Friday, 16 February 2024

Language and Empathy

Anyone who seriously thinks seriously about other minds should arrive at the conclusion that enormous gulfs can exist between people – in outlook, in worldview. This is one of the major realisations I have reached as a result of my reflections on myself and others. Every person is different from every other person. On a whole people find it very difficult to empathise with those different from them because they simply cannot imagine what it is like to be someone else. Ironically I have become aware of these gulfs between people despite the fact that, for instance in my fiction, I have really endeavoured as best as I can to understand others – or at least some others. Or perhaps it might be better to say that I have written stories inspired by my own experiences in an attempt to communicate such experiences to people who have not lived them. Yet such experiences are not unique to me. It is because I have experienced psychosis myself that I feel I can at least a little understand the mad; ordinary people can't do this. I understand homosexuality about as well as is possible for a heterosexual; ordinary heterosexuals don't. I understand religious faith and also understand atheism because I have been an atheist but have also seriously considered religious ideas. Most people not only don't understand others but are unaware that they don't understand others. It seems here that I am being hubristic in suggesting that I do but, don't worry, I am not presuming some special insight into others that most people lack; I know enough to approach others with humility. It is best to presume that the person you are speaking to knows herself better than you do. However this discovery, that seemingly insurmountable differences can exist between people, was not something I possessed when I was younger and was hard won. It was won by virtue of experience. For instance, I know now that religious people, generally, simply cannot imagine a world without God, and atheists, generally, cannot imagine a world with one. Democrats cannot understand Trump supporters and Trump supporters cannot understand Democrats. However humans possess a resource that other animals lack: language. Through language one can at least attempt to communicate his or her inner world to others and at least attempt to understand others.

In this essay I wish to discuss language and how confusion can arise as the result of different understandings of what particular words mean. I especially wish to describe how such misunderstandings can arise in philosophical discourse. I want then to go on to say something about the recent debate in New Zealand concerning the principles underlying the Treaty of Waitangi. Although this debate may seem inconsequential to my foreign readers, readers who might be more interested in the wars in Ukraine and Gaza and the upcoming American election than a parochial issue down here in the Antipodes, it is of fundamental significance to New Zealanders because Te Tiriti o Waitangi can be considered as foundational to New Zealand national identity as the Declaration of Independence and US Constitution are to Americans. I wish to try to present the Maori perspective on this issue even though I am a Pakeha. I want then to return to Anselm's ontological argument for the existence of God. I have discussed Anselm's argument before but I wish to revisit it because I wrote my original post about it over six years ago and readers may have forgotten it; furthermore I suspect I can make my critique of the ontological argument a little clearer than I did in the previous post. These three topics are all thematically connoted to the topic I introduced in the introduction because they all involve mutual sense making and empathy with, or understanding of, others. In particular a proper consideration of what is wrong with Anselm's argument leads to important conclusions with respect to other minds and to meaning itself. Finally I shall conclude by saying some brief things about my own life.

A Youtube channel that the Youtube algorithm regularly directs me to is "Rob's Words". It's host (Rob, obviously) recently uploaded a wonderful video called "Words We've Ruined". He discusses a linguistic term called skunking. Basically different people can use a word in different ways and common usage can change over time; this can result in a situation in which a competent language user feels she has to avoid particular words because of the possibility that her audience will misunderstand her, will parse what she is trying to say in the wrong way. These words have been skunked. Example he gives are the words "nonplussed", "ambivalent" and "bemused". I am not going to talk about these words here because the reader can just look up the video and see if he or she has been using these words correctly. The reason for this problem, as Rob points out, is that the meaning of a word is pulled at once towards its history, its etymology, and its current usage, the novel ways with which it may be being employed by contemporary speakers. Etymology and usage can part company.

Personally I usually pretend that words haven't been skunked. When I use the word "incredible", I have tended to assume that readers can determine by virtue of context when I am using it to mean "not credible" or "unbelievable" and when I using it as an intensifier. Similarly with word like "phenomenal" or "stunning". It should be obvious that in describing the video above as "wonderful", I am not saying it is full of wonders but simply communicating how much I enjoyed it. Still, one needs to be careful. If someone say, "Unicorns are fabulous" we would need a little context to know whether the person is saying "Unicorns are creatures out of fables" or if the person is just being camp. However generally I believe we should assume readers are competent, give them a little credit. Only one time in this blog have I deliberately chosen not to use a word because it had been skunked. In a post last year, I considered using the phrase "assuming for the nonce" and decided, to be safe, to look "nonce" up. I thought "assuming for the nonce" was equivalent to "assuming for the moment" which indeed was true historically and is still true in the US and perhaps in New Zealand. But when I looked it up I found that in the UK "nonce" is a slang word for a pedophile. (I later saw a Ricky Gervais special in which he used the word in this sense.) So I decided it would be safer to use another word. Examples of such semantic misunderstandings abound. On their Breakfast Show here in New Zealand, Jeremy Wells and Matt Heath would in the past often ask international  male celebrities if they had ever "pashed" a man. I don't think Wells and Heath realised that this word "pash" only has the meaning "French kiss" in New Zealand and means something completely different, if anything at all, elsewhere. Some of their guests may have accidentally admitted to more than they meant to.

I do try, although I do not always succeed, to use words precisely. The task is made difficult by the slipperiness of language. However, when you read quality prose, you often find that good writers often speak figuratively, sometimes poetically; it seems readers appreciate writers who find novel ways to express novel ideas. They also appreciate writers who find novel ways to express cliches. Sometimes an idea can only be  expressed using metaphors. The slipperiness of language can sometimes be an advantage rather than a handicap; I wish I could express my ideas more poetically, find ways to exploit the complexities and ambiguities of words, but it is a challenge to make oneself write like Janet Frame, Virginia Woolf, or James Joyce. I don't even trust myself or the reader enough to make jokes because I am afraid readers will take me literally.

In a post I wrote late last year I discussed how the word "deconstruction" has strayed so far from its original definition as put forward by Jaques Derrida in 1967 as to have become almost meaningless. I won't talk about this word again. However I wish to discuss some other words that appear in philosophical discourse and the misunderstandings that result from the different meanings different people attach to them.

Consider the word "rhetoric". My own way of defining this word, the meaning I picked up a long time ago somewhere along the line, is "the art of persuasive speech". This definition is value neutral – an instance of rhetoric can as easily be used to persuade someone of the truth as of something false. Yet in the world we live in today the term "rhetoric" has taken on a pejorative flavour. Pundits and commentators often dismiss the arguments of their opponents as "just rhetoric", "empty rhetoric" or simply as "rhetoric". The implication is that the term "rhetoric" is reserved for false arguments, for specious arguments, but true arguments are not rhetorical at all but something else. Interestingly this ambiguity apparently goes back to the ancient Greeks. Plato didn't like rhetoric but his student Aristotle did. I have, as always, consulted Wikipedia here to make sure I have my facts straight (or are least aligned with Wikipedia) and the entry on it suggests that there is an unbroken tradition of the academic teaching of rhetoric from the ancient Greeks right up until the present day although the syllabus has often changed. What Wikipedia does not do is say anything about the negative connotations this word has in current common usage, which I know it does because I actually do read and listen to what others say, or why these negative connotations have attached to the word. I'll try to hazard a guess. Philosophers such as Hume, Locke, and Mill may have preferred a word like 'logic' rather than 'rhetoric' to describe their arguments, and the rise of the scientific method probably suggested to many people that science and 'reason' were preferable ways to approach the truth than through the deployment of rhetorical devices. Rhetoric became something associated with the oratory of hypocritical mendacious politicians. So there is an ambiguity in the word 'rhetoric' that may mean it has been skunked.

You'd think academics would realise this problem with the term 'rhetoric' but they don't always. At the beginning of 2018 I decided to write a long essay for an English professor as part of a paper here in Auckland. My thesis was that a successful story is a unified argument in favour of some core proposition, what we might call a 'moral' or a 'message', hardly an original thesis but one worth seriously exploring. Because I regard stories essentially as exercises in persuasion, I was attracted to the term 'rhetoric' and so my lecturer recommended The Rhetoric of Fiction by Wayne C. Booth, originally published in 1961, an important work in narrative theory. What struck me is that in this book Booth almost never uses the term 'persuasion' – rather he sought to criticise the dogmatic credo that novelists should feign realism, 'show' not 'tell', and argued that in reality storytellers always introduce an element of artifice into their work (although I can't remember if Booth used this word 'artifice'). It seems that Booth chose the word 'rhetoric' because of its modern connotations, in order to argue that fiction always contains non-realist elements, rather than because of its historical meaning. Shortly after this, I read the The Rhetoric of Fictionality by Richard Walsh, a book deliberately referencing Booth's. Although Walsh's work is interesting and important, I found it even more vexing because again it never uses the term 'persuasion'. Like Booth, Walsh seems to be using the word 'rhetoric' as a synonym for 'artifice'. It was vexing because it seemed to me that if one is going to use the word 'rhetoric' in the title of a book, one should address its historical meaning – yet neither do. If you want to describe all fiction as terms of rhetoric, you should also recognise that the story is trying to persuade the reader of something. Why else use this word? It seems that the word 'rhetoric' has been skunked.

I observed another quite interesting example of miscommunication early in 2022. I was attending an online lecture about Boethius, I think, or possibly one of ancient Greeks. One of my young fellow students said to the lecturer that the view of the philosopher being discussed seemed to him 'quite idealistic'. I knew precisely what this student was trying to say; I don't think I need to spell it out to the reader because this student was intending this word in its modern sense which everyone at least roughly knows. The lecturer thought he was referring to the philosophical doctrine of Idealism, the doctrine that reality is made up wholly of ideas. The poor professor was so steeped in the history of philosophy that he had forgotten how little contemporary students generally know about German Idealism unless they have done a course in it – I know very little about it myself. The mistake is interesting however because our modern word 'idealistic' can I think indeed be traced back to German Idealism in the eighteenth century. The word originally belonged to the philosophers but then leaked out into the wider world and gradually took on its current quite different meaning the same way the term 'deconstruction' more recently did. Today the term 'idealist' is also probably skunked – although given a little context and background knowledge a person should be able to distinguish which sense is being meant on a given occasion.

Another word in philosophical discourse that seems to cause significant trouble is the word 'contingent', a problem because the word is so central to much modern philosophy. In the same course, early on, we read, in translation of course, some passages from St Thomas Aquinas. Aquinas raises the question, "Does God know future contingent truths?" When I read this question, it seemed to me a kind of non-sequitur. I stared at it and simply couldn't understand it. (Aquinas goes on, by the way, to answer this question in the affirmative.) I believe the reason for my incomprehension may have been that the word 'contingent' meant something quite different to Aquinas in the thirteenth century than it does to people today. And even people today are uncertain of its meaning. According to the Oxford English Dictionary, the term 'contingent' has two quite distinct senses: 1.) subject to chance and 2.) occurring or existing only if (certain circumstances) are the case; dependent on. Furthermore philosophers today recognise another meaning: following the work of modal logicians like Lewis and Kripke, the word 'contingent' can be defined as 3.) existing in at least one but not all possible worlds. The problem here is that not only are these three definitions different, they can sometimes be incompatible. It seems to me that if something occurs by chance it cannot be wholly causally determined by prior circumstances, so an event can be contingent in the first sense but not in the second, and vice versa. Similarly it is difficult to square the logicians' definition with the second Oxford definition unless somehow every possible world is associated with unique 'certain circumstances'. And if we believe in free will, it seems that a freely willed action can be contingent in the third sense but not in the two Oxford definitions unless we suppose that 'freely willed' actions happen by chance or are dependent on prior circumstances, something defenders of free will would want to deny.

But how did Aquinas himself understand the word 'contingent'? I don't clearly know. It is arguable that Aquinas anticipated modern modal logic because he thought that God could create any possible world, that is, any world free of logical or metaphysical contradictions, and so in a way all these other possible worlds exist as potentialities in the  mind of God. But did Aquinas believe in chance if he also believed in an omnipotent God? Did Aquinas attach any solid meaning to this term 'chance'? Do any of us do this today? I won't speculate here. But it is worth noting that theologians, even today, always describe God as totally non-contingent and seem to mean by this that God is all of the above, that is, not existing by chance, not dependent on anything else, and existing in all possible worlds (if any). There is equivocation here. From what I've read, Christian Apologetics sometimes breaks down because the arguments slide between different senses of the term 'contingent' without clearly signposting the change.

Language constantly evolves but philosophy in particular has an outsize role in influencing this drift. Sometimes philosophers invent new terms and then these terms filter out to the general public where over time their meanings shift, as happened with 'deconstruction' and 'idealistic'. Sometimes philosophers will take words from the vernacular and pressgang them into theoretical service, introducing new meanings in the process. Sometimes philosophers within the tradition will take established philosophical jargon and seek to redefine it within the tradition – although such philosophers will often say that they are rather trying to establish 'better' or 'more correct' definitions. This does not occur in sciences like chemistry or biology. In these sciences neologisms for chemicals and organisms are coined and then tend I believe to maintain stable meanings subsequently. The difference between philosophy and science might be that philosophical arguments usually depend on shared intuitions – that is, such arguments are not trying to prove completely novel claims or describe completely novel phenomena but rather clarify or elucidate notions people already possess but which they have difficulty clearly articulating, notions shared by the community. In researching and thinking about this topic, I have hit on a key idea that may be of great service to any of my readers interested in philosophy. Within the anglophone world, the main philosophical tradition since people like Russell, Moore, and Wittgenstein has been 'analytic '. Early analytic philosophers distrusted 'natural languages' and wanted to create an 'ideal language'. This does not mean that they wanted to create a wholly new language like Esperanto. Rather, I believe, they wanted to take existing words and stipulate definitions for them that would enable such a language to perfectly or at least optimally mirror the real world. Natural language philosophers however, by contrast, think that we can arrive at truths by analysing natural languages. These two tendencies within philosophy, which we can call, following David Foster Wallace, prescriptivist and descriptivist, contribute to the gradual onward movement of the philosophical conversation, a conversation that because it is concerned with words and shared intuitions permeates out into the wider linguistic community. Both tendencies, however, come into conflict with the insight I mentioned in the introduction, that individuals can possess totally different worldview and thus, potentially, define words differently.

So far I have been considering semantic confusions associated with philosophy but I would like now to describe a semantic confusion I was involved with recently at my weekly pub quiz. A friend of mine said something about how Vladimir Putin wanted to spread communism into Western Europe. I said, "Putin isn't a communist." My poor friend didn't seem to understand what I was talking about. The problem here is that arguably the term "communism" has also been skunked, perhaps almost since its inception. It seems that everyone understands this word differently. Personally I take the rather renegade position that no communist state has ever existed. This is because Marx, when he coined the word in 1848, envisaged it as denoting a classless, stateless society made up of small self-governed communes – hence his choice of the word 'communism'. The term for the official political system of the Soviet Union from the 1920's until 1991 was not officially communism but Marxist-Leninism, a system in which the Communist Party ruled absolutely ("the dictatorship of the proletariat"); this "socialist" system was always supposed to be temporary, a provisional arrangement that would hypothetically give way later to genuine communism (even though genuine communism never arrived). But everyone called the USSR a communist state and people today still call China communist. This indicates that there is indeed enormous confusion today with respect to the word "communism" (and indeed with the related word "socialism"). But very very few educated people today have so little understanding of the term that they would describe Putin as a communist. Although people sometimes throw around words like "oligarchy" and "kleptocracy", I think Russia today should be described as a capitalist autocracy. Putin in fact hates the legacy of Lenin and the other 'Communist' leaders and his rule is based on a nationalistic and even somewhat religious mythos rather than any kind of economic theory. So of course my friend was wrong. The reason my pub quiz friend got confused, and I sensed this at the time, is partly that many people view the current conflict between Russia and the West as a continuation of the Cold War, as a struggle between capitalist democracies and 'communism', because they haven't updated their world views since 1991, and partly that many people seem to assume that all dictatorships are necessarily communist, that 'communism' and 'autocracy' are synonyms. I had to bring up 'fascism' as a counter example. Now you may think my pub quiz team mate was being a bit dopey but I think his misunderstanding may be far more prevalent than my readers may realise.

The lesson in all this is that not only that we need to know, as best we can, the meanings of words to understand someone else but that in order to understand someone else, we often need to guess how he or she understands particular words. Not only does linguistic communication help produce empathy, empathy helps produce communication.

The themes of language and miscommunication bring me to my second topic: Te Tiriti o Waitangi. I talked about this in January last year (in a post called "Concerning Co-Governance") but I shall add a little to what I said then and bring the reader up to date with recent developments here in New Zealand. In 1840, the British Crown signed a treaty with 512 Maori chiefs in which, at least according to traditional readings, the Maori ceded sovereignty to Queen Victoria, were guaranteed rights to their lands and other possessions ('taonga'). and were given all the protections, rights, and privileges of British citizens. Notoriously the Maori version of the Treaty is slightly different to the English version; today legal scholars regard the Maori version as the authoritative version. One linguistic issue is that Maori, for good reason, did not possess the concept of 'sovereignty' in 1840 and so it was translated as as 'kawanatanga', a word today often translated into English as 'governorship' instead but which may not be fully translatable at all. After 1840, a great deal of Maori land passed into settler hands through fraudulent practices such as governmental confiscations. In 1975, the Waitangi Tribunal was set up by the then Labour government to provide redress to Maori tribes ('iwi') for such historical injustices. This makes total sense – it explicitly says in the Treaty that Maori have rights to all their lands and possessions to keep or sell as they choose and by 1975 the Treaty had been recognised as New Zealand's founding document. When the Tribunal was set up, the legislation said that Māori "could bring a claim to the tribunal about a Crown policy or practice (amongst other things) which was or is ‘inconsistent with the principles of the Treaty’" (Te Ara.govt.nz). Note that the Act talks of the 'principles' of the Treaty rather than what the Treaty explicitly says. There is a gap here because the legislation does not specify what these principles are. Eventually these were established by the courts. In 1987, the Court of Appeal determined that the Treaty "signified a partnership between Pakeha and Maori requiring each other to act towards the other reasonably and with the utmost good faith" (ibid). There are two important points here. The first is that this principle was determined by the Court rather than by Parliament. Secondly, the term "partnership" does not appear explicitly in the Treaty. Perhaps the Court found some way to interpret the terms 'kawanatanga' and 'tino rangatiratanga' (chiefly authority) in terms of partnership or perhaps there is documented evidence that the chiefs conceived of the Treaty this way back in 1840. Or perhaps it was judicial activism. However it happened, the idea that the Treaty represented a partnership between Maori and Pakeha entered into and became increasingly important in legal and political discourse. Today just about every government department has as part of its mission statement that it should act in accordance with the principles of te Tiriti o Waitangi.

The embedding of the partnership concept grew far more pronounced under the previous government, under Jacinda Ardern. All government departments and ministries were given Maori names. An independent Maori health body tasked with dealing specifically with Maori health issues, policies, and outcomes, called Te Aka Whai Ora, was set up in 2022. The disastrous Three Waters reforms would have seen New Zealand water services fifty percent controlled indirectly by councils and fifty percent by iwi. Inevitably, because of strong anti-Maori sentiment among a chunk of the electorate, these reforms provoked a backlash, and in October a new, centre-right government was elected determined to reverse these changes. The right liberterian ACT party, now a junior coalition party in the government, had campaigned on a promise that there would be a national referendum on the Treaty. It is important to realise that David Seymour wasn't wanting a referendum on whether or not we should keep the Treaty. He's not that evil. Rather he wanted a public conversation and referendum on what the principles should be. And he does have a point. I disagree with David about many things – I think New Zealand should have a wealth tax and a capital gains tax in order to help prop up our ailing healthcare service, our police, our schools, our water systems, and so on. David, though, has referred to a wealth tax as an "envy tax". But a case can indeed be made that the Treaty's principles should be honestly debated either within Parliament or by the citizenry in order to clarify what they should be (if we can ensure that the conversation doesn't get hijacked by bigots). Its not going to happen though. Having weathered a storm of protests by Maori and by Pakeha allies of the Maori, our new Prime Minister, Christopher Luxon, said he wouldn't support the referendum bill past the select committee stage.

My intent here is not to argue either for or against David but to say something about what I as a Pakeha believe to be the Maori perspective on the issue. Since the election and the swerve away from Jacinda's Maori sympathetic policies, there has been significant activist activity. Among some activists on the left, the view has at some time taken hold that Maori did not relinquish sovereignty when they signed the Treaty. I found this very surprising when I learned of this view. A little while ago, activists broke into Te Papa, New Zealand's national museum, and vandalised a replica English version of the Treaty to make a point about colonisation. I believe that the reasoning underlying this protest movement, the justification for it, is that in the first article of the Maori version of the Treaty, Maori ceded "kawanatanga" and in the second article were guaranteed "tino rangatiratanga". The second term can, today, apparently, also be translated as "sovereignty". So it seems that in the first clause of the Treaty, Maori ceded sovereignty to the Crown and, in the second, were guaranteed it. The activists are motivated thus by how they understand the meaning of "tino rangatiratana". But are they right? I recently read a piece by Sir Apirana Ngata, written in 1922, in which he makes no reference to this apparent contradiction in the Treaty, so this interpretation may be quite recent. Perhaps what the writers and signatories of the Treaty understood by this term depends on its context within the document and how they understood this term at the time. Perhaps the term 'tino rangatiratanga' has itself also been skunked.

The problem with the activist view, however founded on facts it may perhaps be, is that the activists have no clear idea what they actually want. Let us concede for the sake of the argument that Maori never ceded sovereignty. What would this mean for New Zealand? Should Maori take over the rule of the whole country? Which iwi would be in charge? Or would we have two states somehow in the same country: a Maori state with its own government, own taxation regime, own police, own schools, own health care system, and so on, and another state for Pakeha? Given the amount of intermarriage over the last two hundred years, how could we reliably demarcate Pakeha from Maori? Perhaps we could imagine a less dramatic response to a rejection of the English version of the treaty but I am not sure what it would look like.

I'll describe a conversation with another pub quiz friend which might illustrate some of the flaws in this kind of reasoning, the reasoning that seems to lead to the idea of having separate services for Maori and Pakeha. We were discussing Te Aka Whai Ora. My friend, a Pakeha, said, to paraphrase her, that Maori are different from Pakeha culturally and ethnically and so require a qualitatively different kind of healthcare, preferably by other Maori. To be clear, she was supporting the Labour position. A similar kind of argument for Te Aka Whai Ora is that Maori health statistics are demonstrably worse than Pakeha ones and that therefore the old one-size-fits-all model must be to blame. I asked her, "If I decided that Maori treatments were better than Pakeha ones, could I as a Pakeha seek treatment from Te Aka Whai Ora?" Presumably I would be unable to. I followed this up by asking, "If some Maori forms of treatment are more effective than European treatments objectively, why not have a single system that samples the best of both worlds?" It seems to me that the idea that Maori need an entirely different health care system seems to imply that Maori are biologically totally different to Pakeha and that Pakeha doctors are incapable of understanding and treating Maori health issues, an idea which must be incorrect. Yes, in the Mental Health System, culture and interpersonal relationships have an enormous effect on the emotional well-being of patients and so in this context Maori culture and staffing may be important. But it seems to me that when we think of diseases like cancer, heart disease, and diabetes, all that should matter is the competence of the doctors. 

Of course, it may be that in thinking of Te Aka Whai Ora in this way, as a kind of alternative healthcare provider, I may have misunderstood its role. If I have misunderstood it, it may be the fault of the previous government for poor messaging, the media for poor reporting, or the current government for shameless Maori-bashing.

If dividing New Zealand up into separate Maori and Pakeha jurisdictions is practically unfeasible, it seems that lefty activists and the recent protests more generally lack clear objectives. Given this lack of clear objectives, what has been driving the opposition to David Seymour's bill? What are Maori afraid of? In the end I believe the impetus is more emotional than rational. Maori are more emotional than European New Zealanders; their emotionalism is related to Maori spirituality and culture, to the importance of mana and ceremony and connections to kin and land and taonga. Possibly this emotionalism is also partly attributable to the effects of colonisation and past repression. I now come to the point that I have been driving towards. The Treaty is important to Maori emotionally because it indicates respect for Maori. Maori want to be acknowledged as the indigenous people of New Zealand; this is the impulse that has driven the Maori protests. They do not want to be seen as better than their Pakeha compatriots but nor do they want to seen as less than them – and it is the second attitude that is what they are afraid of. The importance that most Maori ascribe to the Treaty is not instrumental. Perhaps a few in the Maori community may hope or have hoped to use the Treaty to try to grab money or power, but most Maori don't. Rather the importance that Maori ascribe to the Treaty is symbolic. Unlike immigrants who voluntarily choose to make their lives in another country, Maori in New Zealand come from here and were here for centuries before the Europeans arrived. Aotearoa is their ancestral home. Many reacted the way they did to David Seymour's proposal because they feared that the Treaty might be taken away from them. The Treaty, especially the Maori version and its interpretation in terms of 'partnership', helps support Maori identity and self-determination as a community. Maori are afraid that if the Treaty were to be somehow nullified or David Seymour's interpretation of it, in which the Treaty is seen as concerning all New Zealand citizens equally, became established law, Maori identity might be erased. Or at least significantly diminished.

Some of my readers may have read or heard of a philosopher called Jason Brennan and his book Against Democracy. If you haven't, you can watch a video on Youtube of him being interviewed by Alex O'Conner. In this book, Brennan argues against universal suffrage on the grounds that most people are too incompetent to make sensible voting decisions, and suggests that people should have to pass a test in basic civics and economics before being permitted to vote. This argument jars with many people, particularly the majority of political philosophers. The most common argument made against Brennan's thesis is that the right to vote has symbolic significance and that this is the reason we should endorse universal suffrage. Close to two years ago, I wrote an essay about this book for a Political Philosophy paper and attempted, not quite successfully, to use this argument myself. Brennan has made the comment that he doesn't think this argument works. I have thought about this recently and worked out what I should have said two years ago. To present the argument formally:

1. Utilitarianism is true.

2. Utility should be understood in terms of emotional states such as happiness or self-respect.

3. Symbolic gestures, such as granting a person the right to vote, bolster emotional states such as happiness or self-respect.

4. Therefore we should grant all people the right to vote.

Although I don't believe in utilitarianism myself, very many people do, so this argument seems a very strong contender in favour of inclusive democracy. The relation of this digression to the discussion of te Tiriti should be obvious. The Treaty, understood as a document concerning partnership, in an analogous way to universal suffrage, has symbolic value that improves the emotional well-being of Maori and does little to harm the emotional well-being of Pakeha (apart from a few bigots who can be safely ignored). Therefore we should maintain the idea of the Treaty as signifying a partnership between the two peoples. Yes, we need to find the right balance between symbolism and actual power over others – Three Waters was probably a mistake. And we need to take into consideration that only a minority of people in New Zealand can speak Maori when naming government ministries and departments. But this second concern can simply be addressed by giving departments and ministries both English and Maori names. I don't quite know where the line between symbolic acts and 'real' political power should be drawn myself but it is not the purpose of this essay to solve all of New Zealand's race relation issues. My aim in this section was to attempt, despite being a Pakeha who has had only glancing contact with Maori culture, to understand why Maori were so deeply upset by the apparently anti-Maori direction the present government has taken, to empathise with them. In trying to do so I am pushing back against the many Pakeha who have made effort to do so. This perspective on the issue enables to us to reconsider those far left activists who deny that Maori ever ceded sovereignty. The motivations of these activists are not instrumental – they are not wanting to completely reform New Zealand culture and institutions. Rather their activism is born from emotional impulses.

I turn now to Anselm.

Anselm's ontological argument is one of the more famous arguments for the existence of God. But it is highly controversial. Atheists today and in fact even many Christians from the eleventh century onwards when it was first proposed have felt that the argument must be unsound somehow but have struggled to say precisely where and why it goes wrong. I believe the mistake in the argument is, from one point of view, quite obvious – but this particular point of view involves looking at words and meanings in a way that runs completely counter to much philosophical tradition, even modern analytic philosophy. It is because of the prejudices of mainstream philosophers with respect to words and meanings that they have found it so difficult to pinpoint the error in the argument.

 In my previous essay about the ontological argument, I quoted Anselm's argument as it was presented in Wikipedia at the time. This time, rather than giving that version again, I shall give my own version.

1. If one can conceive of something like God in all ways except with respect to His existence, one is not conceiving of God.

2. Therefore if one can conceive of God in all ways, one must conceive of Him existing.

4. One can conceive of God in all ways.

5. Therefore one must conceive of Him existing.

4. Therefore, God exists.

This version of the argument is different from Anselm's original formulation. The most important difference is that Anselm's argument depends on the ideas that God is by definition that being none which greater can be imagined and that it is possible to imagine the greatest possible being. I claim however that my version of the argument is equivalent to Anselm's even though it makes no mention of either relative or absolute greatness. Defenders of Anselm may want to insert a jemmy between the two versions but I don't believe any such fiddling around with the arguments will be able to make Anselm's original argument sound when it can be easily demonstrated that my own version of it is unsound. In fact I believe we can set out an even simpler version that is also effectively equivalent.

1. One can conceive of God.

2. If one can conceive of God, one must conceive that He exists.

3. Therefore one must conceive that God exists.

4. Therefore God exists.

The first thing to note about this argument is that I have used the rather vague pronoun 'one'. Who is one? Well, presumably Anselm at least. But Anselm intends the argument to apply to everyone – you, me, the whole population of New Zealand, the whole population of the world, everyone, including Richard Dawkins and Daniel Dennett. Everyone supposedly can conceive of God. The supposed universality of faith in a Judeo-Christian deity is why Anselm thinks his argument is so effective. We are all supposed to be able to conceive of God and consequently His necessary existence; therefore, because everyone either openly or secretly believes in the Judeo-Christian God, this argument must be true. People who call themselves 'atheists' are ether lying or in denial or just stupid. Religious people sometimes trot out the passage from the psalms: "The fool hath said in his heart, There is no God. They are corrupt, they have done abominable works, there is none that doeth good," and there is even a term for the wilful, deliberate, and perverse rejection of God supposedly practiced by supposed atheists – Alex O'Conner discusses this term in one of his debates, a term I cannot include here because I have not been able to track the debate down. However, on the other side of the divide, we can find atheists who deny that anyone believes in God. According to such atheists, religious people are all engaged in irrationality, in wishful thinking and self deception. Insofar as Dawkins, for instance, sees belief in God as a belief at all, it is a delusion. If we consider these people, it seems we can turn lines 1 through 3 of my second version of Anselm's argument against Anselm – because some people do not believe in God then, by Anselm's own argument, these people cannot conceive of God. Some people can conceive of God and others cannot. Which group is in the right? We arrive back at the claim I made in the introduction to this essay, that seemingly insurmountable differences obtain between people. Some people cannot imagine a world without God and some people cannot imagine a world with one, and these two groups are incapable of fully understanding each other because they see the world from incompatible perspective.

However it is not the fact that faith in a single, simple, omnipotent, omniscient, and omni-benevolent God is not universal that kills Anselm's argument (although it does weaken it). The real fatal error, as those of my readers who are on my wavelength will already have noted, is the move from 3 to 4. This move is not valid. To make the argument valid we need to add another premise which we can call 3.5. 

3.5 If one can conceive that something exists, it must exist.

If we add 3.5 the argument is valid despite the fact that 'one' is not clearly identified. But 3.5 is false. We can conceive that something exists –  and be wrong. We can show this through several examples.

Suppose Bob believes in Bigfoot. He knows a great deal of folklore about Bigfoot and has heard testimony from people he trusts who claim that they have seen Bigfoot. It seems to me quite obvious that Bob can conceive of Bigfoot and that furthermore he conceives of Bigfoot as existing. However suppose Bob then learns that the supposed witnesses he trusted were lying or unreliable and encounters people who present him with solid evidence that Bigfoot doesn't exist. This may cause Bob to change his mind. Bob's prior conception of Bigfoot involved Bigfoot's existence and his later conception involves Bigfoot's non-existence. This means that whether Bob conceives of Bigfoot as existing or not has no necessary bearing on whether Bigfoot actually exists. Suppose, alternatively, that a large number of people know a great deal of folklore about Bigfoot but believe he is apocryphal. This is arguably the situation today. Suppose however that a group of respected scientists release a bombshell report that persuades everyone that a few big hairy human-like bipeds do indeed live in the forests of northwestern North America, that the testimony of previous eyewitnesses was credible. It seems then that the meaning of the term Bigfoot will consequently change not only in the minds of many individuals but collectively. Much of this essay has concerned the way different people can understand words differently and the way the general consensus concerning the meanings of words can change over time. I am claiming here that whether something exists or not is part of the meaning of the word used to signify it and that this too can differ between individuals and change over time. I claim moreover that this aspect of meaning applies to both general terms and to proper names.

I could devise many other stories to back up this claim but I will pick only one. Consider unicorns. Everyone today regards them as fabulous. Suppose however that archeologists discover evidence that now extinct creatures almost exactly like horses but with ivory horns growing our of their foreheads roamed Europe and Britain in the distant past. Saul Kripke argues that even if this discovery were to occur, we still would not call such creatures unicorns because, as I construe his argument, the history of this word can be traced back to the fictions written by fabulists in the Middle Ages and earlier and so it seems likely that there is no causal connection between the word's origins and the newly discovered remains. But suppose we imagine a little more: let us suppose that evidence is found that shows that such apparent fictions were directly inspired by actual creatures that roamed Europe and Britain in the Middle Ages. It seems to me that people can justifiably now say, "Unicorns existed after all!" The meaning or conception associated with the word 'unicorn' would have changed and the most important alteration is that we would now say of unicorns, "Unicorns once existed" whereas we would formerly have said, "Unicorns don't exist and have never existed." 

So far I have discussed ontological arguments in term of meanings or conceptions but Anselm's argument, like other ontological arguments, also depends on the notion of "definition". The issue I have raised reoccurs here. In Anselm's day there were no dictionaries but today we can talk about the "dictionary definition" of a word. Importantly the dictionary definition does not specify the whole meaning of a word; in particular, I claim that because most words signify actual things, lexicographers do not bother to mention that they do. But dictionary definitions usually do say if something is fictional or fabulous or mythical. The Oxford definition of unicorn is, "a mythical animal usually represented as a horse with a single straight horn projecting from its forehead." Unlike meanings or conceptions, definitions are determined by experts based on how they observe the way words are usually or authoritatively used by their linguistic community, a determination that can often be difficult to make. Definitions, unlike conceptions, should not differ between people. But still, as I have shown in this essay, definitions too can change. If definitions are contingent and created by people, the claim "god exists by definition" must be false because it equivocates between two different notions of "exists".

The argument I have been making is I think the best way to refute Anselm's argument. But it creates significant further problems because it goes against the grain of the whole modern tradition of analytic philosophy. Russell, for instance, thought that existence should be understood in terms of whether some thing in the real world satisfies one or more predicates and built his system of logic on this idea. We could reject much analytic philosophy and consider countercultural alternatives to predicate logic such as Meinongianism, the doctrine that existence is a property that objects can either have or not have. We could invoke some kind of cluster theory of meaning; at the moment for instance I am drawn to the notion that verbal constructions like "existing", "not existing", "existing in the past but not today", "existing in the works of Lewis Carroll" and so forth are descriptors that as part of a shared cluster of descriptors in the minds of a speaker and auditor enable meaningful communication, a notion inspired by but not identical to a theory proposed by John Searle. The most significant problem is that my proposal seems to imply that we need to have two notions of existence and by implication two notions of truth. Anselm conceived of God existing but God might not actually exist; the proposition "God exists" might be true for Anselm but not actually true. The good ol' Correspondence Theory of Truth does not seem to cut it. We need to come up with some other theory of truth, perhaps social constructivist, perhaps pragmatic. This is far too complicated a topic for me to tackle here in this essay.

In this essay I have covered several subjects. The two themes I have explored concern the meanings of words and our understanding of others. These two themes are closely related because not only do we understand others by virtue of what they say, we understood what others are saying by virtue of our understandings of others. There is thus a strong connection between language and empathy. In spite of what I said in the introduction, perhaps if we make the effort the apparently insurmountable differences between people may not be wholly insurmountable after all.

I'll finish this essay by briefly reporting some things about my own life. In the previous essay I described a visit to Waiheke Island and said that it occurred in spring 2009. In fact it occurred in autumn 2009. It might be that I forgot that I live in the Southern Hemisphere rather than the Northern Hemisphere. This detail may seem trivial but it is important because it shows that how 'ill' I was when I was still taking Respiridone. Second, and this very significant indeed, yesterday my psychiatrist decided to release me from the Compulsory Treatment Order I have been under since early 2014. I have been under the Mental Health Act for almost exactly ten years. I have agreed to continue taking medication for at least a little while but readers may recall that I am now on a far lower dosage than I was two years ago. My reason for continuing to take medication is not that I think I need it but because of the overconservatism of my psychiatrist and mother. Hopefully I will get off it completely some time in the next six months. Even though so much in the world is going to shit, sometimes some glimmers of hope can still be found.

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