The Actual World Is Not a Possible World

Bill Vallicella has a post up on possible worlds, worth reading for those interested in this topic in applied modal logic. However, in the course of his discussion he says,

The actual world is a possible world. This is because everything actual is possible.

While it's not uncommon to find this claim, there is excellent reason to consider this an error; it involves an equivocation on what is meant by 'possible world'.

As used in possible worlds semantics, a 'possible world' is basically just a complete totality distinct from other complete totalities of the same kind but able to be related to them in some way. (In the very strictest sense, i.e., the minimal sense needed for it to be used as the basis of a semantics for modal logic, a 'possible world' is just something along the lines of a member of a set, able to be related to other members of the set, that is associated in a model with assignments of truth values to a set of propositions.) There is nothing about this that requires that 'possible worlds' be worlds, despite the name. You can perfectly well make sense of modal logic by taking a 'possible world' to be the actual universe at a time, or a history at a location, or some sort of perspectival or intentional domain, or any number of other things. It's almost irresistible to assume, when you hear 'possible world', that you are automatically talking about worlds, but this is an assumption that should be resisted. We only get worlds if we add new assumptions. So if we are talking 'possible world' in a minimal sense, it has not been established that the actual world is a 'possible world' in the relevant sense, because that requires additional information that's not actually part of the semantics. And for that matter, the basic semantics says nothing at all about the actual world -- we'd have to add actuality in, too.

It is true, of course, that we often talk about alethic modalities on the scale of an entire world, and so you could very well associate 'possible world' in the semantics with the sense of 'way the actual world could be'. In doing so, we've added additional assumptions we might not add in other contexts, but it's perfectly legitimate to do so, as long as different 'ways the actual world could be' have the features that allow them to be represented as potentially inter-relatable elements in a set that can be associated with truth value assignments to a bunch of propositions -- and since we are (ex hypothesi) comparing distinct 'ways the actual world could be' and the natural way to do that is by using propositions, that's not much of a stretch. So let's assume that we have added this optional assumption that a 'possible world' is not a pure logical object, but instead a logical object that represents a 'way the actual world could be'. Can we then say that the actual world is a 'possible world' in this sense?

The answer is No. Since we are taking 'possible world' to be 'way the actual world could be', the claim, "The actual world is a possible world" is equivalent to "The actual world is one of the ways the actual world could be". But this is not true at all. The actual world is not one particular way the actual world could be; the actual world is just the actual world. To put it another way, if we take 'possible world' to mean 'way the actual world could be', we are taking 'possible world' to represent a "slice" of the actual world, not the actual world itself -- all of the 'possible worlds' together represent the one actual world, and a possible world is one slice of that representation. So 'the actual world is a possible world' is not true, however paradoxical that might sound to the ear; the loaf is not a slice, the deck is not a card, the lottery is not a number, actuality itself does not fall into the genus of particular ways of being actual. And note that this is true even if, in fact, everything in the actual world is represented by something in some possible world.

So there are many possible worlds; the actual world is none of them; the whole set of possible worlds represents the one actual world but only in terms of possibility, not actuality. Obviously, the actual world is in some sense possible; but it is not a 'possible world' in the sense relevant to applying possible world semantics to the ways the actual world can be.*

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* I originally owe this point, from a different context, to Richard Chappell.

A Poem Draft and a Poem Re-Draft

Psalm 94

O Lord of vengeance,
avenging Lord, shine;
Judge of the earth, rise:
Give the proud their wage.

How long shall they boast?
How long, mighty Lord?
They pour out their words,
the evil ones flaunt
and crush your people,
oppress your nation;
they slay those in need,
saying in their hearts,
'God does not see me;
Jacob's God is blind.'

Heed, O stupid ones!
When will fools be wise?
God made eye and ear;
He sees and He hears.
He guides the nations,
instructs us in right --
can you be exempt
when He punishes?

The Tree of Knowing Good and Evil

Ages rise in splendor, born with tumult to be free,
Given good and evil by the serpent on the tree:

Apple for your tasting, dear, a wisdom God may fear,
Taste the peach of higher sight that makes the cosmos clear.
Swiftly all the schoolmen are a jape one might despise,
Mocked by haunted engines that are daring to be wise.

Peasants, unenlightened, are freed to serve the rod,
Money for their chaining seized from altars raised to God.
None can for them speak because the king has lost his head,
priests are turned to bureaucrats, and saints are lying dead.

Homebound wars of faith must all the peaceful nations flee!
Fight instead for cotton and for gold across the sea,
Fight instead for oil, for which the highways rise;
Call it 'cost of freedom' whene'er a soldier dies.

Freedom shall be given; no longer under heel,
All may follow reason, or be slaves to what they feel;
Freedom to be counted, to rise and speak your say:
Be as free as e'er you please, as long as you obey.

Babel rose in glory as the railroads ran on steam,
Bearing stones of science quarried from the land of dream,
Bearing hopes and horrors such as gods alone can make,
Weapons for the grasping hands that from the rajahs take.

Close the plains and commons; there's profit there to find;
Push the peasants off the land when they speak their mind;
Bring them, though they kick, to the progress of the age,
Teaching all that liberty is working for a wage.

'Prince of powers of the air' you thought was but a name;
Rumor broadcast on the air is power just the same:
Do your part and buy with thanks the fruits we advertise:
Factories, plastic, cars, and silver planes to fill the skies.

Life is like tradition; it is something handed down,
Being as you were before, heritage as crown;
Thirsting to be like the gods, we break the ties of past.
Ages born of breaking, though, unbroken cannot last.

Solving every problem will a newer problem form;
Never will the lightning-fire save you from the storm.
Yet you shall be mighty, as wise as gods on thrones,
Ruling land and sea and air till darkness takes your bones.

Greater shall you be, day by day, and year by year,
Greater in accomplishment for which you pay so dear;
Greater than the gods of old will ever men arise;
Greater till they are no more and every wonder dies.

Might on might will pile, like a tower that you build;
Moving all by reason, lightning you will wield;
Up and up to heaven, your limit only sky,
Till you are betrayed while never knowing why:

Every age in splendor has a doom, that it must pass;
Every age of might reveals the serpent in the grass.

Conditor Antiquae Rursum Fidei

Today is the feast of St. Augustine, Doctor of the Church. (The title of the post is from St. Jerome, Letter 195). From De doctrina christiana, Book I, Chapters 13-14, 16:

In what way did He come but this, "The Word was made flesh, and dwelt among us"? Just as when we speak, in order that what we have in our minds may enter through the ear into the mind of the hearer, the word which we have in our hearts becomes an outward sound and is called speech; and yet our thought does not lose itself in the sound, but remains complete in itself, and takes the form of speech without being modified in its own nature by the change: so the Divine Word, though suffering no change of nature, yet became flesh, that He might dwell among us....

Moreover, as the use of remedies is the way to health, so this remedy took up sinners to heal and restore them. And just as surgeons, when they bind up wounds, do it not in a slovenly way, but carefully, that there may be a certain degree of neatness in the binding, in addition to its mere usefulness, so our medicine, Wisdom, was by His assumption of humanity adapted to our wounds, curing some of them by their opposites, some of them by their likes....

...For the Church is His body, as the apostle's teaching shows us; and it is even called His spouse. His body, then, which has many members, and all performing different functions, He holds together in the bond of unity and love, which is its true health. Moreover He exercises it in the present time, and purges it with many wholesome afflictions, that when He has transplanted it from this world to the eternal world, He may take it to Himself as His bride, without spot or wrinkle, or any such thing.

Another Term

It's the start of a new term, and I have been quite busy. I thought I'd put up the schedule of readings for one of my Ethics course, in case anyone's interested in what I do for it. The primary text for the course is Louis Pojman's Moral Philosophy: A Reader, so the page references are to that.

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The following schedule of readings is tentative and subject to change.

Week 1 (August 27)

M: FIRST DAY OF CLASS
Orientation

WARM-UP

W: Plato, Why Should I Be Moral? (60-68)
Plato, Allegory of the Cave (114-119)

Week 2 (September 3)

M: LABOR DAY: NO CLASS

W: Online Survey Due (if possible, do before readings)
Nozick, The Experience Machine (141-142)
Recommended: Thompson, The Trolley Problem (397-411)
Orientation email due

Week 3 (September 10)

CLASSICAL UTILITARIANISM

M: Jeremy Bentham, Classical Hedonism (120-122)
Bentham, Not Paul But Jesus Vol III  (PDF), Part I Chapter I (on asceticism)

W: John Stuart Mill, Utilitarianism (158-163)

Week 4 (September 17)

M: John Stuart Mill on the Art of Life (System of Logic Book VI, Chapter XII, Sections 1-8)
John Stuart Mill on Liberalism (On Liberty, Chapter 1; The Subjection of Women, Chapter 1)

W: Ursula K. LeGuin, The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas (will be provided in class)

Week 5 (September 24)

NATURAL LAW FORMS OF DEONTOLOGY

M: Thomas Aquinas, Natural Law (21-32); ST 2-1.90.4 and ST 2-1.94.6 (the latter two are important sections that for some reason are missing from Pojman)

W: Martin Luther King, Jr., A Letter from a Birmingham Jail

Week 6 (October 1)

M: Jacques Maritain, Communication with regard to a Draft World Declaration of Human Rights (PDF)

KANTIAN FORMS OF DEONTOLOGY

W: Immanuel Kant, The Foundations of Ethics (218-237)
Onora O'Neill, A Simplified Account of Kant's Ethics

Week 7 (October 8)
M: Practice with Formulations of the Categorical Imperative -- reread the Kant section!
Ethical Reasoning Paper Due

W: Kant on Beauty, Sublimity, and Ethical Monotheism

Week 8 (October 15)

M: Rae Langton, Maria von Herbert's Challenge to Kant (PDF)

VIRTUE ETHICS

W: Aristotle, Virtue Ethics (301-311)

Week 9 (October 22>)

M: Alasdair MacIntyre, The Nature of Virtue (323-338)

W: Thomas Aquinas on the Cardinal Virtues ( ST 2-1.61)

Week 10 (October 29)

M: Fourth Maccabees, Chapters 1, 5, and 6

W: Thomas Aquinas on the Capital Vices (ST 2-1.84)

Week 11 (November 5)

M: Dante Alighieri, Inferno Canto V
Thomas Aquinas on Lust (ST 2-2.153.5)

PARTICULAR TOPICS(These classes may be reduced as time requires)

W: FEMINIST ETHICS OF CARE: Nel Noddings, Caring in Education

Week 12 (November 12)

M: ANIMAL RIGHTS
ENVIRONMENTAL ETHICS

W: BUSINESS ETHICS (Ethical Crisis Management)
GOVERNMENT ETHICS (Conflict of Interest)

Week 13 (November 19)

M: DEONTIC LOGIC AND DEONTIC PARADOXES

W: Ethics review, catch-up, prepare for presentations

Happy Thanksgiving!

Week 14 (November 26)

M: PRESENTATIONS
Everyone must turn in at least a draft of the Service Learning Journal.

W: PRESENTATIONS

Week 15 (December 3)

M: PRESENTATIONS

W: PRESENTATIONS
Service Learning Journals Due
Don't forget to include required forms!

Week 16 (December 10)

M: Ethics Review

W: EXAM
LAST DAY OF COURSE

Voyages Extraordinaires #19: Les Tribulations d'un Chinois en Chine

"It must be acknowledged, however, that there is some good in life," observed one of the guests, who, leaning his elbow on the arm of his chair with a marble back, sat nibbling a root of a sugar water-lily.

"And evil also," added another, between two spells of coughing, having been nearly strangled by the prickles of the delicate fin of a shark.

"Let us be philosophers," then said an older person, whose nose supported an enormous pair of spectacles with broad glasses affixed to wooden bows. "To-day one comes near strangling, and to-morrow every thing flows smoothly as the fragrant draughts of this nectar. This is life, after all."

After these words, this easily pleased epicure swallowed a glass of excellent warm wine, whose light vapor was slowly escaping from a metal teapot.

In The Tribulations of a Chinaman in China, a charming and humorous tale, we follow the advantures of the wealthy Shanghai merchant Kin-Fo. Kin-Fo is a lover of the finer things and of the young widow Le-ou, but is also rather bored with life, and when he learns that a major investment in an American corporation has gone badly and is likely to bankrupt him, he decides he's had enough and plans to die. He takes out an insurance policy with The Centenary, an American life insurance corporation, insisting -- despite the expense -- that it cover all causes of death, with the beneficiaries being Le-ou and his philosophy tutor Wang. He then asks Wang, who is a former revolutionary, to assassinate him, which Wang agrees to do. Kin-Fo's fortunes quickly turn, and he discovers that he has good reason to live after all -- but Wang has disappeared and Kin-Fo's time is ticking away, as every moment might bring assassination. Fortunately for him, you don't make a profit in life insurance by being quick to pay out, and The Centenary is going to do everything in its power to keep him alive, with the help of its omnicompetent (and barely distinguishable) agents Fry and Craig.

I found this to be a very fun work, and it also left me wishing that Verne had written more books about The Centenary. It takes a place among my favorites in the series.

Descent from Gods and Titans

I've been thinking a bit recently about genealogies that trace families back to gods and titans. Take, for instance, the opening genealogy of the Orkneyinga Saga:

There was a king named Fornjot, he ruled over those lands which are called inland and Kvenland; that is to the east of that bight of the sea which goes northward to meet Gandvik; that we call the Helsingbight. Fornjot had three sons; one was named Hler, whom we call Ægir, the second Logi, the third Kari; he was the father of Frost, the father of Snow the old, his son's name was Thorri; he (Thorri) had two sons, one was named Norr and the other Gorr; his daughter's name was Goi.

Norr and Gorr end up conquering everything, and they split the winnings between them: Norr rules the mainland (hence the name 'Norway'), and Gorr the sea. Gorr the Sea King has two sons, Heiti and Beiti. We then learn that Heiti is the father of Sveiði, who is the father Halfdan the Old, who is the father of Ivar, who is the father of Eystein the Clatterer, who is the father of the wise Earl Rognvald. Rognvald had a son, the Hrolfr who won Normandy, also known as Göngu-Hrólfr (which literally means Walking Rolf, a nickname he supposedly got because he was too big to ride a horse). This Hrolfr is more commonly known as Rollo, who is the great-great-great-grandfather of William the Conqueror. Tracing genealogies back that far always involves a considerable number of assumptions, but Rollo shows up in my family tree multiple times, so I'm at least fairly certainly descended from multiple Norman families who were certain they were descended from Rollo, which is about as far as you can get in talking about genealogical connection to a person in the tenth century.

While the genealogy may look fairly mundane, it is not. Fornjótr, king of Gotland, Kænland and Finnland, is a jötun, a giant. Aegir is the sea; Logi is fire; Kári is wind or storm. These are all explicitly said elswhere. And, of course, Kári's son Frosti (frost) has a son named Snaer (snow), who has a son named Thorri (deep winter or frozen snow). Sacrifices were made to Thorri (or maybe he's invented to explain the sacrifices by that name), and a month shares his name (roughly from mid January to mid February). He's sometimes thought to have originally been Thor, although I've never seen any argument for that beyond the similarity of the names. Gói, the sister of Nórr and Górr, is light snow, and is also the name of a month. With them the divine age is starting to shift into the heroic age, and with Rögnvaldr the Wise, an associate of King Harald Fair-Hair, the age of heroes is morphing into the age of men. So now you know why I'm so awesome; I'm descended from Storm, Frost, Snow, and Winter. Of course, by this point a very large number of people with Norman and Scandinavian roots could say the same; it is no secret that Scandinavians are the children of Snow and Winter.

This descent-from-the-gods is usually explained as an act of propaganda, families trying to establish their legitimacy and so making up something that makes them special. Forging genealogical connections is not unheard of, so I've no doubt that there have been such cases. But if you look at the contexts, this is not a very good explanation of most of the evidence. For one thing, the ones that look most fictional are obviously allegorical; we don't know in exactly what way they originally took them. We tend to think of genealogy as a description of biological descent; it's very clear that this is not the only function genealogy has served. It is arguably not even the primary function of it through most of history; there is some reason at least to think that people often saw genealogy as symbols, as descriptions of themselves. There's some reason, similarly, to think that people are often not just making up the connections, even many of the most fictional ones; they are discovering connections that they think can be plausibly understood as genealogical -- perhaps such-and-such source says that so-and-so went to such-and-such place and married; perhaps a name loosely like so-and-so's runs in a local family there; perhaps they take the speculative connection as sufficiently established for their purposes. Or another case: Everyone, we are told, is descended from Adam; so where's the point at which we most likely connect up to his family tree? It's bound to be somewhere.

There's also remarkably little interest in exclusivity in most cases; there's no attempt to claim that the family in question is the only family to descend from the god, or even that it's the most important. It's rather like visions of past lives, in which everyone turns out to have been Cleopatra. There are lots and lots of families descended from Fornjótr. By the time of the Orkneyinga Saga, being descended from Fornjótr would not have been a rare distinction; if it can be claimed of Rollo in one line, it can be claimed of many people in many different lines. What is more, these genealogies are often serving not to single out families as special but to situate them in a broader scheme of human life. Many of the older examples are pretty clearly not dynastic genealogies but tribal or national genealogies. The kings and nobles are just the eminent examples. Beowulf is not marking out the Scyldings as special Danes; it doesn't make a sharp distinction between Scyldings and non-Scyldings at all. I plausibly have a Frankish noble house or two in my family tree, as well, so I am assured by certain Frankish sources that I am descended from Helenus, son of Priam of Troy, and thus ultimately from Zeus. That's not surprising, though; the really surprising thing would be to find someone with any Frankish ancestors who isn't.

What is more, many of the genealogies we have were not put forward by people who believed in the gods. Jordanes traces the Gothic royal houses to the Aesir; he didn't believe that the Aesir were divine, but the Romans had gods in their genealogy, so why wouldn't Gothic kings? We often have no evidence at all, even indirect, of a descent-from-the-gods genealogy prior to the coming of Christianity; most of them were compiled by Christians from literary sources. And it is notable that the Norse genealogies tend to treat the whole thing in a matter-of-fact way; there's often no attempt to flag the fact that someone is a god or giant unless it matters to the story, and sometimes the genealogist is going well out of his way to make someone not a god. Euhemerist assumptions can partly explain this; but it's hard to shake the feeling that the people put the gods in not because they were gods but because they were old, that it was not special roots but deep ones that mattered. The Norse genealogies sometimes trace families back not only to Norse gods but to Greek ones as well, as if to say to Greek and Roman civilization, "We're not less deeply rooted than you." If you look at how people do genealogy today, something like that idea is occasionally visible. And if that was the idea, they certainly were not wrong to that extent.

Dashed Off XX

This ends the notebook that was completed in April 2017.

Confucianism as a civil religion of good citizenship (Gu Hongming)

Every sacrament exhibits the principle of 'the truth is made present in its similitude', but each in a different way.

'probability' in Treatise 1.4.1.1 is about belief
(1) the need for checking
(2) the limits of checking
(3) 'knowledge degenerates into probability', from (1) and (2) with rationalist account of knowledge and belief
(4) promiscuous need for checking
(5) 'total extinction of belief' from (3) and (4)
(6) total extinction of belief impossible by nature
(7) Therefore the rationalist account of knowledge and belief is false.

incompleteness theorems as indicators of analogical predication (likewise mathematical hierarchies, likewise nonunivocal but obviously linked uses of terms like 'number' and 'addition' in different fields)

Consent is too often conflated with cooperation, for which it is only the most general precondition.

While probabilities may be part of our body of evidence, we do not in general assess probabilities in assessing evidence. Instead, we usually (a) look at what the evidence seems to say about the world, which involves a kind of extrapolation or simulation given the evidence, and (b) look for indicators of trustworthiness in what it says.

A body of evidence is a symbol (in Peirce's sense) consisting of an iconic sign of the world and indexical signs concerning the relation of that sign to its object.

One is a saint in the measure to which every moment of one's life is described in its disposition by the Lord's prayer.

- the need for a ritual/liturgical/sacramental sociology analogous to a moral sociology

A study of American constitutional law is a study of American history.

philosophy of art as an organon of philosophy (cp. Schelling)

The state is a means to the development of human life, not the end of that development.

Human life must be aesthetic, ethical, and religious all at once.

Note the bizarre tendency of people to treat 'imposed a rule on oneself to prevent a problem' as a sign of lack of willpower (see, e.g., people's reactions to the Graham Rule). This is a fruitful point for considering subversions of temperance in our society.

part-contiguity & part-continuity (distinction in terms of whether boundaries are distinct or shared)

stage theory // occasionalism

unintelligibility
(1) through failure of the knower's power to know
(1.1) in itself
(1.1.1) deficiency (enduring)
(1.1.2) weakness (temporary)
(1.2) in its means and instruments
(1.2.1) inadequacy of means (cause privative)
(1.2.2) impediment (cause positive)
(2) through failure of the known
(2.1) contradiction/incoherence
(2.2) inconsistency with the conditions of the knower

A Bolzano-influenced argument against semiotic rationalism.
(1) Signs require intention for any kind of use.
(2) Either this intention is mine or an intention I recognize others to have.
(3) In both, judgments are required.
(4) Therefore judgments must precede both invention and reception of signs.

monstrousness as semi-absurdity in ethics (presumptive absurdity)

Deliberative government requires self-review checkpoints for consistent action in high-stress situations -- that is, points at which deliberation can be paused and/or set aside for a better time -- points of reasonable delay.

Sacramentals are actions by which the Church intercedes for effects, especially spiritual effects, and the objects materially used in these actions, which are related to the sacraments.

integral parts of the sacrament: minister, matter, form, end of institution
subjective parts of sacrament: mode of sacraments in different rites, also distinction of emergency vs proper/perfect
potential parts: sacramentalia

devotional sacramentalia (get their value from devotional association with the sacraments) vs. impetratory sacramentalia (get their value from the intercession of the Church)
-- might perhaps be better to see this as two dimensions along which sacramentalia variably fall

the sacramentalia as expressions of God's favor to the Church, and thus of the dignity of the Church

If you couldn't get Ought from Is, then learning a new Is would not itself ever have any implications for reasonable behavior.

Every truth has a speculative face and a practical face.

"The nuptial union then is the law of nature, the foundation of human society, and it necessarily superinduces to the law of self-government, the law of family of government...." John Quincy Adams
-- Note that this ends up being quite strong in his view -- the civil association arises not out of individual consensus but out of consensus of families, each family having but one vote.

"Just as water reflects the face, so one human heart reflects another." Pr 27:19

Classify enough things and you will eventually discover something significant.

Sincerity carries an intrinsic power of oratory.

Utilitarianism in practice is reductionism about public interest/common good/public good/mutual benefit. Nothing really requires this -- arguably Bentham, of all people, manages to avoid it, although it is precisely an aspect of his approach that later utilitarians have treated as incoherent. But it is not surprising either -- although the fact that it generally goes unnoticed is.

In assessing whether an action is proportional, we (rightly) assess three things, not one:
(1) whether it is the kind of thing that can achieve a reasonable end.
(2) whether it is done in a way that fits the conditions of a reasonable end.
(3) whether it is done in a measure that befits a reasonable end.

There is no forgiveness without sacrifice.

Part of genius is ardor.

To frame good philosophical reasoning in good poetry, one must first step back from the former to see it in one insight, and then one must sensibly express the insight. It is not an easy task!

Santayana's Three Philosophical Poets could just as easily be called 'Three Kinds of Honesty'.

One weakness of Peirce's account of signs is not including reduplication. Its functions are partly handled by the interpretant, but not as reduplicative. Arguably this is why Peirce ends up having to proliferate classifications.

heroic virtues as virtues in a life of grace and prayer

When we reflect on our mind, we do not find a bundle of perceptions, but perception; getting the bundle, or indeed the plural perceptions, requires a particular kind of causal analysis.

"the practice of temperance varies according to different times...and according to different human laws and customs." ST 2-2.170.1ad3

the Lord's Prayer as a school of humility (Dante)

The theme of the Purgatorio: we are free to repent, which is the restoration of love to its natural character, and this repentance sparks true friendship to life and ennobles it.

Marriage is not an expression of the sexual, but the rational form of life that includes the sexual.

All discussion of possibilities involves abstraction, so modifying an account of abstract ideas, or rejecting them altogether, inevitably affects what can be said about possibility.

Berkeley's view of the mind is primarily of the will rather than the intellect; in a sense notions are acts of will. This is worth considering more broadly.

the sign-structure of devotions: we devote ourselves to something as the locus or sign of something, insofar as the one manifests the other under some aspect (the devotional interpretant)

In practice people treat testimony in the absence of a defeater as a more powerful kind of evidence than personal experience.

People often confuse 'a question can be raised' with 'a doubt has been established'.

(1) Christianity had a swift propagation, the essential shape of which is known.
(2) This advance is of a kind that it would be explained by the truth of Christianity.
(3) Explanations of the fact based on the supposition that Christianity is false, e.g., by imposture and gullibility, are inadequate to capture the effectiveness of the propagation.
-- A problem with the imposture explanation is that while it sounds plausible and simple at the general level, when one looks at specifics, it requires an immense number of successful impostures, not all of which are simple or plausible.

acting-pleasure, satisfaction-pleasure, fulfillment-pleasure

index, icon, and symbol as a division of signs insofar as related to instrument of signification (based on the manner in which the instrument signifies)

Emphasis on miracles, prophecy, inspiration of Scripture in modern apologetics is heavily reactional; i.e., they would have a place but not the emphasis they do except for what opponents of Christianity emphasize.

(1) analogy of nature and system of miracles
(2) analogy of nature and system of sacraments

the sacraments as infusions of divine civilization

Every human person, in his relations to other persons, serves as a symbol.

As a model of character, Jesus has an unusual catholicity of appeal for a peasant from a backwater province as presented by a ragtag bunch of peasants from a backwater province. (Although, to be sure, it is possible to exaggerate both the catholicity and the backwater.)

Sacred doctrine acts like a lens, bringing certain philosophically discoverable truths into greater clarity and focus.

Christianity is very much a semiotic religion.

Job (dialogue), Ecclesiastes (soliloquy), Proverbs and Sirach (counsels), Wisdom (treatise), Psalms and Song (poetic meditation)

autograph originalist inerrantism about Scripture // deism

Understanding defective causes requires understanding conserving causes.

The imposition of names is not purely arbitrary, and thus a name widely recognized raises a defeasible appearance of appropriateness.

Antiquity of institution continually preserved indicates a durability suggestive of truth.

People regularly say things of the idea of space that are only true of the idea of the possibility of extension, likewise with the idea of time and the idea of the possibility of succession.

the blending operation of the imagination (note that this is stronger than recombination)

Axioms clearly may be understood more or less well by different people, or by people at different stages of learning, and therefore they are not, as found in human reasoning, static things, but refinable in formulation and admitting of degrees of clarity.

Neoplatonism has done is well for the uses of theology because it can work at the level of terms and at the level of civilizational schemes.

the Divided Line and the structure of meaning in every term

Overwhelming and enduring factional dominance breeds corruption.

infused virtue | associated frequent practice
prudence | spiritual reading/reflection
justice | vocational duties
fortitude | confession
temperance | communion

polemic by grignotage (typically an approach of those in a weak position, or with severe resource limitations)

Erasure of the past is often a way of pretending to a righteousness or rationality one does not have -- one removes possible points of comparison.

Mathematicians make their hypotheses on two primary grounds: analogy (structural) and induction (ordinary rather than mathematical, i.e., by looking at what is commonly found in a bunch of cases).

The advance of physics has, overall, expanded what is to be recognized as in-principle possible; discoveries have widened general horizons faster than they have refuted particular possibilities.

a priori and a posteriori, if taken to refer to (in)dependence from experience, are relative categories -- nothing prevents something from being both in different ways. (The same is true of older logical senses.)

simultaneity // co-location

That sentences describe things, or ideas have objects, is a relation of facts (or ideas and facts), not a relation of ideas nor a matter of fact. All semiotic relations can only be placed on one side or the other by gerrymandering (or by collapsing the distinction). The same is true of causal and constitutive relations of things: they are intrinsic relations of things.

The problem of induction is usually put in terms of past and future, but it arises from doubt about inference from actual to necessary.

R. Morehead takes universals to be design, but one could go the opposite direction and convert design arguments into arguments about universals.

Much of what Plato's Socrates says about ignorance makes sense if you take it to be a sort of persuasibility.

Permissibility is always conditional, even if the conditions are sometimes very general.

Atheistic arguments from evil require that the relevant moral principles, as understood and formulated by us, are not only true enough for our purposes but so perfect that even an omniscient being could not do better.

possible, being
intelligible, true
valuable, good
integrable, one?

To get a probability requires using a possibility to measure a possibility.

"Even in the world a friend can make satisfaction for a friend." Aquinas

Conditionalizing what counts as reasonable discourse on agreement of people, independently of considering whether those people are being reasonable by some prior standard, is an absurd and inevitably fatal move -- it holds discourse hostage to the obstinate and strategically unreasonable.

No community completely determines itself; there are always prior elements on which it depends.