Philosopher Michael Huemer: RAW 'that snake-oil salesman'

 

Michael Huemer. Creative Commons photo, source. 

I've been interested in University of Colorado philosopher Michael Huemer for awhile; I haven't read any of his books  yet, but I subscribe to his Substack newletter, Fake Noûs.  According to  the Wikipedia article I linked to, among the various opinions he advocates are libertarianism, vegetarianism (although it's OK to eat shellfish), agnosticism and the existence of immaterial souls. Look under "Advice" at his official website for an interesting piece, “Should I Go to Graduate School in Philosophy?”

I did not know Huemer had written about Robert Anton Wilson until I happened to browse the website for Bryan Caplan, the economics professor and blogger, and looked at the site's "Fun" section. Under "Interesting People," Caplan endorses Huemer as "my favorite philosopher of all time," and links to various "unpublished writings" of Huemer. I glanced through an eight-page letter to Brian Doherty, a libertarian writer, and found to my surprise that a large chunk of it was a rant criticizing Robert Anton Wilson.

Here below is a the section of the letter discussing RAW. A few caveats: Huemer is now 54, a philosopher professor at the University of Colorado and the author of a number of books (his new one, Progressive Myths, is just out).  The letter dates to 1992, when Huemer earned a bachelor's degree in philosophy at the University of California at Berkeley. Later that year, Huemer turned 23. He went on to earn his Ph.D. in philosophy at Rutgers University, and then landed a job in Colorado, as he explains in the FAQ on whether to go to graduate school in philosophy I reference above.

I wrote an email to Huemer on Sept. 12, explaining that I write this blog and that I wanted to post Huemer's comments about Wilson. I haven't received a reply. The document has been on Caplan's website likely for awhile, probably years, so it seems fair to post part of it. The full letter is here. The part about RAW is a distinct, numbered section of the letter, and I reprint it here. -- The Management. 

I hope the arguments by which that snake-oil salesman Robert Anton Wilson convinced you of libertarianism were a good deal better than his 'arguments' against the law of excluded middle. 

First of all, nobody should ever say anything bad about Aristotle (beyond the occasional tentative suggestion that perhaps his physics was a wee bit too teleological). He was probably the greatest thinker of all time and founded several academic disciplines, writing seminal works in formal logic, physics, metaphysics, ethics, politics, etc. that expressed what became the dominant theories in the fields for several centuries in most cases. Second, it is hardly the case that the only reason anybody believes in laws of identity, non-contradiction, and excluded middle is because Aristotle said so. People believe them because they strike us as such patent truisms. Third, Wilson's alleged counter-examples are confused. To point out that there are multiple interpretations of certain utterances, is nothing that Aristotle or other logicians have not been aware of for the past two thousand years; and to point out that some of these interpretations are true and some false is a poor argument to show that there are propositions that neither are nor are not the case. Aristotle himself urged explicitly that it was necessary to fix a univocal meaning to every term (and I'm sure he would have agreed it was necessary to fix a univocal meaning to the whole sentence). 

If a French speaker says "L'eau est chaud" and an English speaker says in the same context "The water is hot," then there is something that their utterances have in common. They are different utterances, but they mean the same thing. That is, the sentence is not the same, but the proposition it expresses is; there is one possible state of affairs that both of them purport to describe. This is an important distinction. The law of excluded middle does not assert that every sentence is either true or false; it asserts that every proposition is either true or false. And believe it or not, it was not Robert Anton Wilson who first discovered the existence of ambiguities -- i.e., that a single sentence could express multiple propositions, some of which might be true and others false. 

So, as Bryan pointed out, it doesn't matter to the truth of the Law of Excluded Middle whether you interpret "Water boils at 100 degrees C" as meaning always under every condition or just approximately at standard temperature and pressure, since however you interpret it it is either true or false. (Incidentally, the second is probably the standard interpretation.) Now let's look at the other examples. 

I don't know what "PQ = QP" means. Wilson tells us it's true "in ordinary mathematics" but not in some other mathematics. I can only assume this means either (a) that ordinary mathematics assign definitions to that statement such that it expresses a proposition which is true, while in the other mathematics it means something different, something which is false; or (b) that mathematicians disagree over whether a certain proposition is true, in which case how am I supposed to know who is right? Why is this interesting? I can come up with much more commonplace examples. For instance, I hereby define "people" to refer to elephants. Now I can say, ala R.A. Wilson, that "There are 250 million people in the United States" is true 'in ordinary demography' but false in the demography used by me. But presumably no one would think this shows that the number of people in the country is indeterminate. 

Some facts, as I pointed out earlier, are unobserved. Thus, I'm sure that either there is a tenth planet beyond Pluto or there is not a tenth planet beyond Pluto, but I'm not sure which is the case. Again, so what? Only a dummy would confuse "uncertain" with "indeterminate". 

Some sentences, even, fail to express any proposition at all. "Congratulations on your new job," or "How may I help you?" for instance, express no propositions because they aren't statements. "Colorless green ideas sleep furiously" likewise doesn't express a proposition. 

The status of "Behind the Green Door is a dirty movie" is debatable. I have never heard of the movie. Someone could argue (a) that the sentence is a veiled description of the reaction that the speaker feels towards it, in which case it is true just in case the speaker does have a feeling of disgust towards it. That is, one could argue that "x is dirty" means something like that x causes a feeling of revulsion in the speaker. (b) Someone could argue that for something to be dirty is for it to be filled with explicit sex scenes and intended for stimulating sexual desire in the audience. (c) It could be argued that "dirty" is really undefined or poorly defined so that "BtGD is a dirty movie" doesn't express a unique proposition. (d) One could say that the sentence expresses a combination of a descriptive judgement (that the movie contains explicit sex scenes) with a normative judgement (that this is bad). Finally, (e) it could be argued that the sentence contains a presupposition that promiscuous sexuality is bad (plus a claim that the movie contains explicit sex) and can be true only if that presupposition is true. Now I really don't care which of these theories one takes on the metaphysics of smut, because whatever one says the law of excluded middle holds. 

This business about "game rules" is simply idiotic. It may be true that a certain group of people believe a certain proposition and that you must believe the thing to be admitted to the group, but that tells us nothing about what it is that is believed, or whether it is true or false. I suppose R.A. Wilson would say that the fundamental theorem of calculus is a "game rule" because mathematicians won't take you seriously if you don't believe it. For that matter, anything is potentially a 'game rule' since I could always attach some consequences for people believing or not believing it. But the people in the Catholic church are not playing some kind of game; they really believe that the Pope is infallible (and falsely at that). 

I suppose Wilson hopes that his pseudo-scientific jargon will cow the reader into accepting his arbitrary assertions on religious faith -- e.g., "neurosemantic", "existential reality-labyrinth" -- but the question tougher than any of the quiz questions that I kept pondering is whether Wilson's own statements are true, false, or meaningless.