Pascal on the Subject of Experience: A Non Sequitur?

I recently quoted Blaise Pascal, Pensees #108 (Krailsheimer, p. 57): "What part of us feels pleasure? Is it our hand, our arm, our flesh, or our blood? It must obviously be something immaterial."

 A reader comments, "Doesn't P. 108 strike you as a hopeless non-sequitur, if we take it as an argument at all? Just try to recast it as a valid inference."

If I thought that the aphorism embodied a non sequitur, I would not have approvingly quoted it.  So let me rise to the challenge and present Pascal's thought in the form of a valid argument.

But let's first note that  the first question in the Pascal quotation is genuine while the second is rhetorical.  The second, therefore, is a statement  in interrogative dress.  The second question expresses the proposition that nothing material is the subject of sentient states.  Needless to say, Pascal is not talking about just hand, arm, flesh, and blood.  They are but examples of any physical part of the body where 'body' covers brain as well.

But does the passage embody an argument?   The 'must' in the third sentence suggests that it does. So let's interpret the passage as expressing an enthymematic argument. The argument could be made explicit as follows:

1. We are sentient: we feel pleasure, pain, etc.  (suppressed premise)
2. Nothing material could be sentient.
Therefore
3. As subjects of sentient states we are not material beings.

Clarificatory note: (2) is to be understood as saying that nothing material could be the ultimate subject of sentient states, the ultimate bearer or possessor of such states.  This is compatible with the admission that, in a secondary sense, the body of a sentient being is also sentient.  (Compare indicative sentences and the propositions they express.  That propositions are the primary truth-bearers does not prevent us from saying that sentences are in a secondary sense either true or false.) 

The above is a valid argument: the conclusion follows from the premises.  Hence the Pascal passage, interpreted as I have interpreted, does not embody a non sequitur, let alone a "hopeless" non sequitur.

Of course, a much more interesting question is whether we have good reason to accept the premises.  Since the first is self-evident, the soundness of the argument rides on the second.   Now some will say that the argument begs the question at the second premise.  But that depends on what exactly 'begging the question' amounts to.  Let's not go there.  And please note that begging the question is an informal fallacy, whereas accusations of non sequitur question the formal validity of arguments.  I will cheerfully concede, however, that the anti-materialist must support (2): he cannot just proclaim it obvious or self-evident as he can in the case of (1).

I will conclude by pointing out that although (2) is not self-evident, neither is its negation.  So this is a point on which reasonable dispute is possible.  This is a live issue.  (That some do not consider it such is not to the point.) Subsequent posts will examine the case for the immateriality of the subject of experience.   

How Did We Get to be so Arrogant?

Recalling our miserably indigent origin in the the wombs of our mothers and the subsequent helplessness of infancy, how did we get to be so arrogant and self-important?

In a line often (mis)attributed to Augustine, but apparently from Bernard of Clairvaux, Inter faeces et urinam nascimur: "We are born between feces and urine."  So inauspicious a beginning for so proud a strut upon life's stage.

A Memory of Teaching

I am enjoying teaching quite a bit now that I no longer do it. With some things it is not the doing of it that we like so much as the having done it.

One day in class I carefully explained the abbreviation ‘iff’ often employed by philosophers and mathematicians to avoid writing ‘if and only if.’ I explained the logical differences among ‘if,’ ‘only if,’ and ‘if and only if.’ I gave examples. I brought in necessary and sufficient conditions. The whole shot. But I wasn’t all that surprised when I later read a student comment to the effect that Dr. V. can’t spell ‘if.’

Saturday Night at the Oldies: Marie/Maria/Mary

Beautiful names celebrated in song.

Elvis Presley, Marie's the Name of His Latest Flame
Bob Dylan, Absolutely Sweet Marie  By the way, this certified Dylanologist can attest that in the first line it is 'railroad GAUGE,' not 'railroad gate.'  'Gauge' is a measure of the width of the track; that's what our boy can't jump.
Bachelors, Marie

R. B. Greaves, Take a Letter, Maria

Jimi Hendrix, The Wind Cries 'Mary'
The Association, Along Comes Mary  I only just now fully appreciated these amazing lyrics.
Stevie Ray Vaughan, Mary Had a Little Lamb

And finally Mary takes Marty Robbins back after his tryst with the Devil Woman.

Butchvarov on Semi-Realism about Facts

This post takes up where Butchvarov Against Facts left off.  See the latter post for bibliographical data concerning the essay "Facts" which I presently have under my logical microscope.  And if you are a fan of Butch's work, all of my Butchvarov posts are collected in the aptly entitled Butchvarov category.

(The following is also highly relevant to the discussion currently in progress with the Londonistas, David Brightly and Edward the Ockhamist in the combox to this post.)

Butch's position is a nuanced one as one would expect.  He appreciates the strengths and weaknesses of both realism and anti-realism.  For the realist, there are facts.  For the anti-realist, there are no facts.  Let us briefly review why both positions are both attractive yet problematic.  We will then turn to semi-realism as to a via media between Scylla and Charybdis.

1. Take some such contingently true affirmative singular sentence as  'Al is fat.'  Surely with respect to such sentences there is more to truth than the sentences that are true.  There must be something external to the sentence that contributes to its being true, and this external something is not plausibly taken to be another sentence or the say-so of some person, or anything like that.  'Al is fat' is true because there is something in extralinguistic and extramental reality that 'makes' it true.  There is this short slacker dude, Al, and the guy weighs 250 lbs.  There is nothing linguistic or mental about that.  Here is the sound core of correspondence theories of truth.  Our sample sentence is not just true; it is true because of the way the world outside the mind and outside the sentence is configured.  The 'because' is not a causal 'because.'  The question is not the empirical-causal one as to why Al is fat.  He is fat because he eats too much.  The question concerns the ontological ground of the truth of the sentential representation, 'Al is fat.'   Since it is obvious that the sentence cannot just be true — given that it is not true in virtue of its logical form or ex vi terminorum — we must posit something external to the sentence that 'makes' it true.  I don't see how this can be avoided even though I admit that 'makes true' is not perfectly clear.

2. Now what is the nature of this external truth-maker?  It can't be Al by himself, and it can't be fatness by itself.  Nor can it be the pair of the two.  For it could be that Al exists and fatness exists, but the first does not instantiate the second.  What's needed, apparently, is the fact of Al's being fat.  So it seems we must add the category of fact to our ontology, to our categorial inventory.  Veritas sequitur esse is not enough.  It is not enough that 'Al' and 'Fat' have worldly referents; the sentence as a whole needs a worldly referent. Truth-makers cannot be 'things' or collections of same, but must be entities of a different categorial sort.  (Or at least this is so for the simple predications we are now considering.)

3. The argument I have just  sketched, the truth-maker argument for facts, is very powerful, but it gives rises to puzzles and protests.  There is the Strawsonian protest that facts are merely hypostatized sentences, shadows genuine sentences cast upon the world.  Butchvarov quotes Strawson's seminal 1950 discussion: "If you prise the sentences off the world, you prise the facts off it too. . . ." ("Facts," 73-74)  Strawson again: "The only plausible candidate for what (in the world) makes a sentence true is the fact it states; but the fact it states is not something in the world."

Why aren't facts in the world? Consider the putative fact of my table's being two inches from the wall.  Obviously, this fact is not itself two inches from the wall or in any spatial position.  The table and the wall are in space; the fact is not.  One can drive a nail into the table or into the wall, but not into the fact, etc.  Considerations such as these suggest to the anti-realist that facts are not in the world and that they are but sentences reified.  After all, to distinguish a fact from a non-fact (whether a particular or a universal) we must have recourse to a sentence: a fact is introduced as the worldly correlate of a true sentence.  If there is no access to facts except via sentences, as the correlates of true sentences, then this will suggest to those of an anti-realist bent that facts are hypostatizations of true declarative sentences.

One might also cite the unperceivability of facts as a reason to deny their existence.  I see the table, and I see the wall.  It may also be granted that I see that the desk is about two inches from the wall.  But does it follow that I see a relational fact?  Not obviously.  If I see a relational fact, then presumably I see the relation two inches from.  But I don't see this relation.  And so, Butchvarov argues (84-85), one does not see the relational fact either.  Their invisibility is a strike against them.  A careful examination of this argument would make a nice separate post.  And indeed it did.

Another of the puzzles about facts concerns how a fact is related to its constituents.  Obviously a fact is not identical to its constituents.  This is because the constituents can exist without the fact existing.  Nor can a fact be an entity in addition to its constituents, something over and above them, for the simple reason that it is composed of them.  We can put this by saying that no fact is wholly distinct from its constituents.  The fact is more than its constituents, but apart from them it is nothing.  A third possibility is that a fact is the togetherness of its constituents, where this togetherness is grounded in a a special unifying constituent.  Thus the fact of a's being F consists of a, F-ness, and a nexus of exemplification.  But this leads to Bradley's regress. 

A fact is not something over and above its constituents but their contingent unity.  This unity, however, cannot be explained by positing a special unifying constituent, on pain of Bradley's regress. which is, pace Richard Gaskin, vicious.  So if a fact has a unifier, that unifier must be external to the fact.  But what could that be?  It would have to be something like Kant's transcendental unity of apperception.  I push this notion in an onto-theological direction in my book, A Paradigm Theory of Existence: Onto-Theology Vindicated.  But by taking this line, I move away from the realism that the positing of facts was supposed to secure.  Facts are supposed to be ontological grounds, extramental and extralinguistic.  If mind or Mind is brought in in any form to secure the unity of a truth-making fact, then we end up with some form of idealism, whether transcendental or onto-theological, or what have you.

4.  So we are in an aporetic pickle.  We have good reason to be realists and we have good reason to be anti-realists.  (The arguments above on both sides were mere sketches; they are stronger than they might appear. ) Since we cannot be both realists and anti-realists, we might try to mediate the positions and achieve a synthesis.   My book was one attempt at a synthesis.  Butchvarov's semi-realism is another.  I am having a hard time, though, understanding what exactly Butchvarov's semi-realism is supposed to be.

If the realist says that there are facts, and that anti-realist says that there aren't, the semi-realist maintains that 'There are facts' is an "Improper proposition" (87) so that both asserting it and denying it are improper.

Butchvarov relies crucially on Wittgenstein's distinction between formal and material concepts and his related distinction between saying and showing.  Object is an example of a formal concept, while book is  an example of a material concept.  That there are books can be said.  That there are objects cannot be said.  Instead, it is shown by the use of names.   

'This is an object,' unlike 'This is white,' is a pseudo-proposition.  This is because it attempts to say what can only be shown.  'This is an object' does not say anything. "It shows the logical category to which the item belongs." (75) 

Fact, like object, is a formal concept.  It follows that 'There are facts' and 'A sentence expresses a fact' are pseudo-propositions.  They are pseudo because they attempt to say what can only be shown.   But why , exactly, does 'A sentence expresses a fact' not say or state anything?  Presumably because ". . . it presupposes what it purports to say because 'fact' is the philosophical term for what sentences express." (76)

The following  cannot be said: 'This page is white is a fact.'  It cannot be said because it is ill-formed. (88)  We can of course say, 'That this page is white is a fact.'  But 'that this page is white' is not a sentence, but a noun phrase.  We cannot use this noun phrase to refer to the fact because what we end up referring to is an object, not a fact.  Though a fact is not a sentence or a proposition, it is proposition-like:  it has astructure that mirrors the structure of a proposition. No object, however, is proposition-like.  To express the fact we must use the sentence.  Using the sentence, we show what cannot be said.

Butchvarov's discussion from p. 88 to the end of his article is extremely murky and unsatisfactory.  His semi-realism is not a clear alternative to realism and anti-realism.  Butch sees the problem with crystal clarity, but I cannot see what exactly his solution is.

He tells us that semi-realism with respect to facts  differs from anti-realism by acknowledging that there is more to the truth of true sentences than the sentences that are true.  (88) Excellent!  This is a non-negotiable 'datanic' point.  If it is true that Jack loves Jill, then there must be something in the world that makes this true, and it cannot be Jack, or Jill, or loves, or the set or sum of all three.  If these three items are what the sentence 'Jack loves Jill' are about, then the truth-maker has to be distinct from each and from the set or sum of all. (88)

But Butch also tells us that semi-realism about facts differs from realism by refusing to countenance a special category of entity, the category of fact, the members of which are the referents of declarative sentences. What bothers Butchvarov is that "facts cannot be referred to or described independently of the sentences expressing them" (88)  a consideration which renders antirealim about facts plausible and the correspondence theory of truth implausible. (88)

So what is Butch's third way?  How does he get between realism and anti-realism.  He seems to be saying that there are facts but that they cannot be said, only shown.  But of course this cannot be what he is saying if one cannot say that there are facts!

If there is something that cannot be said but only shown, and what is shown are the referents of sentences, then he is saying that there are the referents of sentences in which case he is saying that there is what he says can only be shown.

This is highly unsatisfactory and barely coherent if coherent at all.  I am tempted to say to Butch, "Look, either there are facts or there aren't. Which is it?  Bringing in Wittgenstein's saying v. showing distinction only muddies already troubled waters."

So I don't see that semi-realism about facts is a viable position.  I suggest we admit that we are stuck with a genuine aporia.

Old Paul Harvey Joke

Man attempts to enter swanky restaurant. Maitre d' informs him that coat and tie are required. Man returns to car, dons coat, and tries once more to enter. Maitre d' says that a tie is also necessary. Man returns to car, opens trunk, takes out jumper cables, and arranges them around his neck. Heated discussion ensues, but maitre d' finally relents: "OK, you can go in, but just don't start anything!"

Harvey_0301I remember exactly when and where I heard this joke.  It was June of 1995.  I was headed from Phoenix to Charlottesville to take part in an NEH Summer Seminar on the Philosophy of Science at the University of Virginia.  As I was 'motorvatin'* in my '88 Jeep Cherokee past  Knoxville, Tennessee on Interstate 40, old Paul Harvey (1918-2009) came on the air and told the above joke.

Now you know the rest of the story.

_______________

*'Motorvatin' borrowed from Chuck Berry's Maybelline.

A Bit of Freedom Comes to Castro’s Island

Fidel Castro came to power in 1959.  In his socialist worker's paradise home ownership was legally forbidden until just now.  Suppose you were 30 in '59, at the age when many are in a position to buy a house for the first time.  Well, now you are 82 with a year to live.  You can buy a house to die in. 

Ain't socialism grand?  That's why leftists want it here, there, and everywhere. 

Private property is the foundation of individual liberty.  This being Friday afternoon, I reckon I'll fix me a Cuba Libre and hoist my glass to liberty.

An Infinite Regress Argument Against Truth-Makers? Round Two

The truth-maker of 'Tom sits' cannot be Tom.  Otherwise it would also be the truth-maker of 'Tom stands' which is the logical contrary of the first sentence.  And that won't do, as London Ed appreciates.  But now what about 'Tom exists'?  This too is a contingent sentence, and so it too needs a truth-maker.  I say the truth-maker is Tom.  The truth-maker of 'Tom sits' is a fact, the fact of Tom's being seated. This fact is a complex having Tom himself and the property of being seated as constitutents.  (Let's not worry about what holds these constituents together!)  The truth-maker of 'Tom exists,' however, is not a fact having Tom and the property of existence as constituents.

Why the asymmetry?  Because existence is not a property in the same sense of 'property' in which being-seated is a property.  I won't repeat the many arguments I have given on this blog and in my articles and book.

But suppose you, like Ed, see symmetry where I see asymmetry.  You think that the truth-maker of 'Tom exists'  is the fact of Tom's existence, or the fact of Tom's existing.   Call this truth-making fact T.  Since T exists, and exists contingently, 'T exists' needs a truth-maker.  I am willing to concede that a vicious infinite regress then arises, though the matter is not entirely clear.

But what does this show?  I say it shows that the assumption that existence is a property is mistaken. 

The dialectical situation is this.  There are plenty of arguments why existence cannot be a property.  And we have good reason to admit truth-makers for contingent truths.  So in the case of contingent existential truths like 'Tom exists' we should say that it is the referent of the subject term itself that is the truth-maker.

Frege’s Regress

Some of us of a realist persuasion hold that at least  some truths have need of worldly correlates that 'make them true.' This notion that (some) truths need truthmakers  is a variation on the ancient theme that truth implies a correspondence of what-is said or what-is-thought with what-is.  You all know the passages in Aristotle where this theme is sounded.

Example. Having just finished my drink, the thought expressed by an assertive utterance of 'My glass is empty' is true. But the thought is not just true; it is true because of the way things are 'outside' my mind. The glass (in reality) is (in reality) empty. So the realist says something like this: the thought (proposition, judgmental content, etc.) is true in virtue of the obtaining of a truthmaking state of affairs or fact. The thought is true because the fact obtains or exists, where 'because' does not have a causal sense but expresses the asymmetrical relation of truthmaking. The fact is the ontological ground (not the cause) of the thought's being true.

One might wonder whether this realist theory of truth leads to an infinite regress, and if it does, whether the regress is vicious. Some cryptic remarks in Gottlob Frege's seminal article, "The Thought: A Logical Inquiry," suggest a regress argument against the correspondence theory of truth.

For Frege, a thought (Gedanke) or proposition is the sense (Sinn) of a context-free declarative sentence. 'Snow is white' and its German translation Schnee ist weiss are examples of context-free declarative sentences. 'Context-free' means that all indexical elements have been extruded including verb tenses.  When we say that a sentence such as 'Snow is white' is true, what we are really saying is that the sense of this sentence is true.  The primary truth-vehicles are propositions, sentences being truth-bearers only insofar as they express true propositions.

Now could the being-true of a sentential sense consist in its correspondence to something else? Frege rejects this notion: "In any case, being true does not consist in the correspondence of this sense with something else, for otherwise the question of truth would reiterate itself to infinity." (Philosophical Logic, ed. Strawson, p. 19) A little earlier, Frege writes,

For what would we then have to do to decide whether something were true? We should have to enquire whether it were true that an idea and a reality, perhaps, corresponded in the laid-down respect. And then we should be confronted by a question of the same kind and the game could begin again. So the attempt to explain truth as correspondence collapses. And every other attempt to define truth collapses too. (Ibid.)

What exactly is Frege's argument here? We begin by noting that

1. Necessarily, for any proposition p, it is true that p iff p.

This equivalence, which I hope nobody will deny, gives rise to an infinite regress, call it the truth regress. For from (1) we can infer that if snow is white, then it is true that snow is white, and
iterating the operation, if it is true that snow is white, then it is true that it is true that snow is white, and so on without end. This is an infinite regress all right, but it is obviously benign. For if
we establish the base proposition, Snow is white, then we ipso facto establish all the iterations. Our establishing that snow is white does not depend on a prior establishing that it is true that snow is white. In general, our establishing of any proposition in the infinite series does not depend on having first established the next proposition in the series. The truth regress, though infinite, is benign.

Note that if the truth-regress were vicious, then the notion of truth itself would have been shown to be incoherent. For the truth-regress is a logical consequence of the equivalence principle (1) above, a principle that simply unpacks our understanding of 'true.' So if the truth-regress were vicious, then (1) would not be unproblematic, as it surely is.

It follows that if Frege's Regress is to amount to a valid objection to the definition of truth as correspondence, "and [to] every other attempt to define truth," then Frege's Regress must be different from the truth regress. In particular, it must be a vicious regress. Only vicious infinite regresses have the force of philosophical refutations.  But then what is Frege's Regress? Consider

2. Necessarily, for any p, it is true that p iff *p* corresponds to reality.

One can think up counterexamples to (2), but the precise question before us is whether (2) issues in a vicious infinite regress. Now what would this regress (progress?) look like? Let 'T(p)' abbreviate
'it is true that p.' And let 'C*p*' abbreviate '*p* corresponds to reality.' (The asterisks function like Quine's corners.) The regress, then, looks like this:

3. p iff T(p) iff C*p* iff T(C*p*) iff C(T(C*p*)) iff T(C(T(C*p*) iff C(T(C(T(C*p*)) . . .
   
Is (3) a vicious regress? It would be vicious if one could establish T(p) only by first establishing C*p* and so on. But if these two terms have the same sense, in the way that the first and second terms have the same sense, then (3) will be as benign as the truth regress.  Suppose that 'It is true that p' and '*p* corresponds to reality' have  the same sense. Suppose in other words that the correspondence theory of truth is the theory that the sense or meaning of these distinct sentences is the same. It would then follow that to establish that it is true that p and to establish that *p* corresponds to reality would come to the same thing, whence it would follow that the regress is benign.

For the regress to be vicious, the second and third terms must differ in sense. For again, if the second and third terms do not differ in sense, then to establish one is to establish the other, and it would not be case that to establish that it is true that p one would first have to establish that *p* corresponds to reality or to some chunk of reality. But if the second and third terms do not differ in sense, then it appears that the regress doesn't get started at all. For the move from the second term to the third to be valid, the entailment must be grounded in the sense of the second term: the third term must merely unpack the sense of the second term. If, however, the two terms are not sense-connected, then no infinite regress is ignited.

My interim conclusion is that it is not at all clear that Frege's Regress is either benign, or not a regress at all, and therefore not at all clear that it constitutes a valid objection to theories of truth, in particular to the theory that truth resides in correspondence.

REFERENCE: Peter Carruthers, "Frege's Regress," Proc. Arist. Soc., vol. LXXXII, 1981/1982, pp. 17-32.