Comments

  • "What is truth? said jesting Pilate; and would not stay for an answer."
    Would we expect the child to intuitively "get" the idea of quantity or number from an exercise like that? — Janus

    From one time? No. (It takes kids more than a couple weeks to make it from kindergarten to 6th grade.)

    I briefly taught math in a homeschool co-op, to a bunch of teenagers. My favorite exercise was asking them why the internal angles of a triangle add up to 180 degrees. They knew that they do, and with enough help they could prove it -- but why is it provable? Why is it true?

    And now we're back on topic.
  • "What is truth? said jesting Pilate; and would not stay for an answer."
    Counting without understanding quantity would just be a meaningless regurgitation of words. — Janus

    At around the same age you learn your ABC's. That's pure sequence, no quantity.

    The, you know, point of math is that things like sequence and quantity end up fitting together.

    Learning to count, for instance, is not the same as learning to measure -- right up until it turns out it is.
  • "What is truth? said jesting Pilate; and would not stay for an answer."
    ↪Sam26


    Or we could do each other's views, but randomly selected, like a secret Santa. ;-)

    Anyhow, I can try to summarize where I am at the moment, still in progress.

    It seems plain to me that truth is not a property of a sentence, like being in English or in the passive voice or contradictory. It's at least a relation between a sentence and something else; that is, it's the status of that relation that makes a sentence true or false. We use "true" as a 1-place predicate only because the value of the other parameter (or parameters, if we need more) is held fixed, or assumed, or implicated, something like that.

    Convention T and other versions of the equivalence thesis may count as adequate descriptions of how we use the word "true," or at least adequate descriptions of a way of using the word common among philosophers, but are only descriptive and offer no explanation for why the LHS tracks the truth-value of the RHS, where all the action is. It notes the material equivalence, and stops. As such, this equivalence should be a consequence of a genuine theory of truth, if such a thing is possible. It may well be that truth has to be taken as a primitive, but I don't think the equivalence thesis either shows that or blocks it.

    As for what a theory of truth that goes beyond the equivalence should look like, and whether it's possible, I don't know. Material equivalence is a slightly odd, slightly old-fashioned mechanism to play such a central role in our understanding of the central concept of philosophy. What if, instead, we had all learned in school that if "The kettle is boiling" is true, it's true because the kettle is boiling, and if the kettle weren't boiling, it wouldn't be true. That's a whole different ballpark, logically speaking. I think the natural place to look for why a sentence is true or false is what the sentence is about, and maybe -- this is hard to say without circularity -- what's relevant to its truth or falsehood. The sort of thing you might push over to the epistemic side -- what would enable you to come to know something is the case -- what goes there is the sort of thing that makes the sentence true.

    TLDR: if I go on with this, I'll probably be reading up on truth-makers.
  • The Propositional Calculus
    ↪Agent Smith


    Sorry, this was goofy:
    It is sometimes desirable to effect such a transformation into a form with only ORs and NOTs (disjunctive normal form) or only ANDs and NOTs (conjunctive normal form).

    CNF and DNF are interesting, but not as described. It's a question of whether you have only ANDs outside and ORs inside parentheses or the other way around.

    A & (~B v C) & (D v ~E) is CNF
    (A & B) v (~C & D) v (~E & ~F) is DNF.

    (Your question called them to mind, as getting something into a canonical form, but then I somehow didn't notice I was writing gibberish! Ah well.)

    You can also get by with a single connective, if you're so inclined, the Sheffer stroke, " | ", read "not both," or NAND.
  • "What is truth? said jesting Pilate; and would not stay for an answer."
    Seems a step too far. I think I maintained that truth ranges over propositions — Banno

    No progress there, so let's revisit "ranging", then I'll give up:

    I don't know what you mean when you say "Truth ranges over propositions and such."
    — Srap Tasmaner

    Nor do I, apart from that it is propositions and such that are true, or not. In a way this is stipulating the sense of "true" we are using here; as might be opposed to a true friend or a true note.     — Banno

    So your position is that "true" is a word that can be applied to various things -- statements, beliefs, friends, bicycle wheels, and so on -- and you've chosen some of those things that seem related and said you're using the word "true" in the sense that it applies to those things; and the sense in which the word "true" ranges over some of those things is, well, that you can apply the word "true" to them.

    Anything to add?
  • "What is truth? said jesting Pilate; and would not stay for an answer."
    ↪Banno


    So you agree that truth is a relation between a proposition and something else. There might be more that goes into that, but it's at least that.

    Here's a variation on this theme. Consider the arrow again. You could say Hit(some-target, some-arrow), and that would be a two-place predicate. But you could also, given a target, produce a one-place predicate, Hit-this-target(some-arrow). You get the one-place predicate by partially applying the two-place predicate.

    Now compare how we handle truth in possible worlds semantics. Is truth a one-place predicate? It can be, if you have fixed which world you're talking about, but the general form would be True(P, W), right? It's a start, but you'll often see more, adding a catchall "situation", ⟨P, W, S⟩, or time and location, ⟨P, W, L, T⟩. You could certainly add language, and deal directly with sentences. However complex this relation becomes, you could always curry it to get back to a one-place predicate "true".

    But truth is only a one-place predicate by assumption or by choice.

    It's at the very least a relation between a proposition and something else. Agreed?
  • "What is truth? said jesting Pilate; and would not stay for an answer."
    In order to miss the target, there must be a target to miss. — Banno

    And I must be shooting at it. I do other things as well.

    But yes, it stands to reason there's a target. Problem?

    it is propositions and such that are true, or not — Banno

    And the arrows that are stuck in the target are indeed there, can be counted and so on. But you would count them not because they are arrows, but because they are arrows that are stuck in the target. There are lots of arrows. Arrows are cheap. What makes an arrow interesting, given that I was aiming at the target, is that it hit.

    We can move on to nails I hit right on the head, if you're tired of archery.
  • "What is truth? said jesting Pilate; and would not stay for an answer."
    Truth ranges over propositions and such. — Banno

    Is hitting the target a property of the arrow? — Srap Tasmaner

    By the way, if I was quoting someone, I didn't know it.

    But can you fill it out? — Banno

    I can tell you what I was thinking; it's not complicated. In order to tell you some part of how things stand in our shared world, I must be accurate. Big as the world is, it is possible to miss when aiming at it. If I tell you Donald Trump won the 2020 presidential election, my arrow has gone wide. It may make a bullseye on some other world, but not on this one.

    Now we seem to agree that having struck the target is not merely the condition of the arrow, but involves the target as well. They are related in a certain way, and it is that relation that we call "having hit the target". Examine the arrow, and you will find it is no different from any other, no different from one that missed the target entirely, no different from one still in the quiver. On all this, I take it we agree.

    Truth is when you hit the target.

    Hence I avoided "Truth is a property of propositions and such". — Banno

    Indeed.

    But if you don't mean that truth is a property of propositions, I don't know what you mean when you say "Truth ranges over propositions and such." "Ranges over" how? What does that mean? Does the rest of the world play any part in this ranging that truth does?
  • "What is truth? said jesting Pilate; and would not stay for an answer."
    Truth ranges over propositions and such. — Banno

    Is hitting the target a property of the arrow?
  • Twin Earth conflates meaning and reference.
    I guess I should reread the paper.

    I'm tempted to say pragmatics is already all over this sort of thing. If I say, "Hand me the blue one," the meaning of that seems to be readily determined by any English speaker, and it could certainly be unambiguous in context, even though that sentence can be used to request completely different items in different situations. -- That the meaning is clear enough can, I think, be shown by cases of misspeaking or mistaken belief on the part of the speaker: if there isn't a blue one, and you really meant to ask for the green one, I'll understand that you were asking me to do something I can't, without ever fixing the reference of your request.

    It would be a little odd to have to extend "situation" to cover the entire history of your species and your planet, though. But that breathtaking expansion of the prerequisites for making sense might be forced on us more often than we think. It's already kinda implied in there being water to talk about in the first place...
  • "What is truth? said jesting Pilate; and would not stay for an answer."
    ↪Michael


    But it was gibberish both times.

    2. T(q) → ∃x(x=q) — Michael

    That's not how that works. You don't need existential generalization to know that q exists; you just predicated something of q!

    You're trying to say that if something has a property then it must exist. But the assertion that something has a property presupposes that it exists. Asserting that it doesn't have some property would work just as well.

    You don't "find out" that the individuals in your universe, like q, exist; you assumed them when you built it, or you name them (uniquely!) when you create them, as with existential instantiation.
  • "What is truth? said jesting Pilate; and would not stay for an answer."
    ↪Banno


    No, I don't think I was saying anything like that, just offering motivation.

    (Snipping lots of musing about "It's raining or it's not", which was more fun to write than to read.)

    I'll stand by my two suggestions:
    (1) it's reasonable to say disjunctions are made true by one their disjuncts being true;
    (2) correspondence can naturally be taken as applying only to informative claims, so tautologies need not apply.

    I don't think the mere existence of disjunctions or conditionals falsifies correspondence theories. (Seems like we would have heard about that if it were so.)
  • "What is truth? said jesting Pilate; and would not stay for an answer."
    It can't be luck if whatever sentence we stick in (pv~p) gets us truth. It's structure, not correspondence. — Banno

    In the back of my mind I'm thinking of the intuitionist's rejection of p v ~p as an unqualified introduction rule. To introduce p v ~p, you have to have p in hand, or ~p in hand, and use the usual rule for or introduction. I simply allowed the introduction but applied the idea to truthmakers: one or the other of those will be what makes the disjunction true when it's true. The disjunction itself is a freebie, vouched for by whichever of the disjuncts is true. You're right of course that one or the other will always turn up, but we still get to say, on each occasion, here's what makes R v ~R true this time.

    (Snipping the rest the past-my-bedtime speculation about truth. Probably shoddy stuff anyway.)
  • "What is truth? said jesting Pilate; and would not stay for an answer."
    ↪Banno


    All that's fine -- I think, I didn't check all that carefully -- but again look where you end up, contrasting

    (1) Is P true?
    (2) Is P possible?

    Why are those constructions so similar, and why would it be so natural to contrast the truth of P with the possibility of P, the likelihood of P, and so on?

    The intensional revolution in fact sweeps away truth along with possibility, necessity and the rest, and leaves a purely extensional model-theoretic semantics behind. ("True" turns out to be an incomplete symbol, completed as "true at W", which is in turn just defined as satisfaction, and everything is just shorthand for that.)

    Which is just more evidence, in a screwy way, that this is the set of concepts truth belongs with -- which is a little surprising, since the stability of truth is nearly what defines the split between extensional and intensional contexts. If truth belongs with this stuff, something isn't what we thought it was.

    (R v ~ R) is never untrue. time and place are irrelevant. — Banno

    The way I was thinking about this: on each occasion when R v ~R is true, it's because R is true or because ~R is true. We additionally know that this covers all possible occasions, but what makes it true on each occasion is specifically one or specifically the other, not the additional fact that there are no occasions not covered by one disjunct or the other.

    R v ~R doesn't need to know it's guaranteed to win in order to win; as far as it knows, it's just always lucky.
  • "What is truth? said jesting Pilate; and would not stay for an answer."
    there's going to be, at a bare minimum, a partial correspondence (it'll rain OR it'll not) — Agent Smith

    Yeah that's it, except partial is full for a disjunction. "Or" means "or", for realsies.
  • "What is truth? said jesting Pilate; and would not stay for an answer."
    ↪Janus


    Not so much because that's not an exclusive or. You're talking about something else.

    ↪Banno


    Here's something for you. Was thinking about 'modal' adjectives after my exchange with @Sam26, and it's curious how it's not at all tempting to treat them as properties of sentences (or propositions, whatever).

    (1) Sheila says you sent that email. Is that true?

    Maybe true is "true of" or "applies to" the sentence Sheila said.

    (2) Is it at least possible that you sent that email?

    No one wonders if the sentence Sheila said is possible. She's already said it.

    Obvious candidates are (a) that "possible" is short for "possibly true" and (b) that we're not talking about the sentence but the state of affairs the sentence describes. (2) and (b) seem to get along fine, but we could have a better match for (a) with something like

    (2') Is it at least possible that what Sheila said is true?

    which you could continue to interpret as Sheila's sentence maybe possessing this property.

    There are ways in which constructions involving "true" and the modal adjectives diverge, but also quite a few where they are very close.

    (3) Is what Sheila said true?
    (4) Is what Sheila said possible?
    (5) No, it's not true because it's impossible.

    That last one is a doozy because if you want to take to take "it" as what Sheila said, you can't take both "true" and "impossible" as properties a sentence might have -- that would be nonsense. It doesn't rule out truth as a property but you need a nuanced expansion of (5) into logical form to allow it. (Maybe the second "it" is impersonal, etc. etc.) Not a huge hurdle, maybe, but you have to wonder why ordinary usage would lean toward sometimes treating these so similarly if they're so different.

    (6) It's not only possible, it's true.

    And if we decide to cut through all this by taking, say, "possible" as meaning "possibly true", there's the peculiarity that these modal adverbs (now) contrast with <null>. Not impossible, but slightly odd.

    (6') It's not only possibly true, it's <null> true.

    Of course we, knowers of systems modal, will be tempted to say this is also

    (6'') It's not only possibly true, it's actually true.

    To a normal person, "actually true" will sound a bit like "really pregnant" or "completely off".

    Anyhow, once we've added "true" everywhere, what's it doing? It's no longer part of the contrast with "possible". But we can't move on to saying that "true" is short for "actually true" because that would completely undermine our treatment of "possible", "impossible" and the others.

    I don't mind resorting to Philenglish ("It is the case that ..." "It is possibly the case that ...") and the formal systems are what they are. I was just wondering if we might learn something from how ordinary usage handles things, and I think I've learned that there is some kind of relationship between truth and the various alethic modes, but the picture is far from clear.

    But (~R v R) does not have the same truth value as (R v X), which would be false if it were not raining and X were false. — Banno

    Agreed, which is why I mentioned that R v ~R will also correspond with it not raining.
  • "What is truth? said jesting Pilate; and would not stay for an answer."
    ↪Agent Smith


    As you like. R v ~R happily corresponds to the fact of it raining, just as R v X, for any X does. Likewise for corresponding to it not raining.

    On the other hand, a tautology is uninformative. It says nothing, and saying it commits one to nothing. It's not entirely unnatural to defend correspondence but restrict it to informative claims.
  • "What is truth? said jesting Pilate; and would not stay for an answer."
    the prosentential view remain undiscussed — Banno

    FWIW, I liked what I saw of the prosentential theory, maybe a few years ago on IEP. It has a linguistic feel to it, and provides reasonable motivation for the existence and usefulness of what sometimes appears to be a superfluous word. (The model-theoretic approach more or less shows it to be unnecessary, so much so that Dummett commented that if you didn't already know what truth was, you'd have no idea what you were defining with all those T-schemas and what the point of it could possibly be.) I keep it in the back of my mind when constructing examples.

    Blocks the Liar, as I recall, and if that matters.
  • "What is truth? said jesting Pilate; and would not stay for an answer."
    ↪Sam26


    Not so odd. I miss a lot. Can you fill it in a little for me?
  • "What is truth? said jesting Pilate; and would not stay for an answer."
    ↪Sam26


    What an odd response.

    After I give examples with the intent of showing the difference between being interested in someone's words, on the one hand, and what they're talking about, on the other, you suggest it will all be clearer to me if I focus on how people use words.

    No need to turn this into another Wittgenstein thread, though...
  • "What is truth? said jesting Pilate; and would not stay for an answer."
    I would say, as per the context of this thread, that true and false are necessarily not part of the conceptual framework of non-linguistic animals. — Sam26

    I get that. True and False are concepts we might naturally think of as applying to linguistic artifacts, so in that sense at least they're "linguistic concepts".

    True is funny though.

    If I ask someone whether they thought what you said was clever, I'm expressing an interest in what you said and how you said it, among other things. If I ask someone whether they thought what you said was true -- I might be investigating your character, or I might be very interested in the state of the world suggested by what you said. (Are the barbarians really within the walls?) Not so much in your phrasing or diction or use of periphrasis.

    So even as it seems to apply to linguistic artifacts, True is a somewhat odd duck. Not alone, though. Many such usages come to mind, especially 'modal' adjectives like ”probable", "likely", "impossible", and so on.

    Anyhow, I don't have any particular agenda here. Was just curious what you were thinking.
  • Thus Spoke Zarathustra: reading
    There is also quite a bit on Nietzsche and Nazism. That does not mean he supported such thinking and practices or that the work on it supports the connection. — Fooloso4

    But it does mean people feel the need to address it, with, I assume, something beyond "No, that's a misreading."

    I tend to think this sort of thing is interesting, just as other commonly misunderstood phenomena are. To "save them appearances", you want not just to point out that the moon is in fact much smaller than a star, but also explain why it appears to be so much larger.

    So it is with texts. In some cases a misreading can be explained by knowing deception. In some cases, it's a failure of the intellectual conscience. But in some of those cases and in others, a widespread misreading indicates something there in the text that people are hanging their interpretation on. So it might be understandable, even when it's wrong, or at least not as perspicuous as other readings. People took Wittgenstein for a behaviorist, and that's probably wrong, but it's not like there's *nothing* in his writing to suggest that.
  • Aristotle: Time Never Begins
    What I’m saying—what is our life? Our life is looking forward, or it’s looking back—that’s it. That’s our life. Where’s the moment? — Ricky Roma
  • Aristotle: Time Never Begins
    ↪Kuro


    Here's how I understand the argument.

    You can conceive of a moment as a boundary between the past relative to that moment, and the future relative to that moment. Geometrically, this would be like picking a point on a line -- let's make it the usual line from school and call that point "0" -- and using that point to define a ray , and a ray .

    So that's a moment, "a beginning of future time and an end of past time."

    *** Edit ***

    Except of course we're not entitled to put it quite like this, and Aristotle doesn't.

    All we need for Aristotle's version is for there to be no first or last moment, that is, all of time just has to be unbounded: , and a ray .

    There's still infinities all over the place, but we don't get arbitrary points in time like 100 trillion years ago.

    ******

    Aristotle also says that the moment is our only "point of contact" with time, that time is unthinkable "apart from the moment." So any point in time we can imagine must be a moment. That is, he's arguing for something like the uniformity of time: every moment is like this, a boundary between past and future, and conceiving of time is, for us, conceiving of such moments.

    Well then it's perfectly clear that time can't have a beginning or an end. If it had a beginning, there would be a moment that was unlike every other moment, that was only the beginning of a future and not the end of a past. Likewise for the end of time. And a moment unlike every other moment is not a moment at all, and cannot be part of our conception of time.

    So far as it goes, the argument seems clearly right. (I didn't quite get it until I thought of "our only point of contact" in a sort of Flatland way -- imagine that all you know of the line is what you know as a point on it, take its point of view, and to be such a point is to see a neverending expanse of line to either side of you.) Indeed, no matter what cosmology tells us, we cannot help thinking it makes sense to ask what happened before the big bang, or what would happen after the big crunch. Time seems to us to go on uniformly from an infinitely distant past to an infinitely distant future.

    In modern terms, it's a bit like taking the tripartite structure of the A-series, and arranging such moments as a B-series. Aristotle doesn't speak here directly of a moment changing from future to present to past, but he insists that a moment is a boundary between a past and a future. You can line up such boundaries in B-series fashion, but that doesn't change them into simple points that have only (tenseless) relations of before and after to other points; they each define two infinite sets of other points, all of which also define two infinite sets of other points, and each and every such point is a boundary between two such sets, between a past and a future.

    *** Edit***

    And then this is interestingly wrong, because we can mistake being unbounded for being infinite in magnitude. It's still true there's no first moment of time, and infinitely many before any given moment, but that doesn't mean they add up to an infinite amount of past time.
  • "What is truth? said jesting Pilate; and would not stay for an answer."
    How would this be about concepts, as opposed to their brain's relationship to a moving object? — Sam26

    I'm not quite sure what to say to this.

    (Yes, I believe the original experiment was looking for rudimentary physics-related expectations among infants -- that something moving along that way will continue to do so, and it turns out as long as something does, even a different something, they appear to be satisfied.)

    What I'm unsure about is the implication that concepts don't have to do with the brain's relationship, as you put it, to objects. I mean, sure, "mind" is probably a much better starting point, but you went with brain, so brain it is. Is that not more or less exactly where we expect to find concepts?

    Maybe not, if you think the social is being given short shrift here. But then are we going to say that societies have concepts but individuals, even individual members of societies, don't? That sounds terribly odd. So if the social demands to be brought in, how exactly? And is the social, shall we say, aspect entirely linguistic?

    Maybe you could have an experiment — Sam26

    Well, this was part of my question, whether experiments were relevant to your position, or whether you understood concepts to be inherently linguistic phenomena in some sense. So are you saying that this is an empirical question after all?
  • The Propositional Calculus
    ↪Banno


    I asked why we should watch, and you answered that I don't have to.

    That is not logical, Captain.

    But I'll take your "suggestion" to go away. Best of luck with your new blog.
  • The Propositional Calculus
    Let me put it this way.

    A forum on philosophy ought have threads on the basics of logic. — Banno

    I disagree. I've done my share of teaching some basic logic here, helping folks with homework, answering questions. We should do that. But we should point people learning from scratch, especially on their own, to better resources.

    In fact, for many sorts of questions, stackexchange is a better resource than us.

    I understand why you might want to brush up, but why should we watch?

    Maybe I just don't understand what sort of conversation you expect to have by presenting textbook material. Are we going to do philosophy of logic? If so, why the textbook review?
  • The Propositional Calculus
    ↪Banno


    Why not just send everyone to Peter Smith's blog?
  • Moderation of Political threads
    It might be better for you not to try that again. — skyblack

    Did you mean for this to sound like a threat?
  • "What is truth? said jesting Pilate; and would not stay for an answer."
    I take it that concepts, are necessarily linguistic, unless you can demonstrate how they're not. — Sam26

    That's an interesting way to put it.

    I'm not sure how to debate whether concepts are linguistic, but in the meantime I'm just curious why you would take such a strong position. Are concepts by definition linguistic? Or do you think they're just obviously linguistic?

    Can you give me a thumbnail of your thinking here?
  • "What is truth? said jesting Pilate; and would not stay for an answer."
    ↪Sam26


    I'll give an example. Infants, I understand, have a sense of object permanence before they have a sense of object identity. If a toy is moved across their field of vision, passes behind a screen, and comes out as something else, that doesn't bother baby. If it doesn't come out at all, that does.

    There's something in the ballpark of the conceptual going on there, I'd say, but what exactly, it's complicated.
  • "What is truth? said jesting Pilate; and would not stay for an answer."
    When I refer to beliefs (pre-linguistic beliefs in animals or humans), it's completely devoid of any conceptual framework for them, but not for us, as linguistic users. So, it seems that the tendency is to impose our conceptual framework onto them. — Sam26

    Some of my intuitions run the other way, but it's a messy area for sure. Research into the cognitive states of pre-linguistic children and animals is bound to be more difficult and less conclusive.

    But I'm a little surprised to see you say, quite definitely, no concepts here, no conceptual framework whatsoever. It sounds like you take this to be true by definition and I wonder why. Is it all about language? Or about what enables language? What's the story here?
  • Moderation of Political threads
    ↪Baden


    I don't even remember that!

    And I correctly retrodicted its result.

    And only 41 people voted.

    I've always assumed we have that Pareto thing here, 80% of posts coming from 20% of posters, and the percentage of members who post is tiny, right? So part of the complication is for whom are we moderating? For the regulars? For the discouraged newbies? For the lurkers? For the sometime posters who get fed up and quit?

    This is the sort of stuff online games go through regularly, and there are no solutions known to make everyone happy.

    a crappy job — fdrake

    It's also crappy if you don't like treating adults like children.
  • Moderation of Political threads
    this type of modding strictness question comes up periodically and it's never been possible to discern a clear majority either way, which suggests to me the community is roughly evenly split on the issue — Baden

    I don't think that follows, especially since part of the issue is whether some members are less inclined to raise their hands.

    I absolutely agree there's no clear mandate for doing either more or less moderating.

    You could, right here on the site, do a poll. Probably of limited value, but it might be interesting. I'll bet if you offered the goldilocks options (too much, about right, too little) that "about right" would win in a landslide, which I think would tell you basically nothing.
  • Moderation of Political threads
    the part I think sounds good but question how that would be done — Amity

    My approach involved threats, so yeah there's enforcement behind it. Roughly, I would threaten to consider (further) disrespectful language a virus; when it shows up, you don't extract the virus, you quarantine the host, which in this case would be the post it appeared in. The threat of an entire post disappearing because you indulged in a little name-calling and belittling somewhere in it, that seemed pretty persuasive, and mostly people agreed to play nice.

    Playing school-marm is a crappy job though.

    the secret handshakes of other veteran members — skyblack

    Yeah, I think there's a bit of this. But that can also just be perception. Not everyone who feels excluded is actively being excluded, even if they're not being actively welcomed either.

    having established them to be the spineless cowards that they are — skyblack

    And this sort of thing is not okay with me, sorry. In a thread elsewhere on the forum, I might even flag it.

    I'm going back to thinking about philosophy now.
  • Moderation of Political threads
    ↪fdrake


    In my brief stint as a mod, I waded into the Ukraine thread a couple times (IIRC) and deleted a few runs of nasty exchanges, I think. But I think I only ever edited a couple posts to save "content" and remove something else, and only when the something else was easy to remove. So I let stand some nasty stuff because it had content mixed in with the insults and belittling, and in those cases I warned participants that in future they would see their substantive points disappear along with the insults if they didn't edit themselves better. Some of you reading this may remember getting a little "Don't do that" from me and a warning that if you did it again, even in a post with actual substance, that whole post would be gone.

    It's just far too much work to have the mods actually sorting the wheat from the chaff word by word, sentence by sentence, or even paragraph by paragraph. And I was never comfortable deciding whether a point was relevant or substantive -- I wanted to leave that to the community. I never deleted anything as irrelevant. Even the guideline to "stay on topic" struck me as ridiculous on this site, where every thread meanders into being about something else than the OP eventually, and I never enforced that.

    I don't know how effective my little campaign for civility was. A bit. I worried a lot about the chilling effects of aggression and manipulation, that it would discourage participation, and I thought our mandate as mods was to encourage participation -- especially from new arrivals. That put me more toward the puritan end of the scale compared to the other mods and admins, who by and large were more tolerant of a little rough and tumble, even a little name-calling, and even insults so long as they were clever. Among people who've been contributing to this site or the old site for a decade, and know each other, no one's going to take that for more than it is. But I think a new arrival to this site might be horrified at how members talk to each other. And even longstanding groups of friends can have what amounts to institutionalized bullying as well as friendly sparring among perceived equals. I have no tolerance at all for bullying and I think some of what goes on here is not best described as "passionate" but as attempts at bullying. I think you should be able to read an entire day's posts on TPF and not once see "Reading comprehension not your strong suit, eh?"

    TLDR: no, there shouldn't be a different standard for political discussions, never should have been; yes, we should raise the standards of the site in general, but not so much through increased enforcement (meaning specifically deleting and editing posts) but by encouraging members to change their own posting habits and changing the community-wide expectations of how you express yourself here.

    But I think mine is the minority view. I think a lot of people would perceive such a site as less interesting and less fun, and some people wish the site were even more "gloves off". But if the thrill of landing a zinger is what you're after, Twitter is right down the hall.
  • Against “is”
    So "is" means equal to. Unless it doesn't. — Real Gone Cat

    There's yet another issue with taking "is" as something like "is the same as" in the most general sense.

    "3 + 1" and "4" are obviously different expressions. So, to say that "3 + 1" is "4" must not mean they're the same expression, only that they have the same value. You'll agree with that, I assume. So our equals sign doesn't mean "is the same as" but only "has the same value as".

    The reason that's interesting, to some philosophers, is because it means that "3 + 1 = 4" can be informative. "4 = 4" might also be informative, but what "4 = 4" tells you, that 4 is equal to itself, is different from what "3 + 1 = 4" tells you. But in mathematics we are authorized to substitute equals for equals anywhere and always: "3 + 1 = 4" is also a substitution rule, so anywhere you see "3 + 1" you can substitute "4" without changing the truth-value of your equations.

    But even though you're not changing the truth value of the equation, you're changing something, else "3 + 1 = 4" would say the same thing as "4 = 4", and there's clearly a sense in which it doesn't. Frege's solution to this little puzzle was, roughly, that "3 + 1" and "4", seen as expressions rather than as values, have a sense as well as a reference: they both refer to the same value, 4, but in different ways. On such a scheme, "3 + 1 = 4" informs you that these two different expressions have the same value, and you have to be told that because expressions have a sense as well as a reference, and the sense of "3 + 1" is different from the sense of "4".

    If you don't have some such scheme, you have to have some other explanation for what we're doing when we teach someone mathematics. How is that someone could know that "3233 = 3233" but not know that "53 * 61 = 3233"?
  • The paradox of omniscience
    ↪fdrake


    I honestly should have said "contingent" where I said "arbitrary" -- but I liked how forceful "arbitrary" sounds, and it captured the peculiar way in which each of us is just blocked from knowing certain things. If you weren't there, you weren't; you can have all the rational beliefs about it you like, but you'll never know. That's just contingency, but it feels arbitrary.

    Here's something for you to talk about: what I postponed in looking at your model was not so much the "rites" stuff, but the propagation mechanism, having been deemed to have performed a rite, trust, staking a position, aiming to be deemed, all that business. That's nice, but applies to lots of things, it seems to me. More than just to the performance of rites. Did I miss something there?

    As for "rites": rites sound like the sort of thing one would generally perform knowingly and deliberately. That's one way of putting the circularity problem. But, as above, another thing I want to say is that you know a great many things accidentally, so to speak, not intentionally and deliberately. I rely every day on things I happened to have learned that I didn't set out to learn. I didn't look up in order to see the balloon that I didn't know was there until I looked up; I just happened to look up and there it was, and now I have knowledge that you don't. From the perspective of a third party, Bill, I could be said to have taken an action that resulted in knowledge, and if Bill's definition of "rite" is loose enough, then Bill can say I performed a rite. Roughly, I did the same thing and achieved the same result as someone who performed that rite knowingly and intentionally. But the fact remains, I could not have performed the rite intentionally, since I lacked the knowledge required to do so. (And we've circled back to circularity.)

    Seem like we also ought to say something about rites as general and specific. If I perform the rite of looking in a box to find out what's in it, there's the general, as it were, "rite schema" and then there's the specific rite, a token of that type, I will perform with this specific box. This "application" step might be a place where we point to additional knowledge required to perform the rite (knowing it, that it applies, how to apply it, etc.), but it's also clearly an area for experimentation. If you wonder what's in there, you might reason, "It looks somewhat like a box; let's see if we can open it (like a box)." That step of analogizing, or of extending the known range of applicability of a rule, is obviously terribly fruitful, and one way to generate unplanned-for, unexpected knowledge, without requiring at least certain sorts of knowledge up front. You don't have to know that the rite will work, or even know that it applies, to try it out. So there's experimentation again, and maybe not quite a solution to bootstrapping, but a clear path for expanding your knowledge base. And that path is deliberate, and intentional, without any knowledge of what the result will be.
  • The paradox of omniscience
    In line with what you're saying, I'd just add that Gilbert Ryle called terms like "see" achievement verbs. To see a wolf entails that there is a wolf there. (Though, of course, one could think they had seen a wolf, but be mistaken.) — Andrew M

    Yes, absolutely. I had Ryle in mind when I said "know" and "see" are both being used "factively". Point of interest that we might be disinclined to treat the identical construction, "I heard a wolf in the bushes" as factive. That is at least intended as a factive use, but we the audience are reserving some doubt that, say, wolves and foxes rustle bushes so distinctively. (But maybe to an experienced woodsman ...) For a more attractively factive use of "hear", consider how different is the sound of a bird searching for bugs among the dry leaves under a bush from the sound of a chipmunk just passing through. Or, for that matter, "I heard an owl up in the big oak tree last night."
  • The paradox of omniscience
    ↪fdrake


    We have at least a couple different threads here now.

    I'm tempted to respond directly to your proposed model here (especially because some of it is close to some things I nearly wrote about earlier), pitch in on refining and extending it, all that, but I'm going to resist that temptation for now.

    One thing that bothers me a little is that the model seems very broadly applicable, which may be a strength, but means we might be missing something specific to knowledge. I think I could read most of what you wrote as applying to, say, rational belief. (And possibly to a great number of other things, ethical questions and so on.) Would you say there's a point in here that is specific to knowledge?

    One thing I've been trying to capture is that there's something a little arbitrary about knowledge. If I know because I was there, even by chance, and you don't because you weren't, that's just the way it is. If I happened to look up and see the balloon before it went behind the trees, I know there was a balloon and you can only take my word for it or not, even if you were walking along beside me.

    I keep reaching for these examples that are clearly matters of perception -- which is suspicious -- but there are also the examples related to remembering, so I don't think I'm actually talking about perception rather than knowledge.

    What about that balloon? Could I provide reasons for you to believe it was there? Maybe, maybe not. You didn't even notice me looking up, but if there was a balloon, we could try to find it again. Even if we find a balloon, that won't prove I saw it, might not even be the same one, but that might give you grounds for believing me. And that might be a mistake -- could be I made it up and the universe provided a spurious balloon to join in the fun of having you on. But I just know one way or the other, at least about whether I saw it, and you can only conceivably have reasons to believe. We are up to two completely different things.

    Do you see your model as talking about this, or as comfortably absorbing this as a particular case?
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