The idea of an existent that's somehow external to "spacetime" is incoherent on my view. I'm 100% certain in ruling that out.

Remember, by the way, that quite a few ideas floated theoretically in the sciences are complete poppycock on my view.

If inner experience is variable, then language is impossible because . . . ? Well, who knows? In order to conclude that we'd need to be resting on a theory that language is only possible if inner experience (re language) isn't variable, but how would we even get to that belief in the first place?

I'm an atheist about there being an entity that created the universe through non-magical means, too, because I'd say the idea of that is incoherent. There can't be something that exists somehow aside from the universe. The universe is everything that exists.

If we want to just name any arbitrary thing "God," then sure, some of those things I'd say I'm not an atheist about, but that's a silly tactic that we could take with all words. In that case, everyone believes and doesn't believe and isn't sure about every single proposition--depending on just how we define the terms involved. We could say, "Oh, you're an atheist. If we define 'atheist' as 'something that is identical to itself.'" And then you could say, "No, I'm not an atheist in that regard if we define 'identical to itself' as the negation of that--'nonidentical to itself.'" And so on. It's silly. Good if we're writing a Monty Python-style sketch, though.

At any rate, if you wanted to propose some limited set of things that first existed (as the universe, I'd say) that somehow had a causal role in creating additional materials, then yeah, I'd be an agnostic on that. We should have good reasons to bother considering it, though.

I have no reason to believe our modes of access to the universe are comprehensive. — Arne

Are you an agnostic about that, too?

Strong atheism is a positive belief that no deities exist. How anyone can be 100% sure of that, I do not see. — Devans99

So would you say that you're not 100% sure when it comes to denying any arbitrary, absurd/fantastical claim that anyone makes? Are you not 100% sure that there's no Zeus hanging out at Mount Olympus? Are you not 100% sure that Kim Jong-un isn't an alien who created the Earth 15 years ago as a science fair project on his home planet of Floopappy?

I have no problem saying that I'm 100% sure that ridiculous, incoherent shit that people fantasize isn't the case. (I enjoy that sort of stuff as fiction, though . . . well, as long as it isn't so incoherent that it just seems like a string of random nonsense.)

The conventional definition of "empirical" said it.

Are you an agnostic about every empirical claim, such as whether you have an automobile?

I'm an atheist. I'm not angry. I'm not really an agnostic.

Empirical claims are not provable period. So that "There is no god" isn't provable is a red herring. "There is no invisible, massless 1976 Corvette in my kitchen" isn't provable, either, but I'm not about to "only" be an agnostic about it. Rather I'd say that I'm certain it's the case.

So correspondence requires thought on your view?

I don't care for her, but I don't dislike her or disagree with her any more than a ton of other philosophers I don't care for, don't agree with. And I'd say that Rand is a better writer than many of them, especially the continental philosophers that I don't care for, who are pretty uniformly horrible writers in my opinion.

At that, I really don't like Rand's fiction, but I don't care for realist-to-soap-operatic "straight dramatic" fiction in general. I like fantastical/imaginative fiction, or at least mystery/crime/thriller fiction (So the exception with Rand is that I did like Anthem okay, since that's the SciFi/allegorical novella).

Rand's value (ethics, aesthetics) objectivism is diametrically opposed to my own views, by the way.

More troublesome, though, and a big part of the reason that she gets the reactions she does is that fans/followers tend to display a cult mentality, and they tend to be ignorant of/dismissive of/uninterested in other philosophy in general. Many even seem to ignore Rand's nonfiction writing.

Correspondence to what's happened/happening does not. — creativesoul

That's a claim. I'm asking for your support of that claim. How does correspondence work sans thought?

i believe society would quickly collapse due to people no longer agreeing on moral principles. — christian2017

The mystery would be why you believe that people agree on moral principles.

If people agree on moral principles, how do you explain arguing over whether it's morally acceptable to be gay, morally acceptable to do various drugs, morally acceptable to not respect and/or to offend others, morally acceptable to act violently in self-defense (and to various sorts of offense), etc.?

I don't think about that which exists in it's entirety prior to our account of it in such terms. — creativesoul

Haha, well that's what you should be doing to do philosophy--think about this stuff. If we're going to claim that the relation obtains outside of a judgment, if we're going to claim that that's how it exists, how it works, then we should have some idea of what, exactly, we're claiming about it ontologically, some idea of how it works, some support of our contentions, etc. especially aside from the fact that it's a common belief or a common way to talk about it.

If you take thinking about the actions of the interlocutors out of the picture, how would you say that meaning arises? In other words, how do those actions denote or connote anything, how do they achieve any semantic associations, if we remove thought from the scenario?

What I'm asking is not what's objective about life expectancy, etc.

I'm asking what's objective about "we should have x (re life expectancy, for example) as a goal."

First, it's nice to see a longer post here that's well-written. You state a topic and follow through with it, explaining it in more depth, you define terms and give examples, there's a good logical flow to the post, etc. I wish writing like this would be the norm here.

The only quibble I'd have is that your last section seems like a bit of jump, but compared to the way longer posts usually go here, it's not that big of a deal.

Aside from that, I'm not sure that I agree with the last two points. "Possible worlds" can simply be seen as saying that something that is or was possible isn't/wasn't actualized. I think we can observe possibility in at least some cases. An example: I can observe that it is (or now was) possible for me to write the first sentence of my post with or without the word "First."

Re the last point, I wouldn't say that any meanings are fixed, but I'd also say that conventional usage can make equivocations unlikely in some contexts, and it doesn't seem to me that necessarily vs possibly might easily obscure equivocations in modal logic. But maybe you'd have a good example of a way that could easily happen.

So language is copying something from one mind to another and we're simply disagreeing on the term used for that something. In other words, we agree that something is copied and we arent talking past each other. We are just using different terms? Are we copying information, meaning, knowledge or what? What if someone claims that all three are the same thing?

If none of that is the case then what happens when language is used? What kind of work is done? — Harry Hindu

What a strange idea in my opinion--that language amounts to "copying" something from one mind to another.

What happens instead, in a nutshell, is that individuals assign meanings to the observable parts of language--utterances, text marks, symbols, gestures, etc, where the "game" is to do that in a way that makes sense of further linguistic observables in context, as well as other behavior, and where part of that is a game of trying to elicit particular behavior as well as gain approval responses, etc. from others.

I didn't claim someone did. Relevant quote: — leo

If no one is claiming that there's anything that interacts with nothing, then why would we not only point out that it's not the case that there isn't anything that interacts with nothing, but essentially start a thread arguing against the idea?'

In other words, it's like saying, "Here's something that no one proposes: 'Blue things are what create black holes.' So let me point out that blue things are not what create black holes. In fact, let me start a thread arguing against the notion that blue things are what create black holes."

nothing interacts with nothing, rather a thing interacts with other things which themselves interact with other things and so on, — leo

And who claims that anything interacts with nothing?

I'd say that the biggest threats are:

(a) the two-sided coin of (i) tribalism (in a very broad sense, including all of the "identity politics" categories) and (ii) a lack of tolerance/acceptance of difference (religious extremist violence is a subset of this, by the way)

and

(b) the two-sided coin of greed/exploitation

Both are going to be very difficult to significantly overcome, because both seem to be fairly endemic to biological nature.

As a possible example - an ethical standard should promote a stable society that provides security and adequate resources for the members of that society. — T Clark

What's objective about that?

So here's what happens in my head when I read your post:

Reductionism in ethics is a total folly. — RW Standing

I think, "Hmm . . . okay--I'm not sure exactly what you'd call 'reductionism in ethics' or why you think it's a 'total folly,' but I'm sure that's about to be explained in the rest of this paragraph." (That last part, due to experience on this board, I think a bit facetiously, unfortunately.)

Asking a person if he believes in Freedom, for instance, is bound to be tendentious.

I think, "Okay, I'm not getting what this has to do with defining what you consider to be 'reductionism in ethics' or why you think it's a 'total folly' . . . but okay, I'll work with it for what it is for a moment," and then I think, "Sure, asking people if they believe in x is bound to be tendentious, especially in a philosophical context, but that's pretty much true for all x, isn't it?"

Values describe the human condition and all of them are valid.

Here I just think, "Huh?? 'Values describe the human condition'? . . . I'm not sure what the heck that would be saying/what it would amount to. And 'valid'? I don't really use the term 'valid' that way . . . but in any event, what would make values valid or not, and why would they all be valid???"

And then in the back of my mind, I'm also both saying:

"What does this have to do with 'reductionism in ethics,' whether that's 'total folly,'?" AND "What does it have to do with 'believing in freedom' and whether that's bound to be tendentious?"

I start getting annoyed that we've had three sentences in a row that don't really seem to be connected to each other, and that are all vague or so obvious as to be kind of pointless to say (the tendentious thing).

But any one value is modified or limited or directed by another.

Again I think, "Huh??" You'd have to explain and try to support what you're claiming here because it strikes me as very dubious.

There is no point in discussing values until the whole is portrayed graphically.

I think, "Displayed graphically???? What in the world?"

End-values or elemental forms of society then show themselves.

"End-values??" "Elemental forms of society???"

My eyes just kind of start glazing over at this point.

In the ultimate analysis we simply have a choice between them,

"We have a choice between values" is like "Do you believe in x is bound to be tendentious."

By now, I'm wondering why the title of the thread and the first sentence promised to be about "reductionism in ethics," because none of the rest of the post seemed to be about that.

Keep your replies in plain English.

That I got a laugh out of at least.



So that's what happens when I read posts like this.

But what if Betty and Bill did not have free will for belief formation? What if deterministic factors caused Betty and Bill to think the way the do? For example, providing Betty with low frustration tolerance would result in her quitting a job she found unsatisfactory (frustrating). Bill will loaded with a high tolerance for frustration, so he stays where he is.

Each of them only seemed to exercise free will.

Most of the time, though, we have no idea what deterministic factors are at work -- on ourselves and on others. This enables us to assign free will as a cause of behaviour. — Bitter Crank

I just noticed your post now. If things were deterministic, the belief that they have free will still makes a difference in the comparative cases, even if it's not true that they have free will.

Dictionary definition of independent: "not influenced or controlled in any way by other people, events, or things" — leo

"Not influenced or controlled in any way" there doesn't mean, for example, that independent things do not interact per the laws of physics. You're reading it Aspie-like so that it's suggesting that to you (as what the words "literally mean"). That's not the idea.

That particular definition is more in the vein of an "independent person" (hence "other people"), where it's trying to get across the notion of someone "ultimately thinking for themselves."

It should be obvious to you that "independent" isn't referring to "not influenced or controlled in any way" per the laws of physics, for example, because then there would obviously not be any independent thing. No one believes that there are objects that can't have forces applied to them by other objects, or that people can't pick up and use pencils or anything like that. Yet they use the word "independent." So obviously they're not saying the "literal" reading you're introducing. ("Literal" is in quotation marks there because the whole notion of a "literal" reading is actually interpretational.)

"Hot" and "having a high degree of heat or a high temperature" or "hot" and <pointing at a glowing coil on a stove> or anything like that don't amount to anything--there's not even any way to make a connection between the two things--without thinking about them, and thinking about them in order to make a connection between them (which therefore isn't identical to the two things), can be more variable than the number of people there are and the number of occasions that they think associatively about the two things.

And because thinking about such things isn't identical to sounds or gestures etc. we can make, we can't avoid the variability in question. So we can't arrive at the sort of "solution" that some people would consider "perfect."

"Independent" doesn't imply "incorrigibly isolated and not capable of interaction."

So arguing against those notions amounts to arguing against a straw man.

How is "the reduction of uncertainty" not either hopelessly vague or just not related to any conventional sense of certainty/uncertainty?

Correspondence isn't. — creativesoul

How do you believe the relation obtains outside of a judgment?

The best articulated definition comes from information theory. — Banno

Didn't Shannon not really define the term? I'm not sure about that. It's been awhile since I read any of that stuff, but I seem to remember the term not really being defined.

At any rate, I'd say that we can transfer data, but obviously I'd not say that we can literally transfer meaning.

So it seems from this that you agree with the title of this thread? — Banno

It would depend on the definition of "information" that we're using. That word tends to be used in a lot of different senses--including simply denoting "data," or alternately "knowledge"--all sorts of things; those are just two examples. So I'm never sure what someone has in mind with it unless they specify a definition.

Cool, I think. So belief does not require thinking about truth conditions/relations, whereas judgment does?

Judging that this or that is true results in belief, wouldn't you say? — creativesoul

You have a belief that the cat is on the mat, say. You have a belief that such and such is the state of affairs that obtains.

Truth, on the other hand, is a judgment about the relationship of the proposition "the cat is on the mat" to the fact (as you believe) that the cat is on the mat.

(Again, under correspondence theory, by the way.)

Empty space appears to have properties - such as quantum fields and (maybe) dark energy. It seems to be something substantial. — Devans99

On my view that's more nonsense that we're making up in order to avoid having to revise theories on a more foundational level.

The theory predicts what we observe: — Devans99

Because stuff is invented (space as a separable thing) to make it work. It's akin to epicycles re planetary motion. That theory fits what we observe, too. It's just that it's wrong. But it was adopted so that we wouldn't have to change the theory.

There’s no empirically observable reason why the space I occupy — AJJ

You're assuming here that's there's something different from you, called space, that you occupy.

It holds me up because my atoms interact with its, but why should they? That they do seems to be because the cosmos is unified; it occupies a unifying space. — AJJ

That's not at all something that you're observing. You're deducing it based on you thinking that there needs to be some reason other than simply things interacting however they do, and "unifying space," for whatever reason that I can't fathom, intuitively satisfies your psychological need for there to be a reason.

None of this makes clear what "bounded by its own individual space" would refer to, though.

. Neither is bounded by its own individual space. — AJJ

What does this phrase refer to? What would that amount to, to be "bounded by its own individual space"?

As opposed to argument or observation. — AJJ

Are you suggesting that you or anyone else is presenting arguments or observations? Just curious.

What I observe about locations is they exist within a unified space — AJJ

You've got to be joking. You observe "unified space"? Can you point to what you're looking at?

with here and there being parts of space) — AJJ

Explain how you're observing that "here and there are parts of space," please.

If space itself is not expanding and it is a regular explosion instead then I would have thought it would have to fit in with one of the following patterns:

- The edges of the explosion are moving faster the the centre parts. In which case matter might be evenly distributed (homogeneous) like we observe, but we do not observe differing rates of expansion.
- Everything is expanding out at the same rate from the centre of the explosion. In which case the galaxies would form a spherical shell, which is not what is observed. — Devans99

Isn't that putting theory above observations?

Theory should explain observations, not dictate what can be observed, and then require fanciful inventions to not have to discard the theory.

We can say that the movements are "as if" the objects in question were on the surface of a balloon, but to then posit the balloon as a real, independent thing isn't justified. The "as if" is simply to help us picture/understand what we're observing.

What sort of things can be moved? How about all of the things that have a spatiotemporal location? — creativesoul


Yeah - Terrapin Station? — Banno

I have to read through the thread in detail--I might be missing context I need here, but there would be two three senses to talk about:

One, relative position. The position of my brain can change relative to my desk, for example. So definitely if we're talking about meaning, for example, that can move in terms of relative position.

Two, whether some phenomenon (in the general occurrence/event/thing sense) can be passed from one object to another in some sense.

In some cases it can. For example, vibrations in one object--a guitar string, say, can in a sense be transferred to another object--such as a guitar's scoreboard, and then whether that can be transferred to a microphone or to other amplification, etc. (even though that's not an "exact" transfer, it's close enough and it makes sense to say that the vibrations were passed from one object to another).

It other cases it can't. For example, the heat resistance properties of hafnium carbide can't be transferred to chlorine trifluoride.

So, it depends on the properties we're talking about, the materials in question, and just what's possible, process-wise, in terms of transference.

And actually I suppose I should say that a third sense is that of transferring, say, a baseball from one person to another. That's really just a relative positional change of the baseball, but it might be worth making a third sense for this type of motion since it's a transference in a way that simple positional change is not, but at the same time it's also not transference in the sense of something like sympathetic resonance (the guitar example).

When we're talking about meaning, that's a property of brains that can't be transferred to soundwaves, gestures, marks on paper, etc. Of course, in a very ontologically loose manner of speaking we say things like "I get your meaning, man," but what's really going on there is not a literal transfer of properties or processes.

That’s pure assertion, I’d say. Even accepting all that, the question remains: Where are locations? Locations have a location, sure, but where? — AJJ

"Pure assertion" as opposed to?

At this point, you should be able to answer these questions as I would. That doesn't imply that you'd agree with me, but you should be capable of understanding my view so that you could answer as I would.

Locations are the answer to where. When you answer where something is, you give a location. So the "where" of any location is the location in question. Locations are given relatively, as I've explained.

I was objecting to the notion of P's being true for me, or you, or someone else, and wanting to see how Terrapin deals with that. I suspect he's working from a notion of relative truth... in the sense that conflates truth and belief.

P's being true does not require any particular person to believe it. — creativesoul

Obviously truth is always to someone on my view, and the notion of it possibly being the case independently of anyone is incoherent on my view (incoherent because it winds up making a category error about what meaning is/how it works, what assessment relations are and how they work, etc.)

The important thing to always keep in mind about my truth theory is that it's in the context of the traditional analytic philosophy tenets that truth and facts are importantly different things, that facts are largely mind-independent states of affairs, that truth is a property of propositions and that propositions are the meanings of statements.

Thanks for sharing all of that.

Wouldn't other conclusions for most of that simply be that

(a) people can believe things, including theoretical things, etc., that are incorrect,
(b) people can and some do make whatever psychological moves necessary to not arrive at a subsequent belief that previous beliefs were incorrect,
(c) beliefs can "color" experiences,

and so on?