Truth versus image-making

Holman W. Jenkins, Jr. has a very good article titled How to Have More Police Shootings in the April 24 Wall Street Journal. Double negatives make the subtitle confusing. The main pairings to choose from seem to be:

1. More people resisting arrest with more police misconduct.

2. Fewer people resisting arrest with less police misconduct.

Only 20-25% of the article concerns police conduct and resisting arrest. Most of the rest is about choosing between the truth and promoting one's self image. Promoting one's self-image has much more priority nowadays, especially for newspapers, journalists, politicians and some business people. "Virtue signaling" is another, newer term for promoting one's self-image.

Seeing the whole article online requires a paid subscription (which could be somebody else's), so the following are excerpts from the article.

"[T]he cavalcade of CEOs who denounced Georgia’s election law didn’t know in the slightest what they were talking about. ... Instead a bunch of business leaders simply adopted Democratic talking points not knowing what the law contained. And, more importantly, not caring." 

"If you think The New York Times and Washington Post mind in the least that their coverage is off-putting to a large number of Americans, you misunderstand the business they’re in. Once upon a time, broad reach really was our industry’s goal, to meet the desire of our advertisers for as many customers as possible. In turn, this drove our need to cover the news in a way that we could defend to all comers as “objective” and straight down the middle."

That's no longer the case. The New York Times, Washington Post, and many other media outlets now prioritize promoting and protecting their self-images over truth.

Joe Biden and Maxine Waters make prejudicial comments about a pending jury verdict to promote their self-image. Finally, of course, many people express opinions about politics and much more that prioritize "virtue signaling" over truth.

Hyperbole, truthfulness, half-truths, lying, Donald Trump, Joe Biden

Let’s consider hyperbole, truthfulness, half-truths, and lying regarding President Donald Trump and Joe Biden.

Trump stretches the truth or uses hyperbole very often. Doing so supports his bombastic narcissism. When he does, the mainstream media folk call it a “lie,” which is itself either hyperbole or an outright lie. For example, if Trump overstates GDP growth as 3% when its actually 2%, CNN and other media outlets don’t say he stretched the truth, but that he lied.

Joe Biden isn’t untruthful as often as Trump stretches the truth, uses hyperbole  or lies. But when Biden lies, it is usually a whopper and/or relies on nitpicking. If Trump says something about Biden that isn’t purely truthful, Biden will jump on the untruthful bit and claim “That is NOT true,” insinuating that everything Trump said is a lie. Similarly, suppose Trump were to say, “The Bidens have received millions of dollars in corrupt payoffs.” It’s clear that Trump did not mean only Joe. Yet Joe would likely respond with “I did not receive a penny,” insinuating that Trump’s claim is 100% false. Biden used this tactic multiple times during their second debate.

Whenever Biden talks about what he would do as president, it’s near impossible for him not to lie, because he flip-flops and contradicts himself so much from one day to the next. Whenever Biden talks about what Trump did or wants to do, it is typically a whopper. 

A prime example is pre-existing conditions regarding health insurance coverage. Trump has said numerous times that he would not allow insurers to reject applicants with pre-existing conditions, without contradicting that at other times. As far as I know, Trump has never even hinted he approves allowing insurers to terminate existing health insurance coverage because the insured has a pre-existing condition. Yet Biden said in the Oct 22 debate about Trump:

“Lastly, we're going to make sure we're in a situation that we've actually protect pre existing -- there's no way he can protect pre existing conditions. None, zero, you can't do it in the ether. … [H]e’s already cost the American people because of his terrible handling of the COVID virus and economic spillover. 10 million people have lost their private insurance, and he wants to take away 22 million more people who have been under Obamacare, and over 110 million people with pre-existing conditions.“

Kamala Harris in her debate with Pence said Trump was out to take away insurance from people with pre-existing conditions.

It would be hard to find bigger lies than these. Firstly, pre-existing conditions pertain to less than 10% of the population with insurance, plus the uninsured. The insured part is applying for individual policies for people under age 65 directly purchasable from insurers and outside the Obamacare exchanges. Nobody can be denied coverage for pre-existing conditions when applying for health coverage via Medicare, Medicaid, Medicare Advantage policies, Medicare supplement policies when first eligible (usually age 65), an Obamacare exchange, CHIP, or an employer plan. All told, that’s most of the population for whom pre-existing conditions is not an issue. However, Biden and Harris exaggerate it to the entire population. 

Biden has said many times he would ban fracking, and as about as often not ban fracking, that it is impossible from him to not contradict himself, i.e lie. He is all for renewable energy (wind, solar) and anti-fossil fuels. He says he wants to end or transition from using fossil fuels. So where will people get gasoline for their cars, and gas or most electricity for their homes? How will that affect airplanes flying? Blank-out. Ceasing or transitioning from using fossil fuels entails fewer jobs that rely on fossil fuels. Biden loves to “advertise” millions of new jobs in renewable energy while blanking out the simultaneous loss of jobs that depend on fossil fuels. He wants to end subsidies of oil and gas, yet says nil about ending subsidies for wind and solar, which are many, many times greater. Ditto for Harris. They can’t have their cake and eat it, too.

Biden says out of one side of his mouth that he will reverse the Trump tax cuts, but says out of the other side of his mouth that he will not raise taxes on people with incomes less than $400,000. These claims are mutually contradictory. Reversing the Trump tax cuts necessarily raises taxes on many with incomes less than $400,000. So together or saying only the latter, Biden's claim is a big fat lie. 

Of course, CNN, Lesley Stahl, the Washington Compost, New York Times, and numerous other media people or outlets don’t challenge the lies and half-truths of Joe Biden or Kamala Harris. They let it pass without comment, maybe due to poor understanding of the two's gibberish.

Blanshard on Implication and Necessity #5

This post is less about what Blanshard says in his book than the earlier ones and my last in this series.

Blanshard's critique is excellent. Still, I wonder why he did not say something like: Why are two of the rows in the truth table, when p is F in post #1, even relevant? To wit, what logical truth is implied by '7 < 4' or 'the moon is made of cheese'?

Subsequent to the problems with "material implication" logic being noticed and acknowledged, relevance logic arose. It was proposed before Blanshard’s book was first published in 1939. However, it didn’t become prominent until the 1970s.

Blanshard on Implication and Necessity #4

Blanshard next summarizes his critique. But what does “necessity” mean?

“It means, replies the empiricist, only that certain parts have been presented together with such unfailing regularity that we have become unable to dissociate them. … Formalism we have found more plausible. It admits the element of necessity that empiricism denies; its peculiarity is that it confines the necessity within certain highly general forms. … As for symbolic logic, we found it [ ] less helpful than the older logic, primarily because with its decision to ignore intension, it had abandoned interest in necessity. Of its three principal ways of conceiving implication, material, formal, and strict, we recognized an advance over the others, but could find in none of them a definition that would cover, even approximately, the necessity actually used in inference and understanding. We are left with this conclusions; necessity is not a habit, induced in us by an inexplicable regularity of presentation. Necessity is not a form or skeleton which, while sustaining the fleshy matter of the world, is sharply distinct from it” (397-8).

Blanshard’s use of “empiricist” clearly includes Hume, Mill, and other later philosophers. He references Hume and Mill. He doesn’t reference Locke, and I believe it would be unfair to include John Locke, the leading empiricist, among those whom Blanshard critiques. Locke wrote about habit and ideas by association (in ECHU), but he is not mentioned in The Nature of Thought, Volume 2, nor did he reduce all inference to habit like Hume did.

Blanshard on Implication and Necessity #3

This post is about Mr. Blanshard’s critique of strict implication as posited by C. I. Lewis.

Professor Lewis “would agree that when p implies q materially or formally this gives no assurance that q is deducible from p, nor does it give us what we usually mean by implication. He believes that his own system of ‘strict implication’ gives us both. This relation he defines as follows (the symbol stands for ‘strictly implies’ and  for ‘possible’ or ‘self-consistent’): p  q. = .   (p  q); that is, ‘ “p strictly implies q” is to mean “It is false that it is possible that p should be true and q false” or “The statement ‘p is true and q false’ is not self-consistent.” When q is deducible from p, to say “p is true and q is false” is to assert, implicitly, a contradiction” (385).

Note: is not the symbol in Blanshard’s book, but I couldn’t find how to use his and is often used to mean imply.

“There is no doubt that this sense of ‘implies’ is far nearer to the ordinary meaning than the previous senses. It no longer asks us to say anything so alien to common usage as that every true proposition implies every other, or that every false proposition implies all conceivable propositions; it is far more critical and selective” (385)

“Take an instance. ‘If anything is red, then it is extended.’ This, I think, is a fair example of implication in an ordinary sense. Now when we say that anything’s being red implies that it is extended, it is our meaning this, that if we denied that it was extended we whould also have to deny that it was red? I do not think so. I agree, of course, that when p implies q, to deny q does commit us to denying p also; I agree that in such a case to affirm p and deny q would be inconsistent. … When I say that p implies q, I am saying that a certain relation holds between them. The inability to insert not-q consistently instead of q is not the same as that relation, but something that holds in virtue of it” (386-7).

Blanshard on Implication and Necessity #2

This post is about Mr. Blanshard’s critique of formal implication.

“We turn, then, to formal implication. Our hopes rise as we do, for Mr. [Bertrand] Russell describes it as ‘a much more familiar notion’ which as a rule is really in mind even when material implication is mentioned. But these hopes sink again as we learn what formal implication means. ‘Formal implication is a class of material implications; it asserts that in every case of a certain set of cases material implication holds. … In the statement ‘Socrates is a man implies Socrates is mortal’ we have the expression of a material implication. In the statement ‘If anything is a man then it is mortal’ we have the expression of a formal implication …”

“Now as an account of necessity do we find here any advance? Certainly not so far as concerns the items summarized. Each statement of  a implying  a,  b implying  b, etc., is merely a factual statement that  a and  a (the truth of  a and the falsity of  a), etc. do not occur together. And we have seen there is no necessity there. Does it appear then in review by which we take in all the items as a glance? No again. If the connection of p with q in some one case falls short of being necessary, that same connection does not become so merely holding in all cases.”

“We begin to see, then, in what such logic involves us. It cuts us off altogether from the knowledge of universal truth” (381-2).

“The ignoring of necessity on the part of what is offered as logic, where if anywhere one would expect to find necessary connection, is a legitimate ground of dissatisfaction with the newer logistic disciplines … Stripped of its symbolism and regarded in bare logical essentials, this is the well worn atomism of Hume and Mill. There are no necessary propositions, only statements of class inclusion. There are no necessary inferences; what look like these are statement of exceptionless conjunction” (383).

“When he [the formalist] says ‘triangles have internal angles equal to 180 degrees’, does he mean ‘no triangles do in fact lack this characteristic'? If this is all he means, he has no reason to be surprised if he finds a triangle tomorrow with half or twice that number; there never was any must in the case; the new fact is merely one to be noted, and added to his collection. … Indeed extensional logic has here reversed the true order of priority; it is only because we have a prior insight into the nature of the triangle and what this nature involves that we can be so sure about particular cases. When we say a implies b, we surely mean that a in virtue of being a rather than c or d, implies b; the implication is bound up with intension. And we are clear that in the intension or content upon which thought is directed, we find connections far more intimate than the de facto togetherness to which material and formal implication are both restricted.” (384-5).

Blanshard on Implication and Necessity #1

In The Nature of Thought, Volume 2, chapter XXIX, Brand Blanshard critiques modern logic. He addresses three versions of ‘p implies q’ – material, formal, and strict. This post will be about the first of these. If the reader gets the notion that Blanshard made a straw man, see Wikipedia’s article strict conditional.

Take two propositions at random, p and q. There are 4 possible combinations of their being true or false. What that means for ‘p implies q’ (p → q) in a modern logic truth table is as follows.

          p    q    p → q

          T    T       T

          F    T       T

          F    F       T

          T    F       F

“Now in the usage of the formal logicians one proposition is said to imply the other materially when any one of the first three possibilities holds” (375). That is, when p → q is T. If the two propositions are both true, then they imply each other, even if one of them is ‘snow is cold’ and the other ‘grass is green’. That’s because we could assign either to p and the other to q.

“If two propositions are both false, again they imply each other, regardless of what they assert; ‘Darwin discovered gravitation’ implies ‘Benedict Arnold wrote Jerusalem Delivered. Finally, if the first proposition is false and the second true, once more the first implies the second; ‘Darwin discovered gravitation’ implies that Roosevelt was re-elected in 1936. It will be noted that our false proposition about Darwin has been used twice and that it implies not only every false proposition that can be made, but all true propositions as well; ‘a false proposition implies all propositions’. In sum: p always implies q except when p is true and q is false.”

“What are we to say of implication so defined? Does it describe or define the element of necessity we are seeking? On the contrary, necessity does not enter into it at all.”

“We shall see this more clearly if we ask whether it provides a basis for inference. For it will be admitted that in inference, if anywhere, we are generally using necessity, and that any satisfactory account of necessity must accord with the use we make of it there. Now it is plain that in the actual work of inference we constantly succeed in passing from one proposition to another without knowing the second independently. What sort of relation must hold between them to make this possible? It must be one in which the second is a consequence of the first. Mr. [Bertrand] Russell writes, as we have seen, ‘in order that one proposition may be inferred from another, it is necessary that the two should have that relation which makes the one a consequence of the other’ (375-6).

The logician “would admit that in the proposition ‘snow is cold’ there is not the slightest hint that grass is green, but would add that that is quite irrelevant to whether one implies the other” (376).

“A logic whose propositions are bound together only by this sort of implication is a logic in which, strictly speaking, nothing follows from anything else” (377). “Material implication itself is not, we have seen, a necessary relation” (379).