Dashed Off XXXV

This finishes the notebook that was completed in September 2025.

 What is the relation between causation and memory?
--- Irrelevant (Noncausal Theories)
--- Relevant: Is appropriate causation necessary and sufficient?
--- --- No: Is it neither necessary nor sufficient?
--- --- --- --- No: Hybrid Causal Theories
--- --- --- --- Yes: Post-causal Theories
--- --- Yes: Does it involve some form of transmission?
--- --- --- --- No: Distributed/Procedural Causal Theories
--- --- --- --- Yes: Does it involve some form of preservation?
--- --- --- --- --- --- No: Constructive Causal Theories
--- --- --- --- --- --- Yes: (Neo-)Classical Causal Theories
[Roughed out from Michaelian & Robins, "Beyond Causal Theory?"]

There is no violation of rights that one can make that cannot be done by a state through its officials or representatives.

human beings collectively as utility monsters relative to other species

rhetorical inventio: thinking through the true and true-like that render a case or its explanation probable

(1) We know how to make moral statements.
(2) This competence requires that some of these be true.
(3) Therefore some moral statements are true.
-- (2) would be based on the idea that skill at using kinds of statements excludes systematic misuse.

Persons are causes of both order and exception to order.

Most things can be done by genius, by art, by method, or by diligence.

method as external art, as skill-like diligence

A middle term may be descriptive, comparative, relational, circumstantial, or authoritative.

stages in deterioration of factional politics
(1) argumentative collaboration
(2) passive-aggressive negotiation
(3) aggressive negotiation
(4) passive-aggressive reaction
(5) preemptive prevention
(6) aggressive reaction
(7) aggression on grounds of what is anticipated
(8) hostility

justified true at-least-belief
justified true no-less-than-belief
justified true beliefishness

order : system :: form : substance

observational vs narratival counterexamples to arguments

sign proper (manifests object) vs sign inverse (manifests interpretant)

fictionalisms that appeal to fiction vs those that use 'fiction' as an analogy vs those that are structurally like other fictionalisms but have no clear relation to fiction

Unlimited semiosis implies a capacity, not a process or network.

Pascal's Wager is not based on expected value but on a theory of reasons.

We find external bodies not only resistance to our wills but obscure to our intellects.

interpolative vs extrapolative inferences in reading fiction

grounds of reasonable incredulous stare
(1) apparent direct contradiction
(2) apparent self-defeat
(3) apparent contradiction of experience
(4) apparent violation of consensus sapientorum
(5) apparent violation of consensus gentium
(6) apparent impracticability
(7) apparent lack of evidence

interpolation into a model of an extrapolative object

In every discipline, there are rules of thumb and simple methods done at first for practical convenience that then slowly settle into confirmation as more than merely practical.

We use the term 'make believe' of a wide variety of activities that have a wide range of quasi-doxastic effects and formats.

Need does not entitle, although it may give priority or further specification to already existing title.

Paradigm case arguments got correct the idea that an account of meaning must accommodate ostension when relevant, and actual ostension rules out empty classification. Paradigm case arguments, however, cannot establish the quality of the classification itself. They prove that a position is not purely verbal, in the sense of using words that correspond to nothing, but not that it is articulated into words on the most appropriate way.
PCA's work most effectively against *unqualified* skepticisms, specifically about *existence*, where this is taken to imply that discourse is *either meaningless or purely verbal*; it also can serve as a *ground of challenge* (the skeptic must clarify the classification/analysis/definition relevant to his conclusion).

What counts as a mistake depends on the ends.

It's odd that philosophers discussing the 'method of cases' talk about 'intuitions' and 'elicited judgmetns' rather than the cases themselves. They talk about whether *responses to cases* are evidence, whetehr this is due to the constitution or the causation of the *responses*, and not about the cases.

appearance + reliability principle -> truth of, inferred from, or evidenced by appearance
appearance + causal principle -> existence of causes of a sort to cause appearance
appearance + method of questioning -> questions suggested by appearance

Taht something is a 'category mistake' is established by reductio ad absurdum. (Ryle)

Some of what is imaginary is not dependent on us and some of what is real, is.

Intellectual inquiry is not a Markov process.

"Every philosopher of the present day has his 'aggressive' as well as his 'affirmative' position. You understand his 'aggressive' position so far as you understand what those tenets are which he desires to overthrow; and you understand his 'affirmative' position so far as you understand what those tenets are which he desires to establish in their place." W. G. Ward

free will in a state of probation vs free will in a state of consummation

God is always in our future and unavoidable.

the experience of anti-impulsive effort
the experience of anti-inertial effort
the experience of meaning in action not derivable from circumstance or antecedent because different in kind
the experience of selection of alternatives

Value is what the intellect understands through the will; inquiry is what the will intends through the intellect.

categorizing kinds of fiction by modal axioms

the sensible as a kind of representamenality

We storytell ourselves to ourselves and otehrs, characterize ourselves and organize our memories by plot and scene and episode, extract themes from our lives, and take for the diction, spectacle, and melody of those lives.

The structuring of language is an exegesis of phenomena.

Meaning is intelligible structuring or ordering to an end

Realism in excessive doses is highly toxic to fine arts.

"If we are open to recognize a person in one member of a species, we are open to recognize a person in all members of it." Oliver O'Donovan

Persons are both providential and provident.

conscience as the High Court, consciousness as the adminsitrative court

People are not hypocrites about things that can't be done; hypocrisy is only about the attainable.

Millians confuse a use of proper naming with proper names themselves; in fact, you can treat even common nouns in a Millian way without their ceasing to be common nouns with an articulable sense.

Gn 2:24 as a prophecy of the Church (Grosseteste argues on this ground that the union of Christ and the Church would have happened even without sin)

Proper names should not be conflated with singular reference.

being is not a genus -> no division can dequately divide being into well defined classes or concepts

one : reference :: true : sense :: good : function

Fiction is possible because of the mind, but is not itself a psychological matter.

Words are always mediate rather than immediate signs; they are signs of signs, not incidentally, but by nature.

definition per additamentum

Every concept virtually contains other concepts.

Not all doubts are the same kind of doubt, and skeptics generally do not recognize these differences.

Augustine De Trin 8 on Alexandria

nominatio per se vs. nominatio per alio

We know ourselves with the help of other people.

It is often a great advantage to let nature do your detailed thinking for you; this is an advantage of the experimental sciences.

We inject realities into our imaginations and coat our realities with imaginations.

binary incipit and desinit
incipit (x,y): x incipiates y; x makes y begin to b

Much of the work of the Church is done by kind and pious friends.

Relaxation and inactivity are not the same.

We tend to reject the idea of death as an end because we see ourselves as having an affinity with eternal things.

In assessing evidence, we need to consider not just probabilities of and given particular evidences, but the quality of the overall state of evidence. We assess this by cultivating expert familiarity.

figments of the saints as icons (we find something like this in Bridget of Sweden, Margery Kempe, and other mystics with very visual, or sometimes auditory, experiences)

iconology as providing the framework for all private revelation

mystical experience -> internal realization as icon -> communication in writing -> internal realization for reader as icon -> testimonially mediated sharing in iconic experience

Dreams and ambitions without clear-eyed prudence are merely lovely temptations.

"For that is to be called love which is true; otherwise it is desire." Augustine

In human society, necessity often works like a declarative speech act.

From our social ontology interacting with the world, we causally extrapolate a physical ontology.

Human beings unite around particular people and around abstractions.

exists as, true in, good for

"Given any sufficiently determinate standards, it will be an objective issue, a matter of truth and falsehood, how well any particular speicmen measures up to these standards." Mackie

(1) It is objectively true that rational beings in societies have standards.
(2) Therefore it is objectively true or false whether human actions measure up to them.

"I concede that if the requisite theological doctrine [i.e., divine purpose for human life] is true, a kind of objective prescriptivity could be thus introduced." Mackie

In solving a problem we have to have some sense of what is solving it *enough*.

Bail is a social threshold -- those who can make bail have social connections at least sufficient to make it.

Truth is warrant for daring.

Our happiness consists not only of good results, even if we assume consequentialism, but also reasonableness and proportion and nonregrettableness of means.

Relative to a fictional world, everything in the real world is *hypothetical* and confirmed or disconfirmed (1) by what is true in the fictional world and (2) by authorial intention.

"The response to fiction is a complete product of make-believe and judgments about the work that do not occur within the scope of the make-believe at all." Gregory Currie

They style of fiction affects the style of the fictional world.

Make-believe is not an attitude but an activity.

Most M are P --> All non-R M are P
Most S are M --> All non-R S are M + All M where S are non-R M
 --> All nonR S are P 
Therefore Some S are P
(one would always need a way not to equivocate on residue R)

History and Free-Will

Again, it is not in the history of man, as in natural history, where the structure of the various plants and animals forms by close analogy one connected system of species and genera; and where the growth, bloom, decay and extinction of individuals follow in an uniform order, like day and night, or like the change of the seasons. But in the sphere of human freedom; as man is a natural creature, but a natural creature endowed with free-will, that is to say, with the faculty of moral determination between the good or heavenly impulse, and the wicked or hostile principle; all these organic laws of nature form only the physical basis of his progress and history. And hardly do they form this—but rather a mere disposition of which the direction depends on man, or on the use he makes of his own freedom. It is only when that higher principle of man’s free-will has been weakened, debased, obscured, extinguished, and utterly confounded, that those laws of nature can hold good in history. Then indeed the symptoms of a diseased age, the organic vices of a nation, the prognostics of a general crisis of the world may be determined to a certain extent with the precision of medical science.

[Friedrich Schlegel, The Philosophy of History, James Burton Robertson, tr., Volume II, Lecture XV.]

Bo Motori Clamitabo

Motor Bus
by A.D. Godley 

What is this that roareth thus?
Can it be a Motor Bus?
Yes, the smell and hideous hum
Indicat Motorem Bum!
Implet in the Corn and High
Terror me Motoris Bi:
Bo Motori clamitabo
Ne Motore caedar a Bo---
Dative be or Ablative
So thou only let us live:
Whither shall thy victims flee?
Spare us, spare us, Motor Be!
Thus I sang; and still anigh
Came in hordes Motores Bi,
Et complebat omne forum
Copia Motorum Borum.
How shall wretches live like us
Cincti Bis Motoribus?
Domine, defende nos
Contra hos Motores Bos!

 

This was once an extraoardinarily popular poem. The joke, of course, lies in declining motor and bus as if they were true Latin nouns. 'Bus' is in reality a shortened form of omnibus, which is the dative form of omnis. (It is also the ablative form, hence the line in the poem 'Dative Be or Ablative'.) The original expression was a French use of omnibus as an adjective -- voiture omnibus meant a vehicle for everyone, and this got shortened to 'bus' in English.* Thus we get all the declensions of the fictional Latin word 'bus'. On the singular side: Bus, of course, is the nominative; Be is the vocative; Bi is the genitive; Bo is both the dative and the ablative (they each get one of the Bo's in the poem); and Bum is the accusative. On the plural side: Bi is the nominative; Borum is the genitive; Bis is the ablative; Bos is the accusative. Motor is also declined appropriately, as an adjectival noun.

Bo Motori clamitabo / Ne Motore caedar a Bo is absolute brilliance: it means 'I will cry out against the Motor Bus, lest I be struck down by a Motor Bus'. 

* This has nothing to do with the poem, but this is vividly reminding me of the time in sixth grade (I think) when I lost points on an English assignment about etymology for (correctly) saying that 'cab' was the shortened form of cabriolet. 'Cabriolet' is related to a word for 'goat', and it was a popular way of describing how the cabriolet carriage moved, i.e., in a skipping, bouncy kind of way. Cabriolets eventually got replaced by heavier, more durable hackney carriages; nobody knows why they were called 'hackneys', but popularly all vehicles for hire had come to be called 'cabs', so the hackneys often were still called 'cabs' too. At the end of the nineteenth century, cab owners began installing mechanical and electrical taximeters to better keep track of fares, hence the name 'taxi cab'. (The word 'taxi' is indeed related to the word 'tax'; a taximeter is a measuring device for what you are being charged or 'taxed'. We have since shortened 'taximeter' to 'meter'.) The assignment, of course, had been written in the expectation that someone would say that 'cab' is the shortened form of 'taxi cab'. But this is not right. 'Taxi' is a shortened form of 'taxi cab'; but 'taxi cab' is an expanded form of 'cab', which predates it by over a hundred years. I suppose the assignment accidentally did its job, though; I remember nothing else whatsoever about it, and, indeed, very little from the class, but I will never, ever, ever forget the etymology of 'cab'.

The Lion of Rome

 Today is the feast of Pope St. Leo I the Great, Doctor of the Church. From his Sermon 74, on the Ascension:

The mystery of our salvation, dearly-beloved, which the Creator of the universe valued at the price of His blood, has now been carried out under conditions of humiliation from the day of His bodily birth to the end of His Passion. And although even in the form of a slave many signs of Divinity have beamed out, yet the events of all that period served particularly to show the reality of His assumed Manhood. But after the Passion, when the chains of death were broken, which had exposed its own strength by attacking Him, Who was ignorant of sin, weakness was turned into power, mortality into eternity, contumely into glory, which the Lord Jesus Christ showed by many clear proofs in the sight of many, until He carried even into heaven the triumphant victory which He had won over the dead. As therefore at the Easter commemoration, the Lord's Resurrection was the cause of our rejoicing; so the subject of our present gladness is His Ascension, as we commemorate and duly venerate that day on which the Nature of our humility in Christ was raised above all the host of heaven, over all the ranks of angels, beyond the height of all powers, to sit with God the Father. On which Providential order of events we are founded and built up, that God's Grace might become more wondrous, when, notwithstanding the removal from men's sight of what was rightly felt to command their awe, faith did not fail, hope did not waver, love did not grow cold.

Misplacement

 Someone can have misplaced gratitude, that is, misplaced acts of gratitude. You can also have misplaced compassion, misplaced generosity, misplaced honesty, misplaced respect. When we look at all of the cases, a pattern starts to result:

(1) In these 'misplaced' cases the virtue itself is fine. That is, misplaced gratitude is the act of gratitude; even if your gratitude is misplaced, it can express a genuine virtue of gratitude. You can acquire the virtue of gratitude by acts that include misplaced acts of gratitude. Something is wrong with the act, but the acquired virtues are unaffected.

(2) All of the relevant cases seem to be closely tied to what St. Thomas calls the potential parts of justice. You can occasionally make a case for misplaced acts of virtue from some other region of the realm of virtue (misplaced caution, perhaps, or misplaced patience, or misplaced docility), but I think when we look at such cases more closely, we will always find that a potential part of justice is always involved somewhere. I think we can actually rationally prove something like this. By the very nature of the case, misplaced acts of virtue require two things:

(a) An identifiable standard of right action: They need this in order to be misplaced. There has to be something to distinguish the misplaced and the correctly placed.

(b) A latitude in how this standard applies: They need this to prevent the misplacement from making the act inconsistent with the virtue.

This is exactly the profile of potential parts of justice, which are virtues that (like justice) have a standard of rightness based on what is in some sense due but (unlike justice) have a looseness in the debt or in how it is paid. Gratitude, like justice, is in some sense a rendering of what is due: it can be misplaced. Gratitude, unlike justice, doesn't make things even: thus there is no exact standard that it has to fit. Because of this combination, we can have misplaced gratitude: gratitude in cases where we are not getting what's due right can at least sometimes still be real cases of gratitude.

This would also explain, of course, why it's difficult to make sense of 'misplaced justice' in a sense where the justice would still be genuinely just. If you aren't actually contributing to making things even, you're not meeting the standard of justice. Justice has fairly strict and exact standards, and the misplacing the act means that you are no longer meeting them, however well intentioned you might be.

(3) I said before that I think that in non-justice-family virtues we only get misplacement if a potential part of justice is involved. Virtues can 'command' acts of other virtues. (The same is true of vice.) For instance, you could, out of gratitude, sacrifice to God; then the act of the virtue of religion (sacrifice to God) is also, as if it were an instrument, an act of grattitude. So when a virtue annexed to justice 'commands' another virtue, it introduces the above conditions, and misplacement becomes possible, because the non-justice-family virtue is acting as a sort of instrument to the justice-family virtue.

(4) Do all potential parts of justice allow for misplacement. St. Thomas gives the following as virtues annexed to justice as if they were potential parts:

religion
filial piety
observance (respect)
truthfulness (honesty)
gratitude
vindication
liberality (generosity)
amiability 

Of these, we've already noted that you can obviously have cases of gratitude, honesty, generosity, and respect. 

Vindication is trickier, because it is the virtue concerned with punishment, and misplacement of punishment could very well be unjust, as one of the key components of justice is not to harm. Obviously if every misplacement of vindication involved injustice, misplacement would not be possible here. However, I don't think this is the case. I think there are genuine cases in which punishing the wrong person as an honest error, while obviously a defective act, could very well be consistent with the virtue. But perhaps it's easier to think of the misplacement not in terms not of persons but in terms of punishments, in which one could apply the wrong punishment in a way that does not involve acting viciously. Misplaced vindication may be rare, but I don't think it's impossible.

The three best candidates for potential parts of justice that do not allow misplacement, then, are religion, filial piety, and amiability. 

Religion obviously doesn't allow much room for misplacement, because misplacement gets you easily into idolatry (if you misplace by worshipping something other than God) or undue worship (if you misplace by worshipping with the wrong kind of worship). In a sense, the seriousness of worship squeezes out most of the room for misplacement by introducing a higher strictness of standard. In a sense this is what justice was doing with vindication: it was introducing a stricter standard of what is due that could cause problems with misplacement. Since here the stricter standard is part of the virtue itself, rather than another virtue, there's even less room. Nonetheless, it's perhaps just difficult to have misplaced religion that is still virtuous religion, and not absolutely impossible. Think of Emeth in C. S. Lewis's The Last Battle, for instance.

Filial piety is a candidate for much the same reason as religion -- it involves a stricter standard of what is due. If religion can be misplaced, then obviously filial piety could, in principle, although the reverse is not necessarily true. The distinctive difficulty with filial piety is that it's harder to think of how misplacement would work. Filial piety is respect for parents, but the way it works extends to others -- you can have acts of filial piety to people who are not literally your parents. Obviously you can have them to any of your ancestors, but also to those who are in a parental position to you for some other reason, and to people and things who are associated with your parents in a way that concerns filial piety. So merely extending acts to people other than parents is not misplacement; if we are thinking in terms of other people, it would have to be people who have no parental association with you at all, and it's difficult, although perhaps not impossible, to think of real-world cases. But perhaps again we should think of it not in terms of different people, but of acts of filial piety toward parents (or parental figures) that happen to be inappropriate for some other reason -- for instance, we could perhaps talk of misplaced piety in cases where a child is giving a parent the kind of respect that would ordinarily be right, but is not appropriate because of (say) sexual abuse.

Amiability, or friendliness, is in some sense at the opposite end. Religion and filial piety are candidates because they are most like justice in terms of strictness of what is due; they differ from justice primarily in that there is no payment adequate to making things even. Amiability on the other end is the potential part of justice that is least like justice in terms of strictness of what is due -- it has the most latitude of all the virtues annexed justice. You can think of it in terms of a kind of debt -- you owe it to people try to be friendly -- but that's so loose a sense of debt that one might think it merely metaphorical. That there is some kind of connection with debt, however, is perhaps more obviously seen negatively: if you treat people in an unamiable way, you have treated them in a way that they do not deserve.  Nonetheless, this is quite loose. This might make one worry whether we then would still have enough of a standard to allow the misplacement, particularly as we owe our 'debt' of friendliness to everyone -- i.e., we owe it to everyone to act in such a way that we ourselves are not shutting down all possibility of genuine friendship. Nonetheless, friendship is not anything goes, and it seems you can very well have misplacement in the same way we suggested with filial piety, but even more easily: your act of friendliness, while consistent with the virtue, can be the sort of thing that would ordinarily be appropriate, but is not in the case due to some extrinsic reason.

Thus I think it is in fact true that all potential parts of justice allow misplaced acts of the virtue, although in cases where there can be additional strictness, either due to the matter of the virtue or due to interaction with some other, stricter, virtue like justice, it can be more rare because more difficult.

Doctor Subtilis

 Today is the memorial of Bl. John Duns Scotus. He is thought to have been born in 1265 or 1266. There is a longstanding dispute over whether the 'Scotus' in his name means that he was from Scotland or Northern England, but the 'Duns' is usually thought to indicate that he was born in Duns, Scotland. He became a Franciscan (usually thought to have taken the habit in Dumfries) and was ordained in England in 1291. He studied at Oxford, and then taught at Paris. He was suddenly sent to teach in cologne in 1307, and died in 1308. Thus the famous poem on his sarcophagus in Cologne: 'Scotia birthed me, Anglia accepted me, Gallia taught me, Cologne holds me.' From the Ordinatio, Book I, distinction 3, part 3, question 4, article 1.1, section 580, on the image of God in the soul (my rough translation):

The soul has in itself some perfection according to which it is first act with respect to generated awareness (notitiae genitae), and it has in itself some perfection according to which it formally receives generated awareness, and it has in itself some perfection according to which it formally receives volition. These three perfections are called 'memory', 'understanding', and 'will' -- or 'soul', inasmuch as it has these. Thus the soul, inasmuch as it has the total first act with respect to intellection (to wit, something of the soul and the object present to it as intelligible), is called 'memory', and this in particular 'perfect memory', including both intellect and that by which the object is present to it. The same soul inasmuch as it receives generated awareness is called 'understanding', and 'perfect understanding' as it is under that generated awareness. The will is also called perfect inasmuch as it is under a perfect act of willing. Therefore, taking these three on the part of the soul as they are under their three acts, in these three terms, I say, is consubstantiality as these three realities that are on the soul's part, but there is distinction and origin as these actualities are received in the soul according to these realities of the soul.

(It's worth remembering that 'perfection' in medieval Latin is a synonym for 'completeness' or 'completion', and thus is here a technical term for 'what completes something as a being'. 'Genitum' can also mean 'birthed'.)

Witness

 We, too, though we are not witnesses of Christ's actual resurrection, are so spiritually. By a heart awake from the dead, and by affections set on heaven, we can as truly and without figure witness that Christ liveth, as they did. He that believeth on the Son of God hath the witness in himself. Truth bears witness by itself to its Divine Author. He who obeys God conscientiously, and lives holily, forces all about him to believe and tremble before the unseen power of Christ. To the world indeed at large he witnesses not; for few can see him near enough to be moved by his manner of living. But to his neighbours he manifests the Truth in proportion to their knowledge of him; and some of them, through God's blessing, catch the holy flame, cherish it, and in their turn transmit it. And thus in a dark world Truth still makes way in spite of the darkness, passing from hand to hand. And thus it keeps its station in high places, acknowledged as the creed of nations, the multitude of which are ignorant, the while, on what it rests, how it came there, how it keeps its ground; and despising it, think it easy to dislodge it. But "the Lord reigneth." He is risen from the dead, "His throne is established of old; He is from everlasting. The floods have lifted up their voice, the floods lift up their waves. The Lord on high is mightier than the noise of many waters, yea, than the mighty waves of the sea. His testimonies are very sure; holiness becometh His house forever."

[John Henry Newman, Parochial and Plain Sermons, Volume 1, Witnesses of the Resurrection.]