Beyond Necessity

Street of straw

2012-01-31T09:28:00.001Z

I gave an example in this post from June 2010 of the odd little details of a man’s life that occasionally obtrude from otherwise serious and impersonal work. I just found another in Buridan’s Summulae de dialectica Book I c. 7. Gerardus est cum Buridano; ergo ipse est in vico Straminum. What is he on about? Well, the Vicus Straminis or street of straw – so-called from the straw-strewn floors of the schools, was in the area still known as the Latin Quarter, the centre of the Arts schools of Paris. Petrach calls it the strepidulus straminum vicus, the noisy street of straws, presumably because of the incessant noise of the disputation going on. This was where Buridan would have conducted his lectures in the 1330s, and presumably spent so much time there that if Gerard is with Buridan, then he is in the Vicus Straminis.

The street is now called the Rue du Fouarre – there’s a bit about it in the French Wikipedia, but seems to have retained little of its former scholastic glory. The article quotes Balzac, who says that it was once the most famous street in Paris in the thirteenth century. But now (that is, in Balzac’s day), it is the poorest one.

Buridan on logical form

2012-01-30T10:01:00.000Z

I posted four extensive works by Jean Buridan at the weekend, and just noticed this interesting argument in Book I question 6 of his Questions on the Prior Analytics, which is connected with my earlier discussion on context and indexicals. He asks whether an expository syllogism - a syllogism in which the middle term is an expression that demonstratively identifies a subject - is valid in virtue of its form.

Latin	English
Sexta quaestio est utrum syllogismus expositorius sit bonus gratia formae.	The sixth question is whether the expository syllogism is good [i.e. valid] in virtue of its form
Et arguitur quod non: quia iste syllogismus videtur esse expositorius 'hic homo est albus, hic homo est niger; ergo nigrum est album', et tamen consequentia non est bona, quia conclusio est manifeste falsa et tamen possibile est quod ambae praemissae sint simul verae, scilicet si in maiori demonstratur Socrates et in minori Plato.	And it is argued that it is not, for the syllogism “this man is white, this man is black, therefore a black thing is a white thing, and yet the consequence is not good, because the conclusion is manifestly false and yet it is possible that both premisses are true at the same time, namely if Socrates is pointed to in the major, and Plato is pointed to in the minor

He replies that if one suppositum is signified in the major and another in the minor, the middle term is varied, and if the middle term is varied, it is not a good syllogism, nor is it a good expository syllogism. I don’t quite understand how this shows that the syllogism is valid in virtue of its form, however.

Buridan's Summa Dialectica

2012-01-28T16:48:00.001Z

Buridan's immense Summa of logic is now available at the Logic Museum. Latin only for the moment.

On knowledge of God

2012-01-27T08:44:00.003Z

A nice post here by Maverick about whether the way to God is through the self, or by ‘scholastic’ analysis of propositions or thoughts or doctrines. He quotes Augustine (De Vera Religione, c. 39): Noli foras ire, in te ipsum redi. In interiore homine habitat veritas, which he translates as "Do not wander far and wide but return into yourself. The truth resides in man's interiority". I think ‘inner man’ is better and more literal – interiore homine is one of Augustine’s favourite expressions, which he himself probably borrows from the words of Paul in his letter to the Ephesians, 3.16 - ut det vobis secundum divitias gloriae suae virtute corroborari per Spiritum eius in interiore homine - “That he would grant you, according to the riches of his glory, to be strengthened by his Spirit with might unto the inward man”

Giles Fraser would frequently bang on about the two Gods of Genesis: the creator God, known by description, all-powerful and all-knowing, the God that the Scholastics mostly wrote about in their extensive theology. And the God who would walk through the garden of Eden, who looks like a man, and who cannot be approached by logical analysis.

Filed under 'propositionalism'. Propositionalism is the view that all reports of intentional states can be analysed as propositional attitude reports. See my discussion here. I assume it is obvious how this is connected with the idea of ‘the inner man’.

Larkin on semantics

2012-01-26T20:50:00.002Z

It seems Philip Larkin agrees with me. Explaining why he wrote poetry on the BBC overseas service in 1958, he said

If I must account for it, I think it would be best described as the only possible reaction to a particular kind of experience, a feeling that you are the only one to have noticed something, something especially beautiful or sad or significant. Then there follows a sense of responsibility, responsibility for preserving this remarkable thing by means of a verbal device that will set off the same experience in other people, so that they too will feel How beautiful, how significant, how sad, and the experience will be preserved.

Yet if the meaning of words changed constantly, or meant something different depending on the different people who heard them, poets like Larkin could not possibly combine words in a poem to set off the same experience in other people.

Context and content

2012-01-25T13:24:00.003Z

Anthony has commented a couple of times that we require context in order to resolve the ambiguities inherent in language. True, but the requirement is strictly limited, as the following argument shows.

We can divide sentences which require context into those which contain indexicals, and which therefore require a perceptual context, and those which require a linguistic context (or those which require both, but this is not an important or separate case). An indexical is a term which requires a perceptual background in order to be intelligible. The background will determine which object is pointed to, or which place is 'here' or which time or date is 'now', and so on. The context requirement for indexicals is therefore limited.

The requirement for linguistic context must also be limited, for if the context-supplying language A itself required a linguistic context B, and if B required yet another context C, there would be an infinite regress, and nothing would be intelligible. But language is intelligible, therefore the requirement for linguistic context must be limited.

As an example of the limitation of linguistic context, consider:

A man and a boy were standing by a fountain. The man had a drink.

The sentence 'the man had a drink' requires a context in order for its meaning to be properly understood, for the description 'the man' tells us which of the two individuals standing by the fountain had a drink. The context is supplied by the preceding sentence 'A man and a boy were standing by a fountain', which requires no further context. We understand the first sentence simply by understanding the meanings of 'a', 'man', 'and', 'boy' and so on, and this understanding should be available to any competent speaker of the language. As a result, the two sentences together require no further context at all. Any competent user of the language can understand them, as long as they are available together, and as long as their correct sequence is determined by the physical nature of the text (or by some other method of determinate ordering).

Who voted for the Wikipedia blackout?

2012-01-23T13:44:00.000Z

Belette comments here that a vote for the Wikipedia blackout from anyone with a ‘redlink’ account (i.e. one with a minimal number of edits) “isn't going to get any notice”.

How wrong can he be? Certainly, the election began with ‘tagging’ of the votes which were from ‘SPA’ or sockpuppet accounts. But a number of Wikipedians opposed this, and took the issue to the administrator’s noticeboard (02:34, 16 January 2012). They also complained on the page of Philippe Beaudette - Head of Reader Relations for the Wikimedia Foundation and (note well) an employee of the Wikimedia Foundation.

Hi there Philippe. There's currently an ANI discussion regarding an editor who's tagging SPAs over at the voting page, on the basis that the comments of "passers by" don't get counted. Just want to clarify, is there such a rule in place for that discussion? I'm under the impression that we're inviting any and all of our readers to comment, and we do indeed give equal value to comments of readers-only and established editors alike. Thanks, Swarm X 03:29, 16 January 2012 (UTC)

Beaudette replies “Your impression matches my intention. I'll make note to the closing admins. Feel free to reference this statement. Philippe Beaudette, Wikimedia Foundation”. An anonymous member of the powerful arbitration committee also requested that the tagging stop. “… you might as well stop tagging the SPAs; those of us who are going to close are already pretty aware of these issues, and it seems your actions, which I have no doubt were initiated in good faith, have wound up annoying some people needlessly without adding much to the discussion (04:52, 16 January 2012)”

Thus every single vote for the blackout was accepted, even if it was from an IP, or an account which had been set up for the express purpose of voting. Such accounts could not participate in an article deletion debate, or vote in an arbitration committee election, or even start a new article, or edit a semi-protected page. Yet they were allowed to vote to close all of Wikipedia for 24 hours.

This is of course wholly inconsistent with what Jimmy Wales said in an interview with CNN, 17th Jan , that the Wikipedia community, and the editors of the website voted for the blackout. No they did not.

Anonymity and governance

2012-01-22T10:37:00.005Z

Commenter 'Belette' has questioned my attempt to connect anonymity with the failure of democracy. I thought this would be obvious, but fair enough: this is a logic blog and the argument I gave in the previous post was far from demonstrable, being full of all sorts of missing assumptions, handwaving, enthymeme and absent premisses. Let's try and tidy it up and take it from the top with the following pseudo-syllogism:

Anonymity leads to conflict of interest
Conflict of interest leads to bad governance
Ergo, anonymity leads to bad governance

Even this is not deductively valid, but it will do for now. I will leave the minor (COI leads to bad governance) unless anyone objects, for while not self-evident, it can easily be made so by supplying some missing assumptions. Note also that I have substituted the idea of governance for that of 'democracy'. Democracy does not always result in good governance, and it is governance we are interested in. I also use 'governance' rather than 'government'. The latter almost always implies the action of a state, whereas it is governance in the widest sense that I am concerned with.

So let's focus on the major premiss: does anonymity lead to conflict of interest? Certainly. A conflict of interest arises when an individual under one description F1 has an interest which is opposed to the the interest of that individual under the description F2. For example, let F1 be 'director of charity X' and let F2 be 'commercial supplier of provisions and services to charity X'. Clearly the individual under the first description has an interest and a duty to procure the same service at the lowest possible price, whereas, under the second description, he has an interest in supplying them at the highest possible price. Allowing the directory of a charity to be the same person as its chief commercial supplier is therefore a conflict of interest. But if we cannot identify the individual satisfying each description, it will be practically impossible to prevent such a conflict. Let F1 be satisified by John Smith, a publicly identifiable individual. Let F2 be satisfied by some individual under a fake user name. Unless we can connect the public name with the made up one, we will never know if there is a conflict of interest.

One recent example of such a conflict on Wikipedia was when the PR agency Bell Pottinger was found to be editing Wikipedia under the fake user name 'Biggleswiki'. Another less recent example was when London Labour councillor David Boothroyd was not just an editor of Wikipedia under the pseudonym 'Sam Blacketer', but was a member of its important 'Arbitration Committee', probably the most senior decision-making body on the project. Paul Williams, then director at Wikimedia UK, said: "Sock-puppeting is a very serious offence for anybody. But for someone on the Arbitration Committee it is even more so. It can result in a lifetime ban. The problem with Wikipedia is that you can hide behind user names, but there is an expectation that you don't write for self-interest. In this case there is a conflict of interest." There you go.

There are other instances of politicians anonymously acquiring important positions in Wikipedia, and who don't want to be publicly identified, but I will leave those for now, as they are for use in the book I am writing on Wikipedia. I will leave you with an example from last weeks 'Blackout vote'. The full vote for the blackout was on this page. Over 700 members of the Wikipedia 'community' voted in support of an action that affected hundreds of millions of people across the world. Closer inspection reveals that many members of this community may have voted twice, or even more. About 150 of the support votes were from accounts opened specifically for voting, or re-used. There were a number of obvious 'sleeper' accounts, opened some time ago, almost certainly by existing accounts who wanted to vote twice or more. Typical of the first kind is Korney654*, who only edits twice, the first time to the article on Oboe, displaying knowledge of Wikipedia that is untypical of a first time user, the second time to vote. Typical of the second kind is Phauxcamus* who opened his or her account in 2006, made a handful of edits since then, and now votes for the blackout. It is highly probable that all these votes were second or third votes from more established Wikipedia account names. There is no more evident and absurd form of conflict of interest than pretending not to be yourself under a different, anonymous description.

Belette will probably argue that such conflict of interest only arises in the real world, because it has dishonest motives, whereas Wikipedians only act in the best motives. There is no reply to that except to laugh or shrug, with a wink at the gallery.

*With apologies to any editor who was really acting in good faith. The point is, it is difficult to know under a system that almost guarantees anonymity in this way.

Wikipedia and democracy

2012-01-21T15:19:00.007Z

The Wikipedia blackout on Wednesday 18th January 2011, protesting about legislation against online piracy and copyright theft (SOPA and PIPA), seems to have been a great success. According to Wikipedia's own (breathlessly enthusiastic) article about it, six US senators who had been sponsors of the bills, including Marco Rubio, PIPA's co-sponsor, Orrin Hatch, Kelly Ayotte, Roy Blunt, John Boozman, and Mark Kirk, said that they would now withdraw their support for the bills. Several other congressmen issued statements critical of the current versions of both bills. The following day, eighteen of the 100 senators, including eleven of the original sponsors of the PIPA bill, had announced that they no longer supported PIPA.

The Wikimedia Foundation reported that there were over 162 million visits to the blacked-out version of Wikipedia during the 24-hour period, with at least 4 million uses of the site's front page to look up contact information for their U.S. Congressional representatives. The Electronic Frontier Foundation reported that more than 1 million email messages were sent to congressmen through their site during the blackout.

I see it as a success for a different reason. It has brought home to many people that Wikipedia wields immense power. I don't know how much it would cost to advertise for a whole 24 hours on a network that was viewed by 162 million people, but it would be more than I could afford. As a guide, ITV's most popular show, the X-factor, pulls in about 11 million people. Only the richest and most powerful vested interest - which Wikipedia now obviously is - could command a budget for that kind of global coverage. If even a few perceptive people start seeing that Wikipedia is a threat to democracy everywhere, then I count that as a success.

You object that newspapers like the Sun, the Daily Mail, The Daily Telegraph, the Guardian (to mention a few British ones) wield a similar influence, and have an editorial bias. I reply: these are just four newspapers, of different political persuasions. You have a choice, and people often choose a newspaper that reflects their natural political tendencies in any case. But there is only one Wikipedia. Moreover, The Daily Mail does not pretend to be an encyclopedia. And traditional media, which have an publicly identified editor, and an owner, can be engaged by traditional legal methods. This is not the case with Wikipedia. Wikipedia is invisible and anonymous.

Wikipedia has a strong internal administrative power structure, but it is invisible. Its administrators are hidden behind silly names like "Happy Melon", "The Cunctator". They are fiercely protective of their anonymity. One of them (on a now secret mailing list) writes "Of course, I'm writing from an anonymous email account with a pseudonym that has always been in place, and probably always will. I've had things oversighted on five different projects, and removed from places where 'oversight' is far from standard practice, to protect that anonymity. Is the fact that you don't know my name, address and date of birth a concern to you? Is the fact that I've written code for the cluster, or administrated three ArbCom elections, a problem for you?"

Er, yes, it's a problem for me. You cannot sue Wikipedia, because it does not exist. The Wikimedia Foundation, which does exist, and has a legal identity, claims it simply runs a website. They claim that actions taken on Wikipedia are by members of the 'community' - people like the Melon guy, and about another thousand of these faceless, anonymous individuals whose identity will never be known, and who are responsible to no one.

The picture above expresses everything I fear about Wikipedia. It is faceless, it hides behind a mask. It casts a shadow over the lives of billions of people. And it is essentially a conspiracy against the public of all English-speaking nations.

Tomorrow I will talk about how Wikipedia/Wikimedia managed to get the 'community support' for its action on Wednesday. Keep twiddling those dials.

The internet is angry

2012-01-19T12:52:00.002Z

The internet is angry. This is because the internet is a spoilt and stupid 15 year old child. It is a child who cannot spell, who confounds categories, who perpetrates fallacies in logic Aristotle never imagined or dreamed of, who is illiterate and uneducated, and behaves in the most high-handed and petulant way if any of this is pointed out. The internet wrote Wikipedia, in fact.

Thus, most of what happened yesterday was nonsense. Andrew Orlowski does get it right, however.

Wikipedia’s blackout has already forced journalists and students into some perverse acts: such as checking facts, reading primary sources, and critically weighing up the opinions of experts. But these childish protests against an unnecessary law could become an annual event unless we address what’s really at stake. This, strangely, is something nobody wants to talk about.
We’ve got a problem. In every field of commerce, except one, money follows popularity. If you sell more fridges or more insurance policies, than anyone else, then you’ll have the most income. On the internet this isn’t true. Payment remains largely optional.
What the anti-Sopa companies – which include large corporations such as Google that benefit from piracy – refuse to admit, is that they [i.e. copyrightholders] are entitled to enforce their rights. Even in the libertarian paradise of Somalia, shopkeepers had to club together to pay the warlords to police against theft.
We certainly owe our grandchildren a world where they can take their talents to market, and not be obliged to whore themselves out to sponsors, making anti-obesity advertisements for the Government, or promotional jingles for Coca Cola. But the internet doesn’t offer us that future. We need to be fixed. The anti-SOPA protests show just how Silicon Valley, the world’s stroppiest teenager, refuses to grow up. It’s a war they like fighting too much to stop.

The narrative conception of reference

2012-01-18T09:54:00.002Z

Sentences like “I noticed the dark-haired girl I had met the other night” drive me to frustration. I read fiction in a slapdash way, and have a poor memory for detail. So I leaf through the pages, trying to find when ‘the other night’ was, and when I have, try to find the dark-haired girl. But who or what am I really trying to find here? It’s a piece of fiction, there was no such girl. And what do I mean ‘no such girl’? There are billions of dark-haired girls, and thousands of ‘other nights’.

However, frustration aside, the example throws light on an idea I have discussed earlier, namely that the semantics of a definite description are ‘external’ to the proposition that contains it. According to the classic theory of descriptions, the semantics of the description is ‘internal’ to the proposition. We understand the meaning of ‘the first dog born at sea’ by understanding the dictionary meanings of ‘first’, ‘dog’, ‘sea’ etc. But we don’t understand ‘the dark-haired girl I had met the other night’ simply by understanding a dictionary. I have to locate a passage from a previous part of the narrative in order to understand it. The description is incomplete, and we require information external to its proposition in order to understand its meaning.

It also illuminates the conception of reference that I have defended in many posts here, the conception of reference as essentially embedded in a narrative. When the author used that description, he or she was doing so in the knowledge that information provided earlier would be available to me. They knew that because they had written the narrative that included the information, and they knew it would be available in a text presented (either in print or in hypertext) in an ordered sequence. They knew that I would be reading ‘the dark-haired girl’ on p. 46 after I had read ‘a dark-haired girl’ on p.15.

I would argue that all descriptions are presented to us in essentially the same way. The author of the description uses it with the expectation that the background information necessary to understand it are available to his audience. A work of history, for example, is no different from a work of fiction. Gibbon’s monumental Decline and Fall is written as a single work covering more than a thousand years of history. But if he wrote it correctly, i.e. such that his intended meaning was available to any diligent person reading it, recurring descriptions, even when incomplete in the sense above, should be intelligible to the reader. In writing his history, Gibbon knew, or intended, that the persons reading it would have the whole work available, and that proper understanding of it requires reading it in the intended order.

It may seem to be different in the case of narratives which do not have a definite order, but I will discuss these cases later.

Critical Thinking

2012-01-17T20:15:00.001Z

The Pocket Guide to Critical Thinking, by Richard Epstein. A reader sent me a copy asking for a view, or a review, so I had a look. Verdict: not a work on logic as such, but on informal argumentation. It covers claims, a bit about compound claims (i.e. compound propositions linked by logical connectives like 'and', 'or' and so on), reasoning from experience, use of numbers and graphs, and a bit at the end about generalisation. It bears roughly the same relation to logic as Aristotle's Topics does to his more formally structured logical works.

There is considerable use of examples, which I found slightly tiresome after a few chapters. However, I left it lying around and found my 16 year old son reading with keen interest. It clearly has an appeal to that age group and indeed my correspondent confirmed that this was the target readership. It would be useful to anyone who was interested in studying logic or philosophy at university level, and wanted a background in the approach and method which these subjects use. So, I would certainly recommend it.

Epstein also wrote the somewhat more advanced Computability, reviewed here by Richard Zach.

Richard L. Epstein, The Pocket Guide to Critical Thinking, 4th edition, Advanced Reasoning Forum, Socorro U.S.A. 2011.

Brains

2012-01-15T14:42:00.000Z

Brains! No, not zombies, but the 'Brains' group blog, which I was invited to join. First post, such as it is, is here.

Semantic reference and speaker's reference

2012-01-15T10:17:00.001Z

Tristan Haze pointed me to this paper by Saul Kripke, which mentions the distinction between speakers reference and semantic reference. "I'd be interested to hear whether you think this answers your objection".

Having read Kripke's paper, which has a lot about another famous distinction, made by Keith Donnellan (I have discussed this somewhere here, some time ago), I don't think it does. My view is that all 'reference' whatsoever is semantic reference, so I don't make the distinction between different kinds of reference.

Furthermore, I don't think that what Kripke calls 'semantic reference' is the same as what I mean by it. I claim that all reference has the same semantic model as 'story relative reference'. Story relative reference is the mechanism that allows us to say which character is which, in a narrative that can be true (as with history) or false (as with fiction). This kind of reference cannot involve any semantic relation between language and the world, because it has the same semantic properties whether or not the information was caused by real people or events, or not. I argue this cogently against Tim Crane's view of reference here.

If I am right (i.e. reference is not a language-world relation) then my 'semantic reference' cannot be Kripke's semantic reference. For Kripke, a definite description signifies semantically by allowing us to identify a unique individual in the world that satisfies that description. Just by knowing the semantics of the terms 'queen', 'England' and '2012', we can determine which individual in reality is satisfied by 'Queen of England in 2012', and so can grasp the truth conditions of 'the Queen of England in 2012 lives in London'. By contrast, I reject entirely the view that the semantics of anything involves a word-world relation. This is true of definite descriptions as well as proper names. So what I mean by 'semantic reference' is different from what is meant by Kripke, and by most other contemporary philosophers of language.

I will say some more about definite descriptions in the next post.

More about non-men

2012-01-14T12:23:00.001Z

Anthony has asked for some more about indefinite (or 'infinite') negation. Well he will have to wait for our book to come out (working title: Time and Existence: Duns Scotus' Questions on the Perihermenias) if he wants much more. Opus II Book I Q4 ("Does an Indefinite Name Posit Something") and Opus II Book II Q2 (Does ‘This Is Not Just; Therefore, This Is Non-Just’ Follow?) refer. Until that happy day, here is Thomas Aquinas on the same subject, in his commmentary on the Perihermenias, Book II lecture 2:

Latin	English*
Sicut ipse dicit,enunciatio aliqua virtute se habet ad illud, de quo totum id quod in enunciatione significatur vere praedicari potest: sicut haec enunciatio, homo est iustus, se habet ad omnia illa, de quorum quolibet vere potest dici quod est homo iustus; et similiter haec enunciatio, homo non est iustus, se habet ad omnia illa, de quorum quolibet vere dici potest quod non est homo iustus.	It must be noted that, as Aristotle himself says, the enunciation, by some power, is related to that of which the whole of what is signified in the enunciation can be truly predicated. The enunciation, "Man is just,” for example, is related to all those of which in any way "is a just man” can be truly said.So, too, the enunciation "Man is not just” is related to all those of which in any way "is not a just man” can be truly said.
Secundum ergo hunc modum loquendi, manifestum est quod simplex negativa in plus est quam affirmativa infinita, quae ei correspondet. Nam, quod sit homo non iustus, vere potest dici de quolibet homine, qui non habet habitum iustitiae; sed quod non sit homo iustus, potest dici non solum de homine non habente habitum iustitiae, sed etiam de eo qui penitus non est homo: haec enim est vera, lignum non est homo iustus; tamen haec est falsa, lignum est homo non iustus.	According to this mode of speaking it is evident, then, that the simple negative is wider than the infinite affirmative which corresponds to it. Thus, "is a non-just man” can truly be said of any man who does not have the habit of justice; but "is not a just man” can be said not only of a man not having the habit of justice, but also of what is not a man at all. For example, it is true to say "Wood is not a just man,” but false to say, "Wood is a non-just man.”
Et ita negativa simplex est in plus quam affirmativa infinita; sicut etiam animal est in plus quam homo, quia de pluribus verificatur. Simili etiam ratione, negativa simplex est in plus quam affirmativa privativa: quia de eo quod non est homo non potest dici quod sit homo iniustus. Sed affirmativa infinita est in plus quam affirmativa privativa: potest enim dici de puero et de quocumque homine nondum habente habitum virtutis aut vitii quod sit homo non iustus, non tamen de aliquo eorum vere dici potest quod sit homo iniustus.	The simple negative, then, is wider than the infinite affirmative-just as animal is wider than man, since it is verified of more. For a similar reason the simple negative is wider than the privative affirmative, for "is an unjust man” cannot be said of what is not man. But the infinite affirmative is wider than the private affirmative, for "is a non-just man” can be truly said of a boy or of any man not yet having a habit of virtue or vice, but "is an unjust man” cannot.
Affirmativa vero simplex in minus est quam negativa infinita: quia quod non sit homo non iustus potest dici non solum de homine iusto, sed etiam de eo quod penitus non est homo. Similiter etiam negativa privativa in plus est quam negativa infinita. Nam, quod non sit homo iniustus, potest dici non solum de homine habente habitum iustitiae, sed de eo quod penitus non est homo, de quorum quolibet potest dici quod non sit homo non iustus: sed ulterius potest dici de omnibus hominibus, qui nec habent habitum iustitiae neque habent habitum iniustitiae.	And the simple affirmative is narrower than the infinite negative, for "is not a non-just man” can be said not only of a just man, but also of what is not man at all. Similarly, the privative negative is wider than the infinite negative. For "is not an unjust man” can be said not only of a man having the habit of justice and of what is not man at all—of which "is not a non-just man” can be said—but over and beyond this can be said about all men who neither have the habit of justice nor the habit of injustice.

Note that 'man is just' etc is better translated as 'a [or the] man is just'. According to Aristotle and the scholastics, the apparently negative 'is non-just' is really something positive or affirmative said about anyone who has a determinate nature such as a man or an animal. Thus is not as wide as definite negation, because not being a just man can apply to anything you like, so long as it is not just, or is not a man.

That's not to say the matter is any clearer, really.

*Translated by Jean T. Oesterle Milwaukee: Marquette University Press, 1962

Men and non-men

2012-01-13T18:01:00.003Z

Anthony rightly raised the problem of my ‘some men are not men’. He suggested (rightly I think) that this is a problem for ‘Brentano equivalence’, the thesis that ‘Some A is B’ is equivalent to ‘An A-B exists’, and that ‘some A is not B’ is equivalent to ‘An A-not-B exists’.

He is right. If Brentano is right, then ‘some men are not men’ is equivalent to ‘men that are not men exist’, which is clearly wrong. So what’s the problem? I suggest that Brentano is wrong. Clearly we can say that some of the men who landed on the moon have now died ( for example, Alan Shepard, the one who played golf on the moon). So, some men such as Shepard are no longer men. If Brentano is right, that implies that men who are non-men exist, which is false. Non valet consequentia, so Brentano is wrong.

The late thirteenth century philosophers of language, such as the early Scotus, were acutely aware of this problem. Many of them distinguished between so-called indefinite negation of the form ‘A is a non-B’, and pure negation ‘A is not B’. Indefinite negation is affirmative. It affirms the existence of an A that is non-B. In this sense ‘some man is a non-man’ is false. By contrast, pure negation denies everything, including the affirmation of existence. In that sense ‘some man is a not a man’ is true, pace Brentano.

The problem is to render this in predicate logic. The formal sentence ‘for some x, Ax and not Bx’ is affirmative in the traditional sense: it asserts that some x is both A and non-B. However, the pure negative for ‘not for some x, Ax and Bx’ is not equivalent to the medieval ‘some A is not B’. The predicate logic version simply denies the existence of anything that is both A and B, whereas the medievals understood it in the sense we understand ‘some men (such as Alan Shepard) are not men (i.e. are men no longer)’.

Brentano’s thesis was the first formulation of one of the key assumptions of the modern predicate calculus. It is wrong for the same reason the calculus is wrong. It does not translate the meaning of a standard English sentence in the way we want to translate it. So what is the meaning of the sentence, and into what formal language can we translate it?

De re and de dicto

2012-01-11T13:16:00.000Z

Tristan Haze recommended this 1977 paper by Kripke which I am working through. He mentions the de re / de dicto distinction on page 258, and once again I am struck by the way that so much of our terminology and ideas are inherited from medieval Latin philosophy and logic. I discussed this before with respect to a priori.

The de re / de dicto distinction is mentioned in a passage here from Thomas's Summa Theologiae, which I quote here using the Dominican translation.

Latin	English
Unde et haec propositio, omne scitum a Deo necessarium est esse, consuevit distingui. Quia potest esse de re, vel de dicto. Si intelligatur de re, est divisa et falsa, et est sensus, omnis res quam Deus scit, est necessaria. Vel potest intelligi de dicto, et sic est composita et vera; et est sensus, hoc dictum, scitum a Deo esse, est necessarium.	Hence also this proposition, "Everything known by God must necessarily be," is usually distinguished; for this may refer to the thing, or to the saying. If it refers to the thing, it is divided and false; for the sense is, "Everything which God knows is necessary." If understood of the saying, it is composite and true; for the sense is, "This proposition, 'that which is known by God is' is necessary."

Latin

English

Unde et haec propositio, omne scitum a Deo necessarium est esse, consuevit distingui. Quia potest esse de re, vel de dicto. Si intelligatur de re, est divisa et falsa, et est sensus, omnis res quam Deus scit, est necessaria. Vel potest intelligi de dicto, et sic est composita et vera; et est sensus, hoc dictum, scitum a Deo esse, est necessarium.

Hence also this proposition, "Everything known by God must necessarily be," is usually distinguished; for this may refer to the thing, or to the saying. If it refers to the thing, it is divided and false; for the sense is, "Everything which God knows is necessary." If understood of the saying, it is composite and true; for the sense is, "This proposition, 'that which is known by God is' is necessary."

I am not sure about the translation. 'De re' is rendered as 'about the thing', and 'de dicto' as 'about the saying. Correct-ish, but we have the difficulty of translating a Latin term which is probably being used in a technical sense. He uses the verb consuevit which means 'is usually' or 'is customarily', which suggests that the terminology was established when he was writing in the 1270s. It certainly was - the distinction is mentioned at the end of this very technical discussion probably written in Paris around the same time (Aquinas taught in Paris in the 1260s). Even Abelard, writing in the 12th century, mentions it. A dictum - literally 'what is said' - of a proposition is what is said or asserted by the proposition. In Latin it is expressed by the accusative-infinitive form, e.g.. Socratem currere which means 'that Socrates runs' or 'Socrates's running'. A de dicto proposition is thus one which has a dictum as subject. For example, in Socratem currere est verum (it is true that Socrates is running) the subject is Socratem currere, which is the dictum (or refers to it, medieval texts frequently conflate use and mention), and the predicate is verum. See Catarina's interesting paper here.

When Thomas talks about the composite and divided sense, he almost certainly means what Ockham is talking about here. (Not yet available with English translation, however). Ockham's point throughout the Summa is that the dici de omni pretty much always applies to propositions understood de re, and so Frege's puzzle does not apply in such a sense. In propositions understood de dicto, there are nearly always problems with substitution. His ideas about this are mostly in Part III-1 of the Summa, none of which is available in English online, and indeed very little of which is available offline. It is a philosophical scandal that the works of one of England's greatest philosophers are not available in the language of his own country. (For much of his life William would have spoken as well as written in Latin, but the language of ordinary people was a form of middle English similar to the English of Chaucer which would still be intelligible to us modern folks).

Wikipedia student assignments - what could go wrong

2012-01-10T19:56:00.001Z

A reader has complained by email that there is too much medieval philosophy and not enough about Wikipedia. Well mate, I'm sure there are readers of this blog who appreciate the medieval philosophy and roll their eyes at the Wikipedia stuff. But, just to oblige, and I admit I have been a bit quiet on Wikipedia for the last few weeks:-

There is a fascinating study here of what happens when you let students loose on Wikipedia. A sample of students were invited to make edits to psychology articles, with depressing results. The supervising editors found that students found it difficult to write proper citations, despite being trained for academic writing. They did not understand the subject well enough to write for the average reader of an encyclopedia, and even made mistakes that even a non-expert could spot. Because of their reliance on a single source, it was difficult for them to paraphrase the source without making mistakes or writing nonsense, and so frequently, the text was incomprehensible.

I'll let you read the article and decide for yourselves. But there were a few points hidden in there. The first was how bad the students were at writing in a way that generalists could easily understand. Indeed, it was the Wikipedian mentors, who were not experts in the subject, who were much better at this. I'm not surprised. Writing for a middlebrow audience is difficult, and 'accessibility' is one area where I would fault the otherwise excellent Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. (As well as Wikipedia of course, which fails to be accessible in many interesting ways).

The second was that, as the mentors observe at the end of their paper, the reason that the students' poor edits were reverted was because of the care and attention paid to the articles. They say that the fact that the plagiarism and poor content was reverted or fixed "is almost wholly down to the extraordinary efforts of three Wikipedians. ", and mention that even on popular subjects, the actual number of committed Wikipedians able to police edits is generally over-estimated. This suggests that a lot of poor edits are getting through without being reverted, which doesn't surprise me either.

Tomorrow: Thomas Aquinas.

Reprise (reference)

2012-01-08T11:56:00.003Z

A number of new readers have joined since I started the topics on 'reference' more than a year ago. To avoid going over the same ground again, I will link to some earlier posts for background. Of course, this is all work in progress, and anything may change.

For example, Anthony objects that I am attempting "to develop a theory of reference based on fictional stories". Correct, and that is the whole point. As I argued earlier, the semantics of empty proper names do not obviously differ from that of non-empty names, and it seems that the names of historical characters individuate in just the same way as fictional ones. See also this post about the reference of 'God' and 'Allah'.

I have argued further here that there cannot be such a thing as reference failure. To understand a proper name is to understand which person its sentence is about.

This means (I have argued) that reference cannot be relation between a term – a linguistic item - and an item in non-linguistic reality. The verb 'refers to' is therefore logically intransitive. I explain the notion of logical intransitivity here, and its application to reference here. This leads to the "'Frodo'-Frodo" theory of reference.

Augustine on language

2012-01-07T16:38:00.001Z

More Augustine: The commentary on the Sermon on the mount, in parallel Latin-English. And The Teacher (De magistro), in Latin only at this point, except for a short paragraph at the beginning which I have tackled. It is an enquiry into the nature of language and signs, very difficult. Wittgenstein, as practically everyone knows, was profoundly influenced by Augustine, although I don't know if he had read this piece. When translated, it will be the first English version on the webs.

Reference and intention

2012-01-06T17:16:00.004Z

I start my discussion of Kripke’s theory of reference by questioning whether it is necessary that we intend to use a name with the same reference as the person we learned the name from. In at least one simple example, this is neither necessary nor sufficient. Imagine a game were a group of people make up a story by successive members of the group uttering successive sentences of the story. So the first member starts:

(1) A soldier called ‘Alex’ returned from the war.

And the second member goes on

(2) Alex was looking forward to seeing his wife, Jenny, and his daughter Lucy.

And the third continues

(3) Jenny was only eight years old.

Now clearly the third speaker got it wrong. She probably meant to say ‘Lucy’; she meant the daughter, since it is a matter of biology that the wife cannot be eight years old. But her meaning or intentions are irrelevant in any case. For she has successfully used the name ‘Jenny’ with the same reference as the second speaker, and has successfully communicated the proposition that the soldier’s wife was only eight years old, even though she did not intend to use the name that way. What is relevant is not the intention of the speaker, but rather the rules of use of proper names (or other referring terms like pronouns or descriptions), plus an informational background available to both speaker and audience*.

Causation and intention are irrelevant, at least in this particular case. I shall argue in subsequent posts that all the different ways of passing on a reference are reducible to examples such as this one.

*Or an assumed background, which I shall discuss later.

The causal theory of reference

2012-01-05T09:53:00.003Z

My next series of posts are going to be about the causal theory of reference. As a preliminary, here is how the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy characterises the theory.

The causal theory was adumbrated by Kripke[9] (1980) as an alternative to the description theory of nominal reference. The central idea underpinning this sort of theory is that (the use of) a name refers to whatever is linked to it in the appropriate way, a way that does not require speakers to associate any identifying descriptive content with the name.

The causal theory is generally presented as having two components: one dealing with reference fixing, the other dealing with reference borrowing. Reference is initially fixed at a dubbing, usually by perception, though sometimes by description. Reference-fixing is by perception when a speaker says, in effect, of a perceived object: “You're to be called ‘N’.” Reference-fixing is by description when a speaker stipulates, in effect: “Whatever is the unique such-and-such is to be called ‘N’.” (As noted by Kripke (1980), the name ‘Neptune’ was fixed by description, stipulated by the astronomer Leverrier to refer to whatever was the planetary cause of observed perturbations in the orbit of Uranus.)

After the reference-fixing, the name is passed on from speaker to speaker through communicative exchanges. Speakers succeed in referring to something by means of its name because underlying their uses of the name are links in a causal chain stretching back to the dubbing of the object with that name. Speakers thus effectively ‘borrow’ their reference from speakers earlier in the chain but borrowers do not have to be able to identify lenders; all that is required is that borrowers are appropriately linked to their lenders through communication. However, as Kripke points out, in order for a speaker (qua reference borrower) to succeed in using a proper name to refer to the object/individual the lender was using the name to refer to, he must intend to do so. Thus, I may use the name ‘Napoleon’ to refer to my pet cat, even if the lender of the name used it to refer to the famous French general. For in such a case, I do not intend “to use the name to refer to the individual the lender used it to refer to.”

From the article “Reference”, section “Causal Theory of Reference”, Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy.

Aardvarks and reference fixing

2012-01-04T10:13:00.002Z

Kripke writes:

A rough statement of a theory [of reference] might be the following: An initial 'baptism' takes place. Here the object may be named by ostension, or the reference of the name may be fixed by a description. When then name is 'passed from link to link', the receiver of the name must, I think, intend when he learns it to use it with the same reference as the man from whom he heard it. If I hear the name 'Napoleon' and decide it would be a nice name for my pet aardvark, I do not satisfy this condition. (Perhaps it is some such failure to keep the reference fixed which accounts for the divergence of present uses of 'Santa Claus' from the alleged original use.

Is that right? How do we intend to use a name with the same reference as the person from whom we heard the name from?

More Augustine

2012-01-03T16:58:00.000Z

Now added in parallel text:

About the Manicheans, mostly.

Whitehead on thinking

2012-01-03T12:07:00.002Z

Alfred Whitehead: "It is a profoundly erroneous truism, repeated by all copy-books and by eminent people when they are making speeches, that we should cultivate the habit of thinking what we are doing. The precise opposite is the case. Civilization advances by extending the number of important operations which we can perform without thinking about them."

Augustine - Soliloquies

2012-01-03T08:20:00.000Z

I got round to a much-needed overhaul of the Augustine index in the Logic Museum. This now has pretty much everything Augustine wrote, arranged in approximate date order, with links to Latin and English versions where available. Logic museum parallel text versions are indicated in bold. And there is the addition of the Soliloquies in parallel text. Note that all Logic Museum texts are 'anchored', so that can link to any section of the text. For example, section 20 of book I.

Kripke on reference fixing

2012-01-02T09:23:00.000Z

Anthony comments here about the difficulty of making sense of 'reference fixing'. Let's see what Gareth Evans and Saul Kripke say about it. In section 1.7 of The Varieties of Reference, Evans gives what he calls a 'particularly clear example' of the phenomenon.

Even if we follow Russell, and hive off definite descriptions for separate treatment as quantifiers, there still remain terms which would intuitively be regarded as singular terms, but for which the 'no referent - no thought (sense) position seems quite incorrect. A particularly clear example can be produced by introducing a name into the language by some such 'reference fixing' stipulation as* "Let us call who invented the zip 'Julius'". I call such names, whose reference is fixed by description, 'descriptive names'. Here, as with definite descriptions, it seems impossible to deny that someone speaking, and known to be speaking, 'within the scope of' this stipulation could express a thought, and convey that thought to another person, by uttering "Julius was an Englishman", even if the name is empty.

I'm not sure it is altogether clear, for the reasons that Kripke mentions in lecture III of Naming and Necessity. He asks whether the referent of 'Godel' could be fixed as 'the person who discovered the incompleteness of arithmetic', then imagines a situation where a man called 'Schmidt' was actually the author of the theorem. His body was found in Vienna in mysterious circumstances many years ago, and his friend Godel got hold of the manuscript, and published it as his own.

On the view in question, then, when our ordinary man uses the name 'Godel', he really means to refer to Schmidt, because Schmidt is the unique person satisfying the description 'the man who discovered the incompleteness of arithmetic' ... So, since the man who discovered the incompleteness of arithmetic is in fact Schnidt, we, when we talk about 'Godel', are in fact always referring to Schmidt. But it seems to me that we are not.

Perhaps a similar problem attaches to our Shakespeare example? If the name 'Shakespeare' simply means 'whoever wrote the plays such as Hamlet, Macbeth, Romeo and Juliet', and if Edward de Vere did in fact write those plays, then when we are talking about and referring to Shakespeare, we are in fact talking about and referring to De Vere. But it seems we are not, as Kripke puts it.

*I have modifed Evans' wording to avoid indent problems

On the usefulness of believing

2011-12-30T14:43:00.000Z

St Augustine's work, in parallel Latin English now at the Logic Museum here. Scotus quotes this a number of times, so I thought it useful to include. My aim, one day, is to have a hypertext that covers all the 'authorities' (Aristotle, the Church Fathers, the Vulgate of course) linking to all the scholastic texts that quote them or refer to them in any way.

Did Shakespeare write Shakespeare?

2011-12-30T10:20:00.000Z

I just found this again, a nice summary of the method by which we can establish that Shakespeare really did write Shakespeare, and which illustrates some of the ideas I developed in my last post.

The method is to construct a number of ‘description clusters’, and then demonstrate that these clusters can only be satisfied by a single historical individual. A description cluster is a number of sub-descriptions of which it is beyond question that they are satisfied by a single individual. Thus we have the ‘William Shakespeare the author’ cluster, consisting of the subdescriptions “Shakespeare the author of Titus Andronicus”, “Shakespeare the author of Henry VI Part 2”, “Shakespeare the author of Romeo and Juliet”, etc. We know (or are at least very certain) these sub-descriptions apply to the same person, because those plays were published with the name ‘William Shakespeare’ in his own lifetime.

Then we have the description cluster William Shakespeare the actor, consisting of the subdescriptions ‘Shakespeare who played in the King’s Men, 19 May 1603’, ‘Shakespeare who appeared on Sir George Home’s list of "Players"’ etc. We are very certain they are uniquely satisfied because it is unlikely the same company would have had two actors of exactly the same name.

Similarly we have description clusters for ‘William Shakespeare the Globe-sharer’, consisting of descriptions found in legal titles to shares in the globe theatre. Finally we have a cluster for ‘William Shakespeare of Stratford’. Each of these clusters is satisfied by a single person. To prove that they are all satisfied by a single person, rather than four separate people, we look for little overlaps, where it seems highly like that two or more sub-descriptions in different clusters are satisfied by a single person. For example, a sub-description in the ‘William Shakespeare of Stratford’ cluster contains the information ‘is legally entitled to be called “gentleman”’. So does a subdescription in the ‘William Shakespeare the Globe-sharer’ cluster. Similarly, a subdescription in ‘William Shakespeare of Stratford’ matches a subdescription in the ‘William Shakespeare the author’ cluster.

The available evidence, at least if the website linked to is correct, is that because of a significant number of overlapping subdescriptions, the four big clusters are satisfied by a single person. There is actually a fifth cluster (or perhaps it's a subcluster of the 'Will Shakespeare of Stratford' cluster) of descriptions attached to Shakespeare's monument in Stratford church. These refer to Shakespeare (i.e. the subject of the monument) as a great writer within a few years of his death.

Reference fixing by description

2011-12-29T09:38:00.002Z

Biblioarchy and Anthony have commented on ‘reference fixing’ by description. Anthony objects that in order to fix the referent of 'Shakespeare' as 'the man who wrote the plays and poems traditionally attributed to William Shakespeare of Stratford-upon-Avon", we need to agree on who that was.

If we just leave it floating out there as possibly being one person, and possibly being another person, and possibly being several people, and possibly not being a person at all (maybe aliens wrote the plays), then we haven't fixed it.

Biblioarchy makes a similar point, saying

Some Oxfordians and many Stratfordians believe that more than one hand was at play on many of the texts. Also that they appear to be palimpsests of sorts, revised and rewritten over the years by 'The Author', Shakespeare, whomEver he was, and perhaps, a cadre of University Wits in the Fisher's Folly Days Mid 1580's. This would of course, completely demolish the Stratfordian time-line, setting it back a decade, and disqualify the Stratford man.

Well, the idea of ‘reference fixing’ is not mine. Kripke introduced it in Naming and Necessity, and Gareth Evans discusses it in The Varieties of Reference. Kripke’s point – there is an excellent summary of it in the SEP article on Reference - is that while we can determine the reference of a proper name by some uniquely satisfied description – for example, we can fix the reference of ‘Aristotle’ as ‘the last great philosopher of antiquity’, the semantics of the name cannot be identical with the semantics of the description. For ‘the last great philosopher of antiquity’ might well apply to Plato in a possible world where Aristotle died in infancy.

But these comments do suggest a deeper problem with the whole idea of fixing reference by description, given that primary sources do not give us a single description of a putative historical character, but rather a series of descriptions. What if there wasn’t a single author of the Shakespeare plays? What if one person wrote Hamlet, another person wrote the Tempest? Indeed, I believe Oxfordians have to insist that the authors are different, given a fairly certain dating for the latter play of after 1604, when De Vere died*. What if there wasn’t even a single author of any of the plays? All mathematicians know about Nicholas Bourbaki, who is not a person at all – the name is a pseudonym under which a collective of French mathematicians wrote a series of books about advanced set theory and algebra.

My own subject is Duns Scotus. Who was he? A hundred years ago, we might have fixed the reference of his name by the description ‘the author of De Modis Significandi’. But that would have been wrong, as Grabmann demonstrated in 1922 that this work was by Thomas of Erfurt, a fourteenth century logician belong in to the Parisian ‘modist’ school. The authenticity of the Questions on the Prior Analytics, once attributed to him, is also doubtful. And though his books on the Categories, and on the Sophisticis Elenchis, and of course the monumental Ordinatio are almost certainly authentic, it is clear that we have a series of different descriptions – ‘the author of the Ordinatio’, the author of the Lectura, and so on – rather than a single description.

Scotus' biographical details are even more problematic. We have a handful of details about his life. Records show that someone of that name was ordained at St Andrew's Priory, Northampton on 17th March 1291, from which we infer a probable date of birth of about 1265, given the minimum age of 25 for ordination. So we have the description “person named ‘John Duns Scotus’, ordained in 1265 etc’. We believe he was in Oxford in 1300, based on a single passage in the Ordinatio that I discuss here. His name is on a list of those who opposed King Philip’s attempt to depose Pope Boniface around 1303. We have a few other bits of information. But whether these different descriptions are all satisfied by the same person is little more than conjecture and probable inference. We don’t know for absolutely certain whether there was a single author of his individual works. His Questions on the Perihermenias comes down to us in two separate versions, one of which (Opus I) contains a fragment of what may be another work. It is not certain how much of this was edited or rewritten by his disciple Antonius Andreas. So even a single work has a series of descriptions corresponding to the differing codices or primary sources which have come down to us.

*Shakespeare made extensive use of narratives describing the wreck and redemption of the ship the "Sea-Venture" in Bermuda in 1609, and the events which ensued when the crew made it safely ashore.

Lunatic, Liar or Lord?

2011-12-27T16:38:00.000Z

I have now scanned in Question 2 of the Prologue to Scotus' Ordinatio. There is much of interest here. There is the well-known allusion to the defeat of the Egyptians at the battle of Hims (also known as the battle of Wadi al-Khazandar) in 1299. The battle was on 22-23 December 1299, but the news did not reach Oxford until the summer of 1300, which is taken as evidence that Scotus began the revision of the Ordinatio then. He writes that, with the co-operation of God, Islam will soon be ended "for it is greatly weakened in the year of Christ 1300, and many of its devotees are dead and some have fled". This was gravely lacking in foresight.

There is also a reference to Josephus' history of the Jews, which for a long time was used as evidence for the "historical Jesus". Josephus questions whether Jesus was really a man, says he was the worker of miracles, and was the Messiah. We are not now certain whether this passage is authentic, or a Christian interpolation.

And there is an argument that must be a very early version of the one now known as Lunatic, Liar or Lord?, popularised by C.S. Lewis and many other Christian apologists.

The argument as we now have it is that Christ (or in other versions, the Christians who wrote the gospels) either deceived by conscious fraud, and so was a liar, or was himself deluded, and so a lunatic, or was telling the truth, and so was the Lord. This is the 'trilemma'. The argument (1) that Jesus (or the Christians who wrote the gospels) could not have been lying, because Christianity forbids lying, (2) that he could not have been deluded, because of the evidence of his rationality (or the rationality of the Christians who wrote or preached the gospels).

Scotus argument is essentially the same, although a little more complex. I will discuss it later.

Belief reports versus evidence reports

2011-12-26T07:44:00.000Z

Biblioarchy has commented here on what Oxfordians believe. He says " Bacon was not De Vere, and no Oxfordians believe this. Take my word for it, I know them." I do take his word for it, and it is a further objection to Eric Schwitzgebel's view that such belief ascriptions have an indeterminate truth value.

Nor do I see any difference between "The Oxfordian theory is that Edward de Vere was Shakespeare", which Eric agrees does have a determinate truth value, and "Oxfordians believe that Edward de Vere was Shakespeare" which, as I understand Eric, does not have a determinate truth value.

Biblioarchy's comment also reminds me of other verbs that create intensional contexts, such as 'is emphatic that', 'holds that', 'insists that', 'has received evidence that', 'has good reason to claim that' and so on. It is entirely implausible that the substitution problem connected with these verbs is different in any way from the problem of belief ascriptions.

Break

2011-12-23T18:32:00.000Z

Sorry not to have responded to comments. I've been in the North (Liverpool in fact, then Manchester, then Sheffield). I'll catch up at some point. If I don't, I wish all my readers and commenters a very happy Christmas.

Edward

On Lois Lane and rationality

2011-12-20T13:25:00.001Z

Lois Lane has the following two beliefs

(1) that Clark Kent cannot fly, and that Superman can fly.

Yet Clark Kent and Superman are identical. Substituting ‘Superman’ for ‘Clark Kent’ in the first belief gives us the beliefs

(2) that Superman cannot fly, and that Superman can fly.

Clearly it is irrational to hold the beliefs characterised by (2). Does this mean that Lois has irrational or illogical beliefs in believing (1)? Or is the inference from (1) to (2) invalid? Contra: the beliefs characterised in (1) are clearly not irrational. For we base our beliefs on evidence. The evidence given to us in the Superman stories suggests that Clark Kent and Superman are identical. The reader is always shown evidence that Clark Kent is Superman, by means of scenes showing him changing from his office suit and glasses to his Superman costume, without glasses. The same stories show us that Lois Lane does not have the benefit of this evidence. She is looking the other way, or is looking for shoes or handbags while Clark is changing his costume. Therefore

(3) The reader of the stories has evidence that Clark Kent is Superman

(4) Lois Lane does not have evidence that Clark Kent is Superman

Therefore, I argue, it is not irrational for Lois to have the beliefs expressed by (1). It is not irrational to believe that of which one has no evidence to the contrary – even though other people, such as the reader, have evidence to the contrary. Therefore the inference from (1) to (2) is invalid.

Note, and this is actually is my main point against Eric’s position here, that it is invalid for exactly the same reason that the following inference is invalid.

(5) Lois Lane has evidence that Superman can fly, therefore she has evidence that Clark Kent can fly.

The puzzle about substitution and belief statements is the same as the puzzle about substitution and evidence statements. Even though Clark Kent is identical with Superman, the evidence that Clark Kent is Superman is different from the evidence that Clark Kent is identical with himself.

On learning the law of identity

2011-12-20T13:22:00.002Z

Anthony asks whether we could learn in 2012 that Shakespeare is identical with Shakespeare, given that we learned in 2012 that the Oxfordian theory is correct. I reply, this makes it difficult to distinguish between principles like the law of identity, and flaky theories like the Oxfordian theory. Consider the following two statements.

(1) It follows from the law of identity that Shakespeare is identical with Shakespeare
(2) It follows from the Oxfordian theory that Shakespeare is identical with Edward de Vere

It would clearly be false to say – even if it did turn out that the Oxfordian theory was correct - that it follows from the law of identity that Shakespeare is identical with Edward de Vere, i.e. that it follows from a logical principle that some fringe theory is correct. Otherwise we could prove all sorts of strange theories from logical principles, which of course we can’t.

Frege's Puzzle and In-Between Cases of Believing

2011-12-19T08:50:00.000Z

There was a post this weekend at Eric Schwitzgebel's The Splintered Mind about Frege's puzzle, which continues to preoccupy philosophers of mind, and is "is a heck of a mess in philosophy of language" according to Eric.

Frege's puzzle is this. Lois Lane believes, it seems, that Superman is strong. And Clark Kent is, of course, Superman. So it seems to follow that Lois Lane believes that Clark Kent is strong. But Lois would deny that Clark Kent is strong, and it seems wrong to say that she believes it. So what's going on?

Eric suggests the problem is that "Almost all the participants in this literature seem to take for granted something that I reject: that sentences ascribing beliefs must be determinately true or false, at least once those sentences are disambiguated or contextualized in the right way".

I have discussed this problem before, notably here, in the context of impersonal verbs taking that-clauses. The problem is that whatever applies to belief-ascriptions, must apply also to impersonal ascriptions such as "there is evidence that p", "it was discovered that p in yyyy", "according to the theory of X, it is the case that p", for these sentences, as will become clear, also suffer from the substitution problem. Thus, if Eric is right, sentences like "there is little evidence that Edward de Vere was the author of Macbeth" are not determinately true or false, which seems counterintuitive.

Let me explain. I often warn people against unquestioning acceptance of Wikipedia, but what it says here today seems unquestionably right.

"The Oxfordian theory of Shakespearean authorship proposes that Edward de Vere, 17th Earl of Oxford (1550–1604), wrote the plays and poems traditionally attributed to William Shakespeare of Stratford-upon-Avon.

That is surely true. That is what the Oxfordian theory is. Whether the theory is right or not is irrelevant. The question is whether this characterisation of the theory is correct. It is, and it uses, without mentioning, the proper names 'Edward de Vere' and 'Shakespeare'. But there are circumstances in which its truth would not survive substitution. Let's suppose we discover that Francis Bacon were identical with Shakespeare, as Cantor famously believed, spending much of his personal fortune trying to prove it. If so, we should be able to substitute 'Francis Bacon' for 'William Shakespeare' in a sentence telling us what the Oxfordian theory is. But it is not true that, according to the Oxfordian theory, Edward de Vere was Francis Bacon. Nor would be true to say that plays and poems such as 'Macbeth' were traditionally attributed to Francis Bacon, even if Shakespeare were Bacon. Nor would it be true to say that we discovered that Shakespeare was Shakespeare in 2012, even if it were true that we discovered that Shakespeare was Bacon in 2012.

Yet sentences like "Oxfordians believe that Edward de Vere wrote the plays and poems traditionally attributed to William Shakespeare" are unquestionably true, i.e. determinately true (or false). By equal reasoning, since the problem seems identical, this suggests that sentences ascribing beliefs must be determinately true or false.

On the true nature of reality

2011-12-18T09:57:00.004Z

I have finished the first draft of a translation of Chapter 51 of Ockham's Summa. To put this in context, it is part of chapters 40-62 which cover Aristotle's ten categories or 'praedicamenta' or 'genera'. In this part of the book, Ockham argues that the categories are not ten kinds of thing that exist in reality, outside the mind, but rather they are kinds of term - ten terms that signify the same thing in different ways. He writes (my translation)

For it should not be thought that the ten genera are things outside the soul, or that they signify ten things, each of which is signified by only one of the genera, but rather the teaching of the Peripatetics shows that the ten genera are ten terms signifying the same things in different ways. For just as the eight parts of speech can be distinct, and yet signify the same thing, e.g. 'white', 'whitening', 'to whiten', 'go white', so the identity of the things which they convey can be consistent with the distinctness of the categories.

Is that right? It is consistent with Ockham's strategy throughout this part of the book. Instead of saying 'Socrates has wisdom' we should say 'Socrates is wise'. We should not suppose that the abstract term 'wisdom' is some king of thing outside the soul, which bears some odd relation to Socrates such as 'instantiation' or 'inherence'.

Someone will object (perhaps they are from Phoenix) doesn't this miss something out? Is 'wise' just another way of referring to or 'suppositing for' Socrates? Surely not. Socrates himself - per se ipsum - is not the referent of 'wise'. There must be something in reality which, in addition to Socrates, makes 'Socrates is wise' true. There must be some difference between the fact that 'Socrates' refers to Socrates, and the fact that 'wise' refers to Socrates. And that difference would be wisdom itself. Whereas it is part of the meaning of 'Socrates' that it signifies him, it is not part of the meaning of 'wise'. There must be something more to reality than the referent of subject and predicate.

I reply: there may well be something more, but as I have argued before, this 'missing part' of reality cannot be conveyed by noun phrase. I won't repeat these arguments in detail, but briefly, Socrates and wisdom gives us two separate things, but not Socrates being wise. And Socrates being wise is not enough, since we want to know whether his being wise is a fact, is the case etc. There is always something missing from a noun phrase that makes it incapable of expressing reality. To express reality we need a verb. But realists always insist on talking about reality using noun phrases. What do they have against verbs? Why this discrimination? If verbs were a part of society, they would be a disadvantaged minority, socially excluded, if realists had their way.

And note also that it is not the nature of the verb to express action. For 'action' is an abstract noun phrase. For there to be action, the action must take place, or happen. In any case, there are verbs that do not signify actions at all, such as 'to rest', 'to remain', 'to endure' and so on. As Arnauld says in his Logic, Part II chapter 2, "On the verb", 'Peter lives' is a proposition and 'Peter living' is not. If you add 'is' to 'Peter living' to get 'Peter is living', you get a proposition, and this is because the participle 'living' does not signify affirmation, whereas the verb 'is' does. "From this it appears that the affirmation that does or does not exist in a word is what makes it a verb or not".

Is there something in reality that corresponds to the noun-verb structure that is essential to all language? If so, we could not talk about it, at least, not using nouns. We could express reality, but not signify it.

Ockham's Fregean moment

2011-12-16T14:29:00.002Z

I am working on chapter 67 of Ockham's master work, where I find something that reminds me of Frege. Ockham is talking about 'material supposition'. This is a mode of supposition where a word stands for itself. It's rather like when a word is enclosed in quotation marks (which the medievals didn't have), except the whole point of quotation marks is that we create a new word to stand for the unquoted word, and so the word precisely doesn't stand for itself.

Ockham claims that there are situations when a word signifies something that it does not materially supposit for. His example is the sentence "animal is predicated of man", in Latin: animal praedicatur de homine. Note the word 'homine', which is the ablative case of the word 'homo'. This is important, for Ockham's sentence is true because 'a man is an animal' is true, which in Latin is homo est animal. Note the nominative case of 'homo'. So when we say "animal is predicated of man", we mean that animal is predicated of homo, not homine. But we can only say that using the word homine, at least in Latin. (Or perhaps the same is really true in English, except the ablative of the word 'man' is the same as the nominative?) Thus the quoted homine signifies itself, i.e. homine, but supposits for its nominative homo. (Hope that makes sense).

That seems trivial. But it seems remarkably close to Frege's famous puzzle about the concept horse. Frege held that simple propositions like 'Red Rum is a horse' are composed of Object and Concept. The object is signified by the object word "Red Rum" and is thus Red Rum himself. The concept is signified by the predicate " - is a horse". Let's call that the concept Horse. But now the puzzle. The sentence "the concept Horse is a concept" is also a simple sentence, where the term "the concept Horse" occurs in subject position. So it signifies an Object, according to Frege. And so is not a Concept. Thus, the concept Horse is not a concept. Frege admits this is odd.

It must indeed be recognised that here we are confronted by an awkwardness of language, which I admit cannot be avoided, if we say that the concept horse is not a concept, whereas, e.g., the city of Berlin is a city, and the volcano Vesuvius is a volcano.

This seems remarkably similar to Ockham's puzzle about homine, although it would take some work to tease out the underlying basis of it, if any.

A piece of enormously complex polyphony sung over a drone of Aristotelianism and a cantus firmus of revelation

2011-12-15T16:55:00.000Z

A long title to go with the other one today. Michael Sullivan’s perceptive and entertaining ramble on Ockham and Scotus is well worth looking at.

Does a Common Term Suppositing with a Present Tense Verb Supposit Only for Presently Existing Things?

2011-12-15T16:25:00.000Z

Sorry for the strange title but it is a literal translation of one of the questions (Latin: Utrum terminus communus supponens verbo de praesenti supponat tantum pro praesentibus) in Scotus’ Questions on the Perihermenias, and I am struck by the increasing resemblance between the discussion going on here, and the discussions on the same subject going on in the late 13th century in Oxford and Paris. In my last post, I discussed the slightly paradoxical syllogism

(1) No y is identical with Caesar
(2) Some x was identical with Caesar
(3) Some x is not identical with any y

to which David Brightly objected that

For (1) to be true it's clear that the range of the quantified expression 'no y' cannot be all men who ever were. Rather the present tense 'is' modifies the quantifier 'no man' restricting the ys in (1) to the presently existing men. Similarly in (2) the past tensed 'was' modifies the quantifier 'some x', restricting the xs to the men who ever were, ie, no restriction at all.

Well that’s true, and that’s one solution proposed by some of the scholastics, who thought that the present tense of the main verb of the sentence restricts (Latin: restringit) a common term like ‘man’ to suppositing (i.e. ranging over) presently existing men (praesentibus).

What’s wrong with that solution is the present tense that we have to use when we say what things are in the domain or range of quantification. David says that using a verb in the past tense allows the quantifier it to range over all the man that ever were. The problem is the implied present tense of the ‘ranging’. How is it that the quantifier ‘ranges’ – present tense – over past men, men who longer exist? Surely it can’t. Nor can the domain now ‘contain’ all such men. It used to contain them, but now it doesn’t. So the second premiss (2) cannot be true. There cannot be any x that was identical with Caesar, because however wide the domain or range of quantification, the domain exists in the present. It has to exist in the present because we say that it is the range of our quantification, and to say that we must use the present tense.

Anthony is closer when he says that the real problem is presentism, but there are problems with presentism also, which I will talk about later.

Clarification

2011-12-14T17:48:00.001Z

David Brightly has rightly questioned whether my argument is valid:

Caesar was a man
Caesar is not (any longer) a man
Some man is not a man

It's not, unless our domain of quantification consists only of men. But I can easily restate the argument

No y is identical with Caesar
Some x was identical with Caesar
Some x is not identical with any y

I don't see any way round that. Of course, some x was identical with some y (for y = Caesar, where the verb "=" has past tense). And perhaps we could read the existential quantifer as tensed - there was an x such that x is not identical with any y. But there's no way we could make any sense of it in standard predicate logic. Moreover, the standard way of understanding quantification as a kind of relation between variables or open sentences or predicates on the one side, and objects on the other, makes no sense either. For example, logicians say that the predicate "- was an emperor" is satisfied. Is satisfied? Or was satisfied?

Quantifying over

2011-12-12T17:17:00.003Z

In an earlier post I asked whether some men are not men. Intuitively all men are men, and so ‘some men are not men’ is false. Yet if the term ‘man’, occurring in the subject position of a sentence, means something like ‘someone who is, was or will be a man’, and given that Caesar was once a man, but is no longer a man, i.e. not now a man, it seems to follow that some men (e.g. Caesar) are not men, i.e. were men but aren’t now. Thus, counterintuitively, some men are not men. From this we derived the even more puzzling ‘some present events are not present events’. Caesar’s crossing the Rubicon was once a present event. And if ‘present event’ means ‘event which is, or was once, or will be present’, and since Caesar’s crossing the Rubicon is not present, it apparently follows that at least one present event (crossing the Rubicon) is not a present event.

David Brightly, taking the approach of a contemporary logician, helpfully suggests that “we just stipulate in advance which men we propose to quantify over and this bounds what 'some man' may refer to. It could be men alive, dead or alive, living in Midsomer, ever been married, whatever is appropriate, as long as we make it explicit and make appropriate adjustments elsewhere.”

I object that it is a problem either way. If the English word ‘man’ in fact only means presently existing man, it immediately follows that we can’t quantify over men in the 13th century, for there are none to quantify over. Nor were there any. ‘Some man lived in the 13th century’ is false, unless there is a 700 year old man still alive. The question is what the word ‘man’ ranges over. If only presently existing entities, then there were no men alive 10 years except for those alive now, thus very few men who were alive 90 years ago. Census records are all false. There were not 7 million people living in London in the 1920s. More like a few thousand (namely all present Londoners who are old enough to have lived here 90 years ago).

If by contrast we accept that there were 7 million Londoners in the 1920s, we have to accept that most of these, namely the ones who have died, are no longer Londoners. Thus, some Londoners are not Londoners. You can’t escape the problem by specifying ‘domains of quantification’.

On believing the same thing

2011-12-11T16:09:00.002Z

I asked: If Tom believes that snow is white, and Carol believes that snow is white, are they believing the same thing or not? And Anthony asked rhetorically, if I am eating a hamburger, and you are eating a hamburger, are we both eating the same thing or not? If I am nervous, and you are nervous, are we both experiencing the same emotion? If I have 5 apples, and you have 5 apples, do we both have the same number of apples? I'm reading a copy of "The Great Gatsby". You're reading a different copy of "The Great Gatsby". Are we both reading the same thing?

If we are both eating a hamburger, then in one sense we are eating the same thing, namely hamburger. Perhaps we could say the sameness in question is a 'formal' identity. In another sense we are not, given that there are probably two hamburgers in question, hence there is no sameness in the sense of 'numerical' identity. Clearly there is no numerical identity between what Tom and Carol believe, even though they both believe that snow is white. But if the identity is formal, where is the matter which has the form? The form of hamburger is embedded an organic carbon compound (meat). The form of "The Great Gatsby" is embedded in another compound (tree pulp, paper). What is the material that embeds the form of the proposition 'snow is white'?

On an existential problem suggested by Anthony

2011-12-09T14:15:00.000Z

I am beginning to appreciate more the comments provided by Anthony (if only he would think before commenting, and not endlessly comment and delete - bear in mind that any comment whether deleted or not comes through my email box).

I suggested earlier that some things used to exist, but no longer exist. Given my acceptance of Brentano's equivalence - that "some A is B" is equivalent to "Some A that is B exists", Anthony has spotted that this entails that some things are no longer things, and are thus not things (although, to be sure, they were things). And indeed some men (e.g. Caesar) who were a man, are no longer a man. Ergo, some men are not men.

This has the distinct whiff of paradox, which I will investigate later.

Ockham and Bradley's regress

2011-12-09T14:04:00.004Z

I am currently working on chapter 51 of Ockham’s Summa Logicae, and I have spotted something that looks very much like Bradley’s regress. He writes

Nec illud quod subiungitur de materia et forma, subiecto et accidente, toto et partibus, et spiritibus unitis corporibus concludit rem relativam mediam inter illa unita. Eadem enim quaestio remaneret de illa re media: quomodo facit unum cum eo in quo poneretur? Aut enim se ipsa, et eadem ratione standum fuit in primis unibilibus; aut alia unione, et tunc procedetur in infinitum.

I am still working on a translation, but it means something like this. The context is Ockham’s argument against the existence of relation as a distinct category of thing separate from the things that are related. He says that the joining of matter and form, subject and accident, whole and parts etc into one object does not imply the existence of a relation-entity intermediate between the two. For the same question would apply to the relation-entity. How is the relation made one with the thing (such as the unity of matter and from) in which it is posited? Either by itself, and by the same reasoning we should have stopped at the first two things capable of being united (e.g. matter and form alone), or by another union, and then there would be an infinite regress.

But this is Bradley’s regress, or something very similar to it. Bradley did not invent his regress!

An interesting side note: the Latin phrase eadem ratione standum fuit in primo seems to be a stock phrase always used in the context of regress proofs. Burley uses the same argument, and the same phrase here, arguing that if something X exists, this is either because of its essence, or from something added to its essence. If because of its essence, then existence is part of essence. If because of something else Y added to the essence, then Y exists either because of its essence, or by something added to its essence. If by something Z added to Y, then we have to ask the same thing about Z, and so on ad infinitum. But if by its essence, then by the same reasoning we should have stopped in the first place (eadem ratione fuit standum in primo). I.e. if it is enough for Y to exist because of its essence, the same reasoning applies to the starting point X, and we should have stopped there.

A similar argument, and the same phrase, is used by Thomas in lecture 3 on Book 10 of the Metaphysics. When a man is said to be one, the term one does not express a different nature from man, just as being does not express a different nature from the ten categories; for, if it did express a different nature, an infinite regress would necessarily result, since that nature too would be said to be one and a being. And if being were to express a nature different from these things, an infinite regress would also follow; but if not, then by the same reasoning we should have stopped at the first instance (pari ratione standum fuit in primo). See also Summa I Q6 a3 arg3, where he argues that good is good essentially, and not by something added to it, Summa I Q27 a3 arg1, where he argues that no other procession exists in God besides that of the Word, Summa IIa Q109 a6 arg3, arguing that a man does not need grace in order to prepare for grace, and De Potentia Q3 arg 7 arg7, arguing that the forces of nature suffice for the action of nature without God operating therein.

See also Albertus, Metaphysics IV iv (scanned but not corrected or translated), where he argues that there is no medium between odd and even.

It’s interesting because the stock phrase suggests a stock argument, and therefore its use by writers prior to Ockham suggests the argument did not originate with him. But it is a stock argument against multiplying entities. We must choose reason 1 which tells us not to multiply entities, and reason 2 which tells us we must multiply. If we choose reason 2, we get another entity, but then must choose between reason 1a, which tells us to stop there, and 2b which tells us to continue multiplying. But if we choose 2b, we get an infinite regress. Therefore choose reason 1a. But now the crucial point: reason 1a is the same as reason 1, therefore by the same reason whoy not just stop at 1 - pari ratione standum fuit in primo.

Ockham uses this argument all over the place in the Summa, and it is pretty much the basis of his nominalism. But the examples above suggest that it did not originate with him. His genius lay in seeing its application in metaphysics and logic, in using it as the foundation for his nominalistic program, and in writing the Summa, which is a masterpiece of extended argument, intermixed with polemic and some entertaining ranting and abuse. (More on the ranting and abuse later).

Does everyone believe something?

2011-12-06T09:06:00.000Z

Anthony asks whether ‘that it will rain next week’ is something. The quotes are scare quotes, but I could rephrase his question using real quotes. Does the noun phrase “that it will rain next week” name anything? And if so, what kind of thing is it? Is it located in space? Indeed, is it located in time? If I say that grass is green today, and you say the same thing tomorrow, is what you say tomorrow numerically identical with what I say today? Is the object of saying, stating, thinking, believing etc. a timeless eternal object, located nowhere in space itself? Is that Platonic idea consistent with nominalism?

I'm not sure a logician needs to worry about questions like these. A logician is worried about whether an arguments like

Everything said by Tom is true
That snow is white is said by Tom
That snow is white is true

or
Tom believes that snow is white
Tom believes something

are valid. And surely they are. If Tom believes that snow is white, then the simplest answer to the question of what 'that snow is white' refers to is simply that it is what Tom believes. Why bring space and time into it?

Wikipedia and the Enlightment

2011-12-05T09:08:00.001Z

A debate is raging in Wikipedia about why their 'valued articles' are not very good, and hence not very valuable. You can follow it on their mailing list here. The list of 'Valued Articles', which is itself not very good, because it omits many obviously vital articles (such as Theology) is here. The obvious answer (which seems to have occurred to no one) is that there is a shortage of editors who know about these subjects. Take one of the vital articles on their list, Age of Enlightment. It begins

The Age of Enlightenment (or simply the Enlightenment or Age of Reason) was an elite cultural movement of intellectuals in 18th century Europe that sought to mobilize the power of reason in order to reform society and advance knowledge. It promoted intellectual interchange and opposed intolerance and abuses in church and state. Originating about 1650–1700, it was sparked by philosophers Baruch Spinoza (1632–1677), John Locke (1632–1704), Pierre Bayle (1647–1706), mathematician Isaac Newton (1643–1727) and Voltaire (1694–1778). Ruling princes often endorsed and fostered figures and even attempted to apply their ideas of government. The Enlightenment flourished until about 1790–1800, after which the emphasis on reason gave way to Romanticism's emphasis on emotion and a Counter-Enlightenment gained force.

This is horrible and clumsy and fails to explain what the Age of Enlightenment was really about. First of all it was a period rather than a movement, which is in fact why it is called the 'age' of enlightenment, lasting from about 1740 to 1780, although its ideals persisted for long after that, and I would like to think or hope that this blog embodies some of them.

Secondly, the Enlightenment is essentially a set of values shared by prominent writers and thinkers of the period. Their guiding principle was that the increase of knowledge, the use of reason, and the application of the scientific method would improve the condition of humankind. Its outlook was a belief in the possibility of progress: human beings are essentially good, and people can better themselves and society by education and the application of reason.

The introduction to the Wikipedia article doesn't really get us there at all. I'm not sure that enlightenment thinkers regarded themselves as an 'elite'. One of their basic principles was that reason is the property of all humankind, and not of some self-elected elite. To say the movement 'promoted intellectual interchange' may well be true, but is true of many other movements. The third sentence about princes "endorsing and fostering figures" and "applying their ideas of government" makes no sense. And the final sentence is horribly 1066-ish.

The problem is simple: the theory of "crowdsourcing" doesn't work. According to this theory, 'anyone can edit' an article, and by some Darwinian process the good edits will survive and the bad ones will perish and become extinct, and so we will end up, after 10 years of Wikipedia, with an absolutely perfect and flawless article about the Age of Enlightenment. That theory is clearly false. It is a crime that the gang of illiterates who have taken over Wikipedia should have let such a noble project - one which should have been the very embodiment of the ideals of the Enlightenment - languish and decay so lamentably.

Ockham on the continuum

2011-12-04T09:54:00.002Z

Newly translated, for the first time on the Internet etc., here is chapter 45 of part I of Ockham's Summa Logicae. Here, Ockham's applies his nominalism to the age-old question of the continuum. Is a point something separate and indivisible from the line of which it is a point? Is number something different from the things which are numbered?

Ockham says no. Aristotle’s intention, according to Ockham, was to deny that there is anything indivisible 'in this world below' (in istis inferioribus). Continuous quantity is nothing other than a single thing having one part at a distance from another part, and discrete quantity (number) is nothing other than the numbered things themselves. The difference between continuous and discrete quantity is simply that the parts of continuous quantity mutally protude onto one another [ad se protensae mutuo], whereas the parts of discrete quantity (i.e. two men) can be as near or as far as you like, with no 'medium' between them.

... in the case of discrete quantity it does not matter whether or not the items which constitute the discrete quantity are distinct in place and situation or not, or whether there is a medium between them. Hence, for two men to be 'two', it does not matter whether there is a medium between those two men or not. For they are two when there is no medium between them, just as when they are distant from each other by a hundred leagues, nor does the predication 'two' of those men vary because of anything to do with nearness or distance. On the contrary, if they were in the same place at the same time they would be two, just as if they were not in the same place.

The translation is new, and has not been through any of the review stages required in the Logic Museum, so all suggestions welcome.

Bad performance

2011-12-03T17:22:00.002Z

Sometimes just the performance can make music horrible, even though the performers are skilled, and the rendition has no obvious flaws. Here's Guarachi Guaro by the Salvadorean band Proyecto Acústico. Compare it with the arrangement it was taken from by Cal Tjader and his quintet from 1953. Much better, but why?

Here also is the original by Dizzy Gillespie, arranged by Gerald Wilson. Only 276 views, though superior to the others. Love the wind up gramophone. I have one of these in the attic, I may take it out for a 'spin' some day.

The insoluble problem of future tense statements

2011-12-03T12:19:00.000Z

Vallicella finally addresses the problem of Excluded Middle and Future-Tensed Sentences. A prediction in 1996 that the FTSE would reach 10,000 by 2011 would have been wrong at the time the prediction was made. As he points out (using the US Dow index as his example), subsequent events merely made it evident that the content of the prediction was false, rather than bring it about that the prediction had a truth-value. Not even God can restore virginity*.

This suggests that the Law of Excluded Middle applies to future tense statements, but this causes him puzzlement, expressed in the following 'aporetic triad'.

1. Law of Excluded applies unrestrictedly to all declarative sentences, whatever their tense.
2. Presentism: Only what exists at present exists.
3. Truth-Maker Principle: Every contingent truth has a truth-maker.

They can't all be true, according to him, because the conjunction of any two implies the negation of the third. So here is a genuine insoluble problem. Each has a strong claim to our acceptance, but all of them cannot be true together.

Is that right? First, I don't see why the three statements are logically inconsistent. Why can't the truthmaker for a future tense statement exist now, in the present? However, presumably Maverick buys the argument I gave here. If the truthmaker exists now, and given that we cannot change the immediate present or the past, we cannot change the truthmaker’s existence. So we cannot change the future, for the truthmaker that exists now makes the future true, but we can change the future, ergo etc. So we can assume the additional premise

4. The truthmaker for any contingently true proposition exists only at the time for which the proposition is true.

By the expression 'time for which' a proposition is true, I am attempting to translating the medieval Latin pro tempore, meaning, roughly, any time at which any present tense statement corresponding to a non present tense statement is true. For example, if I truly say 'it will rain next week', when today is 3 December 2011, the time for which my statement is true = any day next week, i.e. the week commencing Monday 5 December. The corresponding present tense statements are 'it is raining today', uttered on Monday, or on Tuesday, Wednesday etc.

But statements 1-4 above cannot all be true. If only things in the present exist, future truthmakers do not exist. It may be that they will exist, but they don't now. So the statement 'it will rain next week' has no truthmaker (although, if it does rain, it may be that it will have one). And yet law of excluded middle surely applies to any statement whatever. If it does rain next week, and I say that it will rain next week, then surely we can say next week that 'Edward was right'.

Which of the four statements above is incorrect? (Rhetorical question, for those who read my blog regularly).

*Pace Peter Damian.

The lazy argument for not doing anything

2011-11-30T15:56:00.000Z

When inspiration fails, I turn to the Maverick’s site to look for easy pickings, and, lo, I find his post from Tuesday about future contingents. Bill starts with a tolerably useful distinction between the two senses of ‘proposition’ that caused so much anguish for Anthony (and me) the other day

Accordingly, a proposition is the sense of a context-free declarative sentence. A context-free sentence is one from which all indexical elements have been extruded, including verb tenses. Propositions so construed are a species of abstract object. This will elicit howls of outrage from some, but it is a view that is quite defensible.

I.e. proposition in the sense the medievals used it is “context-free declarative sentence”. A proposition in the modern sense is the sense (or ‘meaning’) of a context-free declarative sentence. (The medievals sometimes distinguished between a spoken proposition, i.e. context-free declarative sentence, and a ‘mental proposition’, i.e. the sense of a context-free declarative sentence.

Bill continues with a version of the ‘lazy argument’ for not doing anything, as follows.

1. Either I will be killed tomorrow or I will not.
2. If I will be killed, I will be killed no matter what precautions I take.
3. If I will not be killed, then I will be killed no matter what precautions I neglect.
Therefore
4. It is pointless to take precautions.

This is a breathtakingly rotten argument. Is it true that I will be killed in France tomorrow, I will be killed even if I take the precaution of not going to France? Surely not. It cannot be true that I will have been killed in France, even though I have not gone to France. The argument is only effective if we believe in truthmakers. For if the proposition ‘I will be killed in France tomorrow’ is true now, then Truthmakerists say it has a truthmaker now, i.e. some state of affairs that ‘makes it’ true. But if the truthmaker exists now, and given that we cannot change the immediate present or the past, we cannot change the truthmaker’s existence. So we cannot change the future, for the truthmaker that exists now makes the future true.

The early Duns Scotus has a nice argument against this which I discussed in a post in 2009. Scotus writes

It must be understood that a proposition about the future can be understood to signify something in the future in two ways. So that the proposition about the future signifies it to be true now that something in the future will have to be true [verum esse habebit] (for example, that ‘you will be white at a’ signifies it now to be in reality so that at time a you will be white). Or it can be understood that it signifies now that you will be white then: not that it signifies that it is now such that then you are going to be white, but that it signifies now that then you will be white. For to signify it to be [the case] now that you will be white at a, signifies more than to signify that you will be white at a.*

I take it that “signify it to be [the case] now that you will be white at a” means signifying that a truthmaker exists now for ‘will be white at a’.

*From a translation I made in 2009, which may be different from the corresponding translation (of Aristotle’s Perihermenias) that is now going through the usual process at CUA publications.

2011-11-29T18:35:00.000Z

Brandon has a thoughtful comment on an approach to truthmakers that turns the current discussion on its head.

If I recall correctly David Brightly at some point commented that it was possible to take a view in which truthmaker theory goes at things backward -- takes propositions as given facts and then tries to find the reality to suit, whereas one could take reality as the given fact and then look at how propositions express it (or fail to do so). I think this latter approach is more promising. If Truthmaker Maximalism and Necessitarianism are both true -- if you can find a truthmaker for every true proposition and the link between truthmakers and true propositions is not loose but logically rigorous -- then this would virtually guarantee that the approach was fruitful in and of itself. But if either of them is false, then truthmaker theory is, at the very most optimistic assessment, missing something important.

I can't find where David Brightly said this but, yes, that's right. If I manage (unlikely) to draw a faithful representation of my garden, then we don't take the picture and find the reality (a garden) to suit. Rather, the garden is the given, and then we look at how well the picture resembles it. Aquinas (and Scotus) say something along these lines.

Wikipedia: major studies detect cooling over Antartica

2011-11-28T17:04:00.000Z

On 26 April 2009 – that is, two and a half years ago – an account called ‘Ivanelo’ added some material to the Wikipedia article on ‘Climate of Antarctica’, including the claim that “Since mid 1960s, all major studies detect cooling over the most of Antarctica”.

Today (28 November 2011), climate expert William Connolley reverts the edit, with the comment “rm twaddle (how did that stand for so long)”. Quite. On the assumption that the claim is twaddle, how was it not spotted for so long? Particularly as Connolley himself had worked on it interim.

This is something to store up for my discussion with the UK charity commission. Wikimedia UK managed to persuade them – see the discussion here - that processes exist on Wikipedia to ensure high standards of article quality. Their solicitors, Stone King, certainly assured them that “the content promoted has sufficient editorial controls and safeguards on the accuracy and objectivity of the information provided”. This is highly questionable. Connolley is one of a few subject matter experts who understand how to make judgments about their area of specialism. But there are not many like him, and the whole process of Wikipedia governance is inimical to such specialism. Connolley himself would like the Arbitration Committee of Wikipedia "to think more about content and less about conduct" - see his election guide here - but he knows that will not happen.

A simple definition for truthmaker?

2011-11-27T15:17:00.001Z

Brightly suggests a rule for finding a truthmaker for any proposition p, viz., any entity t such that 't exists' entails p will do the job. Thus we have an 'equation' to solve. When p = 'Vallicella exists' a solution would appear to be t = Vallicella.

I'm not sure that will do. For a start, it suggests that every truthmaker T of a non-existential proposition is a truthmaker for at least two propositions, namely the non-existential one, and also the existential one 'T exists'. E.g. let T be the truthmaker for 'it is day'. Then it is the trutmaker for that, and also the truthmaker for 'T exists'.

Also, more worryingly, the entailment relation is very easy to satisfy. If p is true, then its truthmaker is any (existing) entity x whatsoever, since x exists, and p is true, i.e. if x = a then 'a exists' and p are both true, and we have entailment. Entailment only failing when the antecedent is true and the consequent false. (I think, I always get lost with entailment).

Want to donate to Wikipedia?

2011-11-26T16:37:00.001Z

I just noticed a burst of traffic from a site discussing whether to donate to Wikipedia. Welcome to Beyond Necessity. On donating, I'm not necessarily saying don't, but do check where your money is going first.

If you are logging in from an IP based in the UK, even if you are not from the UK but here on business or pleasure, you will be taken to a page owned by Wikimedia UK. Note that carefully. It says Wikimedia with an 'm' not a 'p', and it says 'UK'. If you are outside the UK you don't get the 'UK' but you still get the 'm'.

Wikimedia is not the same as Wikipedia, so you are not donating to Wikipedia. Now some of the money will go to Wikipedia to pay the costs of running the enormous servers which support the huge Wikipedia traffic. But that is small compared to the sum that Wikimedia spends annually, and in any case you are not supporting the construction of Wikipedia itself, which is entirely written by volunteers. Often very badly written, as I have said many times here. Gregory Kohs has some good financial analysis here.

Wikimedia International (the Wikimedia Foundation) spends lots of money on travel, entertainment, and Sue Gardner's decent salary. But none of this supports Wikipedia itself. As for Wikimedia UK, the money will go entirely on what is listed here, none of which I can make any sense of.

If you want to help education, donate via gift aid to an institution run by competent and qualified staff. I donate generously to the Warburg, which is a great place and offers great courses, and has a great library of Renaissance books. I don't give any money to a bunch of incompetent clowns at Wikimedia UK.

Bad music: you are on hold

2011-11-26T12:57:00.001Z

I searched YouTube for examples of the sort of music you hear when you are put 'on hold' but could find nothing much except this spoof. In any case, well worth it for a laugh and the music is an authentic example of the genre.

Voicemail music is the purest example of music that is essentially and per se bad. It's not merely indifferent music to which naff words have been set. Nor is it music which has been made extra bad by a horrible video. Nor essentially good music which has been contaminated by the setting or arrangement (Barry Manilow's arrangement and setting of Chopin's Prelude XX for example). No, it is music which is essentially horrible. If there is a Platonic heaven that contains the uncontaminated essence of the Beautiful, there must also be a Platonic musical hell in which this stuff all goes.

I have no answers, as usual, to the philosophical and musicological question of why voicemail is bad, or even the particular tonal or harmonic features that make it instantly recognisable as being 'on hold'. Over to the experts.

Presentism and truthmaking

2011-11-26T11:00:00.000Z

Anthony, who occasionally asks some very good questions (I'm sorry I don't have time to address them all), asks in a comment to this post whether my position on truthmakers is inconsistent with my presentism. I'm not sure exactly where he is coming from, but I agree there may appear to be an inconsistency when I use singular terms like 'Socrates' to refer to non-present, and therefore non-existing individuals.

I explained this a while back. See this post and the posts it links back to. The verb 'refers to' is, I claim, a logically intransitive verb. This concept I have tried to explain to the Maverick on many occasions, with little apparent success (smiley face icon).

The truthmaker for 'Socrates exists'

2011-11-25T15:17:00.000Z

No one agrees, so let’s look again at the premiss (3) of my earlier argument. I claim that the truthmaker for ‘A exists’ is not A itself. I argue as follows. If Socrates himself is the truthmaker for ‘Socrates exists’ then, from the definition of truthmaker, Socrates makes the proposition ‘Socrates exists’ true. But that is manifestly false, given that Socrates no longer exists. I.e. the proposition

(*) Socrates makes the proposition ‘Socrates exists’ true

is manifestly false. For he cannot make that proposition true unless it is true. But it is false. Socrates no longer exists, so ‘Socrates exists’ is false. So Socrates does not make the proposition ‘Socrates exists’ true, and therefore, by the definition of truthmaker, Socrates himself is not the truthmaker of ‘Socrates exists’.

Duns Scotus banned from Wikipedia

2011-11-24T08:50:00.001Z

Here. More insight into the bizarre world of Wikipedia. 'Johnny the Vandal' spends his time creating hundreds of Wikipedia accounts every week in order to vandalise the encyclopedia. There is a whole team of people reverting his edits, and placing those little tags on the account page. This has nothing to do with creating a comprehensive and reliable free reference work, and indeed diverts attention from that noble project. The obvious solution would be to have some form of identification before users could open accounts. This would prevent the silly and pointless activities of both Johnny the vandal, and the 'vandal reversion' industry on Wikipedia. It would also deter those more subtle vandals whose aim is to create libellous biographies like this. But Wikipedia has not got its head around that idea yet.

Breathtakingly rotten arguments

2011-11-24T08:41:00.000Z

Maverick has a post here, which I haven't had time to give full attention to. He says that my infinite regress argument against truthmakers is 'breathtakingly rotten'. This wrongly implies there can be degrees of goodness or badness in arguments. Not true: an argument is either valid, or it is not. All invalid arguments are equally bad, and all valid arguments equally good. And I think my argument is perfectly valid, as follows.

1. There are truthmakers (assumption)
2. If the truthmaker for 'A exists' is not A itself, this leads to a contradiction (by infinite, vicious regress)
3. The truthmaker for 'A exists' is not A itself
4. (Contradiction) Therefore there are no truthmakers

It seems clear that Vallicella accepts consequence (2), but rejects assumption (3). So he accepts the argument is valid, and therefore (by implication) accepts that it is good, and therefore not 'breathtakingly rotten'. Whether (3) is true or false is a separate argument, and I haven't seen any such argument against it, nor any replies to my arguments for it.

A separate thread of the debate, which he refers to in that post, is whether the notion of a truthbearer implies the notion of a truthmaker. I think it does, but haven't given any conclusive arguments for this, yet.

Philosophy and occult philosophy according to Wikipedia

2011-11-21T14:35:00.001Z

There's a bizarre discussion going on here on Wikipedia about what counts as philosophy. Someone removed the 'Philosophy' category from articles, for example from Anarky (comic book character) and The Illuminatus! Trilogy (not sure what that is), and from John Dee (renaissance magician or 'occult philosopher').

It really irritates philosophers when their subject gets confused with things that are entirely different from, indeed contrary to the strict and proper definition of the term. 'Metaphysics' does not mean sitting cross-legged and chanting 'om', yet Wikipedia classifies writers like Rhonda Byrne as 'metaphysical writers'. It irritates them in exactly the way that Patrick Moore used to get irritated when people would confuse astrology with astronomy.

And while words change their meaning over time, that does not mean a comprehensive and reliable reference work should classify items according to their original meaning. As I pointed out here, the word 'astronomy' (astronomia) used to mean what the word 'astrology' now means, i.e. the superstitious and occult art. There were also proper astronomers, but they were called 'astrologers'. That does not mean that a comprehensive and reliable reference work would list medieval occultists under 'medieval astronomers', nor medieval scientific astronomers under 'medieval astrologers'. But then Wikipedia is not a comprehensive and reliable reference work, as I have argued here so many times.

Wikipedia: it will be a new and glorious day

2011-11-20T13:28:00.001Z

While researching the book on Wikipedia, I came across this lovely article*, written by Larry Sanger in the early days when Wikipedia was completely unknown but already showing strong signs of growth. Sanger has been badly represented by the Wikipedia establishment - portrayed as the one who argued for a long and painful process of article acceptance, originally the model for the defunct Nupedia, against Jimmy Wales' who wanted a collaborative and open model. Actually it was the other way round. Sanger was the father of Wikipedia. However, his views of how experts would work with the project sadly never came to fruition.

"... whereas, in 2001, an expert on T would be so disgusted by the article that he wouldn't think of participating in Wikipedia, in 2002 he might be so impressed by the article, and therefore also by Wikipedia's collaborative article-creation process, that he becomes a Wikipedian on the spot. It doesn't take many experts, thus inspired, to create a lot of good articles. Therefore, as Wikipedia articles improve, the project will surely attract more and more experts. Wikipedia participants in the beginning were limited mainly to hobbyists, students, and generalists, and a few experts; but it now has the attention of a lot more graduate students and professionals. In a few years, the project will have attracted the attention of very many more experts.

... It will be a new and glorious day."

*"Britannica or Nupedia? The Future of Free Encyclopedias" Kuro5hin, Wed Jul 25, 2001.

Bad music: pan pipes

2011-11-19T14:20:00.000Z

I was passing the charity shop when I noticed a six-pack of CDs, still in their box. Compilations of Elton John, the Bee Gees, The Carpenters and so on. As if that wasn't enough, these were all covers, on pan pipes. Pan pipes is a big subject, and there is little time here. But here is "How deep is your love", unfortunately no description available on YouTube, it is so bad. But a massive 3,000 plus views, for all that.

Representation, truth, and infinite regress

2011-11-18T09:56:00.001Z

I have argued (e.g. here and here that the notion of a ‘truthmaker’ leads to an infinite regress. If there is such a truthmaker, an entity that makes a proposition like ‘Socrates sits’ true - let it be A - then it comes into existence when Socrates sits down, and ceases to exist when he stands up. But 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.

A similar problem attaches to the idea of representation (and at bottom, I believe, it is the same problem). Can the trueness or faithfulness of a representation – itself be represented? We say a picture is a true or faithful representation of what it represents. Aquinas says that truth is the adaequatio - literally the ‘equality’ or perhaps ‘adequacy’ – of thought to reality. This is like the modern concept of a ‘mapping’ or even ‘correspondence’ is similar – imagine the thought being like a picture or map that we could lay against the reality and match each element of the map against an equal and corresponding element of the reality that is mapped. But how do we represent the accuracy or ‘equality’ of the representation itself? The accuracy or trueness of the representation is itself an aspect of reality, and must be captured, but is not itself a feature of the representation. For accuracy is a relation, and the representation is only one term of the relation.

To represent the accuracy, we need a further representation – imagine a picture of both the represented object and the representation, with mapping lines drawn between the corresponding elements. But then this is also a representation. To represent its accuracy, we would have to represent it together with the two objects it represents, together with further lines joining both the mapped elements and the mapping lines. This is something too complicated to draw or even to imagine, but even that would not be enough, for we still have a representation. The accuracy of this must also be represented, and so on ad infinitum.

The problem is inescapable. If we buy the idea of a ‘truthbearer’ (a proposition, a thought, whatever), the idea of a ‘truthmaker’ comes with it. The truthbearer is one term of the relation, the truthmaker is the other. But the truthmaker can’t be the other term, because truth is a relation, and the truth includes the existence of the relation, as well as the existence of its two terms. Just as the accuracy of a representation cannot itself be represented, so the truth of a truthbearer cannot itself be expressed.

There was no eclipse yesterday

2011-11-17T16:53:00.001Z

There was in fact no eclipse yesterday, as I predicted two days ago. Hence my prediction was right.

There will not be an eclipse tomorrow

2011-11-15T10:42:00.003Z

I checked on the NASA website here, which confirms there will be no eclipses tomorrow (16 November 2011), although there will be a partial solar eclipse on November 25.

So are the statements “there will be no eclipse on 16 November 2011” and “there will be an eclipse on 16 November 2011” both true? We don’t know for absolute certainty, of course. The whole universe may blow up at midnight, or the second coming may happen, or God may just stop the solar rotation of the earth. But we should not confuse mere epistemic considerations with considerations of truth and falsity. It is almost certain that there will not be an eclipse tomorrow, therefore it is almost certain that the proposition “there will be no eclipse on 16 November 2011” is true. Therefore, if the truthmaker-theorists are correct, it is almost certain that the proposition has a truthmaker. But what is that truthmaker?

According to Vallicella, a truthmaker should not be confused with the physical cause of some proposition being true. So the truthmaker for the eclipse proposition is not the current motion of the solar system and associated gravitational laws. So what is it?

Commenting 101

2011-11-14T11:48:00.000Z

This is a logic and philosophy blog and so comments require some elementary philosophical ‘good manners’. Here is an example of a ‘bad mannered’ comment, split into its five separate sentences.

1. FOOL, n. A person who pervades the domain of intellectual speculation and diffuses himself through the channels of moral activity (Bierce knew the score on bumblers, including ones wearing prussian helmets..and a tutu)
2. Actually, Ock. the causation issue regarding "truthmakin'" which bothers the faux-platonists at Mav.com is a legitimate issue, however primitive (for Armstrong as well...and holy Frege, and logicists--or, it should be).
3. The Rand-monkeys are sort of aware of it.
4. Social-economic existence ...compels people to observe facts/evidence (ie, to do science--as the saying goes, "necessity being the mother of invention"--fact-gathering leads to the development of tools, so forth), and ...there is a causal relation between the observation and its translation into syntax.
5. In brief--not quite strict determinism (and is a carny-perp a product of poor conditioning, or just evil? both probably)

This is bad-mannered and useless. (1) is a quotation from Bierce followed by an observation about tutus which I don’t follow. A tutu is a sort of ballet frock. What does a ballet frock have to do with the theory of truth? (2) says that the truthmaking issue is a serious one. Well yes, but we already know that, so it is not helpful. (3) is a pure ad hominem. (4) says that people observe facts, and that the observation causes translation into syntax. This is the closest to a relevant comment. But it is misplaced. The question is whether there are things that make true statements true, not whether there are observations that cause things to be written down or spoken. (5) is a comment about determinism whose relevance I do not understand.

Address comments to what is being argued or claimed in the post itself. Comments should engage with either the validity of the argument (do the initial assumptions imply the conclusion), or with the soundness of the argument (are the initial assumptions true?). If you are questioning the validity of an argument, give an example of where the premisses are true, and the conclusion false. If you are questioning the truth of an assumption or a claim, give reasons why it is wrong.

Another commenter wrote on the last post “I don't see anything having been sorted out. What I see is an example of terrible, upside down, epistemology”. This is also not helpful. Give an instance of what has not been sorted out, and show clearly why it has not been sorted out. And show which bit is ‘epistemology’, and show why it is terrible and upside-down.

From now on I will be deleting any comment that strays too far from these basic rules. I will also delete any comment that contains ad hominem, even if it is otherwise acceptable.

On failing to understand

2011-11-13T10:10:00.000Z

Maverick has a nicely observed post here on the different senses of 'I do not understand', as used by philosophers. For the sake of completeness I have copied it here.
---------------------------------------------------------------
CJFW was fond of use (i). If he said 'I do not understand' you knew that something very bad was coming your way. I'm not immune to it. And as a brief ad hominem can I point out the Peter Lupu is not immune to it either – I've lost count of the times he has said it, usually in sense (ii).

On this one, I genuinely don't understand what a truthmaker is. Its broad definition is: something that causes a truthbearer (a 'proposition') to be true. Part of my difficulty is with 'truthbearer'. What sort of thing is it? Is it a mental item like a thought? Is it a physical item of some kind? Or is it a Platonic abstract object? I'll assume the latter.

And what sort of causal relation obtains between truthmaker and truthbearer. Bill has said that it is not a cause that is mediated by some physical event or state, in the way that the sun rising is the cause of truth of the proposition 'it is day'. The truthmakerist holds there is something 'in between' the sun rising and the truth of the proposition, and this 'in betweenie' is being-day-ness or something like that. Is that right?

So there is supposedly some direct, unmediated causal relation between a physical item (the state of affairs 'being day') and an an abstract Platonic entity. And I am finding that difficult to get my head round, in sense (iii).

I also have the difficulty with future tensed statements like 'the sun will rise tomorrow'. Does that proposition exist as a truthbearer now, or tomorrow? Does its truthmaker exist now or tomorrow? I commented on that problem here. If the truthmaker for a future tensed proposition exists now, it seems difficult to avoid logical determinism. But if it exists in the future, we have to explain its coming-into-existence. Is the coming-into-existence or actual-existence part of the state of affairs that constitutes the truthmaker? Then it seems difficult to avoid the infinite regress problem I already pointed out.

And at this point my head is swimming with such difficulties and confusions that I can only confess misunderstanding in sense (iii) alone.

Richards on popular culture

2011-11-13T09:23:00.002Z

Researching attitudes to pop culture before the 1960s I came across this comment by I.A. Richards*

With the increase of population the problem presented by the gulf between what is preferred by the majority and what is accepted as excellent by the most qualified opinion has become infinitely more serious and appears likely to become threatening in the near future. For many reasons standards are much more in need of defence than they used to be. It is perhaps premature to envisage a collapse of values, a transvaluation by which popular taste replaces trained discrimination. Yet commercialism has done stranger things: we have not yet fathomed the more sinister potentialities of the cinema and the loud-speaker, and there is some evidence uncertain and slight no doubt, that such things as 'best sellers' (compare Tarzan with She), magazine verses, mantelpiece pottery, Academy picture, Music Hall songs, County Council buildings, War Memorials ... are decreasing in merit. Notable exceptions, in which the multitude are better advised than the experts, of course occur sometimes, but not often.

Note that the Wikipedia article on Richards provides more evidence for my theory that most of Wikipedia was written by 2007, and that it was written my a small number of people more in the manner of a conventional encyclopedia than by 'crowdsourcing'. The current article differs little from the version of July 2005 – subsequent changes are mere alterations to format, linking and 'wikifying', and it was entirely written someone editing from this IP address.

*Principles of Literary Criticism, 1924, republished by Routledge Classics 2001, p. 31.

Contradictions do not exist

2011-11-12T08:33:00.000Z

By chance, I found where ‘contradictions do not exist’ came from. See chapter seven (“The Exploiters and the Exploited”) of Ayn Rand’s Atlas Shrugged.

I'll give you a hint. Contradictions do not exist. Whenever you think that you are facing a contradiction, check your premises. You will find that one of them is wrong.

Taken literally, i.e. in the standard logical use, this is horribly wrong, even if the intended meaning is not. A ‘premiss’, in traditional logic, is one of a set of propositions that are used to support the conclusion of an argument. Being ‘wrong’ is not a term of traditional logic, but ‘false’ is clearly what is meant. It is certainly true that if two or more propositions involve or imply a contradiction, then at least one of them is false. But that does not imply, as Rand imagines, that contradictions do not exist. For a contradiction is simply defined as two premisses (or propositions) that contradict each other. If the premisses exist, so does the contradiction, just as a left and a right shoe make a pair.

What Rand probably meant was that contradictory premisses cannot be true. That is perfectly correct, and is the Principle of Contradiction itself. So she probably meant something quite simple and obvious, indeed a law of logic. Why she chose to put it that way is more difficult. Perhaps by ‘facing a contradiction’, she meant facing the state of affairs that is the truthmaker for a contradiction. And of course there could be no such truthmaker, even if there were truthmakers for other propositions (which I deny, of course).

Bad music: steel guitars

2011-11-11T10:54:00.001Z

If you have ever listened to country music, you have probably heard a steel guitar. Here's Hank Williams and his band, with steel guitar briefly at 1:03. But where did the steel guitar come from?

Supposedly it was invented in Hawaii. The story goes that in the mid 1890's Joseph Kekuku, a Hawaiian schoolboy, was strolling by the railway with his guitar. He picked up a metal bolt lying by the track, and slid it along the strings of the guitar. And so the steel guitar was born. There are a number of different stories about this, of course, so probably one of them is true.

Hawaiian guitar music become popular in America in the 1930s, and I used to have a lot of 78s of it. I still have some Felix Mendelssohn in the attic somewhere. Mendelssohn (a descendent of the more illustrious classical composer of the same name) recorded many jazz 'standards' Hawaiian style. Here he is with 'I got rhythm', recorded 28 Oct. 1940. His Teddy Wilson-ish piano break is very nice, coming in at 1:10, followed shortly by the steel guitar at 1:43. Here he is again with Hawaiian war chant.

The sound found its way into country music via Alvino Rey, who is credited as the father of the pedal steel, a steel guitar played flat on its back using pedals that increase the range of the instrument. Here he is playing 'St Louis Blues', which features a talking steel guitar. Another pioneer was Herb Remington. Here he is playing Goodbye Liza Jane, and (at the age of 83) Remington Ride. Finally, Leon McAuliffe and his Western Swing Band play Panhandle Rag (January 1949).

In more recent times we have the Junior Brown. He is famous for the excellent Highway Patrol, of which my wife has a visceral and extreme dislike. She only heard it once, many years ago, but still remembers it with hatred. Sometimes I mention its existence simply to annoy her.

Brown is also notable for Guit steel blues, although this owes more the slide guitar tradition that originated in the Mississipi delta, than to Hawaii.

Two clear arguments against truthmakers

2011-11-10T16:03:00.000Z

The Maverick Philosopher challenges me to lodge one clear objection against the idea of a truthmaker. Very well.

The background. I originally objected that in order to make its proposition p true, a truthmaker must exist. Let the truthmaker be T. Then, when the proposition ‘T exists’ is true, p will be true. But (I hold) the truthmaker of ‘T exists’ cannot be T, anymore than the truthmaker of ‘Socrates sits’ can be Socrates. Let it be T*. But now we must ask about the truthmaker of “T* exists”. This cannot be T*, by the same reasoning. Therefore there must be another truthmaker T**, and so on ad infinitum. The Maverick objects to my initial assumption that the truthmaker of ‘T exists’ cannot be T itself. For if it is, there is no regress (or at least, not a vicious one), and my argument fails.

That is by way of a preliminary. The whole dispute depends on whether the truthmaker of ‘T exists’ is T itself, and I shall now give two arguments that it cannot.

The first argument assumes that the meaning of a singular proposition (i.e. sentence) does not depend on whether its singular term has a referent. ‘Socrates sits’ means the same whether there is such a person as Socrates or not. Plenty of philosophers (direct referentialists) disagree with this assumption, but I believe Maverick does not. Thus it is contingent whether any object falls under the proper name ‘Socrates’ (used in the standard sense to mean a certain Athenian philosopher, the teacher of Plato). Thus it cannot be that Socrates makes the proposition ‘Socrates exists’ true. I.e. the proposition

(*) Socrates makes the proposition ‘Socrates exists’ true

is false, because Socrates does not exist. Maverick may object that in the past it made (past tense) the proposition true. I reply: even if that is conceded, (*) is still false. Maverick may then object that ‘makes’ is to be understood tenselessly, as in propositions like ‘2 plus 2 equals 4’. I reply: if so, he must then explain why Socrates sometimes (tenselessly) makes the proposition ‘Socrates exist’ true (i.e. when Socrates is alive) and sometimes (tenselessly) he fails to make it true (now he is dead, or before he is born). There must be some additional factor. Hence the truthmaker of ‘Socrates exists’ cannot be just Socrates himself, and I rest my case.

My second argument is from future tense propositions. Assume that it will rain tomorrow, and so ‘it will rain tomorrow’ is true. Does the truthmaker for that proposition exist today, or only tomorrow, when it rains? If only tomorrow, then I argue as before. What causes the truthmaker to come into existence. It cannot be the truthmaker itself, for the reasons already argued. But if the truthmaker exists today, and thus exists for all time, in a sort of date-stamped way like ‘it will rain in London on 11 November 2011’, then the future is already determined. But the future is not determined, ergo etc.

A thought whose being consists in its being true?

2011-11-08T08:25:00.000Z

The question being discussed here about truthmakers has some affinity with a question discussed by Frege in his late essay “Negation”. He compares grasp of a thought with understanding of a question. And, just as we can understand a question without understanding the correct answer, so he argues that there cannot be a thought ‘whose being consists in its being true’

The content of a question is that as to which we must decide. Consequently truth cannot be counted as going along with the content of the question. When I raise the question whether the Sun is bigger than the Moon, I am seeing the sense of the interrogative sentence 'Is the Sun bigger than the Moon?' Now if this sense were a thought whose being consisted in its being true, then I should at the same time see that this sense was true. Grasping the sense would at the same time be an act of judging; and the utterance of the interrogative sentence would at the same time be an assertion, and so an answer to the question. But in an interrogative sentence neither the truth nor the falsity of the sense may be asserted. Hence an interrogative sentence has not as its sense something whose being consists in its being true.
[...]
And since the sense of an interrogative sentence is always also inherent in the assertoric sentence that gives an answer to the question, this separation must be carried out for assertoric sentences too. It is a matter of what we take the word 'thought' to mean. In any case, we need a short term for what can be the sense of an interrogative sentence. I call this a thought. If we use language this way, not all thoughts are true. The being of a thought thus does not consist in its being true. (Negation, from Translations from Philosophical Writings of Gottlob Frege, ed. Peter Geach, p.125).

I wonder if a ‘truthmaker’ as understood by the advocates of truthmaking is the same sort of thing as Frege’s marvelous but impossible thought. Something that if we perceived it for what it was, would simultaneously communicate to us the truth of what it includes.

First picture of a truthmaker

2011-11-07T08:41:00.001Z

This blog is always first! Following up the first reported sighting of a truthmaker for the proposition 'this watch is on the table' nearly 100 years ago in June 1915*, the South West London metaphysics research laboratory can proudly announce it has located a picture of it.

Problems remain, however. Is 'this watch' a pocket watch? Or a Patek Phillipe or one of those pink Barbie watches beloved of little girls? What kind of table is it? The picture suggests it may be a George II card table. But it may be George III, or one of those nasty cheap imitations with a veneer so thin you could peel it off with no more than a plastic safety razor.

Where on the table is the watch? This early sighting suggests bottom right, but clearly anywhere on the table will do. You could turn the watch at any angle, or even turn it face down. All these possible states of affairs will make the proposition true. Are they different truthmakers, then? Or are they in reality the same truthmaker? But then what does it look like? The watch would have to lie at every possible position and every angle on the table, like a multiple exposure picture - imagine those time-lapse pictures of busy city streets, with the red lights streaming like a ribbon on one side, and the white front lights on the other.

I suspect more research is needed. Back to the laboratory.

*"Diese Uhr liegt auf dem Tisch" - Wittgenstein, Notebooks 1914-16 p.69

Pictures of truthmakers

2011-11-06T13:23:00.002Z

Keen to understand the idea of a 'truthmaker' better, I ran Google images to find a picture of one.

The result wasn't helpful. There were lots of pictures of a book by D.M. Armstrong, an astoundingly witty and tasteful picture of a man's stomach tattooed with a picture of a cat, with the cat's bottom where his navel was, but nothing to do with truthmakers. Also a picture of Ronald McDonald, and even a picture of Bill Vallicella's friend Peter Lupu.

So we have no picture of a truthmaker, as yet. I think the problem is similar to the one faced by cartoonists who want to represent motion. A still picture is by definition without movement. Similarly the linguistic representation of truthmaker is is by a noun-phrase, and thus by definition lacking the 'doing-ish' content signified by the verb.

Perhaps a cartoon representation of a truthmaker would work? What would be the equivalent of the 'zoom' and the lines representing the space-time trail of Billy Whizz?

More thought needed.

Just my two cents

2011-11-05T10:29:00.002Z

If anyone says "Just my two cents" I mark them down mentally as an idiot and a moron. Often abbreviated to the intendedly humorous "just my $0.02". Why do people say this? Two cents is a small and insignificant contribution. So why bother to advertise that your contribution to the discourse is small and insignificant? It's often a lie, said contribution usually being long-winded and repetitive. It's often true, said contribution being banal and lacking any form of insight. But if the latter, surely such self-awareness would be the cause of humble silence, rather than an idiotic and mindless rant.

It's similar to "that's what I think, anyway". Well of course it's what you f--ing think. And that's my two cents.

Bad music night: Jazz rock

2011-11-05T09:01:00.000Z

There is much to say here, and little time. I suggested in last week's post that the 'freedom' and 'individuality' of free jazz was merely ornamental: a cadence around a standardised musical form. It fools us into thinking we are free, rather than oppressed and alienated by the capitalist system.

This freedom was taken to its extremes in the late 1950s and 60s and beyond, leading to stuff like this, the Sun Ra Arkestra, which is really horrible, or the Soft Machine at the Proms, which is horrible in a different way. The Proms piece has all the hallmarks of 'free' improvisation around a standard form. The standard form is little more than a modulation between two harmonic states. The complex construction of 'All the things you are' has been lost altogether. But that's as it should be. Complex harmonisation and progression and sophisticated orchestration and arrangement takes time and genius. An individual performer has no time, and he (or she) probably little genius, otherwise they would have been composers or arrangers instead of honking on a crappy saxophone.

People whose formative years were not in the late 1960s and early 1970s have no idea what it was like, and the horrors we had to sit through in the name of free jazz. Hours and hours of it. And the jumped up intellectual types who would rave about it and look at you like a piece of dirt of you merely hinted that it was awful. Those times are long gone, at least I hope so. As a final reminder, here are the wonderful Spinal Tap.

Flirting with linguistic idealism

2011-11-05T08:34:00.003Z

Vallicella concedes to David Brightly here that the only way to get at 'truthmakers' is via the nominalisation of sentences. For example

Tom is fat ==> Tom's fatness
Tom is seated ==> Tom's being seated

All we seem to be doing is turning a verb and noun phrase into a verbal noun or gerundive. I agree. This has a an affinity with my position on assertion. The verb contains something that turns a noun phrase such as 'Caesar's death' into 'Caesar died'. This cannot be nominalised, for if it could be, the verb would no longer be a verb. All the philosophical difficulties connected with the notion of assertion, truth, truthmaking, extralinguistic reality, Bradley's regress etc etc are down to this simple, almost trivial fact. The reality that we are trying to communicate by means of a sentence must include what we are communicating by a verb, and not just a verbal noun. Thus we cannot name or designate or refer to this reality. For naming or designation or reference is a function of noun phrases, not of verbs, and we can only communicate what is real - what is the case - by means of a verb.

Which means that it cannot be 'a reality' at all. For the demonstrative noun phrase 'that reality' is ipso facto a noun phrase. We need to add that this putative reality is a reality, that it really is the case. But 'is the case' is a verb phrase. If we nominalise it, we are back to 'its being the case', which does not quite capture 'the reality'. Is its being the case a fact? Or is it something merely claimed by John, or Freddy? To convey the reality, we need a verb, and thus convey more than 'the reality'.

Yet Vallicella still wants more, so it seems.

And yet surely we cannot rest content with saying that 'Tom is seated' is just true. Surely there is more to a true sentence than the sentence that is true. It can't be language all the way down. Or all the way out. I get the sense that nominalists like Ed are flirting with linguistic idealism.

Not really. There clearly is more to a true sentence than the sentence that is true. It's just that we can't name it or refer to it.

Truthmakers and infinite regress

2011-11-03T10:55:00.001Z

Vallicella has a post here about my post here. Of my argument he says “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.” Don’t hold back, Bill!

Actually my argument has a close affinity to Frege’s argument against the correspondence theory of truth, but never mind. Let’s restate it. Let’s suppose that any sentence of the form “S phi's” has a truthmaker. But that truthmaker cannot be S itself, for the reasons Vallicella adduces in an earlier post. If I understand his argument, it is that if phiis ‘sits’, it is contingent whether Socrates is sitting or not, so the truthmaker for ‘Socrates is sitting’ cannot be Socrates himself.

That is his argument. I merely extend it to the verb ‘exists’. Let phi be ‘exists’. Since it is contingent whether any object (apart from God) exists or not, it follows – if Bill’s argument is valid – that the truthmaker T of ‘S exists’ is different from S itself. And then we get an infinite regress, for ‘T exists’ must also have a truthmaker. By equal reasoning, the truthmaker U of that sentence must be different from T, and so on.

I am not saying that Bill’s argument is valid. I am saying that, if it is valid, then equally my argument is valid, unless he shows how the verb ‘exists’ differs in any way from verbs like ‘sits’. Which I don’t think he has done.

He might argue that ‘exists’ is not a predicate, whereas ‘sits’ is. I reply, it is a predicate. ‘- exists’ is satisfied by Obama, but not by the Tooth Fairy. Perhaps there are other arguments that would justify his conclusion. But the point is, he has to give one.

Another argument against truthmakers is that if ‘it will rain on Friday’ has a truthmaker, then it must be a presently existing truthmaker (for the sentence, if true, is true now). So, today being Thursday, the truthmaker for ‘it will rain on Friday’ exists now. By the same reasoning, it had a truthmaker yesterday, given that if ‘it will rain on Friday’ is true today, the same sentence must have been true yesterday. But we cannot change the past. Therefore, if truthmakers for future tense statements exist we cannot determine what happens in the future. But we can determine what happens in the future. Therefore there are no truthmakers for future tense statements, and if so, what reason is there to believe they exist at all?

Accidental versus essential predication

2011-11-02T14:52:00.000Z

Anthony asks whether this scholastic distinction between accidental and essential predication makes any sense. I think it does. Ockham says, in Chapter 25 of the magnificient Summa Logicae that “An accident is what is present or absent without the corruption of the subject”. So ‘Socrates is sitting’ predicates an accident of Socrates, for sitting can ‘be present’ or ‘be absent’ in Socrates without Socrates being corrupted, i.e. ceasing to exist. By contrast ‘Socrates is a man’ is essential predication. If ‘man’ ceases to ‘be present’ in Socrates, then Socrates ceases to exist. Socrates is nothing if he is not a man. But he is still something if he is not sitting.

The medieval philosophers fretted considerably about whether, pointing to dead Socrates, we are pointing to a man or not. But we can leave that problem for now.

Truthmakers

2011-11-01T08:31:00.003Z

A truthmaker is something that makes a proposition true at a given time. When Socrates is sitting, so there is a truthmaker that makes ‘Socrates is sitting’ true. When he stands up, there is no longer such a truthmaker: it ceases to exist.

I accept Maverick’s arguments, which I discussed briefly here, that Socrates himself cannot be the truthmaker for ‘Socrates is sitting’. For Socrates is sometimes not sitting (for example, when he stands up). Socrates remains identical with himself, but fails to be identical with any currently existing person.

But, pari ratione, by equal reasoning, 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.

Accidental identity

2011-10-31T09:21:00.002Z

Maverick has a long post about ‘truthmaking’. I’m not certain I followed it, but will try to summarise it as best as I can. The identity of Socrates with a sitting being makes the sentence ‘Socrates is sitting’ true. But this identity is accidental, because if Socrates stands up, he is no longer identical with any sitting being. Therefore what makes the identity true at one time, and false at another, is something different from Socrates, given that Socrates always remains identical with himself. Therefore Socrates alone cannot be the truthmaker of ‘Socrates is sitting’.

Is the summary correct? If so, what do we make of this argument?

Repetitive labour and Wikipedia

2011-10-30T12:39:00.002Z

In an effort to understand the different ways in which 'editors' contribute to Wikipedia, I have been using this tool to survey the average number of edits per page of the current 726 active administrators on the English Wikipedia. I completed this rather tedious task this morning.

The result is that there is a wide range of edits per page from a low value of 1.21 at one extreme, to a high value of 20.51 at the other. The value distribution, as a percentage of the sample, is shown in the table at the bottom.

What does this mean? Clearly an editor with a very low edit/page count will be spending very little time on individual articles. The limiting value is 1, meaning that an editor never returns to a page once they have done something to it. The upper value is limited by the maximum number of edits to any single article, and will occur if one editor entirely wrote that article, with no help whatsoever.

What else can we say? My main question is the different value contributed by editors with radically different edits per page. Are the contributions of those with a high count, of a higher or lower value than of those with a low count? Before you leap to conclusions, consider the following thought experiment. Suppose that the article on Caspar David Friedrich, which is not a bad article, and is indeed a Wikipedia 'Featured Article', had been written by about 1,700 different editors. Thus (since there have been about 1,700 edits to this article) each editor would have contributed no more than one edit. The article would have grown to its present good quality entirely from the separate and probably disconnected contributions of the different editors. And then extend the thought-experiment by supposing that all the Featured Articles - which are supposed to be the very best quality that Wikipedia has to offer - were written in this way.

As a limiting case, suppose there are 1,000 Featured Articles, and only 1,000 editors working on them, that each has 1,000 edits, and each editor has edited each article exactly once. It is theoretically possible that all Featured Articles grew to their currently 'good' state by such a process. In that case, edits per page would not be a good metric to determine whether the editor was what Wikipedians call a 'content contributor'. All editors would be 'content contributors', but they would distribute their content thinly and evenly across many different articles. This would be the 'classic crowdsourcing' that I discussed earlier articles such as this.

But this is clearly not the case. More research is needed, but there are several bits of evidence suggesting that when 'value' or 'content' means the sort of quality assessed by the Wikipedia 'Featured' or 'Good' article assessment, it is editors with a relatively high edit per page who contribute this. For example, look at the page here which tells us who contributed to the Caspar David article. Three editors stand out, namely Ceoil (8.43 edits per page), Modernist (8.07) and Fpenteado (9.29). Not only did these editors contribute significantly to this article, they contributed significantly to many other articles on Wikipedia.

Another piece of evidence is the type of contribution made by those with low edits per page. For example, the lowest edit per page of my sample was Andre. If you look carefully at what he is doing, he is simply adding links to articles on the Estonian Wikipedia, something which he seems to have been doing for a very long time. That doesn't mean he is not adding something of value to Wikipedia, but you clearly couldn't build an article like the one on Caspar David simply by adding links to the Estonian Wikipedia. Clearly not. Or consider the contribution history of 'Gaius Cornelius'. He is using what is called a 'bot' on Wikipedia, i.e. a robot or mechanised editing tool. As you see from its description here, it is a tool 'designed to make tedious and repetitive tasks quicker and easier'. This is mainly formatting and linking to other articles. Again, this doesn't mean he and his robot are not adding some sort of value to Wikipedia, but it's clearly not the sort of value that could build an article like the one on Caspar David.

Now we could go further and bite that very difficult bullet: what is the economic value of the different contributions? That is, what would be the market value of the labour corresponding to the different edits per page? There are a number considerations here, and please note I am not an economist. The first is that if quality of articles was a prime consideration, where 'quality' is measured by the Featured Article process, and where quality is the prime objective of the project, you would want to attract more 'content contributors' to increase quality. Second, given that the table above suggests that content contributors are scarcer than mechanical contributors, you would want to pay more to the content contributors. Finally, the principle that repetitive labour is easily learned, and thus less well paid than labour whose skill is difficult to acquire, would suggest paying the content contributors more, perhaps much more. Which is the case in conventional encyclopedias, of course, where the bulk of the work is done by poorly paid penny-a-liners, often using custom-built databases such as Crystal, and the remaining 'flagship articles' are commissioned to skilled subject-matter experts for a premium fee.

This begs the question of why content contributors exist on Wikipedia at all, but that's a subject for another discussion, and I have rambled on enough for today.

By the way, Beyond Necessity is approaching a record number of page views this month. 3,848 views to today, compared to 3,490 last month, and looking to hit the 4,000 barrier by the end of this month. So, please feel freer than usual to click on some of the internal links here. With best wishes to all.

Edits per page	Percentage of sample
1-2	22%
2-3	44%
3-4	18%
4-5	8%
5-6	4%
6-7	2%
7-8	1%
greater than 9	1%

Music night: free jazz

2011-10-28T08:21:00.003Z

In an earlier post I mentioned standardisation, the first of the two features which characterise popular music, according to Adorno. All popular music is written to a stock formula which never varies in its essentials, although individual pieces may differ by various accidents. The second feature, which is a corollary of the first, is what he calls pseudo-individualization. This is a way of imparting a fake individuality to mass produced music, thus imbuing it with a 'halo of free choice'. Standardisation is a form of mind control that does the listening for the consumer. Pseudo-individualization makes them forget that what they are listening to is 'pre-digested'.

Thus the popular interest in popular music is a form of false consciousness. It makes the masses forget that they are oppressed and exploited by the capitalist-consumerist system. Worse than that, it gives them the illusion of free choice: it makes them the unwitting architects of their own subjugation.

Adorno says that jazz improvisation is the most extreme example of this.

Even though jazz musicians still improvise in practice, their improvisations have become so "normalized" as to enable a whole terminology to be developed to express the standard devices of individualization: a terminology which in turn is ballyhooed by jazz publicity agents to foster the myth of pioneer artisanship and at the same time flatter the fans by apparently allowing them to peep behind the curtain and get the inside story. This pseudo-individualization is prescribed by the standardization of the framework. The latter is so rigid that the freedom it allows for any sort of improvisation is severely delimited. Improvisations — passages where spontaneous action of individuals is permitted ("Swing it boys") — are confined within the walls of the harmonic and metric scheme. In a great many cases, such as the "break" of pre-swing jazz, the musical function of the improvised detail is determined completely by the scheme: the break can be nothing other than a disguised cadence. Here, very few possibilities for actual improvisation remain, due to the necessity of merely melodically circumscribing the same underlying harmonic functions. Since these possibilities were very quickly exhausted, stereotyping of improvisatory details speedily occurred. Thus, standardization of the norm enhances in a purely technical way standardization of its own deviation — pseudo-individualization.

This is in marked contrast to the view of jazz in the 1940s that Kerouac gives us, through the eyes and ears of his protagonist Dean Moriarty, in his seminal On the Road.

It was a sawdust saloon with a small bandstand on which the fellows huddled with their hats on, blowing over people's heads, a crazy place; crazy floppy women wandered around sometimes in their bathrobes, bottles clanked in alleys. In back of the joint in a dark corridor beyond the splattered toilets scores of men and women stood against the wall drinking wine-spodiodi and spitting at the stars — wine and whisky. The behatted tenorman was blowing at the peak of a wonderfully satisfactory free idea, a rising and falling riff that went from "EE-yah!" to a crazier "EE-de-lee-yah!" and blasted along to the rolling crash of butt-scarred drums hammered by a big brutal Negro with a bullneck who didn't give a damn about anything but punishing his busted tubs, crash, rattle-ti-boom, crash. Uproars of music and the tenorman had it and everybody knew he had it. Dean was clutching his head in the crowd, and it was a mad crowd. They were all urging that tenorman to hold it and keep it with cries and wild eyes, and he was raising himself from a crouch and going down again with his horn, looping it up in a clear cry above the furor. A six-foot skinny Negro woman was rolling her bones at the man's hornbell, and he just jabbed it at her, "Ee! ee! ee!"

We don't know exactly what the tenorman was playing, but it was certainly a form of the be-bop idiom that emerged in the 1940s. For example, in another part, Kerouac mentions 'Congo Blues' which I discuss here. Very little music was actually composed by be-bop artists. They would take a 'standard' number, written in the standardised form of 1930s jazz that Adorno mentions, and would 'improvise freely' around it. A favourite subject was "All the things you are", a show tune written by Jerome Kern. Here is Richard Tauber singing it, and here is Joan Morris. Both versions appear utterly unlike any form of be-bop. By contrast, here is the renowned version by Gillespie, Parker, Stewart and Cole. Somewhat later there is the Sonny Rollins version.

The first two are awkward and stilted and old-fashioned, the second two seem progressive and, from the point of view of the 1940s and 50s, modernist. Or so it seems: but was Moriarty just a victim of the false individualisation that Adorno despises? Is there any real improvisation, given that the harmonic structure is identical in all versions? Is the freedom that excited Kerouac, the 'wonderfully free idea', merely an illusion, a melodic circumscription, nothing more than a cadence?

Indeed: is the story of popular music in the 20th and 21st century no more than a form of false consciousness? Be-bop gave way to completely free jazz, when absolutely nothing remained but the cadence. Pop music gave way to 'progressive music' in the late1960s and 70s. In the 1980s there was 'Indie', short for 'independent' music. The 1990s saw the massive growth in popularity of rap and hip-hop and gangsta music, still dominating the charts. Are all these 'progressive' versions of popular music simply a vehicle for Adorno's standardised forms, painting a halo of free-choice and individualism, but nothing more than a form of mind control that make us the instrument of our own distraction from our oppression and ultimate alienation from the means of production? A way of forgetting that we are not free?

2011-10-27T07:48:00.000Z

The Maverick gives an interesting symmetry argument that Ockham’s maxim about not multiplying entities according to the multiplicity of terms does not support classic nominalism, namely the view that there is no singular entity, no 'universal', signified by a common term. He writes

If the Razor forbids the multiplication of categories of entity according to the multiplicity of categories of terms, then I agree, but fail to see how this supports nominalism. There are singular terms and there are general terms. Someone who maintains that only general terms, but no singular terms, enjoy extralingusitic reference would be well within the stricture laid down by the Razor as your formulate it.

I don't disagree. Clearly more is required, and we have to look to Ockham’s semantics to get classic nominalism. Ockham, in common with most 13th and 14th century philosophers of language, held that there is a relation of ‘supposition’ between terms and extra-mental objects. Thus ‘man’ supposits for Socrates, Plato, Aristotle and so on. Exactly the same relation holds between singular terms like ‘Socrates’ and the object they supposit for (in this case, Socrates). The only difference between common and singular term is that the latter are naturally suited to supposit for only one individual, whereas the former can supposit for as many as you like.

Given this, and given the Razor, classical nominalism certainly does follow. It is fruitless to posit a singular entity designated by the common term ‘man’, which Socrates, Plato, Aristotle etc., fall under in some odd way, when you can explain it in the simpler way above. A common term does not signify a singular entity. Rather, it signifies many entities.

In summary, Ockham's maxim does not on its own support classic nominalism. We have to add his semantics as well.

On not multipying entities

2011-10-26T14:04:00.002Z

There is a nice post today by the Maverick on “The Use and Abuse of Occam's Razor: On Multiplying Entities Beyond Necessity” There are few points to raise. Maverick writes “Occam's Razor is standardly taken to be a principle of theoretical economy or parsimony that states: Do not multiply entities beyond necessity.” True, it is standardly taken thus, but as Thorburn showed nearly 100 years ago, Ockham did not say exactly that. He actually said that plurality is not to be posited without necessity (Pluralitas non est ponenda sine necessitate). Moreover, it is not ‘his’ razor. Scotus (on the lines of whose thinking Ockham’s thinking is largely developed) used it, and it is probably earlier than that. He also says that is vain to bring about through more what can be brought about by fewer (frustra fit per plura quod potest fieri per pauciora).

Furthermore, the maxim does not really capture the spirit of Ockham’s nominalism, which is better expressed by his claim that one cause of error is ‘to multiply entities according to the multiplicity of terms, and that every term has a (corresponding) real essence’ (Secunda radix est multiplicare entia secundum multitudinem terminorum, et quod quilibet terminus habet quid rei).

He says this at the end of chapter 51 of the monumental and magnificient Summa Logicae, of whose structure you can get a flavour here. Chapters 40-62 are a long discussion of Aristotle’s categories, and Ockham’s objective, after some essential preliminaries set out in chapters 1-17, is to show that most of the ten categories are not really types of being at all, but really types of term. For example, chapter 51 is part of chapters 49-54 on Aristotle’s category of relation (ad aliquid, relatio). Ockham wants to show that the term ‘relation’ is not a name for a particular type of thing, outside the mind, really distinct from some absolute thing (res extra animam, distincta realiter a re absoluta). Otherwise, whenever a donkey moved down on earth below, every heavenly body would be changed in itself, because of the change in its spatial relation with the donkey. Or we might mistakenly suppose that a father is a father by some extramental thing such as ‘paternity’.

We are led into these errors from the ease with which Latin (and other romance languages, but Ockham rarely talks about these) is able to construct abstract terms like ‘fatherhood’ from concrete terms like ‘father’. He discusses this in chapter 5 and subsequently. Such terms have a similar beginning verbally, but different endings, and the abstract nearly always has more syllables than the concrete. Ockham argues that the concrete and the abstract are really synonyms. To say that Socrates has humanity is no more than to say that Socrates is a man. For this reason there are no abstract names corresponding to many concrete names. E.g. though we frequently use the names ‘cow’, ‘donkey’, ‘goat’, there are no corresponding abstract terms like ‘cowhood’ or ‘donkeyness’. And the ancient philosophers did not use this diversity “except as an ornament of speech, or for some other accidental reason, just as in the case of synonymous names.” [--]

How Objectivism informed Wikipedia

2011-10-26T13:17:00.002Z

I have been reading Jeff Howes' Crowdsourcing and Andrew Lih's The Wikipedia Revolution. More on Lih's book at some point, but I was gripped immediately by this curious passage (p.36):

The three of them [i.e. Jimmy Wales, Larry Sanger, Tim Shell] were attracted to Objectivism for a reason. The Objectivist stance is that there is a reality of objects and facts independent of the individual mind. By extension, a body of knowledge could be assembled that was considered representative of this single reality. Put simply, objectivity relates to what is true, rather than ruling whether something is true or false. And their encyclopedia could detail what is true in the world without judgments. Sanger would put it this way: "Neutrality, we agreed, required that articles should not represent any one point of view on controversial subjects, but instead fairly represent all sides".

Considered as a whole, this makes very little sense. Many philosophical systems, and many non-philosophical ones, such as basic common sense, consider that there is a reality of objects and facts independent of the individual mind. It's not that Objectivism has a monopoly on this idea. It follows (given a few other assumptions, such as reliable sense perception) that a body of knowledge could be established or documented which was representative of external reality. More common sense.

And then he writes "Put simply, objectivity relates to what is true, rather than ruling whether something is true or false." This is at best incoherent, and at worst a non sequitur. What is meant by 'relates to what is true'? Does it mean that the assembled body of knowledge is true? Well of course it must be, otherwise it wouldn't be true (first year philosophy students learn that 'knows that p' implies 'p'). And why 'without judgments'? Isn't judgment required to assemble a 'body of knowlege'? Finally, there is the statement quoted from Sanger, which I discussed earlier here, about not representing any one point of view. Larry Sanger is a competent philosopher, and I'm sure that whatever he said to Lih when he was interviewed got pretty garbled and mixed up by the time it reached the printing presses.

Adorno on popular music

2011-10-25T16:57:00.003Z

I am working on the Wikipedia book, and starting with pre-1960s attitudes about high and low culture, i.e. those pre-contemporary prejudices to which the whole Web 2.0 world-view is utterly opposed. I discussed Reith's view in an earlier post.

The Marxist sociologist Theodor Adorno (1903-1969) cannot be left out here. Adorno was passionate about music as a child, growing up in a wealthy and cultured family. He came to the United States in 1939 to join the Princeton University Radio Research Project as chief of the music division. The project was funded by the Rockefeller Foundation, for understanding the effects of mass media on society.

Adorno was highly critical of the effects of popular music. One of his essays is here, where he tries to capture the difference between highbrow and lowbrow music. There are two. The first is 'standardisation'. He makes the interesting point that the difference between high and low is not simply a matter of complexity and simplicity.

All works of the earlier Viennese classicism are, without exception, rhythmically simpler than stock arrangements of jazz. Melodically, the wide intervals of a good many hits such as Deep purple* or Sunrise Serenade are more difficult to follow per se than most melodies of, for example, Haydn, which consist mainly of circumscriptions of tonic triads and second steps.

However, the complicated in popular music never functions as "itself" but only as a disguise or embellishment behind which the scheme can always be perceived. The whole structure of popular music is standardized, "even where the attempt is made to circumvent standardization".

Standardization extends from the most general features to the most specific ones. Best known is the rule that the chorus consists of thirty two bars and that the range is limited to one octave and one note. The general types of hits are also standardized: not only the dance types, the rigidity of whose pattern is understood, but also the "characters" such as mother songs, home songs, nonsense or "novelty" songs, pseudo-nursery rhymes, laments for a lost girl. Most important of all, the harmonic cornerstones of each hit — the beginning and the end of each part — must beat out the standard scheme. This scheme emphasizes the most primitive harmonic facts no matter what has harmonically intervened. Complications have no consequences. This inexorable device guarantees that regardless of what aberrations occur, the hit will lead back to the same familiar experience, and nothing fundamentally novel will be introduced.

'Serious' music, by contrast, is an organised whole in the context of which every detail must be understood, and which is never the simple enforcement of a musical schema. This cannot happen with popular music. No removal of detail affects its musical sense.

The second feature which distinguished the popular from the serious is pseudo-individualisation. More later.

* The song from which the hideous rock group took their name.

Truthbearers and truthmakers

2011-10-22T09:32:00.003Z

According to my commenter Anthony, "reality exists". I assume this is a reference to Ayn Rand's principle that 'existence exists'. His idea seems to be that when we assert anything, what we assert must exist. Therefore we cannot assert anything false, for there is no state of affairs corresponding to a false statement. If I utter 'Anthony is sitting', and Anthony is standing, there can be no state of affairs corresponding to my utterance. Therefore I cannot state anything. The utterance exists, but what it tries to state does not.

There are many problems with this idea. For every true statement, there is a corresponding negation. Assume that Anthony is standing, and so the sentence 'Anthony is standing' states something true. What about 'Anthony is not standing'? It cannot be true, for it cannot be true that Anthony is both standing and not standing. But it cannot be false, for if this 'objectivist' account is true, there are no false statements. Yet it seems to be a statement for all that. If I can meaningfully assert that Anthony is standing, why can I not equally deny that?

What about beliefs? Can I believe that Anthony is not standing, when he is standing? Apparently not, for the object of my belief is a state of affairs (Anthony-not-standing) that has no existence, and according to Rand, only existence exists. So I believe nothing. Only when Anthony sits down can I have such a belief.

What about questions? I ask 'is Anthony standing?'. The person who says 'yes' has agreed to something. The one who says 'no' has disagreed with the same thing, and so disagreed with something that exists. So you can say 'no' to a true statement, yet you cannot make the corresponding negation. You can say 'no' to 'is Anthony standing?', but you cannot say that Anthony is not standing. That is quite puzzling.

The Stoic philosophers resolved the problem by distinguishing between utterance (phone) which may be mere noise, e.g. 'arxas grexurgh', articulate speech (lexis) which may be meaningless, e.g. 'green is happy', and discourse (logos) which is meaningful speech. They also gave the name lekton to that which is signified by meaningful speech. Lekton is derived from the Greek verb legein, which signifies 'to mean' as well as 'to say' (somewhat like that Latin dico).

Sextus Empiricus* gives the most complete account of their theory:

The Stoics say that three things are linked together, that which is signified, that which signifies, and the existing thing. That which signifies is the utterance, e.g. 'Dion'. What is signified is the thing indicated by the utterance and which we apprehend as subsisting with our thought, but the barbarians [i.e. non-Greek speaking] do not understand, although they hear the utterance. The existing thing is that which exists outside, e.g. Dion himself. Of these, two are corporeal, i.e. utterance and the existing thing, while one is incorporeal, i.e. what is signified, i.e. the lekton, which is true or false.

Thus we can distinguish between the state of affairs asserted by 'Anthony is standing', which some modern philosophers call the truthmaker, and the lekton, which some modern philosophers call the truthbearer. The truthmaker exists in reality, given that Anthony is standing. No truthmaker exists for 'Anthony is not standing'. The truthbearer, by contrast, is an immaterial, nonphysical entity, the meaning of 'Anthony is standing'. This has the value true. A truthbearer also exists for 'Anthony is not standing', but that has the value false.

There is nothing in Rand's theory that precludes the existence of such non-physical truthbearers or lekta. So long as such non-physical things exist, they are a form of reality (albeit a non-physical form). I don't know, of course, whether Rand's theory does preclude non-physical things. But if it does, it faces the difficulty of explaining statements which are false.

*Adv. Math. viii 11, 12.

What does not agree with reality, does not exist.

2011-10-21T14:29:00.001Z

We might have got there at last with Anthony, who now says "what does not agree with reality, does not exist". I rather thought it was heading in that direction. What a false statement asserts, does not agree with reality. "Snow is black" says that snow is black. But snow being black does not agree with reality. Ergo, snow being black does not exist. Ergo, "snow is black" does not state anything at all, for if it did, it would have to express a state of affairs that is not real, a non-enity, a nullity, a void. Ergo, there are no false statements: all statements are true.

Nailed it at last.

Bad music night: cod gaelic

2011-10-21T14:03:00.001Z

It's Friday and bad music is with us again!!! This week, cods scots and cod irish music. Plenty to choose from, but we'll start with Killarney, by Michael William Balfe (1808-1870), sung by John McCormack. Of Balfe, the wonderful Oxford Companion to Music rather back-handedly says he had "an instinct for easy-flowing melody, unembarrassed by any subtleties of harmony or orchestration". See what you think. I think it's absolutely hideous, as is Roamin' in the Gloamin', in this version by Harry Lauder. Billy Connolly is very rude about this ('singing shortbread tins'), somewhat unfairly given that Lauder really was Scots, although he soon moved to London (and lived in our road for a bit) to make his fortune. (Also what is this thing about 'the Blue Misty Hills of Tyree?' at 1:30? A Google search reveals only Connolly's version. Was there ever really such a song?)

Nor must we omit the awful and hideous Donald where's your troosers. And finally, something slightly (but only slightly) more authentic, some Jimmy Shand. I saw a pile of Jimmy Shand 78s in a junk shop years ago, and always regret not buying them.

The Joy of Antique Wikipedia Entries

2011-10-20T07:37:00.002Z

There is a nice piece at Big Think on The Joy of Antique Wikipedia Entries.

It’s sheer magic: flyblown tomes you'd otherwise never encounter are suddenly thrust under your nose. People and events with zero impact on the modern world somehow become relevant again. Need to learn about New Hampshire conchologist Augustus Addison Gould? Of course you don’t, but thanks to the zombified 1911 Britannica, you can!

My father was obsessed with encyclopedias so I grew up in a house that was heaving to the rafters with all kinds of them. There were even some volumes of the very first Britannica lying around in the stair cupboard. So I appreciate the sentiments. But it's a bit disappointing when a hundred year old source is the only information on the subject, as I pointed out here and here. It's also irritating, as I have said hundreds of time, that Wikipedia is celebrated as some mystical magical emergentist phenomenon that has produced the sum of human knowledge by the underlabour of millions of uneducated volunteers. This is simply not true, as I have argued.

And disappointing, again, that the horribly flawed Nature study is still being cited as evidence of Wikipedia accuracy.

William Kane Craig

2011-10-20T07:13:00.000Z

Buddy Kane is a fictional character in the film ‘American Beauty’. He is an extremely successful estate agent, the "king" of real estate, who has persuaded many people to buy the homes that he is an agent for. William Lane Craig is a character in real life. He is an extremely successful theologian and public speaker who has persuaded many people to buy the claims of fundamentalist and literalist Christianity that he is a spokesman for.

Some questions for Anthony

2011-10-19T12:34:00.001Z

Some questions for Anthony, who is still not convinced that any statements are false, yet (paradoxically) seems inclined to disagree with absolutely anything I say. I.e. for pretty much any x that I say, he strongly disagrees with x, yet will not admit that x is false (for he sees that if he says that what I say is false, he will have contradicted himself, given his implicit position that no statement is false, not even the statements of mine that he disagrees with). Well, some more questions for him.

Anthony, please remain seated (I assume you are sitting at a computer terminal while you are reading this).

1. Do you agree that ‘Anthony is sitting’ is true?

Now stand up, please.

2. Do you agree that ‘Anthony is sitting’ is no longer true?

3. If so, do you also agree that ‘Anthony is sitting’ is now false?

Craig on an infinite old universe

2011-10-19T07:55:00.000Z

I listened to some of the podcast of the Craig-Law debate. Craig's argument is in stages. (1) An argument that the world had a beginning in time. (2) That the world therefore had a creator (3) that this creator is good (4) that this good creator is the very being whose son is the Jesus who was resurrected.

Taking the first, I was surprised by his arguments about an infinitely old universe. He seemed to be arguing that there are parodoxes associated with a denumerable infinity. For example, if you take away all the odd numbers, you are left with infinitely many even numbers, so an infinity subtracted from an infinity still equals infinity. Is this a paradox, or just a feature of infinite domains? He seems to acknowledge this, but then says that this means that infinity is simply a mental construct, and nothing real. Therefore an infinitely old universe, which would have to be real, cannot exist. That is also odd. Most mathematicians, who are Platonists to the core, would hold that the natural numbers are real, but have no difficulty with the 'features' associated with a denumerable infinity.

Did anyone else find this odd?

Craig Law podcast

2011-10-18T16:03:00.000Z

Is here.

On living forever

2011-10-18T07:56:00.000Z

A thoughtful post from the Maverick here.

The problem is not that our lives are short; the problem is that we are in time at all. No matter how long a life extends it is still a life in time, a life in which the past is no longer, the future not yet, and the present a passing away. This problem, the problem of the transitoriness of life, cannot be solved by life extension even if, per impossibile, physical immortality were possible. This problem of the transitoriness and vanity of life is one that religion addresses.

I'm sure he knows the bit where Wittgenstein asks rhetorically (at the end of the Tractatus, I don’t have the reference with me) whether any problem is solved by the idea of my living forever.

Law vs Craig update

2011-10-18T07:41:00.001Z

I didn’t make it to the debate at Westminster last night, having been lazy and left it too late to get tickets. You can get a flavour from the comments here, though, and a podcast will be available soon. The consensus seems to be the Law lost the argument because he did not even attempt to reply to Craig’s ‘kalam’ argument (The kalam argument is that the universe has a beginning, that everything has a cause for beginning, and that the cause is God. I believe Aquinas rejects this argument). Law’s argument was that if God exists at all, he must be an evil God, and therefore Craig’s god (who is perfectly good) does not exist. I argued in an earlier post that perhaps God is not fair, in leaving many clues (e.g. dinosaur bones) that suggest that the universe was designed in a different way that he has said it was designed, and thus designed it in a way that invites punishment of the inquisitive and intelligent.

Further update: Stephen Law has now posted his version of the debate on his site, with the following sections, with transcripts of his opening speech, and his criticism of Craig's moral and Resurrection arguments.

I summarise Law’s opening speech as follows. Law begins with the standard argument from evil, including a graphic description of the suffering that has existed in the world. If Professor Craig’s god exists, there must be, not just some reason, but an entirely adequate reason for every last ounce of all this suffering and horror.
He turns to an interesting twist on this argument (I don’t know whether this is and original twist or not, I shall ask). An evil god hypothesis is as well supported by Professor Craig’s cosmological and fine-tuning arguments as is belief in his good god hypotheses. Yet, if you believe in an evil god, you face the mirror problem of explaining why there’s so very much good. But if the evil god argument is absurd, so is the good God. (This is essentially an appeal to identical logical form, which we at Beyond Necessity like very much).

He forestalls an objection. Some Christians try to explain certain evils by saying that, being good, god gave us free will. Law flips this around. Why couldn’t the evil god have given us free will in order to choose evil? By means of similar ‘flipping’ arguments, he argues “if the evil god hypothesis can, solely on the basis of observational evidence, be ruled out as highly unlikely, why can’t we similarly rule out the good god hypothesis?”. He concludes “That’s the challenge I am setting Professor Craig tonight. To explain why belief in a good god is, on the basis of the available evidence and arguments, not just a bit more reasonable than belief in an evil god, but very significantly more reasonable.”
It seems clear from this that the Facebook commenters here did not understand Law’s point. One of them says “The kalam was not challenged once, only the moral nature of the Creator of the cosmos”, as though this was an objection, and quotes Craig as saying several times that “it’s a strange form of atheism that holds to the existence of an uncaused, immaterial, timeless, spaceless, powerful, transcendent and personal being who just isn’t morally perfect”.

This is not a reply to Law’s argument. As Law makes clear above, his evil god argument applies equally to the kalam argument as to the fine tuning argument. Law is not challenging these arguments themselves, but rather challenging the fact that they do not support the existence of an uncaused, immaterial, timeless, spaceless being who is good, rather than evil.

Do false statements exist?

2011-10-16T08:28:00.003Z

Commenter Anthony questions whether false statements exist, and says

In order for me to concede that false statements exist, I would need clarification of what is meant by "statements" and what is meant in saying that they "exist". If the answer I receive is "they just do" or "most people accept that they do", you can argue all you want about "burden of proof", but I will not be convinced, any more than I would be convinced by the same "arguments", that "red unicorns exist".

OK then. Starting with the definitions. There are various definitions of 'statement' but I will go with 'declarative sentence' for this one. As for 'exists', I will read 'false statements exist' as equivalent to 'some statements are false'. See my earlier remarks about Brentano equivalence.

So we need to demonstrate to Anthony's satisfaction that some declarative sentences are false. That is easy. The sentences "The sky is red" is a declarative sentence, and it is false. So, some declarative sentences (i.e. at least one) are false. If Anthony denies that "The sky is red" is false, there is an equally easy reply. If you deny something, you are denying that it is true. But if you are right in denying this, it must be false. So in order to make the objection at all, you have to concede that at least one declarative sentence, in this case "'The sky is red' is false" is false, and thus concede the point. More generally, to affirm "no declarative sentence is false" is to deny "some declarative sentence is false". But if that denial is right, "'some declarative sentence is false' is false" is true, and so at least one declarative sentence is false, namely "no declarative sentence is false". Slightly more formally:

(1) No declarative sentence is false (assumption)
(2) "Some declarative sentence is false" is false (E and I are contradictory opposites)
(3) "Some declarative sentence is false" is a declarative sentence (definition)
(4) Some declarative sentence is false (substitution)
(5) Contradiction (1 and 4)

I doubt this will be the end of the matter.

Hot chicks explain philosophy

2011-10-15T09:25:00.003Z

I didn't realise these were on the internet. This one is pretty straightforward*. A chick in a bikini says "To make abstractions hold in reality is to destroy reality". It's Hegel (Vorlesungen über der Geschichte der Philosophie, Berlin, 1836), but that's not the point. It's Hegel as quoted by an attractive girl in a bikini. It's a setup: the intended point is that hot chicks in bikinis and profound Germanic philosophy are an inappropriate combination. But why? Is it the bikinis, or the hotness, or both?

This one is more difficult. It looks like a setup again, particularly when she gets to the definition of Philosophy: "Philosophy comes from 'Philo', to love, and 'sophy', hearing yourself talk". But then the same person gave us this, which appears to be entirely serious, even when she says "what the concept of God comes down to is that God is a concept". There is no bikini, but there is a fair amount of pouting. Or this - more existence of God plus cleavage. Is the combination of the ontological argument plus pouting and beauty appropriate? **

Is physical ugliness the only suitable handmaiden of philosophy, and is physical attractiveness a distraction? That would be the traditional view. Aristotle was reproached for paying attention to his clothing, as though attention to physical appearance was an bad thing in a philosopher. Kant was said to be so ugly that his face was 'a reproach to physiognomy', as though this did not matter, even a good thing. But our modern view is more enlightened. There really shouldn't be anything inappropriate about quoting Hegel, dressed in a bikini. Why does it seem there is?

But enough of that. I'll leave the problem to Bill Vallicella, who we know lurks around here occasionally, and has more Platonistic tendencies.

* Thanks to commenter 'The Blind Dog' for reminding me of this.
**This is nothing to do with gender, by the way, and the same applies to the idea of any of these guys deconstructing Wittgenstein.