[This originally appeared as a guest post that I wrote for Richard Chappell’s blog Philosophy, et cetera]

Here’s one of the few canonical philosophical puzzles that I had learned about by the age of five. What’s the truth-value of the following statement?

(L) This statement (L) is false.

The problem, of course, is that if (L) is true then it’s false, and if (L) is false then it’s true. Thus, any theory of truth that assigns a truth-value to (L) is internally contradictory, since the theory will (inter alia) include the contradictory truth-ascription:

(TL) L is true if and only if L is false.

Since there are no true contradictions, a theory of truth must not assign any truth-value to (L) at all. But how do you doing it? If a statement hasn’t got a truth-value, then the usual take is that they are, in some respect, nonsense; that is, they fail to make an assertion — just as “Cat mat on the sat the” fails to make an assertion. The canonical approach to (L) in the 20th century has been to try to come up with some principled means of ruling (L) out of the language by means of setting up the right structure of rules beforehand (just as you can point to the preexisting rules of syntax to show that “Cat mat on the sat the” doesn’t amount to a complete sentence). The most famous attempt, and the inspiration of many of the subsequent attempts, has been Tarski’s attempt to sidestep the Liar Paradox by means of segmenting language into object-language and meta-language layers. The idea being that, if you do this assiduously, you can avoid self-referential paradoxes because self-reference won’t be possible in languages whose sentences can be ascribed truth-values; because they can only be ascribed truth-values within a meta-language that contains the names of the object language’s sentences and truth-predicates for those sentences. I have a lot of problems with this approach; a full explanation of them is something that I ought to spell out (indeed, have spelled out) elsewhere. But here’s a quick gloss of one of the reasons: Tarski and the people inspired by him started setting up ex ante rules to try to rule out self-referential sentences because it’s self-reference that makes the Liar Paradox paradoxical (and that makes for similar paradoxes in similar sentences; exercise for the reader: show how “If this sentence is true, then God exists” is both necessarily true and strictly entails the existence of God). But there’s an obvious and general problem for the method: there are self-referential sentences which are unparadoxical, and indeed self-referential sentences which are true. Here’s an example which may or may not cause trouble for Tarskian theories, depending on the details:

(E) This sentence (E) is in English.

(E) is truth-valuable; and in fact it is true. (If, on the other hand, it had said “This sentence is in French,” it would have been false.) Now, this may cause trouble for the Tarskian method and it may not, depending on the details of a particular account. (Sometimes people want to ban all self-referential sentences; sometimes they are more careful and claim that object languages might be able to name their own sentences but only so long as they don’t contain the truth-predicates for their own language.) But even if (E) is allowed, you haven’t solved the problem. There are plenty of self-referential truth-ascribing sentences that aren’t paradoxical, too. Here’s one:

(EM) Either this sentence (EM) is true, or this sentence (EM) is false.

Unlike (L), this causes no logical paradoxes. If you suppose that it’s false, that means that it turns out to be true — since the second disjunct, “this sentence (EM) is false” turns out to be true; meaning that it cannot be false. But it can be true, without contradiction. So it has to be true, if it has any truth-value at all. That shouldn’t be surprising; it’s an instance of the law of the excluded middle, and all instances of the law of the excluded middle are true.

Now, you might think that (EM)’s relationship to ordinary talk is attenuated enough, and the reasons for thinking it unparadoxical are technical enough, that it might be an acceptable loss if some other technical stuff that saves us from (L) happens to rule out (EM) too. I’d be inclined to agree, except that (EM) isn’t the only example I had up my sleeve, either. Here’s another. In the Prologue to the Travels, Marco Polo wrote,

We will set down things seen as seen, things heard as heard, so that our book may be an accurate record, free from any sort of fabrication. And all who read this book or hear it may do so with full confidence, because it contains nothing but the truth.

Let M be the conjunction of all the assertions that Marco Polo makes in his book. The book contains nothing but the truth if and only if M is true, but that the book contains nothing but the truth is one of the many assertions in the book, so “M is true” is one of the conjuncts of M. Thus:

(M) This conjunction (M) is true, and Marco Polo traveled the Silk Road to Cathay, and served in the court of the Great Khan, and observed the barbarous customs of lesser Armenia, and … and … and ….

But it’s either true or false that Marco Polo’s book contains nothing but the truth; that assertion is a standard bit of understood language (passages just like it are a near-universal feature of traveler’s tales, or other extraordinary stories where the author feels the need to reassure you that she’s not making things up). If your theory of language throws it out as nonsense, then your “theory of language” needs to be thrown out, on the grounds that it’s not semantically serious. (Whatever it’s a theory of may be interesting, but it’s something other than language as it actually exists.)

Now, like Polo, I may have been fudging just a bit in what I said. I suggested that M isn’t paradoxical; I don’t think it is, but there is a way to make it seem paradoxical. Lots of readers have doubted that Polo was telling the truth; some of them, for example, were unimpressed by the evidence that he had ever served in the court of the Great Khan; others weren’t so sure about the tales of dog-headed men or giant birds that consumed elephants. Whatever the case, they believed that Marco Polo made at least two false assertions in his book: (1) the claim about his journeys that they doubted, and (2) the claim that his book contained nothing but the truth. Call these the normal skeptics. I’m sure there were also a few readers (however credulous they would have to have been), who believed that the Travels really did contain nothing but the truth; that is, that there were no false assertions in the book, including the assertion that the book contained no false assertions. Call these the normal believers. But now imagine a third kind of reader, a perverse skeptic — a philosopher, of course — who noticed that you could gloss the contents of the book as M, and who decided that she believed everything that Polo said in the book about his journeys, from the customs of lesser Armenia to the domains of the Great Khan to the giant birds. She believes everything in the book, except … there is one assertion that she thinks is false — that is, (1) the assertion that everything in the book is true, and nothing else.

There are a couple of different ways that you could approach the difficulty. One way is to point out that the perverse skeptic really is being perverse. That’s just not how you can sensibly read the book. Either you think that nothing in the book is false, or you think that at least two things are; the assurance of truthfulness just can’t be a candidate for falseness until something else has been shown false. But if you list the truth-conditions of M, then “M is true” is one among them, and it’s hard to see how you could stop the perverse skeptic from going down the list and picking that one as the only one to be false. Certainly Polo doesn’t say “The rest of the book besides this sentence contains nothing but the truth.” And given that he did say what he did, I’d be hard put to say that “this book contains nothing but the truth” isn’t one of the untruths denied by the sentence, if something else in the book is false.

Another way to approach it is this: you can imagine an argument between the normal skeptic and the normal believer; whether or not one ever managed to convince the other in the end, you can in principle identify the sorts of reasons that they might offer to try to determine whether Polo really did tell the truth about the birds, or about the Khan, or…, and you can say what things would be like if one or the other is true. But what kind of argument could the normal believer and the perverse skeptic have? How would one convince the other? Or, to take it beyond the merely psychological point to the epistemological point, what kind of reasons could the normal believer possibly give to the perverse skeptic to give up the belief that “this book contains nothing but the truth” is false? (She can’t point to all the true statements about his journey; the perverse skeptic already believes in those.) Or, to take it beyond the epistemological point to the ontological point: what sort of truth-makers could even in principle determine whether the normal believer or the perverse skeptic is in the right?

So there is a problem with M, to be sure. But the problem is not the same as the problem posed by L: there’s no logical contradiction involved, so its self-referentiality sets off no logical explosions. And the solution can’t be the same either: the radical move of abandoning the sentence as meaningless works with (L), where there’s just no right way to take it, but it doesn’t help us out with (M), where there obviously is a right way to take it (i.e., as the normal readers take it, and not as the perverse reader takes it).

So there has to be some right way to go about ascribing a truth-value to (M) (and also (E)). Whatever it is, it may very well also explain how we can ascribe a truth-value to (EM). But it certainly cannot also mean that we try to ascribe a truth-value to (L). What is it? Is there some kind of principled and motivated general rule that we can add to our logical grammar, so as to get M and E and maybe EM but no L? If so, what in the world would it be? If not, then what do we do?

(I have my own answers; for the details, you can look up Sentences That Can’t Be Said in the upcoming issue of Southwest Philosophy Review. Or contact me if you’re interested enough to want a copy of the essay. But I want to pose the puzzle and see what y’all think about it as it stands.)

Update 2005-12-08: I fixed a minor error in phrasing. Thanks to Blar for pointing it out in comments.

A couple of notes are in order about new philosophical material on the web. First, I’ve put up some new new material at Philosophy, et cetera; and second, I’ve put up some new old material at the Fair Use Repository.

First, my new new material: Richard Chappell of Philosophy, et cetera generously invited me to contribute some guest posts while he was away at a conference. Here’s the results, such as they are:

• Philosophy, et cetera 2005-12-05: Freak intelligence, marginal cases, and the argument for ethical vegetarianism, in which I take a critical look at one of the canonical arguments for ethical vegetarianism and how it is typically defended. (I actually think that a version of the argument works, but explaining why requires more detail-work than ethical vegetarians have typically done.)

• Philosophy, et cetera 2005-12-07: The ends in the world as we know it: in which I curse a non-functional comment form, argue for a richer conception of what the world studied by science contains (by way of Michael Thompson’s account of aristotelian categoricals), and reply to some comments on my ethical vegetarianism post.

• Philosophy, et cetera 2005-12-08: If the title of this post is true, then you should read it, in which I invite people to puzzle over some self-referential statements other than the famous Liar Paradox (“This sentence is false” is not the only self-referential statement you can make philosophical hay out of; and it seems likely that treating it as if it were has lead to some philosophical errors about self-reference).

Second, there’s quite a bit of new old philosophical material now available at the Fair Use Repository. One of my initial projects for the Fair Use Repository was to increase the availability and visibility of G. E. Moore’s philosophical writing; beginning with a freely available transcription of Principia Ethica (1903) and, after half a year and several atrocious puns on G. E. Moore’s last name, moving on to two other notable works on ethics. The scriptorium has been busy since then, too; the public domain Mooreana now available to the free world now includes:

• The Nature of Judgment (1899). One of the essays that launched Moore and Russell’s break from British Idealism. (That’s something of a retrospective judgment, incidentally; in the essay itself Moore’s thesis is that the world is constituted by concepts; it’s the account of concepts that marks the beginnings of a divergence from the idealists….)

• Principia Ethica (1903)

• Moore’s review of The Origin of the Knowledge of Right and Wrong by Franz Brentano (1903), mentioned in the Preface to Principia Ethica.

• The Refutation of Idealism (1903), another locus classicus for Moore’s break with British Idealism (by this point already fully accomplished). This was actually already available through Andrew Chrucky’s wonderful ditext.com, but not well-formatted for citing, and since I needed to cite it elsewhere, I repurposed his text according to the Fair Use Repository conventions.

• Ethics (1912), Moore’s wonderful but little-read sequel to PE

• You can also find Ralph Barton Perry’s February 1904 review of The Refutation of Idealism, which appeared in one of the very first issues of J. Phil.

There’s also lots of new old stuff to peruse besides Moore. Here’s a quick attempt at a break-down:

1. Bertrand Russell, The Elements of Ethics (1910) is available in full. The essay attempts to sketch out the outlines of a theoretical ethics, based on by Russell’s reading (sometimes his misreading, but what else is new?) of Principia Ethica.

2. Bertrand Russell, The Principles of Mathematics (1903): Russell’s first great labor towards a logicist account of mathematics. As of today, Preface, Chapter I: Definition of Pure Mathematics, Chapter II: Symbolic Logic, and Appendix B, Russell’s first full statement of the Theory of Types, are available in full online.
   

3. Ludwig Wittgenstein, review of of Professor Coffey’s The Science of Logic (1913): the first public record of Wittgenstein’s philosophical views (and one of only three works on philosophy published in his lifetime); this is a merciless review of a logic textbook, written at the invitation of The Cambridge Review in late 1912 and published in early 1913, while Wittgenstein was still an undergraduate at Cambridge. The original (which has apparently not survived) was written in German, and then translated into English by Wittgenstein, with the help of his friend David Pinsent.
   

4. T. H. Green, Prolegomena to Ethics (1884): transcriptions of the Analytical Table of Contents (which summarizes the argument of the entire book), the Introduction, the (enormous) first chapter, and Book III Chapter I are now available online.
   

5. Lewis Carroll, What the Tortoise said to Achilles (1894) and A Logical Paradox (1895): Lewis Carroll published two articles in the philosophical journal Mind on logical paradoxes (interestingly, he published them as Lewis Carroll, rather than as Charles Dodgson). One of the articles, What the Tortoise said to Achilles, is discussed vigorously to this day. The other, A Logical Paradox was a hot topic in philosophical logic for about 10 years or so after its publication; today it’s almost unknown because people took it for granted that material implication had solved the problem. (Try reading it and see if you feel any intuitive pull towards the paradox.) Still, if there are good reasons to doubt that material implication does a good job of capturing the meaning of conditional statements, there may also be good reasons to start trying to get into the puzzle again. In any case, both articles are now available online.
   

6. William James, Essays in Radical Empiricism (1912): James’s elaboration and defense of radical empiricism, the doctrine of a world of pure experience. Ralph Barton Perry’s editorial Preface and James’s first essay, Does Consciousness Exist?, are available in full online.
   

There’s more where that from. Stay tuned!

Sean Martin at common sense philosophy and Richard Chappell at Philosophy, et cetera have lately been puzzling over the claim that so-called sentences such as Caesar is a prime number are not false, but rather meaningless. They’re both inclined to think that this is wrong: it seems obvious enough that there’s a set of all prime numbers, and that Caesar isn’t in it (since everything in it is, inter alia, a number, and Caesar is not), so Caesar is a prime number is simply false. I think that the claim is meaningless rather than false, and that their attempt to give it a meaning commits a classical error in philosophy, of the sort exposed by Wittgenstein in both his earlier and his later work. But this will take some explaining.

To get an idea of why I take Caesar is a prime number to be meaningless, it will actually help to consider the psychological story that Richard suggests to deflate the intuition that it is meaningless. (I think Richard’s on to something in his story, but I think that it has more than a merely psychological bite.) He wonders if some might be tempted to deny it meaning simply because it is so very false, necessarily and obviously so, that no-one would ever even dream of seriously entertaining the thought that it might be true. Then, rather like how something might be so cold that it burns, so some sentences might be so false that they no longer seem it. I think that this is in fact the right track to be on, but to see why it actually supports the intuition for regarding Caesar is a prime number as meaningless rather than false, we need to observe that the difference between this mistake and the mistake involved in humdrum falsehoods such as Caesar was a barkeep is a difference in kind, not merely a difference in degree.

Think about it this way. Suppose that I — intending to say something true in the English language — say Caesar was a Greek. Ordinarily we would take this sentence to be both meaningful and false: Caesar was a Roman, not a Greek. So when I said it, I made a mistake; but there is an open question as to what sort of mistake I made, and you’d have to ask some questions to figure out the best way to understand my error. For example, I might have made a factual error about either Caesar, the man, or about Greeks, the category; if you asked why I said that Caesar was a Greek, I might say that I heard that Caesar was born in Athens, and believed it. Or I might have heard that in Caesar’s day, Greece extended from Anatolia to the Pillars of Hercules. Either of these would be flabbergasting examples of historical ignorance; but they would nevertheless be mistakes about Caesar or about the Greeks. On the other hand, it’s possible that my answers might reveal a linguistic mistake, about the word Caesar or the expression a Greek. For example, I might have thought that a Greek meant anyone born in an ancient Mediterranean culture, or that Caesar was Plato’s family name. In this case I didn’t make a mistake about Caesar, the man, or Greeks, the category. I just made a mistake about the terms that I was using to express myself, and the way to correct me would not be to teach me some history, but rather to clear up my misconceptions about what Caesar and a Greek mean in the sentences in which they are used.

Now let’s return to Caesar is a prime number. Suppose, again, that I said this, and that I wanted to say something true in the English language. What sort of mistake could you understand me as having made? Is there any conceivable matter of fact about Caesar, the man (or prime numbers) that I could be misinformed about which would explain my thinking that Caesar is a prime number? I can’t think of any conditions under which that kind of error would explain the utterance. The only cases that I can conceive, so far as I can tell, are cases in which there is a mistake about meaning, that is, in which I just haven’t got any sort of cognitive connection between my use of Caesar and a prime number in the sentence, and the actual man Caesar or the actual set prime numbers. Maybe I had been taught that Caesar was a name for a constant (equal to 3, say). Or maybe I thought that prime number was a way of saying a powerful member of Roman society. Either of these would, again, involve some flabbergasting ignorance, but what’s important to note here is that it’s not ignorance about Caesar or ignorance about prime numbers. Any position I might be in, such that it would explain my uttering Caesar is a prime number, is just a position in which I haven’t correctly learned how to use the sign Caesar or a prime number, in which I’ve made a mistake about the role that they play in the English language. (You might say: Look, I can think of a factual error you might make about Caesar that would make you think he was a prime number. You might have thought that he, Caesar, was an integer greater than zero, not a man. But do you really think that someone who thinks that Caesar was an integer greater than zero has correctly learned what Caesar means, in any plausible sense of the word meaning?)

The mismatch here is important: the kind of mistakes you can make that would lead you to utter Caesar was a Greek may be either factual or linguistic; but the kind that would lead you to utter Caesar is a prime number are — if what I’ve said is right — only linguistic. That’s a difference in kind between the two cases, and I think it’s a difference in kind that reflects something important about the logical (not just the psychological) status of the two utterances. If you are using English, then when you try to say Caesar is a prime number you are just not succeeding in meaning anything by it. (You may mean something by it in your own idiolect, but that’s another matter.) Gilbert Ryle famously called this sort of mistake a category mistake, and Carnap (who is the immediate source of Sean’s puzzlement) explained the mistake by saying that the name Caesar and the predicate is a prime number have a particular logical syntax — so that Caesar is a prime number, even though it fulfills the rules of English syntax, still fails to fulfill the rules of logical syntax, because part of understanding what Caesar means is understanding that he is not the sort of thing that is either prime or non-prime; and understanding what ____ is a prime number means is understanding that the predicate can only be ascribed to, or withheld from, a number. I think Carnap’s understanding of the situation is actually gravely mistaken, and Ryle’s description is perhaps misleading (for some detailed reasons why, see Edward Witherspoon‘s Conceptions of Nonsense in Carnap and Wittgenstein in The New Wittgenstein, and Cora Diamond‘s What Nonsense Might Be in The Realistic Spirit). The short of it is that the conclusion is right — Caesar is a prime number hasn’t got any meaning in English — but the diagnosis is wrong, and wrong because it presumes that Caesar and —- is a prime number all have determinate meanings that you can pin down independently of the statements that they occur in; having pinned them down, you can then say Look, the meaning of Caesar is incompatible with the meaning of —- is a prime number; if you try to put them together, they just won’t fit. But expressions have no meaning in isolation; they only get meanings in the context of their significant use within a language (for example, as they are employed in making assertions). If someone goes around saying Caesar is a prime number I don’t know what he means; I don’t know what he means by Caesar, or prime number, or even is a, at least not until I’ve asked him to explain to the point where I can see the sort of linguistic mistake that he’s making. If I ask him, I may find out that he was trying to say one of the things I mentioned above — for example, that Caesar was a powerful Roman, or that 3 is prime. Or I may find out that he was not asserting anything at all, but rather belting out an example of nonsense for philosophical purposes. Or, I may, after all, find out that he was just babbling, as much as if he had said Blitiri bububu. The problem isn’t even that Caesar is a prime number couldn’t have a meaning; I just mentioned a couple meanings it might have. It’s that it doesn’t, because, as people use the words, there isn’t any meaning given to Caesar in the number-place of a mathematical categorization, or to —- is a prime number in the predicate-place of a description of a person. Thus Wittgenstein’s claim that philosophical pseudo-problems are of the same kind as the question whether the Good is more or less identical than the Beautiful (TLP 4.003); the problem with that question is that — at the very least — no meaning has been given to the sign identical when it is used as an ordinal predicative adjective.

Now, if I put myself only in the Wittgensteinian position of saying that one or more parts of Caesar is a prime number hasn’t got a sense, and refuse to take the Carnapian route of saying that they’ve all got senses but those senses entail that the sentence as a whole must not have a sense, then Richard or Sean can always claim that they’ve given the constituent words a commonsensical meaning, and that given those meanings, the sentence is meaningful and false. For example, they both suggest giving Caesar the sense of Caesar, the man, x is a φ the sense of x is an element of the set of φ‘s, and prime number the sense of a whole number that is evenly divisible only by itself and 1. But of course is a member of is no better off than is a when I try to imagine a factual error that would explain my saying that Caesar’s a member of the set of prime numbers, and the same thought-experiments that tend to count against the notion of a univocal meaning for is a, no matter what the subject and predicate nominal are, would also tend to count against the notion of a univocal relation of set membership, no matter what the relata are. If there is some general meaning that encompasses all of Caesar was a Greek, Caesar was a Roman, Caesar is a prime number, 3 is an Italian, 3 is a prime number, 3 is an irrational number, etc. then let them give it — but we have a right to expect that whatever meaning they give will have to make it clear how you could make some mistake about matters of fact, and not just the meanings of terms, that would explain how you could utter the category-error cases above.

And no, I don’t think that an appeal to the primitives of mathematical set theory will help here at all. Of course, sets of numbers, nations of people, orchards of trees, and so on may all have some similar formal features; those formal features may make some parallel treatment according to the schema provided by, say, axiomatic set theory possible. But that no more means that Caesar is a Roman and 3 is a prime number express the same relationship than your ability to map planar geometry into polynomial equations using the techniques of analytic goemetry means that geometry really is just algebra (or vice versa). That would also mean that there isn’t any meaningful set consisting of {Caesar, 3, the peach tree in front of my house, …} (since the claim is that no meaning has, so far, been yet given to the notion of a set, or to one or more of the purported elements of the set). If you had high hopes for a set like that, well, I’m sorry.

A parting note. Richard also wants to know about sentences that use empty designators (such as The present king of France is bald or Odysseus was set ashore at Ithaca while sound asleep). Some philosophers (Strawson, for example) think they’re meaningless; others (Russell, for example) that they are false. For what it’s worth, Frege, contrary to popular opinion, did not think that they are meaningless; but he didn’t think they were false either. He thought that they express a thought but have no truth-value (see my exegetical comments at Philosophy, et cetera). But I think that Frege clearly fails to give us a viable alternative — determinate thoughts are either true or false; what it is to have a determinate sense just is to have truth-conditions which are either met or unmet. As for whether Strawson or Russell is right, though, my suspicion is that either one of them could be right, depending on the sentence. There’s no reason to think that just because some uses of names and definite descriptions are tractable by means of Russell’s theory of descriptions or Strawson’s theory of presupposition, that all of them have to be tractable by the same method. Is Odysseus was set ashore at Ithaca while fast asleep a failed attempt to make an assertion, provided that there was no historical Odysseus? Probably. Certainly Russell’s attempts to gloss names such as Odysseus or Apollo with definite descriptions have been failures — see Naming and Necessity for some of the reasons why. Similarly I think that the King of France is bald probably presupposes rather than asserts that there is a present King of France, and so fails to say anything rather than saying something false. On the other hand, there are cases where it seems quite clear that Russell’s theory of descriptions ought to be applied: someone who says Yesterday I interviewed the present King of France! has said something that is both meaningful and false. And there are also cases that I think are simply not clear. I’m not sure whether, say, We are all subjects of the Emperor of North America asserts or presupposes that there is an Emperor of North America; you’d probably need to find out more about the dialogical context in which it was uttered to know whether it asserts falsely or fails to assert.

Richard also wants to know whether the condition that a sentence either violates syntactical requirements or else contains nouns that fail to refer is necessary or sufficient for a sentence to be meaningless. I think that it is not sufficient, for the reasons I give above: there are at least some cases in which sentences with empty designators ought to be treated according to Russell’s theory of descriptions, and those sentences say something false. Nor do I think it is necessary, for there are examples of sentences that neither contain empty designators nor violate any syntactical rules, but which must be meaningless on pain of contradiction. Here’s an example: This sentence is false. Here’s another one: Either this sentence is false or God exists. Clearly the designators in them are not empty: the sentence itself guarantees that they will pick out something. But if there’s any plausible candidate for a syntactic rule that they might be accused of violating, I haven’t found it. If think you’ve got a syntactic rule that you can cite to rule these sentences out, then go ahead, make my day.

I have some material coming down the pipe that I’ve been chewing on for a while — a little bit on philosophy, some stuff on copyrights and contracts, and some stuff on the nature of law. Plus some announcements about various things of varying interest. But my aching feet are going to keep me from getting to it today. So, in the meantime, here’s some things that I’ve had going on elsewhere:

Bloviating elsewhere

• Tonight at No Treason, I dispute Stefan’s claim that tyrants and murderers often have satisfying lives (in any sense of the word satisfying that matters), and argue (with Plato) that being a tyrant is actually the most miserable kind of life. (The point is related, somewhat, to some similar remarks I made against some utilitarian arguments over at Philosophy, et cetera.)

• Over at Kevin Carson’s Mutualist Blog, Kevin discusses land theft against farmers in modern history, and I follow up in comments by debating with P. M. Lawrence over land ownership, homesteading, and slavery. I defend the radical notion that the Southern plantations should have been expropriated from the slave-drivers’ illegitimate control, and distributed amongst the former slaves, after Emancipation. (It should have been distributed not as reparations for slavery — although the former slaves also deserved those — but rather because freed Blacks were the rightful owners of the land that they had lived and worked on all their lives.) Lawrence objects on several fronts; I defend.

• At Project for the New Anarchist Century, I object to Jeremy Sapienza making shit up about the civil rights movement and Rosa Parks in particular. We go on to debate the historical significance of the Montgomery Bus Boycott.

• At Alas, A Blog, I object to several commentators saying, over and over again, that society causes any number of conditions that make rape and other forms of violence against women, as if society were some looming presence outside of us. In fact it just is us. And refusing to recognize this snuffs out any questions we might have about just who, among the men and women that make up society, does most of the things that constitute a rape culture. (Here’s a hint: it is not, for the most part, women.)

Howard Dully and My Lobotomy on NPR

Meanwhile, NPR recently broadcast a riveting and heartbreaking audio documentary, My Lobotomy by Howard Dully. At age 12, diagnosed with nothing worse than being a difficult child, Dully was one of the youngest victims of Walter Freeman’s ice-pick lobotomy. It turns out that the complaints were nothing but a pack of lies, but even if they weren’t, the senseless mutilation of his brain would have still have been an atrocity. In any case, Dully somehow survived with his faculties mostly intact, and is able — unlike so many of Freeman’s other victims — to search for answers about his suffering and to tell his own story. Dully also talked about his experiences some more on Thursday’s Talk of the Nation. It’s not stuff you can enjoy listening too, really, but it is stuff that you should listen to. And listening to it is not a burden; while not pleasant, the tale is compelling, chilling, and, sadly, real.

Further reading

• GT 2002-08-20: Brain Mutilation for Fun and Profit: the Story of Walter Freeman
• Psychosurgery.org: Remembering the Tragedy of Lobotomy

You might wonder why I put in so much time over the past few months transcribing G. E. Moore’s ethical works for use on the web. Well, I did it because it was needed. Consder the following page, clipped from the most recent Dell catalogue:

Someone at Dell clearly needs to be sent a copy of Moore’s Open Question Argument: what more explicit example of the Naturalistic Fallacy could you find?