This is Interesting

1o Things Christians and Atheists can Agree On

I don't agree with it 100%, but I find it quite interesting.

Something About the Meaning of the Word "Could"

I'm not quite sure about the philosophical implications here, if there are any, but here goes.  

Take the following two sentences:

(1) "Gov. Spitzer could have been more honest with the people of New York."

(2) "Gov. Spitzer could have been a potato." 

The interesting thing about these two sentences is that the word "could" is being used in a very different way in both of them.  I am not quite sure if I can say why succinctly, but I'll try. Basically, in one sense they are both true.  But in another sense (1) is obviously true but (2) is obviously false.

So Wittgenstein talks a lot in both the Tractatus and the Investigations about how we, as speakers, can be misled by the grammar of our language into believing that we are saying something different than what we are really saying.  I think that these two sentences are an example of this.  But I think that (a) it's a problem specific to English, in that the use of cases in languages like French and Latin avoid it, and (b) it's only a problem for analytic philosophy, in that only some philosophers would see these two sentences and conclude that there is a possible world where Gov. Spitzer is more honest and that there is a possible world where Gov. Spitzer is a potato.

The mistake is to think that what I am talking about is something about the essence of what constitutes being Gov. Spitzer, and not about how the English language works.

Consider:

"I could have gone to work today."

"I could have gone to work today, but I didn't."

"I could have gone to work today, and I did."

"I went to work today."

"I could go to work tomorrow."

"I could have died at birth."

"I could have been born a girl."

"I could have been a six-footer."

"I could still turn out to be a six-footer."

"I could be a six-footer."

"If it hadn't had been for the oxygen deprivation, Lisa could have grown up to be a strong and healthy woman."

"Tiny Tim could wake up tomorrow and be the healthiest boy in London." (With God, all things are possible.)

"I could be more honest with myself."

"I could be stronger, if I worked out more." ("I would be stronger, if I worked out more.")

"I could be the President of the United States of America."

"I could be the King of France."

"I could be a potato."

"I could be a butterfly, dreaming it was a... dude."  

I have to go to bed now.  But this has something to do with a question of ethics:

"Gov. Spitzer should have been more honest with the people of New York."

"Gov. Spitzer should be a potato." 

Something About the Meaning of the Word "Will"

Question: Do human beings have a soul, are they able to assert their will against the predetermining laws of force and causality, or are they merely subject to the same principles of nature as the tides and falling rocks? Ought one to be a behaviorist or an anti-behaviorist? A monist or a dualist?

Answer: I had spent all day in front of my computer, working on my Wittgenstein paper. My girlfriend came home from work, and she made us a couple of martinis, and we sat in the kitchen eating chips and salsa. It was nice to give my eyes and my mind a break, to relax and think about nothing in particular for a while. But the night was getting late, and I still needed a good four or five more pages before morning. So - in an act of pure will - I got up from the table and went back to typing on my computer.

Something About the Meaning of the Word, "Chance"

Question: Is the world pre-determined, does it operate in accord with a set of universal laws, or is it random and chaotic, and subject only to randomness and chance?

Answer: I'm sitting in class, and my cell phone starts quietly beeping at me. It's battery is low. I thought [had believed] that I had put it on silent, but it was on "loud". I take it out of my pocket and start fiddling with it under the table, trying to get it to shut up. Just after I get it to "vibrate", it rings; some number I don't recognize is trying to call me. So my phone makes a little noise, but at least it doesn't start loudly playing "Flight of the Valkyries" for everyone to hear. If the person on the other line had happened to call one minute earlier, or if my phone hadn't been low on batteries, then I would have been responsible for interrupting class with my anti-Semitic phone ring, and that would have been very, very embarrassing. "Phew," I think to myself, "That was lucky."

History- Part I

Yesterday, I read in the Chicago Tribune that there is only one (1) living World War One veteran in America. There is also one Canadian, and two British veterans still alive, as well as several Frenchmen. He doesn't mention Russians, Germans, Austrians, Hungarians, Italians, Serbs, Turks, etc. The author - Cory Franklin - is mainly arguing that the United States is neglecting its duty to history and our veterans by failing to educate its youth properly. He says:

And yet, how much do we teach our citizens about World War I today? My son's high school American History textbook covers American involvement in the war in less than two pages, roughly the same amount of coverage it gives to the Reagan Iran-contra affair. Dismissed in a single sentence are 50,000 combat deaths the United States suffered in less than a year and a half, more than 10 times the number of Iraq War casualties to date. The 650,000 civilians who died of influenza at the end of the war, a pandemic spread by closely quartered Army troops, are not mentioned in the book at all.

And as bad as we are with our own history, we know even less of the experience of other countries at war. America, of course, was relatively lucky in World War I; Europe and Russia lost nearly 20 million soldiers and civilians. The history textbook doesn't even mention them.

Franklin's right, of course, but what's between the lines is this: That World War I is not an American war - it is a European one. The war's narrative is a complicated one; it involves European nationalism, the effects of rapid industrialization, the simultaneous rise of Western Democracy and the European bourgeoisie, and their threat the the aristocracy and the thousand-year-old empires. These are difficult concepts for an American student to grasp. (Just as it is difficult for us to understand why the Kurds don't want to live with the Shiites, or the Albanians don't want to live withe Serbs.)

The American Narrative - like American literature - is simple compared to the European's. (

03.04.08

Because words are not signs, godammit! And a language is not a system of signs - they behave in completely different ways.

The thought runs as follows: There must be something arbitrary about a word, because it is always possible for us to decide to use a different word than the one that we are using merely conventionally. For example, the English "dog", the French "chien', and the German "Hund" all signify the same thing!
Therefore, the sign is an object of convention. It is inessential - only the thought that is being expressed is necessary.

But this is a gross abuse of the meaning of the word, "arbitrary"! I use the word "dog" here because the conventions within which I was raised, because of my forms of life, because if I want to make myself understood to myself and to others, I must use the word "dog"! And this means that I do not use it arbitrarily! Furthermore, it is a mistake - that is, it leads to certain philosophical confusions - to say that the word "dog" signifies either the object or the concept "dog". (Depending on who you ask and when.)

But it is still true that the relationship between the sign, er, sorry 'word' "dog" and the object that it signifies is not a necessary one. I agree with you that the sign only has a sense insofar as it has a use within a system of signs, but this is importantly different from it having a necessary, non-contingent relationship. The word can only say how things stand, not that they stand.

I don't understand this use of 'arbitrary' of which you speak. If you want to claim that there is one kind of relationships that are arbitrary, and then there is this other kind of relationships that are 'true in every possible world', then you are already speaking nonsense to me! What could possibly fulfill this latter criteria of being necessarily true, true a priori, or true in every possible world?

Only the truths as shown by the propositions of logic.

But the propositions of logic don't actually say anything! They're senseless!

Or nonsense.

So the disagreement rests on what kind of relationship - if any - exists between language and the world. And whether or not we can ever do anything more than just gesture at the world through our language.