Freak intelligence, marginal cases, and the argument for ethical vegetarianism

N.B.: I am not Richard Chappell, nor was meant to be. I'm Charles Johnson, and I normally post at Rad Geek People's Daily; I've volunteered to help out a bit while Richard is away. My interests wander a lot, especially around the areas of metaphysics, philosophy of logic, and ethical and political theory; here's a chance to combine a bit of all three. I think that we have some pretty substantial ethical obligations toward non-human animals (hereafter: "animals"; sorry, taxonomic correctness). In fact, I think those obligations are substantial enough that we're ethically bound, among other things, to stop slaughtering cattle, pigs, chickens, etc. for food. I can't say, though, that I'm particularly thrilled with the state of the philosophical debate, and in particular I'm not particularly thrilled with a lot of the arguments that try to defend something like my conclusion. Part of the problem is a problem that's general in a lot of applied ethics: the desire to make arguments that seem to be compatible with a lot of very different philosophical or meta-ethical views tends to end up with arguments that are actually compatible with only a very narrow view of what the world contains. (That's because, by design, anything that looks too philosophically murky or controversial is pared away in order to make the argument's appeal broad enough. But what if the world really does have philosophically murky or controversial features?) As a chief example, take the argument over so-called "marginal cases" and the ethical significance of belonging to a particular species.

Here's stereotype of how the dialectic goes. Quid tells Quo that she should give up meat, and when Quo says "I'd rather not; I like meat", Quid tells her that it's cruel to slaughter your fellow creatures for your own benefit (especially when the benefit is so trivial as getting a meal that you like better). After all, nobody would think that it's O.K. to kill and roast your fellow humans, even if it turns out that roast man-flesh is a truly delicious meal. Quo isn't convinced; she argues that slaughtering humans and slaughtering animals is different, and when Quid demands to know why, Quo remarks that humans have some distinctive mental capacity that gives humans a direct moral standing that animals, like plants and rocks, don't have. (Which property Quo picks isn't relevant here. Common candidates include self-consciousness, reflective reason, abstract thinking, moral agency, and some other stuff.)

Quid comes back with the famous "Argument from Marginal Cases". There are a lot of different ways to gloss the argument, depending in part on the details of the pro-meat argument that it's responding to, but here's a schematic gloss: pick any mental property that you like that might explain a difference in moral standing, and tag it Morally Relevant Rationality (MRR) for convenience. No matter what property you pick, one of two things will be true. Either (1) all humans will have MRR, but many or most animals will have it too (e.g.: responsiveness to pain, formation of desires), in which case MRR will be too broad to justify slaughtering animals; or else (2) no animals will have MRR, but there will be at least some humans who don't have it either, in which case MRR will be too narrow to live up to our expectations of a rational ethical theory. Horn (1) of the dilemma is clear enough; to account for horn (2), Quid points out that for pretty much any distinctive mental property that you can find in paradigmatic cases of humanity (healthy adults with no congenital defects and a normal upbringing), there will be at least some "marginal cases" -- infants, the comatose, people with brain lesions, the severely mentally retarded, feral children, etc. -- who don't have it now, or lost it, or never had it to begin with. But any ethical theory that entails that we could ethically slaughter infants, the comatose, people with brain lesions, the severely mentally retarded, feral children, etc. for food is monstrously wrong. Therefore there are no reasonable candidates for MRR that do the work anti-vegetarians want them to do. Therefore, put down that steak.

The argument's attractive because, among other things, it saves you from the hard philosophical work of having to respond to each concrete suggestion for MRR, or having to engage with the specific arguments for the connection between MRR and moral standing. After all, if the dilemma really does cover all plausible candidates then Quid can use the argument as a schematic for a response to any candidate for MRR and any account of the connection between it and moral standing. The problem, though, is that there's a perfectly good response to the Argument from Marginal Cases on the record -- the call it Argument from Species Normality -- and, as far as I know, ethical vegetarians in the literature haven't yet successfully responded to it. In fact, as far as I know, ethical vegetarians in the literature haven't even understood it.

Here's how the response goes. Quo concedes that Quid has pointed out a genuine difficulty. But, she says, there's a way out. Here's how. Take horn (2) of the dilemma, and choose some mental property that paradigmatic humans have but animals don't. It's true that not all humans have that property. But there is another, closely related property that all and only humans (including all "marginal cases") do have: each and every one is human. This may seem trifling or crude, but suppose that Quo goes on to point out that being human means (among other things) being a member of a species whose paradigm cases have MRR, that is, one of the kind of creature for whom it is normal to have MRR. So even though there will be humans who individually lack MRR, Quo contends that enjoying the human form of life -- even if, in a particular case, the mental faculties that are involved in that form of life are undeveloped or frustrated or damaged (perhaps irreparably) you are obligated to treat them differently from the way you would treat an animal; for animals the place occupied by MRR isn't empty or inaccessible; it just doesn't exist.

The canonical vegetarian response to the Argument from Species Normality seems to be to misunderstand it. One way to misunderstand it is to bring out the doctrine ethical individualism, as if it explained anything; the idea is that "being a member of the same species as x, y, and z" is a pure Cambridge relation; why should that external relation have any burlier ethical consequences than "having the same name as x" or "being the third person born after y." Why should having these kind of "properties" have any ethical bearing at all? Wouldn't making ethical distinctions based on them be a case of arbitrary (and therefore unjustifiable) group privilege? (People who like ghastly neologisms sometimes call this "speciesism," by analogy with "racism" and "sexism.")

But this is a mistake, and I think it's a mistake that's no less crude for being so common. Making it may be the result of making some other mistakes about the logical form of statements about living creatures and the natural kinds they belong to, of the sort discussed by Michael Thompson in The Representation of Life; as Thompson shows, philosophers tend to try to understand statements about living creatures and their distinctive forms of life with a much too narrow idea of what sorts of logical features statements can have, and they tend to systematically get things wrong by excluding, or ignoring, the kinds of teleological facts that Thompson calls "aristotelian categoricals." For example, consider the natural-historical statement, "the domestic cat has four legs and a soft coat of fur." This is a true general statement. And it is not to be refuted by pointing "But look at poor Tibbles, who has been shaved and maimed in a tragic accident!" The reason that it is true is not that all domestic cats have four legs and a soft coat of fur (poor Tibbles doesn't). Nor is it that some or many or most or even the overwhelming majority of domestic cats have these features. (Even if some mad scientist released a virus that caused all the domestic cats in the world to permanently shed their fur coat, "the domestic cat has a soft coat of fur" would still be true.) It's that cats are the kind of creature that has four legs and soft fur under normal conditions, even if tragic circumstances have altered those conditions for some cats, or even for all cats temporarily. (If they altered conditions for all cats permanently, that might constitute a change in the form of life for cats as such. But that's not important here.)

These distinctions make a difference. In particular, it's important to see how aristotelian categoricals make a difference for what we can say about individual members of the species. They make a difference with respect to value, in obvious cases. If Tibbles has two legs, that's a tragedy; it's something wrong with poor Tibbles. If I have two legs, that's normal; that's how humans are. The fact that we recognize my two-leggedness as normal and Tibbles' two-leggedness as a defect is tied up with the fact that I'm supposed to have two legs and that Tibbles is supposed to have four. And that's a biological fact about Tibbles herself, not just a Cambridge relation to other members of her species. It goes similarly with humans who suffer from a cognitive defect. The point of the appeal to normality isn't relational or statistical; the point is to show how all human beings, each and every one of them, individually has a particular intrinsic property. That property isn't just sharing a species with other humans who do have MRR. It's having, individually, a faculty for MRR (whatever that may be), and we're supposed to be able to exercise it, even if in particular cases that faculty is not yet developed, or inactive, or frustrated, or irreparably damaged. A human being that can't comprehend language or engage in reflective reasoning has a something wrong with her (that's what calling it a "disability" or a "defect" means); a pig that can't comprehend language or engage in reflective reasoning is just living how the pig lives.

(Actually that's not quite right. An infant that can't understand language or reflectively reason isn't abnormal or defective. But that's no more difficult to deal with than the fact that people who are sleeping don't exercise MRR while they're unconscious. The normal condition in the human form of life is that infants will develop MRR over time. Not so pigs.)

I think this is also closely related to the other common response to the Argument from Species Normality -- what we might call the Argument from Freak Intelligence. Here's how James Rachels put it (in "Darwin, Species, and Morality", Animal Rights and Human Obligations, Tom Regan and Peter Singer, eds., p. 100):

This idea--that how individuals should be treated is determined by what is normal for their species--has a certain appeal, because it does seem to express our moral intuition about defective humans. "We should not treat a person worse merely because he has been so unfortunate," we might say about someone who has suffered brain damage. But the idea will not bear close inspection. Suppose (what is probably impossible) that a chimpanzee learned to read and speak English. And suppose he eventually was able to converse about science, literature, and morals. Finally he wants to attend university classes. Now there might be various arguments about whether to permit this, but suppose someone argued as follows: "Only humans should be allowed to attend these classes. Humans can read, talk, and understand science. Chimps cannot." But this chimp can do those things. "Yes, but normal chimps cannot, and that is what matters." Is this a good argument? Regardless of what other arguments might be persuasive, this one is weak. It assumes that we should determine how an individual is to be treated, not on the basis of its qualities, but on the basis of other individuals’ qualities. This chimp is not permitted to do something that requires reading, despite the fact that he can read, because other chimps cannot. That seems not only unfair, but irrational.

I think Rachels is obviously right here; it would be wrong to treat the hyperintelligent chimp that way on those grounds. (A fortiori, it would also be wrong to slaughter a hyperintelligent pig and eat it. The fact that normal swine are not as intelligent as human beings wouldn't be a reasonable ground for denying it a right to life.) Species membership isn't a good grounds to make a distinction in cases of freak intelligence. But he's just wrong to draw the conclusion that the case of humans with cognitive defects has to be symmetrical with the case of animals with freak intelligence. Perhaps the problem is that Rachels is still thinking of the appeals to species or kind as if they were just appeals to membership in a set with some particular defining characteristic. If that's all that was at stake, then trying to make an ethical distinction based on it surely would be arbitrary. But that's nota all; the Argument from Species Normality gains whatever force it has by appealing to faculties or potentialities that each individual humans, as a human, has. Think of it this way: a pig with freak intelligence has, ex hypothesi, manifested MRR. Actuality entails potentiality, so the pig has the faculty for MRR and it makes sense to demand that it get the same moral level of consideration you give to your fellow humans (whatever the right level for that is). But that does not entail that you also have to demand that animals with normal cognitive abilities for their species get the same level of consideration you give to your fellow humans with severe cognitive defects (whatever the right level for that is). Non-actuality doesn't entail non-potentiality, and you have to distinguish between the cases where a faculty is present but unexercised, damaged, frustrated, undeveloped, etc. and those in which there isn't any faculty to lament the damaging of at all. And one of the reasons that you would give for making distinctions of this sort just is that there's a difference between a healthy adult pig with the cognitive abilities of a pig and an adult human with the cognitive abilities of a pig. If you aren't approaching the world of life with a rich enough conceptual framework to recognize these kind of teleological facts, then you probably need to enrich your conceptual framework before you can sensibly deal with the notion of goodness at all.

Now, is it true that the distinctively human faculty for MRR, whatever that is, even if it's not being exercised, and even if it can't be, in a particular case, really does make for a burly difference in moral standing between humans and animals? Probably, but is it enough of a difference to justify slaughtering and eating the animals even though you'd never consider treating "marginal case" humans that way (and would rightly be punished harshly for doing so)? I doubt that it is true. But I think to give a good reply to the Argument from Species Normality, you'll need some kind of argument that specifically engages with the details of the particular faculty that's suggested to play the role of MRR, and the details of the account that's given to connect it to moral standing, in order to show that it doesn't make enough of a difference, or doesn't make the right kind of difference, that's needed to justify the incredible suffering inflicted by the meat industry. Trying to avoid the messy part of the argument by skipping over the details and making an appeal to marginal cases just won't get you anywhere that you should want to go.

Is "desire" a natural kind term?

Here by the invitation of the Socratic Shadow himself (aka Richard Chappell), I'm Neil the Ethical Werewolf. Werewolves are typical Humean beings, driven by their desires, and I'm going to be doing lots of desire-related blogging in the days to come. Today I'm going to attack a view about what desire is, and make some suggestive arguments about how to better understand desire.

In his new book, Three Faces of Desire, Tim Schroeder claims that "desire" is a natural kind term. He offers a supervenience base for desire. Drawing on psychological and neurobiological results, he claims that “To be a desire is to be a representational capacity contributing to a reward or punishment signal.” To be a reward or punishment signal is to be a signal with the power to strengthen or weaken an organism's mental dispositions in processes of reinforcement learning. If I keep getting something that I desire (i.e., if I keep being rewarded) after engaging in some behavior, the disposition to engage in that behavior will be strengthened. If I keep getting something I have an aversion to -- if I keep being punished -- my disposition will be weakened.

This doesn't merely work for behavioral dispositions, but certain perceptual capacities as well. When I pass my finger over the Braille letters in an elevator, it's hard for me to get any precise tactile sensation of how the dots are arranged. It strikes me as surprising that anyone can get such a feeling by touching them – as one must in order to understand the dots as a word. Blind people who have learned Braille, however, can do so. This is because correct sensory discrimination has been repeatedly rewarded in the process of learning Braille. The desire to understand a particular word was satisfied, and perhaps a teacher praised the blind person. So the mental dispositions required for fine-grained perception of Braille letters were reinforced.

So now you're probably thinking, "All this mental-disposition-changing reward stuff amounts to an interesting fact about desire. But why does Schroeder think that desiring B is nothing more than representing B in such a way that it contributes to the strengthening of mental dispositions when B comes about? How does this have anything to do with being motivated to do A when one believes that doing A will bring about B? Or maybe being pleased when discovers that B will happen? Aren't these the things that really make something a desire?"

Well, here's where the empirical evidence gets really interesting. The brain structure that realizes the reward system -- the VTA/SNpc -- is causally upstream from the brain centers that realize pleasure and desire-belief motivation. Schroeder writes that “The neural basis for reward is the normal cause of pleasure and an important cause of motivation.” I won't go into the evidence for this here (it's gonna be a pretty long post as is). So just take it as a premise of Schroeder's argument for the time being. Actually, if you like you can give Schroeder the following, more useful premise: "In every case of human pleasure and motivation that desire intuitively ought to explain, the reward system does the explanatory work."

Suppose we see "desire" as a natural kind term like "water," and regard desire's ability to cause motivation and pleasure as similar to water's having wetness, drinkability, and clarity. In other words, these are merely parts of the stereotype of the thing, not its actual essence. Being a representational capacity contributing to a reward or punishment signal is the hidden essence that explains how desire motivates us and causes us to be pleased, just as being H₂O is the hidden essence that explain's water's wetness, drinkability, and clarity.

Now let me launch my counterexamples to Schroeder's view. When considering each of these cases, assume Schroeder's premise -- that in humans, the neural basis for reward explains pleasure and motivation. It's just like the Twin Earth cases, where you accept the empirical claim that the stuff in our lakes and rivers is actually H2O. My first case will attack the claim that reward systems are necessary for desire. The second will attack the claim that reward systems are sufficient.

First, suppose there are creatures on some other planet who are much like us, except that their mental dispositions cannot be strengthened or weakened by reward signals. Perhaps these creatures – call them the Unconditionable – spring from the womb fully formed and able to do all the things that we humans require a reward system to learn. In particular cases, their phenomenology and behavior is identical to ours, minus whatever immediate phenomenological and behavioral effects require a reward system. The Unconditionable have a particular conative mental state which plays a major role in explaining their behavior. When they believe that doing A will bring about B, and they have this conative state towards B, they do A. If they fail to attain B, they feel the same emotions of disappointment and frustration that we do. But if they succeed, they feel as excited and happy as we would. Does their lack of a reinforcement learning system make the conative state that motivates their actions not count as desire?

Second, imagine the Creatures of Habit, whose mental lives are largely unlike ours, but who have the same kinds of reward systems that we do. They regularly engage in habitual, unintentional tics. They have representational states picking out certain states of affairs, and when they happen to tic before one of these states is produced, ticcing behavior of that kind is reinforced. Their reward and punishment systems strengthen and weaken neural connections contributing to these behaviors and other things, changing their mental dispositions just as our reward systems change our mental dispositions. But when they represent B as a reward and believe that they can bring about B by getting A, they never do A (unless A coincidentally happens to be a tic that they have learned). Intentional action that is motivated by a combination of belief and some conative state is entirely foreign to them. Do these creatures have desires, in virtue of the fact that they represent certain states of affairs as rewards?

It seems to me that the Unconditionable have desires, while the Creatures of Habit do not. Schroeder’s theory gives counterintuitive results in both cases. (Do you think so too? Post your intuitions in the comments! I wish I had time to make up cool buttons like the ones you get when you take an online quiz. One would say "I'm Tim Schroeder!" and the other would say "I'm Neil Sinhababu!" and I haven't decided on the other two. Unfortunately, I'm lazy.)

I haven't given sufficient arguments for this conclusion yet, but let me give you the conclusion I'm pushing towards: It's wrong to think of “desire” as a natural kind term like “water”, and see its ability to cause behavior and pleasure as analogous to the clarity and wetness of water, which are merely part of a stereotype that helps us identify it. Desire’s ability to cause behavior and pleasure aren't merely part of a stereotype which allows us to identify desire. They're essential to desire itself. Far from being necessarily constituted by a hidden essence that explains its outward properties, desire wears its essence on its sleeve.

(For the record, I don't have Putnam's intuition and I actually think that there's a possible world where water isn't H2O. Guess I'm just not the kind of werewolf who likes natural kind terms.)

Guest Bloggers

Tomorrow I head down to Dunedin for the AAPC, which will keep me occupied till Thursday. Fortunately, an ethical werewolf and a radical geek kindly agreed to philosophize here in my absence. Enjoy!

Investing in Rational Capital

Life is full of problems. We want them solved. But how best to achieve this? Let's distinguish two general strategies for attaining a difficult goal. You can jump right in, or you can take an indirect approach - first aiming to improve your capacity to attain the ultimate goal. The overwhelming quantity and quality (read: difficulty) of social and political problems makes me question how much we can achieve directly at present. However, I'm more optimistic about the indirect approach. Though we don't know the solutions to all problems, we know enough to ensure that society is better situated in future, thus enabling future problem-solving. This is because (1) we have discovered a reliable source of solutions, namely, rational inquiry; and (2) we know how to grow this source, so that more of it is available in future. The answer, in part, is education.

Define the "rational capital" of a society as a pseudo-quantitative measure of the rational power it can harness -- through philosophers, politicians, journalists, activists, community groups, etc. -- to solve social problems. At the moment, this quantity is depressingly small. So, rather than squandering it all on 'buying' a handful of solutions today, we should be investing this rational capital, so that we might pursue grander projects tomorrow.

We need to invest in better education, and philosophical training in particular. School children should learn to distinguish valid from fallacious arguments, and reason from rhetoric. They should be encouraged to think critically about ethical issues. Intellectual curiosity must be nourished from a young age, with open discussions of all the fascinating philosophical questions that you never find in schools today.

But this only gets us so far. Philosophical education can develop the potential for rational inquiry, but it still remains to be harnessed. This will require institutional change, with all levels of government becoming more open to democratic participation. Government must be transparent, so that our representatives can be held accountable. Provision must be made for public deliberation and debate - the free exchange of reasoned arguments - and their conclusions heeded.

Ultimate success requires that we be able to reform our political culture away from empty sloganeering, towards substantive debate of reasoned arguments. As I've said before:

There are some issues that are genuinely difficult, and we can't expect any easy answers to them. But for others, it really isn't that hard to come to the truth if one is willing to think critically. Politicians and partisans defend obvious falsehoods all the time. It shouldn't happen. They ought to be exposed as either stupid or dishonest. Once we're all agreed on the easy questions, then we can concentrate on disputing the hard ones. And if we continue to hold each other up to the high standards of reasoned discourse, then perhaps some real progress might be made. So why aren't we doing this?

Perhaps people avoid rational argument because they're no good at it. Successful education should provide the required skills and overcome these fears of intellectual inadequacy. (I assume that most people are not born irretrievably stupid.)

Another problem might be apathy or lack of interest in social and political issues. This is no doubt exacerbated by feelings of political impotence and disenfranchisement. Efforts to promote deliberative democractic participation should help alleviate this side of the problem. (I assume that most people are not essentially self-centred or apathetic.)

Any other suggestions for how we ought to invest our rational capital?

Categories:

• Philosophy
• Civics
• Politics
• Education
• Rationality

The Future of Consequentialism

One objection to consequentialism is that there's no way we could even begin to guess at the full (long-term) consequences of our actions, millenia into the future. As such, we would seem to be 'morally blind', unable to attain moral knowledge. Now, I need to take this objection especially seriously, because - as an indirect utilitarian - I tend to think that the standard "counterexamples" to consequentialism (e.g. the organ-harvesting doctor) fail to take the big picture into account, and thus mistake what consequentialism would actually recommend. But then, it must be asked, when we do consider the big picture, what does consequentialism recommend?

The difficulty is exacerbated by the butterfly effect: the smallest changes in initial conditions can have momentous consequences, as the differences ripple outward, each sparking off a cascade of new differences itself, which accumulate and become ever more significant as time progresses. In a way, it's both gratifying and awe-inspiring: every decision we make, everything we do, has a profound impact on the course of future history. (This is the more ego-friendly way of thinking about determinism.) But what chance do we have of foreseeing this future?

Actually, I think we can generally know pretty well what sorts of actions are likely to produce a better future. These judgments are fallible, of course, but that's true of everything. It's possible that some particular repugnant action (murder or sadistic torture, say) will just happen to ultimately prove beneficial. But the vast majority of the time that surely won't be the case. So, as indirect utilitarians, we play by the numbers and adopt that "practical morality" or strategy that will give us the best results that are really possible for us. I think it's interesting to ask what sort of practical morality would be recommended by this long-term view. The most morally salient action-types will be those which are in some sense self-propagating, setting up a "cycle" that will continue to echo through the generations. Bearing this in mind, child abuse is perhaps one of the most evil things in the world -- not just because of the damage done to the individual victim, but because it risks corrupting his psychology in such a way as to perpetuate the "circle of violence", as the victim grows up to become an offender themselves. Any one individual's suffering is not so significant in the grand scheme of things, however. So the long-term view might lead us to conclude that non-viral actions (might murder be an example?), which don't tend to self-replicate in this fashion, are not so serious. That is, we might be forced to conclude that it is better for an abuser to kill his victims rather than release them, if the former evil would be less "contagious". This is a surprising result. I'm curious to hear what others think of it.

The very best actions will also be those which tend to propagate themselves. Education stands out, for me, as a very significant issue here. But that's a topic for a future post. More generally, virtuous character seems to be pleasantly contagious. There are some people I've known whose sheer goodness makes me too want to be a better person. Random acts of kindness can inspire the recipient to "pass it forward" (there was a neat movie built around this idea), again creating a ripple effect which builds towards a significantly better future. Compassion, generosity, sincerity, and passion, all strike me as viral virtues. Each individual instance tends to do some minor good, and also tends to influence others to replicate it. Similarly, but in a negative fashion, for the vices: selfishness, deceitfulness, hatred, and perhaps apathy.

This is all very speculative, admittedly. (A philosopher's attempts at armchair sociology are probably not to be trusted.) So, if my meta-theory is correct, then our moral theorising will need to become more empirically informed about what I have called "viral" or "contagious" action-types. The future of consequentialism thus depends upon progress in developmental psychology, sociology, and the social sciences generally, if it is to survive skeptical concerns about the future.

Categories:

• Philosophy
• Ethics
• Epistemology

I miss spare time

Like before, every day I think of new topics I want to blog about. Unlike before, I don't seem to have time to actually get around to writing them up. It's most distressing. (Also unlike before, I now have some income. So I guess it isn't all bad.) Still, as the guy on Jurassic Park says, "Life will find a way..."

So False as to be Meaningless?

Sean at common sense philosophy discusses the sentence: "Caesar is a prime number."

Apparently some people (including Carnap) think this claim is not false. They don't think it's true either, of course, but rather meaningless -- just like "Caeser is and." Though I agree about the latter, I think the former sentence is simply false. This is because, as Sean points out, there is a set of all prime numbers, and Caesar is not among its members. This undeniable fact immediately entails that Caesar is not a prime number, and hence "Caesar is a prime number" is false. I wonder if some might be tempted to deny it meaning simply because it is so very false, necessarily and obviously so, that no-one would ever even dream of seriously entertaining the thought that it might be true. Then, rather like how something might be so cold that it "burns", so some sentences might be so false that they no longer seem it. Very odd.

Despite the failure of this particular example, there are some sentences that seem genuinely meaningless despite syntactic conformity, such as Chomsky's famous example: "Colourless green ideas sleep furiously." Though I'm actually tempted to just call that one false too. It is not the case that colourless green ideas sleep furiously. Ideas don't sleep -- furiously or not, and whatever shade of colourlessness they might come in!

What do people usually make of claims about non-existent subjects, e.g. "The present king of France is bald." False or meaningless? Is there any sort of consensus on this issue?

What is it about a sentence that makes it meaningful (or not)? Consider the condition that a sentence either violates syntactical requirements or else contains nouns that fail to refer. Is that condition necessary for meaninglessness? Is it sufficient? Are there any better criteria you can offer?

Categories:

• philosophy
• semantics

Philosophers' Carnival #22

The 22nd Philosophers' Carnival is here. I especially liked Clark's post on (Continental) phenomenology vs. theory. Hallq's post on taking skepticism a step further reminds me of Reid's response to skepticism. Actually, I've been meaning to blogroll Hallq for a while now. I should get on to that...

Tags for Categories

Two bits of news, both involving the wonderful del.icio.us. I've added a linkroll of comments I make to other blogs. It should be on the main page sidebar, just below the list of (this blog's) "recent comments".

You may have noticed I haven't updated my manual 'categories' for several months. It's just too much work. (I can usually find more recent posts using a site-search anyway.) But ecmanaut has come up with a very useful-looking Greasemonkey [see here] script which makes it easier to categorize your blog posts using del.icio.us tags. So I'm trying that out now. The only complication is that I already tag other websites, so to isolate my blog posts I will tag them with 'PhilosophyEtc'. This can then be combined with topical tags to yield my blog archives by category (e.g. tools). I'll eventually add the most important category links to my sidebar, for ease of access.

P.S. See here for an introduction to tags and why they're so well suited for forming Blogger categories.

Categories:

• blogging
• tools

Upcoming Carnival

Time flies. The next Philosophers' Carnival is coming up on Monday. Be sure to send in a submission by the weekend, to give the host plenty of time (and content!) to prepare.

Also remember that you're welcome to nominate others' posts using the simple and convenient del.icio.us nominations system.

[Update: Not much time left!]