Divided by a Common Language

In Toronto I once brought a group of my fellow graduate students almost to tears of laughter by commenting offhand that I thought that anyone who talked much about supervenience ought to be drug out in the street and shot. It's a common enough idiom, but seems to be largely confined to the Southern U.S. (hence the use of the dialectical 'drug' rather than 'dragged'). They'd never heard the expression before; they recognized it as hyperbole, but still found the lack of proportion hilariously funny. One could imagine, though, some people taking it quite literally and being shocked about it -- so very primitive, barbaric, and bloodthirsty! -- and one can even imagine a few misguided people, trying to be helpful, arguing that, in fact, there could very well be circumstances where you might want to shoot anyone who talks about supervenience.

The fact of the matter is, hyperbole is a standard trope in Texan conversation, and secession is a common topos in Texan discourse.* Except in very rare cases it has nothing to do with separatism; it's a way of expressing (1) annoyance at non-Texans and (2) pride at being Texan, both of which are common themes in Texan rhetoric. I remember reading somewhere, I forget where, of someone's shock that in a recent poll about 1/5 of Texan men and women said that they think Texas should secede from the Union. This is precisely why you should not trust polls; if you know enough Texans, you know it's precisely the sort of thing a lot of us would tell someone regardless of whether we literally believed it. There's no way, from the wording of the question, to tell who means it literally and who means it figuratively. Texan hyperbole, again. You have to remember that we're the sort of people who set up the unsuspecting by casually commenting that Texas is the biggest state and, when the literal-minded reply that Alaska is the biggest state, disdainfully respond, "Only on the outside," or, "The inside of my grandmother's freezer is bigger and more interesting than Alaska," or, "I was talking about the biggest state on God's map." And it really does confirm the prejudices of a lot of Texans that 'Yankees' are pinched-lipped, finger-wagging idiots when people can't see that Ted Nugent is obviously joking or that Perry's comments about secession were standard boilerplate rhetoric in parts of Texas. No doubt it's different elsewhere, and no doubt that's the problem here, but in the context of Texas trying to read anything into comments like that, at least beyond a general expression of dissatisfaction, is as worthless as trying to read what tea leaves tell you about the stock market.

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* It is not equally common everywhere in Texas. In my experience the secession topos tends to be less common in urban centers, and also less common in Central Texas -- the latter almost certainly having to do with the influence of Austin, which contains an odd and ever-intriguing mix of the stereotypically Texan, hippy affectations, and cosmopolitan pretensions. It is very common in West and North Texas, however. It's possible that there are other factors.

Two Poem Drafts

Astraea

The stars fell down; we felt
the light shift vivid red
and somewhere in Orion's belt
you fell down dead.
Your dreams whispered in ears
not made to hear your song
above their sundry fears
as, headlong,
they rushed to frivolous games,
drawn like light to well,
like moth to nova-flame,
like unfound souls to hell;
still you stood, stood still,
unchanged by changing winds,
a quiet rill
opposing tides of men.
All stars fail; in blinding light
they fall and fall
into deep night,
that deepest night that conquers all;
and all too soon,
your words still ringing in our heads,
on some strange, star-encircling moon
your spirit fled.

The Moon Sang Soprano

The moon sang soprano to the bass of the sea:
The fish danced in schools and defined ecstasy
As the waves crashed the shore with an infinite bliss
That was voiced by the deep and eternal abyss.

Blogroll Revision

As you can tell if you aren't reading this by feed, I am redoing my sidebar, especially my blogroll. It hadn't been updated (beyond an addition here or there) in a year, and Blogrolling, which was the means of organizing the main blogroll that I had used since the beginning, went to advertisements. I tried to live with the advertisements; I fully understand that a business has to stay in business. But it finally drove me crazy and I killed it. I'm also doing a bit of reorganizing. Strictly speaking I prefer to have blogs listed on the blogroll that I actually do read, and that requires that the blogger actually post at least semi-regularly. Depending on circumstances I'll allow a bit of flexibility, perhaps hoping that a lull is merely a lull, or because the posts that do trickle out are quite good. But if you don't post, you will eventually fall off the blogroll, however much I like your blog.

Of course, this is a great opportunity to hear what blogs you would recommend.

Reid on Appeals to Ridicule

An interesting passage by Reid:


Essays on the Powers of the Human Mind To which are Added, An Essay on Quantity, and An Analysis of Aristotle's Logic ... By Thomas Reid

The idea that ridicule can be a test of truth was made famous by Shaftesbury; I haven't looked very extensively, but this is the only case I've ever come across of someone accepting it. The problem that's usually raised with using ridicule as a test is that ridicule often suggests more about the mind engaging in it than about the position ridiculed -- a frivolous mind will ridicule anything with which he disagrees.

(My own view is that ridicule is a test of nothing; rather, it's a rhetorical move, and like every rhetorical move is designed to move and influence. The real test is not ridicule but the quality of the reasoning and the accuracy of the representations that lead you to recognize something as ridiculous. That is, what does all the work is not the ridicule but its justness, to use the word Hume would use.)

God's in the Details, and the Devil Is, Too

One of the most difficult things one faces in the history of philosophy (and in many other fields of inquiry, I'd imagine) is generalizing from particular claims and arguments without destroying essential detail. On the one hand, to make sense of things we need to classify them, and classification involves generalization and abstraction from details. On the other hand, if you describe things vaguely enough, with no regard for possible distinctions, you can make anything seem consistent with anything, and anything seem inconsistent with anything, regardless of the actual state of the argument. For instance, you could take two positions that in fact are mutually exclusive and in fact are deliberately opposed to each other and treat them vaguely enough that you end up conflating contrary views. Likewise, you can take two very, very vague terms, like 'science' and 'religion', both of which cover any number of things, and talk about how 'science and religion are inconsistent'. Nobody in their right mind would argue that observing Passover makes it impossible to observe the stars; you certainly wouldn't mean that the Sikh doctrine of the Panth makes it impossible to study butterflies; you don't mean that the Sermon on the Mount contradicts the equations used in quantum physics; you aren't saying that the Catholic Church has commanded its members never to speculate about the Big Bang or the inflationary hypothesis. At least, if you were saying these things, you'd be a lunatic. So you must actually mean something very specific. And if you mean something specific, you have to ask yourself why you are talking about this very specific thing so vaguely, at a level where distinctions are lost and there is danger of unlike things being conflated and like things being misclassified. And if you meet someone who talks this vaguely about anything specific, you have to worry that it's a sign that they're playing a confidence game; only confidence men and snake-oil salesman talk that vaguely about specific things, because it's a way of talking about things that allows you to ignore relevant details and important distinctions. Another thing it allows you to do is to make inferences based purely on verbal similarity and not on anything of substance. Generalizations have to be made; but there is a form of generalization that involves equivocation. And that is to be avoided.

So the natural question is what steps should be taken to handle this potential problem. Are there domain-general guidelines that could be used? Or does it really vary from topic to topic? (Of course, both could be true.) How do you try to make sure that your abstractions and generalizations are abstract and general enough to work with but not so abstract and general that essential and relevant distinctions are lost?

Enlightenment and Authority

The proper effect of enlightenment, accordingly, is twofold: improved knowledge rules out illusory means and, insofar as it entails greater power, multiplies the genuine ones. To destroy the illusion of a means is not to cut the amplitude of choice, for, insofar as it extends to illusory means, choice itself is but an illusion. In an ideally enlightened community, authority would be spared the unhappy task of directing the common effrot, in the darkness of illusion, along a possibly disastrous line. But, inasmuch as an excellent condition of knowledge implies greatly increased power, social science at its perfection would multiply genuine means and broaden real choice. It would, consequently, increase the need fo rauthority as a factor of united action in the cases where the plurality of the genuine means renders unanimity fortuitous.

Yves R. Simon, A General Theory of Authority, University of Notre Dame Press (Notre Dame, Indiana: 1980) p. 45.

Ninth Centenary of St. Anselm's Death

James Chastek reminds us that it is the 900th anniversary of St. Anselm's death; so it's quite a significant dies natale. Michael Liccione kindly pointed to a post I did several years ago on Anselm's ontological argument (also cross-posted here), in which I suggested that it was sound in such a way that it could be rationally rejected; you can go over to one of those and discuss that post if you like. In a previous year I gave some Anselm-related links. Jasper Hopkins has some lovely online translations of his writings. If you do analytic philosophy, by the way, I strongly recommend the Fragmenta Philosophica; Anselm does analytic philosophy as well as and perhaps better than you do. Only the very best works of contemporary analytic philosophy are in the same league as Anselm's tour-de-force analysis of facere.

It seems fitting to mark the day with the prayer from the end of the Proslogion (I am using Hopkins's translation).

O God, I pray, let me know and love You, so that I may rejoice in You. And if I cannot in this life [know, love, and rejoice in You] fully, at least let me advance day by day until the point of fullness comes. Let knowledge of You progress in me here and be made full [in me] there. Let love for You grow [in me here] and be [made] full [in me] there, so that here my joy may be great with expectancy and there may be full in realization. O Lord, You command—or, rather, You counsel—[us] to ask through Your Son; and You promise [that we shall] receive, so that our joy may be full. O Lord, I ask for what You counsel through our marvelous Counselor; may I receive what You promise through Your Truth, so that my joy may be full. O God of Truth, I ask; may I receive, so that my joy may be full. Until then, may my mind meditate upon [what You have promised]; may my tongue speak of it. May my heart love it; may my mouth proclaim it. May my soul hunger for it; may my flesh thirst for [it]; may my whole substance desire [it] until such time as I enter into the joy of my Lord, the trine and one God, blessed forever. Amen.