Two Poem Drafts

The second is a poetic exercise, based on Catullus 8, in which you try to use English words to suggest the sound, rather than the meaning, of the original Latin. I cheated a bit by reading v as English v rather than as the classical Latin w-sound, which would give a weally, weally weird sound, and using a few other anglicizations. Of course, it's hard to make anything that does that well and makes any sense in English, but I confess myself rather pleased with "you fill, sir, your ferry with candies, to be solaced" (the original is fulsere vere candidi tibi soles, 'truly, brilliant suns blazed for you'). 

 Two Epics

Two great prose epics did England make:
one was the Tale with Hobbits,
of humble things that rise to wake,
all the schemes of pride to break,
of friends who never will forsake;---

two great prose epics did England make:
one was the Tale with Rabbits,
the quiet hearts who hold up the light
amidst the crashing of darkness and night,
the peaceful folk who rise to the fight;---

and in these epics, clear and bright,
true sustenance the soul may take,
and form heroic habits.

Not Quite Catullus 8

Mister Cattle, in designing ineptly your rage
at what the days, perishing prettily, declare,
you fill, sir, your condo with candies, to be solaced;
conventuals treat of this, corporeally, with caveat.
Who matters? Known but by quantity, name beaten out newly,
a ballet like to molten tomb, choked with seafaring boats,
or, like to volleyballs, now pulled nigh apart,
you fill, sir, your ferry with candies, to be solaced.
Now I am ill and unveiled, too quiet, important -- no lie --
not quite frugal, unstaring; now, mister, vividly
obstinate man, perfect your dark art,
that no rogue have any invitation -- 
yet too you dole out like a rogue bearing nullities.
Scholastically weighed, too! To be man and vital,
quick as night-bats flit in day's light failing,
but unknown by the mob in its sea-saw declaiming,
unbiased and replaced and, labelled, in morgue placed --
that's you, Cattle, destined to suffer.

Subjunctive Modus Ponens

 We have subjunctive conditionals of the form, If p were true, q would be true. We can abbreviate these as (p > q). Indicative conditionals admit of modus ponens, (If p is true, q is true; p is true; therefore q is true). So it seems natural that there would be something analogous for subjunctive conditionals. However, there are complications.

The antecedent of If p were true, q would be true is ambiguous. It could mean something like:

If p were true [rather than what is actually true], q would be true.

Call this the properly counterfactual interpretation. But it could also mean:

If p were true [as it may be], q would be true.

Call this the fortassic interpretation (from Latin fortasse). These are not at all the same thing, but subjunctive conditionals can be used in both ways. This matters a lot. The Supplement on Debates over Counteractual Principles at the SEP has the following example:

If George were caught, he would face years of prison.
Actually, George did get caught.
In that case, he will face years of prison.

This is clearly invalid on the properly counterfactual interpretation. It is at least defensible on the fortassic interpretation. Another example, from the same source:

If the soldier had shot the prisoner, then (even) if the captain hadn’t given the order to shoot, the prisoner (still) would have died.
Actually, the soldier did shoot the prisoner.
So, if the captain hadn’t given the order to shoot, the prisoner would have died.

Again, this is clearly invalid on the properly counterfactual interpretation. But if the main conditional is fortassic, then it is again defensible.

The essential thing is that when we construct a subjunctive conditional, we can do so in such a way as to rule out the possibility of the actual state of affairs from falling under the antecedent (properly counterfactual) or in such a way as to allow that it could (fortassic).

In both of the above examples, we need fortassic interpretations in order to allow the indicative second premise to be combinable with the antecedent. On the counterfactual interpretation, it becomes irrelevant and we have committed an equivocation, namely, treating the indicative p is true as if it were the same as were p to be true. 

Thus, if we have a genuine counterfactual conditional, we can only get modus ponens if our ponens premise is shifted toward the same set of counterfactual situations as the antecedent of the counterfactual conditional:

If p were true [given some change to the actual], q would be true.
p were true [given the same change to the actual].
Therefore, q would be true [given the same change to the actual].

Colloquial English doesn't let us do anything directly like p were true on its own; the usual way we would say something like this is, 'p would be true'. Thus:

If George were caught, he would face years of prison.
George would be caught.
So he would face years of prison.

The shift in how it's stated is awkward, but I suppose it could be argued that it serves a function. In 'George were caught', we are, from the way things actually are, positing a counterfactual situation in which things would be different; with 'George would be caught', we are shifting to the perspective of that counterfactual situation. We then draw a conclusion from within that perspective.

The fortassic interpretation allows us to do the same thing; it just also allows us to treat the perspective of no-difference-from-the-actual as one of the options.

The abbreviation (p > q) unfortunately obscures this. If we say,

p > q
p
Therefore q,

there is nothing to indicate that the ponens premise (p) is to be taken subjunctively and not indicatively. Thus we should probably require something like an index in the antecedent of a subjunctive conditional, to let us indicate when we are in the same region of possibilities:

p₁ > q
p₁
Therefore q.

But this is not always adequate, either. When we have the fortassic conditional and an indicative ponens, the indicative does not cover the same region of possibilities; it's only a part of it. We could do something like p_∈1, but this does not distinguish the indicative situation from the other situations that fall within that region of possibilities. Perhaps p_@∈1? But we need something along such lines if we are to handle counterfactuals properly in a formal notation.

Links of Note

 * A. T. Fyfe, The Need for God and the Problem of Evil within William James' Moral Philosophy (PDF)

* Brandon Warmke, Commencement Speech Morality

* Oliver Traldi, Jane Austen and the Defence of Virtue, at "The Common Reader"

* There Exists an X, The strange history of abortion before Christianity

* John Psmith, REVIEW: 50 Years of Text Games, by Aaron Reed, at "Mr. and Mrs. Psmith's Bookshelf"

* Christopher Kennedy and Malte Willer, Assertion, expression, experience (PDF)

* B. Jack Copeland and William Lyons, Ryle's War

* Senia Sheydvasser, Where are Groups? What are Groups? Why are Groups?, at "The Deranged Mathematician"

* Hunter Coates, A Fresh Translation of Romans 9-11

* James Hartley looks at Watership Down at "The Madrid Review"

* Fr. Justin Hewlett, Choose Your Own Programming Adventure, at "Geek Orthodox"

* Lucas Thorpe, Kant on moral character, immortality, and holiness as the limit of virtue (PDF)

Greatness and Brevity

  My mouth will speak the praise of the Lord: of that Lord, through whom all things were made, and who was made among all things: who is the revealer of the Father, the creator of the mother: the Son of God from the Father without a mother, the son of man from a mother without a father: great in the day of the angels, small in the day of men: the Word God before all times, the Word flesh at the appointed time: the creator of the sun, made under the sun: ordaining all ages from the bosom of the Father, consecrating this day from the womb of the mother: remaining there, coming forth here: maker of heaven and earth, born under heaven on earth: ineffably wise, wisely an infant: filling the world, lying in a manger: ruling the stars, sucking at breasts: so great in the form of God, brief in the form of a servant; so that neither was that greatness diminished by this brevity, nor was this brevity oppressed by that greatness. For nor did he abandon divine works when he took on human limbs: nor did he cease to reach from end to end mightily, and to dispose all things sweetly; when clothed in the infirmity of the flesh, he was received in the virginal womb, not enclosed; so that neither was the food of wisdom withdrawn from the angels, and we might taste how sweet the Lord is.

[St. Augustine, Sermon 187.1]

Apostle of Andalusia

 Today is the feast of St. Juan of Avila, Doctor of the Church.

Take courage, and set out with diligence and fervour: nothing is worse than for a beginner to commence badly by indulging his body and trying to please the world. Shut your ears against all human praise or blame, for in a little while both the critic and the man he judges will be dust and ashes. We shall one day stand before God's tribunal, where the mouth of wickedness shall be stopped and virtue will be exalted. Meanwhile, embrace the cross, and follow Him Who was dishonoured and Who lost His life upon it for your sake. Hide yourself in our Lord's wounds, so that when He comes, He may find you dwelling in Himself. Then He will beautify you with His graces, and give Himself to you as your reward for having left all things, even yourself, for His sake. How little, indeed, does the man who forsakes all things give up! He but leaves now, what, whether he will or no, he can keep but for a very brief time. Even while he possesses it, it brings him misery, for all that is not God only burdens and saddens the soul, which its Creator alone can satisfy. Open your heart to Him, and rejoice in Him, and you will find Him more tender and loving than can be imagined.

[St. John of Avila, from Letters of Blessed John of Avila, p. 101.]

Judging as Man and for Man

 The Express Moral Principles of which I have spoken, as the basis of Duties, are those which express, in an imperative form, the five Cardinal Virtues: namely, the Principle of Humanity, that Man is to be loved as Man: the Principle of Justice, that Each Man is to have his own: the Principle of Truth, that We must conform to the universal Understanding which the use of Language among men implies: the Principle of Purity, that the Lower Parts of our nature are to be governed by the Higher: and the Principle of Order, that We must obey positive Laws as the necessary conditions of Morality....They commend themselves to our assent, in proportion as our moral nature is cultivated and educed: they become evident to us when we think and feel as really moral creatures. The perception of them may be obscured by the influence of the ferine part of our nature ;---by savage rudeness, passion, partiality: but in proportion as the ferine element is subdued, and the human element brought out in its proper force, these Principles are accepted. When man judges as man and for man, he is enabled to see their full meaning; and with their meaning, their truth.

[William Whewell, Lectures on Systematic Morality (1846), Lecture V, p. 108.]

Dashed Off XVI

 Neoplatonism is a philosophy of intelligible experience.

Human beings overflow their experiences through story, art, and social connection.

Everything Denethor sees and infers is correct at a certain level, but he has lost his ability to contextualize it properly. Insight without proper understanding therefore becomes the seed of despair, all because pride removes the safeguards against loss of understanding.

The cosmos is evangelical, a good manifestation of divine goodness.

If we were to accept the idea that the laws of nature evolve, this would require a vast space of possibilities through which evolution occurred, which would require something actual as its sufficient reason.

"Now that is properly credible which is not apparent of itself, nor certainly to be collected, either antecedently by its cause, or reversely by its effect, and yet, though by none of these ways, hath the attestation of truth." John Pearson (he contrasts attestation and manifestation)
"Whatsoever is, must of necessity either have been made or not made; and something there must needs be which was never made, because all things cannot be made. For whatsoever is made, is made by another, neither can any thing produce itself; otherwise it would follow, that the same thing is and is not at the same instant in the same respect; it is, because a producer; it is not, because to be produced: it is therefore in being, and is not in being, which is a manifest contradiction. If then all things which are made were made by some other, that other which produced them either was itself produced or was not; and if not, then have we already an independent being; if it were, we must at last come to something which was never made, or else admit either a circle of productions, in which the effect shall make its own cause, or an infinite succession in causalities, by which nothing will be made; both which are equally impossible." (he takes this only to imply a supreme maker when considering these not singly but in their order and connection)

Paley's watch argument is perhaps derived from Pearson's Exposition.

"Grace is given for the merits of Christ all over the earth; there is no corner, even of Paganism, where it is not present, present in each heart of man in real sufficiency for his ultimate salvation. Not that the grace presented to each is such as to bring him to heaven; but it is sufficient for a beginning." Newman

the solipsism of the world

law : form :: right : matter
(law as aliqualis ratio juris)

common good at moral, jural, and sacral levels

The Beast of the sea has ten crowns because it claims authority that is usurped, a surplus of authority beyond what it can have a right to.

Every human action is filled with more meaning than any external observer could ever infer from bare observation alone.

We communicate not with bare signs but as participants in a shared system, the human system, constituted by reason and common feeling and overlapping experience-types.

We are not purely external observers to each other; our views overlaps the views of otehrs, and we observe as partly in the know.

The First Amendment protects the means by which the People form customary law and decide representation.

origin, order, overflow

Part of our appreciation in hearing singing arises from our ability to sing ourselves.

Narrators are posited in reading; authors can take advantage of this.

Make-believe is a way of socializing the world.

"Le joujou est la premièr initiation de l'enfant a l'art, ou plutôt c'en est pour lui la première réalisation...." Baudelaire

"The true parallel for play is not to be found, of course, in conscious art, which, though it be derived from play, is itself an abstract, impersonal thing, and depends largely upon philosophical interests beyond the scope of childhood. It is when we make castles in the air and personate the leading character in our own romances, that we return to the spirit of our first years." Robert Louis Stevenson

We ourselves are the primary props for make-believe. In using others, we extend them a courtesy of equality; if we can be a pirate, a stick can be sword.

music // ornamental decoration

Where Walton says 'imagination', one can often just substitute 'appearance', and his account of imagining seems even more obscure than the notions of seeing-as that he criticizes.

Adults do sometimes definitely make-believe, and these cases are *palpably different* from even acting on a stage.

Sometimes when we say 'I imagine', we mean 'I posit myself to imagine'.

It is odd to talk of fictional and nonfictional *statements*; these adjectives more properly apply to works, stories, descriptions, etc. Merely looking at a statement is inadequate to tell whether it is fictional or not.

'Uttering fiction' is like 'uttering refutation'; it is at least partly perlocutionary, which is why it sounds odd.

degrees of fictionality

the actual world makes true the statement, 'There is a hole in the ground', vs. The author makes true the statement 'There is a hole in the ground'

There is no imaginative state that is make-believe; make-believe is a doing.

We can extrapolate from the real world: A B therefore complete for D. We can extrapolate from the real world even when we know the real world deviates: A B D so consider A B C.

accepting something for the sake of argument & accepting something for the sake of story

Imaginings, just like believings, may be corect or incorrect, and in fact in imagining we are often aiming at the true.

We don't imagine propositions as such but referents.

Gricean maxims as supplementation rules for fictions (they arguably do better as such than Walton's own rule).

Dreams are not fictions but are more like entertainments of possibilities or like loose proposals for drafts that could become fictional tales and descriptions.

Fictional worlds are the actual world, fictionalized.

the germinality of a prop for a fictional world

To exist in a society is to be the object of at least minimal indirect friendly action for that society.

It is clearly a function of biographies, text-books, and newspaper articles to serve as props for imagination, pace Walton, because that is how they inform, and why they each have a style; they are aids to imagining what happened, or what happens, or what is happening. Thisi s why they often tell us explicitly to imagine or propose little stories and fictional descriptions, or elaborate hypothetical situations. Where they difer from fiction in the usual sense is that this function is secondary.

The opposite of fiction is not reality but something more like reception.

All societies are structured by allegiances and alliances.

Waht signifying and signified and interpretant share might be called the vicus -- the signifying being that which is carrying on in the place (vice gerens) of the signified, and it seems that the two share vicus because of the interpretant.

A significant part of education is familiarizing yourself with what you are learning, and familiarization is not always dignified.

Isaiah 28:15 and the idea of demonic pacts

Each sacrament is a picture of the Church.

Machiavell, Discourses 2.2: "the purpose of a republic is to enfeeble and weaken, in order to increase its own body, all other bodies"

The fiction/nonfiction distinction is not a fundamental feature of language but a classification of language uses in terms of what they can be useful for.

etiological, physiological, and intentional functions of elements in stories

Telling a story does not commit one to implicational closure, which has to be added by the ends for which one tells the tale; nor does it always allow contradiction explosion, because available possibilities may switch and shift during the telling.

No consequentialist whose consequentialism appeals to an overall state can run an argument from evil.

the privation theory of badness of argument

Reasoning about implied fictional truths is always defeasible, involving defaults and presumptions, and ambivalent often leaving things indeterminate.

homage < hominaticum (pertaining to the man)
fealty < fidelitas

To be an animal is to live within a system of natural rewards and punishments

alethiology
(1) the concept of truth and its primary determinations
--- --- (a) truth proper and ontological truth
--- --- (b) formal truth and instrumental truth
--- --- (c) natural truth and artificial truth
--- --- (d) primary truth and secondary truth
--- --- (e) approximate truth
--- --- (f) true and false
(2) truthmaking and verification
--- --- (a) truthbearers
--- --- (b) truthmakers
--- --- (c) use and assessment of truthbearers ('theories of truth')
--- --- (d) truth values in a model
--- --- (e) the potentially true and the actually true
(3) manifestation and exemplation
--- --- (a) manifestation
--- --- (b) objective causation
--- --- (c) exemplar causation
(4) unity of truth
--- --- (a) unity by correspondence
--- --- (b) unity by coherence
--- --- (c) pragmatic unity
--- --- (d) infinite intelligible
(5) truth as good
--- --- (a) intellectual disposition to and aptitude for the truth
--- --- (b) mode, species, and order
--- --- (c) inquiry-relative values of truth
(6) splendor of truth
--- --- (a) experience of truth
--- --- (b) clarity and proportion in integrity
--- --- (c) intellectual beauty as a mark of truth
--- --- (d) truth as an objective cause of love
(7) falsehood
--- --- (a) privation of truth
--- --- (b) false by privation of mode
--- --- (c) false by privation of species
--- --- (d) false by privation of order
--- --- (e) the sophistical and merely apparent truth

Whitehead's prehension gives too little role to anticipation.

Degrading or breaking safeguards often leads to short-term benefits.

Our capacity to relate to others is increased and deepend by overcoming both internal resistance and external impediment.

In participation, the participated functions as if it were a kind of genus of participating.

(1) We ought to strive to promote the highest good.
(2) Therefore the highest good must be possible.
(3) Thereore there must be something actual such that the highest good is possible.

As we better understand a field, we often find that the explananda become harder to explain; our explanations work for what we originally saw in need of explanation, but the explaining shows there to be more to be explained.

interactive design in biological systems (one biological population shaping another biological population, like ants termites, or toxoplasma ants)

Many of the things we experience, we experience through experiencing them with others; the sympathetic experience is part of how we experience them.

The patient is first physician (although sometimes others have this role, e.g., parents for children, or immediate caregivers for those who cannot care for themselves).

hierarchy ; subsidiarity :: collegiality : solidarity :: conciliarity : common good

Orders are in a sense both sacraments and sacramentalia. (This is most obvious with the diaconate.)

One reason for freedom of speech is that people need to be able to defend themselves against public-opinion punishments.

Bayesianism as an account of verisimilitude

Vashti as type of sin (Chastek)

Torah as sign and expression of divine goodness (Ps 25:8-10)

safeguards and fallbacks as purdential instruments of trust