... Depends on where you are: it's common in the U.S., but extremely rare in Europe. (This WHO report from 2007

... Joshua, Well, either circumcision of infants is a rights-violation or it isn't. I think that it's wrong whether or not it's a rights-violation (if it's not

MBH:

(1)* The analytic-synthetic dichotomy implies psychologism.

Alright, but what’s the argument for that? Are (1a) and (1b) below:

(1a) If an analytic-synthetic continuum is the case, then a belief that p will not necessarily cause a belief in all that p entails. For instance, p may entail q but q may be believed because of empirical evidence that q — not automatically by the belief that p.
(1b) An analytic-synthetic continuum is a frame that disallows psychologism.

… supposed to be a lemma to establish that (1) is true? If so, then it seems that you’ve just given me the following argument:

(0) If ASC, then necessarily not P.
Therefore, (1) if not ASC, then P.

… which is simply a formal fallacy. Am I missing something? If so, what? If not, how is this any kind of argument for premise (1)?

(2) Under psychologism, if p entails q, then the belief in p will cause the belief in q.

I don’t know of any psychologicians who believe that this is true in the unqualified form you’ve just stated it. (For example, lots of people believe some stuff about probability which is sufficient to prove that switching is a winning strategy in Monty Hall scenarios. But very few of them believe that switching is a winning strategy, unless you try very hard to show them how this can be so. Psychologicians don’t expect that people who believe in a set of premises always as a result believe in everything that the premises jointly entail! In fact, they more or less always (1) qualify the claim by saying that the causal connection only holds under a set of ideal conditions for cognition (e.g., the believer has to have time to think about it, has to be paying attention, etc.) and (2) insist that the causal connection between believing that p, and believing in q, under those ideal conditions, is in any case only an empirical generalization, which may admit of exceptions, not a necessary connection. But if anything, genuine impositionists (like the impositionist reading of Kant, or like Mises) want to insist on a necessary relationship, not an empirical generalization; which is part of the reason why so many of them (Impositionist-Kant, Mises) tend to be so fiercely anti-psychologistic.

; they generally hold that this kind of epistemic closure is qualified by a set of normative cognitive conditions (the believer has to have adequate time to think, a certain degree of intelligence, etc.), and, furthermore, they hold that this causal relationship between believing that p and believing that q, under the normative is an empirical generalization which may admit of exceptions, not a necessary connection or universal law.

(3) Believing = Seeing. (You can only see what you believe is there.)

I have no idea what you mean by this. = suggests equivalence or identity; but your parenthetical gloss looks like a statement of necessary conditions. In any case, when you say “seeing,” are you actually referring to sight here? I.e., is (3) intended to say exactly that S counts as (literally) seeing O only if S believes that O exists? That’s what your later references to perception seem to suggest. But if so, then when you come to:

(4) If p entails q, then an analytic a priori judgment that p allows for the perception that q

… you’re stuck with a real hot mess. I guess this is intended to be a simple conditional within a pair of universal quantifiers over all p and all q, but in order to actually get this anywhere near being adequately formulated, you’d actually embedding a lot more in the way of conditionals and quantifiers (e.g., “an analytic a priori judgment that p allows for…” is going to mean something like, “If p entails q, then: if q is an observation report of some S seeing some O, then (it is possible for q to be perceived if: p is an analytic judgment and there is an apriori justification for p).” But in the rest of your argument, you fallaciously convert the italicitzed “if” to an “only if” (by introducing a “would otherwise be disallowed” that was nowhere in the previous premise); you also act as if you already have all the antecedents of these embedded conditionals already satisfied, and can proceed to assert conclusions that you inferred from the consequent (that a perception that q is presupposing a belief that p). But you haven’t satisfied them. You’ll need to actually give an example of (1) a p which is an analytic judgment with an apriori justification; (2) a q which is an observation report to the effect that some S sees some O; and then (3) show that that analytic truth logically entails that observation report (!). Which seems to me something you’re not likely to be able to do; that’s not the sort of thing that analytic truths normally entail. But if you don’t have at least one p and a q you can give us, then you have no basis for inferring (6); you’re just asserting something you inferred from the consequent without first having satisfied the antecedent of the conditional.

Or maybe you meant something else by “allows for the perception” than this sort of observation-report, but then it’s not clear at all how (4) is supposed to be connected with the previous premise in (3), if (3) is supposed to have something to do with the factivity of seeing. Of course, as I said, I’m really pretty baffled as to what (3) is supposed to be saying; so perhaps (3) also means something different, which is connected. But what, then?

Me:

Frege definitely endorses a version of the synthetic-analytic dichotomy. . .

MBH:

Maybe on the surface he does. I’ll take your word for it.

Well, you don’t need to take my word for it. He discusses it in Foundations of Arithmetic, among other places.

But his destruction of psychologism hammers the synthetic and the analytic together.

Maybe, but I don’t see how that pertains to the question. I think Frege also has commitments which undermine reflectionism, but the fact remains that, nevertheless, if you asked him for his views on the Third Realm, he was very ardently committed to a picture that looks an awful lot like reflectionism.

... I think it's unlikely that this kind of consideration could result in the kind of polarity switch that you're talking about -- that it could reasonably

Why has the Gay community tried to convince the religious right that their definition of marriage is wrong/should not be the legal definition?

Most of the folks I’ve encountered in the gay community (*) aren’t interested in convincing the religious right of much of anything. Even if that were desirable, it doesn’t seem especially likely. What they are interested in is convincing some other groups of people that the religious right’s specific religious beliefs about marriage shouldn’t be given privileged legal standing.

(*) At least, the activist end of it, which is the main region of the gay community I’ve spent time in.

Why haven’t supporters of gay marriage …

Well, you ask “Why haven’t…?” but the strategy and tactics that you’re suggesting here have already been suggested over the past several years by a lot of different people who support gay marriage, as well as by people who oppose gay marriage from a gay liberationist standpoint. (See for example Alisa Solomon, Terry J. Allen, Steve Swayne, Marcus Line, Alexander Cockburn, Betsy Brown, etc.) There are liberal versions of this (e.g., Solomon’s article) which turn on separation of church and state and call for a lot of existing legal privileges to be transferred from religious to civil institutions; and there are radical versions of it (e.g., Brown’s article) that cal for a lot of existing legal privileges to be abolished, by devolving the rights from couples to individuals, or to private associations that might or might not have anything to do with sexual coupling (e.g., might apply to “Boston marriages” or to best friends or any number of other relationships).

I happen to agree with these authors, and I think that this approach, especially in its radical version, is a good idea. But you should also be aware that what you’re proposing is not a simple one-off reform, but a radical and fundamental rewriting of nearly all existing American law. That’s why I like the idea; but it shouldn’t be surprising that many people who have pressing immediate concerns (like being able to be with the love of your life in her dying moments, or not constantly living in fear of deportation) might end up looking for quick fixes that can piggyback on existing social norms and legal protections for married couples. I think that’s regrettable in some ways — I think the search for political quick fixes actually often retards progress, because of the way it bogs us down in interminable political fights. But I’m not puzzled as to why people do it, or particularly sympathetic to the claim that it’s motivated by a desire to control others. It’s generally motivated by people having very serious real-world problems and wanting not to be treated like shit by local or national authorities.

Anon73:

From a left-libertarian perspective wouldn’t this be a good law since it is protecting bakers from tyrannical bosses?

That sounds more like a left-paternalist perspective than a left-libertarian one. Left-libertarians generally believe that workers ought to defend ourselves from tyrannical bosses, through the economic means, rather than depending on legislatures or courts to protect us through the political means.

... I'm against circumcising infants or anyone else who hasn't consented to it. But one could only argue that it's "just as bad" as clitoridectomy from a

MBH:

I read it like this: if an author’s notion of the analytic entails a dichotomy between the synthetic and the analytic, then that author’s endorsement of analytic a priori judgments implies impositionism.

O.K., but why do you read it like that? What’s the argument for holding that, under an analytic-synthetic dichotomy, analytic apriori judgments are imposed?

Your reading doesn’t seem to help you out much with Frege: Frege definitely endorses a version of the synthetic-analytic dichotomy (he thinks that Kant was wrong in characterizing arithmetical judgments as synthetic, but he explicitly agrees with Kant that geometrical judgments are synthetic apriori). Maybe I missed it somewhere, but I also know of nowhere that Frege suggests that the division between the two is anything like a “continuum.” Wittgenstein certainly gets many things from Frege, but I don’t know of any sign of Frege specifically suggesting much of anything like the later Wittgenstein’s concerns about projectibility or enabling conditions for the application of concepts. If he does, could you show me where he does?

Unless I’m missing something, it seems like Frege meets your conditions for impositionism about analytic apriori judgments. But it seems to me that that’s would be a very peculiar assessment of Frege’s views, and you’d need to offer some very strong reasons to support it. If Frege is a party to the impositionist-reflectionist debate, then it seems to me that his notions of logic and its relationship to an eternal, non-material, non-psychological, objectively graspable Third Realm place him obviously and completely in the reflectionist camp, not the impositionist camp — at least, about the judgments of arithmetic.

Or, to go to the daddy of this whole analytic-synthetic business, Kant, when read as an impositionist, is, again, plenty big on a rigid dichotomy, but he’s not an impositionist about analytic apriori judgments. The whole point of the exercise, on impositionist readings of the critique, is that synthetic apriori judgments are imposed. Analytic apriori judgments don’t need to be; Kant never suggests that there is any particularly fancy story that has to be told about them.

Wait, what? What makes you think that believing:

(PAA) Praxeological judgments are analytic and apriori judgments

implies impositionism about praxeology? That would only follow if analytical apriori judgments are all imposed; but non-impositionists don’t believe that they are.

Frege believes that:

(AAA) Arithmetical judgments are analytic and apriori.

But if that’s supposed to imply that Frege is an impositionist about arithmetic, you must have a different understanding of Frege than I do.

The impositionist reading of Kant (which I think is the wrong reading, but it is a reading) doesn’t generally hold that analytic apriori judgments are the things that are imposed on the thing-in-itself, either. What Kantian impositionists are interested in are synthetic apriori judgments.

I think the conflation problem also shows up even in putting the words into use in categoricals. E.g., the double use of “animals” doesn’t cause much trouble in being able to understand that “No animal can speak for itself” has a (true) exclusive interpretation and a (false) inclusive interpretation, or in accepting statements like “Some animals can fly aeroplanes” or “Some animals are human.” Supposedly “All men are created equal” should be just as flexible in interpretation, but the same people who would accept “Some animals (viz., us) can fly aeroplanes” are far less likely to be willing to accept “Some men can give birth” or “Some men are women,” unless they are defending a thesis.

But I suspect the interpretive stickiness in the “Some” categoricals has something to do with cognitive stickiness that probably also shows up in the “All” categoricals — that there’s some reason to think that the meaning is not really reliably being switched over to the inclusive meaning in the universal claims, either. If they are being understood to include women, it’s generally only going to be done by some considerable act of will, against the cognitive grain (the same act of will it takes to read “Some men are women” as a true existential claim), or else is being done only as an afterthought, which is easily forgotten when you start reasoning from the statements that you’ve accepted as true.