A Yangist's Musings(一位楊家的沉思)

Philosophical Amputations: 1: "Brute Facts" and "Institutional Facts"

2012-01-07T07:27:00.000-08:00

For those readers who I have, I should start by apologizing for not providing much content over the previous months. I have focused most of my attention on linguistic projects (think Khan University for foreign languages), and the time that I've spent in philosophical dialogues occurred in Warp, Weft, and Way (specifically here, here, and here) and some other places.

But a new year is upon us, and in efforts to keep my New Years resolution (as I said I would last year), I decided that I would force myself to dedicate at least a certain amount of time to some philosophical topics.

But more still, my exposure to the philosophical literature and lectures has left me disappointed by the very nature of the philosophical venture, and so much of my attention has turned from doing philosophy (attempting to answer philosophical problems) to doing what I'll call an amputating approach to philosophy -- telling philosophers that the distinctions, definitional underpinnings, and other groundwork for the explanatory models that they aim to provide or address are themselves incoherent nonsense.

That said, I don't get invited to many philosophers' parties. They don't like much being told that their salaries are won by sophisticated con artistry. It's a heavy sword. It's hard to swing.

Thus, for filler between talks about Yang Zhu and most of my "hardcore" Analytic stuff, I decided that I would open a subtopic -- Philosophical Amputations -- to outline some of those terms which exist in philosophy, but which fizzle to nonentities upon some basic logical inspection.

This first one came from John Searle's lecture series on the philosophy of language, specifically his discussion of "brute facts" and "institutional facts."

I think most people, even without much investigation, could shoot down most of what Searle has claimed here. But let's take it piece by piece.

"The brute fact doesn't require a human institution in order for it to exist."

Searle's own example does not exemplify this claim. Take the sentence, "The Sun is [about] 93,000,000 miles from the Earth." First of all, that fact only exists because of an institution -- measurement. The decision to define an arbitrary length as a unit (say, a centimeter, or a league, or a li), demands the institutionalization and standardization of that length as that length and not any other. The fact follows from the institution of that measuring system.
But can there by any facts that are not institutional? No. The entire delineation of facts versus non-facts is a "human institution." It's a distinction between the observations that we make and, more or less, its "agreement" with the sentences that one uses to code that observation. Those sentences are built on a lexicon of terms and predicates that are the institution of a certain language, and thus the fact is just the comparison of a decoded sentence and our observed knowledge.
But this has an interesting consequence. It means that all facts are merely tautologies of a given language. Consider the measurement example that Searle gave. We could, at any time we chose, make a neologism for a unit between the Earth and the Sun. Let's call it a "solarterron." Now, if someone asks, "How far away from the Sun is the Earth?" I can now respond, "It's one solarterron away." But what have you really learned about the distance? Well, unless you know what a "solarterron" codes, you have learned nothing. The answer isn't contained in the sentence, alone, though the truth-value of that sentence is true by definition, and as such is tautological. The answer is contained in the empirical observation which is independent of the way in which we describe it. The sentence is merely a code which a person must decode and compare to his observations and experience. If the code says something that doesn't match the empirical data, then it's false, and it's true otherwise, and those true facts are ultimately definitionally true for that given language, and so are tautological (or conversely, are contradictory). There is no "bruteness" to the relation. There's the observation, which is independent of language, and then there's a description which can match the observation and be true or fail to match it and be false. All facts, truth, and the rest depend the language, and they follow from the language's underlying definitional foundations for their establishment.

"The Sun and the Earth are that far apart no matter what anybody thinks."

That's not true, either. The Earth and the Sun are that far apart because we observe it to be that far away, and so think it is that way, and the statement is true because we have an institution that makes it true by definition.

"They [regulative rules] regulate behavior that can exist without the rule, whereas some rules not only regulate behavior, [...] but they constitute the very behavior that they regulate, in that isn't even behavior of that kind unless they are following a certain number of the rules."

Searle's example of the regulative rule: "Drive on the right side of the road," can just as well be a constitutive rule if we reinterpret his statement. Is it really driving in any conventional sense if the people don't agree on an institution for driving on certain sides of the road? Well, what we want most out of this rule is to avoid collisions, which impedes driving in the sense that we normally would mean it. If by "drive," Searle only meant, "Travel any distance by operating a motor vehicle," then the rule really is regulative in that sense. However, if Searle meant by "drive," "Travel to destinations safely and securely by operating a motor vehicle," then the rule actually constitutes the behavior, since it is decidedly unsafe to drive on the wrong side of the road that we've institutionalized. A behavior that we may read as regulative in one sense is equally constitutive in another sense.
One can see the explanatory power of constitutive rules over a falsely distinguished class of regulative rules in other contexts. "Do not kill another human unless you must do so to defend yourself." Why then, do you suppose that slave-owning societies try so hard to dehumanize their slaves? Why do many wars receive a propagandist's spin that the enemy is a threat to personal safety?

"In the case of driving, people had to make up their minds." In effect, they institute a lane directionality rule. But this is not the case with the game of chess.

Actually, that is exactly the case with the game of chess. In order to constitute the game, people had to assign movement roles to pieces and relevant protocols for play and end of play. Those can be changed at any time upon agreement of the players. A game called "Knightmare Chess" does exactly that. Any "official regulations" of chess exist only within the officials' dominion (e.g. "official tournaments").

Often in philosophy, we find jargon that muddies the waters to make them seem deep. The "brute fact" and "institutional fact" are two such junk terms, since we have no definitive criterion by which one could substantially categorize a fact under the former heading, but not the latter heading simultaneously. We can handle all of our descriptions of rules and so forth without this extra contrivance, and in the interest of accurate and parsimonious understanding of the matter at hand, we should pluck it from our brains and cast it into the fire.

Speaking of Folk Language vs. Empirical Science...

2011-06-13T07:51:00.000-07:00

Alice Dreger mentions a handful of challenges to the macroscopic, anatomical distinctions that we assume in our natural languages. One challenging implication of her talk is that we could end up eliminating much more law (which, like philosophy does, operationalizes on our natural language's presumptions, often distinguishes by "intuition," and makes an ad hoc legitimization of its own previous stances and practices) than we would expect and than many people are comfortable pursuing.

Arguing the Inferiority of Philosophical Methods to the Methods of Empirical Science to Philosophers

2011-06-10T12:37:00.000-07:00

It obviously meets some resistance from people who identify themselves as professional philosophers, but I managed to spin a sausage metaphor into an issue about the efficacy of philosophers' methods to arrive at empirically relevant claims.

"I took it to be a reference to a principle you clearly do accept, according to which if a subject S is immune to empirical study, then it is not possible to know claims involving S, nor to fruitfully study S."
-- Mr. Zero (of The Philosophy Smoker)

Actually, my claim is more along these lines: If you claim that any statement S is immune to empirical verification, then it is no more likely to report true, falsifiable statements than random guessing would (because soundness and consistency are indistinguishable in such models), and thus is not a fruitful study.

The issue is the disconnect between using and coining words to describe the world and using words, alone, to “explain” the world. “Happiness,” or “goodness,” for instance, may be total misnomers under empirical scrutiny and may only be meaningful as an array of stimuli responses that people would call “being happy.” However, there is no reason to appeal to the natural language, which we can revise or contrive to fit more specific empirical results. The specificities of Alexander Shulgin, for instance, would have more interesting and empirically testable things to say on happiness and he didn't get them by considering the philosophical history from the Aristotelian age to the present.

My bulk criticism is actually an empirical problem. It comes from my actual dealings with hippies (“Daoists,” “Ayurvedics,” “polarity therapists,” and tons of other people who I met in the lot of “alternative medicine” while I was studying manual therapy) and other philosophers. I learned that my disgust was similar to an observation from scientist and Sinological historian Joseph Needham, who evinced that empirical sciences failed to come to fruition in the East (and were similarly stifled in the West) because their approach was to force empirical results to conform to purely linguistic contrivances. That's a square-peg-to-round-hole problem. The less intellectually impeding thing to do is to conform our language to the demonstrated results, and then to have a means of factual dispute from there. This is the kind of progress that moves us from phlogiston-talk to oxidation-talk, from four-humors-talk to bacterial-and-viral-talk (in China, for instance, it was “五行說”). It doesn't come from philosophers.

Philosophers are a strange bunch in that they can coin terms on a whim so long as they are “philosophically interesting” or “bug our intuitions” about things, while they consider a sufficiently common term in our lexicon (however remotely, e.g. be, have, good, know, think, believe, make/cause), and thus they appear quite relevant to laymen. Conversely, they could be straightforwardly demonstrating via their own method of coinage, self-imported distinction, and argument, that philosophical criticism, itself, is critiquing the inadequacy of its own methodology. This is why I suspect that there can be so many more rival schools of philosophy than there can be of most empirical science camps.

"It seemed to me that [Anonymous] 6:11 was pointing out that this principle is itself immune to empirical study, and so is self-refuting in the manner of the verification principle."
-- Mr. Zero (of The Philosophy Smoker)

I think that philosophers can be empirically scrutinized. I think that empirical method can explain their methods of making themselves seem like they're doing relevant discourse on abstract topics, and I think that such studies would confirm many of the criticisms that I've made here.

Now, you may think that my claim on S above is not empirically verifiable, but I think the empirical test for such a statement seems pretty straightforward.

This was a final post to a couple of responders at the end. They probably will still think that I'm deeply misled about my dependence on non-empirical principles, and I'll probably still think that they're deeply misled about their dependence on empirical grounds to make those "non-empirical" principles into relevant claims to fact.

Nevertheless, a pretty good example that predicts the sort of empiricist takeover of philosophical questions is in a 2005 MIT talk with the aforementioned Alexander Shulgin, Christof Koch, and Patricia Churchland. You can view the entire video on MIT's web site, or you can view it part by part below. And yes, I know that Churchland is a professional philosopher, but what she says might pin many philosophers' ears back.

Why Science Conforms to Mathematics

2011-05-30T15:56:00.000-07:00

...in four premises.

All mathematical truths are definitional facts and their inferences. (They are axioms and theorems.).
Their truths are pan-empirical.
If an empirical statement contradicts a mathematical truth, then it is a falsehood.
Causation is the correct identification of two portions of an identical empirical event. (Causation dissolves the myth that two distinct events were actually two distinct events at all.)

In other words, conformity to tautology is the gold standard for truth in any epistemic endeavor, and if an empirical statement conforms to that standard, then it is defensibly a fact until (a) another defensible fact falsifies the initial statement or (b) the empirical predictions follow with mathematical regularity (they are sufficiently proven as premise (4). Falsifiability still holds for (b), since non-falsifiable pseudo-science (simply, but more elaborately stated in tense-logical terms) claims the nonsensical (A ∨ ¬A) ⇒ B) ∧¬(∅ ⇒ B).

Of these four premises, the first needs the most unpacking, since definition is a result of use of necessary empirical divisions, and the axiomatic statements of logic and math are statements about how all languages operate and the bare transformations that one can perform once those operations are clear.

Liezi Speaks (列子說) on YouTube

2011-05-30T12:45:00.001-07:00

There's a full series of "Chinese Thinker Speaks" videos that seem to cover a broad range of topics. This one, which apparently aims to discuss the Liezi, actually takes a famous parable from the mouth of Yang Zhu (though not from the Yang Zhu chapter).

You can read the original Chinese at the Chinese Text Project, and I have copied Graham's English translation below:

"When Yang Zhu was passing through Song, he spent the night at an inn. The innkeeper had two concubines, one beautiful and the other ugly. The ugly one he valued, the beautiful one he neglected. When Yang Zhu asked the reason, the fellow answered:

"'The beautiful one thinks herself beautiful, and I do not notice her beauty. The ugly one thinks herself ugly, and I do not notice her ugliness.'

"'Remember this, my disciples,' said Yang Zhu. 'If you act nobly and banish from your mind the thought that you are noble, where can you go and not be loved?'"

-- Liezi, 2:16 (trans. Graham)

The Job of a Philosopher is Nothing Special

2011-05-08T22:35:00.000-07:00

This may is a big pronouncement, but do philosophers generally acknowledge that they're actually doing nothing in their own departments that couldn't just as easily be a side-project whilst they work in a different capacity in another department? I think that many philosophers don't, but don't really take the time to justify their own existence convincingly to the lay public, to academic boards, or to many domains of the academic community at large. Worse yet, I think that they, not the philosophers, are right not to be convinced.

Despite my being entrenched in certain problems that relate to "philosophers," per se, I never really thought that the title itself meant anything beyond "professional arguer," someone who has an encyclopedic knowledge of a narrow subcategory of some other profession's work, and whose role is largely that of a handmaiden's: We pinpoint the inconsistencies in that profession's work, or conversely, solve problems by formal inference that they hadn't yet done for themselves.

The problem that I often found in practice and interaction with other philosophers, either in texts or in face-to-face discussion, is that philosophers have this horrible habit of "system building," of musing on a topic so independently that its conclusions either lose relevance to the actual data that they're supposed to survey and assess for clarity and coherence. "System building" is that pretense that laymen feel once they see the philosopher's dastardly habit of trapping themselves in their own neologisms, and then condescending people whose "expertise" (which one can fake with a masterful use of specialist jargon) doesn't assume a full knowledge of the same neologisms.

The heart of the futility of the study and practice of "philosophy" (whatever philosophers themselves dispute that it means) become clearer when you tug at threads that are uncomfortable for philosophers. This is something that no appointed philosopher would sanely do in his own interest. Who would make the academic career move of outlining the logical incoherence of his own profession as a substantial independent study, that is, philosophize "philosophy" away by equating it with its rather dull synonym -- argument, and then show that argument is not really much to squawk at? (Surprisingly, the answer is, "A few..." Wittgenstein, Rorty, and members of the Vienna Circle and Berlin Circle were among them.)

The first is a puzzling paradox. Some philosophers deal in paradoxes, but I've not yet met a philosopher who presented me with a philosophical paradox that, if found to be a mere incoherence (as, say, Russell's or Curry's are), would de-legitimize their profession as a standalone institution. This one, I think, does exactly that.

Philosophers are very keen on taking an area of philosophical or scientific concern, and then appending the prefix meta- to it to expound ideas that would not be acceptable claims within the study itself, but still present themselves as relevant discussions on the whole practice. For instance, metaethics attempts to examine the statements that are made within ethics, without actually doing plain old descriptive ethics. Metaphysics attempts to examine the statements that are made within physics without actually doing plain old descriptive physics. Metalogic...the same.

Every meta-study comes with its own "metalanguage," perhaps none more conspicuous than the metalogic's next-level fabrication of operations (on which I could rant volumes) that clarify the problems no better than the object language of the study already intends.

However, the most paradoxical practice extant in philosophy is "metaphilosophy." I should remark that this is a departmentally productive area. Many philosophers will list metaphilosophy as a specialization on their CV's. Metaphilosophy has a philosophical history and productivity (if this essay isn't an example). If your instincts were to laugh at the entire concept of "metaphilosophy" as a legitimate study, you're actually more justified in that laughter than you might think.

I want you to imagine a man. His job is x. He doesn't know that, though, but he is paid a middle class salary to attend office hours, give lectures, and so forth on topics about which he does have some claimed expertise. Ironically, these are all sub-disciplines of x. Well, like any good academic, he wants to know what x is, so he'll ask himself, "What do I do for a living?" And, amazingly, he'll struggle with the answer. Only in a philosopher does this kind of conundrum hit people. Ask a mechanic what he does, and he'll answer, "I fix cars." Ask what a homeopath or chiropractor does, and he'll give you an answer (again, the practice doesn't have to be legitimate, just provide a coherent answer). Homeopaths dilute stuff in water and call it medicine. Chiropractors crack your back and then scold you for having a cracked back.

Imagine, then, a conversation with a philosopher on this very matter:

Inquiring Mind: "What do you do?"
Philosopher: "I'm a philosopher."
IM: "Oh, I see, and what does a philosopher do?
Phil: "Well, we argue about things."
IM: "I see, so what makes you different from any other study of anything?"
Phil: "Let's see if I could differentiate my role a bit. Studies argue with certain tools. Some are empirical, others are conjectural, and others are formal. Our study is different namely in that we wait for other studies to use their tools to collect reliable data, and then we use just one tool, logically stiff-nosed rhetoric, to outline the coherence or incoherence of the views that such data reasonably imply."
IM: "I see, so your job is to take other people's work and sniff out possible problems or solutions that they, themselves, may not see."
Phil: "Partly, yes. Our work is also to relate the conclusions and implications of that data to the work of other academics who did our exact jobs in philosophical history."
IM: "But don't professionals in those other studies use logically stiff-nosed rhetoric in their own efforts to verify and justify the claims that fall within their domains?"
Phil: "Yes, regularly."
IM: "I see, so a physicist, for instance, could reasonably do the work of a philosopher. Could a philosopher do the work of a physicist?"
Phil: "I guess that would depend on one's training. A physicist could be a philosopher if he had a great knowledge of his study and the implications of his study."
IM: "I don't think that would be a problem for a professional physicist."
Phil: "Also, a philosopher could be a physicist if he acquired a sufficient speciality in physics."
IM: "I see, so it's a downhill climb, academically speaking, for a physicist to be a philosopher, but an uphill climb for a philosopher to be a physicist. It sounds like physicists do harder work than philosophers do."
Phil: "It's not that one is harder or easier. They're just different."
IM: "Does that mean that a physicist, assuming that he were interested in philosophizing, would lack some knowledge that is fundamental to good philosophy?"
Phil: "Most physicists, for instance, don't read much other philosophy. They would have a harder time relating their findings to the thoughts of others."
IM: "What about Aristotle, or Galileo, or Newton, or Mach, or Reichenbach, or Einstein, or Heisenberg, or Feynman, or Krauss, or...?"
Phil: "Okay, okay! Physicists may very well have tools to offer insight into their own disciplines, but philosophers branch out into many different sub-disciplines."
IM: "Right, but couldn't I always produce a list of names of noteworthy professionals in a field that you mention whose work contains significant philosophical merit?"
Phil: "The problem, I'm afraid, is that all good arguments have philosophical merit."
IM: "Do philosophers know that there are already professionals in their fields who are doing the work that they want to do?"
Phil: "If they're worth reading, yes."
IM: "Okay, then I'm back to my original question. How is philosophy different from any other study, besides its use of fewer tools than other disciplines use to arrive at their conclusions?"
Phil: "I'll have to think on it."
IM: "You also mentioned that philosophers compare their data or thoughts with the thoughts of other thinkers in history. What, then, makes him any different from a historian?"
Phil: "Well, a historian's main interest is to prove the facts of the occurrences of events, while philosophers would be interested in associating the thoughts of figures to each other."
IM: "Doesn't that assume that thinking thoughts aren't events?"
Phil: "One could say that."
IM: "Well, are they?"
Phil: "I think that our intuitions would tell us as much."
IM: "A historian then could reasonably do the comparative work that a philosopher does, and then track the development of those thoughts throughout intellectual history."
Phil: "Yes, I suppose so."
IM: "Would it be an uphill climb, academically, for philosophers to do that job?"
Phil: "No, not really. Philosophers are particularly keen on doing this, especially when their own expertise is on the thought of a famous figure in the history of philosophy."
IM: "Doesn't that present a problem, though? Philosophers await other thinkers' results, and then they evaluate them rigorously."
Phil: "Right."
IM: "The problem with that is that philosophers from history are using outdated data from older periods in intellectual history, so their problems may be solved by contemporary developments in those fields, or the philosophers themselves may have used comparatively less reliable data (by contemporary standards) to reach their conclusions, and so have less reliable conclusions."
Phil: "This can be the case sometimes."
IM: "Why, then, would we care about what they thought outside of mere historical curiosity?"
Phil: "Sometimes their conclusions are still true, and we still haven't solved the problems that they've presented. Take the problem of induction. It's a problem that is reserved for philosophers mostly, yet the conclusion affects all natural sciences."
IM: "And yet the natural sciences have a method that reliably curtails that problem: falsifiability, abductive reasoning, and fallibility principles."
Phil: "I guess they are doing well for themselves."
IM: "Are there genuinely philosophical problems, then, or are all philosophical problems hijacked from other areas' problems?"
Phil: "I'm afraid that answer would take more time to answer, but feel free to take a few courses to become more acquainted with the study."
IM: "I would, but from what you've presented, I could get the same training if I studied anything that interested me outside of philosophy."

Therein lies the paradox of the metaphilosopher. A metaphilosopher is doing is job if, and only if he assumes that he isn't sure of what he does, but assumes that it's more than what he really does. It reduces to a logical error of attempting to argue on something before giving some a clear definiens for that thing that the argument is supposed to address. The metaphilosopher must forge his argument under an indeterminate universe of discourse, which makes his claims arbitrary.

The fact that a person can be paid to ask himself what he does for a living is laughable, namely because it shows exactly how narrow his role of a mere arguer is. The only problem is self-overestimation, which is widespread among philosophers. They "do more than just argue," or so they think. If that were the case, they would already know what those extra roles might be, and they wouldn't have to appeal to their sole tool, argument, to decipher those roles for themselves. Mechanics know that they're mechanics precisely because they fix cars and are paid for doing so. They don't use the act of fixing a car to learn that their job description is auto repair. They don't assume that they "don't just fix cars" (no matter how much Pirsig would want to over-inflate the task). They're clear about their role, and thus work in a sane and sustainable profession. Philosophers don't, and their obsolescence becomes clearer with every leap that every discipline makes and upon which other philosophers feed.

This is why I would prefer not to be called "a philosopher" in any sense more than I'm "a good arguer about certain topics." That's all there is to it, and that's all there is to us.

道 = U, The Ethical/Political Side

2011-04-19T08:24:00.001-07:00

I posted an entry not too long ago that offered a "set-theoretic reading" of the Daodejing. In it, I claimed that 道 is a primitive attempt to define what we logicians and set theorists call U (the universe of discourse), and then outlined similar claims in the Daodejing that matched true statements of U. At the end, I hinted that this exploration supports Laozi's ethics and politics, as well.

Until I make a link of this sort, much of my previous post would read like it was a highly selective reading, as many areas in the Daodejing appraise common human conduct, but U is most definitely a non-normative domain (it doesn't have any vested interest in human conduct), and without it, my reading would be consistent, but hardly comprehensive. A clear and correct interpretation will avoid that kind of cherry-picking.

Also, these kinds of moves come with many risks of succumbing to "Rand-tardation." We don't want to conflate some tautologous statement for a non-tautologous one, as the ironically labeled "Rational Egoists" do. We want to treat 道 as a device for comparing our lives to those things that are outside of it, and then to adopt the way of life that turns some true predicate of ourselves (P(...a...)) to its complementary predicate (~P(...a...)).

道 doesn't exercise anthropic bias.

"上善若水。
水善利萬物而不爭，處衆人之所惡，故幾於道。"
"Higher good is like water:
The good in water benefits all, and does so without contention. It rests where people dislike to be, so it is close to the Way."
-- Daodejing, 8:1~8:2 (trans. Thomas Cleary)

Water very much seems like it is not invasive or evasive, and thus cooperates with everything and aids in its survival. However, people don't much like dwelling in caves, rivers, or wells. We don't like the feeling of drowning or of dehydration. Humans share, then, a love-hate relationship with a necessity for human life. People are very much this way about many elements under U. However, for Laozi, this informs us how far the apples (humans) have fallen from the tree (U). U, like 道, isn't competitive or preferential. It really isn't anything but itself. No predicate that describes a specific subset of U can be true of every element in U, and we can show that very few things are true of U itself (all of which follow from operational definitions).

In this sense, 道 cannot itself be a collection of codes, commandments, or definitions for goodness, which is what we expect from an ethics. We cannot "become just as 道 is." The ethics of Laozi's work only apply when we begin to contrast our human condition with the condition of 道.

Subsets of U (that is, specially qualified domains of discourse), which include humanity, can provide simple examples for ethical or political heuristics.

Take the following example:

"功遂身退天之道。"
"Retire when your work is done. Such is Heaven's Way."
-- Daodejing, 9:5 (trans. Lin Yutang)

Heaven, the sky above us (天) is not quite the sort of ethereal super-world that we get from other Chinese traditions and Western thinking. Instead, the sky (天) is above us, a sort of upper bound of a set. We are of 天下, of that which is under the heavens (and '天下' is often translated into pronouns like everything, or everybody). Strictly speaking, that translation should belong to 道 if it is U, but we may want to consider the matter under a pre-logical sense of what "being one among everything" would mean here. The 天下 denotes those things which are not U, but which humans interact empirically. For example, after we Anglophones pack our bags into a car, we may say, "That's everything there!" before we close the trunk. However, that's an exaggeration. If it were everything, then it would be the car, too, which would be impossible to pack into its own trunk.

U has so many more elements than any computably large set of elements would, and many of its elements are beyond our observation, yet we can comfortably use everything in plenty of contexts when stipulate all of the constraints for our given discourse. Laozi takes advantage of this feature, and he names domains according to their perceived immensity (or cardinality) to each other.

Laozi regularly refers to 天下 as the entire world, and his claim in Ch.25 is, as one would expect, that 道 is the "mother" (母) (but really, superset) of 天下.

"有物混成，先天地生。
寂兮寥兮，獨立不改，周行而不殆，可以為天下母。
吾不知其名，字之曰道，強為之名曰大。"
"There was Something undefined and yet complete in itself, born before Heaven-and-Earth.
[It is] silent and boundless, standing alone without change, yet pervading all without fail.
It may be regarded as the Mother of the world. I do not know its name; I style it 'Tao'; and, in the absence of a better word, call it 'The Great.'"
-- Daodejing, 25:1~25:4 (trans. John C.H. Wu)

Here, Laozi is also admitting that 道 is just a stipulated set, just like U. From this, he considers that the "world" (天下) is a subclass of 道.

It is also vacuously true that U contains a "better" (and a "worse") state of being than human life. All of the things that we love or despise about ourselves or each other trace to some fact of some other things in U that are false for us. We get to flee, to fight, to feed, and to fornicate, but we're still fragile, finite, fearful, and fixated. Survival and some pleasure commits us to certain miseries which we could solve entirely by becoming like U is. If we are seeking to be "better" than we are, we are seeking to negate some present fact about ourselves (the part that is "worse"). However, that fact would already be true for some subset of U, so insofar as we make an evaluation of a situation, U already contains the "better" situation.

We cannot become U any more than a child can become its own parent, so our approach can't be one that tries to negate that which is human in us (because we would just switch from one subset of U to another). However, we can remain as humans are and a group of things greater than the set of all humans is. We can, too, consider those things whose traits are "better" than ours are and attempt to have those traits, while still remaining essentially human.

This ancient thinking relies on a pre-scientific stereotyping of individuals into general behavioral tendencies, and so relies on a very stern behavioral essentialism. Entities act differently, but generally still act in ways which define what they are.

The bigger question remains: Why would "retiring when the work is done" be any more like 天, and why would it be "better" than being merely human? Whenever an event in the sky happens, such as the rising and falling of the sun, or the coming and ending of a storm, they come and go exactly as their nature dictates. Most would agree that not overworking or overdoing things, wherever they draw the lines for themselves, is overall a better way of living.

It is important to remember that being "better" here, appeals to universal human preference. It does not presume its own moral "goodness." The supposition here is that the Daodejing would grant as tautologous something of this sort: "If something is good, we will seek it," which becomes a tautology if "being good" reduces to "being preferred." It's been my experience that generating a non-biased hierarchy of preferences for all of humanity is a daunting, but an epistemically and scientifically viable task (in part because sciences can tell us what essential features people have, while philosophy can only guess at them). Normative ethics, which must attempt to guess at human intuition from the armchair of already normative statements, is a failure at this. Laozi, as I mentioned, is not doing normative ethics. It would be much clearer to read him as if he were doing pre-scientific moral psychology.

However, something more cynical is relevant here, and these come from conclusions in Laozi's own inspection of the hegemonies of his time. People have a very peculiar tendency to reflect on themselves as active moral agents once they have the means to do so. Hunter-gatherers don't have time to engage in that kind of reflection, or at least not nearly as much time as first-world citizens have. We have no reason to assume that moral agency is essentially human, and viewing other, simpler cultures informs us of exactly how little is required to make us essentially human. For instance, primitive man didn't have what we might call "social causes." They weren't interested in campaigning or legislating for changes in social contracts, in bidding for hierarchies of power and distinguishing lords from subjects, or in earning the contrivances of social or economic class. Disputes and stakes were originally very small, especially compared to the post-Shang ages.

This, alone, is a challenge to Confucianism. If we're really going to appeal to the past or to tradition, then we should not stop at the time of Yao and Shun, but to the time when they and their ranks never existed. The point is that an appeal to such things is an error. It relies on the assumption that the future cannot ever be any better than the past had been, which is unfounded.

The best demonstration of this view in the text itself (and in my estimation, the best summary of the entire Daodejing's ethical import) comes from Ch.38:

"上德不德，是以有德；下德不失德，是以無德。
上德無為而無以為；下德為之而有以為。
上仁為之而無以為；上義為之而有以為。
上禮為之而莫之應，則攘臂而扔之。
故失道而後德，失德而後仁，失仁而後義，失義而後禮。
夫禮者，忠信之薄，而亂之首。
前識者，道之華，而愚之始。
是以大丈夫處其厚，不居其薄；處其實，不居其華。故去彼取此。"
"True virtue is not virtuous. Therefore, it has virtue. Superficial virtue never fails to be virtuous. Therefore, it has no virtue.
True virtue does not "act" And has no intentions. Superficial virtue 'acts,' and always has intentions.
True jen [humanity] 'acts,' but has no intentions. True righteousness 'acts,' but has intentions.
True propriety 'acts,' and if you don't respond, they will roll up their sleeves and threaten you.
Thus, when the Tao is lost there is virtue.
When virtue is lost there is jen, when jen is lost there is Justice, and when Justice is lost there is propriety.
Now 'propriety' is the external appearance of loyalty and sincerity And the beginning of disorder.
Occult abilities are just flowers of the Tao, and the beginning of foolishness.
Therefore the Master dwells in the substantial, and not in the superficial.
[He] rests in the fruit and not in the flower, so let go of that and grasp this. "
-- Daodejing, 38 (trans. Charles Muller)

Laozi gives some very clear reasons to retain our essential humanity and to discard things that are "superficial" (薄). For one, there are no such things as vanity, or political struggle, or inferiority complexes, or fear of punishment, or (Sartre's) "inauthenticity," or lures of deceived notions of "gain" in the essential human being, which is the human being in total isolation. They simply cannot arise, as they demand (to use Sartre again) "the Stare," those sentiments of social pressure that arise because others are attempting to use others as means to their ends. U contains only those things which can exist, but the pitfall of our mental fabrications is their innate susceptibility to being total nonsense -- contradictory propositions under a ludicrous model for organizing the world. If that is the case, we have no obvious reason to assume that the content of those fabrications is greater than the content of ∅, and if it isn't, then we can just as well abandon them because, either way, we're still retaining ∅ as a subset of ourselves essentially, but not distracting ourselves from taking on better characteristics, which we can gain from inspection of 道.

Babies, for instance, have essentially human ends to serve, two of which are nourishment and companionship. However, Laozi recognizes that no hegemony enables such ends, but demonstrably enfeebles them -- for instance, in the recruitment of soldiers, in the levying of taxes, in the impositions of law against one's basic loyalties and impulses, etc. Case in point: Almost everywhere where there is a common religious or state law, suicide is illegal! But what punishments can the state or religion impose on those who complete the crime? And if you save them, haven't you only done so just to punish them in accordance with a trumped-up law or to compel them to submit once more to the very world that makes them seek their own deaths? Vanity! Straight, hegemonic vanity!

Though I am a Yangist, I do side with Laozi on these basic arguments. Only stern arrogance could attempt to reduce humanity to its social roles or political agendas. To believe that the solution to human suffering or the means to better living lies in the submission to even more ad hoc normative guesswork, regardless of its origin, is fruitless, especially when reliable methods for determining the essential nature of humanity exist and people could use that empirical knowledge to enable the satisfaction of human preferences adequately. The best laws of governance will read like they are laws of physics.

"天下皆謂我道大，似不肖。
夫唯大，故似不肖。
若肖久矣，其細也夫！"
"All the world says that my Tao is great, but seems queer, like nothing on earth.
But it is just because my Tao is great that it is [so queer] like nothing on earth!
If it were like anything on earth, how small it would have been from the very beginning!"
-- Daodejing, 67:1~67:3 (trans. John C.H. Wu)

道 = U, The Metaphysical Side

2011-02-19T08:10:00.000-08:00

For a long time, I've treated 道 (as a noun) as the universe of discourse (U) and treat most literature on 道 as a primitive approach to logical reasoning in a pre-logical society (that is, one where formal logic and deductive proof was not actively developed). I have only discussed my justification for this kind of move in small circles because my intention was to reinterpret the entire Daodejing as a formal treatise of a sort that would earn it more attention from mainstream Analytic philosophers. I've called it a "set-theoretic reading" (you know, like a Marxist reading, just not stupid). The treatise remains a stunted work in progress, though I didn't see any harm in presenting a nice outline version of a major assumption of such a work for early criticism and commentary. That said, here goes...

Most of my justifications for claiming that 道 is U follow from the many comments that discuss features that 道 has or lacks, which I read in an attempt to understand 道 as a set. These are a few of my observations in that attempt:

道 is infinite and the forefather of everything.

"道沖而用之或不盈。
淵兮似萬物之宗。"
"Tao is a hollow vessel, And its use is inexhaustible!
Fathomless! Like the fountain head of all things."
-- Daodejing, 4:1~4:2 (trans. Lin Yutang)

I've deemed this "hollow" and "inexhausible" container (沖) talk as one about the 道 as something such that it does not merely inject to the natural number line, that there are, crudely, infinitely many things which are of 道. If 道 really is U, then it would be a "source of everything" or an "ancestor to everything," at least in the sense that everything about which we could possibly have a discourse would be a subset of or element of U.

道 is abstract, and its empirically known subsets are not 道.

"道可道，非常道。"
"The tao that can be described is not the eternal Tao."
-- Daodejing 1:1 (trans. Chan)

Chan's translation simplifies a matter very well. When they discuss 道 as a verb (as in "可道"), most translators often translate it to some sort of (often presumed) illocutionary act -- referring, addressing, describing, speaking, telling. This is less than mundane activity for Laozi, since it's practically a litmus test for determining if something is 道, or rather 常道 ("the eternal Tao"). If 道 is U, then Laozi outlining a basic fact about U, that none of its subsets except for those that equal U are U.

My interpretation further presumes that Laozi's "describing" (道, v.) refers to "describing from our five senses." In a pre-logical world, the abstraction of U would always appear as exist "before" the existence of everything else and of anything that we could see, or smell, or taste... The Daodejing offers that kind of treatment. 道, the U, is the source of everything; but more, it doesn't have any of the features of the things that we can access with our five senses.

道 is the union of all possible contraries (whereas the intersection of them would be the empty set, ∅, or "nothing").

"反者道之動；弱者道之用。
天下萬物生於有，有生於無。"
"The movement of the Tao By contraries proceeds; And weakness marks the course Of Tao's mighty deeds."
-- Daodejing, 40:1 (trans. James Legge)
"The things of this world come from something; something comes from nothing."
-- Daodejing, 40:2 (trans. Red Pine)

Legge's flowery translation does favorably portray the set-theoretic reading of these lines. The "contraries" (反) are the "action" or "proceedings" (動) of 道, since failing to account for complements of subsets of U would not generate U. People sometimes allude this first sentence to Taijitu, that of complementary forces working together (and seeing the 道 as U would make that move easier) and determining the nature of everything in nature, and for lay primitive theory, that is probably plenty adequate. However, what convinces me more that they're discussing an abstraction prior to set theory is the line that follows it: "Everything comes from something" (that is, everything that we can know is a subset of 道, of U, but also from subsets of 道 or U). "Something comes from nothing," though, interprets more openly under the presumption that 道 is U. There are things that we can derive from the empty set, such as all of the theorems of logic and the definition for natural numbers. However, it's a stretch to believe that Laozi or any pre-Han Chinese thinker had any such thoughts. Instead, thinking prior to a formal means of understanding subsets and nested sets, we may claim that our denotations for things don't "come from" anywhere. They're just presumptions, just in the way that U is a presumption. We need to assume U for discourse on any topic, just as ancient Chinese thinkers need to assume 道 for their discourse on references to make sense. Our noises and scribbles have to correspond to referents, and the collection of those references, in a pre-logical China, would be some part of 道.

There are narrowed 道, such as a "Way of the heavens" (天之道) and a "Way of mankind" (人之道). In logic, we can stipulate a narrower U (certain sets of numbers, for instance), but it is still defined as a union of all of the sets and elements that would still fit the definition.

"天之道，不爭而善勝，
不言而善應，
不召而自來，
繟然而善謀。"
"Heaven's Way (Tao) is good at conquest without strife:
Rewarding (vice and virtue) without words,
Making its appearance without call,
Achieving results without obvious design."
-- Daodejing, 73:3 (trans. Lin Yutang)

The ability to make stipulations like this allows Chinese thinkers to discuss other philosophical areas, especially ethics and politics. However, these metaphysical areas and ethical areas connect together in a very special way for Daoists, especially when it comes to pursuits of 天之道 and 非道, that is, those unchanging and overarching principles the guide our mortal world (and that is, pursuit of truth).

The defense of such a link is not foreign to us. Spinoza, Kant, and Wittgenstein derive their ethical stances from highly (logically) formal considerations of "the world"; and it would not be out of place for the philosophers of ancient China to appeal to an impartial, all-pervasive force (namely, 道) which would inform their ethos, as well. This is the approach that I will take when I approach the Ethical/Political Side, the sense that one could make of Laozi's ethics from a set-theoretic reading of the text.

Yang Zhu Does Not Acknowledge the Hooded Man

2011-02-13T06:59:00.000-08:00

Earlier, I found a link to someone who was reading Yang Zhu for his language learning (Spanish-Chinese). Something struck me about that passage that reminded me of a rather prevalent paradox in the Western literature -- the Hooded Man. Both are interesting probes at the logic behind reference, particularly about knowledge of references.

The Hooded Man is one of the classic Sorites paradoxes that was introduced by Eubulides of Miletus in the 300's BCE. It has various renditions, but since I'm going to invoke Yang Zhu's parable, I'm going to make it match more closely to his story:

"You say that your dog knows you, but you came in wearing black clothes and he did not know you."

This is the problem that angers Yang Bu in the related parable, which Yang Zhu manages to reason to his brother to calm him:

"Yang Chu said [to Yang Bu]: 'Do not beat him [your dog]. You are no wiser than he. For, suppose your dog went away white and came home black, do you mean to tell me that you would not think it strange?'"
-- Liezi, 8:26 (trans. Lionel Giles)

What I find intriguing about these passages is that Eubilides is proposing a sort of linguistic or logical error to which we are prone, that he is criticizing our misuse of language or our faulty reasoning to express what we mean clearly. Yang Zhu's story is quite different, though. Yang Zhu is using this exact reasoning to show that such claims are not errors, but exactly correct expectations that follow from a straightforward reasoning. Thus, for Yang Zhu, no paradox exists here, just a difference in the two's understanding of reference.

Let's explore this more by using a descriptive theory of reference. The descriptive theory of reference is the theory (attributed largely to Bertrand Russell's essay, "On Denoting") to which Yang Zhu appears to be appealing. In it, our reference to Yang Bu is just relating to all of the things which he uses to define Yang Bu, which we can simplify to mean a variable for which a series of propositions are necessary to isolate just that one element.

We could say, then, that Yang Zhu is assuming the following: "x is (=) Yang Bu only if [P₁(...x...) ∧ ... ∧ P_n(...x...)]", where P's are predicate that contains x as an argument. For the Yangist position, referring to Yang Bu is just referring to that x. In "proper names," we usually stipulate a few overlooked definiens, like that there is exactly one x to which the predicates apply, or that it refers to only those features that isolate him from other referents (including, perhaps, that he was named that). The problem is that different people have different definiens which may not always isolate the referent properly. In this case, it is that Yang Bu's dog thinks, "x is Yang Bu only if, among other things, x wears white clothes." He wasn't wearing white when he returned, so his dog barked at him because the dog thought that he wasn't Yang Bu.

What Yang Zhu explains to Yang Bu is that his anger is hypocritical because he reasons in exactly the same way. Yang Bu probably thinks, "x is Yang Bu's dog only if, among other things, he has white fur." The issue of reference, then, could be corrected with some reconsideration of those necessary conditions so that our imprecise communication matches our more precise intentions. (This interestingly turns us to the Heap paradox, which, despite its name, also has a straightforward rebuttal.)

The Hooded Man version, however, does not seem to employ this kind of reasoning. Instead, it makes a criticism of a different sort: "If x is (=) Yang Bu (a), then his dog knows him. x is still Yang Bu even if he wears black clothes, and yet his dog doesn't know him." These two sentences appear to contradict each other, but in fact, they do not. The paradox arises because of an ambiguity in the word to know, which Yang Zhu's explanation to Yang Bu correctly addresses.

But does this cohere with the original passage? We can read the original passage with some definitional contexts, and it doesn't appear to be the case at first glance. The ancient Chinese '知' is equally ambiguous with modern English's to know, unlike Spanish's conocer or saber.

A reading of the 白話 doesn't disambiguate, either, and Mandarin does have a means to disambiguate to know even more than the Latin languages do (including one for techne, one for episteme, and one for acquaintance)...

"...穿白衣出去。遇到天雨，脫下白衣，穿上黑衣回家。他家的狗不知道，迎面叫起來。＂
-- 新譯列子讀本, p.286

...so what avoids this supposed paradox and leads us to the more obvious conclusion?

It seems that both instances are changing the referent to what they didn't know. In the Hooded Man version, the dog doesn't know that Yang Bu is (=) the man in the black clothes. In Yang Zhu's version, the dog doesn't know that Yang Bu changed his clothes after he left. Because Yang Zhu accepted the dog's ignorance of a situation, and thus a failure of recognition, rather than ignorance of fixed entities (as Yang Bu did), it never occurs to Yang Zhu to think of this situation as paradoxical.

Yang Zhu, Yang Bu, and the Dog...in Spanish

2011-02-02T11:27:00.000-08:00

A (presently anonymous) Spanish blogger and Chinese enthusiast has posted a Spanish translation of a rather popular Yangist anecdote from the 說附 chapter of the Liezi (26). Below is Lionel Giles's English translation of the passage (with links to the whole book's translation here):

"Yang Chu's younger brother, named Pu, went out one day wearing a suit of white clothes. It came on to rain, so that he had to change and came back dressed in a suit of black. His dog failed to recognize him in this garb, and rushed out at him, barking. This made Yang Pu angry, and he was going to give the dog a beating, when Yang Chu said: 'Do not beat him. You are no wiser than he. For, suppose your dog went away white and came home black, do you mean to tell me that you would not think it strange?"
-- Liezi, 8:26 (trans. Lionel Giles)

I have some thing to say about this passage and its possible relevance to the "the Hooded Man" Sorites paradox. Expect one in the coming weeks.

Musing on the Pragmatic vs. Semantic Theories of Truth with Mozi

2011-01-30T03:36:00.000-08:00

There was a very interesting post about truth that came a few days ago in Warp, Weft, and Way about Hansen's claims that the ancient Chinese thinkers did not use a semantic conception of truth, and that their evaluations for the truth of a claim were pragmatic rather than semantic.

Many people seem to agree on the latter claim. Chinese philosophers were very much more occupied with pragmatics over semantics. In my experience, it just goes with political science's and political philosophy's discourse. For them, truth of a "semantic" or objectively verified sort, is given only the consideration needed to implement a political plan, which is why you'll hear more about "cost-effectiveness" and other issues of expediency outmatching more permanent solutions that come at a significant, even if temporary, inconvenience. Hansen and I agree that the ancient Chinese care about semantic truth (as I qualify it below), or at least opted for true assertions over false ones, but that their arguments and discourse were not in defense a semantic sense of truth and falsehood, but on a pragmatic one.

I'll admit here that I (as a redundancy theorist) don't acknowledge "semantic" truth as a very coherent notion as it is normally discussed the rigors of formal semantics, but I'll entertain their difference as making a distinction between more "scientifically rigorously" true claims, versus pragmatically true (that is, expedient in fulfilling a stated goal).

The best reason that I know to give against the belief that the ancient Chinese philosophers clearly separated pragmatic and semantic theories of truth comes from Mozi. Mozi's work is very much a guided critique of the Confucians and the holes that they leave in their views due to a lack of rigor. Most importantly, the objective measures for a preferred or non-preferred action isn't directly stated in the 儒家 corpus of the time (though the 中庸 may be an effort at exactly that).

The issue with Mozi is that his decided semantic values, 是 and 非, which is the crux of Mohist consideration and consternation, are not easily derived into just plain-old Boolean values. 是非, even now, very much has a normative meaning, and these meanings are not qualified and separated in the Mohist canon, just as they are not so clearly done today (in Chinese-language logic books, 對 and 錯 are the most common natural-language stand-ins for Boolean values). We could take an extremely radical view on this, that Mozi equated or very closely correlated falsehood with evil, but the Mozi does not evidence such a stance.

Mozi's take on the fundaments of (the truth over the matter of) virtue (and the first instance of "是非") read very closely to Peirce's discussion on the methods of tenacity and authority in "A Fixation of Belief":

"古者民始生，未有刑政之時，蓋其語‘人異義’。是以一人則一義，二人則二義，十人則十義，其人茲眾，其所謂義者亦茲眾。是以人是其義，以非人之義，故文相非也。是以內者父子兄弟作怨惡，離散不能相和合。天下之百姓，皆以水火毒藥相虧害，至有餘力不能以相勞，腐臭餘財不以相分，隱匿良道不以相教，天下之亂，若禽獸然。

"夫明虖天下之所以亂者，生於無政長。是故選天下之賢可者，立以為天子。天子立，以其力為未足，又選擇天下之賢可者，置立之以為三公。天子三公既以立，以天下為博大，遠國異土之民，是非利害之辯，不可一二而明知，故畫分萬國，立諸侯國君，諸侯國君既已立，以其力為未足，又選擇其國之賢可者，置立之以為正長。"

"In the beginning of human life, when there was yet no law and government, the custom was 'everybody according to his own idea.' Accordingly each man had his own idea, two men had two different ideas and ten men had ten different ideas -- the more people the more different notions. And everybody approved of his own view and disapproved the views of others, and so arose mutual disapproval among men. As a result, father and son and elder and younger brothers became enemies and were estranged from each other, since they were unable to reach any agreement. Everybody worked for the disadvantage of the others with water, fire, and poison. Surplus energy was not spent for mutual aid; surplus goods were allowed to rot without sharing; excellent teachings (Dao) were kept secret and not revealed. The disorder in the (human) world could be compared to that among birds and beasts.

"Yet all this disorder was due to the want of a ruler. Therefore (Heaven) chose the virtuous in the world and crowned him emperor. Feeling the insufficiency of his capacity, the emperor chose the virtuous in the world and installed them as the three ministers. Seeing the vastness of the empire and the difficulty of attending to matters of right and wrong and profit and harm among peoples of far countries, the three ministers divided the empire into feudal states and assigned them to feudal lords. Feeling the insufficiency of their capacity, the feudal lords, in turn, chose the virtuous of their states and appointed them as their officials."
-- Mozi, 3:1 (trans. W.P. Mei)

The parallel between Peirce and Mozi is uncanny; and like Peirce, Mozi is describing the evolution of brute individual opinion to brute authoritarian opinion as a natural process in the fixation of a certain value. The difference, of course, is that Mozi is obviously more occupied with the fixation of true claims about virtue, and Peirce is more occupied with the fixation of true claims about Mother Nature.

Speaking from a standpoint of schools, a counterexample (and outlier in philosophical thought) is the School of Names (名家), an offshoot school from the Mohists in which Gongsun Longzi is very much toying with semantic truth in his "paradoxes" (which are ancient Chinese syntactic foibles rather than actual paradoxes). These discussions do seriously attend to the semantic conception of truth, of the acceptance of belief in statements that are not ethically laden or distracted with secondary evaluations. That, alone, should refute the claim that the ancient Chinese didn't have or use a "semantic" theory of truth. There were a group of thinkers who were targeting sloppy language and deliberately forming absurd conclusions in order to consider the truth of a matter independently of other valuations which distract from an evaluation for soundness, alone.

It's not that Chinese philosophers didn't argue that statements should be rejected because they are false (How else are they to challenge each other about the nature of 天, or 命, or 德 and still be worth taking philosophically seriously?), but that they did so in a roundabout way. Pragmatic arguments argue that implementation of a supposed plan will or will not yield the consequences that the plan proposes to produce or that the plan produces or does not produce more strongly undesired consequences than desired ones. This, just as much as any "less pragmatic" argument, is still an argument about facts, just facts over a different domain. The more scientifically rigorous, semantic argument ignores one's desires (it is impartial, like Laozi's 天), but just considers the consequences on their own terms. This narrower sense of truth is of greater appeal because it covers pragmatic arguments, as well; and if the general argument in politics is, "Plan x will or will not increase the people's general well-being," a "semantic" argument becomes indistinguishable from a "pragmatic" one. They'll all be truth-apt arguments that can be assessed for their own validity and soundness (that is, confirmation by experience).

Online Find: Cultural Studies Small Book Collection -- Yang Zhu (國學小叢書 -- 楊朱)

2011-01-23T04:20:00.000-08:00

Another friend has located yet another online collection of Chinese-language philosophical resources. The most pertinent to this wedge of the Internet is a summary text of the life and thought of (who else?) Yang Zhu. The text is dated, but ought to make great winter reading. The most pertinent reading to recent conversations that I've had on Yangism begins on p.43. Like always, I'll have some reviews of the chapters as they're completed.

Jared Lee Loughner: Opinionation, Obsession, and Obliviousness

2011-01-11T10:32:00.000-08:00

I was almost going to pass off this man as a fallacious, headstrong, hyper-politicized pseudo-philosopher with no means to a platform but violence -- a sort of young Ted Kaczynski, except without the academic merits and anti-fiat rather than anti-industrialism fanaticism. In fact, before posting this, I recommended that Gary Curtis write a post about this guy on his blog because his blog likely acquires a much greater readership than mine does. He declined, so I'll settle for writing the post myself. Stupidity of this magnitude really is too great to ignore.

For me, this story is personally compelling for a number of reasons:

I have a huge interest in reasoning, especially through formal grammar and formal logic. Loughner apparently believed that he was an expert logician because he took an introductory logic class at Pima Community College (though his college professors there commented that he was a terrible student). In this respect, I can sympathize somewhat with Loughner's obsession with syllogistic reasoning and attempts at original and critical thought.
Loughner's (accused) murder of six people vindicates my strong belief that illogic is not benign and that "a little bit of knowledge is a dangerous thing." His ignorance of the fundamentals of logic, like the distinction between validity and soundness, and ass-backwards, meta-linguistic prattle speak volumes to the disasters that follow when people begin to imagine that they are geniuses or great visionaries before they demonstrate as much to anyone besides themselves. Loughner stands as a poster child for intellectual arrogance and dilettantism.
All philosophically well-trained people seek to show people who might let rhetoric alone sway them that grammars and logic are so powerful because they are so impersonal and not distracted by matters that are irrelevant to maximal coherence and the preservation of truth in arguments.
Loughner is an egoTist, but may or may not be an egoist, and we egoists may delineate ourselves well from this regular confusion by showing that that self-prioritization does not entail self-absorption.
At the time of this posting, I'm convinced that surviving a gunshot to the head while promoting free speech and open governmental engagement with the public is, among other things, a hugely compelling platform for Gabrielle Giffords' Presidential nomination in 2016 (No, there is no fan site!). We won't know until much later if she'll be will be able to serve at her present job in Congress, but I'd be amazed if she recovers and does not find immense political ascent because of it.
I was born and raised for the most part in Arizona, and I earned my B.A. in Philosophy from Arizona State University.
I've met other people like Loughner who were repulsed by logic and who came with their assumptions about how logic "ought to work", accusations that logic and grammar "didn't work in real life," or that they are "too controlling." I regularly worry that this population endangers me because these people do not bother to check themselves before they wreck themselves.

In my experience browsing introductory logic textbooks (which I did when I was teaching some children the basics of propositional logic and predicate logic), except equivocation, Loughner's fallacies are unsurprisingly not ones that people regularly learn in introductory logic classes. Many of them are really issues about abuses of language, especially the following four:

Reification. -- This is the fallacy of confusing terms with referents for terms. More specifically, the reification fallacy occurs when one assumes that any lexeme or definition that one makes will necessarily contain a referent. Loughner believed that he was some sort of master of "conscience dreaming." However, conscience dreaming is just a noun phrase. It has no clear referent. I can only gather that Loughner believed that he was doing something very significant, but no one could know unless he explained what he was demarcating with his terms.

Here's an easy demonstration of the reification error: For argument, I'll say that I know everything about wigglewomps. Now, the term wigglewomp is meaningless because no speaker of any language knows what the referent for that term is because no one has defined it, and I haven't given any examples of what counts or doesn't count as a wigglewomp. My assertion of an expertise in wigglewomps, then, is just a vacuous truth until I show that there is a referent for the term that I am using.
More formally, the reification fallacy is this incorrect inference:

I have a definition for x.
Therefore, x exists.

Neologism. -- Neologism is just a dime word that refers to a new coinage, usually a special qualification in the definition of a term that we regularly use. Sometimes an arguer will introduce a new lexeme and a new definition; but in other instances, he'll just change the definitions for terms that we regularly use. Neologism isn't a fallacy, per se, but it is a risky tactic in argument because it easily leads to equivocation and reification. Many arguers trap themselves in their solely comprehensible domains of discourse, and when that arguer fails to properly interpret his specialized terms and meanings against more common ones, he puts himself at constant risk of equivocating his new coinage with those coinages that are more familiar. Deceptive arguers use this trick deliberately in the hopes that a listener will not remember that his specialized definition was used in the argument, and thus enable the arguer's equivocation of their meanings later. What does he imagine a "mind controller," or the phrase "the first year in B.C.E." means?
Equivocation. -- Equivocation occurs when someone treats two words with distinct meanings as though they were the same thing. This is exacerbated by superficial similarities among terms: homonymy, homophony, inexact synonymy, etc.
Mere Validity. -- It is very easy to weave logically consistent ideas in artificially closed domains. Fiction is a clear example of this. However, even if the argument form is valid, it does not mean that the conclusions or premises are true. Loughner uses one rule of inference exclusively in his dialogs, modus ponens, and on his way he picked up a funny trick to convince himself of his statements (or so I'll accuse). In the conditional statement of his modus ponens arguments (e.g. P ⇒ Q), he wrote whatever he wanted to conclude as the consequent of that statement (Q) and then made any trivial action with minimal relevance to it the antecedent (P). He then stated the antecedent, and then, by modus ponens, his sought assertion followed.

Loughner's worst blunder is in this video, wherein he argues that his definition of a terrorist is implied by the fact that he defines it as such. His conclusion is true (and lifted from a dictionary), but the conditional premise is demonstrably false. I could define a terrorist to be all men who drink tea at noon, but that does not mean that terrorists are all men who drink tea at noon unless I make an excruciating effort in my use of terrorist_* to ignore all of the connotations of the more common homonym, terrorist. Loughner does not do this. He rather uses the reification fallacy as the conditional premise.
It is also false that calling someone something bad implies that the argument that led to that description is ad hominem. I argue that Loughner is a murderer, but the argument that supports that assertion is not ad hominem.

In this pre-trial stage of the massacre, people seem to be very prone to speculate on the motives of the accused. If his uploaded videos and other online postings comprise his manifesto, there isn't any clear link. Nothing appears to imply that he must try to assassinate Gabrielle Giffords because some scribbled inference told him that he should do it.

However, there are aspects to his rhetoric that convince me that he thought in severe isolation. His attempted arguments don't try to address contrary objections. I see this happening a lot on Internet forums, personal blogs, and social networking sites. Users begin to write the opinions that they have on some topics where they have self-proclaimed insight or expertise, but don't really access resources that give the sort of criticisms that prompt the people to reconsider or revise one's already asserted position. There are definite problems that arise when the method of tenacity, even when it feigns logical rigor, dominates one's perspectives. Intellectual humility and falsifiability didn't even occur to this man, and many similar people who just close their ears to fallibility eventually convince themselves that their musings are divine. Loughner's actions are just a current instance that evidences such a claim.

UPDATE, 1/20/2011:

"I could say something sound right now, but I don't feel like it."
-- Jared Lee Loughner

I guess that he'll get around to it someday.

Altruism Wanes with Opportunity for Egoistic Gain

2011-01-05T10:09:00.000-08:00

This comes from a presentation that was done by Steven Levitt and Stephen Dubner. Their talk claims that experimental data suggests that altruistic acts occur when one's options are closed to giving or keeping a gain, but that they always slide into egoistic tendencies when their options present them. Steven presents the aforesaid trend as a desire to seem altruistic to some imaginary audience, and has construed even the act of giving as an act of egoism, and thus he argues that all acts are still egoistic, just cooperatively so.

One aspect of the experiment that may lead these experiments' subjects to give their money may be risk-aversion in light of unexpected consequences. People are generally unaccustomed to instant rewards, and so might initially greet the experiment with skepticism, and thus try to hint at a willingness to cooperate with an imagined group of intra-experimental reciprocators. One way to test against this is to re-invite all of those subjects to see how much they'll give or take in subsequent scenarios, and then to check against an anticipated rate of profit for partaking in the experiment. It's not clear from this presentation that they've done this, but it would be interesting to see what changes might result. Highly egoistic results in light of this kind of test would speak very much to the vindication of psychological egoism.

Solutions to the Is-Ought Problem

2011-01-01T06:34:00.001-08:00

There are two solutions to the is-ought problem: Define sentences that use ought normatively in terms of merely factual propositions, or deny that ought is meaningful at all. I'm going to present one way to do the former, and in doing so, undo the philosophical study of ethics by reducing it into studies for other fields.

I know that sounds a bit big-headed at first. We've had the unresolved is-ought problem for as long as we've had Hume's philosophy, whose most relevant passages that establish the is-ought problem can be found in A Treatise of Human Nature:

"Those who affirm that virtue is nothing but a conformity to reason; that there are eternal fitnesses and unfitnesses of things, which are the same to every rational being that considers them; that the immutable measures of right and wrong impose an obligation, not only on human creatures, but also on the Deity himself: All these systems concur in the opinion, that morality, like truth, is discerned merely by ideas, and by their juxta-position and comparison. In order, therefore, to judge of these systems, we need only consider, whether it be possible, from reason alone, to distinguish betwixt moral good and evil, or whether there must concur some other principles to enable us to make that distinction.

"If morality had naturally no influence on human passions and actions, it were in vain to take such pains to inculcate it; and nothing would be more fruitless than that multitude of rules and precepts, with which all moralists abound. Philosophy is commonly divided into speculative and practical; and as morality is always comprehended under the latter division, it is supposed to influence our passions and actions, and to go beyond the calm and indolent judgments of the understanding. And this is confirmed by common experience, which informs us, that men are often governed by their duties, and are detered from some actions by the opinion of injustice, and impelled to others by that of obligation.

"Since morals, therefore, have an influence on the actions and affections, it follows, that they cannot be derived from reason; and that because reason alone, as we have already proved, can never have any such influence. Morals excite passions, and produce or prevent actions. Reason of itself is utterly impotent in this particular. The rules of morality therefore, are not conclusions of our reason.

"No one, I believe, will deny the justness of this inference; nor is there any other means of evading it, than by denying that principle, on which it is founded. As long as it is allowed, that reason has no influence on our passions and action, it is in vain to pretend, that morality is discovered only by a deduction of reason. An active principle can never be founded on an inactive; and if reason be inactive in itself, it must remain so in all its shapes and appearances, whether it exerts itself in natural or moral subjects, whether it considers the powers of external bodies, or the actions of rational beings.
"It would be tedious to repeat all the arguments, by which I have proved [Book II. Part III. Sect 3.], that reason is perfectly inert, and can never either prevent or produce any action or affection, it will be easy to recollect what has been said upon that subject. I shall only recall on this occasion one of these arguments, which I shall endeavour to render still more conclusive, and more applicable to the present subject.
"Reason is the discovery of truth or falshood. Truth or falshood consists in an agreement or disagreement either to the real relations of ideas, or to real existence and matters of fact. Whatever, therefore, is not susceptible of this agreement or disagreement, is incapable of being true or false, and can never be an object of our reason. Now it is evident our passions, volitions, and actions, are not susceptible of any such agreement or disagreement; being original facts and realities, compleat in themselves, and implying no reference to other passions, volitions, and actions. It is impossible, therefore, they can be pronounced either true or false, and be either contrary or conformable to reason."
-- David Hume, (A Treatise of Human Nature, Book III, Part 1)

I'm going to eliminate the issue formally by actually showing how normative claims are made and how we can undo the error that "a conformity to reason" does not yield claims whose illocutions are different from a speaker's assertion of facts.

How do we even argue ethics in non-academic environments? Well, it's complicated, but I think that we could simplify it with a sample dialog. Suppose that someone (A) says the following to another person (B):

A: You really ought to quit smoking.

B likes to smoke. He has no intention of quitting, and he doesn't really appreciate A's prescriptive tone, so we can reasonably say that a conversation of this sort might continue with this:

B: Why should I?

How does A (or anyone who asserts what another person ought to do) respond? Well, he probably does so most easily by saying this:

A: You ought to quit smoking because Φ_n.

Here, Φ_n is just some other sentence or sentences (which we can translate into logical forms and then define into a single proposition), all of which argue [Φ_n ⇒ *Ought*(b,Φ_m)] ∧ [*Ought*(b,Φ_m) ≝ "B ought to quit smoking." (or an equivalent translation of that sentence)]. This is a problem for the is-ought problem because we are always arguing for prescriptions on the basis of assertions of fact. This means that we're always going about ethics the wrong way (that is, arguing on facts for a proposal of what we ought to do) or it means that normative or prescriptive claims translate into some sort of truth-apt assertions to make the discourse coherent.

The issues that are at the center of all ethics are just these questions: What is this Φ_n, exactly, and what axioms prove Φ_n? All of the schools of contemporary normative and metaethics answer these questions in different ways, but they never deny that the model under which the problem arises doesn't exist. No one argues that arguments for and against normative claims and prescriptions don't exist, that people don't actually argue this way. Ethicists' burdens are to interpret what the arguments assert and then to argue why they are correct or incoherent.

It's pretty straightforward from here. We have no reason to deny that Φ_n exists. In fact, logic tells us that there are trivially many reasons that we could pose for *Ought*(b,Φ_m) via the weakening rule ([P ⇒ [Q ⇒ P]]). Our burden, however, is not the providence of just any assertions that we could vacuously write as sufficient conditions for *Ought*(b,Φ_m) because *Ought*(b,Φ_m) is what someone in B's situation is denying (B asserts ¬*Ought*(b,Φ_m)). Φ_n must convince B of *Ought*(b,Φ_m).

Here are just a few examples of what Φ_n could be:

Φ_n1: A: Smoking causes lung cancer.
Φ_n2: A: I'll kill you [B] right now if you don't quit smoking.
Φ_n3: A: You're smoking at a gas station.
Φ_n4: A: I am speaking on behalf of God.

These examples of false and true assertions could convince B. But we should always remember that B may very well have retorts (Φ_o) that frustrate A's effort to convince him of Φ_m. For some instances:

Φ_o1: B: Good! I hope I die of lung cancer!
Φ_o2: B: You couldn't kill a fly, pussy!
Φ_o3: B: This is a smokeless cigarette.
Φ_o4: B: God doesn't exist.

However, all of these assume some coherent means of blocking an argument which we could express as follows: That I ought do something means that all of the propositions which identify what it means to say that I ought do something are true. When we do this, however, we also outline all of the merely factual propositions (Φ_q) that comprise the prescriptive proposition *Ought*(b,Φ_m).

Below I have produced a model that has some decent efficacy in outlining all of the constituents of a prescriptive or normative statement, which I will write from A's perspective:

You, B (b), want Φ_p. [Want*(b,Φ_p)]
You want that you don't want Φ_p, but that you get it. [*Want*(b,¬*Want*(b,Φ_p)) ∧ *Want*(b,*Get*(b,Φ_p))]
If you get Φ_p, then you won't want Φ_p. [*Get*(b,Φ_p) ⇒ ¬*Want*(b,Φ_p))]
You get Φ_p if, and only if Φ_m. [*Get*(b,Φ_p) ⇔ Φ_m]
Your doing something is Φ_m. [Φ_m = *Do*(...b...)].
That you ought Φ_m is the previous assertions (Φ_q) 1 through 5. [*Ought*(b,Φ_m) = [Φ_q1 ∧ [Φ_q2 ∧ [Φ_q3 ∧ [Φ_q4 ∧ [Φ_q5]]]]]]
The facts of Φ_n imply that you get Φ_p if, and only if Φ_m. [Φ_n ⇒ [*Get*(b,Φ_p) ⇔ Φ_m]]

English has made good progress in conflating two different senses of the word ought, which has made this reduction much easier to achieve than it would be in a different language that differentiated its predictive sense (e.g. "He ought to be here by now,") over its more obligatory sense (e.g. "Everyone ought to floss their teeth regularly."). This ambiguity is actually a good clarification, as ethical statements, then, reduce into wants and expectations of others' wants, and those things can be empirically investigated matters. The prescriptive language is some simple abbreviation for the more complex argumentation, but that argumentation is not, itself, moral, just a common tool of speech that we use to influence social behavior (which is what language primarily does for us).

The problem with our regular talks on these subjects is that we (when we resemble people A) assume all of the assertions that we don't make in a discourse, all of which we (when we resemble people B) can quite easily deny. We're not challenging what "ought be" on the grounds of some other prescription (because we could always regress by demanding more justification for that prescription) or another "value on High". We just submit and challenge them on the grounds of the assertions of our wants and incentives.

We can look at Φ_n again, but this time add the remaining constituents to make them more closely match the members of Φ_q. We can see that by explicitly stating Φ_q1 and Φ_q4 and some immediately accepted consequences from the assertions that were made above parenthetically, that A has indeed presumed these facts when he was arguing with B.

Φ_n1: A: Smoking causes lung cancer.
(You don't want to die of lung cancer, and you won't if you quit smoking, but will if you don't quit smoking.)

Φ_n2: A: I'll kill you [B] right now if you don't quit smoking.
(You want not for me to kill you, but I will if you don't quit smoking and I won't if you do quit smoking.)

Φ_n3: A: You're smoking at a gas station.
(If you smoke at a gas station, you will explode. You want not to explode, and you won't explode if you quit smoking.)

Φ_n4: A: I am speaking on behalf of God.
(God is vengeful if ye obeyeth not his Word. He shall smite thee if ye continueth thy smoking, but he shall not smite thee if ye cease thy smoking. To the more, you wish not be smitten by him.)

If I have not yet convinced you that you are talking about facts over wants specifically when you are making prescriptions, I'll leave comments open to objections. (This skeleton should present enough to state objections to the details or to request them if you want them.)

I have mentioned already that this tactic of reinterpretation completely removes ethics as a self-standing philosophical study. Any issue over what all people ought to do will have to comprehend the universal wants of humanity or the universal facts that determine all people's individual wants. No philosopher will be able to give an adequate account of such things, since individual objections regarding personal wants cannot be refuted by mere logical analysis. Ethicists and other philosophers have to take many of their assertions at face-value. For instance, a philosopher often cannot reasonably charge that one's claims to have peculiar or unfeasible wants are self-deceptive. His investigative tools are just inadequate to raise that kind of objection. The tools for the sincere investigation of human nature must be empirical, not philosophical. Without this direct interference against philosophical musing on ethics, all claims over what is "right" versus "wrong" remain, as some disgruntled commentators have rightly seen it, veiled emotional battles for singular Utopian ideals.

Woody Allen Interview: Schopenhauerian or Yangist?

2010-05-06T05:06:00.000-07:00

Brian Leiter's page linked to an interesting interview between Woody Allen and Robert Lauder. He thinks that it reads more like Schopenhauer (pessimism plus escapism through aesthetic appreciation). Of course, my bias makes me render it as a Yangist take (a lifetime of misery offset by the sensual pleasures). I report. No one decides.

Stimulating Discussion with Bill Haines

2010-03-14T12:45:00.000-07:00

It's all been taking place here. The conversation expands from a discussion on 命 and its particular usage in Yangist prose (something more agreeable with "inevitability") to the Yangist philosophical outlook in general. Some of his responses and critiques could benefit from lengthier responses, both those of my own "Yangist apologetics" and from the founder's mouth, so I'm sure that there will be parallel pieces for me to write here.

From what I've gathered in doing some research on my conversation partner, he's very well-suited for a discussion on good old 楊家 if this piece on consequentialism and this publication on Youzi are sufficient indicators. If he happens to read this, I hope he'll forward any other links that he'd like to have associated with his professional work.

Yang Zhu's Garden of Pleasure Online

2010-01-29T04:15:00.000-08:00

I was just forwarded a link by a close friend which contains the notorious seventh chapter of the Liezi (列子), complete with a freely downloadable MP3 audio book. Hugh Cranmer-Byng provides the introduction to this decades old translation from Anton Forke, which the same friend gave me as a gift in print (I had been using the same e-text to which the above link links.) a couple of years ago.

The Liezi fragment is by far my favorite reading of the Yangist Nachlass, though not the most academically stimulating (the Lushi Chunqiu [呂氏春秋] better meets said demand and impulse). It's good to think of that chapter as a good summary piece from which further arguments can be constructed by adding the Yangist pieces that are tucked away in a few other books from the period.

Enjoy!

The Descent from Moksha to Utter Damnation

2010-01-13T12:24:00.000-08:00

Natural language inspires great fantasy and crushes us with its reality. There is little satisfaction of the former and constant irritation and disenchantment from the latter. Unlike our formal counterparts, which are as pristine and minimalistic as they are deliberately contrived to be, natural languages, though they map (often over-elaborately) to these formal designs, are molded from the partly diverted adherence to a good intention of mutual conversational coherence in syntax, while simultaneously resisting that very urge in its waste heap of semantic disparity. The expert in language, regardless of the particular field, is already given an unpalatable chore. He must sort the garbage as though it were all recycling, take the mess of terms that have been dirt-farmed and muck-raked throughout history and categorize them in a manner that brings some semblance of “order” and formal intelligibility to the crass inventions of the formally apathetic.

This breeds a lot of resentment, as one might detect, but also a lot of idealism, which, as I later determined, idealized not only the speech of the community, but further the behavioral nature of humanity through the necessary conditions that would need to be in place for such a speaking community to coherently exist (if it can at all). Though I clearly started somewhere in the middle, much in the way that Dante dreamed up his heavens and hells from Earth, eventually I fabricated an (I believe) stimulating and accurate hierarchic appreciation for the ideal, real, and damning statuses of the language community, the supreme scenario being at the top and the increasingly hellish scenarios trickling under it until no further damnation could offer anything more coherent (possible) than the one above it.

Moksha arises from omnipotence.– There is no language. All impetus for communication is killed off by instant satisfaction of those facets to our humanity that motivate communication with others.

Requirements: omnipotence and omnibenevolence, either of the speaking group or of a single entity “on high” who governs all of them.
Pitfalls: The consideration is logically incoherent for the following reasons:

A plurality of omnipotent beings would itself hinder the actual ability for one omnipotent being to destroy another.
A single omnipotent being would be impossible for he would either necessarily inhabit no domain in order to lord over it or would be definitively identical to all of the actions of the domain.
The notion of “creation” already invokes action from being outside of a given domain during that creation, and in the case of all modal possibilities, would remove an omnipotent being from all of them, and thus make him impossible, just as a contradiction is (In short, creation of the whole modal universe is a contradiction.)
The notion of “omnipresence,” which would be one power of an omnipotent being, would mean that the omnipotent being is a member of the empty set (∅), which itself is the empty set, whose elements are nothing ({}).
That the omnipotent being has the power to be necessary, not contingent means that the being refers to a tautology, and thus is definitively equivalent to an infinity of vacuous truisms.

Moksha arises via Earth's somehow established harmony.– There is no language. The overseer of this linguistic moksha is not omnipotent, but only dominant over all of Earth's processes; or otherwise, the probabilistics of human desires and inadvertent actions that coordinate and enable the desires of the entire speaking population is sustained until the whole of humanity simultaneously desired its own demise.

Requirements: a successful overseer of the Earth; or, a probability-defying feat of pure chance for the rest of human existence starting from whenever it began.
Pitfalls:

If bald happenstance and probability were not on the overseer's side, that overseer would require, too, that his unique requirement for this moksha status be maintained for his entire tenure as overseer (for the remainder of the existence of humanity), which could only be guaranteed with another overseer, and so on, ad infinitum. Either the singular omnipotent being would need to exist to cover for all of that, which is impossible, or just one of those beings would have to have a probabilistic anomaly working in its favor, which is radically improbable.
The probability end of this is very slim, and its fulfillment would not be known until the whole of humanity ended itself in its final, simultaneous, and collective wish, and as a result it would not be known to the speech-liberated community, itself.

Language is universal (and so universally unambiguous) and universally intuited.– There is no such thing as inquiry into the meanings of terms or a request for clarification of sentence structure, as every definiens for a term is “blueprinted” in the mind of every individual and the syntax is likewise universally standardized and implanted. New terms are instantly learned as developments prompt the need for them, and those terms, too, are instantly learned by those for whom their interests prove relevant.

Requirements: super-intelligent telepathy, or the like; an elaborate, advanced network of neurologically implanted semantic programming and tightly ordered governance on lexicography with solely epistemic grounds for revision.
Setbacks: The requirements are beyond everyone's present technological, governmental, intellectual, and anatomical capacities and permissions.

Language is universal and largely learnable.– Inquiry into the meaning of terms is purely a nominal requirement in order to engage in informed discourse on a topic. Those who do not know the meanings of the terms can be (with few exceptions) taught them, and until then are deemed incompetent to contribute to certain areas of discourse as objectified by the definitional truisms set by the universal language's semantic grid and syntax rules.

Requirements: a cultural inheritance in which the universal language is entrenched, a widespread perspective that the reversion to linguistic dispersion would be so anti-pragmatic that it frightens people into conformity with a universal language
Setbacks: The requirements are beyond everyone's present technological, governmental, and intellectual capacities and permissions.

The universal language is learnable by a select population of speakers.– While it would not be possible for everyone to learn this universal language to some extent, a substantial population could learn to integrate that universal language into their regular affairs for successive generations. This would legitimize the necessary infrastructures (from parental immersion, to peer interaction, to institutional learning) in order for the universal language to propagate itself and possibly survive beyond the other languages. In time, the works of individual cultures' histories could be satisfactorily translated into this universal language, and so domestic concerns regarding the shift to a single worldwide dialect would fade into the background, and rather be a specialized paleontological-esque interest.

Requirements: a universal language, a sustained group of speakers.
Setbacks:

There is not yet a universal language, either auxiliary or naturally arising, which has gained sufficient appeal within a dominant population even to begin to chisel its semantics into one that provides a single proposition for which the term is its placeholder. Only the most primitive symbols have few semiotic variants in its written script, and those notational systems only allow for discourse on the most formal of affairs (i.e. on arithmetic, higher mathematics, symbolic logic, etc.). Those attempted auxiliary natural languages do make some headway in trying to offer some sense of primitive definition, but many at losses in semiotic ease, lexicographical ease, means of tidy semantic growth, syntactic familiarity, means of establishment in a substantive population, and so forth.
People stupidly and regularly prize the uniqueness of “their culture,” which often connotes a treasuring of “their culture's” native language. Reminders that people are selectively eulogizing periods in their history, engendering self-pride or personal resentment despite lack of basis for that pride or resentment in oneself, and attaching all sorts of claims of entitlement, specialness, subversiveness, esoteric insight, and other foul bullshit to their predetermined predicaments are met with opposition from exactly those bullshitters. Said opposition ranges from rhetorical resistance (in the place of good argument) to physical violence.

Widespread multilingualism births a universal language.– Most, if not all people are fluent in two of the three most popular languages on Earth. With a source of universal contact assumed (e.g., the Internet), this will lead to increased integration of the lexicon, and it seems reasonable to predict that a convoluted, but approachable universal language will simply “bubble up” as a result of said interactions. The language will actually become universal because the multilingualism will cover a population of speakers that dominates the planet, and that will eventually pressure all of human civilization to acquire the one language that works “practically everywhere.”

Requirement: a global interest in the communication with those groups that speak the most popular languages on Earth (At present, English, Mandarin, and Spanish are the most popular languages on Earth and are all sought for commercial purposes.).
Setbacks:

Certain divergences from the popularly conceived syntax, even if they come at an increase in communicative efficacy if adopted, would receive biased rendering. The supplements would be simply dismissed as unintelligible unless immense research efforts favored the promotion of one adoption over another.
At present, most global interest in one form of communication is very chauvinistic, and so different factions compete, rather than cooperate in order for (most commonly) Chinese, English, or Spanish to become “the language that everyone uses.” This happens primarily in income-seeking industries where the product being offered is instruction in that language. There exist some exceptions, most notably the Language Infinity group blogging community, though it appears to be financed partly by those competing groups.

A popular natural language with vexing deficiencies and excesses becomes the universal language.– Eventually, one language becomes the language that the whole world speaks, and foreign languages gradually die out. We are left with a history of untranslated texts and a trail of disenfranchisement of foreigners who are not native speakers or able to reach a native level of language skill.

Requirements: a victor in an analogously evolutionary struggle for language proliferation.
Setbacks:

The language chosen is incompetent to translate classic works from the histories of other civilizations, and so gaps intellectual history.

The singularity of the language chosen generates heavy resistance against the arbitrariness of rather unsavory features of that language, including needless and confusing syntactic devices, misleading and highly ambiguous rhetorical adoptions, and perversely difficult or particular semiotics or phonetics.

If variants of the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis are proven, we may accidentally inhibit intellectual progress through our forethought-less selection of a language. (And this is not cured by any of the present natural languages that survive presently.) Every major language has features that make its communicability into another major language come at a huge semantic loss, and present translators do little to remedy the obvious losses that polyglots in other academic areas detect more easily.

Multilingualism exists as a specialized skill among members of Earth's population.– Only a certain percentage of the world population retains the ability to speak more than one language. Polyglots are evenly distributed in their social standings. No great benefits or huge deficits arise on the whole for those who are fully bilingual.

Requirements: a sustained interest among members of the linguistically competent population to understand and utilize other languages; authoritative, yet conventional standards and measurements of acquired bilingualism; a principle of (interpretive) charity.
Setbacks:

Growth beyond this point is severely hindered by various chauvinisms that almost always condemn or condescend foreign language acquisition.
The principle of charity in interpretation can be violated or overused in the service of ulterior motives. In its violation, interpretations of text, speech, or other media involving natural language become demonstrably contentious, antagonistic, and deliberately aggravating to other speakers. With an open issue still standing over the feasibility of truly stating atomic facts in language, there is no decision that yet affirms or denies that the principle of charity could be infinitely violated, and thus render no interpretation adequate for the most exacting or pedantic interpreter. In the principle of charity's overuse, any text, regardless of content, may be bloated with ad hoc semantics shredding (i.e. the infinite allowances to accuse a given reading of ambiguity and to introduce infinitely many definiens for purportedly “homonymous” terms). This means that any text may be intentionally bastardized by the aforesaid moves and allow an interpreter or translator to express whatever propositions he wants from the text in order to defend the text against any formally rigorous attacks, and thus from the text's extinction. The text, itself, becomes non-falsifiable (and for the academically naïve, that's a sign that the work is a fiction or a vacuous tautology).
The principle of charity, itself, requires some interpretation of its correct implementation, and that appears to require a highly technical account, which violates the principle that it supports. This is not a logical contradiction, but rather a severe hindrance in invocation of the often presupposed “virtue” of the principle of charity, since, as has been noted, its disuse and overuse both have severe consequences, and it only survives if at least some explanatory languages vigorously reject it.

Monolingualism becomes universal among separate populations.– Everyone only speaks the language into which they were born. They coin individual terms in their own isolated communities, and they receive no foreign importation to their languages.

Requirements: communities in which each speak and devise languages that are mutually unintelligible to each other.
Drawbacks:

No worldwide standards of measurement and no universal notations will be invented. Communication of arithmetic beyond the number two will be impossible for some communities, while others will be able to have natural, facile discourse on complex mathematics.
The less linguistically advanced community will not be able to effectively learn from the more advanced one. Just to fathom the bigotry that would ensue from this (and the “justifications” for atrocities that would follow from that) is enough to call it hell for any militarily weak minority.
Any division in dialect that emerges from a preexisting language and becomes unintelligible to that original population likewise schisms the population in which the dialectical divide occurred.

Humans are competent in language, but are (barring a single exception outlined in the requirements) universally incommensurable.– One constantly efforts himself to communicate, but the speaker's utterance never becomes understood as anything more than a phoneme or lexeme by any speaker (The listener knows that he's hearing a language, but has no clue what the other is trying to say.). However, the listener attempts to react in a manner as though he understood, too frequently acting against the illocutionary acts of the speaker.

Requirements: a system in which one non-communicative person is taught a language by exactly one speaker, but dies immediately when the formerly non-communicative person begins to use the language in a manner that would be comprehensible to the other; a brain defect that prevents the acquisition of foreign languages.
Drawbacks:

All interpersonal communicative effort is a vanity. No one understands anybody else.
Technologies must be constantly reinvented, since any tool that one invents that employs a symbolic system will only survive as a tool for the life of the owner.

Humans do not possess language.– Human beings fail to produce any symbolic systems for communication or for their own private discourses (which in this case may be exemplified by a self-made map).

Requirement: homo sapiens sapiens with language-specific brain defects.
Drawbacks: Social relations are crippled.

Human beings are compelled to be incommensurable.– No matter what the status of the language is, everyone misunderstands everyone else and acts on those misunderstandings. No perlocutionary acts from listeners correspond with the illocutionary acts from speakers because listeners are being constantly maligned at some stage (of language parsing, of referent association, etc.), or because they're just really huge dicks.

Requirements: shared or distinct lexicons among people; vastly diverse systems of commands for interpretation, or outright universal refusal to act on the patterns of a comprehended natural language.
Pitfalls:

This scenario is logically incoherent because it implies that the learning of any language is impossible. Any attempt at language instruction would be instantly misinterpreted in its conveyance to another. “Students” who behave randomly despite repeated stimuli demonstrate that they fail to adhere to or detect the pattern that the instructor is attempting to establish, and so are not acquiring any model, natural or formal, that would qualify as a language because they never integrate or apply rules for the construction of WFF's in any language (which, in natural languages, are sentences). Since sentences and other WFF's fail to be constructed, there is no device by which one could conceivably “fail” at offering a proper interpretation, since that very notion of failure already denies the possibility of there being coherently presented sentences in the language (and therefore, illocutionary acts that accompany it) for which one could judge proper correspondence in the perlocutionary act (i.e. There's no judge of felicity!). Language itself would be too much of a failure to fail in any particular instance.
The scenario presented at any level produces a paradox. The universal failure to act on patterns of a language would require that one behaves in accordance with any given sentence if, and only if that sentence is not the very same sentence. We would conclude that one does not act in accordance with any sentence, and therefore that one does not behave in accordance with the sentence, 'One behaves in accordance with any given sentence if, and only if that sentence is not that same sentence.' Not to behave in accord with that sentence is to behave in accordance with that sentence, and to behave in accordance with that sentence is not to behave in accordance with that sentence.

Any further linguistic damnation would only widen the chasms of inconsistency of the damnation that is presently at bottom. What remains of interest for me are the following questions:

First, is this descent rightly ordered?

Second, are there any intermediate positions that offer peculiar or fascinating results?

Third, assuming the correctness of this range of statuses of the world of speakers, where do we stand generally, and where do we stand in certain instances?

Kicking Off Their New Collaboration with a Side of Yang

2009-11-24T07:05:00.001-08:00

Yang Zhu is now one of the hot discussion topics on Warp, Weft, and Way. It feels wholly out of place for me not to comment, given my obvious leanings, but I think my now dominant conviction in the eventual dissolution of philosophy (whatever they think it means) has put me at odds with giving "philosophically relevant" defenses of the Yangist position.

My solution: Inject something tangential and wait it out...

Two Concerns with A Daoist Theory of Chinese Thought

2009-08-18T04:19:00.000-07:00

I should mention before starting that, upon an inquiry, I listed the text at which I'm about to gripe as one of my fifteen most influential books in my entire book-reading history, and while I find his writing to be problematic or false in four respects, I find almost all of the rest of his text to be correct in both broad strokes and minor details. Its words adeptly confirmed my preconceptions about the function of language within the ancient Chinese culture (though I believe he effectively undoes "Indo-European biases" and "folk linguistics" more generally) most deeply, and it gave credence to just a few suspicions that should strike readers from the Western tradition:

Importation of Indo-European folk psychological biases into the reading of ancient Chinese philosophy, even though the terminological distinctions present in ancient Chinese literature have neither the need nor allotment for said biases, pronates such a reader to mislabel his own unreflected errors as those of the great thinkers of ancient China.
The concern for truth in ancient Chinese ethics doesn't lie in the truth of the normative evaluations or prescriptions, themselves, but in the social beneficience, efficacy, and constancy of employment upon the use of those evaluative measures and prescriptions within the community. In other words, it doesn't matter so much to ancient Chinese ethicists what the "moral facts" are, but (to quote Russell, in his antagonism to it) "what [they] think would have beneficient social effects if [they, the ethical propositions] were believed" and used precisely and pervasively within a linguistic community.
For the ancient Chinese, language is a legislative, not semantic matter. Thus, accuracy in language is based on appeal to a legislation.
The above-mentioned legislation, for every early Chinese philosophical group, will appeal either to their cultural or linguistic tradition and heritage, or to a preconceived notion of "natural order of things," ordained by some "self-evident" level of authority, or both.
Mengzi's innatist arguments were philosophically inept against and largely irrelevant to the Mohists' push for heavy revision of the Confucian ethos, its demands for objective measures of normative evaluation, its dual inquiry for what the standards of morality are why morality should matter at all (his open question and obligation question).

First Concern, Validity by Set Relation:

This is of a technical bit that Hansen wrote in discussing Mengzi's apologetics for logical incompetence, which, while still true that Mengzi doesn't appear to demonstrate competence with logic, the Mohists' or otherwise, really isn't a logical error on any front.

"The Mohists analyzed and criticized an algebraic form of inference. The algebraic form goes as follows: if [X is Y]. then is [KX is KY] where K is any constant term. For example, a horse is an animal, the head of a horse is the head of an animal; riding a horse is riding and animal, and so on.

"The Mohists, we we shall see later, show that this apparently cogent inference is invalid" (p.192).

This follows to...

"The rejection of the algebraic argument form is valid. If it goes wrong in even one instance, then (in its simple form at least) it cannot be a valid argument form. They correctly undermine the inference procedure that makes "killing-thief not killing-person" appear to be a paradox. The matching of phrases is not reliable. Their solution involved reading the phrases non-extentionally. They had a logically impeccable argument for rejecting this proposed inference form" (p.257).

This appears to confuse validity with adequate definition. Mohists are free to redefine the terms how they please, and they may set the conditions such that thieves are outside of the domain of persons. However, that has no bearing on the validity of the logical form of the statement.

Perhaps there is no other easier mirror of the axiomatic force of the proposition given above than with axiom K (Kripke's Distribution Axiom) within modal logic:

□(P ⊃ Q) |- (□P ⊃ □Q)

The proof in the Mohist case would follow like this in a normal modal logic:

□(P ⊃ Q) ⊃ (□P ⊃ □Q), by Axiom K
| (P ⊃ Q), by ACP
|| □P, by ACP
||| ◊~Q, by ACP
|||| ~Q, by 4, ◊I
|||| ~P, by 2,5, MT
|||| P, by 3, □I
|||| (P & ~P), by 6,7, Conj.
||| ~◊~Q, by 5-8, CP
||| (◊~Q & ~◊~Q), by 4,9, Conj.
|| ~◊~Q, by 4,9, Conj.
|| ~~□~~Q, by 11, Equiv.
|| □~~Q, by 12, DNE
|| □Q, by 13, DNE
| (□P ⊃ □Q), by 3-15, CP
(P ⊃ Q) ⊃ (□P ⊃ □Q), by 2-15, CP

There have been various renditions applying this axiom in one respect or another, most strikingly epistemic logic (which looked most similar to Hansen's original notation), but this concept even applies to predicate logic in various degrees, both between terms and predicate symbols and between quantifications and conditional formulas under the quantified scope.

Actually, this logical inference is allowed by all of the major logics that I know, and appears essential for even a mereological spin to be coherent (something that Hansen attributed to pre-Han Chinese thinkers in his other book). It's a simple effect of the transitivity property in set-inclusion, and since identity is covered under transitivity, reflexivity, symmetry, and antisymmetry, it follows for identity propositions, and therein for algebraic logics, as well. The strike of the intuition for the inference appears to be unfairly contrasted against the soundness of the claims it produces, which is a matter over definitional adequacy and soundness of premise, not validity.

Second Concern, Hasty Dismissal of Psychological Egoism:

Surprisingly, for a book elaborating on the philosophies of the preeminent thinkers in ancient Chinese philosophy and its contemporary commentators, Yangism gets a rather sparse treatment, which he legitimizes for two reasons: most Yangist material is second-hand and of dubious reliability, and also Yangism couldn't play into any of the other major schools because of its combined anarchism and anti-conventionalism (a Daoist feature) and its appropriation of self as the innate natural bias from which all moral judgments are and are best made (approached Mohist-ically).

I would say that it is fortunate that Hansen is less outspoken about Yangism. I grew to dread the unfair slights the ethical and psychological egoisms of Yangzi would endure given his brief, and hasty dismissal of the psychological egoist altogether:

"Our Western bias toward psychological egoism stems in part from the Christian doctrines of original sin and, in turn, from classical Platonic denigration of the physical. We learned to value the intellect as morally transcendent. Reason should control our base, animal feelings and emotions. This tradition influenced Western thinkers to ignore genuine and undeniable social tendencies in humans and to treat moral rationality as an ability to transcend our instinctive nature.

"The great works of the Western world give scattered, grudging acknowledgment that humans are social animals, but they reduce most of our social inclinations to a deep kind of egoism. One's apparent goals may be altruistic or moral. Our real ends, they insist, are self-interested (say, avoiding guilt or gaining approbation). Since we have a desire to be good, we are merely egoistically satisfying one of our desires when we act altruistically.

"For two hundred years, Western philosophers have understood the fallacy of these explanations [citing Butler]. Naturally it is my desire. Otherwise, it would not motivate me. This does not make the desire a desire for my welfare. The content of the desire is for the well-being of others. That we have such desires is all a psychological moralist needs to show to rebut the psychological egoist. And obviously we do. Despite its continued popularity and tough-minded veneer, psychological egoism is empirically naive and supported by a conceptual confusion.

"Another, more elaborate, argument for psychological egoism instead explains our altruistic desires by social training. The training process, it alleges, inherently relies on selfish desires. At best, this argument shows that our social desires are psychological acquisitions, not that we do not have them. This argument would challenge Mencius's innatism, but not the position of Mozi and Confucius. Again, however, this additional premise may confuse the existence of an innate desire with its object. It is not clear that the desire to learn language, to mimic, to idealize our parents, and so forth are selfish in content. They are simple, natural, innate dispositions.

"There are other currently fashionable reasons for doubting that the innate structure of human nature is egoistic. Our tough-minded cynics about human nature tend not to notice that sociobiological cynicism contradicts egoistic cynicism. Sociobiology has focused attention on how our genetically implanted dispositions help preserve a genetic code (Writers talk about selfish genes to make this theory sound tough-minded and realistic.) Any parent recognizes that we have an inclination to have, nurture, care for, educate, and then release offspring to the world. This inclination is not in the interest of the individual but the species, the gene pool.

"The Chinese view certainly seems to capture something important about our social nature. A dispassionate, unprejudiced view of human nature must, it seems, acknowledge Mencius's portrait of human nature. If his observations are not enough to prove that human nature is good, they are certainly adequate to show that human nature is social.

"Each of Mencius's seeds describes a plausibly universal feature of a human psyche. All but the most miserable psychopath reacts with feelings for the sufferings and joys of others. Despite the 'looking out for number one' pop-psychology view of self-sufficient healthy egos, we are all affected by the praise and blame of our peers. We do feel shame and conform our behavior to others' expectations. We conform in manners, dress, political opinion, language -- in so many ways that egoistic explanations empty, uninformative formulas. Better to say that these are part of our natural social nature. There is a natural human instinct to cultivate and internalize social practices and to participate in ritual forms in concert with others. And finally, it is true, despite the self-contradictory advice of the moral skeptic, we cannot help making value judgments. We would hardly be recognizable as humans if we did not" (pp.167-168).

What I find most striking about this passage is his claim that psychological egoism results from conceptual confusion. It's striking in its irony. Every astute egoist I've read appears to make the exact accusation against people who pose the arguments above (both his and Butler's) as some sort of refutation of the innateness of self-interest as the primary guiding force to all human behavior.

The harshest criticisms by both authors is better described as a problem of scope. If we simply define self as a being who refers to himself in the first person and interest as possession of an objective derived from that self, then self-interest is equivalent to intentionality. Psychological egoists, to these critics, state that egoism is therein not an empirical theory about ethics, but just another "tough-minded" synonym for a less controversial theory about all human action, a sort of crass way of putting that of course everyone is "self-interested" insofar as they are selves and have interests. The question on the mind of the ethicist isn't that, but what the objectives of those interests include.

To repeat, psychological egoism asserts that the consequences, not the origins, of action are what we use to dictate the moral worth of an action, albeit in sometimes counter-intuitive causal reasoning (i.e. grenade-diving martyrdom). Psychological egoism has only to explain away these contrary cases, since the normative ethicist is not the one who inquires into intentionality, but into the the empirical standards by which we can judge any behavior as morally right/good or morally wrong with universal accuracy.

Hansen's A Daoist Theory of Chinese Thought is a highly enlightened Analytic take on the areas of Chinese philosophy he more thoroughly considers, and it is a great exposition of the Sapir-Whorf kind, and so very much a triumph in (ancient Sinitic and contemporary Anglophonic) philosophy of language. What troubles me, the Yangist, though, is its inappropriate neglect of a most prominent Warring States figure's ideas in the mouthpiece of an eighteenth century apologist. We toil for the spoil, and Yangzi's exposition of such in his own history couple with his criticism that the means (collectivism) were perversely muddled with the ends (individual gratification) is scarcely met with yet another innatist "natural principle of benevolence in man, which is in some degree to society what self-love is to the individual," a non-argument when it's not a muddle.

How About an Actual Yangist Musing?

2009-07-19T22:49:00.000-07:00

You wouldn't guess it from the title, but for however long I've bothered to bother the public with my philosophy, I really have yet to give any full, decisive view on my take on Yangist philosophy, and with good reason.

In the first, I take Yangism to be the most definitively correct string of proposals on human ethics in the history of the study, both Occidental and Oriental. Having explored my contemporaries in ethics, though, it appears that outside of a few stray supportive, truly considerate and deliberative egoists (i.e. non-Randians), most either have no background in Chinese philosophy (much less Yangism) or have their interests lying elsewhere (most of them being fascinated by explorations in Moism, Daoism, Confucianism, and Neo-Confucianism). For my generation of Yangism, it seems, I'm alone. I'm a Yangist apologist against virtually a whole planet of ignorance, apathy, or dissent, the third being largely built on the former two. That pressures my interpretations and commentary to be more pristine than I would normally demand of myself.

In the second, Yangism is a sort of odd cult out in the majority of ancient and contemporary Chinese philosophy. Reaching its height of popularity in the lifetime of Yangzi (楊子) (others calling him just Yang Zhu [楊朱]) and a century or so thereafter, it was violently obliterated by the end of the Qin Dynasty. This followed with some "creative" handling of the Yangist material, leading to some original Yangist inclusions in Daoist texts being meshed with Moist (a rival school's) appendages and what seem to be efforts to make the Yangist view contiguous with the authors' works in which the fragments of Yangist doctrine were smuggled rather than imported. This knowledge is problematic in that it makes some of the plainer inconsistencies to Yangzi's school of thought just as easily dismissed as unfairly dismissed. If Yangism is made incoherent by perversions from opposing schools, they deserve to be exposed and discarded, but if Yangism's own words lead are tainted in their own right, then those deserve either revision or clarification. In that sense, I'm not just an apologist, but also a coherentist guide who takes it upon himself to see what he must sacrifice (which, luckily, isn't much by proportion) to remain on rational footing.

In the third, Yangism has the argumentatively least fair philosophical rivals, and much of the commentary on Yangzi is more of a crass dismissal than actual address to the depth of his work. These rival schools outlasted Yangzi's assertions for millennia. While Confucians, for instance, have had plenty of time to hone their positions and make centuries' worth of clarification, revision, and adaptation, Yangism is pretty much stuck in antiquity. An apologist like myself has to make up for lost time. It will take modern devices to make him modernly relevant, but his voice can't thrive if lost to modern language (English or Chinese) or if hastily wedged into the various contemporary philosophical projects to which his words are relevant.

I have a long-term, manuscript-level project to submit a collection of translational and philosophical commentaries on the areas where Yang's work is still alive, namely the dedicated chapter of the Liezi (列子), "Yangist chapters" (26-31) of the Zhuangzi (莊子), and initial segments from the Lushi Chunqiu (呂氏春秋), to make open defense of Yangzi's ethics and approach to the study of "human nature." However, that requires generation of public awareness and interest, which, for Yangism, is in plain old short supply.

Perhaps, then, I should start with a defense of yet another unjustified vilification of egoism more generally, and Yangism particularly. This gem came from my rather unfruitful interactions with one Jeff Klooger (we have entirely opposed views on the meaningfulness of Heidegger). Klooger, a social theorist and philosopher turned poet, huffed more of the sort of ignorant dissent I had previously mentioned about Yangism, I suppose to tell me that he not only disagrees, but doesn't like me personally. He writes:

"You yourself admitted that your attitude to ethics was influenced most by Yang Zhu and Stirner, which is like saying that you learned how to treat women from Jack the Ripper."

I really wanted to hear more about his discontentment with their views via these armchair attacks. I'm a bit sharp-tongued, myself, so this response followed:

"...I would wager that you have not the slightest background in Chinese philosophy. What exactly could you assert of Yangist or Stirner-ian ethics that makes it like Jack the Ripper's serial stalking and killing of women? Really, go ahead."

Give an opponent the benefit of a disjunction. Maybe he really dislikes Stirner, alone, and would leave Yangzi's work where it lay. This, apparently, was not to be the case.

"There are no Yangist or Stirnerian ethics. You have to feel some responsibility towards others in order to have an ethics at all."

While to my account that is ignorant dissent against the proposals of both Stirner and Yangzi, I should focus on the Yangist error most.

Interestingly, Klooger's premature ejaculation is very much like the unfair caricature of Yangism present in the Mengzi (孟子), perhaps the most famous prejudicial smear against Yangzi's thought in strings of such smears from Yang's contemporaries:

"楊子取為我，拔一毛而利天下，不為也。"
"Yangzi opts for [the doctrine of] acting for the self, so if his pulling out one hair were to to benefit everything under the heavens, he would not act."
-- Mengzi, 13:26 (trans. Joshua Harwood)

My kneejerk reaction is to completely disregard this kind of prejudicial foolishness by quoting right from the very start of the Liezi's (列子) Yangist material.

「楊朱游于魯，舍于陣氏。孟氏問曰：“人而已矣，奚以名為？”
曰：“以名者為富。”
“既富矣，奚不已焉？“
曰：“為貴”。
“既貴矣，奚不已焉？”
曰：“為死 ”。
“既死矣，奚為焉？”
曰：“為子孫。”
“名奚益于子孫？”
曰：“名乃苦其身，燋其心。乘其名者澤及宗族，利兼鄉黨；況子孫乎？”
“凡為名者必廉廉斯；為名者必讓，讓斯賤。”
曰：“管仲之相齊也，君淫亦淫，君奢亦奢，志合言從，道行國霸，死之後，管氏而已。田氏之相齊也，君盈則己降，君斂則己施，民皆歸之，因有齊國；子孫享之，至今不絕。”
“若實名貧，偽名富。”
曰：“實無名，名無實；名者，偽而已矣。昔堯舜偽以天下讓許由、善卷，而不失天下，郭祚百年。伯夷、叔齊實以孤竹君讓，終亡其國，餓死于首陽之山。實偽之辯，如此其省也。”」

"Yang Zhu travelled in Lu, lodging with the Zhen. Meng [Sunyang] asked him: 'We are men, alone. For what use does name serve?'
Yang said: 'Using our names serves to our wealth.'
Meng said: 'Once wealthy, why would we not cease?'
Yang said: 'To serve to our honor.'
Meng said: 'Once honored, why would we not cease?'
Yang said: 'To serve to our deaths.'
Meng said: 'Once dead, to what is there to serve?'
Yang said: 'To serve to our posterity.'
Meng said: 'What benefit will our names be to our posterity?'
Yang said: 'A name embitters our bodies and scorches our hearts. Won't we, taking advantage of our names, bring fertility to our generations [to come], benefit our village's court, and more yet our posterity?'
Meng said: 'All service to a name requires humility; serving to his namesake, we must concede, concede to meagerness.'
Yang said: 'When Guan Zhong was the chief minister of Qi, when the lord was lewd, he was lewd; when the lord was extravagant, he was extravagant. His will and speech so submitted [to the ruler], his Way moved him to his country's hegemony. After he [the lord] died, the Guan line was nothing more [than the Guan line]. When Tian [Heng] was the chief minister of Qi, when the lord was being too much, he lowered himself; when the lord went collecting [taxes], he gave [money] away. The people all flocked to him, and thence he acquired Qi; his posterity relish in it [the power of Qi], which to this day remains unbroken.'
Meng said: '[So] being true to our names, we will be poor; being in pretense to our names, we will be rich.'
Yang said: 'Truth lacks a name, and a name lacks truth; namesakes are a pretense. Formerly, Yao and Shun faked their concession of everything under the heavens to Xu Yu and Shan Juan, yet never [really] conceded it, and retained the throne for one hundred years. Po Yi and Shu Qi truly conceded to Prince Gu Zhu, and in the end perished in their own country, starving on Shouyang Mountain. Only here is the distinction between truth and pretense made so concisely.'"
-- Liezi, 7:1 (trans. Joshua Harwood)

Herein lies a direct and immediate refutation of Klooger's biased and baseless assertion that the Yangist does not "feel some responsibility towards others." Even worse, it challenges precisely the sort of preconception that somehow "the feeling of responsibility towards others" is needed in order to have a very workable, effective ethics, maintain a peaceful society, and so forth.

To the first bit of Klooger's opposition to Yangism, it's clear that Yangzi's lines address the needs of two groups: those within one's own immediate line and those outside of it. Yangzi, unlike the more "idealistic" political strategists and moral philosophers of his time, is quite clearly disinterested in the state as providing anything more than a means to a meal ticket for him and those he would presume some level of emotional attachment -- family members and his clan. For Yangzi, fame (a "name") is just a coinage made in pretense to secure wealth, and the grandiose distraction of virtuosity behind one's actions is merely (co-?)incidental to those who most effectively pursue their own ends for long-term gain. Yangzi isn't cynical about human relationships as they carry import to the individual. Yangzi is rather utterly cynical toward the ruler's claim that his actions are done in service of the wants of the citizen, that somehow a strategist's "correctional intervention" on the rulers would be more than a contrivance, and that there is even the hint of the sort of "humanity" (仁) that was not simply a means to some self-serving end, among other things. It's a clashed American/Chinese idiom: "Work the system, and then retire!"

The seed of the prior paragraph undoes Klooger's second incomprehension that there somehow has to be a "feeling of responsibility towards others" in order for an ethics to be correct. Yangzi demonstrates through his parable contrasting Guan Zhong and Tian Heng that "responsibility towards others" need only be a strategy of winning the hedonistic reciprocation of others, the easiest strategy being to appeal to and entice the innate egoistic and hedonistic tendencies of the people toward oneself. It's not simply that Tian Heng did the opposite of his ruler, but that he made himself look ashamed of his lord's excesses and abuses (i.e. he looked to hate what the citizens were likely to hate), and that he gave his citizens money! That's enough to get one Qi lay generation to love Tian over his lord (thus securing his throne) and more than enough to get future generations in Qi to pay in (blind) gratitude for and in sustained prospects of continued "benevolence" through Tian's family line. There is no such "feeling of responsibility" in this model, only the strategy for personal welfare and satisfaction. In fact, Yang's passage points out that it's not the "feelings of responsibility," but the real actions in a populace's interest that wins support and grants power: "The people all flocked to him, and thence he acquired Qi." The regard for other people, the "responsibility toward" them, so claim Yangists, is an illusion. It's a profitable illusion, but an illusion all the same.

I'm sure this all leaves a rotten taste in Klooger's mouth. Yangism isn't designed to comfort the want of some "other-regarding" explanation for social behaviors that secure happiness for a majority. What it ignores is the very elementary needs for ethics to be a meaningful study at all (My impression is that Klooger doesn't mind inconsistencies, I gather, as long as they "speak" to him in some peculiar way). Normative ethics is understood as a study of "model behavior," or "ideal action," or "the best life," which is really only one level of explanation conjuncted with yet other mysteries that, without clarification, leave the term normative ethics too loosely defined to be an approachable study of anything. Interesting to note that a thorough list of the things we idealize for our own lives match in virtual parallel with the things that would bring us senses of security, pleasure, ease, or entertainment. The self-contained parasympathetic network and reward cycle guides our social interaction. The more enduring question of how to perpetuate our contentment for our own lifetimes and have the rest spill over to the next on our deaths is not one of "morality," but intelligence. Given the misinformed or uninformed remark of one Jeff Klooger, I could imagine his frustration.

Leibniz, Bagua, Binary, and the Turing Machine

2009-05-24T15:21:00.000-07:00

I have been wanting to do some more interesting discussion on the productive works of Sinophilic Western philosophers of the Modern Era, a bit of something to extend my citations and brief discussions of Schopenhauer's contact with Chinese religion, and more specifically Neo-Confucianism. However, this more recent read, for the "hardcore Analytic" "pedantic logician" I am, proved much more fruitful than my find of an empathetic ear to the culturally negligent instructional policy in contemporary philosophy of religion.

I stumbled onto an article titled "八卦不可思議的數字規律" (or "The Bagua's Inconceivable Number Pattern"), which gave firm interest in the Bagua's treatment and discoveries as a mathematical models. The article itself barely takes the space of a page (if you ignore the huge bagua in the article), but divides into three sections, the first of which was most appetizing to my intellectual palette.

The first section of the article talks about the history of Leibniz's find of the binary number system within the bagua and its offshoot diagrams. The article reveals that Leibniz's owes his discovery to an early Christian missionary who sent Leibniz (or as I'm going to call him henceforth, Laibunici [萊布尼茲]) a copy of (what I presume) was a Zhouyi (here put in an ugly grid to ruin its aesthetic appeal). In it, Leibniz apparently saw that basis for the binary number coding system, which we know now as the favored base of a working computer.

It's rudimentary Yijing study for most who would read here, but the idea is apparently that by translating the solid lines to 1 and the broken lines to 0, one gets all of the first eight numbers of the binary number system.

The number series to seven in binary: 00,01,10,11,100,101,110,111

The number series to seven in bagua numbering: 000,001,010,011,100,101,110,111

Of course, from these, the infinity of numbers would follow, and the sixty-four grams of the Zhouyi yielded the first sixty-four numbers from 0-63.

「現在如有一聖人欲選擇一優秀民族，加以獎勵，那麼，他的金蘋果的賜與，一定會落到中國人的身上。」
"Now, if there were a sage who wished to choose an outstanding ethnicity as an additional reward, his golden apple would be given to him given that he were able to have the body of a Chinese man befall him." -- GWF von Leibniz (trans. Joshua Harwood)

While definitely interesting that the Chinese (perhaps unintentionally) formed a diagram which carried mathematical sophistication along with it, the extent to which the Chinese didn't appear to use it toward its better known modern functions is even more interesting. As is commonly known, binary numbering is the preferred base system of the computer, working from strings of ones and zeroes to generate everything that we see on a computer.

The surprise for me is not seeing a clear reason why the Chinese did not invent the computer. Social and economic issues aside, China did not arrive first at most of the major conceptual steps that led to von Neumann's computing machine, and below I've provided a small, chronological list of things that the Chinese did not manage to complete that were pivotal to such invention:

The Turing Machine calculation experiment, off of which von Neumann's model is heavily based, did not occur directly to any major Chinese academic at the time because...
Turing could not have taken interest in mathematical logic because...
Mathematical logic, from Frege, to Hilbert, to Peano, to Russell, to Gödel, was not a remotely Chinese development.

What's shocking, though, is that the Chinese, despite their shortages in the formalisms that brought us there, seem to have a good many essential understandings needed to derive a conception similar to a Turing machine thought experiment.

Perhaps there is nothing more strikingly resembling of a Turing machine to me than an abacus (算盤). We may draw some analogies from Turing's original essay, "On Computable Numers, with an Application to the Entscheidungsproblem" to see what precisely abacuses and Turing machines share in common (also, a site to get a clearer summary and some practice with the machine, itself).

"The 'computable' numbers may be described briefly as the real numbers whose
expressions as a decimal are calculable by finite means. Although the subject of this
paper is ostensibly the computable numbers, it is almost equally easy to define and
investigate computable functions of an integral variable or a real or computable variable, computable predicates, and so forth."

The abacus can only calculate real numbers, and even then, only those numbers with finitely calculable decimals.

"We may compare a man in the process of computing a real number to a machine which is only capable of a finite number of conditions q1, q2, ..., qR which will be called 'm-configurations'. The machine is supplied with a 'tape', (the analogue of paper) running through it, and divided into sections (called 'squares') each capable of bearing a 'symbol'. At any moment there is just one square, say the r-th, bearing the symbol S(r) which is 'in the machine'. We may call this square the 'scanned square'. The symbol on the scanned square may be called the 'scanned symbol'. The 'scanned symbol' is the only one of which the machine is, so to speak, 'directly aware'. However, by altering its m-configuration the machine can effectively remember some of the symbols which it has 'seen' (scanned) previously. The possible behaviour of the machine at any moment is determined by the m-configuration qn and the scanned symbol S(r). This pair qn, S(r) will be called the 'configuration': thus the configuration determines the possible behaviour of the machine. In some of the configurations in which the scanned square is blank (i.e. bears no symbol) the machine writes down a new symbol on the scanned square: in other configurations it erases the scanned symbol. The machine may also change the square which is being scanned, but only by shifting it one place to right or 1eft. In addition to any of these operations the m-configuration may be changed. Some of the symbols written down {232} will form the sequence of figures which is the decimal of the real number which is being computed. The others are just rough notes to 'assist the memory'. It will only be these rough notes which will be liable to erasure."

A two-slider abacus may conceivably have infinitely many decimal place rows (as "tape") and each of the rows will be considered the cell (i.e. the "square") which has the ability to represent a "symbol" for one, zero, or blank. We can consider a one-slide on the heaven tiles to be the blank-to-non-blank determiner, while the earth has an up (one) and down (zero) setting. While abacus users are likely to focus on the table itself, we can instead direct our attention to command sequences based on what happens to one side or another of the abacus.

An automated abacus, then, would function in this way:

Start at a row, specific or arbitrary depending on the intended function.
Read the symbol for that row.
Depending on what's written on the row over which our reader (our finger, I'll suppose), we can alter the state (of infinitely many allowable) and perform exactly one of the following actions in 3.
Erase on heaven tile (slide it down), slide heaven and earth tile up (to 1), slide heaven tile up and earth tile down (to 0), move left, or move right.
HALT if there is no action rule for a given state and reading.

Actually, most of the basic arithmetic could be controlled by a series of mechanical functions which are determined by states and actions. There only needs to be an infinity of rows and enough programmed states to satisfy the operation from any given collection of preset entries.

It appears that, without extra earth tiles, the arithmetic has to be done in unary. However, the machine works on a two-tier binary system: the erased-unerased at the top, and the zero-one at the bottom.

There appears to be a substantial body of detail that needs to enter into proofs for the execution of every arithmetical operation, but for now I'll maintain that with a two-tiled abacus, one heaven tile and one earth tile, and an infinity of rows, one could complete all of the arithmetical operations following only a finite set of rules (i.e. of state changes and actions within those state changes).

That the Chinese did not conceive of automatic abaci is also not of much surprise. Plenty of cultures had them, but didn't think of their automatic calculation without non-human intervention, and more importantly, human mathematical reasoning!

What amazes me more about the Chinese not completing some sort of automation for their calculation machines prior to Turing's thought experiment and von Neumann's invention stems from listening to a recent lecture from Daniel Dennett in which he likens the Turing machine and Turing's conception to Darwin's conception of natural selection. Dennett calls it a "strange inversion of reasoning," which he uses as a cynical way of clarifying that efficiency and order does not imply agential intervention. Dennett's lecture, while quite efficient and sound, is a signature of a facet of Western philosophers out which I've earlier complained. Dennett, like most Western philosophers, never looked past the Abrahamic tradition or the Western hemisphere to check for consistency in his statements. Had Dennett known more of pre-modern East Asian culture, religious practice, and philosophy, he would have probably made two cautious qualifications to this "strange inversion of reasoning." First, this "strange inversion" is only "strange" and an "inversion" to us because of Westernized preconceptions; and second, that well-placed East Asian perspective took the idea that organization was not necessarily agential, and thus that the East Asian reasoning is not at all inverse or "strange" to Turing's or Darwin's reasonings.

While I generally prefer citing Daoist sources, perhaps a primary Confucian source will do much better, as the influence of Confucianism has been a greater mainstay through Chinese history than any of the other pre-Han schools.

"子曰：'參乎！吾道一以貫之。'曾子曰：'唯。'子出。門人問曰：'何謂也？' 曾子曰：'夫子之道，忠恕而已矣。'
"The Master said, 'Shen, my doctrine is that of an all-pervading unity.' The disciple Zeng replied, 'Yes.' The Master went out, and the other disciples asked, saying, 'What do his words mean?' Zeng said, 'The doctrine of our master is to be true to the principles of our nature and the benevolent exercise of them to others, this and nothing more.'" -- Analects, 4:15 (trans. Legge)

"子曰：'為政以德，譬如北辰，居其所而眾星共之。'
"The Master said, 'He who exercises government by means of his virtue may be compared to the north polar star, which keeps its place and all the stars turn towards it.'" -- Analects, 2:1 (trans. Legge)

"子曰：'性相近也，習相遠也。'
"The Master said, 'By nature, men are nearly alike; by practice, they get to be wide apart.'" -- Analects, 17:2 (trans. Legge)

"子曰：'賜也，女以予為多學而識之者與？'對曰：'然，非與？'曰：'非也，予一以貫之。'
"The Master said, 'Ci, you think, I suppose, that I am one who learns many things and keeps them in memory?' Zi Gong replied, 'Yes - but perhaps it is not so?' 'No,' was the answer; 'I seek a unity all pervading.'" -- Analects 15:3 (trans. Legge)

While these passages only give a brief glimpse into the greater Confucian (and by extension, a massive portion of the Chinese philosophical) reasoning, we note that a good many of these statements do not make use of discussion of creations from higher powers. Kongzi's work is not overrun with overt divine command or some tacit creationism. The divine command is replaced in Confucius's work with a (comparably fallacious) appeal to tradition, and the strong conviction that human agents of the past, slightly mythicized, had a proper and right view of the ideal state and household. Confucius himself regularly admits that his doctrine is a product of learning, and even laments in places that he had not intuited automatically what truly constituted justice, propriety, and virtue as his ancestors had. The creationism, the notion of nature as being a product of yet some other greater being, is actually outdone come the Zhou Dynasty. While supernatural elements reside in areas of Confucian thinking, those are not in the thoughts of the universe, and once again, those supernatural impulses appeal mainly to one's own ancestry.

This leads to a comparable "inversion" when compared to the views of the Abrahamic tradition: One does not need to create the universe or humanity in order to know everything, or even the most important truths, about either. In fact, one's knowledge could be virtually null, but one's virtuous and proper nature complete through bare intuition alone. The whole idea of "doing good without doing actively," or of "being of a sort without knowing how to be that was" is consistent, though somewhat divergent, from the same idea that prompt conversation about the abilities of unthinking machines to do the work of what those in the Western past would have regarded as a specially conscious activity.

Again, Chinese had hurdles aplenty that, not surmounted, stifled a good formal lead into anything resembling the Turing machine thought experiment. However, some of the facets that philosophers like Dennett are using to explain the seeming oddity of "unintelligent design" (my phrasing, not his) to those not used to being jostled from their anthropocentrically projected beliefs about the nature of the natural world (the Feuerbach summary), for as strongly as the analogy holds, also appears to favor some of the most important (pre-?)conceptions of ancient China.

Musings on Chad Hansen’s Logic and Language in Ancient China: Part 2, Chapters 2-5

2009-05-24T04:15:00.000-07:00

In my earlier entry, I posed a single criticism against the first chapter of Hansen's book, and only in later chapters do my stronger objections to Hansen's text arise, more specifically, with his denial of certain Western philosophical problems in light of the nature of the ancient (and arguably modern) Chinese lexicon.

The bread and butter of Hansen's text is his defense of what he finds to be the overarching philosophical perspective of ancient Chinese philosophers, which he dubs behavioral nominalism. For the Chinese view, he states, the ancient Chinese philosophical perspective is behavioral "because, in the place of internal mental representations of particulars and properties, the Chinese view of mind (heart-mind) [心], is dynamic; the mind is the ability to discriminate and distinguish 'stuffs' and thereby to guide evaluation and action" (31), and further claims that it is behavioral "because the Chinese philosopher is not committed to any entities other than names and objects. There is no role in Chinese philosophical theories like that played by terms such as meaning, concept, notion, or idea in Western philosophy" (31). Chinese theory of reference, claims Hansen, is really just a one-to-one tie between names (名) and the stuffs (實) to which names refer, forging further and asserting that the ontology of ancient China is mereological. In fact, Hansen spends a great amount of text returning to the mereological nature of Chinese ontology by appealing to the mass noun (or noncount noun) hypothesis, his most popular and controversial view of ancient Chinese language. The challenge for Hansen is to undo what he views as Platonic (non-mereological) presumption in the interpretation of Chinese philosophical texts by appealing to the structure of the ancient Chinese language, to connect the virtually universal prominence of noncount nouns in ancient Chinese noun vocabulary to the rejection of the class-member-to-set manner of predication that inspires the one-many problem, the prompter of Platonic dilemma. "A naming paradigm in conjunction with count nouns, but not mass nouns, generates the traditional one-many problem of philosophy and explains the appeal to Platonism," he writes.

In fact, Hansen is challenging the assumption of abstractionism in all of pre-Han China.

"I want to use these observations about grammar and this hypothesis about the intuitive picture of language and the world appropriate to Chinese grammar to analyze another old question -- does Chinese have abstractions?

"Again, the tides of academic favor seem to have a generational history. The generation which first encountered Chinese thought was struck by the absence of abstract metaphysics and suggested that Chinese language could not form abstractions. The later generation, sensitive to what seemed to them the implicit intolerance of this view, has mostly rejected it. My view is that the question has been misconstrued by both sides. The question is not what language can do, but what theories do do. Classical Chinese philosophical theories had no roles for abstractions.

"I am inclined, in a qualified way, to side with the earlier generation on the question of abstraction (as in a qualified way I supported the later generation on the question of Chinese logic). I would like to argue for the claim that no Chinese philosophical system of the classical period in China was committed to the existence of or had roles for abstract (universal) entities in any of the traditionally important ways that Western semantics, epistemology, ontology, or philosophy of mind had roles for abstractions" (37-38).

Hansen goes through a brief Western history of abstractionism, channeling most of his Chinese antithesis to Plato's impact on ancient and modern Western philosophy, to give some encouraged words to the Englightenment nominalists who unfortunately stuck to the idea of a thing as its intended meaning. He then follows:

"Now my denial of abstraction in China amounts to a denial that there is any similar interlocking set of philosophical theories. I argue that we can satisfactorily interpret Chinese philosophical writings without attributing a philosophical commitment to abstract or mental entities. To know a word is simply to be able to discriminate...If mereological interpretation of the philosophical writings of the period is possible, then given the explanatory significance of the grammar of Chinese nouns we should prefer nominalist interpretations to traditional, Western-style, abstract interpretations" (38-39).

Hansen, at least on the account of at least minimal abstractionism. On page 40, Hansen provides an example (in Wade-Giles), which really can't be appreciated without the traditional Chinese there, as well. It's best for us to pose it as a question:

Take a very, very basic sentence of ancient Chinese, say, "大非小也．"

How should we interpret it?

"Greatness is not pettiness."
"Bigness is not smallness."
"Big is not small."
"Big is not small."
"Small things are not big things."
"Being great is not being small."

All of the above? None of the above? That's the hideous game of ancient Chinese translation and interpretation: no markers for use-mention distinction, no articles, no abstract noun suffixes (like the English -ness or -hood), no linguistic characteristics in word order that allow for abstraction (transliteratred, "大非小也," is, "big not-so small [end-sentence]"), no grand formalism that clarifies one part of speech domain from another. We get serialization, topicalization, and even a few other helpful hints on predication of subjects, but that's slim pickings when compared to other ancient languages, or even modern Chinese!

"The absence of a -ness-like suffix does not prove that there was no theory, nor could its presence prove that there was such a theory. In a sense, the absence of any novel conceptual apparatus at all is evidence that there was no such philosophical theory since usually in the spelling out of such a theory one creates linguistic forms. In the absence of of either theory or conceptual apparatus there is no reason to attribute subconscious reference to the nonexistence abstract objects. Borrowing a metaphor from the Tao Te Ching [Daodejing, 道德經], the language and the theory 'give birth to each other'" (41).

Hansen wants interpretation to favor Quinean semantic ascent (40), but his warrant of it is not exactly convincing. A famous quote from the first chapter of the Daodejing, "無名萬物之母，" is clearly not semantic ascent because we would not treat 名 as the verb of the sentence. The same with, "父父，" by Confucius. These sentences are really just examples of noun phrases that, paired in serialization, presume a sentential completeness. It's just that noun phrases don't seem to make a sentence to the English reader. There was a good review of Hansen's book which undoes some interpretive concerns by reminding that we interpret dual-noun sentences, especially when the terms are identical, by treating the second noun phrase as a predicate, thus giving us, "Without-name is ten thousand things' mother," and, "Father fathers," respectively. Hansen may have given an argument to something a bit better, really an argument for the indeterminacy of part of speech tagging in ancient Chinese, a rather compelling supplement to Quine's indeterminacy of translation in a real-world, full-language context. For Hansen, such a view would promote a mereological preconception of the world, one so strong that it enveloped even the syntax of the language. I'm somewhat confident that serialization pulls enough weight for such a conception of Chinese mind and language.

My most distant departure from Hansen's second chapter is his claim that the one-many problem simply does not occur. No one-many problem? It's strange to me only in that Hansen himself gives the one-many problem under Chinese semantics, and while the "one" and the "many" may differ in a very important respect, the real problem of language that the one-many problem reoutlines, "What does X name really?" (36) is still present in identical form.

"Baby Susie learnes to utter 'doggie' in the presence of Fido (the family dog -- a collie) and the neighbor's German shepherd and a few other occasional mongrels as examples. However, the first time she sees Uncle Harry's Afghan hound, she promptly chirps, 'Doggie!' How did she know? We tend to say she has learned to abstract from particular examples -- learned abstract thinking. She has abstracted from all the particular dogs she had encountered the features common to all dogs. Seeing that the Afghan hound had these features, even though quite different in other respects, she correctly classifies it as a dog. This classification depends on her having an abstract idea.

"Baby Mei-ling, on the other hand, has learned to use the word '狗' for that stuff which she encounters again and again at Uncle Jang's. But the story does not involve any abstracting. Rather one says that she has acquired the ability to distinguish dog-stuff from non-dog-stuff. She is, in effect, not seeing a different object, but a different part of the same stuff. The problem of learning for Mei-ling is how she is able to reidentify the same stuff. But expressing the problem in that way makes us less likely to talk of abstracting properties from different objects. As we shall see (see pp.127-37), the philosophical problem corresponding to the possibility of abstract knowledge generated by the Chinese picture is rather how we can possibly know or love some mereological whole rather than just knowing or loving those parts we encounter in our vicinity" (52).

The problem for Chinese language has merely taken a step forward in this metaphysical jumble. It is plainly arguable from the Platonic view that Mei-ling's understanding of '狗' arises from the temporal instances of her exposure to the same dog, while the ancient Chinese could say of Plato what Hansen has suggested, that all she did was put a label, dog, on a differently perceived "stuff" at some odd time. There's no reason to believe that the one-many problem disappears under this reasoning. Rather, it appears the (pseudo-)problems just dance on different squares.

Perhaps the genius of Chinese and early Analytic tradition is the revelation of the illusion of the one-many problem here as one built on a false dilemma: "Do we get the universal from the particulars, or do we divide the universe into particulars?" The processes are congruent. At the same time that we're dividing the world with our senses, we're also grouping them together with our language. Hence, a term's definition is set by both the way the universe is "cut" and by the way the universe is "grouped." It is a false dilemma to assume that a speaker of a language must gain his knowledge by one means or the other exclusively.

To get the intuitions pumping on the identity of the problem, let's simply pick another word, something much, much more general. How about the word something? Well, do we go from the particulars to the universals, or do we go from the universals to the particulars? In neither case does a member-to-set or mereological metaphysical conjecture help explain the process. Baby Susie points at something and, lo and behold, it is something, and gathers from all of her knowledge that everything is something. Baby Mei-ling points at something and, lo and behold, it is also something, and all she learned was to distinguish it from nothing. The problem for Susie is that she has no reason to form every single thing as something by individual reference, and that's the problem of induction. The problem for Mei-ling is that she has no means of distinguishing something from nothing, and that's Meinong's flaw. The metaphysics on both sides leave explanatory holes that are bigger than the problem it aims to resolve, the exact opposite of an epistemic gain.

For a seond intuition, we may consider the word dog, and then consider what Susie and Mei-ling are really looking at. Let's say the things Susie and Mei-ling are perceiving aren't dogs, but are genetically modified species of a few different sorts, but that eventually, the 狗/dog term is successfully applied to more regular cases of dogs. Did she really ever learn the Form of Dogness or to distinguish dog-stuff from non-dog stuff? My suspicion is to say, "No," and then follow, "but that's irrelevant to the question that the one-many problem purports to aim to solve."

This is the erroneous move I see Hansen making, playing into metaphysics when he need not do so. Hansen can quite plainly accept both manners of language acquirement for whatever language. His defense for mereology would have to be based, instead, on the proximity of ancient (and modern) Chinese to more formal logical syntax, the primitives of which I believe most definitely favor mereological interpretation. Meanings of words are complex, and their meanings are constantly salvaged by the wide nets of disjunctions and revisions given new data, and in light of Duheim dilemma over a similar matter, our understanding of definition (and in large part, determinacy in translation) is all too naive if we force ourselves to assume, Platonically, that some "Form" is built on some intersecting "properties," or mereologically, that the "stuff" is cut up into "parts" and "instances."

Hansen's remaining text is largely defense of his mereological take on linguistic and philosophical considerations of ancient Chinese philosophical texts, starting from Confucian and Daoist sources (Chapter 3), going then to Neo-Mohist sources (Chapter 4), and finally, to Gongsun Longzi's 白馬非馬 (Chapter 5). The commentary is right in broad strokes, in its citations that Chinese philosophy was more geared toward pragmatics and activism over epistemic explanation; that Chinese philosophers worried more about regulative than descriptive use of language (also citing Fingarette's concern with "the force of speech acts" (60)).

Hansen persists with the ideas that Chinese language is highly mereological, that its power of language in ancient China was to "divide or cut the universe of discourse into portions or opposites" (61). I agree with this take of all languages, and I agree from a basis of formal, not natural languages, so don't see this as being particularly Chinese. Anything can only be understood as being the opposite of all of the things that are not it, and by that reasoning, knowing a term is equally a process of eliminating bad conditions leading to appropriate naming as it is a process of absorbing better conditions. Hansen attributes Chinese thinkers, as I also believe personally, the tendency to strong conventionalism, that not only do the sounds and marks for terms arise out of social convention, but that the actual differentiation of referents is dictated largely by social convention, as well.

Most of his positive evidence in favor of noncount nouns in epistemology was found in the following portion:

"Nominalism in the areas of epistemology and philosophy of mind in China is reflected in pre-Han Chinese grammar of propositional attitudes: believes that, thinks that, knows that, and so on. Traditional empiricist Western epistemology rested on a widely articulated theory of mind. The mind was viewed as a container of items called thoughts or ideas which potentially correspond both to words and to objects or states of affairs in the world. That commonsense philosophy of mind is easily correlated with our own grammar of propositional attitudes -- of know and believe. Both verbs take sentences or that-phrases as their 'objects.' Similarly, we take the sentence or proposition to be the 'content' of the belief or knowledge state -- the content of the mind. Hence a mind's believing is just its containing thoughts or ideas. The thoughts are things which, like sentences, may be true or false -- depending on whether or not they correspond to the way the world actually is. This picture of inner, conscious, or mental states suggests that belief is a subjective representation and that knowledge is the representation's corresponding to the way things are. The belief-knowledge distinction is a prominent feature of English grammar.

"Now ancient Chinese has two quite different and grammatically complex expressions which are routinely translated into the propositional attitudes -- chih [zhi] 知 'know' and i wei [yi wei] 以為 'believe'. Because the two expressions were grammatically quite different, Chinese theories of knowledge virtually never used that contrast to formulate skepticism. Instead, knowing was presented as a kind of skill. Think of it as a skill in applying names (discriminating according to community practices). Propositional belief, similarly, was a disposition of a speaker to apply such expressions to objects in a particular way and then to behave in the ways conventionally associated with that predicate; for example, to believe Nixon is evil is to 'evil' (apply the term evil to) Nixon and to vote against him or demonstrate in the streets.

"The grammar of the belief context in Chinese is that of a three-place predicate: x i y wei F (where x is a person, y is an object and F a property), for instance. 'Nancy i [以] John wei [為] the most handsome man in Kansas.' Translators are sometimes careful to replicate this structure yielding the translation, 'x deems y to be F.' The difference between chih and i wei can be represented as analogous to that between a disposition or habit and an acknowledged skill. A skill has a success component; it is done correctly. The disposition may or may not also be a skill. The success element in the meaning of chih is what makes the translation knowledge (versus belief) work. Knowledge, too, has a success or objective component which belief lacks. But the background philosophical account of what this component is in Chinese and Western systems is rather different. The simple word-by-word association hides that underlying structure which shapes the different formulations of skepticism in the two traditions. The Chinese case leads quite naturally to a skepticism based on conceptual relativism where the classical empiricist belief-knowledge distinction led to skepticism of the senses. The 'correctness' or skill in the application of an expression to an object is much more closely dependent on the conventions of a language than is the notion of a correspondence between ideas or thoughts and reality. So the Chinese concept of knolwedge (chih) [zhi 知] is of a skill that is relative to some practice or institution of distinguishing and naming -- that is, to some language" (63-65).

In the Neo-Mohist, chapter, however, Hansen explores the semantic correspondence to a variety of other terms, most pertinently those of idea 意 as counterexample to the claims he makes against abstractionism and of class 類 as counterexample to his denial of Platonic member-to-set relation:

"In the Neo-Mohist chapters, i [yi] 意 'idea' does not, in fact, play the semantic role of explaining the meaning of general terms at all. It is used of images or memory or imagination. The eighteenth century view that meanings are images is a separate assumption which we do not need to attribute to the Mohists. The only direct semantic role of i [yi 意] 'idea' is in explaining the use of sentences for pragmatic communication -- where its translation is 'intent' rather than 'idea.' Lei 類, on the other hand, cannot be the technical equivalent of 'class' since, in the spirit of the Taoist contrast theory of language, the mathematical notion of class is 'born together' with the distinctions of subclass and member. Without any such distinction, lei [類] could only be regarded as a mereological class -- using (as we shall see) only the distinction of part-whole. This conclusion, obviously, is reinforced by the masslike grammar of the nouns called lei-names and the tendency to explain their semantics in the same way one explains the semantics of proper names. We will notice that the use of lei makes it clear that it is mainly used to assert similarity between thing-kinds and only derivatively to describe a thing-kind based on similarity of its parts. Neither term, in its use in the dialectical chapters, contradicts the basic nominalist character of the semantic theory" (113-114).

"I [yi] 意 'idea-image' occurs in several other places in the Canon in various contexts. Graham has noticed that i [yi] 意 'idea-image' is used in connection with hsiang [xiang] 想 'image'. In these contexts, i does seem to be mainly a picture of a remembered or envisioned object. There are other occurrences of a verbal use of i (as in the above quotation) -- roughly, 'to imagine a thing.' It does have an epistemic use, that is, as envisioning, contemplating, and so on, but it is not used in explaining the meaning of words as such. I [yi] never functions as an abstraction from concrete images nor as a general idea corresponding to general terms" (114).

"The term lei 類 'class' is more central to the semantic project in the dialectical chapters. Chmielewski is the main proponent of the view that it means 'class' in the logical or mathematical sense. If that is true, then it is an abstraction called for by the same problems that generate universals for the Platonic tradition. The suggestion has already been rebutted in part by Graham. He observes that objects are never viewed as members of a class, but as, in his words, of a kind or not of a kind. That is close to my own objection: to suggest there is the notion of 'mathematical class' without the notion of 'member' is paradoxical. These are theoretical 'brothers' that, like the Taoist opposites, are 'born together.' The concept of 'class' or 'species' is generated in a theory which also includes 'member' or 'specimen' as distinct from 'subclass' or 'subspecies.' Without these companion concepts (which Chmielewski himself claims are absent), it is impossible to understand how lei 類 could correspond to the mathematical or semantic term class.

"Graham's objection points to another curious feature of the use of lei [類] in Chinese. The concept seems to stand at least one step above 'natural kind.' Thus the Mohists say that ox and horse are t'ung lei [tong lei] 同類 'same lei' but they never say that of white-horse and horse, where we would expect if if lei did correspond even to our ordinary nonmathematical use of kind or class. T'ung lei [tong lei] (same lei) is used to assert a similarity of things in different natural classes, not to represent a relation between objects comprehended by a natural kind term" (116).

Overall, Hansen's behavioral nominalism is quite defensible. However, his defense does not undo similarly Platonic problems, but just considers them from a different perspective from which neither side can claim truth as both bicker on two ends of a common fallacy. For the argument in the presumption of Chinese mereological language to play as both Hansen and I believe it should, I think Hansen would have done much better sticking to his syntactic and semantic artillery, from which his work is much better prepared to drill into the aptness of Chinese to suit modern logical syntax, argue for equal consideration of mereologically gained understandings of terminology, and then shoot holes into the Platonic metaphysical problem from the stance of its fallacy, not the incompleteness of its account. For the linguistic analysis to creep into metaphysics without the full intent of its destruction is, for my tastes and rigor, an unwarranted pacifism.

R.I.P., John DeFrancis

2009-05-24T04:14:00.000-07:00

This is fresh word of mouth from Manyul Im's blog. Not many Analytic philosophers will be familiar with the name, but anyone who ever studied Chinese between 1970 and today has probably run across, if not fully read, the DeFrancis series in the course of their studies.

I found the tool indespensible as a model for my own study, and particularly, development of my vocabulary, and the latter portion of his in memoriam blog post has only further, technologically superior developments in the pipeline.

He was a pure academic philanthropist ("人能弘道; 非道弘人"), and his contributions will be sorely missed.

Musings on Chad Hansen's Logic and Language in Ancient China: Part 1, Chapter 1

2009-05-24T04:13:00.000-07:00

I've long been a fan of Chad Hansen's work, but never until now felt the motivation to voice my adulation and few objections in a more formal medium, and have left my musings for stray conversations with other well-read Chinese philosophers.

My fascination with Chad Hansen is basic. I find, in general, that Chinese philosophers are not so much enthralled by the formalities of logic, despite being well-prepared for such analysis given their linguistic strives (A formal language is still a language!), and it parallels my criticism with the Analytic philosophers of date, who are very honed in their sub-disciplines and are highly skilled logicians, yet do not regularly seek insight outside of their own history when the topic of discussion is relevant to their sub-disciplinal interests. Yet these two traditions (and I assume others) have much to borrow from each other, from fresher terminology and reviewed considerations on categorical distinctions to real solutions to what are becoming longstanding issues in the Analytic philosophy of language, metaphysics, ethics, politics, metaphilosophy, philosophy of science, and philosophy of religion, to name the biggest that come to mind.

Chad Hansen fascinates me because he saw (or so I assume from his writing) exactly what I saw, divided philosophical worlds (one Analytic, the other Chinese) that had a lot to offer each other, and each the tools to help the other.

The first chapter to Chad Hansen's book Logic and Language in Ancient China titled "Methodological Reflections" gives a pretty good defense of the coherentist method of interpretation and makes its best cases against some of the dismissive remarks that I still hear about Chinese philosophy. His defense of coherentism is present, but more looming in the background of his argument than standing to the fore. At the fore of his argument (which are little pieces that help substantiate coherentist interpretive methodologies) are his well-reasoned denunciations of some common dismissals or condescensions of Chinese philosophy, which I have listed below:

The Special Logic Retort: Chinese people weren't applying Western (by which they mean Aristotelian, philosophical, and mathematical) logics, so their reasoning must adhere to some other kind of basis for justification.
The "Think Like a Chinese" Slogan: Only Chinese people have real access to Chinese thought, and so one's mindset must be like a Chinese person's in order to understand an ancient Chinese text correctly.
The Non-Philosophy Retort: Chinese philosophy is really a separate form of literature, a "poetry" or a "cataloguing" that aimed to preserve literary elements over validity.

Hansen's own pages make a thorough destruction of the first retort in some relevant prose, summarized fully in just a few key quotations:

"So 'special logic' was originally thought of as a descriptive claim with a frankly racist content: people who are racially Chinese have different (and incommensurable) dispositions to draw conclusions from premises. The special logic claim was used to demand tolerance from Westerners who found Chinese philosophical theories -- in a world which has become almost a specialized vocabulary item for things Chinese -- inscrutable. Saying Chinese were illogical had a dual effect. It allowed us to acknowledge our inability to understand the ideas and yet to regard those ideas as a 'profound' alternative to our own world view. We could argue for the value of what we could not understand without threatening our own self-image as knowers: 'After all, we can't be expected to understand this'" (13).

"Truth and logical consequence are relative to a language. And there are numerous inferences in a language like modern English for which no simple and direct corresponding inference can be found in classical Chinese (and vice versa, of course). Uncritically assuming corresponding inferences is a common source of distortion of Chinese thought. There are, for example, the inferences built into the meanings of individual words. Ought and right have the property in modern English that 'education morally ought to be available to everyone' entails 'everyone has a right to education.' 'This object is round' entails 'this object has the quality of roundness.' Such inferences are analytic (i.e. follow by meaning alone) in English.

"Now, if we were to translate some sentences of a Chinese text as, say, 'Everyone ought to have an education,' and 'this is round,' we may not use these sentences as proof that the thinkers in question advocated equal human rights or theories of abstraction. Such inferences cannot be attributed to Chinese thinkers on that kind of evidence. The failure of these inferences, while important to understanding the differences in Chinese thought, does not justify the special logic retort since it does not betoken any inconsistency in the thought at all" (16).

"To support the special logic retort descriptively, Chang's claim [that Aristotelian logic is built on Western language systems, a heinous accusation against Chinese and Greek-rooted philosophy] would have to be that Chinese regularly and legitimately token and accept arguments which 'Aristotelian' or Western logic would call invalid. But that hypothesis gives far too much potential for strange beliefs to Chinese people. Suppose, contrary to fact, that Chinese reasoning regularly and legitimately tokened arguments in the form of Kung-sun Lung's [公孫龍的]) dialogue:

All yellow horses are horses.
No yellow horse is a while horse.
Therefore, a white horse is not a horse.

"With a minimum of imagination, one could convince any Chinese thinker of a plethora of weird beliefs: Confucius was not Chinese since Mencius is Chinese and Mencius is not Confucius; chickens are not alive since snakes are alive and snakes are not chickens. No culture that routinely accepted such inferences could have had sagacity enough to rule that empire for two thousand years" (17)!

Of course, Hansen could have saved himself a lot of ink had he just written the retort and uttered this truism, one that should burn in the minds of anyone who wants to criticize formal logic on natural language grounds:

"The logic of which we normally speak is not the logic of any specific natural language. It can be used, via translation, to test inferences in any language. Once we do accept a translation of a sentence of English into the logical symbolism then we can test its validity. But exactly the same is true of German, Swahili, Farsi, and Chinese (ancient and modern)' (18).

For Hansen, as long as an interpretation of data (in his case, of Chinese philosophical texts) sustains itself as logically valid (even if unsound), then we have no reason to posit a special "Chinese logic," and any such discovery would in fact be a secondary discovery upon the affirmed conclusion that there is no coherent way to mold any philosopher's work. However, the problem with even this approach is that we can just as well use our logic to show that a philosopher's works produced inconsistent arguments, and in this case, only the prevalence of such error (as Hansen suggests) would even be a remote indicator of ancient Chinese illogicality in one form of inference or another. Such illogicality, though, already presupposes assessment by "Western" logical means, so the positing of a foreign logic works as little more than a patronization of a failed argument, adding generalized insult to specific injury, as it were.

The "Think Like a Chinese" Slogan is another misled prescription with yet more "frankly racist content." The notion of "special access" to a given philosophy from a given era and geography and the implicit isolation that such a "special access" forces on foreign inquiry relies on an inability of a speaker to gain sufficient proficiency in the language being applied in the prose of that area.

Early in my undergraduate years, I had to refute an expert in German philosophy on exactly this mistake, as she was certain that because my upbringing was not Chinese, I would always lack the social and linguistic background that would allow for a native understanding of the Chinese texts. On two grounds, this thinking is misguided, first because, for the person in question, it undermines her own career, and basically shuns herself from knowing Hegel or Schopenhauer because she, herself, was not of nineteenth century German birth and upbringing; second because there are a plethora of non-Americans who have a plenty thorough understanding of American pragmatism, and that I have no special access to it just because I happen to be American. It may take more work to understand the subtleties of intended reference in foreign language, and if that access is "special" or "privelaged" (not just more convenient because of my prior training), there is no reason to posit that foreign language and social history is unlearnable, and therefore its evaluation impossible.

However, there is another, even more appalling feature of the prescription to "think like a Chinese," that Chinese people have some sort of automatic access to Chinese thought that any foreign commentator would lack. This is tantamount to the racist assumption that all Chinese people know gongfu in that both assume that genetic lineage presupposes knowledge of an empirically gained skillset. The truth is that most Chinese people, just like most Westerners, don't know much of anything about any philosophy. Many Chinese are raised Buddhist and Confucian, but they don't bother to examine what the reasonings for such an upbrining are. In high school, most schools force students to memorize Chinese classics, but they don't examine their meanings and values (Perhaps most humorously to the philosophically inclined, many of my Chinese and Taiwanese friends can recite most of the Sanzijing 三字經, but don't really treat it as a philosophical lesson, but as a children's game.). Chinese philosophy is philosophy, and philosophy takes years of rigorous study to learn and perform with proficiency. Having Chinese as a native language may make their learning of the ancient texts a bit easier, and their private considerations brewing for more years than those of a recent inductee may proffer insight into Chinese philosophy sooner, but none of this excludes those from other backgrounds to access and to assess Chinese philosophical positions with equal or even better points, even if they are "late bloomers" because of comparable disadvantages.

These reasons are not the ones given by Chad Hansen, but they are sufficiently analogous. Hansen more closely argues that we cannot start by thinking as Chinese philosophers because we have to first learn how they think, and we only get to learn how they think by interpreting their works. Secondly, if we are assuming that this "Chinese thinking" contains some sort of implicit "Chinese logic" that defies the allowed translation of their sentences to standard predicate calculus and such, we are back to condescension without the sincere attempt to understand ancient Chinese philosophy, not even to clearly outline its inconsistencies. In other words, Hansen is just being any wise philosopher, claiming we can't simply satisfy ourselves with difficulty in comprehension or logical contradiction and just content ourselves to remain ignorant and contradictory. If there are mistakes, they deserve to be clarified. If there are none, they deserve the same philosophical merit as any other popularly studied philosophy does. It's as plain as that.

Hansen treats the third Non-Philosophy Retort as a result of a wrongheaded approach to "thinking like a Chinese," which actually forces interpretative ventures to seek exactly what they train themselves to find, and thus by treating the work as "poetry" or "cataloguing," will mold their interpretation to be more poetic or more catalogue-like than philosophical. Hansen has strong words against the "injunctions of a certain characterization become a priori methodological predispositions which are self-fulfilling" (25).

"In any case, I have never seen, on any interpretation, an account of some sentence or doctrine of, say, Chuang-tzu [莊子], saying, 'I am really trying very hard to be unsystematic and just to catalogue as many disparate items of information as possible,' or Lao-tzu [老子] implying, 'It is more important that your phrases be balanced than that your principles be correct.' I am naturally suspicious of anyone who implies that this is the way ancient Chinese thinkers viewed themselves. In fact, for the most part, on most plausible interpretations, all these thinkers had just the opposite view" (25).

I should mention something about this chapter that struck me with a very Rortian reaction. Hansen claims that a methodology of interpretation arrives from an assumption that we are dealing with works of philosophy, and therefore set philosophical standards for its value (consistency, cogency, and philosophical import), and that we will only know that a work is not philosophically worthwhile until a thorough investigation shows that nothing of philosophical interest is present in the translated and interpreted text. Hansen adds, though, "And even then our proof is never complete" (26). Hansen seems to be saying that our proof that a text is not philosophically worthwhile is never complete, which I find plainly incorrect. Philosophers have standards for rejecting statements, and once those standards are violated (say, the inference of a contradiction occurs), then the statements are either rejected outright or revised to avoid some problems, like Otto Neurath's ship analogy.

Now, we could stretch the value of something as "philosophically worthwhile" to mean pedagogy on how not to argue, but I think we're assaulted with too many verbal and scriptual examples of that lesson, and we don't need every one of them to make the lesson clear. Eventually, writing loses its philosophical interest, and it has nothing to do with the time or culture that uttered it, but of developments that prove the earlier work to be flawed in reason.

My second problem with this chapter lies with the coherence standard of intepretation because Hansen himself gives a plain reason why we should not necessarily think coherence is the best way to determine the accuracy of interpretation of a foreign text. Some writing is just contradictory. I face a dilemma here because I don't believe that an interpretive theory needs to attempt to "reconcile contradiction or select one of the approaches as...more central than the other" (3). I don't believe that we should accept contradiction, either, but that we should be careful in seeing a sentence of a foreign language or unusual sentential structure as informally erred or contradictory, and that further linguistic investigation of a text should either reassure or question a claim of contradiction or error. What we believe to be more central to the overall text should not play as big a role as what the individual arguments, regardless of how much attention an author gave to it, contribute to the most strongly sustained and contemporarily maintained philosophical positions. Check for fresh lettuce in the middle before you throw the head away. If there's anything to really be gained from the Chinese religious history in this respect, it's their practice of selective syncretism, or as Egg Shen said in Big Trouble in Little China: "We take what we want!"

Then again, maybe I'm just moving "centrality" from a single text to the whole philosophic arena.

A Problem with Russell's Presentation of Daoism in The Problem of China

2009-05-24T04:10:00.000-07:00

Oh, dear Russell! Philosophers have spent so much time, even in his lifetime, picking his life's work to pieces. Obviously it's hard to avoid collision with someone as prolific as Russell, but nevertheless I continually note the grossest concepts of his accounts in philosophy of mathematics, epistemology, and philosophy of language having been undone, some by history's greats and Russell's own contemporaries -- Wittgenstein, Gödel, Strawson, and Austin -- and some by those soon to be consumed in philosophy's history -- Kripke, Putnam, and Searle. Of course, I wouldn't dare to define Russell by the sum of his refutations (What is philosophy but a mass grave of ideas buried and unearthed by the few survivors above?), especially not for someone so open to changing his worldview upon meditation on (at least apparently) sounder reasonings provided him.

His 1922 work The Problem of China, as would be expected for numerous reasons, has regular, but forgivable errors. It means, among other things, that yet another of Russell's pursued subtopics, the history of philosophy, is due for some refutation. For now, I'll only attack one misconception, one that struck me as a significant misrepresentation of Chinese philosophy. It deals with his treatment of Daoism, and in particular Laozi's Daoism, a misstep that he takes in the following paragraph:

"The oldest known Chinese sage is Lao-Tze, the founder of Taoism. "Lao Tze" is not really a proper name, but means merely "the old philosopher." He was (according to tradition) an older contemporary of Confucius, and his philosophy is to my mind far more interesting. He held that every person, every animal, and every thing has a certain way or manner of behaving which is natural to him, or her, or it, and that we ought to conform to this way ourselves and encourage others to conform to it (The Problem of China, Chapter 9)."

"We ought to conform to this way ourselves and encourage others to conform to it." Despite Russell issuing a claim inconsistent with its own paragraph, I also find this a problem among Russell and other Western philosophers who would dismiss a text like the Daodejing as one lacking a cohesive argument.

The inconsistency? Well, the natural way of being would be hard to make imperative or obligatory under Laozi's treatment. "Naturalness" (自然) is not something we can be directed to do. For Laozi, this is backwards logic, as evidenced by Chapter 64:

"Therefore the sage desires the undesired, not prizing hard-to-get riches; studying the unstudied, turning back to what everyone passes by; assisting the nature of ten thousand things, yet not daring to act. (是以聖人欲不欲，不貴難得之貨；學不學，復眾人之所過；以輔萬物之自然，而不敢為。)"

"Naturalness," as it is connoted here, means not doing what one is compelled to do by external influences except those that are already of nature. For Laozi, the notion of social pressure and social expectation is wholly "unnatural," a byproduct of a faulty attempt to use popular value judgments to order the world to some infallibly comprehensible and evaluable entity. Because of this, Laozi's own ethics must resort to the firmest ethical naturalism. Laozi, rather than actually trying to get people to act naturally, is instead conveying what results from natural living, which include many things, but in this particular excerpt include walking away from the motives of a collective which asserts either moral authority or economic certainty on another's action (i.e. that claims to know what someone should do or what should should want). As a clear deductive argument will show, using descriptive ethics as a normative system relies on mere assertion fallacy, and for reasons built on logic, can't be trusted as the arbiter of well-reasoned normative ethics.

An Argument Proving that Humans and Sheep Have Different IQ's:

Appealing to the authority of a group without reasoned basis in fact for value means by definition appealing to the common value judgments held by a group of individuals.
Individuals having common value judgments does not imply that they have a common source.
If value judgments do have a common source, that source is the enforcement of a value judgment made by another individual.
If value judgments do not have a common source, then separate individuals arrived at their value judgments independently.
Either one of the sources of value judgments implies that the authority of a value judgment arises from an individual's assertion of value judgment.
Unless a value judgment is based on more than some mere personal insistence of some value judgment, then that value judgment commits a mere assertion fallacy.
Therefore, relying on what someone insists without appealing to some other facts relies solely on the authority that the speaker presumes, which is, regardless of population (ad populum), a mere assertion fallacy.

We can't trust people to tell us what morality is unless the basis for that morality is substantiated by empirical facts or facts of definition that are not established by the authority of the speaker. However, the facts of definition, unless substantiated by non-empirical, but still insurmountable intuitions (like those of mathematics and logic), will only earn their merit by appealing to the most universal, and as a corollary most general empirical truths that can be stated with the great disinterest. In fact, the empirical facts on which Daoist morality lies are so basic and un-insightful that one's mere capability of perception and conception are enough to account for them. The few boring, humdrum, yet most reliable truths of the world are what inspire the very distinct ethics present in the Daodejing. It is naturalistic, but not in any Western sense, since it's clear that non-cognitivist positions can still take root in Laozi's notion of what it means to assert a moral statement. I'll avoid my take on Laozi's metaethics for now, as it is very difficult to judge precisely using the Analytic delineations. The Daodejing in some lines sounds intuitionistic, in others subjectivist, and in others emotivist and morally skeptical.

What is certain, though, is that Laozi is treating his morality as a matter of fact, but not because of his own egotistical presumption of matter-of-factness. It couldn't possibly be natural, not to the whole of nature, anyway, to impose what Laozi poses as Virtue in any way. In fact, Laozi's ethics is so truly consequentialist that it can't be understood in an imperative linguistic mood. Imperatives bring us back to the masses, and thus is more about control (the speech act of influencing behavior) than the truth of Virtue. The authority of Laozi's ethics, in theory, is supposed to be the unspoken intuition of the reality of the whole universe. The natural morality, for Laozi, does not require a language (and in his view, is better off without it), since awareness of morality conceptually isn't necessary for a morality that is truly innate, just like we don't have to talk about vision in order to see colors.

For Laozi and the Daoists, true Virtue is sympathetic in the purely autonomic, anatomical sense, not always in the social sense. The sympathetic Virtue of Laozi's ethics is one that Russell didn't consider in his brief assessment of the Old Master. Russell, though a champion advocate for "looking only and solely at what are the facts," in his short time in China, had not uncovered the facts of Daoism quite so precisely as he had uncovered facts in his other pursuits. His thanks belongs, instead, to the effort of presenting what he believed the facts to be in a straightforward manner, not necessarily to pronate himself to contradiction by other researchers and (Sino)philosophers, but to give a preliminarily fair assessment of a philosophy quite foreign to him and his Analytic tradition. Only in the outline of his errors will a sincere advance to Analytic Sinophilosophy be possible, and so I commit one more error to the earth and stand on the mound for now.

Schopenhauer Talks Sinology

2009-05-24T04:06:00.001-07:00

The following is a chapter "Sinology" from Arthur Schopenhauer's On the Will in Nature, which is available in full here, and for which I have provided some text editing. I have italicized footnotes, bibliographic notes, and additions to later editions.

NOTHING perhaps points more directly to a high degree of civilization in China than the almost incredible density of its population, now rated, according to Giitzlaff, at 367 millions of inhabitants. For whether we compare countries or ages, we find on the whole that civilization keeps pace with population.
The pertinacious zeal with which the Jesuit missionaries of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries strove to in culcate their own relatively new doctrines into the minds of this very ancient nation, and their futile endeavours to discover early traces of their own faith in that country, left them no time for a profound study of the belief which prevails there. Therefore Europe has only lately obtained some slight knowledge of the religious state of the Chinese. We now know, that is to say, that in China there exists first of all a worship of Nature, which is universally professed, and dates from the earliest times, even, it is alleged, from before the discovery of fire, wherefore animals were sacrificed raw. The sacrifices offered up publicly at certain seasons or after great events by the Chinese Emperor and the chief dignitaries of the Empire, belong to this worship. These sacrifices are dedicated first and foremost to the blue sky and to the earth to the blue sky in the winter solstice, to the earth in the summer solstice and, after these, to every possible power of Nature: the sea, mountains, rivers, winds, thunder, rain, fire, fcc. &c. A genius presides over each of these, and each genius has several temples. On the other hand, each genius presiding over every single province, town, village, or street, nay over family funerals and even sometimes over a merchant's warehouse, has also temples; only, in the two last cases they are destined exclusively for private worship. But public worship is besides offered up to former illustrious Emperors, founders of dynasties and to heroes, i.e. to all such as have benefited (Chinese) mankind by word or deed. Even these have their temples: Confucius alone having no less than 1,650 dedicated to him. This therefore accounts for the great number of small temples found throughout the Empire. With this hero-worship too, is associated the private worship offered up by every respectable family on the tombs of their ancestors.
Now besides this worship of Nature and of heroes, which is universal, there are three other prevailing religious doctrines in China, more with a dogmatical intent. First among these is the doctrine of Taossee, founded by Laotse, an older contemporary of Confucius. This is the doctrine of Reason, as the inner order of the Universe or inherent principle of all things, of the great One, the sublime Gable-Beam (Taiki) which supports all the Eafters, yet is above them (properly the all-pervading Soul of the World) and of Tao, i.e. the Way, namely to salvation: that is, to redemption from the world and its misery. We have an exposition of this doctrine taken from the fountain-head in Stanislas Julien's translation (1842) of Laotse's Taotelring, in which we find that the Tao-doctrine completely harmonizes with Buddhism both in meaning and in spirit. This sect however seems to have fallen very much into the background, and its teachers to be now looked down upon. Secondly, we find the wisdom of Confucius, which has special attractions for Chinese savants and statesmen. Judging from translations, it is a rambling, commonplace, predominantly political, moral philosophy, without any metaphysical support, which has something peculiarly insipid and tiresome about it. Finally, there exists for the bulk of the nation Buddha's sublime doctrine full of love. The name, or rather title, of Buddha in China is Fo or Fhu, whilst in Tartary the "Victoriously-Perfect" is more frequently called by his family-name, Shakia-Muni, and also Burkhan-Bakshi; in Birma and Ceylon, he is generally called Gotama or Tagdtata, but his original name was Prince Siddharta. (1) This religion which, on account of its intrinsic excellence and truth, as well as of the great number of its followers, may be considered as ranking highest among all religions on earth, prevails throughout the greater part of Asia, and according to the latest investigator, Spence Hardy, numbers 369 millions of believers: that is, far more than any other.
(1) According to a Chinese official Report on the census, printed in Peking, and found by the English in the Chinese Governor s palace on entering Canton, China had 396 millions of inhabitants in 1852, and allowing for a constant increase, may now have 400 millions. (" Moni- teur de la Flotte," end of May, 1857.)
The Reports of the Russian Clerical Mission in Pekin give the returns of 1842 as 414,687,000.
According to the tables published by the Russian Embassy at Peking, the population, in 1849, amounted to 415 millions. (" Post-Zeitung," 1858.) [Add. to 3rd ed.]
(1) For the benefit of those who wish to acquire a fuller knowledge of Buddhism, I here note down those works belonging to its literature, and written in European languages, which I can really recommend, for I possess them and know them well ; the omission of a few others, for instance of Hodgson s and A. Remusat s books, is intentional.
1. " Dsanglun, or the Sage and the Fool," in Tibetan and German, by I. J. Schmidt, Petersburg, 1843, 2 vols. in 4to, con tains in the preface to vol. i. (i.e. the Tibetan volume), from pp. xxxi to xxxviii, a very brief, but excellent, sketch of the whole doctrine, admirably calculated for a first introduction to the knowledge of it : the whole book even, as a part of the Kandshur (canonical books), may be recommended. 2. In the Memoranda of the Academy of St. Petersburg are to be found several lectures by the same excellent author (I. J. Schmidt), which were delivered in German in that Academy in 1829-1832. As they are of very great value for the knowledge of this religion, it is to be hoped that they will be collected and published all together in Germany. 3. By the same writer : " Forschungen iiber die Tibeter und Mongolen." Petersb. 1829, in 4to. (Investigations concerning the Tibetans and Mongols). 4. By the same writer: " Uber die Verwandt- schaft der gnostisch-theosophischen Lehren mit dem Buddhaismus," 1828. (On the relation between the Gnostic-Theosophic Doctrines and Buddhism.) 5. By the same: " Geschichte der Ost-Mongolen," Petersb.1829, in 4to. (History of the Eastern Mongols.) [This is very instructive, especially the explanations and appendix, which give long extracts from writings on Religion, in which many passages clearly show the deep meaning and breathe the genuine spirit of Buddhism. Add. to Srded.] 6. Two treatises by Schiefner in German, in the " Melanges Asiatiques tire s du Bulletin Historico-Philol. de 1 Acad. d. St. Petersburg," Tome 1, 1851. 7. " Samuel Turner s Journey to the Court of the Teshoo- Lama " (at the end), 1801. 8. Bochinger, " La Vie ascdtique chez lea Indous et les Bouddhistes," Strasbourg, 1831. 9. In the 7th vol. of the "Journal Asiatique," 1825, an extremely beautiful biography of Buddha by Deshauterayes. 10. Bournouf, " Introd. a PHist. d. Boud- dhisme," vol. i. in 4to, 1844. 11. " Rgya Tsher Kolpa," traduit da Tibe"tain, par Foucaux, 1848, in 4to. This is the " Lalita Vistara," i.e. life of Buddha, the gospel of the Buddhists. 12. " Foe Koue Ki, relation desroyaumes Bouddhiques," traduit du Chinois par Abel Re"musat, 1836, in 4to. 13. "Description du Tubet," traduit du Chinois en Russe par Bitchourin, et du Russe enFrancais par Klaproth, 1831. 14. Klaproth, " Fragments Bouddhiques," printed separately from the " Nouveaa Journal Asiatique," Mars, 1831. 15. Spiegel, "De officiis sacerdotum Buddhicorum," PaliceetLatine, 1841. 16. The same author s "Anecdote Palica," 1845. [17. " Dhammapadam," palice edidet et latine vertit Fausboll, Hovnise, 1855. Add. to 3rd ed.] 18. Asiatic Researches, vol. vi. Buchanan, " On the Religion of the Burmas," and vol. xx. (Calcutta, 1839), Part 2, contains three important articles by Csoma Korosi, including Analyses of the Books of the Kandshur. 19. Sangermano, " The Burmese Empire," Rome, 1833. 20. Turnour, "The Mahawanzo," Ceylon, 1836. 21. Upham, "The Mahavansi, Raja Ratnacari et Rajavali," 3 vols. 1833. 22. ejusd. "Doctrine of Buddhism," 1839, fol. 23. Spence Hardy, "Eastern Monachism," 1850. 24. ejusd. " Manual of Buddhism," 1853. The two last books, written after a twenty years stay in Ceylon and from oral information supplied by the priests there, have given me a deeper insight into the essence of the Buddhist dogma than any other work. They deserve to be translated into German, but without abridgement, for otherwise the best part might be left out. [25. C. F. Koppen, " Die Religion des Buddha," 1857, a complete compendium of Buddhism, compiled not only with great erudition and serious industry but also with intelligence and insight from all the other works I have mentioned above and from many more besides, which contains all that is essential on the subject. 26. " The Life of Buddha," from the Chinese of Palladji, in the " Archiv fur wissenschaftliche Kunde von Kussland," edited by Ennan, vol. xv. Heft 1, 1856. Add. to 3rd ed.J
These three religions, the most widely diffused of which, Buddhism, subsists without any protection whatever from the State, by its own power alone a circumstance which speaks greatly in its favour are far from being hostile to one another, and exist quietly side by side, nay, harmonize even to a certain extent, perhaps by reciprocal influence, so that the sentence: "The three doctrines are only one," has become proverbial. The Emperor, as such, professes all three; still many of the Emperors, even up to the most recent times, have been especially devoted to Buddhism. This is shown by their profound respect for the Dalai-Lama, nay, even for the TesJioo-Lama, to whom they unhesitatingly yield precedence. These three religions are neither monotheistic nor polytheistic, nor are they even pantheistic. Buddhism, at any rate, is not; since Buddha did not look upon a world sunk in sin and suffering, whose tenants, all subject to death, only subsist for a short time by devouring each other, as a manifestation of God. Moreover the word Pantheism, properly speaking, contains a contradiction; for it denotes a self-destroying conception, and has therefore never been understood otherwise than as a polite term of expression by those who know what seriousness means. It accordingly never entered into the heads of the clever, acute philosophers of the eighteenth century, not to take Spinoza for an Atheist, on account of his having called the world Deus; on the contrary, this discovery was reserved for the sham philosophers of our own times, who know nothing but words: they even pique themselves on the achievement and accordingly talk about Acomism, the wags! But I would humbly suggest leaving their meanings to words in short, calling the world, the world; and gods, gods.
In their endeavours to acquire knowledge of the state of Religion in China, Europeans began as usual, and as the Greeks and Romans under similar circumstances had done, by first searching for points of contact with their own belief. Now as, in their own way of thinking, the conceptions of Religion and of Theism were almost identified, or at any rate had grown together so closely, that they could only be separated with great difficulty; as moreover, till a more accurate knowledge of Asia had reached Europe, the very erroneous opinion had been disseminated for the purpose of argument de consensugentium that all nations on earth worship a single, or at any rate a highest, God, Creator of the Universe: * when they found themselves in a country where temples, priests and monasteries abounded, they started from the firm assumption that Theism would also be found there, though in some very unusual form. On seeing these expectations disappointed however, and on finding that the very conceptions of such things, let alone the words to express them, were unknown, it was but natural, considering the spirit in which their inquiries were made, that their first reports of these religions should refer rather to what they did not, than to what they did, contain. Besides, for many reasons, it can be no easy task for European heads to enter fully into the sense of these faiths. In the first place, they are brought up in Optimism, whereas in Asia, existence itself is looked upon as an evil and the world as a scene of misery, where it were better not to find oneself.
(1) This is equivalent to imputing to the Chinese the thought, that all princes on earth are tributary to their Emperor. [Add. to 3rd ed.]
Another reason is to be found in the decided Idealism which is essential to Buddhism and to Hindooism: a view only known in Europe as a paradox hardly worth a serious thought, advanced by certain eccentric philosophers; whereas in Asia it is even embodied in popular belief. For in Hindoostan it prevails universally as the doctrine of Maja, and in Thibet, the chief seat of the Buddhist Church, it is taught in an extremely popular way, a religious comedy being performed on occasions of special solemnity, in which the Dalai-Lama is represented arguing with the Arch-fiend. The former defends Idealism, the latter Realism, and among other things the Devil says; "What is perceived through the five sources of all knowledge (the senses), is no deception, and what you teach is not true." After a long argumentation the matter is decided by a throw of the dice: the Realist (the Devil) loses, and is dismissed amid general jeering. (1) Keeping this fundamental difference in the whole way of thinking steadily in view, we shall find it not only excusable, but even natural, that in their investigation of the Asiatic religions Europeans should at first have stopped short at the negative stand point; though, properly speaking, it has nothing to do with the matter. We therefore find a great deal referring to this negative standpoint which in no way advances our positive knowledge; it all however amounts to this: that Monotheism an exclusively Jewish doctrine, to be sure is alien to Buddhists and in general to the Chinese. For instance, in the "Lettres Edifiantes" (2) we find: "The Buddhists, whose views on the migration of souls are universally adopted, are accused of Atheism."
(1) " Description du Tubet," traduite du Chinois enRusse par Bitchourin, et du Russe en Francais par Klaproth, Paris, 1831, p. 65. Also in the "Asiatic Journal" new series, vol. i. p. 15. [Koppen, "Die Lamaische Hierarchie," p. 315. Add. to 3rd ed.]
(2) " Lettres Edifiantes," Edit, de 1819, vol. viii. p. 46.
In the "Asiatic Kesearches" (vol. vi. p. 255) we find: "The religion of the Birmans (Buddhism) shows them to be a nation far advanced beyond the barbarism of a wild state and greatly influenced by religious opinions, but which nevertheless has no knowledge of a Supreme Being, Creator and Preserver of the world. Yet the system of morality recommended in their fables is perhaps as good as any other taught by the religious doctrines which prevail among mankind. And again, p. 258 : "The followers of Gotama (i.e. of Buddha) are strictly speaking Atheists." Ibid., p. 258 : "Gotama's sect consider the belief in a divine Being, Creator of the world, to be highly impious." Ibid., p. 268, Buchanan relates, that Atuli, the Zarado or High-Priest of the Buddhists at Ava, in an article upon his religion which he presented to a Catholic bishop, "counted the doctrine, that there is a Being who has created the world and all things in it and is alone worthy of adoration, among the six damnable heresies." Sangennano relates precisely the same thing, (1) and closes the list of the six grave heresies with the words: "The last of these impostors taught, that there is a Supreme Being, the Creator of the world and of all things in it, and that he alone is worthy of adoration." Colebrooke too says: (2) "The sects of Jaina and Buddha are really atheistic, for they acknowledge no Creator of the world, nor any Supreme ruling Providence." I. J. Schmidt (3) likewise says: "The system of Buddhism knows no eternal, uncreated, single, divine Being, having existed before all Time, who has created all that is visible and invisible.
(1) "Description of the Burman Empire," Eome, 1833, p. 81.
(2) Colebrooke, " Transactions of the Eoyal Asiatic Society," vol. i. j "Essay on the Philosophy of the Hindoos," published also among his " Miscellaneous Essays," p. 236.
(3) "Investigations concerning the Tibetans and Mongols," p. 180.
This idea is quite foreign to Buddhism and there is not the slightest trace of it anywhere in Buddhistic books." We find the learned sinologist Morrison (1) too not less desirous to discover traces of a God in the Chinese dogmas and ready to put the most favourable construction upon every thing which seems to point in that direction; yet he is finally obliged to own that nothing of the kind can be clearly discovered. Where he explains the words Thung and Tsing, i.e. repose and movement, as that on which Chinese cosmogony is based, he renews this inquiry and concludes it with the words: " It is perhaps impossible to acquit this system of the accusation of Atheism." And even recently Upham (2) says: "Buddhism presents to us a world without a moral ruler, guide or creator." The German sinologist Neumann too, says in his treatise (3) mentioned further on : "In China, where neither Mahometans nor Christians found a Chinese word to express the theological conception of the Deity. The words God, soul, spirit, as independent of Matter and ruling it arbitrarily, are utterly unknown in the Chinese language. . . . This range of ideas has become so completely one with the language itself, that the first verse of the book of Genesis cannot without considerable circumlocution be translated into genuine Chinese." It was this very thing that led Sir George Staunton to publish a book in 1848 entitled: "An Inquiry into the proper mode of rendering the word God in translating the Sacred Scriptures into the Chinese language." *
(1) Morrison, " Chinese Dictionary," Macao, 1815, and following years, vol. i. p. 217.
(2) Upham, "History and Doctrine of Buddhism," London, 1829, p. 102.
(3) Neumann, "Die Natur-und Religions-Philosophic der Chinesen, nacn den Werken des Tchu-hi," pp. 10, 11.
(4) The following account given by an American sea-captain, who had come to Japan, is very amusing from the naivete with which he assumes that mankind consists exclusively of Jews. For the "Times" of the 18th October, 1854, relates that an American ship, under command of Captain Burr, had arrived in Jeddo Bay, and gives his account of the favourable reception he met with there, at the end of which we find: "He likewise asserts the Japanese to be a nation of Atheists, denying the existence of a God and selecting as an object of worship either the spiritual Emperor at Meaco, or any other Japanese. He was told by the interpreters that formerly their religion was similar to that of China, but that the belief in a supreme Being has latterly been entirely discarded (this is a mistake) and he professed to be much shocked at Deejunoskee (a slightly Americanised Japanese), declaring his belief in the Deity. [Add. to 3rd ed.]
My intention in giving the above quotations and explanations, is merely to prepare the way for the extremely remarkable passage, which it is the object of the present chapter to communicate, and to render that passage more intelligible to the reader by first making him realize the standpoint from which these investigations were made, and thus throwing light upon the relation between them and their subject. For Europeans, when investigating this matter in China in the way and in the spirit described, always inquiring for the supreme principle of all things, the power that rules the world, &c. &c., had often been referred to that which is designated by the word Tien (Engl. T heen). Now, the more usual meaning of this word is "Heaven," as Morrison also says in his dictionary; still it is a well-known thing that Tien is used in a figurative sense also, and then has a metaphysical signification. In the "Lettres Edifiantes" (1) we find the following explanation: "Hing-tien is the material, visible heaven; Chin-tien the spiritual and invisible heaven." Sonnerat too, (2) in his travels in East-India and China, says: "When the Jesuits disputed with the rest of the missionaries as to the meaning of the word Tien, whether it was Heaven or God, the Chinese looked upon these foreigners as restless folk and drove them away to Macao."
(1) Edition de, 1819, vol. xi. p. 461. Book iv. ch. i.
It was at any rate through this word that Europeans could first hope to find the track of that Analogy of Chinese Metaphysic with their own faith, which had been so persistently sought for; and it was doubtless owing to investigations of this kind that the results we find communicated in an Essay entitled "Chinese Theory of the Creation" were attained. (1) As to Choo-foo-tze, called also Choo-hi, who is mentioned in it, I observe that he lived in the twelfth century according to our chronology, and that he is the most celebrated of all the Chinese men of learning; because he has collected together all the wisdom of his predecessors and reduced it to a system. His work is in our days the basis of all Chinese instruction, and his authority of the greatest weight. In the passage I allude to, we find: "The word Tien would seem to denote the highest among the great or above all what is great on earth: but in practice its vagueness of signification is beyond all comparison greater, than that of the term Heaven in European languages. . . . Choo-foo-tze tells us that to affirm, that heaven has a man (i.e. a sapient being) there to judge and determine crimes, should not by any means be said; nor, on the other hand, must it be affirmed, that there is nothing at all to exercise a supreme control over these things."
The same author being asked about the heart of heaven, whether it was intelligent or not, answered: 'It must not be said that the mind of nature is unintelligent, but it does not resemble the cogitations of man. . . .'
"According to one of their authorities, Tien is called ruler or sovereign (Choo), from the idea of the supreme control, and another expresses himself thus: Had heaven (Tien) 110 designing mind, then it must happen, that the cow might bring forth a horse, and on the peach-tree be produced the blossom of the pear/ On the other hand it is said, that the mind of Heaven is deducible from what is the Will of mankind!"
(1) To be found in the " Asiatic Journal," vol. xxii. anno 1826, pp. 41 and 42.
The agreement between this last sentence and my doctrine is so striking and so astonishing, that if this passage had not been printed full eight years after my own work had appeared, I should no doubt have been accused of having taken my fundamental thought from it. For there are three well-known modes of repelling the attack of new thoughts: firstly, by ignoring them, secondly by denying them, and lastly by asserting that they are not new, but were known long before. But the fact that my fundamental thought was formed quite independently of this Chinese authority, is firmly established by the reasons I have given; for I may hope to be believed when I affirm, that I am unacquainted with the Chinese language and consequently unable to derive thoughts for my own use from original Chinese sources unknown to others. On further investigation I have elicited the fact, that the passage I have quoted, was most probably, nay almost certainly, taken from Morrison's " Chinese Dictionary," where it may be found under the sign Tien: only I have no opportunity of verifying it. In an article by Neumann (2) there are some passages which have evidently a common source with those here quoted from the "Asiatic Journal." But they are written with the vagueness of expression which is so frequent in Germany, and excludes clear comprehension. Besides, this translator of Choo-hi evidently did not himself quite understand the original; though by this no blame need be implied, when we consider the enormous difficulty of the Chinese language for Europeans, and the insufficiency of the means for studying it. Meanwhile it does not give us the enlightenment desired. We must therefore console ourselves with the hope, that as a freer intercourse with China has now been established, some Englishman may one day give us more minute and thorough information concerning the above-mentioned dogma, of which we have hitherto received such deplorably imperfect accounts.
(1) A note of Schopenhauer's referring to this says : "According to letters from Doss" (a friend of S.'s), "dated 26th February and 8th June, 1857, the passages I have here quoted are to be found in Morrison s Chinese Dictionary, Macao, 1815, vol. i. p. 576, under ^C Teen, although in a slightly different order, in nearly the same words. The important passage at the end alone differs and is as follows: Heaven makes the mind of mankind its mind: in most ancient dis cussions respecting Heaven, its mind, or will, was divined (it stands thus, and not derived) from what was the will of mankind. Neumann translated this passage for Doss, independently of Morrison s rendering, and the end was : Through the heart of the people Heaven is usually revealed. " [Editor s Note.]
(2) Neumann, "Die Natur-und Religions-Philosophic der Chinten, nach dera Werke des Tschu -hi," an article in Illgen s " Periodical for Historical Theology," vol. vii. 1837, from pp. GO to 63.

Eerie! Did Schopenhauer foretell the births of Alan Watts and Joseph Needham? I kid, of course.

I'm most excited by this passage because in it I found a philosopher speaking one of my criticisms, only in my case, on the "philosophy of religion" as it stands today in America, and not the pursuit of sinology as it was perversely done centuries ago. Perhaps I might draw the analogy that makes Schopenhauer's remarks against the "deplorably imperfect accounts" and wrongheaded footing of the original sinologistic venture made prior so devastating to the contemporary trend to narrowly fondle a single culture's byproduct and call itself "philosophy."

Schopenhauer's biggest attack came against the Jesuit missions and their false Deistic expectations that a religion have a Supreme Being personal God as the centerpiece of the faith. In short, Jesuits and Europeans naively anticipated that what their religious culture imposed as doctrine was going to be the same imposition wherever they went. Oh, the calamity! Thorough research proved the failure. God, at least the kind of God that Christian presupposition expects, is nowhere in the three religious pillars of China. It's not in Buddhism, not in Confucianism, and not in Daoism. As Schopenhauer points out, it's not even in the Neo-Confucianism of Zhu Xi (Schopenhauer used an outdated Romanization, "Choo-hi"). Contradiction of their world view simply wasn't anticipated, and so Jesuit sinophilia proved only as sincere as their love for their own religion allowed it to be, ultimately causing them to appeal to Shang Dynastic Shangdi (上帝) in order to spread Christian Gospel (though they did have an initial stumble through tian ["sky, heavens," 天]).

What is it, though, that he finds so distasteful? I might interject in his words and say that perhaps the overwhelming informal fallacy of the whole charade is what would irk any well-reasoned philosopher. The Jesuits managed to run a sort of cross breed composition fallacy, appeal to ignorance, and cherry picking fallacy in order to substantiate the practice of Christianity in the Mainland. Essentially, the earlier European apologetic efforts with respect to China already assumed the conclusion of God and simply went hunting for what they wanted to find, pulling to an age-old concept that none of the Chinese of the era sincerely accepted. The purpose of the Jesuit effort was to win converts into the practice of Catholicism, and they simply did not anticipate and would not concede to Confucian, Daoist, and Buddhist counterargument, particularly not their monotheism, a dead form of which they milked from The Book of History and other resources. The Jesuits simply discarded the philosophical remainder, as it was not of interest to them, and for a long time appeased the Chinese's extra-religious, non-theistic practices.

Let me tell a somewhat analogous story on the contemporary study of the philosophy of religion. Perhaps I should not even start there, but criticize the term "philosophy of religion" as a gross misnomer, more appropriately called "philosophy of a religion, you know the one I mean!" (Hint: the one they mean is Judaism and all of its historical offshoots.) The history of the philosophy of religion, as far as most Western philosophers give it attention now, begins from Roman intellectual convergence at the dawn of Christianity and earlier with their dominion of Jewish territory. The study, criticism, and argument from this "philosophy of religion" is an amalgamation and progression of original and reacting arguments given to central problems regarding the justification of the beliefs of The Old Testament and The New Testament through the Roman Empire and Medieval Era. In contemporary "philosophy of that one religion," the same arguments persist, only in slightly revised forms that have adapted to the counterarguments, scientific discoveries, and technological advancements from the Medieval, Modern, Industrial, and Contemporary Eras.

It's analogous, but not identical. Jesuits presumed monotheism in the culture they intended to investigate, and then unearthed the Chinese texts only to preserve what was of interest to their presumed conclusion. They assumed God was there, they looked hard enough through a foreign culture to find something that to them was close enough, and then treated the remainder as a triviality to their project of proselytizing. Contemporary "philosophers of religion" (i.e. of extended Judaism) presumed monotheism in the philosophical problems they intended to investigate, and then unearthed a few cultures only to preserve the philosophical histories that pertained to their monotheistic presumption. They assumed a god was there, they looked hard enough through a few foreign cultures to find something that to them was close enough, and then treated the remaining cultures as a sort of triviality to their projects of explaining and justifying or refuting a single fundamental religious viewpoint.

I have challenged philosophers of religion from ASU and a few other colleges on the presumed and unjustified precedence of monotheistic religions in "philosophy of religion's" debates. The responses are all nominal. "Oh, that's Eastern philosophy, this is Western philosophy." "The other traditions don't help us solve our problems." Dismissal and excuses for apathy! The same happens in almost every philosophical discipline I've encountered: ethics, epistemology, philosophy of science, metaphysics... It's just in philosophy of religion that I find it most offensively Eurocentric. It turns out that professors of philosophy usually know next to nothing about the philosophies of cultures that don't tie back to Ancient Greece or Europe. That lack of basic knowledge reflects in the professors' undergraduate and graduate students, whose knowledge of even the most basic foreign religious memes and non-European philosophical history are also "deplorably imperfect accounts." The students have positions on the existence of a god, yet none on the existence of Samsara, or Dao, or Brahman. The latter three are "Eastern notions/problems/concepts." They don't discuss them.

Compared to philosophy undergraduates and graduates I meet from China, Korea, and Japan, it's shameful when they demonstrate good fundamental knowledge of ancient Chinese philosophy, ancient Greek philosophy, Modern European philosophy, Analytic philosophy, and even (hiss, evil!) Continental philosophy. Their "philosophy of religion," believe it or not, actually argues concepts derived from more than one region. Maybe it's just the prevalence of five of history's major world religions that broadens their general knowledge. Maybe philosophers there are considerate of the worldwide scope of philosophical inquisition. Maybe their departments aren't so easily prone to specialization to a point of complete neglect of foreign contributors to common areas of inquiry (This is what Asian philosophy department websites suggest.).

This has all been a more practical than abstract philosophical concern, for which I idealize a solution, yet anticipate little cooperation. Perhaps for another day I'll introduce my more typically philosophical concern with this chapter, specifically the strength to which Schopenhauer deserves to credit the correlation of the Neo-Confucian passage, "According to one of their authorities, Tien is called ruler or sovereign (Choo), from the idea of the supreme control, and another expresses himself thus: Had heaven (Tien) designing mind, then it must happen, that the cow might bring forth a horse, and on the peach-tree be produced the blossom of the pear/ On the other hand it is said, that the mind of Heaven is deducible from what is the Will of mankind!" to his own doctrine as set forth in The World as a Will and Representation. Fow now that investigative urge will have to wait.

Wittgensteinian- and Laozi-an-Inspired Take on Proof Theory and Formal Logic

2009-05-24T04:00:00.000-07:00

I want to pose a bit of a conundrum I faced inspired by readings in Wittgenstein and Laozi. The idea, or problem, or whatever you might call it came to me while writing a larger treatise on the internal logic of the Daodejing, which in this instance involved early and late Wittgensteinian elements, and since I'm not one to discriminate ideas so fiercely by origin, I'll give inspirational credit to them both. The example is original, but those keen on the two figures I mention will see its sources almost immediately.

Let's imagine that I want to show a friend the rules of chess, but don't have a proper chessboard or pieces. In this absence, I decide to improvise all sorts of ways to mimic the terrain and pieces. I'll take bits of string, stray coins, checker pieces, gum wrappers, and so forth, and set them on an eight-by-eight grid that I penciled onto a sheet of looseleaf paper. Now, when I begin to describe how the "pawns," "knights," and other such pieces move, I'm able to convey, despite absence of a more conventional chess set, how the pieces move and describe the objective of the game. There is nothing seemingly important about using a horse-shaped piece as a symbol for the knight, nor a cross-headed top for the king, and all around, the function and practice of the game is preserved.

Given this, what would drive one to claim that the following two formal propositions are distinct?

(∀x)(∀y)(Pxy ⊃ Qx), (∃x)(∃y)(Pxy & Rx) |- (∃x)(Qx & Rx)
[(∀x)(∀y)(Pxy ⊃ Qx) & (∃x)(∃y)(Pxy & Rx)] ⊃ (∃x)(Qx & Rx)

Is there a major difference in stating that there exists a proof from some premises to another and simply stating that those premises imply the other? Now, I know that the first implies the second, but could the second just as well be translated into a game of the first and do away with this |- ("there exists a proof") business?

Let's imagine that I want to change the way most people make their moves in the predicate calculus. Instead of creating an open list of rules of inference that one may attempt, I instead create a strict ordered list of procedures to be followed that verify that the claim 2. is a theorem and that, unlike more common practices, tell you the minimum number of members required of the domain of discourse in that proposition.

Write the proposition with all material conditionals altered via material implication: ~[(∀x)(∀y)(~Pxy v Qx) & (∃x)(∃y)(Pxy & Rx)] v (∃x)(Qx & Rx).
Follow DeMorgan's Law, double negation, and change of quantifier rules until the only present negations are those of literals:

[(∃x)(∃y)(Pxy & ~Qx) v (∀x)(∀y)(~Pxy v ~Rx)] v (∃x)(Qx & Rx).

Instantiate every variable, from outside to inside, giving one non-repeating constant to each existential quantifier and conjunction strings for every constant already present to each universal quantifier after instantiating all of the existential quantifiers where possible without violating instantiation rules. This will be called the "minimum extension" of the proposition.

[(Pac & ~Qa) v (∀x)(∀y)(~Pxy v ~Rx)] v (Qb & Rb).
[(Pac & ~Qa) v (∀y)((~Pay & ~Pby & ~Pcy) v (~Ra & (~Rb & ~Rc)))] v (Qb & Rb).
[(Pac & ~Qa) v ([((~Paa & ~Pba) & ~Pca) & ((~Pab & ~Pbb) & ~Pcb) & ((~Pac & ~Pbc) & ~Pcc)] v (~Ra & (~Rb & ~Rc)))] v (Qb & Rb).

The number of distinct instantiations is the minimum number of constants needed within the domain to prove this statement valid in all cases (In this case, three.)
Check each literal for the presence of a negation, and for those present use distribution and DeMorgan's Law to show that any contradiction in them is joined to the remainder of the proposition by a disjunct, and not a conjunct. For brevity in practice, it is acceptable to remove conjuncts within every disjunct that does not have any negations to them elsewhere in the proposition (in this case, anything that's not 'Pac' or '~Pac.')

[(Pac) v (~Pac)].

Negate the minimum extension (or its form with eliminated irrelevancies, if brevity is desired).

~[(Pac) v (~Pac)].

Repeat steps 4 and 5 for the negated minimum extension (here made brief).

~[(Pac) v (~Pac)].
[~(Pac) & ~(~Pac)].

If one proposition produces a contradiction, but the other does not, then the one that does not produce a contradiction is a theorem. If neither produce a contradiction, then the proposition is not a theorem.

Contrast this with a common Fitch-style proof using Classical (at most) rules of inference:

(∀x)(∀y)(Pxy ⊃ Qx)
(∃x)(∃y)(Pxy & Rx)

(∃y)(Pay & Ra)

(Pab & Ra)
(∀y)(Pay ⊃ Qa)
(Pab ⊃ Qa)
Pab
Qa
Ra
Qa & Ra

(∃x)(Qx & Rx)

(∃x)(∃y)(Pxy & Rx) ⊃ (∃x)(Qx & Rx)
(∃x)(Qx & Rx)

I ought to clarify these two different proofs as analogous to the chess issue. Both areas, in very distinct ways, prove the truth of a consequent claim from (an) antecedent claim(s) (implementing notions of plurality in a logic's propositional structure is rather nonsensical given that conjunctions and separated, but dual assertions of separate premises are equivalent). However, what is most striking is not that the proofs work out (though the former is a self-styled approach), but that they get to the same place by playing what some logicians would call a "different game." But how different is this game from the other? If at the most superficial syntactical level we are worried about presentation in the game, then we're really just harping at the semiotics of the game, just as I would with impromptu chess pieces.

That concern, however, is a mass distraction from a greater intuition, at least for me, that the game doesn't change, only the look of the game changes, and it's because none of these proofs carry weight without the rules, but none of those rules carry any weight without the presumption of implication.

I see a major problem with the notion of proof as being meaningfully distinct from just an implication. If a proof is a detailed assertion that a collection of premises implies a certain conclusion, and if an implication means that from the antecedent one is able to prove (via manipulations of smaller implications, via manipulations of small proofs) the consequent, then why would we bother treating proof (X |- Y) and implication (X ⊃ Y, or more primitively, ~X v Y) as separate concepts? Why would we convolute a formal language with a distinction of this sort if the function of logic is to take the primitives of thought and language and lay the foundation of incontrovertible inference?

We usually give a hoot about proof theory because we want to talk about the connection between a language's "syntax" and its "semantics?" Yet what makes us think that a semantic method of implication is somehow distinct from some other method of arriving at a conclusion from the premises? This strikes me as a translational problem, where we have two languages that both suffice to explain how propositions assert fact, and if asserted, guarantee the assertions of other propositions. I can take a formal proposition and prove that its premises imply the conclusion by so many different means, but in inquiring how exactly truth-functions tie to inference rules, for instance, I can create implications on the languages, themselves. However, I need not venture into some "new language" to do this. I can use the same language on a different tier with separate predicates, translating the statement for the soundness of a rule as follows:

(∀P)(∀Q)(∀x)(∀y)(Pxy ⊃ Qx), (∀P)(∀R)(∃x)(∃y)(Pxy & Rx) |- (∀Q)(∀R)(∃x)(Qx & Rx) implies
(∀P)(∀Q)(∀x)(∀y)(Pxy ⊃ Qx), (∀P)(∀R)(∃x)(∃y)(Pxy & Rx) |= (∀Q)(∀R)(∃x)(Qx & Rx) as (preliminarily)...

Where "U(XY)" means, "Use of group of moves X on proposition Y."
Where "C(XY)" means, "X is a conclusion from proposition Y."

Start more generally with...

(∃"Group of Moves"){[U("Group of Moves",[(∀P)(∀Q)(∀x)(∀y)(Pxy ⊃ Qx) & (∀P)(∀R)(∃x)(∃y)(Pxy & Rx)]) ⊃ C((∀Q)(∀R)(∃x)(Qx & Rx),U("Group of Moves",[(∀P)(∀Q)(∀x)(∀y)(Pxy ⊃ Qx) & (∀P)(∀R)(∃x)(∃y)(Pxy & Rx)])} ⊃ (∃"Group of Moves"){[U("Group of Moves",[(∀P)(∀Q)(∀x)(∀y)(Pxy ⊃ Qx) & (∀P)(∀R)(∃x)(∃y)(Pxy & Rx)]) ⊃ C((∀Q)(∀R)(∃x)(Qx & Rx),U("Group of Moves",[(∀P)(∀Q)(∀x)(∀y)(Pxy ⊃ Qx) & (∀P)(∀R)(∃x)(∃y)(Pxy & Rx)])}

Now, this is not final, since I have to define the groups of moves as a sequence or unordered group of moves that alters the premises to derive its sought conclusion.

If one performed a mathematical induction from this starting point, starting with the case of there being a proposition 0 operators in length, and then upon assuming a proposition of n operators in length, to show that it implies that it works for n+1 operators in length, that one can derive the longer single proposition above for any two adequate groups of moves.

This brings me back to the area of my concern. Chess pieces are the primitive operations on a chess board like primitive operations are in a formal logic. In relation to all of the locations on a chess board, a knight doesn't reduce into "sub-knights," each with their own independent moves because none of those "sub-knight" moves are legitimate for any piece that exists as a component of a knight. Knights have no components. Put another way, knights can't do less or more per move than their definition as a moving piece in chess allots. A knight is simply the maximum of eight operations from one of sixty-four starting positions -- up-up-left, up-up-right, right-right-down, etc. A primitive operation in logic only allows one move for any given grouping of terms in "logical space" (among delineated sets). Take negation -- inside a group to outside of that group. A knight represents its moves like a primitive logical operator represents its moves.

Moving in chess actually means employing one of the operations to achieve a valid result (and invalid result in chess would be one where say, the move puts the king in check, or moves a piece outside of the allotted spaces on the board, or puts two pieces of the same team on the same square) according to the operation that the piece represents. "Moving" in logic should be seen in the same way, and this sort of moving in logic is more clearly analogous with inference, not mere operation. This is where the attention in a formal language seems to go wrong if it continually introduces characters that it does not define as abbreviations of accepted primitives, representatives of moves in a game, but move in such a way that they can be translated back into a smaller group of more primitive operations.

Hence my distaste with all of the |-, and even |= talk. If we're abbreviating, let's see the fuller statement that it abbreviates. If we're not, and if we expect these notions to stand primitively, then we should have good cause to note differences between those operations and those operations that look much alike them (like commas [,] to conjuncts [&] and proof operations [|-,|=] to next-order sentential claims [e.g. above]). Too many logic books and books on proof theory just take these sorts of symbols for granted, and talk of them floats around rather loosely for such a definitional project.

Why an obsession with the primitives and definitional rigor, and how is this possibly inspired by Laozi and Wittgenstein? Submit the formal question to philosophical critique and general arguments about why rigor in assessment is a virtue, not a pedantry. The Daodejing has a number of chapters that, on the surface, just sound contradictory, but on another level of assessment, really don't say anything more than any formalism and primitive sense of language would already tell us. The two excerpts that impressed me most and triggered a personal awakening on the topic were the following (I have lumped them together, using the Wang Bi as source and borrowing from the Mawangdui scrolls in some areas marked in red.):

“All under Heaven knows beauty. This becomes beauty, as that is ugly already. They all know goodness. This becomes goodness, as that is bad already. Thus, having and lacking live together, difficulty and ease result together, longness and shortness appear together, highness and lowness are filled together, sounds and tones harmonize together, priority and posterity follow together. Partiality means wholeness, crookedness means straightness, emptiness means fullness, and tatters mean newness (天下皆知美。之為美，斯惡已。皆知善。之為善，斯不善已。故有無相生，難易相成，長短相形，高下相盈，音聲相和，前後相隨。曲則全，枉則直，窪則盈，敝則新。)” (2:1 - 2:12, 22:1 - 22:4).

If we are able to isolate all of the ways in which we are even capable of evaluating a system, then what Laozi says here is trivial, giving definitions of a term by identifying it in contrast to its negation. Of course, what he says becomes vastly, supremely more involved than just this, and Laozi is plenty enigmatic and thorough to match, but those sorts of insights require a development of what he says at the barest level.

However, when we evaluate statements for primitives, the most important thing for us to do is to check many of the generally accepted primitives to see if they can be "broken down" or "reduced" any further into even simpler concepts. My findings are that many can be, and actually can be quite efficiently and to an extent that an immensely strong logic, one that is modal, tense, and of infinitely-ordered quantification, can be taken as just a well-formed cluster on a bare grouping of terms and primitive conceptual schemes. However, we are then calling into question every operation in formal logic and mathematics that is treated as primitive, especially those used in "meta-languages," since they appear most prone to introducing their own complexity. More than this follows, though. The primitives are not just the logical operators. Primitive operators are just the most easily targeted and plainly assessed. Even the terms from our ordinary lingo used in explanation or sometimes implementation into our otherwise primitive-mounted formal structure, terms like domain, set, group, proof, implication, predicate, and function all confront this evaluation and reductive effort, since they are so largely used without an explanation of their own, yet permeate so much of what we consider "knowledge" and "proof" of the relations between "semantics" and "syntax" of a logic. Despite contest from some to the contrary, lack of explanation does not imply primitiveness.

Does this remind you of logical atomism? It should! It should also ring of Kant and Schopenhauer's epistemological foundations, but that's just a historical note and point for added reference and personal reminder, not the actual source of inspiration.

At the same time, I'm urging for language-game accounts of proof, where clarity is reached by common efficacy, even at the formal level. I hear that for a Western philosopher, this point may be most controversial, as I'm defying my own muse, acknowledging the difficulties and self-criticism of the Philosophical Investigations, but not accepting one of its major conclusions. I view it not as his error, but his mortality that hindered fuller knowledge of the primitives of the linguistic moods beyond the indicative, and while he honed in on and exhausted the game of the indicative in a matter of years, he only later diagnosed his tunnel vision, laying not another exhaustive treatise, but the groundwork for others to be created. At least I like to think he inspires me in this way. It makes his disagreement with me sound less vehement.

Does Puritanism Preach Hypocrisy?

2009-05-24T03:56:00.000-07:00

Perusing a used bookstore, I briefly read Emma Goldman's Anarchism as I fingered the shelves. While I was not intent on buying the book (seeing that it was in public domain), I made a quick read of one of the chapters that caught my eye, "The Hypocrisy of Puritanism." While I didn't have enough time to make a full assessment of the chapter on the floor, I easily found her work through Project Gutenberg, and decided to evaluate her argument more thoroughly.

THE HYPOCRISY OF PURITANISM

Speaking of Puritanism in relation to American art, Mr. Gutzen Burglum said: "Puritanism has made us self-centered and hypocritical for so long, that sincerity and reverence for what is natural in our impulses have been fairly bred out of us, with the result that there can be neither truth nor individuality in our art."
Mr. Burglum might have added that Puritanism has made life itself impossible. More than art, more than estheticism, life represents beauty in a thousand variations; it is, indeed, a gigantic panorama of eternal change. Puritanism, on the other hand, rests on a fixed and immovable conception of life; it is based on the Calvinistic idea that life is a curse, imposed upon man by the wrath of God. In order to redeem himself man must do constant penance, must repudiate every natural and healthy impulse, and turn his back on joy and beauty.
Puritanism celebrated its reign of terror in England during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, destroying and crushing every manifestation of art and culture. It was the spirit of Puritanism which robbed Shelley of his children, because he would not bow to the dicta of religion. It was the same narrow spirit which alienated Byron from his native land, because that great genius rebelled against the monotony, dullness, and pettiness of his country. It was
Puritanism, too, that forced some of England's freest women into the conventional lie of marriage: Mary Wollstonecraft and, later, George Eliot. And recently Puritanism has demanded another toll--the life of Oscar Wilde. In fact, Puritanism has never ceased to be the most pernicious factor in the domain of John Bull, acting as censor of the artistic expression of his people, and stamping its approval only on the dullness of middle-class respectability.
It is therefore sheer British jingoism which points to America as the country of Puritanic provincialism. It is quite true that our life is stunted by Puritanism, and that the latter is killing what is natural and healthy in our impulses. But it is equally true that it is to England that we are indebted for transplanting this spirit on American soil. It was bequeathed to us by the Pilgrim fathers. Fleeing from persecution and oppression, the Pilgrims of Mayflower fame established in the New World a reign of Puritanic tyranny and crime. The history of New England, and especially of Massachusetts, is full of the horrors that have turned life into gloom, joy into despair, naturalness into disease, honesty and truth into hideous lies and hypocrisies. The ducking-stool and whipping post, as well as numerous other devices of torture, were the favorite English methods for American purification.
Boston, the city of culture, has gone down in the annals of Puritanism as the "Bloody Town." It rivaled Salem, even, in her cruel persecution of unauthorized religious opinions. On the now famous Common a half-naked woman, with a baby in her arms, was publicly whipped for the crime of free speech; and on the same spot Mary Dyer, another Quaker woman, was hanged in 1659. In fact, Boston has been the scene of more than one wanton crime committed by Puritanism. Salem, in the summer of 1692, killed eighteen people for witchcraft. Nor was Massachusetts alone in driving out the devil by fire and brimstone. As Canning justly said: "The Pilgrim fathers infested the New World to redress the balance of the Old." The horrors of that period have found their most supreme expression in the American classic, THE SCARLET LETTER.
Puritanism no longer employs the thumbscrew and lash; but it still has a most pernicious hold on the minds and feelings of the American people. Naught else can explain the power of a Comstock. Like the Torquemadas of ante-bellum days, Anthony Comstock is the autocrat of American morals; he dictates the standards of good and evil, of purity and vice. Like a thief in the night he sneaks into the private lives of the people, into their most intimate relations. The system of espionage established by this man Comstock puts to shame the infamous Third Division of the Russian secret police. Why does the public tolerate such an outrage on its liberties? Simply because Comstock is but the loud expression of the Puritanism bred in the Anglo-Saxon blood, and from whose thraldom even liberals have not succeeded in fully emancipating themselves. The visionless and leaden elements of the old Young Men's and Women's Christian Temperance Unions, Purity Leagues, American Sabbath Unions, and the Prohibition Party, with Anthony Comstock as their patron saint, are the grave diggers of American art and culture.
Europe can at least boast of a bold art and literature which delve deeply into the social and sexual problems of our time, exercising a severe critique of all our shams. As with a surgeon's knife every Puritanic carcass is dissected, and the way thus cleared for man's liberation from the dead weights of the past. But with Puritanism as the constant check upon American life, neither truth nor sincerity is possible. Nothing but gloom and mediocrity to dictate human conduct, curtail natural expression, and stifle our best impulses. Puritanism in this the twentieth century is as much the enemy of freedom and beauty as it was when it landed on Plymouth Rock. It repudiates, as something vile and sinful, our deepest feelings; but being absolutely ignorant as to the real functions of human emotions, Puritanism is itself the creator of the most unspeakable vices.
The entire history of asceticism proves this to be only too true. The Church, as well as Puritanism, has fought the flesh as something evil; it had to be subdued and hidden at all cost. The result of this vicious attitude is only now beginning to be recognized by modern thinkers and educators. They realize that "nakedness has a hygienic value as well as a spiritual significance, far beyond its influences in allaying the natural inquisitiveness of the young or acting as a preventative of morbid emotion. It is an inspiration to adults who have long outgrown any youthful curiosities. The vision of the essential and eternal human form, the nearest thing to us in all the world, with its vigor and its beauty and its grace, is one of the prime tonics of life."* But the spirit of purism has so perverted the human mind that it has lost the power to appreciate the beauty of nudity, forcing us to hide the natural form under the plea of chastity. Yet chastity itself is but an artificial imposition upon nature, expressive of a false shame of the human form. The modern idea of chastity, especially in reference to woman, its greatest victim, is but the sensuous exaggeration of our natural impulses. "Chastity varies with the amount of clothing," and hence Christians and purists forever hasten to cover the "heathen" with tatters, and thus convert him to goodness and chastity.
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* THE PSYCHOLOGY OF SEX. Havelock Ellis.
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Puritanism, with its perversion of the significance and functions of the human body, especially in regard to woman, has condemned her to celibacy, or to the indiscriminate breeding of a diseased race, or to prostitution. The enormity of this crime against humanity is apparent when we consider the results. Absolute sexual continence is imposed upon the unmarried woman, under pain of being considered immoral or fallen, with the result of producing neurasthenia, impotence, depression, and a great variety of nervous complaints involving diminished power of work, limited enjoyment of life, sleeplessness, and preoccupation with sexual desires and imaginings. The arbitrary and pernicious dictum of total continence probably also explains the mental inequality of the sexes. Thus Freud believes that the intellectual inferiority of so many women is due to the inhibition of thought imposed upon them for the purpose of sexual repression. Having thus suppressed the natural sex desires of the unmarried woman, Puritanism, on the other hand, blesses her married sister for incontinent fruitfulness in wedlock. Indeed, not merely blesses her, but forces the woman, oversexed by previous repression, to bear children, irrespective of weakened physical condition or economic inability to rear a large family. Prevention, even by scientifically determined safe methods, is absolutely prohibited; nay, the very mention of the subject is considered criminal.
Thanks to this Puritanic tyranny, the majority of women soon find themselves at the ebb of their physical resources. Ill and worn, they are utterly unable to give their children even elementary care. That, added to economic pressure, forces many women to risk utmost danger rather than continue to bring forth life. The custom of procuring abortions has reached such vast proportions in America as to be almost beyond belief. According to recent investigations along this line, seventeen abortions are committed in every hundred pregnancies. This fearful percentage represents only cases which come to the knowledge of physicians. Considering the secrecy in which this practice is necessarily shrouded, and the consequent professional inefficiency and neglect, Puritanism continuously exacts thousands of victims to its own stupidity and hypocrisy.
Prostitution, although hounded, imprisoned, and chained, is nevertheless the greatest triumph of Puritanism. It is its most cherished child, all hypocritical sanctimoniousness notwithstanding. The prostitute is the fury of our century, sweeping across the "civilized" countries like a hurricane, and leaving a trail of disease and disaster. The only remedy Puritanism offers for this ill-begotten child is greater repression and more merciless persecution. The latest outrage is represented by the Page Law, which imposes upon New York the terrible failure and crime of Europe; namely, registration and segregation of the unfortunate victims of Puritanism. In equally stupid manner purism seeks to check the terrible scourge of its own creation--venereal diseases. Most disheartening it is that this spirit of obtuse narrow-mindedness has poisoned even our so-called liberals, and has blinded them into joining the crusade against the very things born of the hypocrisy of Puritanism--prostitution and its results. In wilful blindness
Puritanism refuses to see that the true method of prevention is the one which makes it clear to all that "venereal diseases are not a mysterious or terrible thing, the penalty of the sin of the flesh, a sort of shameful evil branded by purist malediction, but an ordinary disease which may be treated and cured." By its methods of obscurity, disguise, and concealment, Puritanism has furnished favorable conditions for the growth and spread of these diseases. Its bigotry is again most strikingly demonstrated by the senseless attitude in regard to the great discovery of Prof. Ehrlich, hypocrisy veiling the important cure for syphilis with vague allusions to a remedy for "a certain poison."
The almost limitless capacity of Puritanism for evil is due to its intrenchment behind the State and the law. Pretending to safeguard the people against "immorality," it has impregnated the machinery of government and added to its usurpation of moral guardianship the legal censorship of our views, feelings, and even of our conduct.
Art, literature, the drama, the privacy of the mails, in fact, our most intimate tastes, are at the mercy of this inexorable tyrant. Anthony Comstock, or some other equally ignorant policeman, has been given power to desecrate genius, to soil and mutilate the sublimest creation of nature--the human form. Books dealing with the most vital issues of our lives, and seeking to shed light upon dangerously obscured problems, are legally treated as criminal offenses, and their helpless authors thrown into prison or driven to destruction and death.
Not even in the domain of the Tsar is personal liberty daily outraged to the extent it is in America, the stronghold of the Puritanic eunuchs. Here the only day of recreation left to the masses, Sunday, has been made hideous and utterly impossible. All writers on primitive customs and ancient civilization agree that the Sabbath was a day of festivities, free from care and duties, a day of general rejoicing and merry-making. In every European country this tradition continues to bring some relief from the humdrum and stupidity of our Christian era. Everywhere concert halls, theaters, museums, and gardens are filled with men, women, and children, particularly workers with their families, full of life and joy, forgetful of the ordinary rules and conventions of their every-day existence. It is on that day that the masses demonstrate what life might really mean in a sane society, with work stripped of its profit-making, soul-destroying purpose.
Puritanism has robbed the people even of that one day. Naturally, only the workers are affected: our millionaires have their luxurious homes and elaborate clubs. The poor, however, are condemned to the monotony and dullness of the American Sunday. The sociability and fun of European outdoor life is here exchanged for the gloom of the church, the stuffy, germ-saturated country parlor, or the brutalizing atmosphere of the back-room saloon. In Prohibition States the people lack even the latter, unless they can invest their meager earnings in quantities of adulterated liquor. As to Prohibition, every one knows what a farce it really is. Like all other achievements of Puritanism it, too, has but driven the "devil" deeper into the human system. Nowhere else does one meet so many drunkards as in our Prohibition towns. But so long as one can use scented candy to abate the foul breath of hypocrisy, Puritanism is triumphant. Ostensibly Prohibition is opposed to liquor for reasons of health and economy, but the very spirit of Prohibition being itself abnormal, it succeeds but in creating an abnormal life.
Every stimulus which quickens the imagination and raises the spirits, is as necessary to our life as air. It invigorates the body, and deepens our vision of human fellowship. Without stimuli, in one form or another, creative work is impossible, nor indeed the spirit of kindliness and generosity. The fact that some great geniuses have seen their reflection in the goblet too frequently, does not justify Puritanism in attempting to fetter the whole gamut of human emotions. A Byron and a Poe have stirred humanity deeper than all the Puritans can ever hope to do. The former have given to life meaning andcolor; the latter are turning red blood into water, beauty into ugliness, variety into uniformity and decay. Puritanism, in whatever expression, is a poisonous germ. On the surface everything may look strong and vigorous; yet the poison works its way persistently, until the entire fabric is doomed. With Hippolyte Taine, every truly free spirit has come to realize that "Puritanism is the death of culture, philosophy, humor, and good fellowship; its characteristics are dullness, monotony, and gloom."

Do I care to summarize? Well, sure, but I'll use her quotes to do it.

"It is quite true that our life is stunted by Puritanism, and that the latter is killing what is natural and healthy in our impulses. [...] Puritanism no longer employs the thumbscrew and lash; but it still has a most pernicious hold on the minds and feelings of the American people."

If it wasn't already obvious, she blames the Puritanical mindset for destroying early Twentieth Century Americans' willingness to naturally express themselves through the arts, sexuality, and general merrymaking.

"The Church, as well as Puritanism, has fought the flesh as something evil; it had to be subdued and hidden at all cost. [...] Puritanism, with its perversion of the significance and functions of the human body, especially in regard to woman, has condemned her to celibacy, or to the indiscriminate breeding of a diseased race, or to prostitution."

She likewise blames Puritanism for imposing shame on early Twentieth Century Americans' self-image, particularly with one's own nudity, and then tugging on that indoctrinated sense of shame with one's own form to subjugate women, to impose either total celibacy or breeding even beyond one's financial capacity for care of children.

"Prostitution, although hounded, imprisoned, and chained, is nevertheless the greatest triumph of Puritanism."

Likewise hinted in my above extraction, Puritanism, despite its severe moral objections to it and heavy enforcement against it, actually begets prostitution.

"Considering the secrecy in which this practice is necessarily shrouded, and the consequent professional inefficiency and neglect, Puritanism continuously exacts thousands of victims to its own stupidity and hypocrisy."

Puritanism, despite all of its practical and ethical flaws, is still popular.

"Every stimulus which quickens the imagination and raises the spirits, is as necessary to our life as air. It invigorates the body, and deepens our vision of human fellowship."

Such things as the arts and entertainment are what keep us physically and socially healthy.

Criticism: Hypocrisy, oh, hypocrisy! If only she would write about it with evidence. The term hypocrisy does not appear appear until exactly this chapter (on Project Gutenberg, this is not so hard to verify), and sadly no hardened proof or clear evidence really supports her claim that that Puritanism is so hypocritical and stupid. While it would be hypocritical of a religion to produce the very thing that it actively despises, the accusation that Puritanical subjugation upon women actually inspires women toward prostitution is not clearly established. How is it that Puritans are or were acting against their own prescriptions? For Goldman, this is answered, but not really defended, and she repeats her answer constantly throughout the chapter. All I'm left to read is a hint of one way in which Puritans might have proven hypocritical, but the link from the Puritanical American ethic to the deliberate foundation of one of its own vices is still left to the imagination of the reader.

Emma Goldman doesn't seem to speak well for anarchist philosophy, at least not in any philosophical sense, because she doesn't seem to have a feeling of burden of proof. Affirmative statements, if to be claimed through some form of reason, actually deserve to be reasoned. Emma's talk, however, is just merely assertive. It claims to state facts that appeal to nothing primitive and derive from nothing deduced and nothing clearly relevant induced. It's a shame. Most religious doctrines are so easy to blow over with basic deductive and inductive skill.

I don't want to hoke my poky for or against anarchism. I do believe, though, that there's good reason for iconoclasm, particularly convictions and doctrines that are sustained by mass conviction, but lack basic credentials that justify their practice in light of alternatives. However, being iconoclastic for the sake of being iconoclastic, to me, erects yet another iconophilia to be challenged. But if I accuse Goldman and other anarchists of this flavor of being counterproductive with their methods, does their shoddy work stand as sufficient proof, or is there need for further argument?

More still, the conclusion she attempted now leaves a question unanswered: Does Puritanism preach hypocrisy? What about Calvinism, or Christianity, or religion as a whole?

Rewording the Ship of Theseus Paradox for Even More Philosophical Catastrophe

2009-05-24T03:52:00.000-07:00

The Ship of Theseus problem is incredibly interesting to me, namely because Western proposals to resolve the definition of sameness with other wild and neologistic metaphysical rides are never quite convincing. I don't claim to have a complete answer, but I definitely wouldn't throw a hat to whether things "endure" or "perdure," or whether things "qualitatively" match while they "temporally," "numerically," and "positionally" differ. Ugh! More words when there shouldn't be, I fear!

The problem surely has made a mess of things for metaphysicians, but I want to show that this problem with identity can permeate some major subjects of philosophical interest, and then use those examples to expose some regularly ignored underpinnings that make the Ship of Theseus problem not so problematic when philosophers stick to their guns.

Language's Ship of Theseus:

Here are two numbers:

a.) 2

b.) 2

Are these two numbers identical? "Yes," so many would say. Yet when you say that, how do you know that? "Well, because you wrote the same numeral in both places," they might respond, to which I have only to ask, "Are you sure?" Are you sure that I wrote the same numeral in both places?

Let's muddy the waters a bit (and let's use some Chinese because lots of Americans think that's fancy), shall we?

Here are some Chinese characters:

a.) 已

b.) 己

c.) 午

d.) 牛

e.) 囗

f.) 口

Are any two of these terms identical? "Yes," one may say. Really? But then why are 已 and 己 playing completely different roles in the language? Don't I mean "already" when I use 已 as I do in say, "已經," versus when I use 己 to mean "oneself" as it is in instances of, "自己?" Or "mouth" (口) versus "enclosure" (囗)? Or "noontime" (午) versus "cow" (牛). Now look a bit more closely at the characters. As you can see, such subtleties are actually present, even in the characters, themselves, that differentiate the terms. If you enlarged your screens, you may already notice a little line sticking out of the top of 牛 or that 囗 is a good bit larger than 口.

Now have a look at those numbers again. Are you sure that they are the same symbol? Are you sure there's not one just a few pixels lacking or an atom more crooked? What about the time when I wrote them? What about their juxtaposition to certain letters of the alphabet (as if I'm being any more lenient on those!)? That's the sort of muddiness I'm looking for!

Religion's Ship of Theseus:

Is a religion still the same religion if all of its doctrines are altered?

A religion in common practice adapts to fit the needs and demands of its modern society, and much of the traditional ethos, cosmology, and most hilariously, eschatology of a certain religion at the time of its inception dies out or becomes "reinterpreted" to fit somewhat more naturally with notions common to popular knowledge of the sciences, or in secular cases, ideas of goodness and lawfulness. We may appeal to some sense of "essential features" of a religion to handle the above question, but if we describe a religion in this way, what determined an "essential feature" from merely "a feature of a religion that, unlike others in its history, has remained constant?"

Perhaps the religion's "essential feature" is one that, if granted, would disavow the entirety of everything that a certain religion says. Let's say that I want to be the first religious follower to deny the existence of its founder. I want to be a Saivite sans Siva. This sounds like something that I couldn't do in such a straightforward manner, but nothing bars it from being impossible. It's feasible that, if so many alterations become so commonplace that they achieve some certain level of orthodoxy, that I would be plainly able to gradually work around some of the presently "essential" conceptions, give or take a few traditionalists and new converts, into the point where even initially fundamental aspects of a religion, such as its claim to supernatural foundation, and even the existence of a deity of a certain form, can be replaced piece by piece. It's quite common in religious history and even contemporary religious debates, as complaints about "liberalization" of a religion calm down and a new border of "moral and spiritual purity" is born from it, and much of these rattlings deal with problems of interpretation of moral standards and textual interpretations of the beginning or predicted end of the world.

Neurology's and Ethics's Ship of Theseus:

What's an example without a mad scientist?

A mad scientist decides that he doesn't want to remember anything about his life anymore because it causes too much suffering. Well, let's say he devises a contraption that enables him to replace his memories with those of some celebrity, which, we'll say, he downloaded illegally from the internet, and one by one the mad scientist swaps his memories until he he wakes up to believe he's...Michael Douglas (Why not, right?). When the police come to arrest the delusional mad scientist turned Michael Douglas for internet piracy, did they arrest the right person?

We should put it this way. There's no mad scientist left in any neurological sense. All of what would have made the agented portions of the mad scientist flew right out the door, since there is no such motivated individual any longer. All that's left is this Michael Douglas mind clone in a mad scientist's remaining anatomy. Here, the Michael Douglas clone is the same person as the mad scientist. If that's so, then why would we still believe that the Ship of Theseus is the same when we replace all of its planks? However, if he's not the same person, then the mad scientist's technology allows for total chaos, since we could pillage and kill, and then just download ourselves into thinking we're Kurt Russell, Vivian Vance, etc., etc.? Yet who do we punish for use of such a contraption to avoid capture?

And for the pièce de résistance, let's imagine instead that this becomes an underground freeware service where anyone can download his whole memory from any point in time prior to his committing an act, and so with regularity can download himself twenty minutes prior to committing any crime. Is there a criminal still chargeable with the crime?

This is just a strange rendition of the common knowledge that suicide, when successful, cannot be punished by civil law, but in its final end, it reworks such that no one really dies, but instead gets a nice little makeover such that everything is scrapped and reloaded to fresh legal innocence.

If an agent makes an utter transformation, is he still the same agent?

Putnam's Ship of Theseus:

If I give a man Powerade when he asks for Gatorade, but he doesn't taste the difference or become affected by it in any way that draws his attention, did I still satisfy that man's request?

Criticisms:

I'm prone to criticize conventional senses of "sameness" for the most part, but my position is more extreme than conventional users of language will really want to have it. It seems that, if certain understandings are made about how "sameness" is determined, then the the first, second, and fourth problems are completely overturned, as is the original Ship of Theseus.

Claim 1: Identity is a convention of definition, and as such, all of the conditions that are both sufficient and necessary for however a term is being defined at a given time is all that needs to be of concern. Once this is clarified, if such a thing can still conceivably exist, then it has all of the components needed for determination adequate reference upon utterance.

Is the Ship of Theseus still the same ship? Well, if you define a ship solely as all of the planks that made the ship when it was so named, then no; and if you wish to define the ship to include some leeway where new planks get "grandfathered in" to become appropriately matching with the ship over time, then yes.

Are the two instances of writing the symbols "2" and "2" indicating a number which is given as equivalent by definition? Well, our symbols have leeway, too. As long as the "2" fits certain angular and proportional specifications within some certain range, then it's fine. Sometimes this regulation is stricter than others, and sometimes may be impossible to tell on writing alone when symbols are too vague. Occasionally, we'll want to make sure that someone who handwrites "lambs" is on the topic of livestock and not poetry.

Am I still an adherent if I totally change the religion? It should be clearer now that I already hinted at the answer. Traditionalists will choose something that states that the past assertions of the text are the correct ones, while non-traditionalists will be open to new insights and support them as their own orthodoxy. However, whether one is "the real religion" or not is a matter of correspondence in definition, and where they insist in the truth of their claims, in the correspondence of what they say with empirical claims.

In ordinary conversation about objects, we usually acquire enough from context to supply satisfactory referents for less strict criteria for adequate reference. I give Powerade to people who don't know the difference between Gatorade and Powerade and don't need to have either one specifically, and they're none the wiser and far from complaint. It's because I made some appropriate assumptions of how they're defining the term in a conversation.

That mad scientist one is a toughy, but what else would I be doing if I wasn't assigning myself busywork?

Claim 2: Pontificating on a term does nothing to clarify its definition.

Have you ever heard people on different ends of the religious or political side fight over something not being "the true Word," or "patriotic," or what have you? Well, one thing you rarely hear is these debaters defining their terms. It's almost sickening. If there's not a common ground of definition, then all of these fights reduce to saying, "Hey, he's supplanting notions that don't fit my definition for some term!" Well, what is the definition for such-and-such a term, and what would motivate anyone else to accept that definition over some other one in which the other's notion fits with it? I guess they just expect people to compensate the former for themselves and take the latter by fiat. It doesn't strike me as very Socratic, nor very pragmatic. It sounds rather the opposite, more Sophistic and rhetorical than anything else. Watch 24-hour news channels and religious broadcasting for examples and cheap, laughable entertainment.

What about philosophers, though? Well, many I've met have been hard at work on exactly this terrain, looking quite Socratically and pragmatically at issues that many others would ignore. At the same time, though, I note a lot of philosophers conceiving other undefined words and then applying them in their explanations, which reads like counterproductive activity that, upon clarifying definitions for those terms originally intended to differentiate said investigated items of discussion, prompts some trimming, and when compromised, some weeding.

Outline against Searle's Chinese Room Argument

2009-05-24T03:45:00.000-07:00

I had this argument that I scribbled on a sheet of paper when I engaged myself with "Minds, Brains, and Programs" by John Searle. Though initially just an impression regarding the overall stance of the paper, it eventually popped into a rough counterargument of its own. I've supplemented full sentences where my original notes just have keywords and phrases. I haven't written this essay, and I don't care if someone else does. My guess is that someone else already came up with an argument similar to my own, so this independent discovery doesn't amount to much in terms of philosophical contribution.

"On the Abuse of Intelligence"

Problem: Analogous Chinese Room Argument -- Am I an intelligent speaker, or just a "symbol monger?"

"Symbol mongering" will refer to acts of following preprogrammed rules to translate one stimulus into another -- languages to languages, sensations to sentences, etc.

If I'm an intelligent speaker on the basis of translation, alone, then this "intelligence" rules out skills of creativity and innovation, which are generally used as markers for intelligence as it is commonly employed. (e.g. "He was smart to solve the puzzle in so few moves.")

Well, perhaps I'm just a symbol monger. But what of machines that advance to match our human behaviors, even those of innovation and creativity (among others)? It would not be impossible for machines to acquire human-like precision in detection of their surroundings and make proper categorical (which are implicitly terminological) distinctions on the basis of those "perceptions" (if we're willing to grant this capacity of robots. If not make another word for it), and even to apply that new data to provide additional programming for its own actions.

If these machines are comparably successful to humans in their mongering, they're not "intelligent?"

Well, what sort of criteria are there for intelligence?

Anatomical? -- If this was the case, then denials of intelligence of machines is just anthropic bias. If an eyeball and a sophisticated device work with comparable efficacy in their intended functions (i.e. seeing), then it sounds like we're just saying, "That robot doesn't count as smart. He wasn't a product of human procreation!" to which any A.I. scientist would rebuke, "So what? That's not what we do, anyway. This isn't bioengineering."

Metaphysical? -- Are we still making "mind" a special case for bio-organisms? Well, not anatomically, so what about talk of mind as something that the brain can't be, which a synthetic device couldn't mimic? But this leaves that horrible problem of definition at hand. If we're just going to define a mind as some non-physical notion, then what of the notion of non-physicality. Metaphysicians don't strike me as very clear on this, but seem more like they're scratching the surface of a hollow fruit.

Behavioral criteria? -- Then what discriminates symbol mongering from intelligence?

Criticism: Searle's talk misuses the term intelligence. Let's take his intuitions. I don't know Russian, and if given a manual for translation from Russian to English, assuming I instantly forgot the rules once I used them, I still wouldn't know Russian. But, if at any point, I memorize any of the rules of translation, I instantly know the other language, just like I know other languages. But how the heck do I determine that? Well, in practice, mainly. I go to Russian speakers, utter a constative sentence (maybe ostending a bit to compensate for lack of fluency), and if they react in a way that indicates understanding, then continue on a conversation assuming the presence of that knowledge, then it seems fair to say that we both know the meaning of the utterance. Performatives work in a very similar way, and the behavioral criteria to establish understanding may need clarifying in some instances, but such things are determinable from behavior.

Let me share some of my intuitions.

Let me give you four sentences in four different languages:

Is a cat is on the mat?
¿Está un gato sobre la estera?
一隻貓在墊子上嗎?
111000101010000101001001010111.........?

Are these sentences different from each other? Clearly, yes! Look at all of the differences in squiggles, particularly on that third one! Sheesh! Now ask an English speaker, Spanish speaker, Chinese speaker, and preprogrammed, sentient, symbol-mongering robot these sentences while in plain view of a cat on a mat (and yeah, make sure they're honest). What responses will we get? "One is."/"Está."/"在啊."/"01..." and statements of the sort.

A zinger: How do you (the reader) know that I know the four languages above, and didn't just memorize four sentences in four different languages? It can't be because I might be able to produce more sentences in these languages, because that simply ushers the question to whether I knew n sentences or just memorized the sounds without knowing what they mean at all. Is it because I was able to associate that they carried analogous reference to some event? If that's the issue, then what makes accuracy in translation so different from intelligence with languages? It couldn't be innovation of original sentences, since I could just as well learn syntax markers and proper word orders for these languages, and even make responses on them from others' statements that simply applied common traits of parts of speech.

And what is Searle to say -- that I can translate languages, but don't really know them, myself? What else is a language besides an ability to translate some bit of data from one domain into another, a crafty, collective memorization wherein "use of language" means "performing an action that enables something else to associate that given action with their respective stimuli?"

Conclusion: Intelligence only makes sense when contrasted with stupidity, but these have to do with behavioral efficacy, and since semantics appears adequately interpretable as just another programmed translation from sensational recording to symbolic representation, I'm left with severe doubts over the presence of "consciousness" beyond the presence of perceptiveness, memory, and self-interested motivation.

Not pristine, I know, but I've found this a quite workable framework for full and clear objection to Searle's Chinese Room Argument. My questions now are whether someone else already had these objections, and whether there are good objections to my objections, to that person's objections, to that person's objections, et cetera.

Take care...