Comments Elsewhere

... 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.

... Sure; neither can I, but I think that we're not the sort of prospective customers Steve Jobs intends to sell iPads to. (Speaking for myself, if I had the

... All contracts foreclose on other options, by definition. If they didn't, they wouldn't be binding contracts. But I think Kevin's point is that that, just

Anon73: My understanding is the term ‘man’ originally meant humans …

Around the time of Beowulf, sure. (*) But by 1952 the primary use of “man” was “an adult human male,” and any educated writer who decided to use it in the allegedly gender-neutral sense would be aware of the distinct possibility of conflation between the exclusive and inclusive meanings. (It’s just that, in 1952, cultural politics were such that most male writers didn’t particularly care about that possibility.) The gender-exclusive primary use of “man” had been well established since “wer” disappeared in Middle English, and in fact the 19th century had seen a series of public controversies in English-speaking countries as to whether or not the use of “man,” “he,” etc. in traditional laws, charters, by-laws, etc. should be construed to include women, or to include men only — with a number of schools, courts, professional associations, etc. specifically deciding that it should be read to exclude women from admission. (**)

Of course, if the title is read as “Males Against the State,” that’s mostly an accurate description of the contents of the book. Angela Heywood, Voltairine de Cleyre, Gertrude Kelly and Emma Goldman are all mentioned in passing only; the folks whose expositions of individualist Anarchism get significant discussion in the book are one and all dudes. Which is a problem in itself, aside from any problems with word choice.

Anon73: If you’re absolutely opposed to it then what do you propose to replace with ‘man’ for a gender-neutral term? “Humans against the State”?

Enemies of the State would have made a good, equally-provocative title. Individuals Against the State would be clunky but prefigure the individualist content of their opposition to the state. There are of course lots of other titles you could choose that couldn’t be carried out by a simple search-and-replace operation on the title. The fact that anti-sexist language sometimes makes one particular phrase awkward or unwieldy doesn’t mean that a talented writer can’t come up with some other arresting phrase to put in its place, if she simply goes back to the blackboard and thinks it through a bit.

(*) “Man” in Old English was inclusive, like “homo” in Latin or “anthropos” in Greek. If you needed to specify gender, you said “wer” or “werman” for an adult male and “wifman” for an adult woman.

(**) In the U.K., the Interpretation Act of 1850 was passed to require gender-neutral constructions of “he,” “man,” etc. in acts of Parliament, apparently mainly to allow more succinct writing; but that bill was also a response to existing legal controversies, and meanwhile in the U.S. a number of schools, courts, and professional associations were insisting on males-only readings in order to exclude women from admission to a number of institutions and professions.

“Man” in Old English generally functioned like “homo” in Latin or “anthropos” in Greek. Of course, people talking about homo in Latin often implicitly had a male in mind, but
If you needed to specify gender, you said “werman” for a male adult and “wifman” for a female adult.)

... Well, so is a paperback book, but I buy a fair number of those anyway. A tablet makes a poor option for your only computer, if any substantial amount of

Couldn’t he have just whistled it?

Lorraine: Of course I'm aware that's advertised-as-free-market not principled-free-market. Surely you're aware that mentions of the free market in the former context far outnumber the latter.

No doubt, but when people associate crazy and contradictory things with a label (*), I think it helps to point out that they are contradictory, and to encourage people to get clearer on the terms that they use.

(*) A fate in which the label "free markets" is not alone; for example, I just read a news story in which I was informed that the Republican candidate for Senate in my state is "practically an Anarchist" (!)).

Lorraine: I'd describe the ideological agenda of the World Bank/IMF not as free market or free trade but 'separation of economy and state.' ... But I think it's an accurate description of what these institutions are trying to force on the human race.

That seems like a very odd description of institutions whose activities consist of governments loaning money to other governments so that the latter set of governments can then transfer it to large corporations, including both local capitalists and MNCs, along with all kinds of government land seizures and government-backed monopoly concessions. Whatever that may be (and it's a lot of things), it's certainly not a separation of economy and state.

Lorraine: The result is of course obvious to all left tendencies; a market economy in which capital has practically friction-free mobility, while the mobility of labor remains very tightly constrained. I'm not ready to attribute all the unfairness built into the actually-existing market economy to the deck being stacked in favor of capital over labor, or to statist manipulations in general, ...

Well, O.K., I don't disagree with you about any of that. (Of course, as an Anarchist I think the statist stacking of the deck is really, really important. But I don't think it's the end of story.) However, I don't think my point had much to do with any of that. It was simply that it seems like there are important points at which your views happen to overlap with the views of professed free-marketeers -- not only the views of mutualists/free-market anti-capitalists like me, but also even with the views of creepy conventionally pro-capitalist smaller-government types. The point is not that you have the same reasons for coming to those conclusions, or that you should like or even want to associate yourself with the latter. It's that it would be strangely self-limiting to swear off an important position (like, say, opposition to the IMF/World Bank, or support for decriminalizing immigration) simply because your views happen to overlap, on that particular point, with folks who you "tribally" feel uncomfortable with. Presumably they like breathing, too, but that's not a reason to give up on it.

Lorraine: ... partly because it's a big leap of faith, and partly, admittedly, because of my tribal distaste for certain parties who would be (arguably) vindicated by such a finding.

Well, um, O.K., that's perhaps an explanation for why you might hesitate to come to a particular conclusion, but is it a good reason for you to do so?