God and Deus

Originally published here. Copying here for reference.

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Bill Vallicella, the famous Maverick Philosopher, 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.

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.

Clearly both writers would have understood each other's work, as regards the dictionary meanings of Latin words. So when Thomas writes (Summa Iª q. 7 a. 1 co.) esse divinum non sit esse receptum in aliquo – 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 Manifestum est quod ipse Deus sit infinitus et perfectus – it is manifest that Deus Himself is infinite and perfect – would he and Spinoza understand the proper name Deus in the same way?

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 Summa Theologiae, using the words of the Bible and the Church Fathers to support complex theological and philosophical arguments. Spinoza’s Theologico-Political Treatise is an extensive commentary on the text of the Bible and its meaning, also supported throughout by biblical quotation. So when Thomas writes

According to Chrysostom (Hom. iii in Genes.), Moses prefaces his record by speaking of the works of God (Deus) collectively. (Summa Theologiae Iª q. 68 a. 1 ad 1)

and Spinoza writes

As for the fact that God [Deus] was angry with him [Balak] while he was on his journey, that happened also to Moses when he was setting out for Egypt at the command of God [Dei]. (Tractatus ch. 3, alluding to Exodus 4:24-26)

it is clear that they are talking about the same persons, i.e. they are both talking about God, and they are both talking about Moses. It is somewhat more complicated than that, because Spinoza has a special theory about what the word ‘God’ means in the scriptures, but more of that later. In the present case, it seems clear that whenever we indirectly quote the scriptures, e.g. ‘Exodus 3:1 says that 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.

God and Allah

Originally published here at Dale Tuggy’s site. Copying here for reference.

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Last month my publisher gave the green light to start work on The Same God? Reference and Identity in Jewish, Christian, and Muslim Scriptures. 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 suspended 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 here, and see Beckwith’s discussion, as well as this by someone called ‘Tuggy’.

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 one 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 here, 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.

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.

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. John of Damascus says:

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.’

John is clearly referring to God 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 calls Spartacus a "freedom fighter" and someone else calls him a "murderous rebel", they are both talking about the same man. This begs the question. What relation is invoked by calling someone a name? How do we talk about 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.

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, Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus 4.243)

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’.

Intentional Identity

Peter Geach (“Intentional Identity.” Journal of Philosophy 64, 627-32, reprinted in Logic Matters. 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.

Hob thinks that a witch has blighted Bob’s mare, and Nob wonders whether she killed Cob’s sow.

But how it could be true? If we read it in the opaque 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 x, x has blighted Bob’s mare, and x 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.

* Hob thinks that for some x, x has blighted Bob’s mare, and Nob wonders whether x killed Cob’s sow.

On the other hand, if we render the original sentence in the transparent 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 say, rather than what people think.

(1) A witch has blighted Bob’s mare.
(2) She killed Cob’s sow.
(3) Sentence (1) says that a witch has blighted Bob’s mare.
(4) Sentence (2) says that she (or the witch) has blighted Bob’s mare.

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.

What does the pronoun ‘I’ refer to?

What does the pronoun ‘I’ refer to? Wittgenstein (Philosophical Remarks, §64).

‘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.

Maverick and Belette on Frege

Back after a software-imposed break. While all this was going on, Maverick philosopher commented on my Frege post, gently supportive but questioning whether cognitive value or informational content can be had by such subsentential items as 'morning star' and 'evening star.' I think it can be had. We both agree the proposition "grass is green" has informational content. This content differs from the content of "grass is yellow". How? How does changing the word 'green' to the word 'yellow' change the informational content of the whole proposition? Surely because the informational value of the word 'green' is different from the informational value of the word 'yellow'. Thus the informational value of a term is precisely its contribution to the informational value of the whole sentence. Frege says somewhere that the same sense corresponds to the same word, and that is why language is useful. We could use a single sign for the whole proposition, as with a train signal (red = the track is closed, green = the track is clear), but he says that would not be very helpful, as we would have to devise a new sign for every different thought we wanted to express. So we split the thought up into parts, with a different sign corresponding to each part of the thought.  If we understand 'informational value' in this way - as the contribution to the informational value of a whole proposition, my argument is sound.

Cmmenting on the post back here, Belette wondered whether my argument was valid at all. I argued as follows.

(1) The sentence “the morning star is the evening star” has informational content.
(2) The sentence “the morning star is the morning star” does not have informational content.
(3) Therefore, the term “the morning star” does not have the same informational content as “the evening star”.

Belette says that ‘the morning star’ really means ‘Venus, at certain positions in its orbit’. I’ll alter this (because I’m not sure the morning/evening distinction is anything to do with the orbit of Venus, as opposed to the rotation of the earth on its axis) to ‘Venus as it is in the morning’. Perhaps I am not understanding him, but I think he means that this expression is something that has a referent in the morning, but at no other time. As the earth rotates and Venus appears to rise in the sky and disappear in the glow of the rising sun, the reference of the expression fails, and becomes non-existent. And as the sun ‘sets’, the referent of ‘Venus as it is in the evening’ comes into existence. Thus the referent of ‘Venus as it is in the morning’ only exists in the morning, and the referent of ‘Venus as it is in the evening’ only exists in the evening. Venus, of course, exists all the time.

But if that is true, the argument above is no longer sound. The sentence “the morning star is the evening star” actually means “Venus as it is in the morning is Venus as it is in the evening”. But this is always false, for if the term on the left has a referent, it must be morning, in which case the term on the right has no referent, and the identity statement is false. Conversely, in the evening, the left term has no referent, and the right term does. Or neither term has a referent, in which case there can be no identity either (identity being a relation between existing things). Hence the second premiss is false, on the assumption that a sentence which is false in virtue of its meaning contains no information.

I question whether ‘the morning star’ does mean that. Surely it is a description picking out a certain object by means of its visibility in the morning. It is not part of its meaning that the object must cease to exist once morning has passed. It may cease to exist, of course, just as the light in the fridge ceases to exist when we shut the door. But continuation or cessation of existence is not part of its meaning. (Perhaps it is different for ‘the prime minister of England’, but that is a different case, I think).

Explaining 'the morning star'

Belete suggests here that the ‘Morning star’ example in the SEP article on intensional logic is not very well explained.
I’m not seeing that, but let me explain the it in my own terms, here. Assume you do not know much about astronomy, but you know how to identify the “morning star”, namely as the heavenly body that is visible in the East in the morning, and you also know how to identify the “evening star”, namely the heavenly body that is visible in West in the evening. Then you may assume these are different objects, and so, if I tell that the morning star is in fact the same object as the evening star, I have given you some useful information. I could go on to tell you that it is not a star at all, but a planet, in fact the planet Venus, which rises and sets with the sun because it is much closer to the sun than we are. But that is not relevant here. The point is that the sentence “the morning star is the evening star” is informative, it tells you something you could not have worked out from the meaning of the terms alone. By contrast “the morning star is the morning star” gives you no information at all. Given that you know what the morning star is, it is simply an expression of the principle of identity, A = A for all A, which presumably you knew, or would have assumed, already. Thus ‘the morning star’ and ‘the evening star’ have different informational content.

Summarising:

(1) The sentence “the morning star is the evening star” has informational content.
(2) The sentence “the morning star is the morning star” does not have informational content.
(3) Therefore, the term “the morning star” does not have the same informational content as “the evening star”.

What’s wrong with that? We might want to make a few extra assumptions to make it logically watertight. For example, to add the assumption that if all the component parts of two sentences have the same informational content, then the sentences themselves have the same informational content (the compositionality principle). But I don’t see what’s desperately wrong with it as it stands.

Contingent and necessary identity

Anthony asks what happens if we attach the sentence "Someone called Shakespeare wrote Macbeth" to a text containing a fragment such as

(*) There was [also] a man called ‘Shakespeare’ who lived in Stratford. Shakespeare was a shareholder of the Globe company

I argued in my previous post that indefinite terms act as ‘referential isolators’. They prevent back-reference to any term in an earlier sentence. What Anthony seems to be getting at here is that ‘wrote Macbeth’ seems to be a description that applies to the Shakespeare who was a shareholder of the Globe, and so we might infer an identity, and hence a reference, that is ruled out by the ‘isolator’ theory.

I don’t agree. Consider

(**) Someone called ‘Shakespeare’ wrote Macbeth. There was [also] a man called ‘Shakespeare’ who lived in Stratford. Shakespeare was a shareholder of the Globe company.

I say that the identity between the Stratford man and the Globe man follows from the truth of the second and third sentence, because we cannot understand the ‘Shakespeare’ of the third sentence without understanding that it refers back to the indefinite ‘a man called Shakespeare’. Hence the identity statement ‘The Stratford man was the shareholder of the Globe company’ is true in virtue of the meaning of the terms.

By contrast, the identity of the author of Macbeth and the Globe shareholder cannot be inferred as a logical consequence of the truth of discourse (**) above. It makes the identity highly probable, admittedly, but probability, even if almost absolutely certain, is not the same as logical certainty. This is because of the referential isolator of the second sentence. By contrast, if we change this to

(***) Someone called ‘Shakespeare’ wrote Macbeth. Shakespeare lived in Stratford. Shakespeare was a shareholder of the Globe company.

i.e. if we turn the isolator into a back-referring term, the statement ‘the author of Macbeth was the Globe shareholder' is now true in virtue of the meaning of the terms.

This resolves Wittgenstein's complaint about identity, Tractatus 5.5303 - "Roughly speaking, to say of two things that they are identical is nonsense, and to say of one thing that it is identical with itself is to say nothing at all.  To say that "X is identical with itself" is trivial, because 'itself' refers back to the subject of the sentence. Because of the grammar, we cannot place an isolator between 'itself' and 'X'.  When there is an isolator, as with (**) above, the identity ceases to be trivial. The identity sign therefore is an essential constituent of our language.

Indexical facts and materialism

The Maverick as ever has come out with a characteristically challenging post here asking whether 'indexical facts' are a threat to materialism.  He concludes that they are.  More later, but I have a brief prologemena here. 

Meanwhile, some preliminary ideas from Buridan, in his fifth question on the first book of his Questions on the Prior Analytics.  What is signified by the expression 'for a man to drink wine'?  He lists out some opinions. According to some it signifies the the sentence (propositio) 'a man drinks wine'.  According to others, it is a sort of signifiable complex entity on the side of reality (a parte rei), corresponding to the proposition 'a man drinks wine'.  Others say that for a man to drink wine is simply the man as he is related in that way to wine.  Yet others say that it is a sort of accident inhering in the man as he is related in that way to wine. More later.

Ockham himself is not drinking wine, as he has an attack of the gout, due to his habit of slouching comfortably in the corner like an eighteenth century gentleman, squinting at the assembled company through a glass of red wine or port, passing trollish and mischievous comments.  This behaviour needs to stop, according to his wife.  Or he could obtain a gout stool, but unfortunately there is no Wikipedia article about it.

Kripke on reference fixing

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

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

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

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

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

*I have modifed Evans' wording to avoid indent problems

Did Shakespeare write Shakespeare?

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

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

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

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

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

Reference fixing by description

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

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

Biblioarchy makes a similar point, saying

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

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

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

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

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

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

Belief reports versus evidence reports

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

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

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

On Lois Lane and rationality

Lois Lane has the following two beliefs

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

On learning the law of identity

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

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

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

Frege's Puzzle and In-Between Cases of Believing

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

On believing the same thing

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

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

Accidental identity

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

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

Do we need identity?

There is the usual vigorous debate going on at Maverick's place, this time about whether proper names can be predicated.  I have been expecting at any minute the objection that we must distinguish between the 'is' of predication and the 'is' of identity, but no sign of it yet.

Let me explain.  In natural language we say things like 'this person is Socrates' or 'that star is the planet Venus'.  We are putting a proper name ('Socrates', 'Venus') in a part of the sentence logic normally reserves for the 'predicate'.  But in modern predicate calculus (MPC) proper names cannot occur as predicates.  We owe it to Frege (as Geach says) that modern logicians accept an absolute category difference between name and predicate, so that in MPC the two types are syntactically different: small letters for proper names, and propositional functions for the predicates.  Thus 'F(a)' represents 'Socrates is running', where 'a' represents Socrates, and F( ) the function '-- is running'.

But what about 'this person is Socrates'?  Ah, that is because we must distinguish the 'is' of identity from the 'is' of predication.  We are not predicating 'Socrates' of this person, but rather the propositional function '-- is identical with Socrates'.  Thus, as Frege says (in "On Concept and Object"), a proper name like 'Venus' can never be a predicate, although it can form part of a predicate. 

That is all pretty standard stuff, but is it the knock-down argument against scholastic logic that it appears to be?  I just looked again at Fred Sommers' excellent book* defending Traditional Formal Logic.  In the chapter 'Do we need identity' he asks why no logicians before Frege had appealed to the distinction between the two kinds of 'is', and argues that the distinction depends on making the category distinction between concept-word (predicate) and object-word (proper name) rather than the other way round.  Thus, it is only after we take on the odd representation of ordinary language sentences as propositional function and argument, that we are forced to make the distinction between the two forms of 'is'.  It is not that we first recognise the distinction as a fundamental principle that forces the odd syntax upon us. 

Sommers argues as follows (p. 121 - I have modified his argument slightly in order to strengthen it).  When we represent ordinary proper names (say 'Venus' and 'the morning star') as logical constants, we use lower cases letters, say 'a' and 'b'.  But then the representation of 'Venus is the morning star' as 'b(a)' is ill-formed.  The lower case letter 'b' cannot appear in predicate place.  It is therefore obvious, says Sommers ironically, that it really has the form 'F(a,b), where 'F' is the grammatical predicate which represents '-- is identical with --'.  "Clearly, it is only after one has adopted the syntax that prohibits the predication of proper names that one is forced to read 'a is b' dyadically and to see in it a sign of identity".


* Fred Sommers, The Logic of Natural Language, Clarendon 1982.

Wittgenstein on identity

Tractatus 5.5303 - "Roughly speaking, to say of two things that they are identical is nonsense, and to say of one thing that it is identical with itself is to say nothing at all.

The God of Christianity and the God of Islam

Vallicella has a nice post here about whether the God of Christianity and the God of Islam are the same God. He points out that if reference is mediated by sense, and that if the sense of 'God of Islam' is D1: 'the unique x such that x is omnipotent, omniscient, omnibenevolent, created the world ex nihilo and is unitarian', and if the sense of 'God of Christianity' is D2: 'the unique x such that x is omnipotent, omniscient, omnibenevolent, created the world ex nihilo and is triune', then:

It is easy to see that no one entity can satisfy both (D1) and (D2). So if reference is routed through sense, then Christian and Muslim cannot be referring to the same being. Indeed, one of them is not succeeding in referring at all. For if God is triune, nothing in reality answers tothe Muslim's conception of God. And if God is unitarian, then nothing in reality answers to the Christian conception.

His examples bring out, in my view, the problem with description theories of singular reference. Suppose that, according to religion A1, there is one god who satisfies the uniquely applying description F1. And suppose that, according to religion A2, there is one god who satisfies the uniquely applying description F2. And suppose, for sake of argument, that F1 and F2 are contraries. Nothing can be both F1 and F2 (Bill's example is 'unitarian' and 'triune'.  Then if religion A1 is correct, there is exactly one F1 and (from the logical properties of F1) there can be no being that satisfies F2. Conversely, if religion A2 is correct, there is exactly one F2, and there can be no being that is F1. According to a description theory, neither god can be identical with the other, if either exists.

But now suppose that both religions have the same ‘core’ holy book B, which refers to one god by name G, but which gives no uniquely defining property for that god. However, at some point in the past there was a disagreement over some heresy, and each religion now has a different supplementary holy book – B1 in the case of religion A1, and B2 in the case of religion A2. It is from these supplementary texts that the disagreement over the uniquely defining properties F1 and F2 arises. But both texts refer to god using the same name G as the core book B. Thus the intended or purported reference of G is the same for both competing religions. The disagreement is not about the identity of the purported referents of G – for these have to be one and the same being – but rather the properties F1 and F2. Both religions agree they are worshipping one and the same god, but they disagree about whether he has the uniquely defining F1 (in the case of A1) or the uniquely defining F2 (in the case of A2).

Something like this clearly holds for Judaism and Christianity. The purported referent of ‘YHWH’ is the same for both Christians and Jews. That is a logical conclusion from the semantics of the Old and New Testament names. You will not understand the New Testament unless you understand that the names 'God' and 'Lord' are meant to refer to the intended referent of 'YHWH' in the Old Testament. But the properties are different. Christians hold that YHWH had a son, who is one and the same god as YHWH, but a different person. Jews do not hold this belief. So a description theory has the god of the Jews and the god of the Christians as being numerically different. But a reference theory (which holds that identity is determined by intended identity or intended referent) has them as being the same.

I do not know much about Islam, but I believe that the Islamic holy books are the records which Muslims believe were dictated by God to various Islamic prophets throughout the history of mankind. I.e. Moses (according to Muslims) was an Islamic prophet. Since Christians, Jews and Muslims agree that YHWH gave the laws to Moses, the intended reference of ‘YHWH’ is the same for all. I.e. if YHWH exists, all three religions are referring to him, even though they disagree fundamentally, and bitterly, about his properties. E.g. Christians believe YHWH he has a son in Jesus. Muslims believe he has a prophet in Jesus, Jews disagree with both of these things, believing Jesus to have been a heretic and a blasphemer, for which reason he was executed.