Persevering Assertions

Now, here we have incidentally suggested to us an important truth, which, obvious as it is, may give rise to some profitable reflections; viz., that the world overcomes us, not merely by appealing to our reason, or by exciting our passions, but by imposing on our imagination. So much do the systems of men swerve from the Truth as set forth in Scripture, that their very presence becomes a standing fact against Scripture, even when our reason condemns them, by their persevering assertions, and they gradually overcome those who set out by contradicting them. In all cases, what is often and unhesitatingly asserted, at length finds credit with the mass of mankind; and so it happens, in this instance, that, admitting as we do from the first, that the world is one of our three chief enemies, maintaining, rather than merely granting, that the outward face of things speaks a different language from the word of God; yet, when we come to act in the world, we find this very thing a trial, not merely of our obedience, but even of our faith; that is, the mere fact that the world turns out to be what we began by actually confessing concerning it.

John Henry Newman, "Contest Between Faith and Sight", Oxford University Sermons. This sermon from Newman's Anglican period is worth reading for anyone who deals with Christian youth in any way. There has been some recent discussion among the American bishops of why Millenials have tended to leave the Church. Answers of various kinds have been given, most reasonable enough within their limits, but the fundamental answer in every generation to this kind of question is the one Newman gives in this essay. The flesh appeals to our cravings; the devil appeals to our pride; but the world just repeats itself, and repeats itself, and repeats itself, like some idiot machine, not just in words but in what it rewards and how it rewards it, in the assumptions that are made in even everyday things, wheedling itself into any space open to it because of our ignorance until we are in the trouble mentioned by Newman later, "of trusting the world, because it speaks boldly, and thinking that evil must be acquiesced in, because it exists".

And argument doesn't help all that much, because while you can argue with this person or that, you can't argue against repetition that continues endlessly regardless of what you say, so that it becomes just part of how people imagine the world. All you can do with respect to that is insist on the opposite, in word and example, as much as you can.

Dashed Off XII

It is an irony of liberal society that the death penalty has become unpopular while at the same time death treatment has become an increasingly common feature of life, and a form of 'health care'.

Confucian Tao // Neoplatonist world soul

In ritual, sensible things are like the phantasms to which abstract thought must convert; ritual is like a sort of externalized thought.

the right to palliation insofar as it is natural and insofar as it is confirmed by the nature of medicine as a humanitarian tradition

The nature of the baptismal priesthood is most clear in the context of the domestic church.

Hume is certainly right that possession is a causal notion.

penalties: expiatory, vindicative, medicinal

There seems to be no legitimate moral ground for futility being in general a reason for discontinuing treatment; there are too many different possible reasons why it might be classified as futile, and too many judgment calls. When you look more closely at the most plausible cases, it is always something else that is bearing the real moral load: triagic need for the resources on a larger scale, lack of resources, religious requirement, deference to patient, deference to family, and the like. An additional strike against futility as a substantive concept in medical ethics is the practical and moral need to build a fence out to protect other moral principles, including that of avoiding unnecessary cut-off of treatment, of giving the patient a more than fighting chance, of allowing room for unexpected and unanticipatable improvement, of recognizing differences among patients and the often statistical nature of assessment that can fail to capture distinctive features of this case, of allowing for the possibility of different judgments by different doctors. There are so many moral principles that are relevant, that trying to use futility itself, you would end up needing a large agglomeration of exceptions to it, to protect other moral concepts.

'forever' used strictly: definitely no end
'forever' used relatively : no definite end
'forever' used reduplicatively: no end in some way
'forever' used hyperbolically: like no end in some way
-- 'always and 'everywhere' have the same pattern

"Understanding, freedom, activity, an always progressive perfection, immortality, the relation in which he stands toward God, and towards his son Jesus, the station he fills on teh earth, and what he is and does in regard to all these: This composes the dignity of man; this gives him his eminently great worth." Zollikofer

Note the linking of murder and lying in John 8:44, the two attacks on the image of God.

lying with imperatives
lying with loaded questions
lying with rhetorical questions
(a man giving directions in imperative form can lie in doing so)

People will often label as self-righteousness any righteous indignation demanding that they repent.

Nothing, or very little, brings home what is meant by 'prince of the power of the air' than seeing what journalistic media, taken as a whole, emphasize and de-emphasize, regardless of the decisions of this or that journalist.

Some rights are grounded on strict, direct obligations, others on indirect obligations, others on special deferential responsibilities, and others on honor and courtesy.

the medical situation: within the circle of the common good, the patient's moral agency overlaps the moral agency of medical personnel and in that overlap is the arena of the moral medical work itself
--something analogous occurs with legal care and spiritual care

All humanitarian traditions generate special deferential responsibilities to those served.

One of the difficulties of human history is the repeated collapsed of attempts to form and develop statesmanship or political rule as a humanitarian tradition; it is the sort of thing that should be, but the way to make it sustainably so eludes us.

forms of the satanic principle of 'life unworthy of life'
(1) coercive sterilization, either eugenic or punitive
(2) killing of impaired children in hospitals
(3) killing of impaired adults in hospitals
(4) killing of impaired prisoners
(5) mass killing (extermination camp)
-- in the case of the Nazis and the murder of children, initial requirement of consent by guardians quickly was smothered by state interest, usually by the intermediate steps of (1) pressuring parents to consent to treatments of a certain kind that increased the scope of the doctors' powers; (2) threatening loss of custody; (3) insisting that the murder was the only merciful thing and that people were monstrous for opposing it (w/ the concomitant insistence that doctors and the state were the appropriate authorities for determining treatment).

to attend to the incurably ill; to render reasonable medical aid, such as is possible, even up to death

Psychology is philosophy of mind attempted by experimental method, sometimes successful but mostly failing.

A medical system, like government, requires checks and balances.

(first principles -> secure signs) -> profiles for reasonable conclusions

Lammenais's account of common sense would be more appropriate to Christian society than society in general (cp. Rosmini).

Rosmini: Kant overanalogizes intellectual act to sensation.

The phenomenal is the realm of reasonable opinion, the noumenal the realm of knowledge. Kant gets this backwards.

Positing and postulation require some underlying causal link, direct or indirect, to be reasonable.

religious tendency as a moral endowment

(1) natural rights (e.g., right to life)
(2) acquired rights
--- (2.1) acquired naturally (e.g., parental rights)
--- (2.2) acquired conventionally
------(2.2.1) intrinsic to society-forming as such (e.g., general rights of fair exchange)
------(2.2.2) consequent to formed society (e.g., civil rights)

Sometimes when we talk about rights, we mean a right; sometimes we mean a family of rights.

Free choice as such requires a certain amount of abstraction and below that threshold we only exhibit voluntary consent.

The intellect must be free to suppose different things, or all inquiry is nonsense.

We avoid pain not as if it were intrinsically bad but as if it vividly manifests something as bad.

the epectasis of the heart (intellect and will)

Jude 19: "There are those who cause divisions, animal men, not having Spirit."

arsenokoitai: 1 Cor 6:9, see Lv 18:22 LXX

the aidios word of the aionion God (Philo, on Noah's work)
= the unending word of the immeasurable God
Rv 14:10 aionas aionian
-- Ps 45:6 LXX eis aionas aionion
Amos 9:11 KXX emerai tou aionios, from days beyond count
Gn 21:33 theos aionios, God unmeasurable
Is 45:17 soterian aionion, salvation beyond measure

The rights of the state are not established by a transfer of rights from individuals, but by an emergence from rights of individuals coming together, which they retain.

States, as such, are fundamentally unproductive, existing by the sweat of those who produce. Their justification lies elsewhere, in justice alone.

Unjust states degrade all the gods of men, turning them into means of power presenting themselves as the standards of value for all things. They parasitically sap both men and nature of their intrinsic value, treating them as mere means. They alienate men from their work and from themselves, and put themselves in the place of God. When Christianity arose, it faced no serious competition from the gods of Olympus; such gods were gods of custom only. Besides the great goddess, only one god rose to the battle with Christ, and was fierce in that battle: the emperor in apotheosis, the sacral king, the state setting itself as a darkness in the high place, moving against Christians with the principalities and powers of empire.

In the long run, only the eternal is inevitable.

Technical vocabulary can ultimately be communicated only by using a common and non-technical vocabulary.

nontechnical language : technical language :: customary law : statutory law

morally acceptable reasons by which nonparents can step into acting in loco parentis
(I) Parents physically incapable
--- (A) death
--- (B) illness
--- (C) remoteness
(II) Parents mentally incapable
--- (A) insanity
--- (B) debilitating mental illness
(III) Parents morally incapable
--- (A) abuse
--- (B) gross neglect

When parents are incapable of exercising parental functions, care of children should default to subsidiary caregivers assisting in parental functions (family participating in the raising of the children, usually) rather than defaulting immediately to the state, which should be a remedy of last resort.

common law as common custom refined by those acquainted with the history of law

"Accepting labour as the universal source of the right of ownership means failing to see that the essence of right is moral, and that is moral essence is found solely in a corresponding jural duty. The determination of the jural duty is therefore the explanation of the right." Rosmini

Rosmini's steps toward rights of ownership
(1) duty not to harm
(2) Some things are united to a person properly, but some are united by a moral physical act in such a way that removing them would harm the person.
(3) Therefore, duty not to remove
(4) Therefore, rights over things

the perioikoi of the Church

creation as title making possible all other titles, in which all other titles participate
derivative titles -> first underived title

rights to innocuous use of another's property

occluding sorrow vs purifying sorrow

"Government ought indeed to take account of the religious life of the citizenry and show it favor, since the function of government is to make provision for the common welfare." DH

"If there is a historical dogma, it is that error is a persecutor, implacable and atrocious, and is such always when it can, and as far as it can. Error is Antiochus; truth, the Maccabees." Lacordaire

Genius often works less by positive force than by lack of impediment.

Note that Rosmini accepts the Scotist position on univocity of being.

Before one can doubt, one must know what it is one doubts.

"Religion embraces the whole of God, and philosophy that part which is worked out with reasoning." Rosmini

mood-lightening vs laugh-inducing humor

In plots, characters, etc., subversion of expectations only works well if the subversion ends up making more sense than the expectations that are subverted.

The modern notion of sovereignty is incoherent, depending on a view of teh world that has been stripped away.

A hydrologist forms an abstract notion (storm event) then, using this to collect a body of data, forms a posit, the '100-year-storm', an idealized storm event that, given the data is the worst statistically to be expected to occur once in an idealized 100 years (i.e., the worst storm event with at least a 1% chance of happening in a year). On the basis of this, they create a fictive line on a map, the floodplain boundary, designating the rainfall of that storm in mass form as it drains.

And Ever the Stars Above Look Down

Barbara Frietchie
by John Greenleaf Whittier

Up from the meadows rich with corn,
Clear in the cool September morn,

The clustered spires of Frederick stand
Green-walled by the hills of Maryland.

Round about them orchards sweep,
Apple- and peach-tree fruited deep,

Fair as a garden of the Lord
To the eyes of the famished rebel horde,

On that pleasant morn of the early fall
When Lee marched over the mountain wall,—

Over the mountains winding down,
Horse and foot, into Frederick town.

Forty flags with their silver stars,
Forty flags with their crimson bars,

Flapped in the morning wind: the sun
Of noon looked down, and saw not one.

Up rose old Barbara Frietchie then,
Bowed with her fourscore years and ten;

Bravest of all in Frederick town,
She took up the flag the men hauled down;

In her attic window the staff she set,
To show that one heart was loyal yet.

Up the street came the rebel tread,
Stonewall Jackson riding ahead.

Under his slouched hat left and right
He glanced: the old flag met his sight.

“Halt!”— the dust-brown ranks stood fast.
“Fire!”— out blazed the rifle-blast.

It shivered the window, pane and sash;
It rent the banner with seam and gash.

Quick, as it fell, from the broken staff
Dame Barbara snatched the silken scarf;

She leaned far out on the window-sill,
And shook it forth with a royal will.

“Shoot, if you must, this old gray head,
But spare your country’s flag,” she said.

A shade of sadness, a blush of shame,
Over the face of the leader came;

The nobler nature within him stirred
To life at that woman’s deed and word:

“Who touches a hair of yon gray head
Dies like a dog! March on!” he said.

All day long through Frederick street
Sounded the tread of marching feet:

All day long that free flag tost
Over the heads of the rebel host.

Ever its torn folds rose and fell
On the loyal winds that loved it well;

And through the hill-gaps sunset light
Shone over it with a warm good-night.

Barbara Frietchie’s work is o’er,
And the Rebel rides on his raids no more.

Honor to her! and let a tear
Fall, for her sake, on Stonewall’s bier.

Over Barbara Frietchie’s grave
Flag of Freedom and Union, wave!

Peace and order and beauty draw
Round thy symbol of light and law;

And ever the stars above look down
On thy stars below in Frederick town!

Alas, although Barbara Frietchie was real, and a staunch Unionist, Stonewall's troops would never have passed her house, and the episode is often thought to be entirely of Whittier's own devising, although Whittier himself insisted that he simply followed his sources (which he did not specify).

Two Poem Drafts

Pes Progrediendi

We have looked and sought in silence
for a whisper of a hope;
it comes in form of shadows
and a long and winding road.
When shall we find our ending?
When shall we reach our home?
When shall the stars descending
bring the sun from nightlong roam?

Some find their heart's desire
and find it black despair;
some by the good inspired
bend their backs with leaden care.
But shall we find our ending?
And shall we reach our home?
When shall the stars descending
bring the sun from nightlong roam?

I know You in the darkness
before the dawn is born.
I know You in my weakness
as I flee the burning storm.
By pieces fear has vanished,
dross has slowly burned away,
one step and then another
down a dark and winding way.

So may we find our ending,
thus may we find our home,
as subtle stars descending
bring the sun from nightlong roam.

The Sun

Beyond where soaring eagles fly,
beyond the ocean-mass of air,
see the shrine of heaven-sky,
see its holy glory there,
beyond, and further still beyond,
for all the air is but a pond
to ocean-void, in which is built
the solar temple, fire-gilt.

Never has it been profaned,
nor touched by crass, unholy hands;
its golden walls by sin unstained,
angel-like it searing stands
beyond, and further still beyond,
past chasm vast that, gaping, yawned
since long before the earth was made;
there angels born of morning prayed.

A Man's a Man, an' Love is Love

Parted
by Paul Laurence Dunbar

De breeze is blowin’ ‘cross de bay
My lady, my lady;
De ship hit teks me far away,
My lady, my lady;
Ole Mas’ done sol’ me down de stream;
Dey tell me ‘t ain’t so bad ’s hit seem,
My lady, my lady.

O’ co’se I knows dat you'll be true,
My lady, my lady;
But den I do’ know whut to do,
My lady, my lady;
I knowed some day we'd have to pa’t,
But den hit put’ nigh breaks my hea’t,
My lady, my lady.

De day is long, de night is black,
My lady, my lady;
I know you'll wait twell I come back,
My lady, my lady;
I'll stan’ de ship, I'll stan’ de chain,
But I'll come back, my darlin’ Jane,
My lady, my lady.

Jes’ wait, jes’ b’lieve in whut I say,
My lady, my lady;
D’ ain't nothin’ dat kin keep me ‘way,
My lady, my lady;
A man's a man, an’ love is love;
God knows ouah hea’ts, my little dove;
He'll he’p us f’om his th’one above,
My lady, my lady.

Particular Ought, Particular Can (Re-Post)

Perhaps it's just the papers and comments I happen to have come across, but I have seen a bit of an uptick in criticisms of 'ought implies can' that make, or at least seem to make, a naive mistake I have pointed out before, so I re-post, in slightly revised form, a post on the subject from 2016.

'Ought implies can' is an old principle, usually attributed to Kant (although you can certainly find older arguments requiring something analogous). There has been an increasing tendency to criticize it in recent years. I think these criticisms are often extraordinarily naive, and tend to confuse the often sloganish way in which the principle is stated with what it was originally intended to mean. If we look at Kant, he is quite clear that it is entirely possible that you can't do what you ought to do -- Kant actually doesn't think it's the sort of thing you could know for sure one way or another. But to command something as a categorical 'ought' is to put it forward as something to be done, and trying to comply, practically speaking, requires taking it as something you can do. The point is that it is reasonable to treat the action as possible for practical purposes; but this is different from having a proof that we can in fact do it, because that would require a proof of free will, which Kant doesn't think we have. Thus it's reasonable to hope you can do what you ought, although you can't in fact guarantee that this is true. Or to put it in other words, an 'ought' morally and practically requires that we treat it as implying 'can', although we limited human minds are not able to prove that it does in fact do so for us in particular. This is quite clearly not a naive interpretation of 'ought implies can'.

But even more naive interpretations are not as naive as the versions sometimes criticized as if they were the way to understand the principle. Here is a case that, as far as I am aware, everyone who has ever claimed that 'ought implies can' has accepted could happen:

Jay has an obligation to do X at a certain time T. Jay fails to do X at T, and thus fails to fulfill his obligation.

But it is also quite self-evident that if you are not fulfilling your obligation, you cannot also be doing what fulfills it. Therefore if Jay is not doing X at T, he can't fulfill his obligation to do X at T. Therefore, one might conclude, he can't do it, so he has no obligation to do it. This would obviously be a problem for the principle, if it required a conclusion like this -- it would mean that no one ought to do anything they don't actually do, so 'ought' would actually imply 'does'. But, of course, this does not appear to be what anyone has ever thought the principle required, which is a sign that this is likely a bad interpretation of the principle. And the culprit (one that seems quite common among criticisms of the principle) would appear to be the idea that the principle 'ought implies can' requires that 'ought' implies every kind of 'can' rather than just some kind of 'can'.

Consider the following scenario:

Kay has an obligation to meet Jay at no later than noon. Kay puts off going to the meeting until it is physically impossible to meet Jay by noon.

Kay can't meet Jay; she's guaranteed she can't. Thus, one might say, it's not true that she ought to meet Jay. But this is not really any less absurd (in philosophy, the technical term for 'blatantly and hopelessly stupid' is 'absurd')as an interpretation of the principle than the previous one: she only can't fulfill her obligation because she's already violating it. That she can't fulfill it in this way does not imply that the obligation does not imply any possibility at all. And, indeed, we know that Kay's obligation was not an impossible obligation to meet; the whole set-up requires that meeting Jay at no later than noon is possible.

To be sure, the possibility is fairly attenuated; but this does not mean that it is not a genuine possibility. I cannot be at home now, for the obvious reason that I am currently somewhere else, namely, on campus finishing up required office hours. But I can be at home now in the limited sense that it is a possible state of affairs that is not inconsistent with my abilities: I could have stayed home rather than doing what I ought, and I am perfectly capable of going home at any point. And the reverse works exactly the same way. Suppose I were at home instead of on campus where I am required to be at this time. I cannot be at home and away from home at the same time and in the same way; therefore, I couldn't be doing what I ought. But the obligation is not linked to what I am able to do when I am violating the obligation; that 'ought' does not imply that 'can'. But this does not show that the 'ought' does not imply some 'can'. And, indeed, if it were literally impossible to do something, one might well say that this shows that you have no such obligation. For instance, if I went around claiming that everybody has an obligation to jump over the moon, it's perfectly legitimate to reject this claim on the grounds that we know for sure that no human being could possibly do so.

Consider another kind of case.

You have an obligation to meet Jay and Kay at noon. As it happens, God, who is omniscient, knows that you won't. If God knows that you won't, however, then you won't. And if you won't meet Jay and Kay at noon, you can't also meet them at noon. So you will not fulfill your obligation.

This works exactly the same way: the impossibility is conditional (it is impossible only given that you in fact won't), and is not in fact an impossibility relevant to that particular obligation.

It's likely that there are cases where the relationship between 'ought' and 'can' is non-trivial. But it is a confusion to hold that the principle requires that if you ought to do something, you can do it, simpliciter; 'ought' does not imply every 'can'. Things may be possible in one way and not possible in another way. And, what's more, you can entirely make sense of the notion that you might have different kinds of 'ought' depending on the different kinds of 'can' to which the 'ought' is linked. What you would need to counter the principle is not to find situations where you can't do what you ought, in some particular sense of 'can't', but to find an 'ought' that is linked to no particular 'can' at all. It would at least be hard work to argue that anyone ought to do things that are absolutely impossible in every way. Without such an argument, however, it seems that every obligation does imply some kind of possibility, even though it doesn't imply every kind of possibility.

(There are, of course, other questions in the vicinity of this, which complicate the question of how obligation and possibility are related. For instance, we sometimes treat trying to fulfill an obligation as if it were not significantly different from fulfilling it, and we sometimes don't. But if trying ever counts, then this changes what counts as 'being able to fulfill the obligation'. And there are a number of other things that suggest that we should also not be too facile in assuming what it even means to say that one can fulfill an obligation.)

International Year of the Periodic Table

Apparently 2019 is the International Year of the Periodic Table, being the 150th anniversary of Mendeleev's first formal presentation of the principles of his classificatory feat. Some various items of interest with respect to the periodic table:

* Ben McFarland, Predicting the past with the periodic table, at the OUP Blog.

* A debate on the nature of the periodic table between Birger Hjørland and Eric Scerri, with a comment by John Dupré.

* Eric Scerri, Mendeleev's Periodic Table Is Finally Completed and What To Do about Group 3?, from 2012, after Mendeleev's original periodic layout was completely filled.

* Eric Scerri, How Should the Periodic System be Regarded? A brief look at some published proposals, which summarizes the basic lay of the land in philosophy of classification

* Make your own periodic table, using the icons in the left-hand upper corner.

Where Galleons Crumble and the Krakens Breed

Atlantis
by Clark Ashton Smith

Above its domes the gulfs accumulate.
Far up, the sea-gales blare their bitter screed:
But here the buried waters take no heed—
Deaf, and with welded lips pressed down by weight
Of the upper ocean. Dim, interminate,
In cities over-webbed with somber weed,
Where galleons crumble and the krakens breed,
The slow tide coils through sunken court and gate.
From out the ocean's phosphor-starry dome,
A ghostly light is dubitably shed
On altars of a goddess garlanded
With blossoms of some weird and hueless vine;
And, wingéd, fleet, through skies beneath the foam,
Like silent birds the sea-things dart and shine.

I Know What the Caged Bird Feels

Sympathy
By Paul Laurence Dunbar

I know what the caged bird feels, alas!
When the sun is bright on the upland slopes;
When the wind stirs soft through the springing grass,
And the river flows like a stream of glass;
When the first bird sings and the first bud opes,
And the faint perfume from its chalice steals—
I know what the caged bird feels!

I know why the caged bird beats his wing
Till its blood is red on the cruel bars;
For he must fly back to his perch and cling
When he fain would be on the bough a-swing;
And a pain still throbs in the old, old scars
And they pulse again with a keener sting—
I know why he beats his wing!

I know why the caged bird sings, ah me,
When his wing is bruised and his bosom sore,—
When he beats his bars and he would be free;
It is not a carol of joy or glee,
But a prayer that he sends from his heart’s deep core,
But a plea, that upward to Heaven he flings—
I know why the caged bird sings!

Voyages Extraordinaires #46: Le Testament d'un excentrique

A stranger, having arrived in the principal city of Illinois on the morning of April 3, 1897, would have had every right to consider himself as favored by the God of travelers. That day his notebook would have overflowed with curious notes capable of furnishing material for sensationalistic articles. And, assuredly, if he had extended his stay in Chicago for some weeks before and some months after, he would have been able to take part in the passions, palpitations, alternating hope and despair, feverishness, even bewilderment, of that great city, which had lost its self-possession.

[My translation.]

The Noble Game of the Goose (PDF) is one of the most widely popular board games in history. Racing by dice roll on a track of sixty-three squares, players try to land exactly on the end square; certain squares on the track impose special operations -- if you land on a goose square, you automatically advance by the same number that you rolled to land on it: if you land on the death's head, you have to start over; if you land on the prison, you lose a turn; if you land on the bridge, you advance twelve; if you land on the maze, you regress thirty; and so forth. In addition, if you land on a square occupied by another player, you force them out of the space and back to the square whence you came.

It's not at all difficult to see why Verne saw the game as having potential for some of his 'geographical fiction'. Given the choice to use it as the structure of the story, you would need a location that would, first, give a reason for people to play, and, second, be large enough, diverse enough, and modern enough to make it geographically interesting. There is obviously only one real answer: the United States of America, land of crazy millionaires and doing anything for dollars, a country vast in size, modern in infrastructure, and endless in geographical variation.

In Le Testament d'un excentrique, published in 1900 and known in English as Will of an Eccentric, the death of multimillionaire William J. Hypperbone, enthusiast for the Game of the Goose, member of The Eccentric Club, and upstanding citizen of Chicago, Illinois, creates a great sensation. In his will, he proposes a large-scale version of his favorite game, to be called The Noble Game of the United States. Six residents of Chicago are chosen by lottery to play; a mysterious seventh is added by codicil. The game takes place in 1897; there are forty-five states, Utah having just become a state in the previous year. In addition, there is the District of Columbia and five territories (Oklahoma Territory, Indian Territory, New Mexico Territory, Arizona Territory, Alaska). Alaska is left out for convenience -- it's a little too much of a challenge -- but that makes for fifty squares on the board. The rest of the squares are filled out by Illinois, which is the starting and ending point and so takes the role of the goose squares. To land on a square, the player has to check in by a certain day at a particular city and post office in that state or territory; at that post office, they will also at the given time receive, by telegram from Chicago, the results of their next dice roll and thus their next location. The special function squares are in the same location on the US board that they are on the Game of the Goose; it seems that there was some attempt to match the special functions to the locations (e.g., the death's head is Death Valley), but this isn't always explained (e.g., the prison square is St. Louis). The players pay out of their own pockets, and on certain squares they can be fined, which they must pay or forfeit the game, but it's a one in seven chance to win a big prize, sixty million dollars in 1897 money, and if you come in second, you get all of the pot from the fines collected during the game.

Coming near the end of Verne's career, it is not well known; despite taking place in the United States, it was never really marketed to the US. It's a very readable book, although the actual plot is inevitably basic, and the characterization, divided among several characters who only occasionally interact with each other, also ends up being fairly basic. But I've noted before that one of Verne's charms for an American is his depictions of the United States as an exotic country, full of weirdness: Maine, where you can be fined for asking for whiskey; Cleveland, where people get strangely enthusiastic about prize pigs; Wyoming, where women can vote; and, of course, that favorite of nineteenth-century European writers, Utah, with its Mormons. And while not deep, it is a swiftly running tale that never flags.

Fortnightly Book, June 9

One of the reasons I started the Fortnightly Book was that I inherited my grandparents' library and wanted to work through the books I hadn't read, and thought I might as well re-read those I had. In practice, probably only about a third of the books I've done have fit this category; others have been new books, or books recommended to me by someone else, or just books I had already that I wanted to look at again. And with things like the Verne project I've drifted further from it. But there are still books on my shelves from my grandparents that I have never gotten around to reading at all. So I think I will deliberately do one that is a complete mystery to me -- not only have I never read it, I don't know anything about the authors, I have never heard anything about it from a secondary source, and the only place I've come across it is the copy that I inherited: Triptych, by Dora Landey and Elinor Klein. It's a sizeable book, but I think part of this is the typography, since the print is not small.

Since I know nothing about the authors, I present to you the information from the "About the Authors" page:

DORA LANDEY was born and raised in Manhattan. Currently a student at Sarah Lawrence College, she lives in the country with her husband and three daughters.

ELINOR KLEIN was born and educated in Massachusetts and was graduated from Smith College. With her son, her husband, and her three dogs, she commutes between an apartment in Manhattan and a donkey farm in the country.

As to the topic of the book, I can tell you that it's about Russia under the Romanovs, as the Revolution approaches, and that the Kirkus Review of the book makes it sound completely insane, like a soap opera in which everyone is on cocaine. We shall see.

************

Dora Landey & Elinor Klein, Triptych, Houghton Mifflin (Boston: 1983).

Fanny Burney, Evelina

Introduction

Opening Passage:

LADY HOWARD TO THE REV. MR. VILLARS
Howard Grove, Kent.

Can any thing, my good Sir, be more painful to a friendly mind, than a necessity of communicating disagreeable intelligence? Indeed it is sometimes difficult to determine, whether the relator or the receiver of evil tidings is most to be pitied.

I have just had a letter from Madame Duval; she is totally at a loss in what manner to behave; she seems desirous to repair the wrongs she has done, yet wishes the world to believe her blameless. She would fain cast upon another the odium of those misfortunes for which she alone is answerable. Her letter is violent, sometimes abusive, and that of you!-you, to whom she is under obligations which are greater even than her faults, but to whose advice she wickedly imputes all the sufferings of her much injured daughter, the late Lady Belmont. The chief purport of her writing I will acquaint you with; the letter itself is not worthy your notice.

Summary: Evelina Anville is out of place in the world. While she is the legitimate daughter of Sir John Belmont, she is unacknowledged, as Belmont was a libertine who denied the marriage and destroyed some of the evidence that he had ever been married to Evelina's mother, Caroline. Evelina has been raised by Rev. Arthur Villars. The story opens with news that Madame Duval, Evelina's grandmother, who had been estranged from her daughter, has only just discovered Evelina's existence, and is coming to take her to France. As Mme. Duval is regarded by no one as a good influence, being a histrionic and absurdly rude in exactly the way the English tend to attribute to the French, Evelina is sent off to a friend. There, however, she encounters the Mirvan family, and gets permission to take a trip to London with them.

Thus begins Evelina's introduction to high society. On the one hand, having been raised in the relatively quiet countryside, she often has no idea what people are doing; on the other, however, she has the triple power, always of immense value in urban high society, of youth, beauty, and artlessness. She commits more than a few faux pas, but she also gets the friendship and interest of a few people worth knowing. Part of the charm of the book is watching Evelina muddle through social situations; because, however, she has intelligence and decency (neither of which are of value in high society, but only in life), and good friends as well, she comes out all right. Some of these episodes are very well done and true to life, being recognizable to anyone who has ever been in awkward social situations in which they did not know what to do. For instance, early on she tries to get out of dancing with someone by the white lie of saying that she is previously engaged, but then finds herself at sea when the man doesn't leave but keeps wondering why her dancing partner has left her by herself. In another case, she is trying to avoid a young man, in whom she is not interested but who quite clearly has marriage on the mind, by deliberately spending her time talking with another man, who from this gets the wrong idea that she's interested in him. She also has more than a few occasions of running into someone she wants to impress while out with her cousins, who are not very polished people.

The story satirizes high society, but it is not merely a satire. It is very much about the nature of family, its honor and its shame, its value and its embarrassments, our need for it and its occasionally grievous difficulty. Many of Evelina's problems are not really due to her but due to the fact that her family is not there or, when they are, are not really concerned with Evelina herself. And a large component of the problem is that families are partly built on communication, not constant but essential, and miscommunication in family matters can sometimes do terrible things to us.

The novel is written well in every way. It is an epistolary novel, but it largely reads like an ordinary first-person novel, told from Evelina's point of view, with just occasional brief interludes in which another perspective enters the picture. The minor characters are often engaging and often funny. My favorite is Mrs. Selwyn, the acid-humored widow with that devastating sarcastic wit that on this earth belongs only to an intelligent elderly woman with a lot of practice; watching her repeatedly set to flight the foppish young men who think themselves witty was in itself worth the reading.

Favorite Passage:

"Goodness, then," cried young Branghton, "if I was Miss, if I would not make free with his Lordship’s coach, to take me to town."

"Why, ay," said the father, "there would be some sense in that; that would be making some use of a Lord’s acquaintance, for it would save us coach-hire."

"Lord, Miss," cried Polly, "I wish you would; for I should like of all things to ride in a coronet-coach."

"I promise you," said Madame Duval, "I’m glad you’ve thought of it, for I don’t see no objection;-so let’s have the coachman called."

"Not for the world," cried I, very much alarmed: "indeed it is utterly impossible."

"Why so?" demanded Mr. Branghton: "pray, where’s the good of your knowing a Lord, if you're never the better for him?"

Recommendation: Highly Recommended; this is a very funny book with charming characters and yet serious themes.

Morality and Joking

Noel Carroll has an interesting discussion of the ethics of joking at The New Statesman. His point that the mere fact that you are joking sometimes does not provide a shield against moral criticism is surely right, but I think his argument is overly simplistic on a few points.

Carroll takes it that "I'm only joking" is supposed to work on the ground that jokes aren't assertions, so if, for instance, someone makes a racial joke, they aren't actually asserting the racial stereotype. I don't think this is right, and I think it's a case of something I've noted before, namely, philosophers overloading the act of assertion. The basic logical function of assertion is to put something on the 'premise board', so to speak; this is the minimal possible thing, and the most essential thing, that can be attributed to assertion, and everything else needs justification. The fundamental core of assertion is to propose something in such a way as to put it into play in reasoning. There is a tendency among philosophers to take assertion to pertain in some way to the 'really real', but, as I've noted before, there is nothing about the act itself that seems to require this. Given this, it seems entirely reasonable to say that at least many jokes involve assertions -- they are quite literally joking assertions.

Thus the real point seems to be that they are nonserious, that they are put forward in a deliberately absurd universe of discourse. Carroll responds to the "I'm joking" gambit, understood as nonassertion, by saying that the moral problem with jokes is not always focused on any purported assertion -- the suggestions, implications, etc., can be the problem. This is certainly true. But if "I'm joking" is put forward as clarifying that the universe of discourse was itself intended to be a universe of things to be treated as absurd, then we still don't have a reason why this would not be adequate.

Because (and this is something to which Carroll doesn't seem to give due weight) sometimes it is adequate. We do sometimes take "I'm joking" to make it all right. And there's another phenomenon that seems relevant here. I once had a Dutch professor who loved telling anti-Dutch jokes. (How do you make copper wire? Give one penny to two Dutchmen.) And you not uncommonly find black comedians telling racial jokes that could ruin the career of a white comedian who told them. For at least a very broad range of jokes, the same joke in different contexts is not subject to the same moral criticisms -- it matters who tells it, it matters where (church or a bar, for instance), it matters when, and so forth.

These points at least seem to suggest that the problem is not actually the content of the joke per se. Rather, the problem is when the joker is taking some kind of liberty to which he has no real right. Now, it seems fairly clear that our senses of exactly where to draw the lines differ quite a bit, and are often hazy, but everyone does seem to recognize this line of criticism sometimes. And it's why certain kinds of joke can be outright disrespectful in one context and perfectly fine in another.

I think there is a good argument that there are kinds of joking that can be said always to be wrong -- kinds of joking that are forms of actively humiliating a person or group, or deliberate ways to blaspheme. This does, I think, suggest that there are kinds of jokes that will only rarely if ever be acceptable; for instance, if people would have difficulty making sense of them unless they were understood to be put forward by one of these bad kinds of joking. But we do need to distinguish joking and the joke that is joked, if I may put it that way; how one handles the question of ethical criticism will depend on which is being considered.

Carroll recognizes the distinction (in his comments about joking being a performing art), but I think the distinction itself suggests that the "I'm just joking" gambit is not actually based on the assumptions about assertion he originally attributed to it. If we are considering the performance and not the script, it is the performing itself that is being criticized, and the script is itself only relevant to the extent that it provides insight into the performance. Consider, for instance, someone in a play playing a racist, doomed to comeuppance, who tells racist jokes. The actor is giving the script; but we recognize that his performance of it should not be conflated with that of an actual racist. If a villain in a story tells a blasphemous joke to mark his villainy, that's not in itself an act of blasphemy. We could still talk about whether it was appropriate, but there's an entirely different kind of inquiry than we would with just an ordinary blasphemer saying the same thing.

The other point at which I think Carroll's argument is a bit simplistic is in his discussion of the conditions of comic amusement. He says, "To make people laugh, a punchline must be free from anxiety or malice." But this seems quite clearly not the case.

We are perhaps here dealing with a problem that we can regularly find in aesthetic matters -- we lack a vocabulary adequate to what we are trying to say. The movie Ridicule is partly built on a distinction between vicious wit (associated with the French) and humor (associated with the English). Vicious wit is not necessarily anxiety-free or malice-free; its primary act is ridicule, and jokes of ridicule can perfectly well involve anxiety or malice. (They do not need to do so, but it takes a certain panache to ridicule without either anxiety or malice.) One could perhaps not include our response to this kind of joke under 'comic amusment', but then not all jokes exist to elicit comic amusement; on the other hand, if we include it, then it's not always true that the punchline must be free from anxiety or malice. His attempt, then, to argue that the morality and the comedy of a joke are not so distinct seems to amount to nothing more than saying that when malice would ruin the joke, it ruins the joke, and does not give (as his phrasing seems to imply) any general account for when this is the case.

Taste of Divine Things

...[O]ne who receives the Holy Spirit from the Father and the Son knows the Father and the Son and comes to them. The Spirit makes us know all things by inspiring us from within, by directing us and lifting us up to spiritual things. Just as one whose sense of taste is tainted does not have a true knowledge of flavors, so one who is tainted by love of the world cannot taste divine things: "The sensual man does not perceive those things of the Spirit of God" (1 Cor 2:14).

[St. Thomas Aquinas, Commentary on the Gospel of John, Chapters 13-21, Larcher & Weisheipl, trs., Catholic University of America Press (Washington, DC: 2010) p. 87 (section 1959).]

There's very certainly an implied reference to wisdom here, since the relation between sapientia, wisdom, and sapor, taste/flavor, particularly with regard to divine things, is common and is found elsewhere in Aquinas; he has in fact just finished talking about the fact that the Son is begotten Sapientia.

A Poem Draft

Seven Incantations

Seven incantations in the Elven realm are known --
three for power, three for splendor, one that stands alone --
mighty as the morning sun, hidden as the night,
locking and unlocking doors between the dark and light.

First, to use a power you must hold it deep inside,
thus in power's fire's flames unburning to abide.
Dying to your shadow frail, life's borders you will cross;
worthy minds alone may make that journey without loss,
getting by returning thence a threefold work and might:
earth, by which the runes of lore are opened to your sight;
water giving vision of the future to the mind;
flame reforging heart and thought to greater mode and kind.

Seven incantations in the Elven realm are taught,
three for power, three for splendor, one most highly sought.
Force they have for changing, for they change your inmost name;
those who have partaken thus, no longer are the same.

Speak the second spelling and a greater flame descends,
sevenfold its working borne on seven burning winds,
placing strength within the heart and crown upon the head,
lore of those who have advised and force of those who led.
Sightedness of eagle and the subtlety of snake,
fishful swimming through all dreams as though they were a lake,
divination's guidance like the tortoise in his shell,
elephantine toughness to endure the dark and fell,
kinship with all creatures good in land and sky and sea:
by this incantation's might the mind of bonds is free.

Seven incantations in the Elven realm are learned,
three for power, three for splendor, one fate has overturned;
rooted are they deep within the universe's rite,
cosmic in expression of the liturgy of light.

Rare indeed the one who finds the third high Elven song;
only those should seek it out whose wills are sure and strong --
not with elemental force nor living souls it pours;
stars instead that rule the worlds with might in endless stores.
By the power of this rite the acolyte may rise,
walk among the rolling suns and change unchanging skies,
master of all charm and shaping, gramarye and chant,
from the cosmic tree receiving seeds of flame to plant.

Seven incantations in the Elven realm are sought,
three for power, three for splendor, one beyond all thought,
signs of power testifying to a higher world,
seven words within whose hearts the universe is curled.

Charm of binding, too, may sound and subtle sages find,
ways to share the course of thought and mingle flesh and mind,
weaker than the starfire, yet an endless hearth of light,
warm against the winter cold, against the shadows bright.
Burdens born from trouble may be shared like heavy load;
thought with thought may travel and share a weary road.

Seven incantations in the Elven realm are sung,
three for power, three for splendor, one the gods have brung,
armaments to shake the earth, to walk the spirit way,
inner secrets of the spheres brought down to realm of day.

Sickness has no power; by a word it is unwound,
medic more availing than mere mortal man has found.
Leprosy it washes into skin both new and clean;
blindness it dispatches, giving eye its healthy sheen;
tongues are freed for speaking, lameness let to leap,
tumors brought to level and deep pain made gentle sleep.

Seven incantations in the Elven realm are found,
three for power, three for splendor, one perfects the round,
full of living spirit and of life unending source,
infinite in wonder, limitless in course.

Death itself has weaker sway on those who know the end;
spell there is to beat it back and bounds of life to bend,
giving to the body's flesh a power to be unharmed,
unfettered by the graveyard with a life thus rendered charmed,
giving to the mind a light that dark of grave may flee,
something of the life of youth and youth's agility;
such a might is given to the one endowed with rhyme
such that even death may quail, though only for a time.

Seven incantations in the Elven realm resound,
three for power, three for splendor, one for godhood crowned.
By their vibrant power souls in holy place have trod,
changed in stages, bit by bit, to something like a god.

Nectar and ambrosia sweet may give the grace of youth,
wisdom like to ancient sage, eternity of truth.
Power beyond power such as gods alone may know
brings the final chantment as it sets the air aglow,
bright apotheosis laid in layers like the sand,
greater by the growing as it piles band on band,
hgiher than the mountains, higher than the crystal sky,
higher than the shining stars that live and do not die,
farther than the final sphere, farther than the end,
step by step in endless way the final spell shall wend.
Seven incantations sound in Elven land and hall:
three for power, three for splendor, one above them all.

The King of Siam (Re-Post)

John Locke, An Essay Concerning Human Understanding 4.15.5 (1690):

If I myself see a man walk on the ice, it is past probability; it is knowledge. But if another tells me he saw a man in England, in the midst of a sharp winter, walk upon water hardened with cold, this has so great conformity with what is usually observed to happen that I am disposed by the nature of the thing itself to assent to it; unless some manifest suspicion attend the relation of that matter of fact. But if the same thing be told to one born between the tropics, who never saw nor heard of any such thing before, there the whole probability relies on testimony: and as the relators are more in number, and of more credit, and have no interest to speak contrary to the truth, so that matter of fact is like to find more or less belief. Though to a man whose experience has always been quite contrary, and who has never heard of anything like it, the most untainted credit of a witness will scarce be able to find belief.

As it happened to a Dutch ambassador, who entertaining the king of Siam with the particularities of Holland, which he was inquisitive after, amongst other things told him that the water in his country would sometimes, in cold weather, be so hard that men walked upon it, and that it would bear an elephant, if he were there. To which the king replied, Hitherto I have believed the strange things you have told me, because I look upon you as a sober fair man, but now I am sure you lie.

Thomas Sherlock, The Trial of the Witnesses of the Resurrection of Jesus (1730):

Taking the observation therefore in this sense, the proposition is this: that the testimony of others ought not to be admitted, but in such matters as probable, or at least possible, to our opinion. For instance: a man who lives in a warm climate, and never saw ice, ought upon no evidence believe that rivers freeze and grow hard in cold countries: for this is improbable, contrary to the usual course of nature; and impossible according to his notion of things. And yet we all know that this is a plain, manifest case, discernible by the senses of men, of which therefore they are qualified to be good witnesses.

Joseph Butler, Analogy of Religion, Introduction (1736):

So, likewise, the rule and measure of our hopes and fears concerning he success of our pursuits; our expectations that others will ct so and so in such circumstances; and our judgment that such actions proceed from such principles;—all these rely upon our having observed the like to what we hope, fear, expect, judge; I say, upon our having observed the like, either with respect to others or ourselves. And thus, whereas the prince, who had always lived in a warm climate, naturally concluded in the way of analogy, that there was no such thing as water becoming hard, because he had always observed it to be fluid and yielding: we, on the contrary, from analogy, conclude, that there is no presumption at all against this; that it is supposable there may be frost in England any given day in January next; probable, that there will on some day of the month; and that there is a moral certainty, that is, ground for an expectation, without any doubt of it, in some part or other of the winter.

David Hume, An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding, Section X (1750):

The Indian prince, who refused to believe the first relations concerning the effects of frost, reasoned justly; and it naturally required very strong testimony to engage his assent to facts, that arose from a state of nature, with which he was unacquainted, and which bore so little analogy to those events, of which he had had constant and uniform experience. Though they were not contrary to his experience, they were not conformable to it.

Anthony Ellys, Remarks on An Essay Concerning Miracles (1752):

Yet this Author intimates plainly enough, that very strong Testimony might justly have engaged the Prince's Assent to these Accounts of the Effects of Frost: For though they were not conformable to his Experience, yet they were not contrary to it. The last Expression, as it came from Mr. Hume, has, indeed, a little different Turn, but is, in effect, the same with this. And his Observation is certainly right; for the Prince neither had had, nor could have, any Experience that Water could not be frozen to Solidity. All that his Experience amounted to, was, that Water had never been actually solid, within his Knowledge or Observation; but this was no Proof from Experience that it could not ever have been so. There was no Experience in this Case that could be Opposed to the Experience for the Credibility of human Testimony. And therefore such Testimony, when strong, as it ought to be, in Proportion to the extraordinary Nature of the Fact related, must have remained in its full genuine Force, and was therefore justly credible, and capable of rendering the Fact related credible to the Prince. Now as Mr. Hume saw the Justness of this Reasoning in the Case before us, so he ought to have seen it, with regard to the Credibility of Miracles upon sufficient human Testimony. For the Reasoning is exactly the same in both. There is no more Experience to any one against Miracles, than there was to the Indian Prince against the Effects of Frost. And since there is no such Experience to be Opposed to that Experience, upon which the Credibility of human Testimony is grounded, that Testimony ought to have its full Force in the Proof of Miracles, as well as of any other Events.

Lady Mary Shepherd, Essays on the Perception of an External Universe (1827):

There may be no perfect analogy in nature, unless it be that there arise exceptions to hitherto universal experience in all classes of things, with which we are acquainted.

The tale of the Indian Prince, who refused to believe a natural occurrence which passed the limits of his own experience, may be told of ourselves ; — we deem some limited observation we make, the measure of an universal fact; — we draw general conclusions from particular premises ; until extended knowledge acquaints us with exceptions, and sometimes with single and most important exceptions to otherwise universal facts.

(There are others, of course, who discuss it. In particular, almost everyone who discusses Hume's essay after the second edition -- the story was not in the first edition, so was added for some particular purpose, probably to address criticisms that Hume by that time had received or foresaw receiving -- at least mentions it.)

On Papineau on Knowledge

David Papineau has a somewhat odd essay on knowledge at Aeon. He wants to argue that knowledge is not a helpful concept, but his argument is very tenuous. He starts out considering a problem about our reluctance to regard statistical evidence as adequate:

Imagine that 100 prisoners are exercising in the prison yard, and suddenly 99 of them attack the guard, carrying out a plan that the 100th prisoner is no part of. Now one of these prisoners is in the dock. No further evidence is available. Guilt is 99 per cent likely, innocence 1 per cent. Should the court convict? Everyone’s first reaction is – certainly not. The court has no information that rules out the defendant being the one innocent prisoner. You can’t convict someone solely on statistical evidence.

But, he says, this is puzzling because we will convict on things like eyewitness testimony that is only 95% certain. Papineau then says the most plausible of the many controversial explanations of this, is Clayton Littlejohn's argument that the difference is knowledge. Then he concludes, "If the courts are aiming to convict the guilty and free the innocent, and to avoid the converse results, what’s the logic in preferring sources of evidence, such as eyewitnesses, that lead to more false convictions?"

Notice that there's no significant connection here. Papineau himself recognizes that the Littlejohn account is not the only account, and that this whole area is quite controversial, so the only thing connecting this problem to knowledge at all is Papineau's estimate that it's the most plausible account. That is weak, at best.* And it's the assumption on which most of the rest of Papineau's argument is based.

The primary argument, mostly gestured at, that does not seem to be based on this assumption is his rejection of the knowledge norm of assertion (one ought to assert something only if one knows it). I agree with the rejection; knowledge has never been a good candidate as 'the norm of assertion'. But his argument doesn't rule out that knowledge might be a norm of assertion; nor does it rule out the possibility that knowledge might just be the optimal case of something fitting whatever norm of assertion we might be assuming. Since Papineau doesn't seem to think that 'knowledge' is an incoherent concept or a meaningless term, surely he would not say that, given merely believing X reasonably and knowing X, that the latter would always be worse. He says, "All we really care about is whether their beliefs are likely to be true.". But is that really all we ever care about? If nothing else the widespread attraction of the idea of knowledge would seem to suggest this is unlikely.

------------------------

* If you're interested in my view of it, I think Clayton's proposal is extremely implausible, and I think Papineau and most people who discuss this matter are making an error, all too common among people of analytic stripe, that because something can be modeled by probabilities it is a matter of certainty and uncertainty. (This gets things backwards; probabilities are often handy in dealing with things like certainty and uncertainty, possibility of error, and the like, but that doesn't mean that they are good for nothing else.) In legal cases (and in many others), the certainty of evidence, while important, is a secondary issue; the primary issue is admissibility as evidence to begin with, which has nothing to do with the percentages. The difference between the prison yard example and an eyewitness example is causation, not knowledge; evidence is a causal notion. Eyewitness testimony is a causal chain purporting to link us to the actual event. (This is one of David Hume's truly important insights.) If you have an eyewitness testifying that this person did something bad, that is evidence, even if defeasible, that this person did something bad, because you have an effect, the testimony itself, that purports to be caused by this person doing something bad. But in the prison yard case we don't have any causal chain, even a purported one, to this person doing something bad.

It's particularly odd to be thinking about knowledge in a legal case, because knowledge, unlike (say) reasonableness, is at least arguably never important in legal cases. This is partly because in legal cases (1) not all legitimate evidence is admissible, for both ethical and practical reasons; and (2) issues of corruption, abuse of power, and the like raise worries that are often more important than accuracy of conclusion, and their safeguards affect the examination process (courts are not supposed to be strictly impartial investigators but to apply law with a bias toward public good). Every DA knows cases where it was so very certain that someone committed a crime, but the obstacles to getting the right evidence, of the right kind and quality, to get a conviction, were just insurmountable. Courts of law are deliberately set up to guarantee that this will happen in certain kinds of cases.

Bizarrely, Papineau comes close to recognizing the issue here, saying,

We hanker for some clear and direct-seeming causal path from the facts to our mind, akin to how nothing lies between the banana and the alpha monkey. Eyewitnesses and their testimony fit that model, but the statistical evidence doesn’t. It’s too indirect.

But knowledge doesn't play any role here; causation explicitly does. (Even the 'clear' doesn't bring in knowledge, because it can be purely a matter of Papineau's preferred concept of belief.)

Music on My Mind

Clamavi De Profundis, "When the Hammer Falls"

Evening Note for Sunday, June 2

Thought for the Evening: Titles of Opinion

We live in an opinion nation. But as I tell my students, your opinion on its own is useless; since any idiot can come up with an opinion on anything, if you have an opinion, all that means is that you are not more stupid than the most stupid person. Ideally, of course, we would all have good reasons for all of our opinions -- reasons, as I tell them, unlike opinions, are valuable to other people -- but in practice, this is unattainable. Practical necessity, if nothing else, will lead us to have opinions for only limited reasons, or for nothing that can serve as a reason for the content of the opinion at all, as when people pick up opinions under the force of peer pressure. It's worth asking, then, what the legitimate answers are to the question, "Why do you hold that opinion?" What answers can be given and still be reasonable answers to this question?

There are probably many different ways to approach this, but if we take as an analogy, even if only a loose one, possession of other things (physical objects, incorporeal hereditaments), four kinds of answers, loosely resembling four titles of possession, stand out as providing you reasonable answers.

(1) possessive title: I hold this opinion for such-and-such reasons that lead to it as a rational (even if defeasible) conclusion. Obviously, specific relevant reasons are the primary titles by which one can say that you have some kind of right to have a particular opinion. If reasons do not give title to opinions, nothing does.

(2) successive title: I hold this opinion because I have received it from someone who, at least as far as my reasons suggest, had some kind of possessive title to it. We cannot practically get by without depending on the testimony of others; that means some of the opinions we have, we have only because other people have them, not because we ourselves have any direct reasons for them.

(3) accessive title: I hold this opinion because it is accommodated well by my other opinions, for at least some of which I have some kind of non-accessive title. As I've noted before, there is a kind of doxastic synousia, a hanging-together of things like beliefs, suppositions, and opinions, that does not seem to be strictly reducible to reason-relations; one belief can accommodate another without necessarily being any genuine reason for it. For instance, peoples' opinions about the universe are sometimes clearly influenced by their politics; people with very democratic views of politics are often uncomfortable with very hierarchical views of the universe. It's not that your political views provide any reason for thinking the universe itself works a certain way; it's just that your habits of political thought make some other kinds of structural thinking about the world easier. There are many subtler kinds of cases. One of the reasons we have opinions is that they fit the way we already think.

(4) prescriptive title: I hold this opinion because, however I got it to begin with, I have held it a long time without finding reason to reject it. People sometimes don't want to admit something like this title, but in fact many of our strongest opinions are likely to be opinions that are too fundamental for relatively weak titles like (2) and (3), but for which we can't pin down any definite possessive title, because we've held it so long, and though we might be able to make up an argument for it on the spot, that's precisely what we'd be doing -- not giving our reason for why we hold it but making up a reason out of thin air for why someone could hold it.

Perhaps there are others, but as they get progressively weaker as we move from (1) to (4), if you have an opinion without one of these titles, the chances that you are unreasonable in holding it seem very high. And we could probably say, in some sense, that you have no right to hold it, that you have no right to have that opinion. From the other side, it's important to grasp that all of this is about reasonableness -- the point is that all of these are reasonable answers to the question, "Why do you have that opinion?" None of these titles mean that your opinion is right, nor do any of them even imply that your opinion is one that can be rationally defended as superior to other opinions. They just are the kinds of answers a reasonable person might honestly give to the question; they are answers that rule out the possibility that you just made up the opinion just to have one, or that you are really trolling, or anything else like that.

This approach to opinions is opposed to a number of other approaches you could find.

(i) The above approach assumes you have to have a 'right' (in some sense) to a particular opinion. You could deny this, and simply say that you can have whatever opinion you have, whatever the explanation for your having it might be. You do find people saying things like this, but I think nobody consistently holds it when you press them.

(ii) You could have an approach that restricts the number of titles. For instance, there is certainly a view, we can call it evidentialism (although perhaps not all forms of evidentialism in epistemology strictly require it), that the only legitimate titles for an opinion are (1) and (2), or even (1) and a restricted form of (2). You do find people stating this view. What you don't find, I think, are people actually living in a manner consistent with it. It doesn't really give us an account of being reasonable about opinion-holding, because it holds a standard people cannot live up to, and therefore is making an unreasonable demand.

(iii) Perhaps you could deny that possessive title is the fundamental title. I don't know any widely respected view that doesn't take theoretical or practical reasons to be the most basic kind of justification for having an opinion, but people do sometimes do strange things that minimize the value of possessive title. Take Bulverism, for instance: this is when people deny that an opinion with possessive title, i.e., backed by at least some o kind of reasons, can be reasonably held because some feature of the person nullifies that title. So, for instance, in the famous sexist remark: 'You only say that because you are a woman'. This is generally considered an illegitimate line of reasoning because (a) it is always or virtually always question-begging and (b) it attempts to bypass all reasons whatsoever, or else to sort out reasons that will be accepted and reasons that won't according to something that has nothing to do with the reasons themselves.

Various Links of Interest

* Gregory Stackpole looks at Isidore of Seville on Secular Rule and Rulers

* Deborah Savage, Adam's Gift: Man in the Order of Creation

* Alexander Zubatov, The Case for Confucianism in America: How an Ancient Chinese Philosophical Tradition Could Save Our Fraying Democracy

* Sabine Hossenfelder summarizes the basics of black holes

* Astrid Lindgren, Pomperipossa in Monismania, a fairy tale about the evil of excessive taxation. Lindgren is most famous for the Pippi Longstocking books; she wrote this little story as a protest over the fact that, under Swedish law at the time, she was being taxed at a marginal tax rate of 102%, because the law required self-employed individuals to pay taxes both as individuals and as employers. The story struck a chord, and started a huge debate about the goals of taxation; it is often credited with being one reason why the Swedish Social Democrats lost the 1976 election.

* Geri Walton, Voltaire's Coffee Obessions in the 18th Century

* The Optimizer's Curse and Wrong-Way Reductions notes some problems for common forms of Effective Altruism.

* John McCoy and Tomer Ullman, Judgments of effort for magical violations of intuitive physics. If you give people a list of fantastic things (conjure something out of thin air, make it cease to exist, make it levitate, make it invisible), which do they think would be hardest to accomplish?

* I don't generally like Cass Sunstein's work, but I do like his suggestion for a word that means "what happens when a group of people, outraged by some real or imagined transgression, responds in a way that is disproportionate to the occasion, thus ruining the transgressor’s day, month, year or life": lapidation.

* St. Ambrose and Baptism of Desire

* Singing Homer's Odyssey

* Lisa Song on the problems with carbon credits

Currently Reading

Fanny Burney, Evelina
David Papineau, Philosophical Devices
E. M. Dadlez, ed., Jane Austen's Emma: Philosophical Perspectives
Michael Pakaluk, The Memoirs of St. Peter: A New Translation of the Gospel According to Mark

How a Two-Year-Old Solves the Trolley Problem