Bleg

When I was in high school I remember finding in a book a way to make a crude syllogism computer using just index cards, a hole punch, scissors and pins (or sticks). There were holes punched in the cards, some of which were closed (i.e., circles) and others of which were open (i.e., the holes were like a little U-shaped bite into the card). There was a master card with a key to all the holes, and you'd stack the cards together, put pins in the holes that represented the propositions, and shake the stack a bit. Some of the cards would fall out and -- if I remember correctly -- those cards had the syllogisms that were valid with those propositions. I made it and thought it was the greatest thing for a while. I have no clue where I found this, but I've wanted since to find the instructions for it. Has anyone come across this themselves, or knows in what book it is found?

Lion of the See of St. Mark

Shenouda III, the 117th Patriarch of the See of St. Mark, Pope of Alexandria, died on March 17th at the age of 88. He was the leader of the Coptic Orthodox, and had the very difficult task of protecting his people in a time of extraordinary tension. The Coptic Orthodox are a form of Oriental Orthodoxy. The easiest way to grasp what Oriental Orthodoxy is, is to look at the first four Ecumenical Councils. Catholics and (Eastern) Orthodox accept all four (and, indeed, the fifth, sixth, and seventh). The Oriental churches, like the Coptic Orthodox, accept the first three (First Council of Nicaea, First Council of Constantinople, Council of Ephesus), but rejected the Council of Chalcedon. The Church of the East accept the first and, I think, the second, but rejected the Council of Ephesus. All three can be called Orthodox in a broad sense, insofar as that name came out of the dispute over Arian Christianity, and all three reject Arianism and accept the teaching of Nicaea. In neither of these latter cases are the rejections necessarily absolute; differences in language and difficulties of communicating across political barriers were often at least as much an issue as genuine doctrinal disagreement. One of the things Pope Shenouda worked for was to clarify how the Oriental position in Christology, which is usually called Miaphysitism, related to the Chalcedonian Christology of Catholics and Eastern Orthodox; miaphysite terminology is usually seen as interpretable in Chalcedonian terms, and thus not necessarily heretical (from the Chalcedonian perspective) in the way that the stronger monophysitism position is, but there has always been a problem of determining just how much the Oriental Churches actually interpret it in terms that (from a Chalcedonian perspective) would be monophysite. Clarifying it was important. Pope Shenouda, while a theological conservative, was strongly committed to ecumenism, and in 1973 he met with Pope Paul VI and became the first Pope of Alexandria to meet with a Pope of Rome in over 1500 years, and they issued a joint declaration of things in common between the two churches.

The current procedure for electing a new Coptic Patriarch is extraordinarily complicated, since it requires voting by both the Holy Synod and the General Congregation Council of the Church to narrow down the possibilities to three candidates; the actual successor is chosen literally by having his name picked out of a hat (to prevent bias it has to be done by a blindfolded child). So it may well be a while before there is anyone to replace him, especially since there are rumors that it will be postponed until after elections for the Egyptian president.

Incidentally, I always like to know the 'mother church' for a Church. For instance, for Roman Catholics it's St. John Lateran (St. Peter's is larger and more famous, but St. John Lateran is the Pope's own cathedral), while for Eastern Orthodox of Byzantine persuasion it's the Church of St. George in the Fener district of Istanbul. It turns out that the equivalent church for the Coptic Orthodox, the Coptic Pope's own cathedral, is the Church of Holy Virgin Mary in Cairo, but it is almost universally called The Hanging Church because it was literally built up high and hangs over an entryway into the Babylon Fortress of Old Cairo. Since the time it was built the ground has risen several feet, but when it was originally built it must have given the sense of almost soaring into the air.

Chesterton for March XXI

The essential rectitude of our view of children lies in the fact that we feel them and their ways to be supernatural while, for some mysterious reason, we do not feel ourselves or our own ways to be supernatural. The very smallness of children makes it possible to regard them as marvels; we seem to be dealing with a new race, only to be seen through a microscope. I doubt if anyone of any tenderness or imagination can see the hand of a child and not be a little frightened of it. It is awful to think of the essential human energy moving so tiny a thing; it is like imagining that human nature could live in the wing of a butterfly or the leaf of a tree. When we look upon lives so human and yet so small, we feel as if we ourselves were enlarged to an embarrassing bigness of stature. We feel the same kind of obligation to these creatures that a deity might feel if he had created something that he could not understand.

Source: "A Defence of Baby-Worship," in The Defendant

Chesterton for March XX

Liberty is the very last idea that seems to occur to anybody, in considering any political or social proposal. It is only necessary for anybody for any reason to allege any evidence of any evil in any human practice, for people instantly to suggest that the practice should be suppressed by the police.

Source: Illustrated London News, 5 June 1920

Chesterton for March XIX

There are only two kinds of people, those who accept dogmas and know it, and those who accept dogmas and don’t know it.

Source: Fancies vs Fads

Shepherd on the External World I: Continuity

We'd all agree, I think, that there is a world around us, one in which we live. But a question we don't usually ask is why we think there's a world around us. Why think that there is any world outside your mind? This may seem like a rather odd question to ask; but it turns out that how we answer it has ramifications for many other fields of thought. Different answers will affect, for instance, how you view the results of scientific investigation; they will change what you count as a good or bad argument for God's existence (or God's nonexistence); they will shift your views about how to approach testimony and hearsay. And this is because your answer to the question of how you know that there is a world outside your mind will influence what you think we can definitely know about that world. One of the important features of early modern philosophy is that this question was explicitly asked, and received a wide variety of answers.

Lady Mary Shepherd approaches the question by splitting it into three different questions. When we ask how we know that there is a world outside our minds, we are really asking three things (Shepherd is following David Hume here):

(1) How do we know that anything continues to exist when we aren't perceiving it?
(2) How do we know that there is anything external to us?
(3) How do we know that there is anything that doesn't depend on our minds?

Each of these questions implicitly makes a distinction: continuous/interrupted; external/internal; independent/dependent. The world outside our mind is continuous (it doesn't just pop into existence when we sense it); it is external (it isn't just part of our minds); and it is independent (it exists on its own).

We can start with the first question. Why do we think anything continues to exist when we aren't perceiving it? I look at a mountain, look away, and then look at it again. I'm pretty certain that it's the same mountain, and that it was still there even when I wasn't looking at it. I cannot currently see the wall behind me; I'm pretty sure it's there, continuing to exist without my sensing it. I'm pretty sure that Toronto continues to exist, despite the fact that I'm not there; I'm pretty sure the stars exist, even though it's daytime and I cannot see them. We expect the world to be there even when we aren't sensing it. But this means that our notion of the external world isn't derived entirely from our senses. We cannot perceive that anything continues to exist when it is unperceived! We cannot sense that the things we sense still exist when they are not sensed! What else needs to be added in order to get this conclusion?

When Hume answered the question, his answer, in Treatise 1.4.2, was complicated -- notoriously complicated. But Shepherd's answer will actually be straightforward. And this is because both Hume and Shepherd recognize that this question depends on our view of causation -- and they have very different accounts of causation. Shepherd's account of causation is reason-based: causal reasoning is rigorous reasoning. Indeed, Shepherd goes so far as to say that all mathematical reasoning is one kind of causal reasoning. Because this account of causal reasoning makes causal reasoning much, much stronger than Hume's account does, Shepherd's answer to the first question is massively more simple than Hume's. (Fortunately for us!) Strikingly simple, in fact. The basic idea is that

(1) Our senses make "irregular calls" for things. (For instance, I can arbitrarily look behind me to see the wall.)
(2) On the basis of this we find that things are very often "ready to appear".
(3) The only way this readiness to appear can be explained is if either the world is set up so that things are automatically created every time we sense them (they are "created purposely, ready to appear") or the things continue to exist even when not sensed (they "continue to exist, ready to appear"), so that things are consistently there when our senses call on them.
(4) We have so many different perceptions that we recognize there must be many different things with uninterrupted existence capable of causing them, because otherwise they would begin to exist without a cause.
(5) Therefore, for every kind of existence exhibiting this consistent readiness to appear, there must be something with the continuing capability of appearing in this way.

In other words, Shepherd essentially is identifying a well-known effect that we experience (ready appearance at irregular calls of sensation) and giving a cause for it. There has to be a cause for it, because these appearances begin to exist, and what begins to exist must have a cause. Likewise, there must be something that exists that explains the consistency of these appearances, because otherwise there is something about the beginning-to-exist of these appearances that has no cause. (The reasoning behind this is somewhat more complicated, but we don't need to go into details here.) From this we see at once that there are things that appear to us in sensation that must continue to exist even when we aren't sensing them.

It is important to notice two things about this, I think.

(1) This is very common-sensical, and deliberately so. After all, what will people usually do when you challenge them to prove that things continue to exist even when they don't sense them? Very often their inclination is to try to prove it by making what Shepherd calls "irregular calls of the senses". If you want to make sure that something is continuing to exist, or is continuing to exist in (at least roughly) the same way when you aren't looking, one natural way to do it is to look at irregular intervals to see if you can catch it out, surprise it, so to speak, show that it's not ready to appear. This is actually quite important. If Hume's account of our belief in continuous existence is right, for instance, this method of "irregular calls" proves nothing; the readiness of things to appear is simply left a mystery and Hume's account of causation makes causal inference weak enough that we can't really prove anything about the underlying causes. But in Shepherd's account this is entirely good reasoning. She recognizes, of course, that it's still a bit loose; we can make our reasoning much more sophisticated and systematic. But the kind of reasoning is good reasoning, and more sophisticated and systematic versions of this simple, ordinary inference don't make it good -- they just make it better.

(2) On its own this actually doesn't get us much. It tells us that there's a lot that corresponds to our sensations and there continues to be a lot corresponding to our sensations even when we don't have those sensations. But we don't have a full account of the external world here: continuity is not enough. It's still possible, for instance, that all the continuing causes of our sensations are really in our mind; it's still possible that they are in the mind of someone else, like God; it's still possible that they are all really caused by us. Many possibilities still exist because we don't know yet whether the world is wholly internal to our minds or at least partly external to them or whether it is dependent on us or independent of us. Likewise, we don't know its full nature, beyond the fact that it somehow corresponds to sensation and keeps existing. We only have one step here.

But we do have a step, and what is significant is that, if Shepherd is right, we know with absolute certainty that there is a world, something that continually exists so that we have the sensations that we do. Getting more than this requires answering the other questions.

Chesterton for March XVIII

The unconscious democracy of America is a very fine thing. It is a true and deep and instinctive assumption of the equality of citizens, which even voting and elections have not destroyed.

Source: What I Saw in America