Nietzsche and the Appeal of the Verifiability Criterion

A long-gone blogger once asked:

Has anyone ever seen an argument – or even a plea – in favor of the verification principle? I mean, beyond anything that just goes, "Hey, now this is cool. We can bash the ethicists, metaphysicians,
and theologians quite thoroughly with this."

As a preliminary stab at an answer, consider the Nietzsche quotation that Richard von Mises uses for the motto of his book Positivism (Harvard University Press, 1951, p. xii):

. . . die kleinen, unscheinbaren vorsichtigen Wahrheiten, welche mit strenger Methode gefunden werden, hoeher zu schaetzen als jene weiten, schwebenden, umschleiernden Allgemeinheiten, nach denen das Beduerfnis religoeser oder kuenstlerischer Zeitalter greift.

. . . to value more highly the little, unpretentious, cautious truths, arrived at by rigorous methods, than those vast, floating, veiling generalities for which the yearnings of a religious or artistic era reach.

A plea for the Verifiability Principle (VP) might just consist of an invocation of the above value judgment: precise, verifiable knowledge about matters of empirical fact is of higher value than broad and uncertain theories about ultimates like God and the soul.

Of course, no (classical) metaphysician shares this value judgment — a judgment which, nota bene, must be merely subjective on good positivist principles — and will hasten to point out that the Principle is self-vitiating in that it implies its own lack of cognitive significance. (Exercise for the reader: 'verify' that for yourself.)

Of course, Hume, whose famous Fork is a conceptual precursor of the VP, faces a similar difficulty: What is the epistemological status of the principle that every significant idea derives from a sensory impression? Does that express a matter of empirical fact? No. A mere relation of ideas? No.

Then consign it to the flames, for it can contain nothing but sophistry and illusion!

Happy Birthday to the King of the Beats, the Saint of the Slackers

KerouacAt any given time I am reading about 20 books. Yesterday afternoon, while reducing the whole of an Arturo Fuente 'Curly Head' to smoke and ashes, I enjoyed Chapter Seven, "Beats, Nonconformists, Playboys, and Delinquents" of Tom Lutz's Doing Nothing: A History of Loafers, Loungers, Slackers, and Bums in America (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2006).  The chapter in question contains a penetrating discussion of Jack Kerouac's particular mode of slacking off.  It is marred by only one inaccuracy: Lutz (p. 215) confuses Boston College with Boston University.  Kerouac received a football scholarship to BC, not BU.  (He chose Columbia, however, fatefully as it turned out: had he gone to BC there would have been no meeting of Ginsberg and Burroughs, and no Beat Generation).

My chance reading about Jack yesterday was most auspicious in that today, the 12th, is his birthday.  Had his slackery not led him deep into the bottle, he might have been with us today.  But he'd be an old coot.  Today is the 90th anniversary of his birth.

Does it matter much whether one gets off the "slaving meat wheel" at 47 or at 90?  "Safe in heaven dead" is the main thing.

Kerouac grave

What is Social Justice?

How could any decent person be opposed to social justice? Don't we all want to live in a just society? But as Barry Loberfeld points out,

The signature of modern leftist rhetoric is the deployment of terminology that simply cannot fail to command assent. As [George] Orwell himself recognized, even slavery could be sold if labeled "freedom." In this vein, who could ever conscientiously oppose the pursuit of "social justice," — i.e., a just society?

One of my criticisms of Bill O'Reilly is that he will use the phrase 'social justice' without explaining what it means. He will say something like, 'Obama is for social justice.' The average person who hears that will think, 'Well, what's wrong with that?' This is where the lately lamented (here and here) anti-intellectualism of conservatives comes back to bite them. Too many conservatives fail to realize the importance of defining one's terms before launching into a debate. Of course, I am talking about ordinary conservative folk and their political and talk-show representatives; I am not talking about conservative intellectuals.

Define your terms! This is is such an obvious demand that I feel slightly embarrassed to make it; but given the low level of culture one must make it and make it again.

Walter Block, here, offers a characterization that Mr O'Reilly should be able to wrap his 'no-spin' head around:

First, this concept [social justice] may be defined substantively. Here, it is typically associated with left wing or socialist analyses, policies and prescriptions. For example, poverty is caused by unbridled capitalism; the solution is to heavily regulate markets, or ban them outright. Racism and sexism account for the relative plight of racial minorities and women; laws should be passed prohibiting their exercise. Greater reliance on government is required as the solution of all sorts of social problems. The planet is in great danger from environmental despoliation, due to an unjustified reliance on private property rights. Taxes are too low; they should be raised. Charity is an insult to the poor, who must obtain more revenues by right, not condescension. Diversity is the sine qua non of the fair society. Discrimination is one of the greatest evils to have ever beset mankind. Use of terminology such as "mankind" is sexist, and constitutes hate speech.

Now I refer you to an excellent First Things article by Michael Novak which you should carefully study. Excerpt:

From this line of reasoning it follows that “social justice” would have its natural end in a command economy in which individuals are told what to do, so that it would always be possible to identify those in charge and to hold them responsible. This notion presupposes that people are guided by specific external directions rather than internalized, personal rules of just conduct. It further implies that no individual should be held responsible for his relative position. To assert that he is responsible would be “blaming the victim.” It is the function of “social justice” to blame somebody else, to blame the system, to blame those who (mythically) “control” it. As Leszek Kolakowski wrote in his magisterial history of communism, the fundamental paradigm of Communist ideology is guaranteed to have wide appeal: you suffer; your suffering is caused by powerful others; these oppressors must be destroyed. We need to hold someone accountable, Hayek notes, even when we recognize that such a protest is absurd.

Novak seems to think that there is such a thing as social justice "rightly understood." I am not convinced that right-thinking people should use the term at all. The Left has destroyed it and now they own it. Anyway, what  is wrong with plain old 'justice'? How could justice fail to be social? 'Social justice' as currently used carries a load of leftist baggage.

As I have said many times, if you are a conservative, don't talk like a (contemporary) liberal. Don't use question-begging phrases and epithets such as 'social justice,' 'Islamophobe,' and 'homophobe.' Never acquiesce in the Left's acts of linguistic vandalism. If you let them command the terms of the debate, you will lose. Insist on clarity of expression and definition of terms. Language matters.

'Social justice,' then is a term that our side ought to avoid except when criticizing it. Novak, however, thinks that the phrase has a legitimate use:

 

Social justice rightly understood is a specific habit of justice that is “social” in two senses. First, the skills it requires are those of inspiring, working with, and organizing others to accomplish together a work of justice. These are the elementary skills of civil society, through which free citizens exercise self–government by doing for themselves (that is, without turning to government) what needs to be done. Citizens who take part commonly explain their efforts as attempts to “give back” for all that they have received from the free society, or to meet the obligations of free citizens to think and act for themselves. The fact that this activity is carried out with others is one reason for designating it as a specific type of justice; it requires a broader range of social skills than do acts of individual justice.

Khan Academy

60 Minutes last night did a segment on the Khan Academy, an online source of short tutorials in mathematics, science, and other subjects.  A wonderful resource for homeschoolers and anyone interested in filling in the gaps in his education.  I viewed a couple of algebra and a couple of probability lectures last night and found them to be of high quality.  Recommended by Bill Gates.

On the Expressibility of ‘Something Exists’

Surely this is a valid and sound argument:

1. Stromboli exists.
Ergo
2. Something exists.

Both sentences are true; both are meaningful; and the second follows from the first.  How do we translate the argument into the notation of standard first-order predicate logic with identity? Taking a cue from Quine we may formulate (1) as

1*.  For some x, x = Stromboli. In English:

1**. Stromboli is identical with something.

But how do we render (2)?  Surely not as 'For some x, x exists' since there is no first-level predicate of existence in standard logic.  And surely no ordinary predicate will do.  Not horse, mammal, animal, living thing, material thing, or any other predicate reachable by climbing the tree of Porphyry.  Existence is not a summum genus.  (Aristotle, Met. 998b22, AnPr. 92b14) What is left but self-identity?  Cf. Frege's dialog with Puenjer.

So we try,

2*. For some x, x = x.  In plain English:

2**. Something is self-identical.

So our original argument becomes:

1**. Stromboli is identical with something.
Ergo
2**. Something is self-identical.

But what (2**) says is not what (2) says.   The result is a murky travesty of the original luminous argument.

What I am getting at is that standard logic cannot state its own presuppositions.  It presupposes that everything exists (that there are no nonexistent objects) and that something exists.  But it lacks the expressive resources to state these presuppositions.  The attempt to state them results either in  nonsense — e.g. 'for some x, x' — or a proposition other than the one that needs expressing. 

It is true that something exists, and I am certain that it is true: it follows immediately from the fact that I exist.  But it cannot be said in standard predicate logic.

What should we conclude?  That standard logic is defective in its treatment of existence or that there are things that can be SHOWN but not SAID?  In April 1914. G.E. Moore travelled to Norway and paid a visit to Wittgenstein where the  latter dictated some notes to him.  Here is one:

In order that you should have a language which can express or say everything that can be said, this language must have certain properties; and when this is the case, that it has them can no longer be said in that language or any language. (Notebooks 1914-1916, p. 107)

Applied to the present example:  A language that can SAY that e.g. island volcanos exist by saying that some islands are volcanos or that Stromboli exists by saying that Stromboli is identical to something must have certain properties.  One of these is that the domain of quantification contains only existents and no Meinongian nonexistents.  But THAT the language has this property cannot be said in it or in any language.  Hence it cannot be said in the language of standard logic that the domain of quantification is a domain of existents or that something exists or that everything exists or that it is not the case that something does not exist.

Well then, so much the worse for the language of standard logic!  That's one response.  But can some other logic do better?  Or should we say, with the early Wittgenstein, that there is indeed the Inexpressible, the Unsayable, the Unspeakable, the Mystical?  And that it shows itself?

Es gibt allerdings Unaussprechliches.  Dies zeigt sich, es ist das Mystische. (Tractatus Logico-Philosphicus 6.522)

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.