Tuesday, November 02, 2004
Good, evil and knowledge
Knowing what is good and what is evil is an important step in choosing to do what is right. If we are to concede, by Socrates’ way of thinking, that the only real power is the power to do good, there are certain presuppositions that we must accept, some of which are defensible, and some that raise more questions and that would require a leap of faith in order to accept.
Socrates takes a long-term view on the notion of power, as well as one that is highly influenced by the effects on one’s own soul. By the long-term, I mean that Socrates focuses on the consequences ones own actions have in the long run, categorising short-term pains and pleasure as respectively, either conducive to, or detrimental to eudaimoneia. Therefore, suffering pains in the knowledge that this will lead to good is a form of power, whereas living hedonistically and not building upon the virtues (arête), as Aristotle prescribes, is not power, as it can only lead to demise of one’s own soul. Socrates’ views here can be described as practically karmic. There seems to be an underlying belief that whatever goes around must come around, and what is done with evil intent shall not go unpunished.
Here, Socrates claims that even though the rhetorician would perhaps be able to argue his way out of punishment, if ever caught for doing an injustice, this still does not mean he has real power. The rhetorician has not taken into account that even though he has escaped immediate punishment, his own conscience will eat away at his soul. This guilt that follows from having done wrong, which Socrates claims will happen, entails that one would have a sense of what is right and what is wrong to begin with. Otherwise, it would appear that there is no punishment for doing wrong. This is inconsistent with the pet thesis that Socrates later nurtures – that one who has knowledge of good and evil will always choose to do good. The just person will not have acted unjustly. The person with no sense of justice will not feel any guilt when he has done wrong.
Socrates implies, nonetheless, that there will be retribution at some point in time – if not in this lifetime, then in the afterlife. It is, however, a rather large claim that the soul longs for that which is good. Firstly, we must accept that there is a soul, and that it does carry on it a record of what evil deeds we have performed. We must accept that there is an objective ground of good that this soul is aware of and will seek to follow, and that it will turn evil and be punished if this path of good is not followed.
Socrates’ argument steers away from the concept of power to the ability to achieve good, implying this to be the only type of power worth considering. His analogy of the cook aiming to please compared with the doctor knowing what is good for the health illustrate this, but do nothing to convince that this knowledge of what is good is the true power.
Thus, in claiming that the rhetorician has no real power, Socrates refers to his belief that only the power to do good is real power. What, then, is power? As defined in the Concise Oxford Dictionary, power is “the ability to do or act”. Socrates would add to that the word “well” or “good”. This, however, is not implicit in our notion of power. Another definition is “a. Government, influence, or authority. b. Political or social ascendance or control.”
Socrates’ views betray a naïve theoretical view of the world. Whilst it is hard to disagree with Socrates on a theoretical level, I find it hard to practically endorse his views. One would be hard-put to argue that the green political party was doing anything wrong – after all, it is not easy to state that saving the environment is a bad thing. However, they are not a political party that does not have a history of power or large-scale influence. It would seem that a tendency to act in accordance to a notion of what is good does not, in fact, promote power. Socrates calls for an ideal world where people would act fee of any conflict of interest towards a better society. This invokes a feeling of respect for the advocate of what is right, but does not practically have the power to change society. What is needed is an appeal to the self-gratifying nature of mankind
Nonetheless, the influence that Socratic thought has had over the course of time suggests that doing good does make an impact, at lease in theory. However, can one truly say that the political scene has changed since time days of ancient Greece? Political spiels that aim to please as many uninformed voters as possible are the basis of the campaigns run by would be presidents and their parties. Perhaps Socrates is saying that this undermines the power of democracy. Here, I would agree with him. The power of the rhetorician is not a power within the ideal of democracy, which relies on a nation of informed citizens making an informed choice. Rhetoric does not operate within this framework, but rather works counterproductively to it, promoting the masking of truth, and spewing forth notions that appeal to the majority. Indeed, if we are willing to accept the notion of democracy, and the presuppositions linked to this, we can reject rhetoric as having no power. After all, a city populated by the wise and the knowledgeable needs not advocates of popular opinion.
Even conceding, however, that there should be a nation where the citizens proactively choose to discover what is right and what is wrong is no guarantee that people will act in accordance to this. The pet thesis of Socrates - that a person, once fully cognoscente of the meaning of justice, will act in accordance to this is not a reasonable presupposition. Perhaps a master dietician will be able to prescribe a fully nutritious diet to anyone that comes for his services, but it does not mean that he himself will not ever indulge in a luxurious slice of cake once in a while. There is a presupposition that just action will always have priority over all other actions.
I would say that the rhetorician has power. It may not be the power that Socrates’ strongly advocates – the power to do good, but a power to wreak havoc. The cake maker may not have the power to make you healthy, but he does have the power to make you fat. The rhetorician’s power does not lie in improving society – other than by sheer coincidence, but he does have power to mobilise society. There is no implicit meaning to ‘power’ that implies that it is to be deployed only with the intention of good in mind. Examples abound in history of men and women who have used their power of rhetoric to achieve ghastly outcomes, e.g. Adolf Hitler. The great men in history, who have achieved what can be deemed as righteous and applaudable, such as Martin Luther King Jr., Mohandas Ghandi, Nelson Mandela, did not achieve what they did by virtue of knowing what was virtuous. Without the art of rhetoric to help them, perhaps South African and American black people would still be living in substandard conditions, and perhaps the people of India would still be unliberated.
Bibliography
1. The Concise Oxford Dictionary Ninth Edition CD-ROM, Oxford University Press 1997 – 1999, Licensed to Focus Multimedia Press, United Kingdom
2. Plato, ‘Gorgias’, translated by Chris Emlyn-Jones, 2004, Penguin Books Ltd., England
3. ‘The Greeks and the Good Life’ study guide and readings, Semester 2, 2004, Monash University Arts.
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Sense and reference
Frege’s work centres on developing a logo-centric version of language, so that it might be applied to the uncovering of knowledge without the danger of bias. His motivation for such work stemmed from his perceived need for a logical language so that he could more easily deal with logic in maths. At first glance, it may appear that he is, in fact, trying to work in the boundaries of psychologism, the theory that logic is a description of the natural and regular thinking pattern of persons. He is not, however, trying to perpetuate this at all, and his views, upon later inspection, reveal themselves to be anti-psychologistic. Rather, he seeks to impose a system of logic on a system of language he otherwise views as being illogical.
Frege makes the division between assertible and ontological truth, drawing the line, respectively, between those truths, which can be proven from feelings and experience, and those, which can be proven to be true simply by means of logic. His focus is on those truths that can be reached via means of logical reasoning, as these are the ones he focuses on, saying that it is these truths which are independent of the human mind, and exist regardless of whether or not people take it to be true. So here we see Frege’s anti-psychologism. If it were the case that logic was a description of the regularities of human thought, then if the entire world were to claim to conclude logically that donkeys were able to fly, then, on a psychologistic account, this would be the case. Frege dismisses assertible truths as being unconducive to the search for truth.
Frege speaks of sense and reference, as well as object and concept. Frege notes that in referring to objects, quite often it is possible to refer to the same object in many different manners. Thus, he splits meaning into two composites. An American might say ‘trashcan’, whilst an Australian would say ‘rubbish bin’ in the same conversation, whilst both referring to the object in which they would like to throw a used napkin. This Frege describes mathematically as ‘a=b’. He proposes that this is in a sense, like saying ‘1+4 = 2+2’. The values - ‘truth value’, i.e., ‘reference’ - of both sides of the equation are in fact, the same, but the angle of presentation (the ‘sense’) is different. Thus, it can be stated that ‘the trashcan is full’ is a ‘proposition’ which we are analysing. The sense of this proposition is different than that of ‘the rubbish bin is full’, but since ‘trashcan = rubbish bin’, and we can logically conclude that the ‘trashcan’ is, indeed, full, we can conclude that the reference of this proposition, is indeed correct, and thus, the sentence is true. Were this not to be the case, and the ‘trashcan’ were actually empty, the proposition ‘the trashcan is full’, while still possessing a discernible ‘sense’, would have the truth value of ‘false’, for the reference is does not, in fact, exist.
Frege also analyses the composites of the proposition, breaking them down into object and concept. In a proposition, say, ‘the butterfly is black’. The butterfly is the object of the sentence, and ‘is black’ is the concept. Frege introduces the idea of an unsaturated sentence, which is the object and verb combined, pending on a noun to complete it. So ‘the butterfly is’ on its own is not yet a proposition on it’s own.
Frege’s account then, seems to draw its basis on the Aristotelian view of language. Indeed, it has many close ties to Aristotle’s work, and at this point still sounds like what Aristotle says, albeit embellished, about sentences being true if the nouns and verbs combine in a way in which they express what is true, and sentences being false, if this is not the case.
However, there is a subtle, yet significant difference to the manner in which Aristotle formulates ‘true’ sentences to that which Frege does. Aristotle’s method is that of syntactic combination – he sees sentences in terms of subject and predicate, or noun phrase and verb phrase, combining to form sentences which are either true or false. Frege, as pointed out earlier, sees sentences in terms of object and concept, as mentioned earlier.
In Aristotle’s view, a sentence can refer to a universal or a particular. Universal concepts can be used to refer to an image or thought that is used to represent all things or beings falling under a single category, such as the word ‘planet’. This can, on the Aristotelian view, be used to signify Venus, Mars, a planet in a distant galaxy, an imaginary one, etc. The word ‘planet’ is thus used to refer to a general category of ‘planethood’. The properties of this universality are properties that would pertain to all items in this category. This universal term can be used to make generalities about, and represent, all members of this category, without referring specifically to any particular. Most importantly, in this view, the word ‘planet’ by itself has properties that can be ascribed to it. A particular is, on the other hand, a concept that can only refer to one item, therefore, most commonly, these words are proper names, such as ‘Foucault’.
Here, Frege makes a break from the views held by Aristotle. Frege rejects the idea of universality. The problem he encounters with it is that while we can imagine particulars, say, ‘Jupiter’, we cannot conjure up an image of a generic ‘planet’. Indeed, the concept seems somewhat cloudy, and this ideal of a ‘planet’ escapes us. The view that Frege is driven to – nominalism – is that there are no universal ‘ideas’ that can be justified. These universals do not have a meaning. They do not possess a reference, so therefore cannot be used to signify the true, as Aristotle does. Frege, instead, elects to say that they have no meaning independently as ideals, but only insofar as they are linked to certain sets of particulars. So, unlike Aristotle, Frege does not view sentences as universals relating to particulars, but rather as objects stating a concept relating to the object.
Frege views the concepts in a sentence as a kind of function, and describes it as a mathematical formula F(x,y), where F states the relationship between x and y. In this way, x and y are not independent of each other, as are the subject and predicate in the Aristotelian view. If x is to refer to ‘chilli’ and y to refer to ‘Calicles’, and the function to be ‘is loved by’, we have the sentence ‘chilli is loved by Calicles.’ The method that Frege uses prevents the problem of syntactical difficulties arising, as it does in Aristotle’s view, by appealing directly to the deep structure of a sentence. By stating the proposition in terms of the relation between x and y, Frege shows mathematically that we are in fact saying the same thing if we are to state ‘Calicles loves chilli’.
Expanding and deepening from where Aristotle left off, Frege introduces the notion of sentential connectives and quantifiers into his theory. Sentential connectives are words such as ‘and’ or ‘yet’, which serve to unify two propositions, forming a single sentence out of them.
Frege confronted the problem presented by propositions such as ‘transparent politicians do not exist’ and ‘nothing is free’ by creating a mathematical function that can be applied to language. The first sentence takes a sentential operator, or a negator and a concept and melds them together to form a ‘not-concept’, and attributing this to something that does not exist. The second is attributing a concept to a non-existent object. Frege breaks down these concepts first to the positive form, so from the first sentence, we have ‘transparent politicians exist’. In front of this claim, Frege places a horizontal line, to represent ‘the case’, or the proposition, so that now we have ‘the case that transparent politicians exist’. Since this is a false claim, Frege breaks up this horizontal line with a vertical line representing ‘not’ extending downwards from the middle of the horizontal. Now we have ‘not the case that transparent politicians exist’. Since we now have a true claim, Frege places what he refers to as a ‘judgement stroke’ vertically at the beginning of the line, and this represents the true. So, now we have ‘It is not the case that transparent politicians exist.’ Frege goes into much more minute detail on the functional representation of truth, but this, I feel is the core of it. From this we can derive a much more practical formula $x Fx, meaning ‘there is something which is F’. To indicate that there is not something which is F, then we add ‘~’, thus ‘~$ transparent politician x’. From the second case we get ‘~$ free x’ – ‘it is not the case that there is something which is free’.
The question arises as to whether Frege is too prescriptive in his theory, and in constructing his view into as many steps as he has made a theory that can only be applied to certain families of languages, including Germanic and Romantic languages. In Finnish, the sentence ‘nothing is free’ is expressed as ‘ei ole mitaan ilmaista’ is literally, ‘there is not something free’ In Thai, the word ‘mee’ means containing a property’, thus ‘mai mee arai tee mai mee rakaa’, is roughly translated as ‘there is not in the property of something that which does not have the property of price.’ Both languages seem to roughly overstep the need to reduce the sense of the sentence into positives from which a truth-value can be discerned. This undermines Frege’s system of three steps ‘proposition’ > ‘sense’ > ‘reference’. Indeed, the speakers of Thai and Finnish show no evidence that they are able to think any faster than the speakers of English or German, and are not congratulating themselves on their logical superiority.
What it suggests, instead, is that ‘sense’ is to some extent implicit in the ‘reference’ presented by any given sentence, and that the jump can therefore be made directly from the ‘proposition’ to the ‘reference’. Since it is impossible to always discern that a ‘reference’ may have more than one ‘sense’, recipients of a proposition treat these propositions on a case-by-case basis, with ‘sense’ factored into the ‘reference’. The speakers of a language do not remove the ‘reference’ from the context of the sentence. So, in asking ‘how is Mary’s partner?’ and ‘how is Jane’s father?’ perhaps, objectively speaking, both cases are referring to ‘Jonathan’. However, when the speaker replies ‘he is fine’, he is not referring to ‘Jonathan’, but rather to either ‘Mary’s partner’ or ‘Jane’s father’. The intention of the one making the interrogative has to kept in mind, and the intention when asking about ‘Jane’s father’ is different from the intention of inquiring about ‘Mary’s partner’. These two questions are referring to different roles of the same person, and the answer to these two questions may be radically different: ‘he is a good father’ or ‘he hasn’t been talking to Mary much recently’
Frege describes a doctrine of ontological truths combining to uncover more truths. He seems to have created a language that is free from bias in its scientific aims. However, for whom has he designed this system of notation? Frege is openly derisive about the way people have the tendency to think, claiming, “[there is] a widespread inclination to acknowledge as existing only what can be perceived by the senses”, opting, instead to take the path of logic. Logic, however, can be seen as too theoretical. As much as it is possible to logically conclude that time travel is possible, this does not mean that it exists.
As comprehensive as Frege’s account may be, he does not make any room for value judgements other than true or false in formulas. As far as describing human language goes, this seems to be a large inadequacy. Words such as ‘good’, ‘bad’, ‘courageous’, ‘beautiful’ are words that Frege is forced reject as being universals. Frege’s nominalist view would have to, controversially, reject the idea of there being an objective good. Socrates, while basing much of his argument on logic, as does Frege, would hardly agree here. Of course, their accounts of logic do not agree. They may both agree that in logic resides the truth, but Socrates seems to lean towards a more psychologistic approach to logical argument, appealing to his opponent’s logic to reinforce his arguments. Frege, on the other hand, presupposes an independently existing logical system. In not factoring in any, in his view ‘subjective’ values, such as ‘good’, ‘bad’ or ‘beautiful’, Frege makes his study of logic even drier than mathematics, for mathematics does deal with unpredictable variables.
Frege says in the preface of ‘Begriffsschrift’ “it is not the psychological genesis, but the best method of proof that is at the basis of the classification”. Insofar as science is concerned, perhaps this is the case, but Frege is attempting to describe the machinations of language, something that is an invention of humans, and prescribe a logic by which it should function. His rationality is somewhat too concise, and in the end, it turns on itself. Frege does not take, into his calculations, account that people do not generally think in terms of mathematical functions. Any system, no matter how complete and comprehensive, only has value so long it is functional. The way Frege describes language does not truly represent the way in which logic functions in a person, but is a highly idealised, impractical account.
Bibliography
Aristotle, De Interpretatione, chapters 1-7 from The Works of Aristotle vol 1., ed. Jonathan Barnes. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1984, pp. 25–7.
Plato, Gorgias, trans. Walter Hamilton and Chris Emlyn-Jones. Penguin Books, England, 2004
Gottlob Frege, Preface to Begriffsschrift from Frege and Gödel: Two Fundamental Texts in Mathematical Logic, ed. Jean van Heijenoort. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard, 1970, pp. 5-7
Gottlob Frege from the Preface to Grundgesetze der Arithmetic, from The Basic Laws of Arithmetic, trans. Montgomery Furth, Berkeley: University of California Press, 1964, pp. 10-25
Gottlob Frege, ‘Function and Concept’, from Michael Beaney ed. The Frege Reader. Oxford: Blackwell, 1997, pp. 130-48
Gottlob Frege, ‘Letter to Husserl’ from Michael Beaney, ed. The Frege Reader. Oxford: Blackwell, 1997, pp. 149-50
Roy Harris, ‘Frege on Sense and Reference’ from Landmarks in Linguistic Thought, 2nd edn. vol. 1, London and New York: Routeledge, 1997, pp. 196-208
Karen Green, ‘PHL2120 Language Truth and Power’. Clayton: Monash University Arts, Semester 2, 2004
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