Carniphobia: a dialogue

The scene is a university canteen.  Adam is affixing a poster bearing the slogan ‘Meat is Murder’ to the student noticeboard.  Bob, a coursemate of his, approaches Adam.

Bob: What are you doing?
Adam: Organising a vegetarianism meeting.  Are you interested?
B: Furrows his brow  No.  And I didn’t have you down as a carniphobe, either.
A: What?
B: You’re campaigning against people eating meat?
A: Yes.
B: You’re a carniphobe.  You’re bigoted and prejudiced against people like me who eat meat.
A: Puzzled  No I’m not.  I just think eating meat is immoral.  I mean, don’t you think that…
B: If you don’t like eating meat, then don’t do it.  What business of yours is it what grown adults put in their own bodies?
A: Well, I suppose there’s a sense in which it’s not ‘my business’. If someone stole from someone else on the other side of the world today, there’s a sense in which that’s not my business; but that doesn’t mean I’m not entitled to a moral opinion about it, or to campaign against it. Same here.
B: Eating meat is part of who I am!
A: Well, I’m not entirely sure that people are born carnivorous…
B: I WAS!
A: …but even if they are, that doesn’t mean that going along with that is OK.  The fact that you, I or anyone has a tendency, inclination or urge or do something doesn’t make it OK to do that thing, even if the urge or whatever is innate.  Wouldn’t you agree that animals…
B: Eating meat is almost completely accepted in society these days, except by wackos like you.
A: Uh, have you considered the possibility that ‘society’ is wrong about this?

Clive, a representative of the Student Union, approaches Adam and Bob.

Clive: What’s going on?
B: This bigot…
Adam shows one of his posters to Clive
C: No, no, no, you can’t use a university room for a meeting like this!
A: Why not?
C: You’re in contravention of Student Union Equality and Diversity policy.  We can’t condone discriminatory events like this.
B: Thank you.
A: Discriminatory?
C: Yes.  This event discriminates against carnivores, so you can’t hold it on campus.
A: Has the world gone mad?

(This dialogue was inspired by an old blog post from William Vallicella).

‘There is no magic’, part 1: conceptualist semantics

I often hear the complaint that involving God in an explanation for anything that happens in the world is an appeal to ‘magic’ and therefore Not Allowed. In fact, this charge is levelled against any explanation which does not assume metaphysical naturalism. Ray Jackendoff makes this exact move in his 2002 book Foundations of Language: Meaning, Brain, Grammar, Evolution (Oxford: OUP), in the course of giving an outline of what he thinks a semantics of natural language should be like:

I propose to begin from the following surely uncontroversial postulate:

People find sentences (and other entities) meaningful because of something going on in their brains.

That is, we are ultimately interested not in the question: What is meaning? but rather: what makes things meaningful to people? This anchors the enterprise both in the theory of psychology and in ordinary human experience.
A second postulate is:

There is no magic.

That is, we seek a thoroughly naturalistic explanation that ultimately can be embedded in our understanding of the physical world.
Such an explanation comes at a heavy price. (p268)

Now, I could say something about Jackendoff’s first postulate, but for present purposes I want simply to take it as an introduction to the second. Of course, Jackendoff isn’t talking about God – the ‘magic’ charge is one he will come to level at rival theorists in semantics. I want to take a brief look at whether, by his own lights, Jackendoff’s own theory avoids being magical. I hope this will cast some light on the question of whether or not ‘a thoroughly naturalistic explanation that ultimately can be embedded in our understanding of the physical world’ is what we really should be after, or indeed what it would look like. This will take two or three posts; I haven’t decided yet.

Jackendoff thinks that realist views of language end up relying on ‘magic’:

Frege and much of the tradition following him take language to be independent of its human users: it relates directly to the world […] language is indeed “out in the world” and it refers to “objects in the world”; but people use language by virtue of their grasp of it, where “grasp” is a transparent metaphor for the “the mind holding/understanding/making contact with” something in the world. […]

One might interpret Katz’s program this way. he is personally interested only in the part of language that is an abstract object “in the world” […] But an abstract object by definition has no physical manifestations that can impinge on the nervous system. So how does the nervous system “grasp” them? Without a careful exegesis of the term – which no-one provides – we are ineluctably led toward a quasi-mystical interpretation of “grasping,” a scientific dead end. (pp296-9)

So much for those thinkers. Anyway, this is Jackendoff’s own view of word meaning:

Linguistic semantics per se is the study of the interface between conceptualization and linguistic form (phonology and syntax) […] In particular, lexical semantics studies the organizations of conceptualization that can be bundled up in a single word (or to be clearer, in an interface rule whose other end is a morpheme). (p293)

I’ll unpack that a bit. The idea is that a word has a particular meaning – for an individual, remember – by virtue of the fact that the word groups together particular concepts in the individual’s mind. So, what is a concept? This is a fraught question, but I’ll try to give as untendentious a characterisation as possible. Very roughly, a concept is a way of dividing up experience. That is to say, it’s because I have the concept BOOK¹ that I’m able to categorise items around me into books and non-books, and because I have the concept READ that I’m able to categorise actions into those of reading and those of not-reading (or, more accurately, that I’m able to categorise anything into an action of reading or not-an-action-of-reading), and so on. Which is not to say that the concepts themselves just are abilities. Some people say this, but I think that Jackendoff has in mind, rather, that concepts are parts of thoughts. This should become clearer as we go on.

OK, but what is it that gives concepts meaning, then? How can a concept be about books, or reading, or Ray Jackendoff, or natural language semantics? Concepts are in the mind, and these things are out in the world. What is the nature of the connection between them? Jackendoff doesn’t think much of Jerry Fodor’s suggestions for dealing with the problem:

For [Fodor], language is a mental faculty that accesses concepts […] In turn, concepts have a semantics; they are connected to the world by virtue of being “intentional.” The trouble […] is that one cannot make naturalistic sense of intentionality. If suffers from precisely the same difficulty as “grasping” language […]: there is no physically reliable causal connection between concepts and objects. (p300)²

So much the worse for naturalism, you might say. But Jackendoff doesn’t. Instead, he proceeds by ‘pushing “the world” down into the mind of the language-user too, right along with language’ (p303). His solution is that, actually, not only concepts, but also what concepts are about, are in the mind. In fact, concepts just are what they are about:

We must explicitly deny that conceptual structures are symbols or representations of anything in the world, that they mean anything. Rather, we want to say that they are meaning […] Language is meaningful, then, because it connects to conceptual structures. (p306)

Such an explanation comes at a heavy price, all right. What Jackendoff is saying is that the concept BOOK can be about books because books are in the mind – because the book I see ‘in front of me’ is, in fact, a set of sense impressions that are entirely mental. But without some additional qualification this looks like idealism, which I hardly think comports with ‘our understanding of the physical world’, which I’m quite sure Jackendoff takes to be, well, physicalist. Idealism, by his lights, would be ‘magic’.

Jackendoff doesn’t quite go down this route, although at points he seems to be toying with it³. Instead, the trick is to be found in the construction of concepts. That’s what I’ll focus on next time.

Notes
1 It's conventional to give the names of concepts in capital letters. I'm going to follow this convention.
2 The disagreements between Jackendoff and Fodor as to the nature of concepts, and their relation to word meaning, go much deeper than I have time, space or energy for here, although I may return to this issue in the next post. See for example Fodor’s 1998 book Concepts: Where Cognitive Science Went Wrong (Oxford: OUP), pp49-56.
3 See the remarks on Berkeley on p305, and on reality ‘independent of human cognition’ on p309.

Life & Liberty Petition against measures in the Coroners and Justice Bill

From the Christian Legal Centre:

We the undersigned petition the Prime Minister to Abandon the Government's opposition to the free speech protection clause in the Coroners and Justice Bill.

Preserving the sanctity of life and freedom of speech are vitally important to the preservation of liberty and good governance under the rule of law in the United Kingdom. These are under immediate threat by measures in the Coroners and Justice Bill. We the undersigned, therefore, petition HM the Queen, the Prime Minister and the Leader of the House of Lords to:

1. Protect the value of human life in the UK by opposing proposed amendments authorizing state-sanctioned assisted suicide; and

2. Protect freedom of speech by abandoning its opposition to the free speech protection clause currently within the sexual orientation hatred offence which preserves the right to, discuss, criticise and urge to refrain from certain forms of sexual conduct or practices.

Go here to sign the petition. HT: Anglican Mainstream and Christian Today, where you can go for further details. The right to ‘discuss, criticise and urge to refrain from certain forms of sexual conduct or practices’, currently under threat, is something I think reasonable non-Christians will also want to see preserved.

Go Iranians!

Riot after Iranian election - police run away from crowd:

I’ve subscribed to Mousavi1388’s YouTube channel for updates on the situation in Iran.

It’s not the economy, and don't call me stupid

<rant>A quick note to all the Labour politicians I keep hearing and seeing on the radio and the TV, who are quick to explain in advance their party’s upcoming shockingly bad performance in the local and European elections as the result of a ‘global economic crisis which began in America’: stop treating the electorate as if we are stupid. If Labour gets a thumping tomorrow it’s not because the voters can’t tell the difference between problems which are the government’s fault and those which aren’t. It’s because the public is fed up with ZaNu Labour in charge. In my case, it’s partly because I’m fed up with being patronised.

To Harriet Harman in particular, whose performance on BBC Radio 4’s Today programme this lunchtime was particularly irritating: the expenses scandal has not made me lose my faith in democracy (as if anyone thought a totalitarian regime would be less corrupt); rather, it has made me lose any last shred of faith in the people we have elected. Praising to the skies people who are about to resign because of the scandal, and blaming the media for their treatment, is sadly just what I have learned to expect from a government that has completely forgotten (if they every knew) that they work for us. Get ‘em out.</rant>

The porpoise-driven life

‘Original fin’.  Chuckle.

Christ is risen!

He is risen indeed, Hallelujah!

I hope you all have a wonderful Easter. For the occasion, I recommend Ralph Wilson’s ‘Emmaus Road Story’ on Ben Witherington’s blog, along with the following video (added 21/04/2009):

I gave up blogs and blogging for Lent (without announcing that here), which is why this space has been quiet and I haven’t read anyone’s posts for the last six weeks. But I’m back now, and hope to have some observations to share soon.

How not to do evangelism

Michael Jenson on martyrdom

Going through some old notebooks over the weekend, I found the following notes (in grey) on the subject of martyrdom and the Christian "way of being a self", from a seminar given by Michael Jenson on a church retreat back in 2007. Jenson has subsequently finished his PhD on this very subject. I don't know how much of what follows was revised for that, as I haven't been able to find out where his dissertation was published, but I've reproduced my notes here becaue I thought parts of some of them would be relevant to the series of posts I've been doing about Christians facing persecution in the UK at the moment. I've also expanded them slightly to make them into full sentences, and filled in some sub-points from memory as well.

12 proposals about martyrdom:

1. Martyrdom is the external enactment, or representation, of the internal reality of the Christian life: that is, death to self (Mark 8:35) from the very beginning of our walk with God (Romans 6:3-4). Like Dietrich Bonhoeffer, himself martyred in Nazi Germany, said, "When Christ calls a man, he bid him come and die".
2. Etymologically, martyrdom means witness, and this is the New Testament use of the word. Suffering will be involved in witness (Matthew 10:17-20) as a result of the gospel proclamation that Jesus is Lord.
3. Martyrdom is an imitation, and an amplification (Acts 7:59-60), of Jesus in his passion and death.
4. Martyrdom is completely different to suicide because
   
5. Martyrdom affirms life by renouncing it. Life is very valuable, in fact, it is the most valuable gift we can give; and it also comes from the best thing there is, namely God. Nevertheless, some Christians are called to give it up, as some are called to give up other possessions for the sake of the gospel (Matthew 19:16-30). What's important is that we "sit loose" to these things.
   
6. As evidence that people are willing to die for Christ, martyrdom is a sign of the ongoing power of Jesus in the world.
7. As Augustine said, "It is the cause, not the punishment, that makes the martyr", so e.g. Gandhi wasn't a martyr, because he didn't testify to the truth.
8. Martyrdom is an act of God, not human beings, so one can't self-designate as a martyr. Martyrs don't pursue their own death (1 Peter 3:13-17).
9. Martyrdom is a sign of a distinctively Christian mode of speech: we love people to death. The way we speak means we run risks, ranging all the way from ridicule to death. But we don't (or shouldn't) bang on about our rights; rather, we should be concerned about what is right.
10. Martyrdom is a sign of the impernanence of earthly power compared with God's eternal reign. The book of Daniel gives a good series of examples of this.
11. Martyrdom is not merely a stand of dissidence, but a witness to the rule of God in Christ. Therefore, a (carefully-considered) truce is possible with the government or other power structures if they listen.
12. Martyrdom is a sign that our way of being a self is completely at odds with the secular one(s): we renounce pleasure and security if need be. Knowing this will help us to explore and perhaps understand the "mutual incomprehension" that often exists between Christians and non-Christians.
    

Points 4-5 about martyrdom vs. suicide remind me of G.K. Chesterton's remarks on that subject (the paragraph beginning "About the same time"). This is particularly relevant at the moment because I suppose (as Jensen supposed) then when people hear "martyrdom" today, the first thing they think of is suicide bombing. See also point 8.

As I recall, what provoked the most discussion at the time was point 9, particularly the insistence that we don't "bang on about our rights". Jenson was keen that the church shouldn't be making itself into just another special interest pressure group, trying to carve out its own space within which to operate. As I agreed with Alex Fear about the Nadia Eweida affair, I agreed (and agree) with Jenson about this. Something that emerged from the discussion is that one natural outworking of the point that we should, rather, be concerned about what is right is that we should be as concerned for other people's rights as our own. This means holding the state to account in terms of the justice it promises to provide.

Still more petition material

I'm in a mood to keep digging these up.

Christian foster mother struck off after Muslim girl converts (Telegraph)

Foster parents are supposed to "respect and preserve" the faith of those in their care. However, in this case, the girl in question was 16 years old and the interest in Christianity was all her own, according to the article. Mike Judge of the Christian Institute said:

I cannot imagine that an atheist foster carer would be struck off if a Christian child in her care stopped believing in God.

Good point. Now the girl is back with her parents, who are apparently unaware of her conversion, I wonder if we could be facing another case similar to that of "Hannah".