Francesco Patrizi

The case of Francesco Patrizi, the Venetian philosopher, is a fine illustration of the nationalistic warfare that infests Wikipedia, and the inaccuracy and distortion and bias that follows as a result*.

The problem is that Francesco has at least three different identities. His place of birth was on the island of Cherso in 1529, which lies off the coast of Dalmatia, now in modern Croatia. The state of his birth was the Venetian Republic, which dominated the area until the early 1800s. His intellectual heritage is the Western philosophical tradition: he spent seven years at Padua studying Aristotelian philosophy, in Latin. He studied Plato, and seems to have had a knowledge of the original Greek texts, even owning a collection of Greek manuscripts [1].

Consequently, there is a war on Wikipedia about Francesco's identity. Is it defined by the Western intellectual heritage with its Latin and Greek origin? All that Francesco learned in his years at Padua and afterwards are derived from it. Is it the Republic of Venice, now in modern Italy? Francesco could not have been taught without the universities in Italy whose staff and administration were not paid for by Croatians. Or is it the modern state of Croatia, where his birthplace now lies?

Wikipedia, or at least its current version, defers to the first, calling him by the Latinised name of Franciscus Patricius. Adopting the second, the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy article [2] uses his Italian name. But in Croatia, of course, he is known as Frane Petrić, although (I am told) they made a mistake here: they used the Croatian diacritic sign on the consonant, invented only in the middle of the 1800s.

The whole issue presents problems when you are doing real history. How do we separate the contribution of an individual from the contribution of the tradition they are writing in? No intellectual contribution made by an individual, even by an original thinker such as Aristotle, is uniquely due to their special talent, although ability is a necessary condition. An equally important influence is individual teachers, who in Francesco's case would have been Italian. So in what sense does a country - a modern country like Croatia, say - own a persons's work?

The problem becomes particularly acute in a place like Wikipedia, where the only intellectual interest - that is to say, no intellectual interest at all - lies simply in a nationalistic dispute, in this case between Italians and Croatians. The talk page shows it beautifully. "He was Italian for culture and birth" says Giovanni Giove (presumably an Italian). "It is sad to see that User:Factanista has started an further edit war to imposte [sic] his nationalistic POV" says Giovanni. "It is you who is edit-warring " replies Factanista (presumably a Croatian). "I'm going to report the behaviour of User:Factanista to an administrator" says Giovanni. "Please do, you will be reported shortly yourself" objects Factanista.

The history of the article itself [3] is instructive. Hundreds of reverts and unreverts, as the intellectual battle unfolds. An Italian editor removes the word 'Croatian' [4] with the comment "oh please, lets avoid stupid national bickering". It is immediately reverted back [5] with the reply "then stop to deny his roots and ethnicity". Which of course makes it all the more absurd. What does ethnicity have to do with the work of a man who wrote, in Latin, about the Greek philosophers Aristotle and Plato? It is different in the case of someone like Chopin who, though he studied in France and was influenced by the French tradition, wrote specifically Polish nationalistic pieces. This case, by contrast, is more like the case of Joseph Conrad, who was Polish but whose works are all in English. Or Wittgenstein, who was Austrian and who actually wrote in German, but who was taught by an Englishman** (Russell), and whose work was most influential in England where he lived and worked for most of this life. Ethnicity has very little to do with it.

What is really sad is how the article suffers as a result. In its current version (permanent link above) all but the first three paragraphs are copied verbatim from the 1911 Encyclopedia Britannica article [6]. The introduction is mostly taken from the SEP article. I have commented on this irony before - that "an ultra modern high-tech medium like the Internet, when it reflects anything of importance, reflects the obselete views of 19th century scholars". None of the people who have edit-warred for at least four years over the ethnicity of this man, seem to have any interest in his thinking.

At least I found something valuable in my research today: When ethnicity did not matter in the Balkans by John Fine. About "The back-projection of twentieth-century forms of identity into the pre-modern past by patriotic and nationalist historians". Possible holiday reading.

*Many thanks to Peter Zuvela, who brought this to my attention.
** Wikipedia has Russell down as a Welsh philosopher, of course.

Ochlocracy

Ochlocracy. It means 'mob rule' or perhaps 'crowdsourcing'. I'm going to write more about this later, having recently revisited Gustave le Bon's wonderful The Crowd.

Meanwhile here is what one philosopher said about the wisdom of the crowd.

"Philosophy: I'm a philosopher; why don't I edit the article on my subject? Because it's hopeless. I've tried at various times, and each time have given up in depressed disgust. Philosophy seems to attract aggressive zealots who know a little (often a very little), who lack understanding of key concepts, terms, etc., and who attempt to take over the article (and its Talk page) with rambling, ground-shifting, often barely comprehensible rants against those who disagree with them. Life's too short. I just tell my students and anyone else I know not to read the Wikipedia article except for a laugh. It's one of those areas where the ochlocratic nature of Wikipedia really comes a cropper".

By Wikipedia editor Mel Etitis, who is a well-known philosopher in real life. He left Wikipedia shortly after this comment in 2007.

Truth in numbers?

In my previous posts on truth [1], [2], I explored the idea that truth has no special benefit over falsity. "It is a piece of idle sentimentality that truth, merely as truth, has any inherent power denied to error". Here, I shall suggest that it is worse than that. Truth has powerful enemies, and there are forces systematically favouring error. As befits a scientific investigation, I shall present the theory, followed by evidence (using the example of Wikipedia once more) supporting it.

First, the theory: Those who support the truth are in a large majority. Of 100,000 people, probably all but ten would like to see the truth. But their interest is only feeble. The remaining ten support false beliefs of various kinds. They probably think these beliefs are true, but they are false for all that. And their false belief is passionate and determined. It follows that, if anyone is allowed to publicise their belief, and if there is a moderate cost to publicising it, such as arguing about it or being involved in an 'edit war'*, the proponents of error will always be victorious. For they are passionate in their error, whereas the others are only feeble in their truth.

Now, the evidence. No sane or normal or reasonable person contributes to Wikipedia, and so all contributors fall into the following broad classes: deviant, aficionado, quack, activist, cultist, crank. The reasons for their persistent interest, together with Wikipedia article examples, are as follows. I list them in approximate order of the power that belongs to them.

1. First are the deviants, usually the sexual deviants. The pedophile lobby has long been an active force on Wikipedia. They are powerful because, like everyone else, they are passionate about their sexuality, seeing it as in some sense normal, and also because no reasonable person is likely to edit articles about pedophilia, 'pederasty' and so on. Hence monstrosities like this, which is indistinguishable from monstrosities like (WARNING: pedophile website - not safe for work) this. See also the article about the PPA 'Wikipedia Campaign' at Wikisposure.

2. Aficionados ('fans') are a large and diverse group on Wikipedia. They are mostly harmless devotees of obscure subjects like Japanese comic books or American science fiction TV. The error lies not so much in the uncritical approach to the subject as the undue weight given to a subject which is essentially ephemeral and unimportant and unencyclopedic. This is probably harmless, although not in the case of Ayn Rand, who I have discussed before. The coverage of her ideas is extensive in Wikipedia, and out of all proportion to her real importance in philosophy, which is practically nil, particularly outside the United States. Aficionados are powerful in Wikipedia because they are mostly viewed as harmless, and because there is no 'weighting' policy in the encyclopedia. Quite reverse: they even have a policy: Wikipedia is not paper, and so there is no practical limit to the number of topics it can cover, or the total amount of content. The practice of a normal reference work, which is to assign pages in rough proportion to the received importance of a subject, does not apply here. Thus the academically marginal Ayn Rand receives more coverage than Aristotle, the father of Western philosophy and easily the most important figure in the Western intellectual tradition. The article on his Sophistical Refutations, for example, is no more than a list of contents. Compare this in size and scope with any article on the nonsensical and philosophically illiterate work of Rand, e.g. this.

3. Quacks are peddlers of fake cures, bogus medicine and psychological theory. There is plenty of this on Wikipedia. Their interest is commercial rather than idealistic. The Wikipedia administration does attempt to weed out blatant commercial advertising, but it is also corrupt. The subject that touches me the most is the rubbishy and fraudulent Neurolinguistic Programming. These articles had support at high levels of the Wikipedia administration, and so quite a few more neutrally-minded editors (including myself) were banned for attempting to trim them. See also EMDR, or Ken Wilber, or this lot, gulp.

4. Cults are groups with strange beliefs who have an interest in publicising their existence, recruiting new members, and usually suppressing the more unpalatable facts about their financial statements and other irregularities. Too many of these to mention, but some of the more amusing include the Brahma Kumaris, who seem to enjoy some support among Wikipedians, at least judging from the way that those who opposed them are so regularly blocked, simply for saying stuff like this ("You and your other adherents have wasted too much time of too many people's lives ... never mind mentioning the broken families and suicides that litter your religion's history"). The Scientologists did not fare so well, as is well known (their IP is currently blocked), but that is only because a group of prominent Wikipedians dislike scientology - it has nothing to do with any self-governing mechanism that prevents cults from promoting their views on the global electronic reference work. See for example Prem Rawat, defended for years by a prominent Wikipedia administrator, although he eventually came to grief.

5. Activists are the supporters of extreme political movements. These are also numerous, but the force can be less strong with them because there are often equally extreme political movements who are bitterly opposed, and so they 'edit war' the talk pages of the articles concerned. See the archives of the articles on The Troubles, the thirty-year conflict in Northern Ireland, which was intellectually as violent as the actual troubles were physically bloody. Or Islamic Republic is the same as Arab Republic. However, the articles on Yugoslav communism, e.g. on Tito seem to have got by with their strange point of view unscathed. They do not reflect the views of more recent historians who view Tito as essentially a Stalinist, but rather adhere to and reflect the propaganda of the former Communist Party of Yugoslavia. The article about Tito is written in a child-like manner, reminiscent of Yugoslav primary school textbooks from the 1970s. This may be the result of the 'partisan' group of editors who control those articles, and the relative lack of interest from anyone else.

6. Cranks. These are individuals who have a passionate belief in some idea, theory or system that they developed on their own, and which has been rejected by the academic establishment. Naturally they turn to the encyclopedia which anyone can edit. Cranks have little power on Wikipedia, because unlike the rest they are not part of a larger group and can easily be picked off, and also there is no fraudulent secondary literature they can tap. Nonetheless they flourish in dark corners - I am glad to see that Boolean logic, which has nothing to do with George Boole, still survives, and that the Ancient Egyptian Race theory seems to be thriving, at least between periods of illness or coma. And how about this whole category of stuff which is completely deranged (" the Mental Plane is located between, and hence is intermediate between, the astral plane below and the higher spiritual realms of existence above").

Add to this the eccentric and perverse features of Wikipedia governance and software. First, the ability of any IP addresses to edit, which results in a tidal wave of crude vandalism every day. This in itself is not a problem, since there are about 500 administrators who instantly clear it up. The problem is rather the administrators, many of whom are retired ex-military types or police, and who are not interested in encyclopedias at all. They just enjoy whacking vandals. The problem is that they don't really distinguish between vandals and ordinary editors, and don't really understand the disputes at all. They have no theoretical interest in a dispute between a scientist and a homeopathist or chiropractor. But if they see either of them getting out of line, i.e. infringing Wikipedia's strict 'civility' rules, they whack them anyway.

Second is the fact that accounts are anonymous, and there is not even elementary identity checking. Thus a problem editor who has been 'blocked' can instantly register again. Furthermore, they can create multiple accounts ('sockpuppets' or 'socks') to give the illusion of strong support for error. This frustrates the supporters of truth, many of whom stoop to the same tactics. Worse, Wikipedia has evolved an elaborate secret police ('checkusers') whose job is to spy on accounts for 'sock'-like behaviour and block them if necessary. This deflects the administration from the real job of building a comprehensive and accurate reference work, moreover it encourages types who are intellectually unsuited for such work.

Which is, of course, why Wikipedia is nothing like a comprehensive and accurate reference work. How would we change this? Well, the theory (that small numbers of passionate devotees of error will always defeat an army of those with a feeble and weak interest in the truth) suggests abandoning the idea that 'anyone can edit'. It's fine if only 'disinterested' persons can edit, but as the different but connected meanings of 'interest' suggest, it is difficult to get disinterested people to do this. They simply aren't, er, interested. Another idea would be this. Levy a small 'falsity tax' on everyone. A majority of people would vote for this, if the tax were proportionate to their feeble dedication to the truth. The money from the tax would then pay for experts with a proven neutrality and lack of 'interest' to write articles. This is essentially the economic model of a university, a system invented in the Middle Ages, and which therefore existed long before Web 2.0.

*Edit war: long protracted dispute on Wikipedia. Sometimes between the forces of truth and error, more often between propopents of different kinds of error (such as environmentalists and oil company employees).

The Cult of the Amateur: Lessig vs Keen

Someone here told me to look at here, where Lawrence Lessig replies to some of the criticisms of Internet 'culture' made by Andrew Keen in his book The Cult of the Amateur ("How Today's Internet Is Killing Our Culture and Assaulting Our Economy ").

Many of Lessig's points are spot on, for example his criticism of Keen's sloppy grammar - "what is puzzling about this book is that it purports to be a book attacking the sloppiness, error and ignorance of the Internet, yet it itself is shot through with sloppiness, error and ignorance". He is probably right to say that policy makers should not be concerned (as Keen apparently is, p.115) when the costs of an activity drop because society has found a way to do the same activity more efficiently. There is no point in preserving the living of those who farm trees to make printed books if (I say if) exactly the same social benefit can accrue from disseminating that information through the internet.

However, I take issue with Lessig about the ghastly Wikipedia. Keen claims

Since Wikipedia's birth, more than fifteen thousand contributors have created nearly three million entries in over a hundred different languages—none of them edited or vetted for accuracy (p4).

Spot on. Perhaps an exaggeration: no doubt some of Wikipedia's entries have been vetted for accuracy, and so (as we logicians know) it is literally false to claim that none have been vetted. But most of them haven't, and that will do. Keen disagrees:

this is absurdly false. Wikipedia is constantly edited, and attributions
constantly vetted for accuracy. Indeed, for many of the articles, the level of
editing and vetting is vastly greater than any article published in any
encyclopedia ever.

Not at all. There are superficial attempts at vetting for accuracy, and the level of attempted vetting for accuracy is certainly vastly greater than ever before tried by humans. But trying is not the same as achieving. There have been 911 edits to the Wikipedia article Existence since the first version begun on 1 June 2001, 9 years ago. It is still much worse than the original version (which was not particularly good either). Regular readers of this blog will appreciate this is a subject I have some acquaintance with. The kind of 'vetting' that goes on in Wikipedia is merely superficial. And so it is (in my view) for pretty much all the articles on philosophy, and most of those in the humanities generally.

Lessig suggests that Keen means Wikipedia is not "vetted" by experts.

Or exclusively by experts (for again, experts certainly participate in
Wikipedia). This is related to Keen's obsession (indeed, I'm sure if he has one,
his shrink must have a field day with this obsession) with "experts" and makers
of "taste." So central is this to Keen's argument, it deserves its own
heading.

But having read on, I didn't find any argument against this central claim - namely the claim that Wikipedia suffers from not being vetted by experts. In any case, I think the articles speak for themselves. Some parts of Wikipedia are good, much of it is written by amateurs (meaning: non-experts). But the parts that are written by amateurs are generally not good, and the parts that are good are mostly not written by amateurs.

Priceless

Once a corrupt bureaucracy makes a mistake, it can't even be mentioned. (Thanks to Barry Kort).

Truth in ten minutes

Well, Wikipedia now has a child protection policy, largely cobbled together as a reaction to the Fox News article about pedophile activism. The best part is the policy talk page where Wikipedians have been ardently discussing the rights of minorities to edit Wikipedia. “We should consider that such persons openly avowing pedophilia provide the world with a very rare perspective and a potentially useful resource.”

The idea that the truth will emerge if you open the means of promoting it to absolutely everyone is fundamental to how Wikipedia works, and (as the remark above proves) is an article of faith to most ‘Wikipedians’. But as I suggested here, truth is more fragile. There is nothing magical or complicated or difficult about recognising it yourself. The problem is to get it others to recognise it. Although it takes in general about 10 minutes to discover the truth about most matters, only one person in every thousand people is likely to spend that time. Of the rest, 9 people will find it so painful that they can get only as far as 3 minutes, and will spend the rest of the time and much more in opposing every attempt at publicising it. The remaining 990 people have only a minute to read about it, and thus are forced rely on the other 10. This is the best model for understanding Wikipedia.

God and Allah

I came across an internet discussion where they were earnestly discussing whether 'God' and 'Allah' have the same reference. There are three positions that a Christian - who believes that the name 'God' has a reference, and that it refers to the supernatural and all-powerful being who is mentioned in both the Old and New Testament - could take on this.

1. 'Allah' is an empty name, referring to nothing. If you are a Christian description theorist, you believe that all propositions containing 'Allah' have an implicit existence claim, and so are all false. If you are a (direct) referentialist Christian, you hold that all such propositions are senseless, since they cannot have truth-value.

2. 'Allah' refers to a supernatural and powerful (though not all powerful) being who is not identical with God. Thus all the claims of Islam implying an identity with God, such as this passage where Allah speaks to Adam and Eve, are false. Others may be true.

3. God and Allah are identical, but Islam says many things about God that are not true. The only true things are the those relating to the Old Testament. For example, Allah expels Adam and Eve from Eden: God did do this, and Allah is identical with God, ergo etc.

What if 'God' and 'Allah' are both empty names? Can we make sense of such claims to identity or difference? I favour a 'haecceity predicate' theory of proper names. Being the very individual that you are cannot be a property of you. Otherwise, as Bill Vallicella has pointed out, all sorts of absurdities follow. How could the the 'thisness' of an individual exist even if the individual whose thisness it is does not exist?

But if proper names are not descriptions, haecceity is clearly a predicate, since we can make a predicate from any proper name thus: '-- is identical to Socrates' (or 'God' or 'Allah'). That is the only way we can make sense of narratives like the Koran and the Old Testament, which mention the same supernatural being as the same being throughout.

Walters on Wikipedia

Excellent stuff here from Guy Walters in the Daily Telegraph. Has Wikipedia been overrun by left-wing trolls and junk historians? A "Left-leaning caucus of self-appointed editors who spend their days adjusting entries to fit in with their Weltanschauungen". Yes. And junk historians too. See also Oliver Kamm over at The Times.

A Milanese interjection

"Renzo arrived quite triumphant, and reported his success, finishing with a ahn? - a Milanese interjection which signifies - Am I a man or not? can you find a better plan? would it ever have entered your head? and a hundred other things".

The Betrothed (I Promessi Sposi) - Alessandro Manzoni.

William of Ockham

I said earlier that I would look at the Wikipedia article on William of Ockham*. This followed James Hannam's article in the Spectator deploring the fact that "the entry on Alhazen is 7,000 words long and bristles with 126 footnotes. Major figures of the medieval Christian world such as Ockham receive only 2,500 words". I commented that as well as being short, the article on Ockham was 'grossly misleading and incorrect'. How misleading? How inaccurate?

Life
The article begins with the observation that Ockham was born in Yorkshire and not, as most standard reference works suppose, in the village of Ockham in Surrey. This curiosity was inserted by an IP address on 3 May 2010. The philosopher C. Delisle Burns proposed this in 1916, but I can find no modern reference work that says this. Some sources say that he actually came from Woking, which had a similar spelling in medieval times, but Wikipedia does not mention this at all.
The rest of Ockham's biography is not so bad. It mentions the usual things about being summoned to Avignon, the controversy among the Franciscans, leaving Avignon in 1328 for exile at the court of Louis IV. Biographies in Wikipedia are generally accurate and well-written, mainly because, I suspect, there is no difficulty about which order to set out the facts. You start with a birth, and end with a death, and there is stuff in between.

Philosophical Thought
When we turn to the work of a great person, it is much more difficult, because this requires understanding the work, and making a judgment about which parts of the work to emphasis and explain. This is particularly important with medieval philosophers because, mostly, we have very little information about their lives. We have an intimate and deep knowledge of what they thought, because we have their work. But this requires understanding their work, and so we turn to the work of Ockham according to Wikipedia.

The odd section on his philosophical thought begins "In scholasticism, Okham advocated a reform both in method and in content, the aim of which was simplification" which is straightforwardly lifted out of the Catholic Encyclopedia, and which illustrates an important principle of Wikipedia (and much of the Internet) that essays about more serious subjects (i.e. subjects unconnected with Pokemon, Star Trek episodes and 'porn star' biographies) are taken from out of copyright sources like the Catholic Encyclopedia, or the 1911 Britannica. The irony that an ultra modern high-tech medium like the Internet, when it reflects anything of importance, reflects the sometimes obsolete views of 19th century scholars.

Nominalism
The section on nominalism is mostly lifted from the Catholic Encyclopedia, except for the paragraph at the end, where the abrupt change in style signals an entirely plagiarised excerpt from the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. The strange claim that Ockham has been called a "terminist", to distinguish him from a nominalist or a conceptualist, is from the Catholic Encyclopedia. Thus the article combines what is probably wrong ('terminism' can be consistent with nominalism**) with the section from the SEP which is intended for an academic audience, and is impenetrable out of context.

Natural Philosophy
The whole section on Natural Philosophy is eccentric and strange, with a convoluted discussion of impetus theory, of the views of Mach and Whitehead, and of "the president of the Birmingham Scientific Society, George Gore". This section was added on 7 June 2007 by an editor who was later banned for promoting strange and eccentric views on the history of science. You can read the discussion here. It illustrates an important principle of Wikipedia, namely that many editors are like this, and eventually end up banned. Their reason for editing Wikipedia is to promote some pet theory that they could not get published in an academic journal, but will always be accepted by 'the encyclopedia that anyone can edit'.

Ontological parsimony
The next section also mixes up passages from the Catholic Encyclopedia and the SEP, in a way that is highly misleading. It says that 'Ockham's Razor' is formulated by him as “For nothing ought to be posited without a reason given, unless it is self-evident (literally, known through itself) or known by experience or proved by the authority of Sacred Scripture.” The sentence is lifted verbatim from the SEP, except the SEP does not claim it is a formulation of the principle. Rather it suggests it is a sort of exception to the principle.

The original version of the article also copied the SEP claim that Ockham does not accept the Principle of Sufficient Reason. In a strange edit here made in 2006, an editor changes this to 'accepts' the principle. This is the same editor who added the plagiarised sections from the Catholic Encyclopedia, and whose contribution history suggests many such insertions, including a whole article about the late Scholastic philosopher Zabarella. Note that Wikipedia now contradicts itself, for the article on Ockham's Razor still retains the claim that Ockham did not accept the Principle of Sufficient Reason.

Theory of knowledge
The section on Ockham's theory of knowledge is clearly not plagiarised; the style is too amateurish and clumsy. As Dr Johnson once quipped: "Your work is both good and original. Unfortunately the parts which are good are not original, and the parts which are original are not good". (Or something like that).

Political Theory
The section on his political is reasonably written and seems reasonably accurate (although I am not an expert on this aspect of Ockham). It is however very brief, given the importance which experts attach to his work. if he really was one of the first medieval authors to advocate a form of separation between church and state, why does Wikipedia devote far less space (one sentence) than it does to the biography of a porn star?
Logic
The section on Ockham's logic is also remarkable for its brevity, considering that Ockham's fame rests mostly on his logical work, the magisterial and compendious Summa Logicae. It mentions only Ockham's anticipation of De Morgan's laws, and of many-valued logic. The latter claim is completely misleading. It illustrates the tendency of all reference work to emphasise the ideas of thinkers which anticipate, or seem to anticipate, later developments in philosophy and science, at the expense of other interesting ideas they may have had. No source is given; it probably comes from Ockham's defence of the 'traditional' interpretation of Aristotle (in Exposition in Librum Perihermenias I.6.15 - see the SEP article here). But it fails to mention that nearly all commentators on the famous 'sea battle' problem discussed by Aristotle were exercised by the problem of statements about future events, and by the possibility that such statements are neither true nor false. Thus the idea of a third 'truth value' did not originate with Ockham, and may have originated with Aristotle, depending on how you interpret Aristotle.
There is no discussion at all of how Ockham's nominalism is connected with his logic, of his use of supposition theory, nor of the way that Ockham really does anticipate the ideas of modern analytic philosophy in his view that you can address 'metaphysical' problems by carving up a sentence in the right way.

In summary: the Wikipedia article on William of Ockham, one of England's most illustrious and important philosophers, is woefully incomplete and inaccurate. It mixes blatant plagiarism with blatant falsehood. This is not surprising. What is surprising is the way that the respectable press eulogises Wikipedia, respectable institutions like the British Museum are entering into partnership with it, respectable donors like the Sloan Foundation are contributing large sums of money to it. This needs to change, although it is hard to see how.

* Permalink: version of 24 June 2010.
** Particularly in the case of Ockham's nominalism, defined as the view that we should not multiply entities according to the multiplicity of names.

The Dumbest Generation

"According to recent reports from government agencies, foundations, survey firms, and scholarly institutions, most young people in the United States neither read literature (or fully know how), work reliably (just ask employers), visit cultural institutions (of any sort), nor vote (most can’t even understand a simple ballot). They cannot explain basic scientific methods, recount foundations of American history, or name any of their local political representatives. What do they happen to excel at is – each other. They spend unbelievable amounts of time electronically passing stories, pictures, tunes, and texts back and forth, savoring the thrill of peer attention and dwelling in a world of puerile banter and coarse images."

* http://www.dumbestgeneration.com/home.html
* http://www.latimes.com/entertainment/la-et-book5-2008jul05,0,6248930.story

Vaknin and Reagle on Wikipedia

I just found Sam Vaknin and Joseph Reagle. Vaknin is mostly repelled by Wikipedia, which he describes as a 'cult'. his website is here, and a few of his Wikipedia discussions here. Amidst a sizeable amount of ranting there are a few real gems.

As far as I can judge, the Wikipedia's coverage of the natural and exact sciences is pretty good. Its humanities articles are an unmitigated disaster, though: they are replete with nonsense, plagiarism, falsities, and propaganda. I know a bit about psychology, economics, philosophy, and the history of certain parts of the world. Articles dealing with these fields are utterly and sometimes dangerously unreliable.

Correct (I will give some examples over the next week). Wikipedia articles about set theory, pure mathematics, physics and other exact sciences are pretty good, as far as I can judge. But almost any article about the softer sciences and the humanities, and particularly philosophy, is a disaster.

Vaknin also has insightful things to say about teenagers and encyclopedias. He disparages the citation requirements of Wikipedia, which the teenage editors are obsessive about. The problem is that without credentials and education, an editor cannot tell the difference between good and bad sources. And as I commented here, they rarely bother to check the sources. If you understand the citation rules, you can make up any piece of nonsense you like, using a citation that does not support it in any way, particularly if you use academic papers and books which are not online, or obscure or out of print publications.

Vaknin says that even when the claims are 'verifiable' (i.e. backed up by reliable sources), research is not about hoarding facts (which Wikipedia generally is about, look for any article at random and you will soon come across a list - usually a list of silly things). "Wikipedia articles read like laundry lists of information gleaned from secondary sources". True research "is about identifying and applying context and about possessing a synoptic view of ostensibly unrelated data." (My emphasis).

Reagle, by contrast, is clearly a fan. Vaknin dismisses him entirely as a 'computer scientist'. I have only read his article on neutrality, and I was not impressed. It consists mostly of cursory remarks about 'neutrality', including a part about the X Windows System (what is that?), and a brief paragraph about the neutrality of Switzerland. It did not go on to ask the question implied by the title: whether Wikipedia is neutral. To do this, you need to take a reasonable sample of Wikipedia articles and compare them against some acceptable definition of neutrality. The article by James Hannam discussed in an earlier post did just that. Hannam took a definition of neutrality, namely, a topic balance which agreed roughly with the balance given by scholarly opinion, and found Wikipedia wanting. The entry on Alhazen is 7,000 words long and bristles with 126 footnotes. Major figures of the medieval Christian world such as William of Ockham* receive only 2,500 words.

I saw none of this critical approach in Reagle's essay. However, perhaps I should read more of his work and perhaps I am being unfair. The dispute is discussed in the Wikipedia signpost here, by Vaknin here. Reagle also has a weblog, and here is a video of one of his presentations.

*The entry on Ockham is also grossly misleading and incorrect. More later, perhaps.

The Fragility of Truth

Still musing on Wikipedia, I am revisiting Mill's On Liberty which has a fascinating insight into the nature of truth:

But, indeed, the dictum that truth always triumphs over persecution, is one of those pleasant falsehoods which men repeat after one another till they pass into commonplaces, but which all experience refutes. History teems with instances of truth put down by persecution. If not suppressed forever, it may be thrown back for centuries. [...] It is a piece of idle sentimentality that truth, merely as truth, has any inherent power denied to error, of prevailing against the dungeon and the stake. Men are not more zealous for truth than they often are for error, and a sufficient application of legal or even of social penalties will generally succeed in stopping the propagation of either. The real advantage which truth has, consists in this, that when an opinion is true, it may be extinguished once, twice, or many times, but in the course of ages there will generally be found persons to rediscover it, until some one of its reappearances falls on a time when from favourable circumstances it escapes persecution until it has made such head as to withstand all subsequent attempts to suppress it. (On Liberty, Chapter Two).

Quite right. The truth, being recognisable as true, will pop up again and again, and be suppressed again and again, until a favourable accident allows it to prevail and flourish. It is a piece of Wikipedia nonsense that the magic pixie-dust of 'crowdsourcing' will instantly drive out falsehood and all error. The crowd is often wrong. It is often right, of course, but even then it can rarely be bothered to go to Wikipedia to correct the error. Only the obsessive and the insane are likely to do that, and the truth is mostly lost on those.

On Burley and Wild Oaks

This weeks' reading: "Walter Burley: His Life and Works" by Jennifer Ottman and Rega Wood (Vivarium 37pp. 1-23). There was no reference that I could find to Burley knowing Scotus while at Oxford (see my post here) but the article was full of some fascinating trivia about Burley. It opens with a one-paragraph summary that incorporates the intriguing statement that 'Burley found himself imprisoned for a forestry offence in 1336'.

When I summarise a subject that is large and broad, like someone's life, or a period in history, I try to imagine that every other piece of information about that subject has been annihilated except for my summary, which alone will be handed down to posterity. What are the really really important things that people in the future will need to know about this man, or this period in history? Ottman and Wood include the bit about the forestry offence. And why not? It captured my attention, and perhaps it tells us something about Burley.

There is more on p.19. Burley had been granted two oaks in Sherwood forest, near his rectory in Pytchely, by Queen Philippa (wife of Edward III and founder of Queen's College). When his men cut them down in 1336, Burley was arrested and imprisoned, aged 60. He was pardoned in December of the same year by Richard de Bury. How he came to be granted the oaks, why he cut them down, and why the offence was so serious as to deserve imprisonment, is not explained.

Another snippet is the inclusion of Burley's evidence that people undertake great risks for the sake of excessive enjoyment. 'Secundo est notandum quod multi superabundanter quaerunt delectationes qui tamen non fugiunt tristitias superabundanter. Multi enim multas tribulationes labores et pericula sustinent propter delectationes consequendas: ut patet de multis incontintentibus, qui propter delectationes corporales consequendas patiuntur frigora et calores et multa pericula ambulantes solitarii per noctes hyemales in tempore frigidissimo ad consequendum delectationes corporales et voluptates, et tales magis negociantur circa delectationes quam circa tristitias" (Expositio super decem libros Ethicorum Aristotelis, Venice 1500, 115ra).

I translate: 'Second, it must be noted that many superabundantly seek pleasure, who nevertheless do not superabundantly avoid suffering. For many [people] undergo much hardship, effort and danger because of the bodily pleasure that results. As is clear in the case of many immoderate [people] who, because of bodily pleasure, endure coldness and heat* and many dangers walking alone on winter nights in extreme cold, for the bodily pleasure and enjoyment that is to follow. And such [hardships] are more endured because of the pleasure, than on account of the suffering'.

I am intrigued by what sort of bodily pleasures he had in mind. And what events prompted this idea? Ottman and Wood conclude "clearly Burley was an engaging as well as a useful author".

* I don't follow this.

Frege's Point

What Geach calls 'Frege's point' is the claim that the same thought or proposition may occur now asserted, now unasserted. Frege expresses this very clearly in a short essay*, posthumously published, probably written in 1915, where he argues that asserting a sentence is a matter of the assertoric force with which the sentence is uttered, and that assertion is not the function of the word 'true'.

His argument is as follows. Uttering a sentence 'sea water is salt' merely expresses a thought. Nothing is meant to be asserted (behauptet werden solle). This becomes clear when turn the sentence into a that-clause: 'that sea-water is salty'. The that-clause does not assert anything. Or we could have the sentence spoken by an actor on a stage, where the actor does not speak with 'assertoric force' (or at least only seems to).

We can make this even clearer, he says, by adding the words 'it is true' to the expression 'that seawater is salty'. This forms a sentence that we can also turn into a that-clause: 'that it is true that sea-water is salty'. Thus the sense of the word 'true' does not make any essential contribution to the thought. If I assert 'it is true that sea-water is salty', I assert the same thing as if I assert 'sea-water is salty'. Thus the assertion is not to be found in the word 'true', but in the assertoric force with which the sentence is uttered.

Readers of this blog will recognise this as the thesis that William Vallicella has been defending from his website in Arizona. I shall discuss Frege's argument in my next post.

* "My Basic Logical Insights" (Posthumous Writings, transl. P. Long and R. White, 251-2. This is a translation of Nachgelassene Schriften 271-2).

Burley on empty names

I have been reading the early fourteenth century writer Walter Burley. He was working at the same place (Oxford) and the same time (late 1290s) as Scotus, and I wanted to understand how Burley approaches certain questions mentioned by Scotus. In his Questions on the Perihermenias, written in 1301, edited by Stephen Brown (Franciscan Studies 34 (1974) 200-295), question 4, Burley considers the question of whether existence is the same as essence, and in part of that question (4.44) he considers whether propositions like 'Caesar is a man' and 'a man is an animal' are eternally and necessarily true (even if Caesar no longer exists, and even if no man were existing).

He claims that nothing is actually in a real genus, unless it actually exists (nihil est in genere reali actualiter nisi actu exsistat). This (he says) follows from what Aristotle says in Metaphysics 6 at the end, where he divides being into being outside the mind, and a sort of diminished being in the mind, which he excludes from consideration. True being is divided into the ten categories, and so every category of being is true being outside the mind. Thus 'Caesar is a man' is false. He also mentions an argument that Scotus considers in his questions on the Perihermenias, namely Averroes' dictum that in substantial change, a thing loses its name and definition.

He considers the objection (4.54) that every proposition in which genus is predicated of species is necessary, such as 'A man is an animal' and 'a rose is a substance'. He replies that such propositions do not have to be necessary, nor true, unless the species necessarily has being. If 'man exists' is necesary and always true, then 'a man is an animal' is necessary and always true. Otherwise not.

This is opposite to the Scotus' conclusion. Scotus finds that 'Caesar is a man' is true, and he holds that essential propositions (which are sort of our 'analytic propositions') are eternally and necessarily.

Whether the two men met, we do not really know. One source (article "Walter Burley", by Mary Sommers, Blackwell Companion to Philosophy in the Middle Ages) claims that Walter attended Scotus' lectures in 1298, but does not identify her source (beyond the three secondary sources mentioned in the article, I am following these up).

On the question of whether existence and essence are the same, Walter agrees with the opinion of Godfrey of Fontaines (a writer that Scotus was certainly familiar with). Perhaps more about Godfrey later, when I finally track down the elusive De Wulf editions of his work.

Avicennian logic?

I only just discovered this. It is a Wikipedia 'Request for Comment' or RfC, which is rather like a court where Wikipedia editors pile on to each other, attack and eat their own. This one is quite extraordinary and concerns an editor 'Jagged 85' who has been systematically falsifying material in Wikipedia since he (or she) joined in 2005. The editor had a clear and consistent anti-Western agenda, systematically distorting source material in a way that untruthfully promoted Islamic (and also other non-Western) intellectual achievements, usually by claiming that a scientific developments or invention or discovery was made or anticipated by some non-Western philosopher or scientist.

It highlights a clear set of issues, as follows.

1. There is a large amount of material affected in Wikipedia, which is widely used as a reference work by millions of people, who trust it as a reliable source. The editor contributed to 8,115 pages, making 63,298 edits. Much of the problem material seems still to be there.

2. It demonstrates the role of Wikipedia in disseminating misleading and blatantly incorrect information across the web. The editor began work five years ago in December 2005, hist first edit claiming that "The Indus Valley civilization is in fact recognized as having been the first to develop urban planning. " Because many of his edits are now established, they have been reproduced and cited all over the internet. For example: Google 'Avicennian logic' (including the quotes) and it returns 6,000 sites (the top one being the Wikipedia article on 'Avicennism', where the phrase originates). Yet I am sure there is no formal system of logic known to scholars as 'Avicennian logic'. Avicenna made interesting contributions to logic, certainly, mostly in propositional logic, although this was originally developed by the ancient Greeks. But so did dozens of other middle-Eastern and Western writers, and the innovations of Avicenna do not compare in scale or impact with those of the high middle ages such as supposition theory, 'consequences' and so on. The article on 'Avicennism' says that "Avicennian logic had an influence on early medieval European logicians such as Albertus Magnus". Yet the idea that most influenced these scholars, including Albert, was Avicenna's distinction between essence and existence, which was a genuine innovation, and a departure from Aristotle. This idea had a profound impact, in different ways on Aquinas, Giles of Rome, Henry of Ghent, Scotus and eventually Ockham. But it is a metaphysical idea, not a logical one. As far as I am aware, no medieval writer discusses Avicenna's logic (as opposed to his commentary on the Metaphysics, which they frequently cite). Kneale's great work The Development of Logic mentions Avicenna twice, neither in connection with logic. Bochenski does not mention him at all. None of the articles in the main secondary sources on medieval philosophy mention Avicenna's logic (although they discuss his other achievements at length).

3. It proves a clear weakness in the Wikipedia 'verifiability principle'. The editor always provided reliable sources for their claims. However, examination revealed either blatant misrepresentation of the source, or a selective interpretation that went far beyond the author's meaning. For a long time no editors bothered to check these. The problem was amplified by his frequent use of scholarly works not available on the internet. Most of Wikipedia's editors are amateurs who have no access to a university library. Thus they cannot check a source from a journal, or an old or obscure book that would only be found in a library. Typical of his technique is this edit where he claims that "Avicenna developed an early theory of impetus, which he referred to as being proportional to weight times velocity, which was similar to the modern theory of momentum" citing Aydin Sayili (1987). "Ibn Sīnā and Buridan on the Motion of the Projectile", Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences 500. Yet the source attributes the theory to the fourteenth century French philosopher Buridan, not Avicenna. People trust Wikipedia because they believe the system of 'anyone can edit' allows for cross-checking and verification of references by a large group of users. Clearly, they should get out of this habit.

Thought is quick

"Enthymeme" is a form of argument where one or more of the assumptions is so obvious that it need not be stated. Suppose at a party my wife says "It's past eleven". I know what she means, which can be expressed by the following syllogism.

(Major) If it is past eleven and we are out, then leave now!
(Minor) It is past eleven and we are out
(Conclusion) Leave now!

She does not need to state the major premiss, nor even the conclusion, but I catch her drift. Note both the major and the conclusion contain an imperative. Arthur Prior investigated the logic of arguments containing imperatives in his paper "On Some Proofs of the Existence of God" , published in Papers in Logic and Ethics, Duckworth 1976.

Note also that the minor premiss is an assertion, and must be understood as such for the argument to be valid. If by contrast it meant something like "Would you like another large gin and tonic?" her conclusion would not follow. The point being, "linguistic meaning" is king. If it were not for the meaning we assign to expression types, we would not be able to express ourselves in ways like this, that superficially suggest that meaning constantly fluctuates, and that some expressions have no linguistic meaning.

Thomas Hobbes gives an entertaining example in Leviathan Chapter III (my emphasis).

"For in a discourse of our present civil war, what could seem more impertinent than to ask, as one did, what was the value of a Roman penny. Yet the coherence to me was manifest enough. For the thought of the war introduced the thought of the delivering up the king to his enemies; the thought of that brought in the thought of the delivering up of Christ; and that again the thought of the thirty pence, which was the price of that treason; and thence easily followed that malicious question; and all this in a moment of time—for thought is quick."

The Value of Lawyers

"Great as are the evils which society still owes to lawyers, the lawyer-class has always been a civilizing agency".

Hastings Rashdall, The Universities of Europe in the Middle Ages, Oxford 1895, Vol II Part II, p. 708.

The Prosentential Theory of Truth

In a comment to Vallicella here I mentioned an article on the pro-sentential theory in the Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy, and said that the theory has 'some affinity' with the 'assertoric' theory of truth I have sketched out here (as well as fiercely defended at Vallicella's place.

Here, I will take some of the claims made for the prosentential theory in that article and compare them with the corresponding claims of the assertoric theory, to see how close the affinity is.

The Assertoric Theory
The assertoric theory of truth is that the copula 'is' of a simple declarative subject-predicate sentence, such as

Tom is running

contains two components. One is the copula, whose function is to join subject and predicate to form the 'content' of the sentence. The content we can signify by a noun phrase such as 'that Tom is running' or the verbal noun 'Tom's running'. The other is the assertoric component, whose function is to signal assertion, i.e. to signal that the person uttering the sentence is saying something capable of being true or false. We can make the internal structure of such a declarative sentence transparent by parsing it as follows:

It is true / that Tom is running

The Prosentential Theory compared to the Assertoric Theory
1. "According to the prosentential theory of truth, whenever a referring expression (for example, a definite description or a quote-name) is joined to the truth predicate, the resulting statement contains no more content than the sentence(s) picked out by the referring expression."

Although the theories are similar, the fundamental difference is that, according to the assertoric theory, the 'truth predicate' (actually the truth operator) operates on a noun phrase signifying the content of the sentence, not the sentence.

2. "The central claim of the prosentential theory is that ‘x is true’ functions as a prosentence-forming operator rather than a property-ascribing locution."

The central claim of the assertoric theory is that 'x is true' functions as an operator on a 'that'-clause that forms a normal sentence (not a 'prosentence'). It claims also that this operator is implicit, though not lexically visible, in a sentence that does not use the words 'is true'.

3. "According to the prosentential theory, the statement ‘p is true’ says no more than the statement ‘p,’

The corresponding claim in the assertion theory is that 'it is true that p' says no more than that p. I.e. 'It is true that Tom runs' says that Tom runs. However, the theory distinguishes between the operator 'it is true that', which operates on a sentence to produce another sentence (of equivalent meaning), the operator 'that' which operates on sentences to produce a noun phrase, and the operator 'it is true' which operates on 'that' clauses to form sentences. This is a crucial feature of the theory which is necessary to prevent the 'substitution problem'. If we substitute the noun phrase 'that Tom runs' for 'p' in 3 above, we get the nonsensical

(*) The statement 'that Tom runs is true' says no more than the statement 'that Tom runs'

which is nonsensical because 'that Tom runs' is not a statement, but a noun phrase. If by contrast we substitute the sentence 'Tom runs', we get

(**) The statement 'Tom runs is true' says no more than the statement 'Tom runs'

which is nonsensical because 'Tom runs is true' is not a well-formed sentence (it would be well-formed if we read it as 'that Tom runs is true', i.e. read the sentence as a that-clause, but then we are not substituting the same thing salva significatione. (To be fair, the IEP article does note the problem of substitution, but does not sufficiently explain how the prosentential theory overcomes it).

4. " The prosentential theory of truth counts as a ‘deflationary’ theory because it denies that any analysis of truth of the form "(x)(x is true iff x is F)" can be given, where ‘x is F’ expresses a property that is conceptually or explanatorily more fundamental than ‘x is true.’ "

The assertoric theory is also a deflationary theory on this criterion. According to the assertoric theory, 'is true' operates on a noun phrase (a that-clause) to form a sentence. This operator is present, explicitly or implicitly, in the main verb of every declarative sentence. It is fundamental to the semantics of the declarative sentence, and no more fundamental explanation is available.

5. "The prosentential theory of truth implies a solution to the liar paradox. Consider the following sentence.- This sentence is false - if it says something true, it is false ... if it says something false ... it is true. [... ] Some attempts to solve the liar paradox involve extreme measures. Tarski, for example, thought that the paradox could be avoided only by eschewing ‘semantically closed languages’ [...] Tarski succeeds in avoiding the basic form of the liar paradox—but only at a very high price. He must content himself with providing an account of ‘true-in-Li’ rather than an account of truth. And, since natural languages like English are semantically closed, Tarski’s theory also has the weakness of applying only to artificial languages. ... According to the prosentential theory, (43) is neither true nor false because it fails to pick up an anaphoric antecedent. Just as I cannot inherit my own wealth, a prosentence cannot inherit its content from itself. "

The assertoric theory solves the Paradox in essentially the same way. 'is true' is fundamentally an operator, not a predicate. When attached to a 'that'-clause, it does not predicate anything or attribute anything to anything named by the clause. It merely signals that the speaker is asserting the content signified by the clause. In the case of the Liar sentence, there is no content to be asserted. According to the assertoric theory, we must analyse every declarative sentence into a content-part, and an assertoric part. Thus the Liar sentence must be analysed as

What this sentence says is false.

where the content part is signified by 'What this sentence says', and the assertoric part to the denial 'is false'. But the sentence says nothing, because the attempt to locate a referent for it fails.

Deflationary theories of Truth

A common objection to deflationary theories of truth is sentences like 'Everything Tom says is true'. Analysing this as

(A) For all p, if he asserts p, then p.

results in incoherence when we attempt to substitute. If we substitute sentences like 'snow is white', we get

(B) If he asserts 'snow is white', then 'snow is white'.

which is nonsense. If we substitute propositional content, signified by a 'that' clause, we get

(C) If he asserts that snow is white, then that snow is white.

which is also nonsense. However, we can evade this difficulty along the lines I have suggested in earlier posts. The first insight is that 'it is true that' is a complex operator built from 'it is true', which operates on 'that' clauses to form declarative sentences, and 'that' which operates on sentences to form 'that' clauses. Then it is coherent to hold that the semantics of any declarative sentence can be represented formally as

(D) |- c

where the operator |- corresponds to the 'it is true' part, and 'c' to a that-clause. I.e. we parse 'it is true that Tom runs' as 'it is true / that Tom runs'. Then the problem sentence 'He is always right' can be analysed as

(E) If he says c, |- c

Suppose for example that he says that Tom runs. then c = that Tom runs (note I substitute a 'that' clause, not a sentence), and |- = 'it is true', as above. This yields

(F) If he says that Tom runs, it is true that Tom runs = if he says that Tom runs, Tom runs

which makes perfect sense.

Why truth is not a predicate

As I have argued below and elsewhere, the copula 'is', as in

(1) Tom is running

has a twofold function. The first is to join subject and predicate together into a single content that is expressible by the sentence. For example 'Tom's running' or 'that Tom runs'. The second - and this is something only a verb can do - is actually to express this content. Thus

(2) Tom's running is the case

or 'That Tom runs is a fact' or 'it is true that Tom runs'. Now as it happens the operator 'it is true' which we attach to the that-clause 'that Tom runs' or 'is the case' which we attach to 'Tom's running' also contains the verb 'is'. But this, I argue, is a grammatical accident. The 'is' in 'is the case' is mere filling. The operator 'is the case' is a unitary element of the sentence. It would be better expressed by a single verb 'isthecase' or 'itistrue'. If it is essentially complex, then of course it contains the verb 'is', and if it functions as a copula, then it will have the twofold function described above. 'the case' would be a predicate that we could attach to the subject 'Tom's running' to form the noun-phrase 'Tom's running being the case'. And we could further assert this to form a new sentence 'Tom's running being the case is the case' and so on ad infinitum.

This is obvious with 'is the case'. We are not tempted into supposing that 'the case' is a predicate that qualifies Tom's running in any way. It is less obvious with 'it is true'. It is more tempting to suppose that the noun-phrase 'that Tom is running' refers to some content, a thing, and that in forming 'that Tom is running is true' we are predicating 'truth' of this content. Bad things lie in that direction.

See also Maverick Philosopher for a different take on why truth is not a predicate

Semantic cancellation

The dispute about assertion continues at William Vallicella's house here. To recap. I hold that every declarative sentence contains an 'assertoric component'. This is part of the semantics of the sentence. Vallicella objects that one token of the same sentence-type may be used to make an assertion, another not. "Therefore, there cannot be an assertoric component in indicative sentence types ... whether there is anything assertoric about a token depends on how it is used in a concrete situation."

My reply to this is that the phenomena Vallicella has in mind can easily be explained by the possibility of 'semantic cancellation' i.e. the use of a sign added to an expression to cancel out part of the semantics of the expression. If we agree that semantics is compositional, and if we agree that verbal composition does not always reflect semantic composition (as in 'Tom runs' = 'Tom is running'), then we allow for the possibility of 'semantic cancellation'.

If we allow for semantic cancellation, we automatically allow that one token may have a different semantics from another of the same type, because of the presence of semantic cancellation in the latter case. For example, in

(A) Tom runs
(B) Sarah believes that Tom runs.

(B) has a different semantics from (A). (A) is true iff Tom runs. But (B) can be true or false whether or not Tom runs. But this is not an argument against the existence of an assertoric component which relates 'Tom' and 'runs'. Semantic cancellation explains this. The operator 'that' cancels out the assertoric component in (A), and converts its semantics into that of a noun-phrase. This phrase is object to 'Sarah believes', where the assertoric component is now located inside the main verb 'believes'. We can further cancel this out by adding another 'that' operator to create another that-clause, as in:

(C) that Sarah believes that Tom runs.

and so on. Note that semantic cancellation can be non-verbal. If I utter 'Tom runs' together with a nod and a wink (meaning that Tom is a lazy fellow who takes no exercise at all), the nod and wink is a cancellation operator on the verbal part of the assertion. I.e. the utterance of the sentence accompanied by the nod and wink is equivalent to

It is not the case that / Tom runs

where 'Tom runs' is the verbal component, and 'It is not the case that' corresponds to the non-verbal nod or wink. Ironic or arch modes of expression can also be used to the same effect ('Tom runs - oh yeah right').

In summary. Vallicella's argument against an 'assertoric component' is that a token of the same sentence-type may be used without making an assertion. My reply to his argument is that this is because of semantic cancellation, which removes the assertoric component. The fact that this componet is removed in the one case, does not prove that it did not exist in the other.

The ultimate goal of this is a nominalistic theory of truth which is a version of the redundancy theory of truth. i.e. a theory which denies the existence of both truthbearers and truthmakers. There is something else at stake also, nothing to do with truthbearing and truthmaking. Vallicella's type-token argument is a general argument against 'semantic determinism'. Semantic determinism is the thesis that the same tokens of a type-identical set of signs will always have the same meaning. If this were not true, it would destroy the possibility of communication. Given that we cannot bring things that are not directly known to speaker and hearer (such as other people's thoughts, or things that are not perceptible to us) into the discussion, we have to use words as symbols of things - nominibus utimur pro rebus notis, quia non possumus nobiscum ferre res ad disputandum. If different tokens of these symbols (or rather sets of symbols) did not have a fixed and constant meaning, how could we communicate at all?

Now I agree that a subset of the symbols we use can change their meaning depending on context. But when we include the whole context, and if we regard the context itself as part of the symbol-set, then I claim that the semantics is deterministic. For example, when I use the word 'this', pointing to an animal, then 'this is a tree' is false. When I point to a tree, the same sentence (i.e. a different token of the type 'this is a tree') is true. So it may appear that the semantics of 'this is a tree' is indeterminate. But if we include the act of pointing, i.e. the gesture, and the tree-appearance, as all included in the symbol-set, then the semantics is determinate. Any token of 'this is a tree' accompanied by the act of pointing, and a representation of the demonstrated object, will have the same meaning (and the sentence will be true when the representation is in fact of a tree, false otherwise).

So, quite a lot is at stake.

The Truth Operator

A modified version of my comment on Maverick Philosopher, about the distinction between truth as a predicate, which as Bill argues seems to commit us to realism about truthmakers, and truth as an operator, which does not appear to lead to such a commitment.

I subscribe to an 'operator' theory of truth. Each sentence has a syncategoric semantic component which corresponds to assertion. This component is always locked inside the main verb of the sentence. The operator 'that', which forms a that-clause from the sentence, strips out this assertoric component to convert the sentence into a categorematic expression signifying a possible object of thought, belief, assert, judgment etc. The operator 'it is true' replaces the assertoric component again to give us back the sentence (although the main verb is now the 'is' of 'it is true' rather than the verb of the operated-on sentence).

Thus the expression 'it is true that' is a sentence-operator that contains two operators, namely 'is true' and 'that'. The operator 'that' operates on sentences to produce a that-clause:a noun-phrase that names a content, a possible object of belief and judgment. It does this by removing the assertoric element from the sentence. The operator 'it is true' operates upon that-clauses, to form whole sentences. Such sentences have the same truth-conditions as the original sentence. Thus:

(1) Snow falls

is a sentence that asserts something, via the assertoric component embedded in the main verb 'falls'.

(2) that snow falls

is a that-clause naming a possible object of judgment or belief, such as in the sentence 'John believes that snow falls', which we parse as 'John / believes / that snow falls' to clarify its relational form 'X believes Y'. Note that in the belief sentence the verb 'falls' is no longer the main verb. The truth or falsity of 'John believes / that snow falls' no longer depends on whether snow does fall or not. Rather it depends on whether John believes this or not. Finally

(3) It is true that snow falls

Gets us back to a sentence with the same truth-conditions as (1), but with a different semantics. The main verb is now the 'is' of 'it is true', and the verb 'falls' is a subordinate verb. The assertoric component of (3) lies in the 'is' of 'it is true', the assertoric component of (1) lies in 'falls'. We can parse (3) as 'It is true / that / snow falls' to make it clear that there are two operators rather than one (Frege's mistake was to think there is only one). Or we can parse it as 'It is true that / snow falls' to make it clear that the combination of 'it is true' and 'that' gives us a further operator.

This may remove the temptation to suppose that there are such things as 'truthmakers'. (Well it won't, I imagine the supporters of truthmaking will continue in the deep error of their ways, but that is the way). The operator approach is of course consistent with a thoroughgoing nominalist program. I wonder whether, if ordinary language had the right synactic structure so that operators and existence-verbs and the like were clearly identified, the users of that language would be so committed to realist semantics. Could we even 'do' metaphysics in such a language?

The meaning of Meinong

Bill Vallicella has an interesting defence of Meinong here. The statement

(1) There are items that have no being

is clearly self-contradictory. This is the reading attributed to Meinong by analytic philosophers (boo!) reading Meinong. But perhaps Meining meant this

(2) Some items have no being.

which (Bill argues) is not self-contradictory.

This argument entirely depends on the meaning of the word ‘being’. Bill’s claim that (1) is self-contradictory suggests he is reading it as expressing what ‘there are’ expresses. I.e. he would regard ‘there are blue buttercups’ as semantically equivalent to ‘blue buttercups have being’. Call this the ‘being/there are’ equivalence thesis. By contrast, his claim that (2) is not self-contradictory suggests he is reading ‘some’ statements as not expressing being. I.e. he would regard ‘some buttercups are blue’ as different both from ‘blue buttercups have being’ and ‘there are blue buttercups’. Call this the ‘some/there are’ non-equivalence thesis.

But what if I say

(3) There are no items that do not have being ?

Am I contradicting one who claims that some items have no being? Apparently not, for if according to Bill we are to read statements beginning ‘there are’ as expressive of ‘being’, then (3) does not deny (2) at all, indeed is perfectly consistent with it. I show this as follows. The statement

(4) ‘There are no X’s that are Y’ is equivalent to ‘any X that is Y does not have being’

follows from Bill's ‘being/there are’ equivalence implied above. I then substitute (4) into (3) to give

(5) Any item that does not have being, does not have being

Thus the statement that there are no items that fail to have being is apparently consistent with the statement that some items fail to have being. But that hardly seems correct. The natural reading of (3) is as the denial of (2), and hence its contradictoru. If one is true, the other is false.

Bill’s error (as I see it) is in denying the equivalence of ‘some’ and ‘there are’ statement. Is there really any logical difference between ‘there are blue buttercups’ and ‘some buttercups are blue’? Or between ‘there is a bridge crossing the river between Barnes and Hammersmith’ and ‘a bridge crosses the river between Barnes and Hammersmith’? I doubt it. But if we uphold ‘some/there are’ equivalence, and we uphold the ‘being/there are’ equivalence, we are led into contradiction again: if (1) is self-contradictory, (2) is.

Alternatively we could deny the ‘being/there are’ equivalence. But then we have the difficulty of what ‘being’ statements mean. We have no difficulty understanding ‘there are’ statements. You know what I mean when I say ‘there is a bridge crossing the river between Barnes and Hammersmith’. If you are stuck in Barnes and want to get to Chiswick via Hammersmith, it is very helpful to learn that statement is true, and you can act upon it accordingly. But ‘a bridge crossing the river between Barnes and Hammersmith has being’ is obscure, and not one a motorist can readily deal with. He either interprets it as meaning *there is* a bridge crossing the river. But that is no different from ‘some bridge crosses the river’ or ‘at least one bridge crosses the river’, and it follows a simili that (2) is self-contradictory. Or he regards it as altogether mysterious, and it follows that Meinong’s claim is mysterious and obscure. That is the dilemma.

The Theory of Descriptions according to Wikipedia

So Peter Smith couldn't help correcting Wikipedia's entry about the Theory of Descriptions here. I am not sure if his point is entirely fair. (Certainly there are far worse things on Wikipedia philosophy and logic he could have tried to fix, e.g. this abomination).

It depends on what problem the Theory of Descriptions is intended to fix. The medieval Latin philosophers faced a similar problem and they arrived at a substantially similar solution to Russell, but they didn't have a distinction between 'a' and 'the' (which is the focal point of Peter's correction). So logicians such as Ockham were no wiser than Wikipedians?

The problem that Ockham (and the early Scotus, Robert Kilwardby and many others) were trying to fix was that 'Chimera is white' and 'Chimera is not white' are both false. But Aristotle says that de quolibet dicitur affirmatio vel negatio vera - either the affirmation of any sentence is true, or its negation is. Ockham argues that the second sentence is not really a negation of the first, for it can be unpacked as 'Chimera is something and it is not white'. The real negation, by contrast, is 'Chimera is not something or it is not white'. (Ockham like the other medievals was not worried here about uniqueness claims).
If the problem to be solved is not a 'non denoting description' but rather the one outlined above, namely that '[the] present King of France is bald' '[the] present King of France is not bald' are both false, then the original Wikipedia entry is not off the rails entirely.

Or perhaps he is objecting to something else, namely that unpacking 'chimera is white' into 'chimera is something-white' leads to an infinite regress. The medievals discussed this problem too. They saw that if 'Caesar est homo' = 'Caesar est ens homo', i.e. 'est' always unpacks into 'est ens', then this leads to an infinite regress, 'Caesar est ens homo' = 'Caesar est ens ens homo' and so on. Nicholas of Paris, Robert Bacon (not to be confused with Roger) discussed this in the early 13th century. But that is something else.

Priscian's Institutiones Grammaticae

Priscian's Institutiones Grammaticae now available (Latin version only) in the Logic Museum annex. I had ignored Priscian before, thinking of him as a grammarian. Which he is, mostly, but there are interesting philosophical and logical insights in this enormous work. Such as that the present time is that of which part is past, part is future (Book 8, p. 414). Scotus uses this to explain how a sentence in the present tense (e.g. "Robert is just passing through the door") may be true even when the event it refers to may just be over.

Praesens tempus est cuius pars praeteriit, parsque futura est

Osmund Lewry

A link here to an article in the new Logic Museum about Osmund Lewry, a Dominican who made some outstanding contributions to the history of logic in England, particularly in Oxford, in the thirteenth century. The article is part of the new Medievalists category which is designed to remedy the poor coverage of scholarly bibliography on the web.

I am trying to find a copy of Lewry's often-cited PhD thesis - "Robert Kilwardby's writings on the logica vetus studied with regard to their teaching and method". There are copies in the Bodleian and in the British Museum but previous experience suggests that this will be a painful and time-consuming process. The academic world still has to come to grips with the Internet and the concept of 'Open Access'.

I shall keep my regular readers amused with the story of my progress.

Andrew of Cornwall

A link to my article about Andrew of Cornwall here in an attempt to discover why Google seems consistently to favour Wikipedia. I created a smaller version of the same article in Wikipedia (which I will not link to for obvious reasons), but Google sadly ignores it.

Snow in London

Alan Rhoda has been defending the idea that there must be some necessary connection between the present and the future in order for propositions about the future to be true or false. I restate his argument as follows. A true proposition depends on what exists - a 'state of affairs' - for its being true. The state of affairs that makes the proposition true at some particular time must exist also at the same time. Accordingly, it cannot be true now that there will be snow in London tomorrow, unless this truth 'supervenes upon present reality', i.e. there is some existing state of affairs which makes this proposition about the future true. Which is absurd. Why should snowing in London tomorrow be logically connected with any state of affairs existing today?

The mistake lies in his assumption that what makes a proposition true at some time must exist at that same time. Certainly there is a connection between truth and existence. This was recognised by the scholastic philosophers of language. Unumquodque sicut habet esse, ita et veritatem "As each thing is in respect of being, so it is in respect of truth", taken from Aristotle Metaphysics book 2 (993b 31). A proposition signifying that some state of affairs exists, is true or false depending on whether that state of affairs exists or not.

A corollary of this is what I shall call the Adequacy Principle: that the state of affairs signified to exist by the proposition can be no more (and no less) than what makes the proposition true. Otherwise, suppose a proposition signifies the existence of more than what is required to make it true, e.g. suppose that it signifies the existence of X and Y, but Y alone is sufficient to make it true. Then so long as Y exists, the proposition will be true, even if X does not exist, and even though the proposition signifies that X does exist. This is impossible, therefore a proposition can signify the existence of absolutely no more than what is sufficient to make it true. (A similar argument proves that a proposition can signify the existence of no less than what is necessary to make it true, but that is not relevant here).

From the Adequacy Principle it follows that a proposition in the future tense, signifying that some state of affairs Y will exist, depends for its truth on the future existence of Y, and nothing else, particularly nothing else in the present. The proposition 'It will snow in London' can be analysed as

* Snowing in London will be the case

which signifies that the future state of affairs 'snowing in London' will exist. It signifies no more than that, in particular, it does not signify that some state of affairs X exists now. Why should it? It may be that some present state of affairs (large cold front sweeping in from Siberia) will be the cause of the snow. But the proposition in the future tense has nothing to say about cold fronts.

Ayn Rand: lost in translation

The strange arguments continue in my comments box below and I continue to be mystified. One of the 'objectivists' there claimed that

1. If the premises [of an argument] are known to be false, are arbitrary, or from revelation, then even if the logic is valid, the proof [i.e. the conclusion] is indeed not a claim about reality.

To which I immediately objected

2. God can reveal to me the truth of a mathematical theorem, which is a claim about reality, therefore (1) is false.

This is a standard form of argument used in philosophy. Someone claims 'if p then q'. If you are able to give an example of 'p and not-q' that is obviously true, then you have refuted them. Since (1) is equivalent to the claim that no conclusion revealed by God is about reality, it is clearly refuted by (2).

This argument (which as I say is a standard type of argument you learn early on when you study philosophy) drew a number of objections. The first was

3. If you can suddenly prove a mathematical theorem, which can be validated to all fair rationals in the world, you are within your rights to say you got it from God if you wish.

This is not an objection to my argument. I am arguing that (1) above is false, because according to (1), it is impossible for the premisses of an argument to be true, and for the conclusion to be about reality, i.e. for the conclusion to be true. But the example (2) clearly demonstrates that it is possible for true premisses to be derived from revelation. It might be questioned whether I knew the conclusion to be true, because I was relying on revelation and not mathematical understanding. But a true proposition is unquestionably true, whether I know it or not. The next objection was

4. Your (hypothetical) revelation from God is no demonstration of its truth. If the content of the revelation, once examined in real world terms, is found to be true, then logic prevails from the latter reasoning, not from the former.

The argument here is that because the conclusion is not demonstrably true (because its truth is revealed), therefore it is not true. This is false again, and seems to rest on a confusion between truth and demonstrable truth. If a proposition is true, it is true, even if it is not demonstrably true. The next objection was

5. Even if metaphysically factual, the mathematical revelation is not epistemically true.

I don't understand what are meant by 'metaphysically factual' or 'epistemically true'. The latter probably means 'is not known to be true'. To be sure: if God reveals a true proposition to me, without my understanding why it is true, I probably cannot be said to know it. But that does not show it is not true.

When I suggested that 'objectivists' tend to make claims about truth and logic and metaphysics as though they were experts on the subject, which turn out to be nonsensical or silly, or ill-thought out, it was objected that this is because non-objectivists use concepts 'loosely'. This contradicts my impression that objectivists (or at least the ones here) use concepts loosely. It seems to me that they confuse the notions of truth and validity, of truth and knowledge of truth, of proofs and statements. These are all concepts used by logicians and which have a clear meaning that is carefully taught in elementary logic classes. I put it to the objectivists that it is not logicians who 'use concepts loosely'.

Scotus on future contingency

I mentioned in this post last year that I was working on Scotus' discussion of the problem of future contingents, in his Questions on the Perihermenias, and I said I would discuss it in the future. Alan Rhoda's post on 'alethic openness' has finally got me round to doing so. Alan writes:

For a proposition to be true, what it represents as being the case must
correspond to reality, to what is the case. Likewise, for a proposition to be
true now, what it represents as being the case must correspond to present
reality, to what is the case now. [my emphasis]

Scotus discusses a claim very similar to this in Book I of the Questions, qq 7-9. He disputes the claim apparently made by Rhoda above, namely that the truth of a proposition about the future must correspond in some way to 'present reality'. He writes:

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

It rather hangs upon what Rhoda means by 'true now'. Scotus argues for something like a redundancy theory of future truth. A proposition that says that S will be P so is (now) true iff it will be P, and false if it will not be P. If you mean by 'is now true' something like 'something exists now in reality that makes the proposition true' then Scotus would disagree (and so probably would I). If you mean that 'now' simply indicates the present tense of the 'is' in 'is true', then this is harmless and trivially true.

I think Scotus puts this very neatly, and we do have to take seriously his claim that "to signify it to be [the case] now that you will be white at a, signifies more than to signify that you will be white at a."

See also my discussion of rain tomorrow.

The supporters of Ayn Rand

I was going to follow up the previous post on Rand with a few comments but Triablogue beat me to it. There are also some excellent comments on the post made by Dominic Tennant in the course of a running argument with someone called John Donohue. Tennant leaves me with very little to say on Rand's 'existence exists' axiom. But fortunately it leads me to another thought that had been in the back of my mind, about supporters of Rand. I judge the worth of a writer by reading them. But also instructive to read what their supporters say. Supporters of Rand, in my experience, tend to be shrill, and philosophically and logically illiterate. Perhaps that tells us something about Rand?

Tennant points out the 'Existence exists' is incoherent - existence is commonly regarded as a second-order property. Not by everyone, I should point out, but certainly Frege's view that existence is a second-order predicate is accepted by nearly all those in mainstream analytic philosophy. Nor is Donohue's restatement, "whatever exists exists" in any way useful, because it is either merely tautological and doesn't tell us anything, or it is equally incoherent (for it dubiously assumes that existence is a first-order predicate).

Donohue objects "All truth discovered by Objectivism is through induction, and all induction is consistent with the constraint that all existents named/claimed in the induction must actually exist in objective reality". Tennant immediately objects that if the entire worldview is inductively inferred, there is no certainty in it, for induction is an informal fallacy. Donohue objects that induction is not a fallacy, and that its goal is to deploy reason with greater and greater precision until a given proposition/claim achieves a position of "true" and "certain" within the context of human knowledge. Tennant objects that he cannot be serious. Induction is an informal fallacy—it is a kind of logically invalid inference which may nonetheless yield true results. "In logic, a type of nonvalid inference or argument in which the premises provide some reason for believing that the conclusion is true. Typical forms of inductive argument include reasoning from a part to a whole, from the particular to the general, and from a sample to an entire population. Induction is traditionally contrasted with deduction. Many of the problems of inductive logic, including what is known as the problem of induction, have been treated in studies of the methodology of the natural sciences. (Britannica Concise Encyclopedia, 'induction'.)"

As Tennant correctly points out, what Donohue is describing here —"greater and greater precision"—is characterized by deduction. Induction works in the opposite direction: from greater precision and certainty towards less and less of the same. How can Donohue not be familiar with the problem of induction? How can he not be aware that absolute certainty is not guaranteed by merely inductive inference? Perhaps this is because Donohue has only read Rand, which does seem consistent with his ignorance of basic logical concepts. "Next time, take a Logic 101 course and read some introductory philosophy before you head out into the real world and try to pontificate on a blog published by people who have a clue and can call your bluff."

All very true, and remember that Donohue is one of the more articulate supporters of Rand. This began with problems at the Wikipedia article on Rand. Rand supporters turn up in large numbers to make sure that any 'objective' assessment of Rand's work is impossible, and they wear out the more logically-minded editors with this endless logically illiterate ranting. There is nothing in Wikipedia's policies that prevents this happening. Everything on Wikipedia is done by 'consensus', even if that is a consensus of idiots. This would not have mattered in the days when Wikipedia was a tiny website run by a dedicated band of enthusiasts. Now it really is used by everyone on the planet. If only it really were the sum of all human knowledge. Governments are now forcibly taking over banks. Why can't they forcibly take over Wikipedia?

Ayn Rand and Wikipedia

Was Ayn Rand a philosopher? That is the question now being taken to the important mediation committee of Wikipedia. There is currently a disagreement about whether the article about her should qualify her as a 'popular' or 'commercially successful' philosopher, or an 'amateur philosopher' (as Anthony Quinton did in his article on popular philosophy in the Oxford Companion to philosophy), or whether she is a philosopher without qualification.

This involves many difficulties, the main one being that Wikipedia has no concept of 'expert opinion'. We simply cannot ask Anthony Quinton or Ted Honderich or any of the philosophical establishment to weigh in on this important question. The question must be settled by whoever of the anonymous and mostly unqualified editors who turn up at the article talk page to thrash out a consensus. Which is not as bad as it sounds. Wikipedia has strict rules about 'reliable sources' and an entire manual devoted to citation. The rules are orientated towards mainstream academic consensus, and against 'original research' and using duff sources. This means you should use primary sources, however good, to support a claim. You should avoid using a blog or other self-published sources. Reliable and authoritative secondary sources are the preferred method of citation. Thus articles like Wittgenstein can be pretty good. The prose is often awkward and amateurish, and you have to put up the usual slavish political correctness of Wikipedia. But the results are not nearly as bad as you might have expected.

The difficulty is to assess writers like Rand, who have been so marginalised by the academic establishment that it is hard to find any reliable sources dealing with her, or her work. Who was Rand? That is the first question that non-American readers are likely to ask. I had not read any of her work until last week, and had only heard of her through Quinton's passing reference in the Oxford Companion. Well, read the article linked to above, which gives you a flavour of her work. There is a helpful lexicon on a pro-Rand website here, which contains samples of her writing. Otherwise there a few reliable sources which give a critical assessment of her work. Try these posts by the philosopher William Vallicella, who has a good explanation here of how Rand fails to understand Kant, and here where he points out some elementary - really elementary - logical errors in her work.

My view, based on a cursory reading of her actual writing, was that she lacked even a basic understanding of the essentials of the subject. I was particularly intrigued by her views on existence. But that is a personal view which, despite my qualifications, counts for nothing in Wikipedia. More about this later.

Meanwhile, let the excellent Brandon have the last word. He shows well how it is possible to combine sympathy with frankness (something the Wikipedia article should aim at, in my view). "Is she a bit of a hack when it comes to philosophy? Definitely. But I think what we see in Rand is someone of considerable native talent and ability whose reason never underwent the sort of discipline that would have made that talent genuinely shine."

Commentaries on the Perihermenias

A new set of pages in the Logic Museum (index here) consisting of Boethius' translation (from Greek to Latin) of Aristotle's 'On Interpretation', and three commentaries on them: Boethius' own, Abelard's and Aquinas'. The commentaries are both excellent introductions in their own right to Aristotle's work, and a useful insight into the medieval conception of logic.