Maverick Philosopher – Page 798 – Footnotes to Plato from the foothills of the Superstition Mountains

A. C. Grayling and a Stock Move of Militant Atheists

Since A. C. Grayling has surfaced in the ComBox here, it it will be useful for people to see just what sort of fellow he is. So over the next few days I will reproduce three or four of my Grayling posts from the old site.

Militant atheist philosopher A. C. Grayling writes,

Religious belief of all kinds shares the same intellectual respectability, evidential base, and rationality as belief in the existence of fairies.

This remark outrages the sensibilities of those who have deep religious convictions and attachments, and they regard it as insulting. But the truth is that everyone takes this attitude about all but one (or a very few) of the gods that have ever been claimed to exist.

No reasonably orthodox Christian believes in Aphrodite or the rest of the Olympian deities, or in Ganesh the Elephant God or the rest of the Hindu pantheon, or in the Japanese emperor, and so endlessly on – and officially (as a matter of Christian orthodoxy) he or she must say that anyone who sincerely believes in such deities is deluded and blasphemously in pursuit of "false gods".

The atheist adds just one more deity to the list of those not believed in; namely, the one remaining on the Christian's or Jew's or Muslim's list.

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Does the Atheist Deny What the Theist Affirms?

It seems to me that there is a sort of 'disconnect' in theist-atheist debates. It is as if the parties to the dispute are not talking about the same thing. Jim Ryan writes,

The reason I'm an atheist is straightforward. The proposition that there is a god is as unlikely as ghosts, Martians amongst us, and reincarnation. There isn't the slightest evidence for these hypotheses which fly in the face of so much else that we know to be true. So I believe all of them to be false.

This is a fairly standard atheist response. Since I picked up the use of 'boilerplate' in philosophical contexts from Jim, I hope he won't be offended if I refer to the quoted passage as atheist boilerplate. It puts me in mind of Russell's Teapot part of the drift of which is that there is no more reason to believe in God than there is to believe that "between the Earth and Mars there is a china teapot revolving about the sun in an elliptical orbit . . . ."

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The Recent Dennett-Plantinga A. P. A. Debate and the Question of Tone in Philosophy

This just over the transom (interspersed comments in blue by BV):

I regularly follow your blog, and have for a couple of years now. I have considerable respect for you as both a philosopher and a communicator in general – you seem to get curt or impatient at times, but you still manage to be civil even then, and your treatment of arguments in your posts always comes across as fair and in the spirit of trying to best represent the views of those you are discussing.

I mention all this because my question is this. What do you make of exchanges along the lines of what was recently recounted on Prosblogion, between Dennett and Plantinga? I'm not talking about the content in this case, but the tone. Is it really the case that arguments in favor of God/theism in general, and Christianity in particular, are treated with open mockery and derision even in what is supposed to be a professional exchange by a respected philosopher? Is Dennett representative of how naturalists treat theists/Christians in discussion, or is he exceptional?

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The ACLU and Mardi Gras

Fat Tuesday, coming as it does the day before Ash Wednesday, derives its very meaning from the beginning of Lent. The idea is to get some serious partying under one's belt just before the forty-day ascetic run-up to Easter. So one might think the ACLU would wish to lodge a protest against a celebration so religious in inspiration. Good (contemptible?) lefties that they are, they are ever crusading against religion. Perhaps 'crusade' (L. crux, crucis) is not the right word suggestive as it is of the cross and Christianity; perhaps 'jihad' would be better especially since many loons of the Left are curiously and conveniently ignorant of the threat of militant Islam and much prefer going after truly dangerous outfits like the Boy Scouts.

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Mardi Gras

I penned the following observation on Mardi Gras 2005 around the time of hurricane Katrina, but even I found it too 'insensitive' for posting at that time. But 'insensitive' is what we conservatives are supposed to be, right? The thought is correct, in any case, and political correctness be damned.

If the good folks down Nawlins* way spent less time letting the good times roll and more on the deferral of gratification, they might be better prepared for nature's little surprises.
_____
*New Orleans

Three Senses of ‘Or’

‘Or’ is a troublesome particle in dire need of regimentation. Besides its two disjunctive meanings, the inclusive and the exclusive, there is also what I call the ‘or’ of identity. The inclusive meaning, corresponding to the Latin vel, is illustrated by ‘He is either morally obtuse or intellectually obtuse.’ This allows that the person in question may be both.

The exclusive meaning, corresponding to the Latin aut, is exemplified by the standard menu inscription, ‘soup or salad,’ which means one or the other, but not both. Logicians view the inclusive ‘or’ as a basic propositional connective. Thus our first example would be symbolized by p v q, where p is the proposition expressed by ‘He is morally obtuse’; q the proposition expressed by ‘He is intellectually obtuse’; with ‘v’ — in honor of vel — standing for inclusive disjunction. Exclusive ‘or’ can now be defined as follows: p aut q =_df p v q & ~(p & q), where the tilde and the ampersand, both propositional connectives, represent negation and conjunction respectively.

A Reading for Schopenhauer’s Birthday

Arthur Schopenhauer was born on this date in 1788. I don't imagine he was given to the celebration of birthdays for reasons that may be gleaned from this YouTube reading by D. E. Wittkower.

It is an accurate and pleasant reading of the whole of "The Vanity of Existence" (from Parerga) with only one insignificant divergence from the English text as presented in The Will to Live: Selected Writings of Arthur Schopenhauer, ed. Richard Taylor, pp. 229-233.

Listening to another read is inferior to careful and meditative reading and re-reading by oneself in solitude with pen and notebook at the ready.

It does little good to listen to philosophy being read or even to read it oneself. One needs to work through a text slowly, pondering, comparing, re-reading, reconstructing and evaluating the arguments, raising objections, imagining possible replies and all of this while animated by a burning need to get to the bottom of some pressing existential question. You must bring to your reading questions if you expect study to be profitable.

If one fails to enter into the dialectic of the problems and issues one will come away with little more than a vague literary impression. But real study is hard work demanding aptitude, time, peace, and quiet, a commodity in short supply in these hyperkinetic and cacaphonous times. Back in the day, old Arthur was much exercised by "the infernal cracking of whips" as he he complained in his classic "On Noise." What would he say today? Could he survive in the contemporary crapstorm of hiphop horseshit kaka-phony?

So turn off that cell phone before I smash it to pieces!

Saturday Night at the Oldies: Harry Chapin, Taxi

A reader complained that I had discontinued Uncle Wild Bill's Saturday Night at the Oldies. (I'm torn between making this a pure, hard-core philosophy site and 'adulterating' the philosophy with bloggity-blog self-indulgent content.) So I'll start it up again. Here is a riveting song by the late Harry Chapin (1942-1981). I heard it the other day on the radio while driving and was reminded what a great writer and performer he was. Excellent live version here. The last verses are particularly moving:

And she walked away in silence,
It's strange, how you never know,
But we'd both gotten what we'd asked for,
Such a long, long time ago.

You see, she was gonna be an actress
And I was gonna learn to fly.
She took off to find the footlights,
And I took off for the sky.
And here, she's acting happy,
Inside her handsome home.
And me, I'm flying in my taxi,
Taking tips, and getting stoned,
I go flying so high, when I'm stoned.

Consciousness and Existence: Is Every Consciousness a Consciousness of What Exists?

What follows in purple are two quotations (from separate works) from the Ayn Rand Lexicon.

If nothing exists, there can be no consciousness: a consciousness with nothing to be conscious of is a contradiction in terms. A consciousness conscious of nothing but itself is a contradiction in terms: before it could identify itself as consciousness, it had to be conscious of something. If that which you claim to perceive does not exist, what you possess is not consciousness. (FNI, 124)

Directly or indirectly, every phenomenon of consciousness is derived from one’s awareness of the external world. Some object, i.e., some content, is involved in every state of awareness. Extrospection is a process of cognition directed outward—a process of apprehending some existent(s) of the external world. Introspection is a process of cognition directed inward—a process of apprehending one’s own psychological actions in regard to some existent(s) of the external world, such actions as thinking, feeling, reminiscing, etc. It is only in relation to the external world that the various actions of a consciousness can be experienced, grasped, defined or communicated. Awareness is awareness of something. A content-less state of consciousness is a contradiction in terms. (ITOE, 37)

This sort of writing is typical of Rand and Peikoff, et al. It is confused and confusing and will be dismissed out of hand by most philosophers. Yet there may be a solid point here that someone like Harry Binswanger could develop and make persuasive. It is clear from the above passages and others that Rand wants to show that there exist entities that are transcendent of consciousness. Indeed, she wants to show that the denial of such transcendent entities is self-contradictory. But how will she achieve this goal?

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Searle on Non-Intentional Mental States

Herewith, a quotation from John Searle that supports my contention that there are non-intentional mental states:

Now clearly, not all our mental states are in this way directed or Intentional. For example, if I have a pain, ache, tickle, or itch, such conscious states are not in that sense directed at anything; they are not 'about' anything, in the way that our beliefs, fears, etc. must in some sense be about something. ("What is an Intentional State?" in Dreyfus, ed. Husserl, Intentionality and Cognitive Science, p. 259.)

Searle writes 'Intentional' rather than 'intentional' to underscore the fact that 'intention' as philosophers use it is a terminus technicus wider in meaning than 'intention' as when one says, for example, 'Her intention is to retire in Florida.' My intending to run a half-marathon in May is an instance of Intentionality, but so is my noting that the sun is setting — despite the fact that Old Sol's habits don't fall within the purview of my will. I Intend the sun's setting, but I don't intend it. Get it? Now that the point has been made, I will drop the capital 'I.'

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Further Modal Concepts: Consistency, Inconsistency, Contradictoriness, and Entailment

I argued earlier that the validity of argument forms is a modal concept. But the same goes for consistency, inconsistency, contradictoriness, and entailment. Here are some definitions. 'Poss' abbreviates 'It is broadly-logically possible that ___.' 'Nec' abbreviates 'It is broadly-logically necessary that ___.' '~' and '&' are the familiar truth-functional connectives. 'BL' abbreviates 'broadly logically.'

D1. A pair of propositions p, q is BL-consistent =_df Poss(p & q).

Clearly, any two true propositions are consistent. (By 'consistent' I mean consistent with each other. If I mean self-consistent, I'll say that.) But there is more to consistency that this. It is a modal notion. Consistency cannot be defined in terms of what is actually the case. One must also consider what could have been the case. As long as p, q are contingent, they are consistent regardless of their truth-values. If both are true, they are consistent. If both are false, they are consistent. If one is true and the other false, or vice versa, they are consistent.

D2. A pair of propositions, p, q, are BL-inconsistent =_df ~Poss(p & q).

D3. A pair of propositions p, q are BL-contradictory =_df ~Poss(p & q) & ~Poss (~p & ~q).

Note the difference between inconsistency and the stronger notion of contradictoriness. If two propositions are inconsistent, then they logically cannot both be true. If two propositions are contradictory, then they are inconsistent but also such that their negations logically cannot be true.

Example. All men are rich and No men are rich are inconsistent in that they cannot both be true. But they are not contradictory since their negations (Some men are not rich, Some men are rich) are both true. All men are rich and Some men are not rich are contradictory. Some men are rich, Some men are not rich are neither inconsistent nor contradictory.

D4. P entails q =_df~Poss(p & ~q).

Entailment, also called strict implication, is the necessitation of material implication. If '–>' stands for the material conditional, then the right hand side of (D4) can be put as follows: Nec (p –> q).

(Alethic) modal logic's task is to provide criteria for the evaluation of arguments whose validity or lack thereof depends crucially on such words as 'possibly' and 'necessarily.' But if I am right, many indispensable concepts of nonmodal logic (e.g., standard first-order predicate logic with identity) are modal concepts.

The Difference Between Possibility and Contingency

Over lunch yesterday, Peter Lupu questioned my assertion that possibility and contingency are not the same. What chutzpah! So let me now try to prove to him that they are indeed not the same, though they are of course related. To put the point as simply and directly as I can, possibility and contingency are not the same because every necessary proposition is possible, but no necessary proposition is contingent. Perhaps this requires a bit of explanation.

We first divide all propositions into two mutually exclusive and jointly exhaustive groups, the noncontingent and the contingent. The first group subdivides into two mutually exclusive and jointly exhaustive subgroups, the necessary and the impossible. A proposition is necessary (impossible) just in case it is true in every (no) possible world. A proposition is possible just in case it is true in some possible worlds. It follows that if proposition p is necessary, then p is possible, but not conversely.

Since we know that there are necessary propositions, and since we know that every necessary proposition is a possible proposition, we know that there are necessary propositions which are possible. But we also know that no necessary proposition is contingent. It follows that we know that there are possible propositions that are not contingent. It follows that the extension of 'possible proposition' is different from the extension of 'contingent proposition.' This suffices to show that possibility and contingency are not the same. Here are some definitions. I have included definitions not fomulated in the imagery of possible worlds for those who are 'spooked' by his imagery.

A proposition p is possible =_df there is a possible world in which p is true.

A proposition p is possible =_df it is not necessary that p be false.

A proposition p is contingent =_df there is a possible world in which p is true and there is a possible world in which p is false.

A proposition p is contingent =_df p is both possibly true and possibly false.

Example. No color is a sound is possible but not contingent. There is a possible world in which it is true, but no possible world in which it is false. Tom's favorite shirt is red is contingent. There is a possible world in which it is true and a possible world in which it is false.

UPDATE (21 February): David Brightly provides a very useful map of the modal terrain in the Comments.

Are There Non-Intentional Mental States?

The thesis of this post is that there are non-intentional mental states. To establish this thesis all I need is one good example. So consider the felt pain that ensues when I plunge my hand into extremely hot water. This felt pain or phenomenal pain is a conscious mental state. But it does not exhibit intentionality. If this is right, then there are mental states that are non-intentional. Of course, it all depends on what exactly is meant by 'intentionality.' Here is how I understand it.

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The Cartesian Dream Argument and an Austinian Contrast Argument

J. L. Austin, in a footnote to p. 49 of Sense and Sensibilia (Oxford, 1962), writes of ". . . the absurdity of Descartes' toying with the notion that the whole of our experience might be a dream." In the main text, there is a sort of argument for this alleged absurdity. The argument may be set forth as follows:

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