Hemlock Street: 6/18/2008

2005-08-08T12:48:00.000-07:00

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715 Hemlock Street: A History of Analytic Philosophy

by Tommy Saxophone

"The impulse that carries you towards philosophy is assuredly noble and divine; but there is an art which is called by the vulgar idle talking, and which is imagined to be useless; in that you must train and exercise yourself, now that you are young, or truth will elude your grasp."

[Plato, "Parmenides", 135c (Jowett)]

Table of Contents

Prologue: I Meet Joe
Chapter 1: The Wager
Chapter 2: Locke Fundamentals
Chapter 3: Locke's Epistemology
Chapter 4: Philosophy and Science - The Night Santiago Met Charlie Parker
Chapter 5: Locke On Language
Chapter 6: Berkeley Fundamentals
Chapter 7: Berkeley On Language
Chapter 8: Austin's Paper On David Stove and The Possibility Of Inductive Reasoning
Chapter 9: Santiago on Hume
Chapter 10: Santiago on Hume (continued)
Chapter 11: At the Mechanics' Institute Library
Chapter 12: The Dais
[complete to here...]
Chapter 13: Wolfgang on Kant
Chapter 14: Wittgenstein
Chapter 15: Frege
Chapter 16: Russell

Epilogue: The Death of Santiago

Prologue: I Meet Joe

In the Fall of 1971 I hitchhiked into San Francisco with my dog, Rain-Rain. I found an ad for a room for rent on a bulletin board in a laundromat on Fillmore Street and walked over to Hemlock Street to see it.

The Upper Fillmore neighborhood was in the middle of 'urban redevelopment' and most of the buildings on either side of Hemlock had been demolished. The street ran between two nearly vacant lots covered with weeds and broken bricks. I trudged up Hemlock backpack on my back, my alto saxophone case in one hand and Rain-Rain's leash in the other.

At the top of Hemlock Street a man and woman were standing in front of a cedar shingled cottage talking and laughing in the late afternoon sun. The man had short black frizzy hair and a trimmed black beard and wore a sport jacket, white shirt, black pants and cheap black dress shoes. The woman was tall and heavy with a ruddy complexion.

"Excuse me. Where is 715 Hemlock Street?"

The woman responded with a merry smile. "Who wants to know?" she said with an air of mystery.

"I'm Tommy. I just hitched in from Pennsylvania and I'm looking for a room to rent for the winter."

"I'm Murray" she offered her hand. "This is Joe and that's 715 Hemlock." She nodded toward the cottage. As Murray and I spoke Joe was looking me up and down. Puffing on his pipe he scanned me suspiciously from head to toe.

"There's a yard for the dog!".

Joe had decided I was ok. He was smiling intensely, a snaggle toothed and tobacco stained grimace, eyebrows arched high on his forehead, an idiotic peasant grin, what I later came to think of as his "shtetl grin".

The cottage was cool and dark with dusty woodwork and overstuffed furniture. A few full bookcases stood against the walls. The kitchen at the back of the house was sunny. The kitchen windows looked out on a little yard surrounded by a cyclone fence to separate it from the rest of the vacant lot. There was a tiny vegetable garden in one corner of the yard.

Joe was insisting I come look at the bathroom. The toilet was surrounded by a sturdy platform built of plywood and two by fours. "Mukti used to rent your room. He just got back from India. In India they squat" Joe explained. "They don't sit. They squat."

I understood that the platform, level with the toilet seat, allowed one to squat astride the toilet. I moved towards the door. "In India they squat!" Joe repeated. "They don't sit. They squat."

"Yeah, Joe. Mukti did a great job on that" I said, attempting to move the conversation along. But Joe wasn't listening. He was lost in thought, standing in the bathroom puffing on his pipe.

So I put my saxophone and my backpack in the sunny little bedroom at the back of 715 Hemlock Street. I put Rain-Rain's food and water bowls in the kitchen. The next morning I went down to Folsom Street to get a bike messenger job.

You'd think if you came upon a couple of people at a random moment in their lives that, statistically, that moment would probably be typical. But I lived on Hemlock Street for eight months and I never again saw Joe and Murray exchange a civil word.

Joe had a very diverse set of acquaintances. Coming home one evening I met Joe with two Haitian nurses, a man and a woman, just returning from work and both still in scrubs. "So pleased to meet you, Tommy" the young man said as with a warm smile he held out his hand. "Any friend of Joe's is a friend of mine, Tommy!"

Joe and his two friends chatted and laughed in the twilight. As the group fell quiet for a moment the young male nurse turned to me and said with great sincerity "I see three hundred and sixty degrees of God."

Jimmy, on the other hand, was a petty criminal. Thin and sandy haired, Jimmy was in and out of jail, sleeping at the missions, cadging meals at Joe's. Arriving late one night in a rain storm with unexplained bloody gashes on his palms, Jimmy dried off next to our gas heater and regaled me with stories of his bowel movements. Joe warned me that Jimmy was unreliable and not to give him any money. Jimmy was hurt. "Aw, Joe, why are you telling Tommy that? Am I such a bad guy?"

On the weekends, Joe and I would often take long walks. One Fall afternoon we set out for the Muni Pier at Fisherman's Wharf.

"Joe, were you in San Francisco for the Summer of Love?"

Joe didn't answer for a minute or so but I was learning to manage the peculiar rhythms of his conversation. He puffed on his pipe as we climbed the hill to Lafayette Park. Suddenly Joe stopped and pointed his pipe at me. "I knew Janis Joplin when she was a waitress in a doughnut shop in North Beach. She's a big star now." Joe was from Boston and said "stah".

We walked a few steps further and Joe stopped again. "One of my friends had a crash pad on Haight. Do you know who stayed there?"

"No. Who?"

Joe leaned towards me. "Charles Manson."

"No kidding! Charles Manson? Wow! Far out!"

"But that was Before."

"Oh yeah. Before." I nodded and agreed, giving Joe to understand that I knew what he meant by "Before".

We walked a few more paces. Joe stopped and repeated "That was Before. Before!" Joe was emphatic. But when I glanced over at him again he was walking and smoking and apparently thinking of other things.

At the Muni pier we bought coffee in little styrofoam cups and coffee cakes and sat on a bench overlooking a grassy swath beyond which lay the pier and the sunny bay. The lawn was dotted with sunbathers and couples lounging on blankets. Rain-rain played with the children and other dogs. Young men at far ends of the meadow were flinging frisbies across the expanse.

"Beautiful day, Tommy."

"Yes, Joe. It is a beautiful day."

"People work hahd all week and need to relax, forget their cares."

A frisbie skidded toward us on the pavement. Joe trapped it with his foot and walked the frisbie back to a young athlete. We drank our coffee and Joe smoked his pipe.

Even before I knew they were Joe's friends I noticed Santiago and Wolfgang. A tall, lean old man with long white hair in a pony tail and workingman's clothes, matching his stride to that of a shorter, dour man in professorial tweeds. The taller man gestured as he spoke, the shorter man listened intently.

"Wolfie! Santiago!" Joe stood up to greet the pair.

"Joseph! Good to see you." The tall man grasped Joe's hand and with his other hand shook Joe affectionately by the shoulder.

"This is Tommy. Mukti left. Mukti went to Oregon to a commune. Tommy's my new tenant. But not just a tenant, a friend!"

I shook hands with Santiago, the tall man with the pony tail, and with Wolfgang, his hatchet faced companion.

"Not just a tenant, a friend!" Joe repeated. "Tommy studied philosophy at the University of Chicago!" Joe waved his pipe in my direction. "Tommy: Wolfgang and Santiago are philosophers too!"

"We're merely readers of philosophy, Joe." Wolfgang spoke with a German accent. His demurral was gracious and genuine.

But we had interrupted the two friends' conversation. "Well, Wolfie and I will take our leave, Joseph. So nice to meet you, Tommy. Joseph, bring Tommy down to Fosters some morning. Perhaps we can rekindle his interest in philosophy. Too bad he missed The Wager." Santiago shook my hand in parting, his own hand a huge, calloused paw.

Santiago and Wolfgang resumed their walk down the path. Santiago, a sheaf of papers rolled in the hip pocket of his blue bell bottoms, walked slowly, hands clasped behind his back, listening with great interest to his friend. As they disappeared around a bend in the path I saw Wolfgang make a remark and Santiago laugh in response.

Joe and I sat back down on our bench.

"Joe, what goes on down at Fosters?"

"Wolfgang and Santiago discuss philosophy. Philosophical discussion." Joe said the word "philosophical" with an exaggerated and ridiculous smacking of the lips.

Fog was beginning to drift through the trees. I called Rain-Rain and we started back home.

"But...what was The Wager, Joe?"

"I heard the whole thing. It was in Fosters in the morning." Joe stopped and turned, poking his pipe at me. "The Philosophical Wager was even in Herb Caen!"

"Tell me about it, Joe. What was the bet? Were there others in on it?"

"Well, Hutch and Austin were there. And Wild Man."

"Wild Man the bike messenger?"

Joe stopped again. "You know Wild Man?"

"Sure. Everyone knows Wild Man. Is he a philosopher?"

"Aren't we all?" Joe gave me his shtetl grin.

* * *

Over the months that followed Joe and I took many walks and Joe recounted the extraordinary philosophical debate that took place in the neighborhood cafeteria at the edge of San Francisco's Tenderloin district.

Part I

Chapter 1: The Wager

On a rainy mid-winter morning Wolfgang and Santiago sat at a window table in the Fosters at Polk and Sutter. Coffee cups and newspapers littered the table. "Wolfgang. Did you read Herb Caen yet? Caen has an item on Bridges:"

"Longshoreman's Union boss Harry Bridges standing at the corner of G'Gate and Jones and recalling, detail by detail, an incident that had happened 20 years earlier. 'Some memory you've got,' said a friend admiringly. 'That,' replied Bridges, 'is why I'm not in jail.'"

Santiago laughed to himself. "Bridges and I shipped out together a few times. Smart fellow. Australian..."

But Wolfgang was absorbed in his own section of the paper.

"Russell's dead Santiago."

Santiago slowly put down his paper and sat up. "You don't say, Wolfie. The old goa..."

"Really Santiago!"

The two friends fell silent for a moment each in his own way digesting the news of Bertrand Russell's death. Santiago put down his paper and leaning towards his friend, began to sing in a gentle baritone:

"So let's have another cup of coffee,
and let's have another piece of pie."

Gusts of wind were throwing the rain against Fosters' plate glass window. Two men were struggling up Sutter against the storm. One of the men peered into Fosters and seeing Santiago, Wolfgang and Joe seated inside, gestured to his companion.

Wolfgang leapt to his feet to get chairs and to make room at the table for the sodden newcomers. Hutch was tall and stocky and hatless. He wore wingtip brogues and a long, old overcoat - collar turned up against the weather - and carried an ancient weatherbeaten leather briefcase fitted with leather straps and brass buckles.

Austin was shorter and wiry with close cropped black hair and horn rimmed glasses and was much better dressed for the weather in hiking boots and a brightly colored hooded raincoat. The jacket, of a type recently fashionable called a "parka", had complicated pockets and many velcro closures.

Hutch peeled off his overcoat, heavy with rain, and threw it over a chair. Austin followed suit and the two young men were soon seated and recovering from their exertions.

Austin took off his glasses and using his handkerchief began wiping them clean of raindrops. "Heard about Russell, Santiago?"

"Ah yes. Russell. We were just preparing to memorialize that savant over pie and coffee."

Hutch grunted morosely. "Pie and coffee and worms and dust!"

"I should have known you'd take this hard, Hutch. You were a great admirer of Russell."

"Let's be at least this precise, Santiago: I was and remain one of Russell's many admirers." Hutch was wearing heavy wool dress pants - now damp - and it was only with effort that he hauled one leg over the other to strike an attitude of sulky, uncomfortable nonchalance.

Santiago laughed and, reaching over, playfully shook the back of Hutch's chair making Hutch's head bobble gently. "But you will join us in pie and coffee, Hutch, won't you? Hungry or not you owe it to Russell's memory to fling sugar and flour and shortening in the face of implacable death!"

Fosters did not have table service. It was a cafeteria. But Wolfgang and Santiago were friendly with one of the cooks. Alberto, a tall balding Argentinian with a bushy mustache, came over to take their order.

"So. Five pies and five coffees." Perhaps noticing that he appeared to be a bit dejected Alberto singled Hutch out for special attention. The Argentinian bent over Hutch solicitously, asking with an insinuating leer, "And how about a little friend for the pie? A little ice cream? Nice and cold!"

"Pie and ice cream and coffee all around, Alberto!" Santiago said. Alberto hurried off to the kitchen.

"Well, Hutch," Austin remarked after a pause, "the Great Old Man of philosophy is dead. Now all that stands between civilization as we know it and a new Dark Ages is you and me..."

"...and a few thousand other graduate students."

"What do you have against Russell, Santiago? He was the greatest philosopher of your generation."

"That smarts, Austin. The man must have been a hundred years old when he died."

"Ninety eight." It was Wolfgang who had spoken.

Hutch and Austin looked at Wolfgang with curiosity. Both had long heard interesting rumors concerning Wolfgang's acquaintance with any number of well known British philosophers.

"Did you know Russell, Wolfgang?" Austin said. "Davidson says you studied with Russell at Cambridge."

"What can you tell us about Russell, Wolfgang? Any personal anecdotes?" Hutch added, a bit breathlessly.

"Well, Hutch and Austin, I'll tell you about the first time I met Russell. One afternoon when I was a young graduate student, tea was being served in a commons room, a room of leaded glass, heavy drapes, wood paneling, faded oriental rugs, leather sofas..." Wolfgang had a faraway look in his eyes as he recalled this incident from his youth.

"I was on line for tea and as I reached for the sugar my arm collided with that of a distinguished gentleman standing in back of me. It was Russell. I apologized and indicated that Russell should by all means take sugar. Russell was so gracious. He smiled that warm V-shaped smile of his and insisted that I take sugar before fetching a few lumps himself."

"Russell took sugar in his tea?" Austin seemed genuinely amazed.

"The tea was for a lady friend."

"But let's not just gossip about the man". Hutch rummaged in the ancient briefcase and brought out a slim hardbound volume. "I think we can do better than flour and sugar. Would anyone mind if I read a passage from 'A Free Man's Worship'? Santiago?"

Santiago shook his head innocently. " 'Not I' said the cat."

"Wolfgang?"

"That's a wonderful idea, Hutch. Please."

Alberto arrived with pie and ice cream and coffee and the group settled in their chairs to eat their dessert and listen to Hutch as he read the peroration from Russell's famous essay.

"Such, in outline, but even more purposeless, more void of meaning, is the world which Science presents for our belief. Amid such a world, if anywhere, our ideals henceforward must find a home. That Man is the product of causes which had no prevision of the end they were achieving; that his origin, his growth, his hopes and fears, his loves and his beliefs, are but the outcome of accidental collocations of atoms; that no fire, no heroism, no intensity of thought and feeling, can preserve an individual life beyond the grave; that all the labours of the ages, all the devotion, all the inspiration, all the noonday brightness of human genius, are destined to extinction in the vast death of the solar system, and that the whole temple of Man's achievement must inevitably be buried beneath the debris of a universe in ruins--all these things, if not quite beyond dispute, are yet so nearly certain, that no philosophy which rejects them can hope to stand. Only within the scaffolding of these truths, only on the firm foundation of unyielding despair, can the soul's habitation henceforth be safely built.

"How, in such an alien and inhuman world, can so powerless a creature as Man preserve his aspirations untarnished? A strange mystery it is that Nature, omnipotent but blind, in the revolutions of her secular hurryings through the abysses of space, has brought forth at last a child, subject still to her power, but gifted with sight, with knowledge of good and evil, with the capacity of judging all the works of his unthinking Mother. In spite of Death, the mark and seal of the parental control, Man is yet free, during his brief years, to examine, to criticise, to know, and in imagination to create. To him alone, in the world with which he is acquainted, this freedom belongs; and in this lies his superiority to the resistless forces that control his outward life."

"Brief and powerless is Man's life; on him and all his race the slow, sure doom falls pitiless and dark. Blind to good and evil, reckless of destruction, omnipotent matter rolls on its relentless way; for Man, condemned to-day to lose his dearest, to-morrow himself to pass through the gate of darkness, it remains only to cherish, ere yet the blow falls, the lofty thoughts that ennoble his little day; disdaining the coward terrors of the slave of Fate,"

Here Hutch's voice caught.

"to worship at the shrine that his own hands have built; undismayed by the empire of chance, to preserve a mind free from the wanton tyranny that rules his outward life; proudly defiant of the irresistible forces that tolerate, for a moment, his knowledge and his condemnation, to sustain alone, a weary but unyielding Atlas, the world that his own ideals have fashioned despite the trampling march of unconscious power."

The table was quiet when Hutch finished reading.

Santiago took cigarette papers and a little cloth pouch of tobacco from the breast pocket of his flannel shirt and began to roll a cigarette. With one hand he formed the cigarette paper into a little trough and carefully sprinkled the dry flakes of tobacco into the groove. Licking the edge of the cigarette paper and with a deft roll of the fingers of one hand Santiago produced a cigarette which he handed to Wolfgang.

"Hutch? Austin?"

He repeated the procedure, rolling cigarettes for the two young men. After rolling one final cigarette for himself Santiago took the pouch's yellow drawstring in his teeth, pulled the mouth of the little cloth sack shut and replaced it in his pocket. Joe leaned around lighting the cigarettes one by one. The five men, Santiago, Wolfgang, Hutch, Austin and Joe, sat in silence, smoke collecting in a cloud over their table.

Santiago leaned back and stretched out his long legs. He was wearing heavy wool socks and leather sandals. The socks were worn but carefully darned and the hem of one leg of his blue sailcloth trousers was hand-embroidered with a floral pattern. Santiago blew a smoke ring and then thoughtfully blew another smaller ring that passed neatly through the center of the larger one. He was holding his cigaratte between thumb and forefinger. Using his pinky finger he slowly shaved the ash of the cigarette and it fell onto his pie plate.

"Nonsense."

The word hung in the air with the tobacco smoke.

Hutch tossed the slim volume of Russell's essays onto the formica table where it landed with a bang. "We attempt to memorialize a dead and distinguished philosopher and your response is..."

"Sacrilegious?"

"It's not your flippancy that offends, Santiago. It's your imprecision. 'Nonsense' is not an argument. And Russell's memory deserves better!"

Santiago closed his eyes and ducked his head apolegetically as he beckoned toward the briefcase. Pushing the bag across to Santiago, Hutch, still angry, gazed absently out the big plate glass windows.

Santiago reached deep into the bag and pulled a half dozen volumes out onto the table. He picked up a book and thumbed through it:

"Hence we are driven back to correspondence with fact as constituting the nature of truth." ["The Problems of Philosophy", Chapter 12]

Paging through various of the books, Santiago read snippets of Russell.

"Philosophical knowledge...does not differ essentially from scientific knowledge." ["The Problems of Philosophy", Chapter 14]

"Observation is the sole guarantee of truth." ["Mysticism and Logic"]

"But the authors I have quoted certainly mean to assert something further, which I believe to be false. "Science does not pretend to be a bedrock of truth" implies that there is another, non-scientific method of arriving at truth." ["Mysticism", pg. 1]

"And then there's this one, Wolfie."

"The view which I should wish to advocate is that objects of perception do not persist unchanged at times when they are not perceived, although probably objects more or less resembling them do exist at such times..." ["Mysticism and Logic", pg. 95]

Santiago stopped reading. "Doesn't that remind you, Wolfgang,..."

"No it doesn't, Santiago". It seemed that Wolfgang knew what was coming and was attempting to forestall it.

"...of Twain's comment that Shakespeare's plays were not written by Shakespeare, but by another man with the same name?"

Neither Austin nor Hutch found the remark funny. Wolfgang, whose manners were European and courtly, hastened to apologize for the rudeness of a private joke.

Santiago shuffled through the books on the table and, selecting another one, flipped through it quickly. "Ah, here it is. As the lawyers say, 'the smoking gun'." "Smoking gun" was a bit of corporate jargon that Santiago's wife Zoia had brought home from her job as a legal secretary downtown.

"I cannot admit any method of arriving at truth except that of science...". [Mysticism]

Santiago held the book out over the table in one hand. "But gentlemen, science is NOT the bedrock of truth. And you can take...that...to...the...bank." The ancient volume coughed a puff of dust as Santiago snapped it shut.

Austin leaned back, tipping his chair onto two legs and eyeing Santiago narrowly. Austin was a doctoral candidate in philosophy at the University of California at Berkeley. He had a reputation as a brilliant student and every expectation of a long and prolific academic career. He knew that Santiago had left school in his teens and had had very little formal education - and no formal training whatsoever in philosophy. But a merchant seaman has a lot of time to read and to think during thirty years at sea. Austin understood - perhaps without even caring to admit it to himself - that Santiago's challenge was an opportunity for profound philosophical combat.

"You can't prove that proposition. And I have a hundred dollars that says so."

"Thank you, Austin. I accept the wager.
"And you, Hutch? Do you so cherish Russell's moral bromides that you're reluctant to dig in their foundations? You know, Hutch, had Russell designed a hell, he'd have reserved a special circle for those who embrace conclusions they find agreeable without..."

"You're on, Santiago!" Hutch said. "Now how do you intend to go about making your case?"

"Nothing up my sleeve, Hutch. I'll begin by estabishing the meaning of the words 'truth' and 'science' within the context of British Empiricism, a tradition to which Russell was proud heir. So we meet here in two weeks to consider Locke's 'Essay Concerning Human Understanding'."

"No Merleau-Ponty? No Gurdjieff? No Jonathan Livingston Seagull?" Austin remarked sarcastically. "Are you going to take on this whole philosophical tradition with your bare hands?"

"With my bare hands indeed young Austin! This philosophical approach is auto-immunological. It's its own worst enemy. "

"Really, Santiago!", Wolfgang scolded, "you've thrown your hat over the wall. But this is pure braggadocio!"

The sky had cleared and motes were dancing in the sunlight streaming into the cafeteria as the five men began putting on their coats. Hutch made a motion towards his wallet but Santiago waved him away and picked up the check.

Outside, the friends said their goodbyes. Wolfgang and Hutch headed south down Polk Street. Santiago and Joe were starting up Polk when Austin pulled Santiago aside.

"Santiago, I want to talk to you."

"Of course, Austin. Are you all right?" Santiago could be hard on the young scholars but he harbored a strong paternal feeling for them and was alarmed at Austin's urgent tone. "Is Jennifer all right? Is it money? Your student loans?"

"No! No! No! It's about your assertion that 'science is not the bedrock of truth'. Admit it. You can't prove that proposition without resorting to some sort of 'scorched earth skepticism'."

"Oh is that all. Well, I intend to argue, young Austin, that if we assume that 'science is the bedrock of truth', it follows that language is meaningless. And since the first statement - that 'science is the bedrock of truth' - is clearly meaningful, it cannot also be true."

Austin considered for a moment. "Hmmm. Very compact. But impossible to prove. Good luck, Santiago."

Austin was turning to leave when Santiago gripped his arm at the bicep and drew Austin toward him. Santiago was well over six feet tall and, although a septuagenarian, still had the physique of the young man he once was, the young man who'd begun his career at sea barely a teenager, climbing into the rigging of the few sailing ships that still plied the Mediterranean in the early years of the 20th century. Santiago's grasp nearly lifted Austin off his feet.

"Look around you!" Santiago hissed ferociously, forcing Austin's attention to the intersection of Polk and Sutter teeming with midday traffic. "It's a world of MEANING, Austin, not a world of 'sense data'." Santiago spit out the last two words as if they denoted some unclean thing.

Relaxing his grip Santiago gave Austin's shoulder an affectionate parting squeeze.

Austin was shocked. In his world, nothing discredited an intellectual position more completely than passionate advocacy. Of course every academic philosopher understood that all philosophical disputation was fundamentally personal. Austin had been at the APA meeting when Jim Sudarshik challenged the great Elizabeth Anscombe. Sudarshik, gangly and guileless, with a ridiculous overbite, was in the audience. Anscombe in her customary red corduroy pants and holding a cigar was at the podium. Sudarshik made a point, obviously very important to him and the result of careful preparation, regarding Frege's discussion of the identity of the morning star and the evening star. Anscombe, the lawyerly predator, evicerated him. She began with furrowed brow, thoughtfully turning Sudarshik's proposition this way and that, discovering ambiguities, construing and dissecting Sudarshik's thesis. Delivering her summation Anscombe improvised an argument so ingenious that no one in that room of one hundred Doctors of Philosophy could anticipate her next step - and not one could find any flaw. As Anscombe drew to a conclusion, everyone, save Sudarshik, was thinking the same thing: "I'm so glad it wasn't me!"

The sidewalks were drying in San Francisco’s bright winter sun. As Austin watched Santiago and Joe heading North on Polk, dodging the puddles, he noticed that his arm was asleep.

Chapter 2: Locke Fundamentals

Joe had a girlfriend, Janeen. Janeen was harelipped, slow and cheerful. One rainy winter evening Joe and Janeen and a few friends were gathered in the living room of the little bungalow on Hemlock Street. I sat up with Joe and Janeen and the others for a while. But I'd spent the day delivering envelopes and packages in a cold downpour. I was exhausted and I had to get up the next morning to go to work again. So I said good night and went into my room where Rain Rain was already asleep on the floor next to my foam pad. I crawled into my sleeping bag. I could hear Janeen's fruity giggle and the rise and fall of conversation and laughter from the next room.

Suddenly Joe's voice rose above the hubbub, thundering at the group like an Old Testament patriarch. "YOU can sit up all night. YOU don't have to get up and go to WORK. TOMMY works hahd for a living. HE'S not on WELFARE or SSI! HE WORKS." Cowed, the group fell silent.

Joe's friends weren't keeping me awake but I was flattered by Joe's tirade. I hadn't really thought of it like that. I was a college dropout working as a bike boy - had been a bike boy off and on for years. But yes, I DID get up and go to work every day. I drifted off to sleep feeling good about myself.

* * *

Santiago was reading aloud.

I shall always have the satisfaction to have aimed sincerely at truth and usefulness, though in one of the meanest ways.

The five had gathered again at the same table at Fosters. It was sunny and Alberto was just pouring a fresh round of coffees. Santiago was wearing reading glasses and had an ancient blue volume and a notebook open in front of him.

The commonwealth of learning is not at this time without master-builders, whose mighty designs, in advancing the sciences, will leave lasting monuments to the admiration of posterity: but every one must not hope to be a Boyle or a Sydenham; and in an age that produces such masters as the great Huygenius and the incomparable Mr. Newton, with some others of that strain, it is ambition enough to be employed as an under-labourer in clearing the ground a little, and removing some of the rubbish that lies in the way to knowledge;--which certainly had been very much more advanced in the world, if the endeavours of ingenious and industrious men had not been much cumbered with the learned but frivolous use of uncouth, affected, or unintelligible terms, introduced into the sciences, and there made an art of, to that degree that Philosophy, which is nothing but the true knowledge of things, was thought unfit or incapable to be brought into well-bred company and polite conversation.
[Locke's "Essay", Epistle to the Reader – p. 11]

"Clearly, Locke - like Russell - reveres science. But where is it established that 'science is the bedrock of truth'? I had hoped to find the subject addressed," Santiago lifted a corner of Locke's "Essay" as if to peer under the book for the proof , "but in vain...".

Had Santiago merely asked for a justification of Locke's apparent assumption that 'science is the bedrock of truth' probably Hutch would never have reacted so emotionally. But Santiago's sarcasm - his lifting of the corner of the book, his patronizing tone following so soon after Locke's gorgeous prose - provoked Hutch to an outburst.

"Oh you 'had hoped' had you?" As Hutch leaned across the table towards Santiago a lock of Hutch's straight black hair fell across his brow. "Disingenousness, thy name is 'Santiago'! In fact, Santiago, - and as you well know! - with the very air he breathed Locke inhaled the principle of the authority of reason over faith, of intellectual honesty over blind obedience to authority - however venerated or antique the authority. That period of history - which we now refer to as 'The Enlightenment' - saw the emancipation of a large portion of humankind from superstition and bondage both physical and intellectual as well as from disease and material want." Hutch screwed his face into a sneer of incredulity. "And you want Locke to prove this? Come now."

Hutch might have said more but sensing that he was getting little support from Austin, who was tipped back on his chair chewing on a cocktail swizzle stick and listening with an air of polite interest, Hutch brought his speech to a conclusion.

"Giordano Bruno died for this proposition. Civilization has blossomed from this proposition."

Santiago didn't appear much moved by Hutch's vehemence. "Your equation of 'reason' and 'science' must be accidental. Surely you understand, Hutch, that whether or not these two terms are interchangeable is exactly what's at issue in our discussion." Santiago paused, drank some of his coffee. Now it was he who warmed to his topic. "But if you're suggesting that 'science is the bedrock of truth' based only on some supposed improvement of the human condition then I'll apologize for the misunderstanding and cancel our wager right now. And in making you this offer, Hutch, I'm not even asking you to prove that the human race is in fact - and 'net, net' - the beneficiary of a new golden age as brought to us by science."

"You mean to say that you doubt that overall the human race - or at least the developed world - is not better off now than it was 400 years ago?" Hutch said with disbelief.

Hutch was a medical student at Stanford. He came from a family of doctors in St. Louis. Both his father and mother and grandfathers on both sides were successful surgeons. As an undergraduate at MIT Hutch had studied biochemistry and mathematics, graduating with honors. As it happened Hutch had a deep love of English literature and had almost decided to pursue a career in literary scholarship until the combined influence of both sides of his family was brought to bear on his career plans. To Hutch, even to broach the topic of the usefulness of science was unthinkable.

"Electricity, scientific agriculture, the airplane, antibiotics..." Hutch began to tick off a list of science's achievements, "...anesthetic surgery, the microprocessor..."

Santiago interrupted Hutch's enumeration. "Perhaps we can cut our discussion short. Note well Hutch: my argument does not rely on any assumptions regarding science's usefulness or harmfulness. Whether or not science is a boon to humanity is irrelevant to the point I wish to make. But if you'll concede that you hold science to be 'the bedrock of truth' based only on its usefulness, then I'll consider that your dedication to science-as-truth falls short of Lord Russell's and we can terminate our discussion right now."

Austin intervened before Hutch could answer. "We won't concede that 'science is truth' just because it's useful."

Austin's apparent willingness to negotiate away what Hutch regarded as the essential meaning of "The Enlightenment" - to Hutch the very flower of human progress - reignited Hutch's enthusiasm for the argument.
"But Austin, to dismiss the wellbeing of humanity as some sort of 'bottom line', 'net, net'...Santiago's formulation is so glib, so callous! It's indefensible, really. Is Santiago some sort of moral Archimedes and has he found a place to stand..."

"Calm down, Hutch." Austin made a 'T' with his forearms, the signal in basketball for a timeout. "Sure it's indefensible - and Santiago doesn't want to defend it. What he wants is for us to concede that science might be just a 'useful lie'? Do you want to admit that? I don't think so." Austin tipped his chair back. "We're not interested in 'settling', Santiago. Go ahead. Make your case."

"Having had to hold a man down while his leg was amputated, the amputee being fortified with nothing more than a glass of gin and a reassuring squeeze on the shoulder, I will concede your point regarding anesthetic surgery, Hutch." Santiago shuddered visibly at the memory of the ghastly shipboard incident.

"Here Hutch." In a friendly gesture, Santiago pushed Locke's "Essay" across the table. "You have the voice and the presence to do this justice."

With some effort Hutch forced himself to be civil. He read the passage pointed out to him by Santiago:

I have been forced to take several things for granted; which is hardly avoidable to any one, whose task is to show the falsehood or improbability of any tenet;--it happening in controversial discourses as it does in assaulting of towns; where, if the ground be but firm whereon the batteries are erected, there is no further inquiry of whom it is borrowed, nor whom it belongs to, so it affords but a fit rise for the present purpose. But in the future part of this Discourse, designing to raise an edifice uniform and consistent with itself, as far as my own experience and observation will assist me, I hope to erect it on such a basis that I shall not need to shore it up with props and buttresses, leaning on borrowed or begged foundations: or at least, if mine prove a castle in the air, I will endeavour it shall be all of a piece and hang together. Wherein I warn the reader not to expect undeniable cogent demonstrations, unless I may be allowed the privilege, not seldom assumed by others, to take my principles for granted; and then, I doubt not, but I can demonstrate too. All that I shall say for the principles I proceed on is, that I can only appeal to men's own unprejudiced experience and observation whether they be true or not; and this is enough for a man who professes no more than to lay down candidly and freely his own conjectures, concerning a subject lying somewhat in the dark, without any other design than an unbiassed inquiry after truth. [Locke's "Essay" 1.4.26 - p. 106]

"Thank you Hutch. A beautiful passage and beautifully read. Now let's consider Locke's argument. But 'experience' means different things to different philosophers. What does Locke mean by the word 'experience'?" Santiago read:

Let us then suppose the mind to be, as we say, white paper, void of all characters, without any ideas:--How comes it to be furnished? Whence comes it by that vast store which the busy and boundless fancy of man has painted on it with an almost endless variety? Whence has it all the materials of reason and knowledge? To this I answer, in one word, from experience. In that all our knowledge is founded; and from that it ultimately derives itself. Our observation employed either, about external sensible objects, or about the internal operations of our minds perceived and reflected on by ourselves, is that which supplies our understandings with all the materials of thinking. These two are the fountains of knowledge, from whence all the ideas we have, or can naturally have, do spring.

[Locke's Essay 2.1.2 - p. 109]

First, our Senses, conversant about particular sensible objects, do convey into the mind several distinct perceptions of things, according to those various ways wherein those objects do affect them. And thus we come by those ideas we have of yellow, white, heat, cold, soft, hard, bitter, sweet, and all those which we call sensible qualities; which when I say the senses convey into the mind, I mean, they from external objects convey into the mind what produces there those perceptions. This great source of most of the ideas we have, depending wholly upon our senses, and derived by them to the understanding, I call sensation.

[Locke's Essay 2.1.3 - p. 109]

If it shall be demanded then, when a man begins to have any ideas, I think the true answer is,--when he first has any sensation. For, since there appear not to be any ideas in the mind before the senses have conveyed any in, I conceive that ideas in the understanding are coeval with Sensation; which is such an impression or motion made in some part of the body, as makes it be taken notice of in the understanding.
[2.1.23 – p.120]

Santiago closed the book and took off his glasses. "Consolidating Locke's argument we have the following: 'Let us then suppose the mind to be...white paper, void of all characters, without any ideas...[It is] furnished...[by] particular sensible objects, [which] do convey into the mind several distinct perceptions of things...which when I say the senses convey into the mind, I mean, they from external objects - by sensation - convey into the mind what produces there those perceptions.'"

Santiago looked slowly around the table. "What do you think, gentlemen?"

Austin was wary and said nothing. Hutch nodded his head in cautious agreement. "That doesn't sound very controversial, Santiago."

"So Hutch, this sounds like common sense?"

"I'd say so."

"Well let's note it well, gentlemen. This is Locke's ontology and deserves our careful attention."

Austin had been hanging back, careful to avoid the risk of closing with his adversary but now, he thought he saw an opening. "But Santiago, Locke doesn't make ontological assertions. Russell said that 'Locke made a bigger difference to the whole intellectual climate of mankind than anyone had done since Aristotle.' Russell is referring to Locke's not wanting to get involved in idle speculations about 'being'"

Hands folded on the table, Wolfgang raised his index finger indicating a desire to speak. Wolfgang had observed the discussion with an air of innocent, even naive, interest. Saying little himself he'd focused polite attention on whoever was speaking. But Austin's free and easy commentary on 'being' and 'ontology' had apparently crossed a line. His simple gesture was enough to silence Austin immediately. There was a disquieting steeliness in Wolfgang's gaze now.

"Aristotle has said",

Obviously then it is the work of one science to examine being qua being, and the attributes which belong to it qua being.

[Aristotle's Metaphysics, Book IV 1003 b 15]

"Locke's answer to Aristotle in Book I, Chapter 2 of his "Essay", is perhaps what you were thinking of, Austin, when you mentioned Locke's aversion to 'ontology'?" Again Wolfgang quoted from memory,

I suspected we began at the wrong end, and in vain sought for satisfaction in a quiet and sure possession of truths that most concerned us, whilst we let loose our thoughts into the vast ocean of being; as if all that boundless extent were the natural and undoubted possession of our understandings, wherein there was nothing exempt from its decisions, or that escaped its comprehension.

[Locke's "Essay" 1.2.7]

"But Locke is a philosopher, Austin, and he is not free to choose his questions."

Wolfgang asked for the copy of Locke's "Essay". Shooting the cuffs of his Oxford shirt from under his tweed jacket - leather patches at the elbows - Wolfgang arranged himself in his chair. He sat with his back straight, his left arm lying elbow to fingertip on the formica near his chest, his feet flat on the floor. As Wolfgang paged through the volume, it was easy to imagine him in just such a posture, hours on end, in some huge, gothic pile of a library, leaded glass windows high up in the walls, greenish glow of lights hanging on long cords from the lofty vaulted ceiling, the footsteps of the last of the departing patrons echoing on the stone floor, Wolfgang still reading, barely stirring, the janitor moving noisily among the long oak tables emptying the waste paper baskets.

Not looking up from the book, Wolfgang continued, "Perhaps you are thinking, Austin, that when philosophy has 'removed the rubbish' we'll understand that ontological questions are meaningless and therefore have no right answers and that we need not be tempted to 'bathe' in what Locke calls the 'ocean of being'?"

In fact that was exactly what Austin was thinking. He said nothing

"But Locke doesn't seek to avoid ontology, Austin", Wolfgang continued to page through the "Essay".

"Locke simply assumes that ontological questions are easily answered. He approaches ontology like a kibitzer at a chess game played by Grand Masters. He notices that one Grand Master's opponent has exposed his Queen. Locke leans over and whispers 'Take his Queen, it's open!'"

Wolfgang had found the passages he was looking for. Now he looked up from the book and addressed Austin directly. "As if Locke's rudimentary notion of 'being' had never occurred to Aristotle!"

Wolfgang turned his attention back to Locke's "Essay". "No, Austin. Despite the demurral in Book I, Chapter II, Section 7 of his 'Essay', Locke is not afraid to make all sorts of ontological assertions. To wit:"

Herein, therefore, is founded the reality of our knowledge concerning substances--That all our complex ideas of them must be such, and such only, as are made up of such simple ones as have been discovered to co-exist in nature.
[Locke's "Essay" 4.4.12]

But then it is they contain REAL TRUTH, when these signs are joined, as our ideas agree; and when our ideas are such as we know are capable of having an existence in nature...
[Locke's "Essay" 4.5.8]

I say, then, that we have the knowledge of OUR OWN existence by intuition; of the existence of GOD by demonstration; and of OTHER THINGS by sensation.
[4.9.2]

"And finally..."

Metaphysical truth...is nothing but the real existence of things, conformable to the ideas to which we have annexed their names.
[Locke's "Essay" 4.5.11]

"But if 'the real existence of things' is 'existence in nature' then Locke's statement that '...metaphysical truth...is nothing but the real existence of things, conformable to the ideas to which we have annexed their names' is an equating of 'metaphysical' with 'empirical' truth.

"Taken as a whole, the body of proven, quantitative empirical propositions is what we call 'natural science'. So Locke is asserting that 'natural science is metaphysical truth', another way of saying 'science is the bedrock of truth'.

"Let us not lose sight of the fact that this argument depends on Locke's epistemology, so ably outlined by Santiago. For Locke, all of our knowledge comes through sensation and sensation originates (albeit in some unspecified and perhaps unknowable way) in the objects of nature. There can therefore be no knowledge which is not knowledge of nature, a proposition which permits Locke to equate 'metaphysical' and 'empirical' truth."

Austin was intimidated by Wolfgang's erudition as demonstrated by his earlier word-for-word citation of the passages from Locke and Aristotle. Wolfgang's scholarship was a legend in Bay Area academic communities. But the line of argument being pursued by Santiago and Wolfgang seemed to Austin so intolerably reactionary, Austin felt obliged to respond.

"The passages from Locke that you cited are obvious, ontological and true."

Hutch laughed appreciatively. In fact, Hutch had believed all along that Locke's so-called "ontological" statements as cited by both Santiago and Wolfgang were obviously true and required no further proof. But Hutch had been unsure as to whether or not one might claim in a philosophical argument that certain propositions were "obvious". So far as Hutch was concerned - and to his great relief - Austin had brought the argument back to earth.

For a moment no one spoke. Santiago had been for the duration of Wolfgang's talk paring his nails with a large and elaborately engraved switchblade knife. Santiago addressed the young men without looking up.

"Hutch, Austin, have you fully aired your argument? Please. Take all the time you need. Make sure we understand you."

Who can resist an invitation to make himself clear? Hutch took up the thread.

"Gentlemen, I'm not a philosopher but it seems to me that 'Truth' - even with a capital 'T' - has to start with common sense.

"The question that ought to occur to us is not what motivated Locke to adopt 'experience and observation' as the basis for his philosophy. Rather, we should be asking how any philosopher could have rejected 'unprejudiced experience and observation' in favor of any other basis on which to make his argument. In fact it's not possible to successfully defy common sense without the support of some extra-rational authority - an authority either political or ecclesiastical."

"Is there always a difference?"

"Right Austin. Precisely! During the period that preceded the Enlightenment there wasn't always a difference. The power of the church was total. And confronted with the rack, one and one might be three or four or one hundred and thirty five or whatever the man in the mitre said it was. The political and intellectual climates of Europe allowed Locke to restore 'common sense' to its rightful role as foundation for all human reasoning. Common sense is common to us all and is therefore the only possible basis for comity. And some modicum of comity is the necessary - if not sufficient - condition for a civilization based on something besides arbitrary authority and brute force."

Hutch had moved the argument into an area in which he felt quite comfortable and both his voice and posture bespoke his great confidence in the essential reasonableness of the point he was making.

"And so we can see that what we began as an isolated exercise in 'reason' must necessarily lead us to consider the historical context in which Locke wrote. And so it is with the proposition at issue. To assert that 'science is the bedrock of truth' may or may not be an 'ontological' statement - that is beyond my ken. But it is certainly a statement about the way we reason, the way we live, what...we...live...for." Hutch separated and emphasized these last four words.

"To deny that 'science is the bedrock of truth' is therefore to express a socio-ethical opinion. And a socio-ethical opinion can never be established as ultimately true or false: Rather it proves itself by its consequences to civilization - or rather to the sum of human well-being."

Hutch paused. But seeing he still had Wolfgang's and Santiago's full and gracious attention, he continued.

"To Russell 'common sense' meant more than just the baseline reasoning abilities of a mature adult. To Russell, common sense - however prosaic and mundane in practice - is the aggregate wisdom of a civilization. Individual 'wisdoms' tear us apart, force us into sects and finally murderous factions. But common sense binds us together. Common sense is the bedrock of science and science is the bedrock of truth." Hutch couldn't resist: "QED." He fell silent and let silence drive his point home.

His point was of course dangerously close to the "settlement" that Santiago had offered earlier and that Austin had rephrased and rejected as equivalent to a concession that science is perhaps nothing more than "a useful lie". But Hutch's delivery had been so persuasive - almost parliamentary - that Austin decided against pointing out to Hutch that this was ground they'd already covered.

"Give me your briefcase, Hutch." Austin asked. Austin rummaged in the brief case and took out a well thumbed copy of Russell's "History of Western Philosophy". "This is what Russell says about Locke, Santiago."

Perception, [Locke] says, is "the first step and degree towards knowledge, and the inlet of all the materials of it." This may seem, to a modern, almost a truism, since it has become part of educated common sense, at least in English-speaking countries.

[Russell, "History of Western Philosophy"]

"So, Santiago. Are you prepared to deny 'a truism...of educated common sense'?", Austin asked.

"Yes, Austin. I am prepared to deny 'a truism of educated common sense'."

Hutch and Austin both groaned in frustration. To have pushed the rock so far uphill only to have it roll back down to the bottom...

"Really Santiago." Hutch said, rolling his eyes. "This really is paradox mongering. Don't tell me that you don't believe what virtually everyone else freely admits!"

"You've spoken eloquently, Hutch. But now you're beginning to sound like Huey Long. I'm all philosophized out." Santiago took out his wallet - a substantial leather envelope attached to one of Santiago's belt loops with a thin silver chain - to settle the bill. "But before we adjourn, one more thing. Austin, can you name one of these 'things' that - to borrow a phrase from Locke - has a real existence in nature?"

Austin's mood of collegiality had evaporated. "Don't treat me like an idiot", he said sourly. "Say what you mean."

"Really Austin. Humor me as you would a child. Please, pick a thing 'in nature' - point it out."

Alberto, the Argentinian cook, was sweeping the floor a few tables away. Austin had begun to gather his things and as he did so he carelessly waved his hand in Alberto's direction.

"So Austin. You've selected Alberto as your example of a 'natural thing'."

"OK, Santiago. Now what's the punchline?"

"No punchline, Austin. For future reference. You know these philosophical arguments always require an example. Now we have something more interesting than 'Ayer's table'." Santiago also began to assemble his books and papers.

Alberto had noticed that he'd become the object of their attention. He stopped sweeping and looked for a moment at Hutch and then at Austin. Finally, he looked at Santiago and with a grave expression, his mouth contracted into a tight little "o", put his right index finger a little below his right eye and pulled gently down at the skin under the lower eyelid. It was a characteristically Latin American gesture and subject to many interpretations. In this case it apparently meant something like, "I am aware that I'm being watched."

As the group dispersed into the darkening of a San Francisco winter twilight Alberto regarded them - especially the two younger men - with a suspicious glare and then continued his sweeping.

Chapter 3: Locke's Epistemology

I awoke one sunny Saturday morning to the sound of voices coming from in front of 715 Hemlock. Our neighborhood was a mixture of old, young, white, black, latino, oriental. The same old victorian might house a macrobiotic hippie commune and a working class family. All of these diverse populations appeared to be represented in the little crowd standing out in front of our cottage. A young Hispanic man wearing a bandana around his forehead and overalls seemed to be lecturing Joe, appealing to him for his support. Murray stood at the edge of the crowd listening and watching.

The 700 block of Hemlock Street was an alley running east-west between Webster and Laguna dividing a mostly demolished city block in two. The only two buildings in the rubble on the south side of Hemlock were our own cottage and the long, low concrete building which stood just next to it.

As the young man spoke to Joe, he gestured often toward that concrete bunker.

"My brother man, those walls are painted with the blood of the people of the Upper Fillmore!"

By virtue of his standing on the uphill side of the group Joe appeared to be taller than he was. He stood puffing calmly on his pipe, one hand across his chest, the other clasping the pipe's bowl. As I watched from the steps of our cottage I waited for Joe to break his silence, to gesticulate with his pipe, to launch into some sort of repetitive and ironic monologue. But Joe held his peace.

The group was obviously of one mind regarding the issue under discussion. They seemed to respect Joe and desired at least his blessing for their cause. It seemed to me that Joe's withholding of his support must precipitate some sort of confrontation. But as it became clear that Joe wasn't interested in the issue of the little concrete bunker the group simply began to disperse. The young man who'd made the little speech actually stepped up to Joe to shake his hand.

Murray lingered as the crowd broke up. She appeared to want to catch Joe's eye but Joe was impervious to her glances. Finally Murray turned and walked across the rubble toward the old apartment house which was the only building in the whole vacant lot north of Hemlock. The old red apartment building had a set of wooden balconies running up its back side. These wooden balconies were unpainted and massive and gave the building the appearance of a Chicago tenement. This was Murray's home and she was its only tenant.

Now that we were alone Joe found his voice. "Remarkable! Remarkable! Art of the people! 'El Pueblo! El Pueblo' That's 'people' in Spanish. 'El Pueblo'. People's Art. People's Park. Did you know that Volkswagen means People's Car?"

Joe paused, shtetl grin on his face, waiting for my response.

"What's in the concrete building, Joe?"

Joe walked past me into the house. "Tonight. I have the key. I'll take you on a tour. A tour!"

When night fell Joe was as good as his word. He took an old flashlight from under the kitchen sink and we went next door.

The bunker's double doors were just two pieces of plywood with a hole in each through which was threaded a heavy chain secured by a padlock. Each door bore the black stenciled legend "CAUTION RODENTS BEING POISONED". Joe had a key.

Like the lot that surrounded it the floor of the bunker was nothing but dirt and broken bricks. Inside, the building was dank and smelled of wet cement.

Joe shook the flashlight and the light brightened. A fresco ran around all four walls of the bunker near the ceiling. The painting depicted "The Stations of the Cross" in bright colors, in a sort of WPA heroic realism. But the artist had imagined the journey as leading from a Mexican village across endless fields of vegetables through shabby and deserted city streets and finally to a tomb in the side of a hill. But the hill looked very much like San Francisco's Alta Plaza or Lafayette Park - with people walking their dogs and a long slanting row of neat Victorian houses in the middle distance.

As Joe threaded the chain back through the holes in the plywood and secured the padlock I glanced over my shoulder and saw Murray's unmistakeable bulk silhouetted in a window, watching us from the top floor of the apartment house in the corner of the vacant lot across Hemlock Street from our little cedar shingled cottage.

"Earlier in our discussion, Wolfgang and I summarized some central Lockean precepts:"

'Let us then suppose the mind to be...white paper, void of all characters, without any ideas...[It is] furnished...[by] particular sensible objects, [which] do convey into the mind several distinct perceptions of things...which when I say the senses convey into the mind, I mean, they from external objects - by sensation - convey into the mind what produces there those perceptions.'

Metaphysical truth...is nothing but the real existence of things, conformable to the ideas to which we have annexed their names.

I say, then, that we have the knowledge of OUR OWN existence by intuition; of the existence of GOD by demonstration; and of OTHER THINGS by sensation.

Santiago hesitated, as if undecided as to whether or not to broach a certain topic, and then spoke. "Lads, the Mississippi River is more than a mile wide at the Gulf of Mexico. But at its headwaters in Northern Minnesota a child could almost leap across. The argument we're undertaking is like a long journey down a river. We're standing at the figurative headwaters of that argument, a mere trickle. The propositions that flow from Locke's premisses will develop into a flood of paradox and contradiction. Do we really have to navigate the whole river to its mouth?" There was an unusual note of pleading in Santiago's voice. "Or is it possible that you can grasp the implausibility of Locke's assumptions at their very source?"

Hutch and Austin looked back at Santiago blankly.

Seeing as this was how things stood Santiago sat up and squared his shoulders in resignation. "Hokey, dokey", he chanted in a fake Norwegian sing-song and began to leaf through Locke's "Essay".

"About how long do you estimate this will take?" The whole exercise was beginning to wear on Hutch - its outcome a foregone conclusion so far as he was concerned. He would sit for as long as he had to in order to collect his one hundred dollars - and he regretted taking Santiago's money not one bit. (Anyway Hutch suspected that, although they lived in a single rented room in a hotel at Post and Hyde and cooked brown rice and carrots on a hot plate, Santiago and Zoia were not as poor as their living situation might have led one to believe.)

"When I finish my exposition of Locke you'll have my whole argument - in sum if not in detail. If at that point you can tell me - while holding straight faces - that the Empiricist tradition is 'not controversial' at its very root, we'll settle up and I'll treat us all to dinner at Sam Wo's. Agreed?"

Hutch and Austin both nodded. Santiago signaled to Alberto for a fresh round of coffees and turned back to his copy of Locke's "Essay".

"Locke's epistemology is nothing if not straightforward."

The better to understand the nature, manner, and extent of our knowledge, one thing is carefully to be observed concerning the ideas we have; and that is, that some of them, are SIMPLE and some COMPLEX.

[Locke's "Essay" - 2.2.1]

We have hitherto considered those ideas, in the reception whereof the mind is only passive, which are those simple ones received from sensation and reflection before mentioned, whereof the mind cannot make one to itself, nor have any idea which does not wholly consist of them. As simple ideas are observed to exist in several combinations united together; so the mind has a power to consider several of them united together, as one idea; and that not only as they are united in external objects, but as itself has joined them together. Ideas thus made up of several simple ones put together, I call COMPLEX;--such as are beauty, gratitude, a man, an army, the universe; which, though complicated of various simple ideas, or complex ideas made up of simple ones, yet are, when the mind pleases, considered each by itself, as one entire thing, signified by one name.

[Locke's "Essay" - 2.12.1]

"So all 'complex' ideas are aggregations of 'simple' ideas and as we have seen, all 'simple' ideas come to us only via sensation, external or 'internal'."

...We come to have the ideas of PARTICULAR SORTS OF SUBSTANCES, by collecting SUCH combinations of simple ideas as are, by experience and observation of men's senses, taken notice of to exist together; and are therefore supposed to flow from the particular internal constitution, or unknown essence of that substance. Thus we come to have the ideas of a man, horse, gold, water, &c.; of which substances, whether any one has any other CLEAR idea, further than of certain simple ideas co-existent together, I appeal to every one's own experience. It is the ordinary qualities observable in iron, or a diamond, put together, that make the true complex idea of those substances...

[Locke's "Essay" - 2.23.3]

...All the ideas we have of particular distinct sorts of substances are nothing but several combinations of simple ideas, co-existing in such, though unknown, cause of their union, as makes the whole subsist of itself. It is by such combinations of simple ideas, and nothing else, that we represent particular sorts of substances to ourselves; such are the ideas we have of their several species in our minds; and such only do we, by their specific names, signify to others, v.g. man, horse, sun, water, iron: upon hearing which words, every one who understands the language, frames in his mind a combination of those several simple ideas which he has usually observed, or fancied to exist together under that denomination; all which he supposes to rest in and be, as it were, adherent to that unknown common subject, which inheres not in anything else. Though, in the meantime, it be manifest, and every one, upon inquiry into his own thoughts, will find, that he has no other idea of any substance, v.g. let it be gold, horse, iron, man, vitriol, bread, but what he has barely of those sensible qualities, which he supposes to inhere; with a supposition of such a substratum as gives, as it were, a support to those qualities or simple ideas, which he has observed to exist united together. Thus, the idea of the sun,--what is it but an aggregate of those several simple ideas, bright, hot, roundish, having a constant regular motion, at a certain distance from us, and perhaps some other: as he who thinks and discourses of the sun has been more or less accurate in observing those sensible qualities, ideas, or properties, which are in that thing which he calls the sun.

[Locke's "Essay" - 2.23.6]

"So, summarizing the above:"

...[Substances are collections of] SUCH combinations of simple ideas as are...supposed to flow from the particular internal constitution, or unknown essence of that substance.

...Substances are nothing but several combinations of simple ideas, co-existing in such, though unknown, cause of their union, as makes the whole subsist of itself.

...v.g. man, horse, sun, water, iron: upon hearing which words, every one who understands the language, frames in his mind a combination of those several simple ideas which he has usually observed, or fancied to exist together under that denomination; all which he supposes to rest in and be, as it were, adherent to that unknown common subject...

"So. Hutch. Austin." Santiago closed Locke's "Essay" and took off his glasses. "Do you find Locke's argument plausible?"

"It seems to met that Locke is merely demarcating the boundary between subject and object, Santiago. That seems perfectly plausible."

"Hutch, I'm afraid the plausibility of Locke's argument is an intellectual parlor trick. Locke begins by observing that anything I see or hear or imagine I can analyze into 'simple ideas'. So far, this is plausible. But Locke goes on to assume that the process runs both ways and attempts to build an epistemology based on 'simple ideas'. Locke is like a mechanic who takes an engine apart and then reassembles it only to notice a single part still lying on the garage floor. As we'll see, in Locke's case the missing 'part' is the meaningfulness of language."

Santiago tore a sheet of paper from his notebook and sketched a rudimentary diagram of perception. The little doodle looked like something from a child's science textbook and showed an eye to the right of which was a stick figure. To the left of the eye the stick figure was repeated - but upside-down, presumably in the perceiver's mind. To the right of Santiago's proposed 'scrim' a cloud purported to represent Locke's "unknown common subject".



                           ___        |\                 ........
   \   /         /        /   \       | \              ..............
    \ /         /         \_ _/       |  \           ...............
     |         /\           |         |  |            ...............             
  ___|___     /  |       ___|___      |  |         ....................                    
     |        \  |          |         |  |         .....................
    _|_        \/           |         \  |        ........................              
   /   \        \          / \         \ |            ..................
   \___/         \        /   \         \|           ..................

<- "Alberto" ->
<-----  subject ----> <- Alberto -> <- "scrim" -> <- "unknown common subject" ->

"The objects to the left of the scrim represent perception from a physiologist's point of view. Here is your subject", Santiago drew a circle encompassing both the eye and the upside-down stick figure to its left, "and here is the object, for example Alberto" Santiago pointed to the rightside-up stick figure. "Locke's contribution is the 'unknown common subject' which I've placed behind a screen to indicate its 'unknowability'. Locke is committed to the idea that all of our knowledge comes to us from 'simple ideas'. According to Locke, these simple ideas are assembled into unified objects in the mind's eye, as it were."

"Wouldn't it be more accurate to say 're-assembled'?"

"You might say 're-assembled', Hutch, but the strange consequences of Locke's theory are unchanged. Because we can only perceive 'simple ideas', complex ideas, like 'Alberto', are unavailable to our senses directly. So all we ever know of, say 'Alberto', is a collection of 'simple ideas'. We are free to attempt to infer 'Alberto's' existence given this 'data'. But even if we're successful in making that inference what was previously a perception of a man has, under Locke's theory, become an inductive proof of a man. Remember Locke himself used the words 'unknown essence' and 'such, though unknown, cause of their union'. Locke is thoroughly committed to the absolute 'unknowability' of things in themselves. In fact, Locke's premisses regarding 'sensation' and 'simple ideas' that we discussed in our last get together leave him no choice. What we've always thought of as the 'real world' begins to disappear behind a screen of epistemological theory."

Hutch was unconvinced. "It seems to me that the topics under discussion here are clearly the purview of what we now call 'cognitive psychology'. Your 'scrim' is a line of demarcation between what we know and what we still seek to learn with regard to these 'unknown' objects."

Wolfgang had said little since his rather stern lecture on Locke's ontology. His tone was much gentler now as he came to his friend's aid. "The 'inputs' of cognitive psychology are not Locke's 'simple ideas'. So far as I'm aware, these inputs - please correct me if I'm wrong here Hutch and Austin as I suspect that both of you may know more about this than I - are themselves what Locke would call 'complex ideas'. When the cognitive psychologist studies, for example, 'pattern recognition', he may be considering multiple ambiguous complex ideas each of which is a possible interpretation or 'processing' of a given perceptival 'input', an ink blot for example. But even an 'ink blot' is a Lockean 'complex idea'. I think it's safe to say that Locke's 'simple ideas' are purely philosophical artifacts. I would have to agree with Santiago that all scientific investigation, even psychological research, is concerned with 'complex ideas' and therefore takes place to the left of Santiago's proposed 'scrim'.

"Which is why scientists consider philosophy so irrelevant," Santiago said. "Some scientists can be quite tactless. I recall reading an eminent physicist who said something to the effect that"

Up to now, most scientists have been too occupied with the development of new theories that describe what the universe is to ask the question why. On the other hand, the people whose business it is to ask why, the philosophers, have not been able to keep up with the advance of scientific theories. In the eighteenth century, philosophers considered the whole of human knowledge, including science, to be their field and discussed questions such as: did the universe have a beginning? However, in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, science became too technical and mathematical for the philosophers, or anyone else except a few specialists. Philosophers reduced the scope of their inquiries so much that Wittgenstein, the most famous philosopher of this century, said, "The sole remaining task for philosophy is the analysis of language". What a comedown from the great tradition of philosophy from Aristotle to Kant!
["A Brief History of Time" ("Conclusion"), Stephen Hawking]

"It appears that the man knows nothing of Aristotle or Kant or Wittgenstein or philosophy in general. The cheek! And philosophers take this crap!"

Santiago was at this point merely muttering to himself. His tone was so curmudgeonly that Hutch felt the need to say something - anything - just to talk Santiago down from this choleric mood. "So you were saying regarding Locke's 'simple ideas' that they are purely 'philsophical artifacts'?" Hutch prompted helpfully.

"Sorry friends. I'm an occasional prisoner of my antipathies." Santiago shook off his mood. "So where were we? Ah yes. Actually, Hutch, it was Wolfie who contributed that neat characterization of Locke's 'simple ideas' as 'purely philosophical artifacts'. I might add that these artifacts are in and of themselves quite problematic. A 'simple idea' must have at least two attributes: the quality of 'simplicity' as well as its quality as a sensation, for example 'redness' or 'softness'. A 'simple idea' is by Locke's definition, 'complex'. Arguably there are no 'simple ideas'."

Hearing this, Austin discarded his usual attitude of breezy superiority and putting his chair back on all four legs and removing the swizzle stick from his mouth sat up to the table, a frown of serious attention on his face. "Interesting point, Santiago."

"Oh, so you like that one, Austin, eh?" Santiago needled. "So now we're really doing philosophy, right? If it is a 'simple idea' it is not a 'simple idea'. Russell's Paradox! Godel's Incompleteness Theorem! The possibilities are intriguing."

"Well it was your point and you don't have to heap abuse on me for taking it seriously."

"Feel free to write a paper on it, Austin."

"Sure. I'll use you as a citation. They'll probably have me arrested."

Santiago laughed heartily at this.

Hutch was beginning to pack his things when Austin leaned over and whispered something in his ear. Hutch and Austin exchanged a few quiet remarks as a result of which it appeared that Hutch was deputized to address Wolfgang. "Wolfgang, during our discussion you mentioned 'input's. This whole thing of 'inputs' and 'outputs', this is terminology associated with 'computers' - which Austin and I have been hearing a lot about recently and which we just happened to be discussing earlier today..."

Austin interrupted speaking very quickly. "What Hutch means to say, what we wanted to ask you...My brother is an engineer at IBM back East and he wanted me to ask you some questions about 'Enigma'. We'd heard..."

"Austin is trying to say", Hutch silenced Austin with a glare, "the following: Your mention of 'inputs' reminded us that we had heard that you'd worked on the Enigma project in England during the war. In fact we'd heard that you worked with Turing himself. We had wanted to ask you..." Hutch's voice trailed off.

At the mention of the Enigma project and Turing, Wolfgang had grown thoughtful.

"I didn't work on Enigma, Hutch. Not officially anyway - I was a German national after all. But Alan - excuse me, Turing - and I did discuss some of the mathematics."

Wolfgang's speech was halting. He picked up the pencil that Santiago had used to sketch his little diagram of perception and toyed with it. They could see the muscles working in his jaw. A look of deep and mysterious sadness crossed Wolfgang's face. Suddenly Wolfgang pursed his lips and flung the pencil down. The gesture was so violent and so unexpected that everyone at the table - even Santiago - blinked and started.

"I would tell you about Enigma. But then I'd have to kill you." Wolfgang said softly, eyes downcast.

The remark was so comical - especially coming from the gentle Wolfgang - that the group burst into laughter. Wolfgang stood up and made a tentative, absent-minded gesture as if to consult a wristwatch. "I'm sorry friends but I really should be going. Austin and Hutch, my young friends...", Wolfgang seemed particularly anxious that the two students not feel responsible for his sudden dark mood. "Computers! Ah, yes, computers! We must speak of them some time!"

Chapter 4: Philosophy and Science - The Night Santiago Met Charlie Parker

"So what is the relationship between philosophy and science, you may ask?"

The group had gathered together, this time without Wolfgang who was back in his hotel room - he lived in the same cheap hotel as Santiago and Zoia. According to Santiago, and in answer to the boys' very concerned inquiries, Wolfie was "indisposed", "a bit under the weather" and would be back with them the next time they met. He was "under Zoia's care" and "doing wonderfully well".

"So if my little diagram-with-scrim is correct and philosophy is irrelevant to science. (Just assuming Austin. Humor me). And if these philosophers, these unrequited lovers of truth, if they still insist on 'clearing the ground' for scientists, what exactly is the relationship between philosophy and science?"

It was a sunny Saturday morning and Fosters was a-bustle. Coffee was served along with some fresh coffee cake brought to them direct from the kitchen by Alberto. Joe and the young men settled back to hear Santiago's tale.

"In the late 40's I was between ships and went over to a house party on Diamond Heights. A jazz quartet was playing when I got there. The alto player was also a jazz critic and a poet - he called himself a 'be-bop poet'. The bass player was an old acquaintance of mine, a tall fellow with a gray beard, no mustache. He looked almost Amish. Very serious guy...Old CP'er. "

"CP'er?" Austin asked.

"Communist Party." Hutch was familiar with the history of the American left.

"People were sitting around in the living room and on the porch listening to the music, drinking wine and smoking cigarettes when Charlie Parker walked in. He stood at the back of the room for a few minutes listening to the band - they were playing one of his tunes, 'Ornithology'.

"Someone recognized Parker and word began to spread through the party. Parker was very courteous and encouraged the band to finish the tune. The group was so nervous at Parker's presence that the alto player had to count the tune off three times before they actually managed to come in together. They played the head, the piano player took a solo and the alto player signaled that they should take it out.

"Putting his own mouthpiece on the alto player's horn Parker suggested that they play 'All the Things You Are' and asked the piano player to count it off."

Santiago was silent, appearing for the moment to have lost the thread of his story.

"How did it sound?"

Santiago gazed off into the middle distance, still lost in thought.

"What was it like to hear Parker in person, Santiago? How did it sound?" Hutch repeated.

"So he must have sounded pretty good in person, right, Santiago?"

"What if there were no records, no radio, Hutch?"

"Then" Austin put in, "we’d be reduced to depending on the ‘young alto player’ – and his students, and his students’ students for everything we know about Parker."

"’Reduced?’ I hardly think so Austin. One way or another, the power of that music would have found its way to us. And the young alto player would have had a purpose in life – a reason to not just throw himself off the Golden Gate bridge."

Hutch and Austin both gasped. "He didn’t!" Hutch said in disbelief.

"Just a hypothetical. But we digress, gentlemen." Fully collected, Santiago continued his story.

"It was hot and stuffy in the house and after a couple of tunes, a few of us – including Parker - went out on the porch for a smoke. I had a pack of Camel's and I handed one to Parker and started to hand one to the bass player. But the bass player put up a hand - wouldn't take my cigarette. 'Camel's a non-union shop. I don't smoke 'em.' The bass player went back inside to get his rolling tobacco. Parker laughed. 'Some people have opinions about everything.’

"Now the alto player had joined us on the porch. 'Do you think in keys or in intervals?' he asked Parker. Parker started to respond but the alto player was so anxious at just being in the presence of the great Charlie Parker that he interrupted before Parker could finish answering: 'Do you have perfect pitch?'

"Parker's eyes hardened and his mouth became a thin line. 'It's just music, man. Don't make it more complicated than it has to be.’

"The alto player was stunned - he actually staggered back a step. It wasn't 'just music' to him. It was a way of life: 'The Jazz Life'. The way he talked, the way he walked - pretty much every decision of daily life from his haircut to his choice of socks was in his mind connected in some way with Jazz. But confused and embarrassed as he was, the alto player was still reluctant to let the conversation lapse. 'What kind of reed do you use, Charlie?'

"Parker said nothing but took out his mouthpiece and removed the reed. Taking a half dollar from his pocket, he slid the tip of the reed just a bit over the edge of the coin and asked for a light. I lit a match and Parker held the reed over the fire for a second. Parker handed the burnt reed, which now resembled a popsicle stick, to the alto player who put it in his mouthpiece. Of course the alto player could not get a sound out. Not even a squeak. Parker took the horn and played some quick arpeggios. And then a remarkable thing happened.

"As Parker ran scales up and down the horn using the burnt reed, he forgot his irritation with the alto player and fell into a reverie. He began playing different figures on the horn, different keys, shifting tempos. An idea had occurred to Parker. The party fell silent and a few cars pulled to a stop in the street below to listen as Parker worked through the musical problem. And suddenly, like the moon breaking through the clouds, he found it. A long, soaring line burst from the horn." Santiago made a grand sweeping gesture with his arm. "It was a beautiful evening, balmy and clear. The lights in the East Bay hills twinkled from across the water. The last few notes of Parker's melody hung shimmering in the night sky like the aurora borealis.

"The humiliated alto player sat on a porch step trying to strike a pose of unconcern. Parker gave him his horn back and thanked him warmly and sincerely. 'Nice horn, man.' And Parker was gone."

"Charlie Parker! Wild!" Austin was impressed.

"I'm not quite done, Austin.

"Some years later I was between ships and having breakfast at a cafe on Columbus Avenue. An old shipmate of mine – Gavin Arthur, a ship's carpenter - sat down at my table. Gavin needed a few bucks to tide him over. He said he had something that I might be interested in.

"There'd been a young deck hand on Gavin's last ship, a quiet, unhappy lad but with an unusual talent: He could play be-bop on the ocarina."

"That's ridiculous Santiago", Austin scoffed. "Be-bop is so chromatic. No one could ever play be-bop on the ocarina!"

Santiago sighed. "Believe me when I tell you, Austin: Any sailor who ventures beyond Staten Island is bound to see things far more remarkable than a man playing be-bop on the ocarina!" He continued his story.

"One night they're sailing from Ibiza - in the Balearics. It's a warm evening and as they leave the harbor Gavin and the deck hand are at the stern. The kid takes out his ocarina and plays one of Charlie Parker's 'Confirmation' solos. It was strange, Gavin said - beautiful in its own way but kind of freakish. All of a sudden, the kid stops playing and hurls the ocarina over the rail into the ship's wake and breaks down and begins to sob. Gavin is a sympathetic guy but this kid's personal problems don’t look like something he wants to get involved in so he just keeps smoking his cigarette and looking at Ibiza getting smaller in the distance.

"The kid reaches in his pocket. He unwraps something carefully and is just about to toss it into the Mediterranean when Gavin stays his hand. It's obviously something of great value to the kid but something of which he must now unburden himself. Gavin figures that if it has value to the kid, hey, who knows? Maybe it has intrinsic value. Anyway, why just throw it in the ocean?"

Santiago took a sip of his coffee.

"Well, Santiago, what was it" Hutch asked impatiently.

Santiago reached into his pocket and tossed something onto the table where it landed with a clatter on the formica in front of Hutch. About the size and shape of a deck of playing cards, it consisted of two little panes of glass secured in a worn homemade wood frame. Suspended between the panes of glass like a mounted butterfly was a little chip of wood.

Hutch picked up the little box. "A piece of the True Cross", he said quietly as Austin let out a slow whistle. The word "Rico" was still barely legible. The end of the little wood fragment was burnt blunt. It was Parker's reed.

"And so ends my story, gentlemen. Thank you for your kind attention." Santiago put the little case back in his pocket.

"But Santiago," Hutch reminded, "as I recall, this story was to illustrate the relationship of philosophy and science."

"Well," Santiago assumed an air of innocence, "and so it does, Hutch, so it does."

"Can you be a little bit more explicit, Santiago?"

Austin took the swizzle stick out of his mouth. "Parker is Science and the young alto player is Philosophy."

"Exactly!" Santiago wagged an approving finger at Austin.

"But then what is the ocarina?" Austin asked mischievously.

"Logical positivism!" Santiago answered.

The group roared with laughter, including even Austin, for whom Logical Positivism was ordinarily no laughing matter.

Chapter 5: Locke on Language

One Saturday morning I went over to Fillmore street to do my laundry. I tied Rain-rain to a parking meter and went inside. The laundromat was steamy and had a clean, pleasant smell of fabric softener. It was crowded, mostly with women doing their families' laundry for the week. I pulled my clothes from my backpack and stuffed them into a machine.

"Here." A woman at the next machine took a handful of detergent from a giant-size box and threw it into my machine. "One little load", she snorted ruefully. "Must be nice."

As I scanned the seats looking for a place to wait for my laundry to finish I saw Murray. The round-bottomed plastic seat next to Murray was empty and she patted it by way of invitation. Murray was wearing cheap, cracked, plastic running shoes, sweat pants and a shapeless, oversized turtleneck shirt.

"Hey Tommy Saxophone. How are things on your side of Hemlock street, neighbor?" Her smile was merry, mischievous.

"Good. Good. I really like the neighborhood."

"So the corpses on the loading dock don't bother you?"

"I don't know about them, Murray. Where do you mean?"

"At the end of Hemlock where it meets Laguna, didn't you notice the little brown building? That's the San Francisco College of Mortuary Science."

"Far out. 'Hemlock', 'mortuary science', I wonder if that's a coincidence?"

"I was hoping you would tell me, Tommy Saxophone. You're the philosopher." Her smile told me that the comment wasn't meant as a challenge.

"So have you met many of Joe's friends?"

"Oh, some. Jimmy...and the Nurses..."

"Watch out for Jimmy, Tommy. He's a rip-off artist. The nurses are nice. How about Santiago and Wolfgang - have you met them?"

"Well, yes. In the park. Just for a minute. They seem like interesting people."

"They are very interesting people, Tommy. Very, very interesting people. Did Joe tell you how Santiago got his name?"

Murray took a big package of M&M's from a shopping bag at her feet. We sat and ate M&M's and Murray told me the story of how Santiago got his name.

"Santiago is Sephardic. That means he's Jewish - but from Spain. The Spanish threw the Jews out of Spain a long, long time ago and Santiago's family moved to a Greek island. Rhodes I think.

"Santiago's father was a fisherman. He fished from a little sailboat. When Santiago's mother was pregnant with Santiago, Santiago's father was drowned at sea in a storm. So Santiago's mother was left all alone. She was real poor and didn't have a lot of family around her and now her husband was gone. I guess she was pretty freaked out. Some neighbor gave her a copy of the New Testament and she read it and read it.

"So one day she's walking through the little narrow alleys in her little town and she meets the town priest. I guess the Jews and the Christians didn't have a whole lot to do with each other - but he's decent and he greets her. And so she stops him and says, 'Father, may ask you a question?'

"So he says, 'Yes, my daughter'. And she says, 'Is it wrong to love the Epistle of James more than all of the Epistles of Paul? Is it a sin?'

"Now the priest knows she's Jewish and that she's a widow and so on, and so the question catches him off base. But he's really kindly and so he answers, 'No my daughter, it's not a sin. If James is speaking to your heart, that is a blessing from God.' And then he says, 'And God bless the son you're carrying in your womb, my daughter'.

"And sure enough, a month later she gives birth to a son. And of course she names him 'Santiago'."

"Why 'of course'? I don't get it."

"Hey Tommy Saxophone, you don't get it? 'Santiago'! 'Sant Iago'. 'Saint James'."

"Oh."

On a sunny Spring day the group reconvened at the Fosters at the corner of Polk and Sutter. Here and there old men in worn overcoats sat alone or in groups of two or three drinking coffee and reading the afternoon Examiner. A young man is sat by himself geturing animatedly as he carries on a soundless conversation with an imaginary interlocuter. Three hippies - a young woman in overalls and two young men - were throwing the I Ching at a table in the corner. The young woman knelt on her chair, hovering over the table, casting the pennies expectantly. The low murmur of conversation and the soft hiss of the steam tables was broken by a muffled crash from the kitchen followed by shouted recriminations, laughter.

An amended version of Santiago's sketch of Locke's epistemology lay on the table. But in this version of the sketch there was no 'real' Alberto between the 'eye' and the 'scrim', just the upside-down image of Alberto in the 'brain'. Santiago was speaking.



                          |\                 ........
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<- "Alberto" ->
<-----  subject ----> <- "scrim" -> <- "unknown common subject" ->

"On the one hand, Locke says",

Metaphysical truth...is nothing but the real existence of things, conformable to the ideas to which we have annexed their names.
[Locke's "Essay" 4.5.11]

"...but on the other hand he also says..."

...Substances are nothing but several combinations of simple ideas, co-existing in such, though unknown, cause of their union, as makes the whole subsist of itself.

"So, according to Locke and regarding Alberto, 'Is he is or is he ain't'? Is Alberto purely my mental construct as built from an 'unknown common subject'? What is Alberto himself to make of all of this, Hutch and Austin?"

"Doesn't this touch on the problem of 'other minds'?"

Hutch had only the most superficial acquaintance with this classic philosophical problem. "Now that you raise it, Hutch, I think you'll find Locke's solution to this and the related 'problem of the independent existence of the external world' quite interesting." Santiago took up the copy of Locke's "Essay".

The notice we have by our senses of the existing of things without us, though it be not altogether so certain as our intuitive knowledge, or the deductions of our reason employed about the clear abstract ideas of our own minds; yet it is an assurance that deserves the name of KNOWLEDGE...As to myself, I think God has given me assurance enough of the existence of things without me...

[Locke's "Essay" - 4.11.3]

"'God has given me assurance enough of the existence of things without me...'. Not what you'd expect from one of the Founding Fathers of the Enlightenment."

Austin understood that Santiago was attempting to undermine Locke's standing as a founder of the Enlightenment by associating Locke with "irrational" religious conviction. It took Austin only a moment to find a counter-quote:

No proposition can be received for divine revelation, or obtain the assent due to all such, if it be contradictory to our clear intuitive knowledge. Because this would be to subvert the principles and foundations of all knowledge, evidence, and assent whatsoever: and there would be left no difference between truth and falsehood, no measures of credible and incredible in the world, if doubtful propositions shall take place before self-evident; and what we certainly know give way to what we may possibly be mistaken in. In propositions therefore contrary to the clear perception of the agreement or disagreement of any of our ideas, it will be in vain to urge them as matters of faith. They cannot move our assent under that or any other title whatsoever. For faith can never convince us of anything that contradicts our knowledge.

[Locke's "Essay" 4.13.5]

"And this...", Austin continued reading.

"Nothing that is contrary to, and inconsistent with, the clear and self-evident dictates of reason, has a right to be urged or assented to as a matter of faith..."

[Locke's "Essay" 4.18.10]

"Locke isn't going to joining the Billy Graham Crusade any time soon, Santiago." Austin pushed the book back across the table.

"On the other hand", Santiago riffled through Locke's "Essay", "consider the following."

Because, though faith be founded on the testimony of God (who cannot lie) revealing any proposition to us: yet we cannot have an assurance of the truth of its being a divine revelation greater than our own knowledge. Since the whole strength of the certainty depends upon our knowledge that God revealed it; which, in this case, where the proposition supposed revealed contradicts our knowledge or reason, will always have this objection hanging to it, viz. that we cannot tell how to conceive that to come from God, the bountiful Author of our being, which, if received for true, must overturn all the principles and foundations of knowledge he has given us; render all our faculties useless; wholly destroy the most excellent part of his workmanship, our understandings; and put a man in a condition wherein he will have less light, less conduct than the beast that perisheth.

[Locke's "Essay" 4.13.5]

"Locke has more faith in reason than he has faith in faith. But Locke's faith in reason is based on faith in a God 'who cannot lie'."

"Locke's faith in God is a bolt-on, Santiago. An intellectual vestige of the Middle Ages. It plays no role in his epistemology."

Santiago leaned far back in his chair and rapped on the big plate glass window with his knuckles. A young woman standing with her back to the window turned and peered in using her hand to shield her eyes from the sun's reflection off the glass. Santiago held up an index finger and then motioned for the woman to come inside.

"Let's see if Mildred can help us here."

Mildred was regularly stationed at the corner of Polk and Sutter selling homemade peanut brittle - each package containing a Bible verse - to raise funds for a Pentecostal Church out in the Avenues. Mildred's table was set up on Sutter street, right outside the window at which the group was sitting. The entrance to Fosters was on Polk. Mildred took a package of peanut brittle and walked around the corner and into Fosters. Coming up to their table, the young woman handed a package of the peanut brittle to Santiago and Santiago handed her a dollar. Mildred smiled pleasantly and turned to leave.

"Mildred, would you do us the honor of your company for a moment?" Santiago asked. "We'll keep an eye on your stand."

Just outside the window a cigar box with the morning's proceeds sat on the card table next to the display of peanut brittle. Whether through negligence or naivete Mildred appeared to be quite unconcerned with the unprotected stand. She smiled and nodded her assent.

Mildred wore a plain blue dress that reached almost to mid-calf. Her shoes were ungainly, blue-black with laces and thick heels. The blue cotton pinafore she wore over her white blouse had uneven, wide seams and appeared to have been homemade. A matching homemade blue headscarf tied at the nape of her neck covered all of her hair except for a few very blonde wisps on her forehead poking out from under the scarf. Mildred had a little indentation, a vertical groove, at the tip of her nose as is sometimes found in the Irish. Her complexion was fair and clear and healthy, her eyes a vivid cornflower blue.

"Please Mildred, consider this philosophical passage and give us your impression of this man's faith..."

But Santiago's question offended Hutch's sense of chivalry. "This is so impolite, to subject this young woman to your sort of cross examination. And especially rude when it concerns something so personal as a matter of faith."

Mildred frowned and gave her head a little shake, indicating that she did not feel at all put upon. She turned to Santiago to hear the passage - but glanced back at Hutch with a very faint smile of consolation, as if to apologize for the rudeness of contradicting him.

Santiago read:

For the visible marks of extraordinary wisdom and power appear so plainly in all the works of the creation, that a rational creature, who will but seriously reflect on them, cannot miss the discovery of a Deity.

[Locke's "Essay" 1.3.9]

Mildred took a breath to speak but Austin, looking out the window at the traffic and speaking in a bored matter-of-fact tone, interrupted. "The argument from complexity, the Great Watchmaker. The human nervous system, the genetic code - way too complicated to have evolved by chance, etcetera, etcetera."

"But how much complexity do we require in order to believe? Is a paramecium not complicated enough to convince us of the existence of God?"

Mildred spoke with a Scottish burr - the word 'paramecium' sounded particularly fetching. Her gaze was quite direct in contrast to her otherwise modest demeanor.

"Perhaps this author is trying to tell us that God's glory is evident even in a rock lying on the ground."

The group sat silent for a moment.

"Thank you, Mildred", Santiago said. You've given us food for thought."

"And food", Mildred said, smiling and nodding toward the peanut brittle.

Mildred took her leave with a curtsy - yes, unmistakeably it was a curtsy. She walked out onto Polk, down Polk to the corner of Sutter and made her way up Sutter back to her station where she took her place behind the card table, adjusting her little sign and rearranging the display of peanut brittle.

Mildred's entire little journey had been visible through the cafeteria's plate glass windows. Hutch turned back to the table and reddened a bit as his companions dropped their eyes and busied themselves with their books and papers.

Santiago cleared his throat. "Let's hear what Locke has to say regarding language."

The use, then, of words, is to be sensible marks of ideas; and the ideas they stand for are their proper and immediate signification.

[Locke's "Essay" 3.2.1]

All things that exist being particulars, it may perhaps be thought reasonable that words, which ought to be conformed to things, should be so too,--I mean in their signification: but yet we find quite the contrary. The far greatest part of words that make all languages are general terms: which has not been the effect of neglect or chance, but of reason and necessity.

[Locke's "Essay" 3.3.1]

How [do] general words come to be made[?] For, since all things that exist are only particulars, how come we by general terms; or where find we those general natures they are supposed to stand for? Words become general by being made the signs of general ideas: and ideas become general, by separating from them the circumstances of time and place, and any other ideas that may determine them to this or that particular existence. By this way of abstraction they are made capable of representing more individuals than one; each of which having in it a conformity to that abstract idea, is (as we call it) of that sort.

[Locke's "Essay" 3.3.6]

...The essence of each GENUS, or sort, comes to be nothing but that abstract idea which the general...name stands for.

[Locke's "Essay" 3.3.15]

"Words stand for ideas. So what kind of ideas do 'general terms' stand for? Locke proposes two possibilities: 'real' essence and 'nominal' essence. To understand the pickle Locke has put himself in we need to fully understand what he means by 'real essence'.

First, Essence may be taken for the very being of anything, whereby it is what it is. And thus the real internal, but generally (in substances) unknown constitution of things, whereon their discoverable qualities depend, may be called their essence.

[Locke's "Essay" 3.3.15]

...a real, but unknown, constitution of their insensible parts; from which flow those sensible qualities which serve us to distinguish them one from another, according as we have occasion to rank them into sorts, under common denominations.

[Locke's "Essay" 3.3.17]

Santiago put aside the book and addressed the group with great seriousness. "Let's get this straight right now, kids. When Locke speaks of 'real essence' he is not speaking of material properties which are the subject matter of physics or chemistry. Notwithstanding the assertion in Guyer's essay in Chappell's Locke compendium that Locke is too 'pessimistic' with regard to the possibility that science may unlock the mysteries of 'real essence', Locke holds out no hope that 'real essence' is knowable. In fact, 'real essence' is by definition unknowable by science." Santiago turned back to Locke's "Essay".

Nor indeed can we rank and sort things, and consequently (which is the end of sorting) denominate them, by their real essences; because we know them [real essences] not.

Therefore we in vain pretend to range things into sorts, and dispose them into certain classes under names, by their real essences, that are so far from our discovery or comprehension.

[Locke's "Essay" 3.6.9]

The only imaginable help in this case would be, that, having framed perfect complex ideas of the properties of things flowing from their different real essences, we should thereby distinguish them into species. But neither can this be done. For, being ignorant of the real essence itself, it is impossible to know all those properties that flow from it, and are so annexed to it, that any one of them being away, we may certainly conclude that that essence is not there, and so the thing is not of that species. We can never know what is the precise number of properties depending on the real essence of gold, any one of which failing, the real essence of gold, and consequently gold, would not be there, unless we knew the real essence of gold itself, and by that determined that species.

[Locke's "Essay" 3.6.19]

The only imaginable help in this case would be, that, having framed perfect complex ideas of the properties of things flowing from their different real essences, we should thereby distinguish them into species. But neither can this be done. For, being ignorant of the real essence itself, it is impossible to know all those properties that flow from it, and are so annexed to it, that any one of them being away, we may certainly conclude that that essence is not there, and so the thing is not of that species. We can never know what is the precise number of properties depending on the real essence of gold, any one of which failing, the real essence of gold, and consequently gold, would not be there, unless we knew the real essence of gold itself, and by that determined that species.

[Locke's "Essay" 3.6.19]

By all which it is clear, that our distinguishing substances into species by names, is not at all founded on their real essences; nor can we pretend to range and determine them exactly into species, according to internal essential differences.

[Locke's "Essay" 3.6.20]

To avoid this therefore, they have supposed a real essence belonging to every species, from which these proper ties all flow, and would have their name of the species stand for that. But they, not having any idea of that real essence in substances, and their words signifying nothing but the ideas they have, that which is done by this attempt is only to put the name or sound in the place and stead of the thing having that real essence, without knowing what the real essence is, and this is that which men do when they speak of species of things, as supposing them made by nature, and distinguished by real essences.

[Locke's "Essay" 3.6.49]

But however preposterous and absurd it be to make our names stand for ideas we have not, or (which is all one) essences that we know not, it being in effect to make our words the signs of nothing;

[Locke's "Essay" 3.10.21]

"I'm not convinced, Santiago", Hutch said perplexedly. "We know what gold is. We know its atomic weight and its molecular structure."

"But Hutch, we must always keep in mind that for Locke all complex ideas - like 'gold' - are compounded of 'simple' ideas. However, when we speak of the atomic weight of gold we're not resolving complexity to simplicity. We're explaining complexity in terms of complexity. Locke is stymied here by his insistence on the fundamental role of 'sensation'. According to Locke, we experience life as a shifting, dancing web of sensation. It's the task of the individual to organize these phenomena into more complex entities. Maybe our own organization of sensation mirrors some interior organization 'behind' the scrim. Maybe not. Because this 'interior' organization is not knowable, it is neither philosophically nor scientifically important and drops out of all consideration. This 'interior' organization is what Locke calls 'real essence'. Locke discards the concept, for the reasons I've just given."

"But our knowledge of the molecular structure of gold enables us to predict many of gold's sensible properties. Why wouldn't it be possible, at least in principle, to predict them all?"

"Given his premisses, that's not going to be good enough for Locke."

The complex ideas we have of substances are, as it has been shown, certain collections of simple ideas that have been observed or supposed constantly to exist together. But such a complex idea cannot be the real essence of any substance; for then the properties we discover in that body would depend on that complex idea, and be deducible from it, and their necessary connexion with it be known; as all properties of a triangle depend on, and, as far as they are discoverable, are deducible from the complex idea of three lines including a space.
[Locke's "Essay" 2.31.6]

"'...Be deducible from it...' 'necessary We know the essence of a triangle because we know in advance - that is to say, independently of experience, by deduction, - all of the properties of a triangle. For Locke, if we were to know the 'real essence' of gold, all knowledge of chemistry and physics would be deductive. Empirical observation, the cornerstone of science, would be irrelevant. Convinced, Hutch?"

Hutch started to say something but stopped himself and lapsed into thoughtful silence.

"Hutch and Austin. This point is very important. 'Real essence' is the linguistic correlate to Locke's 'unknown common subject' and so Locke is forced in advance to discard the very possibility of 'real essence'.

"Locke says that 'complex ideas of substances are...certain collections of simple ideas that have been observed or supposed constantly to exist together.'

"'Oh', you say, 'so Alberto is a pattern which I recognize and name!'

"But a pattern is itself a complex idea. It has a shape, a location. 'Simple' ideas, as Locke defines them are literally inconceivable. If we're obedient to the discipline of Empiricism, we can't take refuge in the notion of 'patterns' or 'correlations'. No. If we remain true to the principles of Empiricism, to the fundamental role of 'sensation' in Locke's epistemology, Locke's world is inconceivably meaningless - literally.

"So Locke is forced to retreat from 'real essence' and I'm telling you Hutch and Austin," here Santiago waxed melodramatic, "Empiricism and the traditions that are heir to it never recover.

"So, summarizing Locke's argument to this point, general words stand for abstract ideas which must stand for 'essences' of some sort. According to Locke there are two types of essences, 'real' and 'nominal'. Locke is forced to dismiss the possibility of 'real' essences having any role in the meaningfulness of language. With the rejection of 'real essences' Locke's situation with regard to an account of the meaningfulness of language looks like something from a Road Runner Cartoon: Having plunged off a cliff Locke hangs suspended over the precipice clinging to a very insubstantial branch, that slim hope being - in Locke's case - 'nominal essence'."

The next thing to be considered is, by which of those essences it is that substances are determined into sorts or species; and that, it is evident, is by the nominal essence. For it is that alone that the name, which is the mark of the sort, signifies. It is impossible, therefore, that anything should determine the sorts of things, which WE rank under general names, but that idea which that name is designed as a mark for; which is that, as has been shown, which we call nominal essence. Why do we say this is a horse, and that a mule; this is an animal, that an herb? How comes any particular thing to be of this or that sort, but because it has that nominal essence; or, which is all one, agrees to that abstract idea, that name is annexed to? And I desire any one but to reflect on his own thoughts, when he hears or speaks any of those or other names of substances, to know what sort of essences they stand for.

[Locke's "Essay" 3.6.7]

And that the species of things to us are nothing but the ranking them under distinct names, according to the complex ideas in US, and not according to precise, distinct, real essences in THEM...

[Locke's "Essay" 3.6.8]

Since then it is evident that we sort and name substances by their nominal and not by their real essences, the next thing to be considered is how, and by whom these essences come to be made. As to the latter, it is evident they are made by the mind, and not by nature...

[Locke's "Essay" 3.6.26]

"But this approach has very serious problems."

One thing I doubt not but will seem very strange in this doctrine, which is, that from what has been said it will follow, that each abstract idea, with a name to it, makes a distinct species. But who can help it, if truth will have it so?

"I'm not sure Locke is aware of the enormity of what he's conceding when he states that 'it will follow that each abstract idea, with a name to it, makes a distinct species.' But when he writes 'who can help it, if truth will have it so?' his humility is Socratic."

Santiago shook his head in admiration and continued reading.

For so it must remain till somebody can show us the species of things limited and distinguished by something else; and let us see that general terms signify not our abstract ideas, but something different from them. I would fain know why a shock and a hound are not as distinct species as a spaniel and an elephant. We have no other idea of the different essence of an elephant and a spaniel, than we have of the different essence of a shock and a hound; all the essential difference, whereby we know and distinguish them one from another, consisting only in the different collection of simple ideas, to which we have given those different names.

[Locke's "Essay" 3.6.38]

But this is not all. It would also follow that the names of substances would not only have, as in truth they have, but would also be supposed to have different significations, as used by different men, which would very much cumber the use of language. For if every distinct quality that were discovered in any matter by any one were supposed to make a necessary part of the complex idea signified by the common name given to it, it must follow, that men must suppose the same word to signify different things in different men: since they cannot doubt but different men may have discovered several qualities, in substances of the same denomination, which others know nothing of.

[Locke's "Essay" 3.6.48]

For, let us consider, when we affirm that 'all gold is fixed,' either it means that fixedness is a part of the definition, i. e., part of the nominal essence the word gold stands for; and so this affirmation, 'all gold is fixed,' contains nothing but the signification of the term gold. Or else it means, that fixedness, not being a part of the definition of the gold, is a property of that substance itself: in which case it is plain that the word gold stands in the place of a substance, having the real essence of a species of things made by nature. In which way of substitution it has so confused and uncertain a signification, that, though this proposition--'gold is fixed'--be in that sense an affirmation of something real; yet it is a truth will always fail us in its particular application, and so is of no real use or certainty. For let it be ever so true, that all gold, i. e. all that has the real essence of gold, is fixed, what serves this for, whilst we know not, in this sense, WHAT IS OR IS NOT GOLD? For if we know not the real essence of gold, it is impossible we should know what parcel of matter has that essence, and so whether IT be true gold or no.

[Locke's "Essay" 3.6.50]

Because these simple ideas that co-exist, and are united in the same subject, being very numerous, and having all an equal right to go into the complex specific idea which the specific name is to stand for, men, though they propose to themselves the very same subject to consider, yet frame very different ideas about it; and so the name they use for it unavoidably comes to have, in several men, very different significations.
[Locke's "Essay" 3.9.13]

For, when a man says gold is malleable, he means and would insinuate something more than this, That what I call gold is malleable, (though truly it amounts to no more,) but would have this understood, viz. That gold, i.e. what has the real essence of gold, is malleable; which amounts to thus much, that malleableness depends on, and is inseparable from the real essence of gold. But a man, not knowing wherein that real essence consists, the connexion in his mind of malleableness is not truly with an essence he knows not, but only with the sound gold he puts for it.
[Locke's "Essay" 3.10.17]

"So when a man says gold is malleable he means nothing more than 'what I call "gold" is malleable'. Not too promising. Locke claims that the meaningfulness of language is based on 'nominal essence'. But Locke also asserts that if meaning is based on 'nominal essence' then language is reduced to babble. Locke appears to have sawed off the limb on which he was sitting. He needs come up with some explanation for the meaningfulness of language - and quickly."

By the word GOLD here, I must be understood to design a particular piece of matter; v. g. the last guinea that was coined. For, if it should stand here, in its ordinary signification, for that complex idea which I or any one else calls gold, i. e. for the nominal essence of gold, it would be jargon. So hard is it to show the various meaning and imperfection of words, when we have nothing else but words to do it by.

[3.6.19]

"'Jargon'! Amazing! This is truly a remarkable bit of philosophizing! Locke uses the word 'gold' in the context of systematically demolishing the basis for the meaningfulness of that word. He is perplexed that he finds it 'hard...to show the various meaning and imperfection of words, when we have nothing else but words to do it by'. So how does he reinvest the word 'gold' with meaning? By making it clear that he wishes to be 'understood to design a particular piece of matter; v.g. the last guinea that was coined.' Allow me to put Locke's ad hoc, stop-gap theory of meaning out of its misery."

"Locke makes 'the last guinea coined' the source of meaning for the word 'gold'. But that particular coin is many things: a coin, a very flat cylinder, a representation of monetary value, and so on. You can't have that coin as a proxy for the meaning of the word 'gold' without specifying one or the other of these aspects. But once you indicate that the coin defines the word gold by virtue of its 'goldness', you're clearly involved in a circularity."

"As an aside, allow me to observe that Locke's appeal to particulars - in this case, a particular piece of gold - is even more fundamentally problematic. Locke states that 'all things that exist are only particulars' [Locke's "Essay", 3.3.6]. This concise formula is just Locke's way of saying that abstract ideas do not exist - not at least in the same sense that 'objects of the senses' exist. But in attempting to reject the existence of abstract ideas, Locke installs a universal, the quality of 'particularity', at the heart of existence. As we'll see, this notion of 'particularity' is later adopted by what you might call the Empiricist lunatic fringe. In their hands, Locke's proposition that 'all things that exist are only particulars' is honed to a remarkably stark oxymoron."

"So let me summarize, gentlemen. Locke describes two possible bases for the meaningfulness of language, 'real' and 'nominal' essence. Locke rejects - is forced to reject - the 'knowability' of 'real' essences and consequently rejects the notion that these non-entities could possibly have a role in human communication. He affirms that human speech is based on 'nominal essences' but this reduces language to 'jargon' and destroys language's commonality - and effectively frustrates Locke's goal, stated early in Book Three, to account for words as:"

...marks for the ideas within [a person's] mind, whereby they might be made known to others, and the thoughts of men's minds be conveyed from one to another.

[Locke's "Essay" 3.1.2]

"Locke is surprised by this quandary but his attempts to repair the damage are hasty and ineffective. And with that, gentlemen I rest my case."

"You mean...that's it?" Hutch asked. "That's your argument?"

"Yup. That's it. That's my argument."

There was a long silence as Santiago's companions absorbed this. Wolfgang suggested that Santiago might want to summarize briefly their rather lengthy discussions.

"Thank you, Wolfie. Excellent suggestion.

"In outline my argument is as follows: If we assume that 'science is the bedrock of truth', it follows that language is meaningless. And since the first statement - that 'science is the bedrock of truth' - is clearly meaningful, it cannot also be true. More specifically, with regard to Dr. Locke's "Essay" consider first our paraphrase of Locke's epistemology:"

'Let us then suppose the mind to be...white paper, void of all characters, without any ideas...[It is] furnished...[by] particular sensible objects, [which] do convey into the mind several distinct perceptions of things...which when I say the senses convey into the mind, I mean, they from external objects - by sensation - convey into the mind what produces there those perceptions.'

"And Locke's ontology, which is - roughly and paraphrasing - that..."

'Real truth, metaphysical truth, is nothing but the existence in nature of things conformable to the ideas to which we have annexed their names. Therefore nature is the most real thing that exists. (And therefore science, being the study of nature, is the bedrock of truth.)'

"And as we saw just a few moments ago, Locke is unable to derive a reasonable theory of meaning consistent with these axioms."

There was another long silence.

"That's it?" Hutch said.

Santiago nodded.

Hutch started to say something and then stopped and looked over at Austin, deferring to Austin's greater experience with this type of argumentation.

"Well, Santiago", Austin said, "even if we grant that the statement 'science is the bedrock of truth' requires the specific support of what you call Locke's 'axioms', you're still assuming that this foundation is incapable of supporting a plausible theory of meaning."

"Do you grant the first assumption - that Locke's fundamental assumptions are 'load bearing' members of the edifice of modern analytic philosophy? When Russell asserts that 'science is the bedrock of truth' do you agree that is he relying on Locke's framework? "

This was a tough one for Austin. He'd already reminded the group that Russell considered significant elements of Locke's epistemology to be 'almost a truism'. Austin fell back on his professional training.

"You make it a little too cut-and-dried, Santiago. A little too simple. These are deep, complex issues. There's been a lot of clarification of Locke's basic principles. There's also been a lot of important work on theories of meaning. All you've shown so far is that Locke's theory of meaning leaves a lot to be desired."

"So I take it we're committed to further discussions", Hutch said with a sigh.

The cafeteria was empty. It was almost ten p.m. and the cooks were cleaning up the steam tables with a great noisy bustle the better to signal to this last table that it was time to find another venue in which to loiter. The group began to pack their things.

The cafeteria was empty. The addled young man was gone. The old, gray men were gone. The three hippies had gone to seek their fortunes elsewhere. It was almost ten p.m. and the cooks were cleaning the steam tables with a great noisy bustle the better to signal to this last table that it is time to find another venue in which to loiter. The group began to pack their things.

"Hutch, you didn't read your Bible verse!" Santiago exclaimed. Hutch picked up a small piece of paper that lay on the table next to the crumpled cellophane wrapper. He read:

In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. John, Chapter 1, Verse 1.

Holding the little scrap of paper between his index and middle fingers, Hutch addressed Santiago with irritation. "Did you set this up, Santiago?"

"Set it up?" Santiago laughed.

Hutch looked at the slip of paper again and then glanced out at the corner of Polk and Sutter, now dark and empty. Dismissively, he tossed the scrap of paper onto the table and continued to pack his things.

Wolfgang had prevailed on Santiago to treat the tired and hungry group to a meal at Sam Wo's - notwithstanding that the wager remained undecided. They had a rollicking ride over to Chinatown in Austin's VW bus and were in a jovial mood in anticipation of the meal.

Sam Wo's was - is still? - a cheap noodle shop on Washington Street. The restaurant occupied several floors in a narrow old tenement. The waiter, Edsel Ford Fong, was locally famous for running up and down the stairs and terrorizing the customers. ("You want water? Get it yourself!") College boys attempted to impress their dates by engaging in repartee with Edsel Ford Fung. They usually came away humiliated.

And so Hutch and Austin were more than a little apprehensive when Santiago offered Edsel Ford Fong a few words of greeting in Chinese. Hutch recalled hearing about a recent incident involving the Provost of Stanford University. Campus gossip had it that the Provost - a young African-American woman and a specialist in Sino-American relations - had attempted to strike up a conversation in Chinese with Mr. Fong. For her trouble Fong had struck a menacing martial arts pose and then with a low growl and sudden bark had so startled the Provost that she'd tumbled backward into the stairwell and had had to be borne aloft to a vertical position on the landing by the members of her entourage into whose midst she had fallen. The group ate a hasty and uncomfortable meal at a table near the bathrooms.

But Edsel Ford Fong responded warmly to Santiago's greeting. In fact Edsel appeared to be choking back tears as the two embraced and shook hands and then embraced again. Wolfgang and Edsel shook hands and greeted each other cordially. Then Joe and Edsel smiled and bowed to one another - apparently Joe and Edsel were already acquainted. These proceedings took quite a while and - it being late Sunday night and the theaters having just let out - a crowd had built up on the stairs below the landing on which this ceremonial greeting was taking place. Santiago was turning to introduce the two young men when someone called out that Santiago's party should "get a move on so that all of us can eat". Fong silenced the malcontent with a short barrage of menacing Chinese invective and then allowed himself to be introduced to Hutch and Austin. He greeted the two young men as "like my sons" and promised them he would serve them a meal "they would never forget".

The diners at the best table in the house were too surprised to be offended when Fong ordered them summarily moved. Santiago and his companions stood by as a team of waiters cleared and reset their table.

"Why are they doing all this for us?" Hutch whispered to Santiago.

In a low voice Santiago explained that, arriving young and scared and hungry in San Francisco many, many years before ("...you could still smell the smoldering ashes of the ruins of the quake of ought-six") he'd been taken in and cared for by Edsel Ford Fong's great-grandfather. Some years later, a ship having again brought him to San Francisco, he'd had the opportunity to return the favor, saving the life of Edsel Ford Fong's father under circumstances too involved to relate at the moment.

"Ah, yes. I understand", Hutch whispered. "In these people's culture, the saving of a human life imposes a perpetual obligation."

"Whereas, by contrast, in our culture...?" Santiago whispered back, giving Hutch a questioning sidelong glance.

Their table was ready and Fong shepherded the group to their seats. In place of the customary bare formica the table was covered with an immaculate white cloth. The dirty little bottles of soy sauce and little racks of duck sauce in dusty plastic pouches had been replaced with gleaming silver decanters and delicate china tea cups. Fragrant tea was poured. Hutch checked his watch.

"I've missed all the buses to Palo Alto, Austin."

"That's cool, Hutch. You can take my minibus. I'll crash on Joe's couch and catch a bus to Berkeley tomorrow morning. My first class isn't until eleven."

"What class is that, Austin?", Wolfgang asked politely.

"It's a seminar on 'A Skeptical Solution to the Rule-Following Paradox'."

"Another brick in the wall, eh, Austin? The corporate paradigm as applied to the search for truth. Any word yet on a scheduled date of completion for the Great Immeuble?"

"Shut up, Santiago."

Just then the soup arrived. Besides Mildred's peanut brittle, split five ways, no one in the group had had anything to eat since breakfast. They fell to with gusto. Course after course was served and Edsel Ford Fong was as good as his word. No one in the group could remember having had a better meal.

The dessert dishes were strewn across the table and the group was resting contentedly.

"I have to get going, Austin. I have an eight thirty comp lit seminar. I'll bring your bus back up to Berkeley Thursday night."

By coincidence Hutch had planned to join Austin and Austin's girl friend, Jennifer, for a Grateful Dead dance at the Pauly Pavilion at Berkeley on Thursday. Following the concert the three had planned a camping trip down in Big Sur over the weekend. Austin would drop Hutch in Palo Alto on his way back to Berkeley. Austin could do without his van for the week. It had all worked out splendidly.

"Oh to be young again, Santiago." Wolfgang said with a smile.

Hutch stood up to leave and Austin tossed him the keys to the minibus. Wolfgang begged a ride back to his hotel. Austin, Santiago and Joe were left alone at the table. Fong had the dessert plates cleared and returned with three little teacups of strong spirits. Santiago showed Austin how to toss off the shot in one swallow. Whereupon Fong reappeared and refilled their cups.

It was after midnight and foggy and cold when the trio emerged from Sam Wo's and began to make their way up Washington Street.

"So Santiago, let's assume for the sake of argument that you prove your point and we're forced to toss empirischism...cism overboard." They'd had four rounds of whatever Fong had been pouring.

"Well as you know Austin my argument is a reductio..."

"I know I know Santiago...a reductio ad absurdum." They were working their way up the steep part of California Street on the east side of Nob Hill. Austin stopped walking and stood swaying slightly. "But humor me now! What are the positive consequences if your argument works? I know you have an agenda." Austin belched and wagged a finger at Santiago. "You sly boots."

"Well, Austin. Unavoidably abstract ideas would have to be considered first class ontological citizens, not derivative entities dependent on some 'material reality'."

"You mean..."

"Yes, Austin. I'm afraid so. We'd be forced to concede that abstract ideas exist independently of our perception of them."

As they crested the brow of Nob Hill at the Fairmont, the chill wind hit them full force. Austin cinched his parka hood tighter around his face.

"But Santiago, that position leads to all kinds of paradoxes and contradictions."

"It's empiricism that leads to contradictions. What are we to think of an argument that finally degenerates into the proposition that language is meaningless? Aristotle calls this 'negative demonstration' and recommends that one back away slowly from such an interlocutor.

"On the other hand, what results from the rejection of the fundamentals of empiricism? Paradox perhaps, mystery certainly, but not contradiction. You know, Austin, in Plato's 'Parmenides' a young Socrates trots out a variety of mechanisms describing the working of "Ideas" and an older and much wiser Parmenides attacks and destroys each of these." Santiago was wearing a thin flannel shirt and a watch cap but did not appear either bothered by the cold or winded by the steep climb up California Street. "But once the dust settles and Socrates is forced to concede that he's unable to explain the behavior of these 'Ideas', do you recall what Parmenides says to young Socrates?"

"No. What." Austin said, teeth chattering.

'And yet, Socrates', said Parmenides, 'if a man, fixing his attention on these and the like difficulties, does away with ideas of things and will not admit that every individual thing has its own determinate idea which is always one and the same, he will have nothing on which his mind can rest; and so he will utterly destroy the power of reasoning...'

[Plato, "Parmenides", 135c (Jowett)]

"I thought young Socrates said that."

"No, Austin, Parmenides says it. In Socrates mouth it would have been merely a loser's carping whine. But coming from Parmenides this statement is - if I may say so - one of the great hinges of Western Philosophy."

"I think that's the stuff in the little teacups talking Santiago."

"A prominent analytic philosopher once conceded that '...complete metaphysical agnosticism is not compatible with the maintenance of linguistic propositions'. Which amounts to the same thing as Parmenides' observation. Which amounts to saying that the meaningfulness of language requires the existence - independent of our perception of them - of abstractions."

"It seems to me", Austin said, still musing about the provenance of the passage in question, "that Socrates said that. Not Parmenides."

"You know why you think that, Austin?"

"Why?"

"Because Russell mistakenly attributes the remark to Socrates." ['History of Western Philosophy', P. 128, Simon & Schuster, 15th printing]

They'd arrived at Post and Hyde, the Weller Hotel, Santiago's home. A light shone in a window on the second floor. "Zoia's waited up for me I see. Goodnight Joseph. Goodnight Austin. Thank you both for your company and for the pleasure of your conversation."

Joe and Austin started down Post, their footsteps echoing in the empty street.

"Hey Santiago!" Austin had turned and was walking backwards - none too steadily.

"Who said that '...complete metaphysical agnosticism is not compatible with the maintenance of linguistic propositions'?"

"Russell, Austin. Bertrand Russell."

"Oh." Austin turned and hurried to catch up with Joe. The two continued up Post, over Van Ness, past the huge, white mitre'd dome of St. Mary's, floodlit in the mist, to the little cedar shingled cottage on Hemlock Street.

Chapter 6: Berkeley Fundamentals

One Friday evening Joe suggested we go down to "Minnie's Can-Do Club" on Fillmore to hear "Crazy Mike and His Bad All-Stars".

Minnie's was dimly lit and smelled of stale beer and cigarettes. A jukebox was playing:

"Father, father, everybody thinks we're wrong,
Oh but who are they to judge us just because our hair is long..."

There was already a pretty good crowd in Minnie's. Joe and I threaded our way between the patrons seated at the bar and the cocktail tables crowded against the wall. In the back Minnie's opened out into a space big enough - barely - for a band to set up. The pool table had been pushed into a corner and speakers and amplifiers were piled on a piece of plywood laid across the table to protect the felt. A little yellow-painted spinet piano sat in front of the pool table and in front of the piano a small drum kit and a guitar and bass and microphones completed "Crazy Mike and His Bad All-Stars'" modest set up.

My eyes had grown accustomed to the dim lighting and I noticed Murray sitting at the bar, opposite the piano.

"Joe, hey look, it's Murray..."

I turned to Joe. But Joe had disappeared.

Murray smiled at me and patted the red vinyl seat of the empty barstool to her left. I climbed up onto the barstool and turned to look back at the door.

"I wonder where Joe went, Murray?"

Murray gave me a long, sad smile and drank off the remains of her beer.

"You don't know much do you Tommy Saxophone."

Murray signalled to Minnie for another beer and ordered me a coke. Minnie's Can-Do Club was full now. The bar was lined with working men - carpenters, their pants dusted with gypsum, laborers, cab drivers, a few Muni bus drivers still in their olive drab uniforms, ties loosened.

A group of hippies from a local macrobiotic commune sat at one table. Their hair was long and clean and parted in the middle and all wore sandals without socks, toenails meticulously trimmed. In front of each was a full glass of beer. They sat smiling faintly, practicing their "ahimsa". One particularly adept young man had managed to fold himself into the full lotus on the little bentwood chair.

A group of poor, white, rude boys sat at the next table. They were from Daly City and South San Francisco and Burlingame, and huddled over their beers protectively, resentfully, meeting no one's eyes. The cuff of each boy's right trouser leg was frayed. They were bicycle messengers.

Minnie reappeared in front of Murray and me with a bottle of whiskey and two shot glasses. Minnie was a black woman with a short Afro and the no-nonsense air of the bar owner. She slammed the glasses down in front of us and poured us each a shot. As she closed up the bottle Minnie gave a nod toward the end of the bar.

A middle aged white man sat at the very end of the bar. He wore a red handkerchief tied over his head and denim motorcycle colors. His bare arms were fleshy, flabby and his face was sensitive and intelligent. Catching my eye and holding it, he touched two fingers to his forehead and then - waving his fingers in a little cascade of circlets, an Oriental gesture of obeisance, a Salaam - he touched his fingers to his chest. With some effort I broke the spell of the stranger's penetrating gaze and glanced at Murray. She was looking straight ahead.

"Drink your whiskey, dear."

My eyes were swimming in tears and my throat was burning as I turned to watch the activity on the bandstand. Charlie Hickox, a skinny blonde boy of 15 or 16, was at the piano. One of the Muni bus drivers was looking over Charlie's shoulder apparently coaching him, helping him find something. Charlie would play a fragment of blues and the Muni driver would shake his head; then Charlie would try something else. Finally, Charlie played a rolling bass line borrowed from an old Fats Domino song. The Muni driver smiled. He made a palms up gesture and Charlie moved the tune to a higher key. (The modulation was not just a crude jump but a well prepared and harmonically detailed transition through two key centers to a third tonality more comfortable for the driver. Charlie was a very, very gifted boy.)

The Muni driver had what he wanted now and stepped around in front of the piano and taking a microphone out of its stand he began to speak:

"I am not a millionaire..."

The Muni driver was a balding black man with a gap toothed smile. He wore a wedding band on the hand that held the microphone. He was a big man and his shoulders strained the seams of his short Eisenhower jacket.

"...but I have spent a million dollars."

The crowd cheered as the Muni driver, supported by Charlie's confident ostinato, began to sing Howlin' Wolf's famous blues:

"...I have had my fun, if I never get well no more."

The Muni driver finished his song, acknowledged the applause and returned to his stool at the bar. Now the bass player, the drummer and Crazy Mike joined Charlie on the stand. The drummer settled himself on his throne and faced around to the bass player. Crazy Mike picked up his SG and carefully put the strap over his head. Clasping the horn of the guitar with both hands and lowering his head, Crazy Mike stood motionless.

The band having settled themselves into position Charlie begins to sing the introduction to an old R&B tune. Charlie Hickox is a thin blonde reed of a boy but with a strong tenor. The first dozen measures are rubato, pensive. Gradually the pulse strengthens and accelerates. As the introduction draws to a close, Charlie is telling his story in full voice, accompanying himself with big, churchy, splay-fingered chords. With two measures left in the introduction the rest of the band - which has been standing by quietly, the bass player and drummer gazing into one another's eyes, Crazy Mike slouched over his guitar, head bowed as if in prayer - are moved to action. The bass player and drummer set up an eighth note tatoo. With one beat left in the last measure of the introduction, the drummer reaches out and pulls the microphone boom closer. A rim shot rings out like the report of a rifle. For an instant there is total silence. And then in one coordinated motion Crazy Mike and the bass player swing the necks of their guitars 45 degrees and step to their microphones and the voices of Crazy Mike, the bass player and the drummer are joined in an open-mouthed angelic sigh of harmony as Charlie begins to sing his song.

The macrobiotic hippies, the Muni bus drivers, the dyspeptic bicycle waifs, carpenters and cab drivers, black and white, young and old, renunciant and merely poor, the whole crowd reponds with a roar of pleasure as the beautiful music of "Crazy Mike And His Bad All-Stars" fills Minnie's Can-Do Club.

My ears were ringing when Murray and I left Minnie's. The fresh air felt cool and bracing. Murray and I walked up Fillmore and started up Hemlock in the fog.

"Murray, who was that man that bought us whiskeys?"

"That was Gavin Arthur, darlin'."

"Why did he buy me a whiskey?"

Murray was trudging up Hemlock a step or two ahead of me.

"Gavin Arthur thought it would be nice if you could tell your grandchildren that Gavin Arthur had once bought you a whiskey" Murray said without turning around.

"Who is Gavin Arthur?"

But Murray had already reached the corner and was trudging up Laguna toward the old apartment house which stood alone in the vacant lot and of which she was sole tenant.

"'Thus I refute Bishop Berkeley!'" Hutch kicked energetically at an imaginary rock.

Santiago, Wolfgang, Austin and Joe were seated at their customary window table in the Fosters at Polk and Sutter. Hutch was standing and relating with relish the story of Dr. Johnson's reaction to a sermon by Bishop Berkeley.

"Boswell and Dr. Johnson were leaving the church and Dr. Johnson was perplexed and irritated by Berkeley's 'proof' of the non-existence of matter. They're in the churchyard and suddenly, Dr. Johnson draws back and kicks a big stone saying 'Thus I refute Bishop Berkeley!'"

Again Hutch accompanied the famous exclamation with a vigorous kick. He was so absorbed in his pantomime that he didn't see Santiago's weary roll of the eyes.

"Thank you, Hutch. We've now had the opportunity to savor your reenactment of this great moment in intellectual history three times. Was there anything else you wished to share with the group?"

Hutch and Austin had each bet Santiago one hundred dollars that Santiago could not disprove the proposition that "science is the bedrock of truth" - a paraphrase of a statement made by Bertrand Russell.

Santiago proposed to refute that proposition by first placing it in the context of the Empiricist tradition - that thread that runs from Locke through Hume to Frege and Russell. Having thereby established a historical context for Russell's use of the terms "science" and "truth", Santiago would demonstrate a certain fatal contradiction at the heart of that tradition. To wit, and as Santiago had repeated several times, "If 'science is the bedrock of truth' then language is meaningless. But since that statement - that 'science is the bedrock of truth' - is clearly meaningful it cannot also be true."

Hutch and Austin were reasonable young men in the late 20th century mold. That is, they embraced science and rejected religion as organized superstition. Both esteemed Bertrand Russell but each for his own reasons. Austin, a graduate student in philosophy at the University of California at Berkeley, was acquainted with the polemical, philosophical and mathematical achievements of that thinker.

Hutch, on the other hand, a medical student - but quite literate - admired Russell's less rigorous writings (especially the famous essay "A Free Man's Worship"). Hutch assumed that Russell's contributions to the more technical specialties of philosophy and mathematics must have been suffiently sound and original to have earned Russell the license to speak and write as the "conscience of the 20th century". Hutch was even less inclined to question the reliability of the Empiricist tradition on which Russell based his work.

So it was with some uneasiness that Hutch had listened to Santiago's attack on Locke, the founder of that tradition. There was much about Locke - and Empiricism in general - that Hutch had learned for the first time during their discussions a few weeks earlier. Hutch had determined to be more prepared for their subsequent discussions and to that end had carefully gone over Berkeley's "Three Dialogues Between Hylas and Philonous in Opposition to Sceptics and Atheists" as well as the lesser known "Principles of Human Knowledge." But as Hutch had read and re-read Berkeley's writings - late at night in his Palo Alto garden apartment and in uncharacteristic neglect of his medical studies - he had developed a serious concern for the intellectual capabilities of that stalwart Empiricist.

"He's a boob!"

Hutch was still standing, leaning with both hands on the back of his chair and looming - he was a big, stocky young man - over the smaller, more wiry, Austin who sat tipped back chewing absently on a red plastic cocktail swizzle stick.

"He's a boob, Austin! A one hundred percent gold plated booby!"

Hutch directed these remarks at Austin, his ally in the wager against Santiago. Perhaps Hutch felt betrayed that Berkeley, the second philosopher to come up for their consideration, should occasionally espouse doctrines he found so repugnant. Perhaps Hutch felt that Austin, who was after all a graduate student in philosophy, should have warned him of the variety of opinion that might be uncovered in an examination of the Empiricist tradition - a tradition that should have, in Hutch's mind, provided a solid theoretical foundation for the modern progressive ideologies of which he was so fond.

"Why would one even want to attend a university named in his honor." Hutch spoke half under his breath as he leafed through an anthology of Berkeley's work. Austin took the swizzle stick from his mouth and started to reply but Hutch had found the passage he'd been looking for.

...[I]n the business of gravitation or mutual attraction, because it appears in many instances, some are straightway for pronouncing it universal; and that to attract and be attracted by every other body is an essential quality inherent in all bodies whatsoever. Whereas it is evident the fixed stars have no such tendency towards each other; and, so far is that gravitation from being essential to bodies that in some instances a quite contrary principle seems to show itself; as in the perpendicular growth of plants, and the elasticity of the air. [Berkeley "Principles of Human Knowledge" Section 106, (Everyman Edition, p. 166)]

"This is Empiricism, Austin? With friends like this science needs no enemies."

As to what is said of the centrifugal force, that it does not at all belong to circular relative motion, I do not see how this follows from the experiment which is brought to prove it...For the water in the vessel at that time wherein it is said to have the greatest relative circular motion, has, I think, no motion at all..[Berkeley "Principles of Human Knowledge", Section 114. (Everyman Edition, p. 171-172)]

"And now," Hutch said, "having corrected Isaac Newton, the greatest mind in the history of science, Berkeley will have his way with the Queen of the Sciences:"

119. Arithmetic has been thought to have for its object abstract ideas of Number; of which to understand the properties and mutual habitudes, is supposed no mean part of speculative knowledge. The opinion of the pure and intellectual nature of numbers in abstract has made them in esteem with those philosophers who seem to have affected an uncommon fineness and elevation of thought. It has set a price on the most trifling numerical speculations which in practice are of no use, but serve only for amusement; and has therefore so far infected the minds of some, that they have dreamed of mighty mysteries involved in numbers, and attempted the explication of natural things by them. But, if we inquire into our own thoughts, and consider what has been premised, we may perhaps entertain a low opinion of those high flights and abstractions, and look on all inquiries, about numbers only as so many difficiles nugae, so far as they are not subservient to practice, and promote the benefit of life.

120. ...[H]ence we may see how entirely the science of numbers is subordinate to practice, and how jejune and trifling it becomes when considered as a matter of mere speculation.

"But really there's no stopping the man..."

121. ...However, since there may be some who, deluded by the specious show of discovering abstracted verities, waste their time in arithmetical theorems and problems which have not any use, it will not be amiss if we more fully consider and expose the vanity of that pretence.[Berkeley "Principles of Human Knowledge", Everyman Edition, p. 175]

"And finally Berkeley pinpoints the source of our mathematical perplexities. I feel so much better after reading his explanation."

123. ...And, as this notion [the infinite divisibility of finite extension] is the source from whence do spring all those amusing geometrical paradoxes which have such a direct repugnancy to the plain common sense of mankind, and are admitted with so much reluctance into a mind not yet debauched by learning; so it is the principal occasion of all that nice and extreme subtilty which renders the study of Mathematics so difficult and tedious. Hence, if we can make it appear that no finite extension contains innumerable parts, or is infinitely divisible, it follows that we shall at once clear the science of Geometry from a great number of difficulties and contradictions which have ever been esteemed a reproach to human reason, and withal make the attainment thereof a business of much less time and pains than it hitherto has been.[Berkeley "Principles of Human Knowledge", Everyman Edition, pp. 177-178]

Hutch tossed the book onto the table and took his seat. There was a long silence. Hutch stared at the table as the others quietly digested his remarks.

"You're missing the point Hutch." Austin delivered the provocative remark quite equably which infuriated Hutch. Hutch began to leaf through the Berkeley anthology looking for ammunition with which to respond to Austin.

Now, the Fosters in which our philosophers met sits at the northeast corner of Polk and Sutter. That whole intersection was visible from the table at which the group sat, and beyond the intersection they could see west, uphill, up Sutter all the way to Van Ness Avenue.

"Look, Santiago, it's Wild Man!" Wolfgang pointed out the window.

Indeed, there were two bicycle messengers at the top of Sutter beginning their descent to Polk. Hutch interrupted his rummaging through the Berkeley anthology and turned to watch. Austin took the swizzle stick out of his mouth and tipped his chair back onto all four legs.

Sutter is one way, westbound, and because the light at Polk was red, Sutter, from Polk up to Van Ness was clear of traffic. The messengers rode old truck bikes with wire baskets and high handlebars. Each messenger had taken a lane and they gathered speed as they coasted downhill toward Polk. Cross traffic on Polk was heavy and moving briskly in both directions and as the messengers neared the intersection, one messenger began to slow down for the light.

But the other messenger, heedless of the traffic flowing at speed both ways on Polk, applied himself to the pedals. The group in Fosters half rose from their seats, riveted by the spectacle as the reckless bike messenger hurtled into the busy intersection without so much as a glance in either direction - and then shot out the other side of the intersection an instant later having by some miracle avoided serious injury or worse.

As he sped past the window at which the group sat the messenger stood up on the pedals of the old Schwinn, threw his head back, long hair flowing in the wind, and gave out with a long wolf howl that echoed between the buildings as he disappeared up the block.

Santiago, Wolfgang, Hutch, Austin and Joe turned from the window catching their breaths and commenting on the near-tragedy they'd just witnessed.

"Santiago, it is Wild Man!" Wolfgang exclaimed and got up and began to make room at the table. The messenger who'd had the sense to stop at the light had made his way across Polk, parked his bicycle, and was now coming toward their table apparently intending to join the group.

Wild Man Bill was probably six feet tall but he walked with a slouch, almost a hunchback, that made him seem shorter. A flounce of kinky black hair swept back from low on his forehead. His eyes were beady on either side of a huge beak of a nose. He had a small mouth, his upper lip overhanging the lower slightly. Wild Man was more or less clean shaven but with a dark shadow of a beard coming in. Chest hair poked out of the top of his t-shirt. He wore a walkie-talkie in a heavy canvas shoulder holster.

"10!" The radio crackled to life. Bill pulled the radio toward his mouth.

"10 here."

"Where you at 10?"

"10 clean at Polk and Sutter."

"Take lunch", and the radio went dead.

"Yess!", Wild Man said triumphantly, the 's' trailing off in a long lisping sibilant hiss.

Wolfgang had made a place for Wild Man and now stood to introduce him to the group.

"You know Joe I think." Joe, who knew everyone, nodded.

"Hutch, Austin, this is our dear friend Wild Man Bill."

Austin and - especially - Hutch were irritated at the interruption of their discussion and were barely courteous, each leaning forward to receive a limp, sweaty handshake from the bicycle messenger.

A very faint ironic smile played on Wild Man's little mouth during the introductions. Even more unsettling, Wild Man was, as they say, "shifty eyed". He appeared reluctant to meet the gaze of his interlocutor but darted his eyes from side to side, making eye contact only briefly and obliquely.

Wild Man sat down in the seat Wolfgang was holding out for him and put a grease stained brown paper bag on the table. The bag was creased midway with a horizontal furrow, no doubt from spending the morning pinned to the back of the bicycle basket with an elastic bunchie cord.

"Put it away, Bill", Santiago rumbled. "That can be your little snackie this afternoon. Today I buy!" Santiago motioned for Alberto the cook.

"Sure", Wild Man said, still with the ironic little smile, and put a battered little white bread sandwich back in the greasy bag.

"Alberto, what have you got today to serve a Hero Of Labor?"

"Oh, we have a very tasty open face sandwich, with a hot gravy and mashed potatoes and delicious green beans. We have turkey and a very nice roast beef."

Wild Man opened his mouth to express a preference but Santiago interrupted.

"The gentleman will take one of each."

"Sure" Wild Man shrugged and nodded.

"...And coffee and rice pudding." Santiago turned to Wild Man. "Rice pudding OK, Bill?"

"Definitely!"

Alberto set off for the kitchen.

Wild Man reached out with a grubby forefinger, the nail bitten to the blackened quick, and nudged a copy of the Berkeley anthology around so that he could read the title on the book's spine.

"Hmm...Berkeley.."

"It's pronounced 'Barkly' not 'Burkly'", Hutch said sharply. "Now where were we when we were so..." Hutch let the rude formula trail off without completing it and resumed his paging through his copy of the Berkeley. "So, Austin, missing the point am I?"

Austin sat leaning foward, elbows on his knees, gesturing reasonably with his hands. The red swizzle stick lay across the rim of his coffee cup.

"Hutch, there's a lot of stupid stuff in Berkeley, granted. But he also makes a core argument that's worth checking out."

"Oh, you mean the argument that Dr. Johnson refutes so smartly?"

Austin started to respond to Hutch's provocation but controlled himself and instead reached for a copy of Berkeley lying on the table. He leafed through the book looking for a certain passage.

"In the 'Three Dialogues Between Hylas and Philonous'..." Austin began.

"Oh heaven help us, it's the 'Three Dialogues'", Hutch interrupted. "Hylas and Philonous, 'the purple sky', 'the wild sweet notes of the birds'. Did Berkeley really think that wrapping his hare-brained philosophical speculations in a cheap literary conceit would make them that much more convincing?" Hutch shook his head doubtfully. "Well, he's no Dostoyevsky, I can tell you that!

"It's a pity Berkeley didn't live a few centuries later. We might have had", and here Hutch looked toward the ceiling and made a sweeping gesture with his hand, "'Philosophical Shootout at the OK Garden', starring Henry Fonda as Philonous and introducing, as Philonous' zany sidekick Hylas'..." Hutch scooped some water from his water glass and wetting his hair smoothed the damp bangs down over his forehead. "...Peter Lorre!". Cringing and wringing his hands and bugging his eyes out, Hutch imitated the famous actor's sychophantic whine. "'I know you despise me, Philonous'."

All at the table laughed; all except Austin who understood that Hutch was holding him responsible for Berkeley's entire corpus and that Hutch's humor was directed at him. Austin waited for the hilarity to subside and then began to read from the "Three Dialogues".

Philonous: If you can conceive it possible for any mixture or combination of qualities, or any sensible object whatever, to exist without the mind, then I will grant it actually to be so.

Hylas: If it comes to that the point will soon be decided. What more easy than to conceive a tree or house existing by itself, independent of, and unperceived by, any mind whatsoever? I do at this present time conceive them existing after that manner.

Phil: How say you, Hylas, can you see a thing which is at the same time unseen?

Hylas: No, that were a contradiction.

Philonous:. Is it not as great a contradiction to talk of conceiving a thing which is unconceived?

Hylas: It is.

Philonous:. The, tree or house therefore which you think of is conceived by you?

Hylas: How should it be otherwise?

Philonous:. And what is conceived is surely in the mind?

Hylas: Without question, that which is conceived is in the mind.

Philonous:. How then came you to say, you conceived a house or tree existing independent and out of all minds whatsoever?

["Three Dialogues Between Hylas and Philonous", Everyman Edition, "Writings of Bishop Berkeley", p. 232]

"Oh come now Austin! Please!" Hutch said. "It's a vaudeville routine! It's Abbott and Costello! You don't mean to tell me that you attach some intellectual significance to this?"

Austin responded with another passage from the "Three Dialogues".

Hylas:. Is it not certain I see things at a distance? Do we not perceive the stars and moon, for example, to be a great way off? Is not this, I say, manifest to the senses?

Philonous:. Do you not in a dream too perceive these or the like objects?

Hylas:. I do.

Philonous:. And yet you will earnestly contend for the truth of that which you cannot so much as conceive?

Hylas:. I profess I know not what to think; but still there are some scruples remain with me. Is it not certain I a distance? Do we not perceive the stars and moon, for example, to be a great way off? Is not this, I say, manifest to the senses?

Philonous:. Do you not in a dream too perceive those or the like objects?

Hylas: I do.

Philonous:. And have they not then the same appearance of being distant?

Hylas: They have.

Philonous:. But you do not thence conclude the apparitions in a dream to be without the mind?

Hylas: By no means.

Philonous:. You ought not therefore to conclude that sensible objects are without the mind, from their appearance, or manner wherein they are perceived.

["Three Dialogues Between Hylas and Philonous", Everyman Edition, "Writings of Bishop Berkeley", p. 233]

Austin closed the book. "So Hutch, assuming that Philonous speaks for Berkeley, where has the 'booby' gone wrong?

"It's kind of like..." It was Wild Man thoughtfully considering the philosophical passages. His meal, or rather meals, had arrived and as he spoke he gestured with his utensils, the knife in his right hand, the fork held, continental style, points down, in his grimy left hand, knuckles covered with dark hair.

"...it's kind of like trying to know if the light is on in the refrigerator when the door is closed."

For Hutch that was enough. He turned on Wild Man, snarling: "Well it is reassuring to know where we can find the opinion of the man-on-the-street in the unlikely event we should ever care to hear it!"

Wild Man turned back to his dinner unperturbed by Hutch's insulting tone and Hutch turned back to Austin.

"Does the external world exist independent of my perception of it? Yes. Will the world go on existing after I die? Does the tree falling in a forest make a sound? Does matter exist independent of mind? Yes, yes and yes!"

"You believe this, Hutch?"

"Of course", Hutch answered scornfully, "and, I daresay, so do you, Austin."

"Wolfgang, what exactly did Boswell say about the incident following Berkeley's sermon?"

As Austin was sure he would, Wolfgang had the entire passage from memory.

'After we came out of the church we stood talking for some time together of Bishop Berkeley's ingenious sophistry to prove the non-existence of matter I observed that though we are satisfied his doctrine is not true, it is impossible to refute it. I never shall forget the alacrity with which Johnson answered, striking his foot with mighty force against a large stone, till he rebounded from it. "I refute it thus!"'

"So Hutch, Boswell says of Berkeley's argument, '...though we are satisfied Berkeley's doctrine is not true, it is impossible to refute it'. I hate to tell you this, Hutch, but as history records it, Dr. Johnson - the stone-kicker - is the 'boob'!

"And you know, even Russell said that 'it cannot be strictly proved to be false that...the whole outer world is nothing but a dream'."

Here Wolfgang broke in. "I'm sorry Austin".

"What!" Austin was peeved at the interruption.

"Russell didn't say exactly that, Austin. Russell said that

...We have to ask ourselves whether, in any sense at all, there is such a thing as matter. Is there a table which has a certain intrinsic nature, and continues to exist when I am not looking, or is the table merely a product of my imagination, a dream-table in a very prolonged dream? This question is of the greatest importance. For if we cannot be sure of the independent existence of objects, we cannot be sure of the independent existence of other people's bodies, and therefore still less of other people's minds, since we have no grounds for believing in their minds except such as are derived from observing their bodies. Thus if we cannot be sure of the independent existence of objects, we shall be left alone in a desert -- it may be that the whole outer world is nothing but a dream, and that we alone exist. This is an uncomfortable possibility; but although it cannot be strictly proved to be false, there is not the slightest reason to suppose that it is true.
['The Problems Of Philosophy', Oxford University Press, 1997, p.17 or http://www.ditext.com/russell/russell.html]

Hutch, encouraged, rejoined the conversation. "So Johnson is not a boob after all since Russell and he 'pretty much' agree that the 'external world' exists."

"Not so fast, Hutch. Obviously there's a big difference between kicking a rock and supplying an argument like Russell's."

"Well maybe Johnson's rock-kick has some merit as shorthand for Russell's argument."

"You're familiar with Russell's argument then?"

"Well, not really..."

"Ah ha!"

"Really, Austin", Wolfgang intervened, "perhaps you're not being quite fair. The rock-kick might be said to embody a sort of naive folk-wisdom."

Austin disregarded Wolfgang's comment and continued to address Hutch, "Russell conceded he couldn't prove that the world is not a dream. But maybe you can succeed where even Russell failed. Here." Austin pushed a pad of paper and a pencil toward Hutch. "Go ahead, Hutch. If you hurry, maybe you can solve both 'the problem of the external world' and Fermat's theorem in time for tomorrow morning's Chronicle."

Hutch glared at Austin for a moment and then a sly smile spread slowly across his face.

"It's a pseudo problem!"

"What?"

"You heard me, Austin. Whether or not the external world exists is a pseudo problem."

"You don't even know what a philosophical 'pseudo problem' is, Hutch. You're just repeating something you heard in the student lounge. Besides, while the 'problem of the external world' may or may not be a 'pseudo problem', deciding whether or not it *is* a 'pseudo problem' is a *real* problem."

"Oh brother," Hutch threw up his hands, "who can even talk to you philosophers!"

Just at this point, Wild Man, who'd been enjoying a post prandial cigarette courtesy of Santiago, felt moved to re-enter the conversation.

"Hey Austin, man," he said expansively, "have you guys really thought about that this is like trying to know if the light is on in the refrigerator when the door is closed?"

Between the frustration of his argument with Austin and the irritation of Wild Man's innocent blather Hutch's patience snapped entirely. Speechless with anger, Hutch was leaning threateningly across the table toward Wild Man when the walkie-talkie came to life again.

"10!"

"10 here."

"Dancer Fitzgerald pick up one for Shupin. Skidmore pick up two. Check me at Market and Third with two." The radio went dead.

"Thanks for lunch Santiago". Wild Man acknowledged the rest of the table briefly, eyes darting here and there, the little ironic smile playing about the rosebud lips. In seconds he was out the door, on his bicycle and heading north on Polk.

The messenger's departure had a calming effect on Hutch who now turned his attention to Santiago.

Chapter 7: Berkeley On Language

"So what about you, Santiago? You seem to have figured this all out. Is the world real or just an illusion? Do you agree with Berkeley that: "

...[it is] impossible that any colour or extension at all, or other sensible quality whatsoever, should exist in an UNTHINKING subject without the mind, or in truth, that there should be any such thing as an outward object.[Berkeley "Principles of Human Knowledge" Section 15, (Everyman Edition, p. 120)]

"and that"

PARTICULAR bodies, of what kind soever, do none of them exist whilst they are not perceived.[Berkeley "Principles of Human Knowledge" Section 47, (Everyman Edition, p. 135)]

"and that"

"neither the particular bodies perceived by sense, nor anything like them, exists without the mind."[Berkeley "Principles of Human Knowledge" Section 47, (Everyman Edition, p. 136)]

"You must have thought about this, Santiago. How do you deal with the questions Berkeley raises?"

"I don't, Hutch. The first time I read Berkeley I was a few years younger than yourself and serving on a freighter en route from Lisbon to Seattle. We were waiting in line to go through the Panama Canal and it must have been 120 degrees belowdecks. I was so taken with Berkeley's argument that I couldn't help reading portions aloud to the seaman in the next hammock. He broke a bottle against a bulkhead and implored me to concede that he existed. I haven't speculated much on the substantiality of the 'external world' since. And as you and Austin have amply demonstrated, this argument goes nowhere."

"Oh come now, Santiago." Wolfgang intervened. "Tell the boys your thoughts on this topic."

"It would be as so much sand thrown in their eyes Wolfie. A discussion of the 'independent reality of the external world' would only serve to distract us from my main argument. Suffice it to say that Berkeley simply denies the reality of the objects behind the Lockean 'scrim', Locke's 'unknown common subjects' and Berkeley is inarguably correct. Is the Empiricist's world less 'substantial' once Berkeley's correction of Locke is taken into account? Not my problem, friends.

"The real problem with Empiricism, its soft underbelly as it were, has to do with the inability of Empiricism to account for the phenonmena of language. Our dreams are populated with big giraffes and red houses and all manner and variety of things. The picture of reality which ensues as a consequence of the premisses of Empiricism is inconceivably meaningless, insufficiently robust to support even a dream. Until we've established a foundation for the meaningfulness of language, any questions regarding the independent reality of the external world are moot."

Santiago paused here, took off his glasses and cleared his throat, signals that he wished to regain control of a conversation that to his mind had begun to range fairly far afield.

"Now, Hutch, I know what you're thinking: 'Why do we consider Berkeley an Empiricist?'

"Berkeley is an Empiricist because he affirms the fundamental axiom of Empiricism. To wit:" Santiago put his glasses back on.

Philonous: I see this cherry, I feel it, I taste it: and I am sure nothing cannot be seen, or felt, or tasted: it is therefore red. Take away the sensations of softness, moisture, redness, tartness, and you take away the cherry, since it is not a being distinct from sensations. A cherry, I say, is nothing but a congeries of sensible impressions, or ideas perceived by various senses: which ideas are united into one thing (or have one name given them) by the mind, because they are observed to attend each other. Thus, when the palate is affected with such a particular taste, the sight is affected with a red colour, the touch with roundness, softness, &c. Hence, when I see, and feel, and taste, in such sundry certain manners, I am sure the cherry exists, or is real; its reality being in my opinion nothing abstracted from those sensations. ["Three Dialogues Between Hylas and Philonous", Everyman Edition, "Writings of Bishop Berkeley", p. 287]

"This, Hutch, is Empiricism and the philosopher who will affirm the proposition that any given object 'is not a being distinct from sensations' is forgiven any amount of cockamamie mishegas", Santiago used the Yiddish expression for 'arrant foolishness', "and is welcomed home with open arms.

"However, as we saw in Locke, strange consequences flow from this fundamental Empiricist precept, particularly with regard to language and abstraction. Locke encounters these difficulties late in his investigations and is surprised by them.

I must confess, then, that, when I first began this Discourse of the Understanding, and a good while after, I had not the least thought that any consideration of words was at all necessary to it.[Locke's "Essay Concerning Human Understanding", 3.9.21]

"You may recall that Locke denies - is forced to deny - the possibility of 'real essence'. The meaningfulness of language is not rooted in the world, in 'reality', but in subjective manipulations of sensation which produce what Locke calls 'nominal essence'.

"But as we've seen, Locke himself is dismayed by the inadequacy of this arrangment, that is, by the having to establish the meaningfulness of language based on 'nominal essence'."

One thing I doubt not but will seem very strange in this doctrine, which is, that from what has been said it will follow, that each abstract idea, with a name to it, makes a distinct species. But who can help it, if truth will have it so?
[Locke's "Essay" 3.6.38]

"You'll recall that in his search for the source of the meaningfulness of words, Locke is finally forced to retreat to the following:"

By the word GOLD here, I must be understood to design a particular piece of matter; v. g. the last guinea that was coined. For, if it should stand here, in its ordinary signification, for that complex idea which I or any one else calls gold, i. e. for the nominal essence of gold, it would be jargon. So hard is it to show the various meaning and imperfection of words, when we have nothing else but words to do it by.
[Locke's "Essay" 3.6.19]

"But Berkeley simply sweeps aside Locke's perplexities. It's so straightforward, Berkeley tells us: there no such thing as an 'abstract idea'."

6. A CHIEF SOURCE OF ERROR IN ALL PARTS OF KNOWLEDGE.--In order to prepare the mind of the reader for the easier conceiving what follows, it is proper to premise somewhat, by way of Introduction, concerning the nature and abuse of Language. But the unravelling this matter leads me in some measure to anticipate my design, by taking notice of what seems to have had a chief part in rendering speculation intricate and perplexed, and to have occasioned innumerable errors and difficulties in almost all parts of knowledge. And that is the opinion that the mind has a power of framing ABSTRACT IDEAS or notions of things.

7. PROPER ACCEPTATION OF ABSTRACTION.--It is agreed on all hands that the qualities or modes of things do never REALLY EXIST EACH OF THEM APART BY ITSELF, and separated from all others, but are mixed, as it were, and blended together, several in the same object.[Berkeley "Principles of Human Knowledge" Introduction, (Everyman Edition, p. 95)]

"Berkeley rejects the notion that

'...the making use of words implies the having general ideas'." [Berkeley, "Principles of Human Knowledge", Introduction, (Everyman Edition, p. 99)]

"...and goes on to make the following interesting aside with regard to language."

Since therefore words are so apt to impose on the understanding I am resolved in my inquiries to make as little use of them as possibly I can. [Berkeley, "Principles of Human Knowledge", Introduction, (Everyman Edition, p. 109)]

Santiago looked up from the book. "Good stuff, eh, Hutch?" Hutch responded by directing another angry glare at Austin.

"So by virtue of what sorts of ideas are 'general terms' - which are after all just bare noises - made meaningful?"

...a word becomes general by being made the sign, not of an ABSTRACT general idea, but of several particular ideas...any one of which it indifferently suggests to the mind.[Berkeley, "Principles of Human Knowledge", Introduction, (Everyman Edition, p. 100)]

Now, if we will annex a meaning to our words, and speak only of what we can conceive, I believe we shall acknowledge that an idea which, considered in itself, is particular, becomes general by being made to represent or stand for all other particular ideas of the SAME SORT. [Berkeley, "Principles of Human Knowledge", Introduction, (Everyman Edition, p. 100)]
Whereas, in truth, there is no such thing as one precise and definite signification annexed to any general name, they all signifying indifferently a great number of particular ideas.[Berkeley, "Principles of Human Knowledge", Introduction, (Everyman Edition, p. 106)]

"Berkeley affirms Locke's proposition that 'all things that exist are only particulars' but then goes further."

Since all things that exist are only particulars, how come we by general terms?" His [Locke's] answer is: "Words become general by being made the signs of general ideas."--Essay on Human Understanding, IV. iii. 6. But it seems that a word becomes general by being made the sign, not of an ABSTRACT general idea, but of several particular ideas, any one of which it indifferently suggests to the mind. [Berkeley, "Principles of Human Knowledge", Introduction, (Everyman Edition, pp. 99)]

"Now, in his perplexity, Locke proposes that 'by the word GOLD...I must be understood to design a particular piece of matter; v. g. the last guinea that was coined'. As I noted earlier, this theory suffers from a circularity. That 'last guinea minted' is many things besides being a 'piece of gold'. It is a coin, a rock, a flat cylinder, etc. If that 'guinea' is to stand as the token of meaning of the word 'gold', we need to understand that we refer to that object 'qua' its 'goldness'. Reference to the particular still requires the support of a universal.

"Berkeley's solution that 'a word becomes general by being made the sign...of several particular ideas' suffers from an analogous problem. For example, I find this in this afternoon's Examiner."

Santiago picked a newspaper out of the pile of books and papers on the table.

"Under the headline 'Championship Potrero Hill Oriole's Are A Band Of Brother's' we read the following:"

The winners of this year's Catholic Youth Organization basketball championship is the Orioles, a team composed of the five Lanzo brothers from Potrero Hill. Led by forward Dom Lanzo, the team is undefeated this year.

"Now, Dom is a 'Potrero Hill Oriole'. But 'Potrero Hill Oriole' is an abstraction and according to Berkeley, there is no idea corresponding to the concept of 'Potrero Hill Oriole', there are only the particular five Orioles themselves - and the meaningfulness of the term 'Potrero Hill Oriole' lies in the 'class', as it were, of the five particular young men that comprise the team as represented by any one of its members.

"But Dom is also one of the 'Lanzo brothers'. The term 'Lanzo brother' is another abstract term that, per Berkeley, gets its meaning from a collection of particulars, in this case, the same five young men that comprise the Orioles. But clearly the terms 'Potrero Hill Oriole' and 'Lanzo brother' are not interchangeable. As with Locke's 'last guinea that was coined', some fragment of meaningfulness eludes us here.

"Berkeley's zeal for the 'particular' surpasses even Locke's. Like Locke, Berkeley fails to notice the starkness of the oxymoron: 'All things that exist are particulars', this state of affairs being achieved without the existence of such a thing as 'particularity'. But an author who has 'resolved in his inquiries to make as little use of words as possibly he can' is unlikely to have a highly developed sense of the ironic."

Santiago began to gather his things, whistling softly to himself, apparently satisfied with his own neat summation.

Hutch was in a sour mood as a result of what he perceived to be Empiricism's poor showing that afternoon and began to gather his books and papers, shoving them impatiently into his leather briefcase. By contrast Austin appeared not a bit defensive with regard to Berkeley's strange collection of philosophical oddments.

"Hey Santiago, assuming we've established a foundation for the meaningfulness of language, so then does the world exist independent of my perception of it or doesn't it?"

"Still badgering me about your foolish 'pseudo problem' Austin?" Santiago continued packing.

"Please Santiago", Wolfgang said gently, "tell the boys what you think about the 'problem of the external world'. It won't hurt you to tell them."

"Very well, Wolfie, I will, for all of the good it will do. Young man, if you must know, I believe that the world is an illusion of great moral consequence."

Austin nodded, "Interesting," and was about to make a further comment when he was interrupted by Hutch who had made a show of ignoring the whole exchange.

"Where are you parked, Austin?"

Hutch was riding back to Berkeley with Austin. Joe decided to tag along and visit some friends in the Oakland Hills.

Austin slid the side door open and Joe climbed in. The back of the VW bus was set up like a cozy little casbah. The van's prior owner had built a platform bed which was covered with a cotton India print throw and strewn with pillows. The windows were hung with matching India print curtains. Up front Austin was driving and Hutch was sitting in the passenger seat.

They rode down Post and across Market in uncomfortable silence.

"OK, big fella, what's the matter."

"Nothing", Hutch said.

They rode on in silence for a while. Finally as they drove through the dark and deserted warehouse district south of Market, Hutch blurted out "What's going on Austin? First Locke walks himself into an apparent cul-de-sac with regard to the meaningfulness of language and then this ninny Berkeley manages to sharpen every contradiction in Locke - and when he's not driving the Enlightenment into the ground he's ranting like...like Baba Ram Dass! And you sit there taking it all in as if everything is going according to plan!"

Hutch lapsed into silence again.

"Maybe Santiago was right" Austin said quietly, chewing thoughtfully on his red plastic swizzle stick.

Hutch found Austin's calm tone infuriating. "Right about what?"

"Maybe you're only attached to Russell's 'moral bromides'. Maybe you really don't want to 'dig in their found...'"

"Give me that stupid thing!"

Hutch lunged for the swizzle stick and missed but on a quick second lunge snatched the red plastic straw from Austin's mouth and rolling down the window tossed it out into the wind.

Hutch rolled the window back up. "With every fiber of my being I believe that science is the bedrock of truth. But if things don't improve..."

"Listen Hutch, not to worry."

"Can I look forward to our reading a philosopher who actually solves some of these issues Santiago is raising with regard to language?"

They were going over the Bay Bridge, the lights of the City behind them.

"Well, 'solves' is a pretty big word..."

"No, Austin, 'solves' is a very small word and your inability to tell the difference doesn't bode well for..."

"Hey, hey, take it easy big fella."

"Stop calling me 'big fella' or I'll pound your pointy little head for you!"

At this they both laughed. They were very good friends.

"Seriously, Hutch. We'll wrap this up when we get to the Big W."

"Big W?"

"Wittgenstein. Ludwig Wittgenstein."

They were in Berkeley now, driving up University Avenue. Joe called out to them to stop. There was something he wanted to show them. Austin pulled the bus over in front of a tiny white painted storefront and the three got out.

By the light of a streetlamp they could see a set of half a dozen cellophane covered dinner plates arrayed in the storefront window. A hand-lettered sign hanging inside the door said "Sam's Rotting Food Art".

Indeed, on closer inspection each plate had a full course meal - meatloaf and potatoes and gravy and green beans or fried chicken or fish sticks with french fries and cauliflower - what a diner might call the "blue plate special". Sitting in the sun in the storefront window each of the plates was in some phase of putrefaction, colorful molds growing out of the food.

"Hmmm. This is interesting."

"It's not interesting, Austin. It's idiotic!" Hutch gave Austin a backhanded slap on the shoulder. "Come on, let's get some beers."

Joe abandoned his plan to visit friends in the Oakland Hills - they weren't expecting him anyway - and joined Hutch and Austin for beers on Telegraph Avenue.

*** Chapter 8: Austin's Paper On David Stove and The Possibility Of Inductive Reasoning ***

[TOHN = Hume, 'Treatise of Human Nature, ed. Selby-Bigge (Oxford, 1880)]

This was the day the group had agreed to get together at Fosters' to discuss Hume. Austin had arranged to meet Wolfgang an hour or so before the appointed time in order that just the two of them might review a paper on Hume that Austin had recently completed and that he was considering sending in to a few journals.

Austin was reading aloud from his paper.

"In an exchange of monographs on the subject of 'Hume's Two Definitions of "Cause", [compiled in 'Hume: A Collection of Critical Essays', ed. V. C. Chappell, Anchor Books, 1966] J. A. Robinson and T. J. Richards attempt to reconcile apparent contradictions in the following passage from the Treatise.

We may define a CAUSE to be An object precedent and contiguous to another, and where all the objects resembling the former are placed in like relations of precedency and contiguity to those objects that resemble the latter. I If this definition be esteemed defective, because drawn from objects foreign to the cause, we may substitute this other definition in its place, viz. A CAUSE is an object precedent and contiguous to another, and so united with it, that the idea, of the one determines the mind to form the idea of the other, and the impression of the one to form a more lively idea of the other.
[Hume, TOHN, p. 170]

Of course 'to determine' is another way of saying 'to cause' - and perhaps Hume is attempting to 'pull himself up by his own bootstraps'. But to attack Hume for this cheap circularity is like taking a Grand Master's exposed Queen: one does so only with some apprehension.

On the other hand - and I believe this exhausts our options - perhaps Hume means for us to simply take the first clause of his definition of causation and plug it into the second clause in place of the troublesome 'determines'. Ultimately this appears to me to force us to conclude that Hume's theory (being simply an observation of the constant conjunction of a constant conjunction and a mental 'custom') is itself irrational, or as Hume might put it 'more properly an act of the sensitive than of the cogitative part of our natures' [Op. cit. ]. But Hume is not a man easily embarrased by paradox so I suppose he just might ask us to live with this conclusion.

Austin stopped reading and looked up at Wolfgang who responded with a non-committal nod. While Austin may have regarded Santiago as something of a humbug, he had enormous respect for Wolfgang and it was for this reason that Austin had arranged for an hour alone with Wolfgang - Joe didn't count one way or the other - to go over some recent work of which Austin was quite proud. He'd hoped for a more positive reaction to what he regarded as his rather clever turns of phrase.

"The bulk of my paper deals with a paper by David Stove titled "Hume, Probability and Induction" included in the Chappell collection."

"I'm familiar with Stove's work, Austin. Please continue."
Austin cleared his throat and read on.

If not entirely convincing Professor Stove's argument is sufficiently ingenious to entertain the philosophically-inclined reader - if only briefly. I say 'briefly' because even a cursory appraisal reveals flaws, specifically those types of flaws we commonly see when a philosopher falls so deeply in love with his own argument he is blind to its most obvious defects.

Austin stopped to catch his breath and glanced up at Wolfgang who was listening with an expression of deep seriousness, one side of his mouth drawn down in a tic of intense concentration.

Professor Stove's thesis is as follows:

There exist arguments which, although not valid (that is, their premises do not entail their conclusions), necessitate, for any rational being of limited knowledge who knows their premises, belief rather than disbelief or the suspension of belief, in their conclusions - belief to which nevertheless, a degree of assurance attaches, less than that (maximal) degree which a valid argument necessitates. In short there are probable arguments.

Now, Hume had shown that inductive arguments cannot be valid. Premises about observed instances of empirical predicates never entail generalizations or predictions about unobserved instances of those predicates. Since inductive arguments cannot attain the maximum of rationality, must we conclude that all arguments from experience are altogether irrational?

A middle way will naturally suggest itself to anyone who believes that there are arguments which are probable in the sense explained above. All we need do, it appears, in order to avoid being committed by Hume's result to inductive skepticism, is to suppose that not only are there probable arguments, but that among such arguments there are at least some inductive ones - in short, that there are probable inductive arguments.

['Hume: A Collection of Critical Essays', ed. V. C. Chappell, Anchor Books, 1966, p. 188]

It is the object of this article to show that Hume's refutation of I.P. (inductively probable) arguments is an entirely imaginary episode in the history of philosophy.'

[Ibid p. 189]

The reader with better things to do may be tempted here to - if not 'commit it to the flames' as per Hume's famous recommendation - at least set Stove's essay aside in order to take time to rake the lawn or perhaps re-cane that old chair.

Austin glanced up at Wolfgang again. The corner of Wolfgang's mouth was even more deeply drawn down; he did not appear amused. This wasn't the reaction Austin had anticipated but he forged ahead with his reading.

"Stove asks:

'...must we conclude that all arguments from experience are altogether irrational?'
[ citation ]

"and Hume answers:

'...All probable reasoning is nothing but a species of sensation."
[Hume, TOHN, p. 103]

In other words, contra Stove, Hume's answer to Stove's question is a resounding 'yes'. Clearly Professor Stove's argument has no historical merit. But - apart from any claims about what Hume did or did not intend to be the scope of his argument - does Stove's argument have philosophical merit as an attack on Hume's? The balance of this paper is intended to answer that question in the negative.

Stove parses Hume's argument as follows:

...
(d) All probable arguments presuppose that the future resembles the past. (Stove calls this the "Resemblance Thesis")

(e) That the future resembles the past is a statement concerning a matter of fact.

(f) That the future resembles the past cannot be proved by any demonstrative arguments.

(g) If there are any arguments for this statement [that the future resembles the past], they are probable arguments.

(h) Any probable argument for this statement would be circular.

...

[Chappell, op. cit., p. 194]

Stove maintains that we must reject the notion that Hume could be referring to inductively probable ("I.P.") arguments in (h) because

...[that Hume could be referring to inductive probability] would require us to suppose that in (h) Hume introduced without a syllable of explanation, the idea of an argument which is probable in the sense of I.P., being circular.
...

[This notion] is prima facie self-contradictory. For a circular argument, as usually understood, could not be probable in the sense of I.P., since (whatever its defects as a proof) it *must* be valid."

[Chappell, op. cit., p. 205]

But Stove is wrong and here's why. First let's take a look at Stove's notion of 'inductively probable' arguments. Stove tells us that '...among such [probable] arguments there are at least some inductive arguments.'

[op. cit. Chappell, p. 188]

Are there inductive arguments that are not probable? Such an inductive argument would be demonstrative and I think that no one is going to defend that possibility. Are there probable arguments that are not inductive? For example, to what degree of probability is it true that 'All Being Is One'? Certainly Stove would have to agree that questions such as this are irrelevant to our argument here.

Once we understand that what we're really discussing here are simply inductive arguments without Stove's spurious 'probable' qualifier, it becomes clear that there is a premise missing in Stove's chain of argument above. Arguments are inductive not only because we question whether or not the future may be like the past (and few people really question this on a day-to-day basis, including Hume by his own numerous admissions) but also because our knowledge of nature is limited. As Hume says '...it is commonly allowed by philosophers, that what the vulgar call chance is nothing but a secret and concealed cause'.

[Hume, TOHN, p. 130]

So Stove's argument needs another premise.

(d) All probable arguments presuppose

(d1) that the future resembles the past and

(d2) some knowledge (however 'limited' to use Stove's phrase) of the circumstances surrounding the conjecture

(e) That the future resembles the past is a statement concerning a matter of fact.

(f) That the future resembles the past cannot be proved by any demonstrative arguments.

(g) If there are any arguments for this statement [that the future resembles the past], they are probable arguments.

(h) Any probable argument for this statement would be circular.

Clearly, the circularity we see involving the notion of the uniformity of nature is not enough to make the whole argument circular - and therefore valid - since now there's another premise to account for. Moreover, if we are allowed to assume both the absolute uniformity of nature *and* omnipotent control of the facts surrounding the conjecture, then the argument is both circular and valid and we've avoided Stove's trap.

How could Stove make such a simple mistake? We find a clue in Stove's claim,

[That all probable arguments presuppose that the future resembles the past]...is surely not a proposition which commands immediate assent, or even understanding. [Chappell, op. cit., p. 201]

Speak for yourself, Professor Stove. In fact this is a proposition which, true or false, is understandable to both philosophers and the 'vulgar' (to use Hume's phrase). Is it possible that we can say of Stove what Beattie says of Hume? Is Stove's article 'the vile effusion of a hard heart, that mistakes its own restlessness for the activity of genius, and its own captiousness for sagacity of understanding'?" ["The Philosophy of David Hume", Norman Kemp Smith, Palgrave, 1941, p. 7]

Now Wolfgang appeared to be quite upset.

"OK, Wolfgang. Let me have it. Where did I go wrong. Go ahead. Tear my argument apart."

"It's not your argument. Your argument is actually quite interesting, Austin." Wolfgang said quietly. "But your tone is I think dangerously provocative. 'Caning chairs'? 'Captiousness'? 'Vile effusion'?" Wolfgang's voice rose. "Is this man your enemy? Did he steal land from your ancestors? You wouldn't talk to Alberto the cook like that, would you? So why do you address a professional colleague in this way? 'Hard heart' indeed!"

"Oh is that all", Austin said breezily. He really only cared about whether or not Wolfgang had found his argument sound. "Well the guy really bugs me, Wolfgang. He's some sort of Hume expert and his argument just doesn't wash. That's the way it is in academia, Wolfgang. You know that. Mano-a-mano! Dog-eat-dog!"

"I'm not worried about Stove, Austin. It's you I'm concerned about."

"Me?"

"Yes Austin, 'you'. Stove can take care of himself. Ask Santiago."

Austin cherished his time alone with Wolfgang and it was only at Wolfgang's specific instruction that he forced himself to address Santiago who had joined the group during Austin's reading.

"So what do you know about Stove, Santiago?" Autin asked in a challenging tone. "Have you read his piece in the Chappell anthology?"

Santiago sighed and glanced at Wolfgang with a put-upon expression.

"Go ahead, Santiago", Wolfgang said. "It will be interesting I'm sure for Austin to hear something of 'Stove the man'."

"Well, young Austin, Dave Stove and I go way back. In the 50's a ship I was on needed repairs and we had to spend a month in Sydney. I met Stove in a coffee house. He was taking on two post-modernists, a feminist and a Stalinist, all at the same time - and holding his own. Stove is quite the scrapper. I ended up staying at his lovely place in the countryside outside of Sydney. One of the best meals I ever had was with Dave and his family in his garden one summer evening. Fresh fish, fresh vegetables, incomparable wine, exquisite tobacco...Did I ever tell you what Stove said to me, Wolfgang, about how we were like bookends, he and I?"

"No Santiago, I don't believe you've ever told me this."

"Dave said that he and I were like bookends, a matched set: 'You should have been that very thing that I am and should never have been, Santiago, a professor of philosophy'. For my part, I told Dave that it was always hard to say in advance but that I was fairly certain he would have made a fine, fine seaman."

"And what did Stove say to that, Santiago?"

"He said that I had given him a compliment that surpassed all of the academic honors he'd ever received and one he would cherish forever."

Santiago paused remembering that summer evening in Dave Stove's garden, the air fragrant with herbs, the chirping of the cicadas, the night sky white with stars.

"Oh I get it, Wolfgang. You don't want me to attack Stove because he's Santiago's dear friend."

Santiago snorted. "Like Wolfie said, Austin. Stove can take care of himself. One of his acolytes would dispatch you in a two-paragraph letter to the editor of whatever journal had the temerity to publish your piece."

"So you think my argument is that weak, Santiago?"

"From what I heard you do make a good case. Wolfgang is merely cautioning you that to trot into the arena, throw away your shield and spit in the direction of your adversary may not be the most auspicious way to begin your academic career. Wolfgang does have your best interest at heart."

"Santiago is right, Austin. You are very bright. But you need to learn that professional courtesy is not a form of weakness or a capitulation-in-advance. The academic forms are not always motivated by hypocrisy. Read the letters exchanged between Locke and Lord Shaftesbury, Austin. You can make your point without demeaning your opponent."

"And if that from Wolfgang doesn't convince you to rework your screed, Austin, consider this," Santiago leaned toward Austin and lowered his voice. "An academic career is like a single long chess game. A bad move at the outset can cripple your position for the duration."

Hutch had arrived just as Santiago was offering Austin this advice. "Ah, Santiago the guidance counselor! I'm so sorry I missed this! Please tell me how I can avoid making mistakes that might cripple my own career!"

"Well you might start by making sure you don't inadvertently murder one of your patients in his bed."

"Yes, Hutch", Wolfgang added with a smile, "for you the bar is set quite low, 'Primum non nocere!'"

*** Chapter 9: Santiago on Hume ***

"Today our long journey down the River of Confusion reaches its destination."

Now that they were all present Santiago began his presentation on the philosophy of David Hume.

"Austin rejects Professor Stove's attempt to protect inductive reasoning from Hume's argument. Is it possible that Austin shares Russell's conviction that even 200 years after Hume first proposed that there could be no rational basis for any empirical proposition, that problems remain?

The analysis of such "probable" knowledge led Hume to certain sceptical conclusions, which are equally difficult to refute and to accept. The result was a challenge to philosophers, which, in my opinion, has still not been adequately met.

[Russell, "History of Western Philosophy", Simon and Schuster, p. 663]

"Ah, so Hume the Empiricist eliminates the possibility of empirical reasoning", Hutch interjected in a tone of mock delight. "Of course. I expected no less." Hutch directed a sour look at Austin.

"Boys, boys! Every dog will have his day and I'm sure that Austin is planning his", Santiago said. Indeed Austin was tipped back on his chair chewing placidly on a red plastic cocktail swizzle stick.

"Hume does nothing to correct the course set by Locke and Berkeley. In fact he puts on sail until the yardarms creak. Hume's famous attack on the rationality of all propositions concerning 'matters of fact' - so ably described by Austin a few moments ago - and Locke's theory of the meaningfulness of language, these two barren theses are intimately connected.

"You may recall Locke's rejection of the notion of 'real essence'. When we refer to Alberto as a 'man', there is no quality of 'man-ness' that Alberto possesses that leads us to make that designation. But Locke is not rejecting these qualities or 'essences' simply because they represent artifacts of the much despised 'Scholasticism' that dominated philosophy for centuries prior to 'The Enlightenment'

Santiago paused. "Yes, Hutch? You wanted to say something?"

"Must your voice always drip with sarcasm when you say 'The Enlightenment'?"

"Point well taken Hutch. Because whether or not one's voice might 'drip with sarcasm' when one describes that epoch is precisely what's at issue, right? Let me try to do better." Santiago cleared his throat and tucking his chin into his neck repeated the phrase "'The Enlightenment'" in a low sonorous tone.

"How's that? Or how about this?" Santiago lifted his head and with a fragile smile on his lips pronounced the phrase again in a fey mock-British accent.

"You're really irritating me Santiago. Please get on with your argument."

"Sorry, Hutch, and I will try in the future to be more respectful of the Holy Relics." Santiago resumed his talk before Hutch could object to this new slight.

"As he lays the foundation for his theory of knowledge, Locke rejects the possibility that any quality might exist that is not either one of the primary 'simple' ideas of sensation or a cobbling together of some collection of these sense 'impressions'. No one is more surprised than Locke when he discovers that he's left without any explanation for the meaningfulness of language:"

One thing I doubt not but will seem very strange in this doctrine, which is, that from what has been said it will follow, that each abstract idea, with a name to it, makes a distinct species. But who can help it, if truth will have it so?

[Locke's "Essay" 3.6.38]

"When Locke says 'makes a distinct species' what he means is that your notion of 'gold' as a heavy, shiny metal and my notion of 'gold' which includes a certain reaction to aqua regia are actually two different things. Note well: not 'two different names for the same thing' but 'two different things'. Under control of the axioms of Empiricism no underlying 'thing' is available for naming and the idea of 'gold' - as opposed to 'what you call gold' and 'what I call gold' - is problematic.

"Now we turn our attention to Hume: "

It is therefore by EXPERIENCE only, that we can infer the existence of one object from that of another. The nature of experience is this. We remember to have had frequent instances of the existence of one species of objects; and also remember, that the individuals of another species of objects have always attended them, and have existed in a regular order of contiguity and succession with regard to them. Thus we remember, to have seen that species of object we call flame, and to have felt that species of sensation we call heat. We likewise call to mind their constant conjunction in all past instances. Without any farther ceremony, we call the one cause and the other effect, and infer the existence of the one from that of the other.
[Hume, TOHN, p. 87]

"Here Hume is discussing the relationship of causation which enables us to make statements regarding 'matters of fact'. But notice how even the single flame itself becomes several 'species'. Locke's theory of meaning and Hume's treatment of causation are two sides of the same coin. For Locke, gold seen and gold tested with aqua regia are two different species. Similarly, for Hume, the flame seen and the flame felt are really two different species - that is two different 'things'.

"Perhaps my descriptions of Locke's cul-de-sac with regard to language seemed overstated, Hutch. Perhaps you always secretly harbored the suspicion that underlying Empiricism's web of sensation there were 'objects of sensation', hooks on which to hang our linguistic intentions, the shadows - at least - of 'real essence'. Hume eliminates those possibilities - and Hume's conclusions follow unavoidably from Locke's assumptions."

Hence the colour, taste, figure, solidity, and other qualities, combined in a peach or melon, are conceived to form one thing; and that on account of their close relation, which makes them affect the thought in the same manner, as if perfectly uncompounded. But the mind rests not here. Whenever it views the object in another light, it finds that all these qualities are different, and distinguishable, and separable from each other; which view of things being destructive of its primary and more natural notions, obliges the imagination to feign an unknown something, or original substance and matter, as a principle of union or cohesion among these qualities, and as what may give the compound object a title to be called one thing, notwithstanding its diversity and composition.

[Hume, TOHN, p. 221 (emphasis Santiago's)]
It is a gross illusion to suppose, that our resembling perceptions are numerically the same; and it is this illusion, which leads us into the opinion, that these perceptions are uninterrupted, and are still existent, even when they are not present to the senses.

[Hume, TOHN, p. 217]

Here then we have a propensity to feign the continued existence of all sensible objects; and as this propensity arises from some lively impressions of the memory, it bestows a vivacity on that *fiction*: or in other words, makes us believe the continued existence of body.

The idea of a substance as well as that of a mode, is nothing but a collection of Simple ideas, that are united by the imagination, and have a particular name assigned them, by which we are able to recall, either to ourselves or others, that collection. But the difference betwixt these ideas consists in this, that the particular qualities, which form a substance, are commonly referred to an unknown something, in which they are supposed to inhere; or granting this fiction should not take place, are at least supposed to be closely and inseparably connected by the relations of contiguity and causation. The effect of this is, that whatever new simple quality we discover to have the same connexion with the rest, we immediately comprehend it among them, even though it did not enter into the first conception of the substance. Thus our idea of gold may at first be a yellow colour, weight, malleableness, fusibility; but upon the discovery of its dissolubility in aqua regia, we join that to the other qualities, and suppose it to belong to the substance as much as if its idea had from the beginning made a part of the compound one. The principal of union being regarded as the chief part of the complex idea, gives entrance to whatever quality afterwards occurs, and is equally comprehended by it, as are the others, which first presented themselves.

[Hume, TOHN, p. 16]

"And this, one of my particular favorites, the parable of 'The Fig And The Olive':"

...supposing we consider a fig at one end of the table, and an olive at the other, it is evident, that in forming the complex ideas of these substances, one of the most obvious is that of their different relishes; and it is as evident, that we incorporate and conjoin these qualities with such as are coloured and tangible. The bitter taste of the one, and sweet of the other are supposed to lie in the very visible body, and to be separated from each other by the whole length of the table. This is so notable and so natural an illusion, that it may be proper to consider the principles, from which it is derived.
[Hume, TOHN, p. 236]

"Hume's rejection of 'real essence' is categorical. Hume paints a picture of desolate solipsism:"

I am here seated in my chamber with my face to the fire; and all the objects, that strike my senses, are contained in a few yards around me. My memory, indeed, informs me of the existence of many objects; but then this information extends not beyond their past existence, nor do either my senses or memory give any testimony to the continuance of their being. When therefore I am thus seated, and revolve over these thoughts, I hear on a sudden a noise as of a door turning upon its hinges; and a little after see a porter, who advances towards me. This gives occasion to many new reflections and reasonings. First, I never have observed, that this noise coued proceed from any thing but the motion of a door; and therefore conclude, that the present phaenomenon is a contradiction to all past experience, unless the door, which I remember on the other side the chamber, be still in being. Again, I have always found, that a human body was possest of a quality, which I call gravity, and which hinders it from mounting in the air, as this porter must have done to arrive at my chamber, unless the stairs I remember be not annihilated by my absence. But this is not all. I receive a letter, which upon, opening it I perceive by the hand-writing and subscription to have come from a friend, who says he is two hundred leagues distant. It is evident I can never account for this phenomenon, conformable to my experience in other instances, without spreading out in my mind the whole sea and continent between us, and supposing the effects and continued existence of posts and ferries, according to my Memory and observation. To consider these phaenomena of the porter and letter in a certain light, they are contradictions to common experience, and may be regarded as objections to those maxims, which we form concerning the connexions of causes and effects. I am accustomed to hear such a sound, and see such an object in motion at the same time. I have not received in this particular instance both these perceptions. These observations are contrary, unless I suppose that the door still remains, and that it was opened without my perceiving it: And this supposition, which was at first entirely arbitrary and hypothetical, acquires a force and evidence by its being the only one, upon which I can reconcile these contradictions. There is scarce a moment of my life, wherein there is not a similar instance presented to me, and I have not occasion to suppose the continued existence of objects, in order to connect their past and present appearances, and give them such an union with each other, as I have found by experience to be suitable to their particular natures and circumstances. Here then I am naturally led to regard the world, as something real and durable, and as preserving its existence, even when it is no longer present to my perception.
[Hume, TOHN, p. 196]

"But Hume fails to recognize that his lonely fantasy is only an intermediate consequnce of his Empiricist principles. The rejection of 'real essence' entails the rejection of the possibility of language. And not just our ability to speak to one another but our ability to think, or even to perceive.

"I believe that Locke had had intimations of the devastating consequences of the Empiricist rejection of 'real essence' Can there be such a thing as language? If the principles of Empiricism are true, Locke must offer some rationale".

By the word GOLD here, I must be understood to design a particular piece of matter; v. g. the last guinea that was coined. For, if it should stand here, in its ordinary signification, for that complex idea which I or any one else calls gold, i. e. for the nominal essence of gold, it would be jargon. So hard is it to show the various meaning and imperfection of words, when we have nothing else but words to do it by.

[Locke "Essay Concerning Human Understanding", 3.6.19]

"But what is for Locke a half-hearted gesture of intellectual desperation will some day blossom into 'nominalism', that modern philosophical analog to the phlogiston theory of combustion. As noted in our previous discussion Berkeley did his best to put some meat on the bones of Locke's odd remark. Hume picks up where Berkeley leaves off."

A very material question has been started concerning ABSTRACT or GENERAL ideas, WHETHER THEY BE GENERAL OR PARTICULAR IN THE MIND'S CONCEPTION OF THEM. A great philosopher [Dr. Berkeley.] has disputed the received opinion in this particular, and has asserted, that all general ideas are nothing but particular ones, annexed to a certain term, which gives them a more extensive signification, and makes them recall upon occasion other individuals, which are similar to them. As I look upon this to be one of the greatest and most valuable discoveries that has been made of late years in the republic of letters, I shall here endeavour to confirm it by some arguments, which I hope will put it beyond all doubt and controversy.

Abstract ideas are therefore in themselves individual, however they may become general in their representation. The image in the mind is only that of a particular object, though the application of it in our reasoning be the same, as if it were universal.

This application of ideas beyond their nature proceeds from our collecting all their possible degrees of quantity and quality in such an imperfect manner as may serve the purposes of life, which is the second proposition I proposed to explain. When we have found a resemblance [Footnote 2.] among several objects, that often occur to us, we apply the same name to all of them, whatever differences we may observe in the degrees of their quantity and quality, and whatever other differences may appear among them. After we have acquired a custom of this kind, the hearing of that name revives the idea of one of these objects, and makes the imagination conceive it with all its particular circumstances and proportions.
[Hume, TOHN, p. 17]

"Hume notices a problem with this arrangement that had escaped both Berkeley and Locke:

Nay so entire is the custom, that the very same idea may be annext to several different words, and may be employed in different reasonings, without any danger of mistake. Thus the idea of an equilateral triangle of an inch perpendicular may serve us in talking of a figure, of a rectilinear figure, of a regular figure, of a triangle, and of an equilateral triangle.
[Hume, TOHN, p. 21]

"This is of course the same problem I raised with regard to the Lanzo boys, the five siblings who formed the 'Potrero Hill Orioles' and who were in the Chronicle the other day for winning the CYO championship. The problem is that if there are no general idea's - for example 'Lanzo brother' or 'Potrero Hill Oriole' - then a single individual must serve to represent the general. But how can the same individual represent two different ideas? One might be tempted to suggest that this is accomplished by context. But keep in mind that context is simply a means of resolving ambiguity, of determining which of several ideas are intended. In the present case, our problem is not ambiguity, but the lack of any idea at all that might stand for 'Lanzo brother' or 'Potrero Hill Oriole'. Here's Hume's solution:"

But as the same word is supposed to have been frequently applied to other individuals, that are different in many respects from that idea, which is immediately present to the mind; the word not being able to revive the idea of all these individuals, but only touches the soul, if I may be allowed so to speak, and revives that custom, which we have acquired by surveying them. They are not really and in fact present to the mind, but only in power; nor do we draw them all out distinctly in the imagination, but keep ourselves in a readiness to survey any of them, as we may be prompted by a present design or necessity. The word raises up an individual idea, along with a certain custom; and that custom produces any other individual one, for which we may have occasion. But as the production of all the ideas, to which the name may be applied, is in most eases impossible, we abridge that work by a more partial consideration, and find but few inconveniences to arise in our reasoning from that abridgment.
[Hume, TOHN, p. 20]

"I hope you don't mind my quoting at length from Hume. I don't want to be accused of tearing his words from their context."

"Oh no, Santiago," Hutch answered sarcastically, "please spare us the long passages of Hume - who just happens to be one of the giants of a particularly brilliant period in English literature. That way we can have more time for your own condign remarks!"

"I take it then I may continue?"

"Please."

Before those habits have become entirely perfect, perhaps the mind may not be content with forming the idea of only one individual, but may run over several, in order to make itself comprehend its own meaning, and the compass of that collection, which it intends to express by the general term. That we may fix the meaning of the word, figure, we may revolve in our mind the ideas of circles, squares, parallelograms, triangles of different sizes and proportions, and may not rest on one image or idea. However this may be, it is certain that we form the idea of individuals, whenever we use any general term; that we seldom or never can exhaust these individuals; and that those, which remain, are only represented by means of that habit, by which we recall them, whenever any present occasion requires it. This then is the nature of our abstract ideas and general terms; and it is after this manner we account for the foregoing paradox, THAT SOME IDEAS ARE PARTICULAR IN THEIR NATURE, BUT GENERAL IN THEIR REPRESENTATION. A particular idea becomes general by being annexed to a general term; that is, to a term, which from a customary conjunction has a relation to many other particular ideas, and readily recalls them in the imagination.

The only difficulty, that can remain on this subject, must be with regard to that custom, which so readily recalls every particular idea, for which we may have occasion, and is excited by any word or sound, to which we commonly annex it. The most proper method, in my opinion, of giving a satisfactory explication of this act of the mind, is by producing other instances, which are analogous to it, and other principles, which facilitate its operation. To explain the ultimate causes of our mental actions is impossible. It is sufficient, if we can give any satisfactory account of them from experience and analogy.
[Hume, TOHN, p. 22]

"Note Hume's odd invocation of the psychological. Hume recognizes the issue which, if left unexplained, threatens the whole fabric of Empiricism. He concedes that he can't explain the mechanism he's relying on and retreats into vague analogizing.

"...but only touches the soul, if I may be allowed so to speak..."

"...revives that custom..."

"...not really and in fact present to the mind, but only in power..."

"...represented by means of that habit, by which we recall them..."

"...excited by any word or sound..."

"...those very ideas, that are thus collected by a kind of magical faculty in the soul..."

"But even if we grant Hume his imprecise analogical pseudo-explanation of abstract terms, Hume still runs afoul of '...that principle so oft insisted on, that all our ideas are copyed [sic] from our impressions.' Let's assume for the moment that such a psychological device, that 'custom' that Hume describes, does exist. When prompted with that individual idea that is 'particular in...nature, but general in [its] representation', that 'habit' produces a certain collection of individual objects . Are these individuals random and unconnected? Remember Locke originally proposed this 'nominalism' to rescue language from being reduced to mere 'jargon'. Hume can hardly concede that the collection of individual objects produced by his 'custom' are arbitrary as this would amount to a concession that language is meaningless - which it clearly is not.

"So there must be something more to unite the group than the mere fact of their selection by Hume's 'custom'. The collection of instances must be coherent, resembling. But resembling how? The Lanzo brothers and the 'Potrero Hill Orioles' are two collections of the same instances. We can speak of them qua their 'Lanzo-ness' or qua their participation in that championship basketball team. No matter which way we turn, we can't avoid the necessity of universal terms. And insofar as the axioms of Empiricism don't allow for the possibility of universals, we have to reject those axioms. Everyone convinced?"

"Sounds to me like the same argument again and again", Hutch said.

"Given the premises of Empircism Locke discovers that he's unable to account for language and offers a desperate hint (Book 3, Chapter 6, section 19) that becomes, via Berkeley, the nominalism that Hume relies on. But Hume recognizes defects in that theory and is forced to retreat to the vaguest psychologizing - empirical propositions offered without any empirical support, illustrated by poetic analogy - in order to protect the Empiricist program. This is Empiricism mired in 'nominalism'. This is the sad history of philosophy from Locke to Berkeley to Hume."

"Double play!" Hutch shot his fists into the air in a mocking gesture.

"I do think we need a break." As he said this Santiago was looking past Hutch at an older man who was approaching their table. The man wore an old trenchcoat over a pink chenille bathrobe and bedroom slippers that slapped against the linoleum as he shuffled toward them. Santiago rose to meet the man.

"What's with the get-up, Stan? You look like you're a hundred and fifty years old."

The old man grasped Santiago's offered hand in both of his. "Hello old friend. Hello. Please, sit. I'm interrupting?" Santiago sat back down and pulled a chair over for Stan.

"Thank you anyway, Santiago. I'll only be a minute here. I'm going to have my dinner - I won't bother you and your friends. Forgive me. I wouldn't dress like this if I were going out in public."

Indeed, Fosters was the "dining room" for the residents of the many shabby little hotels in the Tenderloin and it was not unheard of for old men to visit the cafeteria in bathrobes or even in hospital gowns, an old overcoat thrown over the shoulders for modesty.

Stan steadied himself on the back of Santiago's chair and surveyed the group.

"Guten Tag, Wolfgang."

"So very good to see you, Stan. Don't listen to Santiago. You look quite robust."

Stan said something to Wolfgang in German and Wolfgang responded. Santiago joined the conversation nodding toward Austin and Hutch and making a comment in German. The three erupted in laughter.

"It was nothing bad, Austin and Hutch", Wolfgang apologized for their rudeness attempting at the same time to suppress his mirth. "Santiago, introduce Stan Roosevelt to our guests."

"Stan Roosevelt! I know him, Joe. He bought me a whiskey!"

Joe was lying on the couch, head propped up on a bolster, smoking his pipe. He stared back at me steadily.

"I believe you know Joe, Stan."

Stan nodded to Joe. "Joe, I fear, is in one of his incommunicado moods, Wolfgang. What fantastic thoughts are swirling behind that noble Hebrew forehead. Cat got your tongue Joe? Or, Joe, do you have the cat's tongue?"

Wolfgang stepped in to steer the group past this unpleasantness.

"Have you met our young friends, Stan? Hutch, Austin, please meet Standish Samoset Revere Roosevelt, scion of two great American families a well-known personage in his own right. Austin is a graduate student in Philosophy at the University of California at Berkeley."

Stan, still leaning on Santiago's chair, nodded approvingly. "Philosophy! Ah, yes! Berkeley! Very good! Very, very good!"

"And this is Hutch, Stan, Hutch is a medical student at Stanford University."

Stan's eyes lit up. "Un medecin! Excellent! Wonderful!"

Stan turned to Santiago. "So do these young 'uns know Santiago-the-man-of-the-world? Have they seen the knife of finest Toledo steel. Do they know the little Excalibur's story?"

"The switchblade?" Austin asked. They'd all seen Santiago pare his nails with a beautiful switchblade knife.

"You've seen it then Austin? Out with it Saint James! Out with it!"

Santiago drew the elaborately engraved knife from his pocket and with no discernible movement of his hand caused the blade to flick out. He laid the knife on the table.

"It was in Dakar, in the Fifties", Stan said.

"Sorry Stan. It was in Dar Es Salaam", Santiago corrected.

"Yes, Santiago, Dar Es Salaam. I just wanted to see if you remembered." Here Standish Roosevelt put his hand to his eyes. He appeared to briefly lose his balance. Santiago stood up from his chair to steady his old shipmate and guide him to a chair.

"Where was I?" Stan took a moment to collect himself. "Yes, there were three of them in the alley outside the bar in Dar Es Salaam and I do believe they really wanted to kill us. But they didn't reckon on you, Santiago! The one you took the knife from, I believe you broke his arm. If memory serves, you picked him because he called you a 'marrano'."

"I picked him because he had the nicest knife, Stan."

The group sat in silence for a moment.

"What's become of your salon Stan? Your dedicated following?"

If Santiago intended any irony Stan Roosevelt did not acknowledge it.

"Gone. Se fue." Stan flapped his hand in the dismissive Spanish gesture.

"All gone?" Santiago said.

Stan looked at Joe meaningfully. "Pretty much."

Putting one hand on the seat back, Stan began to lift himself from the chair. "But I've interrupted you in conversation with your own coterie."

"I beg your pardon," Hutch said indignantly. "Neither I nor Austin are members of anyone's 'coterie' least of all Santiago's!"

"Spirited! Yes! Good!" Standish Roosevelt said approvingly.

Stan was standing now, unsteadily and a bit forlorn in his pink chenille bathrobe, overcoat and slippers. "Buy me dinner Santiago. Please."

"Certainly, old friend. Whatever you want." Santiago signaled for Alberto, the cook.

"Wow! Interesting guy! Did Santiago really fight those three men? What's a 'marrano'?"

Joe stared at me. Then he frowned at the ceiling. Then he stared at me again for a while. I was about to abandon the conversation when Joe got up from the couch and went over to one of the bookshelves that lined the walls of the little cottage.

Joe handed me a book and sat on the couch smoking his pipe, watching me examine it.

"Hmmm...'Sexual Astrology' by Standish Samoset Revere Roosevelt." I looked at the front and back covers and fly-leaf. "Hey, groovy. There's Stan's picture! Wow he looks young!"

"Sexual astrology!" Joe poked his pipe at me. "That's astrology that links the signs of the zodiac to sexual behaviors Tommy!"

"Far out! When did he write...?"

"Sexual astrology! That's astrology that connects the stars with different human sexual behaviors." Joe dropped his voice. "They say that Stan Roosevelt invented sexual astrology." Joe said this last in a low tone of awe. But it was never easy to distinguish the ironic from the earnest in Joe's conversation.

"Wow!" I said.

"Standish Samoset Revere Roosevelt was a highly respected astrologer and a very highly respected hippie, Tommy. Possibly one of the most highly respected hippies in the Haight. Very highly respected. He chose the date for the first San Francisco be-in."

"And, Joe, Stan bought me and Murr..."

"Very highly respected! They called him an 'elder of the hip community', Tommy. Herb Caen called him an 'elder of the hip community'!"

"And he bought me and Murray..."

"'An elder of the hip community'! Herb Caen! Did you know", Joe dropped his voice again, "Stan Roosevelt chose the date for the first San Franciso be-in."

I started to say something but Joe interrupted. "'An elder of the hip community', Tommy!" Joe paused to draw on his pipe as I took a breath to speak. Before I could say anything Joe interrupted again, "Herb Caen!" baring his teeth for emphasis as he pronounced the famous columnist's last name.

Joe leaned back on the couch and crossing his legs compactly, knee over knee, gave me a big snaggle toothed, tobacco stained, shtetl grin.

"In attempting to defend his 'nominalism' Hume requires the intervention of 'a kind of magical faculty in the soul'. This is the kind of squishy speculation that Hume's hard headed heirs so deplore. But it's not the only example of 'fuzzy thinking' we find in the Treatise. Typically we find this intellectual scotch tape in place at exactly those points which require the sturdiest joinery.

"Here Hume is expatiating on '...this operation of the mind, which forms the belief of any matter of fact...':

An idea assented to FEELS different from a fictitious idea, that the fancy alone presents to us: And this different feeling I endeavour to explain by calling it a superior force, or vivacity, or solidity, or FIRMNESS, or steadiness. This variety of terms, which may seem so unphilosophical, is intended only to express that act of the mind, which renders realities more present to us than fictions, causes them to weigh more in the thought, and gives them a superior influence on the passions and imagination. Provided we agree about the thing, it is needless to dispute about the terms.

I confess, that it is impossible to explain perfectly this feeling or manner of conception. We may make use of words, that express something near it. But its true and proper name is belief, which is a term that every one sufficiently understands in common life. And in philosophy we can go no farther, than assert, that it is something felt by the mind, which distinguishes the ideas of the judgment from the fictions of the imagination. It gives them more force and influence; makes them appear of greater importance; infixes them in the mind; and renders them the governing principles of all our actions.
[Hume, http://ebooks.adelaide.edu.au/h/hume/david/h92t/B1.3.7.html (not in body of text in Selby-Bigge)]

"Note in the above passages Hume's pleading for the sympathy of the reader: 'Provided we agree about the thing, it is needless to dispute about the terms' and '...a term that every one sufficiently understands in common life'. Here's the corker: "

In thinking of our past thoughts we not only delineate out the objects, of which we were thinking, but also conceive the action of the mind in the meditation, that certain JE-NE-SCAI-QUOI [sic], of which it is impossible to give any definition or description, but which every one sufficiently understands.
[Hume, TOHN, p. 106]

"Remarkable! 'JE-NE-SCAI-QUOI'! At the very foundation of this intellectual tradition, we have 'I-don't-know-what'. And this from a man who calls the poets 'liars by profession' [Hume, TOHN, p. 121]. Truly, Hume is Walter Winchell as portrayed by Charles Laughton. And finally, 'Hume the bully' in full cry", Santiago made a face of disgust.

I believe an intelligent reader will find less difficulty to assent to this system, than to comprehend it fully and distinctly, and will allow, after a little reflection, that every part carries its own proof along with it.
[Hume, TOHN, p. 209]

"'The Enlightenment' my foot, Hutch! Talk about patronizing! It's no wonder that a man like Beattie, who probably knew Hume, was so revolted by him.

"But it still remains to allow Hume to speak for himself as he contemplates the dreary landscape into which his ruminations have borne him. Here Hume is considering that he has completed only the first of three volumes."

But before I launch out into those immense depths of philosophy, which lie before me, I find myself inclined to stop a moment in my present station, and to ponder that voyage, which I have undertaken, and which undoubtedly requires the utmost art and industry to be brought to a happy conclusion. Methinks I am like a man, who having struck on many shoals, and having narrowly escaped shipwreck in passing a small frith, has yet the temerity to put out to sea in the same leaky weather-beaten vessel, and even carries his ambition so far as to think of compassing the globe under these disadvantageous circumstances. My memory of past errors and perplexities, makes me diffident for the future. The wretched condition, weakness, and disorder of the faculties, I must employ in my enquiries, encrease my apprehensions. And the impossibility of amending or correcting these faculties, reduces me almost to despair, and makes me resolve to perish on the barren rock, on which I am at present, rather than venture myself upon that boundless ocean, which runs out into immensity. This sudden view of my danger strikes me with melancholy; and as it is usual for that passion, above all others, to indulge itself; I cannot forbear feeding my despair, with all those desponding reflections, which the present subject furnishes me with in such abundance.

[Hume, TOHN, p. 263]
When I turn my eye inward, I find nothing but doubt and ignorance. All the world conspires to oppose and contradict me; though such is my weakness, that I feel all my opinions loosen and fall of themselves, when unsupported by the approbation of others. Every step I take is with hesitation, and every new reflection makes me dread an error and absurdity in my reasoning.

Most fortunately it happens, that since reason is incapable of dispelling these clouds, nature herself suffices to that purpose, and cures me of this philosophical melancholy and delirium, either by relaxing this bent of mind, or by some avocation, and lively impression of my senses, which obliterate all these chimeras. I dine, I play a game of backgammon, I converse, and am merry with my friends; and when after three or four hours' amusement, I would return to these speculations, they appear so cold, and strained, and ridiculous, that I cannot find in my heart to enter into them any farther.
[Hume, TOHN, p. 264]

"Backgammon! Amazing!"

"But he does write beautifully, Santiago."

"Yes, Hutch", Santiago said wearily, "Hume does write beautifully. And so does Locke - but Locke was a mensch!"

*** Chapter 10: Santiago On Hume (continued) ***

"It is usual, when reading the Empiricists, to glance up from time to time and survey our surroundings in order to convince ourselves that, for example, yes, everything is indeeed 'made up of' sense perceptions. The Empiricists encourage this because it distracts us from noticing that in fact the reality they are describing is not the reality we experience at all but an impossible, literally inconceivable, reality. This not to say that the Empiricists are trying to fool us - but only that they have already fooled themselves.

"Hume's absurd and self-defeating scepticism with regard to "matters of fact" is a logical outcome of Locke's principles. But Hume performs another valuable service vis a vis Locke. Hume's examination of the fundamental principles of Empiricism inadvertently uncovers some serious issues at the very root of this doctrine. Here's Hume's restatement of the Empiricist creed:"

There is another division of our perceptions, which it will be convenient to observe, and which extends itself both to our impressions and ideas. This division is into SIMPLE and COMPLEX. Simple perceptions or impressions and ideas are such as admit of no distinction nor separation. The complex are the contrary to these, and may be distinguished into parts. Though a particular colour, taste, and smell, are qualities all united together in this apple, it is easy to perceive they are not the same, but are at least distinguishable from each other.
[Hume, TOHN, p. 2]

"No problem so far. But consider Hume's interesting observation concerning 'shades of blue'."

There is however one contradictory phaenomenon, which may prove, that it is not absolutely impossible for ideas to go before their correspondent impressions. I believe it will readily be allowed that the several distinct ideas of colours, which enter by the eyes, or those of sounds, which are conveyed by the hearing, are really different from each other, though at the same time resembling. Now if this be true of different colours, it must be no less so of the different shades of the same colour, that each of them produces a distinct idea, independent of the rest. For if this should be denied, it is possible, by the continual gradation of shades, to run a colour insensibly into what is most remote from it; and if you will not allow any of the means to be different, you cannot without absurdity deny the extremes to be the same. Suppose therefore a person to have enjoyed his sight for thirty years, and to have become perfectly well acquainted with colours of all kinds,excepting one particular shade of blue, for instance, which it never has been his fortune to meet with. Let all the different shades of that colour, except that single one, be placed before him, descending gradually from the deepest to the lightest; it is plain, that he will perceive a blank, where that shade is wanting, said will be sensible, that there is a greater distance in that place betwixt the contiguous colours, than in any other. Now I ask, whether it is possible for him, from his own imagination, to supply this deficiency, and raise up to himself the idea of that particular shade, though it had never been conveyed to him by his senses? I believe there are few but will be of opinion that he can; and this may serve as a proof, that the simple ideas are not always derived from the correspondent impressions; though the instance is so particular and singular, that it is scarce worth our observing, and does not merit that for it alone we should alter our general maxim.
[Hume, TOHN, p. 5]

"By pointing out this odd exception to the rule, Hume is underlining the stringency of those rules. If 'different shades of the same colour' did not produce a 'distinct idea', then individual colors would not be atomic but would be composite, would admit of both 'distinction' and 'separation' and it would be, to use Hume's words, 'possible, by the continual gradation of shades, to run a colour insensibly into what is most remote from it', in other words, to begin with the extremes of the spectrum and construct the intervening colors. (And note well, Hume is not doing physics here. Hume is describing - or thinks he is describing - those fundamental facts of perception on which all science must be built but which science itself can never be expected to establish.)

"Of further interest in this passage is that Hume has produced an empirical counter-example to his own epistemology. Epistemology is the study of knowledge itself, its nature, its acquisition. Philosophers are held to a standard a bit higher than 'close enough for government work'. But Hume is unfazed."

"Maybe we should give Hume credit for intellectual honesty."

Santiago responded to Hutch's comment with a long bovine stare and then continued his discussion.

"Now, Austin, during an earlier discussion I mentioned that Locke's 'simple' idea's were not really simple - that in fact a 'simple' idea is an impossibility. Hume has noticed this problem."

It is evident, that even different simple ideas may have a similarity or resemblance to each other; nor is it necessary, that the point or circumstance of resemblance shoud be distinct or separable from that in which they differ. BLUE and GREEN are different simple ideas, but are more resembling than BLUE and SCARLET; tho their perfect simplicity excludes all possibility of separation or distinction. It is the same case with particular sounds, and tastes and smells. These admit of infinite resemblances upon the general appearance and comparison, without having any common circumstance the same. And of this we may be certain, even from the very abstract terms SIMPLE IDEA. They comprehend all simple ideas under them. These resemble each other in their simplicity. And yet from their very nature, which excludes all composition, this circumstance, In which they resemble, Is not distinguishable nor separable from the rest. It is the same case with all the degrees In any quality. They are all resembling and yet the quality, In any individual,Is not distinct from the degree.
[Hume, http://ebooks.adelaide.edu.au/h/hume/david/h92t/B1.1.7.html (not in body of text in Selby-Bigge)]

"Now, recall that all ideas are either simple or complex. And complex ideas may be composed of simple ideas or of subsidary complex ideas - an arrangement we refer to as..." Santiago closed his eyes and snapped his fingers searching for the word.

Austin took the swizzle stick from his mouth. "Recursive."

"Thank you Austin, yes, 'recursive'. But what kind of idea is 'simplicity'? 'Simplicity', it turns out, is a 'distinction of reason'."

Before I leave this subject I shall employ the same principles to explain that distinction of reason, which is so much talked of, and is so little understood, in the schools. Of this kind is the distinction betwixt figure and the body figured; motion and the body moved. The difficulty of explaining this distinction arises from the principle above explained, that all ideas, which are different, are separable. For it follows from thence, that if the figure be different from the body, their ideas must be separable as well as distinguishable: if they be not different, their ideas can neither be separable nor distinguishable. What then is meant by a distinction of reason, since it implies neither a difference nor separation.

To remove this difficulty we must have recourse to the foregoing explication of abstract ideas. It is certain that the mind would never have dreamed of distinguishing a figure from the body figured, as being in reality neither distinguishable, nor different, nor separable; did it not observe, that even in this simplicity there might be contained many different resemblances and relations. Thus when a globe of white marble is presented, we receive only the impression of a white colour disposed in a certain form, nor are we able to separate and distinguish the colour from the form. But observing afterwards a globe of black marble and a cube of white, and comparing them with our former object, we find two separate resemblances, in what formerly seemed, and really is, perfectly inseparable. After a little more practice of this kind, we begin to distinguish the figure from the colour by a distinction of reason; that is, we consider the figure and colour together, since they are in effect the same and undistinguishable; but still view them in different aspects, according to the resemblances, of which they are susceptible. When we would consider only the figure of the globe of white marble, we form in reality an idea both of the figure and colour, but tacitly carry our eye to its resemblance with the globe of black marble: And in the same manner, when we would consider its colour only, we turn our view to its resemblance with the cube of white marble. By this means we accompany our ideas with a kind of reflection, of which custom renders us, in a great measure, insensible. A person, who desires us to consider the figure of a globe of white marble without thinking on its colour, desires an impossibility but his meaning is, that we should consider the figure and colour together, but still keep in our eye the resemblance to the globe of black marble, or that to any other globe of whatever colour or substance.
[Hume, TOHN, p. 24]

"Well this tells us how we arrive at a 'distinction of reason'. But knowing the process by which we arrive at a 'distinction of reason' is not the same thing as understanding *what* such a 'distinction of reason' is. Clearly, a 'distinction of reason' is neither a simple idea nor a complex idea. What kind of idea is 'simplicity'? What is the relationship of 'simplicity' to 'simple' ideas, that is, to ideas which partake, in some sense, of 'simplicity'? The 'simple' ideas are themselves atomic and so simplicity is not 'in' them. But surely Hume can't mean for 'simplicity' to be an idea which we develop in some haphazard, random subjectivity without regard to the 'simple' ideas themselves. Clearly 'simplicity' is a quality, but a quality with a special and strange relationship to the 'ideas' which it qualifies. 'Simplicity' is a single idea but somehow it 'spreads itself' over a multitude of other ideas without dividing itself and without the ideas which it qualifies losing their unitary, atomic character."

"But this is a conumdrum as old as philosophy!" Santiago exclaimed, striking the table and startling the group which, if truth be told had, excluding Wolfgang, fallen into something of a stupor during Santiago's long exegesis. "It's known as the 'problem of participation' and blimey if the old farts weren't on to something!"

Santiago fished in the pile of books on the table and fetched out a slim, gray volume.

Parmenides: But I should like to know whether you mean that there are certain ideas of which all other things partake, and from which they derive their names; that similars, for example, become similar, because they partake of similarity; and great things become great, because they partake of greatness; and that just and beautiful things become just and beautiful, because they partake of justice and beauty?

Socrates: Yes, certainly, said Socrates that is my meaning.

P: Then each individual partakes either of the whole of the idea or else of a part of the idea? Can there be any other mode of participation?

S: There cannot be, he said.

P: Then do you think that the whole idea is one, and yet, being one, is in each one of the many?

S: Why not, Parmenides? said Socrates.

P: Because one and the same thing will exist as a whole at the same time in many separate individuals, and will therefore be in a state of separation from itself.

S: Nay, but the idea may be like the day which is one and the same in many places at once, and yet continuous with itself; in this way each idea may be one; and the same in all at the same time.

P: I like your way, Socrates, of making one in many places at once. You mean to say, that if I were to spread out a sail and cover a number of men, there would be one whole including many-is not that your meaning?

S: I think so.

P: And would you say that the whole sail includes each man, or a part of it only, and different parts different men?
S: The latter.

P: Then, Socrates, the ideas themselves will be divisible, and things which participate in them will have a part of them only and not the whole idea existing in each of them?

S: That seems to follow.

P: Then would you like to say, Socrates, that the one idea is really divisible and yet remains one?

S: Certainly not, he said.

P: Suppose that you divide absolute greatness, and that of the many great things, each one is great in virtue of a portion of greatness less than absolute greatness-is that conceivable?

S: No.

P: Or will each equal thing, if possessing some small portion of equality less than absolute equality, be equal to some other thing by virtue of that portion only?

S: Impossible.

P: Or suppose one of us to have a portion of smallness; this is but a part of the small, and therefore the absolutely small is greater; if the absolutely small be greater, that to which the part of the small is added will be smaller and not greater than before.

S: How absurd!

P: Then in what way, Socrates, will all things participate in the ideas, if they are unable to participate in them either as parts or wholes?

S: Indeed, he said, you have asked a question which is not easily answered.

[Plato's "Parmenides", Jowett translation, http://classics.mit.edu/Plato/parmenides.html ]

"Hume's 'distintions of reason' entail the same difficulties that an older and wiser Parmenides raises for a young Socrates. But you'll recall, Austin, Parmenides' concession to Socrates:

'And yet, Socrates', said Parmenides, 'if a man, fixing his attention on these and the like difficulties, does away with ideas of things and will not admit that every individual thing has its own determinate idea which is always one and the same, he will have nothing on which his mind can rest; and so he will utterly destroy the power of reasoning...'

[Plato, "Parmenides", 135c (Jowett)]

"Parmenides anticipates difficulties with Hume's 'distinction of reason' that never occur to Hume. But despite these difficulties, Parmenides proposes that these entities that Hume calls 'abstract ideas' must indeed exist. If philosophy progressed in the way, for example, science progresses, it would be Hume who would have lived 2,500 years ago and Plato who would be more nearly contemporary!"

Austin was not paying attention to Santiago's analysis but was absorbed in trying to remember something. "You quoted this before, Santiago."

"You were drunk, Austin."

"I was?"

"Yup, I quoted from the 'Parmenides' and then I explained the secret of life and then I told you the winners of the next three World Series. Too bad you can't remember!"

Chapter 11: At the Mechanics' Institute Library

There's an impressive bronze statue at the foot of Bush Street in San Francisco. The "Mechanics Monument" depicts a team of men clad in leather aprons, muscles rippling, working some sort of gargantuan press, a grizzled old worker steadying the material in the huge machine as the younger men heave on the press' handle. The monument, completed in 1901 by deaf California sculptor Douglas Tilden, was commissioned to commemorate the life and work of Irish blacksmith Peter Donahue who started a shop under some shade trees south of Market and went on to found the company we now know as Pacific Gas and Electric.
[http://www.sandowmuseum.com/monument.html]

But this reverence for labor found expression in works not merely ornamental. The "Mechanics Institute" is located near the foot of Post Street a short block or two west of the "Mechanics Monument". Now, we are denizens of a 21st Century culture that felt the need to coin a phrase for "work actually accomplished" - the ubiquitous "hands-on" - and it may surprise us that the first viable heavier than air craft was built by two bicycle mechanics. But for the founders of the "Mechanics Institute", established in 1855, "technology" and "skilled labor" were not yet discrete domains. The "Mechanics Institute" was started for just such bright lads as Wilbur and Orville - bookish, handy and inquisitive - and it was one of Santiago's favorite haunts.
[http://www.milibrary.org/hist.html]

Santiago's wife Zoia was a legal secretary and was often pressed into service during preparation of important contracts or before critical litigation. On one such Saturday Santiago walked Zoia from the Weller Hotel at Post and Hyde to Zoia's office in the Bank of America building at California and Kearney and then backtracked to the "Mechanics Institute" where he'd agreed to meet Joe for a game of chess. Neither Joe nor Santiago were Institute members but the Institute, true to the spirit of its founding principles, tolerated non-members in its beautiful, spacious reading room - two stories high with gilt columns and leather sofas, a reading room as elegant as that in any University club - as long as they were civil and created no disturbances.

The Mechanics Institute was uncrowded this Saturday morning. A thin, very elderly man, probably a retiree but dressed as if for a business appointment, was reading a mystery novel. A middle aged woman in an Indian sari was seated at a table reading one of the foreign newspapers which the Institute stored in a rack, hanging from long, varnished wooden poles. A poor grey old man was asleep in another of the easy chairs, chin drooping onto his slowly heaving chest.

Joe and Santiago had just started their game when Santiago was interrupted by a tap on the shoulder. Santiago looked up.

"Hutch! Fancy meeting you here."

Hutch sat down in a chair overlooking the chess board and with hardly a glance at Joe by way of apology for interrupting their game began to speak to Santiago.

"It's doubly odd, Santiago, since I was just thinking about our recent conversations. I want to ask you a few questions - that is if you have a minute." Hutch glanced at Joe and then back at Santiago. "I'm sorry. Was I disrupting your game?"

"What's on your mind, Hutch?"

"A couple of things. First, summarize your argument for me. Briefly." Hutch sat back in the big leather armchair as Santiago paused to collect his thoughts.

"Well, Hutch, briefly, we have the Empiricist axioms. Let me see how closely I can recall them:"

Let us then suppose the mind to be...white paper, void of all characters, without any ideas...[It is] furnished...[by] particular sensible objects, [which] do convey into the mind several distinct perceptions of things...which when I say the senses convey into the mind, I mean, they from external objects - by sensation - convey into the mind what produces there those perceptions.
[Locke's Essay 2.1.3 - p. 109]

"And",

Metaphysical truth is nothing but the real existence of things conformable to the ideas to which we have annexed their names."
[Locke's "Essay" 4.5.11]

"This latter is of course a definition of empirical truth. So Locke - by identifying 'metaphysical truth' with 'empirical truth' - is saying that there is no truth deeper than empirical truth, simply another way of saying that 'science is the bedrock of truth'."

Hutch made an impatient circular motion with his hand. "Not necessary to cite supporting references, Santiago. Just summarize the argument in your own words." Hutch clasped his hands, index fingers extended to form a little steeple. Frowning, he put the steeple to his lips in a gesture of expectation and waited for Santiago to continue.

"Locke builds an epistemology consistent with those precepts. The world of nature being composed exclusively of the objects of our senses, our knowledge of the world is based exclusively on 'simple ideas', that is to say, sensation.

"However, late in the 'Essay', Locke finds that his epistemology, his 'theory of knowledge' is too weak to account for the phenomenon of language. Some words, Locke admits, stand for ideas that are not composed of 'simple ideas', ideas that would be what we call 'abstract'.

"So, Hutch, Locke is unable to account for the meaningfulness of language without violating the basic precepts of Empiricism. Berkeley and Hume rededicate themselves to the Empiricist fundamentals but as far as language is concerned, they only dig themselves more deeply into the hole begun by Locke - that is, the theory which we now call 'nominalism'."

Here, Hutch scowled at the floor and raised a hand to interrupt Santiago. "But what I don't understand, Santiago, is your circuitous route. What more devastating attack on 'science as the bedrock of truth' could there be than Hume's thesis that - if I'm understanding it correctly - there's no rational basis for empirical statements? Why not attack there?"

"Yes Hutch, you would have thought that Hume's conclusions would have forced philosophers to reexamine the Empiricist axioms. Perhaps it's an emotional attachment to the notion that 'metaphysical truth, is nothing but the existence in nature of things conformable to the ideas to which we have annexed their names'. But for whatever reason, Hume's odd conclusions have been debated for two hundred years with very little inclination to question the Empiricist assumptions.

"The beauty of an argument based on language, on the other hand, is that it's so much more decisive. While we may be willing to concede that we exist in some sort of soup of primoridal ignorance as proposed by Hume in the closing passages of Book I of the Treatise, no one can argue that language is meaningless."

"Why not!" Hutch said sharply.

Santiago sighed. "How would one signal that language is meaningless? By carrier pigeon?"

"Right. I get it. Continue."

"So something's got to give, Hutch. One has to either supply a theory of language more plausible than this gerry-rigged 'nominalism' or one is forced to question the fundamental precepts of Empiricism."

Hutch sat for a moment - fingers still to his lips - looking out the tall window facing onto Post Street.

"And why should I care, Santiago? Tell me why I should care about language and meaning and the 'Empiricist axioms' and argumentation that's three hundred years old."

"That's a very good question. Really, it is the question. Give me a minute, Hutch."

Santiago returned shortly with a couple of books he'd fetched from the Institute stacks.

"Are you familiar with Dennett?"

Hutch brightened. "Daniel Dennett the philosopher? Certainly. A very bright fellow! I believe he's at Tufts."

"So you like Dennett, now, do you, Hutch?"

"They call him the founder of the 'new atheism'. A breath of sense in a world of fools, Santiago - no offense."

"Pay attention, Hutch, to this passage from your man."

According to the still robust tradition of the British Empiricists, Locke, Berkeley, and Hume, the senses are the entry portals for the mind's furnishings: once safely inside, these materials may be manipulated and combined ad lib to create an inner world of imagined objects. The way you imagine a purple flying cow is by taking the purple you got from seeing a grape, the wings you got from seeing an eagle, and attaching them to the cow you got from seeing a cow. This cannot be quite right. What enters the eye is electromagnetic radiation, and it does not thereupon become usable as various hues with which to paint imaginary cows. Our sense organs are bombarded with physical energy in various forms, where it is "transduced" at the point of contact into nerve impulses that then travel inward to the brain. Nothing but information passes from outside to inside, and while the receipt of information might provoke the creation of some phenomenological item (to speak as neutrally as possible), it is hard to believe that the information itself - which is just an abstraction made concrete in some modulated physical medium - could be the phenomenological item. There is still good reason, however, for acknowledging with the British Empiricists that in some way the inner world is dependent on sensory sources.

[Dennett - Consciousness Explained (Back Bay Books 1992) (ISBN 0-316-18066-1) p. 55]

"...and now, Hutch, compare that passage with this from Locke:"

If then external objects be not united to our minds when they produce ideas therein; and yet we perceive these ORIGINAL qualities in such of them as singly fall under our senses, it is evident that some motion must be thence continued by our nerves, or animal spirits, by some parts of our bodies, to the brains or the seat of sensation, there to produce in our minds the particular ideas we have of them. And since the extension, figure, number, and motion of bodies of an observable bigness, maybe perceived at a distance by the sight, it is evident some singly imperceptible bodies must come from them; to the eyes, and thereby convey to the brain some motion; which produces these ideas which we have of them in us.

[Locke's "Essay", 2.8.12]

--let us suppose at present that, the different motions and figures, bulk and number, of such particles, affecting the several organs of our senses, produce: in us those different sensations which we have from the colours and smells of bodies; v.g. that a violet, by the impulse of such insensible particles of matter, of peculiar figures and bulks, and in different degrees and modifications of their motions, causes the ideas of the blue colour, and sweet scent of that flower to be produced in our minds. It being no more impossible to conceive that God should annex such ideas to such motions, with which they have no similitude, than that he should annex the idea of pain to the motion of a piece of steel dividing our flesh, with which that idea hath no resemblance.

[Locke's "Essay", 2.8.13]

"Now really, Hutch. How far have we come in the past three hundred years? Dennett's description of perception is equivalent to Locke's except that, with Locke's appeal to God out of reach, Dennett is reduced to perplexity with regard to what he calls 'information itself - which is just an abstraction made concrete in some modulated physical medium', whatever that means."

"What do you mean 'whatever that means'?" Hutch said. "Pretty snide tone with which the precocious mariner addresses Exeter-Harvard-Oxford, Santiago, don't you think?"

"But you do get my point Hutch. Notwithstanding 'transduced', 'phenomenological', 'electromagnetic', three hundred years after Locke, Dennett is still chewing over the same basic metaphor. For Locke it requires an act of God to

...annex such ideas to such motions, with which they have no similitude, [e.g.] the idea of pain to the motion of a piece of steel dividing our flesh, with which that idea hath no resemblance.

"For his part, Dennett opines that

...it is hard to believe that the information itself...could be the phenomenological item.

"Now, let me drop the rhetorical posture, Hutch, what *does* Dennett mean when he speaks of,"

...an abstraction made concrete in some modulated physical medium...

Auto-didact though he was, Santiago had no chip on his shoulder. But he did find Hutch's canard with regard to his lack of formal education, particularly the use of the word precocious, provocative; and his tone reflected his irritation. Santiago paused for a moment, waiting for Hutch's response.

"I have no idea either but you're the Dennett fan, Hutch. It appears that Dennett's 'information' is equivalent to Locke's 'sensation'. So 'sensation' is 'abstraction made concrete in some modulated physical medium'? How illuminating! We've come a long way baby!

"Consider, Hutch, that the most recent of Dennett's books is entitled 'Breaking the Spell: Religion as a Natural Phenomenon'. We agree, Hutch, that Dennett appears to be relying on the Empiricist axioms. If these don't hold then Dennett might be forced to concede that 'science is not the bedrock of truth', in which case any treatment of religion as a 'natural phenomenon' might be interesting but can never be definitive.

"Dennett's overriding problem is that he subscribes to what he calls a 'naturalistic world view', a world view, in his words, 'free of supernatural or mystical deities, forces, and entities'. [http://www.the-brights.net/] But are abstract ideas perhaps entities of exactly the type that Dennett's creed cannot accommodate? In other words, are Dennett's most deeply held personal beliefs rationally defensible? Or is he as credulous as some illiterate peasant who sees a vision of this or that deity in a pizza?"

This was too much for Hutch who was familiar with Dennett's resume. "Santiago, Dennett is a trained scientist. He knows physics, molecular biology, evolutionary biology." [http://ase.tufts.edu/cogstud/incbios/dennettd/dennettdcv.htm]

"Dennett is no scientist," Santiago countered with disgust. "Dennett is a'science-worshipper'! Dick Feynman is a real scientist and you know what he said about the so-called philosophy of science: 'Philosophy of science is about as useful to scientists as ornithology is to birds.'"

"Speaking for myself, Santiago, let me just say that I'm a humanist and leave it at that."

"But humanism is the most shame-faced science-worship, Hutch! The humanist concedes in advance that 'science is the bedrock of truth' and then whines for his little place in the sun. And as for those insufferable science-mystics", Santiago's gorge was up, "they're no better than the humanists." Santiago folded his hands as if in prayer and looking at the ceiling chanted, "'science is the bedrock of truth and now let's leave ourselves a little room to gaze in wonderment at the stars'."

Their conversation had finally attracted the attention of the librarian at the big wooden circulation desk in the center of the floor. The young man caught Santiago's eye and gave him a significant look. Both Hutch and Santiago lowered their voices to whispers.

"So scientists are science-worshippers and humanists are science-worshippers. According to you the only non-science-worshippers are God-worshippers!"

"Actually, Hutch..."

"So you mean to tell me that even God-worshippers are science-worshippers?" Hutch said incredulously.

"Well, not all..."

"Oh brother! So everyone's a science-worshipper except Santiago, right?"

Santiago shrugged. "Hey Hutch, maybe that's why the Hindu's call this the Kali Yuga, the 'Age of Iron'."

Terminally exasperated Hutch left off whispering. "What do I care what the Hindus think!" The woman in the sari seated nearby looked up, startled.

"I'm sorry ma'am", Hutch stammered in a whisper.

The librarian had had enough and was coming out from behind the circulation desk. Hutch, moving toward the door, waved apologetically in the direction of the librarian and the Indian woman and directed an angry glare at Santiago who responded with a wink and a smile and turned his attention back to his chess game.

*** Chapter 12: The Dais ***

Probably it was the screech of tires that woke Murray and sent her to the window. Looking out she would have seen a motionless figure lying prone on the sidewalk three stories below covered with some sort of olive drab tarp.

I lay there for a moment until the sound of the car's engine died away and then threw back my rain poncho and crawled to my feet.

"Hey Tommy Saxophone", Murray called down to me. "What's happening? Are you okay?"

"Yeah, I'm all right...".

Murray must have heard the shake in my voice.

"Come up."

She was waiting for me at the door to her apartment.

"Hey man, what's happening? You camping on the sidewalk on Buchanan Street?"

As usual Murray was in sweatpants and a shapeless turtleneck.

"I was hitchhiking up from Daly City..."

"Come on in man. You definitely need some tea and then you can tell me your story."

The building was very old and the sagging kitchen floor sloped away from the doorway. The kitchen was neat and sparsely furnished with an old formica table and a couple of red vinyl upholstered chairs. Dishes were stacked neatly on the sideboard of the sink and a kettle of water was already heating on the gas stove.

"Take off your shoes Tommy."

Murray led me through a beaded curtain into the living room. The room smelled of incense and was dark except for light that filtered in from the kitchen. I sat down on a mattress covered with a cotton bed spread and sank into the pillows along the wall.

Murray came in with cups of tea and put one of the cups on the coffee table in front of me.

"Drink your tea, Tommy. It'll mellow you out."

"I don't really like tea, Murray."

"This isn't Lipton's. It's Chamomile. It's an herb. It has a lot of medical properties."

I leaned up to the table and took a sip.

"Not too bad. Yeah, it's pretty mellow." I took another sip and leaned back against the pillows.

"So you were hitchhiking up from Daly City..."

"Yeah..."

"...and the wrong people picked you up and..."

"...and they were going to off me."

"Wow. Not groovy! Bad scene! So then what happened."

I shrugged. "I guess they decided not to. They just pulled over and the lead guy told me to get out and put my poncho over my head and not get up until they were gone."

"Didn't you get any vibe from them Tommy? What kind of car did they have?"

"A big Cadillac. Yeah, they did have a vibe."

"So three young guys in a Cadillac offer you a ride on a deserted Freeway entrance in Daly City in the middle of the night and they vibe you out but you get into the car anyway." Murray shook her head and laughed. "Don't tell me. You didn't want to offend them."

"I guess." I was still a bit shaken.
"You said there was a leader."

"Yeah, a driver and a kind of leader guy in the front seat and another guy in the back seat with me. I think the back seat guy was as scared as I was."

"Hey man, don't you read the Chronicle? There's been a lot of that going around lately. It's, like, an initiation."

"An initiation? What do I get into?"

"Not initiating you, silly. An initiation into the gang. Probably for the guy in the back seat."

"Maybe he didn't get in then. I hope he's okay."

"Well that's Karma, Tommy. What goes around comes around. In a past life you did something nice for someone."

"Yeah, well." I took another sip of tea. "I dig this tea Murray. Thanks."

We sat there in silence for a while drinking our tea and I looked around the room. There was another mattress with pillows against the opposite wall and an armchair in a corner by the windows that looked out onto the street. The windows were covered with a single tie-dyed sheet attached to the window molding with thumbtacks. On the wall there were a few psychedelic flyers advertising shows at the Longshoremen's Hall, the Avalon and the Fillmore and a larger poster of an unsmiling and heavily armed young man in a beret seated on a rattan chair.

On a credenza at the dark end of the room opposite the windows I could make out a statue of a seated Buddha, a shelf of books and an unlit Lava Lamp. The center of the room was occupied by a large, low coffee table. The table was bare except for a couple of sticks of incense burning in a brass holder.

"How come you're the only one who lives in this building Murray?"

"Long story, Tommy Saxophone. Long story."

"How long have you lived here?"

"Five years altogether. I used to live downstairs. This used to be Stan Roosevelt's pad."

"Stan Roosevelt! The guy who bought us whiskies! He's Santiago's friend. Joe told me about him."

"Stan knows everyone. Joe, Wolfgang, Santiago, Leary, Watts, Alpert, Kesey, Wavy, Janis, Jerry, Owsley. Even Huey." Murray nodded toward the poster on the wall. "Everyone worth knowing I guess." Murray sighed.

"So how did you end up in his pad?"

Murray didn't say anything. She was sitting all the way back in the armchair in the corner, in the shadows, and I couldn't see her face but for a minute I thought maybe she was crying.

"Gee, Murray. I'm sorry. Hey, that's cool. I was just talking."

"No, Tommy Saxophone. I will tell you the story of me and this pad."

Murray's voice lightened as she recalled earlier, apparently happier, days.

"I got to San Francisco in 1965. It was so groovy back then."

"I think it's pretty groovy now, Murray."

"Oh, Tommy. I'm sorry, man. I don't want to bring you down. But if you think it's groovy now...You can't imagine how groovy it was back in '65."

The news had gotten around the Bay Area academic communities that Wolfgang would be giving a talk on Kant at the Fosters cafeteria at Polk and Sutter and Alberto the cook had spent the afternoon setting up to accommodate the anticipated crowd.

Alberto had pushed several tables together and had covered them with white tablecloths. Behind this dais, in front of the big plate glass windows, Alberto had set up four chairs, one for each of the principals: Wolfgang, Santiago, Austin and Hutch.

Joe had arrived early and was smoking his pipe and sitting in one of the chairs Alberto had set up in rows facing the speakers' table. There was a stack of white linen napkins and a rack of water goblets on the table.

"Wait, Joe. Soon you will see something very beautiful."

Alberto placed a row of the goblets along the table and then began folding the napkins into a variety of fanciful shapes. Fifteen minutes later Alberto stood away from the table with arm outstretched inviting Joe to admire his remarkable handiwork.

The linen origami creations leapt from goblet to goblet from one end of the table to the other never touching the table cloth. Like clouds, the folded napkins suggested various animal shapes - a deer, a rabbit - but the overall effect was of beautiful abstraction, lighter than air. Night had fallen and passersby were stopping at the cafeteria's plate glass window on Sutter to admire the unusual display.

"I learned this from Jimmy Abrams at the Concord. Do you know the Concord, Joe? Big Jewish hotel in Monticello, in New York."

The tall, balding Argentinian cook fetched a wastebasket and came over to sit down next to Joe. Putting the wastebasket between his feet, he took an orange from his pocket and began to peel it.

"A couple of weeks after I started at the Concord, the guests are checking in, right? And some guests come up to my table and someone says, 'OK, this is good here'. You know who it is? It's George Burns. He's up for the weekend treating a bunch of his old vaudeville pals to a weekend in the Catskills." Alberto paused to spit a seed into the wastebasket and wipe his bushy mustache - first one side, then the other.

"So Jimmy Abrams is working the next station and he comes over to me and says, 'you can make a lot of money this weekend - or you can make bubkas.' I ask him to tell me how to make a lot of money and he offers to make the napkin animals for me, for fifteen dollars. The guests love this. When they come into the dining room on Shabbos and everything is set up nice and their table has the napkin animals, you might get one hundred dollars right there! You ever been to the Concord Joe? What a place! Increible!" Alberto spat another seed into the wastebasket and told Joe about the incredible Concord Hotel.

He explains to Joe that the dining room of the Concord is so big you could fit twenty Foster's Cafeterias into it, probably 4,000 people. The whole dining room is run by Irving Cohen, the Maitre D. On check in day, when people come to make their table reservations, Irving Cohen records them all on a diagram on a little desk at the front of the dining room. Halfway through the check-in, Irving Cohen goes to a secret little room off of the dining room and a helper helps him to take off his jacket and put on another one.

"Do you know why he has to change jackets, Joe? Because he has so much money stuffed into the pockets of his jacket." Alberto shook his head incredulously.

"Cohen is a nice guy. Never smiles, but never mean. But you need an enforcer in a place like El Concord. That's Steamboat. Steamboat is El Hefe! He carries a gun. He would just as soon kill you as look at you. That's what you need to run the Concord dining room. You know why they call him Steamboat?" Alberto paused for effect.

"Because he putts around!" Alberto laughed at the Yiddish witticism and took another section of orange. "What a place, man." Alberto shook his head again as he recalled his years at the largest, most famous of all Catskill hotels.

The people who worked the Concord were from all over the world, Jews, Puerto Ricans, Columbians, Chinese; a waiter who's a survivor of Auchwitz, numbers visible on his forearm, working his tables with an Egyptian busboy. "The United Nations has nothing on the Concord", Alberto said.

Room service was apparently staffed mostly with Black Islamic Nationalists who bickered provocatively with the Rabbi over the kosher laws. "He was a nice guy, the Rabbi. A short fat guy...Always joking. The room service waiters would always pretend to forget which plates and which silver to take - just to get his goat. He carried a gun too."

The kitchen was run by Gordon Winarick, according to Alberto, a man even meaner than Steamboat.

"So, listen: the guy who cuts the prime rib is a Chinese guy. Very strong, like Bruce Lee. And when he cuts the prime rib he dance around behind the counter doing all these kung fu moves. So one day, a busboy is waiting for his prime-rib and he starts to bang the plate cover on the counter: 'Hey schmendrick! Más rápidamente man! Hurry up Fu Manchu!' So the Chinese guy spins around like in a ballet and cuts the busboy right across the belly.

"Guess what. Winarick fires the busboy and gives the cook a raise!" Alberto laughed. "Tough place, Joe. Really tough place."

"So I said to Jimmy Abrams, 'teach me to do the napkin animals'. I had to pay him forty bucks and he taught me."

People were starting to arrive for Wolfgang's Kant talk. Alberto dusted the remains of the orange from his lap into the wastebasket, wiped and smoothed his mustache and rose to complete the preparations.

"George Burns loved the napkin animals, Joe. But my table was far, far from the kitchen, all the way out in 'coffin's corner', and I did a lousy job and Burns didn't leave much of a tip. And my other tables were mad because Burns got all special stuff and they complained, like, 'Why don't we get stuffed derma' and so they tipped me lousy too."

Alberto smiled and gestured toward the dais, "But I learned to make the napkin animals. Nice, eh?"

The group that was filtering in was a bit different from Fosters' usual clientele. The men wore corduroy or wool pants with cuffs, comfortable soft leather shoes, cardigans or sleeveless sweaters or tweed jackets; one tall older man with a trimmed beard and a carefully manicured fringe of white hair had a blue wool sweater thrown over his shoulders, Cape Cod style.

Some of the women who accompanied the men wore long dresses, elegant, casual and understated. Others wore cuffed wool or corduroy pants. Several wore jewelry of silver and turquoise.

As a man would introduce his wife to a colleague - perhaps someone she'd often heard her husband speak of, but never had the pleasure of meeting - the woman would lean forward to catch the name, repeat it for confirmation, offer her hand with a warm and genuine smile.

One woman arrived unaccompanied. She had long black hair and a wide mouth. She laughed easily and unaffectedly, though perhaps a bit too loudly, as she chatted with the gentlemen who quickly gathered around her.

"That's Safra Fried", a man at the edge of the group said to his wife, "Anscombe's protege. We expect great things of her."

A group of grad students were arriving now. Mostly male but with a few young women, they were dressed in jeans and many sported the type of expensive colorful nylon outerwear that Austin also favored.

A tall man, on the young side of middle age in jeans and a sweatshirt, held the cafeteria door open for a younger man. Austin had arrived accompanied by his thesis adviser, Jack Dolan. Dolan was an outspoken opponent of the war in Vietnam and had recently burned his draft card at a rally in Berkeley. His eyes were concentrated in a slight squint with crows-feet at the corners. Dolan had an extraordinarily high forehead, his thin brown hair brushed straight back and hanging raggedly over his collar. It was often said, particularly by women in his Introduction to Logic class, that he resembled a bust of Homer.

The balance of the crowd was comprised of Fosters' regulars, the old gray men who lived in cheap hotels in San Francisco's Tenderloin. Some were drawn by the promised post-talk collation, but a few, friends of Wolfie and Santiago, intelligent men undone by drink or bad luck, came with a real interest in the Kant talk.

Wolfgang arrived. He greeted any of the group that managed to catch his eye but appeared to be abashed by the attention as he attempted to make his way through the crowd to the dais excusing himself apologetically as if he were a parvenu and not himself the evening's featured speaker.

The audience found its seats and Santiago, Austin and Wolfgang took their places behind Alberto's beautiful display of "napkin animals". Wolfgang rose and asked the audience to acknowledge Alberto, who was standing off to one side of the dais. The audience gave Alberto a strong and sustained round of applause and Alberto stepped to the table to dismantle his creation and pour water from a plain metal water pitcher, napkin tied around its waist, into the speakers' goblets.

Just as Alberto was laying out a few plates of orange slices for the speakers Hutch hurried in and had to take his place at the head table in full view of the audience. That Hutch was out of his element in this gathering of Humanities academics only added to his embarrassment. He took his seat quickly, apologizing to Wolfgang and glancing at the audience once or twice with a sheepish smile. But anyone who knew Hutch would have detected, under this pantomime of embarrassment, the basal confidence of the medical doctor, master of all he surveys - even in a roomful of strangers.

But even someone who knew Hutch not at all could not have failed to notice the change in his demeanor as, settling into his seat and opening his notebook, he saw sitting in the front row, directly opposite himself: Wild Man Bill and...Mildred.

Were they just sitting together or was it possible they had actually arrived together? This question appeared settled when Mildred, putting her mouth to Wild Man's ear and covering mouth and ear with her hand while still looking toward the dais, whispered a few words to Wild Man.

Mildred was demure in the plain blue uniform frock. She had on her customary blue-black lace-up shoes with heavy heels and her handmade head scarf out of which a few stray, straw-blonde wisps of hair were poking onto her forehead. And of course her eyes were still cornflower blue and she still had the little vertical cleft at the tip of her nose - and the clear skin so redolent of vibrant good health.

As far as Hutch could tell Wild Man had for his part made an attempt to clean himself up for this monstrous "date" - if indeed that's what it was. He wore a sort of zoot suit with a wide tie in a floral print. The pants were baggy and pleated in front, the white dress shirt yellow with age.

But - Hutch noted to himself with satisfaction - clothes do not always make the man as witness the flounce of kinky hair growing from low on the brow, the heavy beard which though recently shaved appeared to be growing back before one's very eyes, the beady, shifty eyes on either side of the beaky nose, the ironic smile playing faintly on the rosebud lips, the slouch and inexplicably sitting next to him this quite admirable, if perhaps excessively devout, young woman attending to the proceedings on the dais with that intelligent and direct gaze that Hutch had found so remarkable in their first encounter.

Hutch started as he realized that Wolfgang's talk had already begun, had perhaps been going on for some time. Visibly drained of any professional aplomb, Hutch was fortunate that the audience's attention was directed at the slight, fifty-ish man with the bad haircut and the German accent, the hatchet-faced fellow who might have passed for Wittgenstein himself. But the self-deprecating Wolfgang, the professorial little man, the Wolfgang with the Chaplinesque little laugh, hand over his mouth as if to hide bad teeth, that Wolfgang was gone. In his place, a serious and self-confident man, sitting up straight, feet flat on the floor, forearms flat on the table on either side of his German edition of Kant's "Critique of Pure Reason".

Wolfgang looked up from his text and was just at the point of beginning his talk when he was interrupted by the scrape of a chair on the linoleum. There being no empty seats, a tardy attendee had had to pull a chair over from a neighboring table. A few turned to see the source of the disturbance and the stranger being recognized a low hubbub spread through the audience. It was Peter Strawson, recently appointed Ryle's successor to the Waynflete Chair of Metaphysical Philosophy at the University of Oxford, an appointment due, as many in the audience knew, to Strawson's landmark examination of Kant's Critique, the very work that was the subject of Wolfgang's talk this evening.

The audience now turned its attention to Wolfgang, curious to see his reaction to the illustrious late-comer. Wolfgang smiled very slightly and nodded to Strawson. Now, heads turned once again to see Strawson's reaction to Wolfgang's greeting. Strawson responded with an equally cordial nod.

The audience quieted and returned its attention to Wolfgang as he began his disquisition on Kant's "Critique of Pure Reason".

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