Are you receiving "spoils" if the government lets you engage in voluntary trade?

Why is a technology company's greater ability to hire immigrants who wish to live and work in the United States -- if such wider scope for mutually beneficial trade is what the immigration bill currently under consideration would enable -- being referred to by so pejorative a term as "spoils"?

Headline of a New York Times article: "Tech Pushes to Keep Its Spoils in Immigration Bill." The "spoils"? "[The bill] makes it easier for foreign students who get science and engineering degrees at American universities to get permanent residency, creates a new temporary visa for entrepreneurs, and in the most contested clause, vastly expands how many temporary contract workers can be brought into this country under so-called H-1B visas, while also raising the minimum wages they must be paid."

The primary dictionary definition of "spoils" is "booty, loot, or plunder taken in war or robbery." "Spoils" are not any kind of benefit gained from peaceful, voluntary trade. Nor can getting an okay from government to engage in peaceful, voluntary trade intelligibly be regarded as receiving "spoils."

The term is wrong whether we regard "spoils" as loot or, derivatively, as the payoffs of a successful political struggle a la "spoils of office." Either way, the Times author is using the term to refer, cynically, to any kind of gains gotten in consequence of the fight over immigration without regard to the essential nature of those gains.

The wealth earned by voluntary trade and productive effort is not loot of any kind and it is not a political plum. The wealth thus created belongs by right to the wealth-creator and those he pays in trade. This means that he did not acquire the wealth by raiding a nearby town or by out-lobbying others. Wealth that one earns by right is not morally tainted. To refer indiscriminately to the results of robbery, of politicking and of production by the same belittling term is to obscure key moral and other differences between these means of pursuing one's interests. It is also to obscure the difference between engaging in politics defensively, in order to protect one's rights, and engaging in politics in order to take by force what belongs by right to others.

Politicians should do only two things with respect to our peaceful economic life. First, abstain from interfering in what Robert Nozick called capitalist acts between consenting adults. Second, enforce protections of our rights to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness against the violence and fraud of criminals and governments.

When legislation forcibly transfers wealth from persons who earned it to persons who did not earn it, then we can talk legitimately, and accurately, about the "spoils" being conferred through that legislation by politicians doing the opposite of what they should.

What about all those concepts with only one member in the class?

I posted the following comments in two parts at a blog devoted to criticizing Ayn Rand's philosophy of Objectivism. Here I am re-posting what I said with a few edits.

Some of what I say below may not make sense unless you know something about Rand's theory of concepts, which as she initially presented it in a short treatise is highly compact. The concept theory is probably her most technical work in philosophy. However, the Second Expanded Edition of Rand's Introduction to Objectivist Epistemology includes a lengthy edited transcript of a workshop about the theory in which she answers a wide range of detailed questions about her explanation and specific formulations. That edition is the place to start if you have an interest in this subject. Although Rand characterizes a concept in several overlapping ways in the treatise, her considered definition in light of her theory is "a mental integration of two or more units possessing the same distinguishing characteristic(s), with their particular measurements omitted."

* * *

Neil writes: "This entire approach (two instances plus perhaps a 'foil') [as inherent in the process of valid concept formation] is highly unlikely to be correct. Every once in a while I read an article about how someone finds a new mammal in Borneo or wherever. Apparently there is no problem 'conceptualizing' it even though only one animal has been found."

Describing an entity and forming a new concept of it are not the same thing. If I create a table with a unique doohicky-flange, and I intend never to make another such, I don't need to form a concept of a special subcategory of table in the tradition of end tables, coffee tables and dining room tables. But if I plan to mass-produce my new kind of table and sell it, I can call it a DH Table or whatever. Of course, I can imagine other DH Tables before I actually produce them. I don't need to have other units of a concept before me perceptually in order to have them in mind. If I did, all higher-order concepts that in order to be formed require more than what is right in front of my eyes (justice, government, planetary systems, historical eras) would have to be declared out of conceptual bounds from the get-go.

Neil does not elaborate his example. Is the single animal discovered in Borneo unique in the world, and regarded by the biologist who studies it as unique in the world? Is it merely a deformed instance of an already-known species? Or does the biologist believe that there is or has at some point been more than one of this previously unknown kind of animal? Does he believe that he is looking at a member of a species?

There is no point in forming a concept of a species of this animal unless there is cause to suppose that it is in fact a member of a species--i.e., one of a group of others like it. The biologist is then forming a concept based on his assumption that there are two or more animals like this. The fact that the existence of other members of the species is only assumed until the biologist can find more members or evidence of more members does not mean that conceptualizers need only one unit of a kind of thing to form a concept of that kind of thing. The concept would refer now to any units that one discovers in the future that are sufficiently like the already observed referent of the concept to also be included in the class the members of which are referred to by the concept.

To what extent the provisionally formed concept of the new species in Neil's example is satisfactory can only be determined when more members of the species are actually found. Moreover, the biologist's provisional concept can be as plausibly formed as it is to begin with only because the rest of the living world is not a blank to him. The biologist can suppose that whatever may be the traits of other members of the species, if the sole member thus far discovered is a normal member of the species, then the traits of the other members will vary only within certain definite limits. But why is the biologist able to make this assumption? He doesn't simply deduce the constraints in a cognitive vacuum, without ever having differentiated and integrated anything in the plant and animal kingdoms ever before. He relies on an extensive background knowledge. Yet the fact and utility of such background knowledge is simply neglected in Neil's example. "More than one" species of animal has already been found. Millions have been found. Millions currently flourish on the earth. And they typically consist of more than one member. When forming his concept of the new species with, so far, only one known member, the biologist can compare the single known member of the new species with what he knows of other species, especially the most closely related other species.

Let there be an alien race that knows nothing of plants and animals; the aliens are fed magically by manna, let's say. In any case, for whatever strange reasons the aliens have lived in splendid biological isolation. Let's also stipulate that they form concepts the way humans do. They have the same kind of consciousness that we do. What they lack is our knowledge and acquaintance with flora and fauna.

Let the aliens one day invent space flight and land on a planet where they discover a single blade of grass--that's it. All the rest is rocks and sand and sky and the two suns. Can our alien adventurers now form a concept of what kind of class this entity belongs to, without any further investigation and without bringing any knowledge that could have been gained only by prior familiarity with plants and animals? Can they form the concept without even a single other blade to which they can compare the blade they've found, let alone without a single other example of a plant to which they can compare it? How is the single blade similar to and how is it different from any other possible members of the species? Same length but different colors? Different colors but same length? Is it a part of something else? Does it have any form of consciousness? Is it normal to be stuck in the ground like that?

The alien discoverers of the single blade have lacked even a concept of species as a kind of organism. Human beings may have trouble distinguishing one species of warbler from another, but the aliens have had no concept of species at all. They've been differentiating themselves only from rocks and sun and rain, not from other organisms. They've never seen other organisms. Perhaps they can imaginatively project different versions of themselves. But none of their science fiction has been exploiting information about elephants, tigers, mosquitoes or cucumbers. The alien astronauts may infer that the blade is alive, for they do have another example of a living thing--themselves--to which they can see the blade is like in that respect. In the expectation of eventually finding other blade-things, they may form a concept of it that they define as "living thing stuck in ground." Since that's the only other kind of living thing they are aware of, the concept, despite its lack of precision, successfully distinguishes the blade-thing and any other blade-things they come across from everything else they know about so far.

If the spacefarers then discover other living things, organisms that are not only alive but markedly different from the blade-thing, the new organisms would probably only briefly if at all be subsumed under the concept that the aliens had formed with the hope of finding at least one other living thing not themselves. Suppose the aliens go around a ridge and see a frog and a flower and a mosquito, maybe even more than one of each. If the aliens expect to be referring to these organisms, they need more concepts. They need to distinguish the plants and animals not only from the aliens themselves but from each other. The aliens must certainly regard the frogs as similar to each other as well as different from the flowers, the mosquitoes and the blade-thing. The same is true for members of the other species that the aliens are discovering. Moreover, this discovery of species with more than one instance makes it more plausible that they will someday find another blade-thing; i.e., that there is a practical point to having a concept, and a word, for blade-things.

If you want to know whether differentiation and integration are fundamental and inescapable requirements of forming concepts and acquiring knowledge of the world, watch what your mind does as you form concepts and gain knowledge. Look first at the normal cases, not the borderline or unusual cases that can be explicated by reference only to the usual case of valid concept formation. When it is cognitively useful to group things together on the basis of their fundamental similarities, I need a concept that enables me to refer to units of that group. I don't need a concept to refer to a unique thing qua unique thing. I need a concept for designating possession. I need a concept for houses. I need a concept for numbers. I need a concept for streets. I don't need a concept for "my house on 101 Mulberry St.," however partial I may be to calling it The Mulhouse. If a biologist says he has discovered a new species even though he has only observed one example of the species, he expects that there are or have been other animals sufficiently like it to be properly considered a member of that new species. There is no need (except for purposes of imagination), and it would be cognitively counterproductive, to form the concept of a species if there evidently is no species, no group, no prospective units, plural.

The art of contradictory mis-identification

Defining logic as "the study of information encoded in the form of logical sentences" is like defining the sentence as "a group of words combined in the form of a sentence."

But Stanford Professor Genesereth's definition of logic (offered in the first segment of an online Coursera course on logic) is worse than circular. Logic is not (fundamentally) about propositions, just as carpentry is not (fundamentally) about hammers or nails. Carpentry is about how to build or repair, and then building or repairing; say, a house. Logic, too, is about method: how to think, and then thinking, perhaps by building an argument or assessing one. Logic is the science and art of reasoning in such a way that one's thought is consistently tied to reality, and therefore capable of yielding knowledge. Translating statements into logical forms (like "All S are P") and understanding the implications of such sentences are a means of doing that. It is a critical part of the method. But logic as science of method is about more than the study of propositions or other "logical sentences."

American Heritage's definition of logic is not bad: "The study of principles of reasoning, especially of the structure of propositions as distinguished from their content and of method and validity in deductive reasoning." But if we read past the comma, this definition seems to give short shrift to inductive logic. The procedure of induction is to draw inferences from premises already adopted as true--to excavate what is implicit in those premises. Induction involves forming by observation and experiment the generalizations that may then serve as premises for subsequent deductions. Once we know that there are aardvarks, and what makes aardvarks like other aardvarks and different from all the non-aardvarks, we can feel logically justified in deducing, "Here's another damn aardvark." Once we know something about the laws of gravity by inductive inference (thanks Galileo, Newton, et al.), we can deduce where the asteroid is headed.

Dictionary.com defines logic as "the science that investigates the principles governing correct or reliable inference." "Inference" we can take to be not quite a synonym of "reasoning." They're both about how to get from starting points to conclusions (although you could say the same thing about the running of foot races). American Heritage says that to infer is to "conclude from evidence or by reasoning." To reason is "to use the faculty of reason; think logically." Dictionary.com says to reason is "to form conclusions, judgments, or inferences from facts or premises" and that to infer is "to derive by reasoning; conclude or judge from premises or evidence."

In his introduction to his logic text The Art of Thinking, David Kelley says that his book is about "how to think." Thinking is a "cognitive process we use in the attempt to gain knowledge or to understand something, as distinct from our emotional responses to things." The subject matter of logic is "the rules and strategies of thinking, certain standards that tell us when we have achieved a clear understanding of some subject or succeeded in proving a case." Kelley distinguishes thinking as a directed mental activity from the "thinking" that has to do with the flotsam and jetsam that floats through one's mind even when one is not attempting to direct thought. I'm going to go out on a limb (a fairly stout limb given the title of Kelley's book) and declare that "thinking" in the narrower sense Kelley spells out is synonymous with "reasoning." Or we can say that reasoning is a kind of thinking: the directed-toward-finding-out-things kind of thinking.

Reasoning and being logical are closely allied. But reasoning has more broadly to do with the exercise as such of the human conceptual faculty to find out about the world. Logic is the method we follow (not always formally and explicitly) to keep ourselves on track in that process. Formal logic is explicit and precise in its vocabulary and directives--perhaps precisely wrong, if and when logicians go off the rails with symbolic arcana or non-fundamental definitions. If we mean by logic only formalized and explicitly applied rules of logic, i.e., logic as a developed science, then its overlap with reasoning as such is not as great as the overlap of any even implicit inferential process that attends to the identity of things.

The principle at the root of logic is the law of identity: the fact that things are what they are. All injunctions of logic are forms of recognizing, accommodating, applying the law of identity and ensuring that it is not violated in thought as we go about identifying facts and drawing further conclusions, i.e., making further identifications on the basis of past identifications. Following the law of noncontradiction is the negative aspect of the means by which we abide by the law of identity: we're taking care to avoid the bad thing in order to continue adhering to the good thing. Whenever we see that we have stated or implied that A is non-A, we know we've made a mistake.

How many different ways can we say that A is non-A without doing so willfully? Lots of ways, some of them very subtle. Hence the need for a science of logic, for a textbook as opposed to a 3x5 card saying "remember that things are what they are." Ayn Rand stressed that identifying the nature of things must follow non-contradictory procedures when she offered a boiled-down definition of logic as "the art of non-contradictory identification." Identification of what? Not, ultimately, identification of the logical character of sentences.

Formal rules of implication help us recognize fallacies and flaws in reasoning, but also to positively assess the strength of our evidence and the level of support for our conclusions. We want "logical sentences" and their relationships to be valid. But we don't want to safeguard from contradiction only "logical sentences." The concern is broader. We also want to know about relationships within and between arguments as well as between propositions in one sequence of an argument; and most important, the relationship between our argument and reality. We want to know what constitutes supportive but inadequate evidence for a generalization. We want what we're saying about reality to be true, or as true as our means and effort make possible.

Classification and definition are among the aspects of reasoning with which logic is properly concerned. You don't convey what logic as the method of reasoning is basically about if your definition of logic--what you write on the blackboard as worth encoding--is "the study of information encoded in the form of logical sentences." Concepts of method have something to do with the purposes the method is designed to achieve. The purpose regulates the method. Logic is fundamentally about guiding our reasoning. Logic is not, fundamentally, about the study of information encoded in units of logical form (although it is also and importantly that). Logic is the study of any principles and standards designed to help ensure that our identifications identify. If we lose sight of that and merely manipulate symbols according to stipulated rules without regarding to whether these rules as practiced can help us to achieve and sustain a consistent knowledge of reality, what we are doing is not logic.

Will Provine has free will

I came across a Cornell Daily Sun article about a lecture by Will Provine on "Evolution and Intelligent Design." As I remember him, Provine liked to attack free will at every opportunity, and he did so at this 2005 event also.

“Choosing doesn’t imply free will,” he said. “Choices are not made freely — there are all kinds of constraints on it.” In an attempt to discredit the view that lack of free will would “lead society into a downward spiral,” Provine argued that without free will there would be no means of blaming people for their actions. “Blame is useless,” he said. “It just creates a horrible system of criminal justice.” 

He added that if society recognized the absence of free will, society would ultimately be much kinder to its less fortunate. 

“I hated the idea of human free will,” Provine added. He also argued that humans mostly provide their own moral guidance, and that “ultimate moral responsibility is nonexistent.” He admitted, “Free will is the hardest [preconception] … to give up.”

As a student at Cornell in the early 80s, I attended one of Provine's seminars. Whether the Sun's quotations of him are strictly accurate, the ideas conveyed sound just like the Provine of thirty years ago. His rejection of free will was never well defended.

Provine seems to think that volition contradicts causality. But if one of the attributes of a human level of consciousness is the ability to initiate choice, this self-regulatory capacity is a feature of our human consciousness. It is an attribute of our identity as human beings.

The law of causality is an implication of the law of identity; causality is the principle that entities act in accordance with their identity. Our ability to select freely among certain alternatives in a way that is not determined by antecedent factors--including whether to think about something we know we need to think about or to evade it (homework, a problem with a spouse that we are afraid to confront, or whatever)--does not imply a contradiction of our identity if that self-regulatory capacity is part of our identity. Nor does free will contradict our genetic inheritance (which inheritance includes the conceptual and volitional nature of our consciousness) or any environmental factors we have to grapple with. Many unchosen factors determine or constrain what we confront when we make choices, but these factors do not obliterate our ability to choose given these constraints. A freely chosen action is certainly caused. We can even say that a human action is fully determined if we include volition as one of the causal factors determining the effects of our action, a free choice made possible by the fact that we have a certain kind of consciousness. But this is not the "determinism" that determinists argue for.

Provine can't get around the fact that we are directly aware of our ability to choose. Introspection gives us that knowledge. Thus, the fact of free will, as such, is self-evident--even if there is much that is not self-evident about how our self-regulatory capacity came about biologically and evolutionarily, or exactly which aspects of consciousness we can directly control and which we cannot. We are aware of our choosing and that we could have chosen otherwise in particular cases. If we conceptualize the exercise of our free will as directly observed without trying to bend what we observe to match some antecedent notion, we arrive at a concept of free will. We recognize that we make choices not necessitated by antecedent factors considered apart from our self-regulatory capacity. The process of waking up, of gearing up to study a passage in a book, of actually acting in a certain way after having determined that such is what one should do--all these are acts of choice that we can directly observe. Whether to attend to reality or not, and, once we are attending, what alternatives to choose in the present context of our lives, are continuous questions. We choose all day long. If we introspect, we are immediately conscious of this choosing and that in any given case we could have chosen otherwise.

But Provine wants to legislate the nature of human consciousness based on his presupposition of determinism. He starts not with what he can observe about his own consciousness in action but with the assumption that men are mechanistically determined, with no true freedom of choice, and uses that to claim that that of which we are directly aware (via introspection) cannot possibly be the case. Our experience of freely choosing among real alternatives can only be an illusion, he says. But he proffers no evidence that it is an illusion except that it contradicts his a priori theoretical assertion of determinism.

This procedure is possible with respect to any observable feature of reality. I can take any untethered theoretical assertion about the nature of reality--for example "there is no matter"--and then, whenever I observe something in reality that contradicts my theory, proceed to claim that what I observe must be an illusion given the alleged truth of my unjustified theoretical claim. Whenever I see a rock, then, I can on this procedure assert that it is "amazing how my consciousness is tricking me into thinking that this material entity exists, since I know that no material entity can exist." Or I can assert that only matter exists, and no consciousness (even though only a conscious entity, obviously, could make such an assertion). Or I can assert, with Provine, that consciousness exists, and human consciousness exists, and the capacity for thought exists, and apparent freedom of choice, of which we can apparently be introspectively aware, exists, but no actual actual freedom of choice of which we are actually aware.

Why, in the case of volition in particular, must it be that that of which we are directly aware is an illusion? Because Provine has a theory about the nature of human consciousness, a theory not based on observation; his theory precedes observation; his theory trumps observation. Ergo, the freely self-regulatory feature of human consciousness can't possibly exist, even though we are directly aware of it, moment by moment all the waking day long--directly aware of this feature of our identity.

But shouldn't one draw one's theories from facts, rather than edit reality to match the theory?

Provine seems to regard free will as necessarily a religious doctrine. Although some thinkers have supposed that free will and religion are somehow comparable or necessitate each other (and therefore comparably valid or invalid), the fact of free will implies nothing religious. The facts that consciousness exists and that the human form of consciousness exists do not imply a supernatural dimension or creatures outside the natural world. Dreams, for example, do not imply the existence of ghosts; but under Provine's approach, the fact that some persons believe in ghosts because they believe that a dead parent visited them in a dream would require a rational, scientifically oriented person to deny the existence of dreams. And yet we dream...