Friday, December 16, 2022

Explicit structure

“Explicit is better than implicit.”
— The Zen of Python

Some works are highly systematic, and they make their structure explicit. They may have intricately divided subheadings like Kant’s works, or they may try to emphatically set apart the definitions and axioms like Spinoza, or they may use an apparatus like medieval disputation or symbolic logic.

Other works leave that implicit. Hobbes’s Leviathan is rightly recognized as a highly understandable and systematic and rigorous work, even if it’s mistaken about things— but it’s relatively “low-tech”, with the running text apparently divided into chapters just to break up the reading and make lookups easier. The case is similar with Murray Rothbard’s ethics and economics, regardless of their other merits.

Implicit structure seems to make for more pleasant reading, but it can also make the structure harder to pick out. Some people may not notice that, besides his famous self-ownership, Rothbard introduces an entirely new fundamental axiom when he starts to talk about punishment and proportionality, since he doesn’t set it apart very emphatically.

It seems easier to simply dismiss an implicitly structured work, since there is no simple way to pick out the parts of its analysis that you reject or would want changed. If you disagree with Hobbes, then I guess you just disagree, and that’s that. If you reject a proposition of Spinoza, on the other hand, you can easily be called upon to criticize either the demonstration or the definitions and axioms which it explicitly evokes.

Sometimes, a lack of explicit structure can allow for a real lack of structure. Hume’s Treatise seems to have a lot of “filler” chapters, which I’m not sure why he even included them. It probably made sense at the time. Maybe.

I think that, in the end, explicit structure is simply better, it’s just not used more because it’s harder to accomplish. Some great work has been done with merely implicit structure, but it could benefit from more explicit formulation— as Spinoza did to Descartes, in his geometrical exposition of the Principles.

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Thursday, December 1, 2022

Damages

The payment of damages must be distinguished both from the restitution of stolen goods and from punishment. It is like the former in some ways and like the latter in others.

Distinction as to definition

The restitution of stolen goods is the return of the specific objects that were stolen, without any attempt to compensate for the fact that they must have suffered wear and use and possibly have been damaged. The payment of damages is the attempt to compensate for all of these things; it includes use and wear, since these are damages done to the good in a broad sense.

Punishment is an act of direct or indirect interference upon a criminal’s body or property1 with the intention to correct moral vices that he is thought to have. It may be materially the same with an act of restitution or payment of damages, but not formally the same, since it is only punishment insofar as it is understood through this definition. An act of punishment, insofar as it is neither restitution nor payment of damages, may be called “pure punishment”.

Distinction as to source of moral obligation

The moral obligation of a criminal to give restitution is the same as the criminal’s obligation to respect property rights. The moral obligation of a criminal to pay damages follows from a similar, but not identical, source. The moral obligation of a criminal to seek his own punishment follows from a significantly different reasoning.

The obligation of a human being to respect property rights follows from the fact that a legitimate owner of property must be expected to have purposes to fulfill with it, so that usage of the property without his consent must be interfering with his purposes, therefore creating an action conflict, which is violent and irrational.

The obligation of a criminal to pay damages follows from the fact that a legitimate owner of property must be expected to have had purposes to fulfill with it, so that, when his property was damaged, his ability to fulfill those purposes was to that extent permanently impeded. So, assuming his purposes to have been rational, it is irrational not to desire that he regain his power to fulfill them, since otherwise he must be understood to have desires that he cannot satisfy, which makes him less understandable as a rational being to that extent.

The moral obligation of a criminal to seek his own punishment follows to a certain extent from his obligation to be virtuous, supposing that there do exist punishments available which he knows to be efficacious for correcting his vices; additionally, goodwill for his community obliges him to seek the deterrence of further crimes in it, as his punishment might provide.

Distinction as to peacefulness and extent

Payment of damages, like punishment, may be exacted either coercively or uncoercively. Like punishment, it is also always uncertain as to what precise extent is proper. Coercive payment of damages, like coercive punishment, may only be exacted by a legitimate state.

Restitution of stolen goods, on the other hand, is always of a precise extent, which is the return of whatever currently remains of the good. Regardless of whether it is exacted voluntarily or involuntarily, its exaction does not constitute coercion, since the property rights have remained with the legitimate owner throughout.

While a state may exercise mercy and refuse to punish, a state may not exercise mercy on behalf of the victim by refusing to exact just damages. However, the state need not agree with the victim as to what extent of damages is just.

Notes

  1. In the beginning of the post on punishment, I only mentioned the criminal’s body. But the broad definition stated at that point was clearly including both direct and indirect interference, since I moved on to distinguish coercive from uncoercive punishments. This is because I believe interference with a person’s property, whether direct or indirect, to be a kind of indirect interference with their body.↩

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Saturday, November 26, 2022

How to interpret the Pope

Mike Lewis, editor of WherePeterIs.com, wrote a blog post in June that contains the following passage:

So the question becomes whether you are able to accept the teaching in good conscience or not. If the pope was to, say, add a sentence to the Catechism mandating that all Catholics were morally bound to be Yankees fans, I would (obviously) dissent.

Fortunately I believe Catholicism to be true, so that will never happen. But the point is that I lack the authority to change the actual Church teaching. Yet many Catholics think they can undo Amoris Laetitia or say the Church approves of the death penalty because it doesn’t align with their understanding of Catholic doctrine. They can’t.

He’s right to think that this will never happen. But in that post, he seems to think that this can never seem to happen, either. And I think this isn’t right.

The Church could seem to teach absurdities, but never truly teach them

If the Pope added the sentence to the Catechism, “all Catholics are morally bound to be Yankees fans”, this sentence in that context wouldn’t necessarily mean to teach that all Catholics are morally bound to be Yankees fans. This is because faith cannot contradict reason, and the Church herself teaches this, and it would be contrary to reason to believe that all Catholics are morally bound to be Yankees fans.

If the sentence “all Catholics are morally bound to be Yankees fans” were added to the Catechism, the proper interpretation of it would therefore be as meaning something figurative, or as a misprint, or something else like that. It certainly can’t mean what on the surface it appears to mean, since that would be irrational. And since it never meant to teach anything wrong, it would not be dissent to disagree with the idea that all Catholics are morally bound to be Yankees fans; it would only be dissent to disagree with whatever the sentence’s “true meaning” was in that context.

Absurdities are different from contradictions with (the apparent meaning of) Tradition

I do not mean to propose a standard of what I agree with, but only one of conformity with the nature of human reason itself, which cannot believe absurd ideas like “murder is okay” or “circles are not round”. These sentences are impossible to accept on their surface meaning, and if we wanted to be charitable with an ordinary friend, we certainly wouldn’t believe he meant to teach their surface meaning if he said the corresponding sentences. We should be much more charitable with the Church, which necessarily never contradicts herself or human reason.

Mike has a point when he raises examples about the Trinity or about traditions more broadly. Unlike matters of reason – such as morality – we don’t have knowledge about the true interpretation of matters of faith. Private interpretation is Protestant, after all. So, if the Pope said that “the Trinity has four persons in it”, it is possible that the surface meaning of that is actually correct, and the previous Church teachings that seemed to teach the contrary were the ones who misspoke. Either way, the Church is consistent, and it is possible for a reasonable person to accept all her teachings, as we are required to. Mike seems to think that in some cases, it would be impossible, and we would have to dissent from some – even though it would still not be right to do so. But we can’t have a moral duty to do the impossible.

Surface interpretation can be dissent, while rational and consistent interpretation cannot

Mike seems to think that this sort of rational and consistent interpretation of sentences is itself some kind of Protestant private interpretation. But it isn’t, since the Pope remains the authority on which persons are Catholic. If the Pope really meant to teach that murder is okay, he could exercise his authority by excommunicating everyone who interpreted his sentence “murder is okay” in a more rationalized way. If he did this, of course, it would mean that Catholicism is false, since it would obviously be necessary to believe something irrational to be a Catholic. But until the Pope did this, it would be the Catholics who actually believed that the Church taught that murder is okay who would be the dissenters, since it is blasphemous to interpret the Church to have meant something irrational.

Anyway, Mike has recently said these arguments in the context of a discussion with Ed Feser about the death penalty, and I don’t agree with either of their opinions on the topic.

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Wednesday, November 23, 2022

Agnes Callard

This blog post is my fan page for Agnes Callard, a philosopher who teaches at the University of Chicago. It is inspired by an earlier fan page, which, at the time of writing, I thought had gone down because its URL had changed. That page, made by Sravan Bhamidipati, summarized Agnes’s opinions on various topics and linked to all of her articles.

This page reproduces Sravan’s list of links and adds other links, as well as some biographical information about Agnes that I thought was worth noticing. Unlike Sravan, I have not attempted to summarize Agnes’s opinions on any topics here, although I have a separate post that summarizes her book. This page has benefited from having been noticed and praised by Agnes herself and pinned to her Twitter, which has helped bring some information I had missed to my attention.

For biographical information about Agnes, touching chiefly on the event christened “Arnoldgate” below, I also recommend the profile of her that was published by the New Yorker on 2023-03-06, which Agnes herself seemed to think was fair.

Drama

Agnes Callard has been involved in three main drama events, which I have named “Arnoldgate”, “Picketgate” and “Candygate”, after the -gate suffix pattern.

Arnoldgate

Arnoldgate refers to the fact that Agnes Callard (maiden name Gellen) left her husband, Benjamin Callard, and married a graduate student named Arnold Brooks, who she had met while still married to Ben.

She and Ben hosted a talk about it as part of her “Night Owls” debate series; the talk may be watched here. Ben seems to still be on good terms with Agnes and her children.

This created some drama at the time and since, and was brought up again by some people when Candygate happened. Arnoldgate was the chief topic of the now-famous profile of Agnes for the New Yorker.

Picketgate

Picketgate refers to the fact that Agnes Callard did not stop teaching her classes around the beginning of June 2019. This was during a ‘strike’ of graduate students – or whatever the proper name is, since apparently the union wasn’t ‘recognized’ yet. Anyway, she was crossing picket lines to teach class, and on June 5th she published a column about why she did it, which apparently caused a lot of Twitter drama that was also brought up again a lot during later events. (This wasn’t on the first version of this page because I had personally missed it, but I was just informed.)

She hosted a public “Night Owls” event with a union representative to address this, but this one apparently wasn’t recorded.

Candygate

Candygate refers to the fact that Agnes Callard, who often tweets stories about her children, once (on 2022-11-01) posted this tweet:

9yo: mama you DIDN’T throw out the halloween candy?!—

[background: we have a halloween tradition where after the kids go to bed, I throw all their candy in the garbage. The next morning, they are filled with rage.]

—thank you SO much!!! [hugs & kisses]

Reader, I forgot.

Agnes’s supposed Hallowe’en tradition created a lot of Twitter drama, which was famous enough to end up on BuzzFeed. At the time, she was proud to end up on BuzzFeed, and thought that her 2020 essay “Acceptance Parenting” was relevant to the topic. Later, she was interviewed by the Daily Nous about it.

Links

Social media profiles by Agnes Callard

Videos with Agnes Callard

She has a YouTube channel, and in that channel she has a playlist of videos from outside her channel. So that covers most of the videos.

But at least one video is missing from that playlist, as of now:

There’s also this Instagram reel of her being asked about her clothing.

Podcasts with Agnes Callard

As a host

As a guest

Articles about Agnes Callard, and written interviews with her

In English

In other languages

Articles by Agnes Callard

Boston Review

Cato Unbound

The Chronicle of Higher Education

Daily Nous

Harper’s Magazine

The New York Times

The New Yorker

The following are the articles by Agnes for The New Yorker, but of course, this profile written by Rachel Aviv about her is famous.

The Point Magazine

The Toronto Star

Unherd

The Wall Street Journal

Academic papers by Agnes Callard

Books by Agnes Callard

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Tuesday, November 15, 2022

Catharsis

It is famously unclear what exactly Aristotle meant by “catharsis” (“purgation”) in Book VI of the Poetics, where the last part of the definition of tragedy is that “through pity and fear, it brings about the catharsis of such emotions”.

It is worthwhile to try to look at what the term has come to mean nowadays. Today, the OED says that catharsis is “the process of releasing, and thereby providing relief from, strong or repressed emotions” – where “strong” is a typical interpretation of what the “such emotions” part meant in Aristotle,[1] but “or repressed” is actually mixing it with the Freudian definition, which I will explain next.

The Freudian definition is often given as “the process of reducing or eliminating a complex by recalling it to conscious awareness and allowing it to be expressed” – which seems to be accurate, but was written by a pair of historians (Schultz & Schultz, A History of Modern Psychology) and is often (e.g., here, here, and here) misattributed directly to Freud & Breuer’s Studies on Hysteria, where I believe it is not found. The best text I have seen on the development of the concept within psychology is this one. I think it is probably unrelated to Aristotle, but it is interesting to try to see it that way.

Merriam–Webster actually gives the Aristotelian and the Freudian definitions separately – “purification or purgation of the emotions (such as pity and fear) primarily through art” and “elimination of a complex by bringing it to consciousness and affording it expression”. Notably, the Aristotelian definition is translated almost literally, without trying to give a specific interpretation of what “emotions (such as pity and fear)” are. So the OED and M–W together seem to try tell us that the term has retained (one version of) its obscure Aristotelian meaning, but with the addition of Freud’s take on the concept as a possible sense of the word.

While the interpretation of catharsis as “purgation” in a sense of giving “release” to the emotions is common, and probably how the word should be used in (out-of-context) modern English usage, it is worth noting that Leon Golden has forcefully argued, in the last part of his Aristotle and the Arc of Tragedy, that there are various philological and theoretical grounds for reading “catharsis” in Aristotle as “intellectual clarification”. Sure enough, this definition is even listed in the LSJ. The idea seems to be, then, that the essence of tragedy is that it makes our emotions intellectually clearer to us.

In the case of the Oedipus Rex, which Aristotle analyses in the Poetics, this would happen through our realizing that Oedipus had to suffer for the prophecy to be fulfilled, so that his suffering fits into this larger cosmic context. As Golden himself says:

The events of Oedipus Rex, Othello, and Death of a Salesman are riveting and persuasive because we are convinced that necessary or probable forces (not irrational, aimless chance) are controlling the events that are unfolding in these mimetic representations and so leading meaningfully to deep learning and understanding about the human condition. That intimate and valuable connection between ourselves as human beings and the work of art is not made if we have recourse to interpretations of catharsis that bear no cognitive connection to the imitative pleasure that is a defining element of our humanity and, it can be argued, the very purpose of our being human.

[1] Addendum, 2022-12-25: I would take this typical interpretation to be exemplified by Malcolm Heath’s introduction to the Penguin edition of the Poetics, though it does not say so in so many words. 

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Wednesday, November 9, 2022

Poets

Three years ago, I used to think that, similarly to Plato, I had an argument against the poets, or rather, against fiction in general.

The basic idea was that fiction is not limited to what has happened in the real world, and therefore contains distortions. So, if someone spent a large proportion of his time reading fiction, the distortions would probably begin to affect his expectations about reality, and he would become a less reasonable person. This would be worse, I reasoned, with more poorly-written fiction, since it would probably be more distorted than well-written fiction.

I actually still believe this argument, but I no longer think that it suffices to recommend that people not read fiction. The reason is that I have come to believe that works of history and science are not faithful representations of the world either, and they are just as likely to mislead someone. So it makes no sense to avoid fiction exclusively. And since nowadays, it is more or less impossible to live without news, history, scientific reporting, and so on, it makes no difference to read fiction too.

I noticed then that it is ridiculous when some people constantly compared real events to events in Harry Potter. But now I also notice that it is no worse to have one’s worldview shaped by certain news outlets.

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Saturday, November 5, 2022

Historical exposition

I believe that there are four main types of historical exposition.

First, there is analysis, which takes recorded facts and expounds them according to assumed causal or logical connections. Analysis may be given according to the synthetic method, giving first the causes and then the effects, or the analytic method, giving first the effects and moving on to the causes. But this is a difference of style, and both methods are nevertheless historical analysis.

Second, there is conjecture, which proposes facts beyond what is recorded. Conjecture is divided into abductive conjecture, analytic conjecture, and synthetic conjecture.

Abductive conjecture proposes possible causes for a given fact. For instance, a historian may conjecture that a sudden disappearance of a people was due to epidemic disease, although there are no traces of the disease left. Analytic conjecture proposes possible components of a given fact. For instance, a historian may conjecture that a recorded stabbing was done with daggers, although the source does not mention the particular weapons. Synthetic conjecture proposes possible effects of a given fact. For instance, a historian may conjecture that an epidemic caused the afflicted population to save less of their income for the distant future, since their survival was uncertain, although there is no record of the amount of their savings.

All history involves at least some conjecture, since it must be supposed that at least some of the known records are truly records and not fabrications, which is an abductive conjecture, albeit often highly certain.

Legend, myth, and fiction (added 2022-11-30)

In view of the terms just mentioned, I have found it useful to distinguish myths and legends from purely historical narratives, as well as purely fictional narratives.

A narrative exposition may propose facts that have no connection with any given facts; such proposals are not to be called conjectural but arbitrary, and insofar as a narrative does this, it is not historical but legendary.

Insofar as a narrative proposes facts, whether arbitrary or conjectural, that are incomprehensible either by concepts of experience, or by a definite analogy with those concepts, such a narrative is mythical. So, by this division, some myths are legends, and some legends are myths, but not all.

A narrative is purely fictional when it is not intended to be connected with present experience by a chain of efficient causes.

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Thursday, October 13, 2022

Emotions are not beliefs

Emotions can happen at the same time as beliefs, and can cause them as well as be caused by them. That said, everyone knows that emotions are not beliefs. This fact has some consequences which I have found useful to list and explain in detail.

They are physiological, not rational

The main difference between emotions and beliefs is that emotions are never caused by your reasoning processes, but by your animal instincts. Accordingly, it is possible for things such as hunger, tiredness, hormones and medications to affect your emotions. This is useful to keep in mind.

They cannot be justified, only expected

It is a common teaching that a belief, if properly caused, can be called knowledge; this is called the justification of the belief. But since emotions are not beliefs, they cannot be justified in that sense. Your emotions can never be called knowledge, although you can know that you felt them. Since they are not even caused by your rational processes, they are certainly not derived as conclusions from your surroundings; they can only be caused by your body’s instincts in an expected or an unexpected way.

They cannot be true, only proper

Beliefs can be true or false, but emotions cannot. We believe, of course, that some emotions are appropriate in some circumstances, such as grief when someone dies. This is a combination of the emotions being expected in the former sense – due to human instinct – and “cultural expectations”, i.e., social norms that require some emotions at some times. Still, properly speaking, the emotions are not true or false; unlike beliefs, they do not represent anything to you, so they cannot be accurate or inaccurate.

They have causes, not reasons

Philosophers usually distinguish between reasons, which only beliefs can have, and causes, which emotions (and other events) can also have. Laypeople tend to ignore this distinction, but it is useful, especially when you are feeling strong emotions. Your beliefs about the past have reasons, which are your memories of the past. They should, accordingly, continue to be believed as long as the reason remains, i.e., as long as the memory remains. Your emotions, by contrast, were caused by events in the past, but the events are not still reasons for them. It is perfectly right, and probably advisable, to stop feeling them as soon as possible.

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Saturday, October 8, 2022

Impartial journalism

I have thought for some years about whether the idea of journalistic impartiality even makes sense. Recently, a friend helped me see it in a new way.

0. Contents

1. The abstract problem

In the consideration of a subject which may be examined with impartiality, but cannot be viewed with indifference…

— Gibbon, Decline and Fall, §20

I had usually thought about journalistic impartiality as an abstract problem. It is difficult enough to define what it would even mean for a newspaper to be presented “objectively” or “impartially”, especially if this is meant to be attainable. Usually, no one cares enough to be rigorous, and people will simply state, without argument, that journalism either can or can’t be impartial, and that it either should or shouldn’t try to do so. I thought for a while that I had a pretty fair case for the conclusion that it is impossible, and this is what I will present next.

1.1. Item presentation

Though I could not always present it so concisely, I believe my argument went something like this:

  1. “Impartiality” should be defined as neutrality with respect to different possible worldviews.
  2. Every decision about how to write something is a human decision, and must have a reason, whether conscious or not.
  3. It is impossible for this reason to be perfectly neutral with respect to all worldviews.
  4. So, it is impossible for any decision about how to write something to be neutral and impartial.

I thought this argument was pretty good, but it nevertheless does inevitably seem that a lot of things are written without any partiality. Maybe the “trade jargon” of journalism prevents partiality somehow. Which is why the following was also important to me.

1.2. Item selection

Even if a news item can possibly be presented impartially, it is clear that a parallel argument can be made about how to select which news items to report, and what kind of emphasis to give them – as in deciding, for instance, whether an item is front page material or not. Given different newspapers with different items and emphases, someone would be hard pressed to claim that any one selection and ordering of items is “the objectively most important news to the public”. Clearly, then, the selection and ordering of items must reflect some point of view, even if the language inside reports somehow does not.

2. The concrete problem

Inner psychological states are never accessible to the historian.

— Bart Ehrman, Forgery and Counterforgery, §3

It turns out that the problem of journalistic partiality has quite a different nature when addressed concretely. My best friend, who does not usually look at cable news, ended up having to watch some recently, and she told me the problems she saw with it, which I thought was insightful.

2.1. Cable news

The problem is that networks such as Fox News habitually do the following:

  1. Impute motives to people that they have not actually stated (e.g., “X politician is trying to do XYZ”)
  2. Report events in a way that is obviously interpretive, regarding moral or aesthetic value (and often inflammatory, e.g. “X politician is using Y group as pawns”)

This is the typical way that they talk about anything, as opposed to there being a separation between “news”, where this is not done, and “commentary”, where this is done; even the running on-screen headlines will have statements of this sort.

2.2. Cable news watchers

In my experience, this actually makes it harder for habitual watchers of such sensationalist content – whether on Fox News or on certain YouTube channels – to see things from any other perspective than their own. Since this is the main way they hear about news, they have a harder time separating the facts from the values that come with them.

Since the content is often meant to arouse anger and other strong emotions, people who watch it often feel such emotions about the content, and have a harder time thinking and talking calmly about contemporary politics. They often fiercely hate their political opponents, and can sometimes find them unbearable.

Also, the habit of ascribing bad motives to political enemies seems to make some people really believe that a large proportion of people with opposing politics really do act with bad intentions a lot of the time. They are led to think that our opponents have no conscience, and are conspiring to destroy the things we hold dear; that they are evil, and are out to get us.

I have seen these effects in some other people, and also in myself. They are defects in thought.

3. Solutions

The solution, then, to the concrete problem, is simply to avoid such value and intention judgments in news reporting, as well as displays of emotion. It is much less difficult than the abstract problem, which is probably unsolvable. News publications can probably easily be impartial in the sense of only reporting observable things, and leave their particular interpretations to a dedicated editorial section.

There is, of course, no incentive for cable news networks or sensationalist YouTube channels to change their ways at all. I believe that the first to do so would simply lose its public to the remaining sensationalists. The public that watches these things is probably simply not interested in impartial reporting; for such people, I suppose the only hope is that some external reason will cause them to grow more mature, so that they will grow tired of such content and abandon it.

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Monday, October 3, 2022

European marriage pattern causes preliminary research

Just earlier today, I found out about the so-called “European marriage pattern” (EMP) and “Hajnal line”. The latter seems less supported by data than the former. Please look at the linked Wikipedia articles to find out what they are.

This got me curious about the possible causes of marriage patterns, generally, and the EMP specifically. (Much of the controversy seems to be about its effects, i.e., whether the EMP leads to improved economic growth or not.) While it would be good to properly think this through from principles, I wanted to see what theories have been raised about it. From a cursory search, apparently there have been the following:

  • Racial and biological theories.— The “Hajnal line” Wikipedia article makes several mentions of racist theories about the line; they apparently rely on the line itself being factually supported, which is questionable. The idea seems to be that the Slavic peoples, for reasons inherent to their race, favor a reproductive strategy used by species whose offspring are individually expendable, such as certain insects; so-called r/K selection would seem to be related here. (Personally, I find such theories distasteful, but given how cursory my research has been so far, I have no arguments against them.)
  • Catholic Christian culture and regulations.— The Catholic Church seems to have had various internal regulations and theological ideas which favor the marriage habits corresponding to the EMP, and nuclear families generally. These explanations are covered at some length in the “Western European marriage pattern” Wikipedia article, and in this Mises Institute article.
  • The Black Death.— This other Mises Institute article cites, in passing, a different theory “that the Black Death aided the EMP by trigging a labor market for women.” A 2013 academic article by Tracy Dennison (PDF), focusing mostly on the EMP’s effects, also mentions the idea that “in England after the Black Death, it is claimed, labour scarcity and a shift from arable to pastoral agriculture increased demand for women’s labour outside the household, encouraging a move towards late marriage, high lifetime celibacy, and a calibration of marriage decisions to economic fluctuations.”
  • Corporative institutions.— The just-cited Dennison article (PDF) also seems to mention how “strong corporative institutions (communities, guilds, universities, firms) which benefited economic growth by guaranteeing property rights, enforcing contracts, and facilitating exchange” made it easier to have a network of people you trust without a large family. This is mainly claimed to be an effect, but also apparently a cause, of the EMP.

That’s all I have seen for now. These things might all be part of the answer (though I wouldn’t consider the first one). As the following passage from the Dennison article (PDF) highlights, however, the range of currently available theories seems unsatisfying, and more work should probably be done:

No variant of this new literature unambiguously spells out the direction of the causal relationships involved. On the one hand, the EMP is supposed to have created a better position for women. But on the other, greater female autonomy is supposed to have given rise to the EMP. And in some variants, both marriage patterns and women’s position are ascribed to underlying factors such as European or Christian cultural norms, the Black Death, or pastoral agriculture. The evident endogeneity of the different variables limits the scope of these claims to the merely descriptive assertion that the EMP was associated with a higher status for women, which in turn benefited the economy.

But even this claim is at odds with the evidence. As the women’s history literature has shown, women had a good economic position in some societies with the EMP and a bad one in others. [...]

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Thursday, September 29, 2022

Influential minority

Suppose that a minority of people has a strong influence on how the majority votes.

You could think either that:

  • (A) This is a bad thing, because this influence presents a strong danger that the people are being fooled into voting for the interests of this minority group instead of their own interests. Without this influence, there is a greater chance that the interests of the majority will decide the laws, which is the ideal.
  • (B) This is a good thing, because the majority of people do not know much about laws, so that their only hope of voting in good laws is by being influenced by a group of more knowledgeable people. Without this, they will vote ignorantly, and be governed by bad laws.
  • (C) This makes no difference, because a minority can only be popular with the majority by saying what the majority already thinks.

It is probably inevitable that all of these sides will show up whenever there is an influential minority, according to whether someone likes them or not.

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Ceptibilism

I have given a fun name to my opinion that words such as “existence” and “knowledge” have exactly two meanings, corresponding to the two mental powers of sensation and reason. Playing on the fact that the former may be called “perception” and the latter “conception”, I have shaved off the prefix, arriving at the neat phrasing that existence is “ceptibility”, i.e., it is indifferent between the conceivable and the perceivable, unless one of the senses of the word is specified. My opinion is that when we say that something exists or that we know it, we mean either that we have perceived it through the senses or that we formed a concept of it. (This is also what we are denying when we deny that something exists, or that we or others know it.) Since we have either conceived it or perceived it, we may be said to have “ceived” it, as a retrogressive coinage.

I think a lot of philosophical debates are very vague because we don’t specify which sense of these words we’re using. Atheists deny that God exists because they are using the word “exists” in the sense of perception, but almost all theists agree that God can’t be perceived with the senses, and they only use the word “exists” in a different sense, although they don’t notice it, because both sides insist on talking about “existence” without defining it.

Only the name is new. This opinion was mentioned before in the following blog posts:

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Sunday, September 25, 2022

Existence of God

I explain in what sense I understand the sentence “God exists”, and why I think it is true in the sense I mean it.

This blog post was first written as a series of text messages to an atheist friend who thought that he simply had no reason to believe it. I have edited it very little from what I sent to him, so the tone may be unusual.

First, notice that, for most of history, people have thought that they can prove that “God exists” is true from pure philosophy; and I think so too, but you have to understand the words right. It is obviously false if by “God” you mean a bearded man in the sky, for instance; there are many true, and many false meanings of it. I’ll explain what I mean by the words, and why I think my sense is good enough for all the mainstream religions, although some staunch bearded-man-believers would hate me for meaning what I do by it. Alright? ...

0. Contents

1. What God is said to be

OK, so first we have “God”. The most ecumenical senses of the word, I think, are these two.

Sense A: The principle/cause of all other things, which is distinct from them and superior to them. (Wuellner)

This is usually what “arguments for God’s existence” are proving, and the most abstract philosophers have this in common with any religious grandmas. The latter two restrictions would exclude most kinds of ‘pantheism’ from counting here.

Sense B: Something “absolutely perfect” in some sense, usually including being perfectly morally good, all-powerful, all-knowing etc.

This one is also common. I would say that my sense of the word “God” fits both of these two common senses, which is good, since that means I’m not just making up a new sense for the word. I wouldn’t usually define God using these phrases, but what I mean by the word fits both of them. I’ll explain “exists” next.

2. That the forms exist

Now, the funny thing about “exists” is most people never define it, and they just talk about things existing and not existing without explaining what they mean, and I think that is what causes a lot of confusion nowadays. This is especially because I think there are two main senses of the word, so I am going to define both of them.

Sense 1: something exists if it can be perceived with the senses.

I think everyone agrees with this; you and I exist, and so on. I think when people are sure that God doesn’t exist, they are thinking that this is the only sense. But I think there’s the other one too.

Sense 2: something exists if it can be understood with reason.

In this sense, you can say that perfect circles exist, and the set of natural numbers exists, even though you’ve never seen them, but it remains true that married bachelors and other nonsense don’t exist. In this sense, we have to say that unicorns exist, although that’s weird, so we rarely do – to avoid ambiguity, we stick to sense 1 when talking about those.

Now, I think those are really the only senses of “exist”, since we human beings don’t have any other mental powers besides the senses and reason. And almost all the theologians agree that God doesn’t exist in sense 1 – it says in the book of John that “no one has ever seen God” (1:18), but even taking only the usual interpretations of the Old Testament, it is usually held that God doesn’t have any physical body, and the times he “appeared” to people were just visions that represented him. So I think you can only go forward with the proof if you agree that sense 2 is a good sense to use the word “exists”. And if that’s fine with you, then I’ll explain how you can understand one thing that fits both senses of “God”, although maybe you’re beginning to get it already.

3. What the form of the good is

I think the way we understand things is we form concepts in our minds, and those concepts are what we are expressing when we give definitions. Now, I think there is one most important concept that is involved with all the others. Plato called it “the form of the Good”, which is very awesome, but maybe not very useful. Sometimes I say it’s “being”, which is also not very clear. But basically it would be the concept of the “intelligible” or understandable or conceivable – it’s one concept, or form, that includes everything that exists in sense 2. Alright? This concept includes all the other concepts, just like the concept of “animal” includes all your ideas of each kind of animal.

4. That the form of the good is God

Now, if you take this central concept, or highest form, you see that it fits Sense A of “God” in a certain way – it is the cause of all things that you understand, insofar as you understand them, since it is involved in your understanding of all of them. Just like your concept of dog is the cause of there being any dogs in your life, since otherwise you couldn’t understand all those shapes and colors as dogs. So it’s the cause of all things insofar as they are intelligible; if you take sense 2 to be the truest sense of existing, which I think Plato did, then that’s perfectly sufficient. (After all, whatever exists in sense 2 has always existed in sense 2, so that’s a more “eternal” way to exist; and since sense 1 concerns “appearance” to your senses, we can say that, by contrast, sense 2 concerns “reality”.) This central concept is superior to the other concepts because it includes all of them, and it’s distinct from them when taken by itself, although it’s part of all of them.

It also fits sense B of “God”, again, only when taken by itself. This is harder to understand, but the idea is that “perfection” would be something fitting the concept. So a perfect dog is a dog that perfectly fits the concept of dog, while a defective dog would depart from the definition in some ways, e.g., dogs are quadrupeds, and the poor pooch only has three legs. Similarly, a morally bad man is departing from the concept of man because we understand that human beings are rational, and being immoral is irrational. Alright? That’s how classical philosophy works. Anyway, so, every concept perfectly fits itself, of course —the concept of dogness is a perfect dog, although particular dogs aren’t perfect— and if you take the universal concept by itself, it obviously has to include every possible perfection, since it includes every other concept – just like how “animals”, taken generally, can do anything that particular animals can do. So the central concept is absolutely perfect too.

5. Epilogue

That’s how I would understand “God exists” in a way that fits both of the common religious ideas about it. Many people would dislike it, but I think it’s pretty good, and good enough for the main religions. Maybe this leaves you a bit confused regarding prayer and miracles, but I can try to explain if you ask a question. If you don’t want to buy all these theories about how thoughts and reason work, then I guess there isn’t much I can do, but I tried.

Anyway, believing that “God exists” in some sense wouldn’t mean you’re a member of any religion, but you have to believe it in order to even be able to believe that a message is from God, right? So it’s a start.

Although you could technically stop there, if you wanted; there are many philosophers who believe it and aren’t in any religion. This seems less common nowadays than in early modern times, but it’s a thing. (I do have an idea of which religion you should join, of course.)

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Judgments

I describe here the division of judgments into kinds from Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason.

First, judgments are divided into a posteriori, or empirical judgments, and a priori judgments.

  • A posteriori judgments are divided into particular empirical judgments and inductive judgments.
  • A priori judgments are divided into pure a priori and impure a priori judgments.

The rest of this blog post will define each of the kinds in that order, with page numbers from the “B” edition of the Critique in parentheses.

0. Contents

1. A posteriori, or empirical judgments

A posteriori judgments are drawn from some experience, upon which they depend; (B2) so, they are always synthetic. Now, “experience teaches us, to be sure, that something is constituted thus and so, but not that it could not be otherwise”; because of this, a posteriori judgments always have no necessity, and no true or strict universality. They may have assumed and comparative universality, as will be explained next. (B3)

1.1. Particular empirical judgments

Particular empirical judgments are empirical judgments about particular things. They are always a posteriori and they lack any kind of universality. They are said to be derived immediately from experience; an example would be your judgment that a bridge has collapsed, made after you have seen it collapsing. (B2)

Not all particular judgments are empirical, because some of them involve a pure concept of the understanding which confers necessity and strict universality to the judgment; see §2.2 of this post. (Prolegomena, §20, fn1)

1.2. Inductive judgments

Inductive judgments may also be called a priori secundum quid, or “a priori in some respect”, but not a priori simpliciter, or “a priori simply speaking”.1 This is because, while they are not independent of all experience, they may be said to be independent “of this or that experience”, since they involve judging about something before you see it actually happening. For example, you may judge that your house will collapse right after you have undermined its foundation. You know this before actually seeing the house collapse, but only because you know from experience that “bodies are heavy and hence fall if their support is taken away”. (B2)

This is to say that these judgments have “empirical universality”: they are drawn from a general rule, but the general rule is itself drawn from experience, through induction.

Empirical universality is an “assumed and comparative” kind of universality (B3) which is “only an arbitrary increase in validity from that which holds in most cases to that which holds in all”, as in the proposition “all bodies are heavy”. (B4) That is, we cognize that bodies are heavy “as far as we have yet perceived” and arbitrarily decide that this must hold for all bodies.

To emphasize their inferior certainty in comparison with a priori judgments, I tend to refer to inductive judgments as “probable”, but Kant did not do this.

2. A priori judgments

A priori judgments are “those that occur absolutely independently of all experience” (B2), so that they have necessity and strict universality. (B4) They may be either analytic or synthetic, and investigating the latter kind was a major aim of Kant’s. (B73)

2.1. Pure a priori judgments

These are a priori judgments that contain no concepts drawn from experience, (B28) though we still find that all of these are nevertheless only valid in empirical use, (B170) i.e., they may only be used to judge about appearances.

Synthetic pure a priori judgments include all properly mathematical judgments, (B741ff) as well as the various principles of the transcendental philosophy (B25ff; table at B200) and the supreme principle of morality. (Groundwork, passim) Various analytic judgments may be trivially drawn from these by clarifying the concepts that they involve.

2.2. Impure a priori judgments

These are a priori judgments that contain some concepts that are themselves drawn from experience, although the judgments made about them are valid a priori. (B3) This is most clearly the case with analytic judgments about empirical concepts, such as “all bachelors are unmarried”:2 although we learn about bachelors and marriage from experience, the judgment that bachelors are unmarried is a priori because it is analytic. Crucially, however, there are other ones, such as the typical judgment that “every alteration has its cause”: although “alteration is a concept that can be drawn only from experience” (B3), this judgment is nevertheless demonstrable a priori, since it is a formulation of the Second Analogy of Experience. (B232ff)

It seems that, in general, although impure a priori judgments concern a concept drawn from experience, they receive the character of necessity and strict universality from a pure concept of the understanding that is involved in them. So, the judgments may even be about particular things, as long as they conceive of those things as being under a universal law. For instance, if instead of judging that “the sun shines on the stone and then it becomes warm”, we judge that “the sun warms the stone”, we conceive of the sunshine under the pure concept of cause, and therefore give it a necessary and strictly universal connection to the heat, making the judgment a priori, though impure. (Prolegomena, §20, fn1)

3. Footnotes

  1. This name itself does not come from the Critique of Pure Reason, but from the Metaphysik Mongrovius, printed in the Lectures on Metaphysics volume. I quote the relevant passage:

    Something is [...] a priori in some respect <secundum quid> when I cognize something through reason, but from empirical principles, e.g., if I throw a stone horizontally – so that it does not fall straight down – one can determine the curve a priori, but according to laws of gravity, which we cognize a posteriori. (pp. 112–113)

    While the Critique does not use this term, it nevertheless clearly describes such judgments without using the name, as a footnote to the Cambridge edition of the Critique indicates.↩

  2. Obviously, here I mean the judgment that “all bachelors are unmarried” made by someone whose concept of “bachelor” is expressed by the definition “unmarried man”. I only even mention this in a footnote because some people try to read the analytic/synthetic distinction as applying to “propositions” being true “in virtue of the meanings of words”, and word meanings are obviously never all that fixed, and those people therefore think they are being very smart by pointing out that “bachelor” sometimes has other meanings, and therefore that the distinction does not work very well after all when used about propositions in this way. I think that, regardless of how other people have used the distinction since his time, this is simply not what Kant was talking about.↩

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Wednesday, September 21, 2022

Catholicism Propounded

Supposing that you want to believe in a religion, this blog post explains why you should become Catholic.

0. Contents

1. Clarification of the search

First, I’ll clarify what you should not be looking for from a religion. You should not be looking for a guide on moral beliefs, or on related beliefs about your freedom and responsibility, or on whether God exists. These issues are matters of knowledge. Since they are capable of precise definition, philosophy can determine, and has determined, the answers to them with certainty. You may simply read the answers off of a philosophy manual, or even from this blog.

Religions should be sought after for questions regarding the possibility and character of an afterlife, as well as the question of why we live in this world rather than in one of the other imaginable worlds. These questions, although they are commonly asked, are of unclear meaning, and we cannot know the answer to them. We may, nevertheless, believe an answer that we are told, and it is safer and more respectable to pick a traditional answer than to make one up. This is why they have been called “articles of faith”.

Religions should also be sought after for the choice of which religious practices to perform, or of which marvelous events to accept as proper miracles. These are questions which are philosophically indifferent, and although some philosophers have claimed to prove the answer of “none” for both of them, they have done so fallaciously. Once again, it makes sense here to pick a tradition and go with it.

If you are determined to accept no answers to these questions, then you are not looking for a religion. Catholicism is only propounded to seekers.

Given this scope of inquiry, I will explain why Catholicism is the right choice of tradition. This blog post will be organized along the traditional “four marks of the Church”, which have been defined in councils and exhaustively discussed by theologians. I have nevertheless thought that it would be convenient to set up my own presentation of them, which is what this blog post is.

2. Unity

The first thing you are looking for from a religious tradition is that it actually have a single definite answer to your questions. The whole reason you are looking for a tradition, after all, is that you decided not to make the answers up for yourself. If you are not quite sure what a tradition teaches, you cannot be sure that you even belong to it, rather than unknowingly diverging from it on some point.

This is where most other traditions fall short. In every other tradition, different teachers teach different doctrines. You are not sure who is right, but more to the point, you are not sure which one actually represents the tradition. ¶ Some of them have a fundamental text – the Bible, say – which supposedly settles disputes. But it doesn’t, of course. It is not actually possible for a written text to have a definite meaning. Each one will read it as he wills. (This blog post is written, but I am alive, and can answer questions from readers.)

Catholicism has a definite content, at least to some extent. To be sure, it has its share of disputes and controversies among theologians. But some things are beyond dispute. They have been defined by councils and popes, and if you diverge from the definitions about such matters, you will be warned and then excommunicated. There is a clear authority of the Catholic Church, which is the Pope. Rarely, there have been multiple claimants to the papacy, making the authority less clear, but these issues are usually overstated, and did not last long, and at any rate, the claimant popes in question did not teach different things on any point of doctrine.

3. Holiness

The second thing you want from a religious tradition is that the answers it gives you be the right answers. Of course, you can’t know that you’re getting the right answers, and this is the whole reason you looked for a tradition to believe in in the first place. Nevertheless, traditions generally cannot avoid speaking on points of science and philosophy which are, technically speaking, matters of knowledge. You would like these things to be fully correct when you hear them – if the tradition is wrong about those, it may well be wrong about the others. God is truthful, so that no one who speaks for God can say falsehoods while doing so.

Catholicism passes this with flying colors. I cannot, of course, explain every teaching of Catholicism regarding science and philosophy and show that it is right, because it would take too long and some people would not be convinced anyway. I can answer questions if asked about specific teachings, however. If you respect me as a person, you may allow that I might be right on this one.

Besides that, however, it is a central teaching of the Catholic religion, defined in the First Vatican Council, that “even though faith is above reason, there can never be any real disagreement between faith and reason, since it is the same God who reveals the mysteries and infuses faith, and who has endowed the human mind with the light of reason.”

So, you are assured of finding no mistakes. If you seem to find a mistaken teaching about science or philosophy in some official Catholic source, you may rest assured that, in all likelihood, the teacher was merely speaking obscurely or confusedly, and his true meaning did not contradict your rational knowledge after all. You may simply go with what reason tells you, and assume that you still belong to Catholicism. This will work every time.

Supposing, God forbid, that it doesn’t work, and that you get excommunicated for teaching a demonstrable rational truth, this will mean that Catholicism is false. I obviously think this hasn’t happened, and won’t happen. If Catholicism were false, the search for a religious tradition would be made much more difficult, perhaps impossible.

4. Catholicity and Apostolicity

Although most traditions, by far, have no clear unity in the sense explained in §2, some non-Catholic traditions nevertheless do seem to have it. The Mormon Church, for instance, has a central authority, and they can similarly excommunicate you from it for teaching the wrong thing. (Officially, it is called “The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints”.) It may be that, somehow, you are not sure of finding any rational mistakes in its doctrines either, so that it isn’t falsified for you on that count. What does clearly rule it out are the other two marks of the Catholic Church, traditionally called catholicity and apostolicity.

In more prosaic terms, these words mean “globality” – geographical universality, the quality of being present worldwide – and antiquity, respectively. The Catholic Church is present all over the world, more or less, and it has existed from since the first century, already claiming continuity with the even older Jewish tradition. The Mormon Church, by comparison, is much more confined to Utah, and certainly does not predate 1830.

Geographical universality, or catholicity (from Ancient Greek καθολικός, “universal”), is important because it means that, from all the groups that are actually teaching anything definite, you are joining the largest group around. The case is similar with the Church’s apostolic antiquity, but across time. We all want to be part of something popular, and if possible, of something that connects us with earlier ages as well. Indeed, sometimes we even think that the true religion should be popular, since it seems dreadfully pessimistic to suppose that the true divine revelation would be stifled or provincial. More practically, supposing that we are wrong at the end of it all, it is less shameful to make a mistake that many other people made. As Augustine said:

Suppose that we have found different persons holding different opinions, and through their difference of opinions seeking to draw persons each one to himself: but that, in the mean while, there are certain pre-eminent from being much spoken of, and from having possession of nearly all peoples. Whether these hold the truth, is a great question: but ought we not to make full trial of them first, in order that, so long as we err, being as we are men, we may seem to err with the human race itself? (De utilitate credendi, §15)

No other religion, from the ones with definite content, will allow you, supposing that you err, to err with the whole human species. Or, at least, with one-sixth of it, by current numbers.

The antiquity of the Catholic Church also means that it most likely was not made up just to dupe you. Joseph Smith benefited greatly from founding the Mormon Church, and his descendants still do so. The Catholic Church only hands down its tradition by rote, because it was handed down to it by a previous generation, and so on throughout the ages of ages. Its priesthood, being celibate, leaves no descendants. Everyone in it is evidently in earnest, for better or worse.

Indeed, in order to believe Catholicism, you do not even have to believe directly in the Catholic Church. Suppose that, taking the Bible as a historical document, you choose the miraculous interpretation of its stories, and believe, as many do, in the divinity of Jesus. Suppose further that you believe that the divine Jesus founded the Catholic Church, which is historically continuous even today with the movement that Jesus founded; and that Jesus promised that the Church would be infallible. This would mean, then, that you have faith in the teachings of the Church only because of your belief in some old miracles and doctrines from ancient history. You don’t have to suppose, from the outset, that the bishops are particularly trustworthy about divine matters, or that the Bible is divinely inspired. No one else is making it this easy for you.

So, supposing that you want to believe in a religion, you should really become Catholic; nothing else makes anywhere near as much sense.

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Tuesday, September 20, 2022

Possible arrangements for a cosmological poem

Suppose that you want to present your cosmological theories to a broad audience. You conceive of a beautiful poem, whether verse or prose: it will present a broad view of the universe as you see it in a brief compass, allowing the reader to marvel at the refined structure of your understanding. There’s one question left to be solved: from where – from what part of the universe – do you begin this poem?

There are a few possible answers, and I have tried to exhaust them here.

0. Contents

1. The silent void (Genesis)

This poem would begin from a primordial chaos, or void, and get to our ordered universe by a series of separations, or divisions. In the book of Genesis, we have light separated from darkness, then the earth from the sky, then the land from the sea. There are other cosmological myths that parallel Genesis, and the arrangement is well suited to metaphysical and philosophical theories as well, as I have shown by a direct parallel with Genesis just earlier. A modern scientific picture which began with the Big Bang would also suit this arrangement, since before the explosion, all matter was confused in a single place.1 Such a poem could eventually arrive, by further division, to the simplest elements (“atoms”) that compose things, but it need not do so, and this is a strength for cosmological theories that do not involve any atoms.

2. The monad (Leibniz)

This poem begins, like Leibniz’s Monadology, from the ultimate simplest elements of the universe, and goes on to describe how they fit together to compose all the things that we experience, possibly working up to a broad view of the whole universe – as the Monadology itself does, ending with a view of the universe as the perfectly-governed city of God. More prosaically, many texts in early natural philosophy began with discussions of primitive elements, such as Aristotle’s Physics and Descartes’s Le Monde, although neither of these were properly atomists, so that poems composed to describe them might fit rather into another section.

3. The monadic chaos (Anaxagoras)

This poem begins by describing how the simplest elements work, but then describes them as composing a primordial chaos, which is then somehow separated into the common objects of experience. This is what (I believe) Anaxagoras thought was quite literally happening – a Mind was slowly separating the chaos of elements into uniform parts – but someone could in theory use this scheme as a poetic structure for a different theory.

4. The human perspective (Pascal)

This poem begins with the common objects of experience. It “zooms into” such objects to find their simplest elements; it also “zooms out from” such objects to find the broader universe that they compose. Since the movement in both cases starts from the same place, the order between them is indifferent. This is done in the section of Pascal’s Pensées called “the disproportion of man”. I have quoted it in full (from the public-domain Project Gutenberg edition) in a footnote to this post.2 Notably, Pascal thought that there could be entire worlds inside atoms, and that similarly, our whole universe could be a mere atom in a much larger world. I am no historian, but I see this as a vivid picture of the strong effect which microscope and telescope observations were having on the human imagination while they were still novelties.

5. Other possibilities

It is unclear whether a poem could divide a primordial chaos directly into simplest elements, and then compose them into common things. As I envision this, it isn’t quite what Anaxagoras did, and I don’t know if it can really make sense conceptually.

I imagine that you could describe the universe with an elaborate analogy to a common object, but this would have to turn out fundamentally the same as one of the given possibilities.

I think all of these kinds of poems may be read as framing devices for presenting the constitution of the universe, without necessarily meaning anything about its history. Some of them are well suited to certain ideas about the latter, however; Genesis has often been interpreted literally, and Anaxagoras almost certainly meant his theories to represent the literal history of the universe.

I have not read Plato’s Timaeus, so I don’t know if it fits one of the structures here or is something else. Also, I would think that some “metaphysical” poems such as Dante’s and Milton’s won’t fit any of these structures because they are rather moral than cosmological.

With these qualifications, I think the four first sections of this post have exhausted all the possibilities for arranging a cosmological poem.

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