An eager young nun and a wise old nun were discussing teaching over lunch. The young nun was waxing enthusiastic over the privilege, but also the responsibility, of forming young minds. The old nun took a glass of water, inserted her forefinger, and agitated the water. Suddenly she removed her finger and the water immediately returned to its quiescent state.
That, said the old nun, is what teaching is like.
Edward, the proprietor of Beyond Necessity, presents an infinite regress argument against truth-makers. Here it is:
. . . I reject the idea of a truthmaker altogether. If there is such a truthmaker, let it be A, it comes into existence when Socrates sits down, and ceases to exist when he stands up. If it were something real – let’s say a candle flame, which comes into existence when we light the candle, and ceases to exist when we blow it out – then there would have to be a further truthmaker for A existing. I.e. the sentence “A exists” can be true or false, and so requires a further truthmaker B, that makes it true when B exists. But then “B exists” requires yet another truthmaker, and so on ad infinitum. That is absurd. Therefore, there are no truthmakers.
I am not sure Ed understands what a truth-maker is. Here is a Philosophy 101 explanation. Suppose we have some true contingent declarative sentence such as 'Tom is tired.' The truth-maker theorist maintains that for contingent true sentences, there is more to the sentence than its being true. There must be something external to the sentence, something that is not a sentence, that 'makes it true.' If you deny this, then you are saying that the sentence is just true and that there is no explanation of its being true in terms of anything extralinguistic. And surely that is absurd, assuming you are not some sort of linguistic idealist. 'Tom is tired' cannot just be true; it is true because there exists a man to whom 'Tom' refers and this man is in a certain state.
Could Tom by himself be the truth-maker of 'Tom is tired'? No. For if he were, then he would also be the truth-maker of 'Tom is manic' — which is absurd. This is why truth-maker theorists (not all but most) introduce facts or states of affairs as truth-makers. David Armstrong is a prominent contemporary example.
Now what are we to make of Edward's argument? The argument seems to be that if sentence s has a truthmaker t, then the sentence 't exists' must also have a truth-maker, call it t*. But then the sentence 't* exists' must itself have a truth-maker, t**, and so on ad infinitum.
Now this is a terrible, a thoroughly and breath-takingly rotten, argument which is why no one in the literature (to the best of my knowledge) has ever made it. Suppose that 'Tom is tired' is made-true by the fact of Tom's being tired. Call this fact F. If 'Tom is tired' is true, then F exists, whence it follows that 'F exists' is true. (This of course assumes that there is the sentence 'F exists,' an assumption I will grant arguendo.) Since 'F exists' is contingent, we can apply the truth-maker principle and ask for its truth-maker. But surely its truth-maker is just F. So there is no regress at all, let alone an infinite regress, let alone a vicious infinite regress. (Please note that only vicious infinite regresses have the force of refutations.) 'Tom is tired' has F as its truth-maker, and 'F exists' has the very same F as its truth-maker. Tom's being tired makes true both 'Tom is tired' and 'Tom's being tired exists.' No regress.
So Ed's argument is a complete non-starter. There are, however, plausible arguments against facts as truth-makers. See my Facts category.
This from a reader:
. . . I am now in my senior year as a philosophy major, considering strongly the prospect of grad school. However, I remain deeply frustrated with myself with regard to my academic discipline and intellectual ability. Instead of philosophy making me proud–which some claim it does–it humbles me. But it does so to such a degree that I feel inadequate. So I want to ask what the remedy is for these frustrations. Also, have you encountered this, specifically as an undergrad, or in grad school? I feel as though I care too deeply about philosophy to 'give it up'. I will do it regardless. Though I've been told I have some ability, I wonder if pressing on to grad school is the way to go given these frustrations.
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.
Is it my eyeglasses that see yonder mountain? No, they are merely part of the instrumentality of vision. Is it my eyes that see the mountain, or any part of the eye (retina, cornea, etc.)? The optic nerves or the visual cortex? All of this stuff hooked together? If you say yes, then what accounts for the unity of the visual experience? Eyeglasses, eyes, and all the rest are merely parts of the instrumentality of visual consciousness, its physical substratum. Not eye, but I see the mountain. What am I? Arguably, if not obviously, something immaterial.
Either mix or don't mix. If you mix, you must move to the level of your companions, which is often to move down. If you don't mix, then they will hate you for being a snob. So you either degrade yourself or incur their dislike.
Mixing a little is no real solution, since they will resent you for not mixing a lot. Any attempted distancing will be perceived as a slight.
A social pariah does not face the social dilemma, but then neither does he reap any of the benefits of communal living.
Familiarity breeds contempt, but aloofness breeds the opposite, envious dislike.
Dilemma or false alternative?
Critical thinking is not necessarily opposed to the status quo. To criticize is not to oppose, but to sift, to assess, to assay, to evaluate, to separate the true from the false. A critical thinker may well end up supporting the existing state of things in this or that respect. It is a fallacy of the Left to think that any supporter of any aspect of the status quo is an ‘apologist’ for it in some pejorative sense of this term.
This mistake presumably has its roots in the nihilism of the Left. The leftist is incapable of appreciating what actually exists because he measures it against a standard that does not exist, and that in many cases cannot exist. The leftist is a Nowhere Man who judges the topos quo from the vantage point of utopia.
There is no place like utopia, of course, but only because utopia is no place at all.
This weblog commenced on 4 May 2004 and has been in operation for seven and a half years. This, the latest incarnation, the Typepad version, began on Halloween 2008. Here are the posts from three years ago. Typepad is not the perfect platform; I doubt if there is one. But it is superior for my purposes to the crappy Blogger, the defunct Powerblogs, and the adequate WordPress.
Readership is trending upwards. I now routinely receive 1,000 to 1,700 pageviews per day. The total pageview count for the last three years is now over one million: 1,029,176 as of a few moments ago. That averages to 939.89 pageviews/day with 2,828 total posts and 4,971 comments.
Can you say cacoethes scribendi?
I've missed only a few days in these seven and a half years so it's a good bet I'll be blogging 'for the duration.' It's like reading and thinking and meditating and running and hiking and playing chess and breathing and eating and drinking coffee. It is not something one gives up until forced to. Some of us are just natural-born scribblers. We were always scribbling, on looseleaf, in notebooks, on the back of envelopes, in journals daily maintained. This is just an electronic extension of all of that.
Except now I conduct my education in public. This has some disadvantages, but they are vastly outweighed by the advantages. I have met a lot of interesting and stimulating characters via this blog, many in the flesh. You bait your hook and cast it into the vasty deeps of cyberspace and damned if you don't snag some interesting fish. The occasional scumsucker and bottomfeeder is no counterargument.
I thank you for your patronage, and I hope my writings are of use not just to me.
Why do we consider last words significant? Is it because we suppose that the moment of death is or can be a moment of heightened existential lucidity? Here are Steve Jobs' last words as reported by his sister. Brace yourself.
Zombies and Other Minds are both well-known philosophical topics, though Zombies are 'hotter': the heyday of Other Minds debates was back in the '50s and '60s. How are they related? Not by identity, though some do confuse the two topics. They are distinct in that Other Minds belongs to epistemology whereas Zombies belongs to ontology. Let me see if I can work this out in detail.
1. What is a zombie?
You will have gathered that a zombie is a creature of philosophical fiction conjured up to render graphic a philosophical issue and to throw certain questions in the philosophy of mind into relief. A zombie is a living being that is physically and behaviorally exactly like a living human being except that it lacks (phenomenal) consciousness. Cut a zombie open, and you find exactly what you would find were you to cut a human being open. And in terms of linguistic and nonlinguistic behavior, there is no way to tell a human being from a zombie. (So don't think of something sleepy, or drugged, or comatose or Halloweenish as in the picture above.) When a zombie sees a tree, what is going on in the zombie's brain is a 'visual' computational process, but the zombie lacks what a French philosopher would call interiority. There is no irreducible subjectivity, no irreducible intentionality, no qualitative feel to the 'visual' processing; there is nothing it is like for a zombie to see a female zombie or to desire her. (What's it like to be a zombie? There is nothing it is like to be a zombie.) I suspect that Daniel Dennett is a zombie. But I have and can have no evidence for this suspicion. His denial of qualia is not evidence. It might just be evidence of his being a sophist. More to the point, his linguistic behavior and facial expressions could be just the same as those of a non-zombie qualia-denier.
2. Where do zombies come from?
Zombies surface within the context of discussions of physicalism. Physicalism is an ontological doctrine, a doctrine about what ultimately exists, what exists in the most fundamental sense of 'exists.' The physicalist is committed to the proposition that everything, or at least everything concrete, is either physical or determined by the physical. To be a bit more precise, physicalism is usefully viewed as the conjunction of an 'inventory thesis' which specifies physicalistically admissible individuals and a 'determination thesis' which specifies physicalistically admissible properties. What the inventory thesis says, at a first approximation, is that every concretum is either a physical item or composed of physical items. As for the determination thesis, what it says is that physical property-instantiations determine all other property-instantiations; equivalently, every nonphysical property-instantiation supervenes on physical property-instantiations. This implies that all mental facts supervene upon physical facts. So if a being is conscious, then this fact about it supervenes upon, is determined by, its physical properties. This implies that there cannot be two beings, indiscernible with respect to all physical properties, such that the one is conscious while the other is not. This in turn rules out the possibility of zombies. For, if physicalism is true, once the physical properties are fixed, the mental properties are also automatically fixed.
3. What useful work do zombies do?
If zombies are metaphysically (broadly logically) possible, then physicalism is false. That's their job: to serve as counterexamples to physicalism. For if zombies are possible, then it is not the case that every nonphysical property-instantiation supervenes upon a physical property-instantiation: a zombie has all the same physical properties as its indiscernible non-zombie twin, but is not conscious. The possibility of zombies implies that consciousness is non-supervenient, something in addition to a being's physical makeup. So one anti-physicalist argument goes like this:
1. If physicalism is true, then every nonphysical property-instantiation supervenes upon a physical property-instantiation.
2. If zombies are possible, then it is not the case that every nonphysical property-instantiation supervenes upon a physical property-instantiation.
3. Zombies are possible.
Therefore
4. Physicalism is not true.
This is a valid argument the soundness of which rides on premise (3). Here is where the fight will come. Without questioning the validity of the argument — physicalists after all are benighted but not stupid — the physicalist will run the argument in reverse. He will deny the conclusion and then deny (3). In effect, he will argue from (1) & (2) & (~4) to (~3). He will deny the very possibility of zombies. He will insist that anything that behaves just like a conscious person and has the 'innards' of a conscious person JUST IS a conscious person.
Now I find that absurd: it is a denial of that subjectivity which is properly accessed only via the irreducible first-person singular point of view. Nevertheless, I will have a devil of a time budging my materialist-functionalist interlocutor. Materialists are bloody objectivists: they think that anythng that is not objectively accessible in the third-person way just isn't there at all, or it if is 'there,' is not to be taken seriously.
Can one support (3) in a manner so compelling as to convince the recalcitrant materialist? After all, (3) is not self-evident. If it were self-evident, then we would have a 'knock-down' argument against physicalism. But there are few if any 'knock-down' (absolutely compelling) arguments in philosophy.
Now zombies are certainly conceivable. But it is not clear whether conceivability entails metaphysical (broadly logical) possibility, which is in play in (3). So it is not clear whether the conceivability of zombies is a compelling reason to reject physicalism. The question of the relation between conceivability and possibility is a difficult one. There is some discussion of this in the conceivability category.
The truth of physicalism is not my main concern this Halloween. My main concern is merely to explain the role of the zombie Gedankenexperiment. The point is that zombies figure in discussions of the ontological thesis of physicalism. If zombies are possible, then physicalism is false.
4. Zombies and Other Minds
So what is the difference between the Zombie question and the Other Minds question? I'll have to think about this in greater depth, but here are some 'shoot-from-the hip' remarks of the sort one can get away with on a weblog.
Suppose Dennett is a zombie as I suspect. The poor creature has no inner life, no interiority. Since he has no mind in the sense of 'mind' in which I know that I have a mind, he cannot be an other mind to me or to any other minded individual. If an organism has no mind, then no question can arise as to how one knows or rationally believes that it has a mind, nor any question as to how one knows nor rationally believes that it is in one state of mind rather than another. It is these epistemological questions that arise within the context of discussions of Other Minds.
As I see it, if physicalism is true, then we are all zombies. We are all stumbling around 'in the dark.' But if so, then the epistemological problems associated with the Other Minds debate should have fairly easy solutions. If verbal and non-verbal behavior is constitutive of mentality, then I should be able to know that you are skeptical or angry or bored or fearful just by looking at your face, observing your 'body language,' and listening to your words. External criteria would suffice. But if we are not zombies, and physicalism is false, then the epistemological questions regain their urgency.
Whatever the exact details, the Zombie and Other Minds questions are not to be conflated.
If you want to spend your mornings thinking and trancing, then you cannot spend your nights drinking and dancing.
Here are the attributes al-Ghazzali recommends seeking in a prospective wife. (Alchemy of Happiness, p. 96 ff.)
1. Chastity
2. Good disposition
3. Beauty ("See a woman before marrying her.")
4. The sum paid by the husband should be moderate
5. She should not be barren
6. Of good stock
7. Not previously married
8. Not too nearly related to her husband.
The importance of #3 is contested, however, by Jimmy Soul inter alia. Otherwise, it is pretty good advice.
From The Alchemy of Happiness, p. 48:
Another dangerous property of worldly things is that they appear at first as mere trifles, but each of these so-called 'trifles' branches out into countless ramifications until they swallow up the whole of a man's time and energy.
Back in April, 60 Minutes had a segment on the monks of Mt. Athos. It was surprisingly sympathetic for such a left-leaning program. What one expects and usually gets from libs and lefties and the lamestream media is religion-bashing — unless of course the religion is Islam, the religion of peace – but the segment in question was refreshingly objective. It was actually too sympathetic for my taste and not critical enough. It didn't raise the underlying questions. Which is why you need my blog.
We know that this world is no dream and is to that extent real. For all we know it may be as real as it gets, though philosophers and sages over the centuries, East and West, have assembled plenty of considerations that speak against its plenary reality. We don't know that there is any world other than this one. We also don't know that there isn't. Now here is an existential question for you: Will you sacrifice life in this world, with its manifold pleasures and satisfactions, for the chance of transcendent happiness in a merely believed-in hinterworld? The Here is clear; the Hereafter is not. It is not clear that is is, or that it isn't, or what it is if it is. When I say that the world beyond is merely believed-in, I mean that it is merely believed-in from the point of view of the here and now where knowledge is impossible; I am not saying that there is no world beyond.
Let us be clear what the existential option is. It is not between being a dissolute hedonist or an ascetic, a Bukowski or a Simon of Sylites. It is between being one who lives in an upright and productive way but in such a way as to assign plenary reality and importance to this world, this life, VERSUS one who sees this world as a vanishing quantity that cannot be taken with full seriousness but who takes it as preparatory for what comes after death. (Of course, most adherents of a religion live like ordinary worldlings for the most part but hedge their bets by tacking on some religious observances on the weekend. I am not concerned with these wishy-washy types here.)
The monks of Mount Athos spend their lives preparing for death, writing their ticket to the Beyond, engaging in unseen warfare against Satan and his legions. They pray the Jesus Prayer ceaselessly; they do not surf the Web or engage in competitive eating contests or consort with females – there are no distaff elements on the Holy Mountain.
Is theirs the highest life possible for a human being? Or is the quest to determine what is the highest life the highest life? The monks think they have the truth, the final truth, the essential and saving truth. Thinking they possess it, their task is not to seek it but to implement it in their lives, to 'existentially appropriate it' as Kierkegaard might say, to knit it into the fabric of their Existenz. There is a definite logic to their position. If you have the truth, then there is no point in wasting time seeking it, or talking about it, or debating scoffers and doubters. The point is to do what is necessary to achieve the transcendent Good the existence of which one does not question.
This logic is of course common to other 'true believers.' Karl Marx in the 11th of his Theses on Feuerbach wrote that "The philosophers have variously interpreted the world, but the point is to change it." Marx and the Commies he spawned thought they had the truth, and so the only thing left was to implement it at whatever cost, the glorious end justifying the bloody means. Buddha was famously opposed to speculation. If you have been shot with a poisoned arrow, there is no point in speculating as to the trajectory of the arrow, the social class of the archer, or the chemical composition of the poison; the one thing necessary is to extract the arrow. The logic is the same, though the point is different. The point for Buddha was not theosis (deification) as in Eastern Orthodoxy, or the classless society as in Marxism, but Nirvana, extinguishment of the ego-illusion and final release from the wheel of Samsara.
If you have the ultimate truth about the ultimate matters, then by all means live in accordance with it. Put it into practice. But do you in fact have the truth? For the philosopher this is the question that comes first and cannot be evaded. If the monks of Mt Athos are right about God and the soul and that the ultimate human goal is theosis, then they are absolutely right to renounce this world of shadows and seemings and ignorance and evil for the sake of true reality and true happiness.
But do they have the truth or does one throw one's life away when one flees to a monastery? Does one toss aside the only reality there is for a bunch of illusions? There is of course a secular analog. I would say that all the earnest and idealistic and highly talented individuals who served the cause of Communism in the 20th century sacrificed their lives on the altar of illusions. They threw their lives away pursuing the impossible. Ethel and Julius Rosenberg, for example. Such true believers wasted their lives and ended up enablers of great evil. In the end they were played for fools by an evil ideology.
So isn't the philosopher's life the highest possible life for a human being? For only the philosopher pursues the ultimate questions without dogmatism, without blind belief, in freedom, critically, autonomously. I am not saying that the ultimate good for a human being is endless inquiry. The highest goal cannot be endless inquiry into truth, but a resting in it. But that can't come this side of the Great Divide. Here and now is not the place or time to dogmatize. We can rest in dogma on the far side.
My Athenian thesis — that the life of thephilosopher is the highest life possible for a human being — won't play very well in Jerusalem. And I myself have doubts about it. But all such doubts are themselves part and parcel of the philosophical enterprise. For if nothing is immune from being hauled before the bench of Reason, there to be rudely interrogated, then fair Philosophia herself must also answer to that tribunal.
Who hasn't thought of attending law school? Before doing anything rash, you may want to peruse the posts of law professor Paul Campos at Inside the Law School Scam. He began the blog in August so you could easily take it da capo.
And then there is the student loan crisis and the moral and economic absurdity of Obama's 'forgive and forget' policy. Just as government interference in the mortgage industry bears a large part (not all) of the responsibility for the housing bubble, it bears a large part of the responsibility for the education bubble.
