[lit-ideas] Re: The Deontic And The Boulomaic
- From: Jlsperanza@xxxxxxx
- To: lit-ideas@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
- Date: Sun, 21 Jun 2009 08:29:13 EDT
It is a pleasure to reply to R. Paul's questions. He is serious and wants
to know _the truth_.
In a message dated 6/20/2009 11:29:49 P.M. Eastern Daylight Time,
rpaul@xxxxxxxx quotes my fresh
>>It's best to deal with operators, like "deontic" and 'boulemaic' (the
good,
>>the teleological, the aretaic).
And asks
>Could you possibly mean 'boulomaic'?
Well, I'm using the term I first came across in Allwood et al, "Logic in
Linguistics", but let me check:
Logic in linguistics - Google Books Result by Jens S. Allwood,
Lars-Gunnar Andersson, Östen Dahl - 1977 - Language Arts & Disciplines - 185
pages
... has to do with logical possibility), epistemic logic (which has to do
with knowledge and belief) and even boulomaic logic (having to do with
desire). ...
books.google.com/books?isbn=0521291747...
------
You are perfectly write -- as per googlebook hit above. They do use
'boulomaic'. It's of course from 'boule' in Greek, and neither 'boulomaic' nor
'boulemaic' are credited in the OED. I did write to _OED3@xxxxxxxxxx
(mailto:OED3@xxxxxxxxx) for inclusion of 'boulomaic', but they say, "it's not
very
current yet". I suppose 'boulemaic' is ill-formed, so thanks.
>I'm confused. When and where is it best to deal with 'operators' like
>these? The sentence itself is ill-formed.
Right -- it's not, in my parlance, a sentence. Only well-formed sentences
are "sentences", but K. Trogge opposes this truth.
>What have the words in
>parentheses to do with what comes before them? Are they simply additions
>to the first pair you mention or are they somehow interpretations of them?
They were meant as interpretations of the boulomaic: the aretaic and the
teleological (both viewed as boulomaic) as opposed to the deontic.
R. Paul quotes my reasoning: Hannibal Lecter says (I never saw the film --
was he into something _bad_?)
>> I like icecream.
_______________
>> I ought to eat icecream.
And writes:
>This makes no sense to me.
Well, it _is_ a version of what G. E. Moore called the 'naturalistic
fallacy' but he committed the non-naturalistic fallacy, so what did HE know?
"like" is more like 'will' or 'want', i.e. the boulomaic operator. In symbols
B(a, p)
________
D( a, p)
The "is" of the 'boulomaic' yields the "ought" of the 'deontic'. Of course
I was simplifying the premises, which should read:
i. B(a, p)
ii. B(a, i)
iii. B(a, ii)
iv. B(a, iii)
ad infinitum
_________________
D(a, p).
For any proposition "p" that is the object of a boulomaic attitude, if we
can provide a Kantian chain of embedding justifications (I don't just want
p, but want to want p, and want to want to want p, ...) this is exactly
analogous to the non-existence of a clause to refute the universalizability of
my pure motivation, and thus, obligation cashes out in desire (as Baker
writes in PGRICE googlebooks ed Grandy/Warner)
>Even if some magico-logician could parse this
>as an argument (it looks like a practical syllogism dredged up off the
>coast of the Adriatic, with some parts broken and others missing), it
>would not follow that just because someone likes something, he ought to
>do it. Hannibal Lecter comes to mind.
Again, I haven't seen the film. He was the figment of some imagination. Who
wrote the libretto? We should deal with real people. Anthony Hopkins looks
like a reasonable fellow to me. He filmed a film near my birth-place, it's
called "The Arsehole of the World", or the "Most beautiful place in the
World". He came to film it with his forreign wife. We loved them.
And thanks for your questions. I suppose that the addition of the further
boulomaic operators do make more sense to you. There _has_ to be a way to
define the deontic in terms of the boulomaic. My shot is a Gricean one which
he calls Kantotelian or Ariskantian, since it magically connects both
genius and leaves, for a change, Wittgenstein (genius as some say he was) out o
f the picture.
Cheers,
J. L. Speranza
Buenos Aires, Argentina
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