Elective Acolytes

 

Not many are called, and even fewer chosen.

Tales from the Vienna Circle Woods

 

Vienna, 1927:

After several more appointments with Schlick alone, Wittgenstein had been persuaded to get together with a select group from the Circle, though he had never once attended an official Circle gathering.

Waismann began, subconsciously, to imitate Wittgenstein’s speaking-patterns.  Schlick began to attribute  some original ideas of his own  to Wittgenstein, though they had been expressed before he had even read the Tractatus.  Wittgenstein must have approved of this submissive attitude:  by the fall of 1929  he was choosing to restrict his discussions to Schlick and Waismann alone, usually at Schlick’s home.

-- David Edmonds, The Murder of Professor Schlick (2020), p. 48-52

 

Though recalcitrant about joining, or even really following the lead of, the Wiener Kreis, Wittgenstein did attend their summer 1930 congress in Königsberg (the one-time hometown of Kant, who was the Circle’s Aunt Sally), which honored him with a presentation re “The Nature of Mathematics:  Wittgenstein’s Standpoint”.  Here he again encountered a couple who had known him as a teen:

Present too at Königsberg  were Professor Stanislaus Jolles and his wife, Adele.  They were the couple with whom Wittgenstein had stayed during his spell in Berlin, 1906-08.  Their relationship with their lodger had been affectionate;  Stanislaus felt protective and paternal toward “Little Wittgenstein”, as they called him.  But, as so often with Wittgenstein, there had been a rupture, and, typically again, it seems to have arisen from Wittgenstein’s perception that his hosts had fallen short of his exacting standards.

-- ibid, p. 97

It didn’t take much for the prickly master to cancel you (or, to use the term current among Berkeley lefty groupuscules during the 1970s before cancel acquired its later flavor among the Woke, to “break with” you).

If you did manage to remain in Wittgenstein’s good graces, it was a mixed blessing, for he tended to treat such scholars as acolytes or thuriféraires, rather than full colleagues.  Consider the case of Friedrich Waismann, mathematician and physicist, and a core member of the Kreis, who enjoyed the rare privilege of occasionally being closeted with Wittgenstein alone:

 

Waismann’s principal function was prompt and note-keeper.  One philosopher later described his relationship to Wittgenstein as one of “glove puppet to controlling hand.”  … There was something shocking about the degree to which he subordinated his interest to those of Wittgenstein, and the ingratitude with which his efforts were rewarded.
-- ibid, p. 101, 104

 

Bertrand Russell, a supremely well-established logico-philosophical panjandrum himself, could not be so scanted; yet “Bertrand Russell, according to Ayer, was now downgraded to being merely ‘a forerunner of the Christ (Wittgenstein)’.” (ibid, p. 109)

Russell himself was cordial to Wittgenstein, who had read Russell’s mathematical philosophizing, and who in 1911  showed up at Russell’s rooms in Cambridge, and soon formed a close relationship.   Russell had been a member of the Cambridge Apostles, cosily known to themselves as simply “the Society”;  and Wittgenstein received an invitation to join.  But once again, Wittgenstein held back from any circle whose multiplicity made them unwieldy to dominate as a whole.

In a letter of 1913, Russell wrote to a friend:

My friend Wittgenstein was elected to the Society, but thought it was a waste of time, so he imitated henry john roby and was cursed.

-- The Autobiography of Bertrand Russell (v. 1, 1951), p. 364

 

(The reference is to an earlier selectee, who disdained ever to attend the Apostle conventicles;  the miffed members promptly canceled him by decapitalizing his name for all eternity, and pronouncing a ritual malediction from time to time.)

 

~  ~  ~

 

In 1932, through the good offices of Gilbert Ryle, the Oxford philosopher A.J. Ayer  was introduced for the first time  to Wittgenstein at Cambridge.   Queried by the eminent Austrian  as to what was the most recent book he’d read (cocktail-party filler or ice-breaker, one would have thought),  Ayer replied, La Vida es Sueño, adding modestly that he hadn’t understood it very well.  That was actually owing merely to his shaky Spanish; but Wittgenstein apparently took it as trenchant skepticism, much along the lines of the logical empiricists protesting that they “didn’t understand” (i.e., considered as rubbish) a great many everyday non-scientific statements.  “From then on he treated me as a protégé.” (-- A.J. Ayer, Part of My Life (1977),  p. 120.)

Ryle appears later to have some regrets about those good-offices:

 

Ryle had met  and got along with  Schlick, but his encounters with Wittgenstein left him with serious reservations.  This was evidently a man who needed acolytes, not colleagues;  someone always on the brink of an explosion,  too quick to divide the world into the saved and the damned.

-- Nikhil Krishnan, A Terribly Serious Adventure:  Philosophy at Oxford  1900-1960, p. 54)

 

In the same memoir, the mild-mannered Ayer recounts the brusque reception that met Waismann, who had so long sedulously served Wittgenstein, when they later became colleagues at Cambridge University:

Waismann was Jewish, and when Vienna fell to the Germans  he fled with his family to England.   He went to Cambridge, which was willing to accept him, but Wittgenstein did not desire that what he regarded as a deceptive echo of his own thought  should be audible in the same university, and therefore announced that anyone who attended Waismann’s lectures  would not be allowed to come to his.

-- A.J. Ayer, Part of My Life (1977),  p. 132

 

Horresco referens, but such petty and revanchist behavior reminds me of Tr*mp.

~

 

The incomparable logician Kurt Gödel  played a notably honorable role in this Kreis of often quarrelsome prima donnas.   While faithfully attending their gatherings, he was content so remain modestly in the background, and be taken for a subaltern, while all the time excogitating, leading to work more important more lasting than anything any of the others in the Kreis would accomplish.   Again, let the portraitist tell it:

 

Although almost all Circle members became convinced that, drawing on Wittgenstein and Ramsey, they had solved the problems of mathematics -- that mathematical truths were a type of tautology -- Gödel had sat quietly at Circle meetings  without believing a word of this.  He was a mathematical Platonist.
-- David Edmonds, The Murder of Professor Schlick (2020), p. 148

 

Those affordances of the Circle, and of Wittgenstein in particular, were worse than useless: positively stultifying for the practice of mathematics.  [For our essays on the subject, consult

=> https://worldofdrjustice.blogspot.com/search/label/Platonism  

]

 

As for the excesses of acolytism, Gödel kept a level head:

 

While Schlick and Weismann revered Wittgenstein, Gödel was among several  bemused by the cult-like deference he inspired in his acolytes. … [And later, when Wittgenstein reigned at Cambridge:]  Many students became disciles -- who, like Waismann in Vienna, subconsciously came to mimic his mannerisms.

-- ibid, p. 149, 247

 

The socio-historian and polemicist Ernest Gellner  provides a glimpse of the Cambridge period of Wittgenstein’s ascendency.  There grew up

 

… the first set of ‘companions of the prophet’.  Initially, there was a small, carefully vetted, conventicle of devotees in Cambridge, in the years preceding the Second World War. … But the movement grew …

Maor premise:  all cultural cocoons, all forms of life, are valid and self-sufficient, and Wittgenstein has shown this to be the case.  Minor premise, never spelt out or discussed, but operationallly taken for granted:  only our cocoon is of any interest. … Entry to Wittgenstein’s seminar was restricted at the master’s whim, and the ideas circulated in privately-copied typescripts which Wittgenstein himself refused to have published.  This esotericism greatly enhanced the appeal of the ideas, which were treated as a major revelation by the adepts.

 

-- Ernest Gellner, Language and Solitude (posthum. 1998), pp. 160-165

 

(Parallels from the history of linguistics  during the Chomsky years, could be adduced…)

~  ~  ~

 

Let it not be supposed that the field of philosophy is at all atypical  among academic specialties, as regards such interpersonal rugosities.  Parallels from the history of linguistics  during the Chomsky years, could be adduced.  As, the mathematician Mark Kac, father of the linguist Michael Kac, remarks in his memoir:

 

Linguistics is a strange field, full of cliques and fiefdoms, each fiercely attached to its staked-out territory, and consumed with enmity toward the others.

-- Mark Kac, Enigmas of Chance (1985), p. 107

 

For an extended look at academic acolyte relations, pour yourself a brandy  and relax with these:

 

=> http://worldofdrjustice.blogspot.com/2013/02/chomsky-freud-and-problem-of-acolytes.html

and its appendix

=> https://worldofdrjustice.blogspot.com/2012/12/the-agony-and-acolyte_28.html

 

These include anecdotes about my fondly former Berkeley Doktorvater  in Rom. Phil.,  Professor Yakov Malkiel, including portraits of the (pro tem) Malkielitas, and one (canceled) Malkielito.  One will detect, in the telling, a Nabokovian tone;  which is only just, as the Malkiel family and the Nabokov clan  were BFFs in Berlin, back in the ‘30’s (while it lasted).

 

Kantian ethics in a pinch

Two items from the morning’s press, illustrate the difficulty of finding guidance in the Categorical Imperative, when the snow hits the fan.

Always keep a copy in your glove-compartment!

(1)  The tragedy of the commons

An op-ed in the wake of “Snowzilla”, followed by a reader’s comment.

http://www.baltimoresun.com/news/opinion/oped/bs-ed-snow-parking-20160125-story.html

Note to Baltimoreans: That parking spot you shoveled out isn't yours

The message was taped to the windshield of a pickup truck parked on a public street:

"This parking space did not magically shovel itself! Be considerate of your neighbors and other people in the neighborhood. DON'T steal parking spaces that people worked for several hours to clear."

The parking space didn't magically pave itself, either — the taxpayers, presumably including the owner of the pickup truck, paid for that — but that point seems to have eluded the anonymous author of this angry missive.

And how can it take "several hours" to shovel the snow out of a parking space? What was the author using to remove the snow, a thimble?

Every time it snows in Baltimore, I am reminded of the words of noted philosopher and humanitarian (and former Sun columnist) Kevin Cowherd: "God forbid we ever get a real emergency around these parts. We'll be eating our children before the sun goes down."

You know the drill. People get out their snow shovels and clear just enough snow to make room for two wheel tracks. Then, after pulling the car out into the street, they put their chairs down in the parking space, to protect the results of "hours" of backbreaking labor, and incidentally making it impossible for snowplows to get through. Then we have a thaw and a freeze, and everything turns into solid ice, with only half as many parking spaces there would be if people had concentrated on getting the snow out of the way instead of guarding "their" parking spaces.

---------

[Comment] Boston dealt with the place markers by picking up everything that was left on the street and carting it away. The natives were outraged but the city stuck to their guns and cleared everything away. Remember too that the mountain of snow they piled up did not melt till last July and it included hundreds of lawn chairs.

Potzteufel !  Who the hell parked in my space ??

https://www.washingtonpost.com/local/the-great-post-blizzard-parking-struggle-pleas-threats-and-lawn-chairs/2016/01/26/16826218-c464-11e5-8965-0607e0e265ce_story.html

In Washington, Nate Bergman spent 96 words stating his case, laser-printed and sealed in plastic.

He’d spent hours digging his car out of a parking place on a Capitol Hill street. He duly acknowledged the legal right of other drivers to take the public space. He appealed to their better natures not to. If that didn’t work, he promised to shovel the snow back to its “original place around your vehicle.” In all, a measured treatise touching on individual liberty and shared responsibility.

In Philadelphia, an unnamed shoveler made the same claim more succinctly: “If you park in my space, I’ll break your [expletive] windows. Have a nice day.”

The death struggle for post-blizzard parking is playing out in different ways in different places all along the East Coast. But few have escaped the plunge into anarchy that erupts when two feet of snow smothers already limited on-street parking.

To the diggers, the moral high ground is clear: Shoveling 300 pounds of snow from a patch of public pavement is like homesteading on the frontier. I cleared it — I own it.

Not so, say the defenders of the commons. Those lawn chairs, pylons and sawhorses standing guard on city streets are squatting on taxpayer property.

“No one owns a parking space,” D.C. Police Chief Cathy L. Lanier said at a news conference Saturday, appealing to citizens to keep their furniture off the streets.

Before the storm even hit, Philadelphia police used a spoof of Drake’s “Hotline Bling” to urge residents to report any illegal cones or trash cans blocking parking spaces. They dubbed it #NoSavesies.

In Boston, which has a long history of snow-related parking disputes, an umbrella group of several South End neighborhood associations banned space saving last year. Now the South End Forum is raising money to compensate drivers when their cars are vandalized by angry space diggers. There were scores of confrontations over parking this week all over the city, including a nonfatal shooting Monday in Dorchester

The moral hair splitting baffled even experts. When does a private citizen earn a claim to a public resource? It’s an ethical whiteout.

Die angewandte "Metaphysik der Sitten"

(2)  Poster-children vs. free riders

That which is held in one half of the brain, is simultaneously rejected in the other.

http://www.nytimes.com/2016/01/26/world/europe/corsico-italy-school-lunch-fees.html

CORSICO, Italy — After being elected last year, Mayor Filippo Errante found that this town, abutting Milan, had accrued an “alarming” debt of more than a million euros in unpaid school lunch fees. So he decided to take what he called an iron-fist approach.

Children whose parents were up to date on payments would be allowed to eat cafeteria-prepared meals. Children whose parents had not paid would not.

“The era of the ‘furbetti’ is over,” Mr. Errante said in a statement on social media last month, using a term that translates to cunning, akin to gaming the system.

Some called the decision a form of blackmail. Others criticized it for creating what they said was a schoolroom apartheid, where some children ate hot meals while the others snacked on homemade panini or a slab of cold pizza.

Petitions and protests ensued. Teachers, principals and many parents rallied in support of those children who would not be given lunches, even as nearly all agreed that school fees should be paid.

The children most affected by the provision belong to families whom Mr. Tortoreto described as “lemons that have already been squeezed dry” by life.  Some are the children of foreigners without legal permission to remain in Italy, others of parents with a history of mental illness.

A New Proof of the Existence of Coffee-Cups

But the math had not clarified one basic question:  what the hell did it all mean?  How could the world of atoms be nothing but a puff of probabilities, and yet conglomerations of those atoms could create something as strong and unbending as the  chair on which he sat?

-- David Kaiser, How the Hippies Saved Physics (2011), p.  54

[Update to an earlier essay.  For the original, with readers’ comments, click here.]

Re the authors of “The Stability of Many-Particle Systems” (1966):

They couldn’t explain why it was  that ordinary everyday objects wouldn’t just go up in smoke.  It was quite anomalous.  Inert matter just lies there in a kind of steady state, ticking over silently in a metaphysical sort of way, but this ordinary and plain fact of experience  was incomprehensible to physics.

-- Ed Regis, Who Got Einstein’s Office? (1987), p. 185

There comes a time in the life of every young person, when they doubt the existence of coffee-cups.  So here comes jolly old Doctor J, to prove it for you;  and more importantly, to reassure you that, even should you someday forget the details of the proof, you may continue  to place entire faith in the existence of these useful objects, asking no questions for conscience’ sake.

(We earlier sketched the idea of the proof, but there the argumentation was informal.)

So!  It’s a quiet Sunday, the desk and the mind are clear, let us pour out a generous helping of this fresh-ground, new-brewed, steaming darkling French roast, into the convenient receptacle which (to all appearances, at any rate) sits within easy arm’s reach upon the solid oaken desktop, to stimulate the grey cells, and set ourselves to this great task  of confounding the nominalists and solipsists.

[Excursus:  Historique du problème

Dr Johnson famously proved the existence of stones  by kicking one (a martyr to science -- he reckoned without his gout).  The Cambridge philosopher of banality, G. E. Moore, satisfied himself (I choose the verb with care) of the existence of physical reality, by noticing his own hands.  (The choice was not a happy one, being potentially seen as solipsistically self-centered, not to say onanistic;  further, the phenomenon of phantom limbs complicates the picture in irrelevant ways.)
Accordingly, we shall proceed by proving the existence of coffee-cups:  both because they form the prototypical physical object for philosophers (apart from mats, which are ignored unless they have cats on them), and because, for mathematicians, who in general care not a fig for the physical, do care crucially about this one concrete object, since coffee is their essential fuel.]

But before embarking upon the abstract part of this argument (since some folks are uncomfortable with abstractions -- though really, they need not be;  what follows makes a lot more sense than most of what gets uttered around the water-cooler), I shall offer what critics have called the objective correlative:  a description of the actual coffee-cup whose space-time coordinates are My-Here and My-Now [** But now see below!].  (Rather than the ambiguous “here and now”;  for such coordinates must indeed be relativized to some observer, though not necessarily a mortal observer.)  After all, we wouldn’t want you to wonder whether we might not be just making the whole thing up.

[**Horrified update, August 2019:  Testing the link, I clicked, winding up  indeed at the sales-site for the "Catholic Attitude" mug;  but -- It has been censored!  Shorn of its knight, along with his attitude! -- Fortunately I -- Fahrenheit-451-fashion -- saved the original image, and included it in this essay; vid. inf.]

From the standpoint of the chemist, the object in question would appear to consist in some sort of ceramic, whatever that may be, though I really couldn’t say -- anyhow, something sturdily non-porous.  In general outline, it forms a cylinder, sealed off at the bottom and evacuated at the top.  Somewhat spoiling this sleek Platonic profile, a handle protrudes from the side, a concession to the physical infirmities of hominoidal incarnation.

It is thus strictly speaking a ‘mug’ rather than a cup;  but still I say “coffee-cup” because, for philosophers (who don’t get out much), that is the prototypical object in the cosmos.  (At least this is true for hypercaffeinated Americans; more leisurely Oxonians look to "the tree in the Quad").  In similar fashion, the propotypical Contingent Truth for the Oxbridge set is:  “The cat is on the mat.”  (That last one is not true at the moment, b.t.w.;  she seems to have wandered off.)

That is pretty much all you need to be  to call yourself a coffee-cup.  But these days, most cups are not quite so minimalist:  most of them sport some wacky slogan of office lore, or the logo of a sports team.  This particular specimen displays the image of a medieval knight, standing in contrapposto, his tabard emblazened with a cross pommée.  On his face is an expression difficult to read, some blend of troubled arrière-pensées and manly determination.  He is set largely within a blue circle, which his mailed headgear slightly overtops; at the bottom -- a detail I just noticed only now -- the end of his belt (bulging slightly at the tip) laps down and over, in a way that, hm,  might be misinterpreted.  And written boldly above him, the words:

Catholic  Attitude

Well.  So much for the objective correlative.  Now for the proof, deo volente -- while mindful of the strictures of Kant:

It remains a scandal for philosophy  and for human reason in general, that the existence of things outside us  must be taken only on faith,
and that, if it occurs to someone to doubt it,
we can produce no counter-argument  sufficient to prove it.

-- Kant, Critique of Pure Reason

~ ~ ~

We must confess at the outset (well, it’s a bit late for that) that we cannot actually prove the existence of coffee-cups, by the lofty standards of proof first intuited by Euclid, and refined  in our own day  to a high sheen.   Outside indeed of mathematics, such a capability appears not to exist:  Whenever I try to read a physics article reporting recent research, it always appears at some point to be hand-waving, “You’ll just have to trust us on this.”   And within mathematics itself (trade secret; don’t whisper this to Muggles) we seldom explicitly set out all the steps, even in the final published results.   As for the actual process of mathematical discovery, it normally bears no relation at all to Hilbert’s formalist program;  at its deepest and most mysterious, it is more like…. (and here we’ll have to whisper very softly) … Revelation…

Anyhow, we obviously can’t actually prove the existence of coffee-cups, because logically, strictly speaking, they might not exist:  We might all be just brains in a vat, hallucinating the whole thing.   So to clear the air, we frankly state our Auxiliary Assumption:

(AUX)  We’re not just brains in a vat.

If you personally reject that assumption -- well, happy marinating.  For the rest of us -- to proceed.

[Excursus:  Among the merits of d’Abro’s history The Rise of the New Physics (1939), is that he repeatedly points out the (sometimes unacknowledged) auxiliary assumptions that were required in the development of even the most successful programs in the physical sciences, by the most celebrated researchers, during physics’ Golden Age.

Almost nothing we do in everyday life  is free of unspoken assumptions, sheer force of habit, and random whims.  So, simply by listing such propositions as (AUX), we are making some modest progress.]

The principal premises of the proof, and the only ones that would occur to most people, are evidential.   This is where the hard work of science is done.  Fortunately, in the case of perceptions of ordinary middle-size objects, Nature does it for us, that we need not continually trouble our little heads:  all sorts of cross-connections and epistemological assumptions are hard-wired into our brains.  (These brains, b.t.w., reside in a cranium, vice a vat.)  We shall nevertheless lay out some of the perceptions and observations that serve to buttress the conclusion to objectual existence -- not so much to convince you yet further that your mug is real, but rather, virtually the contrary:  by such explicit exposure of our evidential grounds, to make plain their essential poverty, absent certain grounding metaphysical principles, along the lines of (AUX) though more substantial -- or rather again, more abstract and as it might be insubstantial, since (AUX), though it has the look of a metaphysical assumption, might in some circumstances be actually demonstrable, and thus empirical, as happens in the movie “The Matrix”.

(PE) Perceptual Evidence

(1) I seem to see before me a colour-patch (Note to the lay reader: These colour-patches compose the whole of the world for the positivist empiricists, who never quite manage to convince themselves that coffee-cups are real, and therefore cannot drink the coffee, and die of thirst), roughly cylindrical in outline -- though the exact projection upon the retina depends on the viewing-angle in complex ways (blah blah blah; insert usual empiricist verbiage here).

(2) When I reach out with my hand (for reassurance as to the existence of your own hands, consult the works of G. E. Moore), groping in the general direction of the above-named coloured patch, I abruptly encounter what seems to be a solid object -- a bit too abruptly, it turns out, as some sort of dark hot liquid is now pouring into my lap.

(3) (Insert more such evidence here -- crucially, cross-modally, involving the sound of the mug as you strike it with your pen; the smell and the taste of the coffee within).

(4)  When I pour a small amount of coffee into this apparent container, it does not quantum-tunnel out:  thus recalling, by uniformity and analogy, such similar objectual posits as the Water-Glass.

(5)  Jones here -- a stout fellow of sound mind -- affirms that, egads, he too perceives a coloured patch in what, calculating the parallax by triangulations, dum-de-dum, doing the math, appears to correspond to the same space-time locus that I myself have identified.

(6)  (etc. etc. etc.)

(C ) Conclusion

Coffee-cups really do exist.

(They do, but this one's just an image of such a cup)

Now:   The thoughtful reader will already have noticed how grotesquely speckled with gaps  such reasoning is -- why, it shouldn’t convince a child.  For, though it pretends to consist of but simple reports of perceptions -- “observation sentences” in the lingo -- rather than any abstract reasoning that might be open to critique, it actually smuggles in a great deal of unbuttressed assumptions.  Thus -- what ties (1) and (2) into any sort of connection with each other?  Why,  the unexamined assumption that the visual coordinates of (1) map smoothly and without controversy to the kinesthetic coordinates of (2):  a fact by no means obvious  -- intellectually, that is;  of course, the identity is more or less hard-wired, though it may take baby a certain amount of groping and spoon-dropping to get the respective ordinates and abscissae to finally match up.  Nor is the correlation in any sense necessary -- indeed, it can be easily overturned in simple experiments involving funny spectacles.

And as for that “Jones” there -- you are assuming the existence of Other Minds, about which great vats of ink have been spilled!  (There is, in fact, one sense in which philosophers at any rate  are brains-in-a-vat.)  And indeed you need vastly more than that -- for the Other Minds projected by mere analogy, might be only Other Monads, and incommunicable among themselves.  All right, wire them one to another -- still not enough:  you are assuming that you each mean ‘the same thing’ when you utter the same (or: “similar”) syllables:  an assumption demonstrably false in every political summit or marital argument.  All right, plow ahead and assume that:  you’re still not there.  With all the intelligence and good-will in the world, your private knowledge might not be transmissable intact: witness the celebrated case of determining whether or not your extragalactic pen-pal resides in a world made of matter or of anti-matter, or whether he is right- or left-handed.  -- And here my grey-cells throw in the towel; but were you (younger, and keener) to pursue this line of speculation further, things would probably only get worse.

No, for the various clauses of (PE) to have any cohesion and probative force at all, we require a vast apparatus of non-evidential, metaphysical assumptions, almost never made plain.  The above syllogism,  (PE) => (C ), is thus in reality an enthymeme .  Suppressed is what we might dub the enthymematic assumption, which we now state here:

(EA -- full version)  Background metaphysical premises

(Insert the entire body of philosophy here, along with the whole of science.  Do not omit to mention the Assumption of Cosmic Uniformity (spatial; temporal; spatio-temporal), the Problem of Induction, the Reliability of Deduction, along with some still-unnamed rules of thumb concerning our right to ignore pesky quantum-mechanical paradoxes when speaking of mid-level objects, etc. etc.)

Now, that is rather a tall order, and even were it somehow to be accomplished for this particular case (which might or might not "go over" towards founding the existence of pickles, say), no individual mind could survey the results and verify their correctness and inter-consistency.   And yet, this is the heavy machinery that we need to conclude to so modest a proposition as the existence of coffee-cups.  So let us superadd, as a concession to our feeble powers of ratiocination and memory, the following Concise Version:

(EA -- concise version)  God is Good.

This one works for me;  but if you’re an epistemological stickler, you can probably get by with this weaker assumption, as stated by Einstein, and applied, not only in his life, but in the practice of his physics:

(EA -- weakened version)  Boshaft ist er Nicht.

Which is to say, anglicê:  at least He is not plain mean.   By which he meant:  The cosmos is not just some vast joke, jerry-rigged to baffle our senses.  Overall, it ultimately makes sense -- even if what we perceive here below, is but the thread-gnarly underside of the grand patterned carpet.

(Note:  The basic point is more logical than theological;  still, the realms do tend to intertwine.)

Historical footnote:

Descartes derived the principle of inertia from two premises:

* the homogeneity of the straight line, and

* the immutability of God, of which the constant quantity of motion in the world is an expression.

-- Charles Gillispie, The Edge of Objectivity (1960), p. 90

Note incidentally that the first of these Cartesian premises  is at least as fraught as the second (the problems and paradoxes of The Continuum).

~

~ For a theo-philosophical fantasia, try this:

Murphy and the Magic Pawnshop

[Kindle] [Nook]

~

~ ~ ~

To add some punch to our insistence on the Importance of the Enthymeme, with all its tacit metaphysical assumptions, let us instance another, less familiar syllogism.

(P) Evidential Premises:

1. Something funny’s going on here.

2. What’s that smell?

3.  I can’t find my car keys -- probably somebody swiped them.

4.  What’s that noise?!

5.  So where does Jones get the money for a fancy car like that?

6. No way I’m letting that bastard merge into my lane.

7. Why are all those people staring at me?

8. Ouch!

9. It’s a conspiracy.

(C ) Conclusion:  The world is ruled by giant lizards.

That conclusion is an actual doctrine, firmly held by some people:  non-institutionalized people, actual citizens who have the right to vote (and who seemingly exercise that right with disproportionate frequency).  I’d provide a link to the relevant Web sites, but fear lest these poison your computer.

What, though, must be the missing enthymeme, which licenses this deduction?  Apparently something like this:

(E)  The cosmos is ruled by Satan.

Compared with (E), (C) begins to look relatively inviting.

~  ~  ~

But enough of such stuffy studies!   The sun, renewed, has broken through the clouds, the bird-sounds rise in chorus, and a breeze bestirs itself among the leaves.   Let us then fare forth, into the wide world, whose splendor bears the imprint of its Maker, as plainly as had He signed it, John-Hancock-style, with His celestial pen.

~  ~  ~

[Afterthought]  But what then, of the java, that flows from the mug whose reality we have just proved???  Why, it flows to fuel the brains of mathematicians! 

[Appendix, Jan 2015]  Having at length satisfied ourselves as to the reality, or at least reliability, of coffee-cups, would should not  on that account sink back into an attitude of Moorean complacency (“I’m all right, Jack;  I’ve got hands”).  For our commitment to these  suggests yet further commitments, which we had not realized were there to assess.  Such as :  Realism with regard to quantum state vectors.

The question of ‘reality’ must be addressed in quantum mechanics -- especially if you takes the view that the quantum formalism applies universally to the whole of physics -- for then, if there is no quantum reality, there can be no reality at any level.

-- Roger Penrose,  The Road to Reality (2004), p. 508

And:

The question of the objective existence of the objects of mathematics … is an exact replica of the question of the objective existence of the outer world.

-- Kurt Gödel, “What is Cantor’s continuum problem?”, in American Mathematical Monthly, 1947.

In for a penny, in for a pound.

~

This notion of ‘enthymeme’ deserves further comment, and here is not really the place;  yet I can find no other home for it, among these essays.  Thus:

This is characteristic of ancient informal logic -- that is, of the logic of proof or of thought-experiment …. ; we regard it as enthymematic  only through hindsight:  it was only later that an increase in content  became a sign, not of the power, but of the weakness, of an inference.

-- Imre Lakatos, Proofs and Refutations (1976), p. 81

For more from this pen, try this:
http://www.linguasacrapublishing.com/justice.html