“But Rad introduces standards of fictional discourse against my objection that ‘praying to God’ is factive.”

I don’t think the connection between “writing letters to Santa Claus” (to take the example) and standards of fictional discourse is quite so straightforward. The language-game surrounding Santa Claus (to take one example) is complicated by the fact that parents engage in fictional discourse that children are expected to treat as factual discourse about Santa Claus, for a few years of their life at least. A number of kids who might tell you that what they are doing is writing a letter to Santa Claus, wouldn’t be saying it under an implicit fictional-that operator. You could, of course, just dig in and insist “Well, in that sense they aren’t writing letters to Santa Claus. They just think they are, and you’re only inclined to call it a letter to Santa Claus when you slip into the fictional context by playing along with the child’s false beliefs.” And I’d agree with you that there’s a sense of “write to” (and “speak to,” “pray to,” and other forms of direct address) where the second person has to exist for you to count as having done it. What I’m more doubtful of is the idea that this is the only sense in which the terms can be used in direct discourse. I’d be interested to know why you think direct (non-fictional) uses of these phrases presupposes the existence of the indirect object.

I’d also note, in this connection, that it’s a common use of English to say things like: “People pray to many different gods,” without presupposing that all of the gods that people pray to exist.

Noumena, I think you’ve got me mixed up with Mike. I don’t think that (4) is meaningless; I think it’s false. Actually, Mike thinks it’s false rather than meaningless, too; what he suggests that if God does not exist, then nothing you can do counts as praying to God. I think that’s either untrue (if you’re using “X prayed to Y” the same way that we often use “X wrote a letter to Santa Claus”), or uninteresting (since if you’re using “X prayed to Y” in a way that presupposes that Y exists, we can always come up with a new proposition, e.g. “I say my prayers”, that doesn’t).

All that I’ve said about (4) is that, when read using material implication, it is only as plausible as the denial of premise (1) (as opposed to the original English sentence, which was intuitively plausible independently of whether I pray or not).

I agree with you that your (4’) is plausibly true — as I’d suggested already above. But it’s not an accurate translation of what the original sentence means, either; it’s actually logically a stronger claim than the original. (The original merely denied that there’s a connection between saying prayers and those prayers being answered if God doesn’t exist. 4’ actually asserts that prayers won’t be answered if you make them and God doesn’t exist. (That’s a claim you can justify apriori, but it’s a different one from the original.)

Noumena, I’m not claiming that pounding out a truth-table for (4) won’t show why it’s unacceptable as a premise (or, what amounts to the same thing, applying M.I. to transform (4) into ~G—>(P&~A), as I did above). I recognize that the argument, as formalized, is just unsound.

What I am suggesting is that the fact that (4) ever seemed plausible in the first place highlights one of the difficulties inherent in being trained to instinctively translate “if p, then q” into “p materially implies q” when you formalize your argument. The premise is intuitively true, but only as long as you’re just reading it as “if-then,” in one of the ordinary English senses, and not as “either not-P or A.”

And I think there may be a moral to the story as to how far strictly technical advances in logic, such as the introduction and intensive use of material implication in foundational logic, deserves the kind of metaphilosophical fanfare that it got early in the last century.

Annie: “Does the fact that riders are paying for their rides not figure into the equation?”

If the riders were being denied rides that they paid for, then they’d have a right to demand the money back. But having paid someone to give you a lift once doesn’t entitle you to demand that you can pay to get a lift from that person whenever you want in the future.

Scott: “Only over-privileged individuals think they are “entitled” to rides from other persons.”

True story: I cook for a pizza place located just off campus in Ann Arbor, and my one late night shift is Saturdays from midnight to 4:00am. One of the first nights I worked this shift, I got bawled out by some lightly buzzed college brat because I wouldn’t tell drivers (who don’t work for me) to drive out to take a pizza to him even though it’s not their job to drive where he lives. The store that served his address was closed, but he was positive that we had to not only make a pizza for him, but drive it out to his place, because he happened to live on a street that’s just off the street that our store is also on (which happens to be one of the main thoroughfares in town, and runs all the way across Ann Arbor and across most of Ypsilanti, too). I suggested that if he wanted the pizza that badly he could place a take-out order and come get his own pizza. This was met with an outraged tirade which lasted for several minutes before he wished me a “shitty night” and hung up the phone.

The poor lad. It is so hard to find good help these days.

Incidentally, for an interesting compare and contrast, see Lewis Carroll’s article A Logical Paradox, from the July 1894 issue of Mind, in which Carroll presents a puzzle with a different kind of nested conditional (“If C is true, then: if A is true, B is not true”). Russell and everybody thereafter thought that this puzzle was trivially solved if you based your theory of conditionals on material implication. Of course, Carroll couldn’t be blamed for not seeing this, since there wasn’t any widespread notion of material implication in English logic until a few years after he died; but (the idea goes) you could just chuck the puzzle out once you got rid of primitive vagueness about logical conditionals.

But, given that material implication causes its own problems with seemingly plausible nested conditionals, as seen here, this may just go to show that it’s a bit harder to dismiss puzzles as relics of antiquated logical notation (made obsolete by the march of technical progress) than some philosophers in the last century were inclined to think. And that Carroll’s questions about implication remain interesting (and open) after all these years. (For more, see my extended post on the puzzle.)

Well, this argument:

“If God exists, then the sky is orange. The sky is not orange. Therefore, God exists.”

… is invalid. Did you mean for the first premise to be “If God does not exist, then the sky is orange”?

In any case, I think there’s an important difference here. Scott’s argument seems plausible at first glance; the reason why is that premise 4 expresses something that seems like it ought to be true: “If God does not exist, then it’s not the case that if I pray to God my prayers will be answered.” Of course; after all, if there is no God then He can’t be answering prayers. What I suggested to be the problem is that what is meant by the if-then nested in the consequent of the premise can’t be captured by truth-functional material implication, because you can’t deny a material implication except where you’re willing to affirm that the hypothesis is true (~(p—>q) <-> (p & ~q)).

This is obviously just material implication run amok.

If “—>” and “if-then” are read as material implication, there’s no reason to believe that premise 4 is true, since what it says is logically equivalent to “If God does not exist, then both (1) I pray to God and (2) God does not answer my prayers,” which hasn’t got any plausibility independent of whether or not I do in fact pray to God.[*] You get the conclusion because whenever p—>q is false, where —> is material implicaiton, p has to be true. But the premise about the answers to your prayers is only plausible if you’re using the nested “if-then” to express some sort of logical or causal entailment (to the effect that if God doesn’t exist, my prayers aren’t efficacious), which material implication doesn’t express. If it is some kind of logical or causal entailment, then inferring 5 from 3 and 4 is just equivocation.

[*] “If both God does not exist and I pray to God, then God does not answer my prayers” is plausible independently of whether or not I pray to God, but that’s logically equivalent to (~G —> (P —> ~A)), not (~G —> ~(P —> A)).

It’s certainly possible for terms to outrun their origins and it’s certainly true that people who use “meme” to describe weblog games that involve suggesting the game to other people aren’t using in its strictly technical sense. But (1) being divorced from a strict technical doesn’t necessarily mean being divorced from all the connotational baggage along with it; it’s pretty clear (to me at least) that the term “meme,” even when misused, is still associated with close relatives such as “mind virus” and the Dark Magic view of persuasion. This is especially true when it is either used or misused to describe anything more serious than silly weblog games; and especially hwen it’s either used or misused to describe anything with which the speaker disagrees (say, religious beliefs or various political myths). I think that the abuse of the term to (for example) simply polemically shove your opponent’s positions out of the space of reasons clearly is a part of both the canonical use and the canonical misuse.

Also, (2) this is especially true when the word is some ghastly neologism with less than 30 years of philological background behind it, with the original coiners and a linguistic community of true believers still using it to mean what it was coined to mean. Particularly when that sub-community is where the people habitually misusing it got the word from, and when they are still in active conversation using (or misusing) the terminology with the echt-memeticists. This isn’t a case like “snob”, which everyone used to use to abuse supposedly vulgar poor tradesmen, but now everyone uses to abuse the snooty rich. It’s a case of a misuse that is not linguistically very far separated from the technical use.

Both (1) and (2) mean that it may very well be worth sticking to the original technical meaning, so as to cast light on the sort of language-games that users of the term are playing, and misusers of the term are dipping their toes into. (For related examples that aren’t ghastly neologisms, consider the gross distortions by the Dobsons and Limbaughs of the world that are now applied to recent coinages such as “moral relativism” and “radical feminism,” both of which admit of a technical definition and both of which are still actively used in their original senses. The abuses of the terms are now much more widely circulated than the correct uses, but that doesn’t mean that we should just admit multiple meanings and defer where necessary to common usage amongst know-nothing blowhards.)

Also, (3) even if we would be right to just distinguish meme-1 from meme-2 (objecting only to the echt-memetics and not to the common twisting of the term), there’s still always aesthetic criticism.

I mean, Jesus, who would want to cast aside perfectly lovely words like “idea” or “game” or “suggestion” with a bunch of ridiculous, cutesy “memetics” argot?

Dude. There’s no such thing as a “meme”. This is an idea that you’ve chosen to suggest. You are not an information-pattern replicator; you’re a human being. Take responsibility for the contents of your own mind!

Let’s say you have a glass vase, and one day when dusting the mantle you knock it off. As it turns out—thank the Good—you’d left a cushion from the couch on the floor earlier when you were vacuuming, and the vase lands on that instead of the hardwood floor. You’re relieved because your vase didn’t break, even though it very well could have.

So, you say, (1) “My vase could have shattered (although it didn’t)!” You’ve just said something true. But if I’m not misunderstanding you (and I fear that I am) it seems as though you’re worried that (1)’s truth makes trouble for somebody who believes that true statements need truth-making facts. But why? Because claiming that there actually exists some fact to the effect that there is possible shattered glass all over the floor or that there are possible worlds in which the vase (or vase-counterpart) is shattered which exist in the actual world, requires you to utter some pretty queer things? Well, maybe.

But if this is the way you are arguing, aren’t you skipping over some pretty commonsensical candidates for the fact that makes (1) true? Here’s one: “My vase could have broken” is true because my vase is fragile. You hardly need a philosopher’s armchair to find out that that’s a fact; you can do it by examining, or dropping, a glass vase. The most plausible candidate for a truth-maker for this particular modal claim is not a part of metaphysics, but rather mechanics.

(I imagine you could do the same thing, mutatis mutandis, for “It was possible for me not to be reading this post right now” and the fact that I have free will.)

So where’s the problem for somebody who believes both in truth-makers and in simple explanations for simple phenomena?