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. — Kenosha Kid
Ideas are developed, rarely overthrown. — Kenosha Kid
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
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
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
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
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
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
That really is all there is to that, I don't understand how it got so misinterpreted, but I apologise for being confusing. — Isaac
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
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
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. — 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? — Isaac
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
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 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.
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 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.
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.
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.
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).
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.
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.
Lockdown, eh? If you're in America right now, my heart goes out to you. — Tarrasque
Most utterances have both an expressive and impressive aspect, do they not? — Tarrasque
What significance do impression and expression have? — Tarrasque
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
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
Here, we have jumped the is-ought gap. — Tarrasque
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
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
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
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
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
"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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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.
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'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.
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".
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.
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)
On my account, it's not only moral utterances but ordinary descriptive utterances that are impressing an attitude toward the idea in question.
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.
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.
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, 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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. — Tarrasque
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.
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.
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
People discuss topics we consider subjective, like how good certain movies are, in reasoned ways all the time. — Tarrasque
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
It should not be used as a guiding principle for determining what is true. — Tarrasque
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
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.
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 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.
Then what should?(serve as a guiding principle for determining what is true)
I think that, even from a relativist standpoint, assigning the property "wrong" to "slavery" best explains what is happening in a moral judgement. — Tarrasque
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
I can't confidently state some principle about how we can reliably come to apprehend truths in all circumstances. — Tarrasque
So, on what basis are you judging 'best' here? What aspects does this explanation have which, say expressivism, doesn't have?
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.
Then on what grounds are you dismissing methods?
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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 think that to say something is objective means it is incontrovertible. — Tarrasque
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
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
If everybody had to settle on verificationism about truth before even engaging in description — Tarrasque
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
To argue that it could not be the case just because it could not be verified is unconvincing. — Tarrasque
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
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
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
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
Our methods should probably depend on what it is we're trying to learn truth about. — Tarrasque
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
(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.)
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.
I think the thing I said earlier in this post about distinguishing practical possibility from in-principle possibility addresses this.
(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).
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.
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.
(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).
Hey, don't be pessimistic about it. Are you going to publish? — Tarrasque
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
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
"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
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
There are also formal issues with expressivism that make it less tenable, like embedding problems or the Frege-Geach problem. — Tarrasque
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
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.
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?
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.
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 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?
It is not an impasse like you would expect if people's disagreements were just brute expressions. — Tarrasque
Pretty much every theory in philosophy has "pages full of reasons" in support of it. I can't believe every theory at once. — Tarrasque
Some people think these attempts succeed, others think that they fail. — Tarrasque
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
Isn't it? You expect the dispute about abortion to be resolved any minute do you? What an endearing sense of optimism you have!
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.
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