Hermeneutics and Anselm's Ontological Argument: Lessons for Lawyers and Others On Existential Proof

When lawyers and others explore the limits of logical proof in proving matters of existence, it's quite useful to explore St. Anselm's Ontological Argument purporting to prove God's existence as a matter of pure logic. Grasping how the argument might might work on a purely hermeneutic level while possibly failing on the pragmatic level helps explain the need for meaning to work in the face of experience. We can also gain much insight on these points by exploring how a common objection to Anselm's argument fundamentally fails. As we'll see, hermeneutics must be pragmatic in the sense discussed below, and this straightforwardly makes the case for hermeneutic pragmatism as best philosophy.

Starting with a common objection to Anselm's argument, it seems but common sense that things either exist or they don't apart from pure logic. For example, as the objection might go, my keyboard I'm using now would exist even if no one knew logic. How, then, can pure logic prove anything exists? Well, the objection and example assume that existence as we commonly understand the term is something simply there apart from language. But that is error. Existence is a concept created by our language (or more precisely our semiotics). That is, existence itself is hermeneutic and things can meaningfully "exist" within countless conceptual schemes of the world that we might construct. Hilary Putnam's exploration of "internal realism" sheds further light here. How, then, is existence less subject to logical proof within conceptual schemes than other concepts like that of God offered by St. Anslem? 

All that said, we of course cannot accept that God must transcendentally exist simply because we can deductively prove God's existence within Anselm's (or any one else's) conceptual worldview. First, this ignores the hermeneutics just discussed: we can have countless concepts of God which may or may not be compatible within the countless potential conceptual world schemes we might use. Second, any such purely deductive ontological argument would ignore a critical element of good reasoning. Our concepts must work in the face of all experience: they must help us predict, organize, and improve such experience in ways that sufficiently handle (for the purposes we have) all experience (including moral experience). If we wish to fully "prove" anything, we must therefore not only successfully prove how concepts flow within a conceptual scheme. We must also demonstrate the pragmatic workability just discussed. This is the real lesson of Anselm's argument and the flaws in the common objection to Anslem noted above. Thus, as theologians wishing to prove the existence of God must address both hermeneutics and pragmatism (and thus embrace hermeneutic pragmatism), so must lawyers wishing to prove matters of existential dispute. 

Anselm's no less fascinating Cur Deus Homo also invites useful instruction in hermeneutic pragmatism. Hopefully soon, I plan to sketch out a more modern rewrite also in question form. In addition to allowing such further exploration of good hermeneutic pragmatism, I hope this will also help too-insular lawyers see how deep explorations of areas beyond the law can make them better lawyers.

How To Do Things With Signs: An Overview of Semiotics for Lawyers and Others

Click HERE for a link to my current draft of "How To Do Things With Signs: Semiotics in Legal Theory, Practice, and Education."

Abstract

Discussing federal statutes, Justice Scalia tells us that “[t]he stark reality is that the only thing that one can say for sure was agreed to by both houses and the president (on signing the bill) is the text of the statute. The rest is legal fiction."

How should we take this claim? If we take "text" to mean the printed text, that text without more is just a series of marks. If instead we take "text" (as we must) to refer to something off the page such as the "meaning" of the series of marks at issue, what is that meaning and how do we know that all the legislators "agreed" on that "meaning"? In seeking answers here, we necessarily delve into semiotics (i.e., the “general theory of signs”) by noting that meaningful ink marks ("signifiers) signify a meaning beyond themselves (the "signified.") Thus, understanding how signs function is integral to lawyers' textual and linguistic analysis. Additionally, as this article demonstrates, legal analysis and rhetoric are much impoverished if lawyers ignore nonverbal signs such as icons, indices, and nonverbal symbols.

In providing a broad overview of semiotics for lawyers, this article thus (1) begins with a general definition of signs and the related notion of intentionality. It then turns to, among other things, (2) the structure and concomitants of signs in more detail (including the signifier and the signified), (3) the possible correlations of the signifier and the signified that generate signs of interest to lawyers such as the index, the icon, and the symbol; (5) the expansion of legal rhetoric through use of the index, the icon, and the non-verbal as well as the verbal symbol, (6) the nature of various semiotic acts in public and private law (including assertives, commissives, directives, and verdictives); (7) the interpretation and construction of semiotic acts (including contracts as commissives and legislation as directives); (8) the role of speaker or reader meaning in the interpretation and construction of semiotic acts; (9) the semiotics of meaning, time, and the fixation of meaning debate; (10) the impact of signifier drift; (11) the distinction between sense and understanding; and (12) some brief reflections on semiotics and the First Amendment. This article also provides an Appendix of further terms and concepts useful to lawyers in their explorations of semiotics.

Keywords: semiotics, intentionality, signifier, sense, reference, meaning, index, icon, symbol, rhetoric, speech act, interpretation, construction, speaker meaning, reader meaning, originalism, first amendment, intent, contracts, legislation, Peirce, Shakespeare, directive, commissive, verdictive

Voltaire and the Semiotics of Dress

For those who doubt that there is a semiotics of dress, here is Voltaire wigged and wigless. Many thanks to the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C. for displaying these busts in near tandem.

Addition to Strings of Thought 5-19-2018

Hermeneutics

                               To Gadamer

Though eye must squint, eye must explore the bird

Who plays at the horizon of the word,

Whose far tints flash, far notes lag as it hops 

Beyond and back from where the language stops.

For the entire "Strings of Thought" as it currently stands, see here.

Addition to "Strings of Thought" (2/7/18)

2/7/18 A legislative bill or other proposal isn’t simply a string of words on a page. Instead, a legislative bill or other proposal involves concepts (the signified) to which words (the signifiers) refer with varying degrees of precision.  Legislators debate the concepts signified and the signifiers as signifying such concepts.  Justice Scalia therefore oversimplifies how language works when he claims that “the only thing one can say for sure was agreed to by both houses and the President (on signing the bill) is the text of the statute.”  (Reading Law, p. 376) Justice Scalia oversimplifies here because any such text was adopted as part of a greater whole, as signifiers of concepts involved in the bill.  For example, a statute reading “All cars must drive on the write side of interstate roads” adopted by both houses of Congress and signed by the President no doubt likely means “All cars must drive on the right side of interstate roads.” It’s hard to believe that both houses and the President agreed on “write side” instead of “right side” of the road. I at least cannot “say for sure” that they did. Justice Scalia concedes the same by acknowledging what he considers “the rare case of an obvious scrivener’s error.” (Reading Law, p. 57)  In the real world, of course, obvious scrivener’s errors are hardly rare.

The entire text of "Strings of Thought" can be found here.

Addition to "Strings of Thought" (1/30/18)

Legislative Intent

1/30/18  Legislative “intent” lies in legislatures’ speech acts and not legislators’ speech acts.  That is, legislative “intent” is the speaker meaning of legislatures not legislators—confusing the two is a category mistake. For example, when the legislature adopts a rule requiring drivers to drive on the right side of the road, the legislature has performed a directive speech act adopting a rule to some end or purpose (such as changing driving patterns to enhance road safety).  When the legislature censures someone, it has performed an expressive speech act condemning someone for some end or purpose (such as discouraging future bad behavior on the part of public officials).  The different purposes (and the plans involved in such purposes) distinguish the different types of speech acts. Recognizing this distinction between legislature and legislator speech acts avoids pseudo-quandaries such as “How can we ever aggregate the subjective intent of countless legislators to determine legislative intent?” or “How do we include the intent of a legislator who votes for a bill for unrelated reasons?” Instead, we ask: “What is the objective bill or proposal (and the concomitant purpose or plan or both) properly adopted by the legislature?”  We also ask: “What are the objective concepts involved?” while acknowledging such concepts can have yet-to-be explored threads and extensions.

1/30/18 A legislature typically speaks best when it adopts a bill or other proposal (and any concomitant purpose or plan) after reasonable debate by legislators.   Although individual legislators’ speaker meaning in such debates can be highly relevant evidence of the legislature’s speaker meaning, legislators’ speech acts are not legislatures’ speech acts. 

The entire post of "Strings of Thought" can be found here.

Addition to "Strings of Thought" (1/21/18)

Speaker Meaning

1/21/18 “Original” speaker meaning includes the unexplored.  Imagine I buy a netted device I categorize as “my hammock” before I unbox and see it.  On the next day, I unbox “my hammock,” count its strings, and note their makeup and weave. On the third day, I tie “my hammock” between two trees.  I broadly gauge its new shape when tied into the world. On the fourth day, I refine “my hammock’s” new shape:  it contradictorily resembles both a canoe and a crescent moon. On the fifth day, I wonder whether “my hammock” now qualifies as a bed and tentatively conclude that it does. On the sixth day, I lie down in “my hammock” and see interesting new views from its vantage point. On the seventh day, I rest with no hammock thoughts in my head.  The “original” meaning of “my hammock” thus casts a wide and variable net not captured from day one. Instead, day by day through day six, I have obtained fuller and fuller understandings of “my hammock” including how it intersects with (and provides vantage points to) the world to which it is tied.  Thus, any “original concept” signified by “my hammock” is larger than any “original conception” (or first-day conception) of something boxed and unseen, is larger than any second-day conception adding counted strings, their makeup, and their weave, is larger than any third-day conception of the hammock as tied, and so on.  Furthermore, for those seeking speaker meaning, any “original concept” and any preceding daily conceptions don’t sleep the seventh day.

The entire post of "Strings of Thought" can be found here.

Speaker Meaning and the Interpretation and Construction of Executive Orders

Here is an abstract of my latest article posted on SSRN:

ABSTRACT:

This Article explores the interpretation and construction of executive orders using as examples President Trump’s two executive orders captioned “Protecting the Nation From Foreign Terrorist Entry Into the United States” (the “Two Executive Orders”).

President Trump issued the Two Executive Orders in the context of (among other things) Candidate Trump’s statements such as: “Islam hates us,” and “[W]e can’t allow people coming into this country who have this hatred.” President Trump subsequently provided further context including his tweet about the second of his Two Executive Orders: “People, the lawyers and the courts can call [the second of the Two Executive Orders] whatever they want, but I am calling it what we need and what it is, a TRAVEL BAN!” 

President Trump & Word Association

As a lover of words, I am of course interested in the following Quinnipiac poll which asked responders "What is the first word that comes to mind when you think of Donald Trump?"  The list provides endless fodder for analysis of speaker meaning.  The top two answers were "idiot" and "incompetent."  Did the speakers mean some subtle difference between those terms?  What about any meant difference between those two terms and such other terms as "unqualified," "ignorant," "stupid," and "clown"?  The third most frequent response is "liar."  Was "liar" meant in a different sense from "dishonest" or "con-man" which pop up later in the list?  Is "leader" (fourth on the list) a complement or is it a factual statement such as "president"  (sixth on the list)?  What about "trying"?  Does that mean the man is attempting to succeed (my guess but it's only a guess) or that he is "causing strain, hardship, or distress" (American Heritage College Dictionary 4th ed.)?  I also wonder how Originalists like Neil Gorsuch would interpret and parse each word in this list.  Reasonable contemporaneous readers can of course draw wildly different conclusions about the meanings of these words.

"Nature Hath Framed Strange Fellows" William Shakespeare and Natural Law

A. Introduction

             

             Natural law theorists might turn to The History of Troilus and Cressida to start building their case.  They might begin with Ulysses’ lofty outline of the “natural” order:

The heavens themselves, the planets, and this center          

Observe degree, priority, and place,                            

Insisture, course, proportion, season, form,                    

Office, and custom, in all line of order,                       

And therefore is the glorious planet Sol                        

In noble eminence enthroned and sphered                         

Amidst the other; whose med'cinable eye                         

Corrects the influences of evil planets

And posts, like the commandment of a king . . . .[1]                      

Such theorists might then use Ulysses’ further stirring words to blend such “natural physical order” with a “natural order” in law and morality as well:

Take but degree away, untune that string,                      

And hark what discord follows. Each thing meets                

In mere oppugnancy.  The bounded waters                          

Should lift their bosoms higher than the shores              

And make a sop of all this solid globe;                         

Strength should be lord of imbecility,                          

And the rude son should strike his father dead;                 

Force should be right; or rather right and wrong,             

Between whose endless jar justice resides,                    

Should lose their names, and so should justice too.^[2]                             

As far as it goes, it is hard to imagine a more eloquent case for natural law than this.

Gorsuch and Originalism: Some Critiques from Logic, Scripture, and Art

(This blog combines, expands, and end-notes two prior blogs)

Ekphrasis & Prose: Sonnet Translations of Poe & Hawthorne

I sometimes wonder whether a prose piece should have been verse from the outset.  Could the deep meaning have been more effectively captured and conveyed by poetic form than by prose?  I've wondered that, for example, in the case of Poe's "The Mask of the Red Death."  With no illusions that Poe's sonnet wouldn't have been much better, here's a concrete example of what I mean: 

Shadow After Poe 

We noticed there was pestilence about.

We played instead of passive victim an
Aggressive agent capable of plan
And execution.  In, we locked it out,

A simple action, really, which we sealed
With weighty velvet curtains drawn across
An iron door bolted tight.  “Our gain, Hell’s loss!”
We toasted with good bourbon and were steeled.

“God helps who helps himself,” we boasted till
We saw a shadow by a comrade still
And cold throughout the reverie.  It hid

As quick within the heavy draperies.  Did
Drink fool?  No.  Oh, no fancy has composed
Such vast lost voices in a single ghost.

I've also wondered the same about individual passages in longer works.  Here, for example, is a bit of Hawthorne's The House of The Seven Gables set to sonnet form:

Originalism and the Fall of Icarus

Well, here we go again. With Neil Gorsuch as the current Supreme Court nominee, once more we hear praises of “originalism” as a judicial interpretive philosophy. As Gorsuch puts it, judges should “apply the law as it is, focusing backward, not forward, and looking to text, structure, and history to decide what a reasonable reader at the time of the events in question would have understood the law to be . . . .” Since law generally looks forward to govern future and not past behavior, and since context drives meaning in much more complex ways than Gorsuch’s words suggest, I’m amazed that people take this backward-looking and overly-simplistic philosophy seriously. I’ve written at length about the problems with such an approach but now also wonder if an old painting might more quickly dispatch such error.

Wittgenstein's Sonnet: No Pictures See Themselves (Addition to "The Apology Box")

    Wittgenstein’s Sonnet

When I was young, words worked a different way.

We hung them round like pictures on a wall

To replicate real objects.  Words used ink

Instead of photographic plates and dyes.

In replication either method worked

So long as illustration captured truth

By rendering objects as they really are.

What more to say?  It all seemed obvious

Until I pictured pictures without us.

No pictures see themselves, their objects, or
A world that is unfiltered by a mind.

Words and their objects are no different.  Thus,

Duck-rabbits now play games within the mind
Where certainty's more difficult to find.

© Harold Anthony Lloyd 2016

  
The current contents of "The Apology Box" can be found here.

Ishmael's Sonnet: Built As "Normal" Boys (Addition to "The Apology Box")

            Ishmael’s Sonnet

                        

They called me Ishmael.  I was a first

Who wrestled with the "bastard" name though I
Was built as "normal" boys.  With Mother, I

Was cast into the desert.  Struggling first,

 

I'd often hide myself.  I'd lie about

My essence in some feint of normalcy

That let me pass.  As I was outwardly

A normal boy, I need not always out

Myself.  And yet the loss of me within

Such phantom lives did further damage. In

Such feints I slandered parents, slandered, too,

The Lord whose kingdom lay within me, too.

I therefore washed my mouth.  "I am" replaced
The "stain" of "bastard" washing had erased.

© Harold Anthony Lloyd 2016

  
The current contents of "The Apology Box" can be found here.

Simon Magus: Beyond Your Heaven and Beyond Your Hell (Addition to "The Apology Box")

        Simon Magus's Case*

Stand back, Jehovah!  I do not concede
Your jurisdiction over me. Instead,
I’ve secret knowledge shared among the wise

Of greater gods that reign above your head
And rest unstained by your Creation here.

Before this secret knowledge made me wise,

Men used to drag me to your temples where
They made me watch the helpless lambs within

Writhe as men slit their bleeding, bleating throats.

It was no better outside than within. 
There children starved and there poor animals

Would tear themselves apart in roles you made

Of prey and predator.  I saw the scrolls

Recounting other evils you had done.

You made the devil.  You made man without

A sense of right and wrong then punished him

For disobeying orders not to learn

That difference giving knowledge of your wrongs. 

You tainted Lilith and her progeny

Though she obeyed and never bit the fruit.

You baited Cain to murder by your whim

Of arbitrary anger at his gift.

You killed by indiscriminate deluge

Both beasts and infants that could not have sinned.

The common language of survivors you

Destroyed at Babel where (to add insult)

You forced your syllables on men though you

Had once told Adam he could name the world.

You tortured Abraham with felony,

Made him conspire with you to kill his son.

You baited Sodom with slick angels so

You might destroy again--this time with fire.
You burned up infants, animals, and turned

Flesh salt before a husband's frightened eyes.

You tortured your good servant Joseph in

A foreign land whose tongue he did not know

In a repeat of Babel’s cruelty.

Your mind on Egypt then, you unleashed plagues

So horrid I would rather not recount

The sufferings of men or beasts whose blood

You craved on doors or threw down from the sky

Or swallowed up attached to chariots

Beneath the crashing waves that closed on those

Not choked in waters turned to blood before.

For forty years you marched men in the sand

Where you dispensed bizarre rules governing

Such things as beards and testicles of priests.

You called these “laws” so you could claim the right

And pleasure of your awful penalties.

Bored with the desert, you then turned to war

Both in the taking and the keeping of

A “promised land,” an oxymoron of

Word rightly kept to steal another’s ground.

Not only does such evil bring you down.

Your very mouth betrays you, too: "I am

A jealous god!”  Such jealousy requires

An object.  By your own admission you

Have competition and are not supreme. 
Consistent with us both, I thus reject

Your sovereignty Jehovah.  I would dwell

Beyond your heaven and beyond your hell.

*Simon Magus was a Gnostic who tried to solve the problem of evil by creating another and better realm beyond the one in which we live.

© Harold Anthony Lloyd 2016

  
The current contents of "The Apology Box" can be found here.

Witch of Endor's Double Sonnets: I Accept No Words for Me Except My Own (Addition to "The Apology Box")

    Witch Of Endor’s Double Sonnets

                            I.

I can't deny that I've known sorcery.

Men's words have cast their spells transforming me

Into a "witch" through verbal alchemy

Purporting to change essences of me.

I am a medium I will admit

But there's no shame or villainy in it.

How can it be an evil if I lend

A tongue to Heaven?  Hypocrites defend

The man who does the same when they declare

A "prophet" in their midst though they would tear

A woman into shreds who has the gift--

Unless of course a woman is more swift

In raising Samuel's ghost when trembling men

Must see it quick.  It's right to use her then.

                       II.

At men's request I raised up Samuel's ghost
That wore white veils across its sunken head
And mouth:  "Saul and his sons will soon be dead!"

Saul blanched and swooned. Now done with Samuel's ghost,

Men scorned my charity.  Not needed more,
I was a witch again good men abhor
And suffer not to live--though oddly men
Who have such powers are most godly men.

I  spat upon their terms, spat out my own,
And recognized no languages where few

Monopolize all prophets for themselves

In "piety" no doubt attempting to
Monopolize all profits for themselves.
I accept no words for me except my own.

© Harold Anthony Lloyd 2016

  
The current contents of "The Apology Box" can be found here.

Ezekiel: The Universe Leaps Over Heart & Head (Addition to "The Apology Box")

Ezekiel’s Double Sonnet

                                                               (A prophet of the exile)
                         I.

A rift ran down the middle of my soul

With halves that tugged perpetually at war

And kept me torn as both a priest and man.

I found that rules and that exceptions can

Be true at once.  Though contradictory,
We must have justice, must have mercy, too,

And must have death although we hear the din

Of dusty bones redressing into skin.

A nation must be punished for its sin,
A nation made of aggregates where one
Thus bears the guilt of all although no one
Is guilty for the deeds another's done:

The father's never guilty for the son
Nor is the child for what the father's done.

                        II.

God's scroll was written to be read. Yet, God
Fed me the message, too.  Sad to the ear
Words somehow tasted honeyed to the tongue.

In honeyed thought, I thought of being young
In Israel again although I knew
That logic stays me.  God, though, had free hand

To seize my hair and whisk me off to stand
Outside the temple walls. I found a hole
Within one wall and peered in where I saw

Beyond facades, beyond exterior awe
To inner awe that dwarfed all things that we
(However wise) have ever felt or said.

The universe leaps over heart and head
Whose terms of course can't curb a universe
Whose essence always brings it back to God.

 © Harold Anthony Lloyd 2016

The current contents of "The Apology Box" can be found here. 

Daniel: Nighttime Hieroglyphics in the Head (Addition to "The Apology Box")

        Daniel’s Sonnet

   (A Jew “exiled” in Babylon)

Through deepest faith, I tapped night's lexicon

That Nimrod changed. Confusion fell upon

More than the day when Babel’s Tower fell.

The language of the night collapsed as well,

And dreams took dialects they’d lacked before.

New gibberish infected night.  Therefore,

Men needed me to translate dreams that hid

Night's messages to them.  Of course, I did.

And when God wrote upon the wall instead

Of nighttime hieroglyphics in the head,

I was the only person who could read

The markings and convey what he had said.

I revel and reveal with words.  They are
Mind's whiskey, its key, and its reservoir.

© Harold Anthony Lloyd 2016

The current contents of "The Apology Box" can be found here.

How the "Ten" Commandments Refute Originalism & Fundamentalism (With Some Help From Herod, Caiaphas & Ahab's Additions to "The Apology Box")

Conservatives often like to claim that texts speak for themselves.  A review of the Ten  Commandments is an easy way to see how such claims are false.  First, such a review nicely shows that we must interject our own judgment even before we start reading a text because we first have to decide what the text is.  When we look for "Ten" Commandments in the Bible, we won't find such a neat list.  Instead, we'll find two places in the Bible (Exodus 20:1–17 and Deuteronomy 5:4–21) which support such a list though we could come up with a different number depending on what we expressly include (for example is not bowing down to other gods included in not putting other gods first or is it a separate command?) and depending upon how we group what we find.  The number 10 is thus in that sense arbitrary.  

Second, once we've used our judgment as to the content and number of the list, reading the commandments still requires much interpretation.  For example, read literally they say that we cannot kill.  That would mean we could not cut down a tree much less kill a wild beast attacking us.  Of course, no reasonable person would take these words that literally and thus no honest person who is reasonable would claim we don't have to use our minds and hearts when we read a text.  Instead, what we generally want to do when reading the words of others is to figure out what the speaker meant by those words.  This involves engaging in what philosophers of language call pragmatics, a topic that I have written about elsewhere.  Have Ahab, Herod, and Caiaphas really tried to understand and follow speaker meaning in the poems that follow? 

Third, the Ten Commandments also remind us of another wrinkle in cross-language cases.  The Commandments are in an ancient language that most of us cannot read.  We must thus rely on translations, and translations also involve judgment and often are erroneous or questionable at best. Anyone who tells us that we can and should take a translation literally and without question is thus wrong on multiple levels.