put away the thesaurus dude.

But what does the word "orange" mean/refer to in the ending phrase "for me to see it as orange"? It refers to the phenomenal character of your first person experience and not a mind-independent property of the object. — Michael

Yes it means both things. Contextually you should be able to tell when someone is talking about orange as a property of the thing and orange as a qualia.

ordinary life we talk about ordinary objects as being coloured, but it's a fiction that we ought recognise in the philosophy (and science) room. Ordinary objects only reflect various wavelengths of light, which is something very different. — Michael

Why is it something very different? Why can't "that object is orange" mean the same thing as "that object reflects the wavelengths of light required for me to see it as orange"? I don't see those sentences as having fundamentally different meanings, the second one is just more verbose

I think the assumption that "you" has a referent separate from Bob or Alice is the problem.

EITHER there's some spirit soul thing, a ghost going around to these bodies inhabiting them, in which case there's no paradox because there is a real difference

OR there are not these spirits and souls, and then there's no "you" that isn't synonymous with Bob, or synonymous with Alice, and there's no paradox.

You're just defining "seeing X" as "seeing some distal X" but obviously that's not a definition that indirect realists agree with. — Michael

Nor does it match how native English speakers use the word seeing. People suffering from psychosis may see things that aren't there. That's a completely normal sentence in English. Seeing is the experience, not the stuff out there.

In fact the colloquial phrase to say that you're experiencing hallucinations is to say "I'm seeing things".

I'll leave you to your ruminations. — Banno

I'd appreciate that

Hoe do you interpret it, otherwise? — Banno

In explaining your interpretation of his words, you said this:

"every truth is the sufficient reason for every other truth"

If you plug in any truth for P, and any truth for Q, it is NOT the case that "...you can't have P and not have Q follow it".

It is NOT the case that, for example, plugging in "the statue of liberty is in new york" for P and "the eiffel tower is in paris" for Q, you can just always plug it in and say "...you can't have P and not have Q follow it". You CAN have "the statue of liberty is in new york" without it being follow by "the eiffel tower is in paris", and we know that because for many years that was literally the case. It was literally the case that "the statue of liberty is in new york" was true, but there was no eiffel tower in paris.

You asked me how I interpret it, I spelled out 2 interpretations for you. I'll spell it out perhaps more clearly and succinctly now:

Interpretation one: when he says "P entails Q", he DOESN'T mean what you think he means, he DOESN'T mean p and q just happen to both be simultaneously true by happenstance, he instead means, in ALL POSSIBLE WORLDS where P is true, Q is true.

Interpretation 2 is the relevance logic interpretation, where you can only say "P entails Q" if you can derive Q from P in some way, or if they share some proposition or predicate.

You said your interpretation doesn't appear on the Paradoxes of Material Implication page. You're being silly. It's the first result. ""If P, then if Q, then P"; a true proposition is implied by any other proposition.[4] For instance, it is a valid argument that "The sky is blue, and therefore, there is no integer n greater than or equal to 3 such that for any nonzero integers x,y,z, xn = yn + zn."[2]" When you interpret his words as "every truth is the sufficient reason for every other truth", you are equating his Entailment with the very first paradox on that page (a subset of it, specifically). It cannot possibly be more clear that that's NOT what he means by entailment, precisely because he said "...you can't have P and not have Q follow it".

Your quote does not rely on " how people mean 'entails' in natural language". — Banno

It's a quote of someone using the word entails in natural language. The "clearly truth functional definition" it gives supports my interpretation, not yours. You're being weird.

that if P→Q then P is the sufficient reason for Q, then any truth will be sufficient reason for any other truth. — Banno

You keep insisting this, it's not any more compelling now than the first time you said it. That's not how people mean "entails" in natural language. If you speak to human beings regularly, you'll discover this.

The entailment used in the podcast is not amongst the so-called paradoxes of material implication. IF the aim is to firm up the notion of cause, or of sufficient reason, by using material implication, as is set out in the quote form the podcast, then any truth will suffice. And that's not what we want. — Banno

That's what you're insisting on, I don't think it's true. I don't think you interpreting what was said correctly. I think I've made that clear

I just read up on relevance logic as well, which is very interesting.

Relevant logicians point out that what is wrong with some of the paradoxes (and fallacies) is that the antecedents and consequents (or premises and conclusions) are on completely different topics. The notion of a topic, however, would seem not to be something that a logician should be interested in — it has to do with the content, not the form, of a sentence or inference. But there is a formal principle that relevant logicians apply to force theorems and inferences to “stay on topic”. This is the variable sharing principle. The variable sharing principle says that no formula of the form A→B can be proven in a relevance logic if A and B do not have at least one propositional variable (sometimes called a proposition letter) in common and that no inference can be shown valid if the premises and conclusion do not share at least one propositional variable.

https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/logic-relevance/?hl=en-GB#:~:text=The%20variable%20sharing%20principle%20says,and%20conclusion%20do%20not%20share

And that actually seems to more neatly map on to what people mean in natural language when they say one thing implies or entails another. A doesn't entail B just because they both happen to be true, A can only entail B meaningfully, to a native English speaker, if A has something to do with B - and in how I use these words, if B is true in all possible worlds where A is true.

One way I've approached thinking about it, and I'm not sure it works but it feels like it works, is talking about it in terms of possible worlds.

So if we go back to "the fact that there are pyramids in Egypt entails that shark species have been around on earth longer than trees have", the reason this doesn't ring true for how people naturally use the word entail is because we can imagine possible worlds where there are pyramids in Egypt but sharks haven't been around longer than trees. It's a coincidental truth that both of those things are true in this world, but one doesn't entail the other because there are possible worlds that are different.

https://gawron.sdsu.edu/semantics/course_core/lectures/truth_sets_possible_worlds.pdf

nope

it seems weird that you're unaware of this gap between what people mean by "entails" and how classic symbolic logic treats those things. Surely in your every day life you don't say things like "the fact that there are pyramids in Egypt entails that shark species have been around on earth longer than trees have". Right? I assume you don't find it reasonable to say things like that in the way you naturally speak, in the way you naturally talk about entailment.

Here's an article about the topic for your perusal: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paradoxes_of_material_implication

I don't see anything explosive there. This seems like one of those cases of a misapplication of symbolic logic. Yes, in symbolic logic, for all P and Q that are both true, P -> Q and Q -> P, but in natural language when someone says P entails Q they don't generally mean "two facts P and Q that have nothing to do with each other but both just happen to be true".

As far as who gets to get naked in what public rooms, it’s probably best to keep all the penises segregated from the vaginas. — Fire Ologist

There's logistical problems with this. What about people with manufactured penises or vaginas? Who checks and how do they check? Would you subject a man-ish lesbian to a genital check before you let her use the women's toilets, because she kinda looks like Justin Bieber or Adam Sandler?

let me spell it out for you a bit more clearly. The best argument for why trans women shouldn't be allowed in women's toilets won't rest on how we define the word "women", it will rest on tangible measurable outcomes from the proposed policies. "In this region, they took this policy and it resulted in a two-fold increase of sexual assaults", something like that. That's a compelling argument against a policy, and it doesn't rely on debating what it says in various dictionaries next to the word "women".

I have no idea what those statistics are in reality. I don't know if crime is increased, decreased, completely stable due to adopting this or that bathroom policy. But that's what's going to persuade people, not you choosing to die on the hill of the definition of a word. .

about without any definitions, can argue distinctions between two different things using words with no fixed definitions? I’m still trying to show that we need definitions at all. “Woman” is just the latest foil. — Fire Ologist

You said words are fixed, that's just incorrect. People need common understandings of terms inside a conservation. Two people could even have sensible conversations if those definitions changed from one conversation to the next, as long as they agreed in each context on what they mean. Idk why you're still harping on about it tbh, you accept that language changes and evolves, I accept that communication relies on some kind of contextual agreement, so we're actually mostly in agreement there about words and how they work to communicate ideas.

If you want to make an argument that people with certain properties shouldn't be in certain places, it really doesn't matter what you call those properties. The argument that you make shouldn't depend on what you name those properties. If people with penises shouldn't be in the toilets we call "women's toilets", it doesn't matter what label you apply to those people with penises, it could be "men" or "trans women" or whatever, the label doesn't matter, the argument shouldn't be about the label. If it is, you aren't making a very compelling argument.

Cis and trans are antonyms, as cis means "on the same side" and trans means "on the other side".

the way those terms are generally understood today, no, cis man and trans man cannot refer to the same human. Those are antonyms.

isn’t a practical justification a definition? — Fire Ologist

No. Practical means something different. It means you can say something like "the consequences of letting people born with penises into these places will have these undesirable effects", and you can make that argument without referring to the definition of women at all.

And for the record, i have no problem with the suggestion that there are negative consequences to letting people born with penises into certain spaces. Maybe that's true, but if it's true it's true regardless of what it says on page 356 of the dictionary.

So are you fixing a difference between “cis men” and “trans women”? — Fire Ologist

I don't even know what this question means. Am I fixing? No, I'm speculating that in reality there is one. I don't fix differences, that's not a meaningful English sentence.

Driving licenses are issued under the untold presumption that the drivers will think the colours of the traffic lights are in the traffic lights, not in the drivers mind — Corvus

They're issued because someone was convinced this person behaves safely in a car, not because of metaphysical reasons about where they think perception happens or where colours exist.

if we don't want certain people in certain bathrooms, we should have practical justifications of that that aren't mired in trite things like semantic arguments. "We don't want you in this bathroom for this this and this reason", rather than "we don't want you in this bathroom because of what it says on page 356 of Merriam Webster's dictionary". You know what I mean?

So are transwomen women or not? — Fire Ologist

That's a great question, and I'm not personally convinced very hard either direction. I think there's a lot of confusion around what it means to be trans, what trans people actually are and what they're going through. I would love to have more clarity on it.

I don't believe in the big conspiracy about trans people that they all just have a weird fetish. Some of them, maybe, but I don't think that's even the majority. I think the majority are probably going through something that's real, tangibly measurably real in some way despite our current inability to measure it. Whatever that thing is, whether that makes them Genuine Women ™️, I just don't know.

Some people hope to find the answer in the neurology of trans people. Something you can point to in the brain to see, see this structure here? Cis men don't have that, trans women do. If such a structure exists, it's pretty elusive, but finding it would clear up a lot of confusion in my opinion

you're doing a motte and bailey. You talk as if language is absolutely fixed and unchanging and then retreat to a more easily defendable position that it can and does change, but that is just kinda temporarily semi fixed in some contexts. It's hard to have a conversation when you claim one thing and then defend another.

Language isn't this objective truth that you can discover, like how we can discover the digits of pi or what elements bind with what other elements. People decide what words mean, together.

that language cannot be a purely rule less enterprise. — Philosophim

Nobody said that though, just said that it's not static. And it's clearly not

I found this connection come up again in a podcast I listen to. Within Reason, latest episode, debunking arguments for god with Graham Oppy.

They bring up the principle of sufficient reason and also determinism separately multiple times, but Alex OConnor makes the connection clear-ish here:

if you take my view, which is that for things to have a sufficient reason, they essentially must, like if P is a sufficient reason for Q, that's the same thing as saying that P entails Q, you know, that you can't have P and not have Q follow it.

https://podscripts.co/podcasts/within-reason/137-debunking-arguments-for-god-graham-oppy

So he's kinda getting at here what I think the connection is - if everything has a sufficient reason, then for every thing Q there exists some P that entails Q, and you can't have P without Q following it. That sounds like determinism to me. (I'm temporarily ignoring the infinite regress there, in the fact that every P is also a Q that needs its own P - they do discuss the inherent regress in the podcast if you want to listen)

This is the kind of train of thought that makes me think the principle of sufficient reason, if taken to its logical conclusion, implies determinism.

If language didn’t contain the static, ever, the notion of “shared understandings” is silly. How can two people share the same understanding if not even words can be fixed? — Fire Ologist

This is a bizarre take. We know language isn't fixed. Surely you know the language you're speaking now didn't exist 2000 years ago. And after it did come into existence, it was spoken very differently from how it's spoken now.

You can have a shared understanding without a perfectly static language, as long as it's static enough. It doesn't have to be entirely static, just relatively stable.

If all words had fixed meanings, there would be one true correct language and all other languages would just be wrong.

Interesting example: in Shakespearean times, the word "nice" meant foolish, it didn't mean kind. In his time, it was understood to mean foolish, and in our time it's understood to mean kind. So we clearly have a shifting non static language, and we also clearly have a contemporary common understanding.

if we're "in a deterministic world", then "options" are metacognitive / retrospective illusions. — 180 Proof

Aren't options pretty much cognitively the same thing regardless of what kind of world we live in? The mental processes that give rise to the feeling of "considering your options" are the same in any case. The effects of those processes are also the same.

then can we trust that it is accurate, in the sense that the sensory content resembles the distal object — Michael

It depends on what you mean by "resemble". At best you'll get, "it's what that object looks like from a particular point of view in a particular context". It may look like one thing to you and something entirely different to a different sort of being, and both of those very different experiences of that object can be equally accurate representations of the object in question despite being very very dissimilar.

love that, it captures a lot of the necessary nuance, imo, of what it means when someone says "that thing is that colour"

As a compatibilist, to me, options exist as a subjective thing. I'm a decision making machine, I don't know the future, but as a decision making machine I can have a simplified model of the world and imagine the consequences of me making various choices, and then choose the option that seems like it will product the best outcome.

That's presumably what chess engines do

current problem as I see it is that semantic direct realists have muddied the waters by trying to adapt direct realist terminology to mean something very different — something which doesn't actually contradict the phenomenology or epistemology of indirect realism. — Michael

That's my take too

so isn't all that answered in the physical description of the sequence of events?

that picture doesn't make that clear, but that's fine.

My question is, don't we have a scientifically agreed upon sequence of events from "there's an ice cream in front of you" to "you're experiencing the visual sensation of the ice cream in front of you"? Like, the matter that makes up the ice cream is there, it reflects or emits photons, some of those photons hit your eyes, your eyes send signals to your brain, your brain interprets those signals and the context they're in to create your full visual-spacial-objectoriented experience of the ice cream and the space it exists in.

If we already know the physical sequence of events, what extra disagreement even is there to be had?

understand the distinction between direct and indirect realism to be better expressed by this picture: — Michael

I don't understand what that picture is getting at at all. They both see an ice cream that's half red, half black. One has a mental image of it being brown and one has a mental image of it being red? That's what I'm getting from it, but that doesn't seem to have much to do with the distinction between direct and indirect realism to me.

There are people in the world who research deadly viruses. There are other people in the world who, if given access to deadly viruses, would use them against millions of innocents. Generally governments and society at large accepts people researching viruses, but doesn't want terroristic people to have easy access to the knowledge and materials required to use them for terroristic purposes.

That's literally all that's happening here. It's not just his views, it's his views in combination with the terroristic methods he's researching.

If he just had a blog saying "I hate jews", fine, who cares? Plenty of people hate jews, we can get over it. But if he's obsessed with hating jews AND intensely researching how to blow up a synagogue, there's a fucking problem.

but I think the judge (Lodder) is pretty clear — Jeremy Murray

did you not read the very next quote?

“It is submitted on your behalf that these are not obscure documents, are not specialist material and that two of them can be purchased on-line. That there was no preparation for any act, and that you are in your 50s, walk with a stick there was no evidence of disseminating to others. I do not sentence you for your political views, but the extremity of those views informs the assessment of dangerousness.”

And that's the whole point of an absolute presupposition. The question isn't whether it's true or false, it's whether it's necessary in order for the enterprise of physics to proceed. You couldn't do physics as it existed in 1900 without something you can measure, i.e. physical substances. — T Clark

That doesn't make it a presupposition though. That just makes it a practical reality. It's a practical reality that we have access to physical objects, can smash them into each other, and so it's a practical reality that if we want to predict the future of the world we live in, we can only do so using the stuff we have access to.

To say physics presupposes all their is is matter, is like saying botany presupposes that all there are are plants. I mean ffs Newton himself wasn't a materialist.

All a principle or law is is a generalization of a regularity in the results of observations and measurements. In order for science to be useful, you have to be able to abstract a general feature of behavior. Otherwise, all you can do is talk about specific instances of phenomena. Again--It's something you can't do physics without. — T Clark

That's not a support of the presupposition claim you made, or an argument against what I said. Yes, you have to suppose perhaps that there are SOME "laws" and so forth, whatever "law" may ontological mean, but you need not pressuppose EVERYTHING is lawful. Maybe I'm misreading your point #3. I think if you want people to accept #3 as a true pressupposition, you're going to have to clearly define what a law is. I can easily see a physicist not believing in "laws" at all, depending on the definition.

I didn't say it was a universal truth or true at all, only that you have to assume, act as if, it's true in order to do physics as it was done in 1900. — T Clark

I replied to this without realizing you were talking about physics. I'm not sure what I think about it now that the context changed. You'd have to define "law" first.

It's not necessary I guess, but physicists do presuppose it — T Clark

Okay, well this one's too weak to even argue about then. Not a presupposition of science, apparently merely a common belief of scientists.

The laws of conservation of matter and conservation of energy were fundamental laws of physics in 1900. Since then, we've learned energy and matter are equivalent. Now we have the law of conservation of matter and energy. Physicists didn't know about anti-matter until the late 1920s. — T Clark

The boundaries of this conversation are weird and vague. What makes something a "presupposition of physics"? Is discovering something true, and then writing it in your physics notes, and then it being taught in phyiscs classrooms, a "presupposition"? That's certainly not how I'd use the term. Is every individual thing physcists thought were true supposed to be a "presupposition"? Is that how you're using the word? Yes, physicists thought it was true that matter and energy are conserved. I don't think that's sufficient to call it a "presupposition".

I actually think that's the most important thing here - for you to define exactly what you mean when you call this things presuppositions of science, or physics, or newtonian physics or whatever the boundaries of this conversation are. To me, it means "someone cannot participate in the social endeavour we call Physics without assuming these things to be literally true". But... can't they? I just don't know about that. I think you're overthinking what physics is about. They're just looking at how stuff moves and behaves and trying to figure out the patterns of it, and a bit more ambitiously, hopefully trying to figure out "why", whatever that means. Do you have to assume all that crap is literally true to notice and try to figure out these patterns? I just don't think so.

found the 'racist man in bedroom' free-speech story,

https://jonathanturley.org/2021/05/26/toxic-ideology-english-neo-nazi-given-four-years-for-his-extremist-views/ — Jeremy Murray

Definitely an interesting case. He wasn't imprisoned just for being generally racist, it seems. It was for "possessing materials which could be of use in preparing terrorist acts." Never heard of a crime worded quite like that before.