The Waltham Circle

To follow in a serious of unfortunately serious posts, I thought I would note some of my worries about Kant's ethics, although I am by no means an ethicist (to quote Jerry Seinfeld: "not that there's anything wrong with that").

Consider the second formulation of the categorical imperative:

Act only according to that maxim whereby you can at the same time will that it should become a universal law.

But how do we set limits on the relevant descriptions that are appropriate in individuating an act and the maxim that is to be applied to it? If I am performing two morally salient actions (stealing and providing for my family), which aspect will be primary in the description? The question of which description will be given priority is somewhat minor, and there are ways around it. But I think a more difficult question is at what level of specificity the description should be applied. First, it may be so general as to be the conjunction of both of these acts, or so specific that moral considerations fade into microphysical considerations. Second, what criteria do we have for bracketing context out of our descriptions of actions and maxims? Perhaps I might not universalize "Do not steal," but perhaps I would universalize "Steal to provide for your family" or some other concatenation of specificities. Yet there is a very strong possibility that without limiting bounds on what descriptions will count as relevant, we can generate descriptions that will render any act moral in virtue of some conjunction of aspects that contribute to the individuation of the act and its related maxim.

This is a separate question from the more traditional difficulty of how to decide between two conflicting imperatives. I take it that this latter problem can be resolved--I know of one colleague is actively working on the issue. My question precedes that one, however, for it challenges how we come to identify an act and a maxim in the first place. What are the appropriate, non-arbitrary grounds of individuation? What are the constraints on description?

The central problem in Dreier's Internalism and Speaker Relativism essay will have been addressed if we understand how the proposition "Hot dogs are good" can be false. The content of the proposition, "Hot dogs are good" has a descriptive element and a motivational element.

The motivational element determines the descriptive element. But, the statement can be cashed out in a purely descriptive proposition. When I say, "Hot dogs are good," the proposition is identical to the purely descriptive proposition, "Irami is normally motivated to eat a hot dog."

This proposition is true if I am normally motivated to eat a hot dog.
The proposition is false if I am not normally motivated to eat a hot dog.
The proposition is true if I am abnormal in that I am not motivated to eat a hot dog, but the norms related to my abnormality would have me be motivated to eat a hot dog.
The proposition is false if I am abnormal in that I am motivated to eat a hot dog, but the norms related to my abnormality would not have me be motivated to eat a hot dog.

This is the only way I can see Dreier's account working. It's the only interpretation I can think of that respects the power of the moral term to change the content of a proposition, in a way that could change the truth value in addition to being expressive of a motivation, but yet, have the proposition not be based on beliefs.

I wanted to see if I could. The Transcendental Unity of Apperception laid out like an eighth grade science project. Or maybe it's a crime board, a metaphysical man-hunt for the knowing subject.

Preface
During the foundation of the Waltham Circle, it was agreed upon by various of the core members that it would be one of the projects of the Circle to formalize a robust concept that had formed within the Circle: that of 'danangness,' signifying the ultimate degree of interestingness. The project has since withered, and many of my colleagues have reverted to using the predicate in its unformalized, primitive form. Perhaps this is best. Nevertheless, I present the rough, first draft of an unpublished manuscript that provides the first operational definitions of the danang predicate. It would have been the task of the Circle to further refine the concepts, distinguishing them from other concepts of formal systems (satisfaction, Tarskian conceptions of truth, etc.). Likely, the product is simply non-sense (not nonsense, but non-sense).

*****

D1: A sentence S is 'danang' if and only if it demonstrates an astonishing degree of awesomeness.
H1: For any proposition p of which we can predicate danangness, the formal result will be a conversion of truth values (assuming, for the moment, a truth functional sentential logic) into an absolute, language-transcendent form of 'Truth' and 'Wrong.'
D2: The danang operator (δ) can be reconstrued as an imposition of a factorial form on truth values in a bivalent canonical system.

The 'danang' symbol (δ) serves as a logical operator like the negation: unlike the other logical operators, it is not a connective between propositions, but functions to convert single propositions (or strings of propositions encased in brackets following the δ-operator). The δ-operator translates the truth value of any given proposition into its factorial.

D3: An arithmetical factorial ('!') can be recursively defined for n > 0 as n(n-1)!.

Because classic sentential logic is bivalent, we might be inclined to apply the factorial to 0 for false, and 1 for true. This is incoherent, for in such a case F! = T! (0! = 1! = 1). The δ-operator must preserve the initial form of a statements truth conditions, or else we will end up affirming such impossible propositions as p & ~p.

The point is to convert the arithmetical definition of the factorial into terms that can be operated on in a bivalent sentential logic. In other words, we should recognize a homologous role of factorials in, first, truth-functional formal systems and, second, quantified predicate systems. In a truth-functional system, set theoretically defined, we can define the factorial of 'True,' or 'T!' as:

D4: T! is the product of all the elements of a set A which, when operated on by a function S(x), combine to specify the class of sentences which are, for that set, true.

Similarly, F! can be defined as the product of all the elements of a set A which together, under S(x), specify the class of false sentences. For our purposes, S(x) is any truth-apt proposition within a given language L1. Its range is restricted to the set A, and likewise any S'(x) within language L2 cannot extend over the class of sentences designated by S(x).

When we consider the elements of a set A that, on S(x), altogether specify the class of true sentences in A, however, we should note that these elements are, in terms of informal language, the foundation for the possibility of S(x)'s truth-aptness. They therefore precede the sentence S(x), as well as any sentence Sn(x) in language Ln. Any truth functional factorial that functions through S(x) therefore eliminates the language restrictions of that sentence and allow us to generate a subset of a given class, the members of which serve to make any sentence within that set true or false. The factorial therefore eliminates the linguistic constraints on our truth values.

It is our position that while the fundamental unit of meaning is the sentence, the sentence's meaning is conditioned by its position within a holistic system of beliefs, attitudes, and experiential conditionings. The truth value of any sentence is therefore only intelligible within the language of that sentence. This is a point made by Quine. Blackburn similarly points out that if an entire language (or theory, in his nomenclature) is rejected, there is no way to make “uncontaminated” attributions of truth or falsity to a sentence formulated within that system. Because every semantic system that is not complete by virtue of its syntax can be intelligibly rejected, every truth functional proposition can, in principle, be subject to what we will here call 'contamination,' whereby operations on the system will contaminate our ability to make sharp attributions of truth or falsity to any statement made within that system.

Applying a sentential factorial will serve to specify the members of a set that make a sentence true or false, outside of the contaminable structure of an incomplete formal or informal system.

The significance of the danang operator is to syntactically specify those elements of a set that, combined, make a sentence true or false. The truth table of any proposition to which the danang operator is applied will look like:

p δ(p)
T T!
F F!

We can colloquially signify the canon by stating that the δ-operator translates any attribution of “True” or “False” to a proposition p in language Ln to a specification of “Truth” or “Bullshit,” respectively.

Even though within a truth functional sentential logic, the δ-operator works only on truth values, in a quantified predicate system it can be treated as a predicate (in the same way that we might canonize “x is true” as “Tx”). In the end, both canonical treatments can be given the same analysis.

D5: Any successful application of the δ-operator to a truth-apt proposition that yields a value of T! can also be said to yield a 'Truth-nugget.' In other words, the value of any true statement to which we can appropriately apply the δ-operator is coextensive with a 'Truth-nugget.'

Conjecture: For any true, danang propositions in a finite set, there will be a coextensive truth nugget.

*****

Theorem: There exists at least one thing that is danang.

Or, we might put it,

∃x(δx)

This is demonstrated by Mr. Brantner's ingenious proof that, assuming the negation of this theorem, the possible world containing no elements of which 'danang' can be predicated would be so astonishingly impoverished that it would, itself, entail danangness.

Are you folks familiar with those canned audio tours museumgoers can purchase to guide them somnambulistically through art galleries the world over? Well, the Rose Art Museum is currently collaborating with Brandeis' cultural production M.A. program, together with our very own Andreas Teuber, to supplant this recorded humdrummery with cans of mutant, shapeshifting mindworms. Mark Auslander, the director of the cultural production program, has solicited your help. That's right pop-cods, they want to get down and get weird with each of you...philosophically, that is. Will you rise to the occasion? Contact Profs. Auslander and Teuber for more info and strut your culture-learnin' feathers today, you proud young cock-sparrows, you.

To light the fuse, here is my submission to be recorded for Andy Warhol's Saturday Disaster (1964):

Behold before you Andy Warhol’s Saturday Disaster. What do you see? No, scratch that. What don't you see? Indulge me for a moment: take a step back...not from the canvas but from your vision. You know that there's some vision going on and that this gaze reveals something. Some content, a duplicated photograph of an automobile accident perhaps. But what, pray, is the content of this gaze, of the seeing, itself? And on what grounds can you even call it yours? Let us approach Saturday Disaster with an eye towards revealing how we might answer these questions. That is to say, let us approach it as an interrogation of the gaze.

Warhol's work exploits an image of death to expose the death of the image. The death of the gaze. The site of this exposure – disaster ground zero – is one in which all human involvement has been expunged, and before which we stand as so many slack-jawed bystanders. The image could have been culled from the pages of any daily newspaper, a medium condemned in earlier times by Kierkegaard as the public sepulcher of Christianity, a mass grave in which all our meaningful commitments are buried, and a quotidian “reminder that the human race has invented something which will eventually over power it.”

Ask yourself, where have we seen this gruesome scene before? We know we're supposed to be appalled, shocked, horrified by it. But somehow these days we're not. By condensing death into mass-produced images, wresting it violently from its living context, and re-contextualizing it into sensationalist reportage to be cropped and crammed into columns of text betwixt stock market tallies and toothpaste adverts, the press levels the unacceptable, the unconscionable, the unspeakable into depthless, decathected surfaces of spectacular ephemera. Revel in these surfaces. Shuffle them in your hands. Allow them to seduce you. Get high on them. Dance upon them, ecstatically. But beware, twice beware, for you dance upon a grave. A graven image. A craven grimace. A surface impenetrable.

We want to say that we have first-hand experience of works like Saturday Disaster. We want to say we have privileged access to such experiences: an inner theater behind our foreheads in which images are projected before an audience of one. Is this not how we come to know death, as we dream, as we die, alone? But what becomes of this privileged access with first-hand experience outmoded? With all trust in it betrayed? The mass media has come to saturate every unmediated aspect of perception to become the dominant intermediary between us and the real. It has monopolized mimetic representation of the world and of ourselves, such that subject and object alike are made tangible only in the ink-black residues deposited on our hands or in the dull, phantom ache of yesterday’s keystrokes on our fingertips. At the reel of the projection booth in the inner theater there lurks an unbidden stranger.

The more readily we recognize our perception in the images propagated by this usurped apprehension of the world, the less we understand of our perception and of ourselves. We experience the abundance it generates – the ceaseless replication, the overproduction of the image – as an abundance of dispossession (estrangement from the world and from each other). Little wonder that the circulation of information, largely a byproduct of the circulation of commodities, is advertised in the aspect of a bargain bin of cheap, disposable, consumer goods. Such is the dispossession of information conveyed by the senses. The gaze no longer belongs to us, but to someone else who purveys it for a nominal fee. A fee which Hegel once likened to “the life, moving of itself, of that which is dead.”

How might art revitalize the gaze and restore it to the percipient? By introducing a mass-produced image, an over-mediated image, a duplicated dead image (of the dead) into the critical spaces of the gallery, Warhol enjoins us to take a stance towards all automatic, alienated modes of perception, and in particular, towards the ways in which we experience death. Saturday Disaster re-appropriates an image of the dead to raise the image from the dead. To reclaim perception as a work, and death as the constant work of our lives.

In this altered context form no longer overdetermines content. Photography, arrogated by the blind, mechanical forces of the mass media to mortify the living, functions in this piece to vivify the dead on both sides of the canvas. The content of Saturday Disaster thereby re-emerges with renewed immediacy. We are shaken into a brutal awareness of this fatal fusion of man and his technologies. The gore, the corpses strewn about, the primal cries of failing brakes and men. So that the work of this content is to double-expose the fatal fusions - the failing brakes and tortured corpses - within each of us. Where once we saw only a dead image, a surface, a dispossession, we now encounter something living, something profound, something human to which we add in human store. It is thus in Warhol’s vision that we come to discover our own.

Consider a person P who is performing an action A under certain conditions C. P As in accordance with an intention I to fulfill a goal G. G is an ancillary goal that is only significant because it must be satisfied in order to satisfy a latter goal, G'. Correlated with G' is a broader intention I'. Moreover, let's symbolize the satisfaction of a goal by saying, for any goal X, "X!." Then, P As with I to G. G! is propitious to G'!. So, P As with I to G in order to, with I', G'!. Now, for any sentence S within language L, S(x) is satisisfied when Px Axs with Ix to Gx, where Ix! and Gx!, given Cx, imply I'x! and G'x!.

Now, consider a sentence S'(xy) that contains at least one two-place predicate. Then, S'(xy) entails that Px Axy Ixy Gxy, and therefore Ixy! Gxy! implies I'xy! G'xy!. Similarly, for any sentence S''n(xnyn...nn) with n-place predicates and n terms, Px1...xn Ax1y1r1...xnynrnnn Ix1y1r1...xnynrnnn Gx1y1r1...xnynrnnn, then if Ix1y1r1...xnynrnnn! and Gx1y1r1...xnynrnnn!, then I'x1y1r1...xnynrnnn! and G'x1y1r1...xnynrnnn!.

Good, now I feel rigorous.

I must disagree with my esteemed colleague, and defend the word "action" and the various senses that have been attached to this multifarious, multivertebrate and multi-grained concept (I note this final adjective in the spirit of The Doctryne of Transcendental Nutritionalism). The Greek "praxis" is often translated into "action," but also frequents other hot-spots in our language, such as "practice" or "doing." These hot-spots are obviously where the "action" is, and hearty, dark ales are a-plenty.
"Act," as it strikes me, tends to denote something fixed and static, whereas "action" gives the sense of an ongoing activity. Lobkowicz has whispered in my ear: Prasso, prasso! I accomplish a journey! I manage a state of affairs! I fare well!
But let us not pour shaven rats down a funnel, and get to the main ingredient: Aristotle. Aristotle uses "action" to speak of the fruitful ways of life that are open to free men, and the journey that constitutes a free man's ethical life. Theoria and Praxis: Theory and Practice. And if we perform an activity well, party time: Eupraxia! And while we are at it, and by "we" I mean "me and those voices that occur in my head when I eat too many Cheetos," it might be worth dispatching of the connection between "practice" and "practical." Although they share a cognate blood-type, the inner beauty of the former and the janitorial-supply-sense of the latter cannot be confused. I simply refuse to let those who venture to invent things like "high fructose corn syrup" lay claim to such a beautiful concept as "action."
But this is not enough. We must quote J.S. Mill for good measure, I guess. "What is action? Not one thing, but a series of two things: the state of mind called a volition, followed by an effect." Notice "volition," a rancid -tion type A. Of course, Mill's quote gives the sense that an action can be complete, but "act" and "action" are used equally in past-tense tension. The beauty in "action" is, ultimately, constituted by a compound: free will and a type of self-creation that cannot be resolved in standard cadence.