The problem of induction can be characterized as having two sides: the epistemological problem, which is how to distinguish between good and bad inductive methods, and the metaphysical problem, which is how to altogether distinguish between good and bad inductions.[1] On the Wittgensteinian view put forward here, we will offer agreement with Hume’s response to the epistemological problem. However, the epistemological response is only possible when predicated upon some idea of a good induction—before we can determine reliability, which is a tabulation of frequency of “successes,” we must first determine what we mean by “success.” Fundamentally, the question of good and bad inductions is what underlies the real crux of an attack on induction: in most cases, how we might traditionally define truth (particularly in a realist fashion) is going to lead to a susceptibility of our inductions to skeptical objection. Indeed, some have been inclined to, in accepting Hume’s arguments on induction, concede that the metaphysical problem of induction is insoluble.[2] Given their criteria for truth and falsehood, this is not surprising.

First, by investigating the terms used in Hume’s argument—particularly “necessity”—we will show how the argument against induction must presuppose induction to succeed. Then, by clarifying our picture of truth, we will argue that the metaphysical problem is in one sense irrelevant to our own position, but show a sense in which we do account for how good inductions are separated from bad inductions. Before proceeding into our arguments, however, we must explain Hume’s arguments against induction.

Hume on the Problem of Induction[3]

In Book I, Part III of the Treatise of Human Nature (1740), Hume formulated what would come to be known as the problem of induction so commandingly—especially for his time—that the problem is also accordingly named “Hume’s Problem.” While the contemporary terminology of induction does not enter his discussion, Hume’s primary concern in Part III was with notions of causality and causal inference.

Because we have no impression of the relation of causation, Hume seeks to alternatively couch causation in terms of human thought, and hence defines a “cause” like so: “An object precedent and contiguous to another, and where all the objects resembling the former are plac’d in like relations of precedency and contiguity to those objects that resemble the latter.” He provides several definitions in the course of his work, but this adequately characterizes his general notion of causation.

Hume distinguishes causal belief from causal inference, the latter of which is only the anticipation of similar conjunctions between a precedent and some state from past conjunctions when the precedent is observed. Causal beliefs, on the other hand, are of the form “[Precedent] X causes Y,” which comes about from reflection on causal inferences. Hume’s framing of the problem of induction, implicitly through his discussion about causation, then, is as follows: in trying to find an account for good or reliable inductions, if we take the statement “all past experiences of X have also been Y” to be a statement of causation, then adding “t is X” to it should yield the good induction “t, not yet observed, is also Y.” However, since causality is not an objective feature of the world, this is not a possibility. The Humean problem, then, is to adjudicate among inductive habits in the absence of any objective distinction like causality, broken down into the epistemological and metaphysical parts described in the introduction. Broadly speaking, Hume’s point is that judgments about future or otherwise unknown instances are problematic, because such judgments are neither a report of an experience, nor a logical consequence of prior experience. This leaves an uncertain space in which we have multiple means of making those judgments that yield different results, but must find a way of choosing the best one (the epistemological problem). Further, we must define “best” in this context (the metaphysical problem).

Some have suggested that Hume has set induction up for failure by making induction far too stringent in suggesting that it proceeds from the premises “All observed Fs have also been Gs” and “a is an F” to the conclusion “a, not yet observed, is also a G.” Instead, they contend that the proper conclusion is “it is therefore probable that a, not yet observed, is also a G.”[4] Hume’s response is simple enough: probabilistic connections are no different from causal connections in that they are not to be found in our experience of the world, but they depend on habits of the mind. Thus, while we can complicate matters more by incorporating probability, the same problem remains.

Generally, Hume puts forward the following dilemma to demonstrate the impossibility of justifying any sort of induction. Given that any justification must be either deductive or inductive, deductive conclusions (which are necessarily true) can not justify inductive conclusions (which are never necessarily true). On the other horn of the dilemma, inductive justification of induction would be circular, since it uses the very principle it sets out to defend. Thus, it is clear that by this reasoning, induction is unjustifiable.

Hume qualifies this conclusion by saying that we may review our inferences and reflect upon their reliability, forming a hierarchy of meta-level inductions—specifically, a chain of inductions about inductions about inductions and so on. Reflecting on these inductions in sequence progressively increases our uncertainty ad infinitum, leading Hume to ask how we “retain a degree of belief, which is sufficient for our purpose, either in philosophy or in common life?”[5] Hume’s answer, in short, is to propose two general epistemic rule types: those that lead us to singular predictive inferences (in other words, our basic inductive methodology), and those that we apply as corrective or qualificatory measures toward the products of rules of the first type. The former could be described as some system of sorting out confirming and disconfirming instances, and the establishment of a threshold of evidence at which we accept or reject an inference. This could also be framed probabilistically (e.g. Bayesian induction). The latter type of rule would form some system of delimiting the precise significance of an inference given its evidence; for example, it might show us in what ways an inference may be falsified, and thus the level of certainty with which we should treat a particular proposition.

The Non-Problem of Induction

A Wittgensteinian response to any philosophical “problem” can be described as a reduction of the problem to a linguistic puzzle, and a subsequent resolution of that puzzle. In short, a linguistic puzzle is a seemingly insoluble contradiction that can be successfully rectified by clarifying the definitions of the terms in use. Once the definitions have been clarified, the next stage is to determine whether the conclusion (whose terms have also been clarified) still follows from the premises, and whether the premises are true. Once this has been done, a problem should have been shown to be merely confusion. This methodology is most strongly associated with Wittgenstein’s most significant work, Philosophical Investigations.[6]

Given this background, we can now freely address the problem of induction. To show how the problem of induction can be reduced to a linguistic puzzle, we will first return to a simplified formulation of it: no inductive conclusions necessarily follow from their premises, because we have no justification for believing that the unobserved will be like the observed once we observe it (a generalization of “the future will be like the past.”) The justificatory problem of induction, put in simple terms by Hume, states it similarly: the definite outcomes of deduction can not justify the indefinite outcomes of induction, and induction can not justify induction without circularity. Thus, we are not justified in believing the conclusion of an inductive argument.

Now, to prove that this is merely a linguistic puzzle, we have to show how clarifying our terms in this argument will dissipate the problem, whether in showing some self-contradictory aspect of the argument, showing that the conclusion that follows from those definitions is unimportant to us, showing that the desired conclusion of the argument does not follow from the premises, etc. By an “unimportant conclusion,” we only mean that all further implications of that conclusion do not constitute anything that merits addressing or reparation. In other words, the conclusion made to have followed from the premises is not a philosophical problem requiring a solution on our part, but just some proposition that conforms to its premises. Our criteria for importance is not simply soundness, as there are many sound arguments that are not of philosophical concern to us. Thus, it is certainly the case that if we define “justification for a belief” as “immunity to the logical possibility of subsequent falsifying events,” we could easily concoct an argument from skeptical premises that (properly) concludes that we are not “justified” in believing any proposition because we have not immunized it from subsequent falsifying events. But, as we will see, this conclusion sounds important because it uses a word which is usually of epistemic importance (justification), but is in fact unimportant because it fails to have any implications worth considering.

We can apply this method to the problem of induction by first investigating the employment of the idea of necessity in the argument against induction. Asserting that there is no necessary connection between matters of fact is not incorrect, given a particular meaning of the word “necessary”—namely, where “necessity” implies conformity to the rules of deductive reasoning. Given that induction has been identified as non-deductive because of the “unfounded” assumption that the future will be like the past, then we can conclude that there is no “necessary” connection between inductive arguments and their conclusions. Asserting that this poses some sort of epistemic problem is a mistake, however. In other words, clarifying the definitions as we have, this conclusion follows from the premises, but it does not tell us anything important. The sense in which we mean “necessary” to establish this conclusion is much connected to the sense in which we used “justified” above: it produces a conclusion that sounds scary because of what we associate with the words in it, but can only establish its conclusion by redefining those words in a way that makes the conclusion ineffective.

Naturally, a defender of induction would be impelled to ask “why is the assumption that the future will be like the past unfounded?”; but note that we are returning to the justificatory dilemma once again. In the dilemma, Hume has ruled out induction justifying induction, on the basis that it is a circular argument. But Hume must find circular arguments unacceptable for some reason: specifically, because of deductive logic. We know from this that the only way to “justify” anything, as the word is used in the argument, is to find a deductive argument for it. So it is evident that understanding the exact implications of accepting the notion of necessity as it arises in deductive logic as our standard for justifiability will help us understand why the conclusion that there is no “necessary” connection between inductive arguments and their conclusions is not important. In fact, we will now show how using deductive logic as a standard of justifiability (in this context) renders the argument against induction useless.

Much like the concept of infinitude, the concept of necessity has no direct referent in our sense experience. Because we have implicitly rejected an a priori account for it, we can only say that the notion of necessity is an effect of our repeat experiences and interactions with the world which represents an effective certitude with which we expect some association to hold. We say that by necessity, the sun rising in the east is associated with morning, but this is an expression of an effective certainty than a certainty so as to assert our omniscience; we simply have little incentive to mention the remaining logical possibility that the sun might not rise in the east. Hume’s account of necessity is the same:

Upon this head I repeat what I have often had occasion to observe, that as we have no idea, that is not deriv’d from an impression, we must find some impression, that gives rise to this idea of necessity, if we assert we have really such an idea. In order to this I consider, in what objects necessity is commonly suppos’d to lie; and finding that it is always ascrib’d to causes and effects, I turn my eye to two objects suppos’d to be plac’d in that relation; and examine them in all the situations, of which they are susceptible. I immediately perceive, that they are contiguous in time and place, and that the object we call cause precedes the other we call effect. In no one instance can I go any farther, nor is it possible for me to discover any third relation betwixt these objects. I therefore enlarge my view to comprehend several instances; where I find like objects always existing in like relations of contiguity and succession.

Clearly, Hume adheres to our view that the epistemic origins of an idea must reside in sense-experiences (“impressions”). Though he was speaking about causal necessity in this passage, his reasoning ensures that he accepts that our idea of deductive logic is also the consequence of a series of impressions. So, given that, we have actually gone ahead and strengthened Hume’s justificatory dilemma by turning it into just a lemma: the option of justifying induction deductively is nonsensical for reasons that prevent us from even admitting it into our discussion. To justify using deduction, we must first justify induction.

Hence, the conclusion of the argument that constitutes the problem of induction, that we are not “justified” in believing the conclusion of inductive arguments, is itself dependent on an inductive argument. Here, we have reached the skeptical error of externalizing logic, which creates arguments more paradoxical than unimportant on this account. If the logical possibility that things could be some other way than we believe them is used to undermine all of our beliefs, then no beliefs undermined in this way can be believed while constructing logical possibilities. But the construction of logical possibilities is only possible given the inductive process that creates our idea of necessity. Further, we cannot sensibly falsify (or take any other action standing outside of) logic, since we can not describe what a non-logical world would look like.[7] Yet this is precisely what, by implication, skepticism requires by questioning our foundations for logic, which are the very experiences and thus inferences from experience that they challenge.

Because Hume does not want to make extra-sensory assertions at all, he is then also committed to holding to this account for the very logical principles he uses to criticize inductive statements. Thus, we have established that the argument attempting to establish that induction is problematic implicitly must assert what it intends to disprove. By showing how we can not use deductive necessity as a criteria for justification (at the epistemic level), we have eliminated the standard by which induction is considered to be problematic. More generally, we have implied that some coordination of repeat sense impressions is the only means we have of generating any criteria of justification. And we can properly call such coordination “induction,” as it is indeed in what “the problem of induction” purports to show defect. By this, we have shown how the general argument against induction fails.

More clarification of the unproblematic nature of induction is still worthwhile, nonetheless. For one, we are still pressed with the question of importance of skeptical arguments such as the argument against induction, as suggested earlier. If the lack of necessity of inductive conclusions prevents us from attaining omniscience—an immunity of our theories to subsequent falsifying events—and can validly offer no prescriptive changes in our behavior, there seems to be no value in pointing it out. It is part of the unavoidable limits of our world. We can label this state as our being “unjustified” in believing inductive conclusions, but what have we changed by doing so? We could easily say a belief is unjustifiable when it does not reduce its conclusions to the properties of cheese. We must ask, “Unjustified relative to what?” The word must be put in some context to have any implications. Saying that we are “unjustified” because we can not look beyond the limits of our world—a precise lack of context—can not have any condemning epistemic implications, for the simple reason that there is no prescription that could ever conceivably change it! To speak meaningfully about “justification,” then, we must affix it to some sensory phenomena to which we can appeal to differentiate among the justified and the unjustified. In this regard, there is still a sense in which we have “justification”; in Humean terms, that sense is predicated on the notion that some inductions are more reliable than others.

Finding out how to distinguish the reliability of different inductive methods is the epistemological component of the problem of induction. More or less, Hume’s response to this part of the problem works quite well: Hume’s intuition that induction about induction begins to yield how we separate good inductive habits from bad ones is straightforward enough. We look at different inductive methods applied over time, and see how often each method produced a good induction. From this, we discern the reliability of different methods.

It is in reference to the so-called metaphysical problem of induction that we can offer more clarity regarding the validity of induction. Certainly, the metaphysical problem, if unanswered, leaves the epistemological problem insoluble as well: after all, we do need some account for what is a “good” versus “bad” induction in order to determine which inductive methods are more reliable than others. Yet, having tossed out criteria for “good” and “bad” such as “corresponding with the external world,” the answer is quite simple: there is no metaphysical problem because there is no metaphysics (at least in the relevant sense).

One posing the metaphysical problem might ask: if we only have sense experiences, what is there that could possibly provide objectivity? Indeed, what reason do we have to sort and organize different experiences to form theories? Without constraints, our sense experiences are simply floating variables from which we could construct an infinite amount of different theories with no difference in consequence. Thus, just as a 2-variable equation has infinite solutions until another equation constrains it, so too does what is “true” have infinite solutions until we affix some constraint to our interpretations. In short, our interpretation of sensory phenomena only has implications when those phenomena arise to some degree outside of our will, and we have particular goals for those phenomena. We have particular desires to bring about certain things in our sense experiences, but we can not simply will these things to come about. We wish to taste something sweet, but no amount of willing a taste of sweetness into our mouths gets us that. Ultimately, this lies against a background of what we understand to be necessary for accomplishing our goals (life) and what we understand to be the end of all accomplishment (death). Simply put, our “metaphysics” is one of life versus death.

That we can not merely will certain things to occur is a basis for objectivity in interpreting our sense experiences; our acceptance of mortality is what gives us the motive to take one interpretation over all and call it “truth,” even if only by the actions we take. 14^th-century explorers had two competing views of the earth, one saying it was flat, one saying it was round. Without fear of death or fear of a voyage done for nothing (both objective constraints), this debate would have been meaningless. After all, there are infinite logical possibilities as to why a flat-earth theory might still prevail over a round-earth. But that explorers found new lands and, after sailing in one direction long enough, wound up in the same place, and have acted on the principle of “circumnavigation” successfully up until the present, has compelled people to accept a round-earth theory over a flat one. People who have acted on this principle, other things equal, have achieved the goals they set out, and they and others will continue to act on that principle. In this sense, people have accepted the round-earth theory as truth; it was a “good” induction.

Thus, good inductions are separated from bad ones on the basis of how successfully they inform our goal-directed actions, where success is measured by the presence of a desired sense experience. By our having thrown out realism, the only case of error that can even be meaningfully considered is where some theory posited based on sense experiences is later falsified by a subsequent sense experience. On our view, this is no longer a problem with induction, of course. It is merely a case in which a particular induction has been identified as “bad” through induction.

Undoubtedly, we can be continually pressed to justify each successive answer we have given. Why shouldn’t we doubt mortality, or anything else foundational to the above discussion? Certainly, there is a point at which we can no longer give any justification, yet it is the very point from which we get our notion of justification. We do superficially agree with the skeptic that such foundational propositions lie beyond any empirical verification, but this is only because our notion of empirical verification is solely derived from these kinds of propositions. At some point, we must reach bedrock: certain beliefs “underlie all questions and thinking.”[8] Even if we imagined the most hard-core doubter telling us that we have “no reason” to believe the “biological myth” of death, he could not be using anything but human-contextual concepts in, say, appealing to our self-interest through telling us that what we believe is false and that we ought to change it. In that way, doubt is only possible with knowledge, so an all-encompassing, ‘hyperbolic’ doubt is clearly nonsensical; in even thinking of that doubt, much more communicating that doubt, we are invariably asserting things that we know.

In addition to questioning the logical feasibility of Hume’s general argument against induction, we have now also supplemented it with an answer to the fundamental question of how we separate good inductions from bad inductions. Most importantly, we have shown how a careful examination of the terms at play in the argument against induction demonstrates how it relies on a contrived sense of necessity as a criterion for justification and improperly treats this idea of necessity as standing independently of induction. In this, we showed how induction is, in fact, the basis of all criteria in evaluating the justification of our beliefs. Then, in addressing the metaphysical problem, we showed how meaningful criteria are generated against a back-drop of goal-oriented action.

With this answer to the supposed problem of induction in hand, we have a kind of argument which, when generalized, defeats skeptical arguments against empiricism. By reducing our criteria for the truth or falsehood of a proposition to its relation to strictly sensory phenomena, we have removed the possibility of skeptical error, and brought the concept of error within the boundaries of the senses: we can only be mistaken in a sense that is relative to other sense experiences. Hume, imaginably, would have appreciated this, as he did not desire to be a thoroughgoing skeptic; he only wished to fight off philosophical phantoms, much like Wittgenstein did. Again, like Wittgenstein, he sought a rational basis for our norms of speech and action, but found the answers of philosophers to be mystical and woefully deficient. Indeed, he did not see a convincing means of showing how we could justifiably believe in induction, and retreated to a seemingly resigned position of “custom and habit.” Our goal here, as was Wittgenstein’s goal, was to show how we are justified in believing in our senses, and thus induction—without resignation.

[2] Ibid.

[3] Ibid. This exposition of Hume’s account of the problem is paraphrased from this source.

[4] Ibid., section 2: “Hume”

[5] Ibid., section 7: “Hume’s Dilemma Revisited”

[6] The Wikipedia entry on Philosophical Investigations explains Wittgenstein’s approach well, at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Philosophical_Investigations#Method_and_presentation

[7] Tractatus, 3.031

[8] On Certainty pp. 415.

In a way, said vandal has deployed the concept of the destructive prank put forward in American Graffiti as an argument for taking a particular action. This action, he believes, will be a functional means to his end (a specific kind of destruction of police property with desired aesthetic consequences). Naturally, one would reject this argument, probably retorting “Don’t believe everything you see in movies.” Indeed, on the popular T.V. show MythBusters, this was tested: a police cruiser was put under the circumstances portrayed in the movie, and it was discovered that the axle could not be removed from the chassis after several attempts. Essentially, what the MythBusters team did was test the validity of the argument, “it occurred in the fictional story of American Graffiti; therefore, it will occur when we try it.”

Like the screenplay writer puts a concept in the script and the director’s crew executes it on the screen, the philosopher postulates a concept in his writing. Through visual representation, the movie scene symbolizes the event of a normal police cruiser’s axle being cleanly pulled off as a result of its attachment to a fixed object; the concept is conveyed to us like the words on a page convey to us the concept of “the People” or “goodness.” The “police-car-axle-trick” concept is a more tangible one, but in due course, it is just as well a concept as “the ideal city.”

Looking in reality for referents for these concepts—or their sub-components—is an act of verifying arguments invoking those concepts. Those arguments which fail to provide concepts with referents sufficient to reasonably draw their conclusions can be described as holding concepts as primary. No philosophers who posit these arguments, naturally, would agree that this is unreasonable. In fact, some may even embrace those kinds of arguments as the only kinds of arguments one could possibly make on the subject matter. The suggestion that concepts are primary in a belief system is hence either one of the philosopher’s own implicit metaphysical and epistemological admission, or one of simple description of a belief system’s fundamental nature.

Here, my intention in exploring belief systems from the perspective of the concepts they employ and the manner in which they employ them is not to form a strictly bounded definition of “the primacy of concepts,” though one could perhaps be created; instead, my intention is to create a helpful way of thinking about how many belief systems—whether they are epistemic, religious, political, social, and the like, or comprehensive—predicate their conclusions upon conceptualization over empirical evidence.

Epistemology

A thorough explanation of what is meant by “concept” is necessary for the proceeding discussion, due to the widely varying use of the word across different disciplines and philosophical viewpoints. The phrase “a concept” refers to an abstract idea in the human mind used to organize sensory information, often expressed through language. Concepts serve as a means by which thought is simplified and communication is made possible, via the distillation of immense amounts of mixed sensory information into discrete and meaningful units. The process of abstraction is the means by which such distillation occurs.

Though they are constructed from information gathered from the senses about the external world, concepts only exist within the human mind. Matter and energy are arranged in a particular way out in the world, which lends itself to certain sensual impressions upon a perceiver; commonalities are then sorted out in the perceiver’s brain to create general attributes or sets of attributes. A natural difficulty of speaking in this manner, of course, is that we can not conceive of a universe without our conceptualization; in other words, we can not think of reality without using concepts like “matter” and “energy” in doing so.

To continue the tradition of epistemologists’ uncanny obsession with furniture, we can begin with the concept “chair.” In common understanding, it is something intended for humans to sit on, with a flat surface and some kind of foundation to separate that flat surface from the ground. There are many different kinds of chairs: rocking chairs, swivel chairs, dining room chairs, patio chairs, and so on. The concept “chair” holds the attributes all of those chairs share in common.

There are certainly things in the world that fit the definition of “chair” given above, but what about the imagination? An easy and commonly cited example of a concept in the imagination is the Pegasus: a winged, white, and horse-like creature. Examining the Pegasus, we find that concepts need not have a direct referent in reality, though at some level the concepts that constitute them must. Thus, the first person to conceive of Pegasus never once had to experience a Pegasus but, having seen horses, white things, and winged creatures, combined some of the attributes he saw into one concept. That we can conceive of something does not imply that such a thing exists somewhere, in the spatio-temporal sense; it only implies that some component parts of the Pegasus exist.

While the process of abstraction requires multiple instances of an attribute for abstraction to make sense, a concept itself is not necessarily an abstraction but can be built of abstractions. Those things in the world to which a concept refers can also be unique things. That there is only one Empire State Building does not mean that the Empire State Building, in our minds, is not a concept. It is a concept built of other concepts, or, better said, is a member of multiple and sometimes overlapping classes of objects: things with a name, buildings, edifices taller than 1,000 feet, and so forth. A concept is hence not necessarily a particular abstraction, but can be a combination of abstractions. A concept without a direct referent—like Pegasus—is one composed of abstractions that do not jointly hold with any object in reality. There are things in the world with wings, horns, and horse-ness, but there are no things that are all three.

In a theoretical context, the process of concept deconstruction is, in logical terms, reducible down to the most basic logical unit of reality. If one had knowledge of the most elementary unit of existence (supposing such a thing was real) and all of its properties, he could hypothetically conceptualize anything: all manner of materials, phenomena, organisms, machines, etc. The human mind, however, is limited to what the senses can perceive and what the brain can process.

Those objects in the world which we immediately perceive help accelerate the process of creating concepts, especially useful ones. Birds, for example, provided to human beings the concept that things could move above the ground; their wings inspired the idea that friction between air and a surface can create a force opposite to gravity.

Someone very intelligent could have figured out that he could make a flying object after watching a leaf fall off a tree, or even just by the feeling of wind pushing against him. It is the first-hand experience of aerodynamics, though, that allowed those inventors to create the concept of aerodynamics. Psycho-epistemologically, all conceivable things must have their origins in some minimum level of experience.

In light of this definition, a concept itself can not be invalid by definition, since what makes it a concept is that it can be conceived of in the human mind. Words are then used to signify concepts and their relation to each other. Each concept, with relation to evidence (the referents of its constituents) in reality, has a range of arguments in which it can be validly used. However, a concept can also be used in an invalid manner.

One may argue that accepting certain concepts as reality can generate desirable consequences. Here, we must make an important distinction between accepting concepts as reality and contextually employing concepts as functional metaphors. In mathematics, for example, complex numbers (even roots of negative numbers) can be argued to be lacking a referent or even inconceivable in reality (like a “round square”). Applying mathematical conventions, though, they can be written down and operated upon. It turns out that the use of the complex number system has resulted in several useful implications about the real number system. The idea of validity, as used here, however, relates to the kinds of claims that are made on the basis of a concept itself. The complex number system as described above serves as a functional concept employed in context of another conceptual system—namely, the system of mathematical operators.

Suppose the adoption of the “legal fiction” of a corporation—treating it like an individual in the legal system, among all the other implications as we know them—was argued for with the justification that it would increase the overall economic product of a society by reducing the costs of causing legal disputes at a greater rate than its negative consequences. Such a hypothesis can be empirically tested. However, the concept of the corporation as an autonomous entity in reality, of course, is a strange one: there is no such being that is conscious, self-aware, can take action, etc. that represents the totality of what is involved in legal proceedings involving a corporation as an individual (all of its assets). Individual human minds make decisions and take actions within that corporation.

The corporation as individual serves as a functional concept employed in context of another conceptual system—in this case, the legal system. Thus, there is a distinct difference between a concept’s being a convenient way of thinking about something—not unlike a metaphor—versus its possession of a referent in reality. To clarify (or maybe jumble things some more), the concept of a metaphor being useful or effective is a concept with a referent in reality. The concept of the food pyramid does not imply that the universe intrinsically organizes food in the shape of a pyramid; however, conceptualizing a healthy diet as a pyramid is a useful tool in teaching one how to proportion his diet.

Warranting clarification is what constitutes a valid claim about reality—or, in other words, what truth is. Phenomenologically, all truth is ultimately a matter of human action. We can not look “behind the curtain” of human experience. In light of that, truth as “correspondence with the external world” is an unverifiable hypothesis, formulated on the basis of a god’s-eye view of human experience. The material consequences of human existence and experience can be the only basis upon which a meaningful idea of “truth” is founded. With skeptical arguments pushed to their limits, life and death are the ultimate standards of knowledge: where we fail to act in accordance with our sense-perceptions, we are hurt—that we are having an experience of pain can not be doubted—or we die, after which doubt seems to be unlikely. Empirical methodology is the adherence to the evidence of the senses and the recognition of its validity. From the standpoint of the mind, the senses are a brute fact; all theories which try to deny the evidence of the senses or to construct truth via some non-empirical means have their origins invariably in the senses. One must have knowledge in order to doubt.

The evidence of the senses has produced a methodology—reason, the scientific method, etc.—which has repeatedly led to successful human existence through consistent integration of sense data. Belief systems in which concepts are primary contradict that methodology. Accordingly, devotion to those belief systems bears the consequences of failure to act upon fact, or at the very least, failure to act upon the best possible methodology for forming beliefs about the world.

The Primacy of Concepts

The phrase “primacy of concepts” thus refers to a particular kind of use of concepts in reasoning to a conclusion. We can not define it without, to some degree, pointing to its inherent flaws, for it is a phenomenon which embodies invalid reasoning by its definition. Because all that we, as humans, can conceive of predicates upon experience, any statement someone makes that bears any meaning to us is a concept, and thus has some relation to reality. The mark of the phenomenon of the primacy of concepts, however, is the outright inadmissibility of certain empirical evidence. Note that the view of concepts outlined here and earlier will quite distinctly run up against others—in particular, the classical theory of concepts, especially of the kind that holds that concepts are mind-independent entities. The primacy of concepts as a fallacy only persists if we accept a mind-dependent and empirical theory of concepts and reject the classical and mind-independent theories of concepts.

Thus, unsurprisingly, the first and most prominent examples of the primacy of concepts are belief systems which embody the “classical” theory of concepts: classical concepts possess a set of necessary and jointly sufficient conditions for that concept to apply to something that hold across all worlds. Classical concepts are represented in philosophy by the tradition of conceptual analysis, the first and most prominent example of which being the work of Plato, which has sought to provide an answer to certain questions such as, “What is happiness? Virtue? Beauty? Freedom? Good? Evil? Knowledge? Space? Time?” These kinds of questions—in most cases when they are asked—personify philosophy in which concepts are primary. Certain concepts possess a nature or essence which can come to be known through the proposal of candidate definitions and the seeking of counter-examples (through thought experiments) to invalidate them. In a way, this process the treatment of concepts as static objects of sorts in philosophical discourse; philosophers of this tradition examine concepts like scientists examine physical specimens, as though they were things in plain view to examine.

In Plato’s Euthyphro, Socrates seeks from his discussion with Euthyphro what the essence of piety is; he asks what in the world makes pious things pious—what they share in common—and not for examples of people who are pious or what the gods are known to think is pious. In the Lysis, he pursues the essence of friendship similarly; in the Phaedrus, love; in the Thaetatus, knowledge; and in the Republic, justice. Behind the character of Socrates in these dialogues is Plato’s theory of the Forms, the most prominent example of a belief system that makes concepts primary. The Forms themselves are a kind of hypostatization of concepts—the forms inhabit a timeless reality outside the human mind. He attempts to provide a direct metaphysical explanation for concepts: they are caused to appear in the human mind as a result of their exact metaphysical counterparts. Hence, it is no surprise that Plato’s approach to concepts is one of classical analysis.

In the case of the scientists, when they ask a question of a physical specimen they capture—such as “of what is this creature made?”—they have agreed upon a referent of the concept signified by “creature,” as applying to the matter in front of them; they have, implicitly and instinctually as a matter of rules of language, agreed that this animate and discrete entity composed of matter is the object of discourse. They can then shock it with electricity, give it food, douse it in chemicals, dissect it, etc. to answer the questions they may have about it.

In contrast to the scientists’ investigations, there is no such obvious referent when it comes to Plato-type questions. They only make sense in context of the theory of the Forms or similar postulations about the external and discrete existence of concepts; so long as we reject such metaphysical claims (and with good reason), the referents that are brought under inspection can only be a product of the amalgamated meanings of the words brought by the parties to the discussion. The explicit reliance of answers to “What is F?” upon intuition is perfectly explainable by the non-existence of concepts as entities in reality and the different definitions brought by different parties to the dialectic. Plato’s exposition of the forms through the character of Socrates in the Republic and other works is very educative in the actual ambiguity of reference, but specimen-like treatment of words.

The above kind of concept primacy is only a subset of a broader definition of concept primacy. One need not formally accept the classical theory of concepts in order to commit a similar fallacy. The idea of concept primacy merely requires that the rational necessity of instance-to-concept reasoning be invalidated, with a concept used to exclude an instance. In this way, belief systems inhabit a continuum of concept primacy: on one end, there are its most egregious cases, in which one conceptualizes something and holds it as reality purely arbitrarily; on the other, there are concepts which have reasonable uses and that are even reasonably used, but are held to a reality above the instances that derived them. The spectrum can be loosely characterized by the placing the examples of mythology, religion, and fantasy on one extreme, and scientism, skepticism, and cynicism on the other.

The Plato-type errors are frequently just unconscious ones; they take the words of language, which are created to describe reality, and turn them into reality itself. At the core of the problems of philosophy—especially those of the Platonic kind—are issues of language. The fallacies of concept-primacy, in general, constitute the removal of concepts from the human context in which they were generated, and the assertion of those concepts as a priori fact. Because those concepts are defined without experience or to the exclusion of some experience, thought experiments can endlessly “refute” one’s conclusions about the world, precisely because they are not based on experience, but upon conceptual construction. Adherence to some system of rules—following religious texts, star-gazing, meditating, utilizing heuristics, and so on—in deriving certain conclusions, when it is to any degree non-empirical, necessarily requires that some empirical evidence can never be cited as both arguments and counter-arguments: the discussion is bound by the domain of the system’s rules.

Descartes’ exploration of knowledge and doubt in his Meditations is subject is another notable—and highly influential—example of concept primacy. Indeed, Cartesian foundationalism and the other deduction-focused metaphysics of several of the Continental Rationalists leave little room in the world for contingency—metaphysically and thus epistemically. They call upon a methodology for verifying beliefs that downplays the senses in favor of “logical truths” and, as Descartes describes them, “clear and distinct” things. Because of the inherent deficiency in providing any truths about the world on the basis of his “hyperbolic doubt” in Meditation I—the hypothesis of the powerful, evil deceiver—it is no surprise that Descartes appealed to the concept of God and argued “logically” for his existence.

The epistemological school following in the tradition of Descartes’ “hyperbolic doubt” is one of skepticism. The claim of skepticism—that knowledge is impossible—is justified on logical grounds: we can not be sure that what we experience as truth about the external world is in fact the external world and not an illusion. As one of skepticism’s most recent representatives, Keith Lehrer put forward a “skeptical hypothesis”:

There are a group of creatures in another galaxy, call them Googols, whose intellectual capacity is 10¹⁰⁰ that of men, and who amuse themselves by sending out a peculiar kind of wave that affects our brain in such a way that our beliefs about the world are mostly incorrect.

The irrefutable logical possibility of this being true, he claims, entails that our beliefs can never be completely justified. Thus, we cannot have knowledge.

The important issue at hand with Lehrer’s skepticism is the prescription accepting his conclusion offers. So we cannot have knowledge of a certain kind; “Now what?” we ask. Not coincidentally, the claim “knowledge is impossible” could itself be a reiteration of the Plato-type language problem—depending on the implications we draw from it. We can be sure here that the skeptical argument defeats the classical conceptions of knowledge (a correspondence theory of truth, for example). The world of the perfectly known and perfectly deductive, from a psychological standpoint, is not a concept with a direct referent found in human experience. Certainty of that kind is either a functional tool of discovery (as in mathematics or logic), or merely a manner of speaking: when I say, “I am certain that I will turn in this paper on Saturday,” I do not mean that in my mind I have discounted the logical possibilities of my severe injury, death, sudden lack of interest in the academic, and so forth. The probability of those occurrences is so low that my statement of certainty is one of cost-benefit analysis: to warn the reader of an alternative outcome is to insure against those outcomes, but such outcomes are so unlikely (and the magnitude of the payoff is so low) that the inconvenience of enumerating the alternative possibilities is a net loss in well-being.

The discussion of skepticism here is not aimed at addressing the flaws of skepticism specifically, but at how the concept-primary world of traditional philosophy’s conceptual analysis is vulnerable to paralyzing criticisms that leave it unable to explain the world with its methodology. However, from the epistemology laid out in this paper, the question “So what?” should immediately follow Lehrer’s argument. Only through fallacy can Lehrer’s argument lead to a significant implication beyond the nonexistence of the classical concept of knowledge—one which this epistemic paradigm holds as an empty fabrication, anyway (to say “I know that x” where there is no possibility of doubt is to be redundant; “x” suffices).

Specifically, the fallacy of equivocation is an exploitation of, or a mistake with, symbols in language that create the illusion that conclusions follow from particular arguments. Take the following silly example:

1) O’Doul’s Non-Alcoholic Beer is better than nothing.

2) Nothing is better than a nice, hearty lager.

3) Therefore, O’Doul’s Beer is better than a nice, hearty lager.

Though the word involved in the relations of quality about the beers is the same one—“Nothing”—it clearly shifts senses from one premise to the next. Only while assuming the word meant the same thing in both premises (“nothing,” as in the absence of all things) would the argument would be a syllogism.

The concluding statement of Lehrer’s argument—“we cannot have knowledge”—certainly does not eliminate the phenomena we associate with our use of the word “knowledge”: the Microsoft tech support knowledge base, the knowledge of the physical sciences, self-knowledge, and so on. There is certainly a distinct difference between my assertion that “I know the earth is round,” versus another’s assertion that “I know the earth is flat.” For one, there are pictures of the world showing its roundness; I can travel off into the horizon, and if I travel long enough, I will return to the place where I started; and when I travel on the land versus how the crow flies, the disparate distances between the two voyages are as geometry would predict with a sphere versus a straight line. I have evidence for my knowledge; while I still may be wrong in some remote sense, the distant possibility is excluded from my speech because it is useless (and wasteful) to enumerate every remote logical possibility of my being wrong. Speech is a means to an end—not a slave to logic. Hence, “knowledge” can be understood by its use: in my case, it is the presence of scientific evidence for my claim.

The classical theory of concepts grants a window for the assertion that there are no referents of a classical concept. Logically, the claim is moot, but it bears psychological implications for those not aware of the linguistic nature of philosophical puzzles. “There is no justice,” as one interpretation of Thrasymachus in Republic would have him say. Someone convinced of Thrasymachus’s assertion would then challenge any person who used the word “justice” with a particular referent in mind, as if to tell him that the “justice” he was looking at did not exist—even if the person who tokened “justice” used it in reference to the legal system, whose norms are often labeled “justice.” That Thrasymachus asserted “There is no justice” changes no reality; it does not alter any rationale for the legal system’s “justice” (that does not depend on the classical concept of justice). Likewise, that Lehrer argues “we cannot have ‘knowledge’” changes no reality; it does not cause me to drop my belief that the world is round, and I am none the worse for it.

How do we ever come to invalidate a primary concept, once accepted? To illustrate, we can begin with an extreme case of a primary concept: belief in a deity as strictly a matter of faith. Acceptance of that premise as true can then explain away any empirical evidence to the contrary. If one believes he has prayed and has not received the desired results, the only explanation is that he was not, in fact, praying correctly, or that he failed to meet some other necessary condition for his prayers to be answered.

Yet this could occur in any variant of concept primacy. Take the example of Marxism: the concepts it employs are founded in historicity of observations about power relations between the powerful and the dominated. In as much as the methodology of historical analysis is applied, though, Marxist concepts must be taken as truth. In turn, when some Marxists are confronted with evidence of countries which have embodied Marxist principles, with their performance measured by amount of violence, material well-being, and other empirical data, they are forced to respond in one of two ways: they must assert that those countries are, in fact, successful in some way according to Marxism, or they must assert that those countries are not, in fact, Marxist.

In either case, there is no way of finding empirical evidence that stands against the theory besides that evidence which can be used to contradict the grounds upon which Marxist concepts are founded. Certain evidence is simply precluded by the acceptance of those concepts themselves. For example, the concept of alienation asserts that it provides objective features of individuals in capitalist society independent of their awareness, so some evidence—such as any assertions made by said persons about their own psychological states—is irrelevant. From a logical and empirical standpoint, a simple way of understanding the inherent irrationality of reasoning from unreasonably chosen concepts is to view doing so through the demands of Occam’s razor. When we cannot distinguish between a world in which the theory is false and the world in which we live, we can not reasonably postulate that theory over another one similarly situated, much less over one which actually has evidence.

The pragmatic problem of the acceptance of any empirically exclusionary belief in practice is quite clear: it creates an infinitely-recurring, invulnerable hope in seeking an outcome that will never be realized. If the reality is that there is no deity who answers prayers, people who pray and accept the argument for this deity will perpetually spend their time praying and depending on this fictional deity, with an argument perpetually compelling them to do so against the empirical evidence they will have (no consistent answering of prayers). If the reality is that the claims of Marxism about human nature, the path of history, and economics are false, societies will continually be founded on Marxist principles and will continually be met with failure, but will continually be compelled to do so when swayed by the arguments of Marxism, against empirical evidence of those failures. Sinners will be created to take the blame.

The philosophically admissible at the level of metaphysics and epistemology (and, ultimately, ethics) translates necessarily to the admissible at the level of the political. The Classical Greek philosophers, as adherents to the classical theory of concepts and their analysis, can be said to be the fathers of formalized political theories in which concepts are primary. Returning to Plato once more, observe the political philosophy he generates from his theory of the forms. To him, justice in the political is to be found in the structure of the city, like justice in the individual is to be found in the structure of the soul. Critical to Plato’s polity is the division of individuals into three classes: producers (farmers, craftsmen, etc.), warriors, and rulers. He bases this tripartite political division on a tripartite division of the individual soul: the appetitive, the spirited, and the rational.

Those assertions about the individual soul can be translated into the modern tongue as assertions about human nature. Like all concepts he expressed must have been, each of the three parts was at some level derived in Plato’s human mind from an empirical experience of human beings as possessing those faculties. However, the broader concept of the human mind as being composed distinctly and exhaustively of these three parts is the concept which he came to use to derive his idea of the just polity. This concept, to a large degree, precluded actual worldly observations about human psychology, and how likely it was in actuality that, for example, a human being like a philosopher king could singly embody rationality.

As a brief aside, it is important to note once more that a formal observance of classical conceptual analysis is not the only way for a series of political implications to be drawn from a concept. Though Thomas Hobbes’ Leviathan in part modernized political philosophy by founding it on a more fully integrated and empirical view of existence, the thought experiment that underlies his view of the state, the State of Nature, is a concept bearing primacy over experience as well. He puts forward a hypothetical situation in which humans are engaged in a perpetual state of war “of every man against every man”—a state so horrible that men will endeavor to seek peace, the only recourse being an all-powerful state. That this state will occur is based on his own construction of human nature. Quite similarly to Plato, he derives the aspects of that nature from some level of experience with the humans of his time: a restless appetite for power, reputation, glory, riches, and so on. However, it is questionable whether those observations—made in the context of a period of political power, religious dominance, poverty, and despair—hold universally and a-contextually.

One final specific area of interest with regards to conceptualization as truth lies in morality. The idea of an intrinsic kind of goodness brings with it a host of problems, both in its derivation and in the end-state it envisions. The “is-ought gap,” a problem with the idea of goodness brought to the forefront by Enlightenment philosopher David Hume, becomes an issue the moment consistent empirical methodology is brought to bear on moral assertions:

In every system of morality, which I have hitherto met with… I am surpriz’d to find, that instead of the usual copulations of propositions, is, and is not, I meet with no proposition that is not connected with an ought or an ought not. This change is imperceptible; but is, however, of the last consequence.

All systems of morality must overcome this challenge—how can a plain fact about the state of affairs of the world entail a (categorical) ought?

Furthermore, how do we come to observe that goodness occurring in the world? As J.L. Mackie explains, “If there were objective values, then they would be entities or qualities or relations of a very strange sort, utterly different from anything else in the universe.” Is it possible to observe these relations? Can they be pointed to without being circularly defined? In the realm of physical fact, it is easy to go from instance to concept: those instances are ostensible. We can point to objects falling down and the orbits of planets to derive the concept of “gravity”; we can observe the lack of bone structure in creatures and derive the concept “invertebrate.” We can even observe human parents who cause pain inside their children and enjoy it, and call that “sadism”—but that, of course, is a sense of sadism as a matter of descriptive fact (i.e. “sadism” means one who causes pain and enjoys it) and not a matter of moral fact. With goodness in most cases, however, the only means of ascribing moral fact to the world is to proceed from concept to instance.

Usually, the most important effects of any belief system stem from its conception of the good; when the goodness it posits is derived from an approach to knowledge in which concepts are primary, the consequences are quite significant in terms of the measurable aspects of human life. That which possesses goodness is what possesses “to-be-pursuedness”; it is that which an end-in-itself is. It is an argument from morality, which historically is easily seen to be a compelling argument for human beings: millions have martyred themselves and otherwise been exploited for causes they believed were right.

How might one rank priority in achieving those goods, however? Here, we can pick on an often self-described moral approach to politics: constitutional liberalism. In Constitutional Theory, Carl Schmitt argued that governments operating under the principles of the Rechstaat are plagued by an inability to take necessary action to preserve it. Primarily, they are bound inextricably to certain rules and procedures that are unbreakable, even in times of need. Constitutional liberalism indeed is sometimes interpreted as carrying with it a supra-legal set of principles by which it is governed. Often times, that supra-legality is itself written into a nation’s constitution. Thus, even adherence to the procedures outlined in that constitution is more than just an instrumental act: adherence to procedure is directly the fulfillment of the principles of goodness upon which the nation is based, or, at least, non-adherence to those procedures is a violation of those principles.

While in practice there may simply be politically expedient reasons why such action is not taken, at least in the context of philosophical debate there persist irresolvable problems between different positions each taking up the cause of, by the given principles of goodness, a worthy end. The results are frequently win-lose situations—zero-sum or negative-sum games—between opposing camps. The long-standing struggle between the often-mutually-exclusive liberty and security, with its many variants, is one such example of this inherent conflict. Should habeas corpus be suspended, or should the risk of a terrorist attack killing citizens (whose lives and property the government is also morally tasked with protecting) be allowed to increase? Should the rights of electoral participation be extended to those who hold values opposite the constitution—threatening that very constitution—or should suffrage and office holding be regulated, an action which by definition opposes the constitution? Are the lives of those living outside the state worth anything next to a citizen of the state, or can those outside the state be killed or harmed so long as it preserves a citizen? If these questions were not a matter of intrinsic goodness, at the very least they would be questions of pragmatism, utility, or even whim. Still, goodness demands that it be followed in itself, presenting a quandary for all states built upon a moral foundation.

No doubt, too, we have brought a new issue into consideration: what are the principles or moral foundations of a given constitution when that constitution is understood to have a life beyond the organisms that brought it into existence? Who is to determine these? From where did these principles come? In any case, national constitutions are representations of belief systems in which concepts are primary, in as much as those constitutions are not in principle built on the explicit consent of those governed by it (or the forcible imposition upon some by others); they are, instead, built upon a concept above human action.

Conclusion

There are many more examples of the primacy of concepts fitting the loose definition provided here, and many implications to be observed from them. All of them are bound together, perhaps, by the broadest implication of the fallacy: it creates a never-ending battle of refutation and counter-example, by means of its dependence on the realm of infinite conceptualization. Indeed, 2500 years of philosophy “qua philosophy” has failed to answer successfully, to the same degree of consensus as the natural sciences and mathematics answer their own questions, the questions which it is purportedly intended to answer—namely, those of human nature and action: what are we? What ought we to do?

Practitioners of the natural sciences, to a large degree, possess a shared language and methodology. As a result, fields like physics and medicine have seen huge advances. The shared methodology, the scientific method, is a means by which conflicting viewpoints are resolved. At the root of this methodology is the presence of clear and distinct referents of discourse: the observations made from controlled experiments involving the materials and phenomena in question. In light of this, there is no surprise that philosophers have been frequently relegated to a back-seat role in new discoveries about the nature of the world, particularly to scientists. Human nature, or at least the empirical data to be used in determining it, is now in the purview of evolutionary biologists; no longer is it the role of the philosopher to postulate it and other things on the basis of intuition.

The philosopher can still try to do this, obviously, and some still do. Nonetheless, the chief difference between the present in the past is that the work of those philosophers has less predictive power and even has facets which contradict the organized empirical evidence of the sciences. Indeed, empiricism in recent human history has created friction between the realities of the world and theories produced by traditional philosophy and other non-empirical means. As the disciplines of science and statistics have increasingly both discovered phenomena unexplained by the old answers and produced theories explaining old phenomena better. At the foundation of this new approach to knowledge are the epistemic postulates put forward at the beginning of this paper. Applying consistent experiential methods is a necessary condition for analytical robustness: just as we can be certain that our experience was what our experience was, we can be certain that we observed what we observed. The realm of interpretation of that experience lies within the scope of doubt and debate, but even with that caveat, empirics have brought mankind a long way from the days of the classical philosophical approach.

When we see the concepts of God, logic, justice, beauty, science, the state, or The People used to draw a conclusion about the world, we can always think of the concept of the American Graffiti police car gag and how a television show went about looking at it objectively. MythBusters is aptly named for this analogy: these concepts can constitute the “myths” upon which society runs (whether effectively or not). The MythBusters are the “boots on the ground” in investigating the many interesting assertions about reality put forward in popular culture.

Though they may just be entertainment, they wave the banner of empiricism in the boldest way possible: they dive straight into reality, replicate the circumstances, and put claims to the test. They do not dream up extreme action scenes to confuse young people more, and they never use visual trickery; they always recreate, observe, and analyze. To do the same to battle myths of the broader, societal kind, there are a parallel set of prescriptions: do not create new myths by deriving a concept and holding it as real without evidence, and never equivocate; always, work from instance to concept and reason from there.

The difference between Star Wars and religion is their number of followers who hold their realism. Many people believe in the latter, so those of us who disbelieve should take pause at this, especially considering that these beliefs often have political implications. In light of that, what good does studying religion serve?

Mythological Particularities: Not so useful?

As I suggested in a discussion of Plato’s Republic, the study of falsehood is only useful in as much as it leads us to truth. If you know that you’ve either got a muscle cramp or just have to go to the bathroom, and disprove the latter by trying and failing, then you can validly believe that you’ve got stomach cramps. The wider in scope that a given theory is, the more likely it is that any of the propositions entailed by its negation are true.  Thus, the best argument that states, “There is a world of the supernatural where things occur, and this is why,” is useful to us, for if it can be defeated, then we can know that we now must explain everything in the world naturalistically.

In this regard the scholarly pursuit of many different belief systems can yield insight into truth. However, utilizing the insights gleaned from ruling out random possibilities of unicorns and leperchauns does not always work, since we are not logical super-computers that can piece together every known proposition of the universe and make deductions from them, and find the sum total of valid human knowledge all at once. Deduction by negation sharply decreases in value as the scope of a proposition “A” shrinks, its referents become more specific, and the number of possibilities lying inside the region of “not A” vastly grows. OK, maybe that wasn’t so clear. In short, it’s that an overwhelming majority of the propositions considered under religious belief systems are extremely specific, low-scope assertions and thus, if debated, tell us little to nothing relevant about reality.

Point in case: what difference does it make to those of us who are scientifically questioning the validity of basic religious claims if there are in fact FOUR horsemen of the apocalypse as opposed to three? Or seven Imams instead of twelve? Or that there are no billiards tables in heaven? Suppose one side were proven to not be the case. What now? What can we conclude about the universe, besides that it is not the case? If it is a proposition that is used as justification for other beliefs, there are millions of other possibilities that can reconcile any problems caused by the refutation of a single detail, if any such problems arise. If two verses in some holy text are in conflict, I can guarantee that some other verse or interpretation is going to fly out of a professional religious advocate’s mouth to fix everything up.

When arguing with religious propagandists, keep that in mind: they can taunt you into pursuing them into the depths of their twisted and humid jungles and ambush you with an arbitrary verse here, a unicorn there, and maybe a flaming sword somewhere. Yet if fundamental analysis points to the fact that their story about reality is in fact a fantastical human construction, why would any rational person opt to talk about what’s “true” in the endlessly deep human imagination, as opposed to talking about truth in the reality to which everyone has sensory access? Furthermore, think of the other side: if someone were committed to defending a position whose fundamental assumptions were false or unprovable, why would he even go near discussing those assumptions? Clearly, if he’s committed to a position rather than a methodology, he’s interested in passing off what he has arbitrarily chosen as truth; why would he allow questionable premises to come under scrutiny?

To help illustrate how skipping past fundamental claims about reality and instead delving into religious mythology is a huge waste of time for the human condition, let’s revisit Star Wars. If someone asserted, as a matter of fact, that the story detailed in Star Wars movies was actually a historical occurrence, would your objection be that it couldn’t be the case because there was no way that the Rebel fleet could have survived the onslaught of the imperial fleet at the Battle of Endor, which by all calculations, would have laid 350 imperial turbolaser batteries for every rebel one, and 200 TIE Fighters for every rebel starfighter, not including the firepower of the Death Star? Surely, you could, and then spend another few hours, years, or centuries answering the counter-objection that “the force” played a major role, and then question why the force perhaps didn’t decide to intervene earlier in the war, then argue about midichlorians and how the rebels had more of them on their side, etc. Or, you could just ask, “What’s your proof that it is the case and not just some fictional story someone made up? Why is Star Wars history and The Lord of the Rings not?” Surely you can not dare to challenge the Star Wars geek’s vast “knowledge” of a human-constructed universe, but you can adequately point out that it’s human fiction, not reality. The difference in effort is gigantic.

But before we proceed, avast, hardy theoreticians: I do not mean to deny the validity of demonstrating internal inconsistency as evidence against any belief in addition to external criteria. Internal consistency is an excellent starting point, because if it can be defeated easily, it is the simplest route to disproof one can find since it speaks purely in terms of what the defender of a theory already believes. Internal contradiction makes a theory disprove itself.

By the same token, however, it is a home-field advantage for mythology-peddlers: they would much rather prefer to argue you in circles about nit-picky details about how some word actually means something other than something else and the translation screwed it up, instead of defend the fundamental presuppositions upon which their entire belief system rests. Islam, for example, has an uncanny knack for running around inside its secret cave-tunnel network of Arabic linguistic ambiguity and pop out tactically to suit its P.R. needs. If the propositions under consideration were those which played a fundamental role – for example, that there is some world which exists which lies beyond the senses, the supernatural – then proving that they’re false would end the religion debate altogether.

Religious advocates know this, and hence they would prefer to prop up the legitimacy of their belief system by spending a majority of their time and resources on what amounts to a gigantic non-sequitur argument: “we debate and discuss fervently about the content of [insert holy text], we are charitable, we create a community where children play together and do fun and creative things, therefore we are right.” Theologians spend their time trying to prove the existence of God in convoluted and complicated ways, but does the average churchgoer or clergyman ever delve so deeply into the validity of accepting God as a premise?

No, of course not! That would be a direct threat to the illusions upon which they power their lives; for the clergyman, it would be his job at risk. For a parent, it would be the possibility of having to tell his child that he was teaching him something false all along – and that would challenge the illusion that the parent can order the child around because he is right, not just because he is stronger. For that parent and for anyone else who would be religious, it would be this same realization about their own parents, which causes a devastating loss of such a critical fantasy. Erasing that fantasy leads to other questions: what else was I taught arbitrarily? Is the rest of my family like this?… and so forth. It’s not a fun proposition.

Understanding the gravity of the consequences of approaching religion from a truth-seeking angle is key to understanding the ages-old evasion technique of dotting i’s and crossing t’s instead of searching for logic and coherence. Truth seeking methodology – logic and empiricism – have the answers, and these methodologies tell us to justify our premises and adhere to the demands of parsimony. To avoid challenging their fundamental illusions, some people simply prefer the mere facade of methodology in order to pretend to themselves and others that they are truth seekers.

Quite predictably, 99% of religious activity and resources are spent on treating this problematic God-assumption as though it were true. In other words, the vast majority of publicly revealed religious activities are not designed to address fundamental arguments (indeed very few are). They are instead designed to utilize this implicit non-sequitur argument, that “we are so honest and giving and great and happy, there’s no way our religion can be wrong!” These things clearly can exist without god existing or even a belief in god (this is why it is a non-sequitur). It is true that they are nice and good things, community and sharing and loving and solidarity and charity and kumbaya around the fire. When one finds that he can substitute many different mythologies in a particular religion’s place, though, he is forced to acknowledge that those things are not an argument after all- they are predicates of value systems, not justifications thereof.

For anyone who has the patience to sit through some sociopath’s erratic fairy tale in order to successfully defeat falsehood, I have the utmost respect. By no means am I implying that myth does not need to be studied in the context of its social necessity. My conclusion has two main parts: first, that the study of mythology and religion would not be necessary if it were not the case that people hinged their personal lives upon them, particularly with regards to how they treat others; and second, that even in the context of our social necessity, far too much time is spent (at least by non-specialists) delving into the tiny inconsequential details, the turbolaser batteries and TIE fighters, of religion rather than arguing the fundamentals that serve as the basis for its rational acceptance.

If someone related to you their long and convoluted fantasy, emphasizing distinctions among details like some unicorns actually being green instead of white, you typically wouldn’t dive into it as academic study and write your dissertation on it. If everyone believed in this fantasy though, and you were being treated differently on the basis of this fantasy, or even had violence used against you as a product of it, you would have no choice but to figure out what the hell it was all about.

By the same token, if you’re busy making a living and working hard, you don’t have time for a dissertation on unicorns. Lucky for you, you are not totally in the dark or at the mercy of academics. All that is required of you is to analyze the basic foundations of a theory and see if they are sufficient for continuing discussion of the theory, and working from there. Even if you don’t succeed at reaching conclusive evidence, it’s always better than the course of action that never leads to knowledge: to delve into only a limited amount of mythological minutiae as your only thought on the subject, which will only inevitably result in your choosing of the side of the debate with the most effective propaganda apparatus. Searching “bible quotes” is NOT going to give you answers about religion. Posting on forums and arguing about the meaning of a particular line in a religious text is not only not going to give you answers, it’s going to waste your time and perhaps confer upon you the illusion of answers, which is the worst possible outcome.

One last thing to note is that, beyond the religion-bashing on my part, both religious and non-religious persons of the kind who hold that beliefs should be formed by something a bit more consistent than random impulse should take heed. Intellectual honesty on both sides of the debate is an absolute necessity; if one refuses to attain conclusive answers in the realm of a theory’s foundations and instead proceeds to just delve into the internal details, then he’s really doing nothing for truth. Doing this with a theory is like carefully calibrating to perfection a ship’s navigation system while it has a gaping hole in the hull. It is an outright denial of reality – an insane bout of wishful thinking – promoted by many reasons which I shall not address here. Its consequences are quite clear, though: the less we understand reality, the less our interactions with it produce the positive results we need. This behavior can not be good for the person who does it, nor for the people he will interact with.

Any avid debater of religious issues should keep all of that in mind. Don’t just tell me that the answer is on page 33. Tell me why page 33, or any page, has the answer. Don’t make my bunk, stock the fridge, clean the showerheads, feed the cats, or swab the decks. Please, just fix the damn hole in the ship.

Summary (where not specified, statements are written in the voice of Rousseau)

In Book I, Rousseau begins his exploration of politics by pondering the source of the legitimacy of political authority. He rejects that its source is found in nature, because such a position implies the inherent natural superiority of the rulers over the ruled, though the superiority that may exist is only sustained by force. In turn, he argues that force is not the basis for legitimacy either: the idea that “might makes right” is nonsensical because it can not imply that the less strong “ought” to follow the stronger, since who is stronger is always determined by who triumphs. There would be no political authority since those who can do, will do. Instead, legitimate political authority is based on a kind of “social contract” created between society’s members. Unlike the argument of Grotius, which proposed a kind of covenant between king and people based on “a right to slavery,” one’s freedom can never be surrendered in a fair exchange. Furthermore once freedom is surrendered, then all rights are forfeited which eliminate any demand for something in return.

Why should such a contract ever be necessary? In short, there comes a point in the state of nature at which society must be formed in order for mankind to survive. The social contract’s purpose is to resolve the problem of how to bind people to each other without infringing upon their freedom, and it does this by requiring the unconditional surrender of the individual’s freedom to the whole community. The important implications of this definition are that the contract will impose the same conditions for all, creating no interest for one person making the conditions difficult for others; there will be no rights that remain that stand in opposition to the state, because the contract is formed unconditionally; and finally, because each person enters the contract on equal terms, no person loses their natural freedom. The ultimate reduction of the social contract can be described thus: “Each of us puts his person and all his power in common under the supreme direction of the general will, and, in our corporate capacity, we receive each member as an indivisible part of the whole.”[1] The new entity, the whole, that is formed as a result of this contract comes to be known as the “Republic” or “body politic,” or, depending on the context, the State, the Sovereign, or the Power. Those who formed the contract come to be collectively known as the people; when sharing in the sovereign power, citizens; and in being under the laws of the state, subjects. The contrast between nature and civil society is important here: though in joining the contract we lose the physical freedom to act upon our personal appetites, we gain liberty via the limitations of reason and the general will being placed upon our behaviors.

In book II, Rousseau’s conception of the state begins with the idea that society functions in correspondence to the interests that people hold in common. Hence, the ultimate end of any state is “the common good.” Acting on the general will expressed by the Sovereign is the only way to achieve this common good. Incidentally, the general will can never coincide with a particular will.

The expression of the general will ultimately takes the shape of law. Law must be made by the people as a whole (i.e. made by the sovereign) and applicable to the whole. But how can the people, especially a large number of them, jointly create a set of laws? Rousseau proposes the lawgiver: an intelligent and selfless individual who will create laws in an unbiased fashion, who lies outside the authority of the Sovereign. However, Rousseau himself admits that “Gods would be needed to give men laws.” Furthermore, what will compel people to follow the laws? Besides textbook coercion, such as the death penalty for those who break the law and thus break the social contract, Rousseau suggests that an appeal to the supernatural origins of laws (much as Moses claimed that the Ten Commandments were given by God) is one way of convincing men to follow them.

The end of Book II consists of Rousseau’s exploration of the kinds of circumstances under which law is most effectively made, specifically in reference to the people for whom the law is to be made, and the nature of those laws. For example, he explains that states are ideally small-to-medium-sized: small enough to be effectively manageable, but large enough so as not to be overrun by neighboring states. The creation and implementation of laws must be timed perfectly, as a people may not yet be ready to be guided, or may have become prejudiced and resistant to the positive changes brought about by good laws. Also, the state in which laws are being established must be in a condition of at least relative peace and plenty, because of the temporary vulnerability and instability caused by a period of laws being implemented.

The goal of any system of law is reducible to two ends: liberty and equality. Here (chapter 11), equality is understood to mean not the complete absence of differences in wealth, but the absence of such differences that would damage the balance of citizens in the state: “but that power shall never be great enough for violence, and shall always be exercised by virtue of rank and law; and that, in respect of riches, no citizen shall ever be wealthy enough to buy another, and none poor enough to be forced to sell himself.” Overall, the general criteria for how laws ought to be made depend on circumstances that differ from people to people and place to place.

At the beginning of Book III, Rousseau explains the executive powers of government in terms of will and strength:

Every free action is produced by the concurrence of two causes; one moral, i.e., the will which determines the act; the other physical, i.e., the power which executes it… The body politic has the same motive powers; here too force and will are distinguished, will under the name of legislative power and force under that of executive power.[2]

The government is, importantly, to be distinguished from the Sovereign; in fact, confusion of the two is dangerous. The government deals with particulars (decrees) while the sovereign deals with the general (laws). Somewhat similar to the contract in Hobbes, the government itself is not a party to the social contract; somewhat different from Hobbes, this is because the government is an intermediary body that is created by the general will and can be freely disbanded by the general will.

As to possible forms of government, there are three primary kinds: democracy, when all or almost all the citizens are magistrates; aristocracy, where less than half are magistrates; and monarchy, where few or one are magistrates. However, there is not one universally superior form of government. In the previous chapter, Rousseau notes that the larger the population of a state, the fewer magistrates there should be. Hence, large states are best suited to monarchy, medium to aristocracy, and small to democracy. Though he personally preferred democracy, Rousseau expresses ambivalence toward democracy as well as monarchy. While he explains his concerns about monarchy’s dangerous efficiency and potential for corruption, he also claims, “there has never been a true democracy, and there never will be.” Only small states with simple and unambitious citizens could remain stable under democratic rule. Overall, though simpler forms of government are preferable to Rousseau, he suggests that mixing forms of government may dissipate the powers of the government relative to the Sovereign.

The Sovereign can maintain itself by meeting in periodic assemblies. Though an impractical demand on the face of it, ancient cities such as Rome managed to do it to some degree. The assemblies are critical because within them, all citizens are as powerful as the magistrates. Because of this, the government may take actions to dissuade such assemblies, which over time may erode the freedom and authority of the Sovereign. At this juncture, Rousseau makes sure to point out that sovereignty can not be represented: “…The moment a people allows itself to be represented, it is no longer free: it no longer exists.”

As part of a set of entailments of the general will, the latter half of Book IV expresses some specific ideas Rousseau has about the state. In some cases, dictatorship is necessary to avert the collapse the state, though the dictator does not represent the people or the laws; the dictator only acts in accordance with the general will so long as the avoiding the collapse of the state is in it. The establishment of a censor’s office is also put forward, as the vanguard of public opinion. Because public opinion is connected to public morality and virtue, and those are connected to law, the censor’s office upholds the laws by influencing public opinion. Finally, Rousseau recommends that people be free to pursue religion as they please so long as it does not conflict with public interest, but also recommends that they be required to adhere to a civil religion with essential qualities: belief in the existence of a just god, belief in the afterlife, faith in the sanctity of the social contract and its laws, and emphasis on tolerance to reduce civil strife.

Critique

The most obvious problem in Rousseau’s argument is the mostly unaddressed question of how the general will is to be determined. In a world with no gods and only men, there is no ultimate and authoritative arbiter of truth and justice. Evidence may stand on one side, but there is no guarantee of an impartial and fair supreme force that binds persons to the correct judgment. This is a phenomenon that applies to all things, even the physically tangible and empirically observable. When it comes to something very abstract and complex like the general will, the problem is amplified further as evidence one could possibly appeal to for his position is necessarily indirect and intuitive at best (see: epistemic critique), lending greater power to those of stronger expressive faculty.[3] Of course, that the determination of physical fact or right and wrong is subject to this uncertainty is not an objection, since this can be leveled against any theory. However, what is questionable is the insistence that every person must be subjected to a violence-backed decision making process that may often not agree with their own judgments. If this poses a problem, there is really no way out: Rousseau makes it clear that The Social Contract is not there merely as a suggestion for those who accept it; it is intended to be a factual and categorical description of human nature and the good society. Thus, even if we accept the general will as real, the question is still left open as to whether the general will is best achieved by organizing society into government as outlined in The Social Contract.

Another development of interest in this particular work is that Rousseau insists on a sharp distinction between nature and civil society, holding that the latter is not part of the former and is instead “artificially” created. This is essentially connected with his notion that “this [the social contract’s] act of association creates a moral and collective body composed of as many members as the assembly contains voters, and receiving from this act its unity, its common identity, its life, and its will.” In other words, Rousseau makes the metaphysical claim that the Sovereign forms a whole greater than the sum of its parts, essential to the idea that the state can not only solve problems that individuals could not possibly solve voluntarily amongst themselves, but that there is a goodness which always supersedes the good of the individual. “Artifice” enters the equation here: once society organizes along the lines of the social contract, civil society becomes possible where it was not possible before. This is critical to Rousseau’s argument, because it is the means by which the individual is given an ethical demand to consent to the social contract and all its entailments, or, conversely, the means by which force is ethically justified against the individual.

Problems with the Social Contract as a Moral Obligation

Without this metaphysical and meta-ethical foundation, Rousseau’s argument would be a non-sequitur the moment he leaps to the conclusion that one has a rational obligation to participate in forming the social contract. The social contract’s “resolution” of the problem of binding human beings together is suspect: Rousseau holds that the freedom of individual human beings is maintained by entering them into a contract on equal terms that imposes “equal” conditions on them. However, this is only so because of Rousseau’s definition of freedom, which downplays freedom of action in nature as largely meaningless due to unenforceability, reflecting the somewhat Hobbesian notion that such freedom is trivial compared to civil liberty, which is the guarantee of lesser freedoms always being protected by the community. More importantly, Rousseau places a great deal of significance upon his idea of moral liberty, which is the freedom from one’s appetites attained by obedience to “self-prescribed” laws. Certain questions must be asked: is joining in the social contract a necessity for moral liberty? Are equal terms and conditions in the letter equal for every individual? Does a man who is self-sufficient and who produces a surplus always stand to gain by entering into an obligation which can often require sacrificing a disproportionate amount of his property on behalf of others? What about someone who produces art or otherwise expresses himself in a way that would result in his censoring under the general will? Rousseau seems to presuppose a set of “right” values with relation to virtue, one’s opinions, etc. There is nothing wrong with this in itself, of course, but this certainly presses Rousseau to provide us with a convincing account of these values which holds as objective. The argument here rests on the validity of his answer.

Epistemic Critique

These objections are virtually trivial in comparison to the most critical problem with Rousseau’s work and works of a similar breed. Generally, they envision the existence of things which lie beyond empirical observation and meaningful rational analysis: in the case of Plato, it was the forms; with Hitler, it was the goodness of the Fatherland and the intrinsic deservingness of the Aryan race; in Rousseau’s case, it is the general will. In testing these theories, we can only observe a world in which people act as though those things exist, and another in which they do not, and then compare results. Yet by what standard do we gauge these results? For what are we exactly testing? For The Social Contract, we can not gauge it by pragmatic standards, because doing so would not be in accordance with Rousseau’s true theory, which states that the good is the general will. Yet we can never directly experience a form, magical Aryan goodness, or the general will. Lacking any epistemological reason to accept that such a thing as the general will exists, we have no other reason to accept it except, perhaps, as a “noble myth” which serves some other end (order, respect for tradition, etc.).

The Dangers of Rousseau

Put in a historical context, Rousseau’s ideas can be said to be responsible for much bloodshed. On one hand, it may not seem fair to say that Rousseau himself was directly to blame for the brutality that ensued in the name of his or at least a mockup of his ideas. However, personal blame is not the thrust of the criticism of Rousseau’s ideas – whose ideological cousins often result in death and destruction – nor is it at all important. If not specifically attributable to Rousseau, many ideas similar to his have been at the root of acts of violence around the world, whether in the form of civil war between factions, or the more subtle “civil war” of members of the state against its citizens. When an analytic light is shined upon the work of Rousseau and similar works, that this occurred is not surprising.

When goodness is placed outside the realm of the empirical and the rational – as when the concepts of state, the people, etc. are made primary, ignoring the instances from which they were derived – the currency upon which morality trades becomes spiritual and intrinsic, generating similar phenomena to those of religious beliefs: martyrdom, persecution, atrocity, or otherwise a climate of self-proclaimed just violence. In such a situation, the nature of goodness is not accessible to everyone, but only to the “enlightened”: the philosopher kings, the popes and bishops, or the politicians. There is no scientific reason to believe that these human beings have a sixth sense that gives them greater access to such knowledge, yet they are perceived to have it. What phenomenon is capable of explaining how biologically similar human beings can be elevated to separate moral categories in people’s minds when there is no evidence to believe that it is the case? There is one lying in plain view which has pervaded most instances of human conflict, especially of this kind: the exercise of power. Rousseau’s theory lends itself to such a world; for this assertion we have not only the immediate evidence from the French Revolution and its many succeeding Republics, but the indirect evidence of the millions of lives ended by collectivism.

Instinctively, one may object that Rousseau believed that every person composing the Sovereign must play a role in the determination of the general will. Still, so long as there are both disagreement and forceful commitment of all participants to the decision ultimately rendered, the problem persists. The category of the “enlightened” simply shifts from the popes and politicians to some arbitrary proportion of the people, be it a plurality, a majority, or a supermajority. The point remains quite the same: democracy without unanimity is just as much an exercise of power as is philosopher dictatorship, popery, or decree.

[2] Book II, Chapter I.

[3] Perhaps this objection is a commentary on Rousseau himself.

A universal describes a member of a class of mind-independent entities in reality that is not a particular thing, but an attribute, relation, etc. The realist position on universals posits that individuals share attributes with other individuals and that this commonality is manifested by the existence of universals. However, several philosophers have objected to this position, on the basis of objections because of the metaphysical strangeness or lack of necessity of universals, among others. In “On What There Is,” W.V. Quine addresses some of the logical and grammatical issues of ontology, and then relates them to the dispute over universals. Quine applies Russell’s theory of descriptions to form ontological propositions that entirely avoid referring to universals and invokes Occam’s razor to repudiate them as a result. One potential drawback to Quine’s approach is that he possibly fails to consistently apply Occam’s razor- as he applied it to the problematic singular descriptors- to the quantifiers (the “bound variables”) with which he replaces singular terms. Beyond that issue, however, Quine makes a convincing case against realist position on universals.

Before exploring universals, Quine discusses a series of preliminary concerns important for establishing his argument. He begins the article by declaring the problem of ontology to be finding the answer to a simple question: “What is there?” Because of the evident fact that there is disagreement on these issues, the first part of his argument is dedicated to exploring the issues of rival ontologies, manifested in the form of a dispute between him and a pseudonymous philosopher, McX. If McX recognizes certain entities (has a different ontology), but Quine does not, Quine “cannot admit that there is something which McX countenances and I do not,” because it contradicts his initial rejection. Quine refers to this traditional Platonic predicament of non-being as Plato’s beard: “nonbeing must in some sense be,” Quine notes, “otherwise what is it that there is not?”[1]

One instance of Plato’s beard in action is a disagreement between McX and Quine over the entity “Pegasus.” McX contests that if Pegasus somehow were not, then the use of the word Pegasus could not possibly be talking about anything- but its usage does talk about something, rendering that position incoherent, resulting in the conclusion that Pegasus is. Because McX clearly does not believe that space and time contain “a flying horse of flesh and blood,” he must provide details about what Pegasus is if it is not that. Quine rules out the possibility that it is just an idea in the mind, pointing out that it is not what “Pegasus” is referring to when people deny it.[2]

Distinguishing Naming and Meaning, via Russell’s Theory of Descriptions

An essential point of contention between Quine and McX reduces to what Quine describes as a gap between naming and meaning, and whether an utterance can be significant or not if does not purport to name some entity existing in reality. In the case of Pegasus, McX argued that if Pegasus were not, then the word would convey nothing (in other words, it would be insignificant). Quine invokes Bertrand Russell’s theory of descriptions to resolve this issue, disentangling the ambiguities and fallacies caused by McX’s poor language use. In particular, the theory of descriptions functions as a means of rephrasing the articles “the,” “a,” etc. to create propositions with better-defined referents. For example, the propositions “the current Czar of Russia is cute,” can be true or false, but in both cases could imply that there is either a Czar of Russia who is cute or a Czar of Russia who is not cute. However, it could be the case- as it is- that there is no current Czar of Russia. Russell’s theory of descriptions would rephrase the original statement as “There exists someone who is Czar of Russia who is cute,” thus making clearer the propositional nature of the existence of the Czar, in addition to his cuteness.

Quine utilizes Russell’s famous “The author of Waverly was a poet” example in order to illustrate the lack of ontological commitment entailed by singular descriptors, by showing that the descriptor can be contextually rephrased into another statement with a truth value. McX falsely assumes that there must be some objective reference in the statement, “the author of Waverly was a poet,” for the statement to be meaningful. Under Russell’s translation, however, the statement is changed to “Something wrote Waverly and was a poet and nothing else wrote Waverly,” thus shifting the burden of objective reference from the descriptive phrase to what is referred to by logicians as a “bound variable” (“something”). Bound variables- words such as “something,” “nothing,” and “everything”- are not names of specific entities, but refer to entities generally with a meaningful ambiguity.[3] The significance of the quantifiers does not require the presupposition of any preassigned objects. To be, according to Quine, is “to be the value of a bound variable” (emphasis added). With quantifiers in mind, Quine asserts that the notion of statements of nonbeing defeating themselves “goes by the board.”[4]

To reinforce his point, Quine anticipates and alleviates a potential problem with converting names to descriptors. In the “Pegasus” example, the word- a supposed name- cannot be processed immediately by Russell’s theory, and it must be rephrased to apply (e.g. “Pegasus was” becomes, perhaps, “Something was a winged horse that was captured by Bellerophon, and nothing else was that”). To make alleged names subordinate to Russell’s analysis, the word must first be translated into a description. Even if there is no evident definition or descriptive translation, an irreducible attribute of being Pegasus can be applied, granting the use of predicates “is-Pegasus” or “pegasizes,” resulting in the possible descriptor “the thing that is-Pegasus/pegasizes.” In summary, all (alleged) names can be converted to descriptions, and by Russell’s theory of descriptions, those descriptions can be eliminated. Quine thus concludes,

We need no longer labor under the delusion that the meaningfulness of a statement containing a singular term presupposes an entity named by the term. A singular term need not name to be significant.[5]

The Debate over Universals

At this juncture, Quine recognizes the need to address universals because of the introduction of predicates like “pegasizes,” having now dealt with the issue of rejecting the presupposition that Pegasus must in some sense be if it is said not to be. McX begins his argument for universals by citing the pre-philosophical common sense of recognizing that there are red houses, red sunsets, red roses, etc. The houses, roses, and sunsets have something in common, and that this commonality is all McX is referring to when he speaks of an attribute. That there are attributes is as “obvious and trivial”[6] as the fact that there are red houses, red sunsets, and red roses; no less does Quine expect from McX’s or anyone else’s ontology, which is basic to one’s conceptual scheme. Under McX’s conceptual scheme, the statement “there is an attribute ‘redness’” must follow from “there are red houses, red sunsets, etc.”[7]

Under a conceptual scheme different to McX’s, argues Quine, it is possible to admit the existence of red houses, roses, and sunsets while simultaneously denying that they have anything in common. “Redness” can be true of each of them individually, but there is no requirement that there must be some entity called “redness”; it could be that the houses, roses, and sunsets are all red irreducibly. Thus, there is no comparative gain in the explanatory power of McX’s theory provided by all entities given under the name “redness.” Incidentally, Quine notes that a potential argument for McX’s ontology was pre-empted by the earlier discussion of the difference between names and descriptions, and how the latter can be significant without becoming the former. Because of this, McX is unable to argue that in order for predicates like “red” or “is-red” to be meaningful, they must be names with the objective reference of a single universal entity.

In response, McX grants the distinction between naming and meaning, and cedes that “is red” and “pegasizes” are not names of attributes. With that, he counters that “meanings” are still universals, perhaps even things similar to the attributes he posits, whether named or not. Quine acknowledges this objection, explaining that he can only satisfy it by refusing to ontologically admit meanings, but he also explains his lack of hesitation in doing so: refusing meanings does not entail the absence of meaningfulness of words and statements. This is evidenced by the fact that McX and Quine can agree perfectly upon classification of linguistic forms as the meaningless and the meaningful, though McX’s criteria for meaningfulness includes the “having” (in one sense) of an abstract entity he labels a “meaning.”

Quine’s criteria are different; his basis for claiming the significance[8] of a linguistic utterance either derives from treating it as an ultimate and irreducible matter of fact, or from analyzing people’s ordinary reactions to the utterance in question and similar utterances. He reduces the useful ways that people commonly speak of meanings to two: the having of meanings (significance) and the sameness of meanings (synonymy). One’s “giving” the meaning of an  utterance is his utterance of a synonym in a more ordinary and clearer language than the original. If such an interpretation of meaning is unsatisfactory, then one can simply speak of an utterance as significant or insignificant, and in relationship to other utterances (in synonymy or heteronomy). Though Quine recognizes the difficulty and importance of handling this approach properly, he once more refers to the lack of any increase in explanatory power resulting from adopting McX’s ontology- in this case, the adoption of special and irreducible intermediary entities called “meanings.”

In light of the preceding arguments, McX is led to question whether any statements are possible that lead one to be committed to universals or other entities Quine finds unwelcome. Once again, Quine cites Russell’s theory of descriptions in tandem with quantifiers, explaining that the entities can be stated as bound variables, so long as it is said that “there is something [a bound variable] which red houses and red sunsets have in common.” As explained earlier, the only way to make ontological commitments is to use bound variables. If “to be is to be the value of a bound variable,” whatever is said by names can be spoken of without names; names can be converted to descriptions, and then eliminated by Russell’s theory of descriptions; the purported namehood of an utterance can be repudiated if no respective entity is affirmed by the proper use of bound variables. Variables of quantification have a range of reference over the whole of an ontology (regardless of the particular ontology), and an ontological presupposition is convincing if and only if it must be considered among entities in this range of reference in order to establish the truth of an affirmation.

Therefore, the utterance “some dogs are white” does not commit the speaker to recognizing doghood or whiteness as entities. Rephrased, it states, “some things that are dogs are white,” which only creates the requirement that the quantifier “something” has a range of reference that includes white dogs, but need not include whiteness or doghood. However, it is also recognized that the statement “some zoological species are cross fertile” entails a commitment to the abstract entities “zoological species” unless the subject of the statement is reducible to another entity. Generally, a commitment to any reference persists until some means of paraphrasing a statement can be devised to change (or properly delineate) its bound variable’s reference.

Choosing an Ontology

Bound variables alone do not commit one to any single ontology, but only describes the process by which one becomes committed to an ontology. One means of adjudicating among ontologies, relative to a particular theory, is by finding an ontology whose entities are required to be within the range of reference of the bound variables of the theory in order to render the affirmations of the theory true. Modern disagreement over the foundations of mathematics is divided almost exactly on the issue of which entities lie in bound variables’ permissible range of reference.

Quine suggests that Occam’s razor be fully applied as an adjudicator among ontologies and that any ontology should be accepted in the same way that scientific theories are accepted: one must seek the simplest theory that accounts for all of the evidence. In the case of ontology, one must seek the simplest conceptual scheme that can be created to account for all the elements of raw experience. Quine’s argument, by his implicit admission, refutes the realist position on universals only as much as he asserts that a physicalist ontology containing universals is a useful “myth,” specifically in the fields of the physical sciences and more so in mathematics; put differently, he refutes it only by undermining its necessity by emphasizing the marked difference between naming and meaning, untangling Plato’s beard in the process. In the end, he states that the question of which ontology to adopt remains unanswered, with only “tolerance and an experimental spirit” as advice and judgment to be reserved for each myth based on its quality relative to a particular point of view.

Critique

One potential shortcoming in Quine’s argument lies in his approach to singular terms- their elimination and replacement by quantifiers- as an application of Occam’s razor. As was explained, if singular terms can be done away with, then their supposed implications about existence vanish. Hence, by using a singular term, one need not acknowledge the existence of the entity described by the term in order to be speaking meaningfully. Yet, if quantifiers could be done away with in the same manner, would they not be also subject to ontological elimination? One such possible elimination arises from combinatory logic, which was initially intended as a means of clarifying the role of quantifiers in logic by their elimination, much as quantifiers were intended to clarify existential statements by a similar process. In her book Philosophy of Logics, Susan Haack notes, “Quine concedes that his criterion doesn’t apply directly to combinatory logic, but observes that it can be applied indirectly, via the translation of combinatory into quantified formula.”[9] This may only be an evasion of the demand that the elimination of quantifiers places on their ontological status (via Occam’s razor). Even without delving into deeper discussion, it is a possibility worth mentioning, as it questions the validity of one of Quine’s necessary steps in reasoning.

Assuming that this problem with Quine’s methodology is somehow irrelevant to his general reasoning or can be answered appropriately, Quine’s dismission of the necessity of universals, as part of a common trend in dismissing the imaginary problems of Plato’s beard, is quite effective. Indeed, something appears highly flawed about the presupposition that denying the existence of an entity somehow presupposes that entity in the same sense that affirming that entity’s existence does. Quine accurately assesses logical possibilities (though not in those exact words) as meaningful, but does not make the error of “stealing” the concept of existence by making it a predicate.

For the non-Quinean, how much can Quine’s reasoning be used to make a more decisive case against the realist position on universals? On an absolute basis, Quine seems hesitant to commit himself ontologically,[10] and does not rule out the possibility of an ontology containing universals; he merely rules out the possibility of a poorly-reasoned ontology containing universals. To utilize Quine’s argument from an objectivist standpoint, there is not much that can be meaningfully done in the discussion of universals besides Occamite elimination, as is true with any other unnecessary multiplication of entities. In communication and in action, often times a person consistently holding the realist view on universals and a person not holding the view are totally indistinguishable, except in their assertions about the nature of universals. Lacking positive proof of a position or falsification of its negatory position, an appeal to Occam’s razor is the only logical argument left to pursue.

[2] Here, Quine briefly introduces a subtler-minded pseudonymous philosopher- Wyman- who advances the argument that Pegasus is simply an unactualized possible. Hence, when it is said that “Pegasus is not,” what is really meant is that Pegasus does not possess the property of actuality; in other words, it is an entity that is already understood to be. Wyman’s definition of the word “existence” entails that “Pegasus” has spatio-temporal connotations if “Pegasus exists,” but that “exists” does not (it merely refers to actualization). Quine then moves on to discuss some problems with unactualized possibles. This discussion is not directly necessary for his discussion of universals, except in as much as unactualized possibles can be looked at as entities in a similar manner to universals.

[3] What Quine means by “ambiguity” in this instance is that the quantifiers are subject non-specific on their own and only necessitate the satisfaction of arbitrarily-stated conditions in a proposition, not that they are poorly defined in usage.

[4] P. 137

[5] P. 138

[6] P. 139

[7] Ibid.

[8] Quine uses “significant” as interchangeable with “meaningful.”

[9] Haack, Susan. Philosophy of Logics. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1978.

[10] At the very least, his hesitation is reflected in this article.

This issue can become exceedingly complex when contradictions are considered in the many possible senses of the word: linguistic contradictions, metaphysical contradictions, ethical contradictions, etc. Contradictions in the metaphysical sense are by far the easiest to understand, because their constituent parts are easily manifest-able in space and time. I can show you some round object, and I can show you some square object, making it fairly easy to see that there is no possible referent when you (accurately) combine the two concepts together. Likewise, you can disprove the statement “’round square’ is a contradiction” by showing me an object that properly conforms to the words’ definitions. But what about contradictions in ethics? After all, how can we possibly draw or point to the statement, “murder is wrong”? While we can point to “murder” by showing an example of it, what the heck is “wrongness”? Yet any sane person would agree that “Murder is wrong” and “killing another human being is right” are contradictory statements. As long as ethical statements are subject to the conditions of truth and falsehood, there must be an essential similarity between them and metaphysical statements.

Before moving to the problematic issue of ethics, the nature of contradictions “in” the universe should be elucidated. (“In” is in quotes because contradictions do not exist so they are not “in” anything, but we are unable to talk about them in any other way. The same applies for phrases like “contradictory things,” “contradictory entities,” etc.) There is a distinct difference between the property of being contradictory and the property of being nonexistent. The former entails the latter, but the latter does not entail the former. Contradictions don’t exist in reality, but neither do lots of other things, like unicorns. However, humans have the useful ability of being able to take concepts formed from previous experience, and recombine them to form “counter-factual” scenarios. With our knowledge of things that are, we can think of things that aren’t: unicorns (a horse and a horn), the U.S.S. Enterprise (a vessel, space travel, an engine, a captain, a crew, etc.), or the love-children of George Bush and Hillary Clinton (big ears, a grin, a freaky facial expression, scary hair, etc.). These things need not have physical existence in reality in order for them to be meaningful. If such imagination weren’t the case, then humanity would never be able to innovate or construct new things or even new ways of using existing things. Without imagination, “rock and stick make spear for kill food” would never have occurred. Reason and our ability to imagine- functions of our brains- became our evolutionary means of survival and adaptation, as opposed to claws, flippers, fins, or little lights dangling from our foreheads.

So to rehash a basic point, when one refers to a “round square,” he is actually referring to nothing. “Roundness” is a property logically incompatible with “squareness.” This summarizes contradictions regarding strictly material entities. On the other hand, unlike how we could with a physical object, we can not easily draw or otherwise represent ethical statements. This makes ethics an ideal breeding ground for logical contradictions. Still, if ethical statements are facts as much as statements about physical objects are facts, then the properties of contradictions outlined above have to apply, at least applying in some way with regards to human psychology. Indeed, human psychology plays a role, primarily in allowing us to linguistically posit and act upon contradictions. Nothing stops us from declaring or acting in accordance with contradictory moral premises. One need only hear some authority figure utter a moral absolute and then do it himself, and when questioned rationalize it. “For me it’s different, because…” “Do as I say, not as I do.”

Reality only forces us to recognize contradictions by preventing us from thinking anything illogical, and by never manifesting something illogical for us to observe. The reconciliation between two contradictory propositions or attributes is a process that can be understood as rationalization. Language, serving its function, has the tendency to provoke the imagination to manifest the referents of a word, phrase, or proposition. When someone says, “cat,” naturally, we think of the image of a cat, perhaps with a particular kind of fur, or it napping and licking its paws- whatever it is that we associate with cats. When someone says, “round square,” of what do we think? If any image is called to mind, it will be something like a square circumscribed within a circle, or perhaps something that has 4 flat sides but with curves connecting them in place of the 90 degree angles. However, this not a true “round square,” leading to my point: we can alter the definition, of either squareness or roundness, to make the concept logically compatible in order for any image to be called to mind. What we cannot do, though, is stay true to the definition of “round” as curved, and “square” as “a polygon with 4 equal sides connected by right angles” and produce a conceivable referent, whether as a real object or a mental picture. Whether consciously or subconsciously, we search for the closest definition to round square we can find and call the corresponding image to mind if we must call to mind an image. This is a valid explanation, for example, for anthropomorphic portrayals of supernatural, incorporeal deities, ghosts, spirits, souls, etc. The supernatural is inconceivable by human perception. If it could be perceived by any of the five senses, it would not be supernatural. But God has a beard, or a booming voice, or at the very least is represented by a bright light (a strictly physical phenomenon). Souls or spirits are white wispy things named “Casper.”

Ethics, as a subsidiary of epistemology (which is subsidiary to metaphysics), can also be subject to this kind of rationalization. After all, how can someone hold the principle “violence should never be initiated against another human being,” yet simultaneously advocate “people have a right to healthcare”? What makes these two propositions incompatible is a state of affairs in the world: since essential components of healthcare – doctors’ and nurses’ labor, machines, medicine, etc – do not just fall from the sky and must be provided by someone’s toil, the only way to guarantee that right is to use violence by threatening those able to provide healthcare or those able to pay for it with harm and ultimately death unless they comply. One way to rationalize this clear contradiction is by incorporating the new belief, “violence should never be initiated against another human being, except if done by the government.” The revised statement itself may be subject to a contradiction, of course (who’s the government? Is it not composed of human beings itself?, etc.), but assuming that (highly dubious) claim is true, it resolves the contradiction.

In light of that, how is it that we can hold a belief, which, in principle, contradicts another one of our beliefs? We have already established one general form of this: keeping the words used to represent the beliefs the same while changing the underlying definitions to make the statements logically compatible. However, rationalization can involve more elements than simply this, including unintentional or unresolvable ones. Hopefully this will lay the groundwork for the next article, in which we will explore more comprehensively the relationship between contradictions and human psychology and action.

In “The Subjectivity of Values,” a chapter in Ethics: Inventing Right and Wrong, J.L. Mackie develops his theory of “moral scepticism.” In the first sentence, he states his thesis plainly: “there are no objective values.” He goes on to fully define his position, by clarifying the sense in which he means it: that there do not exist in the world any such values. Though Mackie’s moral scepticism is a strong explanation for the failure of theories which posit values that are intrinsic features of the universe, such theories do not account for all theories which hold objective values; in short, not all objective theories are of the kind that Mackie describes and critiques.

Initial Discussion

Mackie spends the first portion of the chapter emphasizing a critical set of distinctions to understand his argument: namely, that his theory is not a first-order (normative) form of subjectivism or scepticism, but a second-order (metaethically descriptive) one. For example, his position is not one of a moral skeptic who would argue that we ought to reject all conventional moral judgments (and thus make a positive, first-order statement about morality). Likewise, he is sure to distinguish between other second-order theses and his own. Subjectivist theories such as emotivism attempt to provide an explanation for what constitutes moral speech. An emotivist would argue that all moral speech is merely an instance of the speaker expressing his own attitude toward the subject (“stealing is wrong” means “boo for stealing!”) In contrast, Mackie is simply describing the nature of normative statements and their respective ontological projections (or lack thereof). “Moral scepticism” is concerned with saying what does not exist, as opposed to what does; it is a negative, as opposed to a positive, doctrine.

Mackie does hold that there are clear factual descriptions of acts which we commonly ascribe to moral actions: “the present issue is with regard to the objectivity specifically of value, not with regard to the objectivity of those natural, factual differences on the basis of which differing values are assigned.” In other words, kindness and cruelty can be described in totally non-normative terms; they simply are different classes of behavior to which moral values are commonly attached. However, value statements like “killing is wrong” are not propositional (true or false) like “three plus seven is ten” or “the earth is flat.” The only exception is when there is an agreed upon standard of value (in a sense, an implicit transformation of a hypothetical imperative) for the subject of such a statement. For example, if it were agreed that a good ethics class is one which has a lecture on subjectivism and Hauptli’s ethics class did not have one, then the statement “Hauptli’s ethics class is good” has a truth-value (false). Morality can thus be derived from standards of evaluation, but Mackie argues that appealing to a standard of evaluation simply shifts the question posed by his scepticism to the standard.

The Arguments from Relativity and Queerness

After his introductory discussion, Mackie’s theory branches into two primary sections: the argument from relativity, and the argument from queerness. The argument from relativity begins from a point about the obvious historical variations in the content of moral beliefs across groups, classes, and societies. Of course, the presence of disagreement does not disprove the existence of objective value, just as disagreement does not disprove objective scientific facts. However, scientific disagreement relies on differences in speculative inferences and explanatory hypotheses based on gathered evidence, to which moral disagreement does not have any claim. On the contrary, moral dissimilarity is more indicative of adherence to different ways of living. The causal connection is reversed: people approve of monogamy because they live monogamously, not the other way around. “Universalizable” or other general, basic principles not only come about because of widespread implicit acceptance, but individually because of the strength of one’s response to it, despite the fact that others may respond quite differently.

The argument from queerness itself has two parts, one metaphysical, and one epistemological. Its metaphysical claim, in summary, is that objective values would be radically different from anything in our experience; “if there were objective values, then they would be entities or qualities or relations of a very strange sort, utterly different from anything else in the universe.” In turn, the crux of its epistemological claim is that there would be no way to know these queer things without a special, non-empirical means of knowing them (intuition). The central idea of intuitionism, which is that there is some specific and unique interface with which humans come to realize objective moral values, is thus the logical reduction of all theories of objective values. At some point in these theories, some essential concept or inference will only be known via intuition, thus committing any consistent objectivist theory to a “lame answer” to this problem.

Mackie cites Plato’s Theory of Forms as an extreme example of what an objective moral theory entails. Either objective goods have “to-be-pursuedness” built into them, or situations must somehow have a demand for a specific kind of action. Because of this queerness, Mackie questions the connection between an action and a value, and how, if it were to exist, humans could know it. The wrongness of an action must somehow be “consequential” or “supervenient” upon the action; thus, if the natural class of an action is deliberate cruelty, it must be wrong because it is a piece of deliberate cruelty, to which Mackie inquires, “but just what in the world is signified by this ‘because’?” Whatever it is must be beyond the realm of empirical observation, to which the only intrinsicist response is to find “companions in guilt”: identity, number, the infinite extension of time and space, among other things for which empiricism allegedly can not account. Mackie properly acknowledges that the only valid approach to this objection is by providing empirical accounts of such things, and applying the argument from queerness to those “supposed metaphysical necessities” which cannot be explained.

Critique

It is evident that Mackie’s argument is guilty of a straw-man fallacy, or, at least, of incompleteness. At first glance, it may appear that Plato’s Theory of Forms is used as a straw-depiction of utilitarianism, Kantianism, and other objective moral systems. Indeed, he acknowledges that few philosophers actually believe in the Forms. Nonetheless, as Mackie cites it, Plato’s theory is actually appropriately representative of those systems. He makes two implicit assumptions about objective moral theories: first, that if they are to have objective values, that these values must have an existence in reality as objects or relations have existence; second, that knowledge of such objective values compels the agent to comply. Seeing that, the actual shortcoming of Mackie’s argument is much more subtle: he is essentially claiming that all objective moral theories must possess these properties.

As will be seen, that is clearly not the case. While the following discussion can be construed as a debate resolved by clarifying definitions, the misinterpretation of definitions which Mackie does not clarify may lead to misinterpretations of the implications of his argument. The definition at hand here, of course, is that of “objective value.” If Mackie presupposes that it comes with a Platonic conception attached (the two implicit assumptions listed above), then his argument is unproblematic, but it fails to account for all “objective” moral theories. For the remainder of the discussion, we can understand “objective moral theories” to mean sets of propositions about morality that are true through time, regardless of whether agents believe that they are true, false, or meaningless. What Mackie has successfully refuted is only a subset of the above, that is, he has only challenged those theories which hold values as features of the inanimate universe.

Though ultimately inadequate, Mackie’s argument from queerness offers some valid insight. It is true that there is no logical necessity linking actions with values of the fantastical kind to which Mackie is actually referring. To better illustrate, take the case of any hypothetical imperative: it begins with a conditional “if,” and then a prescribed course of action to best fulfill that condition. The first part sets the desired factual state of affairs, and the second part describes the physical action required to best achieve it. Thus, when an action takes place, a direct connection can be drawn to the corresponding hypothetical value, which is brought about by the achievement of a standard. Suppose the imperative, “if one wants to get an ‘A’ in ethics, he ought to do his final paper.” Then, when Chris does his paper, his action can be linked to the fulfillment of the goal of Chris having an ‘A’ appear on his transcript. Both parts of the statement pertain to material cause and effect, which can be observed and predicted scientifically (i.e., rationally). Suppose, on the other hand, the imperative, “Chris ought to do his final paper (because it is good/his duty/etc.)” If it is true, when Chris does his paper, his action achieves a good- not a good to him, or for him, but a good in itself. How does he know which actions best bring about that good in the first place, if this good simply occurs with no tangible effect upon him? This, in light of Mackie’s argument, is a very difficult question to answer. In contrast, so long as an imperative is conditional, the link between an action and a respective value is quite clear.

The next question leads ultimately to the defectiveness of moral scepticism: must a value be unconditional or categorical in order to be objective? The argument from queerness incorporates the assumption about the impossible kind of “entity or object or relation” that an objective value must be. Mackie’s faulty epistemology may be part of the problem. In particular, objectivity does not necessarily imply intrinsicality. A concept, for example, does not represent some intrinsic feature of the universe, but only comes about as the product of a particular process of integration of sensory information. Likewise, values are not an intrinsic part of reality. For value to exist at all there must be a valuator- an agent- to impose a standard on what is otherwise an indifferent universe. Things are good to agents, for the sake of attaining some goal; they are not simply good in themselves. Put differently, reality comes before morality. Prior to all good and evil, there must be a world of things that can become good, evil, or neither. In that regard, value is conditional: it predicates on the existence of agents who have some standard for the material state of affairs.

Our next concern is what makes these conditional values objective. First, we must ponder the exact notion of value. With no need to assert psychological egoism, we can say that all human action is disposed toward the pursuit of value (subjective or objective), whether it is in seeking worldly pleasures, peace of mind, good conscience, or a healthy soul, and whether these actions are self- or other-oriented. Consider value as a means by which things can be preferred over others; in essence, how an agent values something will affect how he acts in order to attain or keep it. The objectivity of such values arises from the fact that agents, specifically humans, possess a physical nature that generates the material basis for a standard of evaluation, from which “the good” is generated. The presence of the fundamental alternatives of existence or nonexistence (“to be or not to be”) is a necessary precursor of value for humans.[1] Without some fundamental alternative, an agent’s course of action would have no purpose and thus no value, if he would even act at all.

Value, then, is derived from a system of conditional imperatives that reduce to the fundamental alternatives and the respective facts pertaining to them. If one wants to live, he ought to eat; if one wants to eat, he ought to produce food; if one wants to produce food, he ought to learn about agriculture, gathering, or hunting, etc. Because the achievement of prolonged existence or one of its corollaries is the achievement of a material state, there is a consistent and empirically-derived basis for resolving the content of the latter portion of conditional imperatives. In this sense, values are objective; they can not be achieved consistently by arbitrary whim.

Without any further elaboration, Mackie’s argument from relativity will pose a problem for the objectivity of value. One could simply argue that there was never a contention in the first place that the optimal fulfillment of hypothetical imperatives was not a matter of objective fact- that it is only the content of the “if” portions of the imperatives that lend themselves to subjectivity, and this is our concern. The problem with this assertion is that it ignores the essential commonality among human beings. In one way, relativity has merit: if you want to grow food in Italy, grow wheat; if you want to grow food in Ireland, grow potatoes. These are two different “ways” of life, both of which can be correct. However, those statements are merely higher-order expressions of the basic imperative, “if you want to live, eat,” which is one of the many imperatives relating to the agent’s relationship to the fundamental outcomes of existence versus non-existence. In other words, by their being what they are, humans are committed to the conditional imperative “if you are human, and if you want to live, satisfy your physical needs.”[2] The chief difference between a condition such as “if you desire a grade of ‘A’” and “if you are human” is that the products of the latter have claim to objectivity, because the agent does not choose it, whether as an end or a means to an end; it is only a fact given by nature. The result is the existence of an objective value which is not intrinsic, but is logically dependent on the presence of humankind.

In the end, Mackie’s argument for the subjectivity of values makes a strong case against the existence of intrinsic values. He draws attention to several important inconsistencies and difficulties encountered by the philosophical daydreams of Platonic ideals, intrinsic values, and others of their conceptual family. Nevertheless, his argument is insufficient as proof for the subjectivity of values across different agents of the same kind (humans, as the only relevant case). In summation, consider the following hypothetical imperatives: if you are looking for an unambiguous explanation of why the concept of intrinsic value is metaphysically and epistemologically bizarre, read Mackie’s “The Subjectivity of Values”; if you are looking for a normative validation of a moral free-for-all, read Gilbert Harman’s “Moral Relativism Defended” instead; if you are looking for proof that objective values do not exist, you must extend your search a bit farther than Mackie’s limited, albeit excellent, article.

Source:

Mackie, J.L. “The Subjectivity of Values” In Ethical Theory: Classical and Contemporary Readings, edited by Louis Pojman, 446-456. Belmont: Wadsworth, 2002.

[2] “What if I don’t want to live?” is a question that merits some serious discussion beyond the scope of this paper. My summarized response is that life is a necessary precondition for all possible values that follow. One who does not want to live constitutes one who has chosen to reject interaction with reality, which cannot be replaced by something else.