In case the conclusion still isn't clear: if you want to benefit A and not benefit B, you do that by taking from B and giving to A, or by giving A something but not giving it to B. Either way, you're conferring relative gain upon A.

I'm going to try this again. You both claim:

1. White Americans do not benefit from systemic racism in the United States.

Perhaps my usage of "systemic racism" is nonstandard, but I take it to refer to things like the Black-white wealth gap:

In 2016, white families had the highest level of both median and mean family wealth: $171,000 and $933,700, respectively (figure 1). Black and Hispanic families have considerably less wealth than white families. Black families' median and mean net worth is less than 15 percent that of white families, at $17,600 and $138,200, respectively. Hispanic families' median and mean net worth was $20,700 and $191,200, respectively. — The Federal Reserve

In American society, as currently constituted, whites have one hell of a lot more money than Blacks!

You can support (1) by also claiming:

2. A white household with a net worth of $171,000 derives no benefit from a Black household having a net worth of only $17,600.

The total wealth of Americans is not a fixed number to be carved up like a pie; white households don't have higher net worth because non-white households have lower net worth. If it counts as evidence that our system is racist, it's not because there is white benefit here, but because there is non-white deprivation.

But at any given time, the total wealth of Americans is a fixed number. As it rises or falls, the amount by which it changes is also a fixed number. If you were king, distributing wealth as you please, in order to have a racist result, your only options are dividing up existing wealth unequally, or creating more wealth, perhaps by fiat, and dividing that up unequally.

The only way to be racist is to confer relative advantage and disadvantage. If you wanted a racist wealth gap, you would do it by taking the total wealth of Americans, giving 80% to whites, 10% to Hispanics and 10% to Blacks.

I think the sentence you quoted is worth thinking about a moment longer. Maybe not much longer, to be honest, but give it another few minutes, maybe something will come to you.

I'm going to suggest (again) that folks have a look at Peggy McIntosh's original paper, not because I'm endorsing it -- there's a couple things in there that look really weird to me -- but simply because "white privilege" is a term of art and mostly people -- me included before I looked -- seem to be taking it as a normal English phrase they can understand just by looking at it.

For instance, McIntosh makes the point that "privilege" is a misleading term because it sounds purely positive, but white privilege is also the over empowering of members of the dominant race, and this is not a good thing, not good for non-whites obviously but also not good for those overprivileged. It's like having an overprotective parent: you are robbed of challenges which if faced would better you.

James Baldwin used to say things like this -- that racism imperils the soul of white America, of white Americans. That sense of danger is included in the idea of "white privilege". It's not about who gets all the good stuff; it's about being put in a position of power you should not be and then unknowingly projecting that power. This is not a recipe for righteousness.

1. Some members of society suffer harm because they are not white.
2. Whites may of course suffer harm, but whatever harm they suffer cannot be down to them not being white, because they are.

We could even name the harm in (1) "harm-because-you're-not-white", and then we could say

3. White people don't suffer harm-because-you're-not-white.

2 and 3 would both be false if white people were regularly taken to be non-white and thus suffered abuse the perpetrator believed they were inflicting upon a non-white person.

Curiously, the United States does have some history of violence directed against "race traitors". This is a type of harm whites only inflict upon whites.

What a wonderful world.

The cause of the inequalities we are discussing is not addressed in this outcome-based labelling. — Pro Hominem

I don't think we've talked about causes much at all. I'm not even sure what that looks like. To me -- and I'm willing to be educated -- "systemic racism" is in essence just a label for differential outcomes. I think of it as something like "in effect racist", deferring claims about why various institutions are in effect racist, whether it's deliberate, etc. If you look at, say, a small town in the Jim Crow South, where everybody who's anybody belongs to the Klan -- there's certainly systematic racism there but probably no systemic racism at all, as I use the term.

Do you have a different understanding? You seem to suggest that outcomes are not part of the discussion until somebody brings up "white privilege" and that's just not my view at all. Systemic racism is first and last a matter of differential outcomes.

Not marked, marked inconsistently, etc. Think of one-drop laws: only applicable in official contexts with access to records, etc. The rest of the time, someone officially 'black' might pass as 'white'. That's the kind of thing I was leaving room for.

I can tell you all I was really trying to do was give a very broad description of systemic racism, specifically because of @Pro Hominem's position: he accepts systemic racism but rejects white privilege. I thought maybe we could stop trying to convince him to accept something he already accepts.

But I've ended up writing far more about systemic racism, which failing annoys me.

Anyway it was not meant to be contentious at all, just a summary of what we agree on.

ADDED: If there's a difference between 1 and the others, it's only that I wanted to allow the system to be imperfect, miss corner cases, etc.

Forced separation means whatever this is it's certainly not a just society.

I'm not sure how to get around that to answer the other question. Specifically, if white and black philosophers are not allowed to meet to exchange ideas, then both groups are impoverished.

Given that, I'm going to lean toward saying this society is racist. But I'm thinking now that what you're really after is detaching the use of racial categories from the conferring of advantage and disadvantage based on those categories. I think you need a different thought experiment for that.

How exactly are we to read (3)? Are we talking about mandating and enforcing separation?

In general, are you wondering whether it's possible for a system to be racist against everyone?

to be privileged in some way is to be a member of the category that receives advantages and avoids disadvantages associated with that membership. — fdrake

But this is exactly what's at issue: are 'is white' and 'benefits from systemic racism' equivalent (in whatever sense)?

If we look at instances where whites and blacks compete directly (hiring, matriculation, etc) for a scarce resource, whatever data you can marshal won't convince someone who has an example of reverse discrimination to lean on.

What's more, if, say, the hiring manager acts out of bias, then you can still argue it's someone else acting badly that we need to worry about, not the white applicant's obliviousness. (At bottom this just says if there were no racist acts, no one would benefit from them.)

We could argue that the standard of fairness is wrong: that instead of some ideal we could look at how people are actually treated and then ask, 'Are you treated better than average? Then you're receiving a benefit.' I'm not sure how convincing it is.

None of is anything like what Peggy McIntosh was up to. The idea is, roughly, that whites learn how to behave as members of the dominant group, to have certain expectations, etc., without ever being told that these behaviors, expectations, etc. are underwritten by their group's racial dominance. A lot of it has to do with the world at large identifying you as white, seeing you as a member of the dominant group, without you doing anything, without you even being aware that the world treats you a particular way that recognizes your race. The attitudes and behaviors you think are just normal are in fact reserved for white people.

I'm still thinking through it...

I think there's some value in treating bias as a necessary but not sufficient condition for racism.

A few years ago I explained the idea of "systemic racism" to my son like this: suppose a loan officer has a very slight bias against blacks that he is unaware of and it hardly ever makes a difference, but every once in a while he denies a loan application that he shouldn't; imagine thousands of guys like that reviewing thousands of applications at thousands of banks over decades, and you get as a result blacks as a group starting fewer business, buying fewer homes, etc.

And I want to say that if that story isn't stupid, and if we reserve the word "racist" to mean someone who harbors explicit bias or who regularly (something between "often" and "always") acts on an implicit bias, then I don't see the loan officers in my story as racists, even though those acts are racist. That would make systemic racism largely a system of racists acts without there being, or at least not necessarily being, a large number of racists performing those acts.

But that also looks pretty self-serving. I get to say the system is racist without having to call out any but the real bad hombres as racists, and I'm certainly not one of those. All that's needed to get back on track is to deny this:

If the principal motivation for an act is implicit or unconscious, you're not responsible for it.

Stated plainly like that, it looks pretty fucking dubious, but I think something a lot like that can easily slip into how we interpret the story I told above about systemic racism. And because the system is described as the cumulative effect of pretty small, and for each individual perhaps quite infrequent, acts, one of my loan officers could say

Maybe I do contribute to the system being racist without even knowing it, but if I do it's certainly not much.

Of course that's "pretty small" relative to the aggregate of such acts -- for the person who can't start a business or buy a home, it's pretty big; and "small", again, only because that aggregate effect on society is so big. So there are ways to deny responsibility or to accept but minimize it.

If we then look at loans to white applicants as a proportion of loans approved (or of applicants, or of the population at large), we'll find that as a group whites get a bigger slice of the loan pie than they should. There is a "group benefit" even if each individual applicant is only receiving fair and not in any way special treatment. By comparing relative advantage at the group level to the aggregate of absolute advantage at the individual level (stipulated to be none), we get a result that is mildly paradoxical -- but no more than a racist system with no racists in it.

McIntosh's claim is that a white loan applicant actually experiences being a member of the group that does disproportionately well. (Here's the link again.)

I have some thoughts but I'm going to mull it over and let other people talk. Also reading Peggy McIntosh's white privilege papers that more or less started this whole thing.

Is that a semantics question? That is, are you trying to decide whether those points are constitutive of being a "segregational and racist" society, so that by knowing those points to hold we can conclude the label properly applies?

Or would the label you are asking about result from a different sort of inference? That is, those points holding allows you to conclude something more, so that knowing this label applies allows you to say something besides (1)-(4). In which case, I don't know, because I'm not still not sure what you're asking.

Read the stuff on the website. I think the answer is twofold (though I'm no expert):

• "no" because it's not just a sort of theorized in-group preference along the line @Janus was describing;
• you can expect slightly different results each time you take the test.

There are of course some issues and some methodological questions here -- it's science -- but some of this stuff is addressed there.

There is a through-line from the practice of chattel slavery in America to contemporary systemic racism. One side of that the story has this form: blacks were oppressed like this, and then like this, and then like this, and nowadays they're oppressed like this. The people involved in this thread seem mostly to agree on that part. What they don't agree on is the other side of the story. Are there any oppressors in this story? Were there in the past but no longer?

I told a story about injustice earlier in this thread that had four characters: a victim, a perpetrator, a beneficiary, and a bystander. Some people get to choose their role and some don't. Do we call that freedom to choose a privilege?

I have taken the Harvard implicit bias test, at least the one on race -- I assume everyone here has -- and got more or less exactly the result I expected: as a white man of my age who grew up where and how I did, I have a slight but noticeable implicit bias in favor of whites and against blacks. I already knew that -- though I'm not really sure how.

So now what? I'm not sure eradicating my bias is on the table, though I believe my children have less bias than I do and their children will have less than they do. I have even heard psychologists argue that "sensitivity training" of the sort businesses and schools and other institutions pay experts to provide is worse than pointless: not only does it not reduce implicit bias, it tends to make people defensive, resistant to self-examination, and thus less likely to modify their behavior.

Monitoring my own behavior is what I've opted for. I have decided -- rightly or wrongly I'm not sure -- that racism is acting upon bias, whether implicit or explicit, explicit bias is a failure of the intellectual conscience, but implicit bias you just have to live with, make the effort not to act upon it, be open to recognizing when you have, and improve. Not so different from dealing with other cognitive biases really, except that other people may pay a price for your failings.

All to say, the point about stereotypes and their cultural effect is well taken, but there is a public layer we can readily address, a personal layer we can straightforwardly address, and a further personal layer that we must accept as a process we are responsible for managing throughout our lives.

Systemic racism is an observable fact. White privilege is an argumentative construct. One exists, the other is a tactic (I've explained many times why I think it's a bad tactic, but that won't stop any of you from continuing to use it). I've acknowledged that some white people have benefited from racial attitudes and laws in all sorts of ways, and that that is a problem that must be addressed. I do not think that you can support the idea that all white people at all times are benefiting in any calculable way from the oppression of black people. I don't even think you can satisfactorily define who exactly all these "white" people are. ((my emphasis)) — Pro Hominem

1. There exists a system that at least intends to divide people according to a criterion it calls "race".
2. That system marks some members of our society as "black" and some as "white".
3. This system legitimizes violating the human rights of those marked as "black" but not of those marked as "white".
4. The system also legitimizes various sorts of unfair or inequitable treatment of those marked as "black" but not of those marked as "white".

I do not believe there is any disagreement here on (1)-(4).

The disagreement is on how to answer the question Qui bono?

One answer comes from something like critical theory, which I can clumsily attempt:

Those marked as "white" are the beneficiaries by definition. The system is an asymmetrical power structure, and those marked as "white" are on the privileged side. In fact, what people understand as modern liberal free-market society is constituted by just such asymmetries; the "rights" people marked as "white" enjoy are an artifact of such systems. They are not "universal human rights" and never have been; they are privileges doled out to some along with an ideology that falsely claims they are universal, and the evidence that they are not universal has traditionally been explained away by a further pernicious ideology of "race" which marks some people as less than human and therefore not entitled to the putative "universal human rights". The political and economic system those marked as "white" think of as a universal benefit is just this system of oppressing those marked as "black" and granting what it calls "rights" to those marked as "white". "Whites" only "have rights" insofar as "blacks" don't; this is intrinsic to the definitions of "white" and "black" in such a system.

There are others around here who could do a much better job of that than I did.

But there is alternative answer, and this is my similarly clumsy attempt:

The beneficiaries of this system are those who set it up in the first place for their benefit. In the antebellum South, in particular, slave-owners justified the practice of building wealth by extracting labor from slaves with an ideology of "race" that defined those slaves as less than human and not deserving of the rights and freedoms that intellectuals of the time were promoting as the legitimate foundation of human society. These slave-owners benefited economically and politically, and arranged the theory of "race" to include themselves as humans deserving of rights and freedoms, but non-slave-owning "whites" derived no particular benefit from this classification or from the economic gain of slave-owners. After the Civil War and emancipation, "whites" who had accumulated wealth and status continued to promote the ideology of "race" as a way to maintain their wealth and status; some other "whites" may also have benefited here and there a little by the promotion of this ideology and the racist practices of oppression it justified, but this is largely inconsequential, certainly to those who primarily benefited, as the system was never even intended to help them particularly but merely to paper over the continuance of what are really inequities of power and wealth, i.e. class.

The first answer involves some pretty heavy theoretical commitments and I think, generally speaking, either you buy this sort of thing or you don't. It's a lot of work to find a middle path that finds some genuine insight here while preserving a commitment to Enlightenment ideas of rights and democracy and so on.

The second answer has a very different problem: it's not quite an answer at all, at least not directly. If we made the question Qui bono in diebus nostris?, "Who benefits right now? today?", where is the answer? Are we to trace generational wealth back to slave-owners? Do you count as a beneficiary of systemic racism if and only if your family tree includes slave-owners and if and only if some of the advantage you enjoy relative to others is due to the preservation over time of some of their wealth and power? How do we even approach such questions?

We could instead claim that no one really benefits at all from this system, not any more. Racists, who mistakenly believe an ideology originally created to protect wealth and political power, continue to maintain and enforce the system whether or not they even benefit from it in any tangible way. The current system is thus in some ways just an accident, a pointless holdover from an earlier time of injustice that at least made sense in its own pernicious terms, but today is just stupid and needlessly cruel.

It's just hard to see how to square this second take with the gap between black and white household wealth, the disproportionate incarceration of black men, the various achievement gaps in education and employment and health and, well, everything, between blacks and whites. In short, the second version (of the second answer) is perhaps a reasonable view on racism but has nothing to say about systemic racism. At least nothing I can see. So we're forced back to what look like pretty intractable questions about generational wealth and power, privilege and responsibility.

If we're not going to plump for the critical-theory-type view -- and of course some of us are -- we need something that at least answers the questions it answers.

kum-ba-yah — StreetlightX

Using this as an insult you only show your ignorance of the Guadalcanal Diary version.

I could find nothing to disagree with — Janus

I think it likely that around half of what I posted in this thread is dead wrong; I just don't know which half.

A few more thoughts:

I think sometimes people discussing philosophy have a hard time with the idea of disagreement: it's very tempting to think, "If you really understood my position, you'd agree with me; since you disagree, I'll explain it to you again."

There are biggish background disagreements (e.g., religious faith) that can end discussion, so the one further step people are willing to take is to ferret out these differences about which nothing can be done.

It rarely seems to occur to anyone that what another is saying might constitute an actual objection, something that could compel you to revise your views.

I could go on and on. Apologies if my concerns aren't quite relevant to your concerns.

I for one am not here to win arguments, and wish often that the culture of this forum were more collegial, more cooperative. I often fall into defending my position or attacking another's out of habit; now & then I notice what I've been doing and take a step back. As I write this, I can already imagine other forum members lining up to disagree with me. ("If you're not going to defend your position and look for flaws in someone else's, what are you even doing, that's the whole point of philosophical discussion, the arguments are all that matter, etc. ")

I think we can bring about an environment that looks more like cooperative truth-seeking and exploration ourselves, if we make the effort.

If you are riding in a bus, and the bus runs over a person crossing the street, do you bear responsibility for that event because you are a beneficiary of the bus ride? — Pro Hominem

That's a reasonable question.

1. If my rights are not violated, but another's are, is that properly described as a benefit I receive that the other does not?

I think you say "no" here. (I'm inclined to think it's a dumb question, "semantics" in the pejorative sense.)

Let's suppose instead there's something we'd agree to call a benefit on the table, like getting to work on time by being on the bus that some other guy isn't on because the bus left early.

2. If I receive a benefit, or have the opportunity to receive a benefit, through the actions of others not through my own, that another does not, am I responsible for that person being denied that benefit or that opportunity?

Again, I think you say "no", because of course you're not responsible for anyone's actions but your own. So far as it goes, I agree.

But now suppose, as you board the bus, the bus driver decides to leave a few minutes early so that you, one of his favorite regulars, still get to work on time, despite this morning's traffic.

3. If I receive a benefit, or have the opportunity to receive a benefit, and this benefit or opportunity is derived at least in part from others, not I, denying another that benefit or opportunity, am I responsible for that person being denied that benefit or that opportunity?

Again, not your responsibility, right? There may be some injustice here, but it's one you may not even be aware of, much less one you have brought about through your own actions.

What if the bus driver does tell you what he's doing?

4. If I receive a benefit, or have the opportunity to receive a benefit, and this benefit or opportunity is derived at least in part from others, not I, denying another that benefit or opportunity, but with my knowledge and consent, am I responsible for that person being denied that benefit or that opportunity?

That's different, isn't it? You're not the bus driver, and it's not your decision; it's possible the bus driver is so settled in his choice that he wouldn't even listen if you tried to talk him into waiting until the scheduled departure time. Who knows?

But does whatever responsibility you have here derive from the benefit you are to receive? Isn't this just a matter of knowingly allowing injustice? Imagine an old-timer, waiting for a different bus, noticing the driver closing the doors and getting ready to pull out. He might rap on the door with his cane and say, "Hey! You're not supposed to leave for two more minutes!" Are you in a different position just because you, unlike the bystander, will benefit from the driver's unjust action? Even if that action is undertaken specifically to benefit you?

Supposing everyone aware of an injustice has at least some duty to oppose it, do you have a greater duty if you happen to benefit from that injustice?

Consider the range of action available to you and the bystander: the old man can complain, but will likely be ignored; you could demand to be let off the bus, thus mooting the driver's intention to grant you a benefit at the (potential) cost to another. By knowingly accepting the benefit, you do something no bystander does, and you endorse the driver's decision.

If that analysis is right, your duty does not derive from your receiving a benefit, but the form it takes, what specific actions you might be obligated to undertake, might.

I haven't addressed whether you are in fact obligated to do more than a bystander, but it seems clear that you can, so there is at least a question here raised for the beneficiary of injustice that is not raised for everyone.

Very valuable points, thank you.



That's pretty funny, and I'm not going to go anywhere the issues raised in that story.

I noted the lack of presence of a black voice, or of a disabled voice, or of a gay voice. — Banno

For the first at least -- don't remember reading anything about the others -- this is a thing with philosophy as an academic discipline isn't it? I recall seeing numbers that philosophy departments are even more male and more white than other academic disciplines, even than other academic disciplines (like some of the hard sciences) that have widely publicized and discussed disparities. (The whole "girls aren't good at math" thing.) Philosophy departments are off the scale.

Now, I also recall stumbling onto a website where women philosophy students presented horror stories of the hostility they faced, the direct unabashed harassment, that led them to flee the field. I'm not familiar with anything similar for people of color, but it wouldn't surprise me.

But on top of direct discrimination, another explanation occurred to me: bright young intellectuals of color (etc.) have probably been choosing other fields -- mostly in the social sciences I'm guessing -- where work on race and gender is somewhat more mainstream, and where they see lots of work on those issues that excites them and they want to be part of. I have no data on this -- it's a "just so story".

And that leaves philosophy departments mostly to students not as focused on race and gender issues. And one reason to be less focused on race and gender issues is because you can be. The everyday way of describing that sort of situation is to say that you have the "luxury" to spend your time thinking about epistemology and metaphysics because you are not constantly forced by your social interactions to be aware of your race and your gender.

(( This ended up very long -- apologies. ))

Having pressed that distinction I'm going to muddy the waters a bit. Quite a bit.

There's a certain way of speaking about sentences I find quite natural but have been agonizing over in my contributions to this thread. (I also find it a little surprising that no one has called me on it -- if tgw were still here, I think he would have.)

I have described the Liar as purporting to predicate falsity of itself but failing to. I posted comments along those lines several times, and each time I had to decide whether to bother about the little pedant on my shoulder chastising me: 'Sentences do not attempt, do not purport, and so on; a speaker uttering the sentence with assertoric force would be attempting or purporting, and so on.' This is not a minor quibble: Austin, for instance, claimed that it is the historical stating of a sentence -- the speech act which ordinary usage might pick out with words like "He asserts that ..." or "She is claiming that ..." -- which is true or false, not the sentence itself, and certainly not the meaning of the sentence.

Even if Austin's view strikes you, as I think it does most, as wrong, there is some appeal to the idea that a sentence can only be true or false relative to a particular occasion of (perhaps hypothetical) utterance, since what a sentence means, if it is not a tautology, is in quite obvious ways dependent to some degree or other upon those circumstances (of time, place, environment, and of course language), and for sentences involving indexicals or anaphora, as the Liar does, that degree might be considerable. But situation semantics is not my interest in this little post.

A natural thought is that, while it is the sentence itself that is the truth-bearer, we take asserting that sentence as a sort of prerequisite for the assertibility of judgments of truth and falsity. Thus, in telling a story, or reading aloud, or going over a witness's statement, we are not taken to have made an assertion, to have ourselves made any claim to truth, and so in turn the audience is not asked or expected to endorse what we say or not. Insofar as the speaker makes no claim, the audience is not asked or expected to either. Except when they are: you might repeat another's claim, neither explicitly giving nor withholding your endorsement, but to submit it to your audience's judgment. But then we have the original speaker's claim on the table, if not yours. Inverted commas may remove the assumption that the speaker is making an assertion, but leave intact the assumption that the original speaker was. -- But that's all on the side of assertibility, and it still seems clear that whether invited to or not, the hearer of an indicative sentence is always at liberty to judge it true or false; it's just that their judgment may be inappropriate or inconsequential.

And I'm finally getting to the point I actually want to raise: there is a way of talking about sentences that takes the sentence itself as its own speaker. 'What does this sentence here say?' 'What is question no. 3 asking for?' 'This paragraph claims just the opposite.' 'The sign says you have to wait here.' 'The instructions tell you what to do if it doesn't work.' There's even pleonastic speech:

As I went walking I saw a sign there
And on the sign it said "No Trespassing."
But on the other side it didn't say nothing,
That side was made for you and me. — Woody Guthrie

We can take all of this as just a casual way of talking to be analysed away: that to describe a sentence as "saying" something is just to say that it means what a speaker would mean if they spoke that sentence -- a kind of metonymy, in which we attribute to the sentence an intentionality that properly only belongs to the (perhaps hypothetical) speaker, as if the sentence "borrows" its apparent capacity to mean something from its (perhaps hypothetical) speaker, when in truth it's just a sound or a mark, an inert object.

But if we're also going to distinguish, as it seems we very often need to, between sentence-meaning and speaker-meaning -- between "what the words say" and what the speaker "meant by saying those words" -- we might begin to see the point of imagining the "borrowing" going the other way: when we mean something by saying some words, perhaps it is we as speakers who are borrowing the capacity of words to mean something, a capacity which we lack not being signs or symbols but persons. (We certainly produce signs and symbols, but if they have meaning, is it because we imbue them with what we mean, or do we produce them because they already have meaning? Is what we mean the same kind of thing?) There would be some sense, then, to the widespread persistence of idioms which treat sentences as their own speakers, despite everything else which tells us that this is plainly false.

Which brings us back around to the problem of semantic content and assertion. There is a sense in which we naturally read indicative sentences as asserting themselves. (Frege's original version of the Begriffsschrift, if I recall correctly, had a "judgment-stroke", a symbol to indicate that an expression was being asserted, but later versions of the predicate calculus dropped it as unnecessary -- assertion is taken as built-in.) There is a natural reading of the Liar as saying that it's false, "saying" in some "full blooded" sense, asserting its falsity just as much as we would be if we sentient speakers were to assert, 'The sentence 'This sentence is false' is false.'

Bare unspoken sentences that implicitly assert themselves are quite handy for doing logic, of course. It's practically the whole point, to divorce what is said from the person who happens to be saying it; except when you can't, because of indexicals and anaphora, for instance, and then you need quite a bit more machinery than you get from Frege to start making sense again. But there is another point to looking at indicative sentences this way: an assertion is a claim to truth. Who is to sit in judgment of that claim? The speaker is supposed, or assumed, to have already judged a sentence true, so if anyone is to judge the claim, it will have to be someone else; as the speaker, you have already cast your vote. What would be the point of you voting again, by endorsing your own claim? If you tried to pass off your vote in favor of the claim as separate from it, as an additional independent vote, you would be doing something illegitimate. Like everyone else, you get one vote, not two. Thus it is when a sentence makes semantic claims about itself. Sentences like 'This sentence is meaningful/meaningless' or 'This sentence is true/false' appear to be doing something which may be impossible -- cf. that a picture is (or isn't) an accurate representation of something cannot be part of that picture -- but I for one have a strong sense that it is at least illegitimate. The Liar has already cast the vote that all indicative sentences cast for their own truth; it does not get an extra vote to declare itself false as well.

Sure, something like that, and that would be the semantic content. "Proposition" is probably mostly used to pick up content + assertoric force, but there's no need to assume or to accept the ambiguity if we can just say so in so many words. And the point, again, is the minimal one that truth does seem to have something to do with assertion. Just what exactly, I'm incapable of saying.

I only mean that we might want a more, let's say, "neutral" way of describing the semantic content of a statement, so that we can bring out the relationships between

• The cat is on the mat.
• Is the cat on the mat?
• Would that the cat were on the mat!
• On the mat, cat!

and so on. The content of these is, if not quite identical in every case, closely related. A state of the cat being on the mat is claimed to hold, is asked about, is wished for, is demanded, and so on. We comfortably assign meaning to questions, commands, and so on, but truth and falsity only to assertions, that is, to claims that said state is realized in the world.

(There's clearly some close connection between grammatical mood and force, but it's not absolute, since you can, for instance, quite readily ask a question -- speak with interrogative force -- using a sentence in the indicative mood. Think of a detective going over a witness's statement:
D: 'And at that point you saw the man carrying a small ostrich.'
W: 'That's right.'
D: 'Did he see you?'
W: 'No, I don't think so. He was having some trouble with the ostrich.'
The detective is not asserting that the witness saw a man carrying a small ostrich, but asking the witness to confirm that the detective has understood them correctly.)

Even taking "proposition" as a term of art, it's not at all clear that this is what we ascribe truth to. Some concept of force, and in particular assertoric force, send seems to be required.

others may not be so satisfied, though — Janus

Yeah that would be me. For instance, I'm not convinced that '... is true' is a predicate at all, so the scheme I presented there is only a nod toward what's really happening. Lots to think about.

Thanks for indulging my questions -- I hope it's also of value to you to formulate your views for us to read. (I have some conflicting allegiances, so it is indeed helpful to get another's perspective.)

if we just ignore its truth claim in the first instance, seeing that it refers to no possible state of affairs which could make it true or false; then we simply step aside and the whole absurd logical machinery rolls past without touching us. — Janus

This is next door to the view I've come to.

Certainly the Liar appears, or attempts, or purports to predicate falsehood of itself. But there is no way for it to predicate falsehood of itself without also predicating truth of itself -- an instance of predicating Fx and ~Fx at the same time in the same sense. Not only is that a contradiction -- which just leads us back around the loop if we're only concerned with truth value -- it's just not predication. So I think we view the Liar as infelicitous, a misfire, an attempt at predication that fails.

I keep thinking that the heavy logico-semantic approaches take the Liar at its word -- that because it purports to have predicated falsehood of itself, that's what it has done.

That leaves lots to think about, because this way of looking at it doesn't exactly explain the Liar -- on this view, explaining exactly how and why it fails to say what it's trying to. It can't be said -- and I'd like a cleaner way of saying that too -- so we really already know that it's going to fail, but there are different ways of failing to do something impossible, and I'd like a clearer view of what happens here.

You've addressed this sort of question at length, but doesn't this strike you as an odd thing to say:

Far more is known in 2007 about truth than was known in 1957 — Williamson

I don't think my eyebrows would have shot up if he had said, 'Far more is known in 2007 about modeling truth in certain widely used formal systems than was known in 1957.'

After all, here we are discussing a book published five or six years after that pronouncement, which proposes that the concept of truth Williamson refers to is inconsistent and ought to be scrapped.

That needn't give one pause, buy can we say there is more to philosophy being a science than philosophers proceeding as if it is? Is there a pudding you could point to in which we would find the proof?

These glimpses into your views of philosophy -- or at least glimpses of how many contemporary academic philosophers view their work, perhaps you among them -- are very helpful.

If philosophy is to be not just a sort of maternity ward for the sciences, and not their handmaiden, but itself a science (if not the queen), then it's the science of -- ? Concepts?

I thought I was clear that the problem has nothing to do with self reference. Rather is because the sentence is incoherent - it makes no sense. — EricH

But it is not like the examples you give of nonsense.

"... is not true" is just the sort of thing we say about sentences, and it is here said, with the usual meaning, about a sentence. If it doesn't make sense in this case, why not?

I wonder if you could clarify something for me: when you talk about getting rid of Cut and Contraction, is the idea that we can build useful formal systems (good enough for mathematics) that are not prey to the Liar -- though natural languages may have to struggle on without relief -- or is it that the sequent calculus, say, or some other system, represents the system that underlies the informal* reasoning we do in natural languages? (I associate -- loosely and perhaps incorrectly! -- the first view with Frege and the second with Montague.)

Are we to say, 'If only Epimenides (and everyone since) hadn't used Cut and Contraction!' or 'At least we don't have to worry about that in our new and cleaner system'?


* Perhaps "unformalized" is better -- the whole point is that such reasoning may have an underlying system we would consider strongly analogous to the formal systems we develop.

The prosentential theory also throws out 'This sentence is true', I believe, on the grounds that this is only purported anaphora; being your own antecedent, you cannot inherit your content from anywhere, so you have no content.

My little thing sees them differently. The argument is more or less:

If a sentence could assert its own falsehood,
and if S were such a sentence,
then there would be no difference between affirming and denying S,
therefore there would be no difference between S asserting its own falsehood and not,
therefore S can only purport to assert its own falsehood,
therefore no sentence can assert its own falsehood.

I find the no-content approach pretty persuasive, but I like that this approach recognizes that the mess we're in with 'I'm false' is different from whatever is odd about 'I'm true.'

Here's roughly what I'm thinking at the moment.

The Liar purports to predicate falsehood of itself, but as asserting and denying the Liar come to the same thing this is no real predication at all, but only a sort of pretense.

If we force the Liar into the same sort of form Russell analysed, we get for the logical form a somewhat better result than we might have expected -- something like this:

There is a unique sentence that predicates falsehood of itself, and is false.

Better because, if we make the case that the Liar does not predicate but only purports to, then that description is indeed vacuous, and for the very good reason that just as we cannot consistently affirm or deny the Liar, neither can the Liar itself. If it admits it's not really predicating, we're done; if it lies to itself, and relies on that lie, it fails.

I'm still going round and round on this, but that's where I am at the moment.

ADDENDUM:

I was thinking of definite descriptions but I suppose you could do something like

(Li) is a member of the class of sentences that predicate falsehood of themselves, and (Li) is false.

Then you deny that this class has any members.

Either way, you end up claiming, as with the present king of France, that the sentence is false not because it's true but because no sentence actually does predicate falsehood of itself.

Which statement and which presupposition? — Banno

The idea would be something like this:

The Liar does not allow us to accept or reject it, and that's somewhat reminiscent of what goes wrong with

'The present king of France is bald.'

There are in fact two claims here (following Russell's analysis just for the moment to make the point); because of scope issues, we can end up, or seem to end up, denying the predication when what we want to deny is the existential claim that the there is one such individual who is the present king of France. Later work calls such implicit claims 'presuppositions'. (The usual criterion for A being a presupposition of B is that B and its negation both imply A.)

Now consider a claim like this:

'Your ideas are very tall.'

Agreement is wrong, and disagreement is wrong, but not because of anything like a vacuous singular term or a definite description, none of that. So what is wrong? In predicating 'tall' of your ideas, there is a presupposition -- or anyway, something like that -- that 'tall' could reasonably be applied or not to ideas. And this is what you want to deny -- not that this predication is, say, mistaken, that sadly your ideas are only of average height. What we need to deny is that 'tall' is even on the table for ideas.

Now the Liar.

The Liar predicates falsehood of itself. Thus the Liar presupposes (or something) that it is the sort of sentence that can be true or false. Not all can. The Liar certainly looks like one that can, no question. Does that turn out to be the case? If not, what we want to deny is not the Liar's predication, but the Liar's presupposition.

(Before this approach occurred to me, I was thinking about the Liar implicitly claiming that it is possible to be a member of the class of sentences that are true iff they are false, and that it is a member, and that this necessarily empty class has a member and is not empty. I might still end up liking that more, not sure. It's more machinery.)

What we need to say of the Liar is that it's not even wrong. And the way we get to do that is by taking away its claim to have predicated anything at all, by taking away the presuppositions upon which that predication is, well, predicated.

Here.