Is a dog with three legs a bad dog? Is a triangle with two sides still a triangle or is it a defective triangle? Perhaps if we just expand the definition of triangle a bit we can have square triangles.
There is a point of view that holds that to define something we must say something definitive about it and that to say that we are expanding or changing a definition makes no sense if we don’t know what it is that is being changed.
It is of the essence or nature of a Euclidean triangle to be a closed plane figure with the straight sides, and anything with this essence must have a number of properties, such as having angles that add up to 180 degrees. These are objective facts that we discover rather than invent; certainly it is notoriously difficult to make the opposite opinion at all plausible. Nevertheless, there are obviously triangles that fail to live up to this definition. A triangle drawn hastily on the cracked plastic sheet of a moving bus might fail to be completely closed or to have perfectly straight sides, and thus its angles will add up to something other than 180 degrees. Even a triangle drawn slowly and carefully on paper with an art pen and a ruler will have subtle flaws. Still, the latter will far more closely approximate the essence of triangularity than the former will. It will accordingly be a better triangle than the former. Indeed, we would naturally describe the latter as a good triangle and the former as a bad one. This judgment would be completely objective; it would be silly to suggest that we were merely expressing a personal preference for straightness or for angles that add up to 180 degrees. The judgment simply follows from the objective facts about the nature of triangles. This example illustrates how an entity can count as an instance of a certain type of thing even if it fails perfectly to instantiate the essence of that type of thing; a badly drawn triangle is not a non-triangle, but rather a defective triangle. And it illustrates at the same time how there can be a completely objective, factual standard of goodness and badness, better and worse. To be sure, the standard in question in this example is not a moral standard. But from the A-T point of view, it illustrates a general notion of goodness of which moral goodness is a special case. And while it might be suggested that even this general standard of goodness will lack a foundation if one denies, as nominalists and other anti-realists do, the objectivity of geometry and mathematics in general, it is (as I have said) notoriously very difficult to defend such a denial.
– Edward Feser. Being, the Good, and the Guise of the Good
This raises a number of interesting questions, by no means limited to the following:
What is the fact/value distinction.
Whether values can be objective.
The relationship between objective goodness and moral goodness.
And of course, whether a three-legged dog is still a dog.
Meanwhile:
Not stating a case, just précising the facts.
I’m assuming your case is that extending the legal definition of marriage to make it’s benefits available to same-sex couples is a bad thing. Is that your premise? I would say it is an assumption based on prejudice.
I don’t see any effort from you to explain why a broadening of the marriage definition is a bad thing for anyone except homophobes.
I don’t need to argue about whether the broadening of the marriage definition is a good thing. It’s a done deal!
The Vatican is actually going to judge one of their own instead of protecting him?
Now Hell has ice-cubes!
I respect Wojtyła’s support for Solidarity during the Soviet era but I don’t think his time as pope is otherwise due for much praise.
Why don’t I think there are essences, or properties, or essential properties?
Most basically, it’s due to a methodological commitment (and one that I share with Plato and Aristotle): that metaphysics must always answer to the epistemology of metaphysics. By this I mean that anything we posit in our metaphysics must be accompanied by an account of how we are able to have any awareness of the entity posited. (Plato met this challenge by positing the Doctrine of Recollection in Phaedo for how we can know what the Forms are, and Aristotle met this challenge in De Anima in his account of how the intellectual portion of the soul (nous) is able to extract awareness of the Forms from the senses.)
The converse point — one that Plato and Aristotle also accepted — is that epistemology must answer to the metaphysics of epistemology. That is, we need to be able to account for our epistemic activity in terms of the account of reality in order for us to understand what knowledge really is.
The difficulty here is this: can we today accept a Platonic or Aristotelian epistemology? Not without rejecting the past several hundred years of cognitive psychology, comparative linguistics, cultural anthropology, and neuroscience. The reason is this: however it is that brains integrate available environmental information into new patterns of neuronal activity — and there is a lot about brains that we don’t know! — we can pretty confident that
(a) this process is central to all cognitive activity, including “higher-order” cognitive activity like classifying, judging, inferring, weighing evidence, evaluating arguments, detecting fallacies, testing theories, and intentionally acting, and
(b) a neuroscientific epistemology is incompatible with Platonic or Aristotelian realism about Forms. Plato and Aristotle would have us believe that knowledge is ultimately a matter of the structure of the world impressing itself on the mind like a seal on melted wax, and that’s not how brains respond to information. Rather, brains are actively generating endogenous patterns of activity that are perturbed by some kinds of ambient information and not by others, but even the perturbation results in a modified pattern that is also geared towards successful coping of the organism in its environment.
Plato and Aristotle conceive of knowledge as a kind of perception (“seeing with the soul”), and they also conceive of perception as essentially passive (in large part because the phenomenology of perception obscures the underlying neurodynamics, but also because they were fixed on passive vision as a paradigm of perception), so as a result they fail to appreciate knowledge as a kind of activity.
What, then, of essences? And how can we know what they are, if they are? On my view, essences are classifications; to use Wittgenstein’s term, essences are grammatical. It seems quite likely that our concepts and categories have more “central” and more “distant” members (see prototype theory), which means that we will find it “natural” to distinguish between essential and accidental properties. But these distinctions are built into our cognitive machinery, in order to couple perceiving and acting for successful coping in a relatively stable but still often hazardous and unpredictable, environment.
The fact that we can be aware of the structure of our cognition is because human cognition, unlike the cognition of other animals, is substantially transformed by the acquisition of language. But languages are recursive — every language contains its own metalanguage. So the recursivity built into grammar allows us to become aware of some of our own cognitive mechanisms. But, because our brains are very good at modeling what’s going on in the environment and very poor at modeling themselves, we naively take our concepts and categories to be somehow already at work in the objects themselves — and that is what Plato and Aristotle did when they invented philosophy. It’s taken us over two millennia to appreciate what they were wrong (and also right) about, and no doubt the verdict of history will itself be revised in light of further inquiry.
Alan Fox,
No surprise, Alan. As the comfy atheist that you have chosen & grown to be, you show no respect or praise for one of the most respected world leaders of the mid-late 20th c. Why? Simply because he was religious & you are an unrepentant atheist!?
This shows the poverty of TSZ because of folks like you who merely piss on themselves by trashing others. While in reality, a massive showing of leaders from around the world, shared the richness of a life of peace and prayer and gave their respects to Pope John Paul II at his funeral.
I understand what you mean, but I don’t feel threatened by figurative slaughter either. Since I’m nobody’s spokesman and represent only myself and my own views, why the heck do you bring up my nationality at all and contrast my opinions with those of the majority of Poles? I feel no need to conform to the beliefs and attitudes prevalent among my compatriots, and I’m not proud of the stereotypes they give rise to.
The poor beggar can consider himself unlucky. Countless archbishops did the same or worse before him and got away with it. Not that I expect the punishment to be severe.
So, marriage is what people think it is. And when there’s a difference of opinion, nobody is a bigot and everybody can keep thinking as they were, because marriage is what people think it is. Right?
Let’s see. So, now you are assuming, as if I hadn’t stated my case. Then you know nothing of my case and everything you say about it is sheer prejudice.
For your convenience, here’s my case again as concisely as possible.
(1) Heterosexual reproduction (husband and wife) forms the basis of family (parents and children).
(2) Families provide to society the continuity of its population.
(3) If society values its own continuity, it protects families as its basic reproductive unit.
(4) Marriage is one of the symbols of such protection (i.e. given the premises, it’s a good idea to celebrate the union of husband and wife)
The thing is that same-sex couples are not husband and wife, i.e. they have no potential to regenerate the population of society. This is so by Biology 101 and by definition.
That’s not actually a “case” though. It’s just a batch of unsupported propositions you happen to like.
Erik,
May I point out for the n-th time that Biology 101 doesn’t mention “husband”, “wife” or “marriage”? They are not biological concepts.
This argument doesn’t give you the conclusion you want.
Even if the argument were valid, it would establish at most that any society that values legal protection for children will thereby be committed to valuing heterosexual marriage. The argument doesn’t establish that it can’t also value same-sex marriage on other grounds.
In order to establish the stronger conclusion, you need a further premise: that the need for the legal protection of children is the only compelling state interest for conferring a distinct legal status on a monogamous couple.
And this is precisely what we’ve all been arguing about: many of us think that this premise is false, because there are many intrinsic goods to being part of a monogamous couple, and because there are many state interests in protecting those goods with a distinct legal status. Now, in response you want to say that biological reproduction is the essential property of marriage. But, even if (a) there are essential properties at all and (b) social conventions are the sorts of things that have essential properties, this still isn’t going to work.
For one thing, the “traditional” function of marriage in Western societies is less about protecting children and more about controlling the inheritance of property, managing alliances between families. (Monogamous pair-bonding is probably a human universal, though I’m not even too sure about that, since I haven’t looked into it.) Besides which, the appeal to tradition (argumentum ad antiquitatem) is a fallacy.
Exactly. So the first “premise” is confused. But that’s not the end of its problems.
(2) suggests, without support, that there are no alternatives to what Erik calls “families” to provide “continuity.” So it plays upon the equivocation you note in (1).
(3) does much the same thing.
(4) gives us “symbols” and “protection” as if those mean something specific. There are many types of symbols and many types of protection, and, of course, (4) doesn’t follow from anything that precedes it in any case, since it introduces all these new terms. Aristotle would be turning over in his grave if anybody suggested that this “case” were a valid argument (never mind a sound one).
The whole thing is big mess. But that won’t stop Erik from spewing it over and over again.
Gregory:
So, ‘live dangerously’ here with the ‘skeptical’ USAmericans and Brits (and a few Canadians), but don’t pretend that your views on this topic have any traction in your home country. They don’t.
Why is it important that people in your home country agree with you?
newton,
Gregory is irrationally fixated on group identities. He is flummoxed when people think for themselves instead of simply conforming.
Erik,
No case for what? You are not being clear.
keiths,
People get similarly flummoxed when people think for themselves and yet come to the same conclusion.
There are many governmental activities that are “good for society.
Mussolini, it is said, made the trains run on time. I have seen people on the internet waxing nostalgic about Stalin. Hitler had his fans.
Most western governments have tried to balance what is good for the majority with the rights of individuals. I suspect this is because societies do not feel pleasure and pain, but individuals do.
The founders of the United States recognized explicitly that this is a compromise, and that the working definition of compromise is an agreement that makes all parties equally unhappy.
So far so good.
Okay.
Brains? Not minds?
Aristotle and Plato do not have the same kind of realism about Forms, but okay for now. This is a peripheral issue.
This is where it gets really problematic. First, they say nothing about brains. They speak about souls and there are some significant reasons why they do this. Souls are distinct and separate from bodies, maybe not in every person, but “the philosopher dishonors the body; his soul runs away from the body” (Phaedo). Soul is immortal, the body is perishable. So, when you talk about “brain”, you are talking about something else than Aristotle and Plato.
Also, knowledge is not “ultimately a matter of the structure of the world impressing itself on the mind like a seal on melted wax”. For Plato it’s pretty much the opposite – “if we would have pure knowledge of anything we must be quit of the body—the soul in herself must behold things in themselves: and then we shall attain the wisdom which we desire” (Phaedo).
Why should knowledge be appreciated as a kind of activity? Let me guess, because on your assumption, knowledge is what the brain does and any other account of knowledge is false without giving it a closer thought. Right?
Plato’s account seems pretty clear to me. You have read it, so you know it. You simply don’t see things in his way. Nothing to do about it.
Let’s suppose these distinctions are built into our cognitive machinery. Does this mean this is how we necessarily tend to operate? And you rose to another level above it? If you did, then did you also rise above cognitive machinery? If yes, then how can you cognise it? If not, then isn’t the other level actually the same thing as Forms? Are things that are built into our cognitive machinery better than things that are not so built or, to the contrary, worse?
And what were they wrong about and what were they right about? Aren’t right and wrong also categories built into our cognitive machinery? How do you know they are/n’t? And what follows if they are/n’t?
Frankly, there’s nothing in your post against essentialism and no specific refutation of Plato, Aristotle or Forms, besides a hurried attempt at overview. Your post is simply a statement that instead of essentialism, you prefer nominalism or some such, no reason given.
Erik,
Actually, I find nominalism problematic for a whole host of different reasons. If the world consists of nothing over and above concrete particulars, it’s not at all clear to me that the world would have the requisite structure to support counterfactually robust generalizations, which are the backbone of all science. In other words, the very possibility of science requires that the world be a certain way, and nominalism might not be consistent with that. Admittedly, I haven’t worried about the metaphysics as perhaps I should.
My point, though, was about the relevance of prototype theory for our purposes here. According to prototype theory, the distinctions we make between “essential properties” and “accidental properties” are not features of reality that we simply behold; it is a feature of our cognitive machinery that concepts have a structure where certain particulars are “central” or “core”, strongly activating the concept, and other particulars also classified under the same concept are more “distant” or more weakly activated. (Example: if you ask someone from the US to imagine a dog, it is more likely that they will imagine a German shepherd or Labrodor retriever than a chihuahua or a mastiff.)
I think, then, that we should be extremely careful with how we treat concepts like “essence” and “accident” (and, for that matter, “thing” and “property”!). We should not assume that reality in itself must be exactly as we naively classify it as being. For pragmatists such as myself, the correspondence of thought and world is something to be achieved through inquiry. It might be — though I doubt it — that our concepts have the structures they do because reality has the structure it has, and our concepts simply reflect that structure. (Rorty pokes fun at this when he calls that conception of the mind “the mirror of nature”.)
Now, it’s also the case that prototypes are strongly influenced by culture (though it is not crucial to me to deny that some cognitive tools are innate; the infant mind is not a tabula rasa). Hence what people will classify as “essential” and as “accidental” will also be culturally variable.
In your conceptual framework, the concept of “marriage” is so closely tied to the concept of “biological reproduction” that the very concept of “same-sex marriage” is incoherent. In someone else’s conceptual framework, the concept of “marriage” is not so closely tied to the concept of “biological reproduction”, and so the concept of “same-sex marriage” is not incoherent. But in arguing for the superiority of your conceptual framework over ours, the very distinction you are appealing to — the distinction between essential and accidental properties – is itself just a feature of your conceptual framework, and so it can’t be used as a criterion for showing that yours is more faithful to the nature of reality.
I’m not a relativist, but I do think that responding to the challenge of conceptual pluralism is a very difficult and interesting problem; it can’t be swept aside by any merely dogmatic insistence that one’s own conceptual framework is obviously superior.
Yeah, that was my point about Bayesian categorisation, but I don’t think it means there’s a core, if “core” means features that are necessary (see my chairs).
From my understanding of prototype theory, or similar theories (e.g. Churchland’s state-space activation semantics), nothing is ‘necessary’ (or sufficient) — it will be a web of family resemblances all the way down.
It’s only in formal languages that we can specify necessary and sufficient conditions for set-membership. Much of 20th-century analytic philosophy was a set of failures to appreciate that natural and formal languages are different, neither reducible to the other, and both playing distinct and indispensable functions in human life: natural languages for successful cooperation in perception and action, and formal languages for describing the basic structure of physical reality (assuming that structural realism is the right way to go in philosophy of science).
That’s really interesting, KN. But can it really be that no formal language is reducible to any natural language? And if there are some formal languages that aren’t so reducible, is it really right to call them “languages”?
I’m a newcomer to this bit of philosophy; as a Continental philosopher the closest I ever came to Frege in grad school was Husserl, and I only read a bit of Carnap in order to understand Sellars. At present I’m reading Macbeth’s Realizing Reason, in which she develops this view in enormous depth, based on her previous work in Frege. I won’t know more until I’m done with her book.
However, I do feel fairly confident saying this much: natural languages are weakly inferential, and formal languages are strongly inferential. The distinction is Brandom’s, and it amounts to this: a language is weakly inferential if inferential relations are necessary for determining semantic content, and strongly inferential if inferential relations are necessary and sufficient for determining semantic content.
Natural languages are weakly inferential because sensorimotor abilities play a necessary role in determining semantic content. This is one of the big points on which I disagree with Brandom; he thinks that natural languages are strongly inferential, and I think that’s a version of the analytic error of conceptualizing natural languages in terms of formal languages. (The idea that sensorimotor abilities help determine semantic content in natural languages is my distant descendent of Kant’s thesis that concepts need intuitions in order to not be “empty”.)
But, I suspect, in formal languages are strongly inferential because — if I understand symbolic logics, and I’m not at all sure that I do! — there is nothing other than the constitutive rules of the system for determining the meaning of a symbol-string generated within that system. (Am I correct about this?)
The reason why they would still both count as languages is because they both have syntax, semantics, and (definitely in natural languages, not sure about formal ones) pragmatics.
I’m not an expert on this stuff either, but I think it’s at least controversial whether you can have any semantics at all with something that’s not reducible to a natural language–or maybe some kind of “mentalese.” I mean you may have all the formation rules, telling you what is well-formed and the syntactical rules that tell you what follows from or contradicts what, but when you get to
“X” means x
or
“X” refers to x
the “means x” and “refers to x” are in English. I guess it’s kind of like Searle’s Chinese room.
I take it the question here is whether or not we can do formal semantics without taking a natural language as the metalanguage?
I’m no fan of the Chinese Room. It’s supposed to capture Searle’s intuition that semantics is irreducible to syntax. In fact, the Chinese Room is widely misunderstood. It is not an argument, but a thought-experiment designed to persuade us that the following argument is sound:
(1) syntax is irreducible to semantics;
(2) a computer program is purely syntactical;
(3) a mind uses semantics (or is a ‘semantic engine’, in Dennett’s terms);
(4) therefore no program could be a mind.
I’m much happier putting the stress between formal semantics and natural semantics, with sensorimotor abilities structurally coupled to affordances playing a semantic role in the latter but not the former, than I am in making the syntax/semantics distinction do all the work here.
otoh:
So are you for or against the Inquisition? For or against judging?
I don’t think this argument works though, because at this point the sense data is not actually information yet. You’re basically turning the Form into what is sensed and that’s just not what Form is.
Mung,
Yes, there are subtle and important differences between how Plato and Aristotle understand the Forms. That’s one key difference: there are different accounts of our cognitive access to the Forms. Another key difference is that Plato thinks of the Forms are pure Being, as opposed to Becoming, which results from a deficiency or lack that perceptible things have. By contrast, Aristotle uses the contrast between Forms and material to explain perceptible change.
For Plato, we can recognize a dog as a dog because it participates, incompletely and partially, in the Form of Dog (it is incomplete because the particular dog will undergo change). For Aristotle, we can recognize a dog as a dog because the Form of Dog is interacting with the material (the elements). Hard it might be to believe, there’s nothing like the concept of hyle or “material” in Plato. Instead there’s just a gradation of degrees of falling away from pure Being into — well, non-Being, I guess. The Neoplatonists made this much more precise and coherent. And there’s also nothing at all like hyle in the ancient Greek atomists, since the atoms have fully determinate properties (size, shape, movement). The concept of hyle — that unstructured stuff-ness is pure potency, lacking any determinate characteristics — is one of Aristotle’s major conceptual innovations.
Feser has a new article up of some relevance:
more
I’m not trying to transpose ancient Greek epistemology into contemporary terms. In any event, I don’t believe in sense data and I don’t talk about them.
My concern is that you are using the language of Form (information) to refer to something that has nothing to do with forms or essences (brain stuff) in order to reject the idea of forms or essences.
How can you do science without it?
That would be the case if the concept of information is only intelligible in terms of something like Platonic or Aristotelian Forms, and I don’t see why it would be. Shannon information is all I need, I think, for that part of the story. We shouldn’t be led astray by etymology.
KN,
I have come across very few people who I think understand Shannon Information, but I guess that’s another topic for another time.
Meanwhile 🙂
“…essentialism is precisely the sort of theory that one would expect any modern scientific realist to accept…”
– Brian Ellis
Strange question.
What do they call Pope Ratz now? The Dowager Pope? Pope emeritus?
The “Tough-luck-kid-I-saved-your-rapist-from-a-lifetime-in-prison” Pope?
Pope Ratz was the head of the Inquisition from 1981 to 2005. Why don’t we ask him if we should be “for” or “against” the Inquisition ?
As for “judgement” let’s wait a bit and see if that child-abusing pedophile Józef Wesołowski fares any worse under Pope Francis than he would have fared under the other Pope. The Vatican refuses to extradite him to the Dominican Republic where he would face criminal charges — and in fact recalled him to the Vatican from the DR, so that the government could not arrest him in his office, and any charges against him would have to be made in church court (or not at all).
Judgement? It will take a miracle for the church to impose any judgement against Wesołowski more harsh than what they’ve already done: put him under “house arrest” and take away his priestly privileges. The Vatican doesn’t have a prison.
Well, at least they were finally forced to quit burning people to death. MIracles do happen …
And Peripatetic means Aristotelian. I was quoting Plato.
Three possibilities here. Feser is either knowingly misleading, trapped in a widespread misconception, or exaggerating to make clearer his reasons for siding with A-T. I believe the last. He is using a widespread misconception about “third realm” as if outside the material universe (which it isn’t, it’s simply distinct from the material universe, just like “cold” and “warm” and “temperature” are all sharply distinct concepts in the conceptual “realm”, even though they all blend into each other in the physical world) to make his point.
Actually, Plato’s point (on the interpretation of a near-Platonist like myself) is that the essence of a tree or the essence of a man is not to be found on the surface. The surface that you see is not the thing itself. Also, when you break the thing apart, you will not find the thing itself there either. Even when you break it apart, all you get is just more surface. Everything we get through the senses is mere surface, and never the thing itself. Which is rather insightful, contra Aristotle.
On a simple and incomplete explanation, things “an Sich” (i.e. Platonic Forms of things) are not only defined by what they are “in themselves”, but also by their differences from each other. For example, man is not just man by himself, but better understood as man when contrasted with animals and angels.
Oh they are true substances alright (even though the concept of “substance” is reserved for something else on Platonism), it’s just that they are not solid and immutable as conceived on Aristotelianism.
Your point about “the conclusion you want” and “stronger conclusion” only makes sense if I had a “stronger conclusion” to make in the sense that you want me to. But no, I have had my own conclusion which is as it is, neither strong or weak, but moderate and sensible. My conclusion is: Marriage is one of the symbols of state protection of family. That’s protection of family specifically. When the definition of marriage is “extended” or “broadened” as if to be “more just” or “more equal”, it ceases to be about (the core biological) family specifically and therefore ceases to signify state protection of family, and thus society’s protection of its own regeneration is weakened.
No. I don’t need to make it about children specifically or about monogamy specifically. It’s about natural regeneration of society and this happens to be heterosexual reproduction (i.e. the core biological family specifically) in the world we live in.
And I don’t need it to be the only compelling state interest to confer distinct legal status on husbands and wives. All I need is that the link between marriage, family, and society’s regeneration be compelling.
Countries that redefine marriage so that this link is lost cease to value their own natural regeneration. This is a cost that big and rich countries, such as U.S. (itself purely made up of immigrants) and westernmost Europe can bear easily, but you should be able to figure out what smaller countries with their unique identity under threat (e.g. they have a unique language and culture while they struggle with loss of population – this easily applies to every country from Czech Republic eastwards) think of it when the West tries to impose the same cost on them, making it part of “human rights” or such. You would very easily figure it out, if you had empathy.
Since the premise that you suggest to me is false, the rest of what you say doesn’t follow.
To mean it demonstrates the pitfalls of ignoring the role that action plays in perception.
Erik,
All of this seems pretty irrelevant, given that the couples we are talking about have (typically) no interest in the opposite sex, but can equally have children (obviously, only with a partner from outside the ‘marriage’, but requiring only their DNA).
Additionally, ‘natural regeneration’ is creating a massive and troublesome swarm of humanity. If there is a nation that is shrinking due to homosexuality, or would do so if we called them ‘married’, I have yet to hear of it.
Nope, it’s all about What (you think) God Wants. Admit it.
Indeed, your point is irrelevant, because the so-called families created this way are artificial and marginal, i.e. they do nothing to secure society’s regeneration. Whereas the impact of redefining marriage so that it’s not about (the biological core) family and not about natural regeneration of society anymore affects absolutely everybody.
His fellow child-sex-tourist in the Dominican Republic, Father Wojciech Gil, was tried in Poland and recently sentenced to seven years in jail as a result of a court deal (voluntary acceptance of the punishment without pleading guilty) — legal trickstery that saved him from a harsher sentence. But of course Gil was just an ordinary priest and not an archbishop and a papal diplomat, so he was entitled to much less protection from his superiors. Still, many people here believe that he was framed by the Dominican drug lords who hated his “educational” missionary work, that the evidence was fake and the trial rigged.
I wonder why no Christians protest against the use of biologically grounded family terms like “father” to refer to such individuals. But then the subdued Goths dubbed their Hunnish overlord “the Daddy” (Attila).
Erik,
So what? (eta – and that is anyway untrue if they have children).
I find this comment extraordinary. For a start, the word “family” is as reasonable a description of these families as it is to any family. There is no need for the word “so-called” unless you seriously want to restrict the word family to a nuclear two-parent +kids unit, which is simply not how the word is restricted in English. Perhaps there is a translation problem here. But we use “family” in English to include grandparents, cousins, step siblings, half-siblings, adopted children and indeed fostered children, and it can refer to both family of origin and the family you create, whether by marriage, reproduction, or adoption. Also no justification to use the adjectives “artificial” or “marginal” about them. They are as old as humanity – older, because many animals have family groups, and few of them are the “nuclear” families you seem to want to restrict the term to.
But what is even more extraordinary is that you define the word “marginal” in this context as doing “nothing to secure society’s regeneration”.
What?!!?
What on earth do you even mean??? Do you mean “produce the next generation of humans?”
Because I would say that one function of families with children (only one) is to raise children to be contributing members of society. Which can be done by any one, or two, or group (“it takes a village…”) of people, regardless of whether they fit your narrow stereotype of a family, and regardless of whose sperm, egg, or womb was involved in the biological process of bringing the child into the world.
Do you think that parenting a child consists merely of conceiving them? And, if not, do you think that only the parents who conceived a child are capable of raising them? Other than “marginally”, or “defectively”? If so, millions of grandparents, adoptive parents, uncles, aunts, step-parents and foster parents would beg to differ.
Or are you somehow worried that the human population is declining seriously in number?
Erik,
How?
Good point. And I guess, by Erik’s use of the term “family”, Jesus’s family was only a “so-called” family.
That is a prejudicial and erroneous assertion. Allowing same-sex couples to live quietly in security and with equal rights and protection under the law improves stability and economic success for all.
This is the unsupported allegation that you need to demonstrate. All the evidence in from countries that have extended marriage rights to same-sex couples suggests your prejudices are unfounded.
Which is perfectly common sense and easily understood in Platonism. So your dispute is only with Aristotelianism, where natural kinds and “categories” (from the title of the treatise by Aristotle) are static, not dynamic. It doesn’t even occur to Aristotle to say what his categories are categories of so that there were any chance to conceive them in a dynamic way.
Now you got it, finally. And hopefully it stays so.
To me, marriage = husband + wife. It’s the definition. Just like bachelor = male – marriage. It’s the definition.
And how, pray tell, is it any different when you assert your conceptual framework over mine? Shall we peacefully agree that we are both equally bigots to each other from our respective points of view?
The best we’ve had so far, I think,is that it will affect the rights of parents to prevent their adult gay son or daughter’s chosen life partner being regarded as next-of-kin.
Just out of interest, if you define marriage as “husband + wife”, how do you define “husband” and “wife”?