We are considering a case mentioned by O. K. about the alleged reason the shooter may have had to _fear_ -- re: the alleged legitimate self-defense. I was particularly interested in the use of 'reason' vs. 'cause. The passage by O. K. is requoted by McEvoy: "The legal dispute however revolved about whether [the man who shot the two other men] he had reason to fear those guys." and he quotes what McEvoy refers to as a bromide (echoing Poincaré), "Ça, c'est onceptuel. which Poincaré was obviously borrowing from Cole Porter's song, "Ça, c'est l'amour" In a message dated 3/9/2015 6:29:34 A.M. Eastern Daylight Time, Jlsperanza@xxxxxxx writes: There is mere assertion here - "This is conceptual". There is no argument here that shows that the "legal dispute" hinges not on any "conceptual element" [though admittedly a "conceptual element" of sorts is used in framing the legal dispute] but on a "question of fact" - i.e. whether he had sufficient "reason to fear those guys" in the sense of apprehending an impending attack to which he was entitled to respond with pre-emptive force. My previous post made clear that there is no "conceptual analysis" that answers this question of fact: it is a substantive question of fact to be resolved by a substantive judgment and not a question to be resolved by analysis of the meaning of the concepts involved. That is why persons can disagree on whether there was self-defence even though they do not disagree on the meaning of the concepts involved (at least in one sense of the meaning of "meaning"); and I suggest it is just as much a mistake to try to shoehorn this kind of substantive disagreement into the box marked "This is conceptual" as it would be an error to treat "E = mc2" as something whose truth or validity is determined in terms of its merely conceptual elements.In the philosophy of science, this error is propounded by conventionalists like Poincaré..." Well, again, then, my focus nwas not so much on 'self-defense' and how legitimate can be (unless it relies on a definition as per legal rule) but on the rather circumstantial use of 'reason' -- hence my reference to [THIS PHILOSOPHER I LIKE]. As early as 1948, before Davidson had brought all this to the forum (in "Actions, Reasons, and Causes" essay for the Journal of Philosophy, vol. 60 -- Davidson's contribution to a symposium). [THIS PHILOSOPHER I LIKE] writes about the ordinary-language use of 'reason' (as it contrasts with 'cause' -- and it is noticeable that the issue was taken by Hart/Honoré, because they favoured writing a book on causation in the law rather than on reason in the law, which perhaps was less relevant). [THIS PHILOSOPHER I LIKE] writes back in 1948 (Hart will have occasion to quote him for the PHILOSOPHICAL QUARTERLY in 1952, "Signs and words", being Hart's review of Holloway's simplistic "Language and Intelligence"): "Will any kind of intended effect do, or may there be cases where an effect is intended (with the required qualifications) and yet we should not want to talk of meaning?" "Suppose I discovered some person so constituted that, when I told him that whenever I grunted in a special way I wanted him to blush or to incur some physical malady, thereafter whenever he recognized the grunt (and with it my intention), he did blush or incur the malady." "Should we then want to say that the grunt meant something?" "I do not think so." "This points to the fact that for x to have meaning, the intended effect must be something which in some sense is within the control of the audience, or that in some sense of "reason" the recognition of the intention behind x is for the audience a reason and not merely a cause." THE KEYWORD HERE IS "CAUSE" as in Grice's provocative "not merely a cause" -- which is an interesting adverb that McEvoy had used previously, and on which Omar makes interesting remarks. In this case, Grice is implicating (or explicitly communicating by via of entailment, if you must) that a reason IS a cause -- but the reverse does not hold -- a cause is not necessarily a reason). [THIS PHILOSOPHER I LIKE CONTINUES]: "It might look as if there is a sort of pun here ("reason for believing" and "reason for doing"), but I do not think this is serious." "For though no doubt from one point of view questions about reasons for believing are questions about evidence and so quite different from questions about reasons for doing, nevertheless to recognise an utterer's intention in uttering x (descriptive utterance), to have a reason for believing that so-and-so, is at least quite like "having a motive for" accepting so-and-so." "... is at least quite like..." may still not be "... is identical with... " [THIS PHILOSOPHER I LIKE GOES ON: "Decisions "that" seem to involve decisions "to" (and this is why we can "refuse to believe" and also be "compelled to believe"" THE KEYWORD here would be: 'compelled to fear', or 'refuse to fear', because the alleged case of self-defense trades on the idea of 'fear'. [THE PHILOSOPHER I LIKE GOES ON to refer to a case of someone cutting someone else in the street: "If I cut someone in the street I do feel inclined to assimilate this to the cases of meaning, and this inclination seems to me dependent on the fact that I could not reasonably expect him to be distressed (indignant, humiliated) unless he recognized my intention to affect him in this way." "This "cutting" case needs slightly different treatment now, for one cannot in any straightforward sense "decide" to be offended." Here the keyword is on 'DECISION' as based on 'reason' rather than 'cause'. One cannot decide to be offended because being offended is caused by the offensive or offending behaviour. But the person who gets offended, in no 'straightforward case' DECIDES to be offended. "One can REFUSE to be offended, though." by ignoring the causes, I expect. "It looks then as if the intended effect must be something within the control of the audience, or at least the sort of thing which is within its control." WHICH does NOT seem to be the case with the keyword to hand here: FEAR behind a defense of legitimate self-defense. It may do to compare Hart to Poincaré. Poincaré writes: "When a law [cfr. Hart on 'law' and 'legal rules'] has received a sufficient confirmation from experiment, we may adopt two attitudes: either we may leave this law in the fray; it will then remain subject to incessant revision, which without any doubt will end by demonstrating that it is only approximate; or else we may elevate it into a principle by adopting conventions." (Poincaré 1905b: 165–166; 1913b: 335) The analogy in Hart is that a legal rule, while founded on some pre-legal state of affair, becomes conventional in that a mere external attitude towards it is always possible ("It is not conventional among non-cannibalistic societies to eat people" -- "Eating people is conventionally wrong in these societies"). In physics, the conventions are convenient even with respect to physical objects (Poincaré 1902: 152; 1913b: 125). Just as the law of displacements may correspond only approximately to the law of groups and is consequently considered to be the result of two component changes, the first being a displacement, and the second a qualitative alteration, so Poincaré regards the physical complex relation between two bodies A and B in Poincaré's formula below, as the result of two components. The first is regarded as a “simple” geometrical (mathematical, and thus analytical) principle, while the second is itself composed of what Poincaré calls two “epistemological laws.” The physical bodies A and B are thus related to mere geometrical figures A′ ; and B′ of the geometrical space so that R(A,B) ↔ R′(A′,B′) ∧ rA(A,A′) ∧ rB(B,B′) where R′ is a “properly” geometrical proposition, and the "r" -- rA and rB -- express the relationships between objects of the representative space and the geometrical space, such as the relation between solid bodies and motion invariants. Poincaré declares that by changing the relations "r" i.e. rA and rB -- the geometrical proposition R′(A′, B′) could even serve to describe the relationship between two different physical bodies (see Poincaré 1905b: 166– 67; 1913b: 336). The conventional elements in physical theories were often misunderstood by Poincaré's contemporaries. His affirmation that neither of the two propositions i. The earth turns round. and its negation ii. The earth does not turn round. is "more true than the other in the kinematic sense". This is NOT a rehabilitation of Ptolemy's system, but the consequence of the fact that in physics, the empirical systematic (not epistemic) under-determination of theories is limited by unifying considerations. As Poincaré notes: "A physical theory is by so much the more true, as it puts in evidence more true relations." So, the i. The earth turns round. has a richer content expressed by "the flattening of the earth, the rotation of Foucault's pendulum, the gyration of cyclones, the trade-winds, and who knows what else?”" (Poincaré 1905b: 184–85; 1913b: 353). In physics proper—that is, in optics and in electrodynamics—the conventional elements are still there: Poincaré writes: "We meet another sort of hypotheses […] Without doubt, at first blush, the theories seem to us fragile, and the history of science proves to us how ephemeral they are; yet they do not entirely perish, and of each of them something remains. It is these something we must seek to disentangle, since there, and there alone is the veritable reality." (Poincaré 1902: 26; 1913b: 29–30). In fact, Poincaré's model of explanation, founded on a minimum of well-confirmed hypotheses erected into principles and from which any meaningful propositions can be deduced, is called into question by Maxwell's approach. Interstingly, Poincaré and Einstein did not cite each other. This despite the fact that Einstein read Poincaré's Science and Hypothesis before 1905 and Poincaré wrote Einstein a recommendation letter sometime after their only meeting at the first Solvay Congress in 1911 (Walter 2007: chap. 59.3). So, what were the causes (if not reasons) for Einstein's behaviour? Poincaré, himself a physician, besides a philosopher, discovered salient points of the special theory of relativity, such as an operational definition of clock-synchronization to first order in v/c, and a relativistic formula of the composition of speed, the determination of the structure of the Lorentz-group. Using in his famous St. Louis lecture of 1904 the designation (physical) “ principle of relativity” (Poincaré 1905a: 607), which does not apply “to finite equations that are directly observed, but to differential equations” (Poincaré 1913a: 103; 1963: 19), Poincaré reports that Lorentz introduces the conjectures (i.e., the ad hoc hypotheses) of “local time” and of “ uniform contraction in the direction of motion” in an attempt to save the principle in its application to the electromagnetic domain (see Poincaré 1905b: 132 ff.; 1913b: 305 ff.). It was indeed Poincaré (1906) who made Lorentz's theory fully compatible with the relativity principle. We are thus naturally inclined, remarks Poincaré, to admit the postulate of relativity in every domain. In postulating the principle as a “general law of Nature” (Poincaré 1906: 495), its extended form finds its origin in the Galilean principle, and its motivation in its compatibility with a theory explaining why no experiment is able to inform us of the earth's motion relative to the ether. So, the principle is an element of a work in progress containing several conjectures and there is the possibility that it will lose its soundness (Poincaré 1905b: 146; 1913b: 319). Poincaré's old conventional construction of space where he prefers Euclidean geometry on the basis of considerations of simplicity and commodity must be subsumed to a new convention on space-time. Indeed, Poincaré never abandons Galilean space-time but it is not even clear if before 1912 the principle of special relativity with Lorentz co-variance (instead with Galilean co-variance) was enough well-confirmed to be unassailable by experiment and to make the principle with Galilean co-variance unfruitful. Perhaps part of the problem is Russellian (that [THIS PHILOSOPHER I LIKE] worshipped, for we may distinguish, to echo McEvoy between: E = mc2 and E =df mc2 This is still different of course from [THIS PHILOSOPHER I LIKE] and his use of "iff" for a proper analysis has to provide sufficient AND necessary conditions for propositions, whereas " = " and " =df" (unless we adopt a meta-language that Hart feared*) applies to nominal elements within the propositions. Cheers, Speranza * Hart (Letter to Isaiah Berlin): "Dear Isaiah, Thank you for your letter. You wonder why I panic, why I terrify, what I fear. What I am tremendously doubtful about is the adequacy of my abilities and the strength of my interest in the subject. My greatest misgiving (amongst many) is about the whole linguistic approach to logic, meaning, semantics, meta-languages, and object-languages. At present my (necessarily intermittent) attempts to understand this point of view only engender panic and despair but I dimly hope that I cannot be incapable given time of understanding it. The solution or dissolution of philosophical problems in this medium is however at present incomprehensible yet terrifying to me. My main fear is that it is the fineness and accuracy of this linguistic approach which escapes my crude and conventional grasp and that it may be very difficult at my age to adjust one’s telescope to the right focus. As a result of this I have pictures of myself as a stale mumbler of the inherited doctrine, not knowing the language used by my contemporaries (much younger**) and unable to learn it." "I will give your regards to my wife." "Love". ---- ** (Obvious reference to H. P. Grice, b. 1913). The good thing is that he overcame his fears and Grice came to love him.