Romance -- no, not love. Apparently not theology, either.

On “Romance”

(It occurs to me that it would have made sense for me to do this on Valentine’s Day. Oh, well. My curiosity actually arose from my reading my World Religions textbook on Monday, however—I was reading in the chapter on Christianity about Schleiermacher and romantic theology. My driving question: how are all the various uses in contemporary English of “romance” and “romantic” related to one another?)

Let me trace the etymology of the word “romance”, with the help of the Oxford English Dictionary. The original, literal meaning of the word is: vernacular French (the language). This is as opposed to Latin (the non-vernacular). Presumably, this is because French—or at least the Latin of which it was at one point a dialect or offshoot (I’m not really a philologist so I’m not quite sure how this works)—was spoken in Rome, or associated with Romans. By extension, the term came to be applied to the whole group of languages descended from Latin.

So “romance” refers to a language, or a class of languages. What happens when you write a composition in that language? Well, then you have a “romance”. In particular, the OED informs us, a romance (by contrast with literary works in Latin, the non-vernacular) is “A tale in verse, embodying the adventures of some hero of chivalry, esp. of those of the great cycles of mediæval legend, and belonging both in matter and form to the ages of knighthood; also, in later use, a prose tale of a similar character.” I assume that this sort of literature was the most typical written in French, at least at one point in history. Le Morte d’Arthur comes to my mind here—a bit of a red herring, considering that (despite the title) this is actually a work of 15th century English literature (and, this is a prose work, not verse). I venture to guess that Mallory based this work, in part, off of older, French verses. So I suppose this gives us a good example of the “in later use” meaning.

A “romance” later becomes simply a novel; a prose work of fiction. (I think this is the meaning of the French roman?) OED tells us that a romance in this sense is more specifically, “A fictitious narrative in prose of which the scene and incidents are very remote from those of ordinary life; esp. one of the class prevalent in the 16th and 17th centuries, in which the story is often overlaid with long disquisitions and digressions.” Next, it says, a romance is “A romantic novel or narrative.” (Don’t you love it when dictionaries use inflected forms of a word to define that word? Actually, we can forgive OED here because it has already defined “romantic” non-circularly, i.e. earlier in the entry.) So, technically, a “romance” is a novel hearkening back to the “good-old days” of chivalry and knighthood, quests, and so on. “Monty Python and the Holy Grail”, you surely realize, is therefore a romance film. I’m wondering if there could ever truly be such a thing as a feminist romance. (Of course, the proper response is, keep going in the entry for further evolutions of the meaning of the word [sorry, Julian, I mean the usage of the word, of course, and so throughout this post :-p].)

We’re at OED’s definition #4, now. A “romance” is “A Spanish historical ballad or short poem of a certain form.” This seems to make sense, given the extension of “romance” to refer to other Latin-derived languages than French, and the application of the term to verse in the appropriate language. (Why this form of Spanish verse is a “romance” and not others remains a mystery.) Now, the OED says something I find puzzling: “From Sp. romance, whence also F. romance.” Wait…unless I misunderstand the term “whence”, OED is claiming that the French word “romance” derives from the Spanish word “romance”. This seems odd to me, since the first meaning given in this entry meant the French language, specifically! Perhaps what this means is that “romance” began in French, to refer to French, was extended to certain types of French literature, was then borrowed by Spanish to refer to certain types of Spanish literature, and then borrowed back by French to refer to still more types of French literature. ?? Anyway, “a Spanish historical ballad” doesn’t seem implausibly far afield from our earlier definition, i.e. an Arthurian legend of chivalry (or some such).

This next definition is listed as 4b, which means it is closely related to the foregoing. “Mus. A short vocal or instrumental piece of a simple or informal character.” Is this because the Spanish ballads were set to a certain kind of music, which then became “romantic music”? (The 1881 Grove’s Dictionary of Music is cited here: “Romance, a term of very vague signification, answering in music to the same term in poetry, where the characteristics are rather those of personal sentiment and expression than of precise form.”) I suppose that’s where the writers of OED came up with the adjective “informal” to describe romantic music. (Sarah—how does this definition of romantic music strike you? There’s nothing else about music in the entry.)

Definition #5: (back to literature now), “That class of literature which consists of romances; romantic fiction. spec. a love story; that class of literature which consists of love stories.” Ah-ha! For the first time, romance is connected to love stories. (Presumably, our current understanding of “romantic” having to do with love comes from “romance” as a literary classification—having to do with language, form, and mythical-chivalrous content—happening (on occasion) to contain love stories as well.

Here’s 5b: “Romantic or imaginative character or quality; redolence or suggestion of, association with, the adventurous and chivalrous. spec. a love affair; idealistic character or quality in a love affair.” Perhaps this is what someone like Anne of Green Gables would mean by calling something “romantic”. (Something I’d like to know—can’t “tomboys” be romantic, or interested in romance, since they are [one on possible stereotype] interested in adventure rather than in playing lady to a knight?)

6. A “romance” can also be a lie, a fiction, a story, an untruth, a tall-tale, a false-hood, yes, a “whopper”. It helps if it is “picturesque”. Perhaps ordinary, un-extravagant, un-picturesque falsehoods wouldn’t qualify as romances. By the way, the parenthetical comment at the end of this entry made me blink a few times: “An extravagant fiction, invention, or story; a wild or wanton exaggeration; a picturesque falsehood. Also without article (cf. ROMAN CATHOLIC n. and a.).” Is there some suggestion here that Catholicism is “roman” or “romantic” because it is made-up or extravagantly false? No, silly! The point is merely that “romance”, meaning falsehood, can occur with or without the article, for linguistically related reasons to “Roman Catholic” occurring with or without the article.
Definition #7 is about “romance” making a contribution to various compound words.
Definition #8 is the last one in this entry, where it finally becomes an adjective (in the foregoing it has always been a noun): “Having the character or attributes associated with romance; chivalrous; romantic.” Notice again the close connection with chivalry, moreso than with love or romance in our common usage.

In all this, I haven’t had much help connecting “romance” to the Romanticism described by my World Religions book—i.e., post-Revolution French people’s longing to escape modern urban civilization and its corrupting influence, and to return to an idealized agrarian, village, family-oriented lifestyle—let alone to the theology of Friedrich Schleiermacher. (BTW--When we say that Schleiermacher’s theology was romantic, we do not mean that he went about singing silly pop songs about being “in love” with Jesus, or “Jesus-is-my-boyfriend” songs, as is asserted by some to be a fashion of our own contemporaries.) Schleiermacher’s view was that emotion, not reason, was how people connect to God, and that religion is basically a “feeling of absolute dependence”. (Maybe some people would connect feeling absolutely dependent with a “Jesus-is-my-boyfriend” attitude—however, “absolute dependence” in my mind hardly characterizes a healthy romantic relationship, e.g. between husband and wife, lover and beloved).

Perhaps I’ll have to write a letter of complaint to the editors; the entry seems incomplete, and this is supposed to be an unabridged, definitive lexicon.
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"Make me a channel of Your Peace."

-St. Francis

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Defining “Natural”: A Philosophical Problem for Discussion

This is something on which I could use some help.

Preface:

“Entities” is to be understood in the broadest possible way. Entities may be existent or non-existent, simple or complex, irreducible or reducible, emergent or fundamental,[1] mental or non-mental, material or immaterial, etc. (Can you think of any significant bases I haven’t covered here?)

Let’s use “naturalism” to refer to the ontological claim that no entities exist that are non-natural.

Something is “non-natural” iff it is not identical to, reducible to, or wholly composed of natural entities.

Aim:

For present purposes, what we want is a definition of “natural” that allows naturalism to be an internally coherent thesis that someone can legitimately defend as a defeasible, a posteriori hypothesis. Naturalists claim that naturalism is a contingent truth.

Preferably, our definition of “natural” will leave room for the class of natural entities to contain more than the class of physical entities. Naturalism should not automatically entail physicalism.

Method:

I take it that in order for naturalism to be a posteriori and a contingent truth, it must be possible to present an argument for naturalism that is not circular or question-begging. (Perhaps the argument will finally be judged unsound; what matters right now is not the truth value of naturalism but its alleged contingency.)

I take it that the best argument available for naturalism is an argument from the empirical, meta-scientific observation of explanatory completeness[2] something like what follows (this a specifically physicalist version of the argument; I want to explore ways to modify the argument to make it apply to more inclusive forms of naturalism):

Scientific research of the last hundred years or so has had great success in finding physical (hence, natural) explanations for observed phenomena. There is no longer any reason (so the argument goes) to postulate the existence of any special, non-physical entities in order to account for observable, physical effects. Hence, the thesis of

“the ‘causal closure’ or the ‘causal completeness’ of the physical realm,
according to which all physical effects can be accounted for by basic physical
causes (where ‘physical’ can be understood as referring to some list of
fundamental forces)”[3]

has been well-confirmed. The methodological consideration of simplicity thus justifies the ontological hypothesis that the only fundamental entities that exist are those entities which make up the subject matter of physics.

First Try:

The history of science may be taken to confirm physicalism [see above] or else the thesis that there are no unexplainable phenomena. (Note: by definition, “phenomena” is restricted to the realm accessible to our observation). So naturalism could be the claim that we don’t need to posit any queer, non-scientific, supersensible entities in order to give (efficient) causal explanations of any observable phenomena. (We may consequently be justified to infer that there are no such entitites.) Everything we can observe can in principle be explained by other things that we observe, without recourse to the unobservable.

If we said that to be “natural” is to be observable (“non-natural” = “unobservable”), could we call the claim that nothing non-natural is a necessary component of an (efficient) causal explanation a scientific discovery, a posteriori, or a contingent truth?

No. Because something is observable by definition insofar as it causally generates observable effects; and if this is right, then it is an analytic truth, known a priori, “discovered” on reflection rather than observation, that all necessary posits of scientific explanations are observable, or “natural” on the above definition. (If I’m wrong and something can be non-observable but generate observable effects–subatomic particles, for example–then we have to reject our definition of “natural” because we want subatomic particles to count as “natural”, since the physical is supposed to be the paradigm case of the natural.)

Conclusion: This try hasn’t worked because the key claim turns out not to be a confirmable, defeasible, scientific hypothesis but rather a conceptual truth.

Help Desired!!

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[1] By “fundamental” I intend “non-emergent”…can you please confirm or correct my terminology here?

[2] See David Papineau, “Naturalism”, §1.2-1.3, The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, http://plato.stanford.edu/. I call this observation “meta-scientific” because it is a general observation about the fruits of recent scientific inquiry, rather than a particular observation that occurs within a particular scientific research program.

[3] Papineau, “Naturalism”, §1.2.
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"Make me a channel of Your Peace."

-St. Francis

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Moral Judgments and Football Judgments

What is it that makes these judgments not examples of moral/ethical judgment?
And, what would you call these judgments isntead (chauvinistic judgments)?
I am trying to get at something essential to moral discourse here.

• You should support Italy for the World Cup title this year.
• You should support OSU against UM in the upcoming game.

I would like a more or less thoughtful response from all of my readers (however few or numerous they may be!).
Bonus points to anyone who can refer me to a scholarly essay and/or monograph that explicitly deals with this or a similar question.
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"He Himself is our Peace." (Eph 2)

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Thought of the Day: On Nativism

Jerry Fodor has argued that we never really learn new class-concepts; we only learn new vocabulary for class-concepts we already have. For example, if you show me ten things and identify some as "flarn" and the others as "non-flarn", I might learn that the class-concept "flarn" applies to everything that is a flat, green, rectangular or triangular shape. I already had the concept of FLAT+GREEN+(RECTANGULAR OR TRIANGULAR) in my inventory of concepts; I just learned your word for this concept. Fodor argues that all lexical concepts--all concepts that are normally denoted by a single word in English--are innate. On this view, even the concept CARBURETOR is an innate concept. (He further supports this view with arguments designed to show that giving definitions of such concepts--in terms of necessary and sufficient conditions--is not possible using other, simpler concepts.) Let's call this view "extreme nativism".

OK - That was background. Here's my thought (had while walking back from teaching Logic this morning):

The essential claim of extreme nativism is that our class-concepts (at least, the lexical ones) are not learned in a classical empiricist sense--that is, we don't acquire these concepts via experience. They have always been a part of our mental inventory. (Note: Nativists don't deny that experience plays a role in our 'learning' concepts--we may have a concept innately, but we don't 'learn' it, in a sense, until we meet something in our expereince to which we apply it).

Perhaps this claim could be modified or restated to make it seem more plausible. The categories into which we sort the objects of our experience are a subjective contribution that our minds make to our experience, not a contribution that the objective, given reality makes to our experience. (William James says something like this--we classify and categorize things according to 'essences' depending on how it suits our practical purposes at the time). So, categorization is native to our minds, not a part of the world. Perhaps we don't create the class-concepts until we need them; it is not like there is a fixed set of concepts (including CARBURETOR) that is a part of our natural endowment that come out to play when we first meet something the concept applies to. Rather, we have an innate capacity to creatively make up class concepts in accordance with our practical purposes.

In some ways the great mystery (to scientists & philosophers of science) is, where do our concepts come from? And also, where do our hypotheses come from? The scientific method explains how we test our hypotheses, but it does not explain how we come up with them. My suggestion is that the creation of explanatory hypotheses and the conception of class-concepts are essentially and non-reductively products of our innate mental structures and capacities. No input from the external world determines our concepts and hypotheses for us; it is a part of our internal processing mechanism.

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"He Himself is our Peace." (Eph 2)

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