Non-propositional conveyance

One sometimes hears claims like:

1. There are things that can be conveyed through X (poetry, novels, film, art, music, etc.) that cannot be conveyed propositionally.

But what kind of a thing are those things? Facts? Not quite. For while some of the “things that can be conveyed … that cannot be conveyed propositionally” are in fact real and true, some are not. Leni Riefenstahl’s Triumph of the Will and Fritz Lang’s M are both good candidates for conveying “things … that cannot be conveyed propositionally”. But Triumph in doing so conveys falsehoods about the Nazi Party while M conveys truths about the human condition. But facts just are. So, the “things” are not just facts.

What I said about Triumph and M is very natural. But if we take it literally, the “things” must then be the sorts of things that can be true or false. But the primary bearers of truth are propositions. So when we dig deeper, (1) is undermined. For surely we don’t want to say that Triumph and M convey propositions that cannot be conveyed propositionally.

Perhaps, though, this was too quick. While I did talk of truth and falsehood initially, perhaps I could have talked of obtaining and not obtaining. If I did that, then maybe the “things” would have turned out to be states of affairs (technically, of the abstract Plantinga sort, not of the Armstrong sort). But I think there is good reason to prefer propositions to states of affairs here. First, it is dubious whether there are impossible states of affairs. But not only can X convey things that aren’t so, it can also convey things that couldn’t be so. A novel or film might convey ethical stuff that not only is wrong, but couldn’t be right. Second, what is conveyed is very fine-grained, and it seems unlikely to me that states of affairs are fine-grained enough. The right candidate seems to be not only propositions, but Fregean propositions.

But (1) still seems to be getting at something true. I think (1) is confusing “propositionally” with “by means of literalistic fact-stating affirmative sentences”. Indeed:

2. There are things that can be conveyed through X (poetry, novels, film, art, music, etc.) that cannot be conveyed by means of literalistic fact-stating affirmative sentences.

(Note the importance of the word “conveyed”. If we had “expressed”, that might be false, because for any of the “things”, we could stipulate a zero-place predicate, say “xyzzies”, and then express it with “It xyzzies.” But while that sentence manages to express the proposition, it doesn’t convey it.)

Fix aspect ratio of online videos

My wife and I were watching Mr. Palfrey of Westminster on Acorn, and the aspect ratio on s2e1 was 11% off. It was really annoying me (especially before I realized it was just that one episode that was bad). So I wrote a little bookmarklet to adjust the aspect ratio of all html5 videos in a web page.

Here it is: Stretch Video.

To use it, drag it from the above link to your browser’s bookmark bar (which you can show and hide in Chrome with shift-ctrl-b). Then when you have the video on your screen, click on the bookmark and enter the horizontal and vertical stretch ratios, or the correct aspect ratio.

For full-screen video, try first resizing and then switching to full-screen (on some websites, like YouTube, there will be a one second delay before the video stretches on full-screen toggle). (On Firefox, you can also pull up bookmarks in full-screen mode with shift-ctrl-b, which helps.)

To cancel the effect, just reload your video page.

And for fun, here is a Video Rate bookmarklet (we wouldn't want to treat space very differently from time, would we?).

Public domain source code is here.

Emotions towards fictional characters

You're attending a performance of Wit. Vivian is dying of cancer. If you're human, you have compassion for her. You don't want her to die.

We say stuff like that. But is this really how we feel. Emotions have an essential motivational force. But are you motivated to stop Vivian from dying?

Maybe you are motivated, but there is nothing you can do to act on that motivation? Yet there is. You could run on stage, and threaten or bribe the actors to make sure that Vivian lives. Or you could pray that the playwright had put in a happy ending.

Or imagine that you are Margaret Edson's friend, and she's just written the first half of the play and let you read it. Maybe you could plead with her that Vivian live, even though you have a nagging suspicion that art may call for Vivian's death. Surely, if you really cared about Vivian, you would plead, or, if not that, at least you'd feel guilty to be sacrificing her on the altar of art. But there is no call for guilt here.

So, I don't think we really have compassion for Vivian. Rather, there is some kind of a shadow feeling. This shadow feeling has similar phenomenology to the real thing, but its motivational force is different. If I am right about this, this blunts St. Augustine's criticism of drama that it causes inappropriate feelings. For the shadow feelings are quite right.

Fear when watching a horror film, though, may be different... It might be real fear, not just a shadow. But that's because one fears for oneself rather than for a fictional character: one fears being startled by something particularly gruesome, say.

Bad movies

Some films are evil. Birth of a Nation or Triumph of the Will, say. My interest in this post is not in such morally harmful films. Rather, I am interested in bad movies in the sense of trashy or kitschy movies, but which are nonetheless not evil. Star Wars Episodes I-III are examples.

One might say that the films that I am interested in are ones that are bad artistically, unlike Birth of a Nation and Triumph of the Will which promote evil ideas by what is in a narrow sense of the term "good art".

Now if I were to spend the rest of my life on a desert island with a solar powered DVD player, I'd rather have Star Wars I-III (or any one of them) than no movies. (On the other hand, I would rather not have Birth of a Nation or Triumph of the Will, because I'd be afraid that out of boredom I would watch them enough times that the propaganda might eventually start sinking in.) And I think that not only would I be less bored, but I would actually be better off qua film viewer, better off qua being with artistic sensibilities, for watching these films on the island. Despite the fact that I would call these films bad, nonetheless I think they are better than nothing, even qua films. That probably wouldn't be true of all films.

So I think that some of the things we call bad movies are nonetheless better than nothing. They are really, thus, on balance good things, and even on balance good qua films. They are simply bad compared to the better ones, and hence bad compared to our expectations. The point generalizes. Much of what we call bad literature, bad music, bad painting and so on is, nonetheless, on balance good. Qua consumers of the art, we are better off with it than with nothing. Much but probably not all. I don't want to deny that there is literature, music and paintings that it would be better not to witness, simply on aesthetic grounds, but I suspect we greatly exaggerate the quantity of it. In the interests of not being whiny, of appropriate gratitude and optimism, I suggest the more accurate word "mediocre" in place of "bad" when we're not dealing with stuff that's worse artistically than nothing.

My Best Friend

I just finished watching My Best Friend while running on the treadmill. I really liked it. It's like a romantic comedy, but about philia, not eros. Touching.

Sita Sings the Blues

Over the last three nights or so, I watched Sita Sings the Blues (available for free on youtube, and downloadable as an almost free DVD). I enjoyed it immensely. It was both moving and funny, and visually striking. Almost tone-deaf as I am, I found the musical elements too long, but they were nice, too, especially with Closed Captions turned on. (Pet peeve: Films--especially foreign-language ones--where the subtitles don't give song lyrics. Not so here!) It's tempting to assign it to my Love and Sex class in the marriage and commitment section.

A Man With a Problem

Last night I watched "A Man With a Problem" online, an Alfred Hitchcock Presents episode. I think it's pretty close to being the best suspense film I've ever seen--at only 26minutes.

Sharp cutoffs in the moral life

Ted Sider apparently has an argument (I reporting second-hand) that there is a continuum in the degree of sinfulness, but there is no continuum in the heaven-hell welfare spectrum, since there is a sharp jump in welfare as one moves from an eternity of suffering to an eternity of joy. Therefore, he concludes, divine judgment cannot be just if the outcomes are heaven or hell.

Now one way to answer this is to say that there really are sharp cutoffs in the moral life, such as that between those in a state of mortal sin and those not in a state of mortal sin. The cutoffs would not be defined by some kind of a moral arithmetic[note 1], but by a qualitative fact about the state of the person's will. Thus, Aquinas defines the state of mortal sin in terms of the lack of charity. Now, charity is a fairly sharply defined state of friendship with God (which state is always the fruit of grace). The mortal sinner lacks charity entirely, though the charity will be restored in repentance and forgiveness. Now, there might be a continuum in the degree of charity, say from zero to a hundred, but the difference between zero charity and even the tiniest bit of charity is deeply significant. Even a tiny bit of charity makes one fit for eternity with God (but the more charity there is, the more blissful that eternity will be). But a complete lack of charity makes one fit for damnation.

Is it plausible that there should be such sharp cutoffs in the moral life? Well, what led me to this reflection was watching the excellent 1953 film Pickup on South Street. The central character, Candy (Jean Peters), is a woman who has lived somewhat on the wrong side of the law, and is now trying to leave that life behind, but has one last task of greyish legality. However, she finds that she is enmeshed in a situation of Soviet espionage. And then it becomes clear that she sees a yawning gulf between mere crime and treason, and she assumes, perhaps wrongly, that other people living on the wrong side of the law see it this way, too. It is one thing, in her mind to be a pickpocket (though she is not one herself), and quite a different to work for the Reds. The film makes it plausible that there is indeed a sharp cutoff between other crimes and treason. It's almost as if treason were an allegory for mortal sin. See the film—it is really good. (If you have Netflix, it's available from their Watch Instantly section—that's how I watched it.)