tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-213088152024-03-13T04:38:03.887+00:00Beyond NecessityPhilosophy, Medieval Logic and the London Plumbing CrisisEdward Ockhamhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07583379503310147119noreply@blogger.comBlogger718125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-21308815.post-87446307353872713742017-01-22T20:13:00.000+00:002017-01-22T20:13:40.555+00:00Can Kant refer to God?<br />
Originally appeared <a href="http://trinities.org/blog/can-kant-refer-to-god/">here</a>.
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<img align="right" src="http://trinities.org/blog/wp-content/uploads/kant_superman1-237x300.jpg" height="180" />
I am plodding on with Plantinga’s <i>Warranted Christian Belief</i>, which I strongly recommend. He is committed to the Christian (and Jewish and Muslim) belief that not only that there is such a being as God, but also that we are able to address him in prayer, refer to him, think and talk about him, and predicate properties of him. This means using unique descriptions like ‘all-powerful’, ‘all-knowing’, ‘creator of the world’ etc by means of which we can single him out, giving a proper name such as ‘Yhwh’ to him via such reference-fixing descriptions.
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The challenge for this belief is the idea, which Plantinga <em>claims</em> is widely accepted among theologians (I am not sure how to check this), ‘that Kant showed that reference to or thought about such a being (even if there is one) is impossible or at least deeply problematic’. To counter this, he devotes a whole chapter to showing that Kant did not show or prove this with anything the certainty that we might think.
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He considers two competing scholarly interpretations of Kant. According to the <em>one world</em> picture, the terms ‘transcendental objects’ and ‘empirical objects’ should be understood to refer not to two different kinds of entity, but rather to different ways of talking about one and the same thing. He notes that this picture ‘would be accepted even by such staunch pre-revolutionaries as Aristotle and Aquinas.
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According to the <em>two world</em> picture, which is the traditional interpretation, Kant held that there are two realms of objects, i.e. noumenal and phenomenal, which are fundamentally different. Noumena are things as they are in themselves, phenomena or ‘appearances’ are things as they are for us.
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Appearances are the sole objects which can be given to us immediately, and that in them which relates immediately to the object is called intuition. Appearances are not things in themselves; they are only representations, which in turn have their object—an object which cannot be intuited by us, and which may, therefore, be named the non-empirical, that is, transcendental object = x. (A109)</blockquote>
Phenomena are objects that exist in space and time, noumena are neither temporal nor spatial, since space and time ‘are forms of our intuition rather than realities that characterize the things in themselves.’ Since phenomena are constructed by us out of the raw data of experience, they depend on us for their existence. Noumena, on the other hand, do not depend on us for their existence, as they are things <em>as</em> they are in themselves. They form two disjoint worlds: no phenomenal object is a noumenon, no noumenal object is a phenomenon.
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Regarding the one world picture, if our concepts apply to anything, then to the things, because these are the only things there are. And if we refer, we refer to things. What would it mean to say that the category of causality does not apply to the things? This would mean is that noumena do not stand in causal relations to each other or anything else, and hence the <em>complement</em> property, namely <em>not</em> standing in causal relation, would apply to things. This seems problematic. What about being non-self-identical? And if no positive properties apply to things, we would make a mistake if we said that God is wise, or good, or powerful, or loving. ‘That would be because <em>nothing</em> is wise, good, powerful, loving, and the like.’
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The two world picture makes more sense, because 'things' can then refer to phenomenal things. But how do we predicate one thing of another? This requires <em>concepts</em>. On a radical version of the two world picture, (as Plantinga interprets Kant) concepts are a sort of rule for synthesizing the perceptual manifold, i.e. ‘constructing’ phenomenal things out of the ‘blooming buzzing confusion’. Hence your concept of a horse is a sort of rule for putting together different items of experience, into a phenomenal object. And of course such a concept cannot apply to noumena, since they are not ‘given’ to us in experience, and so we cannot construct an object out of them. Moreover, it is not just that no noumenon is a horse, it is also that no noumenon is a non horse, since ‘being a nonhorse’ is also a rule for constructing a phenomenal object from the perceptual manifold. ‘So thought of, a concept could no more apply to [a noumenon] than a horse could be a number.
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On this radical interpretation, our concepts do not apply to God, for God would have to be a noumenon, rather than something we have constructed from the perceptual manifold. And so, interpreted this way, ‘we can’t refer to, think about, or predicate properties of God’.
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In the first place, Plantinga argues that this picture is deeply incoherent. Kant holds that noumena are causally connected to us, yet (on the radical interpretation) we should not be able to refer to them at all or attribute to them the properties of being atemporal and aspatial, ‘or even speculate that there might be such things’. Kant’s thought founders on the fact that the picture requires that he have knowledge the picture denies him. If this picture were really correct, the noumena would have to drop out altogether, so that all remains is what has been structured by us. The idea that there might be reality beyond what we ourselves have constructed out of experience <i>would not be so much as thinkable</i>.
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In the second place, what powerful arguments does Kant deploy to justify the ‘startling’ conclusion that we can’t think about, refer to, or predicate properties of the noumena, given that concepts are really rules for synthesizing the (perceptual) manifold into phenomenal objects and so the only things we can think about are objects we ourselves have somehow constructed. What <em>reasons</em> does Kant give?
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According to Plantinga, these reasons are ‘distressingly scarce’. Perhaps ‘those who urge [Kant's theory] are simply overwhelmed by what they see as its sheer intellectual beauty and power; they don’t feel the need of argument. Indeed, they find the picture so dazzling they are willing to put up with a strong dose of incoherence in addition to absence of argument’. But that, he says ‘doesn’t constitute much of a reason for the rest of us—those of us more impressed by the incoherence of the picture than its beauty—to accept it’ (laughter at the back of class).
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The best he can find are the antinomical arguments, supposedly powerful lines of reasoning on <i>opposing</i> sides of a given question (such as whether the world had a beginning in time). Kant apparently intended the antinomies to support his transcendental idealism. They confront us with the problem that we <i>take ourselves</i> to be thinking about things in themselves – the noumena – as opposed to the things for us, the phenomena.
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If in employing the principles of understanding we do not merely apply our reason to objects of experience, but venture to extend these principles beyond the limits of experience, there arise pseudo-rational doctrines which can neither hope for confirmation in experience nor fear refutation by it. Each of them is not only in itself free from contradiction, but finds conditions of its necessity in the very nature of reason—only that, unfortunately, the assertion of the opposite has, on its side, grounds that are just as valid and necessary. (A421, B449)</blockquote>
But he finds the antinomical arguments not ‘to put the best face on it, at all compelling’. Take the argument about the beginning of the world
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If we assume that the world had no beginning in time, then up to every given moment an eternity has elapsed, and there has passed away in the world an infinite series of successive states of things. Now the infinity of a series consists in the fact that it can never be completed through successive synthesis. It thus follows that it is impossible for an infinite world-series to have passed away, and that a beginning of the world is therefore a necessary condition of the world’s existence. (A426, B454)</blockquote>
‘I am sorry to say it is hard to take seriously’, says Plantinga! Kant begins with the assumption that an infinite series can’t be completed by starting from some point finitely far from the beginning and adding members finitely many at a time at a constant rate, which is true. But it doesn’t follow that it is impossible for an infinite world-series to have passed away, and that a beginning of the world is therefore a necessary condition of the world’s existence, for this just claims what was to be proved: that the series in question had a beginning!
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To conclude, as Kant does, that it is impossible that an infinite series of events has occurred is just to assume that the series in question had a beginning—that is, is finite—but that is precisely what was to be proved. So the argument really has no force at all.</blockquote>
It’s all very entertaining. I haven’t put on my especially reinforced thinking hat to examine the chapter in great depth, nor have I checked through my Kant to be certain of the ‘distressingly scarce’ claim. But I shall <a href="http://maverickphilosopher.typepad.com/">ask Vallicella</a> the next time I see him.
Edward Ockhamhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07583379503310147119noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-21308815.post-31442507665993355942017-01-15T09:01:00.000+00:002017-01-15T09:01:14.075+00:00Are all religions the same?<br />
Originally appeared <a href="http://trinities.org/blog/are-all-religions-the-same/">here</a>.
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I have been working through Alvin Plantinga’s excellent (but frustrating) book <i>Warranted Christian Belief</i>, and I am particularly intrigued by his critique of the work of theologian <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Hick">John Hick</a>.
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Hick began his spiritual odyssey as a traditional, orthodox Christian, accepting what I have been calling ‘Christian belief’. He was then struck by the fact that there are other religions in which the claims of orthodox Christianity—trinity, incarnation, atonement—are rejected. Furthermore, so far as one can tell from the outside, so to speak, the claims of these other religions, taken literally, are as respectable, epistemically speaking, as the claims of Christianity. Still further, according to Jesus himself, “By their fruits you shall know them.” The most important fruits, Hick thinks, are practical: turning away from a life of selfishness to a life of service; on this point, these other religions, he thinks, seem to do as well as Christianity. The conclusion he draws is that where Christianity differs from the others, we can’t properly hold that it is literally true and the others literally false; that would be, he thinks, a sort of intellectual arrogance, a sort of spiritual imperialism, a matter of exalting ourselves and our beliefs at the expense of others. Instead, we must hold that the great religions are all equally valuable and equally true.</blockquote>
How many of us recognise that spiritual odyssey and how many of us have reached that point in their journey? But as Plantinga carefully argues, it is full of pitfalls. Hick wants to declare that all the traditions are actually false. He says ‘literally’ false, but literal truth and falsehood, as Hick conceives them, are just truth and falsehood. The first problem is that if I am to remain a Christian, I must take part in Christian worship, which requires accepting the doctrines of traditional Christianity (‘I believe in Jesus Christ … who was crucified, died, and was buried; he descended to the dead. On the third day he rose again; he ascended into heaven, he is seated at the right hand of the Father, and he will come to judge the living and the dead’). But if I accept these doctrines as only mythologically true, i.e. <i>really</i> false, how can I at the same time accept these false doctrines as putting me ‘into the right relation with the Real’? ‘Is this posture in fact possible for a human being: can a person accept it, and accept it authentically, without bad faith or doublethink?’
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Two, we want to avoid imperialism and self-exaltation by declaring that <i>everyone</i> is mistaken here (‘except for ourselves and a few other enlightened souls’). But aren’t we now exalting ourselves and a few graduate students over nearly everyone else?
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Those who think there really is such a person as God are benighted, unsophisticated, unaware of the real truth of the matter, which is that there isn’t any such person (even if thinking there is can lead to practical fruits). We see Christians as deeply mistaken; of course we pay the same compliment to the practitioners of the other great religions; we are equal-opportunity animadverters. We benevolently regard the rest of humanity as misguided; no doubt their hearts are in the right place; still, they are sadly mistaken about what they take to be most important and precious. I find it hard to see how this attitude is a manifestation of tolerance or intellectual humility: it looks more like patronizing condescension.</blockquote>
Yup.
Edward Ockhamhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07583379503310147119noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-21308815.post-54932759114339579092017-01-11T19:15:00.003+00:002017-01-11T19:19:45.679+00:00Does God have a body?<br />
Originally appeared <a href="http://trinities.org/blog/does-god-have-a-body/">here</a>.
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<img align="right" src="http://trinities.org/blog/wp-content/uploads/deut-411-300x174.jpg" height="180" />Dale <a href="http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/trinity">writes</a>:
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A self is being which is in principle capable of <i>knowledge, intentional action, and interpersonal relationships</i>. A god is commonly understood to be <i>a sort of extraordinary self</i>. In the Bible, the god Yahweh (a.k.a. “the LORD”) commands, forgives, controls history, predicts the future, occasionally appears in humanoid form, enters contracts with human beings, and sends prophets, whom he even allows to argue with him. More than a common god in a pantheon of gods, he is portrayed as being the one creator of the cosmos, and as having uniquely great power, knowledge, and goodness.</blockquote>
Does this mean that God is a person? If so, does this mean that God has a body?<br />
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In <i>The Bodies of God and the World of Ancient Israel</i> Benjamin Sommer argues that it was the normal view in Judaism and in other ancient near east religions that God does have a human-like body, based on Genesis 1. (‘made in his image and likeness’). See also the well-known passage in <a href="https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=exodus+33&version=NIV#">Exodus 33</a> where Moses is allowed to see God’s backside, but nothing else. “When my glory passes by, I will put you in a cleft in the rock and cover you with my <em>hand</em> until I have <em>passed by</em>. Then I will remove my <em>hand</em> and you will see my <em>back</em>; but my <em>face</em> must not be seen.” So God is able to move from one place to another, since he can ‘pass by’, and he also has a hand (and a face).
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<i>Sed contra</i>: Deuteronomy 4:11 ‘Then the Lord spoke to you out of the midst of the fire. You heard the sound of words, <i>but saw no form</i>; there was only a voice.’
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In this connection, I have been reading P.F. Strawson’s seminal 1959 work <a href="http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/strawson/#Ind">Individuals</a>. Strawson writes (<i>Individuals</i>, p.58) ‘it is a conceptual truth that persons have material bodies’. Assuming that God is a self or a person, does this mean that God has a material body?
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I looked at Strawson’s argument again, as far as I could make sense of it. It’s a <a href="http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/transcendental-arguments/">transcendental argument</a>, namely an argument that X is a necessary condition for the possibility of Y, that Y is the case, and so X is the case. Strawson defines the concept of a person as the subject of both M (material) predicates such as ‘weighs 200 lbs’ and P (psychological) predicates such as ‘is depressed’. This is merely a definition, but he goes on to argue (p.102) that the concept of a person, i.e. that which can satisfy both types of predicate, is logically primitive, whereas the concept of a subject who can satisfy P predicates is logically posterior, i.e. can exist only, if at all, as a secondary non-primitive concept, which itself is explicable only in terms of the concept of a person. Thus it is a necessary condition of our having the concept of a subject of experience that it must involve the same subject being able to satisfy material predicates like ‘weighs 200 lbs’ etc.; we <i>do</i> have the concept of a subject of experience; ergo such subjects must be persons as Strawson has defined ‘person’, i.e. a subject to which we attribute both P <em>and</em> M type predicates.
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He adds (p.116) ‘It is for this reason that the orthodox have wisely insisted on the resurrection of the body’.
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His reasoning is difficult to follow, but here is my interpretation. The predicate ‘depressed’ has the same meaning whether you say to me ‘I am depressed’ or I say, ‘you are depressed’, to you. The first is a case of self-assignment of an experience, the other is a case of assigning such an experience to another. This means that we have both the concept of an experience or state of consciousness, i.e. what is predicated by a P-predicate, and a concept of the <em>subject</em> of experience, i.e. the subject of the state of consciousness.
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Now if I tell you that I am <i>also</i> depressed, it follows that different subjects can have the same experience, i.e. when you and I each say ‘I am depressed’ or, to each other, ‘you are depressed’, we are predicating the same thing of different subjects. But different subjects of experience must be distinguishable and identifiable (p.102) , and it is part of Strawson’s wider thesis that subjects can be distinguishable and identifiable only if they are embodied, that is, part of a unified spatio-temporal framework. Thus the concept of a subject of experience would be impossible if the concept were logically primitive. ‘For there could never be any question of assigning an experience, as such, to any subject other than oneself; and therefore never any question of assigning it to oneself either, never any question of ascribing it to a subject at all’. Thus the concept of a person, i.e. a conscious material being, is logically primitive.
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This suggests that we can only have the concept of God as an individual being, i.e. a sort of extraordinary self who commands, forgives, controls history, predicts the future etc, if that concept <i>also</i> includes being the subject of predicates such as ‘has a human form’, ‘weighs X lbs’ and so on. Yet the people saw no form. How is that? Where does Strawson’s argument go wrong?
Edward Ockhamhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07583379503310147119noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-21308815.post-46787899941697721372017-01-08T10:02:00.000+00:002017-01-08T10:02:56.007+00:00Necessarily so?<img align="right" src="http://trinities.org/blog/wp-content/uploads/John_W._Bubbles1-237x300.jpg" />
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It ain't necessarily so<br />
The t'ings dat yo' li'ble<br />
To read in de Bible,<br />
To read in de Bible,<br />
It ain't necessarily so</blockquote>
In <a href="http://maverickphilosopher.typepad.com/maverick_philosopher/2016/05/god-as-biblical-character-and-as-divine-reality.html">God as Biblical Character and as Divine Reality</a>, the Maverick makes the curious distinction between a Biblical character, and the <em>external reality</em> corresponding to the character.
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The two philosophers [Aquinas and Spinoza] are clearly referring to the same Biblical character when they write <i>Deus</i>. But their conceptions of God are so different that they cannot be said to be referring to the same being in external reality.</blockquote>
What could this mean? I was puzzled for a while, but then Bill and I discussed it in the comments boxes, and I noticed the label on the post: <a href="http://maverickphilosopher.typepad.com/maverick_philosopher/fiction-and-fictionalism/#">Fiction and Fictionalism</a>. Then the penny dropped. Bill is comparing the Bible to fiction, or perhaps in the genre of historical fiction where some characters are in ‘external reality’, like Napoleon in <i>War and Peace</i>, and others are simply made up, like Natasha Rostov and Pierre Bezuhov. Thus Moses is the equivalent of Napoleon, and God, <i>qua</i> biblical character, is like Bezuhov. Except that unlike with Bezuhov, there corresponds an external reality to the fictional character God, a divine reality who is real, but not numerically identical with the fiction.
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At least, that’s what I understand from his comment <a href="http://maverickphilosopher.typepad.com/maverick_philosopher/2016/05/god-as-biblical-character-and-as-divine-reality.html?cid=6a010535ce1cf6970c01b8d1e8cdd1970c#comment-6a010535ce1cf6970c01b8d1e8cdd1970c">here</a>.
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There are many problems with this. Much of the Bible is written as history. Genesis, Exodus, Joshua to Kings, and much else, are written in a historical style (‘In the days when the judges ruled …’). And if that history, the story of a single people through hundreds of years, of their kings and priests, also involves supernatural beings, <em>why shouldn’t those beings, who are crucial to the narrative, be included</em>? Of course, a naturalist account would preclude the mention of any such things, except as beliefs in them affected people’s behaviour and influenced events. But that presumes naturalism. Why shouldn’t the history of the Jewish people and nation, properly understood, include the most important person (an omnipotent supernatural being) in that history. Why leave God out? It would be like leaving Napoleon out of <em>War and Peace</em>!
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And of course if we have doubts about the most important character in the story, why not doubt the rest? There is no external evidence, i.e. no evidence outside the Bible, for the existence of Adam, or Eve, or Noah, or even Moses. If we ask whether Moses existed, we are not asking whether there was some external reality corresponding to but different from Moses. Rather, we are asking whether that same Biblical character existed in reality. The character is either one and the same with some historical person, or there was no such person.
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Likewise with God. Did God really speak to Moses, face to face (Exodus 33:11)? If so, then God the Biblical character really did exist (and, being eternal, still does). If not, then why suppose any external reality corresponding to the character at all?
Edward Ockhamhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07583379503310147119noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-21308815.post-80250024447483398982017-01-07T15:03:00.003+00:002017-01-07T15:26:12.359+00:00Identity and necessity<img align="right" height="140" src="http://trinities.org/blog/wp-content/uploads/b700cc2021a928aaf9eca490060b176f1.jpg"/>
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Originally published <a href="http://trinities.org/blog/identity-and-necessity/">here</a>.
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This week I have been pondering the question of whether the God of the Philosophers (a being who is omniscient, omnibenevolent, omnipotent etc.) is the same being as the God of the scriptures (Eleanor Stump thinks <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9dysQxxRpLc">he is</a>, for example), and in particular the question of whether, if he is identical, he is <i>necessarily</i> identical. The philosopher Saul Kripke is famous for upholding the so-called ‘necessity of identity’ thesis, and for many years (I first studied his magisterial and influential <i>Naming and Necessity</i> in 1979). I thought I understood what his argument was. Now I am less sure.
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My puzzle is that there are various ways we can get to the thesis of the Necessity of Identity, yet Kripke apparently accepts none of these. The thesis was first proposed (as far as we know) by modal logic pioneer Ruth Barcan Marcus in 1947 (‘Identity of Individuals in a Strict Functional Calculus of Second Order’, JSL 1947 12-15), although her paper was nearly rejected after Quine, the reviewer, found her methods ‘laborious and often rather obvious, while she seems to avoid the more difficult and interesting questions’. Quine later published a less laborious demonstration of the thesis in 1953 (‘Three Grades of Modal Involvement’ JSL 1953, 168-169), which involves just two assumptions, namely the Principle of Identity, that necessarily a=a, and Substitutivity, that a=b and Fa implies Fb. From these two it clearly follows that if a = b, then necessarily a = b. (Hint: let ‘F’ be ‘necessarily a = ---’, start with Fa, and substitute ‘b’ for ‘a’).
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That is all clear and good. The problem is that Kripke doesn’t <em>want</em> to assume Substitutivity. He questions the universal substitutivity of proper names (N&N p.20), and as is well known he agrees with Frege that the identity of Hesperus the evening star and Phosphorus the morning star had to await discovery by a scientist (Pythagoras) and is thus not knowable from first principles. So ‘It is true from first principles that Hesperus is Phosphorus’ is false, yet ‘It is true from first principles that Hesperus is Hesperus’ is true! If we can change the truth value of the statement simply by substituting a name for the same planet, how can Substitutivity be true?
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Nor does he want to assume that ‘Hesperus is Phosphorus’ is true in virtue of its meaning. He says (N&N p.20) that some critics of his doctrines, (‘and some sympathizers’) have taken him to be implying
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that a sentence with ‘Cicero’ in it expresses the same ‘proposition’ as the corresponding one with ‘Tully’, that to believe the proposition expressed by the one is to believe the proposition expressed by the other, or that they are equivalent for all semantic purposes. Russell does seem to have held such a view for ‘logically proper names’, and it seems congenial to a purely ‘Millian’ picture of naming, where only the referent of the name contributes to what is expressed. But I (and for all I know, even Mill) never intended to go so far. My view that the English sentence ‘Hesperus is Phosphorus’ could sometimes be used to raise an empirical issue while ‘Hesperus is Hesperus’ could not shows that I do not treat the sentences as completely interchangeable.</blockquote>
This blocks a second route to the necessity of identity. Clearly if ‘a=a’ <i>means</i> the same thing as ‘a=b’, and if ‘a=a’ is necessarily true in virtue of its meaning, then ‘a=b’ is also necessary, since it expresses exactly the same proposition. But Kripke does not endorse such equivalence of meaning. Why then does he believe that the necessity of identity is a universal principle?
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It is surprisingly difficult to find any positive argument in his work. Most of his well-known arguments are negative ones, demonstrating that apparent exceptions to the necessity principle are not exceptions at all. For example, we can suppose a situation in which some planet <i>other</i> than Hesperus was called ‘Hesperus’. <i>But that would not be a situation in which Hesperus itself was not Phosphorus</i> (N&N p.108). The only positive argument I could find is this:
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If names are rigid designators, then there can be no question about identities being necessary, because ‘a’ and ‘b’ will be rigid designators of a certain man or thing x. Then even in every possible world, ‘a’ and ‘b’ will both refer to this same object x, and to no other, and so there will be no situation in which a might not have been b. That would have to be a situation in which the object which we are also now calling ‘x’ would not have been identical with itself. Then one could not possibly have a situation in which Cicero would not have been Tully or Hesperus would not have been Phosphorus. (‘Identity and Necessity’ p. 154, there is a similar argument in N&N p.104).</blockquote>
Let’s unpack this. Kripke’s notion of a rigid designator is clear enough, and is an important contribution to the philosophy of language. A rigid designator is one which designates the same object in every possible world. Or if you don’t like ‘possible world’ talk, a term which designates the same in a proposition prefixed by a modal operator like ‘it is necessary that’ or ‘it is possible that’ as when not so prefixed. Then his argument looks like this:
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1. Let ‘a’ rigidly designate a and ‘b’ rigidly designate b
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2. Suppose a=b
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3. Then there is a single thing x, such that x=a and x = b
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<b>4. ‘a’ designates x and ‘b’ designates x</b>
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5. If ‘a’ designates x rigidly, ‘a’ designates x in every possible world, likewise ‘b’
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6. If ‘a’ and ‘b’ designate x in some possible world w, and not a=b, then not x=x
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7. Therefore a=b in w
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8. But w was <i>any</i> possible world. Therefore, necessarily a=b.
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Steps 1 and 2 are suppositions, step 3 follows from 2 by the nature of identity. Step 4 I will discuss shortly. Step 5 follows from the definition of rigid designator, step 6 probably requires further assumptions, but looks OK. Step 7 follows by contradiction, and step 8, the conclusion, by the principle that if we can prove p for <i>any</i> arbitrary w, then p holds for <i>every</i> w.
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Let’s return to step 4, as I promised. We agree that ‘a’ designates a. And that a=x, by assumption. Why on earth would it follow that ‘a’ designates x? Well, let F be ‘‘a’ designates ---’, so ‘Fa’ says that ‘a’ designates a. And let x=a. How do we get from Fa and x=a to Fx? By our old friend Substitution, no less. Yet Kripke claims to reject the universal applicability of Substitution. He could argue that it simply fails to hold in this case, but the thing about being a logical principle is that if it fails in even <em>one</em> case, it has to fail in <em>every</em> case, unless we can find a sufficient reason why it fails in that case, but then of course the principle has to include that reason. Heavy stuff.
Edward Ockhamhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07583379503310147119noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-21308815.post-61897640341778099452016-05-19T19:58:00.000+00:002016-05-19T19:58:01.620+00:00So the bible says<img align="right" src="http://trinities.org/blog/wp-content/uploads/Billie_Holiday_0001_original1-233x300.jpg" height="180" />
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Originally published <a href="http://trinities.org/blog/thats-bible-says/">here</a>.
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<blockquote>
Them that's got shall get
Them that's not shall lose
So the Bible said and it still is news</blockquote>
<a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ebYHB7HS59g">So Billie Holiday sang</a>, probably alluding to <a href="http://biblehub.com/matthew/25-29.htm">Matthew 25:29</a> (‘For whoever has will be given more, and they will have an abundance. Whoever does not have, even what they have will be taken from them’) or <a href="http://biblehub.com/luke/8-18.htm">Luke 8:18</a> (‘whosoever hath, to him shall be given; and whosoever hath not, from him shall be taken even that which he seemeth to have’), but that’s irrelevant. The point is that the subject of the verb ‘said’ is ‘the Bible’, and as Joshua Harris <a href="http://trinities.org/blog/god-and-deus/#comment-2668576404">objects</a>, the Bible cannot ‘say’ anything. It’s ‘an inanimate object, not an intellectual agent’. Well, perhaps we can change that to ‘<i>it</i> says in the Bible – who then is the impersonal ‘it’? What about ‘Matthew says that whoever has will be given more. What if Matthew didn’t write that gospel? Would it then be false that Matthew says that?
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It is key to the theory of reference that I shall propose that we refer by means of the signs we use. Granted, it is through our will and agency that we produce signs: words and sentences that we utter or write, nods, winks, shrugs and other forms of non-verbal signification. But once the signs are in public view, it is they which do the work, as David Cameron found <a href="http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-politics-36260193">to his cost</a>. Were intentions sufficient to make our meaning clear, there would be none of the confusion, ambiguity and lack of clarity that fill every waking moment.
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Indeed, why should intentions or thoughts or stuff inside have anything to do with how we express what some text means or says? Suppose that the thought which Bob expresses by the words 'Sinners will be punished' is the thought that we would express by 'hamburgers with relish are delicious'. So when Bob says '<a href="http://biblehub.com/matthew/25-46.htm">Matthew 25:46</a> says that sinners will be punished', he thinks that Matthew is saying something about hamburgers. Now what he <em>thinks</em> is false, but what he <em>says</em> is perfectly true. Matthew 25:46 indeed says that sinners will be punished, or something like that. The stuff inside our heads is just not important at all, indeed, it is questionable whether the Bob example is even coherent. Are we supposing that he has a kind of private language which, if there were a dictionary for it, would translate the spoken word 'sinners' into the mental word 'hamburgers'?
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This is fundamentally connected with what I will have to say later about reference. Dale Tuggy asks <a href="http://trinities.org/blog/god-and-deus/#comment-2664650438">here</a> about some person who has ‘a goofy and anachronistic interpretation of the Bible, on which both God and Moses are avatars of the Flying Spaghetti Monster. Then what the Bible actually asserts may hardly enter his mind, as he's indirectly quoting it. But I think he [would] still be referring to what it actually asserts, by using the phrase that you've said.’ I agree. In the indirect quotation that he utters, the word ‘God’ refers to <i>God</i>, and ‘Moses’, to <i>Moses</i>. No avoiding that. Perhaps he means to refer so something else, but that does not matter. It is words that refer, not people. But more later.Edward Ockhamhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07583379503310147119noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-21308815.post-4883203895079653472016-05-07T12:35:00.001+00:002016-05-07T12:35:49.163+00:00God and DeusOriginally published <a href="http://trinities.org/blog/god-and-deus/">here</a>. Copying here for reference.
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Bill Vallicella, the famous <a href="http://maverickphilosopher.typepad.com/">Maverick Philosopher</a>, just dropped me a line asking whether, when Thomas Aquinas and Baruch Spinoza use the term 'Deus', they are referring to the same being. This is a difficult and interesting question.
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Bill uses the Latin name 'Deus', alluding to the fact that both men wrote in Latin. Latin was the choice of the 'scholastic' theologians of the 13th century, because it was the language of European scholarship. Thus the work of Thomas, an Italian writing in the 1260s, would have been accessible without translation to his English contemporary Roger Marston. For much the same reason, Spinoza, writing 400 years later, also used Latin.</div>
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Clearly both writers would have understood each other's work, as regards the <em>dictionary</em> meanings of Latin words. So when Thomas writes (<a href="http://www.logicmuseum.com/wiki/Authors/Thomas_Aquinas/Summa_Theologiae/Part_I/Q7#q7a1co"><i>Summa</i> Iª q. 7 a. 1 co.</a>) <em>esse divinum non sit esse receptum in aliquo</em> – the divine being is not a being received in anything, Spinoza would have understood what he meant because he would have understood the standard meanings of 'esse' (being), 'divinum' (of or belonging to a deity, divine), 'receptum' (that which is taken to one's self, admitted, accepted, received) etc. That is clear. All these words are in Latin dictionaries. But when Thomas writes <em>Manifestum est quod ipse Deus sit infinitus et perfectus</em> – it is manifest that <i>Deus</i><em> Himself</em> is infinite and perfect – would he and Spinoza understand the proper name <i>Deus</i> in the same way?</div>
This is a difficult question, for many reasons. But there is at least one sort of case where it is clear they are using the name ‘God’ in exactly the same way, namely when they discuss the interpretation of the scriptures. Aquinas does this many times in <i>Summa Theologiae</i>, using the words of the Bible and the Church Fathers to support complex theological and philosophical arguments. Spinoza’s <i>Theologico-Political Treatise</i> is an extensive commentary on the text of the Bible and its meaning, also supported throughout by biblical quotation. So when Thomas writes
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According to Chrysostom (Hom. iii in Genes.), <i>Moses</i> prefaces his record by speaking of the works of <i>God</i> (<i>Deus</i>) collectively. (<em>Summa Theologiae</em> <a href="http://www.logicmuseum.com/wiki/Authors/Thomas_Aquinas/Summa_Theologiae/Part_I/Q68#q68a1ad1">Iª q. 68 a. 1 ad 1</a>)</blockquote>
and Spinoza writes
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As for the fact that <em>God</em> [<i>Deus</i>] was angry with him [Balak] while he was on his journey, that happened also to <em>Moses</em> when he was setting out for Egypt at the command of <em>God</em> [<i>Dei</i>]. (<i>Tractatus</i> ch. 3, alluding to Exodus <a href="https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=Exodus+4:24-26">4:24-26</a>)</blockquote>
it is clear that they are talking about the same persons, i.e. they are both talking about <i>God</i>, and they are both talking about <i>Moses</i>. It is somewhat more complicated than that, because Spinoza has a special theory about what the word ‘God’ means in the <em>scriptures</em>, but more of that later. In the present case, it seems clear that whenever we indirectly quote the scriptures, e.g. ‘<a href="https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=Exodus+3%3A1&version=KJV">Exodus 3:1</a> says <i>that</i> Moses was setting out for Egypt at the command of God’, we are specifying what the Bible says by using the names ‘Moses’ and ‘God’ exactly as the Bible uses them. Bill might disagree here, but we shall see.
Edward Ockhamhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07583379503310147119noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-21308815.post-22445414353147199872016-05-07T12:33:00.001+00:002016-05-07T12:33:25.972+00:00God and AllahOriginally published <a href="http://trinities.org/blog/god-and-allah/">here</a> at Dale Tuggy’s site. Copying here for reference.
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<img align="right" height="180" src=" http://trinities.org/blog/wp-content/uploads/church_and_mosque1-300x225.jpg" />Last month my publisher gave the green light to start work on <em>The Same God? Reference and Identity in Jewish, Christian, and Muslim Scriptures</em>. Yes, that old question of whether Muslims worship the same God as Christians, which surfaced again last year when Larycia Hawkins, an associate professor at Wheaton College, was <a href="http://www.npr.org/2015/12/18/460312256/evangelical-college-suspends-professor-for-showing-solidarity-with-muslims">suspended</a> following her Facebook post citing Pope Francis's statement that Muslims and Christians worship the same God. Bill Vallicella has a good post about the question <a href="http://maverickphilosopher.typepad.com/maverick_philosopher/2015/12/do-christians-and-muslims-worship-the-same-god.html">here</a>, and see <a href="http://www.thecatholicthing.org/2015/12/17/do-muslims-and-christians-worship-the-same-god/">Beckwith</a>’s discussion, as well as <a href="http://trinities.org/blog/not-the-same-founding-father/">this</a> by someone called ‘Tuggy’.
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The first, and natural reaction, is that the Muslim and the Christian God cannot be the same, given the radically different conceptions that Muslims and Christians hold of the supreme being. Muslims believe that God is not triune, Christians believe that he is triune. Since being triune and not being triune are incompatible, it follows that no being could simultaneously instantiate the Muslim and the Christian conceptions, and so, given that there can be only <i>one</i> supreme being, it seems to follow that Muslims and Christians do not worship the same God. On this view, either the Christian or the Muslim is an idolater: one or the other entertains a conception of something that does not exist, but that which does not exist cannot be a genuine object of worship.
But not so fast! As Christopher Howse pointed out <a href="http://www.telegraph.co.uk/comment/columnists/christopherhowse/7110855/The-Christians-who-call-God-Allah.html">here</a>, the fact that you think others are mistaken in their description of someone's characteristics does not mean that they are referring to a different person.
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Someone, for example, might call Spartacus a "freedom fighter" and someone else call him a "murderous rebel", but they are talking about the same man.</blockquote>
On this view, either the Christian or the Muslim is a heretic, by claiming that God has attributes which are contrary to the orthodox view. <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_of_Damascus">John of Damascus</a> says:
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There are many other extraordinary and quite ridiculous things in this book [Quran] which he [Muhammad] boasts was sent down to him from God. But when we ask: ‘And who is there to testify that God gave him the book? And which of the prophets foretold that such a prophet would rise up?’—they are at a loss.’ ‘Moreover, they call us Hetaeriasts, or Associators, because, they say, we introduce an associate with God by declaring Christ to the Son of God and God.’ ‘by avoiding the introduction of an associate with God you have mutilated Him. It would be far better for you to say that He has an associate than to mutilate Him, as if you were dealing with a stone or a piece of wood or some other inanimate object. Thus, you speak untruly when you call us Hetaeriasts; we retort by calling you Mutilators of God.’</blockquote>
John is clearly referring to <i>God</i> throughout. Second, he is also stating what Muhammad says via indirect quotation: ‘which he [Muhammad] boasts was sent down to him from God’. Thus he concedes that the being that Muhammad is boasting about is identical to the being that he worships. And so it is heresy, not idolatry. Muhammad denies there is an ‘associate’ of the very same being that John worships. Muhammad does not deny the existence of Jesus, but he does deny the relationship between Jesus and God claimed by orthodox Christians.
But it is still more difficult. Howse claims that when someone <i>calls</i> Spartacus a "freedom fighter" and someone else <i>calls</i> him a "murderous rebel", they are both <i>talking about</i> the same man. This begs the question. What relation is invoked by <i>calling</i> someone a name? How do we <i>talk about</i> that person? Well, we use a proper name like ‘Spartacus’, but how does a proper name enable us to do this? Does it embed a description like ‘Thracian gladiator who led an uprising against the Romans’? If so, names that embed contrary descriptions like ‘triune’ and ‘not triune’ cannot possible refer to the same being, and so we are back to the first position. The question is one of idolatry not heresy. If, on the other hand, proper names do not embed descriptions, if they simply refer to their bearers, then they must refer to an existing bearer. Hence (a) God necessarily exists, because I am able to refer to him in saying ‘God exists’ and (b) it must be possible to determine from the meaning of ‘God’ and the meaning of ‘Allah’ alone, whether they are the same being or not. If I know the meaning of an English word and an Arabic word, I must be able to say whether one translates the other or not.
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Can we understand a proposition in which two names occur without knowing whether their meaning is the same or different? Suppose I know the meaning of an English word and of a German word that means the same: then it is impossible for me to be unaware that they do mean the same; I must be capable of translating each into the other. (Wittgenstein, <i>Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus</i> 4.243)</blockquote>
Neither position seems tenable. More later, but as Vallicella says, there is no easy answer to the question. ‘It depends on the resolution of intricate questions in the philosophy of language’.
Edward Ockhamhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07583379503310147119noreply@blogger.com5tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-21308815.post-44017916075507656022016-03-28T08:53:00.005+00:002016-04-08T03:45:46.301+00:00What I say<img align="right" height="180" src="https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/c/cd/Epimenides-poet.jpg" />
"What she said" in the vernacular is a way of expressing or agreeing with what the speaker just said. We can extend this useful idea in all kinds of ways. E.g.
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(1) we can apply a negation operator. Thus 'not what she said'.
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(2) we can apply it recursively. Thus
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A: Snow is white
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B:what A said
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C:what B said
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and so on. Note that all three are statements, each of them says something. Thus to say something is either (i) to say something without reference to another statement. This is the boundary condition. (ii) to reference some other statement which also says something. This is the recursive case.
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(3) We can use other pronouns than the third person. E.g. to saying to C, 'not what you said', thus disagreeing with C, and thus disagreeing that snow is white. In the first person 'what I said', emphasising again what you said before, 'not what I said', changing your mind, as we do. And finally 'not what I am saying'. Does this say anything? No. It is a recursive case that has no boundary condition.
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(4) Finally, we can ask a question. Thus 'what C says?', to which the answer could be 'what C says', or just 'Snow is white', or 'not what C says', thus 'Snow is not white'. As for 'not what I am saying?', there is no appropriate answer, given that 'not what I am saying' has no boundary condition, as in case (3) above.
Edward Ockhamhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07583379503310147119noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-21308815.post-55259886345038235972016-03-15T12:47:00.001+00:002016-03-15T12:50:44.257+00:00Truth and conspiracy<img align="right" height="180" src="https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/1/1e/%C3%9Asta_pravdy.jpg" />
A nice companion to my <a href="http://ocham.blogspot.co.uk/2010/06/fragility-of-truth.html">2010 post</a>:
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For the simple truth is that truth is often hard to come by, and that once found it may easily be lost again. Erroneous beliefs may have an astonishing power to survive, for thousands of years, in defiance of experience, with or without the aid of any conspiracy. The history of science, and especially of medicine, could furnish us with a number of good examples. One example is, indeed, the general conspiracy theory itself I mean the erroneous view that whenever something evil happens it must be due to the evil will of an evil power. Various forms of this view have survived down to our own day.
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(Karl Popper, from the Annual Philosophical Lecture read before the British Academy on January 20th, 1960. First published in the <i>Proceedings of the British Academy</i>, 46, 1960, and separately by Oxford University Press, 1961).</blockquote>
Edward Ockhamhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07583379503310147119noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-21308815.post-75749395470137367302016-03-03T10:47:00.001+00:002016-03-03T10:52:11.539+00:00Signification and assertion <img align="left" height="180" src=" https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/b/ba/Socrates_in_Nuremberg_Chronicle_LXXIIv.jpg" />
<img align="right" height="180" src="https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/9/99/1018_-_Keramikos_Museum%2C_Athens_-_Toy_horse%2C_10th_century_BC_-_Photo_by_Giovanni_Dall%27Orto%2C_Nov_12_2009.jpg" />
Every departmental science has a subject, and its literature talks about or refers to that subject. Physics talks about heavy bodies and momentum and energy, chemistry talks about compounds, biology talks about flora and fauna etc. What does semantics, the science of meaning, talk about? <br />
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And there is the problem. Sometimes we cannot refer to what we signify. <br />
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Frege recognised this problem in 1892, in his essay ‘On Concept and Object’. A sentence consists of words, each of which has a signification or sense. What the whole sentence signifies is thus a compound of the senses corresponding to the words. (See e.g. his undated letter to Jourdain, in <i>Frege’s Philosophical and Mathematical Correspondence</i>, ed Gabriel and Hermes, 1980). The possibility of understanding a sentence we have never heard before depends on this property. What the sentence signifies is something new and perhaps previously unknown to us, but the signification of the words of which it is composed must be known, otherwise we would be incapable of understanding the sentence. For example ‘Socrates is a man’ is composed of the expressions ‘Socrates’ and ‘is a man’, both of which we know and understand. <br />
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The problem that Frege grapples with in ‘On Concept and Object’ is that while we can talk about what ‘Socrates’ signifies, namely Socrates himself, we can’t talk about what ‘is a man’ signifies. Or suppose we can. Let’s refer to it by the expression ‘The signification of “is a man”’. Will that do? No, because that expression is what Frege calls an Object term, an expression that refers to an object like Socrates. Thus the sentence ‘The signification of “is a man” is an Object’ is true. But it cannot signify an object, otherwise the sentence ‘Socrates is a man’ would be composed of two terms for objects. But two such terms cannot compose a sentence, any more than ‘Socrates Plato’ can. The sentence would be a mere list of words. Frege says, enigmatically ‘the concept <i>horse</i> is not a concept’, and attributes it to ‘an awkwardness of language’.
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There is a similar problem regarding what I call signs of assertion. Consider
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It is false that Socrates is a horse</blockquote>
I have not asserted that Socrates is a horse. On the contrary, I have <i>denied</i> it. Yet the four words ‘Socrates is a horse’ occur inside the eight word sentence ‘It is false that Socrates is a horse’. Perhaps we can explain this as follows. The eight word sentence can be split into ‘It is false’ and ‘that Socrates is a horse’. The latter is what Frege calls an object term. It refers to something a mad person might assert as true, the very thing I stand in the relation of denying to. So the meaning of the eight word sentence is changed by putting ‘It is false’ in front, and so if the meaning of the whole sentence is a composite of the meaning of ‘it is false’ and ‘that Socrates is a horse’, the composite is what ‘It is false that Socrates is a horse’ signifies. But of course that can’t be so, for the very fact that we could signify that Socrates was not a horse, would require that Socrates not being a horse was a fact. Worse, ‘It is true that Socrates is a horse’ would signify Socrates being a horse, so would require the existence of Socrates being a horse. Both those contradictory facts would have to exist in order for the contradictory sentences to be significant. Impossible!<br />
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Frege alludes to this problem in a much later essay (‘Negation’) published in 1918. He distinguishes between a question (my example is ‘is Socrates a horse’) from the thought corresponding to an answer like ‘yes’ or ‘no’. For if the sense of the question contained the sense of ‘yes’ or ‘no’, then the question would contain its own answer. The question would express a thought ‘whose being consists in its being true’.
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Grasping the sense [of the question] 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.</blockquote>
Fair enough, but Frege does not see this as a challenge to his compositional semantics. Consider ‘Is Socrates a horse? No’. The first part signifies the question. If adding the sign ‘No’ completes the sense, then what is signified by the whole thing, namely question plus answer, must indeed be something whose being consists in being true, which Frege apparently denies.
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In summary, if the signification of the whole is made up of the signification of the parts, then we should be able to refer to the signification of the whole, if semantics is to be a proper science. But we can’t, otherwise the subject of our science would include items like Socrates not being a horse, as well as Socrates being a horse. Which is impossible. Therefore semantics is not a science, at least not a <em>proper</em> science.
Edward Ockhamhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07583379503310147119noreply@blogger.com8tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-21308815.post-25553162722339407162016-02-28T11:55:00.003+00:002016-02-28T15:52:57.966+00:00Necessary beings <img align="right" height="220" src="https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/e/e7/InTheFifthAtMaloryTowers.jpg" />
We don’t have to buy everything that Frege says about concepts to agree that using a concept expression F we can say things like ‘There are three Fs’ or ‘the number of Fs is n’. We can also say ‘There is at least one F’ which, according to Frege, is equivalent to ‘Fs exist’ or ‘there are Fs’. That seems uncontroversial.
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Therefore ‘girls over the age of 17 at Mallory Towers’ is a concept-expression. For we can say that there are three girls over the age of 17 at Mallory Towers, or that the number of girls over the age of 17 at Mallory Towers is three. And we can say that, since there is at least one girl over the age of 17 at Mallory Towers, that <i>there are</i> girls over the age of 17 at Mallory Towers.
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But here’s the problem. If it is true that ‘girls over the age of 17 at Mallory Towers’ is the name for a concept, then such a concept is <em>not</em> a necessary being. For in a possible world where there is no such school as Mallory Towers, we cannot specify the content of the concept. The property of being a girl over the age of 17 at Mallory Towers cannot be specified without reference to the <em>actual</em> Mallory Towers.
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But that seems impossible. In such a possible world, there are no girls at Mallory Towers, since the school doesn’t exist, hence there are no such girls over 17. Therefore the non-existence of such girls is the non-instantiation of the concept *girl over the age of 17 at Mallory Towers*, and so that concept, in that possible world, has the property of being non-instantiated. But in order to <i>have</i> that property, it must exist. Since this is <i>any</i> possible world, it follows that the concept must exist in <em>every</em> possible world, and so is a necessary being. Yet we just supposed that it wasn’t a necessary being. Contradiction.
Edward Ockhamhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07583379503310147119noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-21308815.post-22553867869358335342016-02-28T11:14:00.003+00:002016-02-28T11:56:41.796+00:00Aggregation <img align="right" height="280" src="https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/0/03/Bocken_Again%21_%2811439149914%29.jpg" />
Is number a property of an aggregate of things? But what <i>is</i> an aggregate? Can the very same things have the same number once disaggregated? Frege (<i>The Foundations of Arithmetic</i> § 23, translation J.L. Austin) writes:<br />
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To the question: What is it that the number belongs to as a property? Mill replies as follows: the name of a number connotes, ‘of course, some property belonging to the agglomeration of things which we call by the name; and that property is the characteristic manner in which the agglomeration is made up of, and may be separated into, parts.’
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Here the definite article in the phrase "the characteristic manner" is a mistake right away; for there are very various manners in which an agglomeration can be separated into parts, and we cannot say that one alone would be characteristic. For example, a bundle of straw can be separated into parts by cutting all the straws in half, or by splitting it up into single straws, or by dividing it into two bundles. Further, is a heap of a hundred grains of sand made up of parts in exactly the same way as a bundle of 100 straws? And yet we have the same number. The number word ‘one’, again, in the expression ‘one straw’ signally fails to do justice to the way in which the straw is made up of cells or molecules. Still more difficulty is presented by the number 0. Besides, need the straws form any sort of bundle at all in order to be numbered? Must we literally hold a rally of all the blind in Germany before we can attach any sense to the expression ‘the number of blind in Germany’? Are a thousand grains of wheat, when once they have been scattered by the sower, a thousand grains of wheat no longer? Do such things really exist as agglomerations of proofs of a theorem, or agglomerations of events? And yet these too can be numbered. Nor does it make any difference whether the events occur together or thousands of years apart.</blockquote>
Edward Ockhamhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07583379503310147119noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-21308815.post-18503521824605991292016-02-21T16:53:00.003+00:002016-02-21T16:54:26.281+00:00Number, concepts and existence<img align="right" height="180" src="https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/b/b1/Horse_drawn_carriage_-_Vienna.jpg" />The Maverick Philosopher is agonising about number and existence in <a href="http://maverickphilosopher.typepad.com/maverick_philosopher/2016/02/on-an-argument-for-the-univocity-of-exists.html">this post</a>. It would be simpler if we returned to the original text of Frege which started all this (<i>Die Grundlagen der Arithmetik</i> 1884. Page numbers are to the original edition).
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<br />
Frege claims with a concept the question is always whether anything, and if so what, falls under it. With a proper name such questions make no sense. (§51, p. 64). He also claims that when you add the definite article to a concept word, it ceases to function as a concept word, although it still so functions with the indefinite article, or in the plural (<i>ibid</i>).
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This is part of a section of the <i>Grundlagen</i> where he develops the thesis that number is a property of concepts, not of things. Thus if I say (§46, p. 59) that ‘the King’s carriage is drawn by four horses’, I am ascribing the number 4 to the concept <i>horse that draws the King’s carriage</i>. The number is not a property of the horses, either individually or collectively, but of a concept.
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From these two claims, namely that number is a property of concept words, and that proper names are not concept words, it seems to follow that ‘Socrates exists’ makes no sense. If ‘Socrates’ is not a concept word, then it seems no concept corresponds to it, but existence means that some concept is instantiated, so ‘Socrates exists’cannot express existence. This is the difficulty that Bill is grappling with.
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But why, from the fact that ‘Socrates’ is not a concept word, does it follow that there is no corresponding concept? Frege has already told us that a concept word ceases to be such when we attach the definite article to it. So while ‘teacher of Plato’ signifies a concept, ‘<i>the</i> teacher of Plato does not. Why can’t the definite noun phrase ‘Socrates’ be the same, except that the definiteness is built into the proper name, rather than a syntactical compound of definite article and concept word. Why can’t ‘Socrates’ be semantically compound? So that it embeds a concept like <i>person identical with Socrates</i>, which with the definite article appended gives us ‘Socrates’?
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As I argued in one of the comments, the following three concepts all have a number
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C1: {any man at all}
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C2: {any man besides Socrates}
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C3: {satisfies C1 but not C2}
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If the number corresponding to C1 is n, then the number of C2 is n-1. And the number of C3 is of course 1, and if C3 is satisfied, then Socrates exists. Simple.Edward Ockhamhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07583379503310147119noreply@blogger.com7tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-21308815.post-86090911900623154932016-02-13T16:26:00.001+00:002016-02-15T10:59:54.523+00:00Metaphysical monstrosities<img align="right" height="350" src="https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/2/29/Aldrovandi-0022.jpg" />
I have been looking at ‘Van Inwagen on Fiction, Existence, Properties, Particulars, and Method’, by Bill Vallicella (<em>Studia Neoaristotelica </em>Review Article 12 (2015) / 2). Bill is the famous <a href="http://maverickphilosopher.typepad.com/">Maverick Philosopher</a>. <br />
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Section 3 deals with <i>haecceity</i>.
A haecceity property is one which, unlike <i>man</i> or <i>white</i> cannot be multiply instantiated, or as Scotus said, not-predicable of several things (<i>indicibilis de pluribus</i>). For example, being Socrates (<i>Socrateity</i>) is a property which, if instantiated, is instantiated by Socrates alone in the actual world and by nothing distinct from Socrates in any possible world.
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It is necessary to posit such properties, Bill argues, to support the semantic thesis of the univocity of ‘exists’ and ‘is’, and its ontological counterpart, that there are no modes of being/existence. It is essential to the thesis that number-words are univocal, and that ‘exists’ is a number-word. But it is not a number-word, for we can say of certain individual things that they exist, using referring terms.
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<blockquote>
Consider my cat Max Black. I joyously exclaim, ‘Max exists!’. My exclamation expresses a truth. Compare ‘Cats exist’. Now I agree with van Inwagen that the general ‘Cats exist’ is equivalent to ‘The number of cats is one or more’. But it is perfectly plain that the singular ‘Max exists’ is not equivalent to ‘The number of Max is one or more’. For the right-hand-side of the equivalence is nonsense, hence necessarily neither true nor false.</blockquote>
Right, but can’t a proper name <i>N</i> signify a property N* which can be instantiated, but by only one individual, and always and necessarily by the same individual? Then it makes sense to state there is only one object possessing N*, a statement which is false only if there are no (i.e. zero) objects possessing N*. Bill considers this, but thinks it a heavy price to pay for univocity across general and singular existentials. <br />
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‘Haecceity properties are metaphysical monstrosities’.
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Why? His argument is that being properties, haecceities are necessary beings, and so exist at all possible times in all possible worlds. But how, before Socrates came into existence, could there have been any such property as the property of being identical to him. There would have been simply nothing to give content to the proposition <i>that it is Socrates</i>.
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Now I agree that a haecceity <i>predicate</i> is essential to save the univocity of ‘exists’. And I agree, for the reasons given by Bill, that a haecceity <i>property</i> is absurd. But can there not be predicates, i.e. grammatical items, which have no properties corresponding to them? <br />
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More later.
Edward Ockhamhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07583379503310147119noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-21308815.post-39329048881870674512016-02-08T14:26:00.001+00:002016-02-08T14:30:52.544+00:00Intentional Identity<img align="right" height="280" src="https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/f/f9/Balai_sorci%C3%A8re_admin.jpg" />
Peter Geach (“Intentional Identity.” <i>Journal of Philosophy</i> 64, 627-32, reprinted in <i>Logic Matters</i>. Oxford: Blackwell, 1972) argues that the following sentence can be true even if there are no witches, yet can only be true if Hob and Nob are, as it were, thinking of the same witch.
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<blockquote>
Hob thinks that a witch has blighted Bob’s mare, and Nob wonders whether <i>she</i> killed Cob’s sow.</blockquote>
But <em>how</em> it could be true? If we read it in the <i>opaque</i> way of reading indirect speech clauses then each that-clause must stand on its own syntactically, but there is no way of interpreting the pronoun ‘she’ as a bound variable. The two thoughts add up, as it were, to ‘for some <i>x</i>, <i>x</i> has blighted Bob’s mare, and <i>x</i> killed Cob’s sow. But we can’t split them up into two separate thoughts, because of the second part of the conjunction. I.e. the following is not well-formed.
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<blockquote>
* Hob thinks that for some <i>x</i>, <i>x</i> has blighted Bob’s mare, and Nob wonders whether <i>x</i> killed Cob’s sow.</blockquote>
On the other hand, if we render the original sentence in the <i>transparent</i> way, we have to presume the existence of a real witch, i.e. some witch such that Hob thinks that she has blighted Bob’s mare, and Nob wonders whether she killed Cob’s sow. Neither of these are satisfactory. I don’t propose any answer yet, but I will start by noticing that the same problem attaches to saying what sentences <i>say</i>, rather than what people <i>think</i>.
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<blockquote>
(1) A witch has blighted Bob’s mare.<br />
(2) She killed Cob’s sow.<br />
(3) Sentence (1) says that a witch has blighted Bob’s mare.<br />
(4) Sentence (2) says that she (or <i>the witch</i>) has blighted Bob’s mare.</blockquote>
Clearly sentences (3) and (4) are true, even though sentences (1) and (2) are false. Yet the problem is exactly the same as the problem involving different thoughts. Thus we have simplified the problem. We don’t have to worry about explaining thoughts in different minds, but only how we express the meaning of different sentences. Meanings are a little easier than thoughts.
Edward Ockhamhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07583379503310147119noreply@blogger.com4tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-21308815.post-31237285922511715422016-02-02T12:22:00.000+00:002016-02-02T15:42:53.998+00:00Kripke's Puzzle<a href="http://www.st-andrews.ac.uk/~eg35/4617puzzle.pdf">This handout</a> clearly explains Kripke’s argument in his seminal paper ‘<a href="http://www.logicmuseum.com/wiki/Authors/kripke/beliefpuzzle">A Puzzle about Belief</a>’. Kripke derives a puzzle from just two assumptions:
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<blockquote>
(D): If a normal English speaker, on reflection, sincerely assents to ‘p’ [<i>supple</i> correctly understands ‘p’], then he believes that p.
</blockquote>
<blockquote>
(T): If a sentence of one language expresses a truth in that language, then any translation of it into any other language also expresses a truth (in that other language).</blockquote>
He also gives a version (the ‘Paderewski’ puzzle) that doesn’t even use (T). His point therefore is that it would be a mistake to criticize Millianism as follows:
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<blockquote>
Millianism implies SUB (=Names are substitutable <em>salva veritate</em>, even inside attitude reports), and SUB is wrong. Suppose we have ‘S believes that Tully isn’t famous’ and ‘S believes that Cicero is famous’. Then SUB lets us derive ‘S believes that Tully is famous,” so we incorrectly attribute contradictory beliefs to a normal person.</blockquote>
This is a mistake because that sort of result is obtainable without SUB, i.e. using just (D) and (T) we end up incorrectly attributing contradictory beliefs to normal people. <br />
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Objection: But if Millianism implies SUB and SUB results in paradox, then Millianism is wrong. Why does it matter if some other principles also result in the same paradox? <br />
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Reply: They aren’t just other principles – SUB just amounts to an <em>intralinguistic</em> application of (T), where e.g. we translate ‘S believes that Cicero is famous’ into ‘S believes that Tully is famous.’ Since (T) seems obviously true independent of Millianism, there’s no reason to blame the paradox on (SUB) and therefore on Millianism.
Edward Ockhamhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07583379503310147119noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-21308815.post-23896586857667499472016-01-29T18:58:00.000+00:002016-01-29T18:58:38.435+00:00You are happy<img align="right" height="280" src="https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/2/25/Museum_f%C3%BCr_Ostasiatische_Kunst_Dahlem_Berlin_Mai_2006_029.jpg" />
When I utter ‘I am happy’ to myself while alone and having been silent for some while, do I mean that the content of my statement could have been communicated to another person, even though it wasn’t? So that I could inform you (by ‘I’) which entity satisfies ‘— is happy’? <br />
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Or do I mean I have privileged access to the referent of ‘I’ in a way that could not be communicated, i.e. so that what I mean to refer to is different from the entity you grasp as *Edward* being happy? In this sense, it would be inconceivable that anyone else could grasp what the referent really was. Only I can grasp the identity. And I don’t mean that as a matter of fact. I mean it’s logically impossible. <br />
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What does this mean for numerical identity? Is the referent of ‘you are happy’, uttered by me to you, numerically different from the referent of ‘I am happy’, uttered by you to yourself?
Edward Ockhamhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07583379503310147119noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-21308815.post-61591595888014337082016-01-27T13:30:00.002+00:002016-01-27T13:36:47.321+00:00Defining reference<img align="right" height="180" src="https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/6/63/AlBernardWithPhotoportrait.jpg" />
Discussions of linguistic reference rarely define what reference is. An example is the SEP article <a href="http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/reference/">here</a>, which as far as I can see does not give any definition, merely stating that linguistic reference is ‘a relation that obtains between certain sorts of linguistic expressions and what speakers use those expressions to talk about’. And what relation is that? Slightly more helpfully it characterises it ‘metaphorically’ as a mechanism that enables us to talk about the world – say about George Bush – through referring terms which <i>hook on</i> to the world.
But only slightly. What are these hooks?<br />
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Let’s try this. If Socrates is <em>not</em> running and Plato <em>is</em> running, ‘Socrates is running’ is false, and ‘Plato is running’ is true. But ‘a man is running’ is true, because Plato is running. The non-referring, i.e. indefinite, statement is true or false regardless of who is running. But the truth of falsity of the singular statements depends on who is running.<br />
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So a singular or <i>referring</i> statement is true when there is some particular person such that the predicate is satisfied by that person, and is false when that person fails to satisfy the predicate, even if the predicate is satisfied by other people. But a
non-referring or existential statement is true when any individual, no matter who, satisfies the predicate.
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Does that work?Edward Ockhamhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07583379503310147119noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-21308815.post-47485515379386890602016-01-24T13:13:00.000+00:002016-02-01T19:38:16.886+00:00What does the pronoun ‘I’ refer to? <img align="right" height="180" src="https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/b/b7/Self-Portrait_in_Front_of_the_Easel17.jpg" />
What does the pronoun ‘I’ refer to? Wittgenstein (<i>Philosophical Remarks</i>, §64).
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<blockquote>
‘I have a pain’ is a sign of a completely different kind when I am using the proposition, from what it is to me on the lips of another; the reason being that it is senseless, as far as I’m concerned, on the lips of another until I know through which mouth it was expressed. The propositional sign in this case doesn’t consist in the sound alone, but in the fact that the sound came out of this mouth. Whereas in the case in which I say or think it, the sign is the sound itself.</blockquote>
Edward Ockhamhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07583379503310147119noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-21308815.post-54497857015442238332016-01-23T16:13:00.002+00:002016-01-23T16:16:12.988+00:00Proper names as identical twins<img align="left" src="http://www.logicmuseum.com/w/images/5/57/Worcester_13_11vb_plato.jpg" height="80" />
<img align="right" src="http://www.logicmuseum.com/w/images/4/41/Worcester_13_9rb_plato.jpg" height="80" />
<a href="http://ocham.blogspot.co.uk/2011/04/individuation-in-perception.html">A while ago</a> I discussed the Bunuel film where <i>different</i> actresses play the <i>same</i> character, and I discussed <a href="http://ocham.blogspot.co.uk/2016/01/face-blindness.html">later</a> how we try to identify people by their faces, or by the sound of their voice. Dogs do the same by their sense of smell, perhaps.
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The difference between the film and reality is that Bunuel signifies the identity by convention. The actresses don’t look that alike, certainly not as identical twins look alike. But Bunuel uses cinematic conventions to convey the identity. One actress is seen opening the door, the other is seen walking through the other side. With actual perception the identity is signified naturally.
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Before printing, we identified proper names in the same way. Here are two tokens of the word 'Plato' in Worcester 13 9rb and 11vb. With electronic printing, we are used to the same word looking exactly the same, which is guaranteed by the computer representing the five letters in the name 'Plato' by the ASCII characters 80, 108, 97, 116 and 111 respectively. This is what allows us to search an electronic document for the same name, or perform <a href="https://www.google.co.uk/#q=plato">a Google search</a> for ‘Plato’.
Even printing on paper guarantees that the letters will look nearly the same. <br />
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Before that, we recognised proper names just as we recognised faces.<br />
<br />Edward Ockhamhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07583379503310147119noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-21308815.post-78558241959218157532016-01-21T13:44:00.000+00:002016-01-21T13:52:40.420+00:00Tenth Birthday!<img align="right" height="180" src="https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/9/97/Birthday_cake_(8973445388).jpg" />
Beyond Necessity is <a href="http://ocham.blogspot.co.uk/2006/01/london-calling.html">10 years old today</a>! <br />
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The first post was remarkably accurate. “But this being London, the plumber will not be there.” Correct, the plumber never turned up, and when challenged, justified this by saying ‘All plumbers are bastards. I should know, I’m a plumber’. We went to a supposedly reputable upmarket bathroom designer in response, but he took half of our money then went bankrupt. A nice Roumanian plumber fixed it for us in the end, to whom we are forever grateful, although the upstairs loo has problems that delicacy prevents mentioning here. <br />
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Best wishes to my small band of readers.
Edward Ockhamhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07583379503310147119noreply@blogger.com4tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-21308815.post-28742119989947434782016-01-17T12:22:00.001+00:002016-01-18T09:12:31.462+00:00Face blindness<img align="right" height="220" src="https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/0/0e/Marian_and_Vivian_Brown.jpg" />
Hume, <em>Treatise</em> Book I Part iii, section 2 (my emphasis):
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<blockquote>
<span style="font-size: x-small;">We readily suppose an object may continue individually the same, though several times absent from and present to the senses; and ascribe to it an identity, notwithstanding the interruption of the perception, whenever we conclude, that if we had kept our eye or hand constantly upon it, it would have conveyed an invariable and uninterrupted perception. But this conclusion beyond the impressions of our senses can be founded only on the connexion of cause and effect; nor can we otherwise have any security, that the object is not <em>changed</em> upon us, however much the <em>new object</em> may resemble <em>that which was formerly present</em> to the senses.</span></blockquote>
Back-reference guarantees sameness of subject. Perception doesn’t. Think of the <a href="http://ocham.blogspot.co.uk/2011/04/individuation-in-perception.html">Bunuel film</a> where two actresses (Carole Bouquet and Angela Molina) play the same character (Conchita). I was one of the many people who were fooled into thinking they were the same actress, because of the identity of character. Think also of the meaning of ‘persona’, namely ‘mask’. This idea comes more easily to me I suppose because I suffer from ‘face blindness’. I find it hard to tell when I am meeting the same (relatively unfamiliar) person or not, and rely on tells such as hairstyle, build, age and so on. I am often embarrassed when I meet the same person in the same day but the lighting is different or they have dressed differently and I do not recognise them. I often have to bluff my way out of it. The world of strangers is literally like a world of masks without identity. My wife and daughter guide me through film plots.
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Now it might be that perceptual ‘reference’, i.e. reidentification, is some guaranteed and fail safe way of acquiring rapport with the subject, so you always know that the same person is before you. But I think not. I think other people just have better visual processing powers, meaning that a person’s face is a kind of uniquely applying description or ‘look’ that only one person can have. A sort of visual haecceitas, but which is descriptive, for all that. Think of identical twins. Their visual description is the same, so it’s a qualitative identity, not a numerical one.
Edward Ockhamhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07583379503310147119noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-21308815.post-88166760290744833082016-01-17T12:13:00.002+00:002016-01-17T13:02:44.728+00:00Aristotle on singular terms<img align="right" src="http://www.logicmuseum.com/w/images/3/30/Hoi%2BPol.jpg" height="170" />
According to Fred Sommers (<em>The Logic of Natural Language</em>, chapter 3) in traditional formal logic (TFL) as opposed to modern predicate logic (MPL), indefinite noun phrases <em>do</em> refer. “The distinctions crucial to MPL between subject expressions like ‘Socrates’ and ‘denoting phrases’ like ‘a senator’ are not crucial in TFL” (p.51).
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Where he gets this idea I don’t know. The scholastic logicians followed Aristotle, and Aristotle says (<a href="http://www.logicmuseum.com/wiki/Authors/Aristotle/perihermenias/boethius#bk17a38"><i>Peri hermenias</i> 17a38</a>) ‘λέγω δὲ καθόλου μὲν ὃ ἐπὶ πλειόνων πέφυκε κατηγορεῖσθαι, καθ’ ἕκαστον δὲ ὃ μή’. ‘By <i>universal</i> I mean what is <i>by nature disposed</i> (πέφυκε) to be predicated of many, by <i>singular</i> what is not [thus disposed]’. He gives the example of ‘man’ as universal, and the proper name ‘Callias’ as singular. The Greek terms καθόλου and ἕκαστον were translated by the Latins as <i>universale</i> and <i>singulare</i> respectively, from which we get the corresponding Latin-English terms. Note the ‘by nature disposed’ bit – Greek πέφυκε, Latin <i>natum est</i>. I.e. it’s in the very nature of a common term like ‘man’ to be predicable of more than one individual. But this is not true of a genuinely singular term, i.e. its nature is such as to be predicable only of one.
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Aristotle also says (<a href="http://www.logicmuseum.com/wiki/Authors/Aristotle/metaphysics/l7#bk1040a25"><i>Metaphysics</i> 1040a28</a>) that we cannot define singular terms, and that we should not be deceived by the fact that some individual objects have attributes that are unique, like ‘going round the earth’ (= the sun according to his geocentric theory). He points out that more than one thing could go round the earth, or none, so the definite description doesn’t really define ‘sun’ (ἥλιος). ‘But the sun was supposed to be an individual (ἕκαστα), like Cleon or Socrates’. So the ‘nature’ of a genuinely singular term is not just to be predicable of one thing alone, like a uniquely applying description, but to be predicable of that thing in virtue of its very meaning. Is Aristotle anticipating Kripke’s doctrine of the rigidity of reference?
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Geach has a challenging objection to this. Suppose I say, referring to a meeting I attended ‘a man was shouting’. And suppose the indefinite noun phrase ‘a man’ <i>refers to</i>, i.e. picks out or identifies some man in the crowd, say Frank, or aims to do so. But suppose Frank wasn’t shouting, but Richard was. Then ‘a man was shouting’ is true, because Richard was shouting. Yet I meant to refer to Frank. I meant to say something which is actually false, but which is true because some other person than I meant satisfied the predicate.
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The whole point of indefinite noun phrases is <i>not</i> to refer, at least if to refer means to identify or pick out, to tell you which individual I have in mind. In that sense, ‘a man was shouting’ doesn’t tell you <i>which</i> person you have in mind. It is true just so long as at least one man – <i>it absolutely doesn’t matter which </i>– was shouting. This contrasts with definite terms, which are true only when the person identified satisfies the predication.
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I hold that all singular ‘reference’, i.e. telling the audience which individual is said to satisfy the predicate, is intralinguistic, and that there are chains of back-reference which originate in some indefinite noun phrase, e.g. ‘a certain young man’. This originating phrase does not refer in the sense that it ‘tells us which’. Clearly it can be <i>satisfied</i>, i.e. true of some man. But it doesn’t tell us which man it was. For example, some have thought that the man in <a href="http://ocham.blogspot.co.uk/2016/01/the-primacy-of-proper-names.html">Mark 14:51</a> was Mark himself, i.e. the author of the gospel. After all, all the other disciples had fled, so who knew about the man in the linen cloth, apart from the author himself? On the other hand, there were other witnesses present, and the story might have been passed around until Mark heard it, who put it in his account.
Edward Ockhamhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07583379503310147119noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-21308815.post-49122614963758466582016-01-16T16:35:00.002+00:002016-01-16T17:29:35.403+00:00Indefinite reference<blockquote>
14:51 And there followed him [Jesus] <i>a certain young man</i> (νεανίσκος) , having a linen cloth (σινδόνα) cast about <i>his</i> naked body; and the young men laid hold on <i>him</i>. 14:52 And <i>he</i> left the linen cloth, and fled from them naked.</blockquote>
The pronouns ‘he’, ‘his’, ‘him’ etc. clearly refer back to ‘a certain young man’. On the theory of extralinguistic reference, they do not refer in themselves, but inherit their reference from the antecedent. But the antecedent is an indefinite noun phrase. Can that refer? Surely not. Mark says ‘νεανίσκος τις’. The article τις (Latin <i>quidam</i>) means ‘a certain’, often used to suggest that the writer either cannot or will not speak more particularly. Commentators have speculated that the man was Mark himself, the author of the gospel, which if true means that ‘a certain young man’ and the pronouns, could be replaced with ‘I’, <em>salva veritate</em>. But Mark deliberately does not tell us. So in what sense does it refer?
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Or suppose it <i>does</i> refer. Then as Geach argues (<i>Reference and Generality</i> chapter 1), the sentence ‘some man was wearing a linen cloth’ is true if some man – any man – was wearing a linen cloth. Even if the speaker has some particular man in mind, say Frank, and he means to say that Frank was wearing a linen cloth, it could have been the case that Frank <i>wasn’t</i> wearing a linen cloth, but some other man was, say Dick. So Dick was wearing a linen cloth, and so what the speaker actually said, i.e. ‘some man was wearing a linen cloth’, is true. But what the speaker <em>meant</em> to say is false.
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It gets more difficult. If it is true that some man was wearing a linen cloth, whoever he was, then it is true to say that <i>he</i> was wearing a linen cloth. Note I use the pronoun ‘he’. I wrote ‘he was wearing a linen cloth’. But the subject of that sentence is a definite noun phrase, and so the sentence is true if and only if <i>that</i> man, and no other, satisfied the predicate. E.g. if that man was Frank, then the pronominal sentence is true if Frank satisfied the predicate, and false if he didn’t, even if <i>Dick</i> was wearing a linen cloth. Furthermore:
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<blockquote>
(1) Some man was wearing a linen cloth<br />
(2) Sentence (1) is true if and only <em>he</em> – that man – was wearing a linen cloth.</blockquote>
How weird. Didn’t I say that sentence (1) can be true so long as someone – anyone satisfied ‘was wearing a linen cloth’? Yes, that’s still correct, because he, that man, could be any of the men. He could be Frank, Dick or Raymond. The whole point is that sentence (1) has an indefinite subject, and so doesn’t tell us <i>which</i> person satisfies the predicate. We know that <i>he</i> satisfies it, if the sentence is true. But we don’t know who <i>he</i> is.
Edward Ockhamhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07583379503310147119noreply@blogger.com0