A hole is the surroundingness of a doughnut; a row is the alignment of ducks; a marriage is the joining of two matched parts. If you treat the doughnut as single material object, then the hole is the way the nut relates to itself. Or the way Pacman's world joins up. Or the way the ground of Kimberly relates to itself. — unenlightened

So you would say that there is a hole in pacman's world, because the hole is a relation -- one which changes description depending on the donut. Do I understand you correctly?

I don't know where predicates and variables sit though they seem like linguistic affairs...

They are! But the approach I'm using puts emphasis on linguistic affairs :D

If we can truthfully predicate of some subject, then we are justified in inferring that there is such a subject. So the form of the statement is very important. Now, clearly we understand that there are things like gerunds and such, so we have to have a way of understanding subjects that aren't actually existent things. For that we analyze ordinary expressions into a clear statement.

Hence why I was asking about the relation you'd posit specifically -- but I think you're using a different idiom.

Also, I think it's important to note here that there are some statements which do not predicate of a subject -- statements that deal with relationship between entities are often like this. So the hole is in Kimberley. I know I started out like that, but I was being sloppy. I should have dealt with a property of the hole, i.e., its surface area, rather than its relationship -- though its curiosity is just that it is, as @fishfry pointed out from the SEP, a parasitic entity that does not exist unless there is something like "Kimberley" to be a hole within.

So it is quantification which indicates existence. We quantify over a predicate, and if said quantification produces a true statement, then we can say the subject of said sentence exists.

Also, this is why I tried to translate sentences into philosophically clear ones. That's all I mean by analysis here.

Incidentally, the topology of Pacman's world is rather odd, the corners all join together as if they were all bent round as in a sphere, but the way they join up is backwards, as if one were on the inside of the sphere. Hence the hole/no hole that doesn't know whether it runs one way or the other.

I think that might just be an artifact of it being a donut designed for 2-dimenional space. Like, if you imagine pulling pac-man's world into our space where the edges of the screen are are where they reconnect -- and that corner is just the place where we opened up the donut in two direction -- but we could have chosen to cut in the middle of the screen, so the speak -- it just would be very confusing for the player to play then :D

Except of course that's not a donut. It's a picture of a representation of one in two-dimensional space, while we know a donut is a three-dimensional object with a hole — Benkei

Do we? How's that?

If we know it by definition, then we're simply defining what we mean -- it's a stipulation. Which can work if we have something else we're arguing about, but when that's the very assertion under dispute I dare say we are begging the question.

Ahh, here we go -- an example of a donut without a hole that is less abstract:

Imagine you're in the middle of the page of this graph paper. Choose any direction to go in, and go straight. When you reach the edge of the paper, place yourself on the opposite side of the page. Continue walking.

This, topologically, is identical to a donut. It's not too hard to imagine either -- just think about what a donut looks like, and then mentally cut through exactly once so that you don't split it in half -- you'll have a cylindrical shape. Then cut down one edge of the cylinder and spread out the cylinder -- you'll have a plane.


A donut is a plane which is connected in the manner I'm describing. Were space donut shaped, rather than what we happen to experience, then this would just be common sense -- to get back to where you started all you need to do is keep walking.

In a way our Earth isn't so far off, it's just so large that we don't notice that it's actually spherical.

Now, if we lived on a donut within the space with which we were familiar -- empirical space as we know it -- we'd be able to look up, sometimes, and see the other side of the donut. But that's a donut in space as we know it, rather than a donut shaped space without a hole.


(EDIT: Just to avoid confusion, the holes in the paper are not what I'm talking about here)

Is Africa yellow just because the sand in the Sahara is? I really have trouble finding what your argument is so far. The immediate matter surrounding a hole is clearly not a hole. — Benkei

Hrrm, probably just misreading you. I'll try and restate in a different way to see if it clicks:


The hole is in Kimberley, South Africa.

Kimberley is 164.3 km2

The big hole is 0.17 km2


Let's just say that "Kimberley" designates the matter surrounding the hole. So Kimberley is clearly not the hole. And we can truthfully predicate of Kimberley that it is 164.3 km square, whereas we can truthfully predicate of the big hole -- its surface -- that it is 0.17 km2.

So, there are two different properties between the surrounding matter and the hole. We might go so far as to say that Kimberley is enholed, thereby indicating that there is a property of Kimberley, but that wouldn't change the fact that we can truthfully predicate of the hole a size different from Kimberley -- thereby indicating that they have different properties, and are separate from one another.

This all follows from the notion of "to be" I opened with.

If we can quantify over a predicate and create a true statement from said quantification, then whatever said statement uses to bound the variable exists -- in this case, the hole.

I think the question is, do properties exist? If so, then holes exist. I'm not committed one way or another because it depends on language use and definitions. Holes are a specific topographic feature such that an area without solid matter is surrounded by solid matter. If defined that way, the question arises do circles and squares exist? It's not particular to holes unless you insist holes ought to be defined by the absence of something. I don't like such a definition though, because I can't take a hole out of the context of the matter defining it because if I remove that matter I'm left with nothing. And this is the same with a square, if you take away the matter, I'm not left with a square but if I remove the square, I still have (amorphous) matter. — Benkei

I agree that if you take away the matter the hole does not exist -- were an asteroid to smash the Earth apart then, within the reference frame of the sun, the hole in Kimberley, South Africa will not be floating there in space without Kimberley being there.

I am not defining holes or arguing from definition in the sense of providing necessary and sufficient conditions -- I am using an ostensive definition, instead. This is a hole! So in your case we'll have to talk about pipes and 3/4" holes, or indentations in place of holes ;).

I am skeptical of holes being a typographic feature, however, given the ability to represent a donut on a plane without a hole in a topologically identical manner.

Cool.

I think we're closer in belief, then, actually -- and I misgrouped you.

I am of the belief that holes exist. It seems less queer to me than the alternative.

Keeping with my idiom, you'd simply agree that the hole exists, and that relations have a reality.

One thing that's queer about relations is that I wonder what can be predicated of them?

At least, this is where I'd be stuck in how I started...

Also, I want to know -- what is the relationship involved?


The difference between us, right now at least, is that I think there is a hole and some background material, and there is a relationship between these two entities -- and I posit an entity because shape is not adequate to address the hole in a donut, as a donut shape can be represented without a hole.

So I would say "The hole is in the ground", where the relationship is indicated by "in" -- not that this indicates being, since we're talking about relationships here, and I am not quantifying over a predicate here.


EDIT: Also, I want to note that I'm open to other approaches with respect to "to be" -- while I'm using a notion of Quine, I'd like other notions put forward and used to analyze or have a better understanding of holes. If you have such a notion aside from quantification I'm all ears.

This seems like a non-issue. Materialists are willing to accept that there is such a thing as space between two objects. It's an uncharitable interpretation of materialism to argue that they must commit to the space between two objects itself being some third material object. — Michael

Whoops! I missed you in my responses.

I don't think I'm arguing that. What I'm arguing is that the materialist is committed to the hole not existing -- it's the ground that exists arranged hole-wise.

Well, obviously different properties will be measured differently. Maybe I should've been clearer: why should we not treat the shape of an object as a property as we do for colour and texture? — Benkei

Well, because we can see the hole, and the hole has properties such as depth, width, and location -- and those properties differ from the properties of the ground, since the ground spreads out, and is certainly not shaped like a hole anywhere else. Would we call Africa a hole just because this one hole exists?

It's bloody ducks in a row all over again. 3 ducks exist and when you get them lined up, there's a row. Ducks in a row, not ducks and a row. Stuff exists and arrangements of stuff exist. a hole or a row is an arrangement. Or a relation, rather like a punch is a relation between a fist and a chin. If you're not sure that punches exist, get your wife or friend to do the experiment with their fist and your chin.

It might turn out that stuff is an arrangement of weirdness (another arrangement). Try not to panic. — unenlightened

I think there's a difference here... I agree that relation is important, but I'd say the relation is between the donut (a shape) and the hole. A donut can be represented, topologically, in a two dimensional space that wraps around -- if you imagine walking on a piece of paper, as you get to the top you immediately appear on the bottom. Were you in such a space -- which we don't empirically witness in our world, but is easily imaginable -- there would be no hole, but the shape would remain the same -- at least from a topological perspective.

But there be a hole I see, and I certainly don't deny its existence -- only noting that its existence is curious.

This Quinean criterion for
'ontological commitment' only refers to objects that 'exist' within given discourses (e.g. geometry, topology, etc) and does not refer to matters of fact (e.g. donut & sphincters) — 180 Proof

Now you're tempting me with my true bait -- exegesis.

But I'm going to use all of my willpower and not debate the meaning of Quine -- and just note that I'm using some of his words as a conceptual jumping off point, not exploring a consequence or a reductio of his philosophy.

To my understanding, at least, "to be is to be the value of a variable" is in reference to objects and predicates. Insofar that you can truthfully predicate of some object therein will you find what it means to exist.

So if "The hole is 3/4 of an inch in diameter" is true, then we can certainly conclude that there exists such a hole.

No Heidegger yet? Cf "The Thing" and his discussion of just what a jug is. — tim wood

Welllll... did he ever really propose what it means to be? He kind of got stuck in his own interpretative circle looking for how one could possibly understand the very question "what is the meaning of being?" -- how on Earth would he know if a hole exists? ;)

But by all means, you can be the one to bring in the ontology of Heidegger, rather than Quine, and bring us illumination on the topic. I'd love to read it! That is why I started the thread.

I think I can group @hypericin , @Benkei , @unenlightened together a little with this one response, though I'll give some direct responses below too.

I would interpret you, within the idiom I'm attempting to phrase this in at the moment, as believing that there is no real hole in the ground. Rather, there is the ground, and we predicate of the ground a shape -- in this case a hole. So in ordinary language we say "the hole is deep", but through analysis we'd translate this as "the ground is shaped hole-wise" or something like that. It's clunky to read, but it fits within the framework between subject and predicate.

So in the first we'd formalize as ∃xL(x) ^ (x = "hole"), I think.
And in the second we'd formalize as ~∃(x)L(x) ^ (x = "hole"), and H(x) ^ (x = "ground")

Hopefully I'm doing that right. The important thing, from my perspective, is that you are asserting that there is no such thing as a hole unto itself, but rather, there are material things (the ground) which are placed into a hole-wise relation.


I'll follow up with individual responses, but I want to keep this post general for now just to share where my mind is moving.

Well, color we could say is electromagnetic waves.

Texture strikes me as a little funny, but it's not so in the same way. If I say that a pipe feels smooth, then that is in the predicate position -- thus linguistically indicating that there is something predicated of an object, the pipe.

Hence why I thought you were making an argument about natural language meaning -- that when we say "hole", in the subject position of the sentence, we actually are referring to a property of the pipe, rather than saying the hole itself has a property.

But a hill is made of something -- dirt and rock and such. That's the strange part about holes. (or shadows, too, as has been mentioned -- similar sort of thing going on).


It's not space itself in question, though. It's not a space that's there -- it's a hole!

Would it matter either way?

For what it's worth, I just woke up early.

If language is fine as it is, then "this hole is 3/4 inch in diameter" is true.


Which would indicate, linguistically at least, that "hole" is not a predicate -- but a subject.

So we'd be in the queer position of believing true sentences that refer to things that don't exist if that were the case.

So, as you would have it, when we say something like

"The hole is five feet wide"

if we wanted to be literally rather than metaphorically true we should instead say

"The ground is holey"

?

The creation of analytic/continental philosophy as a historical category definitely escaped me -- I basically had the standard history in my head before reading this, though I would use that history to attempt to demonstrate that there is not a meaningful distinction if the topic happened to come up. This is definitely a new take on that!

I would still say I agree with him, though -- that there should be something driving a philosophy, be it political or moral or something, that isn't just "pure inquiry", given the inability to step out of our political lives. And I would encourage a reorientation to such an approach -- it seems to me that many would see this as giving up on some kind of ideal of the philosopher. But the best philosophers in history were those engaging in contemporary issues. Even Kant had contemporary issues in mind while writing what appears to be a Pure Critical Inquiry that seems entirely a-political.



I wonder how Heidegger fairs, on this account? :D

I guess there is something of this idealization of the philosopher in my own mind, still, since I do enjoy Heidegger even though I find myself nodding along to this article.

Let's go a step further.

If holes exist, then there exists at least one entity which does not have a material basis -- rather, a hole is something of a relational entity that exists because of the shape of material things. Therefore, not everything that exists is material.

So, if we admit holes exist, we must reject materialism.

EDIT: And so the sciences fall to the humble hole, and not the grandiose plans of the religious ;)

True! But surely that's different :D

Or no?

So are rings -- the bit of jewelry we wear on our hands -- holes, in your book?

But when you consider the sense in which holes (or absences) exist, then you're asking a question about their real nature, and that is what seems to me they don't have. — Wayfarer

Yes, this is the sense in which I am asking.

So it's an unexpectedly deep question, I think (although maybe you did expect it!)

I suspected it :D

I heard some philosopher talking about it once, and once they did (i forget who it was....) I began to see the contours of a philosophical puzzle.

Yes I understand that. It's just that I've heard that particular saying before, and I genuinely don't understand it. — fishfry

Oh, it comes from Quine's On What There Is, if you haven't read it. I have a hand-wavey understanding of it in the sense that I've read a bit of and about Quine.

No, I think holes exist, and so do shadows. There are things that exist and that only appear along with more substantial things. Holes and shadows being the two that come to mind. Ontologically parasitic, what a great phrase.

I think holes exist though. I haven't had a chance to read the SEP article yet. But there's too much math around the question of identifying and counting holes for me to doubt their existence. — fishfry

See, for me at least, the mathematical part is a little less convincing. That would mean that holes exist in the same way that numbers do, and I am less confident when it comes to my beliefs about the ontology of abstract objects.

But the things I see, so I believe, exist.

But, like you said, holes are weird in that they are an absence -- there's not really a property of holes, is there? Maybe size, for any individual hole. But you can make a hole out of anything. And it certainly isn't a thing.

I confess I have never understood this in the least. Bound variables are part of symbolic representations, not the things themselves. A cat is the value of a bound variable as in "Exists(x) such that x is a cat," but I find this very unconvincing. The cat is a cat long before there are logicians to invent quantified logic. I just don't understand this kind of thinking. Must be me. A lot of this kind of philosophical discourse just goes right over my head. — fishfry

I'm just leaping from that point, more than anything. Similarly so with the argument I'm presenting -- I think it's an interesting puzzle. I don't mean to dig into Quine.

Is the question whether holes exist? They most definitely do. Mathematically, if you poke a hole in the x-y plane, then loops around the can no longer be contracted to a point. The hole has changed the topology of the plane. Holes are a huge area of study in math. In algebraic topology they try to find clever ways to count the number of holes in an object. Holes are a thing, not just an absence of a thing. — fishfry

Yes, exactly. I'll try to edit it to make that clearer.




It seems you've changed your stance after your exchange with Wayfarer?

So does that mean they don't exist, or do? Philosophically, say.

Harlem
BY LANGSTON HUGHES
What happens to a dream deferred?

Does it dry up
like a raisin in the sun?
Or fester like a sore—
And then run?
Does it stink like rotten meat?
Or crust and sugar over—
like a syrupy sweet?

Maybe it just sags
like a heavy load.

Or does it explode?

I guess I'd just ask if what Langston Hughes is doing with these words gets at the meaning of the poem or sentences. The very structure of the poem, where the sentences are broken up, changes the meaning I'd argue -- try it one for size:

Does it dry up like a raisin the sun?


Compared to:


Does it dry up
like a raisin in the sun?




I have respect for the notion that the use of a sentence is what we should look to in order to determine meaning because it gives me a picture of an investigator, searching for clues, context, things outside the individual sentence -- a speaker, a history, the sentences surrounding it, the physical book or -- in this case -- digital encoding on the poetry foundation's website.

So the picture of meaning I get is one that encourages reading the words and making guesses based upon context, rather than having something in my head, some intensional something.

But perhaps it's still the wrong picture. But if it were the wrong picture, then I'd argue there's a falsity somewhere -- and that truth and meaning ain't strictly pragmatic, even though said theories conveniently solve a lot of philosophical problems.

I don't think I'm following the metaphor.

Or ,maybe I'm getting caught up in the metaphor.

***

I want to say that reason has limits, that philosophy necessitates reason, and so philosophy also has limits. However, I don't know that noting the limits of reason is really the same as twilight in your metaphor, because you seem to be indicating that there's something more to be known when there is no reason -- as if we must, in some sense, block out (or bracket?) reason to know whatever the night or dimmer stars represent in the metaphor.

But then is it really called knowing if it's unreasonable? Or something else?

Or, given that we're thinking about the subject at all, is the very thought really thinkable? Or are we just getting carried away with metaphors? After all, in Plato the light of reason doesn't bare any analogy to the sun, but is in relation to shadows that we perceive. We mistake the shadows for the forms, when the forms are actually behind the appearances, and when we turn to the light(do philosophy) we witness the forms. It's not an astronomical metaphor, as yours is.


What's your metaphor doing for you? What does it illuminate, or ask? What is the night, the small stars? Or is it all just a kind of something that you're not sure of?

Yes, and the interesting bit here, imho, is that we are discussing bacteria. They have no brain, no nervous system. And yet, they learned how to do CRISPR type operations maybe a billion years before a Nobel Prize winning scientist. And so we might claim that intelligence existed long before the evolution of higher life forms — Foghorn

So did the moon learn to smile, or something?

By innocence I don't mean to question your sincerity! Far from it. Only that there's a lot to unpack and while it seems a simple question, it's actually complicated and requires more than a simple answer.

I don't even know what would count as evidence for either physicalism or whatever-else. When it comes to claims like "Everything is. . . ", well... if such a sentence is true, then literally everything that exists counts as evidence for it.

They aren't really the sorts of claims that a strict evidential calculus can decide answers to, since literally everything counts in its favor -- another way to put this that people seem to like is to say they aren't falsifiable, while keeping in mind that this term is interpretable in multiple ways and I'm just meaning it more colloquially here.


I don't know if there's an example of intelligence that must exclude physicalism. But if you don't have a theory of physicalism -- which I don't exactly either -- then wouldn't it be difficult for anyone to come up with an example which counts as either physical or not?

Just something to think about in trading some examples... I'll try to give some to see what rattles around.



Sticking with the idea presented here as a basis for understanding intelligence:

Bacteria defend themselves from viruses by grabbing a bit of DNA from the virus and storing it in the bacteria's own DNA. This allows the bacteria to recognize the virus the next time they see it, and provide the appropriate defensive reaction.

Bacteria are selecting particular information, storing it, and then referencing it as needed. — Foghorn

So bacteria and people do some of the same things. Bacteria and people defend themselves from viruses, bacteria and people recognize viruses, and bacteria and people react to their environments. There is an entity and an environment, and said entity prioritizes itself in some manner over the environment, and intelligence is this capacity to store information and change future behavior in similar circumstances based upon said information.

Minimally speaking we have perception and memory as a bare-minimum for counting things intelligent. The bacteria, upon re-encountering a threat it has met before, will recognize it and defend itself, and this is all pretty well understood in physical terms.

And humans, too, have perception and memory -- among other things, but perhaps these are not counted as "intelligence" per se but are categorized otherwise.

But where are the anti-bodies in the brain that count as our memory of. . .. well, our memory, too, requires emotion, so I think I can claim that emotion must be part of intelligence as we understand it here too -- and that bit is very different from the bacteria. The bacteria's memory is a protein created which will bind to a particular sequence that identifies a threat with a high degree of accuracy. But where are our memories? We presume they are in our brains, somehow created through the bundled up interaction of neurons -- but we certainly don't know how all this works yet, scientifically. SO, at present at least, we're still working on a physicalist understanding of the mind.

At least as far as I understand things. I am by no means an expert, but just a random guy on the internet.

The laws of physics are not a property of any particular thing within reality, but a property of reality itself. These laws are expressed in a seemingly infinite number of varied circumstances. So bouncing a ball might seem to an observer to be an entirely different phenomena than the orbit of a planet, but the same laws govern both.

What if intelligence is like this? What if it's not a property of this or that thing, but a property of reality which is expressed in many different ways in many different circumstances? — Foghorn

What are some of the phenomena you would propose as being governed by this property?

So far I gather you mean primates like ourselves, and bacteria.

But couldn't the activities you specify -- the analysis, recording, reacting to information through genes, etc. -- also just be the activities of life?

Life eats, shits, reproduces, dies. There are different functions a particular organism must perform or fulfill in order to be counted as life.


And it's not like, say, the moon's smile is caused by intelligence.

Can you provide examples of intelligence in operation that can't be explained by physicalist answers? — Tom Storm

That's a meaty question. :D It's also not quite innocent, though.

Wouldn't a person whose against physicalism already consider the uncontroversial examples of intelligence as needing something other than a physicalist answer?

And, similarly so, a physicalist would see examples of intelligence as bolstering their viewpoint -- that clearly these examples are explained by physicalism, or compatible with physicalism.


But you're asking for that example which clearly cannot be explained by physicalism -- something that's necessarily not-physical. And in order to even hope to answer your question with any kind of possibly satisfactory answer I'd have to know what might satisfy you that something is not-physical?

Or, the other way around, what is your physicalism?

I've said as much a long time ago. If it could be proved that moral realism is correct and that the proposition "it is wrong to murder children" is false or even that the proposition "one ought murder children" is true then I still wouldn't murder children. My actions are motivated in part by my wants/feelings and in part by what's pragmatic; they're not motivated by some reasoned understanding that there are something like moral facts. — Michael

I suppose it just depends on the person. The Holy Book is still at least claimed by people as a moral guide, which is certainly more ambiguous than the book of moral propositions, but pretty close in comparison I think. Abraham was already mentioned in this thread, but he was good because he bowed before God's will in faith. I asked the question rhetorically, but it's not too far from what people do sometimes.

Further, I'd say there's a difference between what your actions are motivated by and what is the correct thing to do. Like, one is a psychological fact about you, and the other is just what people should do or something -- and in general I don't think anyone here is espousing some kind of bare-bones Pure Rationalist Being or something. But it's still meaningful to ask if your actions should be so motivated.

After all, there are people motivated by all kinds of things. But that doesn't mean that just because Richard Nixon wanted to lie that Richard Nixon should have lied, even if it were a pragmatic thing.


So moral facts could, for all the lack of motivation to think of morality in these terms, still exist. This is only to say that while you wouldn't change, your refusal to change wouldn't demonstrate that there are no moral facts or that there is such a fact.

Hopefully, given the content of my previous reply, you can make an accurate presumption with regards to my answer. — Cartesian trigger-puppets

Quite the opposite! :D I am lost at times, I'm afraid, but I'm trying to follow along.

I will state what I think I can understand from your post.

It seems to me you're saying whether your believe in moral facts depends upon certain variables whose values change or vary, and depending upon the value of those variables your belief with respect to moral facts also changes. And, if I read you correctly, you're stuck between deciding whether the entities to which moral statements refer are either psychological or in some sense a property that is, at least in some sense, independent of psychological entities.

I want to note that I could not tell you what a fully-functional, internally consistent and subjectively self-contained metaethical theory is, or why it is a desirable end such that it would convince me to use referents as pragmatic truth-makers in the particular manner you're espousing. This is not to say that I am against it, even, but that I am noting where I am not grasping. Honestly I get the sense that I am out of my depth. But if you're still getting something out of replying, then I'll respond in kind.

This is a guess on my part but I'm wondering if your focus on reference is because of me mentioning moral error theory? -- that moral error theory would be incorrect as long as you could identify a way of parsing moral sentences into ones which have a definite reference which are, thereby, truth-evaluable due to their being entities we can check.

Am I right about that?


............................


I take a fact to be a true statement.

A statement is any sentence within our language which follows the form of a proposition. It is this form which makes a statement truth-apt.

Moral statements, then, are sentences that follow the form of a proposition that are also in some way meaningfully related to morals.

By "the form" I only mean the subject-predicate form, where some subject has a predicate attached.

The main predicate that comes to mind here for me is ". . . is wrong" or ". . .is right" -- with any successfully referring name ". . . is wrong" forms a sentence that is both moral and truth-apt.

Keeping things general you may pick any event you feel is not controversial to evaluate with the ". . . is wrong" or ". . . is right" predicate. Whether the analysis is correct is not here interesting.

To me what's interesting is that there's simply an obvious difference between --

Richard Nixon was wrong when he lied
Richard Nixon was right when he lied.
Richard Nixon lied.

And whether the first or the second is true differs from whether the third is true.

Meaning, sure, we can start to parse all this ethical-talk into a logic of truth. But the difference between sentence 3 and sentence 1 or 2 remains, and should even be apparent, regardless of using the same predicate ". . . is true".

For many circumstances it can even be rational for a person to hold either 1 or 2, in spite of them being contradictories, insofar as they at least believe 3.



I guess I'd gauge to see what you feel about there being a difference between these sentences, and whether or not that difference is apparent -- because that's sort of the whole crux right there. If you don't think there's a worthwhile difference then that's where'd I'd be stuck.

I disagree that there are moral facts.

There are two thoughts I can't quite decide between.

Thought 1 was a defense of moral error theory, but I'm not sure if I have anything more to say on that than I've already said in other threads before... (also tempted to fuck around with Moore and the naturalist fallacy)

Thought 2 is to criticize the notion of moral facts from an orthogonal direction -- to say that the framework sort of misses what's more interesting in ethics. I mean, if someone were to point to some moral fact, say in a book of all moral propositions, that said something you disagreed with would you really change your mind? Aren't we committed to our ethics more than we are convinced of them through the evidence? We shouldn't care about what the true moral propositions are, but concern ourselves with how to live a good life -- the good, not the true, is the aim of ethics.

I mean, science is good for me.

But even in the most recent example of its goods, the production of a vaccine, the goods have been distributed unevenly. Looking at the world here, not locally.

Many of the goods of science are like that.




I suspect one would reply to this by saying that this isn't against science as such but rather the current application of science, or to relegate this contention to a specifically political problem.

But I don't think science can be separated from politics. It is a thoroughly political(-economic) entity. It gets by on funding both from the government and the private sector -- so even in a more non-theoretic sense, science really is a political-economic entity!

Uhhh..... dude. 5/10 bucks a month is not a lot for most of us. And regardless of jamal's politics, he's keeping the sight running. So just... decide i guess? The money just keeps the sight up.

I feel like you're getting close to my criticism of rights, in general.

With your ending I suspect we're closer in mind than the language of rights would predict.

My feelings: We should be able to be craven, jealous, etc... because those are human emotions that need to be expressed and felt. Even acted upon.

But, to express my own sentiments, property rights are a bad place to express those sentiments.

I am not a stoic at all. I'm a bad epicurean. I just hope this is an invitation to talk about, as your title says, what is wrong about rights.

cuz I think rights are bullocks. lol. Just so you know where I come from.

Through twitter i got a new pluhar translation of kant's "critique of judgment"

my old copy broke at the A side of "On the Mathematically sublime" and was falling apart.

Gonna prolly start rereading that when i get it.

Kinda makes me wonder if people who just like Kant like to give his books away?

I have not read the replies, but in reply to your initial question...

I suspect that Biden will continue Obama-precedent imperialism.

And it is a bad thing.

The problem with inviting everyone to the table, including the police, the businessman, etc., is that not everyone is effected the same by police targeting black people. The policeman, the businessman, the politician -- those are the people that have been in charge, and we all already know the results of them being in charge.

It seems to me that governors are actually quite concerned with the demonstrations. Hence the curfews and police repression. They wield a big stick, but in doing so they lose more legitimacy in the eyes of the people they serve.

Hence why there have also been concessions in direct response to the rebellion -- to placate the people into going home and returning things to a normal order. But the concessions so far haven't been structural changes -- they have been the sorts of things which the government should have already done, if it were applying the law fairly: indicting the police officers on criminal charges.

As small a victory as that is -- who really wants to have to destroy businesses and loot them just to make the state do their job every damn time a cop kills someone unjustifiably? That is madness. -- there are structural changes which as being brought up by black-led organizations. After all, unless you plan on using the stick, these organizations are likely the ones that can placate the crowd without using the stick.

It seems to me that it'd be better to implement those as concessions if they want everyone to return home.

Heh, it's ok. It's just the myth handed down that needs to be dispelled. No need to feel like you need to know the myths of other countries that should go away anyways. :D

My impression is that alot of Americans think that black issues came to an end after reconstruction and it's been more or less hunky dory ever since. What say the Americans here? — StreetlightX

I'd say the school book story is that after MLK racism was solved, more or less.

That has nothing to do with the fact of systematic racism. Just because an officer is black that doesn't mean he's not an officer. The race of the police officer doesn't matter for the claim that there is systematic racism -- the race of those effected by the criminal justice system does. And that is disproportionate.

One study stripping away history and using statistical methods on a database covering a single year while denying the "benchmark method" because of a supposed assumption does not throw doubt on the whole claim of "systematic racism" among police shootings, especially when said database is primarily focused on fatal shootings alone, when a gun isn't the only method police use to kill.

I'd say this is cherry picking. Maybe something interesting in there, but I can play that game too by traveling down your articles citations, which I did take a gander at, but figured it was better to just point out what it is we're doing.

is there "systematic racism," absolutely not — Sam26

One can affirm each instance that goes to support the notion that there's systematic racism in the country, and yet deny the inference at the end of it all.

What would motivate such a denial?

It's not like George Floyd's case is unique in the most important way for a belief in systematic racism -- that he was killed when he should not have been killed because he was black. And it's not just the unjust and racialized treatment of the criminal justice system to supports the notion. It's a social fact -- so we don't need to look into the intents of individual officers or ideologies propogated, though those are bound to also be there. But we don't need to. We need only look at the social treatment of blacks vs. whites in the United States, and the inference is supported. At the very minimum we cannot just declare that there is absolutly no systematic racism, like it's a fairy tale to be dismissed and disgusted with.