A Toast to the Men
by Edgar Albert Guest
Here's to the men! Since Adam's time
They've always been the same;
Whenever anything goes wrong,
The woman is to blame.
From early morn to late at night,
The men fault-finders are;
They blame us if they oversleep,
Or if they miss a car.
They blame us if, beneath the bed,
Their collar buttons roll;
They blame us if the fire is out
Or if there is no coal.
They blame us if they cut themselves
While shaving, and they swear
That we're to blame if they decide
To go upon a tear.
Here's to the men, the perfect men!
Who never are at fault;
They blame us if they chance to get
The pepper for the salt.
They blame us if their business fails,
Or back a losing horse;
And when it rains on holidays
The fault is ours, of course.
They blame us when they fall in love,
And when they married get;
Likewise they blame us when they're sick,
And when they fall in debt.
For everything that crisscross goes
They say we are to blame;
But, after all, here's to the men,
We love them just the same!
Wednesday, December 02, 2015
Fault-Finders
How Do You Know What Your Intuitions Are?
As I've noted before, certain strains of analytic philosophy are in the habit of trying to explain the better known by the lesser known -- things get explained in terms of propositions, justification, etc., that themselves have highly controvertible accounts. One of the terms that often comes up is 'intuitions'. It's actually quite recent; the popularity is usually ascribed to the influence of Chomsky's talk of 'linguistic intuitions'. But Chomsky had something very specific in mind, with an account of how linguistic intuitions worked and why we should take them seriously; in the spread of the term to other fields, it hasn't always been the case that people have been as careful as Chomsky. And the inevitable result is that there are a lot of different ideas of what intuitions are, and with rather different accounts that would seem to suggest that they have to work very differently. It's not my interest here to look at this disagreement more closely, but to raise a very different issue that seems to apply across the board.
On one family of accounts, intuitions are suspicions, opinions, judgments, or beliefs. On another, they are predispositions, tendencies making claims attractive to us, or the like. On another, they are appearances or perhaps rather the cognitive state of a subject when something appears to him or her -- in short, kinds of consciousness or perceptions. Take any or all of these. The question I think should be raised is: "How do we know what the content of our intuition is?"
This is not, in itself, a skeptical question. But recognizing that something is what one is actually intuiting is distinct from simply intuiting it, in the same sense that recognizing that you are seeing such-and-such is different from seeing it, or that recognizing that you are hearing Chopin is different from hearing it. While what one intuits need not be oneself, recognizing that you are intuiting something (and thus that it is what you are intuiting) is a matter of self-knowledge. There are even more accounts of what self-knowledge is than there are of what intuition is, although not all of them need be mutually exclusive, since there are a number of reasons to think that self-knowledge is a rather large genus rather than an infima species. (I have in fact elsewhere suggested that this seems to be the case for what analytic philosophers call 'intuitions', as well -- that is, that there are actually lots of very different things that work very differently that get placed into the one box.) But we don't have to get into any of that; we simply wish to raise a few questions in light of it. Three immediately come to mind.
(1) Is it possible to intuit something and not recognize that you are intuiting it? There seems some reason for thinking so. For instance, one might think that we are constantly intuiting things but that we often don't recognize that we are doing so unless we stop to reflect or introspect on what we are doing. After all, we don't spend our lives going around identifying this as an intuition, that as an intuition; we just go about our lives, and occasionally think about intuitions as such.
(2) Is it possible to think you are intuiting something and not actually be intuiting anything? Can the appearance of intuitiveness be mimicked by something else? Is it sometimes the case that what we think we intuit we are actually imposing on ourselves (perhaps under social pressure, or distraction, or hastiness, or some such) rather than really intuiting? For instance, at least some of the intuition pumps in Dennett's "Quining Qualia" could be adapted to suggest this possibility for intuitions.
(3) Is it possible to think you are intuiting something and be wrong about what you are actually intuiting? Here is one possible reason to think so: philosophers appealing to intuitions sometimes seem to suggest that what they are doing is making obscure intuitions more clear. But if intuitions can be obscure, or need to be made more clear, it seems that there is a possibility of jumping to conclusions about what they are before you've actually done the work of making them more clear. And that seems to suggest that you can think you are intuiting something and not be right about what it is.
In each case, the interesting thing is less whether one answers Yes or No than what one's reasons are and what those reasons imply about how one should proceed in appealing to intuitions. Whatever intuition might be, appealing to intuitions is a complex process: it requires intuiting, recognizing that you are intuiting and what you are intuiting, and making use of that recognition. Your account of intuitions does not automatically answer how you recognize the fact that X is what you are intuiting. Is our recognition here simply transparent and certain? Do we need to take steps to make sure that we are doing it correctly, and if so, what would they be? If we take a dispositional account of intuitions, recognizing your own dispositions is not always a simple or easy process. If we take intuitions to be more like beliefs, people do at least claim that such-and-such, although they thought they believed it at the time, was not what they really believed; what is more, people do seem at times to make false inferences about their own beliefs, by not thinking through those inferences properly. If intuitions are more like a kind of consciousness or perception, illusions are quite common for other kinds of consciousness or perception. Regardless of one's account of intuitions, there seems to be a gap here of some significance that needs an explicit bridge.
On one family of accounts, intuitions are suspicions, opinions, judgments, or beliefs. On another, they are predispositions, tendencies making claims attractive to us, or the like. On another, they are appearances or perhaps rather the cognitive state of a subject when something appears to him or her -- in short, kinds of consciousness or perceptions. Take any or all of these. The question I think should be raised is: "How do we know what the content of our intuition is?"
This is not, in itself, a skeptical question. But recognizing that something is what one is actually intuiting is distinct from simply intuiting it, in the same sense that recognizing that you are seeing such-and-such is different from seeing it, or that recognizing that you are hearing Chopin is different from hearing it. While what one intuits need not be oneself, recognizing that you are intuiting something (and thus that it is what you are intuiting) is a matter of self-knowledge. There are even more accounts of what self-knowledge is than there are of what intuition is, although not all of them need be mutually exclusive, since there are a number of reasons to think that self-knowledge is a rather large genus rather than an infima species. (I have in fact elsewhere suggested that this seems to be the case for what analytic philosophers call 'intuitions', as well -- that is, that there are actually lots of very different things that work very differently that get placed into the one box.) But we don't have to get into any of that; we simply wish to raise a few questions in light of it. Three immediately come to mind.
(1) Is it possible to intuit something and not recognize that you are intuiting it? There seems some reason for thinking so. For instance, one might think that we are constantly intuiting things but that we often don't recognize that we are doing so unless we stop to reflect or introspect on what we are doing. After all, we don't spend our lives going around identifying this as an intuition, that as an intuition; we just go about our lives, and occasionally think about intuitions as such.
(2) Is it possible to think you are intuiting something and not actually be intuiting anything? Can the appearance of intuitiveness be mimicked by something else? Is it sometimes the case that what we think we intuit we are actually imposing on ourselves (perhaps under social pressure, or distraction, or hastiness, or some such) rather than really intuiting? For instance, at least some of the intuition pumps in Dennett's "Quining Qualia" could be adapted to suggest this possibility for intuitions.
(3) Is it possible to think you are intuiting something and be wrong about what you are actually intuiting? Here is one possible reason to think so: philosophers appealing to intuitions sometimes seem to suggest that what they are doing is making obscure intuitions more clear. But if intuitions can be obscure, or need to be made more clear, it seems that there is a possibility of jumping to conclusions about what they are before you've actually done the work of making them more clear. And that seems to suggest that you can think you are intuiting something and not be right about what it is.
In each case, the interesting thing is less whether one answers Yes or No than what one's reasons are and what those reasons imply about how one should proceed in appealing to intuitions. Whatever intuition might be, appealing to intuitions is a complex process: it requires intuiting, recognizing that you are intuiting and what you are intuiting, and making use of that recognition. Your account of intuitions does not automatically answer how you recognize the fact that X is what you are intuiting. Is our recognition here simply transparent and certain? Do we need to take steps to make sure that we are doing it correctly, and if so, what would they be? If we take a dispositional account of intuitions, recognizing your own dispositions is not always a simple or easy process. If we take intuitions to be more like beliefs, people do at least claim that such-and-such, although they thought they believed it at the time, was not what they really believed; what is more, people do seem at times to make false inferences about their own beliefs, by not thinking through those inferences properly. If intuitions are more like a kind of consciousness or perception, illusions are quite common for other kinds of consciousness or perception. Regardless of one's account of intuitions, there seems to be a gap here of some significance that needs an explicit bridge.
Tuesday, December 01, 2015
Ought Not, Therefore Doesn't
Something I have been thinking about, without much commitment on the matter. One of the peculiarities of atheistic arguments from evil is that they are by nature arguments that something does not exist because it morally ought not to exist, or can always be translated into forms in which they appear to make this kind of inference. This is not always explicitly brought out, but it's at least very difficult to find an argument that is not at least implicitly committed to a claim like "To be morally perfect, one ought not tolerate the existence of any evil" or "Completely good people ought to prevent any evils they can" or something similar, and in such a way that this does significant work for the argument. In an atheistic argument from evil, it is always the premise that God is wholly good, or morally perfect, or omnibenevolent, or what have you that does the primary work of generating an inconsistency or improbability given the existence of evil. And if you weaken the ought-claim in virtually any way (e.g., "To be morally perfect, one ought not tolerate evil unless one has a really, really, really, really good reason") it always causes serious problems for the argument. Thus the point that arguments from evil can generally be taken to conclude that something (e.g., morally perfect being tolerating evil) does not exist (perhaps even cannot exist) because it ought not to exist.
Likewise, it's very difficult to find any close analogues to this -- that is, it's difficult to find any commonly used arguments that have a similar structure, with a focus on what morally ought not to be the case. This is not to say that there are no arguments that move from some kind of 'ought not' or 'should not' to 'does not'; these are actually quite common, and tell us quite a bit about what we usually mean by 'ought' or 'should'. For instance, if I know how a machine is designed and how it was put together, I might rule out the possibility of some particular error happening because, given what I know, it shouldn't happen. Likewise, I might say that a physical theory says X ought not to happen, and conclude that therefore X does not happen. As I've noted before, 'oughts' tend to indicate what is necessary to have solutions to particular kinds of problems or answers to particular kinds of questions; this is at least part of what 'should' covers, as well, although we often also seem to take 'should' to cover any kind of expectation. Either way, they concern what should be taken as given for a problem or question, often (although not always) conditional on other things.
What seems rare, however, is for us ever to do this in moral situations. Perhaps examples might be found in dealing with moral heroes of various kinds, in which we would be inclined to dismiss that something was done because it would be an immoral thing to do? But I cannot think of any real-life examples, and looking in promising places has turned up nothing. The usual way it works in arguments from evil is we start with a claim or assumption that Any A ought to do B; then conclude that Any A does B; and then add (for some particular topic) Not-B and conclude Not-A (for that particular topic). A designation like 'morally perfect' is taken to imply that what ought to be done is done, at least when it applies. But these will all be limit cases, which we don't usually meet in real life. That would explain the rareness. And it makes at least preliminary sense that you would need something like a limit case -- deontic necessities don't usually imply anything about existence or nonexistence, so to get that you would need (1) an unusually strong deontic necessity or (2) another strong modality to 'mix' with the deontic necessity. Atheistic arguments from evil, while sometimes not very explicit about it, tend to use the latter approach, drawing on the metaphysical or alethic necessity of divine attributes.
Likewise, it's very difficult to find any close analogues to this -- that is, it's difficult to find any commonly used arguments that have a similar structure, with a focus on what morally ought not to be the case. This is not to say that there are no arguments that move from some kind of 'ought not' or 'should not' to 'does not'; these are actually quite common, and tell us quite a bit about what we usually mean by 'ought' or 'should'. For instance, if I know how a machine is designed and how it was put together, I might rule out the possibility of some particular error happening because, given what I know, it shouldn't happen. Likewise, I might say that a physical theory says X ought not to happen, and conclude that therefore X does not happen. As I've noted before, 'oughts' tend to indicate what is necessary to have solutions to particular kinds of problems or answers to particular kinds of questions; this is at least part of what 'should' covers, as well, although we often also seem to take 'should' to cover any kind of expectation. Either way, they concern what should be taken as given for a problem or question, often (although not always) conditional on other things.
What seems rare, however, is for us ever to do this in moral situations. Perhaps examples might be found in dealing with moral heroes of various kinds, in which we would be inclined to dismiss that something was done because it would be an immoral thing to do? But I cannot think of any real-life examples, and looking in promising places has turned up nothing. The usual way it works in arguments from evil is we start with a claim or assumption that Any A ought to do B; then conclude that Any A does B; and then add (for some particular topic) Not-B and conclude Not-A (for that particular topic). A designation like 'morally perfect' is taken to imply that what ought to be done is done, at least when it applies. But these will all be limit cases, which we don't usually meet in real life. That would explain the rareness. And it makes at least preliminary sense that you would need something like a limit case -- deontic necessities don't usually imply anything about existence or nonexistence, so to get that you would need (1) an unusually strong deontic necessity or (2) another strong modality to 'mix' with the deontic necessity. Atheistic arguments from evil, while sometimes not very explicit about it, tend to use the latter approach, drawing on the metaphysical or alethic necessity of divine attributes.
Monday, November 30, 2015
Fall Still Fighting
See It Through
by Edgar Albert Guest
When you're up against a trouble,
Meet it squarely, face to face;
Lift your chin and set your shoulders,
Plant your feet and take a brace.
When it's vain to try to dodge it,
Do the best that you can do;
You may fail, but you may conquer,
See it through!
Black may be the clouds about you
And your future may seem grim,
But don't let your nerve desert you;
Keep yourself in fighting trim.
If the worst is bound to happen,
Spite of all that you can do,
Running from it will not save you,
See it through!
Even hope may seem but futile,
When with troubles you're beset,
But remember you are facing
Just what other men have met.
You may fail, but fall still fighting;
Don't give up, whate'er you do;
Eyes front, head high to the finish.
See it through!
Sunday, November 29, 2015
Fortnightly Book, November 29
The world is quiet here.
Enbrethiliel picked the Fortnightly Book for this time around, and it is Lemony Snicket's The Bad Beginning. Lemony Snicket is the pen-name of Daniel Handler (who often calls himself 'Lemony Snicket's handler'). I will actually be re-reading the entire children's series, the thirteen books of A Series of Unfortunate Events, but I will focus particularly on how it starts.
The books in the series have a number of shared gimmicks. There is always a letter (often on the back cover) from Lemony Snicket to the reader, giving reasons why they should not read such an unpleasant book. Thus The Bad Beginning warns us:
In this short book alone, the three youngster encounter a greedy and repulsive villain, itchy clothing, a disastrous fire, a plot to steal their fortune, and cold porridge for breakfast.
(Incongruous lists is a Snicket staple.) Each book has a melancholy dedication to Beatrice. That of The Bad Beginning is:
To Beatrice---
darling, dearest, dead.
The works end with a letter to Snicket's editor, which typically includes some entirely fantastic plan for getting further manuscripts, and proof of Snicket's story, into the editor's hands. Each book is filled with acronyms, anagrams, cryptic messages, and literary allusions.
And, of course, the works are entirely about an endless series of disasters that strike the three Baudelaire children, Violet, Klaus, and Sunny, beginning with the death of their parents and the villainy of Count Olaf, which they somehow manage to overcome. But much of the strength of the overall story arc, I think, lies in the negative space, the constant hints of the disasters that preceded the Baudelaire children, which only ever come partially into view -- the death of Beatrice, Lemony's cryptic comments about his own misfortunes, the furor and fury over Esmé Squalor's sugar bowl, the VFD, and the like. For it is not an accident that the Baudelaire children suffer so much. They have, through no fault of their own, entered a long, grueling, perplexing war, between those who fight fires (literally and figuratively) and those who start them, between those who value reading books and those who value burning them....
Maronite Year V
The First Sunday of Announcement was about the angel announcing the Forerunner of Christ to Zechariah his father; the Second Sunday of Announcement was about the angel announcing the Christ to Mary; the Third Sunday of Announcement is about the Forerunner and Elizabeth his mother announcing the Christ to Mary.
Sunday of the Visitation of the Virgin to Elizabeth
Ephesians 1:1-14; Luke 1:39-45
A new covenant the Lord has promised;
He will write it in our hearts,
setting His holy seal upon our minds
that we may be His people.
Least and greatest, they will know the Lord's ways.
He will pardon wickedness
and will no longer remember our sins.
Mary like the Ark of the Covenant
came to stay with her cousin.
At her greeting, the Forerunner leapt up,
the prophet in the womb danced.
Like David before the Ark he rejoiced,
in his first prophetic sign
although still dwelling in Elizabeth.
Mary like the Ark of the Covenant
came to stay with her cousin
and Elizabeth spoke with prophecy:
"How can the Ark come to me?
I am visited by my Lord's mother!
Blessed among women are you,
and blessed is the holy fruit of your womb!"
The Word now dwells within you, O Mary!
"My soul magnifies the Lord,
my spirit rejoices in God who saves,
who has graced His handmaiden;
Now all generations will call me blessed
because of the Holy One,
who has wrought wonders for a lowly maid.
"He has mercy on those who fear His name;
He does great deeds with His strength.
He overturns the mighty from their seats;
He exalts the lowly ones.
The hungry He has given food to eat,
the wealthy He makes bankrupt.
He remembers promises He has made!"
A new covenant the Lord has promised.
God has chosen us in Christ.
He has adopted us as his children.
Through his blood we are redeemed.
In Him we have forgiveness of our sins.
Those who hear His word of truth
are sealed with the promised Holy Spirit.
Sunday of the Visitation of the Virgin to Elizabeth
Ephesians 1:1-14; Luke 1:39-45
A new covenant the Lord has promised;
He will write it in our hearts,
setting His holy seal upon our minds
that we may be His people.
Least and greatest, they will know the Lord's ways.
He will pardon wickedness
and will no longer remember our sins.
Mary like the Ark of the Covenant
came to stay with her cousin.
At her greeting, the Forerunner leapt up,
the prophet in the womb danced.
Like David before the Ark he rejoiced,
in his first prophetic sign
although still dwelling in Elizabeth.
Mary like the Ark of the Covenant
came to stay with her cousin
and Elizabeth spoke with prophecy:
"How can the Ark come to me?
I am visited by my Lord's mother!
Blessed among women are you,
and blessed is the holy fruit of your womb!"
The Word now dwells within you, O Mary!
"My soul magnifies the Lord,
my spirit rejoices in God who saves,
who has graced His handmaiden;
Now all generations will call me blessed
because of the Holy One,
who has wrought wonders for a lowly maid.
"He has mercy on those who fear His name;
He does great deeds with His strength.
He overturns the mighty from their seats;
He exalts the lowly ones.
The hungry He has given food to eat,
the wealthy He makes bankrupt.
He remembers promises He has made!"
A new covenant the Lord has promised.
God has chosen us in Christ.
He has adopted us as his children.
Through his blood we are redeemed.
In Him we have forgiveness of our sins.
Those who hear His word of truth
are sealed with the promised Holy Spirit.
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