The masked man fallacy- also known as the epistemic or intensional fallacy- arises where we treat a term whose 'intension' we know as if we also know its extension. I know there is a masked man. I don't know which man is masked. True, by some process of investigation and ratiocination I may come to know that the masked man is Bruce Wayne. But this knowledge may be overturned by further evidence. Alfred the butler was impersonating Batman at a function where Bruce Wayne was present- thus protecting his secret identity.
A person- e.g. the masked man- has an identity based on his embodiment in one and only one physical body or meat-suit. Many different predicates may be applied to him. However those predicates are 'intensional' and their 'extension' may be unknown. Moreover, they are defeasible. A person whose predicate is 'honest' may later be found out to be 'dishonest'.
Thus, it is easy to see, identity for human beings has a physicalist 'extension' linked to one and only one physical body. We commit the masked man fallacy when we think a predicate constitutes the extension of 'identity' for any particular person. True, for some particular purpose, two people may be interchangeable. But that does not mean they have the same identity. They merely share a predicate for some particular purpose.
Violence, as a Group or Social phenomenon, is about threat points and 'common knowledge' of threat points. It is linked to identity iff members of an identity class enforce threat points collectively in a reliable manner. But this ultimately depends on two things
1) within-class sanctions for failure to enforce the threat point when required to do so- e.g. soldiers who run away are caught and shot as deserters
2) 'common knowledge' re threat points- i.e. you know the other guy knows you know he knows xyz.
In the short term, there can be fuzziness with respect to both these things. A guy may be able to get away with pretending to be a Kung Fu expert or a member of the SAS. There may also be genuine ignorance of who will prevail in a violent confrontation. The extension of 'victor in war' is unknown though the intension is clear. But 'victor' is a predicate, not an identity.
To be frank, these are things which are easily understood by kids by the time they are 10 years old. Sen-ile, Sen-tentious philosophers can add no value to the question of how Identity is linked to Violence.
Sen's book on that theme, however, illustrates that writing virtue signaling nonsense can be unintentionally hilarious. Consider the following-
In the days when Muslim rulers controlled the central terrain of the Old World and had massive command over it (between the seventh and seventeenth centuries), Muslims did not define their cultures and priorities in principally reactive terms.
Yes they did. They were continually at war with Christendom while uprooting Buddhism and Hinduism wherever they were able to do so. Muslims were required to react to the presence of kaffirs by uprooting their idolatry unless it was more profitable to impose a discriminatory tax upon them. This was a very successful fiscal and geopolitical strategy. Sen should know this. His family had to run away from East Bengal once the Brits left. It is hilarious that he should say Muslims didn't react in a massive way to the presence of kaffirs within or beyond their borders.
Even though the spread of Islam involved overcoming the hold of other religions—Christianity, Hinduism, Buddhism, and others—there was no need for Muslims to define themselves as “the other,”
Because they were defining the non-Muslims as the alterity hated by God. Islam's ipseity is as those submissive to the one God.
in contrast with some dominant power in the world.
At the time Islam was dominant, it could not be contrasted to any other power. But it became dominant only by attacking and defeating what existed before- Christian Byzantium and Spain, Zoroastrian Iran, Hindu Sindh etc.
There is something of a departure from that self-reliant perspective
which was based on Jihad against infidels in a self-reliant manner- i.e. without bringing in kaffir allies
when the insistence on a unified anti-Western stand
Nehruvian India too insisted on this. Sen forgets the Bandung Conference and the Non Aligned Movement and so forth.
and the overwhelming commitment to fight the West—as the embodiment of the “Great Satan” or whatever— places the West at the center of the political stage of a fundamentalist viewpoint.
Because, after the fall of the Soviet Union, it is, or was, the center of the political stage. Things may be changing now. It may be that the path to Israeli-Palestinian peace lies through Beijing not Camp David.
There was no need for such a reactive self-definition in the grand days of Muslim preeminence.
Nor is there any need for it now. Indeed, few bother with 'self-definition' of any sort. Some pedants may need to do so but pedants are universally despised. On the other hand, Identity classes are still the basis of threat-points and thresholds for violence.
To be sure, there is not much “need” for it today either. Being a Muslim involves positive religious beliefs (in particular, accepting that “there is no God but God” and that “Muhammad is the Messenger of God”) and some duties of performance (like prayers). But within the broad requirements of these religious beliefs and performances, different Muslims can choose different views on secular subjects and decide on how to conduct their lives.
This is not the case for any theistic religion. The Creator demands more of us than does membership of the Rotary Club.
And the vast majority of Muslims across the world do just that even today.
At some times in their lives- sure. But almost all Muslims, sooner or later, experience genuine penitence for any lapses or trespasses and enter into supererogatory duties with a depth of piety that, to my mind is Joy.
In contrast, some of the Islamic fundamentalist movements carve out for themselves a particular territory which involves a social vision and a political outlook in which the West has a powerfully negative but central role.
This may certainly be the view of some who have been harmed by terrorist activity. However, there is no reason to doubt the sincere religious belief of Muslims even if we are at war with them. The fact is, this world will not endure. For those who praise and give thanks to the creator there is an after-life at least for all those whom we know deserve it.
If contemporary Islamic fundamentalism is, in this sense, parasitic on the West,
then it isn't Islamic. It's just some fad silly people have got caught up in.
the terrorism aimed at America or Europe that sometimes goes with it is even more so. To dedicate one’s life to undermining the West and to blowing up prominent edifices that have practical or symbolic importance in the West reflects an obsession with
getting American troops off Saudi soil- which was the direct result of 9/11. However the Saudis proved more than capable of dealing with their homegrown nutcases sometimes by gentle, sometimes not so gentle, means. Al Qaeda was mistaken in thinking that the Monarchy was weak and dependent on Uncle Sam.
the West that overwhelms all other priorities and values.
There was no 'obsession' with the West. It simply appeared safer and more productive to engage in the 'far jihad'- i.e. attacking targets on other continents- than those close by. This was because if you kill an Israeli, lots of Mossad agents turn up to kill you and your operatives.
It is one of the preoccupations that can be much encouraged by the dialectics of the colonized mind.
Saudi Arabia was never colonized. Nor was Iran, though portions of it were occupied from time to time. Even Egypt was only under a 'veiled protectorate' for about 30 years.
In crude civilizational classifications, one of the distinctions that is greatly blurred, as was discussed in chapter 4 , is that between (1) a person’s being a Muslim, which is an important identity but not necessarily his or her only identity, and (2) a person’s being wholly or primarily defined by his or her Islamic identity.
Sen's mistake is to think that if for any x, the required action is y- e.g., if you work in a mortuary, follow Islamic burial customs if the corpse is Muslim- then 'a person is being primarily or wholly defined' by x. This is not the case. It is quite possible for the mortuary attendant to perform the Islamic burial ritual with a sense of profound tenderness and grief because the attendant knows that the subject in question was primarily defined as a great musician- one whose music had been a great solace to the attendant's own people- even though 'being a great musician' is not a necessary aspect of being a Muslim- or having that legal identity in the case of an atheist. Still, from the point of view of the mortuary, what is important is that only dead people are buried. Once you start nailing living folk into coffins, your license may be suspended.
The blurring, which is widely seen in discussions of contemporary politics, of the distinction between being a Muslim and having a singular Islamic identity
There is no distinction. If x is Muslim, x has a singular Islamic identity unless x occupies more than one physical body at one time. This is because 'Muslim' is a Kripkean rigid designator for every Islamic school of jurisprudence. One is either Muslim or one isn't. A djinn may be Muslim. Perhaps it can have more than one body. But no djinn can have a Muslim embodiment as well as a non-Muslim embodiment at one and the same time.
If Sen had learnt a little about Islam, he might have been saved from a puerile doctrine of 'multiple identities' which, according to Hinduism, can only arise for 'yogijivas' who occupy more than one body simultaneously. In my novel 'Samlee's daughter' I describe my interactions with Dr. Sen- who was occupying the body of an elderly West Indian janitor- which I attributed to his being a 'yogijiva'. But I didn't really believe any such thing actually happened. I was trying to be funny.
is driven by a number of confusing concerns, of which an exclusive reliance on crude civilizational categories is certainly one.
Crude people may speak of crude civilizational categories. Others simply say 'civilizational categories don't have much explanatory force. We need something more fine-grained.'
However, the emergence of reactive self-conceptions in anti-Western thought and rhetoric also contributes to this conceptual clouding. Culture, literature, science, and mathematics are more easily shared than religion.
Nonsense! I share a religion with Ramanujan. I don't share Math with him coz I iz as stoooopid as shit. Literature and Science and Culture are things it is difficult and costly to acquire. Hinduism isn't. Christianity isn't. Islam isn't. That's why, for poor people they can matter much more than Sen-tentious shite.
The tendency to see themselves as “the other,” sharply distinguished from the West, has the effect of making many people in Asia and Africa place much greater emphasis on their dedicated non -Western identities—distanced from the Judeo-Christian heritage of the West—than on other parts of their self-understanding.
Sen forgets that many parts of Asia and Africa had a 'Judeo-Christian heritage' before West Europe did. It was being the victim of colonialism or military intervention of an exploitative kind which sparked the resentment which in turn led to the notion of a superior moral ipseity at war with an implacable and imperialistic alterity. This is not to say that anyone was placing 'greater emphasis' on 'dedicated non-Western identities'. They were emphasizing predicates, not identities, applicable to themselves. Thus an Iranian might say 'because I grew up in Iran, I have a sense of modesty as being the crown-jewel of true beauty'. In this case there is a predicate 'grew up in Iran' which is different from 'Iranian'. Another person may say 'though growing up in Californian, the fact that I am Iranian causes me to hold such and such belief or value'. These two people, meeting each other, may agree that it is the 'Iranian' part of themselves which causes them to appreciate a particular point of view. But we are merely speaking of predicates here. There is no identity. The two people are not interchangeable. One may be male, the other female. One may be Black, the other White.
People in an identity class- i.e. a set or category created for a particular purpose- may agree that some predicates are better to have than others. They may also think it is better to have the identity of the King of Spain rather than that of a beggar. But it is not the case that they have the same identity though they may think the same predicates are most desirable.
Can identity be imposed? In other words, if Sen has a crazy theory about me can he in fact get me to act on its basis? Perhaps- by some mesmeric power he has or by reason of his exploitation of some pathology of mine. But this is about as informative as my claim that Sen eats only dog-turds. If I have no power to inflict harm in connection with my claim, then the thing is meaningless or foolish.
Sen says-
Even when one is inescapably seen—by oneself as well as by others—as French, or Jewish, or Brazilian, or AfricanAmerican, or (particularly in the context of the present-day turmoil) as an Arab or as a Muslim, one still has to decide what exact importance to attach to that identity over the relevance of other categories to which one also belongs.
This is not a common occurrence at all. I know no man who had to decide what exact importance he needed to attach to the fact that he is inescapably seen as a biological organism. On the other hand, importance attaches to being seen as someone who should be killed. Where such hazard arises, people exercise extreme caution in not being seen or being seen as something else. That is why soldiers wear camouflage. Sometimes you want to be seen as a bush, not an enemy combatant. But there is zero point to deciding whether you are being seen as a music lover or a cat fancier in that context.
However, even when we are clear about how we want to see ourselves, we may still have difficulty in being able to persuade others to see us in just that way.
Which is why we pick one feasible way we may be seen and go with that persona. I am unlikely to persuade women that I'm a professional athlete. I may be able to fool them into thinking I'm Tom Cruise's tax accountant. That may be enough for my purpose.
A nonwhite person in apartheid-dominated South Africa could not insist that she be treated just as a human being, irrespective of her racial characteristics.
Sen may be surprised to learn that many did. In the end, they prevailed.
She would typically have been placed in the category that the state and the dominant members of the society reserved for her.
But, even in prison, many continued to insist that they be treated as fully equal human beings. Sen may have heard of a gentleman by the name of Mahatma Gandhi. Another such was Nelson Mandela.
Our freedom to assert our personal identities can sometimes be extraordinarily limited in the eyes of others, no matter how we see ourselves.
There is no such freedom. Nobody has an unqualified right to assert their personal identity to anyone else's eyes. Flashers get sent to jail. All Sen is saying is 'even if we think we're hot, others may think we're not. Sad.' This has nothing to do with freedom or assertion or identity.
Indeed, sometimes we may not even be fully aware how others identify us, which may differ from self-perception.
In my case, that's a good thing.
There is an interesting lesson in an old Italian story—from the 1920s when support for fascist politics was spreading rapidly across Italy— concerning a political recruiter from the Fascist Party arguing with a rural socialist that he should join the Fascist Party instead. “How can I,” said the potential recruit, “join your party? My father was a socialist. My grandfather was a socialist. I cannot really join the Fascist Party.”
Mussolini was one of the foremost Socialists of the previous decade. It is plausible that the guy said 'my father was a Catholic, his grandfather was a Catholic, I can't join the Party of the atheist Mussolini.' Anyway, there were no Socialists in the guy's great-grandfather's time.
“What kind of an argument is this?” said the Fascist recruiter, reasonably enough. “What would you have done,” he asked the rural socialist, “if your father had been a murderer and your grandfather had also been a murderer? What would you have done then?” “Ah, then,” said the potential recruit, “then, of course, I would have joined the Fascist Party.”
He would have been paid to join- more particularly because of his impeccable Socialist roots.
This may be a case of fairly reasonable, even benign, attribution, but quite often ascription goes with denigration, which is used to incite violence against the vilified person.
So hatred can involve saying rude things. But it needn't do. The problem here is hatred. The fact that a guy wants to kill us is important. What names he calls us is the least of our problems.
“The Jew is a man,” Jean-Paul Sartre argued in Portrait of the Anti-Semite, “whom other men look upon as a Jew; … it is the antiSemite who makes the Jew.”
Sartre was wrong. The Jew is only a Jew if other Jews look upon him as a Jew. Chesterton- who became a horrible anti-Semite- had his first contributions to a particular magazine rejected. The editor thought his handwriting was 'Jewish'. This did not make him a Jew.
Charged attributions can incorporate two distinct but interrelated distortions: misdescription of people belonging to a targeted category, and an insistence that the misdescribed characteristics are the only relevant features of the targeted person’s identity.
Once again, Sen is wrong. There is no distinction here whatsoever. 'Targeted category' means 'only relevant characteristic'. Sen forgets that extensional Language is not the embodiment of semantics : it is based on pragmatics.
If there is a targeted category, then for the purpose at hand, nothing else is relevant. Thus, if tasked with burying the dead, 'targeted category' is 'corpse'. You are not allowed to bury a living person if they have other relevant features- e.g. looking like they need a dirt-nap real bad.
In opposing external imposition, a person can both try to resist the ascription of particular characteristics and point to other identities a person has, much as Shylock attempted to do in Shakespeare’s brilliantly cluttered story: “Hath not a Jew eyes? hath not a Jew hands, organs, dimensions, senses, affections, passions? fed with the same food, hurt with the same weapons, subject to the same diseases, healed by the same means, warmed and cooled by the same winter and summer, as a Christian is?”
These are not identities. They are predicates. Some Jews may lack eyes or hands. This has nothing to do with identity or essence or anything else. Shylock's point is that many predicates which apply to a Christian apply equally to a Jew. Why should only the latter be subject to draconian punishment? The answer was obvious. It was profitable to do so because the Jews didn't have a good threat-point and, in this particular case, hadn't been before hand in making their existence profitable to their persecutors.
Identities are singular and, save on open markets, difficult or costly to disguise. Predicates however can be altered more easily. We can't be many different people. We can have a variety of predicates. I can't be a young woman as well as an elderly man. But I can twerk like a young woman- though for a modest bribe I may forego actually doing so at my son's graduation ceremony.
Why might an economist say multiple identities exist? One reason is, sometimes two different things are 'perfect substitutes' or can serve two different functions. One consumer good may be different but yield the same utility as a totally different good. Moreover, sometimes a 'capital good' can be a consumer good and vice versa. Another way to say the same thing is that the optimal outcome is multiply realizable. The problem here is that for some specific purpose it can matter how you got to the outcome or which of a pair of perfect substitutes you preferred. Thus, suppose I pay Sima Aunty to find me a beautiful, tall, Tamil speaking bride. However, as a result of her efforts, I end up with a short, ugly, Telugu speaking groom and I discover I am perfectly happy, it would still not be the case that my spouse has two identities or that my sexuality has not changed. This matters because my husband's grandchildren are trying to have my marriage annulled on the grounds that I've tricked a heterosexual man with dementia into marriage. Sima Aunty was actually trying to fix me up with his mentally challenged god-daughter. I saw my chance to marry a rich but very confused old man to whose late- and very ugly- wife I bear a strong resemblance- and took it.
A separate point has to do with 'ergodic' or memory less equilibria. Here, it doesn't matter how an outcome was realized from any point of view. But, in such cases, the elements of an identity class are indiscernible from each other. Liebniz's law applies. But identity classes may be very different from each other because they are 'intensional'. The extension is imperfectly known. Consider the distinction between fermions and bosons. You can't put two fermions into the same quantum state. But bosons have no exclusion principle. I suppose one could say, 'informative predicates' are like fermions. Ontological predicates are like bosons. Applying enough energy may get bosons to act like fermions- at least spatially. But the reverse is not the case. Predicates may be informative or made informative with the application of enough energy. Identities, however, are neither informative nor ontological. They are primitive- that is undefined. Perhaps they are knowable at the end of Time. Perhaps not. Meanwhile, predicates are quite enough to get on with- while yet there are things with which to get on.
Islam, like Hinduism, had a sophisticated Logic and Epistemology which carefully distinguished predicates from subjects. Predicates don't constitute identity though, for any specific purpose, we are welcome to accept a list of predicates as constituting a class or category. The doctrine of 'Tawhid' or 'Advaita' says that, though unknowable, Identity is univocal and monist. Predicates may all be ultimately delusional- 'majazi' or 'maya'. Failure to understand this can cause fanaticism and 'fitna'- both of which have a superficial charm but which are fatal to the commonweal. Sen is on the side of 'fitna'. He prefers to virtue signal rather than enable proper mechanism design so that signals reflect or reward virtue. His modus operandi is to start by denying an obvious truth- e.g. when Islam was dominant, it was greatly concerned with proselytization (which was also the case when Christians became dominant)- and then to say that his lie represents the true 'identity' of the thing under discussion. The fact that what we see nowadays confirms that the relevant identity has not changed becomes evidence that the thing always had multiple identities! This is a doctrine of Dialethia! There are two or more Truths. In that case nobody is a liar!
Suppose we were to repay Sen in his own coin. We would say 'eating dog-turds is an effective method of critiquing neo-Liberal Economics. Sen was given the Nobel Prize for eating dog-turds. The fact that close observers of Sen are not able to detect any turd eating behavior on his part is proof that Sen has multiple identities. Those who deny that Sen devours only dog turds are guilty of traducing a great man who has won international recognition for his prodigious appetite for dog turds.'
Suppose Sen himself were so foolish as to deny the charge that he only eats dog turds. We would then be entitled to use his own theory to convict him of the sin of 'reactive self-definition'. He truly is a dog turd devourer. That is his greatness. Yet he denies his own one indefeasible claim to fame.
Needless to say, Sen- precisely because he believes in his own greatness- will never deny that he is a dog turd devourer. Equally, no sensible person responds when he says mean things about them.
Incidentally, Sen never said 'you are very very fucking stupid' to me. Binmore did. Indeed, all the good teachers or Professors I've had took pains to explain to me why I should quit Skool and just go be an Accountant already. That's because they liked me- or at least didn't want my parents to waste any more money on my education. I am grateful to people like Binmore. I'm not grateful to Sen precisely because he just ran away from me very fast when I tried to approach him after lectures. The man may be as stupid as shit but at least he can spot a Tambram cretin from half a mile away. But this only goes to prove that identities are singular. Buddhijivis have one identity. Iyers have another- which is why Iyers must be granted Extremely-fucking-Educationally-Backward-not-to-mention-Retarded-status with retroactive effect. In fact, I first raised this demand at a meeting in London where Atal Behari had given a speech. Since I spoke in Hindi, Atal could not understand what I'd said but some RSS type came up to me afterwards and urged me to express my grievance in my own language. Finally, he said 'Vajpayee is totally supportive of the Iyer demand to return to rule over Iyerland- your ancestral home. Leprechauns chased you away, but Vajpayee Sahib will intercede for you if ever he becomes Foreign Minister again. Jai Hind. Jai Iyerland.' It was on the basis of this promise that I began my long hegira towards the BJP. I must admit I was disillusioned when, in 2017, a Marathi named Varadkar became Taoiseach of Ireland. This just goes to prove that Gujjus think 'Deccanis are all Dravidians'. Actually, Marathas are Aryan. Iyers are true Dravidians who were driven out of Iyerland by Leprechauns. Fortunately, we were given shelter by penguins of Antarctic. Slowly we are rebuilding our power by drinking plenty of Jameson & Guinness. Not me- I'm too old to drink anything except lassi- but there are other, younger, Iyers made of sterner stuff. One day we will prevail. Mind it kindly. Aiyayo.
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