Tense Logics and Counterfactuals

 Considerations relevant to tense logic go back to Aristotle, but modern tense logic begins with Arthur Prior, who recognized that you could have with tenses an analogue of alethic modal logics (with necessities and possibilities). The Diamond or weak modality operators are:

P: at some point in the Past
F: at some point in the Future

The Box or strong modality operators are:

H: Has always been so in the past
G: Going to always be so in the future

Thus you can get a 'tense logic' in two different directions from a reference point, with pastward strong and weak modalities and futureward strong and weak modalities. In each direction, many standard things for modal logic hold true, including that the relevant strong and weak modalities are interdefinable, e.g.,

Pp = ~H~p
Fp = ~G~p

It follows from this that for every modal logic you can name, you can give a tense interpretation of it. Of course, many of these are weird tense logics -- but, by definition, they are logically possible ways a kind of tense could work. In terms of our ordinary grammatical tenses, we need to have a logic that has strings of modal operators. For instance, getting something like

It had been the case that John went to the store

requires that we be able to talk about what is to the past of something in the past:

PP(John goes to the store).

We also, of course, need to be able to talk about what is to the future of what is in the past, what is to the past of what is in the future, what is in the future of what is in the future, and so forth. One of the earliest important results in tense logic proved that, if we are dealing with a time that is completely linear (no branches), all possible ways of talking about it can be reduced to fifteen combinations of two tense operators. There are thus fifteen possible tenses, if we think of time as being something like a line. Most languages do not use all fifteen. (They also often combine tense with other things, so not all grammatical tenses can be captured by a tense logic alone.)

But of course, we can have tense logic interpretation for any modal logic we want, and we don't have to think of time as linear. It's common to think of time as branching in at least one direction (usually the future). You can also think of many times. For instance, instead of thinking of time as a line, you could think of it as a plane or volume. Thus, in addition to the past, we could have an eckwise and andwise direction (to borrow terms from the short story, "The Dark Tower"). Every point in time would have a pastward, a futureward, an eckwise, and an andwise direction. The eckwise and andwise would work exactly like past and future, but would just not be to the past or to the future. We couldn't guarantee that they were perpendicular, which requires not just tense but a precise way to measure time, but we could recognize them as not all on one line.

This might seem rather silly. But in fact this is not very different from how spacetime works in relativity theory; it gets more complicated when you bring in precise measurements, but if we are only looking at tenses, thinking of several dimensions of time is not any different from thinking of spacetime. Spatial directions too have 'tenses' (forward and backward).

And, of course, in science fiction, we often find people treating counterfactual possibilities as alternative tenses. This is actually older than you might expect; the late medieval scholastics in discussing the logical operation of ampliation identified five logical tenses: past, present, future, possible, imaginable. In medieval logic, it's generally taken to be the case that propositions (or 'enunciations') can be true or false depending on the present moment they are said, but it was also recognized that we sometimes 'ampliate' (make wider) what we are considering. 'John went to the store' is talking about John, who exists now, but is not confined to what John is doing now.

Because of this, we would expect to find analogues of counterfactual conditionals -- counterpresential conditionals, we might call them. And this is what we do find. They're not even very strange:

If John went to the store, he has already bought milk.

If John will go to the store, he will then get milk.

Can we just treat counterfactuals as just another kind of tense? This is almost built in -- tenses, at least in tense logic, are just interpretations of Box and Diamond, strong modality and weak modality, and counterfactuals, at least in alethic modal logics, are also such interpretations. But the kinds of modal logic that most people think make sense of temporal tenses are not obviously the ones you would propose for counterfactuals (and vice versa). The analogy is strongest when we think specifically of 'not being present'. But it maybe gets weaker if we really think about past, future, or alternate possibilities. But we also have to keep in mind that there is no one single view of how time works. Certainly counterfactuals seem more like alternate branches in branching time than parallel linear times. (If we try to understand counterfactuals in this way, we seem to need time to branch in both the pastward and the futureward direction. But perhaps counterfactuals also require an eckwise and an andwise direction.)

Standardization

By some official oversight, which I am quite unable to explain, we are still allowed to write private letters if we put them in public pillar-boxes. The Postmaster-General does not write all our letters for us; even the local postman has as yet no such local powers. I cannot conceive how it is that reformers have failed to note the need for uniting, reorganizing, coordinating, codifying, and linking up all this complex, chaotic, and wasteful system, or lack of system. There must be vast amounts of overlapping, with some six young gentlemen writing letters to one young lady. There must be a terribly low educational standard, with all sorts of poor people allowed to put into a private letter any spelling or grammar they like. There must be a number of bad psychological habits being formed, by foolish people writing their sons in the Colonies or their mothers in the workhouse. And all this anarchy and deterioration could be stopped by the simple process of standardisation of all correspondence.

G. K. Chesterton, Government and the Rights of Man. 

A Quarter of a Millenium

 On the Fourth of July two years ago, reflecting on some comments made by Abraham Lincoln in 1858, I said:

At the present time, about 248 years after the beginning, the United States is a mighty nation of about 340 million people, and we own and inhabit somewhere near six percent of the world's dry land and an even larger share of the world's habitable land, having added Alaska, Hawaii, and various islands to its bulk, as well as having regularized some borders and territories that were still in flux in Lincoln's day. There were only 32 states in 1858, Minnesota having just been admitted in May. We are the world's fourth largest country by land area, the world's third largest country by population. We cover just under two percent of the entire earth's surface and have just under five percent of the world's population. We are by far the world's wealthiest country, having about one and a half times the total wealth of the second wealthiest country. We are an agricultural superpower, the largest agricultural exporter by monetary amount (about eight percent of the entire world market) and the second largest by tonnage; we are an industrial superpower, the second largest manufacturing exporter (about 16 percent of the entire world market). And, of course, nobody needs to be reminded that we are a military superpower.

To which can be added many other things. We are the only nation to have put footsteps on the Moon, an extraordinary achievement that cries out for a national epic that has not yet been written. We made the airplane viable, industrialized the automobile, made personal computing successful, created the Internet, invented GPS. It has been a busy quarter of a millenium. May those who are alive in 2276 look back at something even more impressive than we have seen.

But all of this is in many ways secondary, because none of these is the greatest achievement of the United States. The greatest achievement of the United States is the United States itself. There is a core of who we are that stands on its own, and would still stand even if we were considerably less overwhelming, a set of ideas forged by fire and preserved by tradition and passed down from the generation of the Founders: popular sovereignty, federation, division of powers, natural rights to life, to liberty, and to the pursuit of happiness, civil equality, constitutional respect, unity of nation, pragmatic daring, republican vigilance for liberty, appeal to a higher and more moral law. The labels are abstract, but the actual working is very concrete. In the century in which the United States was born, the British Constitution was seen as the wonder of the world, a strangely impossible mix of balanced oppositions in a patchwork that worked so well that it seemed nearly miraculous. The United States is also very much a near-miracle. But of course the chaos of the British Constitution was not really a chaos; all of the apparent inconsistency was the complexity required to do justice to the one key original idea that the Englishman, even the ordinary Englishman with no title, truly mattered, expanded to the notion that free Britons never would be slaves. By happenstance and providence and very occasional clear sight, and despite all its mess and imperfection, it had built up in such a way as to make that idea breathtakingly visible. Much the same, I think, can be said of us.

We are certainly no Kingdom of Ends, but we are also no mere ideal in a philosopher's head. The difficulty in this world is to maintain a clear view of the importance of the person, both as individual and as in community, that doesn't flatten the person into a mere idea within a mere scheme. Attempts to build a society that can do this generally fail; the best successes are dim and wavering and muddled. But if there is one thing that I hope will still be true in another 250 years, it is that we still capture some of it. May it be!

Radio Greats: The Fourth of July (Yankee Yarns)

This is a re-post, with minor revision, from 2016. 

Alton H. Blackington was a photojournalist who loved New England and who was also a passionate pursuer of human interest stories. He liked the weird, the silly, the heartwarming stories people told about their heritage. (Old-fashioned parts of New England have an almost unlimited number of such anecdotes, full of ghosts and clever tricksters and silly greenhorns and extravagant exaggerations drolly passed off as undeniable fact.) He had a knack for re-telling them. Yankee Yarns, running from 1943 to 1951, was the distillation of all these traits. 

"The Fourth of July", from 1951, tells a tale of some boys from Fairhaven, Massachusetts, who decide, after the town passes a law prohibiting noise on the night of Fourth of July, that they will make a big to-do anyway. They end up causing a bit more bedlam than even they were expecting to cause....

Dashed Off XVIII

 causal and compositional reasoning as the primary source of questions

'spurious' is a causal term

Everything in liturgy requires title:
(1) divine scripture
(2) passions of the martyrs (hagiography)
(3) Church tradition
--- --- (a) global traditions
--- --- (b) local traditions consistent with global
(4) practical necessity
(5) episcopal authorization for purpose consistent with liturgy

The church of LDS interprets 1 Cor 15:29 as justification for the baptism for the dead (cf. Tertullian, On the Resurrection of the Dead, but cf.  also Tertullian, Against Marcion) -- in Mormon vicarious baptism, a living person is baptized as proxy on behalf of the deceased; it's difficult to find any account of how this works theologically (but see D&C 128). [It does not make the dead members of the church, but 'makes available' the ordinance to them because 'what the Saints record on earth is recorded in Heaven'; thus the expansion to other ordinances as well. Socially, since it must be done in a temple, it provides a way for young people to get early acquaintance with temple practices.]

All physical theories are mathematical representations of ensembles and systems of experiments.

Causal reasoning is necessary for distinguishing effective and ineffective experimental strategies, a distinction with which every experimentalist is familiar. (Cp. Cartwright's more general point.)

nomological machine (Cartwright): a stable-enough arrangement of components whose features acting in consort give rise to relatively stable input/output relations
"What matters about nomological machines, whether constructed from iron and steel or from flesh and blood, is tha tthey are made of parts with features that have powers and potentialities." Cartwright

No physical theory can be interpreted except in light of associated experiments and observations.

'Conforming a science to cause and effect' is more generally called 'experiment'; and anything that doesn't have it is not a natural science at all.

Mature natural sciences don't need a 'supplement' of causal notions and principles; mature sciences are experimental and therefore already have them as part of their evidential panoply.

Both  phenomenon and noumenon must be understood under the concept of being.

Our relation to the cosmos is not merely objective but intersubjective, or at least quasi-intersubjective.

logic as a symbol of wisdom

fictions cum fundamento in re (e.g., idealizations)

We need our lives not merely to be structured a certain way but to express something.

Every non-self-defeating theory must have something like a veracitas Dei, i.e., a real, general, stable principle of reliability and accuracy.

The natural tendency of academia is to bureaucratize away things that were originally occasions of creative ingenuity.

Every actual object of cognition requires an explanation of its being an object of cognition.

Our own existence is a persumptive existence, but the presumption is inevitable.

The perception-memory-imagination relations mean that we all do a rudimentary form of phenomenological variation.

God as that which is present to all presences

Our internal sense of time is a sense of differential obscurity; the perceptive relatively less obscure, the retentive more obscure, the protensive even more obscure. But our sense of this is also differentially obscure; yesterday's sense more obscure than today's.

The body is an extraordinary assemblage of measuring apparatuses.

At all times, the life of the Church is Good Friday, Holy Saturday, and Easter; the Church is always living all three days.

Nobody actually believes that violence is the last resort; it would be closer to say that shamefully abject surrender is the last resort; people go to violence well before that.

Stupidity in an educational context is entirely a matter of cultivated habit, not native ability.

Cognitive claims will often also express noncognitive mental states. Where expressivists generally err is in jumping too quickly to the notion that this is all they do.

The magnetism that Stevenson attributes to ethical claims is due to authority, not the claim as such, and is common with other kinds of claims taken as authoritative, e.g., scientific claims. Likewise, the aura of feeling he attributes to ethical words is often found around scientific terms as well (e.g., due to the 'romance of science' or historical associations over time).

People do not commend things on the basis of particular properties but on the basis of fit in context.

In order to obey imperatives, we must reason with them.

People often claim taht things are not consistent which are clearly logically so (e.g., being married and committing adultery). One wya to interpret this is in terms of a lack of smooth coherence of attitude.

Almost all discussions of metaethics assume that ethics is much simpler and much less rich than it actually is; even kindergarten ethics is usually more sophisticated than what one would assume if one went only on metaethical discussions.

1 Cor 11:34 & tradition (e.g., there are practices arranged by the apostles but not given directly in Scripture)

The body is always already a quasi-object of the mind, an availability for being an object that to the mind is already beginnign to be object in many ways.

In experience of the divine, people regularly experience things 'around' the divine, the royal pageantry and insignia of divine majesty, so to speak.

mediate divine presence & theological metonymy

our bodies as standing systems of physical abilities
-- We cannot adequately reason about and use our bodies without considering them as potential as well as actual.

We experience our bodies as interweavings of the material correlates of the voluntary with that which is involuntary, the field of doing and enduring. In certain experiences, we find a shifting -- the correlated of the voluntary stops being so (e.g., by drunkenness) , or the involuntary comes into the scope of the voluntary (e.g., waking up).

We have to incorporate our body into ourselves; we are constantly doing this and sometimes modify our way of doing it. Sometimes we do it primarily by directed attention, sometimes by use, sometimes by how we deal with pain and pleasure in action, sometimes by holding readiness, etc.
-- This is related to the mansions of St. Teresa & Edith Stein.

We have presential knowledge of oru bodies as we do of our minds.

present to vs present for

stories as giving us a better sense of the possibilities of personalities and relationships

our body as anticipated object of others

To wrap us all up into monads, Leibniz had to fold the entire universe into us, and to stop thinking of us as substances, you have to diffuse us entirely through the universe.

Our bodies are our first experience in end-giving and also our first experience in having ends imposed on us.

In 1 Apol 63, Justin seems clearly to distinguish Christ and Spirit. (Cf. Trypho 87-88)

Christ is the Apostle of God (Hb 3:1) and makes his chief students Apostles of God.

The artificial necessarily presupposes potentiality; nothing can be an artifact that is not an actualization of potential in a certain way according to art. The natural, however, does not have such a limitation. This sugges that the natural has three versions:
(1) That which is merely potential without prior potential
(2) That which is purely actual
(3) That which is actualized potential, directly or indirectly, but not according to art

make-plan vs use-plan
(they are related in that a use-plan of ingredients or parts can be directed toward a make-plan, and a make-plan can be directed toward a use-plan)

reactive attitudes --> moral quasi-persons (things personish in a respect)

Openmindedness is not conducive to truth as such, but to certain kinds of inquiry, by removing common impediments to such inquiry.

We experience not merely to experience but to comprehend, and comprehension of any experience requires going beyond that experience.

Human ardor goes in and out, lathough for some it is like great tides and for others like little lapping waves; a common mistake is to assume that the receding is a vanishing rather than a prelude to a different surge. This is true in romantic love, commitment to profession, religious devotion, parental love, and devotion to inquiry. One of the functions of deontic structures like roles and institutions is to keep us involved in important things throughout, so that our tidal nature enriches rather than cuts short the relationships and pursuits that matter.

magic tricks // slapstick
-- Magic tricks work like jokey things in that they are interweavings and nestings of small things with a potential for the wanted reactino, whcih build up when organized together properly; they also both rely on foiled expectation.
-- Magic tricks are like slapstick particularly in that they are physical and therefore easily allow you to build things up not just serially (like stand-up usually must) but parallel or vertically (so, e.g., the trick or joke is actually several tricks or jokes striking simultaneously).
-- A difference is in the relation to incongruity -- slapstick usually plays it up to get the laugh, magic trick usually plays down the incongruity of what would obviously be incongruous, in order to avoid making it look like an obvious cheat and get the puzzlement. Nonetheless, this is not an absolute (jokes used to misdirect, joke tricks, etc.) -- partly because the two easily blend (as in the movie, Now You See Me).

The rule of law begins with reason as legislative.
-- the principle that constitutional law must be interpreted from the bench as broadly coherent and rational (i.e., if inconsistent only partly and by accident) and such as a deliberative body reasoning together might give

"An experience is a reference to a further experience. It is a constant return to the same in ever new ways." Patocka

Every work of fine art is already philosophical, whether a result of philosophical meditation or a result of a philosophical lark, a playing on ideas. This does not mean, of course, that its philosophical character is fully developed; it may be no more than a gesture at one step in philosophical thinking. But the greatest works of art certainly become more. Fine art, like logic, although perhaps less properly, is an organon of philosophical thought. It is the transcendental character of beauty that seems to make it so, beauty's complicated coextension with being.

"Every name befitting God befits him either causatively, similitudinally, adjunctively, or negatively." Alanus of Lille

The habits for using propositions well, for using arguments well, and for using systems of arguments well are all quite distinct, and one often finds philosophers who only have one or two of the three, because they all take work to build, and some forms of training shortchange one or the other.

The Greatest Question

 Yesterday the greatest Question was decided, which ever was de­bated in America, and a greater perhaps, never was or will be decided among Men. A Resolution was passed without one dissenting Colony “that these united Colonies, are, and of right ought to be free and independent States, and as such, they have, and of Right ought to have full Power to make War, conclude Peace, establish Commerce, and to do all the other Acts and Things, which other States may rightfully do.” You will see in a few days a Declaration setting forth the Causes, which have impell’d Us to this mighty Revolution, and the Reasons which will justify it, in the Sight of God and Man. A Plan of Confederation will be taken up in a few days.

[“John Adams to Abigail Adams, 3 July 1776,” Founders Online, National Archives, https://founders.archives.gov/documents/Adams/04-02-02-0015. (Original source: The Adams Papers, Adams Family Correspondence, vol. 2, June 1776 – March 1778, ed. L. H. Butterfield. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1963, pp. 27–29.)]

First Principles and Skepticism

 If we wish to find some proof that human beings are of their nature persuaded of the first principles of reasoning, we need look no further than the history of scepticism. As we have seen, any scepticism which truly denied the principles of reasoning would destroy the possibility of thought and of reasoning. But there has never been a sceptic really prepared to abandon resoning for the sake of immersing himself in total mental and verbal silence. All sceptics have used reason to propagate their opinion. By this very fact they admit and use the first principles of reasoning without being conscious of what they are doing. Moreover, they do this naturally because the first principles cannot be denied. The very act of denial presupposes and requires them.

[Antonio Rosmini, Certainty, Cleary and Watson, tr., Rosmini House (Durham: 1991) pp. 76-77 (sect. 1144).]