Fallacies Outside Language: Accident, Secundum Quid and the Meno

Orientation #

He picks up “the mistakes outside of language” after the language fallacies; he says “we’ve talked about it already a lot of places” (the Isagoge on accident, demonstration) and points forward several times to “the first book of Natural Philosophy,” where Plato will be seen falling into the fallacy of the accident. A text-matching system found the handout “Matter of the Syllogism”, p. 4, read for about ten minutes in this episode. The previous class covered dialectic’s usefulness and the language fallacies (equivocation, composition and division); the next moves to the third figure of the syllogism.

The class, in order #

1. The fallacy of the accident named (“the mistake of mixing up the as such”) #

Point: the first fallacy outside language is the “fallacy of the accident,” better “of the accidental” (Latin accidens = happening): mixing up the “through itself” / “as such” with “what happens.” The distinction has already come up in the Isagoge (accident) and in demonstration. Aristotle says it “deceives even the wise” — “as strong a way as you could possibly say it” — and he thinks the great mistakes of some ancients and moderns are “often of this kind.”

2. Homely examples of accidental conjunction (“marsh air caused malaria”) #

Each shows something always found together with the effect but not its cause as such:

• Marsh air vs. mosquitoes: everyone with malaria had been in marsh air, but sleep under a mosquito net and you may not get it; so it is the mosquito, not the air as such. Second thought: not even the mosquito, but what infects some mosquitoes. You only see this “until you in some way separate the mosquito from the marsh air.”
• “Put on your thinking cap”: professors always lectured in fancy hats, so peasants thought the hat made the lecturer — “purely accidental.”
• His relative from outside St. Paul who came to town and each time someone died, and stopped coming; contrast the case where trouble never happens until Professor Moriarty (or a terrorist) shows up — then suspicion of causality is reasonable.

3. Where it deceives the wise: the accidental that is necessarily there (“How can the accidental be necessarily there?”) #

Point: the hard case is where the accidental is always, even necessarily, found — “that sounds like a paradox.”

• Berkeley: (1) everything I know is in my mind; (2) therefore I know only what is in my mind; so you and I “have nothing to say to each other.” Reply: I cannot know something without its being in my mind — yet Euclid defines square as an equilateral right-angled quadrilateral without adding “in the mind of Euclid”; if “in my mind” belonged to square as such, your definition and mine would differ. “In his mind is accidental to what square is.”
• Stock examples: “Man is an animal; animal is a genus; therefore man is a genus.” “Animal is said of dog; therefore man is said of dog.” “Socrates is a man; man is universal; therefore Socrates is universal.” “Perfectly good syllogism” — hard for the average person to say what is wrong. Student’s diagnosis: genus is not in the definition of animal as said of man. His refinement: man is universal insofar as man is in reason, but man is said of Socrates by reason of what Socrates is (animal with reason), not by reason of what happens to man in the mind. “Something that belongs necessarily to something is accidental to it in some way when it’s said of something else. That’s a very hard thing to express.”
• Forward reference: at the end of book one, Plato himself seems to fall into this; also “all the way up to Sartre,” Kant, and Hegel, who “universalizes this deception.”

4. Shakespeare, Augustine: virtue, sin, and what happens (“some by virtue fall, and others by sin arise”) #

Line (he admits it may be misquoted) he used to put on the board at final exams at St. Mary’s: overconfident good students fell, worried “goof-offs” rose (students read it as about cheating; the academic dean smiled and walked away). Analysis: virtue as such does not make you fall — the pride occasioned by virtue does; sin as such is the way to fall, but by happening it is an occasion to recognise weakness, hence humility and caution. Augustine on the proud virgins of the early church: better they fell into sins of the flesh, which are obviously sins, than remain in pride, since humility is “the only solid foundation.”

5. The distinction is essential to philosophy: “the good is what all desire” (“Is the bad desired as such?”) #

Point: apart from the fallacy, as-such vs. accidental is “altogether essential to philosophy” (seen in demonstrations).

• Meno’s definition of virtue as desire for good things; Socrates objects the bad man too desires good things.
• Objection to the definition of the good as what all desire: the bad is sometimes desired. Reply: the bank robber robs not because it is unjust but “because that’s where the money is”; the adulterer acts because it is pleasant, not because of the adultery. The bad is never desired as such. Whoever denies the definition “is going to get very serious trouble,” and denies it only for lack of this distinction.
• Shakespeare’s sonnet: loving the mistress’s voice though music has a far more pleasant sound — her voice is loved not as such but for what it is associated with; likewise rejoicing at a friend’s squeaky voice on the telephone as a sign he is there; music or a smell recalling a happy event. “The accidental plays an enormous role in our life.”

6. Socrates’ enemies: doing good as the way to make enemies (“how did Socrates make so many enemies?”) #

Student asks about a cause that is necessarily there but not responsible. His example from the Apology: showing a man his mistake removes a mistake, so as such it helps him; yet it makes enemies. Given how humans are, resentment “almost seems to be, as such, the way to make enemies,” but the cause is the man’s pride, “something that happens to you’re helping him.” Need the humility of the slave boy, who is “nobody in that society” — cf. “unless you become like a little child.” Aside: priests who avoid preaching on abortion and contraception so as not to offend.

7. Two student questions: “that’s Greek thought”; Feuerbach and pride (“that’s just Greek thought”) #

• Dismissing Aristotle as “Greek thought” is the fallacy of the accident: philosophy could be in Greek or English; the language is accidental, though one language may be better than another. Msgr Dionne and Fr Bolet [name as heard] held Greek better than Latin and English better than French for philosophy and poetry, though French was their native tongue; André Gide, in his preface to the Pléiade Shakespeare, calls French “presque antipoétique.”
• Was Feuerbach mistaken or deliberately syllogising wrongly? “More pride”: pride is “the chief cause of deception on the side of our will,” so the proud man accepts arguments agreeing with his pride — some self-deception, but voluntary. “The fool has said in his heart there is no God.” Marx’s doctoral-thesis preface takes Prometheus as hero — a strange image, since Prometheus revolts against a Zeus he knows exists and is punished by. Sartre: atheist “in the sense it makes no difference to us whether he does or does not exist” — bad faith, a voluntary choice.

8. Second fallacy: simply vs. in some respect (“what is so simply or without qualification”) #

Point: the second mistake outside language confuses what is so simply (without qualification) with what is so in some qualified, imperfect way.

• Aristotle’s example: “Are you a white man or a black man?” A black man is white in his eyes, red in his lips — no contradiction, since a man is called black or white simply by his skin.
• Delicious poison: “Mummy, is this good to drink?” — bad, simply; but good tasting, “in some imperfect way.” Robbing a bank, murdering an annoying person: bad simply, good in some very diminished way (money, riddance).
• The reverse: any good thing prevents another good (studying vs. party; Sunday Mass vs. sleeping longer), so what is good and even necessary can be considered bad in some way. “Your life is based upon this”: doing bad because in some way good, omitting good because in some way bad; even the terrorists.

9. The distinction all over philosophy (“the enthymeme is in some way a syllogism”) #

• Logic: two kinds of argument, syllogism and induction; the rhetorician’s enthymeme and example are these “in some way” — Greek pōs [as heard “kiss”], Latin secundum quid — not simply. A boy is a man in some way, a kitten a cat.
• Definition: “encircling a definition” (wisdom is the best knowledge) defines in a way, not simply. Behind the distinction lies perfect vs. imperfect. Student asks whether both distinctions (as-such and simply) can be involved at once: yes, sometimes both.
• “Do you know my brother Mark?” — No, simply; but knowing what a man and a brother is, she knows him in a very diminished sense; knowing something vs. nothing, one “in some way” knows everything, since everything is something. Even “I don’t know everything” means something by “everything.” Not a contradiction.
• Wisdom: God is wise, man only in a diminished way; but within human knowledge metaphysics is wisdom simply, philosophy of nature wisdom about natural things, political philosophy about political things. The wise man’s first attribute, knowing everything, holds of man in some way, of God without qualification (“all things are naked and open to him”).
• What is good for man? “What is reasonable,” since man is an animal with reason; what pleases the senses is good “in some way.” “Unreasonable” may sound too weak for murder or terrorism, but you do not see they are bad haplōs until you see them unreasonable: man is by nature a political animal, and these are contrary to life together.

10. The Meno: Meno’s objection and the two arts (“how can we go investigating what we don’t know?”) #

Point: Meno’s objection to a joint inquiry into virtue is this fallacy. You cannot aim at what you don’t know — like asking the gas-station attendant “how do you get there?” without saying where. If the objection holds it takes away both logic (defining and reasoning) and logistikē (counting and calculating), the two arts for coming to know what you don’t know. Reply: it overlooks known simply vs. known in a qualified way. Counting the class: nobody knows how many are present; he counts to twenty-six, “amazing” that he directed himself to what he did not know — because he knew he was looking for the number of students, which was enough to tell him to count. Had the question been “What is a student?”, he would have compared and separated out the common, not counted. “It’s a very subtle thing.”

11. Socrates’ reply makes the same mistake: recollection and the slave boy (“is the slave boy in fact recalling”) #

Socrates recalls priests (not Catholic ones, he jokes) saying the soul existed before the body and can recall forgotten knowledge; Meno asks for evidence; the slave boy, born in Meno’s house and never taught geometry, is led by questions to see that the diagonal is the side of the double square (four original squares make one four times as big; diagonals halve each; the inner square is four halves = two originals). Socrates says he was recalling. Objection: the boy first answered “double the side” — not merely ignorant but mistaken; perhaps he is putting things together for the first time. Example: an oblong measured 10 by 4 — knowing length, width and how to multiply, I am able to know the area 40, but do not know it until I multiply; asked, I say “No.” Grocery basket: knowing each price and how to add, I still do not know the total at the checkout. Knowing in act is knowing simply; knowing in ability is knowing in a qualified sense. So Socrates confuses knowing in ability with actually knowing, “the same kind of mistake that Meno makes” — “you wonder whether Plato did that on purpose.”

12. What this shows about logic (“the very existence of logic depends upon answering that objection”) #

Logic directs you to what you don’t know because in a qualified way you do know it, and uses what you know to come to know what you don’t; “the discourse of reason is coming to know what you don’t know through what you do know.” Learning is not recalling what you learn, but involves recalling that through which you learn; “all advanced learning is of that sort.” Class ends mid-sentence on what Plato is teaching.

His words #

• fallacy of the accident / of the accidental: mixing up the “as such” or “through itself” with “what happens” (Latin accidens = happening) [ed.: per se / per accidens]
• deceives even the wise: Aristotle’s remark on this fallacy, “as strong a way as you could possibly say it”
• by happening vs. as such: his rendering throughout for accidental vs. per se
• Natural Philosophy, first book: where Plato’s fall into this fallacy will be seen [ed.: Physics I]
• the good is what all desire: the definition Aristotle quotes at the beginning of the Ethics and Thomas uses “all the time”
• simply / without qualification vs. in some respect / in some imperfect, diminished, qualified way; Greek pōs, Latin secundum quid, Greek haplōs [ed.: simpliciter / secundum quid]
• encircling a definition: a description that defines “in a way,” not simply
• perfect vs. imperfect: the distinction lying behind simply vs. in some respect
• what is reasonable: what is good for man simply; what pleases the senses is good “in some way”
• logic and logistikē: the art of defining and reasoning, and the art of counting and calculating, “the two arts that direct us to a knowledge of what we don’t know”
• knowing in ability vs. knowing in act: the latter is knowing simply, the former knowing in a qualified sense [ed.: in potency / in act]
• discourse of reason: coming to know what you don’t know through what you do know

Texts #

Read in class

• Handout, “Matter of the Syllogism”, p. 4 (verified source; about ten minutes)
• Plato, Meno: Meno’s objection to inquiry; the slave boy doubling the square (retold at length)

Mentioned

• Aristotle on the sophistical fallacies outside language: accident; simply vs. in some respect (Sophistical Refutations, inferred)
• Porphyry, Isagoge (on accident)
• Aristotle, first book of Natural Philosophy (Plato and the accidental)
• Aristotle, beginning of the Ethics (“the good is what all desire”)
• Plato, Apology (Socrates’ enemies)
• Shakespeare: “some by virtue fall, and others by sin arise”; the sonnet on the mistress’s voice
• Augustine on the proud virgins (no locus given)
• André Gide, preface to the Pléiade Shakespeare
• Psalm: “the fool has said in his heart there is no God”; Scripture: “all things are naked and open” to him
• Marx, preface to his doctoral thesis (Prometheus); Sartre on atheism; Berkeley; Feuerbach; Kant; Hegel

His questions #

• Is it really the marsh air as such that’s causing malaria? No — the mosquito, and perhaps not even the mosquito but what infects it.
• Does it follow, from “everything I know is in my mind,” that I know only what is in my mind? No; “in my mind” is accidental to what a square is, so Euclid leaves it out of the definition.
• What’s wrong with “man is an animal, animal is a genus, therefore man is a genus”? Genus belongs to animal as it is in reason, not as animal is said of man.
• Does virtue as such make you fall? Is sin as such the way to rise? No; pride from virtue makes you fall, and humility from sin makes you rise — both by happening.
• Is the bad desired as such? No — the bank robber robs “because that’s where the money is.”
• Is Socrates as such helping the man or harming him by showing his mistake? Helping; the enmity comes from the man’s pride, which “happens to” the helping.
• Is this delicious poison good to drink? Bad, simply; good tasting in some imperfect way.
• What’s good for man? What is reasonable, since man is an animal with reason.
• How did I know how to get to twenty-six when I didn’t know I was trying to get to twenty-six? In some imperfect way I already knew it: I knew I sought the number of students, which told me to count.
• Is the slave boy recalling how to double a square, or coming to know it for the first time? Coming to know it; Socrates confuses knowing in ability with knowing in act.