Identity in replacement

I will express the 'Ship of Theseus' argument using an 'aporetic' set of propositions. An aporetic set of propositions is where each proposition seems to express an obvious truth, but all of them together are logically inconsistent. As follows.

A. An artifact remains numerically the same if one of its components is replaced, and the rest remain the same.
B. An artifact is numerically the same if all of its components are numerically the same.
C. Identity is transitive (if A=B and B=C, then A=C)
D. If artifact a and artifact b have numerically different components at the same time, a and b are numerically different.
E. Artifacts exist.

It is fairly easy to show they can't all be true*. Therefore one of them is false. In particular, if we accept A-D, we have to drop E. There can be no objects that conform to our intuitive idea of an artifact, which is the implied conclusion of the Ship of Theseus story.

In this post and three later posts, I will examine the four assumptions A-D to examine if the proposition-set is really aporetic (usually what appears to be an aporetic set dissolves upon enquiry, when we find that one or more of the propositions are not obvious or self-evident at all).

I will begin with the assumption that an artefact remains the same, when one of its components is replaced. My son recently wrecked the mudguard of my bike so badly that it fell off and is still lying in the front garden. I plan to take the bike to the repair shop to fit a new mudguard. Will the bike plus new mudguard be numerically identical with the bike as it was with the old mudguard (this is precisely what Peter van Inwagen appears to deny)? The question appears to involve deep metaphysical concepts like temporality and numerical identity, which makes it tempting to challenge it (on the grounds that deep metaphysical assumptions involve doubt and uncertainty from their very nature). But the question is actually quite mundane. Suppose, after getting the bike repaired, I say

(*) This bike had its mudguard replaced at the repair shop yesterday.

Is that true? Surely, on the assumption that I did take this bike to the repair shop, and that the crappy and bent mudguard was replaced with a shiny new one, what I say is unquestionably true. Yet it involves both 'metaphysical' assumptions. It involves identity through the very structure of the proposition. Identity: this bike = the bike that was taken to the repair shop. Temporality: the present reference to 'this bike', and the past 'had' of 'had its mudguard replaced'. Without the 'metaphysical' assumptions embedded in the proposition, we could not make the most simple, mundane and matter-of-fact statements about our ordinary everyday life. Such as replacing mudguards on bikes.

Note also (see my previous post) that we cannot re-tell this story by means of expressions like 'bikewise arrangement of parts'. For it is false to say that this bikewise arrangement of parts (which includes the new mudguard) is the arrangement of parts taken to the repair shop (which included the old mudguard).

I conclude that the principle of identity under replacement - which involves merely the assumption that we can refer to an artefact that exists now (this bike) by means of a past tense statement (the artefact that was taken to the repair shop) - is unquestionably true. Tomorrow (or whenever I can be bothered to write it): the transitivity of identity.

* Roughly as follows. If artifacts exist, suppose that some artifact X exists. Then suppose we replace one of its component to give artifact X1. Then (from A above), X=X1. Then replace one another component in X1 to give X2, as in the Ship of Theseus story. From A above, X1 = X2. And from C above, X = X2. Repeat this process for all the n original components to give Xn. Then X = Xn, by the previous argument.Now take the n replaced components, and assemble appopriately to make artifact Y. From B above, X = Y. From transitivity, X=Y and X = Xn so X = Y. Xn and Y are co-existing, i.e. exist at the same time. But Xn and Y have different components (since Y is made from the original components of X, and Xn is made from entirely new and different components). Thus, from D above, Xn /= Y. Since X = Xn, X /=Y. Contradiction: X=Y and X /= Y.

Reduction by re-telling

A reductionist argument might go as follows. If you can take any story that ostensibly involves the existence of X's, and re-tell it without mentioning X's and without 'losing something' in the re-telling, then conclude that there aren't any X's. It's a bad argument. Either the re-telling means the same, but avoids mentioning X's by name. In which case we haven't avoided mentioning X's at all. It's as though we translated a story about ships into German, thus avoiding use of the English 'ship' by using the German word 'Schiff'. We have avoided the English 'ship', but we haven't avoided mentioning ships. Or the re-telling really doesn't mention X's at all, in which case the requirement that we aren't 'losing something' (ships, e.g.) is violated. You can't fail to mention X's in a re-telling without failing to mention something that was in the original story, and so the argument is obviously not valid.

Yet this is precisely what Peter Inwagen's argument against the existence of ships appears to do, when he re-tells the story of the Ship of Theseus.

Once upon a time, there were certain planks that were arranged shipwise. Call then the First Planks. . . . One of the First Planks was removed from the others and placed in a field. Then it was replaced by a new plank; that is, a carpenter caused the new plank and the remaining First Planks to be arranged shipwise, and in just such a way that the new plank was in contact with the same planks that the removed planks had been in contact with, and at exactly the same points. Call the planks that were then arranged shipwise the Second Planks. A plank that was both one of the First Planks and one of the Second Planks was removed from the others and placed in the field and replaced (according to the procedure laid down above), with the consequence that certain planks, the Third Planks, were arranged shipwise. Then a plank that was one of the First Planks and one of the Second Planks and one of the Third Planks . . . . This process was repeated till all the First Planks were in the field. Then the First Planks were caused to be arranged shipwise, and in just such a way that each of them was in contact with the same planks it had been in contact with when the First Planks had last been arranged shipwise, and was in contact with them at just the same points. (Peter van Inwagen, Material Beings (Cornell UP, 1990) 128-129)

Perhaps I have missed his point, but it appears to be that we can re-tell the story of the ship such that there is nothing in the standard version of the story that is not captured in the re-telling, and the re-telling does not mention ships, ergo there is no need for ships. If that is his argument, it involves the obvious fallacy I describe above. He begins "Once upon a time, there were certain planks that were arranged shipwise". What does that sentence mean? Does it mean the same as 'Once upon a time, there was a certain ship'? Does the expression 'shipwise arrangement of planks' mean the same as the word 'ship'? In which case the re-telling does mention ships, just as a German version of the standard story would mention ships (although by the word Schiff, of course). Or does it mean something different, something that is not a ship? In which case there is something in the standard version of the story (which begins with the assertion that there was a ship) that is not captured in the re-telling (which asserts only the existence shipwise arrangements of planks). Either way, the conclusion does not follow. Either the re-telling does assert the existence of ships, in which case it does not imply the non-existence of ships. Or it doesn't, in which case something has been lost in the re-telling, and the requirements of the argument are violated.

This casts some doubt on Vallicella's assertion here that Invagen "is a brilliant man". The argument does not strike me as brilliant at all. But perhaps I misunderstand it.

Argumentum pro homine

I just noticed something much more horrible.

Argumentum ad baculum

Argumentum ad baculum: literally 'argument to the stick' or as we say 'appeal to force'. Wikipedia gives an odd example in its article here, claiming it is not fallacious.

If you drive while drunk, you will be put in jail.
You want to avoid going to jail.
Therefore you should not drive while drunk.

Surely it is fallacious? If you want to avoid going to jail, then it probably follows that you want to avoid driving while drunk (assuming that you know the consequences of driving drunk, and that you are rational enough to not want anything that is a consequence of what you don't want). But it doesn't follow that you shouldn't drive when drunk. 'Should not' or 'ought not' expresses a moral conclusion. This does not follow from any psychological assumption such as wanting or desiring. Now, the following version of the argument is probably valid

If you drive while drunk, you will be put in jail.
You should not be put in jail
Therefore you should not drive while drunk.

But that is different, because the second premiss contains an explicit moral judgment. I say it is 'probably' valid, because it relies on the assumption that if B is a consequence of A, and if you should not do B, then you should not do A. Which could be questioned.

As for the rest of the article, it made no sense at all. Many things in Wikipedia are well done. What is it about philosophy and logic that Wikipedia finds so hard?

Impersonal assertion

A fundamental objection to my position on assertion (that assertion is a part of the semantics of a declarative sentence) is that assertion must be personal. That is, the subject of verbs like 'assert', 'state', 'say' and suchlike must be a person. Thus no sentence - which is an impersonal, inanimate linguistic item - can assert anything. Thus assertion cannot be part of the semantics of a sentence.

I shall argue against this in two ways.

1. Even if we concede that the subject of an assertion must be personal, it does not follow that we cannot analyse a sentence in such a way that a sign for assertion is made visible. I claim that we can analyse the sentence 'Tom runs' as

It is true / that Tom runs

which means the same, but which contains the sign 'it is true'. The other part is the that-clause 'that Tom runs', which signifies the content of the sentence. This is the same content referred to in sentences such as 'Alice believes that Tom runs', 'Carol hopes that Tom runs', 'Bob doubts that Tom runs' and so on. But no one who utters these sentences asserts that content. If I utter 'Alice believes that Tom runs', I have asserted that Alice believes something. But I have not asserted the thing that she believes: I have not asserted that Tom runs, only that Alice believes this. But when I utter 'It is true that Tom runs', I have asserted that Tom runs. Which suggests that 'it is true' is a sign indicating that I am asserting the content itself, rather than saying something about it (such that it is a belief, or a hope, of someone). The sign 'it is true' is a symbol which, suitably connected with a symbol for the content, signifies assertion.

2. In any case, we need the idea of impersonal assertion for statements whose author is unknown. For example "The next sentence in Genesis says the earth was without form and void, and darkness over it.

In summary. We can analyse a declarative sentence into another sentence which means the same, but which has two main parts: a sign for the content of the sentence and another sign which is used to indicate or signify that the speaker is personally asserting the content, rather than saying something about the content. It is not unreasonable to call this an assertion sign. And sometimes - when the author of the original sentence is unknown - it is equally reasonable to say that the sentence impersonally asserts its content.

Truth versus Equality

Larry Sanger is interviewed in Slate. Some familiar stuff, in particular from an essay he wrote in 2007, but it's worth being reminded - Larry generally gets Wikipedia theory right. He talks about "the complete disregard for expert opinion among a group of amateurs working on a subject, and in particular because of their tendency to openly express contempt for experts", leading to experts - people who make it their life's work to get things right - being driven away by people who have no respect for that kind of mission. He claims this is a worldview common to many programmers: no one should be regarded as more reliable on a subject than anyone else. He calls this "epistemic egalitarianism."

And he emphases a point that I have made frequently here (for example in this post), that Wikipedia is mostly good when it comes to the hard sciences, and particularly on the sort of facts and figures you might look up in Whittakers' Almanac, or the Guinness Book of Records, or Every Boy's Handbook, but a disaster when it comes to the humanities and social sciences.

And of course it is useless and anything politically contentious. I spotted this gem last week, from the article Modern history of Cyprus.

"Efforts to get Turkey to end its occupation and re-integrate the Northern areas
into a Federal structure continue but to little avail, as Turkey continues to
ignore the UN and the European Parliament and continue it's illegal occupation
of the island. The Cypriot government, in accordance with the opinion and
rhetoric of the UN do not recognize any sovereignty that the puppet Turkish
administration have and therefore do not allow International flights or free
trade in the occupied sections of the island. Discussions are taking place to
try and remove these 'embargoes' as it has been argued they violate the human
rights of the citizens in the Northern areas in a similar manner that the
Israeli imposed embargo on Gaza does."

It has been there for months and seems to be part of an ongoing war between the Greek and Turkish Wikipedian-Cypriots. This edit is curious.

Plural quantification and scholasticism

More discussion of plurals at the Maverick Philosopher. Very topical now, but it has been discussed before. Thomas Aquinas:

Unde videtur quod quidquid potest facere unus, possint facere multi, et non e
converso, sicut multi trahunt navem quam unus trahere non posset - "it is clear
that whatever one can do, many can do, but not conversely. For example, many
persons drag the boat which one person could not drag". Summa Theologiae
III 67 a6 (See also Sententia Metaphysicae, lib. 5 l. 2 n. 11).

Aquinas was writing in the 1260's, but the idea is probably older than that. See e.g. Lambert of Auxerre:

Similiter est suppositio confusa sed immobilis quando signum additur
termino communi in singulari vel in plurali et tenetur collective ut cum
dicitur: 'omnis homo trahit navem', positione facta quod omnes homines trahunt
navem et nullus per se, et similiter cum dicitur: omnes apostoli sunt
duodecim. "Similarly, confused but immobile supposition is when the
(quantifying) sign is applied to a common term in the singular or plural and is
understood collectively, as in 'every man drags the boat', assuming that all the
men are dragging the boat and none of them by himself. And similarly in 'all the
apostles are twelve'. (Logica, "De suppositionibus et de significationibus")

Later, William of Ockham discussed the 'Apostles' example in his Summa Logicae II. 4.

How to tell a big lie

"What is most deceptive is not when you lie outright, but when you tell the truth, but not the whole truth. The most important question you can ask of any presentation, not necessarily 'oh is this person lying to me', but 'what isn't this person telling me'. Because if the person lies to you, you can check up on that. But if a person leaves something out, you have no way of checking - you don't know - what has been omitted".

Howard Zinn, interviewed by Truth in Numbers.

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.