December 2006 Archives

Okay, it being the Holiday Season, I tried to provoke my students by defending the view that telling one's children that there is a fat, jolly, man, named 'Santa Clause', that delivers presents on Xmas day, is immoral. I did this as an exercise in challenging long accepted practices. But the more I think about it the more I think my view is correct.

Fact 1: You are lying to your children. (You know that there is no such person and you are intentionally trying to deceive your children into believing that there is).
Fact 2: Lying is (usually) wrong.

A first retort is that we get a lot of joy out of telling kids this and the joy they receive unwrapping their Red Rider bb-guns outwieghs any pain they receive upon learning the truth. But the consequences I think are not as joyful as might appear. Children learn that their parents are liars (which I suppose is only bad because then children become reluctant to do what parents say). They cry (sometimes). It seems the joy of present giving could persist in a world without the Santa myth.

Now, a friend of mine, Carl, had a different response that is well taken, namely, that the practice of telling kids this fiction is actually epistemically useful in that it helps them early on come to appreciate that not everything they hear will be the truth. In other words, it increases the liklihood that they will be cognitively and epistemically successful human agents. While it might be a duty to introduce children to the perils of testimony, Carl's position seems to be utilitarian in spirit. So question: given two alternative ways of bringing about epistemically virtuous children, one requiring lying and the other requiring telling them that not everyone tells the truth (and avoiding the lie), wouldn't the utilitarian prefer the latter? I guess this is an empirical question about the epistemic success of Santa-believing children versus their Santatheist counterparts. My money is on epistemic virtue being achievable without lying (pace Plato).

For those of you wanting to deny my claim by endorsing the existence of Santa, you will need to show that parents know that there is a Santa (so that premise 1 is false). While parents don't currently know this, even if he does exist, perhaps they could come to know it by reading Santa Lives!: Five Conclusive Arguments for the Existence of Santa Claus, by Ellis Weiner (The Berkley Publishing Group, 2005). And yes, it is 'Berkley' not 'Berkeley'. F.Y.I., in addition to being a delightfully funny book, it is also a seeming reductio of Aquinas's five ways.

Duncan Pritchard (U. of Sterling, Scotland, UK) has a blog titled "Epistemic Value." It is part of the Knowledge, Mind and Value project at U. of Sterling. Notice that among its contributors is Sandy Goldberg, chair of my dissertation. Make sure to check it out here. Also, note that contributors include those posting on the blog and those presenting papers at some of the project's conferences.

Note that the 2007 Midsouth Philosophy Conference is upcoming, February 23-4, 2007. Submissions are due by January 7, 2007. Additional information can be found here. By the way, Memphis is a great city (site of the 2006 CSPA). If you haven't walked around town looking for a chicken joint, ditched part of the group to look for BBQ, then ditched part of that group to go to a bar, then you just haven't lived.

Apologies for the brief hiatus. Last week was exam week and I had grading and even an exam to take ("they keep pulling me back in!"). Now that I'm done with all of that, I've been thinking about translation. A recent conversation brought to mind Davidson's "On the Very Idea of a Conceptual Scheme" (reprinted in Inquiries into Truth and Interpretation, 2nd ed., 2001, pp.183-198.) In that article, he endorses the claim that "nothing...could count as evidence that some form of activity could not be interpreted in our language that was not at the same time evidence that that form of activity was not speech behavior" (185). In other words, translatability into a familiar tongue is a criterion of languagehood.

But consider the following case, in which a field linguist L whose familiar tongue is L1 and another linguist H whose familiar tongue is H1. Furthermore, let L be investigating speakers of H1 and let H be investigating speakers of L1. Let's also assume Tarski's approach to truth (and for ease of exposition I'll avoid relativising locutions like 'in-L' where no confusion can result). The characteristics of L1 and H1 are as follows:

L1 is a language with a truth predicate.
H1 is a language without a truth predicate.

Speakers of L1 and of H1 live in the same environment; it has water, trees, people, views of the heavens, etc., and is otherwise just like ours.

Below are samples of translations of utterances of L1 and of H1 speakers into a suitably regimented English.

L1 (Jim is speaking): Snow is white. 'Snow is white' is true. Bob is tall. 'Bob is tall' is true.
(Sue as speaker): Everything Jim said is true.

H1 (Sarah is speaking): Snow is white. Jane is tall. Grass is green. All dogs bark. 'Snow is white' has three words.

Question: How would H, who is investigating L1 speakers, begin to translate "Everything Jim said is true"? First, she cannot define a truth-predicate for H1 and use it to aid in translation. The resulting translations of H are not then in H1, but in H2, the metalanguage for which H1 is the object language. Solution (recall that ex hypothesi the behavior in question is L1 speech behavior): H must employ substitutional quantification. H does have quantification and sentences over which to quantify. So she may employ some of the standard devices for substitutional quantification and get by just fine. But a further question: how does H understand substitutional quantification? If she does understand it, then either of three options must be true: (1) she does it without employing truth (in terms of which it is usually introduced); (2) my hypothesis is false that her language H1 doesn't employ a truth predicate; or (3) she has the concept of truth but not a predicate correct translation of which into English would be 'is true'. Because Davidson assumes that the distinction required in (3) is unintelligible, let's ignore it for the moment. So, (1) or (2)? I submit that because we can create languages without truth predicates we cannot rule out a priori the falsity of my hypothesis. So we reject (2). Hence (1) is the winner. Last question: how does H understand substitutional quantification? My guess is that H must treat it as primitive within H1.

If my scenario is intelligible then we have learned that translation can proceed without a truth-predicate and so plausibly without truth. Are there any problems with this scenario?

Make sure to check out "A brood comb," the latest issue of Philosopher's Carnival. Yours truly managed to get a post in.