Implicature and prostitution*

My good friend Tyler Dickey recently tweeted a photo that got me thinking about implicature.

Depicted is a fabricated transcription of an interview between a female ABC Radio interviewer and Australian Major General Peter Cosgrove, which still serves well as a situation to examine.  To summarize, the interviewer says that to teach children how to operate firearms is to “[equip] them to become violent killers.”  Major General Cosgrove’s response is, “You’re equipped to be a prostitute, but you’re not one, are you?”

According to the story, the interview ended immediately, without another word from either side.  From this, we can infer that either the interviewer or someone producing the interview chose to end the interview due to Cosgrove’s remark.  What may have caused this choice?

A preliminary option is simply Cosgrove’s use of the word ‘prostitute,’ which is unlikely, considering that news sources use the word frequently, and that ‘prostitute’ is a widely accepted term for the class of people to which it refers.

A more likely option is that someone (within the world of the joke) took offense to Cosgrove’s implication that the interviewer is a prostitute.  (It doesn’t hurt to assume that Cosgrove’s flatly saying “You are a prositute” would cause someone at ABC Radio to end the interview.)

For clarity, implicature is the suggestion of one proposition by the use of another.  To borrow an example from Sally Haslanger (which is borrowed from Grice), if a professor writes in a letter of recommendation for a student that the student has very good handwriting, it might imply that the student is not recommended.  This, of course, does not exclude the possibility that the professor thinks the student has very good handwriting and is highly recommended.

There are two possible sources of the implication in Cosgrove’s statement: (1) “You’re equipped to be a prostitute” and (2) “But you’re not one, are you?”  And both may be at play.

In the case of (1), while the statement might appear to provide the implication, I do not think it does.  It is perhaps jarring to hear such a statement, but Cosgrove was probably not incorrect.  That is, with a simple definition of prostitute (“A person, typically a woman, who engages in sexual activity for payment,” according to the New Oxford American Dictionary), there is no reason to believe the female interviewer is not equipped to be a prostitute.

And under this definition, most people are “equipped” to be prostitutes, if we limit our idea of “equipment” to include the human anatomy, rather than entertain the possibility of one’s moral disposition, etc., being part of one’s equipment for being a prostitute.

I believe the real implicature comes from (2).  In asking the female interviewer, “But you’re not [a prostitute], are you?”, Cosgrove makes an implicature as to the interviewer’s status as a prostitute.

Cosgrove did not say, “And you are clearly not a prostitute.”  Had he phrased his statement this way, the transcription’s punchline would lose all its power.  The implicature, then, is found specifically in Cosgrove’s two (necessarily contextualized) words, “Are you?”

The implicature that ABC Radio receives from Cosgrove, I claim, by his being unsure (even if in jest) as to the interviewer’s status as a prostitute, is that she in fact is a prostitute.  The implicature requires the supposition (on ABC Radio’s part) that, in general, a given person who is not a prostitute is known by others not to be a prostitute.

A serious concern, outside of joke-world, is that discourse between two rational parties should not be stifled.  Further, discourse between one rational party and one less rational party should certainly not be stifled by the less rational party.  Yes, this example is fake, but it is nonetheless relevant to claim that the fictionalized ABC Radio was less rational in ending the interview than the fictionalized Cosgrove was in making a statement which he probably knew would be received with such an implication.

Indeed, I think the transcription serves as a joke to its readers (perhaps especially those who support gun rights) for precisely the reason that would make an actual ABC Radio interviewer or producer end such an interview: the implicature.

 

*My unfamiliarity with the subject of implicature motivates my avoidance of the implication that I consider this post to be legitimately philosophical, relative to the philosophical legitimacy of the rest of this blog.

Sophistry in contemporary analytic philosophy

Are today’s philosophers guilty of sophistry, in the Platonic sense?

The sophist is defined by Professor James Duerlinger as “a semblance in the form of a sage.”  More specifically, “the sophist has the skill in disputation to produce semblances of truth in the souls of the young by the use of arguments that seem to establish the truth of conclusions when in fact they do not, thereby making them say things that are contrary to one another.”

It is obvious that just about nothing is “common knowledge” in philosophy.  So who’s to say that a certain argument actually does or does not establish the truth of some conclusion?  And if we can’t answer this, how do we know whether or not we’re sophists?

Some of the most respected philosophers are those who completely refute previous views they had held and argued for.  If you can knock down your own previous views, it shows that you’re not biased or dogmatic.

Professor Duerlinger, as far as I can tell, hates the idea of bringing the pure world of Ancient Greek philosophy anywhere near contemporary analytic philosophy, and indeed, contemporary arguments are toothpicks thrown at an elephant when it comes to Socrates.

Are the greatest milestones in contemporary philosophy, such as Kripke’s causal theory of reference, anything more than skilled disputations that bring about the appearance of the truth of some conclusion?

I read on a website recently, when searching for some opinions about why more women aren’t analytic philosophers, the answer from some anonymous commenter: Women don’t like to waste their time.

After all, there are plenty of refutations to the causal theory of reference, and it is all but impossible that the resulting discussions will end in a “true” conclusion.

For me, philosophy is the only discipline in which questions are raised that I actually feel driven to entertain.  I would bet that many philosophers have a similar motivation: questions in natural sciences, mathematics, psychology, or political science, just aren’t “big” enough.

But it’s starting to sound like “big questions” are just “questions without answers.”  It follows from this that philosophy as a discipline is, at best, an exercise in hypothesis and the disputation of others’ hypotheses.

The Ancient Greeks held a higher opinion of philosophy than this: in general, the search for wisdom was thought to constitute the best possible life.  “The unexamined life is not worth living.”

Is the problem with contemporary philosophy simply that the literature is so massive that a philosopher can’t respectably put forth an argument without contextualizing it in the hot debates of the day?  Or is this the most mature form of philosophical thought?  And is this even recognizable as the best possible life?

Is philosophy a waste of time, or are we doing our best to emulate Socrates in a starkly different environment?  Unfortunately, as far as I can tell, this question is most appropriately entertained by philosophers.

What’s the point of life in heaven?*

Substance dualism is a view about the mind claiming that an immaterial substance (the mind, or, sometimes, the soul) exists in a way that is over and above the physical goings-on to which it is connected.  Substance dualism is often, but not always, associated with theistic view of a Christian afterlife, as ‘survival’ of the destruction of one’s body might be plausible in light of it.

Nozick presents in his paper “The Experience Machine” a machine that can give its user the experience of anything he or she wishes.[1] If you choose to experience being a professional golfer for a year, you will enter the machine and have a year-long experience of being a professional golfer, after which you will return to your regular life.  Nozick’s hypothesis is that no person should wish to use the experience machine, on the grounds that we value doing things, which it does not provide; it does not contribute to your qualities as a person (that is, you will not develop any relationships or real-world knowledge in the machine); it does not provide “actual contact” with the world; and you are essentially an “indeterminate blob” trapped by the machine.

With the substance dualist’s conception of the mind, one could say that Nozick’s experience machine provides experience to your mind, but not to your body.  However, this difference is not sufficient to make Nozick’s hypothesis compelling.  Indeed, Nozick later offers the “transformation machine,” which transforms you into any person with any life you wish to have, and he maintains his hypothesis that you should not wish to enter the machine.  What’s the point of life if anything you wish for can happen in a snap, and no desire goes unsatisfied?

Nozick’s hypothesis might then be stated (in substance-dualist vocabulary) as: your mind and body’s participation in real experiences in the real world is the only thing you can rationally pursue as valuable experience.  Or: a person S has valuable experience if and only if S has a mind and a body and is in direct contact with the external world.  A mind’s participation in experiences without the body is likened to complete immobility and disability of all of one’s senses while receiving periodic squirts of dopamine: superficially pleasurable, but ultimately dismal.

Seen this way, the Christian afterlife seems to me rather undesirable.  Considering that one’s body has been destroyed and that one is not interacting with the external world, from this way of seeing it, the value of the experience of the Christian afterlife disappears.  If the experiences we value depend on the mind, the body, and the real world, what do we desire of the afterlife?

One possibility is that the Christian afterlife is designed in such a way to make the mind (or soul) alone sufficient for valuable experience.  This solution, however, still subverts Nozick’s conception of valuable experience, allowing a lifelong (pleasurable) comatose dream to be considered a ‘good life.’

The believer in the Christian afterlife might further argue that earthly valuable experience is of a different type from valuable experience.  My response is that heavenly valuable experience could in that instance not be properly evaluated from an earthly perspective.  One could not rationally call it desirable, as words like “value” and “experience” are stripped of meaning.

Under the substance dualist’s conception of mind (or soul), Nozick’s thought experiment shows a strong argument that the Christian afterlife cannot be justifiably desired, as its experience is either valueless or is possibly valuable but is so in such a way that to claim to desire it is to render it incompatible with our known values.

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[1] Nozick, Robert.  “The Experience Machine,” from Introducing Philosophy through Film.  Malden, MA: Wiley-Blackwell, 2009.

*This is an informal paper I wrote for a non-philosophy class.

Tomorrow S will die: determinism and facts

Tomorrow S will die.

This statement is true (according to the correspondence theory of truth) if and only if there is a fact that S dies tomorrow with which the statement corresponds.

Facts do not have truth values.  The fact that S will die tomorrow is simply a way the world is, whereas the proposition that S will die tomorrow (or, for that matter, my belief that S will die tomorrow) can either be true or false, which is decided by its corresponding or not corresponding to the right fact.

As Professor Fumerton has asked his students dozens of times, I’m sure: would you say that the statement, ‘Tomorrow S will die’ is either true or false?  (The question is not which truth value it has.)

My intuition was: yes, of course that statement is either true or false, because either S will die or S won’t die.

But that would mean that there is a truth maker for the statement—that there is some fact about S’s death.

And if there’s a fact that exists now (either the fact that S does die tomorrow or the fact that S does not die tomorrow), it certainly sounds like it is, as they say, set in stone somewhere.

Something I think needs addressing is tense of our verbs.  I’ve been saying that the statement “is” true or false and that there “is” some fact about the world.  One might say this smuggles a future fact’s existence into our present thoughts, thereby making it seem like a fact in the future is determined now.

Why not say, “The statement about the future is true if and only if there will be a fact in the world to which it corresponds”?

Because it doesn’t change anything.  According to the correspondence theory of truth, the statement that there will be a fact about the world is made true by a (present) fact that there will (in the future) be a fact about the world that S dies tomorrow.

The result is a sort of recursive existence of facts.  I see no reason present facts can’t contain future facts (facts about the future), which is just as good as the plain existence of future facts.  I’m not claiming all these future facts exist, but that present facts do exist and they can be about whether or not future facts exist.

Let’s say that S ends up living another twenty years.  Right now, then, there is a fact that, tomorrow, there will be no fact that S dies.  And it is not possible that there is both a fact today that there is no such fact tomorrow and that there ends up being a fact tomorrow that S dies.

Someone resistant to the idea of determinism might argue that facts can change, appear, and disappear over time: yesterday there was a fact that my wallet contained five dollars; today there is no such fact.

Similarly, when I was ten years old, the statement ‘I am four feet tall’ corresponded to the fact about my height, while today the statement ‘I am six feet tall’ corresponds to the same fact about my height.

However, I would argue, there will always be the fact that when I was ten years old I was four feet tall, and the same goes for whatever amount of money was in my wallet at any time in the past, and these facts about the past are unchangeable.

Just so, there is now an unchangeable fact that there is (or is not) a fact (or will be a fact) that S will die tomorrow.

Facts are infinite in the world (because there is no point at which another fact cannot exist about any given fact).  Therefore, it matters which facts we choose to acknowledge, and as far as I can tell, particular facts can always be ‘reinforced’ against change and against the passage of time by other facts.

Whatever happens to S tomorrow will happen.  And at this moment, there exists a fact about that occurrence.

The agreement hypothesis

I’ve taken enough philosophy courses (three) to know that students really love to disagree.

(Sure, everyone does, and students are only a percentage of the multitude, and philosophy students are a smaller percentage.  However, physics students, for example, at least at the undergraduate level, have much less to argue about.)

In the fifteen-student seminar I took with Richard Fumerton this past spring, every class period, “folly,” “fallacious,” and “begging the question” were thrown around so much that I occasionally began to daydream, which is when I formed my ‘agreement hypothesis’.

When it comes to issues like identity/survival and the mind-body problem, one gets the sense that no agreement on any scale will ever really happen.  But that’s what’s so fun about philosophy, right?

Nor does agreement seem to have to do with intelligence.  The two smartest and most experienced philosophers alive are not necessarily in agreement about anything.

Still, philosophy isn’t valued for its subjective nature.  You can’t make stuff up and say “I just feel strongly about this.”  Reasoning is important, and arguments are supposed to be deductively valid (the premises guarantee the conclusion) or at least non-deductively sound (the premises make highly likely the conclusion), depending on the argument.  Philosophers are quick to call out contradictions.

This is my agreement hypothesis:

In a class of (ideally) three to five students and one professor, choose one clear-cut topic, such as: if my brain were transplanted into a different body, do I have any reason to care now about what will happen to this new entity with my brain inside, assuming memories do not also transfer?

Spend an entire semester working toward one goal: to get every person in the class (professor excluded, let’s say) to agree on a conclusion.

I hypothesize that this would work, given reasonable enough students (who are willing to commit to views) and strict avoidance of tangential argumentation.

It does, however, seem absurd.  I haste to say that no conclusion should be preordained or promoted by the professor (she should be there for moderation, clarification, providing relevant reading material, and challenging students’ arguments), and there is no reason to call the class’s conclusion ‘right’.

But the underlying idea is that if the other two reasonable philosophy students in the class don’t agree with you, maybe there’s a problem with your argument or your view.  At this point, you should evaluate it together, narrowing your ken to any problems there might be.

If there is no problem to be found, evaluate their views.

In other words, if student A says, ‘I think that I’m alive as long as my brain is alive, so I have reason to care about that entity’, the class must ask, for one, why student A refers to it as ‘my’ brain at that point (beginning a lengthy discussion of possession and identity, I’m sure).

And why wouldn’t she be ‘alive’ while the brain is on the plastic tray outside her current body, on its way to being implanted in the new body?  Or would student A die when the brain is severed from her current body and then come back to life when it meets the new entity?  Maybe her view could be altered to: ‘I’m alive as long as my brain is alive in a human body.’

I think a conclusion could be agreed upon without anyone having to give up well-formed beliefs.

If they’re well-formed, after all, they should be convincing.  Never should a reasonable philosophy student say, ‘Well, that’s just my opinion.’  Reasons are important, and good reasons should hardly be limited to being good for only one person.

Even if it doesn’t work, wouldn’t it be fun to try?

Vegetarianism and the meat in front of you

I tried being a vegetarian in high school, mostly in an effort to eat healthier and to mimic some of my friends.  I ended up folding in under a month, in the face of cravings for sesame chicken and pepperoni pizza.

Since then, I’ve wavered about whether it’s ‘right’ or ‘okay’ to eat meat, and usually ended up just going ahead and eating it.

Colin McGinn, in his book, The Making of a Philosopher: My Journey Through Twentieth-Century Philosophy mentions his vegetarianism.  The argument he gives, in brief, is: “We should not treat animals in ways that do more harm to them than the good we derive; since killing an animal for food deprives it of far more than we derive from the agreeable taste of its flesh, we should not eat animals for food” (53-54).

McGinn’s argument, which he’ll credit to John Harris, et al., is compelling, but not enough to motivate me to change my diet.

This is because the proposition we should not eat animals for food doesn’t address the problem that there is currently an enormous amount of uneaten food in the word that has been prepared from animals.

If the entire world at this instant complied with McGinn’s and Harris’s conclusion, and not a single animal was henceforth killed for food, what would we do with all the meat we already have?

My good friend, journalist Adam B Sullivan, follows a brand of vegetarianism of this sort.  He doesn’t intentionally eat meat, but if, for example, he is accidentally served some meat, he would prefer to eat it than to discard it.

The idea behind the conclusion that we should not eat animals for food, I think, is that animals should not be killed by humans for food, perhaps excluding some extreme cases.

But to what extent should we for moral reasons not eat the animals that are already food?  (I will call this practicing common vegetarianism.)

While McGinn calls (common) vegetarianism “the only morally defensible position” (53), I find the only morally defensible position to be that no human should kill animals for food except when not eating an animal will kill the human.

And, I’m sorry to say, it’s too late for that.

A possible motivation for a common vegetarian diet is decreasing demand for animals to be killed as food.  However, I’m not convinced that my vegetarianism would save even one animal’s life.  Practicing common vegetarianism would therefore only allow me to be ‘part of the movement’ toward an indefinitely far-away solution, which seems vain to me.

So, as long as there’s meat in the spaghetti sauce being served to you, why not keep it out of the trash (and at least derive some energy) by eating it?  After dinner, set a couple of beef-bound cows free from a nearby farm.

Common vegetarianism is too passive a moral position against the killing of animals for food.

Do you believe in solubility?

‘Realism’ is a funny word in philosophy.  In the ‘whether or not some thing exists’ sense of the word—the metaphysical sense of realism (contrasted to anti-/realism about truth)—as I mentioned in my last post, if you’re a realist about God, you believe that God exists.  If you’re an anti-realist about God, you do not believe that God exists.

But the word thing is the fun part here.  The thing that you believe in or don’t believe in can also being something like solubility, which Richard Fumerton uses as an example in Realism and the Correspondence Theory of Truth.  (He actually uses it as an example of poor use of the ‘anti-/realist label’, but I still like the idea.)

Is solubility equivalent to the capacity to behave in a certain dissolving way given the appropriate solvent?  To use Fumerton’s more linguistic approach, is a statement about a substance’s solubility equivalent in meaning to a prediction about how the substance will behave in solutions?

If so, you’re an anti-realist about solubility.  (However, Fumerton considers this controversy trivial to the extent that no philosopher will likely say so.)

This topic came up a few times in the seminar I took last semester with Professor Fumerton.  He asked the class, What does it mean for a lemon to be sour?  That it will taste sour (prediction), if bitten into?

‘No.’ the normal grocery shopper will respond.  ‘All (normal) lemons just are sour, and I don’t need to make any predictions to tell you that.’

Even if you don’t want to make a prediction, you’ve got to explain why we say that lemons which nobody has bitten into are sour.  If it’s the fact that there’s acid in the lemon, that’s just another prediction about acid.

Language is likely at fault here.  The statement ‘This liquid is soluble’ is quite different from ‘This table is rectangular.’

Fumerton’s next (more “interesting”) example just happens to be shape.  An anti-realist about shape says that the statement, ‘This table is rectangular’ is really just a prediction about how someone will experience the table in the right conditions.

It’s a little scary how thin the ice is here.  Being an anti-realist about shape sounds a bit crazy to me (and I don’t know anyone who has outright told me that objects don’t have shape), but how can I justifiably be a realist about shape?  How can I describe it more accurately?

On the other hand, most people are, trivially, anti-realists about solubility.  I want to know what the big difference is.

Being an anti-realist about solubility is, I think, sensible, and I think so because it’s unnecessary to say solubility is something over and above the capacity to dissolve, like a bunch of invisible balloons tied to every molecule of the liquid.  It seems silly.

The question about the sourness of a lemon introduces cognition into the puzzle.  Whereas a soluble liquid needs only a solvent, a sour lemon needs a conscious being.

If we shift our focus to the idea of shape, I’m much more apt to agree that shape is some intrinsic property.  I don’t immediately want to object to the idea that shape is shape regardless of conscious beings.

Unfortunately, this can present a problem for sour lemons.  For the moment, I seem to have committed myself to the view that, in the absence of conscious beings, a lemon would not be sour, but a table would still be rectangular.

Here it becomes another problem of language.  Obviously, the words I’ve been using to describe these things wouldn’t exist without conscious beings, and I can’t exactly delete the meanings of these words in order to discuss a more ‘pure sourness’ that doesn’t have to do with our conscious senses.

But do rectangular tables stop being rectangular the instant the last person on Earth dies?

More on Realism and the Correspondence Theory of Truth will be posted periodically throughout the summer.