I don't do ontology by speculation or purely by logic. — Terrapin Station

If ontology isn’t presupposed or irrelevant, I don’t care what it is.

He was still quite wrong. — creativesoul

You mean your philosophy is more right, right? A theory predicated on logic, internally consistent, and non-contradictory....can be wrong?
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It does not follow from the fact that emotion - alone - cannot furnish us with knowledge about objects that pure reason does not include and/or consist of emotion - at least in part. — creativesoul

No, it doesn’t. Emotion cannot furnish knowledge at all, we allow ourselves as having knowledge, therefore, with respect to knowledge, emotion and pure reason are mutually exclusive. If one wishes to claim reason has an emotional component, he’s welcome to enunciate and sustain it somehow.
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Consider this for a moment. (...) If thinking about thought/belief does not include thinking about the emotional aspects, then such considerations are not taking proper account of that which existed in it's entirety prior to the account. — creativesoul

If I’m considering what color to paint the bedroom, if I fail to think about the starving children in Somalia, then it follows I’ll never decide what color to paint the bedroom because of it? Even if I’m a naturally emotional kinda guy, I don’t need to think an emotional aspect if what I’m thinking about has no emotional content.

Another good post. You’re fun to read...makes me critique both of us.

(neither)idealism or representationalism are at all empirically supportable. — Terrapin Station

They can’t be, they are purely speculative. Nothing about either of those is subject to the scientific method. But they can still be logical.

I don’t agree with direct apprehension of external phenomena. — Noah Te Stroete

Nor do I. Direct perception, sure. No apprehension of external things is direct. The external thing has to become a representation. Plus a whole bunch of other stuff. Scientifically or metaphysically, doesn’t matter.

In the case at hand, the phenomena only occur as thought. That only applies to all phenomena if we restrict our context to thinking about things. — Terrapin Station

Our context is always restricted to thinking about things. What could possibly occur to us except as thought?

Phenomena may very well exist regardless of thought, but they will never occur to us without it.

DOUBLE JINX!!!!!

Out of bounds.

What I said must relate to what you said. You spoke of sources relevant to human thinking which means my response has to be relevant to human thinking. Not paint or canvass.

JINX!!!!!

I agree with both of you. — Noah Te Stroete

Cool. Fuel for Terrapin’s fire.

Yes, without a doubt. There is no source other than ourselves for anything whatsoever. That we’re conscious of, anyway.

So “morality” must always refer to acceptable/unacceptable behavior is a necessary truth. — Noah Te Stroete

I think that’s how he uses the word, yes. But it works just as well for me, when I say it is a rigid designator which must refer to, or represents, one of the two fundamental conditions of being human, which just happens to use the same word.....morality. I think his is use much more general than mine.

I don’t know how creativesoul was using it. — Noah Te Stroete

Page 51, towards the bottom, part of his string of posts. Seemed quite apropos.

Oh. One of those New Age types, huh. Too modern for me.

What do you think makes distinguishing necessary from contingent truths important? Like....why are there two of them anyway?

On this thread, the original rendering of a rigid designator representing morality, forwarded by creativesoul.

I don’t know about rigid designator as a term in general. Is that where other worlds are stipulated?

And why would anybody do that? Use a mere possibility to cast suspicion on an otherwise perfectly valid Earthly conception.

All you gotta do is ask yourself.....how many other worlds have I been to? None....probably....so universality is irrelevant. That leaves necessity.

In this particular case, no other sign, of this given color, shape and location, ever has any other purpose than to signal an action with respect to what the sign represents. Therefore, necessity is satisfied, and the designation is rigid. Sorta like....if this is all it can be, it must be necessary for it to be that. If sufficient compliance is attained, universality is possible.

There's zero rigidity to "what it represents" though. — Terrapin Station

Because the designator is not universal and necessary with respect to its representation, it isn’t rigid? The world ends if you don’t stop at the stop sign? We both know that’s not true, so those can’t be the criteria for rigid.

Although most geniuses are shit at teaching. — Noah Te Stroete

Yeah, and some stuff of genius can’t be taught.

Thanks for dumbing it down for me. — Noah Te Stroete

I didn’t dumb it down, which means you’re just as smart in understanding it as I am in writing it.

Nope. Lots of books, lots of RAM.

attributing it to very different paradigms — Terrapin Station

There’s a lot of them, that’s for sure. Pick one, run with it.

Nope, just an interest, from Maxwell to Hawking, mostly. The really old and the really new, not so much.

I just can't make any sense out of saying/supposing that anything would be rigid — Terrapin Station

If you stopped at the stop sign, the rigidity of the designator is validated. If you didn’t, the designator is no less rigid, but you disregarded it for whatever reason. All the designator needs, is for what it represents to be understood, not necessarily agreed with.

Hmmm.......with only those two choices, guess which I’d pick. (Grin)

https://oll.libertyfund.org/titles/kant-the-philosophy-of-law

It’s long and drawn out, but the part you’re asking about is at the beginning.

“...The capacity of experiencing Pleasure or Pain on the occasion of a mental representation, is called ‘Feeling,’ because Pleasure and Pain contain only what is subjective in the relations of our mental activity. They do not involve any relation to an object that could possibly furnish a knowledge of it as such; they cannot even give us a knowledge of our own mental state. For even Sensations, considered apart from the qualities which attach to them on account of the modifications of the Subject, as, for instance, in reference to Red, Sweet, and such like, are referred as constituent elements of knowledge to Objects, whereas Pleasure or Pain felt in connection with what is red or sweet, express absolutely nothing that is in the Object, but merely a relation to the Subject. And for the reason just stated, Pleasure and Pain considered in themselves cannot be more precisely defined. All that can be further done with regard to them is merely to point out what consequences they may have in certain relations, in order to make the knowledge of them available practically...”

Available practically. The practical and the pure are very different. Pure reason has nothing to do with emotion, for emotion, reducible to none other than feelings of pain and pleasure, can provide us with no knowledgeable object, but merely a subjective condition. The separation of emotion from pure reason is very clear.
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Is mental correlation adequate? Is it both, necessary and sufficient, such that all predication counts as being thought/belief? I can't imagine a good argument against it. — creativesoul

Such that predication counts as thought belief? It does not follow necessarily from mental correlation being both necessary and sufficient, that such counts as thought/belief. Mental correlation *IS* predication itself, and could count as pure reason with as much validity as counting as thought/belief.
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Physiological sensory perception doesn't need turned on. That happens autonomously. — creativesoul

Physiological sensory apparatus doesn’t need turned on; it is available for perceiving autonomously, all else being given. Sensory perception requires an affectation, therefore is not autonomous.

Contentment need not be turned on. That is the simplest of mind states along with it's counterpart... discontentment. — creativesoul

Contentment = pleasure; discontentment = pain. Absolute most basic human emotional states, granted. Innumerable objects responsible for one or the other of these emotional states, sure. Do we need to reason between the state and the object that informs it? No, we don’t. After the fact, we may reason as to the effect (sorrow) with respect to its cause (forgot my anniversary). Be that as it may, for an emotion to manifest as either pain or pleasure requires an object to turn it on. It is required the wavefunction collapse to a probability density of 1, in order to recognize a certainty.
(Sorry.......that just popped in out of nowhere. Disregard)
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emotion and thinking about thought/belief are inseparable, despite lots of folk thinking/believing otherwise. — creativesoul

Theoretically, right?

Any and all evidence to the contrary of one's belief system becomes such as a result of it's being used as such. Prior to the use, what becomes evidence is not yet... evidence. — creativesoul

I’ve lost interest in this. The reductionism necessary to validate my argument is so far down in the weeds it couldn’t possibly pass the wtf test.

If one gets thought/belief wrong, then one gets something or other wrong in their report/account — creativesoul

My report of Kant's shortcomings are existentially dependent upon Kant's words. — creativesoul

So.....Kant, because your report informs me that his “linguistic framework is utterly incapable of taking proper account of the distinction between thought/belief and thinking about thought/belief”, must have something or other wrong in his reporting, in some or all of his various essays, manuscripts, theoretical speculations, etc.

If that is the shortcoming you’re reporting on, this incapable accounting, what makes your thought/belief not wrong? Is it even possible to show his linguistic framework and the intrinsic incapacity attributed to it, to someone else?

Thanks. Read most of the ten pages.

I’m comfortable allowing rigid designator to stand as a distinctive representation of a concept. A stop sign can be a rigid designator. I don’t intend anyone should also agree with and use my terminology, but he should understand without complication what I mean when I use it.

Nothing too deep or troubling about that, I wouldn’t think.

It's hard to fit my world view into the language of your deontology. I talk about numerous desires, within a particular social dynamic leading to rules, but rules no more strict than the rules of grammar. I'm trying to translate that into your language so we can see if there's any common ground, but you might have to meet me in the middle, it's not going to work if you want every proposition translated into Kantese, some just don't translate, there are presumption contained within the language that I just don't hold to. — Isaac

Now that I understand your world-view having a Rouseauan flavor, I can see why not. Wouldn’t work at all, would it? I’m willing to meet in the middle, so use your own language, but first let it be known what we are meeting in the middle of. Me as a transcendental Kantian on the one hand and you as a...what, virtue ethicist?....on the other. You tell me, keeping in mind this is a thread on morality.

You know, Kant acknowledged Rouseau’s major influence on his political and civil philosophy. In “Observations on the Beautiful and the Sublime”, 1764, Kant says “...I am by natural inclination a researcher ... and I thought that this alone could constitute the honor of man. (...) Rousseau set me upright. And I would consider myself more useless than the ordinary worker if everything I did did not contribute to securing the rights of man....”. There are also references to Rousseau in “Anthropology From A Practical Point of View”.

My understanding is that Kant grounds the practical belief in human freedom on the universal fact of moral responsibility. — Janus

Another good point, and relates to what you said about Hume’s simplistic thinking. Hume was an empiricist, which makes explicit the principle of cause and effect be paramount in his thinking. From that, comes this:

“....It appears that, in single instances of the operation of bodies, we never can, by our utmost scrutiny, discover any thing but one event following another, without being able to comprehend any force or power by which the cause operates, or any connexion between it and its supposed effect. The same difficulty occurs in contemplating the operations of mind on body- where we observe the motion of the latter to follow upon the volition of the former, but are not able to observe or conceive the tie which binds together the motion and volition, or the energy by which the mind produces this effect. The authority of the will over its own faculties and ideas is not a whit more comprehensible: So that, upon the whole, there appears not, throughout all nature, any one instance of connexion which is conceivable by us. All events seem entirely loose and separate. One event follows another; but we never can observe any tie between them. They seemed conjoined, but never connected. And as we can have no idea of any thing which never appeared to our outward sense or inward sentiment, the necessary conclusion seems to be that we have no idea of connexion or force at all, and that these words are absolutely without meaning, when employed either in philosophical reasonings or common life....”
(WSM, 1737)

“.....It is God himself, who is pleased to second our will, in itself impotent, and to command that motion which we erroneously attribute to our own power and efficacy....”
(EHU, VIII, 1748)

Hume couldn’t conceive a natural connection between the “authority of the will over its own faculties”, therefore he was left without a cause for a given effect, anathema to an empiricist but sufficient for a sentimentalist. We don’t know whether he threw out the concept of freedom, or never even thought of it to begin with, but the point is, he stopped short, philosophically. Perhaps the shadowy ghost of infinite regress curtailed his intelligence....dunno. Left it to the heavens, he did.

Kant, an the other hand, granting Humian cause and effect in the physical world as given, thus recognizing the need for consistency of the principle with respect to the authority of the will in a possible metaphysical context wherein your “universal fact of human responsibility” is an effect and presupposes a necessary cause. But he was still at the mercy of infinite regress, for to suppose freedom as a cause necessitates it be at the same time an effect. What Hume didn’t consider is this:

“....I adopt this method of assuming freedom merely as an idea which rational beings suppose in their actions, in order to avoid the necessity of proving it in its theoretical aspect also. The former is sufficient for my purpose; for even though the speculative proof should not be made out, yet a being that cannot act except with the idea of freedom is bound by the same laws that would oblige a being who was actually free. Thus we can escape here from the onus which presses on the theory. We have finally reduced the definite conception of morality to the idea of freedom. This latter, however, we could not prove to be actually a property of ourselves or of human nature; only we saw that it must be presupposed if we would conceive a being as rational and conscious of its causality in respect of its actions, i.e., as endowed with a will; and so we find that on just the same grounds we must ascribe to every being endowed with reason and will this attribute of determining itself to action under the idea of its freedom...”

In short, Hume couldn’t prove a cause, Kant showed no proof was necessary. We couldn’t tell the difference between a rational being with freedom theoretically proven as cause for the authority of the will, from a rational being with merely the presupposed idea of freedom as the means for the authority of the will.

TA-DAAAAAA!!!!

OK, so I should have said any discipline having to do with humans in this world demands something like it.

So for me the separation of thought from feeling and the privileging of one over the other, as expressed in formulas like "Reason is, and ought to be, slave to the passions" betrays somewhat simpleminded thinking. — Janus

Agreed. Good thing about Hume...he wrote in good ol’ English, no translational ambiguities. What he wrote is what you get, and of no great difficulty to understand. We know what he meant by reason, we know what he thought its limitations were which regulates its employment. Add in the conditions of the day, his empiricist bent, gives us what we see as simple-minded thinking. Still, it only took 50 years for his moral theory to be shown incomplete and thus sufficiently refuted.

I think his biggest detriment to moral philosophy was....plain and simple....he worked backwards, insofar as he tried to synthesize modern empirical thought to ancient virtue ethics. Which just doesn’t work. You can’t get Greek virtue utilitarianism to inform British Enlightenment sentimentalist plurality.

Kinda funny, if you ask me. People are so much more apt to think themselves as sentimental entities, than to think themselves rational entities.

Re "rigid designation," the whole idea of that isn't really worth bothering with in my opinion. — Terrapin Station

That’s fine. I think it worth bearing in mind, nevertheless, that any discipline predicated on non-contradiction demands something like it.

That which is moral is always a rational determination, so “one should not kill” is just one more in an constant barrage of them.
— Mww

Fine, but not only a rational determination, the subjective feeling that some law exists (I wouldn't put it that way myself, but I'm trying to use your terminology), must come first, and it is this which makes morality relative. — Isaac

Interesting. How would you put it, and how does it make morality relative?

let's say that Joe has a love of a particular part of the Amazon — Terrapin Station

I see what you mean, wherein the realms of anthropology and morality tend to overlap, something like Janus’ civil intentionality. Virtue ethics. That’s ok, it’s a viable consideration. My objection stems explicitly from the distinction I hold between morality the “rigid designator” and anthropology the subjective interaction.

Basic functional society is enough and that requires that we get the social environment right, not moralise. It's like trying to talk a cog into playing the right role in a machine rather than just putting it in the right place for it to do so. — Isaac

True enough. Rather Utopian, though, isn’t it? Idealistic? You’re asking for something history has never given, except in small pockets the rest of humanity failed to value properly. If all we have is social environment and moralizing about social environment, and social environment hasn’t sufficed to render moralizing of no import........why not moralize? Even if dialectic on how to improve social environment so it becomes right, what is that besides moralizing? If it isn’t moralizing, then we’re open to arguing such things as economy, boundaries, relative judicial systems, etc., in order to arrive at social environment right-ness. And all those have at their base, morality.

Is this what you were referring me to?

Let's say hypothetically that the whole world is sat round a table deciding what 'The Law' should be........
(Herein is the groundwork for universality, re: the whole world, implying each and every moral agent)
.......and I propose "No one can murder me, but I can murder whomever I choose". You might say then that is not a very rational suggestion because if everyone adopted it my first desire.....
(It is not a desire, it is to be a law. If adopted, there is no possible desire to do anything but what the law demands)
..... (to not be murdered) would be logically frustrated by my second (that I may murder whomever I choose).

OK. The irrationality lies in the inherent contradiction. If the law became universal, was adopted as spoken by the whole world, the second part of the law is moot, because every single member adopts that no one can murder me. Therefore, you could never murder anybody.

I suppose the notion of universality incorporated in the maxim is in itself not irrational, but it is so improbable in its adoption that rather than irrational, it is the more rationally negligible.

Yes? No? — Isaac

If the candidate had but one teacher or set of teachers all of whom held the same sort of unshakable certainty, and whose belief system actually glorified and looked fondly upon continuing to hold that belief even in the face of overwhelming evidence to the contrary...
In these cases it ain't so easy to change one's mind. — creativesoul

If that is true, then it follows necessarily that lacking any evidence whatsoever, what was not so easy becomes impossible.

I am using the term "morality" as a rigid designator....

What counts as "moral" behaviour follows from one's notion of morality.....

It always refers to codes of acceptable/unacceptable behavior....

Is morality the sort of thing that can exist in it's entirety prior to language acquisition? If we follow current convention, it cannot, unless the written rules for acceptable/unacceptable thought, belief, and/or behaviour are not existentially dependent upon common language. They are by definition existentially dependent upon common language use. So, according to current convention. No. Morality cannot exist in it's entirety prior to common language. That would fail to draw the distinction between thought/belief and thinking about thought/belief. It would relegate all moral thought/belief as metacognitive in it's nature. But it's not. All deliberate oppositional change in one's original adopted morality is......

language is not required for thought/belief about acceptable/unacceptable behaviour. It is required for thought/belief about unacceptable thought, and/or belief.....

So here we must make some sort of decisions. Some may include.....
1. Deny....; 2. Deny...; 3. Admit.....; 4. Reject....
5. Come to the realization that the written rules of conduct consist entirely of and/or are otherwise underwritten by thought/belief statements.....

If all thought/belief about acceptable/unacceptable behaviour counts as morality, then morality - in rudimentary form - is not existentially dependent upon common language.....

What is it (Kant’s a priori practical reason) doing here? — creativesoul

.......

Last things first. Kant is how all the above even happened. You couldn’t have thought any of that without the machinations in your head. The ideas are yours, the words are yours, the very thesis is yours, and very well may have nothing whatsoever to do with Kantian philosophy. The formulation from one to the other to the other are......ooooo yeah........necessarily a product of Kantian a priori practical reason. Can I get an a-MEN, BROTHER!!!!!

Sorry for butchering your well-written thesis, and hopefully I pulled the pertinent bullet points. I understand the keywords as morality as a rigid designator, morality in its ENTIRETY, and the distinction between acceptable and unacceptable. Morality isn’t about our agreements; it’s always about our disagreements.

This gives me the most trouble: Language is not required for thought/belief about acceptable/unacceptable behavior because behavior follows from one’s notion of morality, granted. However, to say language is required for thought/belief about unacceptable thought, and/or belief (without recourse to behavior), still leaves unexplained what that language would be. Could it be because one can witness behavior in another so needs no language to judge it, but if all there is, is thought/belief there is no behavior to witness, hence nothing to judge. If there’s nothing to judge, what use would language have? I’d have to talk to somebody about what he’s thinking, but without any reason to talk to him in the first place? The only conditions under which this would work is in a dialogue about possible behavior, about possible relative notions of a set of rules, about morality itself.

Anyway.....well done; it was fun. Hope I did you justice.

Kant actually accords greater moral merit to one who does something that they really don't want to do out of a sense of duty, than someone who does their duty because that is what they love to do. Although I must say that seems perverse to me. — Janus

It’s a never ending reduction, seems like, doesn’t it? One does his duty when he doesn’t really want to, which is much more morally meritorious because it’s more painful than pleasurable, out of respect for the law to which duty requires your adherence. Coincidentally enough, respect is what Kant uses to replace the prevalent atttitude of his day, feelings. We normal people don’t usually consider respect a feeling, so it fits well as a replacement for it. That he was Prussian certainly didn’t hurt.
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her life is more important because she is the queen' — Janus

I’ll go ahead and disagree with this. Her actions may be more important because she must do queenly things, but her life, irrespective of Her Highness, still occupies space and time, is created, suffers, and belongs to her alone, just like mine. Just as in your “On the other hand.....”
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I think the idea of deliberately acting towards others and being responsible for those actions is where the intentional dimension comes into play. — Janus

You know.....nobody talks too much about the responsibility side, do they. I know I’m more into the causation rather than the correlation, but one does necessarily follow from the other, true enough.