¬p ⊬ □¬(p ∧ JBp) — Michael

Well, yes, that's kinda the point.

That's been done. — Michael

Yep. With the consequences set out in the SEP article:

The debates surrounding the proper characterization of semantic anti-realism go far beyond the scope of this entry. As for the knowability proof itself, there continues to be no consensus on whether and where it goes wrong.

The antirealist claims that there are unknown truths but that all unknown truths of the appropriate kind1 are knowable. With respect to ontology, there are unverified truths but there are no verification-transcendent truth conditions. — Michael

Some do. Good for them. The question of whether they are right remains open.

it neither claims nor entails that all truths are known — Michael

That, Michael, remains an open question. You misrepresent my position. Again, I am suggesting that different logics might have application in different contexts; that we can adopt a realist approach in some circumstances and an antirealist approach in other circumstances; that it is not all-or-nothing.

you have the mind of a doubter — Gregory

Thank you.

I dont agree that life and desire work in that "logical" way — Gregory

Yep. You have difficulty with logic.

Believing that folk only ever get what they deserve requires great faith.

It doesn't say anything about what we ought do, so isn't intended to be "workable". It's a bit of frippery, like the OP.

Isn't that like "why does 1+1 equal 2"?

You're trying to shift the ground. Your claim was that what you get is what you desire. showed that to be incorrect.

Every second is a past but the present remains — Gregory

Gobbledegook, attempting to make an excuse to not be responsible for one's choices.

The past doesn't exist — Gregory

Layered shite is still shite.

I lost my husband 3 years ago to MS. The last couple years of his life were very difficult. At one point, as he was having a lot of trouble making a transfer, I said to him, "Tired of this life?"

He replied, "No, this life is good. It's this body I am tired of." — Questioner

That's an excellent reply.

As the spirit desires so it has — Gregory

You get what you desire? So that if you get poor outcomes, it's becasue that is what you desire?

And I suppose that those who say they did not desire mishap, misadventure and disability are denying what they really desired? True Scotsmen, one and all?

Pretty shitty reasoning.

Can one truly have a choice in remaining ignorant as the very state is a state of not knowing what they ate avoiding? — Benj96

Hu?


(Edit: Oh, "Are". OK. )

Determinism is debatable even in physics. Complexity theory, uncertainty and stochastic calculations all serve to undermine the supposed Newtonian notion of determinism.

What free will is, is also mercurial. It is clear that an intentional act is free when it is not coerced by some else; and that an act's being free is considered essential to the agent being responsible for the consequences. It's less clear what it means for an act to be free rather than physically determined.

It's also clear that free will is used by theists in order to overcome the problem of god's responsibility for evil.

And that's the usual motivation for the need to give an explanation of free will.

So discussions such as this are often veiled theology.

... i am only speaking from my own experience. — Questioner

Your experience is as valid as anyone's.

I guess it depends on the person... — Questioner

It is worth considering what can be said about what we ought do as well as what I ought do. How should we set things up, collectively? See for instance Rawls veil of ignorance.

There is also the philosophical tradition that to reach the highest level of being human was to live a virtuous life. — Questioner

And again, is the goal to achieve "the highest level of being human", or just to do what is right?

"Should we do good?" Of course, we should do good. — Questioner

That's the right response to the OP.

Cheers.

I always feel good when I do the right thing. — Questioner

That might be so, but it is important not to conclude that what is the right thing to do is what makes you feel good.

Poland seems to be the country best positioned to lead Europe against Russian imperialism.

GB put itself out of contention with Brexit. France and Germany are too politically compromised.

Because it's the right thing to do. — Talkopu

Yep.

All of that might be the case, and I more or less agree with you in regard to cooperation. There is more consideration of the ethical in your reply than in others here. You are acknowledging the difference between how things are and how we want them to be; the "we" is bolded becasue ethics is not about self interest.

This question seems moot, since we do. — Questioner

Then you are choosing not to make ethical considerations. You assume that how things are is how they ought be, a recipe for stagnation.

One ought to do good because it contributes to their survival. — Questioner

Why ought one contribute to our survival?

There's this whole big area of reasoning that you are avoiding.

As mentioned, we operate on a system of rewards an punishments. — Questioner

Sure. Ought we?

It's not giving a reason for doing good. — Questioner

The point is that "one ought do good" is no more informative than "one ought do what one ought do" or "doing good is good".

It's pretty clear that "good" in the OP is being used in the sense of "having moral virtue" and not "Desired or approved of".

This ignores human nature. It's akin to saying, "Do this because I said so." — Questioner

How does it ignore human nature, and how is it akin to "Do this because I said so"?

No, I don't think that good is synonymous with, "something one ought to do". For example, most people would agree that selling all your worldly possessions and donating the money to charity is something that would be good. — Hyper

But you ought sell all your worldly goods and donate them to charity. You also ought be self-reliant, which depends on your having worldly goods. You are going to have to work out some sort of balance.

That is, your posited counter example to synonymity does not quite work.

And so is right, we ought to do what is good just because it is good. What is good is what we ought do, and what we ought do is what is good.



, , that we have evolved to do something or to prefer something simply does not imply that we ought to do that thing. There remains the logical gap between what we do and what we ought do. Until you get your heads around that, you are not even addressing ethical issues.

This is not how modal possibility works. — Michael

Are you saying this is invalid? I don't think so.

~p→~◇Kp ↔︎ ◇Kp → p. — Banno

◇Kp means ◇(p ∧ JBp), where JBp means that p is justifiably believed. ◇(p ∧ JBp) does not entail p and so ◇Kp does not entail p. — Michael

Substituting (p ∧ JBp) for Kp we get. ~p→~◇(p ∧ JBp) ↔︎ ◇(p ∧ JBp) → p, which is valid. You keep repeating "you confuse ¬p ∧ ◇Kp with ◇(¬p ∧ Kp)" without showing where.

So you're an anti-realist about counterfactuals? — Michael

No. Context.

The antirealist allows for p ∧ ¬Kp, regardless of what Fitch might think. — Michael

This somewhat begs the question, since of course the antirealist wants the commonplace, that there are things we don't know, to be true. The issue here is how to formulate antirealism so that it is constant with there being things we don't know.


Is the difference in our views now that while I think one can choose realist or antirealist approaches in different situations, you think realism inconsistent in all cases? If not, what do you think the difference between our positions is?

You can also find statistics that say the exact opposite. — Brendan Golledge

Well, here's that search:

https://www.google.com/search?client=safari&rls=en&q=most+domestic+violence+initiated+by+women
Folk reading on can check for themselves that the data does not show "the exact opposite", whatever you meant by that. Even the most generous readings will only shoe at best equal levels of violence between males and females.

Yes, the situation is more complex than the pie chart I posted. Your claim specifically was that

I think patriarchy is a good thing, because there's usually no one who will love his family more than the father. — Brendan Golledge

There there is no evidence to support this, and considerable evidence to the contrary.

Summations are typically as follows:

Domestic violence is a gendered crime, with women being much more likely than men to be the victims of violence and to experience a range of associated harms such as homelessness, assault-related injury and death — Female perpetrated domestic violence: Prevalence of self-defensive and retaliatory violence

The Australian statistics show that only one third of victims are male; that Male and female victims receive very similar numbers and types of injuries; that Males and females are just as likely to engage in coercive controlling behaviours; the Men who have experienced partner violence are 2 to 3 times more likely than women to have never told anybody about it.

The remainder of your post, concerning life expectancy, serial killers and so on, reeks of confirmation bias. As does

Also, you did not even accurately represent my argument, so I'm not going to argue with you anymore. — Brendan Golledge

So, you are not here to have your convictions questioned. Fine.

Notice that ↪Brendan Golledge did not address the more pressing critique, that yet again, we have someone claiming that what is the case is what ought be the case — Banno

You again did not address this.

Yeah. I wasn't gonna say that. Might be time for a check up for some.

This is Schopenhauer. Knowing that it's true, not wondering, but knowing, is part of an altered state. — frank

Trouble is distinguishing what we know from what we just believe. The difference is truth.

I don't know if that's an answerable queston. — Wayfarer

I'm pretty confident it isn't.

I think that's rather simplistic. — Wayfarer

As do I. offered a rational strategy, but was dismissed rather summarily. Feels seem to be what folk want, rather than thinks. That's fine, since the thinks will only lead to aporia, which feels unsettling.

Trouble with identity again. The argument against reincarnation seems applicable here - in what sense was the person in the Irish Cottage the same as @jgill? If all they shared was 'I AM', how do we conclude that they are the same? Or was Jgill experiencing being someone else, in which case experience is not essential to selfhood...? I don't know how to make sense of such experiences, but I don't think mystics do, either.



But also, and back to the topic, is the criteria for what is real to be that it feels real?

Yep. God explains everything, and hence is useless for any sort of clarification.

Assuming the law of excluded middle, BIV ∨ ¬BIV is a truism, and is true even if ¬◇BIV. Realism entails more than this, as explained in the IEP article: — Michael

Yep. You repeat stuff I've already addressed. Only a certain interpretation of realism implies that BIV is possible. That interpretation is not the only one. This is set out in the first half of the paragraph you cite.

One proposal is to construe metaphysical realism as the position that there are no a priori epistemically derived constraints on reality (Gaifman, 1993). By stating the thesis negatively, the realist sidesteps the thorny problems concerning correspondence or a “ready made” world, and shifts the burden of proof on the challenger to refute the thesis. One virtue of this construal is that it defines metaphysical realism at a sufficient level of generality to apply to all philosophers who currently espouse metaphysical realism. For Putnam’s metaphysical realist will also agree that truth and reality cannot be subject to “epistemically derived constraints.” This general characterization...

Or to phrase this differently, it is possible, logically speaking, that your are indeed a vat brain - Putnam's argument fails to show otherwise. The idea is to be rejected not on logical grounds as Putnam supposes, but on more pragmatic grounds as set out by Davidson and Wittgenstein.

And you will not agree with that, as is your right. So the point is moot. Few things are as tedious as discussions of The Matrix.

No it doesn't, just as ◇p does not entail p. Despite me literally telling you not to, you appear to have confused ¬p ∧ ◇Kp with ◇(¬p ∧ Kp). — Michael

Not at all. ~p→~◇Kp ↔︎ ◇Kp → p. If something is not true then it is not possible to know it is true; hence if it is possible to know something then it is true.

Semantic realism... — Michael

Again, I'm suggesting that the choice between applying realist and antirealist logics is context-dependent. So I do not agree that "every meaningful declarative sentence is either true or false" and hence I do not agree that counterfactuals must be either true or false. (Edit: however, I am happy to take "if Hitler hadn't killed himself then he would have been assassinated" as false. He might have been hit by some random artillery fire.)

If you are suggesting that anti-realism is arguing the latter... — Michael

No. Realism is applicable when "a, b, and c and so on exist, and the fact that they exist and have properties such as F-ness, G-ness, and H-ness is independent of anyone’s beliefs, linguistic practices, conceptual schemes, and so on", and to this list we can add knowledge. In cases where truth is dependent on anyone’s beliefs, linguistic practices, conceptual schemes, or knowledge, then antirealism might be applicable.

Oh, ok. My mistake.

Being a theist he could say that the cat is on the mat is true because God is there to judge it to be so. I guess we can say that truth is a property of judgements, if a judgement would qualify as a a kind of proposition, although that question would open up some other issues I suppose. — Janus

So a theist might attempt to adopt a modified Tarski, such that "p" is true IFF p is willed by god. It might be more honourable if @Leontiskos came out with this openly.

Cheers. Obvious stuff. Notice that did not address the more pressing critique, that yet again, we have someone claiming that what is the case is what ought be the case; here, that "our ideas of good and bad are rooted in our biology" and hence we ought do as Golledge wrongly understands biology proscribes. There are two errors here: the lesser, that biology determines our actions, the greater, that Golledge's interpretations of the supposed biological imperatives are correct.

There's a bunch of stuff that needs to be separated out here.

There is a relevance argument against BIV. You take Realism ⊨ ◇BIV, which i thinks is overreach. I say Realism → (BIV v ~BIV), and for independent reasons ~BIV.

Separately, if one rejects p↔︎◇Kp and accepts accepts p → ◇Kp and accepts p → ◇Kp then presumably one rejects ◇Kp→p. If it is possible to know something, then it must be true - one cannot know things that are false. ◇Kp does entail p.

Another, again separate, point is that if p ⊭ (q ∧ ¬Kq) then p ⊨ (p→(q→Kq)). If p doesn't entail that there is something we don't know, then it entails that we know everything. And so again antirealism entails omniscience. This result contradicts denying Fitch.

If something exists then it is possible to know that it exists, and if it is doing something then it is possible to know that it is doing that thing, and if it is not doing something then it is possible to know that it is not doing that thing, and if it doesn't exist then it is possible to know that it doesn't exist – with the same reasoning applied to the past, the future, and counterfactuals. — Michael

What you describe here is as compatible with realism as antirealism.

Generic Realism:
a, b, and c and so on exist, and the fact that they exist and have properties such as F-ness, G-ness, and H-ness is (apart from mundane empirical dependencies of the sort sometimes encountered in everyday life) independent of anyone’s beliefs, linguistic practices, conceptual schemes, and so on. — SEP Realism

This raises the further issue of the suitability of the sort of second-order formalisation we have been using. We've been focused on Kp, that p is known. We could have focused instead on that p is believed, or agreed, or doubted. These again are propositional attitudes, relations between us and the proposition p. Truth is generally not one of those relations. That is the basis of what I have been arguing here. Hence my first point in this thread:

...realism holds that ...stuff... is independent of what we say about it; anti-realism, that it isn't. — Banno

Things are not true because we judge them to be true. Judgement is still a propositional attitude, a relation between the state of affairs and the judge. Truth isn't.

Something which can obviously ever be known once it has been discovered. Once it has been discovered, you will know it was there already, but not up until then. — Wayfarer

Yep.

That tells us about what we know, not about what is true. It is true that the gold has been there for millions of years, deposited in veins by percolating hot water.

However, it is not possible to deduce that ethical principles derived from evolution are false. — Seeker25

What it tells us is that one cannot derive ethical principles from evolution. If what you are espousing is some combination of pragmatism and constructivism, then say so and stop there, without the pretence that evolution somehow provides your imperative.

I think patriarchy is a good thing, because there's usually no one who will love his family more than the father. — Brendan Golledge

Ownership is not love.

Domestic violence statistics do not support your account.

It is difficult to get a purchase on what Leon is proposing.

We have that "the cat is on the mat" is true IFF the cat is on the mat. One hopes that we agree on this, at least. Now I think it is apparent to you and to I that the cat might be on the mat, even were no one around to say "the cat is on the mat". seems to be of an alternate view; that the cat could not be on the mat if there were no one around to form the sentence "The cat is on the mat".

Propositions are strings of words. "the cat is on the mat" is a proposition. It requires all the apparatus of language use in a community. Cats on mats are not strings of words.

While the inferences you have used appear correct, I'm not convinced that ]∀p∀q((p ⊭ (q ∧ ¬Kq)) → (p → ◊Kp)) is as helpful to antirealism as you supose.

It's certainly not compatible with that. — Michael

Then you reject "p↔︎◇Kp where p is basic".

∀p∀q((p ⊭ (q ∧ ¬Kq)) → (p → ◊Kp)) — Michael

It's saying that if "p" does not entail "q is true and not known to be true" then if "p" is true then it is possible to know that "p" is true. — Michael

(Shouldn't that be "q is an unknown truth" for continuity?)

It says that if p doesn't entail that there is something we don't know, then we can know p. That's not the same as

The only unknowable truths are "p is an unknown truth". — Michael

If p doesn't entail that there is something we don't know, then it entails that we know everything. And we are back at the start.

p ⊭ (q ∧ ¬Kq)
p ⊨ (p→(q→Kq))

I think there are other more general grounds for rejecting global scepticism than Putnam's argument that reference fails for BIV. But merely permitting global scepticism is not ground for concluding that realism is false: A→(Bv~B)⊭~A

If you must. Christianity contributed an emphasis on charity to ethical thinking. But if this is only another thread about supposed Christian ethics, I'm out.

The view on sex and marriage expressed in the OP is pretty patriarchal.

It remains entirely possible that we are merely the recipients of extraordinary luck.

But if what it take for us to be here is extraordinary luck, then that we are here shows how we were lucky. While it is unlikely that some particular person won last week's the lottery, it is certain that someone did. Whoever that winner is, they can justifiably think themselves lucky, but they can not justifiably think it lucky that someone one.

It happened to be us. So what?

It seems to me that human beings are hardwired to seek after the good and try to avoid the bad. — Brendan Golledge

Is that anything more than the tautologous "what is good is what we seek, and what is bad is what we avoid"? How. And if so, then

So, our ideas of good and bad are rooted in our biology — Brendan Golledge

says that what we seek and what we avoid is rooted in biology.

Might it not be that we ought fight against those supposed biological imperatives?

Biology might inform, but cannot determined, what we ought do.

Christianity is pretty irrelevant to ethics.