Towards a solution to the "God as author of evil" problem for the Thomistic model of meticulous providence

On the Thomistic primary/secondary causation model of meticulous divine providence, when we act wrongly, God fully determines the positive aspects of the action with primary causation, and we in parallel cause the action with secondary causation.

Like many people, I worry that this makes God the author of sin in an objectionable way.

Alice and Bob are studying together for a calculus exam that will be graded on a curve. In order that she may do terribly on the exam, and thus that he might do better, and hence be more likely to get into his dream PhD program in ethics, Bob lies to Alice, who has missed three weeks of class, that the derivative of the logarithm is the exponential.

What does God cause in Bob’s action on the Thomistic model? It seems that all of the following are positive aspects:

1. The physical movements in Bob’s mouth, throat, and lungs.

2. The sounds in the air.

So far we don’t have a serious theological problem. For (1) and (2) are not intrinsically bad, since Bob could virtuously utter the same sounds while playacting on stage. But let’s add some more aspects:

3. Bob’s intention that the speech constitute an assertion of the proposition that the derivative of the logarithm is the exponential.

4. Bob’s intention that the asserted proposition be a falsehood that Alice comes to believe and that leads to her doing terribly on the exam.

Perhaps one can argue that falsity a negative thing—a lack of conformity with reality. However, intending falsity seems to be a positive thing, a positive (but wicked) act of the will. Thus it seems that (3) and (4) are positive things. But once we put together all of (1)–(4), or even just (3) and (4), then it’s hard to deny that what we have is something wicked, and so if God is intending all of (1)–(4), it’s hard to avoid the idea that this makes God responsible for the sin in a highly problematic way.

There may be a way out, however. In both written and spoken language, meaning is normally not constituted just by the positive aspects of reality but also by negative ones. In spoken language, we can think of the positive aspects as the peaks of the soundwaves (considered as pressure waves in the air). But if you remove the troughs from the soundwaves, you lose the communication. In print, on the other hand, the meaning depends not just on the ink that’s there, but on the ink that’s not there. A page wholly covered with ink means nothing. We only have meaningful letters because the inked regions are surrounded by non-inked regions.

It could well turn out that the language of the mind in discursively thinking beings like us is like that as well, so that a thought or intention is constituted not only by ontologically positive but also by ontologically negative aspects. Now you could be responsible for the ink within the print inscription

5. The derivative of the logarithm is the exponential

without being responsible for the inscription. For instance, you and a friend might have had a plan to draw a black rectangle and you divided up the labor as follows: you inked the region of rectangle covered by the letters of “The derivative of the logarithm is the exponential” and then your friend would ink the rest of the containing rectangle—i.e., everything outside the letters. But your friend didn’t do the job. Similarly, then, if intentions are constituted by both positive and negative features, God could intend the positive features of an intention without being responsible for the intention as such.

This does place constraints on the language of the mind, i.e., on the actual mental accidents that constitutes our thoughts, and specifically our intentions. Note, though, that we don’t need that all intentions have a negative constituent. Only intentions to produce negative things, like falsehood, need to have a negative constituent for us to avert the problem of God willing intentional sin. We could imagine a written language where positive phrases are written in two colors of ink, one for the letters and the other for the surrounding rectangle, and their negations are written by omitting the ink for the letters. In such a language, statements involving positive phrases are purely positive, while those involving negative phrases are partly negative.

I am not very happy with this solution. I still worry that being responsible for the ink in (5) makes one responsible for (5) when one chooses not to have the rest of the rectangle filled in.

Semantics of syntactically incorrect language

As anyone who has talked with a language-learner knows, syntactically incorrect sentences often succeed in expressing a proposition. This is true even in the case of formal languages.

Formal semantics, say of the Tarski sort, has difficulties with syntactically incorrect sentences. One approach to saving the formal semantics is as follows: Given a syntactically incorrect sentence, we find a contextually appropriate syntactically correct sentence in the vicinity (and what counts as vicinity depends on the pattern of errors made by the language user), and apply the formal semantics to that. For instance, if someone says “The sky are blue”, we replace it with “The sky is blue” in typical contexts and “The skies are blue” in some atypical contexts (e.g., discussion of multiple planets), and then apply formal semantics to that.

Sometimes this is what we actually do when communicating with someone who makes grammatical errors. But typically we don’t bother to translate to a correct sentence: we can just tell what is meant. In fact, in some cases, we might not even ourselves know how to translate to a correct sentence, because the proposition being expressed is such that it is very difficult even for a native speaker to get the grammar right.

There can even be cases where there is no grammatically correct sentence that expresses the exact idea. For instance, English has a simple present and a present continuous, while many other languages have just one present tense. In those languages, we sometimes cannot produce an exact grammatically correct translation of an English sentence. One can use some explicit markers to compensate for the lack of, say, a present continuous, but the semantic value of a sentence using these markers is unlikely to correspond exactly to the meaning of the present continuous (the markers may have a more determinate semantics than the present continuous). But we can imagine a speaker of such a language who imitates the English present continuous by a literal word-by-word translation of “I am” followed by the other language’s closest equivalent to a gerund, even when such translation is grammatically incorrect. In such a case, assuming the listener knows English, the meaning may be grasped, but nobody is capable of expressing the exact meaning in a syntactically correct way. (One might object that one can just express the meaning in English. But that need not be true. The verb in question may be one that does not have a precise equivalent in English.)

Thus we cannot account for the semantics of syntactically incorrect sentences by applying semantics to a syntactically corrected version. We need a semantics that works directly for syntactically incorrect sentences. This suggests that formal semantics are necessarily mere approximate models.

Similar issues, of course, arise with poetry.

Competent language use without knowledge

I can competently use a word without knowing what the word means. Just imagine some Gettier case, such as that my English teacher tried to teach me a falsehood about what “lynx” means, but due to themselves misremembering what the word means, they taught me the correct meaning. Justified true belief is clearly enough for competent use.

But if I then use “lynx”, even though I don’t know what the word means, I do know what I mean by it. Could one manufacture a case where I competently use a word but don’t even know what I mean by it?

Maybe. Suppose I am a student and a philosopher professor convinces me that I am so confused that don’t know what I mean when I use the word “supervenience” in a paper. I stop using the word. But then someone comments on an old online post of mine from the same period as the paper, in which post I used “supervenience”. The commenter praises how insightfully I have grasped the essence of the concept. This someone uses a false name, that of an eminent philosopher. I come to believe on the supposed authority of this person that I meant by “supervenience” what I in fact did mean by it, and I resume using it. But the authority is false. It seems that now I am using the word without knowing what I mean by it. And I could be entirely competent.

The unthinkable and the ineffable

Suppose that Alice right now thinks about some fact F and no other fact. Then we can stipulate that “Xyzzies” is a sentence whose content is that very fact which Alice is thinking. Thus:

1. If a linguistically identifiable person can think about some fact F to the exclusion of other facts at a linguistically identifiable time, then F can be expressed in a language.

It does not, however, follow that every fact can be expressed in a language. For it’s epistemically possible that there is a fact F such that a person can only think about F if the person is simultaneously thinking about G and H as well, and there may be no way for us to distinguish F from G and H in such a way as to stipulate a term for it.

This may seem like a pretty remote possibility, but I think it’s pretty plausible. There could be some fact F that only God can think. But presumably any fact has infinitely many logical consequences. But since God is inerrant and necessarily thinks all facts, necessarily if God thinks F, he thinks all the infinitely many logical consequences of F as well. And it could well be that we have no way of distinguishing F from some of its logical consequences in such a way that we could delineate F.

So it is possible to accept (1) while holding that some thinkable facts are ineffable.

However, plausibly any fact thinkable by a human can be thought by the human in a specifiably delineated way (the primary fact thought about at t₁, etc.). Thus our thought cannot exceed the possibilities of our language, since for anything we can think we could stipulate that “Xyzzies” means that. (Though, of course, our thought can (and sometimes does) exceed the actualities of our language.) Thus:

2. The humanly ineffable is humanly unthinkable.

Nonetheless, we might make a distinction between two ways of extending human language. A weak extension is one that can be introduced solely in terms of current human language. Stipulations in mathematics are like that: we explain what “continuous” is using prior vocabulary like “limit”. A strong extension is one that requires something extralinguistic, such as ostension to a non-linguistic reality.

3. There are things that are humanly thinkable that are only expressible using a strong extension of human language.

Truthteller's relative

The truthteller paradox is focused on the sentence:

1. This sentence is true.

There is no contradiction in taking (1) to be true, but neither is there a contradiction in taking (1) to be false. So where is the paradox? Well, one way to see the paradox is to note that there is no more reason to take (1) to be true than to be false or vice versa. Maybe there is a violation of the Principle of Sufficient Reason.

For technical reasons, I will take “This sentence” in sentences like (1) to be an abbreviation for a complex definite syntactic description that has the property that the only sentence that can satisfy the description is (1) is itself. (We can get such a syntactic description using the diagonal lemma, or just a bit of cleverness.)

But the fact that we don’t have a good reason to assign a specific truth value to (1) isn’t all there is to the paradox.

For consider this relative of the truthteller:

2. This sentence is true or 2+2=4.

There is no difficulty in assigning a truth value to (2) if it has one: it’s got to be true because 2+2=4. But nonetheless, (2) is not meaningful. When we try to unpack its meaning, that meaning keeps on fleeing. What does (2) say? Not just that 2+2=4. There is that first disjunct in it after all. That first disjunct depends for its truth value on (2) itself, in a viciously circular way.

But after all shouldn’t we just say that (2) is true? I don’t think so. Here is one reason to be suspicious of the truth of (2). If (2) is true, so is:

3. This sentence is true or there are stars.

But it seems that if (3) is meaningful, then it should should have a truth value in every possible world. But that would include the possible world where there are no stars. However, in that world, the sentence (3) functions like the truthteller sentence (1), to which we cannot assign a truth value. Thus (3) does not
have a sensible truth value assignment in worlds where there are no stars. But it is not the sort of sentence whose meaningfulness should vary between possible worlds. (It is important for this argument that the description that “This sentence” is an abbreviation for is syntactic, so that its referent should not vary between worlds.)

It might be tempting to take (2) to be basically an infinite disjunction of instances of “2+2=4”. But that’s not right. For by that token (3) would be basically an infinite disjunction of “there are stars”. But then (3) would be false in worlds where there are no stars, and that’s not clear.

If I am right, the fact that (1) wouldn’t have a preferred truth value is a symptom rather than the disease itself. For (2) would have a preferred truth value, but we have seen that it is not meaningful. This pushes me to think that the problem with (1) is the same as with (2) and (3): the attempt to bootstrap meaning in an infinite regress.

I don’t know how to make all this precise. I am just stating intuitions.

Physicalism and "pain"

Assuming physicalism, plausibly there are a number of fairly natural physical properties that occur when and only when I am having a phenomenal experience of pain, all of which stand in the same causal relations to other relevant properties of me. For instance:

1. having a brain in neural state N

2. having a human brain in neural state N

3. having a primate brain in neural state N

4. having a mammalian brain in neural state N

5. having a brain in functional state F

6. having a human brain in functional state F

7. having a primate brain in functional state F

8. having a mammalian brain in functional state F

9. having a central control system in functional state F.

Suppose that one of these is in fact identical with the phenomenal experience of pain. But which one? The question is substantive and ethically important. If, for instance, the answer is (c), then cats and computers in principle couldn’t feel pain but chimpanzees could. If the answer is (i), then cats and computers and chimpanzees could all feel pain.

It is plausible on physicalism (e.g., Loar’s version) that my concept of pain refers to a physical property by ostension—I am ostending to the state that occurs in me in all and only the cases where I am in pain, and which has the right kind of causal connection to my pain behaviors. But there are many such states, as we saw above.

We might try to break the tie by saying that by reference magnetism I am ostending to the simplest physical state that has the above role, and the simplest one is probably (i). I don’t think this is plausible. Assuming naturalism, when multiple properties of a comparable degree of naturalness play a given role, ostension via the role is likely to be ambiguous, with ambiguity needing to be broken by a speaker or community decision. At some point in the history of biology, we had to decide whether to use “fish” at a coarse-grained functional level and include dolphins and whales as fish, or at a finer-grained level and get the current biological concept. One option might be a little more natural than the other, but neither is decisively more natural (any fish concept that has a close connection to ordinary language is going to have to be paraphyletic), and so a decision was needed. And even if (i) is somewhat simpler than (a)–(h), it is not decisively more natural.

This yields an interesting variant of the knowledge argument against physicalism.

1. If “pain” refers to a physical property, it is a “merely semantic” question, one settled by linguistic decision, whether “pain” could apply to an appropriately programmed computer.

2. It is not a “merely semantic” question, one settled by languistic decision, whether “pain” could apply to an appropriately programmed computer.

3. Thus, “pain” does not refer to a physical property.

A sharp world

Here are one way of believing in a totally sharp world:

1. Epistemicism: All meaningful sentences have a definite truth value, but sometimes it’s not accessible to us.

This has the implausible consequence that there is a fact of the matter whether, say, four rocks can make a heap, or about exactly how much money one needs to have to be filthy rich.

A way of escaping such consequences is:

2. Second-level epistemicism: For any meaningful sentence s, it is definitely true that s is definitely true, or s is definitely false, or s is definitely vague.

While this allows us to save the common-sense idea that there are people who are vaguely filthy rich, it still has the somewhat implausible consequence that it is always definite whether someone is definitely filthy rich, vaguely filthy rich, or definitely not filthy rich. I think it is easier to bite the bullet here. For while we can expect our intuitions about the meaning of first-order claims like “Sally is filthy rich” to be pretty reliable, our intuitions about the meaning of claims like “It’s vague that Sally is filthy rich” are less likely to be reliable.

Still, we can do justice to the second-level vagueness intuition by going for one of these:

3. nth level epistemicism: For any meaningful sentence s, and any sequence of D₁, ..., D_n − 1 of vagueness operators (from among "vaguely", "definitely" and "definitely not"), the sentence D₁...D_n − 1s is definitely true or definitely false.

(Say, with n = 3.)

4. Bounded-level epistemicism: for some finite n we have nth level epistemicism.

5. Finite-level epistemicism: For any meaningful sentence s, there is a finite n such that for any sequence of D₁, ..., D_n − 1 of vagueness operators, the sentence D₁...D_n − 1s is definitely true or definitely false.

The difference between finite-level and bounded-level epistemicism is that the finite-level option allows the level at which vagueness disapppears to vary from sentence to sentence, while on the bounded-level option, there is some level at which it always disappears.

I suspect that if we have finite-level epistemicism, then we have bounded-level epistemicism. For my feeling is that the level of vagueness of a sentence is definitely by something like the maximum level of vagueness of its basic predicates and names. Since there are only finitely many basic predicates and names in our languages, if each predicate and name has a finite level of vagueness, there will be a maximal finite level of vagueness for all our basic predicates and names, and hence for all our sentences. But I am not completely confident about this hand-wavy argument.

In any case, I find pretty plausible that we have bounded-level epistemicism for our languages, but we can extend the level if we so wish by careful stipulation of new predicates. And bounded-level epistemicism is, I think, enough to do justice to the idea that our world is really sharp.

Partially defined predicates

Is cutting one head off a two-headed person a case of beheading?

Examples like this are normally used as illustrations of vagueness. It’s natural to think of cases like this as ones where we have a predicate defined over a domain and being applied outside it. Thus, “is being beheaded” is defined over n-headed animals that are being deprived of all heads or of no heads.

I don’t like vagueness. So let’s put aside the vagueness option. What else can we say?

First, we could say that somehow there are deep facts about the language and/or the world that determine the extension of the predicate outside of the domain where we thought we had defined it. Thus, perhaps, n-headed people are beheaded when all heads are cut off, or when one head is cut off, or when the number of heads cut off is sufficient to kill. But I would rather not suppose a slew of facts about what words mean that are rather mysterious.

Second, we could deny that sentences using predicates outside of their domain lack truth value. But that leads to a non-classical logic. Let’s put that aside.

I want to consider two other options. The first, and simplest, is to take the predicates to never apply outside of their domain of definition. Thus,

1. False: Cutting one head off Dikefalos (who is two headed) is a beheading.

2. True: Cutting one head off Dikefalos is not a beheading

3. False: Cutting one head off Dikefalos is a non-beheading.

4. True: Cutting one head off Dikefalos is not a non-beheading.

(Since non-beheading is defined over the same domain as beheading). If a pre-scientific English-speaking people never encountered whales, then in their language:

5. False: Whales are fish.

6. True: Whales are not fish.

7. False: Whales are non-fish.

8. True: Whales are not non-fish.

The second approach is a way modeled after Russell’s account of definite descriptors: A sentence using a predicate includes the claim that the predicate is being used in its domain of definition and, thus, all of the eight sentences exhibited above are false.

I don’t like the Russellian way, because it is difficult to see how to naturally extend it to cases where the predicate is applied to a variable in the scope of a quantifier. On the other hand, the approach of taking the undefined predicates to be false is very straightforward:

9. False: Every marine mammal is a fish.

10: False: Every marine mammal is a non-fish.

This leads to a “very strict and nitpicky” way of taking language. I kind of like it.

Hyperintensional vagueness

“Water” and “H₂O” don’t mean the same thing in ordinary English: it is not a priori that water is H₂O. But I suspect that when a chemist uses the word “water” in the right kind of professional context, they use it synonymously with “H₂O”. Suppose this is right. But what if the chemist uses the word with fellow chemists in an “ordinary” way, telling a colleague that the tea water has boiled?

Here is a possibility: we then have a case of merely hyperintensional vagueness. In cases of merely hyperintensional vagueness, there is vagueness as to what an utterance means, but this vagueness has no effect on truth value.

I suspect that hyperintensional vagueness is a common phenomenon. Likely some people use “triangle” to mean a polygon with three angles (as the etymology indicates) and some use it to mean a polygon with three sides. (We can capture the difference by noting that to the latter group it is trivial that triangles have three sides while for the former it is a not entirely trivial theorem.) But consider a child who inherits the word “triangle” from two parents, one of whom uses it in the angle way and the other uses it in a side way. This is surely not an unusual phenomenon: much of the semantics of our language is inherited from users around us, and these users often have hyperintensional (or worse!) differences in meaning.

Utilitarianism and communication

Alice and Bob are both perfect Bayesian epistemic agents and subjectively perfect utilitarians (i.e., they always do what by their lights maximizes expected utility). Bob is going to Megara. He comes to a crossroads, from which two different paths lead to Megara. On exactly one of these paths there is a man-eating lion and on the other there is nothing special. Alice knows which path has the lion. The above is all shared knowledge for Alice and Bob.

Suppose the lion is on the left path. What should Alice do? Well, if she can, she should bring it about that Bob takes the right path, because doing so would clearly maximize utility. How can she do that? An obvious suggestion: Engage in a conventional behavior indicating a where the lion is, such as pointing left and roaring, or saying “Hail well-met traveler, lest you be eaten, I advise you to avoid the leftward leonine path.”

But I’ve been trying really hard to figure out how is it that such a conventional behavior would indicate to Bob that the lion is on the left path.

If Alice were a typical human being, she would have a habit of using established social conventions to tell the truth about things, except perhaps in exceptional cases (such as the murderer at the door), and so her use of the conventional lion-indicating behavior would correlate with the presence of lions, and would provide Bob with evidence of the presence of lions. But Alice is not a typical human being. She is a subjectively perfect utilitarian. Social convention has no normative force for Alice (or Bob, for that matter). Only utility does.

Similarly, if Bob were a typical human being, he would have a habit of forming his beliefs on the basis of testimony interpreted via established social conventions absent reason to think one is being misinformed, and so Alice’s engaging in conventional left-path lion-indicating behavior would lead Bob to think there is a lion on the left, and hence to go on the right. And while it would still be true that social convention has no normative force for Alice, Alice would think have reason to think that Bob follows convention, and for the sake of maximizing utility would suit her behavior to his. But Bob is a perfect Bayesian. He doesn’t form beliefs out of habit. He updates on evidence. And given that Alice is not a typical human being, but a subjectively perfect utilitarian, it is unclear to me why her engaging in the conventional left-path lion-indicating behavior is more evidence for the lion being on the left than for the lion being on the right. For Bob knows that convention carries no normative force for Alice.

Here is a brief way to put it. For Alice and Bob, convention carries no weight except as a predictor of the behavior of convention-bound people, i.e., people who are not subjectively perfect utilitarians. It is shared knowledge between Alice and Bob that neither is convention-bound. So convention is irrelevant to the problem at hand, the problem of getting Bob to avoid the lion. But there is no solution to the problem absent convention or some other tool unavailable to the utilitarian (a natural law theorist might claim that mimicry and pointing are natural indicators).

If the above argument is correct—and I am far from confident of that, since it makes my head spin—then we have an argument that in order for communication to be possible, at least one of the agents must be convention-bound. One way to be convention-bound is to think, in a way utilitarians don’t, that convention provides non-consequentialist reasons. Another way is to be an akratic utilitarian, addicted to following convention. Now, the possibility of communication is essential for the utility of the kinds of social animals that we are. Thus we have an argument that at least some subjective utilitarians will have to become convention-bound, either by getting themselves to believe that convention has normative force or by being akratic.

This is not a refutation of utilitarianism. Utilitarians, following Parfit, are willing to admit that there could be utility maximization reasons to cease to be utilitarian. But it is, nonetheless, really interesting if something as fundamental as communication provides such a reason.

I put this as an issue about communication. But maybe it’s really an issue about communication but coordination. Maybe the literature on repeated games might help in some way.

Dog whistles

From time to time I’ve had occasion to make use of examples where someone says different things to two different interlocutors in a single utterance. My favorite examples were pointing to a bottle and saying “Gift!”, which would mean a very different thing to a German speaker and to an English speaker, or using coded language while speaking to someone while knowing a spy is overhearing. Such examples illustrate the interesting fact that we cannot identify propositions with equivalence classes of utterance tokens, because a single utterance token can express different propositions.

But arguments based on such contrived cases have a tendency to be less than convincing. However, it has just occurred to me that dog whistles in politics are a real-life example of the same phenomenon, and one technically within a single language.

By the way, if we’re looking for equivalence classes that function like propositions, I guess instead of looking at equivalence classes of tokens utterances, we should look at equivalence classes of context-token pairs, where a context includes the language and dialect as well as the (actual? intended?) audience.

Requests and naturalism

If someone asks me to ϕ, typically that informs me that they want me to ϕ. But the normative effect of the request cannot be reduced to the normative effect of learning about the requester’s desires.

First, when you request that I ϕ, you also consent to my ϕ, and hence the request has the normative effects of consent. But one can want something done without consenting to it. For instance, if I have a lot of things on my plate, I might desire that a student give me their major paper late so that I don’t have to start grading yet, but that desire is very different in normative consequences from my agreeing to the lateness of the paper, much less my requesting that it be late.

Second, considerate people often have desires that they do not wish to impose on others. A request creates a special kind of moral reason, and hence imposes in a way that merely learning of a desire does not.

Moreover, we cannot understand requests apart from these moral normative effects. A request seems to be in part or whole defined as the kind of speech act that typically has such normative effects: the creating of a permission and of a reason. Moreover, that reason is a sui generis one: it is a reason-of-request, rather than a reason-of-desire, a reason-of-need, etc.

There is something rather impressive in this creation of reasons. A complete stranger has the power to come up to me and make me have a new moral reason just by asking a question, since a question is in part a request for an answer (and in part the creation of a context for the speech acts that would be constitute the answer). Typically, this reason is not conclusive, but it is still a real moral reason that imposes on me.

Consider the first time anybody ever requested anything. In requesting, they exercised their power to create a moral reason for their interlocutor. This was a power they already had, and the meaningfulness of the speech act of requesting must have already been in place. How? How could that speech act have already been defined, already understandable? The speech act was largely defined by the kinds of reasons it gives rise to. But the kinds of reasons it gave rise to were ones that had never previously existed! For before the first request there were no reasons-of-request. So the speech act had a meaningfulness without anybody ever having encountered the kinds of reasons that came from it.

This is deeply mysterious. It suggests an innate power of the human nature, a power to request and thereby create reasons. This power seems hard to reconcile with naturalism, though I do not have any knock-down argument here.

The General Composition Question

Peter van Inwagen distinguishes the General Composition Question (GCQ), which is to give necessary and sufficient conditions for the claim that the xs compose y without mereological vocabulary, from the Special Composition Question (SCQ), which is to give non-mereological necessary and sufficient conditions for the claim that there is a y such that the xs compose y again without mereological vocabulary. He thinks that he can answer the SCQ as:

1. The xs compose something iff there is exactly one x or the activity of the xs constitutes a life.

But he doesn’t try to give an answer to the GCQ, and suspects an answer can’t be given.

It is now seeming to me that van Inwagen should give a parallel answer to GCQ as well:

2. The x compose y iff the xs compose* y.

3. The xs compose* y iff every one of the xs is a part* of y and everything that overlaps* y overlaps* at least one of the xs.

4. x overlaps* y iff x and y have a part* in common.

5. x is a part* of y iff x = y or x’s activity constitutes engagement in the life of y.

Here, (3) and (4) mirror the standard mereological definition of composition and overlap, but with asterisks added. The asterisked concepts, however, bottom out in non-mereological concepts.

One might worry that constitution is a mereological concept. But if it is, then van Inwagen’s answer to the SCQ is also unsatisfactory because it uses constitution.

I feel that (2)–(5) might have some simple counterexample, but I can’t see one (or at least not one that isn't also a counterexample to van Inwagen's answer to the SCQ).

By the way, there is a cheekier answer to the GCQ:

6. The xs compose y iff the xs and y satisfy the predicate “composes” of the actual world’s late 20th century philosophical English language.

Note that here the response does not make any use of mereological vocabulary, since “‘composes’” (unlike “composes”) is not a piece of mereological vocabulary, but a piece of metalinguistic vocabulary.

Has cultural relativism about norms of etiquette really been established?

Imagine a philosopher who argued that the norms of assertion are relative to culture on the grounds that in England we have the norm:

1. Only assert “It’s snowing” when it’s snowing

while in France we have the norm:

2. Only assert “Il neige” when it’s snowing.

This would be silly for multiple reasons. Foremost among these is that (1) and (2) are mere consequences of the norm of assertion:

3. Only assert what it is true.

(Of course, you may disagree that truth is the norm of assertion. You may prefer a knowledge or justified belief or belief or high credence norm. But an analogous point will apply.)

It is widely held that while the norm of assertion is essentially the same across cultures, norms of etiquette vary widely. But the main reason people give for believing that the norms of etiquette vary widely is akin to the terrible argument about norms of assertion I began the post with. People note such things as that in some countries when one meets acquaintances one bows, and in others one waves; or that in some one eats fish with two forks and in others with a fork and knife.

But just as the fact that in England one should follow (1) and in France (2) is compatible with the universality of norms of assertion, likewise the variation in greeting and eating rituals can be compatible with the universality of norms of etiquette. It could, for instance, be that the need to eat fish with two forks in Poland and with a fork and knife in the USA derives simply from a universal norm of etiquette:

4. Express respect for your fellow diners.

But just as one asserts the truth with different words in different languages, one expresses respect for one’s fellow diners with different gestures in different cultures.

Indeed, presumably nobody thinks that the fact that in France one says “Merci” and in England “Thank you” implies a cultural relativism in etiquette. In both cases one is thanking, but the words that symbolize thanks are different. But what goes for words here also applies to many gestures (there may turn out to be universal gestures, like pointing).

One object that among the norms of etiquette there are norms that specify which gestures signify, say, respect or thanks. But a specification of what signifies what is not the specification of a norm. That “Merci” signifies gratitude and that eating fish with two forks signifies respect are not norms, because norms tell us what to do, and these do not.

5. “Merci” signifies thanks

is grammatically not a norm but a statement of fact. We might try to make it sound more like a norm by saying:

6. Signify thanks with “merci”!

But that is bad advice when taken literally. For thanks are not to be signified always, but only when thanks are appropriate. A more correct norm would be:

7. When a service has been done for you, signify thanks with “merci”!

But this is just a consequence of the general norm of etiquette:

8. When a service has been done for you, signify thanks!

together with the fact (5).

So, we see that the mere variation in rituals should not be taken to imply that there is cultural relativity of norms of etiquette.

If there is to be a cultural relativity of norms of etiquette, it will have to be at a higher level. If in some cultures, etiquette requires one to show respect for all fellow diners and at others to show disrespect for some—say, those from an underprivileged group—then that would indeed be a genuine relativity of norms of etiquette.

But it’s not clear that me that in a culture where one is expected to show disrespect to fellow diners in some underprivileged group that expectation is actually a norm of etiquette. Not all social expectations, after all, are actually norms of etiquette, or even norms at all. A norm (of behavior) gives norm-based reasons. But an expectation that one show disrespect to members of an underprivileged group has no reason-giving force at all.

We can imagine a culture where there is no way to symbolize respect for members of an underprivileged group when dining. On the view I wish to defend, such a lack would not exempt one from the duty to show respect to all one’s fellow diners—it would just make it more difficult to do so, because it would require one to create new ways of showing respect (say, by adapting the forms of showing respect to members of privileged groups, much as in some European languages the polite forms of address are derived from forms in which one used to address nobility in less democratic times).

I am not sure if there is cultural variation in norms of etiquette. But if there is, that variation will not be proved by shallow differences between rituals, and may not even follow from deeper variation, such as a culture where it is not appropriate to thank one’s subordinates for work well done. For in the case of deeper variation, it could simply be that some in some cultures violation of certain norms of etiquette is nearly universal, and there are no accepted ways to show the relevant kind of respect.

In fact, it could even be the case that there is only one norm of etiquette, and it is culturally universal:

9. Signify respect to other persons you interact with in ways fitted to the situation.

If this is right, then social rules designed to show disrespect, no matter how widespread, are not norms of etiquette.

Dr. Smith ate a banana

Suppose you receive this trustworthy report:

1. Dr. Smith ate a banana.

You are now in a position to learn this additional fact:

2. Someone whose last name is “Smith” ate a banana.

But (2) does not logically follow from (1). So how do we learn (2) from the report?

Knowledge of English tells us that “Dr. Smith ate a banana” has “Dr. Smith” as the subject and that this sentence attributes eating a banana to the subject of the sentence. Assuming defeasibly that the the use of English in the report is correct, we conclude that someone correctly styled “Dr. Smith” was reported to have eaten a banana. And assuming defeasibly that the report itself is factually correct, we conclude that:

3. Someone correctly styled “Dr. Smith” ate a banana.

Knowing English, we also know that anyone correctly styled “Dr. Smith” has the last name “Smith”, so we get (2). We also know that anyone correctly styled “Dr. Smith” has a doctorate, so:

4. Someone with a doctorate ate a banana.

These are instances of the familiar fact that what we learn from receiving a report goes beyond the propositional content of the report.

Unicorns and error theory

Kripke famously argued that unicorns cannot exist. For “unicorn” would have to refer to a natural kind. But there are multiple non-actual natural kinds to which “unicorn” could equally well refer, since it’s easy to imagine worlds w₁ and w₂ in each of which there is a natural kind of animal that matches the paradigmatic descriptions of unicorns in our fiction, but where the single-horned equines of w₁ are a different natural kind (at the relevant taxonomic level) from the single-horned equines of w₂. The proposition p expressed by “There are unicorns” is true in one of the worlds but not the other, or in both, or in neither. Symmetry rules out its being true in one but not the other. It can’t be true in both, because then “unicorn” would refer to two natural kinds (at the relevant taxonomic level), while it arguably refers to one (at least if we index it to a sufficiently specific body of fictional work). So, the proposition must be true in neither world, and by the same token, there will be no world where it’s true.

It seems to me, however, that rather than saying that the proposition expressed by “There are unicorns” is impossible, we should say that “There are unicorns” fails to express a proposition. Here’s why. We could imagine Rowling enriching the Harry Potter stories by introducing a new species of animals, the monokeratines. Suppose she never gives us enough detail to tell the two species apart, so all the descriptions of “unicorns” in her stories apply to “monokeratines” and vice versa, but she is clear that they are different species (perhaps the story hinges on one of them being an endangered species and the other not).

Now, if “There are unicorns” in these (hypothetical) stories expresses a proposition, so does “There are monokeratines”. But if they express propositions, they express different propositions (neither entails the other, for instance). Thus, suppose “There are unicorns” expresses p while “There are monokeratines” expresses q. But no reason can be given for why it’s not the other way around—why “There are unicorns” doesn’t express q while “There are monokeratines” expresses p. In fact, the exact same reasoning why Kripke rejected the hypothesis that “There are unicorns” is true in one of w₁ and w₂ but not in the other applies here. Thus, we should reject the claim that either sentence expresses a proposition.

But if we do that, then we should likewise reject the claim that in the actual world, where Rowling doesn’t talk about monokeratines, “There are unicorns” expresses p (say). For it could equally well express q.

Maybe.

But maybe there is another way. One could say that “There are unicorns” is vague, and handle the vagueness in a supervaluationist way. There are infinitely many species u such that “There are unicorns” can be taken to be precisified into expressing the proposition that there are us. Thus, there is no one proposition expressed by the sentence, but there are infinitely many propositions for each of which it is vaguely true that the sentence expresses it.

This might be a good response to my old argument that error theorists should say that “Murder is wrong” is nonsense. Maybe error theorists can say that “Murder is wrong” has infinitely many precisifications, but each one is false, just as “There are unicorns” has infinitely many precisifications, but each one is false.

This suggests a view of fiction on which claims about fictional entities always suffer from vagueness.

An interesting thing is that on this approach, we need to distinguish between in-story and out-of-story vagueness. Suppose a Rowling has a character say “There are unicorns.” In-story, that statement is not vague. I.e., according to the story there is a specific species to which the word “unicorn” as spoken by the character definitely refers. But out-of-story, we have vagueness: there are infinitely many possible species the claim could be about.

This suggests that the error theorist who takes the vagueness way out is not home free. For it is a part of our usage of “(morally) wrong” that it refers fairly unambiguously to one important property. But the error theorist claims vagueness. If the statements about wrongness were made in a story, then the error theorist could handle this by distinguishing in-story and out-of-story vagueness. But this distinction is not available here.

A similar problem occurs for a real-world person who claims that there are unicorns. Maybe one could say that the person intends in saying “There are unicorns” to express a single specific proposition, but fails, and vaguely expresses each of an infinity of propositions, all of them false. If so, then a similar move would be available to the error theorist. But I am sceptical of this move. I wonder if it’s not better to just say that “There are unicorns” as said by someone who intended to express an existential claim about a single definite species is nonsense, but there is a neighboring sentence, such as “There is an extant species of single-horned equines”, that makes sense and is true.

Non-propositional representations

I used to think that it’s quite possible that all our mental representations of the world are propositional in nature. To do that, I had to have a broad notion of proposition, much broader than what we normally consider to be linguistically expressible. Thus, I was quite happy with saying that Picasso’s Guernica expresses a proposition about war, a proposition that cannot be stated in words. Similarly, I was quite fine—my Pittsburgh philosophical pedigree comes out here—with the idea that an itch or some other quale might represent the world propositionally.

That broad view of propositions still sounds right. But I am now thinking there is a different problem for propositionalism about our representational states: the problem of estimates. A lot of my representations of the world are estimates. When I estimate my height at six feet, there is a proposition in the vicinity, namely the proposition that my height is exactly six feet. But that proposition is one that I am quite confident is false. There are even going to be times when I wouldn’t even want to say that my best estimate of something is approximately right—but it’s still my best estimate.

The best propositionally-based of what happens when I estimate my height at six feet seems to me to be that I believe a proposition about myself, namely that my evidence about my height supports a probability density whose mean is at six feet. But there are two problems with this. First, the representational state now becomes a representation of something about me—facts about what evidence I have—than about the world. Second, and worse, I don’t know that I would stick my neck out far enough to even make that claim about evidence unequivocally—my insight into the evidence I have is limtied. Moreover, even concerning evidence, what I really have is only estimates of the force of my evidence, and the problem comes back for them.

So I think that estimating is a way of representing that is not propositional in nature. Notice, though, that estimates are often well expressible through language. So on my view, linguistic expressibility (in the ordinary sense of “linguistic”—maybe there is such a thing as the “language of painting” that Picasso used) is neither necessary for a representation of the world to be propositional in nature.

I now wonder whether vagueness isn’t something similar. Perhaps vague sentences represent the world but not propositionally. But just as we can often—but not always—reason as if sentences expressing estimates expressed propositions, we can often reason as if vague sentences expressed propositions. The “logic” of the non-propositional representations is close enough to the logic of propositional ones—except when it’s not, but we can usually tell when it’s not (e.g., we know what sorts of gruesome inferences not draw from the estimate that a typical plumber has 2.2 children).

Divine speech acts and classical theism

Here is a question I have wondered about and have never heard or seen much discussion of:

1. What does it mean to say that God engaged in some speech act, such as commanding or asserting?

The more anthropomorphic one’s theism, the easier the question can be answered, because the closer the analogy between divine speech acts and ours. But the setting that interests me here is classical theism (both because it’s the truth theory of God and because it’s more challenging). In particular, let’s take on board divine immutability and simplicity.

Let’s think about the human case first. We’re going to have to pay close attention to such factors as intention and context. Thus, the same words in the same tone are an assertion in an ordinary conversation but not an assertion when spoken on a stage. The same handwritten sentence can be a command in one case and in another can be a handwriting exercise. Theorists will differ as to the balance between intention and context in the correct theory. But I think it is easy to argue that an important part of the distinction between assertion and play-acting or between command and handwriting exercise will be constituted by intentions. For instance, it is not simply being on a stage that makes one’s words not be assertions. The actor on stage can yell “Fire!” upon seeing the flames licking the back of the room, and that will be an assertion—even if that word happens to be exactly what the script calls for at this time. (It may be an assertion that is not taken up, though, much as an assertion might not be heard in a loud rooom.)

Very roughly speaking, to engage in a speech act of kind K, one has to form the intention to be taken by one’s audience as engaging in a speech act of kind K.

Now, there are natural rock formations that look like faces. Suppose that somewhere in the solar system there is a natural rock formation that spells out “God exists”, and one day an English speaking astronaut comes across it. Is it an assertion by God?

It is certainly something made by God. For God made everything other than himself. But did God make it with the intention that it be taken as an assertion? Or is it just a formation of rocks intended for some other purpose than to be taken as an assertion? (Presumably, it’s not a handwriting exercise, since God doesn’t need to practice being already perfect.)

On more anthropomorphic theisms, there is no special problem here about the God case. God can form the intention to make an assertion just as a human being can or, just as a human being, he can fail to form that intention. But if divine simplicity is correct, then there are no contingent intrinsic divine properties. There is just God. Any contingency is on the side of creation. In particular, there cannot be two worlds that are exactly alike except with respect to divine intentions intrinsic to God. Divine intentions must supervene on creation and on necessary truths about God. But what contingent facts about creation and necessary truths about God can make it be that the rock formation is or is not a divine assertion?

One might try to make use of divine reasons. I have argued that divine simplicity entails divine omnirationality: whenever God does something, he does it for all the good reasons there are for doing it, rather than choosing which of the good reasons to act on. Now, suppose that in fact the astronaut’s faith in God is strengthened by the rock formation. That’s a good thing. Goods provide reasons. So, God has a good reason to make the rock formation in order to strengthen the astronaut’s faith. But the astronaut’s faith is presumably strengthened by her taking the formation as a divine assertion. So, God has a reason to have the astronaut take the formation as a divine assertion. And, thus, by omnirationality, God is acting on that reason, and the rock formation is an assertion.

But take a variant case. Our astronaut lands on a planet with a rock formation that says “Kneel!” But, now, kneeling is both good and bad for the astronaut. Perhaps it is spiritually good but physically bad, because our astronaut has bad knees. The astronaut takes it as a command. That’s a good and a bad thing: she kneels, hurts her knees, and the mission is in jeopardy. But she spent a few minutes in prayer, and that was good for her. And, in fact, in a complex world there will generally be pluses and minuses of anything. Even in the case of the “God exists!” rock formation, there is some benefit to believing without such overt signs, perhaps a greater maturity of faith.

We could try to make the intention condition work something like this: God counts as intending that something assertion-like or command-like (structured symbolically in the right way) be taken as an assertion or command provided it’s good in some way that it be taken as such. But that seems overbroad. Or we could say it’s an assertion or command provided it’s good on balance that it be taken as such. But when we are dealing with incommensurable values, there may be no “on balance”. These objections aren’t fatal: but they point to a need to do serious philosophical work here.

Here is a possible different solution. We don’t need to advert to speaker intentions in every case to figure out whether something is a speech act of the right sort. When yelled from the stage, we may need to know whether “Fire!” is intended as a warning or as part of the script. But when yelled from the seats, there is no reasonable doubt. There are contexts where no reasonable person in the relevant audience would fail to take something as a certain kind of speech act. You come across the Summa Theologica in a heath. Of course, it’s a speech act, of whatever sort a theological discourse is (a series of arguments and assertions). Every reasonable person who knew the language (that’s perhaps the relevant audience component) would take it as such.

Perhaps we can now say this:

2. In contexts where every reasonable person in the relevant audience who knew the relevant context sufficiently well would take something to be a divine speech act of a certain kind, it is a primary case of a divine speech act of that kind.

For primary divine speech acts, we need some kind of reasonable luminosity: they need to be the sort of thing that one couldn’t reasonably doubt to be divine speech acts if one knew the relevant circumstances. Perhaps God builds into our nature an ability to recognize divine speech acts.

And then we have derivative cases of divine speech acts, which are when the initial audience is enlarged by means of the members of the initial audience becoming heralds of the message, and the process continues. When the herald is being faithful to the message, what the herald says counts as a speech act of the original speaker. So, the heralds pass on the word of God. And since the heralds are human, their intentions are relevant and raise no deep ontological concerns.

This story would lead to a rather restrictive view of divine speech acts. The rock formations, in a vast universe, could be reasonably doubted. So they aren’t primary divine speech acts. The primary divine speech acts may, rather, be more like cases of prophecy, where God makes it reasonably impossible for the prophet to doubt what kind of a speech act it is.

I am not very happy with any of the stories above. This is just a vague and inchoate start. I don’t really want to finish off this task. It would make a really interesting philosophical theology dissertation, though.

On a twist on too-many-thinkers arguments

One of the ways to clinch a too-many-thinkers argument (say, Merricks’ argument against perdurantism, or Olson’s argument for animalism) is to say that the view results in an odd sceptical worry: one doesn’t know which of the many thinkers one is. For instance, if both the animal and the person think, how can you know that you are the animal and not the person: it seems you should have credence 1/2 in each.

I like too-many-thinkers arguments. But I’ve been worried about this response to the sceptical clinching: When the animal and the person think words like “I am a person”, the word “I” refers to the person, even when used by the animal, and hence both think the truth. In other words, “I” means something like: the person colocated with the the thinker/speaker.

But I think I have a good response to this response. It would be a weird limitation on our language if it did not allow speaker or thinker self-reference. Even if in fact “I” means the person colocated with the the thinker/speaker, we should be able to stipulate another pronoun, “I*”, one that refers just to the thinker/speaker. And it would be absurd to think that one not be able to justifiably assert “I* am a person.”

The reportable and the assertible

I’ve just had a long conversation with a grad student about (inter alia) reporting and asserting. My first thought was that asserting is a special case of reporting, but one can report without asserting. For instance, I might have a graduate assistant write a report on some aspect of the graduate program, and then I could sign and submit that report without reading it. I would then be reporting various things (whether responsibly so would depend on how strong my reasons to trust the student were), but it doesn’t seem right to say that I would be asserting these things.

But then I came to think that just as one can report without asserting, one can assert without reporting. For instance, there is no problem with asserting facts about the future, such as that the sun will rise tomorrow. But I can’t report such facts, even though I know them.

It’s not really a question of time. For (a) I also cannot report that the sun rose a million years ago, and (b) if I were to time-travel to the future, observe the sunrise, and come back, then I could report that the sun will rise tomorrow.

And it’s not a distinction with respect to the quantity of evidence. After all, I can legitimately report what I had for dinner yesterday, but it’s not likely that I have as good evidence about that as I do that the sun will rise tomorrow.

I suspect it’s a distinction as to the kind of evidence that is involved. I am a legally bound reporter of illegal activity on campus. But I can’t appropriately report that a violation of liquor laws occurred in the dorms over the weekend if I know it only on the basis of the general claim that such violations, surely, occur every weekend. The kind of evidence that memory provides is typically appropriate for reporting, while the kind of evidence that induction provides is at least typically not.

Interestingly, although I can’t appropriately report that tomorrow the sun will rise, I can appropriately report that I know that the sun will rise tomorrow. This means that the reportable is not closed under obvious entailment.