Codex on Aristotle's Doctrine of the Mean

When I first studied the Nicomachean Ethics, I did so with the help of Urmson's wonderful book Aristotle's Ethics (1988), which surprised me with its strictures against interpreting the doctrine of the mean as a simple thesis of moderation.  Surely, I thought, no one could have read that into II.6.  Now, six and a half years later, I've had a glimpse of what Urmson meant – in the pages of an Inspector Morse novel:

“Morse skipped his way along [the report].  ‘… would suggest a period of between 72–120 hours before the body was discovered.  Any greater precision about these time limits is precluded in this case…’  As in all cases you ever have, muttered Morse.  He had never ceased to wonder why, with the staggering advances in medical science, all pronouncements concerning times of death remained so disconcertingly vague.  For that was the real question: when had Quinn died?  If Aristotle could be believed (why not?) the truth would probably lie somewhere in the middle: 94 [sic] hours, say.”

By coincidence, I was only reading this because of a sloppy piece of academia.  In Twentieth-Century Crime Fiction (2005), Lee Horsley, comparing the relationship between the authors and readers of detective fiction to that between the setters and solvers of cryptic crosswords, promised me that “Colin Dexter also gestures towards parallels between the mystery story and the cryptic crossword in The Silent World of Nicholas Quinn (1977), which involves Inspector Morse with a suspect who is a crossword-setter called Daedalus.”  Alas, this turns out to be an embellishment from Julian Mitchell's TV adaptation (1987), which made Ogleby a more interesting character.

The Myth of the Tenseless (I)

Philosophers are prone to describe mathematical and conceptual statements (e.g. that two plus two makes four and that red is a colour) as ‘tenseless’ on the grounds that time is irrelevant to mathematics and conceptual analysis.  But of course our language does not know which topics are sensitive to time, so on this theory the English present verb form must be systematically ambiguous between present-tensed and tenseless interpretations.  The extravagance of such a theory is astounding.  A much simpler theory would be that English requires every message encoded with it to have a tense, even though sophisticated people understand that in mathematics and conceptual analysis the tense chosen is usually unimportant.  (Cf. Dudman, ‘Conditional Interpretations of If-Sentences’ (1984), §48.)

Sadly, cavalier attitudes towards language are endemic in modern philosophy.  This is the first in a series of posts exposing the problems that arise when people try to foist tenseless statements on English.

According to McArthur's introductory textbook Tense Logic (1976), the statement that it always rains in Boston ‘do[es] not convey any positional information concerning the temporal relation of the speaker and the event or state of affairs depicted’, and its truth-value is independent of the time of its utterance.  Sed contra: any speaker of English would understand the reply ‘I know, it's awful – it wasn't like this 50 years ago.’  This can only be because the habitual statement that it always rains in Boston is as present-tensed as it looks.

Confusion about the Future (II)

The lack of a future tense in Romance and Germanic languages is not widely known; on the tacit assumption that there must be one somewhere, people tend to seize on verb forms and modals whose function is to signal that the speaker is making not a statement of fact but a judgement in the absence of the relevant information – a function that makes them useful for discussing the future, of course, but also for making conjectures about present and past facts.

I shall not explain this further here; from the above remarks, it is obvious what is going on when, for instance, a Dutch blogger working in Cameroon writes of a friend whose time there has recently come to an end:  ‘Ze zal nu al thuis zijn, hopelijk heeft ze het niet te koud’ (‘she will already be home by now, hopefully she is not too cold’).

Instead, this is the second in a series of posts exposing the confusion that ensues when people fail to recognize that these Romance verb forms and Germanic modals do not intrinsically encode futurity.

This time my target is the common theory that the ‘future tense’, when not expressing the future, expresses probability as opposed to certainty.  This admits of a homely and a sophisticated refutation.

Firstly, there is no obvious uncertainty when a French couple, reporting on their round-the-world trip, write:  ‘On sera sans doute passé trop vite pour creuser et trouver des endroits plus sauvages, mais il y avait quand même un peu trop de tourisme a notre goût en Thailande’ (‘we will no doubt have passed through too quickly to delve deeper and find wilder places, but even so there was a bit too much tourism in Thailand for our tastes’).  Other examples abound.

Secondly, if non-future ‘will’ expressed probability, people would use it in situations where in fact they do not.  For instance, if you have just tossed two coins without looking at them, you won't assent to the claim that they won't both have come up heads – whereas you will assent to the claim that they probably won't both have come up heads.  What's worse, the same goes for any probability short of 1.

Both difficulties are avoided by the theory that what ‘zal’, ‘will’ and ‘sera’ have in common is that they signal a judgement in the absence of the relevant information – for it is of course possible to make a certain judgement even in the absence of concrete information.

Confusion about the Future (I)

The lack of a future tense in Romance and Germanic languages is not widely known; on the tacit assumption that there must be one somewhere, people tend to seize on verb forms and modals whose function is to signal that the speaker is making not a statement of fact but a judgement in the absence of the relevant information – a function that makes them useful for discussing the future, of course, but also for making conjectures about present and past facts.

I shall not explain this further here; from the above remarks, it is obvious what is going on when, for instance, an Italian, commenting on Obama’s denial of reports that he uses a Zune instead of an iPod, writes:  ‘E comunque lo Zune sarà già stato sepolto nell’Area 51’ (‘and anyway the Zune will already have been buried in Area 51’).

Instead, this is the first in a series of posts exposing the confusion that ensues when people fail to recognize that these Romance verb forms and Germanic modals do not intrinsically encode futurity.

My first exhibit is from the Bristol Classical Press edition of Borges’ Ficciones.  The third sentence of ‘Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius’ (1940) is ‘El hecho se produjo hará unos cinco años.’  Translating word for word, this reads: ‘The event took place it will make some five years.’  The editors explain that ‘hace [‘it makes’] would be more common but the future indicates a certain vagueness: ‘some four or five years ago’.’  Of course, the future is nowhere in sight; this is simply a judgement in the absence of the relevant information.  A more faithful translation would be ‘it will be some five years ago that the event took place’, or ‘the event will have taken place some five years ago’.

There's a close parallel in William Morris’ The Water of the Wondrous Isles (1897), part 6, ch. 7:  “But Birdalone spake, hardening her heart thereto for very need: ‘Belike then there is a change of days here, for when I last knew of the land there was little peace therein.’  ‘And that will not be so long agone,’ said a townsman, smiling, ‘for I doubt we should see no grey hair in thine head if thy sallet were off it.’  Birdalone reddened: ‘It will be some five years agone,’ said she.”

Here Borges’ editors would presumably explain that ‘it is’ would be more common but the future indicates a certain vagueness, so that what Birdalone meant was that it was some four or five years ago.  But while the latter is obviously something that she could have said if she had wanted to, it is equally obviously not what she actually said.