THE LIAR'S PARADOX (Epimenides's too!)

The Epimenides paradox goes something like this:

“Epimenides the Cretan says, ‘that all the Cretans are liars,’ but Epimenides is himself a Cretan; therefore he is himself a liar. But if he be a liar, what he says is untrue, and consequently the Cretans are veracious; but Epimenides is a Cretan, and therefore what he says is true; saying the Cretans are liars, Epimenides is himself a liar, and what he says is untrue. Thus we may go on alternately proving that Epimenides and the Cretans are truthful and untruthful.” Thomas Fowler, The Elements of Deductive Logic (1869)

 

Another formulation, the so-called Liar’s Paradox goes: ‘Everything I say is false.’ ‘I am lying.’ 

Do not get lost in the truth-functional contradictions implied by these statements. For when you set truth and falsity aside, these statements convey a surprising amount of information. For example, we establish the assumption that:

 

            (0.1) There is such a thing as a statement of the language.

(0.2) This is a well-formed statement of the language. {function; copula; predicate}

 

This is obvious. It is the basis of the game we are playing. But moreover, simply by attempting to decide its ambiguity, we affirm that:

 

            (1.1) Some statements have truth.

            (1.2) Some statements have falsity.

 

Then, looking at the paradox and acknowledging its essential contradiction, we conclude that:

 

            (1.3) Some statements have neither truth nor falsity, and thus

            (1.4) are undecidable to our linguistic understanding.

 

In a world where truth functions determine meaning:

 

            (2.1) There is more to information than mere MEANING.

 

What other information can we glean from this logical paradox (other than attempting to solve it by noting that just because the statement “everything I say is false” is false does not imply that everything else I say is true, or, as is the case with most philosophers, explaining it away by saying that we are applying truth values ambivalently in the language and the metalanguage)? We can ascertain data about the speaker Epimenides, or the so-called Liar (L), who makes these statements:

 

            (3.1) L can make certain well-formed statements of the language about himself.

 

Whether they are true or false matters not at this point to us. Thus,

 

            (3.2) L is not necessarily a reliable witness about himself.

 

And while we can make no inferences about L’s self-consciousness of the truth or falsity of his statements, we can certainly assert that:

 

            (3.3) L’s statement sows confusion.

 

For example, if we imagine a contradiction machine, a machine that can calculate statements logically, then such a paradoxical input statement will disable the machine.

Without any further information about his intentions, we cannot determine whether L actually is a liar or or is merely mistaken or whether he’s intentionally sowing confusing or merely playing a game or whether he’s bullshitting us or is merely confused.

 

Generally, though, our thinking and thus our understanding of reality and, what’s more, our understanding of who we are is necessarily limited by the language we use. And Epimenides’s paradox here points us to merely one facet of this limitation.

 

To ask the question of meaning, to ask what it all means, is to ask the wrong question. It is to voluntarily stop at the gates of the prison that constrains us: the prison of language.

Let's Talk about Bitcoin

What is Bitcoin? Well, if you're a coder you've probably read the 2008 eight-page 'Whitepaper' by someone calling themselves Satoshi Nakamoto here. There it is called a "Peer-to-Peer Electronic Cash System," and that is a clear and precise description. If you haven't read the paper, you should. It is an elegant schema laying out a proposal for an internet of money that avoids the controls of both the private and public banking and monetary systems. If, for example, I am somewhere in the Amazon basin and you are in Outer Mongolia and I know your bitcoin address, I should be able to transfer bitcoin to you (or, at least, transfer to you the permission to use a certain segment of bitcoin I happen to control at the moment) almost instantaneously—without having to go through multiple steps involving various banking systems and clearinghouses, each of which takes an inordinate amount of time and energy and, importantly, an intermediary cut.

The basis of bitcoin lies not in any underlying value or commodity like gold or silver reserves or sow belly futures or even the "full faith and credit" of some government but in mathematical logic. Transactions are bundled together, permanently encrypted or "hashed", and memorialized into a publicly available 256-bit block. Each subsequent block includes within it the hash of the previous block, thus bootstrapping a functionally unalterable chain, i.e., a blockchain. Ultimately, the blockchain is a database or ledger of every electronic transaction. [NB. Clever greedy folks have been trying to hack the math and the code and chip away at the blockchain for over a decade now, and it seems to be holding. So far.]

There are tons of issues with bitcoin that we've all read about. Ethically, all bitcoin transactions are anonymous thus inviting criminality and international laundering beyond the controls of governmental authorities. Politically, of course, this is probably the major issue for the powers that be. Financially, volatility due to bitcoin's lack of underlying "real world" or tangible value—linked to some commodity or so-called fiat currency—makes it a potentially risky investment. Functionally, the irreversibility of transactions can create problems where one party is preying fraudulently on another unsuspecting party. Further, the proliferation of other types of cryptocurrency creates confusion for those not actively involved in the space. Likewise, practically, the necessity of understanding and implementing appropriate digital security measures is a significant barrier to entry for many. And physically, the amount of energy required to digitize the monetary system is daunting. [NB. Cleverer folks than me are working on systematic ways to deal with these and other issues.]

Notwithstanding, there is something profoundly interesting about bitcoin. (And here, I talk only about bitcoin and its blockchain.) First, it stands the current monetary system on its head: trust resides in the certainty of each and every individual transaction instead of in the financial system—Fort Knox, Wall Street, Federal Reserve, government central banks, the IMF, the World Bank, etc. (I only need mention 2008, the year Nakamoto's Whitepaper appeared, to emphasize the importance of this.) Each bitcoin transaction, no matter how large or small, is considered a contract. And the only criterion for the transaction to be memorialized to the blockchain is the validity of that contract as determined by a fixed, public set of protocols. A transaction either satisfies the protocols and is valid, or it doesn't and isn't. Bitcoin democratizes trust. Or, if you prefer, de-colonizes or de-imperializes the international monetary system. Each individual is his or her own bank. Bitcoin empowers individual smart phones to do everything a Citibank or a financial clearing house does. Instantaneously and without intermediation.

Second, and this is what I find most interesting (and promising), ultimately bitcoin seeks to monetize information. It's right there in the name: BIT + COIN. According to Wikipedia, "[a] bit (short for binary digit) is the smallest unit of data in a computer. A bit has a single binary value, either 0 or 1." The world is witnessing an explosion of digitized data as we move from the Googlized web of text searches and cat videos to the internet of things and 5G where, e.g., dumb appliances communicate with each other and with the energy systems that power them without human intervention. It is almost impossible to describe how vast these systems of information transfer are becoming, from driverless automobiles to smart refrigerators, from always-broadcasting, always-interfacing social media to interoperable energy grids, from online voting systems to Mars colonization. And the list goes on. Yet, each bit of data transfer requires a measurable amount of energy to execute. Theoretically, if you can put a price on the energy required for the transfer of a single bit of information—no matter how minuscule the monetary increment—you are creating a potential system of wealth that is, at least for me, incalculable. And this, it seems to me, is bitcoin's great promise.

What's interesting about this is that though the systems of digitial data transfer will proliferate exponentially over time in ways we cannot begin to imagine, there is only ever going to be a fixed amount of bitcoin. For complicated mathematical reasons, there can only exist 21,000,000 bitcoins. That's it. And the last of these will not be mined until sometime around 2140. (Practically, a number of these have been or will be lost due to poor digital hygiene, but that's beside the point.) Twenty-one million is woefully inadequate—by orders of magnitude—to account for each bit of information involved in all these digital transactions, thus Bitcoin has been subdivided into units called Satoshis. Each Satoshi is equal to one hundred millionth of a single bitcoin (0.00000001 BTC). And as a corollary, there will only ever exist 21 quadrillion Satoshis.

The idea here is that instead of an inflationary currency, one which like our own continually prints more money (which devalues and discourages saving: think about the interest you are currently getting on your savings account), bitcoin is deflationary: it's value will only increase as its applications expand because there can never be more bitcoins. This encourages saving and speculation but may disincentivize spending and transactions. Again, bitcoin has no inherent value; its value is entirely transactional, that is to say, its agreed upon value at the time of transaction. Recall that the first "real world" bitcoin transaction was 10,000 bitcoins for two pizzas. Nowadays, such a transaction would be measured in thousandths of one bitcoin. Due to its essentially transactional nature, bitcoin will continue to have, for good or ill, a relativistic and unstable valuation.

The amount of energy required not only to hash and mine each and every transaction (a problem the Lightning network seeks to address by ledgering many transactions off-chain) but to link a monetary value to each and every bit of information transferred would seem to be astronomical, and some amount of abstraction is inevitable. Beyond buying pizzas or clothing or cars or even houses, one can imagine that a user might choose to pay a Satoshi or two to like a Tweet or put a smiley emoji on a Facebook or Instagram post (with the cash going directly to the original poster) rather than having their online personal data surreptitiously mined and sold by social media advertising corporations. Similarly, one can imagine YouTube paying users a few Satoshis for each second they watch an ad or users paying Satoshis per second of streaming music or video. These are literally the simplest sorts of internet transactions imaginable. Or think about putting a precise cost on the amount of energy (down, say, to the milliwatt) a smart refrigerator or HVAC system uses or the exact number of bits of data required to manage a city full of self-driving Übers. The possibility of increasingly precise and timely measurements, i.e., costing, of energy usage and data processing is not negligible. And it's easy to imagine that much of the accounting for these sorts of things could be automated and bottom-lined both to reduce fees and expedite transactions. But the question remains whether the cost of that energy provides sufficient value to make its ultimate, universal application worthwhile. The answer to that question will impact the ultimate viability of bitcoin.

Bitcoin seems to put the lie to the idealism of the early internet attributed to Stewart Brand, to wit: "Information wants to be free." That statement seems as hopelessly naive today as the 'Peace, Love, and Rock 'n' Roll' hippie movement of the Sixties. Information transmittal is rapidly being automated. If it can be automated, it can be commoditized. And if it can be commoditized, it will be monetized. Down to the very bit. This feels like an economic inevitability—certainly in a capitalistic economy, something I don't foresee changing any time soon. And it's not difficult to envision bitcoin as a globalizing force in the current, increasingly fractious, nationalistic mood of the world.

I'll leave off this discussion with a question for mathematicians, physicists, coders, and engineers smarter than me to resolve. Bitcoin is specifically tied to electronics, that is to say binary computing based on base two 0's and 1's. Bits. New and more powerful computing that goes a level below electrons and bits is emerging rapidly though: quantum computing and DNA computing, to name two such. A hundred or so years from now, when the last bitcoin is scheduled to be mined, one wonders whether an economy based on bits and electrons will still be viable. Whether bitcoin might be replaced by, I don't know, a self-ledgering Qubitcoin (NB. Something by that name apparently already exists; I have no idea what it is or does.) or self-replicating RNAcoin is an open question. [Comments welcome.]

Notwithstanding, I believe there's a lot of potential in this whole blockchain paradigm, and bitcoin seems poised best to capitalize on it at the present moment and for the foreseeable future.

[Disclaimer: This is one man's opinion. I'm just a blogger. Nothing herein should be construed either as legal advice or financial investing advice. Bitcoin and cryptocurrency investing is extremely risky in the current climate, and should be undertaken cautiously and with the advice of a trusted professional investment advisor, i.e., not me!]

Frameworks, Pt. 5

To recap Part 3, Donald Trump's tactical approach to consolidating and energizing his base is to manufacture outrage. In Part 4, we discussed the contrasting strategic approach of the Hillary Clinton campaign. How, then, is Hillary Clinton attempting to carry out her 'all things to all people' strategy?

Where Trump needs to build toward an electoral majority from a solid base on the extreme right wing, Clinton needs to stake out a broad segment of the general electorate from a center-left position. To do this, her campaign is seeking to expand her coalition by moving both leftward toward the Sanders base of the Democratic party and allied independents and rightward toward the middle in order to capture a broad majority.

As we've seen, Trump's is a bit of a blunderbuss maneuver—earned media, tweets, gigantic rallies (all empowered by his ratings manipulating outrageous "bullshit"). Clinton's tactical approach is the tried-and-true use of data-driven messaging, or micro-targeting.

If the Clinton campaign wants to appeal to a certain demographic that relies heavily on social media (Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Snapchat, &c.) they employ celebrities and commenters the users of these platforms like/follow/&c. To appeal to serious policy types, she and her influential surrogates publish policy papers and statements in important journals and magazines and newspaper editorial pages. To target informed members of the boomer generation who get most of their information from cable television, her campaign distributes talking points and deploys winsome, attractive talkers to significant programs and talk shows. To appeal to traditional Democrats, the campaign brings out party bigwigs to rallies, fund-raisers, television and radio programs to extol her policies and virtues. She holds private fund-raisers for wealthy donors. She gives talks to a wide range of interest groups. She holds campaign rallies in key precincts and swing districts (something the Trump campaign has yet to master!). Moreover, the campaign and its allies are using traditional, professionally-created ads to reach specific low-information populations through the television and radio programming they consume. And, lastly, the campaign is deploying many professionals and many more volunteers to battleground areas they believe they can win in order to get out the vote—the so-called ground game.

This is the traditional data-driven path to electoral victory we are used to seeing in U.S. elections. It is expensive and involves an enormous amount of energy and resources. It also requires precise data and precision targeting of resources. The Clinton campaign has drawn on and updated Obama's wildly and unexpectedly successful 2008 campaign playbook. It is a very professional operation which seems to have learned key lessons from it previous mistakes and failures.

The essential message of the campaign, as we've indicated, is that Hillary Clinton has the knowledge, experience, and competence required for the job of the presidency. Again, in contrast to Trump's wildly outlandish and, frankly, amateurish claims, her message—agree or disagree—is precise, consistent, and focused.

She has been the wife of a President, a U.S. Senator, and the Secretary of State—all of which count as relevant experiences. It is certainly appropriate to take exception to any of her specific policy proposals or to debate the merits of her specific prior actions or performance in government or out (and that's not what this series of posts is about). Only one of those prior roles, however, specifically and directly relates to her 'all things to all people' strategic claim: her experience as Senator. And there are really only two data points worth considering in this regard.

Clinton was first elected Senator from the State of New York in 2000 by a 55-43% vote. She served for 6 years and ran for re-election in 2006, winning by a 67-31% electoral landslide. That's an enormous 12% increase in popularity after serving for 6 years, with a population sample size of 19 million and during which time New York had a Republican Governor, George Pataki (1995-2005).

Can she be all things to all people? No. But she proved to the people of New York that she could increase her popularity and outreach to a very broad spectrum of a diverse electorate.

The Clinton organization knows who the targets of her campaign should be, and they are aggressively messaging them. They seem to be willing to write off the 10% or so of the Bernie Sanders supporters who will never vote for her in order to appeal to the broad moderate middle of the electorate. They know, too, they can never win over the staunch, near-extremist base of support for Donald Trump. But between those two constituencies there is a lot of room to maneuver, and that's where they've chosen to set their sites and target their message.

Frameworks, Pt. 4

[Quick reminder: in this first major section of this on-going Frameworks essay, we are attempting to analyze the strategies of the two major presidential campaigns. This is not an issue-by-issue policy examination or critique; it's more in the nature of a look at the animating, or structural, philosophies behind whatever specific rhetoric and policy provisions they have and will put forth.]

As we've seen with in Pt. 2 and Pt. 3, Trump and the GOP are using controversy and even fractious conflict to manufacture outrage in the belief it will be sufficient to drive an expanded and newly energized base to the polls in November.

The Democrats and Hillary Clinton are pursuing a very different strategy. At their convention, they trotted out a dizzyingly diverse array of political star power—the sorts of cabinet members, Governors, Senators, Representatives, and local and regional politicians that were noticeably missing from the Republican convention. They appealed to a broad range of constituencies. Where Trump and the GOP are directing their efforts specifically to a circumscribed base, Clinton's approach is more of an "all things to all people" approach.

The Democrats reached out to the passionately committed supporters of Sen. Bernie Sanders' insurgency campaign as well as to the national security professional class. They spotlighted Black Lives Matter as well as police unions. They specifically appealed to various individual identity interest groups: LGBTQ people, African-Americans, Latinos, Arab-Americans, Jews, Asian-Americans, Native Americans, among others. They actively sought the votes of working and middle class folks as well as billionaire donors—labor, management, and owners. They even courted moderate Republicans!

Their hope is to expand their coalition of constituencies rather than constrict their focus to their base. Their convention was a clamorous and somewhat racous cacophany of competing interest groups vying for attention. It used a grand spectacle replete with a mixture of unabashed patriotism and specific policy proposals to attempt to ensure everyone who wanted to be was heard on the issues that matter to them. If the Republicans sought to move toward a more right-wing extremism, the Democrats sought to expand from the middle outward in both directions.

Where the GOP convention offered a vision of a crumbling, humiliated America, the Democratic convention proclaimed that America was once again on the rise—a great nation that will only get greater. The overriding theme had to do with the progress the country has made since President Obama took office after the disastrous Republican presidency of George W. Bush in the midst of the deepest and most serious recession since the 1930's and two seemingly interminable quagmire wars while admitting that there was more work to be done, more progress to be made.

Where Trump is selling outrage in the face of despair, Clinton is selling steady progress and calm continuity. Clinton's campaign is more policy- and performance-driven. She is running on her resume, her knowledge, and her competence. She claims that, by virtue of her vast experience in government, she is ready to hit the ground running on day one. She offers a smorgasbord of well-developed and well-thought-out and vetted policies suggested by a broad range of constituencies. And she knows how to work the levers of power to accomplish those aims.

The Democratic convention also offered a direct and precise emotional counterbalance to the Republican's Trumpfest. If Trump projected an image of the pessimistic, stern, domineering, even distant father who always knows what's best for his dependents but who assures them he is there to defend them, Clinton projected an image of the compassionate, empathic grandmotherly figure standing ready with open arms to soothe the emotional scars and welcome and protect the child from the intemperate outrages of the abusive father. "Love Trumps Hate," as the slogan goes.

[This may sound like simplistic psychobabble, but make no mistake about it: infantilizing the electorate is always a part of both political conventions' emotional subtext. George Lakoff's brilliant essay "Understanding Trump" explains why this so: "What do social issues and the politics have to do with the family? We are first governed in our families, and so we grow up understanding governing institutions in terms of the governing systems of families." This is the rhetorical frame Republicans are particularly good at exploiting, he asserts, and that Democrats perennially fail at. It is my hope that this series of posts will explain, at least in part from a philosophical point of view, why this is necessarily the case and why that is not necessarily a bad thing.]

If the Democrats' strategy works, it could be a game-changer, signalling a new political landscape balance and reversing what has been the standard demographic trends since the Reagan era.

Next: How does Hillary Clinton hope to carry out this strategy?

Frameworks, Pt. 3

Picking up where we left off Part 2, we were trying to think through what I take to be the best case for Donald Trump—or at least the best case the GOP and Trump are trying to make for his candidacy. (Note: Part 1 of this series can be found here.)

Recall: Trump's strategy involves expanding, solidifying, and energizing what he considers to be his base and getting them to turn out to vote in hopefully unprecedented numbers come November.

How does Donald Trump hope to win? By selling outrage.

In practically every single campaign rally or press release or campaign statement or personal tweet, Trump says or does something that would in any other year be deemed outrageous, and possibly disqualifying, in a presidential candidate. It's almost impossible to keep up with his outrages. It's all very entertaining. There has never been a candidate quite like him.

He uses vague adjectives—"huge", "great", "bad", "the best", etc. He insults people—both politicians and celebrities and otherwise. He draws attention to protestors, demeans them, and even encourages his followers to boo them (or worse). He attacks the media covering his spectacles. He draws conclusions from demonstrably false assumptions. He recirculates rumors and gossip. He makes vague, veiled implications that can lead sympathizers to one conclusion about what he believes and critics to an entirely different inference (often referred to as 'dog-whistle' politics). He misleads and lies while at the same time, and often in the very next sentence, telling accepted truths and bromides that confirm the assumptions of prejudices of his followers. He is quite deft at these tactics.

And, I would submit, these are not gaffes. It doesn't matter whether what he says is true or false. You can keep your fact-checkers; for by the time they've broken down whatever he has said most recently and shown it to be false or misleading, he has moved on to another statement. Facts do not matter to Donald Trump. What matters is the outrage and controversy whatever he says or does creates. It is a carefully crafted marketing strategy, one modeled on a professional wrestling/reality TV model. Let me elaborate.

In my Twitter account back on July 31, I ran the following quote from the monogram called "On Bullshit" by moral philosopher Harry Frankfort:

What bullshit essentially misrepresents is neither the state of affairs to which it refers nor the beliefs of the speaker concerning that state of affairs. Those are what lies misrepresent, by virtue of being false. Since bullshit need not be false, it differs from lies in its misrepresentational intent. The bullshitter may not deceive us, or even intend to do so, either about the facts or about what he takes the facts to be. What he does necessarily attempt to deceive us about is his enterprise. His only indispensably distinctive characteristic is that in a certain way he misrepresents what he is up to.

This is the crux of the distinction between him and the liar. Both he and the liar represent themselves falsely as endeavoring to communicat the truth. The success of each depends upon deceiving us about that. But the fact about himself that the liar hides is that he is attempting to lead us away from a correct apprehension of reality; we are not to know that he wants us to believe something he supposes to be false. The fact about himself that the bullshitter hides, on the other hand, is that the truth-values of his statements are of no central interest to him; what we are not to understand is that his intention is neither to report the truth nor to conceal it. This does not mean that his speech is anarchically impulsive, but that the motive guiding and controlling it is unconcerned with how the things about which he speaks truly are.

It is impossible for someone to lie unless he thinks he knows the truth. Producing bullshit requires no such conviction. A person who lies is thereby resonding to the truth, and he is to that extent respectful of it. When an honest man speaks, he says only what he believes to be true; and for the liar, it is correspondingly indispensable that he considers his statements to be false. For the bullshitter, however, all these bets are off; he is neither on the side of the true nor on the side of the false. His eye is not on the facts at all, as the eyes of the honest man and of the liar are, except insofar as they may be pertinent to his interest in getting away with what he says. He does not care whether the things he says describe reality correctly. He just picks them out, or makes them up, to suit his purpose.

Trump generates conflicts and controversies in his public appearances and statements because he knows they will draw attention to him. That is his true enterprise. It brings free television network coverage and large crowds to his rallies. Audiences attend and tune in in the hopes of being entertained in much the same way TV audiences and stadium crowds are entertained by fake, highly produced wrestling matches.

[N.B.: This is a very sly and savvy move on Trump's part because it plays into the structural constraints of corporate news broadcasting. The corporations who own the 24-hour cable news networks have a legal, institutional duty to make a profit for their owners and shareholders. In fact, it is singularly their principal duty. The way their news operations make money is by generating ad revenue. The costs of ads are determined by ratings in competition with their rival networks. Trump coverage—protestors at his rallies, outrageous statements, name-calling, etc.—brings ratings, drives up ad costs, and therefore increases their profits. It's often referred to as "earned media"—a ridiculous euphemism. It's a lovely synergy Trump knows how to take full advantage of—and does!]

So, Trump's outrages generate eyeballs on TV and put butts in the seats at his rallies. Butts in the seats and eyeballs mean ratings and popularity. And popularity and ratings bring further coverage and the chance of even higher ratings and greater popularity. The equation here is a simple one, really: Trump believes he can translate these TV ratings and large crowds into votes on election day.

Don't believe me? Take a look at this quote from Trump's interview on This Week with George Stephanopoulos where he makes this assumption explicit:

Look, I think the Republican convention was great or I wouldn't have had the bounce that I had. As you said, I had 3 million people more than she [Hillary Clinton] had on the final night. She had a Thursday, I had a Thursday, she had a speech, I had a speech, I had 3 million people more than she did. And I had a lot of people. There were a lot of people. I think I had 30 million. They had 27 million. I think we're going to do very well in this election.

"My speech had more viewers, therefore we are going to do very well in this election." Could Trump's assumption be spelled out any more clearly than that? That's the key metric animating his entire enterprise. [It is an assumption, however, that remains to be borne out in practice. For example, Mitt Romney and his followers made the same assumption four years ago to disastrous effect, as did John Kerry before him.]

Fearful of a world spiralling out of control? Angry at others who you feel are preventing you from achieving the American dream? Feeling humiliated both personally and by an America in decline abroad—whether in trade, sport, or war? Outraged by a corrupt Establishment—whether it's Obama and Crooked Hillary or Jeb and Lyin' Ted? Angry at the media for their complicity in this decline? Feel like this country needs a strong man who can fix all these problems? Well, frankly, you have bought the outrage Donald Trump and the GOP are trying to sell. You have been well and truly played by a consummate bullshit artist with designs on becoming one of the most powerful men in the world. And I've just shown you the powerful strategy he's employing to achieve it.

Next, Hillary.

Frameworks, Pt. 2

Assumptions aside, let's look at the strategies suggested by the two parties' conventions and how the candidates are implementing these essential orientations. Starting with Trump and the GOP.

The Republican convention made clear that their strategy this year is to lock down their electoral base, stir them up, and hope they come out to vote in unprecedented numbers. They painted what has been described as a dystopian vision of America, one besieged by terror abroad and chaos and disorder at home, one where economic rot and ruin hamper aspirations, one where government corruption is rampant and pernicious, one where a humiliated America projects weakness around the world in both trade and military affairs.

Donald Trump claims he "alone can fix it" as if by force of personality. He is charismatic and projects a swaggering attitude. Calls himself a winner. Asserts he is stronger and better than any of his rivals. Claims to be a "counter puncher": he doesn't start fights, but he knows how to end them.

In my view, this is precisely what his base (and at least a plurality of the Republican base) wants in its candidate. It is less his principles and policies and knowledge of the issues—or, I would submit, his bleak world view—and more an attitude of superiority and a politics of dominance they want from their candidate. This is slightly different from the traditional, principled conservative Republican approach—but only in degree, not kind. It substitutes charismatic force of personality for conservative principles, but is more concerned with the personal bona fides of the candidate than with whether that candidate's policies will address, much less solve, the problems confronting the country.

Trump projects the image of a wealthy businessman. He is handsome and charismatic. He lives a lavish lifestyle of fame and riches. He has his own jet plane. He is married to a former super model and has doting, beautiful, brilliant, devoted children. His largely male, largely disaffected base identifies with him though most can only dream of having these things.

Trump's partisans feel aggrieved, feel they too deserve this sort of lifestyle. But something is preventing them from attaining these things. And Trump aptly articulates a litany of potential scapegoats (Muslims, Mexicans, Immigrants, Politically Correct Liberals, Establishment Conservatives who have betrayed the base, etc.) to explain why they don't. They want a champion—a counter-puncher—to help them vanquish these bogey men that have put them down and knocked them out. The want Trump to help them reclaim their own personal swagger. And that is precisely what he promises. If Trump wins, America wins; and if America wins, they win. Trump alone is great; only Trump can make America great again; and when America regains its greatness so will his followers.

Trump wants to be seen as the anti-Establishment candidate. And he is without question a political outsider: he is an American businessman and reality television entertainer/celebrity who has never held political office. As the outsider, he is content to pick fights with Establishment figures even in his own party, including everyone from Jeb(!) Bush to Ted Cruz to Paul Ryan to John McCain to Mitt Romney. These feuds only enhance his cachet with his base.

But these intraparty spats are merely the preliminary bouts to his big confrontation with the ultimate Establishment figure: Hillary Clinton. Clinton, to Trump and his base, personally embodies all the evils in the system. By showing he can dominate the entrenched GOP bigshots, he hopes to show he can dominate Clinton and, by the projective principle of transference, dominate the system and, ultimately, the world on behalf of his disaffected followers.

[And, I would note, it is with this anti-Establishment, anti-Hillary appeal—a structural appeal, that is to say—that he specifically reaches out to supporters of Sen. Bernie Sanders, who lost a hard-fought, passionate insurgency campaign against Clinton. Apparently, Trump hopes Sanders' young, idealistic supporters will look past the vast substantive disconnect between the progressive things they want their 'revolution' to accomplish and the policies espoused by Trump and his GOP base and join Trump's anti-Establishment 'movement'.]

(End Part 2)

Frameworks, Pt. 1

Now that the fields have cleared, I want to try and take an objective look at the current U.S. presidential election. I will begin with an analysis of the two major parties, their candidates, and their campaign strategies. In subsequent posts, I will give my assessment of the race, that is to say my opinion. (N.B.: In this piece, I will try to steer away from actual policy discussion and focus strictly on the politics—the strategies and tactics—because I believe that a structural analysis can be especially telling this cycle.)

I begin with two observational assumptions about the two major parties. The Republican Party tends to want to nominate candidates it deems to be strong leaders. It chooses people and expects them to govern as they see fit—and in candid moments you might even catch party members using the term 'rule'. The GOP expects its candidates to adhere to conservative principles and views, and it entrusts them in office to act according to their own lights. It does not expect its elected representatives to pander slavishly to popular opinion or follow polls, but prefers them to hew to a partisan party line (see, e.g., the so-called Hastert rule).

The Democratic Party, on the other hand, expects its candidates to be sensitive to the desires of the people. Opinion polls and lobbying and opinion leaders are key aspects of this electoral pulse-taking. It wants its elected representatives to be willing to seek consensus among competing constituencies and, where appropriate, to seek compromise on issues in order to get things done.

The critical drawbacks of these two competing views are fairly obvious: Republicans tend toward a more authoritarian or bullying stance whereas Democrats are too easily seen as unprincipled, finger-to-the-wind sell-outs. Republicans, for the most part, expect their elected representatives to represent the interests and views of their base constituency and implement strictly partisan policies by whatever means; Democrats, more or less, expect their elected representatives to represent the majority of the electorate, and their policies tend to be geared toward implementing the greater good for the greatest number.

The parties are in no wise perfect exemplars of these approaches. These are pronounced, observable tendencies, however. Each party, I must assume, believes that its policies will better benefit the country as a whole—or at least their vision of what the country is. And, cynically, each most likely believes that its basic philosophy will result in electoral successes for its partisans.

[For a primer on the philosophical/ethical arguments underlying these two approaches, let me recommend Utilitarianism: For and Against by two brilliant 20th Century philosophers J.J.C. Smart and Bernard Williams. The shorthand synopsis locates the crux of the argument as lying between the competing claims of Consequentialism (For/Smart/Democrats) & Integrity (Against/Williams/Republicans).]

We can see this dynamic in practice this year in two key quotes from the respective convention victory speeches of the two major party candidates: Donald Trump's "I am your voice" and Hillary Clinton's "I hear you." Trump will act as he sees fit; Clinton will do what the majority wants.

(End Part 1)

World, Thing, Case, Is, The

"The world is all that is the case." Ludwig Wittgenstein, Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus.

With one deceptively simple sentence, a proposition really, Wittgenstein sets the course for much of Twentieth Century philosophy. What does he accomplish here? Let's take a look.

The form of Wittgenstein's proposition is this: {x is P}, where 'x' is 'the world', and 'P' is the entire set of things that are the case. Of the things that are the case, the world is all of them. In such a formulation, P is predicated of x. For there to be a world, there must first be at least one thing that is the case. And if we find something to be the case, then it is necessarily included in that world.

But what is the meaning of this statement? What sort of world does Wittgenstein envision here? What can we glean from an analysis of these eight single-syllable words? There's really nothing in this sentence that a rudimentary reader of the English language would have trouble reading. And at first face, upon reading it, most readers might very well think they understand it and move on to the next sentence.

Before moving on, it will pay to analyze this statement. What assumptions does it entail, what conclusions does it imply? We can learn quite a great deal about the young Wittgenstein's philosophy by taking this one proposition apart and, in the process, get a taste of how philosophers read and think about things.

You wouldn't know it from a cursory reading, but Wittgenstein essentially gives the game away with his very first word: 'the'. He doesn't say 'A world is all that is the case.' or 'One of many worlds...' He says 'THE world'. Implying there is one unitary reality which he then proceeds to name 'world'. There is A reality. One reality. Not many and not none. There is something out there which just is THE world. It is something around which philosophers, or at least readers of his treatise, can unify.

A world is a thing, and there is one and, by implication, only one of them. We shall have to read on to see how he defines and delimits this world, for this is the aim of the proposition. To wit: to indicate how, in philosophy at least, this 'world' can be formed. If there is a world (and Witttgenstein asserts there is so long as something is the case), it is comprised of the entirety of things that are the case. If something is indeed determined to be the case, everything that is the case therefore constitutes the world.

There is no 'my world' and 'your world' nor is there some lesser world subordinate to a greater world. In science, for example, the most powerful theoretical view is the one that comprises the greatest number of verifiable statements about the reality under observation. More powerful theories supersede lesser explanatory theories. For Wittgenstein, by contrast, THE world exists. It is independent of our knowledge of it, and it contains everything that can possibly be the case. If we discover something to be the case that previously we did not know to be the case, this does not alter THE world. It merely increases our knowledge of THE world.

The 'is' in Wittgenstein's statement is formally a copulative and a powerful one at that, inextricably linking the subject with its predicate. Identifying them for once and for all.

But it accomplishes far more than this. It insists not only that this unitary world exists but that it has substance. The world IS. It exists as the totality of everything that is the case. And then he proposes to tell us of what that world is constituted.

What, then, is the substance of this Wittgensteinian world? Why, of the things that are the case, it is all of them. Now, what can we infer from his use of this locution 'is the case'?

The predicate 'is the case' is philosophical jargon meaning 'true', or more specifically 'logically true'. If you ever studied symbolic logic, you learned about truth tables—variables, operations, connectors, etc. Logical propositions are always either true or false.

If we say that it is the case that 'grass is green', then we mean that if we go out an look at a patch of grass we will all agree that it is green. Or, technically, 'grass is green' is true if and only if grass is green.

[There is not space here to discuss 'greenness', nor is it implied in Wittgenstein's seminal proposition. I'll save that for another day.]

Truth and is-the-caseness, though, are values ascribed to propositions. This is very important in philosophy. Truth is not something that exists in reality. Rather it is a value we give to propositions.

Technically speaking, truth does not exist in Wittgenstein's 'world'. Rather, it is the qualifying quality of the things ('is-the-caseness') that ultimately go to make up THE world. But what exactly are the sorts of things that make up this world? This is where it gets interesting (for philosophers, at least).

Things like grass and greenness do not exist in Wittgenstein's world if we read him aright.

For example, we don't say 'grass is the case', or 'grass is true'. Nor do we say 'green is the case', or 'green is true'. Those plant blade thingies that sprout up from the ground and are often found in people's yards and have appearance of greenness (except maybe in winter or in drought) are not the sort of thing that goes to make up Wittgenstein's world.

Moreover, we don't say grass is green is the case, rather we say 'grass is green' is the case. Is-the-caseness, in this instance, has nothing to do with grass or greenness; it has to do with the mapping of the proposition 'grass is green' to the color of the grass. If the proposition can be demonstrated to map onto things, then it is case and it goes to make up the world.

We might, thus, say there is some grass over there and it has the aspect of greenness. Thus, 'the grass is green' is one of things of which we might say that it is the case. 'The grass is green' gives us, to use Wittgenstein's term, a picture of reality.

The Tractarian world comprises all and only those statements that are true. It is, in a sense, a picture world. A linguistic, or languaged, model of the world. This seems to be what Wittgenstein is saying here. He is not making an assertion about the rocks and seas and stars and people in what we normally think of as the physical reality we all inhabit.

Rather, he is making an assertion about a technical, philosophical world, a picture world of true propositions which, ideally, in the best of all possible worlds, map precisely and completely onto the normal world of rocks and birds and plants and things, etc. And, according to him, there is only one such world, the one which contains ALL of these true propositions.

In other words, we cannot make any headway in making complete and coherent systems of philosophy if we are dealing with the so-called real world, the sensory world of things. We must make ourselves a picture, a precisely circumscribed and accurate model that we can deal with linguistically, that is to say whose axioms and rules we can delineate, a model that contains all and only those propositions we can demonstrate to be true. A complete picture of reality.

Thus, to know the world is to know all possible true propositional statements about that world. To understand it is to be able to generate all true propositions from a given set of axioms and rules. This is what we can glean from an analysis of this one simple statement. Esoteric enough for you? Ready to move on to the second sentence of the book?

It's fair to say that Wittgenstein achieves here what novelists, poets, and other artists seek to accomplish via their works, namely the creation of a world. Here, he takes the opportunity in this prefatory statement to his Tractatus to define the precise parameters of this world.

This is what we can take away from that first sentence. It is, of course, subject to correction, and if Wittgenstein is any sort of philosopher (which he is!), he will address and explain everything we've inferred from it.

This is how philosophers think. They set up precise, technical definitions of the terms they use and operate within those limits. Terms like 'being', 'reality', 'existence', 'world', 'mind', 'knowledge', 'meaning', 'truth', 'beauty', 'freedom', and etc., and etc. all have very circumscribed meanings in philosophical discourse, quite unlike the sort of loosey-goosey way we throw terms about in our day-to-day discussions. In fact, much of philosophical dialogue revolves around making sure the conversants are not talking past each other. Making sure they are agreed on the precise technical meanings, limits, and uses of the terms they are bandying about and about which they are debating. In this, philosophy is different from other forms of discourse.

Wittgenstein's world-making, of course, raises a whole set of problems, some of which he is at pains to decide in the Tractatus. For example, such a proposition begs the question whether there is a real world independent of our knowledge of it—or, our statements about it. That is to say, we have the ontology of the world, everything included in it (i.e., everything that is the case), but we simply lack the foundational wherewithal to determine whether Wittgenstein's Tractarian world completely and coherently captures reality.

The Wittgensteinian world seems set, fixed. This is signaled by the power of 'is'. In his world, can a proposition that was once true cease being true? Can a proposition that once was not-the-case ever become the case? Do new true propositions emerge? Do old true propositions ever fade away?

How do we know that the Tractarian world contains every possible true proposition? If this world includes all and only those propositions that are true, then, by implication, it excludes all and only those propositions that are not true. But can we conceive of propositions that are neither true nor false, and in such an instance should they be included in this world or excluded from it? Are there propositions that are both the case and not the case, and does the world include or exclude them?

Are there aspects of the world that are not susceptible to languaged propositions? That is to say, is the language of propositions all powerful? Is it capable of determining all possible worlds?

What do we do about undecidable propositions? For example, does the Tractarian world contain the statement 'The world is all that is the case'? That is to say, in the Tractarian world is there any way ever to know whether this proposition is or is not the case? Is "'The world is all that is the case' is the case" determinably true or false? There seems to be no way to decide this question in the Tractarian world.

Why do we need these sorts of specialized, technical terminologies and models? What about everyday language and speech? Don't carpenters and business people and politicians and others effectively communicate without resort to all this recursive, semantic, meta-linguistic nit-picking?

Some of these intractable problems (and, of course, others) ultimately caused Wittgenstein to abandon this attempt at articulating the basic principles of a systematic philosophy. This came about in his later book, the only other book he completed and published during his lifetime, Philosophical Investigations.

Confused? Welcome to the world of Philosophy where sometimes being wrong can be a very valuable exercise. It's not that you're wrong that matters, it's how you're wrong.

Being v. Becoming, Pt. 1

Marcel Duchamp, Nude Descending a Staircase, No. 2

As best as we can discern, change is the fundamental force of all existence.

Nothing that exists stands still. Nothing remains the same.

Becoming is the form this fundamental force of change takes in living beings.

Living beings are conceived, assembled molecularly, born; they grow, mature, deteriorate, die, and decompose.

Human beings have created the notion of Selfhood to account for the experience of individuality, of bodily separateness, over the conscious, temporal course of this process.

Selfhood is constructed, named, bequeathed an Identity.

Identity is a function of memory. Identity subsumes the on-going accretion of experience into itself.

Identity implies the unreality of Becoming and, thus, Change.

Identity privileges/presupposes stasis, unity, continuity over both space and time and over Change and Becoming.

The notion of the Self is an illusion, masked/projected by the construct Identity.

It makes no sense to speak of an Authentic Self.

No Self can be called Authentic because Selfhood itself is an illusion. A 'fiction', if you will.

Change/Becoming is not an (Aristotelian) accident/attribute that happens to the (Aristotelian) substance/being.

Change just is.

Becoming is the norm, the fundament of experience. Beings participate/are immersed in the process of Change. Beings Become.

Your Self is not the same now as it was when you began reading this. For one thing, you have gained the experience of reading this. Thus, you are a different Self now than you were a few moments ago. Though it doesn't feel that way.

Being/Selfhood/Identity is an ultimately futile resistance to the reality of Change/Becoming. A negation of Reality. All things, as the man said, must pass.

This resistance of the Self to the omnipresence of Change/Becoming creates a sort of friction that feels substantive. Feeling is stubborn, reactionary (or, better, reactive), and Self-centric, but is crucial to the Selfhood/Identity illusion. (See this serial post, Thyrophobia, remembering to read from the last post to the first.)