You want to say that if all minds ceased to exist, it both would and would not be true that there is gold in Boora — Leontiskos

No, I don't. You are confusing the sentence with its extension. There would be gold in Boorara, even if there were no folk around to know that there was gold in Boorara. Repeatedly, you pretend that others are the presenting arguments you want them to present, not the argument they are presenting. I guess that makes things much easier for you.

Just so you know, I am not planning to pursue this topic very far with you. — Leontiskos

That's not surprising. Your supposed objection is empty.



What is an

existence predication — Leontiskos

?

As I said above, there are no existence predications which are not truth predications. — Leontiskos

What could this be saying? What is an "existence predication"? Quantification? Or just predication? Are you just saying that any predication has a truth value? Or anything more than that "f(x)" is true IFF f(x)?

Ok. I don't know of anyone who has advocated such a position. — Count Timothy von Icarus

Folk only advocate it until it is pointed out. Then they drop it.

saying something is more complex is different to saying it is of greater worth.
— Banno

Curious then that murder charges apply only to the killing of humans. — Wayfarer

Yas, saying some thing is human is different to saying humans are worth not killing. Can you set out why you think this problematic?

...Aristotle... — Count Timothy von Icarus

I'm not really interested in what Aristotle said, so much as what he argued. That is, that Aristotle said this or that doesn't carry much weight for me.

Like I said, those are my notes. — Count Timothy von Icarus

Hand waving at Hofstadter doesn't help much, either.

Seems to me that hierarchies of being are based on essentialism, a notion that we are better off without. But my point here is that saying something is more complex is different to saying it is of greater worth.

Moral Realism: As I explained in the previous post, ethical values are embedded within the very tendencies of evolution. — Seeker25

Moral realism is the view that ethical statements are either true or false. It is opposed to such notions as emotivism, which sees them as neither true nor false but as expressions of one's feelings. It is not the view that ethical tendencies are embedded in evolution. See SEP.

...one cannot act against the tendencies of evolution. — Seeker25

There are, for example, antinatalists in this forum who will say rational considerations show that ending human evolution is a net good. So one might well act against the "tendencies of evolution".

Seems to me that the is/ought distinction remains. You have not provided a way to move from how things are to how things ought to be, apart from your own predilections.

Even supposing that there are such things, why ought we follow evolutionary tendencies?

Antirealism isn't simply phenomenalism or idealism — Michael

Sure. Not sure why you feel the need to point this out. I agree, at least tentatively, with Devitt that Realism is not an explicit doctrine of truth. But antirealism in contrast does seem to commit to one or other non-binary theory of truth.

I don't see that it counts against realism that it might permit global skepticism. We have other reasons to reject global skepticism.

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

Isn't this just saying that what we know must be consistent? That's compatible with realism. It also looks compatible with the SKP: p↔︎◇Kp; and KK: ☐(Kp→KKp). So I don't see it avoiding Brogaard and Salerno's response.

Aristotle doesn't think rocks are proper beings — Count Timothy von Icarus

So now you have real, existing and being. A proper muddle.

Aristotle identifies proper beings as those things that are the source of their own production... For example, a red blood cell is not the source of its own production, nor is it a self-governing whole.

Of course it is. An animal is just a way for red blood cells to make more red blood cells. The telos of red blood cells is to keep the other cells of the body going so that they can reproduce and make more red blood cells...

Telos is a rather slippery notion. That's why it dropped out of use.

What's with the unattributed quotes and references?

Your argument is presumably something like this, "If three humans exist and there are no other minds, and one person dies, then it is still true that there is gold in Boorara. The second dies, and it is still true. By induction we should hold that if the third dies, it will still be true. If the truth was not affected by the death of the first two people, then surely it will not be affected by the death of the third." — Leontiskos

Looks to be another example of your altering an argument to an unrecognisable degree.

No, the argument is not an induction. It is a deduction. There is gold in Boorara. If nothing changes, then there will be gold in Boorara. If life disappears, and nothing else changes, there will still be gold in Boorara.

Its not hard. If something does not change, then it stays the same. If there is gold, and that does not change, then there is gold.

Now you want to do something a bit more, along the lines that if there are no minds, then there can be no propositions, and hence no true proposition. Quite right. But that again does not change the gold at Boorara. Proposition or not, if nothing else changes, it will still be there.

@Michael

The paraconsistent revision (SEP 3.5) is interesting, and again I would not dismiss it offhandedly. It's a reminder that knowledge remains more a family resemblance than a strict category. A "paraconsistent constructive relevant modal logic with strong negation" would be a strange beast indeed. Wansing's article is here, but I've only had a quick look. They present an axiomatisation and proof of completeness.

Now these are the reinterpretations of Fitch that are addressed in the article. I had thought you were offering a different reinterpretation, but in classical logic, and hence was puzzled as to how that might work. But it seems you are offering a semantic restriction? You seem to want to do more than to reject those things that it is logically impossible to know...?

And are either TKP or DKP intuitive to you? Neither are to me. If the debate between Williamson and Tennant is ongoing, then this approach is not all that useful at present.

But KK (SEP 5.3) is for me intuitive. So that it is irreconcilable with SKP is telling.

It does seem to me that antirealism can be consistent by committing to an intuitionistic logic. But otherwise, perhaps not.

Are you happy with that, as is Dummett? This calls back to a discussion from years ago, on Devitt: . I still favour Devitt.

So to the first section, in which Devitt characterises realism as the view that physical entities exist independently of the mental. Devitt notes with considerable glee that there is nothing in this definition about truth. He goes on to point out that truth is independent of the evidence at hand. "Truth is one thing, our means of discovering it, another". Hence, according to Devitt, "no doctrine of truth is constitutive of realism". — Banno

'What is', as distinct from 'what ought to be', in Hume's context, is what is precisely measurable and can be stated with certainty. Which doesn't even extend to causal relations, as it turned out. — Wayfarer

Probably down to Hume, I don't see as that matters much. But values can be stated with certainty and measured.

Yep.

Seems to me that again there is an is/ought problem here.

In so far as "levels of being" ascribes differing values to different things it is an evaluation, and so it is about our attitude towards things rather than how they are.

Which is fine, provided that our evaluations are not mistake for how things are.

Yes — Michael

If so, then we can move on. In the SEP article the independent proof mentioned above is presented as having two types of assumptions, epistemic and modal.
The epistemic assumptions are:
$K(p \wedge q) \vdash Kp \wedge Kq$
$Kp \vdash p$
Now in the main these are not seen as problematic, with the few exceptions noted at 3.1.

The modal assumptions are
$If \vdash p, \text{then } \vdash \Box p.$
$\Box \neg p \vdash \neg \Diamond p.$


The intuitionist response excludes double negation and quantified exchange. I have some sympathy for this being a suitable approach to an antirealist mathematics, along constructionist lines. Accepting that no truths are unknown in mathematics might be understood as simply not having assigned a truth value to formulae outside of our deductions, perhaps along the lines of Kripke's theory of truth. Hence no truths are unknown and yet not all truths are known. I think this mostly gets around the objections of 3.3 and 3.4 in the SEP article, but do not consider the issues closed.

But this will not work with medium size small goods - with cats in boxes. If the cat is in the next room, with the box, but unobserved, there is a place for saying that it is either in the box or it is not, and not simply that we have yet to assign a truth value to "the cat is in the box".

Here again is my suggestion that the choice between realism and antirealism is dependent on context.

Thoughts?

There seems to be a lot of ambiguous phrasing in this discussion — Michael

I quite agree. If you don't mind I will go overt the argument again, just to make sure we agree on the basics.

The SEP argument proceeds as follows:
$\forall p(p \rightarrow \Diamond Kp).$
The Knowability principle, KP: All truths are known by somebody at some time. This is taken as the antirealist premise.

And we are not omniscient:
$\exists p(p \wedge \neg Kp).$

So for some p,
$p \wedge \neg Kp.$

Substitute this into KP:
$(p \wedge \neg Kp) \rightarrow \Diamond K(p \wedge \neg Kp)$

But we already have the antecedent, so:
$\Diamond K(p \wedge \neg Kp)$

Which is false. We can't know that p is true and that p is false. So a contradiction follows from KP and non omniscience, and one of these must be false. So if all truths are knowable,
$\neg \exists p(p \wedge \neg Kp)$

and hence all truths are known:
$\forall p(p \rightarrow Kp).$

Hence Fitch's paradox, if something is true then it is known:
$\forall p(p \rightarrow \Diamond Kp) \vdash \forall p(p \rightarrow Kp)$

I'll pause there. I gather we agree at least that this is the account being scrutinised?

1. The realist believes that it is possible for the truth to be unknowable
2. The realist believes that it is possible for the truth to be unknown — Michael

Not happy with those. Again, I think it should be
1. The realist believes that it is possible for a truth to be unknowable
2. The realist believes that it is possible for a truth to be unknown

And I'll maintain that (2) is all that realism requires.

You lost me.

∀p(◊(p ∧ ¬◊Kp)) says "For all truths p, it is possible that p is true and it not be possible to know p"

I think that should be "For all truths p, it is possible that p is true and yet p is not known". That would be ∀p(◊(p ∧ ¬Kp)).

The realist does not need to say that it is impossible to know that the cat is in the box, only that it is not known. It might be possible that the cat is in the box, but we just do not know.

I think you have one too many modalities.

It's an interesting argument, nice work, though.

So particular truths. While any particular truth might have been unknown, this is different to every given truth is unknown. Is that so?

1. The realist believes that it is possible for truth to be unknowable in principle. — Michael

I'm puzzled as to how to read this. Is it that it is possible for all truths to be unknowable or for some truths to be unknowable?

Very pleasing to see that the proportion of folk who think the OP argument invalid has dropped from a third to a fifth. That's four people - presumably NotAristotle, Hanover, Leon and one other.

There is no collapse. — Wayfarer

Well, I'll leave you to convince the physicists of that,

Cheers. There is more than one SEP article being waved about.

That applies to TKP rather than KP. I don't agree that we only know things that are not contradictory - cartesian truths. So while any particular truth might not have been known, it does not follow that every given truth is unknown. We do know things. That is, the "p" in your logic is all truths when it should be a particular truth.

But to be sure, yours has been the more interesting approach to the topic.

Your want a ghost to be the only thing that can collapse the wave function.

"the realist believes that it is possible for truth to be unknowable in principle". — Michael

Humour me and provide a link. Which article?

Banno has distanced himself from your definition — Leontiskos

I do not trust your ability to understand and present either what I am saying or what is saying.

Curious that thinks Davidson magical, but is happy with ghosts in machines.

No.

You seem to think that a realist will say that nothing is knowable. Not following that at all.

You complimented my essay on it. — Wayfarer

Yep, it was a good essay. That doesn't make it right.

Does this accurately describe your view? — Wayfarer

Nope. I'm arguing that the realist/antirealist issue is a choice of language game, and that there are good reasons to prefer a realist logic to an antirealist logic when talking about medium-sized small goods. Cats in boxes. Or on mats. Or gold in the ground.

But this forum has a plague of antirealists, and I find myself again defending realism against bad arguments.

I am unhappy with Putnam's idea that "Metaphysical Realist is committed to the existence of a unique correspondence between statements in a language or theory and a determinate collection of mind and language-independent objects in the world.". Ugly. But even if it were so, it's not my approach.

Pretty much.

Yep. This is a pattern for Leon.

"...quantum!"

:rofl:

You know that what is to count as 'the observer' in "the fundamental role of 'the observer'" is a subject of debate. Yet you insist that the only thing that collapses a wave function is a mind. It suits your narrative to pretend there is a consensus where there is none.

Time comes into existence with minds. — Wayfarer

No, it doesn't.

Although
that time is passing does.

Time passed before there were minds. That's kinda built in to the notion of there being a time when there were no minds. Basic stuff. You need some quite sophist-icated argument to avoid it. Like his piece of bullshit:
knowing

Laplace’s nebula is not behind us, at our origin, but rather out in front of us in the cultural world — Maurice Merleau-Ponty, quoted in The Blind Spot, Adam Frank, Marcelo Gleiser, Evan Thompson

...which confuses what is true (Laplace’s nebula) with what is cultural (our stories about Laplace’s nebula). It's just bad thinking.

"the realist believes that it is possible for truth to be unknowable in principle."

Which means that the realist believes either that (5) does not entail (1) or that it if "the cat is in the box" is true then it is possibly not possible to look in the box and see the cat. Either entails that if "the cat is in the box" is true then it is unknowable1. — Michael

What?!?

That's silly.

That's an odd post. No, if all life disappeared, so would foxes. Foxes are (usually) alive.

I haven't avoided the question - I answered it quite directly by presenting a truth about what things would be like, given that "all life disappeared from the universe, but everything else remained undisturbed".

You claimed, "If all life disappeared from the universe, but everything else is undisturbed, then it would still be true that there is gold in Boorara." — Leontiskos

Indeed, the bit "everything else is undisturbed" kinda makes the point. One of the things that remains undisturbed is the gold at Boorara.

A shame that you need Kant's analysis of time here, which is wanting. Regardless, the argument does not depend on time. We can posit instead a space with no folk in it to know stuff, and get similar results. There may be a planet in orbit around the pulsar described here. That there is such a planet is either true, or it is false, and this is so regardless of what we know.

This by way of separating what is true from what is known to be true. Again, that a proposition is true is a single-places predicate, "P is true"; but that we know it is true is a relation, "We know P is true". Same for what are commonly called "propositional attitudes"; a name that marks this relational aspect.

...you do understand that what you have there is not my argument... it's yours.

No, perhaps not.

Oh, yes, I noticed your selective quote.

If you are really interested, as opposed to just a poor attempt at baiting, set out for us what it is you think 's argument was, and my reply.

Becasue I do not think you have understood it.

I concluded... — Leontiskos

That's you, not I. You have misunderstood - again - the logic of the argument.

Love you too. If you are going start by misrepresenting what was said, there's not much point in chatting with you. Of course, it is entirely possible that you do think that a reasonable interpretation of what was said... if so, explain what it means for truth to exist. Do you just mean that there are truths?