Butchvarov: Objects, Entities, and Transcendental Idealism

This entry extends and clarifies my post, Blackman Versus Butchvarov: Objects, Entities, and Modes of Existence. 

Preliminaries

For Butchvarov, all consciousness is intentional. (There are no non-intentional consciousnesses.)  And all intentionality is conscious intentionality. (There is no "physical intentionality" to use George Molnar's term.)  So, for Butchvarov, 'consciousness' and 'intentionality' are equivalent terms.  Consciousness, by its very nature, is consciousness of something, where the 'of' is an objective genitive.

Continue reading “Butchvarov: Objects, Entities, and Transcendental Idealism”

Is Obama Smart?

George W. Bush couldn't rub a subject and a verb together and come up with a clean sentence in his mother tongue.  The man lacked verbal facility.  Among many, myself included, verbal facility is a touchstone of intelligence, or rather of one sort of intelligence, verbal intelligence.  Barack Obama has it.  But there is more to intelligence than the ability to sling words while avoiding syntactic howlers.  And when it comes to this 'more,' Obama is sadly lacking.  Obama is an uncommonly good bullshitter and blather-mouth, but the content is sorely lacking.  Does he have even one concrete idea that he is willing to express publicly?  Like Bret Stephens, I don't understand why so many consider him highly intelligent:

I don't buy it. I just think the president isn't very bright.

Socrates taught that wisdom begins in the recognition of how little we know. Mr. Obama is perpetually intent on telling us how much he knows. Aristotle wrote that the type of intelligence most needed in politics is prudence, which in turn requires experience. Mr. Obama came to office with no experience. Plutarch warned that flattery "makes itself an obstacle and pestilence to great houses and great affairs." Today's White House, more so than any in memory, is stuffed with flatterers.

Much is made of the president's rhetorical gifts. This is the sort of thing that can be credited only by people who think that a command of English syntax is a mark of great intellectual distinction. Can anyone recall a memorable phrase from one of Mr. Obama's big speeches that didn't amount to cliché? As for the small speeches, such as the one we were kept waiting 50 minutes for yesterday, we get Triple-A bromides about America remaining a "Triple-A country." Which, when it comes to long-term sovereign debt, is precisely what we no longer are under Mr. Obama.

Attacking the Messenger

Standard and Poor's downgrading of the credit worthiness of the U. S. government from AAA to AA+ should come as no surprise to anyone.  We all knew that current levels of debt are unsustainable.  So what do Obama and Geithner and their shills in the liberal media do?  They blame the messenger for the ill tidings he delivers.

They do the same with the Tea Partiers.  The central concern of the Tea Partiers is fiscal responsibility:  "There is one common thread that is uniting the one million plus people who protested on April 15th, 2009 at over 850 Tea Parties across this great country. That common thread is that we all want fiscal responsibility with our tax dollars."

So what does the Left do?  Instead of facing reality, it launches scurrilous attacks on the messengers.  They are racists, terrorists, hostage-takers, astro-turfers. 

But what is to be done?  This from the WSJ:

Despite S&P's opinion, there is no chance that America will default on its debts. The real importance of the downgrade will depend on the political reaction it inspires.

If the response is denial and blaming the credit raters, then the U.S. will continue on its current road to more downgrades and eventually to Greece. What has already become a half-decade of lost growth will turn into a lost decade or more.

If the response is to escape the debt trap by the stealth route of inflation—a path now advocated by many of the same economists who promoted the failed spending stimulus of 2009—then the U.S. could spur a dollar crisis and jeopardize its reserve currency status.

The better answer—the only road back to fiscal sanity and AAA status—is to reverse the economic policies of the late Bush and Obama years. The financial crisis followed by the Keynesian and statist revival of the last four years have brought the U.S. to this downgrade and will lead to inevitable decline. The only solution is to return to the classical, pro-growth economic ideas that have revived America at other moments of crisis.

Lynne Ballew

At the time I knew her, in the mid-'70s, I had no idea what a remarkable person she is.  I was a graduate student and she was a young professor.  We spoke a few times in the hallway.  A while back I was re-reading some Plato and I came upon a marginalium of mine: "Ask Lynne about this."  That put me in mind of her and I wondered what had become of her.  I had heard that she had left academe but knew nothing more.  A few key strokes  and her inspiring story unfolded before me.

Why We Can’t Ignore Politics

Thomas Mann, Diaries 1918-1939, entry of August 5, 1934:

     A cynical egotism, a selfish limitation of concern to one's
     personal welfare and one's reasonable survival in the face of the
     headstrong and voluptuous madness of 'history' is amply justified.
     One is a fool to take politics seriously, to care about it, to
     sacrifice one's moral and intellectual strength to it. All one can
     do is survive, and preserve one's personal freedom and dignity.
  
I don't endorse Mann's sentiment but I sympathize with it. Hitler came to power in 1933. Imagine the effect that must have had on a man of Mann's sensitivity and spiritual depth. You witness your country, the land of Kant and Schiller, of Dichter und Denker, poets and thinkers, in Heinrich Heine's fine phrase, transformed into a land of Richter und Henker, judges and hangmen.

My response to Mann would be along these lines: It precisely because men of the spirit must survive and survive to create that they must be concerned with politics and with those who can kill and suppress them. You escaped to the USA, but what if there were no such country to which to escape because all of the people of high quality practised your cynical egotism, your selfish limitation to the personal?

One can take politics seriously and do one's bit without sacrificing one's moral and intellectual strength to it.  The latter, I agree, would be folly.

The Diary of Samuel Pepys

Here.  I have the book in my library (but of course!) but this site offers among other things information about the people and places mentioned by the good Pepys as he records the quotidiana of an existence unremarkable  except for the insight it affords into those far-off times.  

How can one not love the 'Net and the love labors of those who toil in its vasty deeps? A peep into the deeps of Pepys.

Academic Rot Exposed

I plugged this site a few days ago.  By now I've read most of the posts, and they are good.    #65 of 100 reasons not to go to graduate school is up.  Title is Teaching is Less and Less Rewarding.

The abdication of authority by professors and administrators that set in in the '60s  is a good part of the problem.  Indeed, much of our national decline is traceable to abdication of authority on the part of parents, teachers, and clergy.  Not to mention go-along-to-get-along politicians.  But that's another post.

Are There Logically Simple Propositions?

Leo Carton Mollica e-mails:
 
Your most recent post (for which many thanks) inspired the below-expressed argument, and I was curious as to your opinion of it . . . . I think it has something behind it, but right now I feel uncertain about my examples in (2).
 
0. There is something curious about the relation between a proposition or declarative sentence and the terms or words that compose it: the list L ("Christ," "Judas," "betrays") clearly differs, at the very least in not having a truth value, from the sentence "Judas betrays Christ," yet nothing immediately presents itself as the ground G of this difference. One plausible candidate for G is some kind of union or togetherness amongst the members of L present in "Judas betrays Christ" and not in L itself, but this proposal is open to a serious challenge.
 
1. Suppose we accept Barry Miller's thesis, from "Logically Simple Propositions," that some declarative sentences have only one semantic element. His favorite such sentence is the Romanian "Fulgura," whose only constituent word translates (if I remember aright) the English "brightens," and which is interesting in requiring no actual or implied subject to form a complete sentence (like "It's raining" in English, but without the dummy subject).
 
2. Now, the lone word in "Fulgura" seemingly can occur outside any proposition. If, for example, someone were to ask me to recite my favorite Romanian word, or to translate "brightens" into Romanian, it would be strange to take me as telling them something false, or to have them respond "No, it isn't," upon my replying with "fulgura." There would, however, be nothing strange about the sentence "Fulgura" being false and someone telling me as much. [. . .]
 
3. Even in such simple sentences, therefore, there is a distinction between the sentence and the words contained therein, for one can be had without the other. But the ground of this distinction cannot be any union or togetherness among the words that enter into the sentence for the simple reason that no union or togetherness amongst items can be had without distinct items to unify or bind together. It can, therefore, be at least plausibly argued that the general ground of the difference between a sentence and its constituent words is no kind of union or togetherness.
 
I take Mr Mollica's basic argument to be this:
 
a. If there are logically simple sentences/propositions, then the problem of the unity of the sentence/proposition is not one that arises for every sentence/proposition.
b. There are logically simple sentences/propositions.
Therefore
c. The problem of the unity of the proposition is not one that arises for every sentence/proposition.
 
My response is to reject (b) while granting (a).  I discussed the question of logically simple sentences/propositions with Barry Miller back in the '90s in the pages of Faith and Philosophy.  My "Divine Simplicity: A New Defense (Faith and Philosophy, vol. 9, no. 4, October 1992, pp. 508-525) has an appendix entitled "Divine Simplicity and Logically Simple Propositions."  Miller responded and I counter-responded in the July 1994 issue, pp. 474-481.  It is with pleasure that I take another look at this issue. I will borrow freely from what I have published.  (Whether this counts as plagairism, depends, I suppose, on one's views on diachronic personal identity.)
 
A.  A logically simple proposition (LSP) is one that lacks not only propositional components, but also sub-propositional components.Thus atomic propositions are not logically simple in Miller's sense, since they contain sub-propositional parts.  A proposition of the form a is F, though atomic, exhibits subject-predicate complexity.
 
B. Miller's examples of LSPs are inconclusive.  Consider the German Es regnet ('It is raining').  As Miller correctly notes, the es is grammatical filler, and so the sentence can be pared down to Regnet, which is no doubt grammatically simple.  He then argues:
 
Now there is no question of Regnet being a predicate; for as a proposition it has a complete sense, whereas as a predicate it could have only incomplete sense. Hence, Regnet and propositions like it seem logically simple. (Barry Miller, "Logically Simple Propositions," Analysis, vol. 34, no. 4, March 1974, p. 125.)
 
I find it hard to avoid the conclusion that Miller is confusing propositions with the sentences used to express them.  Regnet and fulgura are grammatically simple.  But it scarcely follows that the propositions they express are logically simple.  What makes them one-word sentences is the fact that they express propositions; otherwise, they would be mere words.  So we need a sentence-proposition distinction.  But once that distinction is in place then it becomes clear that grammatical simplicity of sentence does not entail logical simplicity of the corresponding proposition.
 
C.  It is also unclear how any intellect like ours could grasp a proposition devoid of logical parts, let alone believe or know such a proposition.  To believe that it is snowing, for example, is to believe something logically complex, albeit unified, something formulatable by some such sentence as 'Snow is falling.'  So even if there were logically simple propositions, they could not be accusatives of minds like ours.  And if propositions are defined as the possible accusatives of propositional attitudes such as belief and knowledge, then the point is stronger still: there cannot be any logically sinple propositions.
 
D.  So it seems to me that 'the problem of the list' or the problem of the unity of the sentence/proposition is one that pertains to every sentence/proposition.  It is a problem as ancient as it is  tough, and, I suspect, absolutely intractable.  For a glimpse into the state of the art, I shamelessly recommend my June 2010 Dialectica article, "Gaskin on the Unity of the Proposition."

In Praise of Blogosophy

Philosophy is primarily an activity, not a body of doctrine. If you were to think of it as a body of doctrine, then you would have to say there is no philosophy, but only philosophies. For there is no one universally recognized body of doctrine called philosophy. The truth of course is one not many. And that is what the philosopher aims at: the one ultimate truth about the ultimate matters, including the ultimate truth about how we ought to live. But aiming at a target and hitting it are two different things. The target is one, but our many arrows have fallen short and in different places. And if you think that your favorite philosopher has hit the target of truth, why can't you convince the rest of us of that? 

Disagreement does not of course prove the nonexistence of truth, but it does cast reasonable doubt on all claims to its possession. Philosophy aspires to sound, indeed incontrovertible, doctrine. But the quest for it has proven tough indeed. For all we know it may lie beyond our powers. Not that this gives us reason to abandon the quest. But it does give us reason to be modest and undogmatic.

Philosophy, then, is primarily an activity, a search, a quest. Somewhere deep in the bowels of the Kritik der reinen Vernunft, Kant remarks that "Philosophy cannot be taught, we can at most learn to philosophize." I agree. It cannot be taught because it does not exist as teachable doctrine. Philosophy is not something we profess, except perhaps secondarily; it is something we do. The best professors of philosophy are doers of philosophy.  A professor, obviously, need not be a paid professor, an academic functionary.

How then should we do philosophy? Conversation face-to-face with the like-minded, intelligent, and sincere is useful but ephemeral and hard to arrange. Jetting off to conferences can be fun especially if the venue is exotic and the tab is picked up your department. But reading and listening to papers at conferences is pretty much a waste of time when it comes to actually doing productive philosophy. Can you follow a technical paper simply by listening to it? If you can you're smarter than me.

So we ought to consider the idea that philosophy in its purest form, its most productive form, is 'blogosophy,' philosophy pursued by weblog. And there is this in favor of it: blogging takes pressure off the journals. Working out my half-baked ideas here, I am less likely to submit material that is not yet ready for embalming in printer's ink.