logic and ontology

This article helps to summarize a number of the positions debated last night.
Logic and Ontology
Some of the highlights:

We might wonder why we should think that quantifiers are of great importance for making ontological commitments explicit. After all, if I accept the apparently trivial mathematical fact that there is a number between 6 and 8, does this already commit me to an answer to the ontological question whether there are numbers out there, as part of reality? The above strategy tries to make explicit that and why it in fact does commit me to such an answer. This is so since natural language quantifiers are fully captured by their formal analogues in canonical notation, and the latter make ontological commitments obvious because of their semantics. Such formal quantifiers are given what is called an ‘objectual semantics’. This is to say that a particular quantified statement ‘∃xFx’ is true just in case there is an object in the domain of quantification that, when assigned as the value of the variable ‘x’, satisfies the open formula ‘Fx’. This makes obvious that the truth of a quantified statement is ontologically relevant, and in fact ideally suited to make ontological commitment explicit, since we need entities to assign as the values of the variables. Thus (L1) is tied to (O1). The philosopher most closely associated with this way of determining ontological commitment, and with the meta-ontological view on which it is based, is Quine, in particular his (Quine 1948).

Logically valid inferences are those that are guaranteed to be valid by their form. And above we spelled this out as follows: an inference is valid by its form if as long as we fix the meaning of certain special expressions, the logical constants, we can ignore the meaning of the other expressions in the statements involved in the inference, and we are always guaranteed the the inference is valid, no matter what the meaning of the other expressions is, as long as the whole is meaningful. A logical truth can be understood as a statement whose truth is guaranteed as long as the meanings of the logical constants are fixed, no matter what the meaning of the other expressions is. Alternatively, a logical truth is one that is a logical consequence from no assumptions, i.e. an empty set of premises.

Whatever one says about the possibility of proving the existence of an object purely with conceptual truths, many philosophers have maintained that at least logic has to be neutral about what there is. One of the reasons for this insistence is the idea that logic is topic neutral, or purely general. The logical truths are the ones that hold no matter what the representations are about, and thus they hold in any domain. In particular, they hold in an empty domain, one where there is nothing at all. And if that is true then logical truths can't imply that anything exists. But that argument might be turned around by a believer in logical objects, objects whose existence is implied by logic alone. If it is granted that logical truths have to hold in any domain, then any domain has to contain the logical objects. Thus for a believer in logical objects there can be no empty domain.

What the philosophers aim to ask, according to Carnap, is not a question internal to the framework, but external to it. They aim to ask whether the framework correctly corresponds to reality, whether or not there really are numbers. However, the words used in the question ‘Are there numbers?’ only have meaning within the framework of talk about numbers, and thus if they are meaningful at all they form an internal question, with a trivial answer. The external questions that the metaphysician tries to ask are meaningless. Ontology, the philosophical discipline that tries to answer hard questions about what there really is is based on a mistake. The question it tries to answer are meaningless questions, and this enterprise should be abandoned. The words ‘Are there numbers?’ thus can be used in two ways: as an internal question, in which case the answer is trivially ‘yes’, but this has nothing to do with metaphysics or ontology, or as an external question, which is the one the philosophers are trying to ask, but which is meaningless.

If there is an explanation of this similarity [the similarity between the subject-predicate structure of though, and the object-property structure of reality] to be given it seems it could go in one of two ways: either the structure of thought explains the structure of reality, or the other way round.

Sim City and "sick ambitions"

The Totalitarian Buddhist Who Beat Sim City

But it wouldn’t be the same as doing it in the game, for the reason that I wanted to magnify the unbelievably sick ambitions of egotistical political dictators, ruling elites and downright insane architects, urban planners and social engineers.

I took an American Anthropology course when i was an undergraduate at Towson, and one of our assignments was to construct a city in SimCity 2000. I'd been playing these games for years, so it wasn't even a challenge. But what you quickly learn is how a game can walk the line between very realistic and totally arbitrary. And, perhaps most interestingly, how we respond (as moral agents) to these distinctions.

python gtk and Glade

I spent a few hours yesterday figuring out this problem.

Given a simple glade3 (gtk.Builder) window, setting the on_window1_destroy signal to gtk.quit didn't seem to work. The window itself would disappear, but the process would continue to run in the background.

After fiddling with it, I finally identified the problem.  It turns out that you have to set on_window1_destroy in the .glade file as well.  The tutorials were unclear, but I guess that kind of makes sense.  I had assumed that the "on_OBJECT_command" format was being parsed so as to hook directly to the OBJECT.  That is, it knew which object to attach the signal to by parsing the signal name. But, instead, you need to set the signal in the glade file so that it is attached to the GtkWindow.

Seems like it will be a pain to set the signals for every object in the glade file.  Hopefully there is an easier way and I'm just missing it.

Fodor and Kitcher

The Boston Review of Books pretty much highlights how I see the debate between Fodor and Kitcher.
Fodor:

Darwin needs an account of selection-for that distinguishes phenotypic traits that cause fitness from traits that are merely correlated with traits that cause fitness.

Fodor and Piattelli-Palmarini are imposing a requirement on natural selection that no biologist or philosopher whom we know of has ever suggested.

apprehension, association, affinity

Part of Kant's transcendental deduction (A119-23) takes us from the empiricist starting point to the position of transcendental idealism. Kant argues from the fact of perceptions as semantic grounds to the necessity of our unifying contribution to those perceptions.

Three steps:

I could not apprehend perceptions, if there were not contiguity between them. Otherwise perceptions would be encountered dispersed and isolated in my mind.
I could not associate perceptions, if there were not a subjective ground for recalling them. Otherwise I would not be able to bring perceptions to an image, or else representations would reproduce each other without distinction.
I could not determine those perceptions as a thing unless they are also associable; I could only be conscious of those perceptions as determinable if they belong to one consciousness. But one consciousness is only possible through the unity of apperception. Therefore, there must be an affinity to perceptions, which provides an objective ground of association.

By showing that there is an object affinity of perceptions, grounded on the unity of apperception, Kant has shown that, while perceptions are still our epistemic starting point, we could make no progress in our cognition unless we contributed objective rules of unity to all of our conscious sensory experience.

In the background, Kant is also setting up a modal question about perception. Perceptions are the ground for any cognitive claim to actuality. A concept is more than merely possible when its object is grounded in perception. The givenness of perception provides independent epistemic grounds to say that the concept is meaningful.

But Hume presented a dilemma about perceptions. All of our cognition is grounded in perception. If I have perceived all of the shades of blue except one, can the concept of that missing perception be considered cognition? Can we talk about possible perceptions in a meaningful way?

The above argument suggests that we can. Perceptions, as conscious appearances, are also subject to the transcendental unity of apperception, and thus, the pure functions of understanding. There are no simple perceptions, thus perceptions can be taken apart and recombined according to the rules laid out by the principles of pure understanding. We can thus ground possible perceptions through the same transcendental principles that would ground the real possibility of an empirical object.

Creative Slack

Jeffrey gets into the psychology of the banal political commentary in this year's parades.

The very act of joining a club is, after all, a calculated attempt to improve or cement one's status and fortune through contrived interaction with a group of similarly desperate social climbers

I never expect much from Krewe D'Etat. And that allows me to be pleasantly surprised. I thought Muses was a bit humdrum this year as well. Although I ended the night in an overall bad mood, after seeing my beloved Dervish turned into a lesbian version of The Corner Pocket.

test

test

Political Speech and the First Amendment

Last night, as I stumbled home from the frigid Saint's parade, I thought about the problematic manner in which Progressive frame the recent Citizen's United decision. I keep coming across arguments against the personhood of corporations - and they drive me insane. First, it completely misunderstands the issue. The question is whether we can use our property as speech. And that seems undeniable. But it has nothing to do with treating corporations like persons. Second, misunderstanding the problem makes progressives look untrustworthy. No one thinks corporations are persons. And when the public realizes that this is not what is going on, they'll see progressives as sophists, constructing arguments out of the air.

So it is imperative that progressives understand the problem with the proper framework. That way we can provide proper, clear responses to civil libertarians without talking past each other. After all, civil libertarians and progressives usually agree. And I don't hold progressives as the only ones to blame. Although progressive haven't framed their issue well, it appears that civil libertarians are often relying on a superficial understanding of the First Amendment.

Precedence is usually ignored by the civil libertarian, since they often take the First Amendment to be straightforward. The problem is that it is not straight forward. Even if we grant you a right to use your property for political speech, the question of what constitutes your property is not obvious. The example I thought of last night was religion. Citizens might incorporate (or not) their religious institution; the religious institution is the property of the congregation. Yet we have clear laws that restrict the presence of political speech in religious worship. While they can take a stand on social issues, they cannot endorse candidates. Otherwise, and this is the key point, they risk their religious tax exemption.

While the church is the property of its congregation, it also holds a special contractual relationship with the government. The government, then, has a stake in the church. Not such that it owns the church, but insofar as it grants them special rights - rights which allow the churches to flourish where they might otherwise fall under the weight of business taxes. Churches don't have to operate like a business because the congregation doesn't share the full burdens of ownership. Similarly for corporations.

Progressive needs to be following the arguments and examples set out by constitutional lawyers such as Lawrence Lessig. For example, in this article Lessig draws together a number of important points by looking at cases in supreme court precedence. His argument takes the form I'd been thinking through, looking at similar cases were we allow the government to restrict speech acts, and then comparing those cases with corporate speech.

First, look at an institution where we have allowed the government to restrict speech acts:

Yet in 1991, in an opinion by Chief Justice Robert's former boss, Chief Justice Rehnquist, in the case of Rust v. Sullivan, the Court found no First Amendment problem at all with the government's restriction on doctors' speech. Indeed, it wasn't even a difficult case according to the Court ("no question but that the statutory prohibition contained in § 1008 is constitutional.")

Why? How? Well the doctors at issue worked in family planning clinics that had received at least some of their funds from the government. And in exchange for that benefit, the government was free to gag the doctors however it wished.

Then compare it to the corporation:

But of course, corporations do receive a gift from the government. The government limits the legal liability of investors in that corporation in exchange for their risking their capital to spur innovation and growth. That benefit is significant.

So it seems that the progressive argument against Citizen's United is getting strong. Greenwald, my favorite civil libertarian, notes Lessig's argument and will hopefully write a response soon.

To me, Lessig's argument seems strong. While it is filled out with legal facts, the argument itself is one that I, a layperson, could arrive at on my own. It gets to the heart of the matter without being rhetorically complex. And, most importantly, it doesn't rely on the false argument about the personhood of corporations.

Shorter Lessig:
The government gives fiscal rights to corporations, so it has a stake in their political speech.

Hell froze over

I had no idea I was in agreement with Jay Batt.

"I'm not so thrilled about taking people's land and letting LSU just do what they want," Batt said. "I'm more in favor of rebuilding Charity Hospital ... and not tearing down or deconstructing city properties."

First I had my heart broken. Now this. What the fuck did I do wrong this morning? Answer: get out of bed.

McCain Feingold

Supreme Court rolls back campaign spending limits
Wow.

Safety is not an American value

Greenwald puts it precisely.

The Constitution is grounded in the premise that there are other values and priorities more important than mere Safety. Even though they knew that doing so would help murderers and other dangerous and vile criminals evade capture, the Framers banned the Government from searching homes without probable cause, prohibited compelled self-incrimination, double jeopardy and convictions based on hearsay, and outlawed cruel and unusual punishment. That's because certain values -- privacy, due process, limiting the potential for abuse of government power -- were more important than mere survival and safety.