Miracles as Signs

 I've been preparing for a busy next week, so I am behind on almost everything. But for whatever reason there has been talk of miracles in a lot of different places online, and I wanted to put down a few still-inchoate thoughts on the subject, in no particular order.

(1) A miracle is in its proper genus a sign. A sign is something manifesting something to something, or, to speak more precisely, using the terminology of C. S. Peirce, a representamen (R), an object (O), and an interpretant (I) in triadic relation. For the miracle to function as a sign, it requires three things to come together:

(a) a set of events and happenings in the world, having particular identifiable characteristics (R);

(b) something beyond itself to which it refers (O);

(c) a possible meaning or interpretation in a mind, allowing that mind on recognizing R to understand O (I).

It's a 'possible' meaning in a mind for the same reason that signs in a closed book are still signs even if no mind actually interprets them.  But it also has the implication that R can be a sign of O even if someone takes it to be a sign of something else, or not a sign at all. This is actually quite important for miracles. To take a famous example:

"Father, glorify your name!” Then a voice came from heaven, “I have glorified it, and will glorify it again.” The crowd that was there and heard it said it had thundered; others said an angel had spoken to him. (Jn 12:28-29 NIV)

As signs, miracles are no more immune to misinterpretation, especially deliberate misinterpretation, than any other sign, and likewise, they are no more immune to a refusal to interpret. As with every other sign, the mind has to be prepared in order to become an actual I linking R and O.

(2) There is a bad habit of assuming that if you find a 'natural explanation' for a miracle, you don't need to recognize it as a miracle. This is obviously not right in an elementary sense -- the number of 'natural explanations' that have been offered for alleged miracles but that are certainly false is very large. Merely proposing an explanation does not establish as the correct explanation. But the point goes even farther than this, because it very much matters exactly what the natural explanation explains. R is pretty much always capable of some kind of natural description because it's recognizable by our natural capacities, and all the parts of this admit of some kind of natural explanation. If water turns into wine, the behavior of the water admits entirely of a natural description, and the behavior of the wine admits entirely of a natural description. But it's also possible that the actual transformation does, as well -- for instance, assuming that it is not an instantaneous replacement of one thing by another, the transformation may well be a matter of molecules reorganizing in a way that is entirely describable by ordinary chemistry, even if it is a series of reactions and restructurings that never otherwise occur. The chemical description would in some sense be an 'explanation', but it would just explain the R's having the characteristics it does, and would be entirely inadequate to explain the actual change. 

Further, a natural explanation as to the proximate causes of a change is not a natural explanation of the meaning of the change. This plays a role in what were traditionally called preternatural miracles, which are by definition events entirely within the normal course of nature, but which involve a peculiar confluence of natural events in a context that makes it meaningful. Most of the plagues of Egypt were 'just' infestations and epidemics of frogs, gnats, flies, pestilence for livestock, boils, locusts. All of these admit of natural explanation. (Indeed, people have pointed out that some of the plagues seem naturally to follow on each other -- large quantities of dead frogs could easily lead to large quantities of gnats and flies.) But when we have done so, the matter is left exactly where it was. What makes the plagues of Egypt miraculous is their meaning:

"And the Egyptians will know that I am the Lord when I stretch out my hand against Egypt and bring the Israelites out of it.” (Ex. 7:5 NIV)

But nothing about the biology of frogs and flies explains the apparent meaning arising from Moses demanding that the king of Egypt let the Hebrews leave and then plagues repeatedly following when the king refuses.

(3) A common temptation in apologetics is to assume that one must first establish the possibility of miracles in general, then establish that this particular case is a miracle, and then interpret the miracle. But this fails completely to have a proper regard for miracles as signs. As a sign, a miracle must appear, i.e., R must be able to relate to I.  Thus the actual path for understanding a miracle is to start with this appearance of miracle, which includes both the unusual event and the apparent meaning that can be communicated by it, then an elimination of the reasons to think it may be merely apparent. Then, finding apparent miracles that do not seem to be merely apparent, we have established the possibility of miracles in general. We do not deduce miracles from first principles any more than we deduce the existence of books from first principles; we experience them, or hear about people experiencing them, and proceed from there. First we have the apparentia, then we recognize it as an explanandum, then we determine what would be an adequate explanans. 

An apparent miracle, whether the appearance is direct experience or testimonial, can only be either: (a) illusory; or (b) an unusual natural event with no significance, as in the famous case when French peasants reported to their bishop that rocks were falling from the sky, and the bishop gathered all the evidence (which later became important for the study of meteorites) but eventually closed the investigation because he could find nothing to indicate that it meant anything; or (c) a supernatural work of some created spiritual power; or (d) a divine work. If it's illusory, it will be illusory either as a matter of physical misperceiving; or as a matter of psychological misperceiving, like delusion or hallucination; or as a matter of testimonial fiction. 

In other words, we find apparent miracles in the world, in a broad sense of 'apparent'; some of these turn out not to involve identifiable sensory, psychological, or testimonial defects, and therefore are genuine wonders, broadly speaking; genuine wonders with supernatural significance are supernatural wonders; and those that have efficacy, mode, or end appropriate to God are miracles in the most proper sense. Sorting all of this is just a matter of honest inquiry, although by the nature of the case the inquiry is often difficult. But it's also the case, that here, as elsewhere, we can accept any of these for the sake of following through the argument, and because miracles are signs, this is often enough for them to fulfill their function. Certainty is not a requirement for effective signification.

(4) Of what kind of thing are miracles the signs? They are signs of authority. In miracles worked directly by God this is obvious. But it is also the case in other kinds of miracles. St. Gregory the Great has a famous comment in which he says that the saints work miracles either by authority or by prayer. Miracles worked by prayer, of course, are actually worked directly under the authority of God; the role of the saint is merely per suffragium. They just put in the request, so the miracle is properly a sign of God's authority, and the prayer is just the occasion. In miracles worked by authority, however, the immediate authority signified by the miracle is that of the human being; but this sort of authority, of course, comes ultimately from God, and therefore ultimately signifies divine authority.

In the Desert of Zin (Nm. 20), Moses is told to make water come from a rock by speaking to it; he chooses instead to reprimand the children of Israel and strike the rock with his staff. Water comes from the rock, so the same result occurred. But Moses gets into very serious trouble over this -- indeed, it is given as the reason why God refuses to let him reach the Promised Land. And one way to interpret this is that Moses, in doing other than what God tells him, messes up the sign precisely as a sign of authority.

Profitable Sayings

 If you love knowledge, you will be a master of knowledge. What you have come to know, preserve by exercise; what you have not learned, seek to add to your knowledge; for it is as reprehensible to hear a profitable saying and not grasp it as to be offered a good gift by one's friends and not accept it. Spend your leisure time in cultivating an ear attentive to discourse, for in this way you will find that you learn with ease what others have found out with difficulty.

Believe that many precepts are better than much wealth; for wealth quickly fails us, but precepts abide through all time; for wisdom alone of all possessions is imperishable. Do not hesitate to travel a long road to those who profess to offer some useful instruction; for it were a shame, when merchants cross vast seas in order to increase their store of wealth, that the young should not endure even journeys by land to improve their understanding.

[Isocrates, To Demonicus 1.18-19.] 

Dashed Off XXIX

 "The great writers of aphorisms read as if they had all known each other well." Elias Canetti

Beyond a very limited point, neither imagination nor sympathy suffice for inhabiting another's perspective, or even sharing their imagination and sentiment.

Morality is as much about the world in which we can live as it is about ourselves.

the service of calm passions to reason

It is an important step in maturity to recognize that your value is not because God needs you but because God loves you.

All of our acts of love are dim, distorted echoes of the divine creative act. Not recognizing the imitation and creativity is a grave failing; not recognizing the dimness and distortion is at least as grave a failing.

Mathematics looks superficially as if it were the realm of clean and clear conceptual analysis, but both history and acquaintance with mathematicians show that this is potentially misleading; all these apparently clear and clean results are the results of (1) generations of mathematicians working on precisely the same kinds of problems; or (2) large cooperative communities of mathematicians arguing intensively over the matter for decades; or (3) mathematicians stumbling accidentally on the solution, often in the middle of trying to do the opposite of what the solution required; or some mix of these. In reality, conceptual analysis in mathematics is difficult and messy, with mathematicians throwing everything they can think of at it, following thousands of possible clues, filtering heaps of possible stipulations. There is no general method or systematic process for it beyond trying and trying again, using every heuristic and analogy that seems even slightly relevant.

disordered hatred of evil (e.g., losing sight of the good)

People will do extraordinarily stupid things to avoid looking stupid, and extraordinarily evil things to avoid looking evil.

We modulate our assessment of goodness and badness of consequences in light of meaning or role in context; this is true of even basic things like pleasure or satisfaction of preferences. (The failure to allow this at a basic level is a reason why utilitarianisms so often get results that people find uncanny, creepy, and unsettling.)

In order to make decisions about what we should do, we fictionalize our lives and selves, as a way to consider the options.

Intellectual fields grow out of lives; mathematics (e.g.) grows out of mathematical life.

the role of plausible fictionalization in inquiry and discovery (the 'what if', the 'Suppose we did this')

reductio ad absurdum as using fiction to prove

The wise affect everything, the good endure always.

The balance of education is in every field both to learn widely but hold to the essential.

Even mathematicians are motivated by the mathematically heroic -- to achieve the height of Gauss or such, even if only for one moment on one small thing. All intellectual fields get their power from striving for a form of heroism, some kind of greatness of deed that puts one at the pinnacle of what it is to be a human being working in that field.

LLMs get their most impressive results because they approximate the human sense of relevance by statistically analyzing vast quantities of its results.

allusion and the feeling of depth

coordinated game pairs (hide/seek; DM / rpg character)

[justice (dike) -> order (eunomia)] -> peace (eirene)

joy : charity :: order : justice

We rely on the expressiveness of music not merely to express but also to compensate for the difficulty of expressing.

When we say that one thing (A) means another (B), we do not mean that B follows from A, even with background information; we mean that A is B for a relevant interpretational purpose, that A can be interpreted as B.

formal and instrumental norms
natural and voluntary norms
spontaneous and artificial norms

omniscient third person narration as an essential part of intellectual inquiry in general (e.g., to coordinate different perspectives or appearances, or to assess mistakes and erorrs)

To learn from inquiry, we must usually narrate it.

When we compare suffering to suffering, we never do so directly outside of philosopher's constructed cases.

We understand suffering and happiness only by telling stories about them.

We do not experience singular pains as bad, but more as resistance or pushback; and we do not experience singular pleasures as good, but more as interesting. Pain and pleasure become appearance of bad and good only as they cease to be singular, momentary, and unexplained.

Once there is a definite thing, there is a definite order for it.

Sympathy, the sense of fairness, and stable all-things-considered preference are all reasons to think something has non-instrumental value.

Maximizing happiness and maximizing utility (causes of /factors contributing to happiness) should not be assumed to be the same.

Harsanyi's aggregation theorem has a problem common to arguments of its general sort: it shows that a conclusion is required by certain assumptions which are taken to be 'reasonable', but fails to involve any recognition that 'reasonable' may be had in different modes, thus providing no effective argument that these are assumptions we need to posit always rather than assumptions we may want to posit sometimes.

The categorical imperative implies that every candidate standard of success in action must be considered from the point of view of the rational person sharing standards with other rational persons in a rational community structured by such standards.

Playing with dolls and pets is part of how children understand parenting and being parented.

God as infinite valuable // God as infinite intelligible

possible relations between one fictional character (A) and another (B)
(1) incorporation (e.g., B is by authorial attribution the same as A)
(2) extension (e.g., B is a different version of A by the same author)
(3) responsive imitation (e.g., B is a version of A by different author)
(4) allusive imitation (e.g., B is different but represents A, e.g., in a parody)

Many things that make us 'feel alive' do so contrastively, by touching lightly on our mortality.

Empathy is not the proper emotional response to horrors.

Pain and pleasure do not aggregate; some (but not all) of the measurements of pain and pleasure do.

Description is a style of speaking, not a metaphysical status.

Being grateful to beneficiaries for accidental benefits increases the chances that similar benefits will be given intentionally; gratitude is an encouragement to beneficence.

The state has no absolute claim on obedience; it has to earn it (although this is sometimes after the fact, on credit -- i.e., the state borrows the obedience with promise that it will turn out to be worthwhile to the lender).

A problem with 'gender' in discussions is that the word is deliberately used to blur sex, social role, and membership in a community; but these do not all work the same way. And because 'gender' blurs these things, it makes it impossible to work out their proper relations.

Anything we say about someone can be said as an insult or as a compliment.

An attitude is a way of relating.

rationality as capacity for at least eventually recognizing the necessary and the obligatory

docilitas as the true epoche

We understand the goodness and badness of pleasure and pain in terms of what they motivate.

Ways to be derivatively intrinsically bad are to be instrumentally bad in an excess that is destructive, or instrumentally good in an excess that is self-defeating.

The goodness and badness of pleasure and pain are in their contribution to a life.

-- All other things being equal, we help those beasts most who can most help us.
-- All other things being equal, we help most those beasts with which we most easily sympathize.
-- All other things being equal, we most help those beasts with which we see ourselves already co-contributing in a worthwhile system.

Faith is a trust in an intelligibility not yet seen, and hope in an improvement not yet had.

Whether or not something is a mere truism depends on context.

considering the various parts of man as though they were various persons (ST 2-2.106.3 ad 1)

The oblique is the path to power.

strands of morality (Dorothy Emmett)
(1) C-strand (Custom) -- "rules of thumb, wisdom of experience, and taboos"
(2) R-strand (Reciprocity) -- "attempts to bring some rationality into customary morality"
(3) G-strand (Generosity) -- "a highly personal kind of behavior, which certainly cannot e prescribed in any set of rules, or be expected as of right"

overflow obligations
(1) 'for all one knows' cases under uncertainty
(2) analogous cases
(3) cases that are preconditions
(4) cases that facilitate primary obligation

What some people call 'empathy' is just weak emotional regulation.

kinds of direct objection
(1) alethic
--- (a) logical
--- (b) probable
(2) epistemic
--- (a) probative
--- (b) common sense
(3) pragmatic
--- (a) deontic
--- (b) prudential
(4) functional
--- (a) irrelevance
--- (b) inadequacy

displausibilization: attacking a position indirectly by refuting things with which it is imaginatively and associatively linked

the casuistries of honor and shame

Obscure and confused ideas are not different kinds of ideas from clear and distinct ideas.

Almost all entrenched political controversies arise from an attempt of everyone to avoid the real point of disagreement.

It is part of the business of the moral philosopher to give what is useful for personal advice and exhortation, because an ethics useful for neighter would obviously be defective.

Moore's argument that Casuistry is part of Ethics is quite good

Moore's Trilemma
(1) Either 'good' denotes (a) a simple and undefinable notion or (b) a compelx and thus definable notion; or (c) an unintelligible or meaningless notion.
(2) As being good is good, (b) gets us the open question argument and, in addition, gives us analyses that are sometimes obviously too complicated to allow equivalence.
(3) As we do in fact understand questions about good, (c) is not sustainable.

The line between pleasure and pain is fuzzy.

Act in such a way as does not rule out sublimity in human life.
-- broadly related to heroism, which is to act in such a way as suggests the possibility of sublimity of character

Having too many jokes begins to spoil all jokes.

A philosophical notebook is an explorer's journal: partial charts, natural-historical studies, reminders for navigation.

Pleasure and pain agree in being means to further life and aids in navigating the world.

We should take seriously and appreciatively goods we cannot maximize, that are received only as gift or that are beyond our ability to guarantee.

Since possible worlds are constructed with propositions, taking propositions to be sets of possible worlds requires either (1) that propositions not have truth values for every possible world or (2) that every proposition is the set of all possible worlds. (Any truth value has to be considered for each proposition, whether true, false, or other.)

knowledge : proposition :: extension : constructed lines

Beneficence often takes advantage of luck.

'Bayesian arguments' as often arguments from fictional conversion testimony
-- as often used, they require that the probability assessments be both subjective and objective

hypotheticals as an instrument for approximating possibilities

presumptive True -> conditionally required Diamond

genius as rationality without logical fetters

We read with other readers, including the author as reader.

skepticism as glass cannon

Every virtue has an aspiring, an achieving, and a consolidating action.

kinds of difference between waking and dreaming: substantiality, efficacy, rationality, comprehensivity, teleology, intersubjectivity

First Reflection

 The first reflection of human beings 1. is lively precisely because phantasy is still fresh and vivacious, as it is in the youth of individuals, of nations and of humankind; 2. is new precisely because it is first reflection, discovering the relationships of things with a kind of creative inventiveness; 3. is sublime because it is necessarily concerned with relationships between the most important and necessary things, and indicates invisible beings such as a cause, a God; 4. is vast because it has not yet learnt to halt before particular things and their minute parts where there is nothing to hold its attention, but gazes around once more, ranging eagerly over everything to which, still unsatisfied, it adds the infinite.

[Antonio Rosmini, Certainty, Cleary and Watson, trs., Rosmini House (Durham: 1991), pp. 156-157.]

Rosmini notes that this is why ancient poetry often has the features it does. 'First reflection' is also responsible for the features of what he calls 'popular knowledge', which lies between direct or immediate knowledge and the philosophical knowledge that arises from what he calls 'second reflection'. In the sense that the terms are used here only direct knowledge is factive; that is, precisely because they are reflective, popular knowledge and philosophical knowledge can be mixed with various errors. But ideas arising from first reflection tend to have a vivid, common-sensical, concreteness to them, due to being a synthesis of different things into something that makes some kind of sense; their primary difficulty is a tendency to glide over potentially important distinctions. It is from dealing with this failing in popular knowledge that philosophical knowledge, arising from the much more analytical second reflection, comes; thus Rosmini says that philosophy first arises from the masses.

Two Poem Drafts

 Social Media

The chim-chim of conversation may lull to sleep the ear;
the termless perorations may eat through all the year;
the chatter on the branches may drown the highway-roar;
but one day it will falter.
One day it will end
and the mouth take bit and halter,
all blather to forfend.

The blatherskite may jabber with ishkabibble roar;
the monkeys sling their gibber, the jungle trees to bore;
the World our Foe may babble and repeat its mock and sneer;
but one day it will silence.
One day it will end,
and the tongue, despite its violence,
beneath the yoke will bend.

Strange Primates

I hear the music and your eyes
are lovely like the ocean-wave,
darkly blue and gray,
like wild and stormy skies,
like death, so deeply grave --
yet somehow they are bright with light
that overshadows day.
And in such times I know,
whatever the worldly-wisemen say,
whatever counsels fools may rave,
that we, strange primates,
are yet unbound,
yet timeless,
though even our timelessness dies;
that something eternal we somehow save
from rapacious time that flies --
and there, only there, are we found.

Sounds and Movements

 Music is a joy, an unavoidable human disposition. So, people cannot be without music; if they feel joy, they must express it in sound and give it shape in movement. The way of human beings is such that changes in the motions of their nature are completely contained in these sounds and movements. 

 Xunzi, "Discourse on Music", in Xunzi: The Complete Text, Eric L. Hutton, tr., Princeton University Press [Princeton, NJ: 2014] p. 218.

Gift of the Lord

 Today is the feast of St. Matthew, Apostle and Evangelist. Most of what we know about him directly comes from his call:

As Jesus was walking along, he saw a man called Matthew sitting at the tax booth; and he said to him, “Follow me.” And he got up and followed him. And as he sat at dinner in the house, many tax collectors and sinners came and were sitting with him and his disciples. When the Pharisees saw this, they said to his disciples, “Why does your teacher eat with tax collectors and sinners?” But when he heard this, he said, “Those who are well have no need of a physician, but those who are sick. Go and learn what this means, ‘I desire mercy, not sacrifice.’ For I have come to call not the righteous but sinners.” (Mt 9:9-13 NRSV)

In 10:3, he is again called a tax collector; other than that, he is just mentioned as one of the Twelve. In the very similar corresponding passages in Mark 2 and Luke 5, the tax collector is called Levi; Mark specifies further that he is the "son of Alphaeus". On the basis of this, Matthew and Levi are almost universally identified; because another one of the Twelve is also usually identified as 'James, son of Alphaeus', there is a common tradition that they were brothers. There are technically other possibilities consistent with the texts we have -- e.g., that Matthew, Levi, and James were three brothers -- but all of them are more complicated and none of them show up in the tradition. In the first century people using different names for different purposes was not uncommon; Judeans in Judea and Galilee had a much more fluid sense of names than we do. (One idea I once heard, which is pure speculation, but which has always stuck in my mind, is that Jesus, whom we know sometimes to give his disciples names, called Levi and gave him the name 'Matthew', Gift of the Lord, as a way of putting his past behind him.)

Some people have suggested that Matthew may also be the 'Mattai' who is one of the five disciples of Yeshu the Nazarene in Sanhedrin 43a; but it's hard to say. The rabbis may be conflating Jesus with another, earlier person of the same name, and in any case they are not interested in the history but in the question of whether something in a preserved baraita (an oral tradition not found in the Mishnah) conflicted with a given interpretation of the law. They effectively conclude that it doesn't because the Yeshu case was a weird exception due to the practical conditions. Of the five disciple names given, the others (Nakai, Netzer, Buni, and Toda) seem to be chosen just to make the point that the case was a unique one, which suggests that we should not put much weight on it. Nonetheless, we can't rule out that the original story was partly inspired by Matthew's name to begin with, and the play-on-words it allowed, so we don't know.

According to tradition, Matthew mostly spent his life preaching in Judea, but eventually went to preach to the Jewish community elsewhere -- most traditions and legends say Ethiopia, although by a weird quirk of naming, this could mean either Africa or modern-day Georgia, we don't know. He is traditionally regarded as a martyr, although we don't know how he died; one later legend suggests that he was killed by sword during liturgy.

His status as an Evangelist is due in part to the influence of Papias, who says in a quotation preserved by Eusebius that Matthew collected the logoi or sayings of Jesus in the Hebrew dialect, and others interpreted it. It's unclear whether the Gospel was attached to the name of Matthew because it seemed like the one that best fit the claim of Papias or whether Papias says it because it was already seen as Matthew's. In either case, it is a very reasonable conclusion that the sayings Papias mentions and the Gospel of Matthew are connected; parts of the Gospel as we have it are clearly arranged around sets of prophetic texts connected to Jesus' life and around sets of parables, so it's entirely possible to think of the Gospel as we have it as being such an original set of sayings 'interpreted'. (If you accept Markan priority, the 'interpretation' could very well have been in part by integrating it with Mark.) 

What is interesting is that Matthew is consistently associated with writings specifically for Jewish Christians; this is true not only of Papias's tradition and the superscription for the Gospel, but also of the various heretical works attributed to Matthew. James son of Alphaeus is sometimes identified with James the Less, who was one of the Brothers of the Lord. The Brothers of the Lord were relatives of Jesus who played (as we see at the beginning of Acts and in 1 Corinthians 9) an important leadership role in the early Christian community, especially around Jerusalem, up to the destruction of the Temple. There are complications with identifying James son of Alphaeus and James the Brother of the Lord, but if they are identified, then it would mean that Matthew may have been one of the Brothers of the Lord too. (The brothers of the Lord are named in Mark 6 and Matthew 13 as James, Joseph, Simon, and Judas, but we don't know if the list is intended to be exhaustive or just representative.) I'm inclined not to make the identification between the two Jameses, but it's certainly one that has occasionally been made.