The law of the excluded middle: part III

I will assume familiarity with my earlier discussions of this issue.

The law of the excluded middle, or LEM, we have found, is useful. But the most commonly cited reason for taking an absolutist view of LEM is not persuasive.

So we are ready to modify LEM when there seems to be good reason to do so, whether in the direction of truth gluts or in that of truth gaps.

Today we arrive at politics. There is a common argument in political philosophy that depends on the notion of aggression, or the first use of force, as itself always wrong. I think that it is fair to say that every state structure in the world depends on the consent of large portions of the population, in this sense the legitimacy, of a lot of actions that can fairly be described as the first use of force. Without more, it looks like we must reach anarchistic conclusions: every state structure is wrong.

That was never a argument of which I was fond, even when I was an anarchist of a sort. But that is not my point here. The argument as I have phrased it is a stylized form of the arguments made by Murray Rothbard, Tibor Machan, Robert Nozick and some others of note. [Rothbard is portrayed above.]

My point is that any such argument relies on a broad notion of what aggression is, an absolutist view of its badness, and -- wait for it -- an absolutist view of the law of the excluded middle. What happens after all if action X is both aggression and not aggression? Or if action X is neither?

Specific example: carbon emissions. I have come to the conclusion that the well-being if not the survival of humanity requires our collective ability to limit carbon exhausts into our atmosphere. This may well require the existence of organized structures (perhaps nation-states amongst whom diplomats and international organizations work toward common ends) -- structures that can mandate limits on such emissions, imposing penalties on those who violate the rules.

Does that mean that individuals enforcing such rules would be aggressing against individuals trying to emit ("on my own land and in peace with my neighbors!" as they might say)? Are all such limits a first use of force and so an aggression.

I think in such a situation there is a utility in saying "both yes and no." So I think we may all have a survival interest in acknowledging truth gluts and evading the political inferences that the three above named gentlemen drew from their presumed absence.

Searle: The Chinese Room

John Searle has become the object of accusations of improper conduct. These accusations even have some people in the world of academic philosophy saying that instructors in that world should try to avoid teaching Searle's views. That is an odd contention, and has given rise to heated exchanges in certain corners of the blogosphere. At Leiter Reports, I encountered a comment from someone describing himself as "grad student drop out." GSDO said: " This is a side question (and not at all an attempt to answer the question BL posed): How important is John Searle's work? Are people still working on speech act theory or is that just another dead end in the history of 20th century philosophy? My impression is that his reputation is somewhat inflated from all of his speaking engagements and NYRoB reviews. The Chinese room argument is a classic, but is there much more to his work than that?" I took it upon myself to answer that on LR. But here I'll tak...

A Story About Coleridge

This is a quote from a memoir by Dorothy Wordsworth, reflecting on a trip she took with two famous poets, her brother, William Wordsworth, and their similarly gifted companion, Samuel Taylor Coleridge. We sat upon a bench, placed for the sake of one of these views, whence we looked down upon the waterfall, and over the open country ... A lady and gentleman, more expeditious tourists than ourselves, came to the spot; they left us at the seat, and we found them again at another station above the Falls. Coleridge, who is always good-natured enough to enter into conversation with anybody whom he meets in his way, began to talk with the gentleman, who observed that it was a majestic waterfall. Coleridge was delighted with the accuracy of the epithet, particularly as he had been settling in his own mind the precise meaning of the words grand, majestic, sublime, etc., and had discussed the subject with William at some length the day before. “Yes, sir,” says Coleridge, “it is a maj...

The Growing Block Theory of Time

My own disposition, in regard to the philosophy of time, is toward the "growing block" theory. This is the view that past events remain realities, that present-moment events are also realities, but that future events are not yet real. The image is of the universe as a block with an edge on (say) the right-hand side. The block is expanding because that edge is moving ever further right, and that edge is what we call the present, or, simply, "now." Everything to the left of that edge is both static (the past is complete) and, still and forever, real. Think of the phrase "the moving finger writes." The chief alternatives to the growing-block theory are "presentism" (only the now-edge itself is real) and "eternalism" (past, present, and future are all real." I believe that time is a growing block because (1) that's what it feels like, (2) we should stick with the introspective phenomenon unless we have good reason to abandon ...

Jamesian Philosophy Refreshed

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