

Ockham and Induction

Ed of Beyond Necessity reports that he has translated some chapters on induction from Ockham's Summa Logicae. He goes on:

Ockham says that induction "is a progression from singulars to the universal", which is pretty much the modern understanding of the term.

That is not wrong, but it is not quite right either.  On a well-informed modern understanding induction need not involve "a progression from singulars to the universal."

Suppose that every F I have encountered thus far is a G, and that I conclude that the next F I will encounter will also be a G. This is clearly an inductive inference, but it is one that moves from a universal statement to a statement about an individual. The inference is from Every F thus far encountered is a G to The next F I will encounter will be a G.  So it is simply not the case that every inductive inference proceeds from singular cases to a universal conclusion. Some such inferences do, but not all.  This is a common misunderstanding.

It is also a mistake to think that deduction always proceeds from the universal to the singular.  See On Falsely Locating the Difference Between Deduction and Induction.

The Ne Plus Ultra of Music

For me, it doesn't get any better than the late piano sonatas of Beethoven, especially Op. 109, 110, 111. This is music preeminent and unsurpassable, though some of Brahms comes close. Here is Claudio Arrau performing the First Movement of Sonata 32, Opus 111.

And here is Daniel Barenboim playing the 2nd movement.  If this doesn't move you to tears, then you need a major soul-adjustment.

I am an elitist, but not a snob. An elitist in that I maintain that such popular genres as blues, jazz, folk, rock, and so on are not music in the eminent sense: they do not speak to what is highest and best in us. But there is nothing wrong with that. The claims of the lower self have their limited validity. Not a snob, in that I enjoy and appreciate music of all kinds, with only a few exceptions, as witness my Saturday Night at the Oldies series.    

To say that the best of the blues is the equal of the best of Beethoven is a bit like saying that the best of Carnap is equal to the best of Plato. Either you see what is wrong with that or you don't. If you don't, I can't help you. Here we enter the realm of the unarguable.

Positivism is to philosophy as muzak is to music.  Put that on your Stove and cook it!

Addendum:  Ed Farrell suggests that it does get better, and mentions the late quartets.  He has a point as witness the third movement of opus 132, Heiliger Dankgesang.  Click on the Farrell link and enjoy his fine photography.

Compensations of Advancing Age

You now have money enough and you now have time. The time left is shrinking, but it is your own. There is little left to prove. What needed proving has been proven by now or will forever remain unproved. And now it doesn't much matter one way or the other.

You are free to be yourself and live beyond comparisons with others. You can enjoy the social without being oppressed by it. You understand the child's fathership of the man, and in some measure are able to undo it. You have survived those who would define you, and now you define yourself. And all of this without rancour or resentment. Defiant self-assertion gives way to benign indifference, Angst to Gelassenheit. Your poem might be:

     Brief light's made briefer
     'Neath the leaden vault of care
     Better to accept the sinecure
     Of untroubled Being-there.

You now enjoy the benefits of a thick skin or else it was never in the cards that you should develop one. You have been inoculated by experience against the illusions of life. You know that the Rousseauean transports induced by a chance encounter with a charming member of the opposite sex do not presage the presence of the Absolute in human form. Less likely to be made a fool of in love, one is more likely to see sisters and brothers in sexual others.

The Grim Reaper is gaining on you but you now realize that he is Janus-faced: he is also a Benign Releaser. Your life is mostly over, but what the past lacks in presentness it gains in length and necessity. What you had, though logically contingent, now glistens in the light of that medieval modality necessitas per accidens: it is all there, accessible to memory as long as memory holds out, and no one can take it from you.

What is over is over, but it has been. The country of the past is a realm of being inacccessible except to memory but in compensation unalterable.  Kierkegaard's fiftieth year never was, yours was. Better has-been than never-was. Not much by way of compensation, perhaps, but one takes what one can get.

You know your own character by now and can take satisfaction in possessing a good one if that is what experienced has disclosed.

York on Breitbart: Culture is Upstream from Politics

Here:

Breitbart knew instinctively, as people in Washington and most other places did not, that movies, television programs, and popular music send out deeply political messages every hour of every day. They shape the culture, and then the culture shapes politics. Influence those films and TV shows and songs, and you’ll eventually influence politics.

The Left had known that for generations, but on the Right, so many people in politics thought only about politics. To Breitbart, that was folly.

 

Taqiyya, Tawriya, and Creative Lying

Here:

Perhaps you have heard of taqiyya, the Muslim doctrine that allows lying in certain circumstances, primarily when Muslim minorities live under infidel authority. Now meet tawriya, a doctrine that allows lying in virtually all circumstances—including to fellow Muslims and by swearing to Allah—provided the liar is creative enough to articulate his deceit in a way that is true to him.

[. . .]

As a doctrine, "double-entendre" best describes tawriya's function. According to past and present Muslim scholars (several documented below), tawriya is when a speaker says something that means one thing to the listener, though the speaker means something else, and his words technically support this alternate meaning.

For example, if someone declares "I don't have a penny in my pocket," most listeners will assume the speaker has no money on him—though he might have dollar bills, just literally no pennies. Likewise, say a friend asks you, "Do you know where Mike is?" You do, but prefer not to divulge. So you say "No, I don't know"—but you keep in mind another Mike, whose whereabouts you really do not know.

Abortion and Infanticide: What’s the Difference?

If you agree that infanticide is morally wrong, should you not also agree that late-term abortion is also morally wrong?  Consider this argument:

Infanticide is morally wrong
There is no morally relevant difference between infanticide and late-term abortion
Therefore
Late-term abortion is morally wrong.

To cast it in a slogan:  Late-term abortion is pre-natal infanticide!

But of course the argument can be run in reverse with no breach of logical propriety:

Late-term abortion is not morally wrong
There is no morally relevant difference between infanticide and late-term abortion
Therefore
Infanticide is not morally wrong.

To make a slogan of it: Infanticide is post-natal abortion!

Since the arguments and slogans  'cancel each other out,' the question arises whether we can move beyond a stand-off.  The pro-lifer finds it evident that infanticide is morally wrong, violating as it does the infant's right to life, and extends that right to the late-term fetus, while the type of pro-choicer I will be discussing in this post finds it evident that late-term abortion is morally acceptable and extends that moral acceptability to infanticide.

My response to the problem makes appeal to two principles, the Potentiality Principle, and the Modified Species Principle.  After I lay them out I will ask  whether they help us avoid a stalemate.

The idea behind the Potentiality Principle (PP) is that potential descriptive personhood confers a right to life. In other words, the idea is that potential descriptive personhood entails normative personhood.  For present purposes we may define a person in the descriptive sense of the term, a descriptive person,  as anything that is sentient, rational, self-aware, and purposive.   A person in the normative sense of the term, a normative person, we may define as a rights-possessor.  We assume that actual descriptive persons are normative persons and thus have rights, including a right to life, a right not to be killed. Presumably we all accept the following Rights Principle:

RP: All descriptive persons have a right to life.

What PP does is simply extend the right to life to potential persons. Thus,

PP. All potential descriptive persons have a right to life.

I have undertaken the defense of PP in other posts and I won't repeat myself here.  PP allows us to mount a very powerful argument, the Potentiality Argument (PA), against the moral acceptability of abortion. Given PP, and the fact that human fetuses are potential persons, it follows that they have a right to life. From the right to life follows the right not to be killed, except perhaps in some extreme circumstances.

It may be that the right to life has multiple sources. Perhaps it has a dual source: in PP but also in the Species Principle (SP) according to which whatever is genetically human has the right to life just in virtue of being genetically human. Equivalently, what SP says is that every member of the species homo sapiens, qua member, has the right to life of any member, and therefore every member falls within the purview of the prohibition against homicide.

The intuition behind SP  is that killing innocent human beings is just plain wrong whether or not they are actual persons in the descriptive sense of the term.  Now late-term human fetuses are of course human beings, indeed human individuals (not just clumps of cells or bits of human genetic material).  And of course they are innocent human beings.    it follows that they have a right to life.

Subscription to SP entails that a severely damaged infant, a Down's Syndrome baby, for example,  would have a right to life just in virtue of being genetically human regardless of its potential for development. Some will object that SP is involved in species chauvinism or 'speciesism,' the abitrary and therefore illicit privileging of the species one happens to belong to over other species. The objection might proceed along the following lines. "It is easy to conceive of an extraterrestrial possessing all of the capacities (for self-awareness, moral choice, rationality, etc.) that we regard in ourselves as constituting descriptive personhood. Surely we would not want to exclude them from the prohibition against killing the innocent just because they are not made of human genetic material." To deal with this objection, a Modified Species Principle could be adopted:

MSP: Every member of an intelligent species, just insofar as it is a member of that species, has a right to life and therefore falls within the purview of the prohibition against the killing of innocents.

The two principles (PP and MSP) working in tandem would seem to explain most of our moral intuitions in this matter. And now it occurs to me that PP and MSP can be wedded in one comprehensive principle, which we can call the Species Potentiality Principle:

SPP: Every member of any biological species whose normal members are actual or potential descriptive persons, just insofar as it is a member of that species, possesses a right to life and therefore falls within the purview of the prohibition against the killing of innocents.

Does the above help us move beyond a stand-off?  Not at all.  No committed pro-choicer will accept the principles I have articulated above. And of course I won't accept his rejection of them.  For they are eminently rationally defensible and free of any formal or informal logical fallacy.  And of course no empirical facts speak against them.  Here as elsewhere, reason and argument can only take one so far.  They are wonderfully useful in achieving clarity about what one's position is and the reasons one has for occupying it.  But no argument will convince anyone who doesn't accept one's premises.

Here as elsewhere reason is powerless to decide the question even when informed by all relevant empirical facts.

In the end it comes down to basic moral intuitions.  Some people have moral sense and some people don't.  I say: Can't you just SEE (i.e., morally intuit) that killing an innocent human being is morally wrong?  If you say 'no,' then I call you morally obtuse or morally  blind.   I throw you in with the color-blind and the tone-deaf.   And then I go on to call into question your motives for holding your morally outrageous view.  I might say: "The real reason (i.e., the psychologically salient motive) for your support of abortion and infanticide is your desire to have unrestrained sexual intercourse without accepting any responsibility for the consequences of your actions.  At the root of it all is your refusal to practice self-restraint, and your selfish desire to do whatever you please."  But even in the cases where such a psychological explanation is  true it will do nothing to convince the opponent.

Here is something to think about.  Would the abortion/infanticide question be such a hot-button issue if  it weren't for our innate concupiscence kept constantly aflame by a sex-saturated society? (Pardon the mixed metaphors.)  Could it be that concupiscence unrestrained clouds our moral vision and makes us unable to discern moral truths?

This post was 'inspired' by After-Birth Abortion: Why Should the Baby Live? (A tip of the hat to the noble Maverickians who brought it to my attention.)

The title leaves something to be desired as regards felicity of expression.   'Afterbirth' is either the process whereby the placenta is expelled from the uterus after the neonate has exited, or else the placenta itself.  May I suggest 'post-natal'?  And to call infanticide after-birth or post-natal abortion is an egregious misuse of language inasmuch as abortion in this context is the termination of a pregnancy by killing of the fetus.  Infanticide is not the termination of  a pregnancy.  One cannot terminate a process that has come to fruition.   

Journeys and Preparations

We plan our journeys long and short.  We lay our plans for trips abroad well in advance.  And those who leave their homeland and emigrate to another country take special care.  Why then are we so careless about the journey on which all must embark and none return?

"Because it is a journey into sheer nonexistence.  One needn't be concerned about a future self that won't exist!"

Are you sure about that? Perhaps you are right; but how do you know?  Isn't this a question meriting some consideration?

What I Like About Wittgenstein

He was one serious man.  I have always had contempt for unserious people, unserious people in philosophy being the very worst. You know the type: the bland and blasé  whose civility is not born of wisdom and detachment but is a mere urbanity sired by a jocose superficiality.  I have always had the sense that something is stake in life, that it matters what we believe and how we live. What exactly is at stake, why our lives matter, and how best to respond to nihilists and Nietzsche's Last Men are profoundly baffling problems.  But that life is serious is a given.

Perhaps unfortunately, Wittgenstein seemed unable to 'punch the clock' and play the regular guy among regular guys for even a short time.  Wittgenstein died in the house of Dr and Mrs Bevan, a house that bore the auspicious name, 'Storeys End.'  Ray Monk relates the following anecdote:

Before Wittgenstein moved into their house, Dr Bevan had invited him for supper to introduce him to his wife.  She had been warned that Wittgenstein was not one for small talk and that she should be careful not to say anything thoughtless.  Playing it safe, she remained silent throughout the evening.  But when Wittgenstein mentioned his visit to Ithaca, she chipped in cheerfully,  'How lucky for you to go to America!' She realized at once that she had said the the wrong thing.  Wittgenstein fixed her with an intent stare: 'What do you mean, lucky?'  (Ludwig Wittgenstein: The Duty of Genius, p. 576.)

Poor Mrs Bevan!  The first shot depicts LW in 1925, the second on his death bed in 1951.

Ludwig08

Ludwig19

The Feckless Mr. Obama Did What?

He apologized for the unintentional burning of some copies of the Koran.  Unbelievable and disgusting.  If we can't dump this incompetent  come November, it may be all over for this great nation.  2012 is indeed a watershed election year.

Wise up, conservatives.  Don't hang back because Romney is not a true conservative. He isn't, of course:  he's a wishy-washy, flip-flopping pretty boy.   He's going to get shot up like hell in the crossfire from the Tea Party and the Occupy-X malcontents.  But he's electable and better than Obama. He's the best we got. 

Politics is a practical business. It is always about the lesser of evils, except when it is about the least of evils. It is not about being ideologically pure. It is about accomplishing something in a concrete situation in which holding out for the best is tantamount to acquiescing in the bad. Political choices are forced options in roughly William James' sense: he who abstains chooses willy-nilly. Not choosing the better amounts to a choice of the worse.

Each of the Republican contenders has drawbacks. But any of them would be better than Obama.  Even Ron Paul.

Never forget: Le mieux est l'ennemi du bien.  (Voltaire)   "The better is the enemy of the good." The thought is perhaps better captured by "The best is the enemy of the good." In an imperfect world it is folly to predicate action upon perfection. Will you hold out for the perfect spouse? Then you will remain alone. And if you yourself are less than perfect, how can you demand perfection in others?

Meditation on this truth may help conservatives contain their revulsion at their lousy choices. Obama, who has proven that he is a disaster for the country, got in in part because of conservatives who could not abide McCain.

To expect perfection in this fallen world is to succumb to the sort of pernicious utopianism that characterizes leftists.

Uptalk or ‘High Rising Terminal’

So that's what that annoying girl-talk mannerism is called:

But the idea that vocal fads initiated by young women eventually make their way into the general vernacular is well established. Witness, for example, the spread of uptalk, or “high-rising terminal.”

Starting in America with the Valley Girls of the 1980s (after immigrating from Australia, evidently), uptalk became common among young women across the country by the 1990s.

Talk like that, and you are, like, a bonehead?