[lit-ideas] Re: Paying taxes for months on end
- From: Robert Paul <robert.paul@xxxxxxxx>
- To: lit-ideas@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
- Date: Fri, 27 May 2005 21:44:14 -0700
Phil Enns wrote:
> Robert Paul wrote:
>
> "'The police have no right…' can be understood as meaning that the
> police may not enter one's home without a search warrant, and this may
> be all that needs to be said. However, by way of explanation of why they
> may not one can appeal to the Bill of Rights."
>
> There is no problem with 'The police have no right to .. ' because the
> word/sign 'right' does not refer us to talk of rights.
I think this must mean that it need not lead us to talk 9further?) of
rights.
> There is no need to ask 'What right is in operation here?'. Instead, we ask
> What can or can't the police do in ...'. The problem arises when we think
> that
> any explanation must appeal to something other than the operation of
> government, that '.. no right to .. ' must refer to something.
This may be somebody's problem, but it isn't mine. It's as if you took
Wittgenstein to be saying that in order for an expression of any kind to
be meaningful it must refer to something (and that something must be the
kind of thing which can be kicked or bitten).(I add this qualification
because without it one could retort that 'right' in '…no right to…'
refers to a right, which would be a sensible reply if one weren't the
early S. I. Hayakawa disguised as the early Wittgenstein. This was
never Wittgenstein's view about the how words get their meaning, either
in the Tractatus or later.
You do appear to avoid the question of whether or not the sentence
we're talking about is intelligible, even though it contains a natural,
unproblematic use of the word 'right.' It seems to me that you find talk
of rights incoherent (although you're certainly able to talk of them
without, as far as I can see, crashing into some Meinongian golden
mountain) because you believe that there can be no ordinary talk about
rights that does not land us some meta-discourse about them. I think,
and thought you did too, that one could understand expressions in which
the word 'right' occurred without entering that thicket. That is, one
need not be a political or legal theorist in order to understand the
sentence about the police.
It's surely a bit disingenuos to say, after having ably sustained a
discussion of rights, their derivation and contingencies, that you stand
by your earlier statement that 'any talk of rights is incoherent.'
Robert Paul
at the end of the warmest May 27th on record
somewhere near Lake Oswego
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