Your field is Physics I believe. Imagine if I cited some old ideas about black holes or quantum mechanics and you said "Oh there's been a lot of new developments since then", citing the latest research and I just said "Oh yeah, but these old guys are still cited so your new lot haven't done a very good job have they?". I think we both know that's not how science works. — Isaac

Data doesn't expire. Ideas are developed, rarely overthrown. That's not how science works, except on TV. No, if you referred to a 40 year old theory that is taught in college courses today, that is written about in books today, that is still regularly cited to this day, whose ideas are still present in the current vocabulary, I don't think I would patronize you about it even if I disagreed with it, especially if you were referring to it as common knowledge, and especially if you also cited later research. Rather, I'd cite something that I thought contradicted you. Wouldn't it be simpler and better to post something that's more up-to-date that contradicts what I wrote?

Data doesn't expire. — Kenosha Kid

It does in psychology. When research methods are shown to be flawed, or problematic (such as Kohlberg's), the data coming out of that research is considered less robust than it was.

Ideas are developed, rarely overthrown. — Kenosha Kid

Agreed, but the aspects of the ideas of Kohlberg relevant to this discussion are the degree and form of socialisation involved in the development of morality. It is exactly those aspects of his overall idea which have been 'developed'.

I only thought you might be interested if you hadn't already heard about it, and then was surprised to hear you suggest that it doesn't really change things and wanted to know more about why you thought that. No one's patronising anyone. I'm just confused by your answers, that's all.

Rather, I'd cite something that I thought contradicted you. Wouldn't it be simpler and better to post something that's more up-to-date that contradicts what I wrote? — Kenosha Kid

As I said, I only thought you might be interested in some newer research, nothing more. I really wasn't expecting such an odd exchange.

It does in psychology. When research methods are shown to be flawed, or problematic (such as Kohlberg's), the data coming out of that research is considered less robust than it was. — Isaac

Kohlberg's data is known to be limited. This is why his interpretation which generalised more than it could is faulty. (For instance, Kohlberg wrongly defends the timings of stages which are not seen in different cultures.) But you'll find that in most psychological research and it's done quite deliberately now. One has to control for variables not under study that might affect the outcomes. This is particularly important in small sample sizes. Gopnik is worse than Kohlberg at this in some ways. She typically uses very small sample sizes that are dominantly from one demographic but includes a small number from others, then only breaks the data down by gender. Kohlberg's data at least tells us a lot about Western white boys, being based on large samples of Western white boys. Gopnik's is harder to assess because she over-relies on small samples without controlling for some of the very variables that Kohlberg has been shown to invalidly generalise to.

Agreed, but the aspects of the ideas of Kohlberg relevant to this discussion are the degree and form of socialisation involved in the development of morality. — Isaac

Right, and less so Kohlberg's explanation or generalisation of it, which is not consistent with my description. So to the extent that I agree with Kohlberg that there exists a stage of child development of morality in which classical conditioning precedes the child's ability to morally rationalise -- which by no means excludes their demonstrated elementary empathetic capabilities -- what do you think exists in Gopnik's research that demonstrates this not correct? That's what I'm trying to figure out.

As I said, I only thought you might be interested in some newer research, nothing more. I really wasn't expecting such an odd exchange. — Isaac

I'm totally open to newer research; as I said, Gopnik and Meltzoff's ideas were what I had in mind for how children build moral models, and Meltzoff was one of several citations in that first review I sent you. It seems odd to me to infer from an additional reference to older, still cited theory that my awareness of child development ended in the 80s. I don't mean this in a "you hurt my feelings boohoo" way; it's just an odd response, although it would perhaps make more sense if you could state why you think Gopnik ruled out punishment as an element of moral development, or rule out that it precedes moral reasoning. There is up-to-date research you can read on this in APA's journals that demonstrate that this sort of associative learning not only occurs, but is effective.

Anyway... we've probably derailed the thread enough :rofl:

I think you've misunderstood my intention regarding the reading suggestions, I meant literally nothing more by it than that you might be interested, and was even careful to acknowledge the possibility that you'd already read these studies and had your own opinion on them. That really is all there is to that, I don't understand how it got so misinterpreted, but I apologise for being confusing. Let's leave that there.

what do you think exists in Gopnik's research that demonstrates this not correct? That's what I'm trying to figure out. — Kenosha Kid

I'm not really interested in presenting my own position on the matter. I've spent a 25 year career in psychology (and my wife's a psychologist too, so it didn't even stop when I got home!). At no point in time in those two and a half decades have I ever managed to convince anyone of a viewpoint they were not already amenable to. Our data simply isn't robust enough to have that kind persuasive power such as you might find in physics or chemistry. If you want to believe in an 'Obedience and Punishment' Pre-conditional stage, nothing I present will have sufficient gravity to dissuade you. Just think about the quality of evidence from Kohlberg which persuaded you in the first place - a few answers to hypothetical dilemmas...

If you're looking for alternative ways of looking at this, I'm more than happy to discuss, but if you want me to deliver my stunning coup de grace, you'll be disappointed. I've really nothing more to offer than that there's another way of framing this that's equally valid.

What interests me far more is how you arrive at your beliefs, especially if you've read the more modern research, what compels you to stick to an obedience and punishment model? What attracts you to that idea. Most of my comments are only engineered to find answers to those sorts of questions I'm afraid.

What interests me far more is how you arrive at your beliefs, especially if you've read the more modern research, what compels you to stick to an obedience and punishment model? What attracts you to that idea. — Isaac

I don't particularly. I don't think punishment says anything more than how punishment works. It's not a general theory of child development, just an example selected at random of how children begin making associations between behaviours and badness before, or rather as part of the process that, they have fully-developed rational models of morality.

That really is all there is to that, I don't understand how it got so misinterpreted, but I apologise for being confusing. — Isaac

No need dude, didn't mean it in an angry way. I'm pretty sure you've read more into what I was saying than I intended, and it sounds like I've misread what you were saying in response to boot. 'thappens :)

how children begin making associations between behaviours and badness before, or rather as part of the process that, they have fully-developed rational models of morality. — Kenosha Kid

Yes, that's the bit I was interested in. The idea that children make associations between behaviours and badness before they have fully-developed rational models of morality is not necessitated by the empirical evidence. It might be the case, it equally might not. There's nothing so powerful in the literature to compel any rational person to fall down on one side or the other; so there needs to be something more than just Kohlberg's experiments that's made you think this way. It's that I'm wondering about.

The idea that children make associations between behaviours and badness before they have fully-developed rational models of morality is not necessitated by the empirical evidence. — Isaac

I think this is somewhat back-to-front. If children were fully functioning moral agents from day one, that would be distinguishable, not just in the data, but in everyday experience. That isn't what is observed. It wasn't observed by Kohlberg. It wasn't observed over the last twenty-five years by Tomasello. The delayed manifestation of second-personal agency (~3 yrs), and the further delayed manifestation of reasoning about groups, inductive moral reasoning and moral self-direction (~5 yrs) are not consistent with the hypothesis that children are, even if fully equipped, fully functioning moral agents. But structured "naughty step" type punitive measures do have short-term efficacy before this.

So, just to explore these beliefs... Say I could present evidence of babies exhibiting second-personal agency, would you prefer that to be the case? You'd have a choice then - look for the flaws in this new evidence I presented (there will be flaws), or accept that it demonstrates Kohlberg et al are not necessarily right, and so open up alternatives. Which would you choose? (or just decide you're not going to waste your time indulging me in hypotheticals - up to you, of course!)

So, just to explore these beliefs... Say I could present evidence of babies exhibiting second-personal agency, would you prefer that to be the case? You'd have a choice then - look for the flaws in this new evidence I presented (there will be flaws), or accept that it demonstrates Kohlberg et al are not necessarily right, and so open up alternatives. Which would you choose? (or just decide you're not going to waste your time indulging me in hypotheticals - up to you, of course!) — Isaac

Yeah man, chuck it up. It'll be interesting to discuss.

Yeah man, chuck it up. It'll be interesting to discuss. — Kenosha Kid

It was a hypothetical. I'm not so much interested in discussing the actual papers (you've clearly got a very broad grasp of the issues in developmental psychology, but, as I've said, I only find these kinds of discussions worthwhile under very limited, usually professional, circumstances. Online it's just too much effort for too little gain). I was just trying to get at whether you felt compelled by the evidence to take the stance you do, or otherwise. Can I ask, did you have some other theory before reading Kohlberg. Did he compel you to change your original position, or did he confirm what you already suspected?

It was a hypothetical. I'm not so much interested in discussing the actual papers (you've clearly got a very broad grasp of the issues in developmental psychology, but, as I've said, I only find these kinds of discussions worthwhile under very limited, usually professional, circumstances. Online it's just too much effort for too little gain). I was just trying to get at whether you felt compelled by the evidence to take the stance you do, or otherwise. Can I ask, did you have some other theory before reading Kohlberg. Did he compel you to change your original position, or did he confirm what you already suspected? — Isaac

I think you're overstating my position on Kohlberg. I referred to it because it's a well known system and I just happened to have selected punishment as an example. There are other, later ones (including Tomasello's), but, while there's a lot of overlap, they don't all focus on the same things. I actually get the impression that punishment is a touchy subject in psychology, but it's par for the course in parenting research and teacher training.

Gopnik's analogy between how children build models and how science theorists do so is compelling, which is why I was surprised that you thought that not only were Kohlberg's explanations wrong, you thought that his punishment stage was overthrown, because I've never seen Gopnik really touch on that subject. (Again, happy to learn otherwise.) Tomasello, unsurprisingly, a huge influence, although I think he makes up for lack of knowledge about our ancestors by looking to modern humantiy which, as you know from my other posts, I think is a mistake. Sapolsky, obviously.

I was surprised that you thought that not only were Kohlberg's explanations wrong, you thought that his punishment stage was overthrown, because I've never seen Gopnik really touch on that subject. (Again, happy to learn otherwise.) — Kenosha Kid

I won't be able to get to this until tomorrow, but in advance of that, can you outline what kind of null hypothesis you'd have were you to test something like the absence of second-person agency concepts in under 3s, or the necessity of a primary stage of moral development associating behaviour with punishment. What sort of thing could I show you that would compel you to discard Kohlberg's first stage, or some similar developmental theory. I don't want to focus necessarily on Kohlberg, just the general picture of what you see as satisfactory evidence in this general regard.

The reason I ask, bringing it slightly back round to topic, is that it seems to that the way people use terms like 'bad' are instrumental to their concepts. We can ask the linguistic child whether X is 'bad', but we're doing little more there than checking they can use the word correctly... the word we just taught them to use. But what would it mean to say that a pre-linguistic child associated punishment with 'bad' behaviour, or that they felt 'bad' when punished? If we make assumptions based on their responses then we're begging the question in the later studies. If we don't, we've no data to base any extrapolation from.

Lockdown, eh? If you're in America right now, my heart goes out to you.

Nope! Two different orthogonal divides, the distinction between which is critical to my account. Direction of fit is about the kind of opinion (descriptive or prescriptive), and impression vs expression is about what you’re doing with that opinion relative to someone else (just showing them what opinion is in your mind, or trying to change the opinion in their mind). You can impress or express either kind of opinion, descriptive or prescriptive. If anything, expression is more description-like because it merely shows what your opinions are (so is like describing your opinions), while impression is more prescription-like because it tells someone to have certain opinions (so is like prescribing your opinions). But they are still orthogonal: you can express your beliefs, impress your beliefs, express your intentions, or impress your intentions.

I was making the mistake of necessarily associating impressions with prescriptions and expressions with descriptions. Thank you for your helpful clarification. Description(belief-level) and prescription(intention-level) are what I really care about here. Impression and expression seem unimportant. Most utterances have both an expressive and impressive aspect, do they not? If I say, "There is a truck right there!" I am both revealing my belief that there is a truck, and imploring my listener to share my opinion. Not only this, but a proposition can have neither aspect. Imagine that we find a piece of paper with "the Earth revolves around the sun" written on it. We could imagine, however unlikely it may be, that this writing appeared by chance: bugs crawled onto the paper and died in just such a pattern, or something equally implausible yet possible. There is no expression or impression involved. We can still evaluate this proposition as true or false. We could do the same with a moral sentence. What significance do impression and expression have?

I must admit I have noted this apparent asymmetry before and struggled to reckon with it. It makes me feel like there is something I haven't fully developed right. When it comes to my approaches to assessing the correctness of either beliefs or intentions, I do end up with a nice symmetry again, but it feels like some bridge between the symmetry of meanings and the symmetry of assessment is missing, for the reasons you state. So I'm glad we're talking about it, because this is the kind of situation where I usually come up with newer, better thoughts.

I agree with this assessment. Also, I'm glad that I'm not just running you through the same argument-counterargument loops you've probably dealt with a thousand times on this forum! I definitely have more challenges to your line of thinking in store. You're certainly challenging mine - I don't usually engage in this type of written exchange at all, and of course, the contents of your theories are almost entirely new to me.

The symmetry I end up with for assessing the correctness of either kind of opinion is checking the opinion against experiences, where experiences come in different varieties that carry their own direction of fit: experiences with mind-to-world fit are sensations (like sight and sound), and experiences with world-to-mind fit are appetites (like pain and hunger). In both cases, assessment of the objective correctness of an opinion needs to account for not just the experiences you are actually having right here and now, but all the experiences anyone could have in any context.

I went back in the thread to where you explained your views on feelings, and gave that section a few close readings. The trouble in walking this tightrope of symmetry is to ensure that one side of your dichotomy does not simply reduce to the other. Let us compare appetites and sensations. A complete physical description of my brain would include both my sensations and my appetites. I realize that hunger is not the only appetite, but it is the one I will use as an example here. My most basic "ought"(I ought to be fed) is grounded by an "is"(I have the brain state "hunger"). What is this relationship? Is it supervenience? Is it necessity? Is it equivalence?

Let me be more precise: it is not that I have the brain state "hunger" that matters to us. I infer from what you've said above("all the experiences anyone could have in any context") that what matters is not my appetite, but everyone's idealized appetite were they in my situation. The fact remains that the resulting "ought" is reducible to a collection of appetites, which are themselves describable in terms of physical brain states. Depending on the relationship between the "ought" and the brain states, the below might be a valid deduction:

P1. All beings like us would have the brain state "hunger" in situation Y.
P2. I am a "being like us" in situation Y.
C. I ought to be fed.

Here, we have jumped the is-ought gap. Ordinarily, we would require a premise like:

P3. Beings like us with the brain state "hunger" in situation Y ought to be fed.

However, if P3 is reducible to P1, we do not need P3. The "ought" would be intrinsic to the "is."

I think perhaps the missing bridge that avoids the asymmetry you note -- and this is just me thinking on the fly here, not recounting thoughts I've already had before, so thank you again for prompting some new thought -- is that direction of fit needs to be reckoned not so much as a relationship between the mind and the world, as it usually is, but rather as a relationship of these different descriptive and prescriptive models to our overall function from our experiences to our behavior. We don't have direct access to the world, all we have is the experience of our interactions with the world, what it does to us and what we do to it.

According to verificationism, unknowable noumena(things-in-themselves) do not exist. Given this, it is unclear to me why you feel the need to distinguish between "the experience of our interactions with the world, what it does to us and what we do to it" and "direct access to the world." Verificationism would hold that an idealized version of the former is identical to the latter.

Being interactions between ourselves and the world, our experiences of either kind are about both ourselves and the world: sensations tell us about how things look to beings like us in certain circumstances, appetites tell us about how things feel to beings like us in certain circumstances. The direction of fit is more between those self-regarding and world-regarding aspects of the experience, internal to the experience, than between the mind and the world itself.

Now, let's return to sensations and perceptions. The thing of most note here is the concept of "beings like us." Let us apply your truthmaking method to its intended context: differences between the perceptions of humans. First comes the brute observation of the individual. This takes the form of me seeing a ghost. Second, we compare this to our ideal aggregate's experience. Beings like me, in the situation where I saw a ghost, would not see a ghost. This is a discrepancy between how beings like me(with proper function) perceive the world, and how I perceive it. Therefore, "I saw a ghost" is rendered false.

Where this gets interesting is with the introduction of beings entirely unlike us. We can imagine aliens who perceive the world drastically different than we do. They could experience appetites and sensations wholly separate from the ones humans experience. Does this entail relativism about descriptive truth? Such an alien must compare their experience with beings like themselves, not beings like us. Their conjunct of all "true"(re: empirically verifiable to beings like them) propositions might overlap with ours, but there would be things we can verify that they cannot, and things they can verify which we cannot. Can a proposition like "objects take the form of shapes" be true-for-us but false-for-them, or even more confusingly, true-for-us but nonsense-for-them? Are neither of us lacking in our description of reality, since reality just is our relative ideal description? Or, are we both aiming at an underlying truth and coming away with only part of it?

This doesn't seem to be a logically necessary premise in the same was as "if stealing is wrong, getting your little brother to steal is wrong". So it makes sense that you wouldn't reconstruct that in the same way as the brother implication, as "(stealing) implies (cheating)", because that's incorrect; there could be stealing and not cheating.

Of course there can be stealing without cheating! My premise P2 is false, but this is inconsequential in a discussion of logical validity. An argument with false premises can still be valid, and a theory of logic has to account for why it is valid. I think there is some confusion over my point here, so I will elaborate on it further.

Consider a symbolic modus ponens:

P1. A
P2. A > B
C. B

So long as A and B are standing in for propositions, this argument is valid. Now consider my original moral modus ponens:

P1. Stealing is wrong.
P2. If stealing is wrong, then getting your little brother to steal is wrong.
C. Getting your little brother to steal is wrong.

This argument seems valid in the usual way. My second example(the one with cheating) was to demonstrate that your alternative account of the above's validity(it's valid because little brother stealing entails stealing) does not actually explain why the argument is formally valid. What I showed was that even if "B" does not entail "A," the argument is still valid, and trying to apply your explanation of "B entails A"(in that case, cheating entails stealing) fails.

There are several approaches you might take to explain moral modus ponens. First, you could accept that these propositions are truth-apt in the regular way. Then, moral modus ponens is the same as any common variety modus ponens. Second, you might hold that moral utterances are not truth-apt propositions at all. They might serve a purpose that is not purporting to report fact, such as expressing an attitude. This is the view of moral emotivists. The moral emotivist encounters the following serious problem:

P1. Stealing is wrong(expresses Boo, stealing!)
P2. If (Boo, stealing!), then (Boo, getting your little brother to steal!)
C. (Boo, getting your little brother to steal!)

The first issue here is that the atomic sentence in P1(can be represented as "A") is used to express a sentiment, while the same exact sentence does not do this in P2. By saying "If stealing is wrong, then getting your little brother to steal is wrong" I am not expressing an attitude towards the antecedent. Therefore, "A" as an atomic sentence in P1 and "A" as the antecedent of a conditional in P2 have different meanings. In P1, "stealing is wrong" expresses an attitude towards stealing, but in P2, it does not. This breaks the law of identity(A=A) which is obviously necessary for modus ponens to be valid. This is called the Frege-Geach problem, and while you are not an emotivist, I believe that your theory needs to be wary of it as well.

The second issue is that, even if the first issue is ignored, it is not clear that the relationship between the the premises and the conclusion is one of validity. If I accept P1 and P2, then reject C, am I failing logically? It seems that I am merely violating some kind of moral rule(Don't do what you boo!) concerning my attitudes, rather than a logical one. I may hold inconsistent attitudes, but am I making a logical mistake?

My original intention in introducing this line of analysis was to apply the first issue of the Frege-Geach problem to your theory. If you are claiming that moral propositions serve not to report fact, but to perform an act of prescription, you are vulnerable to this issue. While in an atomic moral sentence(Stealing is wrong!) I may be prescribing something, in the antecedent of a conditional(IF stealing is wrong, then..) I am not prescribing anything. My utterance of this sentence does not commit me to an attitude on stealing. This puts the law of identity on fragile ground, as explained above.

You might say that using moral sentences in regular formal logic is some kind of mistake, since they are "correctness-apt" rather than truth-apt, and we should be using a system that you have constructed as part of your theory to explain them. Not only does this require significant justificatory legwork, it is unclear why we should be compelled by the "schmogic" of moral propositions, or hold such "schmogic" in equal standing to regular logic.

For the same reason that "false" is contained within "contingent": supererogatory = not-obligatory, and all bad things are not-obligatory, just like contingent = not-necessary, and all false things are not-necessary. (There are some things that are necessarily false, but that just means impossible; likewise, things that are "obligatorily bad", so bad you are obliged not to do them, are just impermissible).

If you are using supererogatory to merely mean "not obligatory," this is idiosyncratic. It means "above and beyond the call of duty" or "to a level far exceeding what is obligatory." I'm not one to argue about the definitions of words, as they mean what we want them to mean, but if you are going to use a customized version of a word, it is usually best to clarify before employing it.

I disagree. When it comes to the limited domain of descriptive propositions, I agree completely with the verificationist theory of truth: a claim that something is true of the world yet has absolutely no empirical import is literally meaningless nonsense. If something like gods can really be said to exist, there must be something observable about them.

Here is my challenge to the verificationist theory of truth. You hold that for something to be true, it must be empirically observable. I take you to mean observable in principle, as this is the strongest form of the claim. From our discussion it is also clear that you believe the "empirically observable" and the "physical" to be one and the same category. For something to be empirically observable, it must be physical, as our empirical methods interact only with the physical world. If something is physical, it exists, and if something exists then true claims can be made about it. For true claims to be made about something, it must be empirically verifiable, as you have stated. Therefore, if and only if something is physical, it is empirically verifiable. If I can provide an example of something that is physical yet not empirically verifiable(even in principle), verificationism becomes quite untenable. Such a damning counterexample seems to exist.

Consider the Heisenberg uncertainty principle. We are confident that we can know either the precise position or the precise speed of a particle at a given time, but not both. A particle is a purely physical entity, and facts about particles are physical facts. I can ask this question:

"Knowing this particle's current position, what is its current speed?"

The answer to this question is empirically unverifiable, in principle. By measuring the particle's position, we necessarily prevent ourselves from verifying its speed. Must we conclude that the question is nonsense? This seems especially unintuitive when we consider that we could have chosen to measure the particle's speed instead. If we had done so, its position would be unknown to us. Can a question about a physical matter of fact become nonsense moments later? If we are verificationists, we must concede that at the time of measuring the particle's position, to ask of its "speed" is nonsensical, referring to a property that does not exist. This is certainly not what physicists conclude here. Rather, the Heisenberg uncertainty principle establishes that there are physical matters of fact which are empirically unverifiable.
If verificationism is true, we have complete information about the particle each time we measure it. What would the Heisenberg uncertainty principle be stating if there was nothing to be uncertain about? I think that this alone is enough to do away with verificationism, but I will provide further reasons which I consider to be overdetermining.

Defining verificationism without reference to a separate truth seems problematic. Why do we not appeal to the consensus of what we have, in fact, empirically verified? Well, because we know our methods are flawed. We must instead appeal to the consensus of our "idealized" methods. An idealized method is one where any mistakes we make are eliminated. A mistake is an inaccuracy. An inaccuracy to what? To the truth? How do you define our ideal methods of observation other than "the ones which accurately capture the truth?"

Causality cannot be proven true empirically. Are questions about causality nonsense? Our investigations into the material world are predicated on all sorts of assumptions that are, themselves, empirically unverifiable. I am hard pressed to imagine us building a search for truth atop a foundation of nonsense.

The past is empirically unverifiable. Whether or not a certain dinosaur ate in a certain spot sixty million years ago is a matter of fact that we are incapable of observing. The same can be said of whether Charlemagne had an even or odd number of hairs on his head, or whether a man in New Zealand stubbed his toe last week. Should we conclude that questions concerning these subjects are literally not truth-apt?

Some people consider verificationism self-defeating. The claim "empirical verification is the only way to learn truths about the world" is, itself, empirically unverifiable. That means, by your account, that someone asking "Is empirical verification the only way to learn true things?" is asking an unintelligible question. The statement itself cannot be true or false.

Moving on,

The prescriptivity involved there is still ultimately the same kind as moral prescriptivity, though. It's basically a case of considering what the proper function of a human mind is -- proper as in good, good as in prudential good, which we've already established boils down to moral good -- and then looking upon yourself in the third person, so to speak, and thinking "Hey, there's a mind! Is it functioning properly? No no, it should be perceiving like this and desiring like that instead..." It's self-parenting. Parents teach their kids how to think, both in terms of figuring out what is true and in terms of figuring out what is good, for the moral good of those kids, and everyone they'll have an impact on, right? Likewise, making sure we ourselves are thinking correctly is ultimately for a moral good too.

How can you establish that holding true beliefs is always morally better for us? I can't imagine such a stance being grounded in the "appetites," which you tout as the foundation for moral imperatives. A man being cheated on by his wife experiences no harm, so long as he remains unaware. Discovering the affair is what causes him hedonic harm. Here, one benefits from holding a false belief. Yet, we still believe it is morally wrong to cheat when your partner doesn't know about it.

Consider believing in a benevolent, all-knowing god. It is plausible that I could live a life where I purely benefit from having this belief. When my life goes poorly, I can keep my chin up, believing that it's all a necessary part of god's great design. When my life goes well, I can attribute my good fortune to god looking after me, rewarding me for my virtue and compensating me for my hardships. This belief may be prudential(thus moral) for me to have, and for others to encourage me to have. Concluding otherwise requires an account of why truth is valuable separate from moral good.


If you are concerned with pragmatism rather than existential truth, it would seem most pragmatic to simply postulate abstract objects exist and move on from there. From the pragmatist perspective, who cares if they are real? They are useful. Their explanatory power, and the lack thereof of the alternatives, speaks for itself.

Lockdown, eh? If you're in America right now, my heart goes out to you. — Tarrasque

I am, and thanks.

Most utterances have both an expressive and impressive aspect, do they not? — Tarrasque

Impressions generally imply expressions, but not vice versa. You can merely express your opinions without necessarily impressing them on anyone.

What significance do impression and expression have? — Tarrasque

Expressions aren’t claims of objective truth — they’ll not propositions, as in they’re not proposing anything to anyone. They’re just showing something about one’s own mind. The main importance for meta-ethics is to distinguish my view from expressivism, where a major difference is that I don’t think moral claims are just expressing desires, but rather impressing intentions; which also implies an expression of intention, which intentions also imply some desires, but it’s more than just an expression of desire.

Impression and expression also clear up Moore's paradox, as I explained earlier. It seems paradoxical to say "x is true but I don't believe x", even though it's totally possible to disbelieve something that is actually true, and my explanation is that saying "x is true" impresses and therefore also expresses belief in x, which then contradicts the expression of disbelief, "I don't believe x".

The moral equivalent of that paradox would be the sentence "x is good but I don't intend x". It seems to me that what you intend and what you think are good are as inseparable as what you believe and what you think is true. It is possible to intend other than what is good, just like it's possible to believe other than that is true, but in saying something is good you implicitly express your intention that it be so, and so contradict the attendant explicit expression of intention otherwise.

But just as saying "x is true" doesn't merely express belief -- it's different from just saying "I believe x" -- so too saying "x is good" doesn't merely express intention -- it's different from just saying "I intend x". The difference between those things, in either pair, is the difference between expression and impression. "x is good" differs from "I intend x" in precisely the same way that "x is true" differs from "I believe x".

My most basic "ought"(I ought to be fed) is grounded by an "is"(I have the brain state "hunger"). What is this relationship? Is it supervenience? Is it necessity? Is it equivalence? — Tarrasque

This is the issue that I've been having trouble communicating to Kenosha and Isaac. I don't hold these "oughts" to be grounded in any "is". We can give a descriptive account of the cause of someone feeling or thinking that something ought to be, just like we can give a descriptive account of the cause of someone feeling or thinking that something is, but that account is not the reason why they feel or think that. We don't have to know anything at all about brains to go to our appetitive experiences as the ground of our "oughts", any more than we need to know about brains to go to our sensory experiences as the ground of our "is"s.

In the latter case it's rather transparently the other way around: we learn descriptive facts about brains empirically, by relying on our sensations, our "is" experiences. If we then used our knowledge about brains, gained through sensory observation, to justify using sensory observation, that would clearly be circular reasoning. The reliance on sensory experience comes prior to any description of the brain. Likewise, on my account the reliance on appetitive experience as the ground for prescription comes prior to any description of the brain.

I infer from what you've said above("all the experiences anyone could have in any context") that what matters is not my appetite, but everyone's idealized appetite were they in my situation. — Tarrasque

I'm not sure this is an accurate account of my account, because there could be differences between people that would make them have different appetites in the same situation. A moral claim is objectively true if it accounts for all of those different appetites in all different circumstances. Just like a really objectively true descriptive claim about the color of an object has to account for people with different kinds of color vision and different lighting conditions.

Here, we have jumped the is-ought gap. — Tarrasque

Only seemingly, because of the misunderstanding hopefully cleared up two quote blocks ago.

According to verificationism, unknowable noumena(things-in-themselves) do not exist. Given this, it is unclear to me why you feel the need to distinguish between "the experience of our interactions with the world, what it does to us and what we do to it" and "direct access to the world." Verificationism would hold that an idealized version of the former is identical to the latter. — Tarrasque

It's precisely that "idealized" that makes the difference. We don't, and can't, have a complete account of the way that the entire (possibly infinite) world would be experienced by all (possibly infinitely many) kinds of being. We only have the way that bits and pieces of it are experienced by beings like us. So we can't just take "the whole world, independent of all experience" (that non-existent noumena) and hold it up against "our picture of what the world should be like". We can only compare "the way this bit of the world seems to us like it is" and "the way this bit of the world seems to us like it ought to be".

Now, let's return to sensations and perceptions. The thing of most note here is the concept of "beings like us." Let us apply your truthmaking method to its intended context: differences between the perceptions of humans. First comes the brute observation of the individual. This takes the form of me seeing a ghost. Second, we compare this to our ideal aggregate's experience. Beings like me, in the situation where I saw a ghost, would not see a ghost. This is a discrepancy between how beings like me(with proper function) perceive the world, and how I perceive it. Therefore, "I saw a ghost" is rendered false. — Tarrasque

You experienced something, which you interpreted to be a ghost. Other very similar beings in very similar circumstances did not experience anything that they interpreted as a ghost. Whatever the objective truth is, it will need to account for your experiences as well; we don't just throw out your experience of seeming to have seen a ghost, but we need to account for why it seemed to you like there was a ghost, but not to others. Is something different about you, even though you're very similar to the others? If something different about the circumstances, even though they're very similar to the ones you saw? Or are they actually experiencing the same thing that you are, but you're just interpreting that experience differently than them? Maybe you and they both experienced the same sight, but you interpreted it as a ghost, while they interpreted it as a lens flare.

Where this gets interesting is with the introduction of beings entirely unlike us. We can imagine aliens who perceive the world drastically different than we do. They could experience appetites and sensations wholly separate from the ones humans experience. Does this entail relativism about descriptive truth? Such an alien must compare their experience with beings like themselves, not beings like us. Their conjunct of all "true"(re: empirically verifiable to beings like them) propositions might overlap with ours, but there would be things we can verify that they cannot, and things they can verify which we cannot. Can a proposition like "objects take the form of shapes" be true-for-us but false-for-them, or even more confusingly, true-for-us but nonsense-for-them? Are neither of us lacking in our description of reality, since reality just is our relative ideal description? Or, are we both aiming at an underlying truth and coming away with only part of it? — Tarrasque

That last bit. The parable of the blind men and the elephant is the illustration I like to use here. Three blind men each feel different parts of an elephant (the trunk, a leg, the tail), and each concludes that he is feeling something different (a snake, a tree, a rope). All three of them are wrong about what they perceive, but the truth of the matter, that they are feeling parts of an elephant, is consistent with what all three of them sense, even though the perceptions they draw from those sensations are mutually contradictory.

My original intention in introducing this line of analysis was to apply the first issue of the Frege-Geach problem to your theory. If you are claiming that moral propositions serve not to report fact, but to perform an act of prescription, you are vulnerable to this issue. While in an atomic moral sentence(Stealing is wrong!) I may be prescribing something, in the antecedent of a conditional(IF stealing is wrong, then..) I am not prescribing anything. My utterance of this sentence does not commit me to an attitude on stealing. This puts the law of identity on fragile ground, as explained above. — Tarrasque

On my account, it's not only moral utterances but ordinary descriptive utterances that are impressing an attitude toward the idea in question. We normally take your symbolic propositions "A" and "B" to be, by default, full indicative sentences, like "x is an a" and "x is a b" for instance. On my account, we abstract out the indicative-ness, the descriptive-ness, of those sentences, and deal with the gerund states-of-affairs "x being an a" and "x being a b". Then we can re-apply that indicative-ness/descriptive-ness, or instead apply an imperative-ness/prescriptive-ness, and the underlying logic goes unchanged.

So, given those gerund states-of-affairs above, this is the underlying syllogism:

P1. A
P2. A -> B
C. B

Spelled out, that reads (ungrammatically, because these are so far incomplete sentences) "x being an a, and x being an a implies x being a b, therefore x being a b".

To get the ordinary indicative/descriptive type of syllogism, we could instead write:

P1. is(A)
P2. A -> B
C. is(B)

Spelled out, that reads "x is an a, and x being an a implies x being a b, therefore x is a b".

We could instead make an imperative/prescriptive variation on it:

P1. be(A)
P2. A -> B
C. be(B)

Spelled out, that reads "x ought to be an a, and x being an a implies x being a b, therefore x ought to be a b".

This works perfectly fine in your brother-stealing example, because "x being an a" does imply "x being a b" in that case (so to speak; getting your brother to steal does imply stealing happening). But in the stealing-cheating example, I figured you didn't mean the ordinary English version to suggest that it is not possible to steal without cheating, only that the badnesses of them are connected. If you didn't mind that implication, then the above formalization would still work just fine: x ought to be not stealing, and x not stealing implies x not cheating, therefore x ought to be not cheating.

But if not, then you wouldn't want to translate that second premise as "x not stealing implies x not cheating" (gerund, equally applicable to descriptions or prescriptions, just stating a relationship between those states of affairs), but rather as "'x ought to be not stealing' implies 'x ought to be not cheating'". Symbolically, that would then be:

P1. be(A)
P2. be(A) -> be(B)
C. be(B)

If you are using supererogatory to merely mean "not obligatory," this is idiosyncratic. It means "above and beyond the call of duty" or "to a level far exceeding what is obligatory." I'm not one to argue about the definitions of words, as they mean what we want them to mean, but if you are going to use a customized version of a word, it is usually best to clarify before employing it. — Tarrasque

I didn't realize I was using a customized version of the word; I honestly just thought "supererogatory" was the deontic equivalent of "contingent". Doing some further research now prompted by this, I see that the word I really want is "omissible". I'll make sure to use that instead from now on, and change where I've mis-used "supererogatory" in the past where possible.

"Knowing this particle's current position, what is its current speed?"

The answer to this question is empirically unverifiable, in principle. By measuring the particle's position, we necessarily prevent ourselves from verifying its speed. Must we conclude that the question is nonsense? This seems especially unintuitive when we consider that we could have chosen to measure the particle's speed instead. If we had done so, its position would be unknown to us. Can a question about a physical matter of fact become nonsense moments later? If we are verificationists, we must concede that at the time of measuring the particle's position, to ask of its "speed" is nonsensical, referring to a property that does not exist. This is certainly not what physicists conclude here. Rather, the Heisenberg uncertainty principle establishes that there are physical matters of fact which are empirically unverifiable. — Tarrasque

Quantum physics is full of different interpretations, so I'm cautious to speak authoritatively about what all physicists think, but as I understand it, the uncertainty principle doesn't just say that we can't know position and speed at the same time, but that to the extent that we measure one, the other becomes literally undefined. A particle with a definite momentum has no definite position; its position is actually smeared out across space.

Defining verificationism without reference to a separate truth seems problematic. Why do we not appeal to the consensus of what we have, in fact, empirically verified? Well, because we know our methods are flawed. We must instead appeal to the consensus of our "idealized" methods. An idealized method is one where any mistakes we make are eliminated. A mistake is an inaccuracy. An inaccuracy to what? — Tarrasque

To other observations. We're (rightly) cautious about the accuracy of our present beliefs because we haven't made all of the observations (and never can), and there may be ones that contradict what we presently believe. To assert that something is objectively true is to assert that there won't ever be any contradictory observations. We can never know that with certainty, of course, but we can think it is so, at least tentatively.

Causality cannot be proven true empirically. Are questions about causality nonsense? Our investigations into the material world are predicated on all sorts of assumptions that are, themselves, empirically unverifiable. I am hard pressed to imagine us building a search for truth atop a foundation of nonsense. — Tarrasque

Causality, like physicality, is part of the background assumption of objectivity that we have to make in order to go about the process of investigating what is real. We can't empirically prove that anything is objectively real, either, but the question of whether anything is objectively real is prior to the empirical investigation. Likewise, the question of whether anything causes anything else. Empirical investigation helps us sort out what kinds of things cause what other kinds of things, on the assumption that things cause other things in the first place and all our experiences aren't willy-nilly incomprehensible.

The past is empirically unverifiable. Whether or not a certain dinosaur ate in a certain spot sixty million years ago is a matter of fact that we are incapable of observing. The same can be said of whether Charlemagne had an even or odd number of hairs on his head, or whether a man in New Zealand stubbed his toe last week. Should we conclude that questions concerning these subjects are literally not truth-apt? — Tarrasque

According to current physics, that information does still exist in the universe, and so in principle those things are empirically verifiable, it's just ridiculously impractical to go about doing that verification. Although some of that information may actually be in principle inaccessible now, just like the position of a particle with well-defined momentum is, in which case yes, those facts about the past are actually undefined, just like most facts about the future. (As part of my views on the nature of time and on modal realism, I fully embrace that there are multiple possible pasts of any given present; pasts just rapidly converge to extremely similar states of affairs, opposite how futures rapidly diverge).

Some people consider verificationism self-defeating. The claim "empirical verification is the only way to learn truths about the world" is, itself, empirically unverifiable. That means, by your account, that someone asking "Is empirical verification the only way to learn true things?" is asking an unintelligible question. The statement itself cannot be true or false. — Tarrasque

This is why I only embrace verificationism explicitly within the narrow domain of descriptive truths. The principle of verificationism itself is not a description of the way the world is, but is something we settle on prior to even engaging in description. Much like the principle of objectivity, and its relation to causation, detailed above.

How can you establish that holding true beliefs is always morally better for us? I can't imagine such a stance being grounded in the "appetites," which you tout as the foundation for moral imperatives. A man being cheated on by his wife experiences no harm, so long as he remains unaware. Discovering the affair is what causes him hedonic harm. Here, one benefits from holding a false belief. Yet, we still believe it is morally wrong to cheat when your partner doesn't know about it. — Tarrasque

The information about the cheating still exists out there in the world threatening the harm of its knowledge to the man. If it were possible (which it's not) to change the world such that all information about the cheating was completely eradicated, then that would be equivalent to changing the world to be one in which the cheating had never happened. And that would be a good thing, if you could literally undo past harms. But we can't, and knowing about them can be prudentially useful in preventing future ones.

Consider believing in a benevolent, all-knowing god. It is plausible that I could live a life where I purely benefit from having this belief. When my life goes poorly, I can keep my chin up, believing that it's all a necessary part of god's great design. When my life goes well, I can attribute my good fortune to god looking after me, rewarding me for my virtue and compensating me for my hardships. This belief may be prudential(thus moral) for me to have, and for others to encourage me to have. Concluding otherwise requires an account of why truth is valuable separate from moral good. — Tarrasque

Such a person holding such a false belief may end up expecting the world to be different from the way it actually is, and so behave imprudentially because of that. (I have relatives with this exact problem, people who could act to make their lives materially better, but who use "God will take care of it" as an excuse to do nothing, and end up suffering for it). If it were the case that such a person could never encounter anything about the world that would be counter to this belief, then that belief would either actually be true, or just be empty. Nominally "believing" nothingness that makes you feel good is morally good, and factually not even wrong, so epistemically permissible, if inconsequential.

If you are concerned with pragmatism rather than existential truth, it would seem most pragmatic to simply postulate abstract objects exist and move on from there. From the pragmatist perspective, who cares if they are real? They are useful. Their explanatory power, and the lack thereof of the alternatives, speaks for itself. — Tarrasque

If you mean abstract moral objects specifically, then what explanatory power do they have? They don't have any impact on how I should expect the world to seem, descriptively, to my senses, to be, so there's no use in positing them as descriptively real objects.

As for the usefulness of abstract objects in general, I do grant them a kind of abstract existence, just like I grant other possible worlds, because doing so helps to explain "why is this world like this?" That doesn't go against my empirical realist (physicalist phenomenalist) ontology, because I'm not a Platonist about them, but rather a mathematicist like Tegmark, but explaining that ontology is a long topic that I'm already planning for another thread.

Excited to get into epistemology and ontology threads when they come up. Are you a mod here or just a very involved user?

The moral equivalent of that paradox would be the sentence "x is good but I don't intend x". It seems to me that what you intend and what you think are good are as inseparable as what you believe and what you think is true. It is possible to intend other than what is good, just like it's possible to believe other than that is true, but in saying something is good you implicitly express your intention that it be so, and so contradict the attendant explicit expression of intention otherwise.

At face value, this seems patently false to me. Ex,
"Going to the gym today is good but I don't intend to go to the gym today."
Often, we recognize that things are good, but nonetheless intend otherwise. Conversely, it can't be said that we often recognize things to be true and yet believe otherwise. Alternatively, consider the guilty meat eater:
"Eating meat is wrong but I still intend to eat meat."
He may have come across a moral argument that convinced him that being a vegetarian is the morally right thing to do. He may still be a slave to his vices, or be insufficiently motivated by moral reasons. Nothing seems overtly paradoxical about this.

This is the issue that I've been having trouble communicating to Kenosha and Isaac. I don't hold these "oughts" to be grounded in any "is". We can give a descriptive account of the cause of someone feeling or thinking that something ought to be, just like we can give a descriptive account of the cause of someone feeling or thinking that something is, but that account is not the reason why they feel or think that. We don't have to know anything at all about brains to go to our appetitive experiences as the ground of our "oughts", any more than we need to know about brains to go to our sensory experiences as the ground of our "is"s.

In the latter case it's rather transparently the other way around: we learn descriptive facts about brains empirically, by relying on our sensations, our "is" experiences. If we then used our knowledge about brains, gained through sensory observation, to justify using sensory observation, that would clearly be circular reasoning. The reliance on sensory experience comes prior to any description of the brain. Likewise, on my account the reliance on appetitive experience as the ground for prescription comes prior to any description of the brain.

What I am concerned with is not the reason why a subject thinks something ought to be the case. I am concerned with what renders them correct, independently of whether they know they're correct or not. It is not an issue of justification. It is an issue of truthmakers.

"What would make 'murder is wrong' true?" Is a different question from "How can we know that 'murder is wrong' is true?" I am asking the former. Of course, you would say that these claims cannot be true at all, they can merely be correct. I don't think that your distinction between "correctness" and "truth" is particularly convincing, which I will address later in this post. Just substitute "true" for "correct," or "truthmakers" for "correctness-makers," wherever it is pertinent.

Let me throw out an analogy that you may or may not consider relevant to this part of our discussion. Consider consensus relativism: the idea that what is moral is what the majority of people think is moral. I would claim that this theory jumps the is-ought gap. It claims that because a certain physical fact holds(people think X is moral), we derive from that what we ought to do(people think X is moral, therefore X is what ought to be done). You might reply that just because I can give a causal/descriptive explanation for people's agreement, that says nothing about the reasons why they come to their consensus about what is moral. I would find this to be an unconvincing rebuttal: if it is the fact that they agree that renders certain acts morally wrong, this fact is a physical fact. If we conclude something about what we ought to do from this physical fact, we are crossing the is-ought gap. The issue arises because, in consensus relativism, the truthmaker of moral claims is consensus. Consensus among humans is a natural fact. Likewise, if it is some natural fact of humans(they have certain appetites) that makes X moral, we are getting an ought from an is. Now, unlike a lot of people who misunderstand the significance of the is-ought gap, I don't think Hume had the final word on morality. But your theory in particular seems built on strictly partitioning "is" from "ought," so I think the distinction being crystal clear and incontrovertible is especially important for you.

I'm not sure this is an accurate account of my account, because there could be differences between people that would make them have different appetites in the same situation. A moral claim is objectively true if it accounts for all of those different appetites in all different circumstances.

So, is everybody's appetite given equal weight? Bloodlust or sadism can be considered appetites. Some people have these appetites. How does your metaethical theory account for these? Are they not ruled out for being in the minority? If half of all people had bloodlust as a base appetite, how would this change ethics?

It's precisely that "idealized" that makes the difference. We don't, and can't, have a complete account of the way that the entire (possibly infinite) world would be experienced by all (possibly infinitely many) kinds of being. We only have the way that bits and pieces of it are experienced by beings like us. So we can't just take "the whole world, independent of all experience" (that non-existent noumena) and hold it up against "our picture of what the world should be like". We can only compare "the way this bit of the world seems to us like it is" and "the way this bit of the world seems to us like it ought to be".

This is well put, and generally true. As a principle of epistemology, specifically constrained to physical matters, verificationism is about as good as it gets. What I don't see as plausible is the jump from "we can't possibly know everything" to "there is nothing outside what we can know." In fact, they seem to be borderline contradictory. If there is nothing outside what we can know, what are we failing to know when we can't possibly know everything?

That last bit. The parable of the blind men and the elephant is the illustration I like to use here. Three blind men each feel different parts of an elephant (the trunk, a leg, the tail), and each concludes that he is feeling something different (a snake, a tree, a rope). All three of them are wrong about what they perceive, but the truth of the matter, that they are feeling parts of an elephant, is consistent with what all three of them sense, even though the perceptions they draw from those sensations are mutually contradictory.

This is great. I like this parable a lot, and wish I had thought of a comparable example myself. Let's imagine that, for whatever reason, communication between these three blind men is impossible. Clearly, they are all restricted in the ways in which they can examine the elephant. If the only consistent consensus each can form is with himself, why is his judgement about the elephant not accurate? Snake-man can only verify a snake, tree-man can only verify a tree, and rope-man can only verify a rope. If verificationism about truth is correct, none of these men are wrong. Verificationism would assert that, in such an allegorical case, there would be no underlying fact of "elephant." If they cannot confirm an elephant, there is no elephant. Does this not seem as intuitively false to you as it does to me?

But if not, then you wouldn't want to translate that second premise as "x not stealing implies x not cheating" (gerund, equally applicable to descriptions or prescriptions, just stating a relationship between those states of affairs), but rather as "'x ought to not steal' implies 'x ought to not cheat'". Symbolically, that would then be:

P1. be(A)
P2. be(A) -> be(B)
C. be(B)

This is the best interpretation of what I meant. This response does the best job at preserving formal validity. I want to preface wherever this part of the discussion goes by saying, in trying to consider an alternative account of logic itself invented by someone far more educated than me, I am getting in quite over my head. I have 5+ tabs of SEP open trying to figure out what is going on here. Miscommunication is very likely.

On my account, it's not only moral utterances but ordinary descriptive utterances that are impressing an attitude toward the idea in question.

It is important to remember that propositions need not deal only in utterances. We could, again, imagine that bugs have died in the shape of words on some piece of paper to form a valid modus ponens. Impression would play no role in our evaluation of it.

My systemic objection here would be that classical logic works very well for us. An alternative account being merely internally consistent(if yours in fact is) does not give us sufficient reason to switch, universally, our understanding of classical logic to Pfhorrest logic. We would need a compelling case to conclude that when your position produces errors in classical logic, we ought to discard classical logic rather than your position.

Attempts to eliminate the importance of tense from logic have, I believe, been made before. They are highly contentious. The work of R.M. Hare comes to mind. "Semantic content" and "meaning" are closely connected concepts. Sure, "Close the door!" and "The door ought to be closed." and "The door is closed." and "You should believe that the door is closed." all can be thought of as different forms of the same primitive idea, "the door being closed." Can we conclude from this that the meaning of all of the above is identical? Can they be freely interchanged with each other, and all be represented by the same variable in a deduction? Formal meaning must be quite distinct from semantic content if we can conclude this. "All doors are closed" and "some doors are closed" are both merely quantified versions of "the door being closed," yet, differentiation between them in formal logic is incredibly important. In avoiding the Frege-Geach problem, you might leave yourself with an account of logic that is too fuzzy to be as useful as classical logic.

This is also where I will further explore your distinction between "truth" and "correctness." Typically, logic deals in propositions that can be true or false. Validity is a property of arguments that lies in the relationship between premises and conclusions, where an argument is valid only if the truth of the premises entail the truth of the conclusion. This relationship of entailment is core to logic. You consider the domain of what can be true to solely contain the domain of what is physical. Other domains that we might normally consider to be capable of bearing truth, such as matters of mathematics, logic itself, morality, and theology, you consider merely "correctness-apt."

You do not seem to object to logical arguments being built around "correctness" in the same way we might normally use "truth." That you would consider a moral modus ponens to be capable of validity at all requires "correctness" to have the same relationship with logical entailment that traditional "truth" does. It seems that the concept of truth, as typically employed, you have replaced wholesale with this notion of "correctness." Under your account, "truth" has therefore been reduced in scope to refer merely to "physical truth." It appears, then, that rather than identifying a supercategory above and including our typical term "truth," you have introduced a subcategory: "physical truth." This is why I would suggest abandoning the "truth/correctness" dichotomy entirely, and just referring to "truth" and "specifically physical truth." If correctness does everything that truth does in logic, it just is truth. We can cast aside "all truths are physical truths, all else is correctness" in favor of "some truths are purely physical truths, and these are relevantly different from nonphysical truths." Since you don't espouse a correspondence theory of truth, you don't have to account for anything that nonphysical truths correspond to. This change would not be problematic for your theory at all.

I didn't realize I was using a customized version of the word; I honestly just thought "supererogatory" was the deontic equivalent of "contingent". Doing some further research now prompted by this, I see that the word I really want is "omissible". I'll make sure to use that instead from now on, and change where I've mis-used "supererogatory" in the past where possible.

No worries, glad I could help clear that up. "Omissible" works much better, though I might even simply suggest "Nonobligatory." It stands in clear contrast with "obligatory," and I know you love your symmetries.

Quantum physics is full of different interpretations, so I'm cautious to speak authoritatively about what all physicists think, but as I understand it, the uncertainty principle doesn't just say that we can't know position and speed at the same time, but that to the extent that we measure one, the other becomes literally undefined. A particle with a definite momentum has no definite position; its position is actually smeared out across space.

You make a good point. We ought to be cautious in speaking about quantum physics that we do not tread into "quantum woo" territory, given that neither of us know much about it. I was under the impression that the Heisenberg uncertainty principle established epistemic uncertainty, but if I am incorrect, I have nothing further to add to this line of argument. It may be legitimately indefinite - we might lack full information because full information does not exist to be had at at the moment of measurement.

To other observations. We're (rightly) cautious about the accuracy of our present beliefs because we haven't made all of the observations (and never can), and there may be ones that contradict what we presently believe. To assert that something is objectively true is to assert that there won't ever be any contradictory observations. We can never know that with certainty, of course, but we can think it is so, at least tentatively.

I feel like that interpretation of the word "objective" kinda came out of the blue. I don't think that to say something is objective means it is incontrovertible. I would rather say, of a truth that no knowledge could ever be obtained to contradict it, that such a truth is "indefeasible." When it comes to "objective," it is most often used in contrast with "subjective." I defer to Derek Parfit's definition here, which I like a lot and I think really captures what we mean when we talk about things being objective:

"According to subjective theories, we have most reason to do whatever would best fulfill or achieve our present desires or aims. Some Subjectivists appeal to our actual present desires or aims; others appeal to the desires or aims that we would now have, or to the choices that we would now make, if we had carefully considered the relevant facts. Since these are all facts about us, we can call such reasons subject-given. According to objective theories, we have reason to act in some way only when, and because, what we are doing or trying to achieve is in some way good, or worth achieving. Since these facts are about the objects of these desires or aims, we can call such reasons object-given."
-Parfit, On What Matters vol. one

We could claim something to be objectively true(true independently of our opinion on the matter), and yet maintain that this claim is defeasible in the face of potentially undermining evidence. I do agree with you that we should never proclaim truths to be indefeasible, as this can be dangerously dogmatic. Kant argued something similar in his essay "An Answer to the Question: 'What is Enlightenment?'" which I would highly recommend.

Causality, like physicality, is part of the background assumption of objectivity that we have to make in order to go about the process of investigating what is real. We can't empirically prove that anything is objectively real, either, but the question of whether anything is objectively real is prior to the empirical investigation. Likewise, the question of whether anything causes anything else. Empirical investigation helps us sort out what kinds of things cause what other kinds of things, on the assumption that things cause other things in the first place and all our experiences aren't willy-nilly incomprehensible.

Yes, we assume these things to be true. That is what an assumption is: taking something to be true. That is an example of something we take to be true, and which might actually be true(things might actually cause other things, or they might merely correlate consistently), but cannot be empirically verified.

The idea that there are only empirical truths or definitional truths has its roots in "Hume's Fork," which asserted that truth neatly divides into the two camps of "matters of fact" and "relations of ideas." If you prefer, we could accurately describe the two camps as "synthetic a posteriori" versus "analytic a priori." I take it you believe something like this, since you said at the start of our discussion that mathematical truths are merely definitionally true relations of ideas.
Hume's Fork has since been refuted, thanks in large part to the work of Kripke, who introduced the necessary(re: analytic) a posteriori truth, and Quine, who put the analytic-synthetic distinction itself on dubious ground.

According to current physics, that information does still exist in the universe, and so in principle those things are empirically verifiable, it's just ridiculously impractical to go about doing that verification.

As long as information exists in the universe, it is empirically verifiable in principle? What about information that is moving away from us faster than the speed of light, at the edge of the observable universe? It is physical, yet empirically unobservable to us. Same with matters of the past - we are dealing with imperceptible matters of fact. If I say "Charlemagne had an odd number of hairs on his head," I might be correct on a guess. What would render me correct? If Charlemagne did, in fact, have an odd number of hairs on his head. Surely you wouldn't believe it impossible that Charlemagne might have had an odd number of hairs on his head? If you were to claim that it would be impossible for me to sufficiently justify a belief that he did, I would agree. However, holding these things to be undefined seems a harder bullet to bite than just admitting we can't know everything. Mystery is an aspect of the human condition, and we ought to become accustomed to it.

This is why I only embrace verificationism explicitly within the narrow domain of descriptive truths. The principle of verificationism itself is not a description of the way the world is, but is something we settle on prior to even engaging in description.

If everybody had to settle on verificationism about truth before even engaging in description, nobody engaging in description would disagree with verificationism. People do disagree with verificationism(in fact, it's by far the minority position), ergo, we do not need to settle on verificationism before engaging in description. If you construe "description" to mean "describing physical things," it is trivially true that empirical methods are the best methods to engage with empirical subject matter. But, not everyone makes this conflation. Most people think things can be true yet not physical. Only the most extreme skeptics doubt causality, yet even people working in the sciences doubt that verificationism about truth is legitimate.
We have plenty of reason to believe things that cannot be empirically verified: truths of math, logic, reason, and morality especially.

The information about the cheating still exists out there in the world threatening the harm of its knowledge to the man. If it were possible (which it's not) to change the world such that all information about the cheating was completely eradicated, then that would be equivalent to changing the world to be one in which the cheating had never happened.

So, if we stipulate that nobody besides me and the other woman would ever find out about it, cheating on my partner would be morally permissible?

Imagine two worlds: In W1, the holocaust never happens. In W2, the holocaust did happen, but it happened 20,000 years ago and no traces of it remain to be observed by contemporary people. Do we have reason to call W1 better than W2? Should we prefer to exist in W1? I say yes. The suffering of people still matters, whether or not we can empirically verify that they suffered.

If it were the case that such a person could never encounter anything about the world that would be counter to this belief, then that belief would either actually be true, or just be empty.

The existence of god is unfalsifiable, therefore god exists. This is a bad argument, but from the perspective of the man whose belief is never falsified, he may not be mistaken to make it. It is conceivable that there could be some fact which, if he learned it, he would cease to believe in god. It is equally conceivable that he could never encounter this fact. Some theses are just unfalsifiable: solipsism, simulation theory, god, Descartes' deceiving demon, and causal determinism among them. I would agree that believing in these things is rarely useful, and in that sense "empty," but any one of them may nonetheless accurately describe the condition of the universe. It may be the case that you are the only entity in existence. To argue that it could not be the case just because it could not be verified is unconvincing.

If you mean abstract moral objects specifically, then what explanatory power do they have?

The explanatory power lies in the observation that we discuss moral facts the same way we discuss other facts. We debate, disagree, and use reason to draw conclusions from premises. When we disagree, we believe that one or both of us are incorrect. As you are discovering, reforming our language and logic to compartmentalize moral facts is a Herculean task. Some might call it unpragmatic. Postulating that when we say "slavery is wrong," we descriptively assign a property "wrongness" to an act "slavery," and do so either correctly or incorrectly, is easy. It reflects what we appear to be doing with moral language, prima facie. The only substantive objection you've offered to seeing things this way is the argument from queerness, which just asserts that moral facts seem too weird to exist. That's not something that would deter a pragmatist.

The explanatory power lies in the observation that we discuss moral facts the same way we discuss other facts. We debate, disagree, and use reason to draw conclusions from premises. When we disagree, we believe that one or both of us are incorrect. As you are discovering, reforming our language and logic to compartmentalize moral facts is a Herculean task. Some might call it unpragmatic. Postulating that when we say "slavery is wrong," we descriptively assign a property "wrongness" to an act "slavery," and do so either correctly or incorrectly, is easy. It reflects what we appear to be doing with moral language, prima facie. The only substantive objection you've offered to seeing things this way is the argument from queerness, which just asserts that moral facts seem too weird to exist. That's not something that would deter a pragmatist. — Tarrasque

As I raised with Pforrest earlier, this is simply not true so a s a basis for believing prima facie in moral truths it's sketchy at best. Currently, a significant number of surveys show most people to be moral relativists (or at least not moral absolutists). Even if this were not the case, however, what you'd be setting up here is the principle that we should, no matter the absence of mechanism, no matter the lack of parsimony, take as true whatever it is that most people believe to be true. "Most people believe there are objective moral facts, therefore we should assume there are objective moral facts". You have, however, in your assessment of those very moral facts just discarded the idea that what most people believe to be the truth about those moral facts is indeed the truth about those moral facts. This is a contradictory approach on the face of it. Likewise we could go the other way and ask whether most people believe prima facie that "what most people believe should be taken as being the case". I've no surveys to go on here, but I'd wager not many would agree with that, so even if it were true that "most people believe there are moral facts", adhering to our first principle would mean that we should not take this as reason to believe that there are moral facts.

accidental post, please ignore

As I raised with Pforrest earlier, this is simply not true so as a basis for believing prima facie in moral truths it's sketchy at best.

Which part is simply not true? When I said this, referring to our use of moral language:

"We debate, disagree, and use reason to draw conclusions from premises. When we disagree, we believe that one or both of us are incorrect."

This has been true in my experience. Even moral relativists do this. They advance their various viewpoints, disagree about moral issues, and believe that others are incorrect(only relative to their own morality, rather than an objective one). People discuss topics we consider subjective, like how good certain movies are, in reasoned ways all the time.

Currently, a significant number of surveys show most people to be moral relativists (or at least not moral absolutists).

That's surprising to me, considering that most people are religious. If this is true, it's still compatible with what I said above. People still discuss moral facts in the same way they discuss other facts. Relativists just believe these facts are subjective.

Even if this were not the case, however, what you'd be setting up here is the principle that we should, no matter the absence of mechanism, no matter the lack of parsimony, take as true whatever it is that most people believe to be true. "Most people believe there are objective moral facts, therefore we should assume there are objective moral facts".

That would be a foolish principle! I am in agreement with you that "Most people believe there are objective moral facts, therefore we should assume there are objective moral facts" is a bad argument. However, I do think that people are warranted in believing what seems to be true to them, until it is defeated by a stronger reason to believe otherwise. Appealing to consensus is useful to gauge what people generally believe. It should not be used as a guiding principle for determining what is true.

You have, however, in your assessment of those very moral facts just discarded the idea that what most people believe to be the truth about those moral facts is indeed the truth about those moral facts. This is a contradictory approach on the face of it.

Have I? I don't think I've discarded what most people believe to be the truth about moral facts. If most people start with an intuition that "slavery is permissible," this intuition is what they have the most reason to assume until it is defeated by a reason to the contrary. This is not in contradiction with my assessment above, but in agreement with it.

Likewise we could go the other way and ask whether most people believe prima facie that "what most people believe should be taken as being the case". I've no surveys to go on here, but I'd wager not many would agree with that, so even if it were true that "most people believe there are moral facts", adhering to our first principle would mean that we should not take this as reason to believe that there are moral facts.

I agree with you here. What most people believe is usually pretheoretical, so it serves as a weak basis for establishing truth. Most people start from what they intuitively believe, then encounter arguments and theories that challenge their view. Once they begin this process, their intuitions will often become something they no longer have reason to believe. These prima facie beliefs will have been defeated. Until they are defeated, we have sufficient grounds to hold them.

This has been true in my experience. Even moral relativists do this. They advance their various viewpoints, disagree about moral issues, and believe that others are incorrect(only relative to their own morality, rather than an objective one). — Tarrasque

Maybe (although not in my experience), but you advanced this as evidence of us ascribing properties to objective entities (like slavery), so in the case of relativists they would not be ascribing the property 'wrong' but the property 'something I believe is wrong'. In order to take moral realism as prima facie true on the basis of it seeming to be how we talk about moral dilemmas, you'd have to present evidence of us mostly talking about moral dilemmas assuming realism, and that's just not the case.

People discuss topics we consider subjective, like how good certain movies are, in reasoned ways all the time. — Tarrasque

But this would seem to support the opposite of what you're saying. We advance reasons whilst talking about how good certain movies despite virtually all of us being of the opinion that movie preferences are subjective. So what this example demonstrates is that our mode of conversation (reasoned argument) and our use of terms like 'best' does not in any way indicate that we consider the underlying judgment to be objective. It's just the way we talk.

I do think that people are warranted in believing what seems to be true to them, until it is defeated by a stronger reason to believe otherwise. — Tarrasque

Indeed. The question is what kind of thing here would constitute a reason to believe otherwise, and why this principle then doesn't just apply to moral judgements themselves.

It should not be used as a guiding principle for determining what is true. — Tarrasque

Then what should?

If most people start with an intuition that "slavery is permissible," this intuition is what they have the most reason to assume until it is defeated by a reason to the contrary. This is not in contradiction with my assessment above, but in agreement with it. — Tarrasque

I might have your position confused then, I thought you were arguing against moral relativism. I'm a relativist myself, so we're in agreement here.

Maybe (although not in my experience), but you advanced this as evidence of us ascribing properties to objective entities (like slavery), so in the case of relativists they would not be ascribing the property 'wrong' but the property 'something I believe is wrong'. In order to take moral realism as prima facie true on the basis of it seeming to be how we talk about moral dilemmas, you'd have to present evidence of us mostly talking about moral dilemmas assuming realism, and that's just not the case.

Definitely never said anything about "objective" entities. I think that, even from a relativist standpoint, assigning the property "wrong" to "slavery" best explains what is happening in a moral judgement. If I say "the movie was good," I am assigning the property "good" to the movie. I am just doing so in a subjective manner. "The movie is good" might be true when spoken by someone who liked the movie, but false when spoken by someone who disliked the movie. Similar for something like "broccoli tastes good," or if you are a certain type of moral relativist, "murder is wrong."

We talk about moral facts assuming cognitivism, but not necessarily the kind of realism you're imagining. The case I have been advancing here is agnostic to the matter of strong moral realism. Cognitivism holds that:
(1) Moral statements are truth-apt(can be true or false)
(2) At least some of them are true.

Moral relativism is a cognitivist theory. Moral relativism holds that moral statements are truth-apt, and sometimes true. Their truth is dependent on subjective facts: different types of moral relativists might believe these facts to be an individual's attitudes, or the consensus of a society, or something like that.

But this would seem to support the opposite of what you're saying. We advance reasons whilst talking about how good certain movies despite virtually all of us being of the opinion that movie preferences are subjective. So what this example demonstrates is that our mode of conversation (reasoned argument) and our use of terms like 'best' does not in any way indicate that we consider the underlying judgment to be objective. It's just the way we talk.

Yes, moral cognitivism is compatible with moral relativism. The way we talk about movies gives us good reason to believe, prima facie, that our statements about movies are cognitive. I wouldn't infer anything from this alone about whether movie evaluations are objective or subjective.

I might have your position confused then, I thought you were arguing against moral relativism. I'm a relativist myself, so we're in agreement here.

I am not personally a moral relativist, but I was not arguing against moral relativism here. I was disputing Pfhorrest's version of prescriptivism, which makes claims to its own unique sort of cognitivism, even though how he has described it so far is not compatible with the tenets of cognitivism I mentioned above.

Then what should?(serve as a guiding principle for determining what is true)

Our methods should probably depend on what it is we're trying to learn truth about. I can't confidently state some principle about how we can reliably come to apprehend truths in all circumstances.

I think that, even from a relativist standpoint, assigning the property "wrong" to "slavery" best explains what is happening in a moral judgement. — Tarrasque

So, on what basis are you judging 'best' here? What aspects does this explanation have which, say expressivism, doesn't have?

different types of moral relativists might believe these facts to be an individual's attitudes, or the consensus of a society, or something like that. — Tarrasque

Well then those are not properties of the behaviour in question, they are properties of those regarding it. I suppose you could say that a property of slavery is that such-and-such a group of people think it's bad, but that seems like an unnecessarily clumsy way of just avoiding assigning the property to the person rather than the behaviour.

I can't confidently state some principle about how we can reliably come to apprehend truths in all circumstances. — Tarrasque

Then on what grounds are you dismissing methods?

So, on what basis are you judging 'best' here? What aspects does this explanation have which, say expressivism, doesn't have?

Usually when the semantic content of a type of discourse is a certain way, we use that discourse in ways that match the semantic content. An example of expressivist discourse is cheering for sports teams. We see people yell "Go, Canucks! Woooo!" and take them to be expressing their approval for the Canucks. If we were going to assume that when people said "Go, Canucks! Woo!" they were actually meaning "The Canucks are the best team in the NHL." we would need a reason to do so.

"Murder is wrong" is structured the same as "The sky is blue" or "The economy is failing." If we were to take "murder is wrong" to be a blunt expression of "Boo, murder! Grrr!" we would need a reason to do so. We usually don't assume that people are making a category error in their speech. People's moral discourse couldn't be substituted for growls and cheers and retain the same meaning. I've never seen an expressivist who puts their theory into practice and changes their surface-level speech to match what they claim it means. Presumably, people would look at them very funny, and not understand "keeping promises is good" to be equivalent to "Wooooo, keeping promises! Hell yeah, woop woop!"

There are also formal issues with expressivism that make it less tenable, like embedding problems or the Frege-Geach problem.

Well then those are not properties of the behaviour in question, they are properties of those regarding it. I suppose you could say that a property of slavery is that such-and-such a group of people think it's bad, but that seems like an unnecessarily clumsy way of just avoiding assigning the property to the person rather than the behaviour.

Really? I think describing the property as being assigned to the person is far more clumsy. If anything, a relativist is assigning the property "Wrong-according-to-me" to "slavery," not assigning the property "Thinks-slavery-is-wrong" to himself. Again, compare to a color judgement. When I say that grass is green, the content of my sentence does not include myself. If somebody wanted to see if they agreed or disagreed with my judgement, they wouldn't check me for the property "thinks-grass-is-green," they'd check the grass, because that's where the alleged property "green" is. If color perception is subjective, we could disagree but both be right.

Then on what grounds are you dismissing methods?

On what grounds am I dismissing appealing to consensus as a guiding principle for truth?
Well, presumably for the same reasons you dismiss it. Laypeople's views are usually uninformed and have not been subjected to serious scrutiny. Like you said,

what you'd be setting up here is the principle that we should, no matter the absence of mechanism, no matter the lack of parsimony, take as true whatever it is that most people believe to be true. "Most people believe there are objective moral facts, therefore we should assume there are objective moral facts".

Excited to get into epistemology and ontology threads when they come up. Are you a mod here or just a very involved user? — Tarrasque

I’m not a mod, and I’m not even sure I’m very involved here compared to others. I haven’t even been here a year so far. I’m just some isolated guy who wants to actually talk to other people about the philosophical system I’ve been brewing for a decade instead of just writing it down in my book that nobody will ever read.

At face value, this seems patently false to me. Ex,
"Going to the gym today is good but I don't intend to go to the gym today."
Often, we recognize that things are good, but nonetheless intend otherwise. Conversely, it can't be said that we often recognize things to be true and yet believe otherwise. Alternatively, consider the guilty meat eater:
"Eating meat is wrong but I still intend to eat meat."
He may have come across a moral argument that convinced him that being a vegetarian is the morally right thing to do. He may still be a slave to his vices, or be insufficiently motivated by moral reasons. Nothing seems overtly paradoxical about this. — Tarrasque

The distinction I make between desire and intention is important here. Being a slave to your vices is a case of your intentions not being causally effective on your actions, e.g. you mean to do something, you think you ought to, you resolve to do that, but despite that you just can't help but do otherwise, because other desires besides the desire you desire to desire override it.

This is analogous to mirages and optical illusions. Sometimes you perceive something, and you know that perception is false, you judge that your perception is incorrect, but that doesn't stop you from perceiving it anyway. You perceive something you don't believe. Likewise you can desire something you don't intend. As just like you might not help but act on some perceptions even though you disbelieve them (e.g. recoiling from a scary hallucination you know isn't real), so too you might not help but act on some desires you don't intend to.

Once again, natural language is a little sloppy, and I know this distinction is not nearly always maintained in ordinary speech, but in the ways that I'm distinguishing the concepts, to intend something and to think it's good are identical in the same way that believing something and thinking it's true are.

In the case of the gym example, if you honestly don't intend to go to the gym, rather than just not desiring to and expecting those slothful desires to win out, then that would suggest that you think there is some greater good than going to the gym that you would be neglecting, so you think you going to the gym today is not actually good (because in the full context you think doing so would be worse than not doing so), even if you think going to the gym generally is good.

What I am concerned with is not the reason why a subject thinks something ought to be the case. I am concerned with what renders them correct, independently of whether they know they're correct or not. It is not an issue of justification. It is an issue of truthmakers. — Tarrasque

I get that, and that's what I'm meaning to address. The truthmakers of moral claims, on my account, are the appetitive experiences of things seeming good or bad in the first-person. Not the sensory experiences of other people seeming, in the third person, to be having experiences of things seeming good or bad. Just like the truthmakers of factual claims, on my account, are the sensory experiences of things seeming true or false in the first-person, not the sensory experiences of other people seeming, in the third person, to be having experiences of things seeming true or false.

This avoids solipsism or egotism, as I expect you'll object next, because you can either trust other people that they had the first-person appetitive experiences that they claimed to have, or go have those same experiences yourself if you don't trust them. In either case, it's that first-person experience that is the truth maker, not any third-person account of a fact that someone's brain is undergoing some process.

So, is everybody's appetite given equal weight? Bloodlust or sadism can be considered appetites. Some people have these appetites. How does your metaethical theory account for these? Are they not ruled out for being in the minority? If half of all people had bloodlust as a base appetite, how would this change ethics? — Tarrasque

Who or how many people is not relevant. But in any case bloodlust or sadism as usually defined would be desires, not appetites. Someone desires to kill or hurt someone else. That doesn't mean that a complete moral account has to grant them what they desire. But whatever raw experiences they're having that give rise to those desires, whatever kind of psychological pain or whatever may be behind it, those are appetites, and need to be satisfied.

The thing about appetites, unlike desires or intentions, is that they definitionally cannot conflict, because they are not about states of affairs, just experiences. The trick is to come up with some state of affairs that satisfies all those experiences. Just like sense-observations cannot conflict, only perceptions or desires can, because the latter are about states of affairs, while the former are just raw data, and the trick in science is to come up with some state of affairs that somehow satisfies all that sense-data.

This is well put, and generally true. As a principle of epistemology, specifically constrained to physical matters, verificationism is about as good as it gets. What I don't see as plausible is the jump from "we can't possibly know everything" to "there is nothing outside what we can know." In fact, they seem to be borderline contradictory. If there is nothing outside what we can know, what are we failing to know when we can't possibly know everything? — Tarrasque

Think of it like this: There are no things that we could never know, but there are infinitely many things that we could know. Because we're starting with a finite amount of things that we do know, we will always have merely a finite number of things that we do know, and consequently infinitely many things that we still don't know. But all those infinitely many things we don't know are still part of the set of things we could know.

Consider natural numbers for analogy. There is no natural number that could not, in principle, be counted up to. But we can never finish counting all of the natural numbers. No matter how many we count, there will still be infinitely many that we haven't yet counted. But those are still nevertheless in principle countable: if we keep counting we will eventually count any number you'd care to name, but there will always still be more that we haven't counted yet.

This is great. I like this parable a lot, and wish I had thought of a comparable example myself. Let's imagine that, for whatever reason, communication between these three blind men is impossible. Clearly, they are all restricted in the ways in which they can examine the elephant. If the only consistent consensus each can form is with himself, why is his judgement about the elephant not accurate? Snake-man can only verify a snake, tree-man can only verify a tree, and rope-man can only verify a rope. If verificationism about truth is correct, none of these men are wrong. Verificationism would assert that, in such an allegorical case, there would be no underlying fact of "elephant." If they cannot confirm an elephant, there is no elephant. Does this not seem as intuitively false to you as it does to me? — Tarrasque

If there was truly absolutely no way in principle to ever tell anything about the object they're feeling than the things they "mistakenly" feel, then yes, those things would actually not be mistakes. But such an impossibly absolute separation of all experiences would also be them existing in literally separate worlds, on my account, so it's not all that weird that one of those worlds would have a snake, one a tree, etc.

It's important to keep distinct things that are "practically impossible" and things that are really and truly impossible in principle. There are lots of cases where it's "practically impossible" to verify something, but still actually possible in principle, and it's that in-principle that makes the difference. If you extend the "practical impossibility" to ridiculous lengths, you end up getting ridiculous-sounding conclusions, and if you take it impossibly far all the way to complete actual impossibility, you get ridiculous conclusions like these three men existing in actually separate worlds.

Hard-core physics already deals all the time with things that are practically impossible but possible in principle when looking to resolve apparent problems with its models. Like, information seems like it could be lost in black holes, which breaks some fundamental principles of quantum physics about the conservation of information, but a possible solution is that a particle falling across the event horizon causes (to be loose and visual about it) ripples on the horizon which affect the emission of Hawking radiation from that horizon, allowing in principle the information about what fell into the black hole to be constructed from the "completely random" Hawking radiation, via the implications of that about the ripples made in the horizon by the in-falling stuff. Of course nobody in practice is ever going to be able to gather enough data about the Hawking radiation coming out of a black hole to figure out some particular item that fell into it aeons earlier, but in principle it's possible and that's enough to save the principle of information conservation.

It is important to remember that propositions need not deal only in utterances. We could, again, imagine that bugs have died in the shape of words on some piece of paper to form a valid modus ponens. Impression would play no role in our evaluation of it. — Tarrasque

In reading the message written in dead bugs, we necessarily interpret it as though it was an utterance. Part of what makes something an impression or an expression is the interpretation of the audience; really, it's more the audience's interpretation than the speaker's intention that conveys any kind of communication at all. A person makes noises with their mouth or marks on a paper and someone else sees or hears those and thoughts come into their mind in reaction, which may or may not have been the thoughts intended by the person who made those noises or marks, if (as in your example) there even was a person who made them.

So if you read what seems to be an impression written in dead bugs that happen to have died in that pattern, and you read it as an impression, not just as a meaningless pattern of dead bugs, then to you it is an impression.

My systemic objection here would be that classical logic works very well for us. An alternative account being merely internally consistent(if yours in fact is) does not give us sufficient reason to switch, universally, our understanding of classical logic to Pfhorrest logic. We would need a compelling case to conclude that when your position produces errors in classical logic, we ought to discard classical logic rather than your position. — Tarrasque

I don't mean my system of logic to contradict classical logic at all. I mean my system to be merely a way of encoding things in more detail, that can then be useful in making inferences.

It's like the switch from simple subject-predicate syllogisms to properly quantified modern predicate logic. Before modern predicate logic, a sentence like "every mouse is afraid of some cat" would be logically decomposed into the quantifier "every", the subject "mouse", and the predicate "is afraid of some cat". But that leaves it ambiguous as to whether there is one particular cat of whom all mice are afraid, or whether each mouse is afraid of one cat or another but not necessarily all the same one. In modern predicate logic, we would instead break it down into either "there is some cat such that for every mouse, the mouse is afraid of that cat", or "for every mouse, there is some cat such that the mouse is afraid of that cat". All the rules of logic that applied before still apply, but now we're capable of distinguishing these two meanings from each other, and reasoning about them differently as appropriate.

Likewise, in my logic, every ordinary indicative descriptive sentence "x is F" can be turned into "is(X being F)" and all the same rules of logic will apply to them. But if there was another sentence "x is G" where G is a predicate meaning that what it's applied to ought to be F, instead of treating that as a completely unrelated sentence, we could render it as "be(X being F)". You can do the exact same rules of logic to that re-encoding as you would with "x is G", but you can also see relationships between that statement and the statement "x is F" and generally other statements about x being F.

Sure, "Close the door!" and "The door ought to be closed." and "The door is closed." and "You should believe that the door is closed." all can be thought of as different forms of the same primitive idea, "the door being closed." Can we conclude from this that the meaning of all of the above is identical? Can they be freely interchanged with each other, and all be represented by the same variable in a deduction? Formal — Tarrasque

I certainly don't think those are all identical in meaning or freely interchangeable. "is(S)" and "be(S)" mean very different things, they just have in common the state of affairs S. "be(x F'ed)" and "be(you F'ing x)" are also different statements, even though the later implies the former.

This is also where I will further explore your distinction between "truth" and "correctness." Typically, logic deals in propositions that can be true or false. Validity is a property of arguments that lies in the relationship between premises and conclusions, where an argument is valid only if the truth of the premises entail the truth of the conclusion. This relationship of entailment is core to logic. You consider the domain of what can be true to solely contain the domain of what is physical. Other domains that we might normally consider to be capable of bearing truth, such as matters of mathematics, logic itself, morality, and theology, you consider merely "correctness-apt."

You do not seem to object to logical arguments being built around "correctness" in the same way we might normally use "truth." That you would consider a moral modus ponens to be capable of validity at all requires "correctness" to have the same relationship with logical entailment that traditional "truth" does. It seems that the concept of truth, as typically employed, you have replaced wholesale with this notion of "correctness." Under your account, "truth" has therefore been reduced in scope to refer merely to "physical truth." It appears, then, that rather than identifying a supercategory above and including our typical term "truth," you have introduced a subcategory: "physical truth." This is why I would suggest abandoning the "truth/correctness" dichotomy entirely, and just referring to "truth" and "specifically physical truth." If correctness does everything that truth does in logic, it just is truth. We can cast aside "all truths are physical truths, all else is correctness" in favor of "some truths are purely physical truths, and these are relevantly different from nonphysical truths." Since you don't espouse a correspondence theory of truth, you don't have to account for anything that nonphysical truths correspond to. This change would not be problematic for your theory at all. — Tarrasque

I don't have any problem with talking about "truth" in the broader sense that you are. I only substitute "correctness" because to some people, "truth" implies descriptiveness, and I want to avoid confusion with them. You're absolutely right that there's two concepts here, a narrower one and a broader one, and I don't have any particular attachment to the terms used for them, just so long as they are distinguished from each other.

The narrower concept, though, is not specifically "physical truth", but "descriptive truth". On my physicalist account, those are identical, but for the purposes of logic, they don't have to be. Saying that there exist some abstract moral objects is a descriptive, but not physical, claim. It would be made true by reality being a certain way, by it being an accurate description of reality. Likewise any kind of claim about the existence of any nonphysical things: they're still claims that things are, really some way. There are other kinds of claims that don't purport to describe how reality is at all, though; most notable, prescriptive claims, that something ought to be, morally. I think that those kinds of claims can also be true in a sense, but a non-descriptive sense; hence I try to say "correct" instead of "true" to avoid possible implications of descriptivism, but I don't mind at all when others do otherwise.

(Besides its conflict with my physicalism, I would still object to moral non-naturalism because it's still a form of descriptivism, and so still tries to draw an "ought" from an "is": there are these abstract moral objects, therefore things ought to be like so-and-so.)

I don't think that to say something is objective means it is incontrovertible. — Tarrasque

I didn't mean that at all. I meant only an expectation that it won't be controverted. If you expect that something will be contradicted by later observations, or is already contradicted by observations from a certain perspective, then you don't think it's objectively true. So if you do think it's objectively true, then you expect that it won't be and isn't already contradicted, from any perspective. That says nothing at all about your degree of certainty in that expectation, just that, on the overall balance of things, that is your expectation.

The idea that there are only empirical truths or definitional truths has its roots in "Hume's Fork," which asserted that truth neatly divides into the two camps of "matters of fact" and "relations of ideas." If you prefer, we could accurately describe the two camps as "synthetic a posteriori" versus "analytic a priori." I take it you believe something like this, since you said at the start of our discussion that mathematical truths are merely definitionally true relations of ideas. — Tarrasque

Something like it yes, but not exactly that. My fork would have three tines. In the middle are the relations between ideas, without any attitude toward them, neither claiming those ideas are correct to describe reality with nor correct to prescribe morality with, just that those ideas have those relations to each other. Then on one side are claims that those ideas are descriptively correct, i.e. "true" in the narrower sense; and on the other side are claims that those ideas are prescriptively correct, i.e. "good". I think both of those kinds of claims can be objectively evaluated by appeals to shared experiences, and the same kind of logic can be done to both, because the logic hinges entirely on the relations between the ideas, not on whether they are fit for description or prescription.

As long as information exists in the universe, it is empirically verifiable in principle? What about information that is moving away from us faster than the speed of light, at the edge of the observable universe? It is physical, yet empirically unobservable to us. Same with matters of the past - we are dealing with imperceptible matters of fact. If I say "Charlemagne had an odd number of hairs on his head," I might be correct on a guess. What would render me correct? If Charlemagne did, in fact, have an odd number of hairs on his head. Surely you wouldn't believe it impossible that Charlemagne might have had an odd number of hairs on his head? If you were to claim that it would be impossible for me to sufficiently justify a belief that he did, I would agree. However, holding these things to be undefined seems a harder bullet to bite than just admitting we can't know everything. Mystery is an aspect of the human condition, and we ought to become accustomed to it. — Tarrasque

I think the thing I said earlier in this post about distinguishing practical possibility from in-principle possibility addresses this.

If everybody had to settle on verificationism about truth before even engaging in description — Tarrasque

Sorry, I didn't mean that it's not possible to do description without first agreeing with verificationism, just that questions like whether or not to adopt things like verificationism are logically prior to any investigation about the world.

You might be interested in my previous thread on The Principles of Commensurablism, which is all about my basic philosophical framework that this meta-ethics / philosophy of language is in the context of.

(I spent that entire thread trying to disengage with Isaac and never got around to actually presenting an argument for those principles, but if you want to ask about them over there, I will).

So, if we stipulate that nobody besides me and the other woman would ever find out about it, cheating on my partner would be morally permissible? — Tarrasque

The practical vs in-principle thing applies here again, and is basically the difference between "would" and "could". But taking this as an example situation, if nothing bad could in principle ever befall your partner because of your actions -- if there was no chance of bringing home an STD, or of you abandoning or growing more distant from your partner over this other woman, or anything like that, if you and your partner's relationship went completely unchanged, other than her being mad at you -- would you really have done something wrong, or would she just be unjustifiably angry? Sure her being angry is in itself a bad thing, but anyone can be angry about anything, and that doesn't automatically make the thing bad; my girlfriend gets angry if I put the spoons handle-down instead of handle-up in the dish drainer, but that doesn't make it morally obligatory to do it her way.

I know I'm weird in not sharing the inherent sense of outrage about "infidelity" that other people have, and it's not because I want to run off and do it with other people myself, but because I'm just honestly not a possessive person. I've been in open relationships before and not felt jealous, unless it actually had negative consequences for me (like, she wants to go spend more time with him and leave me alone and lonely). If you got rid of all the negative consequences -- which may not always, in practice, actually be possible -- then I don't see how it would be a genuinely bad thing.

To argue that it could not be the case just because it could not be verified is unconvincing. — Tarrasque

This is where a lot of my core principles come from. When we get down to questions that we cannot possibly find an answer to, but cannot help but implicitly assume some answer or another by our actions, we have to assume whichever way is most practically useful to finding other answers. I rule out solipsism, egotism, all kinds of relativism and subjectivism, appeals to faith, authority, popularity, intuition, all kinds of transcendentalism, justificationism, and the reduction of "is" to "ought" or vice versa, all on those grounds: those are things we have to figure out logically prior to investigating the world, that an investigation of the world can't answer but must assume answers to, so we only have practical reasons to assume one way or another, and any assumptions that would leave us unable to proceed with any further investigation have to be rejected, and their negations assumed instead. Which negations are the core principles all of this is proceeding from, discussed in that other thread.

The explanatory power lies in the observation that we discuss moral facts the same way we discuss other facts. We debate, disagree, and use reason to draw conclusions from premises. When we disagree, we believe that one or both of us are incorrect — Tarrasque

My account expects exactly that, too. Those are features of moral universalism generally, not specifically of moral non-naturalism.

Postulating that when we say "slavery is wrong," we descriptively assign a property "wrongness" to an act "slavery," and do so either correctly or incorrectly, is easy. It reflects what we appear to be doing with moral language, prima facie — Tarrasque

There is the quite similar situation of the predicate "is true", or "is real". On my account, these kinds of predicates (wrong/right, false/true, bad/good, unreal/real, immoral/moral, incorrect/correct, etc) are not describing a real property of a real object, but a linguistic or mental "property" or a linguistic or mental "objects": they're saying what to think or feel about some idea or state of affairs. "Slavery is wrong" takes the idea of the state of affairs where slavery is happening and says to disapprove of it, in the same way that saying "slavery is real" takes the idea of the state of affairs where slavery is happening and says to expect to see it out there in the world.

The only substantive objection you've offered to seeing things this way is the argument from queerness, which just asserts that moral facts seem too weird to exist. That's not something that would deter a pragmatist. — Tarrasque

It's not just the argument from queerness, but a more general physicalism (there are practical reasons for both realism and empiricism, which amount to physicalism, which rules out the existence of non-physical objects), and also an even more general non-descriptivism (there are practical reasons to reject reducing "is" to "ought" or vice versa, which rules out translating moral utterances to descriptions of reality, be it a natural or non-natural part of it).

I do think that people are warranted in believing what seems to be true to them, until it is defeated by a stronger reason to believe otherwise. — Tarrasque

:clap: :point:

Our methods should probably depend on what it is we're trying to learn truth about. — Tarrasque

:100: :up:

I was disputing Pfhorrest's version of prescriptivism, which makes claims to its own unique sort of cognitivism, even though how he has described it so far is not compatible with the tenets of cognitivism I mentioned above. — Tarrasque

In the broader sense of “true” instead of which I’m using the word “correct” for disambiguity (from senses of “truth” that imply description), it does.

I’m just some isolated guy who wants to actually talk to other people about the philosophical system I’ve been brewing for a decade instead of just writing it down in my book that nobody will ever read.

Hey, don't be pessimistic about it. Are you going to publish? The only negative thing I would say about the sort of "theory-of-everything" approach you have is that it requires a reader to sacrifice more of their initial beliefs than a single, cohesive "theory-of-one-thing." It's a lot harder to convince someone to adopt a wholly unique theory-of-all-issues than, say, simply fit a meticulously argued panpsychism into their belief system. But, obviously, trying to fit it all together is an impressive undertaking.

The distinction I make between desire and intention is important here. Being a slave to your vices is a case of your intentions not being causally effective on your actions, e.g. you mean to do something, you think you ought to, you resolve to do that, but despite that you just can't help but do otherwise, because other desires besides the desire you desire to desire override it.

This is analogous to mirages and optical illusions. Sometimes you perceive something, and you know that perception is false, you judge that your perception is incorrect, but that doesn't stop you from perceiving it anyway. You perceive something you don't believe. Likewise you can desire something you don't intend. As just like you might not help but act on some perceptions even though you disbelieve them (e.g. recoiling from a scary hallucination you know isn't real), so too you might not help but act on some desires you don't intend to.

This can be explained easily in terms of second-order desires. I might have a certain desire, but desire not to have that desire. In such a case, the "desire I wish I had" is not affecting my actions, but the "desire I do have" is. Being a slave to my vices might be my first-order and second-order desires conflicting. If X being good is a belief, I can sincerely hold that X is good and yet not intend to X. While I want-to-want-to-X, I unfortunately don't want-to-X.

In the case of the gym example, if you honestly don't intend to go to the gym, rather than just not desiring to and expecting those slothful desires to win out, then that would suggest that you think there is some greater good than going to the gym that you would be neglecting, so you think you going to the gym today is not actually good (because in the full context you think doing so would be worse than not doing so), even if you think going to the gym generally is good.

This seems to imply that, in deliberating different options, only the maximal one is "good." This precludes the idea of deliberating between multiple good options. It doesn't follow that just because going to the gym is not the most good, it is not good at all.

"Going to the gym is good, but I don't intend to go to the gym." could reflect that I am not going to the gym because of a conflicting greater good, I agree. But, I can still cogently evaluate going to the gym as good, while not intending to do it.

The truthmakers of moral claims, on my account, are the appetitive experiences of things seeming good or bad in the first-person. Not the sensory experiences of other people seeming, in the third person, to be having experiences of things seeming good or bad. Just like the truthmakers of factual claims, on my account, are the sensory experiences of things seeming true or false in the first-person, not the sensory experiences of other people seeming, in the third person, to be having experiences of things seeming good or bad.

This avoids solipsism or egotism, as I expect you'll object next, because you can either trust other people that they had the first-person appetitive experiences that they claimed to have, or go have those same experiences yourself if you don't trust them. In either case, it's that first-person experience that is the truth maker, not any third-person account of a fact that someone's brain is undergoing some process.

So, if I understand you correctly, experiencing a first-person appetite is an irreducible ought. I'm still not confident that this is the case. The fact of my appetitive experience is a physical fact, even from the first-person perspective. If I were in pain, I could, say, go through an MRI and verify that I am in fact in pain. Of course, I don't need to do this to have the experience of being in pain. Similarly, I don't have to go through an MRI to verify that I am having a perceptive experience of looking at a painting. If where I have pain, I have an ought, there seems to be a relationship between "me factually being in pain" and "what ought to be the case."
In the same vein as above, do you think that
"I am hungry, yet I ought not to be fed." is some kind of paradox? If "I am hungry" entails "I ought to be fed," it must be.

Who or how many people is not relevant. But in any case bloodlust or sadism as usually defined would be desires, not appetites. Someone desires to kill or hurt someone else. That doesn't mean that a complete moral account has to grant them what they desire. But whatever raw experiences they're having that give rise to those desires, whatever kind of psychological pain or whatever may be behind it, those are appetites, and need to be satisfied.

Sure. Bloodlust could easily be defined in terms of an appetite, though. What makes hunger an appetite? It is an experience of a certain sort that can only be satisfied by an actualization through my sensations, in the case of hunger, me being fed. You classify pain as an appetite as well. It, also, is an experience of a certain sort that can only be satisfied by a sensory actualization. In the case of pain, the appetite is to be relieved of the pain, and a physical coming-to-be in accordance with my appetite satisfies this. Similarly, bloodlust is an experience of a certain sort that can only be satisfied by a coming-to-be of seeing someone else hurt. It might feel like an anger-based appetite of a sort. People do experience things like this. Consider the phenomenon of "cute aggression," where people often report wanting to tightly squeeze and hurt adorable animals. This cannot be explained at the level of desire, as people who experience cute aggression have no desire to hurt these animals. Their experience is at a deeper level, which can be contradicted/overridden by desires, and I believe it could be accurately construed as an appetite under your view.

Even if you don't think that humans have this bloodlust-appetite, you could imagine a being that does. We would still need to factor its appetite into our consideration under your theory. I find this to have troubling implications if sinister appetites "need to be satisfied," as you say. The idea of an appetite that necessitates the suffering of others does not seem inherently contradictory, impossible, or even hard to imagine.

Consider natural numbers for analogy. There is no natural number that could not, in principle, be counted up to. But we can never finish counting all of the natural numbers. No matter how many we count, there will still be infinitely many that we haven't yet counted. But those are still nevertheless in principle countable: if we keep counting we will eventually count any number you'd care to name, but there will always still be more that we haven't counted yet.

This makes sense, and does a good job at resolving the apparent contradiction I had pointed out.

If there was truly absolutely no way in principle to ever tell anything about the object they're feeling than the things they "mistakenly" feel, then yes, those things would actually not be mistakes.

But there is still an elephant. They may not be making methodological mistakes, but their perceptions of various objects where there is in fact an elephant represents a deviation from what is actual.

It's important to keep distinct things that are "practically impossible" and things that are really and truly impossible in principle. There are lots of cases where it's "practically impossible" to verify something, but still actually possible in principle, and it's that in-principle that makes the difference. If you extend the "practical impossibility" to ridiculous lengths, you end up getting ridiculous-sounding conclusions, and if you take it impossibly far all the way to complete actual impossibility, you get ridiculous conclusions like these three men existing in actually separate worlds.

Yes, this is an important distinction to make when discussing hypothetical situations. I defer to Parfit again here, where he draws the distinction between what is "deeply impossible," such as a square circle, versus merely "technically impossible," like teleportation. Your goal here seems to be to define a satisfying constraint for "in principle," so that when we say "something is true of the physical world if and only if it is verifiable in principle," we don't get lost in the weeds over what is merely practically impossible.

In reading the message written in dead bugs, we necessarily interpret it as though it was an utterance. Part of what makes something an impression or an expression is the interpretation of the audience; really, it's more the audience's interpretation than the speaker's intention that conveys any kind of communication at all.

I definitely don't think that we necessarily interpret it as an utterance. "Expression" and "impression" seem to be, as you have so far used them, properties related to what a speaker is intending with their words. What you're now saying implies that if I take someone to be impressing a belief on me, they are in fact doing so.
In the case of the dead bugs, applying "expression" or "impression" in the intentionary sense is a clear error. What am I applying them to? The dead bugs? The piece of paper? If a piece of paper that was written on by nobody can cogently be claimed to impress/express beliefs, the terms become a lot less meaningful. I can similarly say that a mountain impresses on me the belief that it is large when I look at it.

So if you read what seems to be an impression written in dead bugs that happen to have died in that pattern, and you read it as an impression, not just as a meaningless pattern of dead bugs, then to you it is an impression.

As above, why then are impression and expression properties of utterances at all? They could be properties of anything that brings me to have a certain belief. Also, didn't you claim that the impression/expression distinction resolves Moore's paradox? With these clarifications, you will have to retreat to the weaker claim that they only resolve Moore's paradox from the perspective of someone who assigns impression/expression to the sentence in the same way that you have. If their evaluation of impression/expression differs from yours, they are still correct in taking Moore's paradox to self-contradict. You might be fine with this conclusion.

Likewise, in my logic, every ordinary indicative descriptive sentence "x is F" can be turned into "is(X being F)" and all the same rules of logic will apply to them. But if there was another sentence "x is G" where G is a predicate meaning that what it's applied to ought to be F, instead of treating that as a completely unrelated sentence, we could render it as "be(X being F)". You can do the exact same rules of logic to that re-encoding as you would with "x is G", but you can also see relationships between that statement and the statement "x is F" and generally other statements about x being F.

P1. be(X being F)
P2. If be(X being F), then be(Y being E)
C. be(Y being E)

This restructuring alone does not resolve the Frege-Geach problem. A statement of the formal form be(P being Q) is a prescription. Its utterance prescribes a state of affairs. This is clear in the case of the atomic sentence P1: be(X being F), or "it ought not to be the case that there is stealing," if you'd rather. Prescription is the semantic content of that proposition. In the context of the antecedent in P2(IF be(X being F), then...), the semantic content of "be(X being F)" does not prescribe. We see, then, that be(X being F) in P1 and be(X being F) in P2 have different semantic content. In classical logic, we would now have to use different variables to represent them, and our modus ponens would no longer be valid.

If you want to avoid this by "abstracting the prescription away" or something similar, that is where you would conflict with classical logic. The relevant semantic content of a proposition cannot just be abstracted away, or else we get things like "Close the door!"(an imperative) being logically equivalent to "The door is closed."(a description). The semantic content of a proposition is what makes it mean what it does. If you change relevant parts of that content, it becomes a new proposition.

I don't have any problem with talking about "truth" in the broader sense that you are. I only substitute "correctness" because to some people, "truth" implies descriptiveness, and I want to avoid confusion with them. You're absolutely right that there's two concepts here, a narrower one and a broader one, and I don't have any particular attachment to the terms used for them, just so long as they are distinguished from each other.

The importance of using "truth," for me, is the consistency with the vernacular in logic. Formal logical relationships, most crucially entailments, are based in the truth or falsity of their propositions. Claiming that something is "not truth-apt" should imply that it is not evaluable in formal logic, not usable to form valid arguments, etc. Since you use "correctness" in the same way "truth" is used in logic, I think it is important to call it truth.

The narrower concept, though, is not specifically "physical truth", but "descriptive truth". On my physicalist account, those are identical, but for the purposes of logic, they don't have to be. Saying that there exist some abstract moral objects is a descriptive, but not physical, claim. It would be made true by reality being a certain way, by it being an accurate description of reality. Likewise any kind of claim about the existence of any nonphysical things: they're still claims that things are, really some way.

I don't see "physical" as analogous to "descriptive," for the reasons you state. The nature of how you conflate the two is a little confusing to me. I would expect that you would entertain that nonphysical facts could be described truthfully, if they really existed, but they do not, ergo descriptions aiming at them are false. "God is real" would not be some weird quasi-proposition that we can't make sense of, it would just be a false proposition. It makes less sense to hold statements concerning nonphysical descriptions as not truth-apt at all, as you admit these things could be made true by reality being a certain way.

There are other kinds of claims that don't purport to describe how reality is at all, though; most notable, prescriptive claims, that something ought to be, morally. I think that those kinds of claims can also be true in a sense, but a non-descriptive sense; hence I try to say "correct" instead of "true" to avoid possible implications of descriptivism

I have your principle of descriptive truth down, I think: "X is a descriptive truth if and only if X is, in principle, empirically verifiable as true."

What I'm after is a similar principle for your establishment of moral correctness. "X is a correct prescription if and only if..." what? You have explained your idea of prescriptive correctness, but I've found these explanations a little vague. I'm looking for a definition of what "prescriptive correctness" really is, in the form of a principle, like the above for descriptive truth. I'd have trouble trying to just throw "appetitive experiences of seeming good or bad in the first-person" into a principle like that without horribly misinterpreting and butchering what you're saying.

(Besides its conflict with my physicalism, I would still object to moral non-naturalism because it's still a form of descriptivism, and so still tries to draw an "ought" from an "is": there are these abstract moral objects, therefore things ought to be like so-and-so.)

Maybe some non-naturalist theories work like you say, but this is not a necessary feature of moral non-naturalism. If the non-naturalist claims "murder is wrong" is a fact, it is a normative fact. The relationship between "murder is wrong" and "you ought not to murder" is that "you ought not to do what is wrong." The non-naturalist has no problem assuming this premise, and neither do you. In fact, you seem to espouse(in agreement with many realist positions) that what is wrong is implicitly that which you ought not to do. If this counts as crossing the is-ought gap, then you cross it yourself when you hold "murder is wrong" as interchangeable with "it ought not to be the case that there is murder." Also, the is-ought gap in no way implies that there is some fundamental divide in our language between two types of diametrically opposed claims.

Something like it yes, but not exactly that. My fork would have three tines. In the middle are the relations between ideas, without any attitude toward them, neither claiming those ideas are correct to describe reality with nor correct to prescribe morality with, just that those ideas have those relations to each other.

If you are going to assert that mathematical truths are merely truths of relations between ideas, belonging in the middle of your fork, you need to support that. This would require an account of analyticity. Distinguishing between "things that are true by definition" and "things that are true in virtue of a contingent fact" is much harder than you might initially think.

I think the thing I said earlier in this post about distinguishing practical possibility from in-principle possibility addresses this.

Somewhat, but also somewhat not. Take the example of information on the edge of the observable universe. It is, even in principle, impossible for us to verify that information. This is because part of what it means to be us is that we are here, and if we cannot verify some information from here or somewhere we can get to from here, it is not verifiable at all to us. You could stipulate that if someone was on the edge of our observable universe, that information would be verifiable to someone. So, in one sense it is verifiable "in principle," but it is not verifiable "to us" in principle.

(I spent that entire thread trying to disengage with Isaac and never got around to actually presenting an argument for those principles, but if you want to ask about them over there, I will).

My condolences.

I know I'm weird in not sharing the inherent sense of outrage about "infidelity" that other people have, and it's not because I want to run off and do it with other people myself, but because I'm just honestly not a possessive person. I've been in open relationships before and not felt jealous, unless it actually had negative consequences for me (like, she wants to go spend more time with him and leave me alone and lonely). If you got rid of all the negative consequences -- which may not always, in practice, actually be possible -- then I don't see how it would be a genuinely bad thing.

The reason I chose infidelity is because it is a type of dishonesty, betraying a mutual expectation that is present in many relationships. Obviously, in a relationship where fidelity is not a value that a reasonable expectation is built around, infidelity is not a serious transgression. I found the example compelling because most people would prefer to know that their partner was cheating on them, if they could so choose, rather than maintain the blissful false belief to the contrary.

This is where a lot of my core principles come from. When we get down to questions that we cannot possibly find an answer to, but cannot help but implicitly assume some answer or another by our actions, we have to assume whichever way is most practically useful to finding other answers.

I think this is pretty true. I think "deep skepticism" is vastly overrated. It is easy to live in a nice house, in a first-world country, with your pick of luxuries, and wax philosophical about how we can doubt everything we believe. Someone needs to be living in a hole, with nothing, before they can truly be said to have embraced infinite doubt. Who among us truly lives as a solipsist?

However, I do not conclude from this that we must assume something like solipsism could not possibly be true. I would just conclude that we should not afford much importance to its possible truth.

(there are practical reasons to reject reducing "is" to "ought" or vice versa, which rules out translating moral utterances to descriptions of reality, be it a natural or non-natural part of it).

This is not what the is-ought gap establishes. Maybe you should go into your reasoning a little more here.

Wrapping up this post, let's return to verificationism about truth once more. This is a tangentially related epistemology argument, so I thought I'd put at the bottom. Let us focus our lens on the concept of verification itself. When we speak of verifying something, we speak of confirming it to be true. What does this mean? What is the difference between something which is truly confirmed, and something which we are merely justified in believing?
It seems intuitive that if we have genuinely confirmed that something is true, we know it to be the case. In fact, you claim that what is true is limited by what we can know. This raises the question: what can we know? There are two ways to take this question. One is methodological:
"How do we know that we are not mistaken in thinking we know X?"
One is definitional:
"What conditions would a person have to satisfy for them to have knowledge of X?"
The latter is my question to you. If what can be true is constrained by what we can know, then before we ask what is true, we ought to ask what we can know. Before we know what we can know, we must know what it is to know at all. So, what conditions does a person have to satisfy to have knowledge of X?

Hey, don't be pessimistic about it. Are you going to publish? — Tarrasque

I've self-published on the internet already (link in my user profile), but I've yet to confirm that a single person has even read the entire thing, so I'm really lacking in confidence that anyone would want to pay to read it, when they won't even read it for free.

The only negative thing I would say about the sort of "theory-of-everything" approach you have is that it requires a reader to sacrifice more of their initial beliefs than a single, cohesive "theory-of-one-thing." It's a lot harder to convince someone to adopt a wholly unique theory-of-all-issues than, say, simply fit a meticulously argued panpsychism into their belief system. But, obviously, trying to fit it all together is an impressive undertaking. — Tarrasque

One of the reasons I ended up doing this systemic approach was because it seems one can't argue for one position in one subtopic without bringing up other subtopics. This thread is just about philosophy of language, specifically moral language, but we've already had to shy away from tangents leading off into philosophy of mind, will, ontology, and of course other, more normative fields of ethics. Everything has implications on everything else, and when studying everything I found those implications traced down to a few core principles. So I start with the reasons to adopt those few core principles instead of others, and then explore the implications of those on everything else, since if I started in any one place I'd end up tracing it back to those principles which in turn would raise a bunch of "but what about this other field then" questions anyway.


Tomorrow is my birthday and I'm going out of town for it, so I probably won't have time to reply to the rest of this until Sunday. Looking forward to it.

Usually when the semantic content of a type of discourse is a certain way, we use that discourse in ways that match the semantic content. — Tarrasque

Who's this 'we' and from where are you getting your assessment of usually? I certainly don't, and neither do any of my colleagues. We wouldn't get very far understanding the role of things like social influence or group identity if we just presumed everyone meant exactly what they said. If someone after work tells you the would 'kill for a beer' are you concerned for their sanity, or do you presume they didn't literally mean what they said?

"Murder is wrong" is structured the same as "The sky is blue" or "The economy is failing." If we were to take "murder is wrong" to be a blunt expression of "Boo, murder! Grrr!" we would need a reason to do so. — Tarrasque

And we have plenty of them. People have been studying this for hundreds of years, we're not coming to it fresh just now. Have you read the works of any expressivist philosophers? What is it that you think the pages are full of if not reasons? Are they to you just a series of blank pages with ",,,and therefore expressivism" at the end?

I've never seen an expressivist who puts their theory into practice and changes their surface-level speech to match what they claim it means. — Tarrasque

That's begging the question. Their surface level speech already matches what they claim it means, that's why they claim it means it. Why would they match their surface level speech to what cognitivists claim it means? If "You shouldn't murder" means "Boo Murder!", then the expressivist has nothing to change in their surface level speech, "You shouldn't murder" means exactly what they intend it to.

There are also formal issues with expressivism that make it less tenable, like embedding problems or the Frege-Geach problem. — Tarrasque

Just mentioning the name of a problem doesn't really help anyone understand why you think it's applicable. Do you think expressivist philosophers are unaware of the Frege-Geach problem? If not, then presumably they don't think it makes their position less tenable, and they presumably have their reasons. So what's relevant here is not merely the existence of a reason to find their position untenable, it's why you find that reason compelling.

When I say that grass is green, the content of my sentence does not include myself. If somebody wanted to see if they agreed or disagreed with my judgement, they wouldn't check me for the property "thinks-grass-is-green," they'd check the grass, because that's where the alleged property "green" is. If color perception is subjective, we could disagree but both be right. — Tarrasque

Again, you're just making an assumption that the manner of speech dictates how the world is. when someone is determining whether the leaf is green, the ventromedial prefrontal cortex is barely involved, neither is the insular cortex. Both are heavily involved in judging something like murder being wrong. The ventromedial prefrontal cortex is responsible for regulation of emotional affect and the insular cortex is involved in feelings of disgust and visceral somatosensation. If the question "is murder wrong" was like the question "is the leaf green" then why would completely different brain regions be involved? So we can presume it's not. So why would we presume now that it's grammatical structure had the same meaning? When determining whether to murder someone (or commit some other immoral act) one does not consult one's database of actions to see what property this particular one has attached to it, one consults a wide variety of emotional responses. So, if that's what's actually happening when we make moral choices, then why would our moral talk be all about assigning properties to behaviours, properties which are barely consulted when they consider one of those behaviours?

Who's this 'we' and from where are you getting your assessment of usually? I certainly don't, and neither do any of my colleagues. We wouldn't get very far understanding the role of things like social influence or group identity if we just presumed everyone meant exactly what they said. If someone after work tells you the would 'kill for a beer' are you concerned for their sanity, or do you presume they didn't literally mean what they said?

That's begging the question. Their surface level speech already matches what they claim it means, that's why they claim it means it. Why would they match their surface level speech to what cognitivists claim it means? If "You shouldn't murder" means "Boo Murder!", then the expressivist has nothing to change in their surface level speech, "You shouldn't murder" means exactly what they intend it to.

Clearly your experience differs from mine here. My experience with people discussing morality usually consists in them putting forward claims, like "abortion should be permissible," and supporting their position with reasoned arguments. It is not an impasse like you would expect if people's disagreements were just brute expressions.

And we have plenty of them. People have been studying this for hundreds of years, we're not coming to it fresh just now. Have you read the works of any expressivist philosophers? What is it that you think the pages are full of if not reasons? Are they to you just a series of blank pages with ",,,and therefore expressivism" at the end?

Yes, proponents of expressivism provide pages of considered arguments for expressivism. This is just like how proponents of cognitivism provide pages of considered arguments for cognitivism, proponents of quasi-realism provide pages of considered arguments for quasi-realism...

Pretty much every theory in philosophy has "pages full of reasons" in support of it. I can't believe every theory at once. I could suspend judgement until I have read every book arguing for or against a position, but that would leave me unproductively agnostic on many things.

Just mentioning the name of a problem doesn't really help anyone understand why you think it's applicable. Do you think expressivist philosophers are unaware of the Frege-Geach problem? If not, then presumably they don't think it makes their position less tenable, and they presumably have their reasons. So what's relevant here is not merely the existence of a reason to find their position untenable, it's why you find that reason compelling.

I've already talked about the Frege-Geach problem and why I find it convincing earlier in this thread. It came up in reference to Pfhorrest's prescriptivism.
No, I don't think expressivist philosophers are unaware of it. Nor do I think they find it insignificant: as far as I'm aware, every noncognitivist theory at least attempts resolution of embedding problems, including the Frege-Geach problem. Some people think these attempts succeed, others think that they fail.

Is there any particular literature on expressivism you recommend?

Again, you're just making an assumption that the manner of speech dictates how the world is. when someone is determining whether the leaf is green, the ventromedial prefrontal cortex is barely involved, neither is the insular cortex. Both are heavily involved in judging something like murder being wrong. The ventromedial prefrontal cortex is responsible for regulation of emotional affect and the insular cortex is involved in feelings of disgust and visceral somatosensation. If the question "is murder wrong" was like the question "is the leaf green" then why would completely different brain regions be involved?

So, emotional areas in our brain are more active when we make moral judgments. People certainly have moral sentiments. No cognitivist would deny that. Is the fact that people react more strongly when judging murder than when judging a leaf surprising? People care far more about wrongness than they do about greenness.

So why would we presume now that it's grammatical structure had the same meaning? When determining whether to murder someone (or commit some other immoral act) one does not consult one's database of actions to see what property this particular one has attached to it, one consults a wide variety of emotional responses. So, if that's what's actually happening when we make moral choices, then why would our moral talk be all about assigning properties to behaviours, properties which are barely consulted when they consider one of those behaviours?

Emotional responses and deliberative thought both play roles in deciding what actions we take. What do you make of people who claim to employ reason in moral decision-making?

It is not an impasse like you would expect if people's disagreements were just brute expressions. — Tarrasque

Isn't it? You expect the dispute about abortion to be resolved any minute do you? What an endearing sense of optimism you have!

Pretty much every theory in philosophy has "pages full of reasons" in support of it. I can't believe every theory at once. — Tarrasque

Right. So your claim that we should treat moral claims as they appear to be until we have reason not to is irrelevant. We already have reasons not to. What we ought to be discussing is the weight of those reasons, the degree to which you find them compelling.

Some people think these attempts succeed, others think that they fail. — Tarrasque

Again, so the mere existence of these counter-arguments is irrelevant, as is the mere existence of your reasons. The relevant issue is why you find them compelling.

Emotional responses and deliberative thought both play roles in deciding what actions we take. What do you make of people who claim to employ reason in moral decision-making? — Tarrasque

Moral decision-making is extremely complex. Some things we know almost for sure are that...

1) Decisions which we call 'moral' ones are actually a very wide range of decision-types involving (sometimes very different) areas of the brain. I'm loathe to make absolute statements, but one I think I could stand by is that moral decision-making definitely is not one unified thing. It is several disparate and possibly even mutually exclusive processes depending on the exact nature of the decision. we do not involve the same process in deciding to care for a baby as we do in deciding to give to charity.

2) The processes used for for any given decision-type vary across people, ages and circumstance. At any given time a decision might be made on the basis or norm-following, rules, consequences, emotion, empathy... At any given time this decision might be something we're consciously aware of, or something we're process sub-consciously.

So the answer to your question is - I'm sure they do...sometimes.

Isn't it? You expect the dispute about abortion to be resolved any minute do you? What an endearing sense of optimism you have!

I'm not quite that optimistic! We haven't even resolved the dispute about vaccines, or the dispute about flat earth.

1) Decisions which we call 'moral' ones are actually a very wide range of decision-types involving (sometimes very different) areas of the brain. I'm loathe to make absolute statements, but one I think I could stand by is that moral decision-making definitely is not one unified thing. It is several disparate and possibly even mutually exclusive processes depending on the exact nature of the decision. we do not involve the same process in deciding to care for a baby as we do in deciding to give to charity.

"The range of moral criticism, as most people understand it, is broad. Various forms of behaviour, such as premarital sex, homosexuality, idleness, and wastefulness, are often considered immoral even though they do not harm other people or violate any duties to them."
-Scanlon, What We Owe To Each Other

I agree with your assessment. There are many unrelated topics that we ascribe moral value(or disvalue) to. It is not surprising that the decision-making processes we employ are diverse, given the scope of what we consider to be "moral decisions."

2) The processes used for for any given decision-type vary across people, ages and circumstance. At any given time a decision might be made on the basis or norm-following, rules, consequences, emotion, empathy... At any given time this decision might be something we're consciously aware of, or something we're process sub-consciously.

I agree with this. What winds up making our choices, at the end of the day, is variable. At least some of the time, though, we make decisions based on reasons. These well-considered decisions are often better decisions.