Keith’s Conundrums: Sound or Unsound?

Keith Douglas

All of the words from last time’s list are technical terms within various scholarly fields. They are also homophonous with similar words in ordinary language. I bring this to everyone’s attention because situations where this homophony exists is a source of many contentious debates. It is also interesting to consider how the ordinary use relates to the technical one and when one should use the technical one. If we are skeptics, I dare say we should be clear with our audiences when we are using which sense. One can also claim sometimes that, although the technical usage is not in play, it may well be the case that it should be.

Let’s look at the list again to see how the terms vary in these respects.

1. Energy

This is my personal favourite on the list, because not only do we have the “energy of the room” metaphor used to explore ideas of how people are feeling in a situation, and of course its meaning from physics (a property of things meaning something like “degree of changeability”), but there are also constant “new age” and other pseudoscientific meanings. These seem to all have in common one fundamental mistake: the treating of energy as if it were a stuff, not a property.

The phrase (popularized as far back as Bertrand Russell) that “the universe is made of matter and energy” is a misreading of the famous E=mc² equation. This states a relation between mass (a property) and other properties (the speed of light, c, etc.). Dimensional analysis (as Maxwell did in the 19^th century with another equation) shows this to be wrong. (Pure “counts” can occur in science: That’s what the unit of the amount of substance — i.e., the mole — is used for.)

2. Force

Forces in physics are just that which causes acceleration. In everyday contexts they are more along the lines of causes more generally. (There is a debate in evolutionary biology over whether natural selection is a cause, which would be an interesting generalization.)

3. Delusion

The technical meaning is from psychology and in particular from various diagnostic manuals and clinical practice more generally. From what I understand, delusions in this sense must have other characteristics beyond “false belief.”

4. Sex

This one is tricky. It belongs to reproductive biology as a technical term, though up until recently it seems it has overlapped strongly with the ordinary meanings. The debates over how many human sexes there are run afoul of this. Arguably, as Jerry Coyne has pointed out, there are, in this sense, two human sexes and some recognized intersex conditions. I do not know if one should (biology-wise) count “both” as a different sex, however (rather than being, well, both sexes). This raises interesting questions about the evolutionary function of organs and what proper function is. Those debates are complex!

5. Belief

From here we move from the natural sciences to philosophy in the narrow sense. “Belief” is a term of art from epistemology. “Held as true” or “held as worthy of acting on,” etc., are some of the glosses. It does not have the ordinary language connotations of “ungrounded” or “unjustified” or “superstitious.” Some people who leave religion say they have “no more beliefs,” which is false if “belief” is taken in the epistemological sense. There is an interesting connotation-in-translation concern I have wondered about: “Croyance” to me, as a non-native speaker of French, seems to have a stronger version of the connotations than its English language counterpart. Would anyone care to chime in there, particularly native speakers and true bilinguals?

6. Class

This is a technical term, with distinct meanings, in both the social sciences (particularly sociology and economics) and in logic. In logic, different class theories exist. In most of them, the idea is that a set or a class is an entity characterized exactly by its members (where membership is a primitive relation implicitly defined by the axioms of theories). Sets can have other sets as members; classes are in some ways “bigger” than sets, and do not have classes (but may have sets) as members. For example, in some class theories, there is a class of all sets, but certainly no set of all sets or class of all classes. (And no set of all classes, somewhat obviously!) In ordinary life, “set” in these membership-oriented senses and “class” are more or less synonymous and they shade into the meaning from social science pretty quickly. (It is debatable if the social science use is distinct here.)

7. Language

Linguistics makes use of several technical meanings of language. The most important one for many purposes is the one which allows the Chomskyian school, for example, to claim that humans are the only species with language. Arbitrary forms of communication are not languages in this sense. Are the Chomskyians correct? I will not presume to debate this matter here, but I will note that it is not about whether dogs can communicate to their owners or whether bees dance to convey “information” to other bees.

Sound or Unsound?

Moving on to today’s puzzle — this time, we have a paradox, which I borrow from Michael Clark’s little book, Paradoxes from A to Z. This one is again using standard logical vocabulary. Consider the following argument:

This argument, A, is unsound. Therefore, this argument A is unsound.

So, is A unsound or not? Suppose it is unsound. Then the premise is true (because that’s what it claims), and the conclusion repeats the premise, so it is valid (albeit circular — X therefore X is truth preserving). So, it is therefore sound.

But we just assumed it was unsound. Contradiction. Which is it? Is this argument sound or unsound? You can reason through the alternative, that it is sound, etc., for yourself to finish the meta-argument.