Universalism, the prevailing doctrine of the Christian Church during its first five hundred years – John Wesley Hanson
Is there anything good about hell? Our discomfort about hell and its ultimate good – Paul Dirks
That all shall be saved: Heaven, hell, and universal salvation – David Bentley Hart
Four views on hell, 2nd ed.

Paul and Jesus: How the Apostle Transformed Christianity – James Tabor
Heaven and Hell: A History of the Afterlife – Bart Ehrman
From Plato to Christ: How Platonic Thought Shaped the Christian Faith – Louis Markos
The Power of Parable: How Fiction by Jesus Became Fiction About Jesus – J. D. Crossan

Yeah, the Buried Giant. I don't know why I typed it that way. It's alright, but I'm leaving it aside for now to finish some other stuff.

Chester Himes – If He Hollers Let Him Go
Joan Didion – Play It As It Lays
José Antonio Villarreal – Pocho
John Steinbeck – Tortilla Flat

T. C. Boyle – The Tortilla Curtain
Kazuo Ishiguro – The Buried Knight
Virginia Woolf – To the Lighthouse
Tommy Orange – There There

Were you asleep during the entire 2000s and 2010s? How many times have we gone over this?

But it's not novel. Surely you know this? Its banality is reason to suspect that there is some other reason you think it warrants discussion.

What's the point? Why the interest in judging the morality of Christians? Is it just a secular victory lap, mocking the old guard that the last generation killed?

Who cares, if none of this stuff is real anyway?

What is the reason for this moral pearl-clutching?

I can't speak for others, but I catch the whiff of a kind of pre-bigotry on it. I feel the same way when people start insinuating, on 'rational' grounds, that the beliefs that Muslims, or Mormons, or etc. hold are immoral, and so ... etc., etc.

As I said, there is something funny about the inheritors of actual world-historical evil clutching pearls about non-existent evil. And the new atheists in particular often then hop over to 'well, it's just rational to profile Muslims at airports,' and so on.

What is the real motivation behind this sort of moral suspicion? Is it idle moral speculation? Is it a worry that Christians, or some other religious group that believes in hell, is a moral danger to everyone else? But this is a fantasy – the powers in the West are firmly secular.

If the question were posed to me, I'd answer it this way:

As to Christianity, you're right, its view of eschatology probably makes no moral sense, and it's probably bad to believe it (though I do think Christianity's recommended virtues in life are far better, and it's unlikely that any better ones have ever been elaborated by people).

As to the believers, blaming someone for adhering to a traditional faith with unpleasant implications is probably a bad idea if it has any concrete consequences (such as eschewing or punishing that person), as it's all metaphysical stuff and thus not worth much. Thinking otherwise strikes me as hysterical and short-sighted, and indulges in a moral smugness we're not entitled to.

It also seems to me easy to blame people for things that don't matter (metaphysics), especially when we are heirs to what is in contention for one of the worst concrete evils in world history (the British Empire and its offshoots) – this changes the topic a bit, but I always see a kind of deflection from things that actually happened when we retreat to quibbling over things that don't exist anyway.

That's not to say I dislike the position of 'modern, Western people,' since I'm one of them and basically agree – but we shouldn't mystify ourselves with tired tropes about how we got wise to irrational and immoral beliefs (this is certainly untrue). Granted, my ethnic and philosophical stock is more Anglican / Catholic, and so even though I don't believe in the stuff, I was never constitutionally prone to any New Atheist sympathies, and so have never found this sort of moralizing against the past compelling. It's more interesting to ask honestly why we believe what we do, than to congratulate ourselves for believing it, is what I'm saying.

I doubt it. People's own propaganda about themselves is never right.

The real answer as I understand it from 'serious' believers as opposed to (mere) apologists is that God's justifications and authority are beyond us. Whatever indignation we might feel is quaint: we're to trust in God, and lean not on our own understanding.

The way the objection is framed assumes a kind of intellectual and moral hubris alien to the pre-modern world, and alien to much of contemporary religious life – it's not taken for granted that if we can't understand why something is right by our own moral standards, we are therefore allowed, or maybe even compelled, to condemn it based on that same understanding. That is, it was always taken for granted in religious life that God had reasons that were beyond us, and the tone of Lewis' objection, as with all new atheism (and especially that associated with Australia), is one that doesn't object to, but simply doesn't understand, the idea that there might be good reasons that one cannot understand.

I'm not defending this sort of world view (there are epistemological and moral problems with accepting the goodness of decisions you can't understand) – but it should be put in perspective that way. Modern people of the West, and this is particularly true of the English diaspora, have simply lost a mode of cognition that pre-modern people had, and so can't make sense of the morality contained, let's say, in Proverbs that leads to these sorts of conclusions. And so it strikes such people as ridiculous.

In addition to the Derrida and Vendler, I've got the following on the list:

Noam Chomsky – Cartesian Linguistics: A Chapter in the History of Rationalist Thought
Benjamin Lee Whorf – Language, Thought, and Reality: Selected Writings of Benjamin Lee Whorf
Wilhelm von Humboldt – On Language: On the Diversity of Human Language Construction and Its Influence on the Mental Development of the Human Species
Abu Nasr al-Farabi – The Book of Letters

Yeah, that's right. On a classical logic, it will be true just in case t (that is, whatever object 't' denotes) is in the domain. On a free logic, it will be true just in case t is in the 'inner domain,' or domain of existents.

On a classical logic, E!t should be trivially true in any model, because every model has to assign to each individual constant a member of the domain. So just in virtue of naming t, you're committed to it existing in this sense. Everything exists.

On a free logic, E!t is not trivially true – it can be true on some models, and false on others, depending on whether t is in the domain of existent things. Some things don't exist (according to some models).

Free logic
Existence is a first order predicate, and hence
Singular terms can refer to things which are not members of the domain
The domain is not empty — Banno

My understanding is that free logic has a split domain, one of existents and one of non-existents (although you can interpret the domains however you want – there are just two of them). The difference between them is that individual constants can refer to members of either domain, while quantifiers range only over the individuals in one domain (the domain of 'existents').

As far as I know, you don't need the dual domain to have E! – you can define it in a regular old first-order predicate logic, which is pretty much what you did above.

So we say, as a postulate governing its interpretation, that E!x iff ∃y[y=x].

Where the free logic comes in is that you can interpret ∃ as quantifying over only the domain of 'really existing things.' So if you say something like 'the aether exists,' and the aether is referred to by 'a,' you can put the aether in the non-existent domain, so that:

E!a comes out false, because, we interpret it as:

∃x[x=a]

And this will come out false. Why? Because the quantifier ranges only over individuals in the domain of real existents, which the aether is not in (it's in the domain of non-existent things). So we find no individual x in the domain that is identical to a. So the translation of 'the aether exists' is false.

But we can still say, e.g. 'John doesn't believe in the aether,' if we interpret that as ~B(j,a), and have that come out as true – so long as we allow individual constants like 'a' to refer to things both in the domain of existents and the domain of non-existents.

The result is that we can refer to non-existent things, and say true things about them, while we cannot existentially quantify over them, meaning that it will be true to say they don't exist.

This is all from memory – anyone can correct me if they're looking at the material.

I've not read this, but one of my favorite texts on ethics of all time is the 3rd(?) section of Stanley Cavell's The Claim of Reason, where he brutalizes this book. — StreetlightX

Cool, I might check it out. Stevenson is mainly referenced today as an influence on a kind of non-cognitivism about moral language, so far as I know (which I don't think is plausible).

Yes, although the technical innovation of free logic is not the introduction of an existence predicate (you can define such a predicate in any first-order logic easily, and so the dictum that 'existence is not a predicate' doesn't mean much). The innovation is a split domain, one over which the quantifiers quantify, and one over which they don't though you can still refer to the individuals in the 'outer' / 'non-existent' domain using individual constants.

Like any logical formalism, there's no question of it being right or wrong, just apt to certain purposes.

Reviews of previous books:

Austin's Sense and Sensibilia –
Really incredible. No idea why I hadn't read it sooner. Section VII should be mandatory reading for everyone. Sadly some of the finer-grained judgments he uses to attack Ayer strike me as either mistaken (in that I actually agree with Ayer's linguistic judgment) or too slippery to be used effectively as a methodology, and some of the ripostes struck me as ad hoc. It's a testament to how ineffective this kind of appeal to ordinary language tends to be that it breaks down precisely where interesting questions are asked, and the audience can't seriously sympathize with either party without just claiming to have one linguistic intuition over another. But, in the critique of foundational empiricism, really incredible.

Hayakawa's Language in Thought and Action –
Seemed stupid, stopped reading near the beginning.

Searle's Speech Acts –
As with all Searle, this is mostly boring, and not particularly insightful beyond a few clarifying points with regards to past authors (updating the Gricean notion of meaning in terms of the Austinian introduction of illocutionary acts, for example). Some of the postulates he appeals to, like that what is referred to must exist, that reference requires being able to uniquely identify an object to be successful, etc. just seem straightforwardly wrong, and I think treating predication and reference as 'speech acts' just muddies the Austinian terminology unnecessarily.

Stevenson's Ethics and Language –
Seems promising so far, though maybe out of date by this point as a work of analytic philosophy. Only a short way into it.

Austin's How to Do Things With Words –
Rereading this one. Still a masterpiece. I see new things every time I read it, and the insights seem to hold up better and better with time.

Probably going to read Vendler's Linguistics in Philosophy and Derrida's Of Grammtology next. And maybe Barthes' book on semiotics.

If you're not sore at the end of the day, you don't work.

Revisiting some Anglophone classics about language from mid-century:

J. L. Austin – How to Do Things with Words
J. L. Austin – Sense and Sensibilia
John Searle – Speech Acts
S. I. Hayakawa – Language in Thought and Action
C. L. Stevenson – Ethics and Language

Well all they have are a clear and thorough descriptions and examples at hand, but if you feel that philosophy has nothing legitimate or worthwhile to say about doubt, fear of uncertainty, and the desire for control, than maybe you haven't been gripped by the necessity philosophy can instill, which differs from the solidity of the method of science. — Antony Nickles

It's more that philosophers will read a series of books written in response to each other, and assume that what's talked about in those books must be universally meaningful or interesting, or get at what problems intrinsically confront human beings in some interesting way. The problem is that their scope is typically limited, and so they're typically wrong – usually because the only thing they've read is those books. Skepticism in the sense phils talk about it is just not something most people throughout history would have even understood.

But Wittgenstein (and later Cavell) are able to show that there is a truth to skepticism, that knowledge is limited--we are separate (see The Claim of Reason). Now this is not "linguistic"; it is part of the human condition. — Antony Nickles

I'm wary of claims like this, since there is no a priori reason to listen to philosophers about what is or isn't part of the human condition – often, their claims about such things are just empirically wrong on anthropological grounds, and what appears to them to be 'part of the human condition' is just presented to them that way because they've read certain things.

As to the issue of skepticism, philosophers have long recognized how its claims are bound up with uses of the word 'know,' and there have been suggestions that since these sorts of words are used differently in different places, there actually was no single coherent problem the skeptics were even addressing. I tend to agree.

Skepticism itself appears only at specific cultural moments that involve a disillusionment with certain forms of dogmatism, and then gets reified into an abstract problem of 'under what conditions does x know that p?' and so forth. One of the things I like about OLP is that it is able to treat problems as they arise in their native home. The bad flip side of this is that its refusal to create an abstract theory or set of procedures prevents it from being very effective in a lot of practical environments.

Some more stuff on the way:

Leonard Pitt – The Decline of the Californios: A Social History of the Spanish-Speaking Californians, 1846-1890
Gregory Nokes – The Troubled Life of Peter Burnett: Oregon Pioneer and First Governor of California
John Rollin Ridge – The Life and Adventures of Joquín Murieta
Nathanael West – The Day of the Locust
Neal Harlow – California Conquered: The Annexation of a Mexican Province, 1846-1850

Here's the deal with OLP, as I see it.

Philosophers often think that they are arguing over the way things are. However, on closer inspection, they are often apparently not, but are rather simply using language in different ways, or recommending that language be used in a different way to describe the same sort of thing, or engaging in some kind of grammatical confusion, or something like that. OLP is a series of heuristics and observations about how and why this happens.

Its primary doctrine (if you want to call it that) is a kind of meta-semantic thesis about how words get their meaning: the meaning of a word is (or supervenes on, or essentially involves) the way a linguistic community uses it. To know what it is a philosopher is claiming, we have to look at the words they're using to make their claims, and what they could possibly mean by those words. Because philosophers often use words in non-standard ways, it is often not clear what they mean – and they often shift between standard implications of the uses of their words, and arguments that crucially invoke non-standard meanings to draw their conclusions. One can't have it both ways, and once one sees that this is what is happening, the point at issue is revealed not to be about 'the way things are' in the sense the philosopher might have thought.

To see how this works, it helps to remember Malcom's parable of the wolf and the fox. Suppose two philosophers are in a forest, and they come upon a clearing. Before them stands a furry, four-legged animal. Philosopher A says, 'It's a fox!' Philosopher B says, 'No, it's wolf!' Now, they disagree somehow. Confused, Philosopher A says, 'But what do you mean? It's the wrong shape to be a wolf – its tail is too large, and it's too small.' Are we, Philosopher A wonders, having a factual dispute about what sort of animal stands before us? That is, does Philosopher B see something different than A, or have some different opinion about what, given what they both see, the animal is like?

But no, Philosopher B responds, 'Oh, of course, I grant all that. Nonetheless, it is a wolf.' And now Philosopher A is confused again. If the two agree on the actual properties of this animal, why does Philosopher B insist on calling it a wolf, and not a fox? Are they perhaps using the words 'fox' and 'wolf' in different ways? Does Philosopher B speak English differently, or is Philosopher A confused about the criteria for what makes a fox or a wolf, according to the use of the words? He asks to clarify, but Philosopher B responds, 'Oh no, I quite agree that you are using the word 'fox' in the normal way. And I agree that according to the normal use of the English word 'fox,' the sort of animal we see before us is just the sort to which that word, ordinarily used, is correctly applied. Nonetheless, it is not a fox, but a wolf.'

Now Philosopher A is stumped. What can Philosopher B mean, that it is a wolf? There are a few things Philosopher B might legitimately do – (1) he might say that given what 'fox' means ordinarily, the animal before them is not of that sort, that is, a kind of factual claim, or (2) he might say that, given what sort of animal is before him, he disagrees that the word 'fox' is actually ordinarily applied to it, or ought to be applied to it, and one ought to use the word 'wolf' instead for that sort of creature. Or he might be doing some mix of the two, since in making claims we are always simultaneously coordinating on how things are, and what the appropriate use of the words used to describe them is.

But there is something Philosopher B apparently cannot do coherently – he cannot say simultaneously that the ordinary use of 'fox' is such-and-such, and that that animal is an appropriate target of the word according to that ordinary use, and that it is nonetheless not a fox, and that this claim is not a mere linguistic matter, but something substantive the philosopher has discovered. The claim sounds shocking and radical – that animal is a wolf, not a fox! Incredible! But on inspection, the philosopher is either confused, or is expressing nascently some desire to refer to what is normally called a fox using a different word, 'wolf' – for some reason. Hence the issue, if there is one, is linguistic.

Now, you might think – do philosophers really do this sort of thing? Isn't that silly? Who would even make such a claim? But the answer is yes, they do, all the time – in fact, this constitutes a large majority of what philosophers do. A philosopher often takes some situation, and against the way it would normally be described, claims that some other, seemingly surprising thing, is true of it instead. But when pressed, it seems they neither disagree about what is actually happening (the way things are), nor do they overtly claim to be making some sort of linguistic judgment or revision. So what are they doing? It is at this crucial juncture, so very common in philosopher, that the OLPer will say the philosopher is caught in some sort of 'confusion.' Untangling that confusion is unfortunately not a sure thing, since all such confusions are different, and there is no surefire way of figuring out how it arose or why, and no guarantee that the confused philosopher will understand how to untangle it.

A favorite example of the OLPers was the claim made by Russell that, properly speaking, we do not see any physical objects at all – we only see parts of our brains. Yet, according to the way the word 'see' is used, we typically never see our brains, but do see physical objects. So what can Russell mean? In reflecting on what he could mean by this, as an exercise, you might come to understand an example of what the OLPer is talking about.

Soon to start reading, after the last batch is done:

John Fante – Ask the Dust
Jack London – Martin Eden
Frank Norris – The Octopus: A Story of California
Josiah Royce – The Religious Aspect of Philosophy: A Critique of the Bases and Conduct of Faith

I'm referring to constant symbols. It is not the case that the point is to have the value for constant symbol invariant across models. A model assigns a member of the universe of the model to a constant symbol. There is no requirement that all models agree on what they assign to the constant symbol. Not all models have the same universe, so it's not even possible that they all agree on what they assign to a constant symbol. — TonesInDeepFreeze

Across worlds, not models. A model has a set of worlds, in its frame.

Anyway, the question I have is not what happens when a definite description fails, but rather, how do we do we reconcile ordinary semantics for either predicate logic or modal predicate logic with dangling non-denotating constants? — TonesInDeepFreeze

What do you mean, 'ordinary?' Obviously in a strict sense you cannot reconcile them, since ordinary predicate logic has no notion of a constant that doesn't refer to anything. There's just a domain, and then the interpretation function maps each constant to a member of that domain.

And I don't know what 'the relevant individual' refers to in your remark. — TonesInDeepFreeze

It's whoever, intuitively, the constant is supposed to refer to. So if 'b' refers to Bob, then it might refer to Bob in all worlds where Bob exists, but to * in all worlds in which he doesn't exist.

The method requires a theory in which at least one constant symbol 's' is either primitive or already defined: — TonesInDeepFreeze

No, it just requires some distinguished object in the domain, like say *.

Well, I'll word it slightly more carefully. Kripke's modal logic as it was initially presented as a propositional modal logic, and so it simply didn't have any terms for variables over individuals. There were just propositional variables, sentential connectives, and modal quantifiers.

In a standard quantified modal logic, however, you need both a domain of individuals and a domain of worlds. And on a standard reading of the identity relation, it is necessary by definition (Kripke made a big deal about this in NN). Thus, if a = b in w, then in all w', a = b.

Therefore, if you make existence claims as follows:

∃x[x = a], to mean 'a exists,'

Then if you have '∃' quantifying over the domain of individuals, independent of the domain of worlds, then it will have the same value at any world – either it will be necessarily true, or necessarily false.

If you want to get around this, you have to reinterpret '∃' so as only to quantify relative to a world, such that each world is associated with a sub-domain of individuals, and '∃x[x = a]' is true in w iff there is an individual x in the sub-domain associated with w that is identical to a. If you read it this way, then the formula can be contingently true, and contingently false – true in worlds whose sub-domains contain a, and false in worlds whose sub-domain does not.

Do you have any thoughts on my question: How can we have a method of models in which, for certain models, there are constant symbols such that the model does not assign a member of the domain of the model? It throws off the way we evaluate satisfaction and truth in models. — TonesInDeepFreeze

Well, the point of a non-logical constant is that its value is invariant across worlds. You could, of course, have a modal logic where individual terms like constants have different denotations relative to different worlds. And you could then allow that they refer to 'nothing,' say, at worlds where the relevant individual doesn't exist. How you want to represent this formally is up to you – one old formal trick is to use a dummy object, say *, to which the value of all terms that have nothing satisfying them at the world map to. You would then need to make a semantics that deals with the dummy object – you could assign predications of it to false, or to a third undefined truth value, and so on.

That's right. I didn't mean to suggest that the unique existence predicate was of the same kind as the regular existence predicate (which is of individuals).

Not to say you couldn't construct such a notion, of unique existence, though – the problem with logic and trying to use it to address philosophical issues is that you can do whatever you want.

Quantifiers are (nothing but) predicates of formulae.

I don't mean 'second-order' in the sense of a second-order logic that quantifies over predicates. I just mean this:

Where 'v' is a variable and 'p' is a formula, E!v[p] is true at w iff there is exactly one individual x in the domain such that p is true at w on any assignment that maps v to x.

The unique existence predicate is second-order, and serves a similar function as an existential quantifier – so it has a different syntax, and occurs alongside a variable and a formula it scopes over. It's like an existential quantifier, except only one individual in the domain is allowed to satisfy the formula.

Soon to start reading:

Andrew Isenburg – Mining California: An Ecological History
Louis Warren – God's Red Son: The Ghost Dance Religion and the Making of Modern America
Robert Righter – The Battle over Hetch Hetchy: America's Most Controversial Dam and the Birth of Modern Environmentalism
Anton Treuer – The Indian Wars: Battles, Bloodshed, and the Fight for Freedom on the American Frontier
Kevin Starr – California: A History

Sometimes, the exclamation point signals unique existence, as opposed to just existence. It varies.

Your standard quantified modal logic contains an infinite number of predicate symbols, which are just assigned interpretations relative to a model. Let 'E!' be one of those symbols, and read it such that where 'a' is an individual constant, 'E!a' is true at w iff the the referent of 'a' exists at w.

It doesn't need to have a particular definition – it's just a predicate.

Anyway, what you mentioned is a semantical. How would we express that as a formula in the modal logic itself? — TonesInDeepFreeze

I don't know what you're asking.