Richard: Put in more intuitive terms, we can ask: could our world have turned out in any possible way?

Sure. In fact, I’d wager that it’s necessarily true that our world could have turned out in any possible way, provided that you’re not equivocating on the sort of modality you’re talking about in between the “could” and the “possible.” After all, any way that our universe could not have turned out to be is (ipso facto) an impossible, not a possible, “way.”

To put it another way, isn’t your question here just equivalent to asking whether the world could have turned out in any way it could have turned out, or whether it’s possible for the world to have turned out in any possible way?

Richard: Or are some possibilities so extreme that they could only be realized by a different underlying universe?

I don’t think I know what this even means. What would it mean to have a numerically (not just qualitatively) different universe from the one we’ve got? I can conceive of things going quite differently in this universe, but I really have no idea what I’m supposed to imagine about this numerically distinct, alien world that would make it something other than the world we’re in, under different circumstances. (If they are numerically distinct, could they both be actual at once? If not, why not? But if so, doesn’t that conflict with the condition of totality?)

Alex Skiles: Whether or not property P is essential to object x itself has to do with whether or not x has P in all possible worlds. But possible worlds aren’t the sorts of things that can have properties in other possible worlds.

I don’t see why they wouldn’t be. If there are statements that are true of possible worlds, (e.g. that in at least one of them I went to bed instead of writing these remarks), then that seems like a good prima facie reason for saying that those statements are actual, i.e., are among the states of affairs that constitute the actual world. But if you accept that, then you accept applying predicates to worlds within other possible worlds (e.g. that the world in which I go to bed has, in this the actual world, the property of having been accessible for me).

Of course, you could deny the prima facie case, and argue either (a) that modal facts aren’t in any possible world, but float outside (over? under?) any possible world; or (b) that there aren’t really any facts about possible worlds at all. But the sort of transworld realm of facts required for (a) seems to undermine the idea of possible worlds as total; and to assert (b) just seems to be to give up on possible worlds as anything other than a useful fiction.

Will: Can you seriously expect Israelis to give Lebanese civilians equal importance as their families?

That depends on what context you’re speaking in. Importance for what?

If you mean, “Should Israelis give innocent Lebanese strangers as many birthday presents as they give their own family members?” then of course the answer is no.

If you mean, “Should Israelis feel the same urgent need to rescue innocent Lebanese strangers from danger as they feel towards their own family members?” then the answer is probably still no, but less obviously so.

If you mean, “Should Israelis be willing to actively go out and ”slaughter” innocent Lebanese strangers in order to protect their own family members from danger?” then the answer is no, they should not. Murder is wrong.

Will: Given the choice of saving a dozen people I don’t know or my wife I would choose my wife. I wouldn’t care how unethical it was.

We’re not talking about a situation where Lebanese civilians just happen to be in danger, and Israelis have to choose between “saving” them or saving their family members. We’re talking about a situation in which the IDF is rolling out, professedly in the name of ordinary Israelis, and actively killing innocent Lebanese civilians, supposedly in the process of trying to damage or destroy a guerrilla army (Hizbollah), which many of those civilians are not members of.

So the “choice” you pose here is a weak analogy at best. The proper question to pose to yourself is: would you be willing to go out and murder a dozen people you don’t know in the process of saving your wife from some unrelated menace.

I wouldn’t. And if you would, then you’re a fucking sociopath.

Genius:

as a [consequentialist] I would say they have an obligation to do what is required to defend themselves without causing more harm than would have been caused by the thing they are trying to prevent.

Consequentialism does entail this standard, but I think that that’s a good reason not to be a consequentialist: the standard is too lax about murdering the innocent. It excuses (in principle, if not in fact) all kinds of retaliatory violence, even terroristic violence, against people who have done nothing to deserve it. If the Israeli army could save the lives of 100 Israeli civilians by murdering 99 Lebanese civilians in retaliation for an attack, I think they would still be wrong to do so, even though there’s a decrease in the net body count. Reason being that the 99 Lebanese civilians (ex hypothesi) didn’t have anything to do with the threatened murder of the 100 Israeli civilians, and other people’s lives are not yours to volunteer for that kind of sacrificial duty. This connects up with a more general problem I have with consequentialism in the theory of justice: it suggests that the primary demand of justice on you is that you take steps to minimize the amount of net evil going around in society. Not so: the primary demand of justice is that you must be just.

Clark:

Doesn’t Israel have the right to either eliminate Hezbolla as a threat or come to some sort of peace accord?

Sure, but not by any means necessary. They have no right whatsoever to inflict massive and disproportionate human costs on the lives and livelihoods of civilians in Lebanon in order to “eliminate” Hizbollah or to force their hand diplomatically (or to do the same thing, mutatis mutandis, in Gaza, to eliminate or force a settlement on Hamas). After all, the Israeli government could do all kinds of things to eliminate the threat from Hizbollah; they could, for example, firebomb all the cities in southern Lebanon until everyone in the area was dead, or they could threaten to use nuclear weapons on Beirut, Damascus, Tehran, etc. These would be far more effective at the task of restraining or destroying Hizbollah than the current military strategy is; I leave it up to you and your God to judge why it is that they are not appropriate responses to the death or capture of a handful of soldiers, or the threat posed to civilians from ongoing poorly-aimed rocket attacks.

Clark:

Once a war starts the fact is that there are collateral casualties. While I think there is a lot one can blame Israel for the fact is once the war starts there isn’t the possibility of a clean fight like you suggest.

This is not an argument in favor of so-called “collateral casualties” (that is, killing or maiming innocent people). If it’s an argument against anything, it’s an argument against going to war.

Clark:

One can’t simply say, “I can’t think of anything better” and then simultaneously say, “their current actions don’t meet the standard of restraint.” That’s just a cop out.

Oh yes one can. If you can’t figure out any way to achieve your aims without doing evil to innocent third parties in the process, then your aims had jolly well better go unachieved; it is better to do nothing than to do evil.

I would like to be able to suggest something that the IDF could do that would not be evil and that would be better than doing nothing at all; attacks on Israeli civilians are criminal and should be stopped where possible. But I’m under no obligation to come up with that constructive advice for them before I condemn immoral policies that they’re presently engaged in: they are obliged to stop doing evil immediately and completely, whether or not anybody has thought of any better way to accomplish their professed goals.

Clark:

I hate to say it but as democracies both the people of Lebanon and Palestine have to foot a lot of the blame. (Just as Americans have to accept the blame for George Bush)

Oh, bullshit. What blame should I accept for the policies of a ruler that I never voted for, never supported, and have no effective control over whatsoever?

Richard,

If I accept your claims of non-supervenience, it’s unclear to me that this demonstrates anything remarkable about natural laws. It would demonstrate nothing, in particular, about whether natural laws apply necessarily or only contingently to the stuff our world is in fact made of (lead, gold, atoms, quarks, matter, whatever). At the strongest it would demonstrate that there are possible worlds made of alien stuff that behaves according to correspondingly alien laws. But it tells us nothing about the modal status of “Lead does not transmute into gold just by being put into such-and-such a shape.” Since pretty much all of our natural laws are already expressed using natural kind terms, it’d be hard for world-descriptions that systematically exclude them to tell us anything about the natural laws.

Second, why should we accept that a “purely non-dispositional account of the world” is even possible? What sort of purely non-dispositional properties do you have in mind? As an exercise, just try describing what qualities water and XYZ have in common with each other, without mentioning any dispositional properties at all. (Transparency, tastelessness, odorlessness, wetness, etc. are all qualities typically mentioned here, but none of them will do for your purposes: they all involve dispositions. Water, for example, is odorless whether you’re actually sniffing it or not, and XYZ would still be transparent even when it’s dark.)

Given that the antecedent conditions are never satisfied in the actual world, it seems that both (A) and its negation are consistent with the actual physical phenomena. Presumably (A) is false, but it could be true of a world otherwise identical to our own, couldn’t it?

In order to be certain that this is true, don’t you have to hold that members of natural kinds don’t have any of their dispositional properties essentially?

If members of natural kinds (say, lead) have dispositional properties (say, chemical stability) essentially, then it may very well turn out that (for example) any possible world where you have X-shaped lead is a possible world where that lead will not transmute into gold. There might be possible worlds where leaden stuff does that, but that would be a possible world with an alien substance, unknown in our world, not a possible world with lead.

It’s open to you to claim that members of natural kinds only have dispositional properties contingently. But that will require some argument; it’s certainly not obvious to me, at least, that certain chemical dispositions aren’t part of the essence of (say) salt or gold or lead, or that certain biological dispositions aren’t part of the essence of (say) slugs or tigers or bats.

Alternatively, it’s open to you to claim that falling under a natural kind can entail having certain dispositional properties, but deny that natural kind membership supervenes on the “totality of our world’s actual spatiotemporal properties,” i.e. you could have possible worlds with perfectly identical “actual spatiotemporal properties,” but have one of them containing lead and the other containing an alien substance that’s like lead except it transmutes under the right (as-yet unfulfilled) conditions. But you’d have to give me some pretty burly argument to convince me that natural kind terms aren’t part of the basic description of the properties of the world as we know it. I don’t know how you’d even begin constructing a complete description of a world without ever using a natural kind term. (“Well, you see, these two worlds are exactly identical in their physical properties. But in W1 there is water and in W2 there is not.” Well, then, they’re not exactly identical in their physical properties.)

“Why shouldn’t this model be extended to teachers? Why shouldn’t schools be co-operatives/partnerships of teachers who compete against each other?”

They used to have these things in Europe; I believe they were called “Universities.”

The multiple layers of administrative bureaucracy that have piled themselves up on the shoulders of scholars are a relatively new “innovation,” which grew like a tumor and metastasized throughout the world mostly over the course of the late 19th and early 20th century.

Fontwell, the question here is what you mean by the “wrongness” of a statement. If you mean that the statement is ill-formed or meaningless, many if not most philosophers in the 20th and 21st centuries would agree with you. (In fact, I would too.) But the question is what sort of principled and motivated account we can give to explain why it is ill-formed or meaningless. Just pointing out a problem doesn’t solve it; the question is how you can have a language that allows you to make assertions of the form “A is true,” where A is a name or description that designates a particular sentence, while avoiding the awkward consequence that one of the sentences you might deny is the very sentence by which you deny it. Just banning sentences that lead to contradictions, solely on the basis of their leading to contradictions, has a couple of awkward effects: (1) it seems to be nothing more than linguistic gerrymandering; if I write “Johnson’s thesis is false,” then why should I be able to name it “Jackson’s thesis” but not “Johnson’s thesis”? What’s to stop me? (2) There are in fact self-referential sentences that don’t result in logical contradictions, but do cause philosophical headaches in other ways. Sentences of the form “If this sentence is true, then P” don’t directly result in any contradiction, but do allow you to prove absolutly any proposition whatsoever that you care to substitute for P. M, as discussed above, seems to be a part of our ordinary language, but it also seems to allow for the possibility of the bizarre disagreement between the normal believer and the perverse skeptic. And T, as discussed by Blar, is logically completely compliant — if it’s true, it’s true, and if it’s false, it’s false. But its semantics seem to shrink to a vanishing point; there seems to be nothing even in principle that could make it true, or make it false.

Blar, I think you’re right to show interest in T (in my essay I talk about it as an essential part of understanding what’s wrong with L) but I don’t think that M can be reduced to it. The simple reason being that T can’t meaningfully be asserted but M can (and was, by Marco Polo). I think that part of what a theory has to do in accounting for the “data,” as it were, is to account for the fact that Polo wrote M (or rather, wrote its equivalent in Italian) and we understood what he wrote.

One way to think about this is that when we evaluate M (and so, if we try to evaluate your looped case of M1, M2, M*, in such a way as to capture what M said) there seems to be a right order to do the evaluation in. First you figure out whether the normal believer or the normal skeptic is right about all the other statements in the book, then you count the assurance as false only if that’s entailed by the falsity of one of the other conjuncts. And that’s how you get the truth-value of M.

You could say, “O.K., well, that gives us a convention for calling M true or false and so also a convention for calling T true or false.” But of course if that is the convention, then we don’t have one for T, since T doesn’t have any “conjuncts” besides itself. There doesn’t seem to be any point at all at which it could be tied down to anything in logical space. So it does seem to me that there has to be an important difference between M and T; the question is how to spell out what that difference is.

As for the suggestion that we can translate M simply as M2, and so get the truth-conditions that we want, well, I agree that we can, but I’m not at all sympathetic to the claim that that’s how we should understand what Polo said. Because, well, that’s not what Polo said, and there are also technical problems that surface in most of the accounts that would give you some motivation for making the translation. I don’t know about you, but it certainly seems true to me that if Polo lied when he said, “This book contains nothing but the truth,” then his book contains at least two counterexamples to his claim: first, whatever it was he was lying about as far as his journey is concerned, and second, the assurance that he was telling the truth.

The difference is brought out by imagining a case of memory manipulation. You have a false belief about the way things actually seemed at the time, but it nevertheless truly seems actual to you now.

Well, you needn’t invoke sci-fi memory manipulation; faulty memory happens all the time, in small ways. But isn’t this just a case of distinguishing a difference in scope, rather than any kind of burly objective-subjective distinction? “It seems to me that I did in fact tell you ‘Happy anniversary’” [= S(P(T(i,u, h)))] and “It did in fact seem to me that I told you ‘Happy anniversary’” [= P(S(T(i, u, h)))] are just two different propositions on the face of it, because the scope of the past-tense qualifier is different. (Indeed, it’s not hard to see how different the conditions for their appropriate use are.) I think pretty much everyone who’s discussed the seeming infallibility of first-personal mental ascriptions has then limited it to first-personal present mental ascriptions, haven’t they?

Shulamite, “This sentence is false” does not attempt to ascribe falsity to the words “This sentence,” any more than “The first sentence written by Plato was false” attempts to ascribe falsity to the words “The first sentence written by Plato.” Both of them attempt to ascribe falsity to the sentence picked out by the denoting phrase.

Even setting that issue to one side, though, I don’t think your solution is even materially adequate. Among other things, it would require us to dismiss statements such as (M) for precisely the same reasons that we dismiss (L). But (M) is a perfectly ordinary bit of understood language. I think any theory that discards it is, for exactly that reason, not a good theory.

Shulamite: If “this statement is false” refers to some other statement (like “paradoxes are fun”), then the whole paradox disappears from the very beginning, and there is simply nothing to explain or even puzzle about.

This is not so. There are what are called “looped liar” paradoxes. Consider:

(P1) P2 is true.

(P2) P1 is false.

If P1 is true, then it follows that P2 is true; thus that what P2 says obtains; thus that P1 is false. But if P1 is false, then it follows that P2 is not true; thus what P2 says does not obtain; thus P1 is true. Similarly, if P2 is true then P2 is provably false, and if P2 is false then P2 is provably true. Any theory of truth that ascribes either truth or falsity to both P1 and P2 is therefore false, because internally contradictory.

There are also cases where we simply don’t know the contents of the sentence to which we are referring. For example, you might say, “the first assertive sentence Plato ever wrote was true,” or “the first assertive sentence Plato ever wrote was false.” Provided that Plato existed and did write one or more assertive sentences, one of these is true (although we will probably never know which one of them is). But allowing these kind of descriptions can be risky. For example, suppose that the first thing I say on Tuesday was, “The first thing Shulamite said today is false.” And the first thing you said on Tuesday — not knowing that I had said this — was “The first thing Rad Geek said today is true.”

Here’s one of the few canonical philosophical puzzles that I had learned about by the age of five. What’s the truth-value of the following statement?

(L) This statement (L) is false.

The problem, of course, is that if (L) is true then it’s false, and if (L) is false then it’s true. Thus, any theory of truth that assigns a truth-value to (L) is internally contradictory, since the theory will (inter alia) include the contradictory truth-ascription:

(TL) L is true if and only if L is false.

Since there are no true contradictions, a theory of truth must not assign any truth-value to (L) at all. But how do you doing it? If a statement hasn’t got a truth-value, then the usual take is that they are, in some respect, nonsense; that is, they fail to make an assertion — just as “Cat mat on the sat the” fails to make an assertion. The canonical approach to (L) in the 20th century has been to try to come up with some principled means of ruling (L) out of the language by means of setting up the right structure of rules beforehand (just as you can point to the preexisting rules of syntax to show that “Cat mat on the sat the” doesn’t amount to a complete sentence). The most famous attempt, and the inspiration of many of the subsequent attempts, has been Tarski’s attempt to sidestep the Liar Paradox by means of segmenting language into object-language and meta-language layers. The idea being that, if you do this assiduously, you can avoid self-referential paradoxes because self-reference won’t be possible in languages whose sentences can be ascribed truth-values; because they can only be ascribed truth-values within a meta-language that contains the names of the object language’s sentences and truth-predicates for those sentences. I have a lot of problems with this approach; a full explanation of them is something that I ought to spell out (indeed, have spelled out) elsewhere. But here’s a quick gloss of one of the reasons: Tarski and the people inspired by him started setting up ex ante rules to try to rule out self-referential sentences because it’s self-reference that makes the Liar Paradox paradoxical (and that makes for similar paradoxes in similar sentences; exercise for the reader: show how “If this sentence is true, then God exists” is both necessarily true and strictly entails the existence of God). But there’s an obvious and general problem for the method: there are self-referential sentences which are unparadoxical, and indeed self-referential sentences which are true. Here’s an example which may or may not cause trouble for Tarskian theories, depending on the details:

(E) This sentence (E) is in English.

(E) is truth-valuable; and in fact it is true. (If, on the other hand, it had said “This sentence is in French,” it would have been false.) Now, this may cause trouble for the Tarskian method and it may not, depending on the details of a particular account. (Sometimes people want to ban all self-referential sentences; sometimes they are more careful and claim that object languages might be able to name their own sentences but only so long as they don’t contain the truth-predicates for their own language.) But even if (E) is allowed, you haven’t solved the problem. There are plenty of self-referential truth-ascribing sentences that aren’t paradoxical, too. Here’s one:

(EM) Either this sentence (EM) is true, or this sentence (EM) is false.

Unlike (L), this causes no logical paradoxes. If you suppose that it’s false, that means that it turns out to be true — since the second disjunct, “this sentence (EM) is false” turns out to be true; meaning that it cannot be false. But it can be true, without contradiction. So it has to be true, if it has any truth-value at all. That shouldn’t be surprising; it’s an instance of the law of the excluded middle, and all instances of the law of the excluded middle are true.

Now, you might think that (EM)’s relationship to ordinary talk is attenuated enough, and the reasons for thinking it unparadoxical are technical enough, that it might be an acceptable loss if some other technical stuff that saves us from (L) happens to rule out (EM) too. I’d be inclined to agree, except that (EM) isn’t the only example I had up my sleeve, either. Here’s another. In the Prologue to the Travels, Marco Polo wrote,

We will set down things seen as seen, things heard as heard, so that our book may be an accurate record, free from any sort of fabrication. And all who read this book or hear it may do so with full confidence, because it contains nothing but the truth.

Let M be the conjunction of all the assertions that Marco Polo makes in his book. The book contains nothing but the truth if and only if M is true, but that the book contains nothing but the truth is one of the many assertions in the book, so “M is true” is one of the conjuncts of M. Thus:

(M) This conjunction (M) is true, and Marco Polo traveled the Silk Road to Cathay, and served in the court of the Great Khan, and observed the barbarous customs of lesser Armenia, and … and … and ….

But it’s either true or false that Marco Polo’s book contains nothing but the truth; that assertion is a standard bit of understood language (passages just like it are a near-universal feature of traveler’s tales, or other extraordinary stories where the author feels the need to reassure you that she’s not making things up). If your theory of language throws it out as nonsense, then your “theory of language” needs to be thrown out, on the grounds that it’s not semantically serious. (Whatever it’s a theory of may be interesting, but it’s something other than language as it actually exists.)

Now, like Polo, I may have been fudging just a bit in what I said. I suggested that M isn’t paradoxical; I don’t think it is, but there is a way to make it seem paradoxical. Lots of readers have doubted that Polo was telling the truth; some of them, for example, were unimpressed by the evidence that he had ever served in the court of the Great Khan; others weren’t so sure about the tales of dog-headed men or giant birds that consumed elephants. Whatever the case, they believed that Marco Polo made at least two false assertions in his book: (1) the claim about his journeys that they doubted, and (2) the claim that his book contained nothing but the truth. Call these the normal skeptics. I’m sure there were also a few readers (however credulous they would have to have been), who believed that the Travels really did contain nothing but the truth; that is, that there were no false assertions in the book, including the assertion that the book contained no false assertions. Call these the normal believers. But now imagine a third kind of reader, a perverse skeptic — a philosopher, of course — who noticed that you could gloss the contents of the book as M, and who decided that she believed everything that Polo said in the book about his journeys, from the customs of lesser Armenia to the domains of the Great Khan to the giant birds. She believes everything in the book, except … there is one assertion that she thinks is false — that is, (1) the assertion that everything in the book is true, and nothing else.

There are a couple of different ways that you could approach the difficulty. One way is to point out that the perverse skeptic really is being perverse. That’s just not how you can sensibly read the book. Either you think that nothing in the book is false, or you think that at least two things are; the assurance of truthfulness just can’t be a candidate for falseness until something else has been shown false. But if you list the truth-conditions of M, then “M is true” is one among them, and it’s hard to see how you could stop the perverse skeptic from going down the list and picking that one as the only one to be false. Certainly Polo doesn’t say “The rest of the book besides this sentence contains nothing but the truth.” And given that he did say what he did, I’d be hard put to say that “this book contains nothing but the truth” isn’t one of the untruths denied by the sentence, if something else in the book is false.

Another way to approach it is this: you can imagine an argument between the normal skeptic and the normal believer; whether or not one ever managed to convince the other in the end, you can in principle identify the sorts of reasons that they might offer to try to determine whether Polo really did tell the truth about the birds, or about the Khan, or…, and you can say what things would be like if one or the other is true. But what kind of argument could the normal believer and the perverse skeptic have? How would one convince the other? Or, to take it beyond the merely psychological point to the epistemological point, what kind of reasons could the normal believer possibly give to the perverse skeptic to give up the belief that “this book contains nothing but the truth” is false? (She can’t point to all the true statements about his journey; the perverse skeptic already believes in those.) Or, to take it beyond the epistemological point to the ontological point: what sort of truth-makers could even in principle determine whether the normal believer or the perverse skeptic is in the right?

So there is a problem with M, to be sure. But the problem is not the same as the problem posed by L: there’s no logical contradiction involved, so its self-referentiality sets off no logical explosions. And the solution can’t be the same either: the radical move of abandoning the sentence as meaningless works with (L), where there’s just no right way to take it, but it doesn’t help us out with (M), where there obviously is a right way to take it (i.e., as the normal readers take it, and not as the perverse reader takes it).

So there has to be some right way to go about ascribing a truth-value to (M) (and also (E)). Whatever it is, it may very well also explain how we can ascribe a truth-value to (EM). But it certainly cannot also mean that we try to ascribe a truth-value to (L). What is it? Is there some kind of principled and motivated general rule that we can add to our logical grammar, so as to get M and E and maybe EM but no L? If so, what in the world would it be? If not, then what do we do?

(I have my own answers; for the details, you can look up “Sentences That Can’t Be Said” in the upcoming issue of Southwest Philosophy Review. Or contact me if you’re interested enough to want a copy of the essay. But I want to pose the puzzle and see what y’all think about it as it stands.)

Update 2005-12-08: I fixed a minor error in phrasing. Thanks to Blar for pointing it out in comments.