Five Ways of Teaching

Mencius said, 'A gentleman teaches in five ways. The first is by a transforming influence like that of timely rain. The second is by helping the student to realize his virtue to the full. The third is by helping him to develop his talent. The fourth is by answering his questions. And the fifth is by setting an example others not in contact with him can emulate. These five are the ways in which a gentleman teaches.'

Mencius Book VII, Part A, section 40. D. C. Lau, tr. Penguin (NY: 1970) p. 191.

On Ought and Is: Preliminary Detour

I promised that I would say something about my own view of the is/ought problem, and thus say something about where I agree and where I disagree with Hume. To give the basic summary at the outset, the points I think Hume gets right are these:

(1) The inability to infer a statement with an 'ought' from a statement with an 'is' is a problem that arises only within the context of moral rationalism.
(2) Hume is right that an account treating moral obligations as relations between ideas is a highly implausible account of obligations.
(3) Hume is right that an 'ought' can be derived from a certain class of facts, namely, facts about what we regard as good and bad.
(4) Much of our moral life is a matter of good or bad moral taste.

Where I chiefly disagree with Hume is in his sentimentalism; I think it leads him to draw the line between reason and passion in the wrong place, and therefore to give a misleading account of how we recognize goods, to confuse virtues and moral roles, and to take a genuine insight (that there is moral taste) too far, by treating it as covering the entire field of moral life. But to understand why I think so, it is important to take a brief detour at the beginning to discuss what Hume means by 'reason'. This is a point that trips up many amateurs reading Hume, not always through any fault of their own.

There is a very famous line from Book II of the Treatise of Human Nature: "Reason is, and ought only to be the slave of the passions, and can never pretend to any other office than to serve an dobey them" (SBN 415). The claim is easy to misunderstand if taken out of context, but in context it makes sense.

'Reason', or as he sometimes calls it, 'understanding', is a technical term for Hume. It is, specifically, the imagination insofar as it judges according to demonstration or probability: "as it regards the abstract relations of our ideas, or those relations of objects, of which experience only gives us information". The 'imagination' part of this is all Hume, since Hume thinks all operations of the mind are operations of the imagination. But insofar as it involves relations, Hume is in agreement (as far as his use of the term goes) with the rationalists. In Malebranche and Clarke, the major rationalists Hume knew, the judgment of reason is understood as the perception of relations. The precise account varies, because there is no perfection agreement about what is related by these relations. But it is a standard rationalist position that when we judge something to be the case, what we are really doing is perceiving a relation between things. So, for instance, a rationalist might hold that when we make a judgment about what 2 + 2 is, we are really not doing anything other than perceiving that the idea of 2 + 2 is related to the idea of 4 by a relation of equality and is related to the ideas of 3, 5, etc., by relations of inequality. And, of course, the use of the word "perceiving" here is quite intentional: rationalists hold that the relations are not made by us, but exist independently of us. All that's left for us to do is to perceive the relation.

So 'reason' is a technical term for the rationalists, and Hume simply takes over this sense of the term -- as I said, and as I will explain later, I think this was a mistake, but it was understandable: it was, after all, the way many of the philosophers who discussed the question used the term. The only modification made was to adjust for the fact that Hume, unlike the rationalists, did not distinguish between reason and imagination (this, I think, is another mistake, but, again, that will come up later). Hume makes his claim about reason being the slave of the passions in the context of motivation, and in particular while discussing the common trope of the struggle of reason against the passions. His point is quite clear: reason in the technical sense can't motivate any action because merely perceiving a relation is not a motivation to anything at all. It may on some occasions be an object of motivation, that is something to be motivated about, but only insofar as you have an independent aversion or inclination to it. Hume is certainly right about this: nothing can motivate except insofar as it seems good or bad. But mere perception of relation between two things is not a recognition of the relation as good or bad, nor of the objects related as good or bad.

In Hume's account we recognize objects or relations as good or bad not by perceiving relations but by the pleasure and pain caused by our passions when we are thinking about the objects or relations. Some things make us uneasy; we are carried away from those things. Some things we find satisfying; we are drawn toward those things. Therefore, since reason can't motivate, and all motivation is through the passions, the only role reason has in action is to bring things to the passions. Reason, as perception of relations, is indeed like a slave: it brings things to the passions to judge, and it is the passions, not reason, that decide what to do with them. And it really ought to be: if you tried to make it the master, nothing would get done. So, Hume concludes, there is no real sense in which anyone experiences a struggle between reason and passion, ever.

Why, then, does the trope exist at all? The answer Hume gives is that 'reason' in the rationalists' technical sense is not the only sense of the term. We have a more colloquial sense, not defined very well, and perhaps not definable at all, that is much broader than the technical sense. On Hume's view, not all passions are violent or easily noticeable. Some passions are very calm and quiet. What is more, a number of these calm and quiet passions are very powerful passions: they are stable, effective, and decisive. Because they are calm and quiet and produce no disorder in us, however, we have a tendency to confuse them with another kind of mental operation that is calm and quiet and produces no disorder: reason. In Hume's own words:

'Tis natural for one, that does not examine objects with a strict philosophic eye, to imagine, that those actions of the mind are entirely the same, which produce not a different sensation, and are not immediately distinguishable to the feeling and perception. Reason, for instance, exerts itself without producing any sensible emotion; and except in the more sublime disquisitions of philosophy, or in the frivolous subtilities of the schools, scarce ever conveys any pleasure or uneasiness. Hence it proceeds, that every action of the mind, which operates with the same calmness and tranquillity, is confounded with reason by all those, who judge of things from the first view and appearance.

These calm passions are known by their effects, which can sometimes be extensive. Examples that Hume gives are benevolence, resentment, love of life, kindness toward children, the general desire for the good, and the general aversion to evil. These things, because they are calm, are colloquially treated as if they had more to do with reason than with other passions. Therefore when people talk about the struggle between reason and passion they are really, in Hume's view, talking about the struggle between two kinds of passion: calm passion and violent passion.

This is an important point, without which Hume's view will be radically misunderstood: what Hume calls 'reason' is not what most people call 'reason'. Most people are not using the term in the technical sense Hume has in mind. 'Reason' for him means what the rationalists mean by it: perception of relations. Most of us use the term in what Hume would regard as a loose sense of the term. Some of the things we attribute to reason Hume would agree should really be attributed to 'reason' if we are going to use the term this loosely; but he thinks it doesn't belong to reason in a strict philosophical sense but to our passions and sentiments.

I've taken this detour because in any comparison between Hume's view and other views, failing to understand what Hume means by 'reason' will muddy the comparison. Hume is using the term in a technical sense, one that must be taken into account in interpreting him. It is also a sense that must be taken into account when saying what one thinks he gets right and wrong. Since this post is getting a bit long, I will do that in my next post on this subject, which should appear at some point in the next few days.

In a Lower Orb, and Slower

The Conquest
by John Norris

I.

In Power or Wisdom to contend with thee,
Great God, who but a Lucifer would dare?
Our Strength is but Infirmity,
And when we this perceive, our Sight's most clear:
But yet I will not be excell'd thought I,
In Love; in Love I'll with my Maker vy.

II.

I view'd the Glories of thy Seat above,
And thought of every Grace and Charm divine,
And farther to encrease my Love
I measured all the Heights and Depths of thine.
Thus there broke forth a Strong and Vigorous Flame,
And almost melted down my mortal Frame.

III.

But when thy Bloody Sweat and Death I view,
I own (Dear Lord) the Conquest of thy Love;
Thou dost my highest Flights outdo;
I in a lower Orb, and slower, move.
Thus in this Strife's a double Weakness shewn,
Thy Love I cannot equal, nor yet bear my own.

Links and Notes

* The Women in Philosophy Task Force "is an umbrella group that works to coordinate initiatives and intensify efforts to advance women in philosophy". (ht)

* Alexander Pruss on the Grim Reaper Paradox and the Kalam argument

* D. G. Myers has a post up on the topic of influence, following on a discussion of what it means for something (like a novel) to be overrated. There are some things I agree with and disagree with, I think, and you can expect a post at some point; but I will have to think through some things more carefully first.

* The SEP has a new article on xuanxue.

* George Washington Carver's pamphlet, How to Grow the Peanut and 105 Ways of Preparing it for Human Consumption. The same website also gives his pamphlets on sweet potatoes and tomatoes. Carver, I think, is often misunderstood; he was one of the great science popularizers of the twentieth century. He did relatively minor scientific work, had far fewer discoveries than are usually attributed to him, and most of those were mere curiosities rather than revolutionary. He was a competent researcher, in that he got results, but he was also an unorthodox one, perhaps due to his lifelong aversion to administrative tasks: he refused to write down his procedures and he kept no lab records. But he was truly extraordinary at interesting people in the science of simple things, so much so that in the six decades since his death his legend has never stopped growing.

* Some notable YouTube finds:

Johanna Kurkela, Nothing Else Matters
The Quire of Cheahs, Spem in Alium. The wonders of technology: Spem in Alium is a forty-part polyphonic piece by Thomas Tallis. Once this would have required a choir of forty people, each taking a part. This was done by one person and recording technology. The nearly ten minute piece required 36 hours to make. (ht)
Idumea (an excellent version, a bit quieter and less anguished than most good versions, in which, through the wonders of technology again, seven of a person sing the Sacred Harp classic together)

* Nathan Smith, Why Socialism Does Not Work but Monasticism Does (Word). We tend not to see monasteries this way, but they have good claim to be the most efficient and stable wealth-generating institution prior to the rise of the modern corporation -- and even there, while they are less efficient than modern corporations, under the right conditions they can be massively more stable. This wealth-generating feature of monasteries is found in Buddhism as well as Christianity; and the ease with which Buddhism and Christianity allow for monastic lifestyles has been one of the historical causes for a number of the massive expansions each has undergone. Monasteries also have the important feature that they are not merely wealth-generating institutions but also study-based institutions; in addition to building a stable economic framework, they create an infrastructure for interaction among intellectuals. They are very efficient at this, too; it took the invention of the university to find anything that could surpass them at it.

* Daniel Nolan, Why Historians (and Everyone Else) Should Care about Counterfactuals (PDF)

* Sherry's Hundred Hymns List continues:

#21 Joyful, Joyful, We Adore Thee
#20 There is a Fountain
#19 Crown Him with Many Crowns
#18 That Old Rugged Cross
#17 In Christ Alone
#16 O Sacred Head Now Wounded
#15 Christ the Lord is Risen Today
#14 Before the Throne of God Above
#13 O the Deep, Deep Love of Jesus

#19 was third on my ten hymns list, and so far is the fourth (if I count correctly) to be listed in the Hundred Hymns.

Immaterial Unintelligent Substance

An interestingly unusual instance of an appeal to the great chain of being:

It has been observed by the curious, and beautifully described by Mr. Addison and Mr. Locke, that in the scale of beings, there is such a gradual progress in nature, that the most perfect of an inferior species comes very near to the most imperfect of that, which is immediately above it: that the whole chasm in nature, from a plant to a man, is filled up by such a gentle and easy ascent, that the little transitions from one species to another are almost insensible: That if the scale of beings rises by such a regular progress so high as man, we may, by a parity of reason, supppose, that it still proceeds gradually through those beings, that are of a superior nature to him; that there is no manner of chasm left, no link deficient in this great chain of beings.

Now according to this observation, which is apparent through all the known works of God, and by a parity of reason presumed of those above our knowledge, there should be in nature some being to fill up the vast chasm betwixt body and spirit; otherwise the gradation would fail, the chain would seem to be broken. What a gap between senseless material, and intelligent immaterial substance, unless there is some being, which, by partaking of the nature of both, may serve as a link to unite them, and make the transition less violent? And why may not space be such a being? Might we not venture to define it, an immaterial unintelligent substance, the place of bodies, and of spirits, having some of the properties of both.

[Catharine Trotter Cockburn, "Remarks on the Notes by Archbishop King's Translation Concerning Space, &c., With a digression on Dr. Watt's Notion of Substance," in Catharine Trotter Cockburn: Philosophical Works, Sheridan, ed., Broadview Press (Toronto: 2006) p. 97.]

Cockburn is one of the too-often-overlooked great philosophers of the early modern period. This passage is from an appendix to a work published in 1743. Space as a substance intermediate between mind and body makes for a somewhat striking picture, a version of a view that was actually quite popular in the early modern period; to accept it you would have to have very particular assumptions, but I imagine that a poet or fantasy writer could do some splendid things with it.

(I intended to note that the reference to Locke is to ECHU III.iv.12 and IV.xvi.12.)

Admin Note

You may notice that comments are now moderated. The reason is that someone was recently banned from commenting here due to irrational attacks on other commenters (antisemitic insults and the like). In particular, he continued to do so after being explicitly warned to stop or be banned; but as sometimes happens with comment-thread trolls, the person in question has been unable to grasp the concept of a ban, and has repeatedly tried to evade it. So that I won't have to worry about quieter folks being attacked by the sort of malice typically involved in his comments, comments will be under moderation for an indefinite period. This will allow me to delete his comments before anyone wastes time reading them, but will mean that during certain times of the week (Fridays and Saturdays especially at present) any comments you leave will be slow in appearing. Apologies for any inconvenience.

UPDATE: A warning for all commenters -- instead of addressing the issue on his own blog, he has bothered one commenter here on her blog, writing trollish off-topic comments as part of his case that he is not a troll. I am recommending to all commenters that for the immediate future they not enter their blog link when commenting here if they allow comments there. Apologies yet again for any inconvenience. This post will be moved to the top.

Philosophical Vindication of Judaism in IV Maccabees (Repost)

This is a repost, slightly revised, of a 2008 post.

To someone raised with a notion of philosophy that is Greek, along the lines of Plato and Aristotle, there is something a bit odd about traditional Judaism, with its insistence on a large number of little restrictions on things like diet. One might be tempted to argue that there is nothing philosophical or rational about only eating animals that are cloven-footed and cud-chewing, particularly given that there is no overarching reason given for it. One might think: It's just there in the book, so Jews do it; utterly irrational. What value could such a life hold for those who value reason?

Perhaps one of the more interesting Jewish responses to this general type of argument is found in the book usually known as IV Maccabees. We know nothing certain about its author or its date; the author was probably an Alexandrian Jew, probably drawing from II Maccabees, which he develops in a way that was common in the ancient world, namely, by composing speeches, put in the mouths of participants, to make a point. The discourse may also have originated in a Hanukkah homily. But this is all speculation. What we do know, from the work itself, is that the author fell squarely within both the Greek and the Jewish traditions and explicitly poses for himself and his readers the question just mentioned. We find the explicit statement of this in the context of the martyrdom of Eleazar. Eleazar has been brought before Antiochus IV, who is trying to erase Judaism from his domain, and is therefore giving Jews the choice of either breaking the law, by eating forbidden food, or being tortured and put to death. Eleazar, an old man, is brought before Antiochus. Antiochus says to him (5:6-12),

I would counsel thee, old man, before thy tortures begin, to tasted the swine's flesh, and save your life; for I feel respect for your age and hoary head, which since you have had so long, you appear to me to be no philosopher in retaining the superstition of the Jews. For wherefore, since nature has conferred upon you the most excellent flesh of this animal, do you loathe it? It seems senseless not to enjoy what is pleasant, yet not disgraceful; and from notions of sinfulness, to reject the boons of nature.

And you will be acting, I think, still more senselessly, if you follow vain conceits about the truth. And you will, moreover, be despising me to your own punishment. Will you not awake from your trifling philosophy? and give up the folly of your notions; and, regaining understanding worthy of your age, search into the truth of an expedient course? and, reverencing my kindly admonition, have pity upon your own years?

Thus an opposition is set up between philosophy in the proper Greek sense, which involves true understanding, and the "trifling philosophy" and "folly" of the "superstition of the Jews." Eleazar responds by rejecting the line Antiochus is trying to draw between trifling and untrifling philosophy: Antiochus wants to focus on particulars, like not eating animals that walk on paws, and say, 'Isn't that an odd and frivolous detail?' But Eleazar points out that this is to miss the point; the particular is valued not in itself but because of what it is a part of, namely, divine law. The question before Eleazar is not, as Antiochus wishes to suggest, whether to choose to eat unclean food or to die; the question is whether to live a Jewish life, a life according to Jewish law, or to die. And it is in this context, the context of a whole Jewish life, that the particular detail turns out not to be so trifling at all. The point has no significance in itself, perhaps; but if this is the point at which Antiochus has chosen to test commitment to God and His law, then it is not so minor.

Thus we cannot pick out particular details and label them 'rational' or 'irrational' without regard for context; rationality and irrationality are really forms of evaluation that apply to ways of living. It is only in this context that particular practices can be considered rational and irrational; one might roughly put the point by saying that they are rational or irrational depending on the sort of person they make you. And on this basis Eleazar argues that life according to Jewish law is a rational life according to the standards of the Greeks themselves (5:22-26):

But thou deridest our philosophy, as though we lived irrationally in it. Yet it instructs us in temperance, so that we are superior to all pleasures and lusts; and it exercises us in fortitude, so that we cheerfully undergo every grievance. And it instructs us in justice, so that in all our dealings we render what is due; and it teaches us piety, so that we worship the one only God becomingly. Wherefore it is that we eat not the unclean; for believing that the law was established by God, we are convinced that the Creator of the world, in giving his laws, sympathises with our nature. Those things which are convenient to our souls, he has directed us to eat; but those which are repugnant to them, he has interdicted.

Thus Jewish life is, because of the Torah, a training in what the Greeks would have recognized as the four cardinal virtues. (The author's adaptation of the occasional Greek practice of putting piety, eusebia, in the place of practical wisdom or prudence makes excellent sense when one considers the ancient Jewish trope that reverence for God is the beginning of wisdom.) Antiochus wishes to say that Jews are irrational for following kosher laws; but Eleazar argues instead that following kosher laws is an instruction in temperance, fortitude, justice, and piety. On the basis of it, Jews train their reason to control their passions, to hold steady in misfortune, to consider others, and to worship God in an appropriate way. (A similar apologetic for the law, in a different context, is found in Wisdom 8.) Such a life is eminently rational, however much Jews may need simply to trust that God knows what He is doing in giving this or that particular commandment.

Of course, merely saying that Judaism is a life of instruction in virtue is easy. What we really need to know is whether Jewish life is really a life of right reason in the way Eleazar suggests. And the author of IV Maccabees argues that this is clearly shown in the deaths of the Maccabean martyrs, which provide a "narrative demonstration of temperate reason" (3:19). By his death Eleazar "made credible the words of philosophy" (7:9); so much so that his death is in some sense a victory over death (7:1-3). The reason for this is put in the mouth of the sixth of the seven brothers:

And he, while tormented, said, O period good and holy, in which, for the sake of religion, we brethren have been called to the contest of pain, and have not been conquered. For religious understanding, O tyrant, is unconquered. Armed with upright virtue, I also shall depart with my brethren. I, too, bearing with me a great avenger, O deviser of tortures, and enemy of the truly pious. We six youths have destroyed thy tyranny. For is not your inability to overrule our reasoning, and to compel us to eat the unclean, thy destruction? Your fire is cold to us, your catapelts are painless, and your violence harmless. For the guards not of a tyrant but of a divine law are our defenders: through this we keep our reasoning unconquered.

In other words, Jewish life is a life of right reason, one that is shown by the fact that it trains people to a life of temperance, justice, courage, and piety, preparing them for wisdom; and on the basis of this they are able to display the excellence of law in both life and death. Fortified by God-given law, the reason of the martyrs is unconquered by tyrant, torture, and death; it emerges victorious in the contest of pain, and shows that it, and not the trifling philosophy of the tyrant, is a true path of wisdom. Their courage, moderation, and piety in the face of the death is a simultaneous victory for Judaism and philosophy; by the way in which they refuse to forsake the Jewish of life, they have the ultimate philosophical crown: they live and die with unconquered right reason.

Kamm on the Enlightenment

Oliver Kamm on the Enlightenment:

And there is an essential continuity among the national variants of the Enlightenment in their secularism.

By secularism, I don't mean atheism. Atheism is a philosophical position. I hold to it, and I regard the spread of atheism over the long term as both likely and overwhelmingly beneficial. But for cultures born of the Enlightenment, private religious belief is not so much an enemy as an irrelevance. What matters is that religion should not intrude into the public sphere. It must make its accommodation, however it chooses to get there, with modern mores, liberal values and secular education. If it won't, then it makes itself an enemy.

In fact, however, it is very difficult to show that this is the case: to a very large degree this is an anachronistic imposition. The major thinkers of the Scottish Enlightenment, for instance, split clearly into people who might be called secularists (Hume, Reid, Gibbon) and people who can in no serious sense of the term be called secularists, despite clearly being Enlightenment thinkers (Reid, Campbell, Witherspoon, Beattie). The French Revolution created what was literally a state religion of Reason. Enlightened Orthodoxy in Geneva was hardly secularist. The famous English 'Moderation' was largely furthered by people like Warburton, who was very far from thinking that private religious belief was an "irrelevance" or that it should not intrude into the public sphere: their Moderation was the middle way of the Church of England (between the two extremes of priest-dominated Catholics and visionary Quakers and Methodists). Actual advocates of separation of church and state, outside of certain religious groups like the Baptists, were relatively rare if all of Europe is taken into account; some on the secularist side, in fact, proposed establishmentarianism as the means for de-fanging religion (Hume is an example), and a major French Enlightenment document like the Civil Constitution of the Clergy is not at all something that banishes religion from the public sphere, despite secularizing it. There are no doubt particular thinkers of whom Kamm's summary would be a reasonable summary. But the 'Enlightenments' were hardly one-note music boxes, and on the topic of religion the notes make for extraordinarily diverse polyphony. (I think David Sorkin's The Religious Enlightenment does a fairly decent job of looking at some strands of the Enlightenment that are often overlooked.) And even the Virginia Statute for Religious Freedom, which Kamm holds up as a key example, doesn't lay down the public/private distinction the way Kamm does: "all men shall be free to profess, and by argument to maintain, their opinions in matters of Religion, and that the same shall in no wise diminish, enlarge or affect their civil capacities" is not a recipe for banishing religion from public view, and it protects public religious expression as much as it limits it. This is one of the possible effects of religious liberty and separation of church and state: no longer enforceable by government, religion still pervades the public sphere because impediments preventing it from participating in the arguments of the public sphere are removed, and therefore it becomes something that regularly has to be dealt with by politicians in their attempts to persuade their fellow citizens. You can take away the force of law from every religion; but if the mind of man is free, that includes being free to bring up religious claims in civic and political arguments. And Americans, to take just the obvious example, always have.

Kamm opens by proposing the Virginia Statute as the most significant document of the Enlightenment. My vote for the most (historically) significant document of the Enlightenment: Rousseau's Emile, the novel that launched a thousand educational reform movements.

Arnhart on Hume on Ought and Is

Larry Arnhart gets Hume right on ought and is:

Like many of the proponents of "evolutionary psychology," Thayer assumes that biological science cannot explain moral experience because science is concerned with factual claims rather than value judgments, and he attributes this fact/value distinction to David Hume. But Thayer misses Hume's point. Hume distinguishes is and ought in order to show that moral assessments are derived not from pure reason alone but from moral emotions. Yet far from denying that moral judgments are judgments of fact, Hume claims that moral judgments are accurate when they correctly report what our moral judgments would be in a given set of circumstances. Correct moral judgments are factual statements about the species-typical pattern of moral sentiments in specified circumstances.

There are, of course, a number of complications; but as a three-sentence summary of Hume's rather complex view of moral judgments, the end of this paragraph is quite good. As I noted in a previous post, Hume is quite clear that the distinction is to show that "moral assessments are derived not from pure reason alone" but from moral sentiments; although, due to complexities in Hume's theory of taste, things are not as straightforward as the second sentence makes it sound, it is still pretty much right, and Hume does treat moral judgments as a kind of factual statement about moral taste; and Hume is quite clear about the "species-typical" part. And Arnhart seems to be right, too, when he says that Darwin recognized that "the ethical naturalism of Smith and Hume allowed morality to become an object of scientific study, because scientists could study the natural roots of moral judgment in the evolved moral emotions of the human animal."

I hadn't originally intended to blog more on this subject, but I'm thinking at present of writing a post on my own view of the ought/is question -- the things I think Hume gets quite right, the points at which my view diverges from his, etc. If I do, in fact, write it, it will probably be up at some point in the next week.

Proper Place

It's been a while since I've posted the result of a meaningless online quiz. Here's my result from Mark Vernon's My Philosophy Guru Quiz:

Your recommended philosophy-guru is ARISTOTLE.

Key fact: The star pupil of Plato.

Must have: A desire to study the world and see what it reveals.

Key promise: The good life, which comes from living a virtuous life.

Key peril: The virtuous life can be tough.

Most likely to say: "Everything has its proper place."

Least likely to say: "Science is where humanity went wrong."

Even as a Dragon's Eye

Even as a dragon's eye that feels the stress
by William Wordsworth

Even as a dragon's eye that feels the stress
Of a bedimming sleep, or as a lamp
Suddenly glaring through sepulchral damp,
So burns yon Taper 'mid a black recess
Of mountains, silent, dreary, motionless:
The lake below reflects it not; the sky,
Muffled in clouds, affords no company
To mitigate and cheer its loneliness.
Yet, round the body of that joyless Thing
Which sends so far its melancholy light,
Perhaps are seated in domestic ring
A gay society with faces bright,
Conversing, reading, laughing; — or they sing,
While hearts and voices in the song unite.

Flowers

Today is the feast of St. Thérèse of Lisieux (1873-1897), also known as the Little Flower; she has the liturgical title, Doctor of the Church, which is given to teachers of great importance. Here is S. L. Emery's 1907 translation of one of her poems. The flowers, of course, are little acts of love, like a kind word, or a small sacrifice for someone else's sake.

To Scatter Flowers

O Jesu! O my Love! Each eve I come to fling
Before Thy sacred Cross sweet flowers of all the year.
By these plucked petals bright, my hands how gladly bring,
I long to dry Thine every tear!

To scatter flowers! — that means each sacrifice,
My lightest sighs and pains, my heaviest, saddest hours,
My hopes, my joys, my prayers, — I will not count the price.
Behold my flowers!

With deep, untold delight Thy beauty fills my soul.
Would I might light this love in hearts of all who live!
For this, my fairest flowers, all things in my control,
How fondly, gladly I would give!

To scatter flowers! — behold my chosen sword
For saving sinners’ souls and filling heaven’s bowers.
The victory is mine: yes, I disarm Thee, Lord,
With these my flowers!

The petals in their flight caress Thy Holy Face;
They tell Thee that my heart is Thine, and Thine alone.
Thou knowest what these leaves are saying in my place;
On me Thou smilest from Thy throne.

To scatter flowers! — that means, to speak of Thee, —
My only pleasure here, where tears fill all the hours;
But soon, with angel hosts, my spirit shall be free,
To scatter flowers!

June 28, 1896

Material Conditionals in Natural Language

Bill Vallicella has a post up on an argument by Errol Harris on material implication. I don't have much to say about his objection to the argument; since I haven't read the work in question, I can only go on the excerpt given, and based on that, the Maverick Philosopher seems to be quite right. But he takes the example, "If the earth is flat, I am the Pope" and says of it:

I submit that this conditional is at once both a material conditional and a piece of ordinary language. Thus here we have an ordinary language example of a material conditional. So although the material conditional is a theoretical construct for logical purposes, it is exemplified in natural language.

But I think it's worth our time to press this somewhat. In order to be a material conditional, this conditional must meet two conditions:

(1) Its behavior for logical purposes must be describable using the entire material implication truth table.
(2) Its behavior for logical purposes must be entirely describable using the material implication truth table.

And by 'behavior' here I mean nothing more than the way the conditional is used in natural language reasoning, since we are discussing whether this can be both a material conditional and a piece of ordinary language. In order to be both, it must be a piece of ordinary language whose usage is entirely describable entirely by the right truth table.

But there is some reason to doubt that this is the case, because one might argue in the following way. I am not the pope whether the earth is flat or not. There is nothing about the earth being flat that would make it necessary for me to be pope, and there is nothing about my not being pope that makes it necessary that the earth is not flat. Therefore it would be logically consistent state of affairs if I were not the pope and the earth were flat. But if it is logically consistent for 'I am not the pope' and 'The earth is flat' to be true, then the truth table for the the conditional, 'If the earth is flat, I am the pope," is not the truth table of the material conditional, since it is inconsistent with that truth table for the truth of the antecedent and the falsehood of the consequent to be consistent with each other. To be sure, it happens to be a fact about the actual world that both antecedent and consequent are false, and this is the reason we are using the conditional in the first place. But it seems odd to say that whether or not this conditional is a material conditional depends on contingent facts about how the world is; and given that a true antecedent and false consequent are logically possible, it seems that we would have to say this in order to say that Condition (2) is not violated. The conditional has a modal behavior that would allow it to deviate, in principle if not in practice, from the behavior it would have to have as a material conditional. [ADDED LATER: Re-reading this, I don't find it to be adequately clear. The point boils down to this: If there is any modal or probabilistic component to the conditional, it is not a material conditional, since the material conditional truth table has no modal or probabilistic components. But the conditional as usually used doesn't rule out the combination of the truth of the antecedent and the falsehood of the consequent -- it merely relies on the fact that they both happen to be false, the consequent to a very high degree of certainty, and the antecedent to a degree of certainty that is being put on a level, for practical purposes, with the degree of certainty for the consequent. It is, in fact, what we would usually take it to be: a figure of speech classifying one possibility's likelihood of being false with another possibility that everyone is certain is false. Thus there is nothing about it that strictly rules out the compossibility of true antecedent and false consequent; it merely treats this as an extraordinarily unlikely possibility.]

Moreover, there is the difficult of showing that any piece of natural language exemplifies an entire truth table rather than only some fragment of it. That is, it's difficult to show that Condition (1) is met. In a formal language, where connections are defined in terms of truth tables, there is no problem. One can tell, simply by looking, that p → q has the truth table of a material conditional in standard propositional logic, because that is how → is defined in propositional logic. But natural language connections like 'if' are not defined in this way, and one might well hold that the conditional "If the earth is flat, I am the pope," was composed solely for the purpose of allowing modus tollens, and for no other reason. Can it then be represented by any part of the material implication truth table that does not deal with a false consequent? It isn't clear that it can. The behavior of 'if' in general isn't represented by the material implication truth table, because (to take just one example) common usage takes it in such a way that the counterpart of modus ponens in natural language is defeasible; so we can't take the right truth table to be built into 'if' itself. Therefore the missing parts of the truth table can't be supplied from the way 'if' is generally used. Perhaps there is some way around it, but it seems to be difficult to establish that any piece of natural language meets Condition (1).

This is not to say that there might not be cases of the material conditional being exemplified in natural language. But we run into the same problems here that Jennings has noted with regard to finding exclusive disjunction in natural language: matching natural language usage to truth tables is very tricky, because you have to use the entire truth table and that truth table has to be wholly sufficient for describing behavior for logical purposes. If either of these are violated, we don't have a material conditional exemplified in natural language but merely a conditional that is not a material conditional but sufficiently analogous to it that we can sometimes pretend that it is. And that's a different thing.