Evening Note for Sunday, June 28

 Thought for the Evening: Vicarious Intention

There are clearly situations in which people have vicarious intention, i.e., intention on behalf of another. An obvious example is parenting, which often involves intending on behalf of one's child; various kinds of representation and mediated agency are more complicated forms. This is not something for which we have any obvious theory. There are a few things that need to be considered, however.

(1) Vicarious intention is distinct from intention on one's own behalf with another in view. Most of our social intentions (including in situations that can involve vicarious intention) involve intending for ourselves while nonetheless taking others into account. Vicarious intention requires a tighter integration of the other into one's intention. 

(2) Vicarious intention is, or is typically, personative. The person vicariously intending for another is usually personating them, i.e., acting as part of their person, as their agent in personal action. This personative role has to involve a number of things:

(i) a personator
(ii) a personated
(iii) an end of personation
(iv) a deontic structure appropriate to that end
(v) a range of actions allowed by that structure that are relevant to actual situations

For instance, a parent (i) can make a decision on behalf of a child (ii) for the child's good (iii); the child's good involves a set of obligations and responsibilities that the parent must consider and that 'authorize' the parent to make and treat certain kinds of decision as if their child was the one making decision (iv). This constitues the whole panoply of power and action involved in parenting (v).

(3) The vicarious intention is the intention of both the principal intender and the one on whose behalf the principal intender intends. Given such a personative role, then the actual decision on behalf of the child is an action done with vicarious intention. Note that we should distinguish decisions on behalf of the child from decisions for the child; the latter need not be vicarious at all, and can simply be an imposition of authority. When acting in a personative role, the parent is standing in the child's place, making the child's decision.

(4) One of the contexts in which vicarious intention is found is in infant baptism. As St. Thomas puts it, the infant "can be said to intend, not by their own act of intention, since at times they struggle and cry; but by the act of those who bring them to be baptized" (ST 3.68.9 ad 1). This has all of the features noted above. Obviously we have personator (i) and personated (ii); the end of personation (iii) is the spiritual care for the child, which requires and authorizes (iv) relevant adults to take steps toward the child's salvation and spiritual health (v).  The full rite makes the personator cooperative here -- it is not just the parents/sponsors but the whole Church with them that carries that is intending on behalf of the child. However, the latter introduces an aspect to this kind of vicarious intention that is not common to all forms of vicarious intention, namely, charitable communion; as Aquinas also says, the Holy Spirit "unites the whole Church together, and communicates the goods of one member to another" (ST 3.68.9 ad 2). One of the effects of this is that much more can be vicariously intended than could usually be done.

The closest analogue to this in non-grace contexts seems to be political representation. While it doesn't have the communion made possible by the virtue of charity, it does have a community, and a common good. But more than that, I think the particular aspects of common good that create the deontic structure authorizing vicarious intention are fixed by human nature. In particular, they are due to humans being political animals and therefore requiring civil society for their complete development. It is thus natural for us to form into a moral person, the civil society, and this requires that there be decision-makers making the moral person's intention, on behalf of all of the members relevantly concerned. This is rather different from that which the Church exercises specifically as a sacramental body of Christ (although the Church also has this kind), but it also, within the range of actions allowed by the end and deontic structure, allows much more to be vicariously intended than could usually be intended.

It is worth noting that infant baptism is an unusually complicated case, because the vicarious intention is layered: the parent as member of the Church, the Church as a political community, the Church as a sacramental communion.  The result is that baptism of a child is an act within a family (part of the parent's educative work on behalf of the child), an act of initiation into the society of the Church, and an act of faith, hope, and love exercised on behalf of the child in the order of grace.

In any case, this is all quite rough, but one must begin somewhere.

Various Links of Note

* Matthew Minerd, Christocentrism in the French School: Revisiting Charles-Louis Gay, at "To Be a Thomist"

* Johan E. Gustafsson, A Godelian Ontological Proof with More Plausible Axiological Principles (PDF)

* Miriam Ellis discusses a previously unknown letter by J. R. R. Tolkien.

* The Vesuvius Challenge, which is scanning the burned papyri from Herculaneum, has reached a milestone: they have fully deciphered the first scroll, PHerc 1667, and have a preprint paper on it. Since the scroll was itself in not-very-good-shape, what they have is fragmentary, but enough to know that it probably discussed Stoic ideas. (They suggest that it was a Stoic work, but it could also be an Epicurean work discussing and criticizing Stoicism, or the Stoic part of a doxographical account about several philosophical schools.) And, of course, even given its fragmentary nature, its always possible we may find another partial copy of the same thing, either here or somewhere else, or that future scholarship may discover that some reference already extant may be an allusion to this work.

* David Horan's translation of the Platonic dialogues at the Foundation for Platonic Studies.

Currently Reading

Michael Flynn, Eifelheim
Antonio Rosmini, Certainty
Vladimir Propp, Morphology of the Folktale

In Audiobook

Ursula K. LeGuin, The Tombs of Atuan
Ursula K. LeGuin, Worlds of Exile and Illusion
Jim Butcher, Small Favor

Eirenaios

 Today is the feast of St. Irenaeus of Lyons, Doctor of the Church. From Adversus Haereses, Book III, Chapter 19:

But again, those who assert that He was simply a mere man, begotten by Joseph, remaining in the bondage of the old disobedience, are in a state of death having been not as yet joined to the Word of God the Father, nor receiving liberty through the Son, as He does Himself declare: If the Son shall make you free, you shall be free indeed. But, being ignorant of Him who from the Virgin is Emmanuel, they are deprived of His gift, which is eternal life; and not receiving the incorruptible Word, they remain in mortal flesh, and are debtors to death, not obtaining the antidote of life. To whom the Word says, mentioning His own gift of grace: I said, You are all the sons of the Highest, and gods; but you shall die like men. He speaks undoubtedly these words to those who have not received the gift of adoption, but who despise the incarnation of the pure generation of the Word of God, defraud human nature of promotion into God, and prove themselves ungrateful to the Word of God, who became flesh for them. For it was for this end that the Word of God was made man, and He who was the Son of God became the Son of man, that man, having been taken into the Word, and receiving the adoption, might become the son of God. For by no other means could we have attained to incorruptibility and immortality, unless we had been united to incorruptibility and immortality. But how could we be joined to incorruptibility and immortality, unless, first, incorruptibility and immortality had become that which we also are, so that the corruptible might be swallowed up by incorruptibility, and the mortal by immortality, that we might receive the adoption of sons?

Seal of All the Fathers

 Today is the feast of St. Cyril, Patriarch of Alexandria and Doctor of the Church. From his Commentary on Hosea, chapter 2:

We are therefore saved when God has mercy and compassion on us; we have been made righteous, "not because of any works of righteousness that we have done, but according to the abundance of his mercy," as Scripture says. We were also sumoned to the spiritual relationship through faith, and by being thus summoned we come to know the one who is God by nature. Consequently, he says, I shall betroth you to myself in faith, and you will know the Lord. Faith made its entrance in advance, therefore, and we were enriched also in this way by knowing Christ -- and this, in my view, is the meaning of what is said to some: "If you will not believe, neither will you understand." Now, the fact that the clear understanding of the mystery of Christ achieves a share in eternal life for those worthy of it the Son himself confirms in speaking to God the Father in heaven: "Now, this is eternal life, that they may know you, the one true God,a nd Jesus Christ, whom you have sent."

[St. Cyril of Alexandria, Commentary on the Twelve Prophets, Volume 1, Robert C. Hill, tr., The Catholic University of America Press (Washington, DC: 2007) p. 90.]

Thou Best the Heart Can Raise

 Ode to Tranquillity
by Samuel Taylor Coleridge

Tranquillity! thou better name
Than all the family of Fame!
Thou ne'er wilt leave my riper age
To low intrigue, or factious rage;
For oh! dear child of thoughtful Truth,
To thee I gave my early youth,
And left the bark, and blest the steadfast shore,
Ere yet the tempest rose and scared me with its roar. 

Who late and lingering seeks thy shrine,
On him but seldom, Power divine,
Thy spirit rests! Satiety
And Sloth, poor counterfeits of thee,
Mock the tired worldling. Idle hope
And dire remembrance interlope,
To vex the feverish slumbers of the mind:
The bubble floats before, the spectre stalks behind. 

But me thy gentle hand will lead
At morning through the accustomed mead;
And in the sultry summer's heat
Will build me up a mossy seat;
And when the gust of Autumn crowds,
And breaks the busy moonlight clouds,
Thou best the thought canst raise, the heart attune,
Light as the busy clouds, calm as the gliding moon. 

The feeling heart, the searching soul,
To thee I dedicate the whole!
And while within myself I trace
The greatness of some future race,
Aloof with hermit-eye I scan
The present works of present man --
A wild and dream-like trade of blood and guile,
Too foolish for a tear, too wicked for a smile!

Dashed Off XVII

 Sanctions are not a generally motivating factor when it comes to law; people who follow the laws are only sometimes thinking of the sanctions, and in fact many times people are not very aware of what the sanctions are, at least outside extreme cases. People seem more motivated by, 'This is how we do things' -- i.e., socially -- than by 'Or else', and people both demand the 'or else' to wield against social deviation specifically and get angry if it is wielded against people doing 'what everyone does'.

To be right often, we must be wrong often.

Evaluating is often harder than creating and applying is often harder than analyzing.

Since social institution always presupposes normativity of some kind, normativity as such can't be socially instituted; it arises naturally in social contexts; get a bunch of sufficiently cognitive agents in cooperation, and you have normativity. It just is part of what such cooperation has to involve.

We construct norms because normativity is natural to us.

durability of argument-form
(1) Take an argument.
(2) In use, people tend to vary it a bit.
(3) An argument is more durable if minor plausible variations keep conclusion roughly the same.

"A man without religion is a maimed man." Gaudi

Language is a system of rites.

"A consturction only becomes interesting when it can be placed side by side with other analogous constructions for forming species of the same genus." Poincaré

The mathematics for physics is drawn out of causal structures, particularly of measuring devices.

Social progress in any aspect involves many small improvements over many domains, which eventually start interacting with each other.

"Home is the part of the universe so thoroughly elaborated by our tendencies that it has become for us, so to say, an enlarged sphere of disposability." Patočka

fictive lived-experiencing of the past

Nothing we actually know is merely singular.

The capacity to abstract is essential to sign use, because things are signs in a respect.

In speech we instrumentalize our voice & philosophers of language often do nto do justice to this.

Signs often come in complexes so that we can pick one representamen out of the whole as convenient (e.g., spoken words -- written words -- associated gestures & expressions -- iconic representations).
-- Metonymies and synechdoches perhaps come out of treating things themselves as such sign-complexes.

Measurement always involves getting the right causal interactions under the right conditions.

In language we often use words to operate on and modify words and their meanings.

intension/remission -- quality as quasi-quantity
estimate/approximation -- quantity as quasi-quality

Every human person has an implicit wisdom; the difficulty is unfolding it.

Mt & Lk: Christology by causation
Mk: Christology by remotion
Jn: Christology by eminence

agak-agak -- v., to estimate/guess; adj, involving guesswork
agaration: estimation

When human beings reject a transcendent order, they gravitate to a totalitarian one.

being as showing itself to other being, being as showing other being to yet other being

Temporal measurement requires presence to a clock, and spatial to a boundary; presence is thus more fundamental.

Fully to understand oneself as a creature requires the concept of nothingness. (the 'distance between being and nothing')

"It was not nonexistent things that needed salvation, so that a command alone would have sufficed, but the human being, already in existence, who was corrupted and perishing." Athanasius

When we look at genuine and successful prediction, it always begins with retrodiction.

(1) Either infinite regress of causes or state.
(2) If infinite regress, there is something with unlimited power for effect, i.e., the series and what maintains it.
(3) If state, there is a first cause, with unlimited power for effect.

In artistic matters, the sacred becomes secularized and the secular becomes sacralized.

regulative, educative, and nobilitative right & wrong

Shared biological reasoning has the force, in reasoning, of mutual obligation.

It is important to the function of physical theory that its equations not be happenstance equations, that they are Box and not merely True. V=kP needs to be true not here and there, now and then, but true in all relevant possibilities. (The tricky thing, of course, is that we may not know the exact range of relevant possibilities -- studying this is one of the standard paths of scientific discovery.)

"It is amazing how much one can learn from just following the grammar of scientific utterances."Judea Pearl
"Data do not understand causes and effects; humans do."

One of the fundamental problems in modern politics is that honest attempts to correct evils lead easily to temptations to injustice.

'a medium, a tangible help, in conveying memories of sympathy and comfort'

grave goods as a sign of respect for persons as persons

Charles Elton and niche-convergence: "the tendency...for animals in widely separated parts of the world to draft into similar occupations" (Animal Ecology)

-- Achinstein on design-, use-, and service-functions

'Epistemic virtues' in analytic philosophy are generally just moral virtues in contexts of inquiry. (They are inquiring subjective parts of moral virtues.)

As we move from art -> prudence -> knowledge -> understanding -> wisdom, we move roughly from dealing with the less common to dealing with the more common. ('Roughly' because each higher can 'use' the lower quasi-instrumentally.)

All virtues have 'self-regarding' and 'other-regarding faces, btu the 'roles' of these faces differ according to the virtue.

Human beings know together, but even in knowing together do not know in precisely the same way.

We are all both persons and ghosts or echoes of the persons we are.

We always share some credit for the success of our inquiries with others.

Since intellect thinks allt hings, the presence of what is foreign to thinkign all things hinders and obstracts it; what appeared within would impede what was without.

Judicial review is powerful because it is in fact a notwithstanding power. However, judicial review is also the progressive explicit recognition by the courts of limtiations to their own authority.

It is not so much that truth must be tested and deepened over time as that we must be.

The oldest known extant statue is the Lion-Man of Hoblenstein-Stadel, carved out of ivory with flint knife between 35000 and 40000 years ago. It had to be reconstructed out of more than 200 fragments, 'glued' together with a reversible mix of beeswax, artificial wax, and chalk. It was found with bone tools, worked antlers, beads, and pendants. A similar but smaller image was found at Hohle Fels.

The earliest known extant humanish artifacts are knapped stone tools at Lomokwi 3 in Kenya, from about 3.3 million years ago, predating the genus Homo, and thus associated with either Kenyanthropus or Australopithecus. The next definite tools are Oldovan, beginning about 2.9 million years ago, and Acheulan (apparently a significant leap forward) about 1.7 million years ago & associated with Homo erectus, which is not only manipulating and hammering stone but creating hand axes. The Mousterian, beginning about 160000 years ago and associated with Neanderthals, shows a massive variety of tools using stone and antler with remarkable precision. The Aurignaian, beginning 43000 years ago, associated with Homo sapiens, expands this even further and includes jewelry, cave art, and figurines.

If I meet a lion in the prehistoric savannah and tell it I am no threat, is this religion? If I have made a figurine and show it to the lion to communicate the same, is this religion? If I get by unscathed and think the lion understood my message, is this religion? If the figurine represents an actual line and I talk to the figurine as if a friend, is this religion? If I like the figurine because I feel lionlike, is this religion? If I identify with the figurine, which I take to represent both me and the lions, is this religion? If I take it to represent lions generally, including myself, is this religion? If I wear and display the figurine whenever I need to deal with lions, is this religion? If I ask the figurine to help me when I need to deal with lions, is this religion? If I ask the figurine to help me when I need to deal with lions, is this religion? If I share food and drink with the figurine to get on the good side of lions, is this religion? Anthropologically, these are all kinds of things that human beings do spontaneously in some form or other.

The use of human body lice, which are clothing-dependent, to date clothing suggests that humans wore clothes about 40000 to 170000 years ago; residues and deposits suggest about 120000 years ago. Clothing tools are known to have existed (sewing needles in particular) about 50000 years ago (associated with Denisovans).

The earliest definite evidence of controlled use of fire is at Wonderwork, from about 1 million years ago; any earlier & it becomes unclear whether it was really controlled. Yulambo Falls shows clear evidence of fire-use tools about 180000 years ago. The earliest extant fired pottery is from Xianrendong about 20000 years ago.

term, connection, direction

To find invariants, you need causal reasoning about what varies.

It is an eror to think that because Euclidena diagrams can be visually inspected that they therefore work entirely by visual inspection.

"As strange as it may sound, the notion of probability raising cannot be expressed in terms of probabilities." Judea Pearl
"The proper way to rescue the probability-raising idea is with the do-operator; we can say that X causes Y if P(Y|do(X)) > P(Y)."

Qualities of the Heart

 Talent is a gift, the use we put it to depends on ourselves. Now talent of itself affords no guarantee of being well employed, rather it may tempt us to abuse the gift. The heart, on the contrary, inclines us to make a proper use of such talent as we may possess. More valuable therefore are the qualities of the heart, which give a right direction to our actions; virtue, in fact, is the only thing in man deserving of praise, inasmuch as it is his own. 

 Antonio Rosmini, Letters, Chiefly on Religious Subjects, pp. 599-600 (To Don Paolo Orsi, 27 Jan 1827).

Links of Note

 * The Death and Evolution of Education, at "The Lyceum Institute"

* Christian, Russek, & Griffiths, Resolving Feynman's restaurant problem reveals optimal solutions and human strategies

* Dario Compagno, Identifying Intended Effects with Causal Models (PDF)

* Charles Hughes Huff, Deuteronomy Is Not a Punishment, on the 'Hahn School' interpretation of Deuteronomy, at "in media mabul

* Michelle Van Loon, The Sure Way of Edith Stein, at "Mere Orthodoxy"

* Matthew Minerd, Ens Morale: The Scholastic Metaphysics of Morals, at "To Be a Thomist"

* Gregory B. Sadler, The Original Turing Test

* Jane Psmith reviews David Gelernter's 1939

* Sandrine Bergès, A philosophy of home, at "Aeon"

* Ryan Moulton, Where to Find the Colors Your Screen Can't Show You

* Rob Alspaugh, The Evolution of the Diablo Cosmology, at "Teaching Boys Badly"

* There is good reason to think that two sermons by St. Augustine have been newly rediscovered.

* Cordithicus, St. Thomas Aquinas Was Not Obese

* Abraham Anderson, Rousseau, Hume, and the Dreams of a Spirit-Seer (PDF)