Is it not absurd, though?

Yeh. No matter what I say the keys are locked in the car I locked.

I think to accomplish something like that you'd have to stipulate Wittgenstein, almost. Not quite, because you can argue this or that about him, but if you bring in Davidson as a point of comparison it seems that Wittgenstein is harder to interpret -- or at least has more interpretations to decide from -- than Davidson.

o yeah no worries. You said as much in your review.

It definitely sounds up my ally. I just haven't gotten around to reading the pdf yet is all.

Aahhhh!

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human_leukocyte_antigen

I was privileged enough to learn about that for work, at one point.

I found the idea of a protein complex as the basis for self/other fascinating, and still do.

I didn't know about the organism you linked about though. Very exciting stuff.

Listened to it. It sounds like a complex and meaty book that I'd be interested in.

One critique: I would not reduce the negation of the negation to Nietzsche's Will to Power. But I could just be misunderstanding too.

Hrm! Apparently I didn't dig deep enough. Those labs would both be a lot of fun to work in.

There is deduction in math and logic; everyone else has to make do with induction, abduction, probability. — Srap Tasmaner

That is -- making shit up and then seeing if it works(and finding that it usually does not). Though in school I call it "Guess and check"

The division between philosophy and literature is not so clear. — Fooloso4

Yup. My inclination is to reduce philosophy to literature.

The question of the OP is, in part, can we find the path to these qualities by examining the peculiar nature of philosophical reflection? — J

First, excellent OP. I hesitated to respond until you gave me something more specific to latch onto.

I'd say we can, but that we don't need to.

If philosophy is only reflection then clearly there's something "higher" than philosophy -- action, life, experience, whatever you want to call it.

We can reflect forever (and I ought note that this is a feature, not a bug): but I think that philosophy touches upon what we do.

Or, at least, I see action as a part of philosophy.

Which makes the idea of philosophy as the highest discourse a bit hard to follow. -- though you've made me think of Ian Hacking's Elevator Words in The Social Construction of What?. Take a gander at page 31* of the pdf and page 21* of the printed page numbers and tell me what you think.

*They are the same page with a subsection titled OBJECTS, IDEAS, AND ELEVATOR WORDS -- that's the section I mean. His notion of elevation seemed similar to your idea about higher discourse.

EDIT: Though I'm laughing upon rereading where the examples for nonfancy commonsensical actions is (throwing a ball, rape) -- OK! What about (throwing a ball, theft)? lol. But I suppose that's the continental in me. Also, I don't think I'd draw the division as Hacking does, it's just a text to riff from that came to mind.

:heart: :broken:

https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/46560/dulce-et-decorum-est

Bent double, like old beggars under sacks,
Knock-kneed, coughing like hags, we cursed through sludge,
Till on the haunting flares we turned our backs,
And towards our distant rest began to trudge.
Men marched asleep. Many had lost their boots,
But limped on, blood-shod. All went lame; all blind;
Drunk with fatigue; deaf even to the hoots
Of gas-shells dropping softly behind.

Gas! GAS! Quick, boys!—An ecstasy of fumbling
Fitting the clumsy helmets just in time,
But someone still was yelling out and stumbling
And flound’ring like a man in fire or lime.—
Dim through the misty panes and thick green light,
As under a green sea, I saw him drowning.

In all my dreams before my helpless sight,
He plunges at me, guttering, choking, drowning.

If in some smothering dreams, you too could pace
Behind the wagon that we flung him in,
And watch the white eyes writhing in his face,
His hanging face, like a devil’s sick of sin;
If you could hear, at every jolt, the blood
Come gargling from the froth-corrupted lungs,
Obscene as cancer, bitter as the cud
Of vile, incurable sores on innocent tongues,—
My friend, you would not tell with such high zest
To children ardent for some desperate glory,
The old Lie: Dulce et decorum est
Pro patria mori.

The key is to ensure that any contact is purely transactional- just enough to meet the basic requirements of existence, without letting it spiral into further emotional entanglements. — schopenhauer1

So what do I owe you?

I suppose I don't really care if we call it democracy or whatever -- if our political actions lead us to war I take that as a sign that something is wrong. But imperialism demands war until everyone is eliminated.

I think once we start justifying the horrors of war in the name of the good we've lost sight of the good.

Well, according to Wikipedia, authority on all knowledge :D --
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aristotle

In Athens, he probably experienced the Eleusinian Mysteries as he wrote when describing the sights one viewed at the Mysteries, "to experience is to learn" (παθεĩν μαθεĩν

So seems others' agree with you based on reading his texts.

I was just thinking if you had something definitive like that it would likely be published or publishable. Ancient evidence is always sketchy and requires lots of interpretation from multiple experts. It's really interesting because of that, but it's definitely difficult to ascertain lots of specifics that one might ask.

Heh. Fair.

I'm not sure it's obvious Plato did due to the cave analogy. Would it be that hard for an aristocrat to hear the tales people tell and reforge them to demonstrate a point? He may have even been there, but the analogy -- especially given its literary form -- doesn't give clear evidence about Plato either way.

He could have heard it from someone else enough times to forge a myth that appealed to the people around him without attending.

Do you have any evidence to suggest that Aristotle went through the Eleusinian Mystery ceremonies? — I like sushi

I think this is so far back in history that if you had some clear evidence you could publish a paper on it.

Ooooo... makes good wine!

Oh, either/or. I'm not picky. It's the Epicure in me.

Only if it pays in both carrots and tomatoes and turnips.

Well, it's not the first time, it won't be the second time...

I'm not offering an answer here, just pointing out that the difference between formal and informal languages is more intractable than it might appear. — Banno

Hey, that's my job! :D

yeah it seems hard to emphasize the parenthetical points if we only typed it out in lowercase without punctuation.

Heh I wouldn't be surprised if I made a few mistakes.

I did write it out while following the symbols though :D -- but I take your point that it's not something I'd ever say outside of logic.

∀x ∃y ∀z ((P(x) ∧ ∃u (Q(y) ∨ (R(u) ∧ ∀v (S(v) → T(z, v))))) → ¬(∀w (U(w) ∧ ∃t (V(x, t) → W(t, w))) ∧ ∃p(X(p) ∧ ∀q (Y(q) → Z(p, q)))) ∨ (A(x, y, z) ∧ ∀b ∃c (D(b, c) → (E(x, b, c) ∧ ∃d (F(d) ∧ G(d, x, y))))) — TonesInDeepFreeze

For all x there exists a y for all z such that if P is a property of x and there exists a u such that -- Q is a property of y or u is a property of R and allv's such that if v is S then the orderd pair z,v is T then it is not the case for all w such that w is U and there exists a t such that if t,x is V then t, w is W AND there exists p such that p is X and All q such that if q is Y then the ordered pair p q is Z OR x, y, z is A and for all b there exists a c such that (if the ordered pair c, b is D then x, b,c is E and there exists a d such that d is F and d, x, y is G.



Obviously.

they have lost the song and are left with only noise. — unenlightened

...though part of my interest here is also in how it seems plausible that sound would effect things in a strictly physical analysis, and if you replicate effects you'll observe consequences, and the whole project can superficially be read as obvious woo.

I stopped 1/2-way through the video you linked because the studies they cited all had the same problem, and that's more or less what I saw when I looked into this. (tho tell me if I ought continue)

But the idea is super interesting and could be rigorously tested without much of a theory. Lots of good data could be produced on the question that controlled and tested for so, so many things. It's just seen as too magical.

For me I like the idea of finding ways of making the songs make sense in the noise, to utilize your metaphor.

Keep 'em coming.

I like to be corrected -- it helps me learn. Alot of this is fuzzy in my head so I'm all ears -- formal training was an eternity ago, light, and now I just read logic books on my own in my free time for fun like a nerd.

Learning is one of the nice things about TPF.

Isn't formal language a part of natural language? — Banno

I agree with on truth, or at least that's basically been an intuition that my other argument in the other logic thread relies upon, and I'm suspicious of substitution with respect to natural language -- it has more boundaries to it than we'd formally expect. That's why I conceded the point to @TonesInDeepFreeze about ironic statements, in natural language, don't fit the form of the OP.

@Srap Tasmaner -- My introduction to propositional logic and set theory came from a math class, so I do think there's some overlap between math and logic. What makes me hesitate to reduce logic to math has more to do with thinking about informal logic as still a part of logic, even though it doesn't behave in the same manner as formal logic -- at least by my consideration. I can understand a reductio without a formalization of it, and it always seems to me that that underlying, vague intuition of reasoning is basically what we check our formalisms against, in particular circumstances.

Oh, nitpick away. I don't pretend to have a mastery here -- just an interested person who doesn't mind being corrected.

So "P → Q" can be read as "P is contained within Q", and it makes sense of material implication because P can be empty set, which is a member of every set.

Okay. I was twisting things around with probability because of the example, but they're not related.

I flip these values accidentally in my mind all the time. I could just be confusing myself. When stating it in terms of probability space my thought is that we can look at A and its negation as a probability space -- say a quarter that's fair has a 50 percent chance to land heads, and since there is only one other possibility (we could call it "Not-heads") we can deduce that not-heads' probability "is contained within", i.e. determined by, the probability of Heads.

Sort of thinking about future events in analogue to the bag of different colored marbles -- George is late has 99 white marbles, George is on time has 15 red marbles, and George doesn't show up is 1 black marble.

I find the visualization helpful. We're just doing Venn diagram stuff here. — Srap Tasmaner

Yes that's very helpful, thanks. I was getting lost in the idea of a probability space and how that relates to "contains in", but the visualization makes it quite literal and easy to comprehend.

So going back to

Ask yourself this: would "George will not open tomorrow" be a good inference? And we all know the answer: deductively, no, not at all; inductively, maybe, maybe not. But it's still a good bet, and you'll make more money than you lose if you always bet against George showing up, if you can find anyone to take the other side.

"George shows up" may be a non-empty set, but it is a negligible subset of "George is scheduled to open", so the complement of "George shows up" within "George is scheduled", is nearly coextensive with "George is scheduled". That is, the probability that any given instance of "George is scheduled" falls within "George does not show up" is very high. — Srap Tasmaner

The probability space here is the set of possible outcomes we've thus far observed and, under the assumption that the distribution over that probability space has not changed -- George hasn't converted to the church of punctuality, giving us a reason to believe the probability space has changed -- the good bet is he'll show up late.

EDIT:

Wrapping that back to the OP, now...

A -> ~A
A
Therefore ~A

The (probability) space of A is entirely contained within the (probability) space of not-A.


Well, of course it is. That's almost a restatement of the probability of P v ~P equals 1.


Not sure where I'm going with this, just thinking out loud more than anything.

https://web.stanford.edu/class/cs103/tools/truth-table-tool/

Thanks :).



This is a meaty post.

Almost too much for me :D -- one thing that's interesting is your reduction of material implication to set theory. I'm not sure how to understand that, really -- if the moon is made of green cheese then 2 + 2 = 4. That's the paradox, and we have to accept that the implication is true. How is it that the empirical falsehood, which seems to rely upon probablity rather than deductive inference, is contained in "2 + 2 = 4"?

I'm intentionally throwing wrenches/spanners here so kindly tell me to 'ef off if it's uninteresting or simply misinformed. I'm starting to feel the tread in this conversation where I'm in too deep over my head.

I remember enjoying it -- it's something of a lament and criticism of disenchantment as the one true knowledge. The plant studies stuck with me as an interesting bit because it seemed like such an easy thing to test, empirically, so you didn't even need to care if the idea was silly -- it got along with my general attitude of anarchy towards scientific knowledge.

When I say A sarcastically, I mean ~A, of course. And that is equivalent with A -> ~A. But I don't present it like that at all. I just say A and there is an implicit premise that when I say it, I mean its negation. I don't know how even modal logic could capture that. Or maybe, I am saying that A is true in an alternative world and false in the actual world, but even that seems far-flung.

Getting back to Srap Tasmaner, he's looking for a use of A -> ~A in everyday discourse. I don't think your proposal works, since people don't acutually say things of the form A -> ~A to convey sarcasm. It seems to me that you followed an interesting idea, but it doesn't do the job here. — TonesInDeepFreeze

Fair enough. I agree it doesn't fit the form -- people don't actually say the implication, it's only equivalent to the implication (but so are so many other formulas...).

True. The one time he did we all know it's because his wife grilled him the night before and he felt guilty but ever since the divorce it's been same old George: He only opens when he feels worried and ever since the divorce the man is never worried!

:D

This seems the easier approach to making sense of A -> ~A in a commonsense setting.

You mean substitute "George will open the store" with "If George will open the store then George will not open the store"?

Why make that substitution? I don't see how that is what the ironic speaker is saying. — Moliere

I can give you a story that comes to mind in which I'd assert something like that -- say I'm commiserating with a coworkers frustration about George not being as reliable as we'd like, even though he's a good enough fellow.

The substitution is there only because the OP starts with A -> ~A and asks for validity, so substitution seems to work as a model for the sarcastic talking. I agree that the person speaking sarcastically does not in any way mean these logical implications, though -- it's only an interpretation of everyday speech to try and give some sense to the original question that's not purely formal.

What is the conditional? — TonesInDeepFreeze

A = "George is going to open the store tomorrow"

So, by substitution:

George is going to open the store tomorrow implies George is not going to open the store tomorrow.

If it turns out, extensionally at least, that George opens the store tomorrow then the implication is false -- and I don't think that sarcasm means to invoke material implication, but this seems an example of everyday communication which material implication seems to capture. George opens the store tomorrow, so tho I state one and believe another it turns out that my belief is false and the assertion true (attempting to use your intensional definition here) -- so the implication turns out to be false. I'm thinking more baby logic here:

A -> ~A

Put it in a truth table and if A is true then the implication is false.

I like the idea of an irony operator :D

What I want is an example where this conditional is actually false, but is relied upon as a sneaky way of just asserting ~A. — Srap Tasmaner

A thought I have is sarcasm, but in the context of asserting a falsehood mistakenly.

So I can sarcastically say "George is going to open the store tomorrow" to mean that George is usually late and we are the ones who open the store on the regular. But if George opens the store tomorrow then the conditional was false because I asserted A to imply not-A, but in fact A is true so the conditional is false.

I haven't seen anyone define any of the positions in a clear and non-vacuous way, much less go on to argue in favor of one or another. — Leontiskos

If dialethism is true then pluralism is true.
Dialethism is true as it resolves the liar's paradox in a clear, non-vacuous way.
Therefore, pluralism is true.

Of course LNC and LEM are different. — TonesInDeepFreeze

Heh. Well, I'd expect that from you :D -- I'm not sure that the differences between them are at the level of "of course" for the participants here.

I can't find the post about the liar paradox; my own point was merely the technical one that the contradiction of the liar does not require LEM.

I agree. I don't think the liar's needs anything technical at all. For thems who prefer utterances we can frame it in plain language as "I am telling a falsehood right now"

Implications of this theory are far-reaching. It suggests that intelligent species, faced with existential threats, will inevitably develop coping mechanisms. — ContextThinker

I want to attack the notion that this idea is an evolutionary adaptation.

All species develop coping mechanisms, from viruses to us. Some of the species die in the process of natural selection and thems who chose the environmentally-conditioned adaptations which effect reproduction positively for the species are thems who developed the coping mechanisms that passed on.

But evolution has nothing to do with religion, in my opinion. Once we acquired the ability to speak language -- well, I think that's more in the ballpark of why religion exists. But it's pretty hazy since it's not like any of us were there at the dawn of talking/writing.