Natural and artificial languages

Belette makes a breathtaking comment here that deserves comment. 

I know about the difference between a pointer and the thing pointed to. I'm a software engineer. Its all a lot clearer in an artificial language; one day philosophers will realise that.

This is breathtaking both in its ignorance and (for that reason) in its arrogance.  For the entire history of Anglo-American philosophy since Frege in the 1880s and Russell in the 1900s onwards is about using the insights acquired from the development of the predicate calculus - mainly by Russell and Whitehead in Principia Mathematica - to address ancient philosophical problems.

Russell says "I remain convinced that obstinate addiction to ordinary language in our private thoughts is one of the main obstacles to progress in philosophy"*.    Russell's early work explored the idea that the misleading subject-predicate form of traditional Aristotelian logic was responsible for the pernicious defects of monism.  His theory of descriptions is intended to show that by using a formal language to analyse a problematic sentence like 'the king of France is bald', we can resolve an apparently intractable philosophical problem.  Following that, almost the entire program of Anglo-American analytic philosophy (AAA) is to address philosophical problems by analysing ambigous, vague statements expressed in ordinary language into precise, crisp, verifiable statements in some formal or artificial language. Obviously the distinction between 'pointer and thing pointed to', which is essential to Tarski's theory of truth, has a significant place in this program.

So what is it that philosophers are not realising? 

*Quoted in R.M. Sainsbury, "The Perfect Language", Russell, Routledge 1979, p.140

Wikipedia article feedback

I have just been looking at the Wikipedia rating system. You go to the bottom of an article and click 'view ratings' to see what the crowd thinks of its trustworthiness, objectivity, completeness and quality of writing.

First of all, I don't understand the distinction between 'trustworthy' and 'objective'. Could an article be rated as objective, but utterly untrustworthy?  Or lacking any kind of objectivity, but entirely trustworthy?  In any case, I can make little sense of the results, when picking on articles that I know are poorly written, incomplete and untrustworthy, but which the system rates as well-written, complete etc.

For example, I've commented on the Ockham article many times, e.g. here.  There are many errors and many omissions, and the quality of the writing essentially depends on your view of how easy it is to combine paragraphs from the Catholic Encyclopedia with paragraphs of drivel. How are the lay public supposed to judge on the completeness of coverage of a subject when the whole point of an encyclopedia is to inform them about it?  How can they judge its objectivity? I agree that they might be able to judge the quality of the writing, but even this stinker, which has a quality template slapped on it, doesn't score that badly.

Interestingly this one, on Roscellinus, which I can see is a combination of the Catholic Encyclopedia and Britannica 1911, scores worse on quality of writing than the awful ones above.  But it's quite well-written, although the style is somewhat antequated. Perhaps the reason is its use of much longer sentences and paragraphs.  Perhaps the 4chan generation prefers articles with short paragraphs and short sentences.  So perhaps we can blame the internet yet again, he says, sounding like an old fart aged 70 who reads the Daily Mail.

(I had a look at 4chan yesterday but that is a subject for another vituperative, old fart kind of post).

Spamming in medieval Latin

The discussion continues on Wikipedia about whether links to the Logic Museum constitutes 'spam' or not.  It descends into ever deeper levels of absurdity.  E.g. "There is not much spamming in Medieval Latin these days".  Very true.

I see also that the article on Ockham's magnificient Summa Logicae has now been protected against vandalism.  When Wikipedia goes wrong, it goes very very wrong.

Maverick and Belette on Frege

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

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

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

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

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

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

Blogger editor has broken - no more posts until resolved

23 Feb - upgraded to IE 8, all now seems to work.  More posts in the pipeline, sorry for the interruption in service.

Explaining 'the morning star'

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

Summarising:

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

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

De dicto in Wikipedia

I'm glad to see that something may (possibly) be done about the current ban on links from Wikipedia to the Logic Museum. John Vandenberg, who is president of Wikimedia Australia, and who is slightly more sane and mature than the bunch of teenagers who run the place, has left a kind comment on the spam blacklist page, saying that "The Logic Museum is scholarly work, of exceptional quality and utility to Wikipedia".

Yes of course, John!  How else would readers of Wikipedia understand the use of Latin phrases like de dicto and de re?  I discussed this in an earlier post, but let's see what Wikipedia has to say about this important distinction.

De dicto and de re are two phrases used to mark important distinctions in intensional statements, associated with the intensional operators in many such statements. The distinctions are most recognized in philosophy of language and metaphysics.

The literal translation of the phrase "de dicto" is "of (the) word", whereas de re translates to "of (the) thing". The original meaning of the Latin locutions is useful for understanding the living meaning of the phrases, in the distinctions they mark. The distinction is best understood by examples of intensional contexts of which we will consider three: a context of thought, a context of desire, and a context of modality.

This is horrible. Note the article doesn't have any warning sign that something is wrong (to preempt a complaint that William made about the Maverick post yesterday.  It is a mixture of the horribly clumsy and the horribly wrong.  The plural 'important distinctions' is merely clumsy, given that there is just one distinction.  So is "The distinctions are most recognized in philosophy of language and metaphysics", although it is not clear whether recognised is meant, as though writers outside those subjects are aware of the distinction, but refuse to recognise it, or whether made is intended, in the sense that writers outside those areas simply aren't aware of the distinction at all.

But some of it is just wrong.  The standard use of the term 'intensional' qualifies not a statement but a context.   See e.g. the more useful SEP article on this.  And the distinction itself is a distinction in reading or sense, which the introduction does not explain properly. Thus there is a de re reading of a particular sentence, or a de dicto.  And the worst bit is the explanation of the Latin 'original meaning'.  'De dicto' does not mean 'of the word', as my previous post made clear, and as another excerpt from the Logic Museum, this time from the Summa Logicae of pseudo-Aquinas (my hasty translation) makes clear.  A dictum is what we now call a 'that clause', which Latin expresses by combining an accusative with an infinitive - Socratem currere - 'Socrates's running' or 'that Socrates runs'.  In Latin such a construction can be the subject of a sentence, as in Socratem currere est necesse, where 'that Socrates runs' is the subject, and 'is necessary' is the predicate. We can say the same in English, although it sounds a bit old-fashioned, such as in 'that snow is white is a well-known fact'. In no way does 'dictum' mean a word, as Wikipedia says, possibly confusing it with 'dictio' which can mean a word, or an expression. It literaly means 'about (de) what is said (dicto).

As for de re, 'of the thing' is slightly better, although res in has a much richer semantics than the plain English 'thing'.  It is sometimes translated as 'about reality' or 'about the reality'.  Note the two letters that begin the word 'reality', which is not a coincidence.

Here is the link to the Summa Logicae.  Don't try inserting it in Wikipedia: it will get you banned. Needless to say, Google returns the Wikipedia article first, on a search for de dicto.

Latin

English

Ad sciendum autem earum quantitatem, notandum quod quaedam sunt propositiones modales de dicto, ut, Socratem currere est necesse; in quibus scilicet dictum subiicitur, et modus praedicatur: et istae sunt vere modales, quia modus hic determinat verbum ratione compositionis, ut supra dictum est. Quaedam autem sunt modales de re, in quibus videlicet modus interponitur dicto, ut, Socratem necesse est currere: non enim modo est sensus, quod hoc dictum sit necessarium, scilicet Socratem currere; sed huius sensus est, quod in Socrate sit necessitas ad currendum.

Now for knowing about their [i.e. modal propositions'] quantity, it should be noted that some modal propositions are de dicto, such as "that Socrates runs is necessary", namely those in which the dictum [i.e. the clause "that Socrates runs"] is the subject and the mode [i.e. 'is necessary'] is the predicate, and these are truly modals, for the mode here determines the verb by reason of composition, as was said above.  And some are modals de re, namely in which the mode is interposed in dictum, e.g. "Socrates necessarily is running", for the sense is not now that the dictum is necessary, namely 'that Socrates runs', but the sense of it is that in Socrates there is 'necessity towards running'.

Should you trust Wikipedia?

Sounds like one of mine, but actually one of the Maverick's, over here.  Recommended, as always.

Contingent and necessary identity

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

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

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

I don’t agree. Consider

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

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

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

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

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

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

British library Wikipedian

I nearly commented on this but Andrew Orlowski got there first.

Referential isolators

The previous post gives the background. It is time to introduce the idea of ‘referential isolation’, which we can easily explicate by considering the difference between the following three sentences.

(1) There was a man called ‘Shakespeare’ who lived in Stratford. There was a man called ‘Shakespeare’ who was a shareholder of the Globe company.
(2) There was a man called ‘Shakespeare’ who lived in Stratford. Shakespeare was a shareholder of the Globe company.
(3) Shakespeare lived in Stratford. Shakespeare was a shareholder of the Globe company.

Discourse (1) is two separate and complete sentences. It is not part of the meaning of the two sentences that there was a person who lived in Stratford who was a shareholder of the Globe company, although it is part of their meaning that there was someone in Stratford, and that there was someone – possibly the same person, possibly a different person – who was part of the Globe company. Thus it is not part of the meaning of the second sentence that its subject, if there is one, is the same as or different from the subject of the first, nor that it is the same as or different from the subject of any previous sentence. The indefinite article is thus a referential isolator. It prohibits back-reference to any previous sentence.

By contrast discourse (2) is complete as a whole, but the second sentence is incomplete. That is because the definite article ‘the’ cannot be meaningful unless it identifies the subject of some preceding sentence – in this case, the immediately preceding sentence, the first. It forces us to look back in just the way that the indefinite article forces us not to look back, and so acts as the opposite of an isolator (a ‘conductor’, perhaps?). Yet the back reference comes to a halt at the first sentence, because the isolator (‘a man called Shakespeare’) is still in place. The two sentences are complete, and have the force of a single indefinite sentence. They tell us that some person lived in Stratford and belonged to the Globe, without telling us whether this person was the same as or different from the subject of any previous sentence.

Discourse (3) is incomplete both as single sentences and as a whole. That is because when attached to the larger text of which it is a fragment, it is capable of generating further implications that you won’t get from (2), or (1). If there is a preceding sentence saying ‘someone called Shakepeare wrote Macbeth’, then we can infer, when (3) follows it, that the author of Macbeth lived in Stratford, and was a shareholder of the Globe. The two sentences are a sort of live rail potentially connecting us an earlier part, or parts, of a larger discourse.

This all presumes two things, namely (a) that the discourse is ordered by prior and posterior sentence and (b) that all parts of the discourse are available ad audientem. This is true of any verbal discourse through the ordering of time of utterance. It is true of any written text where the order of reading is determined, and the text is securely bound together so that there are no missing pages, or worm-eaten parts, or any other form of corruption. It is true of hypertext containing fixed and ordered links. It is not true of corrupt texts such as manuscripts, or where the text is complete but with the pages wrongly bound. It is not true of a newspaper where the articles are not supposed to be read in any particular order. It is not true of news media in general, where even if there is ordering there is no guarantee that the audience has received all the elements of the ordering (for example, he or she has missed the 9 o’clock news).

The question of how reference operates in the case of disordered and incomplete texts will be the next topic for discussion.

Someone white was going to dispute

The rest of the sophismata by Heytesbury are now available in the Logic Museum here, which reminds me of an old post in Beyond Necessity about the medieval sophism Album fuit disputaturum. The sophism is summarised in that post, and there are now two versions of it in the Logic Museum. One by Heytesbury himself, and the other written about 90 years earlier around 1250 by an unknown Parisian scholar.

I have a third version which I am currently transcribing from the manuscript known as Worcester 13, probably written about 1270, which I may publish in the Logic Museum when it is more or less ready.

Semantic completeness and singular terms

In my last post I distinguished between terms of which you would learn as part of a general requirement to communicate with others, and terms that you would need for specialist communication.  The former you would find in any standard or pocket dictionary,  the latter in a specialist work according to subject (a medical dictionary, a glossary of advanced mathematical terms etc).

The purpose of doing this was to avoid making any philosophical distinction such as between general terms (man') and singular terms ('Socrates').  General terms can occur in generalist ('man') and specialist ('acrocanthosaurus') reference books, and similarly for singular terms: the proper name 'London' is in my general dictionary, the name of individual Londoners in the London telephone book (think of a telephone book as a specialist dictionary of proper names), and the names of individual streets in the specialist 'A-Z of London' street directory.

I say that a discourse is 'semantically complete' in respect of any particular reference dictionary when it is syntactically well-formed, and when its meaning is clear to any person who has learned the meaning of terms found in the dictionary. 

I shall show that a discourse consisting of more than one sentence can be semantically complete, even when some of its component sentences are semantically incomplete. For example:

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

Clearly the two sentences taken together are semantically complete. Any compact dictionary of English contains words such as 'a', 'man', 'boy' etc, and anyone who has learned the meaning of those words and understands basic English syntax will understand what the two sentences mean together.  So also the first sentence is complete.  Everyone who understands basic English understands "A man and a boy were standing by a fountain".  But the second sentence is not complete, at least not on its own.  You don't understand "the man had a drink" without reference to the first sentence, because without it, you don't understand that the two sentences together imply that a man who was standing by a fountain had a drink.  To understand the second sentence, you have to understand that 'the man' refers back to the man mentioned in the first sentence.  So it is not semantically complete, even though it is part of a discourse which is.

It is the same when we use proper names.

(2) A man called 'Dudley' and a boy were standing by a fountain. Dudley had a drink.

Even though the name 'Dudley', as it is used here, is not contained in any directory or dictionary of proper names, the meaning of the two sentences together is available to any competent speaker of English. For the name 'Dudley' is defined in the first sentence, and for that reason the second sentence is semantically incomplete.  It depends on the definition of the name given in the first sentence, and is not properly understandable without it.  Thus the 'reference' of the proper name 'Dudley' is really back-reference to a previous part of the text.

This conception of reference contrasts with the Kripkean conception of reference where the incomplete sense of a singular sentence must be completed by reference to the external world (not some prior text), and where the sense of a singular term must somehow be 'passed on' from speaker to hearer.  There is no need for reference to the external world, and there is no need for 'passing on' reference.  The reference of the name 'Dudley' in the second sentence is clear because of the semantic completeness of the two sentences together.  It is objectively clear, and does not need to be 'handed' from one person to another except in the sense that the speaker is able to construct a discourse that is clear to any competent hearer, and when the hearer is competent enough to understand it.

Competent users of a language

Yesterday I pondered whether we can make sense of 'competent user' of a language, given that we can never fully master any language.  There about 170,000 words in current use in the English language, of which I probably know about 15,000.  New words are being added every year.  In addition to that, there are billions of proper names whose meaning no single person has knowledge of. I'm assuming that French, German, Indian and Japanese proper names count, given that they, or some Anglicised version of them can meaningfully be used as part of an English sentence.

Is there any sense to the notion of 'competent user'?  Perhaps we should distinguish between 'competent use' of a language and 'specialist use'.  A specialist user will understand all or most of the terms connected with the specialism.  The specialism might be in medical terms, engineering or scientific or legal terms, in place names, historical figures.  Of course, nearly everyone is a "Facebook" specialist in the sense they know the names of  their friends - names whose meaning they know but probably 99.99% of the people on the planet do not.  A generalist user, by contrast, will be equipped to communicate using terms that are in general use.  It might be difficult to set a boundary for such generalist terms, but it would probably include all the words in the Shorter Oxford Dictionary, many proper names such as 'London', 'America', 'Caesar', 'Elizabeth II' and so on.

I will then define a discourse (i.e. a sentence or group of sentences) as 'semantically complete' when its meaning is clear to any generalist user of the language.

Semantic completeness

This morning I had the idea for the following loose definition. A discourse* 'semantically complete' when any competent user of the language can understand it, simply in virtue of understanding the language.

But this of course won't do.  I had meant to eliminate proper names, because understanding the language is not a requirement for understanding them.  But who is to say that  the process of learning new proper names (or new meanings for the same proper name) is not also a process of understanding the language?  I need a criterion for 'understanding the language' that rules out proper names, but I don't have one.

Is it that a certain perceptual acquaintance, or some relation with the external world is necessary in order to learn  a proper name?  Well perhaps, but that doesn't distinguish them from common names, because to learn the meaning of certain basic terms like 'red', 'round' and so on, we have to be acquainted with external reality.

*Discourse - a sentences or any group of sentences.

You are a donkey

New in the Logic Museum, fifteen Sophismata by the Oxford logician and mathematician William Heytesbury. Heytesbury also wrote a work proving that you are donkey (tu es asinus) in no fewer than 39 ways, called Sophismata Asinana. A sophisma is a statement where there are apparently reasonable arguments supporting both the statement and its denial. Resolving the sophisma involves close and careful attention to the meaning, possible ambiguities, and avoidance of fallacy. Latin only, for the moment.

The New York Times on the Wikipedia blackout

A nice piece here by Cary H. Sherman. It happens that he is chief executive of the Recording Industry Association of America, which represents music labels, so clearly a possible bias there. But he is fundamentally right about the problem of a very large website like Wikipedia which is exploiting its status as a supposedly neutral and independent to make a self-serving political point.  Platforms such as these have real power which is equal to, if not greater than the power of the traditional news carriers, as I argued earlier here.

Public restrooms in Bratislava

A real gem - read it before it gets deleted.

As of 2011, urinating or defecating in public in Slovakia is punishable by a fine of €33. The mistrust of public toilets, including at night when they are lit, is such that many prefer the toilets in fast food restaurants. Many restaurants and pubs lock their toilets and issue keys only upon demand by their customers. In spite of queues reminiscent of the days of socialism, there are no plans to build additional public restrooms in Bratislava.
The tourist industry is not happy with the situation, but the competition is that toilets are not perfect in other cities.

Every horse is living

Here is a translation of a question by Jean Buridan which has some affinity with our earlier discussion about men who are not men.  Reading what he says, it is clear that he would resolve our difficulty by rendering 'some men are not men' into 'some things which are men, are not men', which is clearly false.

Dici de omni

A new article in the Logic Museum on the dici de omni, a principle derived from Aristotle which was supposed by the medieval scholastic writers (such as Giles of Rome) to underlie all reasoning.  The article mentions the debased and inaccurate  version of the principle used by neo-scholastic writers and used in manuals of 'traditional logic' such as Mill's System of Logic.  It also mentions the current version of the Wikipedia article, which is seriously incomplete and inaccurate.  The irony, which I love, is that Wikipedia will be unable to link to the more comprehensive Logic Museum article because of the ban on all outward-bound links to the Logic Museum.  There is also a new category for 'dici de omni' so you can reference scholastic texts mentioning the principle, as well as a category for Wikipedia articles, linked from the Logic Museum, which need improvement.

Reasons for belief

There is a survey here being run by Duncan Colvin as part of his postgraduate research at Goldsmiths under the supervision of Prof Chris French, on why people believe or disbelieve certain things.  I tried but gave up at the first slide.  I had to indicate whether I believed or disbelieved creationism, and my top 3 reasons for believing or disbelieving it.  I thought straight away of the reasons scholastics might give for believing in the eternity or finitude of the world, constructed as three arguments for, three against, a long discussion for or against, followed by 'replies to the main arguments', and then realised any reply I gave in the little boxes on the survey would be sadly inadequate against such a standard.

Indexical facts and materialism

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

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

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

Street of straw

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

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

Buridan on logical form

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

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

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

Buridan's Summa Dialectica

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

On knowledge of God

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

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

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

Larkin on semantics

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

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

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

Context and content

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

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

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

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

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

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

Who voted for the Wikipedia blackout?

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

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

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

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

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

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

Anonymity and governance

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Wikipedia and democracy

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The narrative conception of reference

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

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

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

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

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

Critical Thinking

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

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

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

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

Brains

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

Semantic reference and speaker's reference

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

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

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

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

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

More about non-men

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

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

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

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

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

Men and non-men

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

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

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

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

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

De re and de dicto

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

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

Latin

English

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

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

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

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

Wikipedia student assignments - what could go wrong

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

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

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

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

Tomorrow: Thomas Aquinas.

Reprise (reference)

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

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

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

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

Augustine on language

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

Reference and intention

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

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

And the second member goes on

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

And the third continues

(3) Jenny was only eight years old.

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

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

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

The causal theory of reference

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

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

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

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

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

Aardvarks and reference fixing

Kripke writes:

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

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

More Augustine

Now added in parallel text:

• De moribus ecclesiae catholicae
• De moribus Manichaeorum
• De duabus animabus

About the Manicheans, mostly.

Whitehead on thinking

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

Augustine - Soliloquies

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

Kripke on reference fixing

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

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

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

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

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

*I have modifed Evans' wording to avoid indent problems

On the usefulness of believing

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

Did Shakespeare write Shakespeare?

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

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

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

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

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