The preference angle can ground the choice between the woman and the cyst. — Banno

Victor Frankl said that you can't compare one person's pain to another's. The pain in any being takes up all the available space.

The preference angle is just mumbo jumbo because for some odd reason one is resistant to saying "I value the mother's life over that of the fetus.". Just say it. You don't need to defend it. It's how you feel.

Likewise, your choice of calling it a cyst when I've already told you that most aborted material has a beating heart, is for what? Just call it a fetus. That's what it is.

:up: mañana

A cyst is just a cyst. — Banno

You know only part of the blastocyst becomes a fetus. The rest is a protective covering and the placenta.

But you can decide for yourself. — Banno

Right. The preferences-angle is BS. People decide for their own reasons.

Ok, if that is so, should we prefer the preferences of a cyst to those of Amber Thurman? — Banno

Why not?

Statements of opinion aren't true or false
— frank
Why not? "Frank thinks statements of opinion are neither true nor false" seems to be true... — Banno

That was in the PhilosophyNow article. We could do a read through.

Perhaps the logical monist says "this is how you ought think", the nihilist says "It doesn't matter what you think", the pluralist, "this is how we show if your thinking is consistent" — Banno

Russell mentioned that logical nihilists don't tend to measure up to the name. They do recognize the application of something like logical laws.

Nor does it have preferences — Banno

All life demonstrates preferences.

It looks like logical nihilism is going to hinge on the Liar.
— frank
I don't see why you would think that. — Banno

That's just the first example given of shooting down so-called laws of logic in G Russell's article.. The PhilosophyNow article focuses on what strikes me as word games. Statements of opinion aren't true or false, so bivalence is defied?

Logical monism claim that there are logical laws that hold in absolutely all case. Logical pluralism claims that no law holds in absolutely all cases. Logical nihilism holds that logical laws do not hold in any case. — Banno

Does the situation compare to moral nihilism? A logical nihilist recognizes that there are logical laws in play, but they hold by fiat? So there may not be a huge difference between nihilism and pluralism?

It just comes down to power. Where abortion is illegal, there are few doctors who will do it because they don't want to be punished.

If you want abortion to be legal, you'll have to get yourself some power. Logical arguments have zero to do with it.

Under Roman rule there were revolts to establish a free independent Jewish state — BitconnectCarlos

And that worked out really well for the Jews.

okey dokey

I feel so refreshed. Where's the paypal button?

@BannoQuick question:

It looks like logical nihilism is going to hinge on the Liar. It's supposed to be violating the LONC? I haven't seen other examples.

Am I understanding that correctly?

It is not necessarily caused directly by global warming. — Agree-to-Disagree

That's true. This is why they use computer models to discover anthropogenic climate change. Pointing to today's weather is not the way to convince non-believers because we're always just one volcano away from cool weather than can last a decade.

Focus on the computer models. Not this year's weather.

Maybe time will tell.. — AmadeusD

yep

I suspect that the difference of opinion between Leontiskos and I is that he thinks of logic as an account of how we either do, or perhaps how we ought, to think. — Banno

With that guy, I'll note that

at time 1, he's opposed to x, while being as insulting as possible
at time 2, he's in favor of x, while being as insulting as possible.

There's no explanation for why he changed his mind. Something's up with dude.

So far as my previous posts on this page, I was making the point that we can talk about our utterances with greater lucidity that about our thoughts, simply because our utterances are public. — Banno

That may be true, but Frege was interested in thoughts. I think comparing and contrasting him to Wittgenstein would be a cool way to examine that.

One of the problems here is that focusing on Frege may give the false impression that his account remains paradigmatic for modern logic. It isn't. — Banno

That's fine. Frege remains fascinating. If I found a good article comparing and contrasting Frege and Witt on the issue of the world (...the world is all that is the case) would you be interested?

sock puppet?

Again I ask what motivates a person to go on like this? — John McMannis

Why not focus on the topic rather than on psychoanalysis?

Kuwait has been in the news recently because of the record temperature recorded from Kuwait's Mitribah weather station. A "staggering" 54°C. — Agree-to-Disagree

The last time I was in Las Vegas it was 52 C. So what?

Global-warming/climate change (GW/CC) fanatics have gone wild claiming that Kuwait has become "almost unlivable". In truth it has nearly always been "almost unlivable". — Agree-to-Disagree

I haven't heard anyone to talking about Kuwait. :razz:

Why did you bring up Kuwait?

Both aspects of this reply are awesome. — AmadeusD

:cool:

Leontiskos is the guy who was just a few days ago forcefully insisting that Frege did not philosophize in terms of thoughts. Then he said maybe Frege did in his early years, but transitioned to something else later own. :lol:

The coolest results I get from using AI (I use Wonder) come from giving it an image to start with. If I wanted a three story building, I'd give it an image of a three story building and then see what it does with it. I go through lot of iterations and sometimes feed its own images back into it.

HIlarious he's a mod. — AmadeusD

She's not a mod anymore.

See the SEP article on states of affairs.

"Thoughts can be the contents of propositional attitudes. When one says “There are three things that everyone who works on elementary physics believes”, one quantifies over things that everyone working in elementary physics believes: thoughts (see Chisholm 1970: 19). Thoughts are also truth-value bearers (“There are three truths that everyone who works in elementary physics believes”). How are thoughts related to states of affairs? For instance, how is the thought that Socrates is wise related to the state of affairs Socrates’ being wise?

"Prima facie,thoughts are one thing, states of affairs another. Thoughts and states of affairs differ in their individuation and existence conditions.

"Individuation-conditions: Thoughts are supposed to be the contents of propositional attitudes like belief and desire. Let “j” be shorthand for a propositional attitude verb (“desire”, “believe” etc). If one can j that p without eo ipso j-ing that q (and vice versa), the contents that p and that q are different. Now I can believe, for instance, that Hesperus shines without believing that Phosphorus shines. Hence, if thoughts are the contents of propositional attitudes, the thought that Hesperus shines is different from the thought that Phosphorus shines. If the thought that Hesperus shines is different from the thought that Phosphorus shines,thoughts cannot be logical complexes whose constituents are particulars and properties. Following Frege, many philosophers therefore take thoughts to be complexes that are built up out of modes of presentation. Here “thoughts” only refers to such complexes. Since there are different modes of presentation of the same particular (property), there can be different thoughts that concern or are about the same particulars and properties. In contrast, Hesperus’s shining and Phosphorus’s shining are the same state of affairs, namely the complex that contains only the planet Venus and the property of shining. We will see in section 2.4 that not all philosophers follow Frege’s lead. If one has arguments for a coarse-grained individuation of the objects of belief, states of affairs may serve as contents of propositional attitudes."

I think that rather than worry over this issue, this thread might benefit from comparing Frege's view of the world to Wittgenstein's. Or maybe that would be a different thread. But it would more interesting to me. It's a pretty fascinating topic.

In a multicultural society how much is it incumbent to teach the subgroup the dominant customs? — schopenhauer1

I live in a capitalist society, so that's something that money settles. Some rappers are billionaires, right?

Can that contribute to self-fulfilling prophecy? Is that itself treating others as having less agency? — schopenhauer1

It's possible. One source of counter message is in forms of Christianity that teach having faith in yourself. They focus on how to avoid the pitfall of pity. Someone may think they're helping you with their pity when it's actually destructive.

It seems to be the case this is what happens in multicultural societies or when dealing cross-culturally. If let's say a subgroup individual does X "bad" action, we say, "Oh he is a product of that culture". If the dominant culture individual does X "bad" action, we say "He made a bad decision" or at the least make it much more atomized (it's his family at the most, or his own personal background or life story, not necessarily cultural). — schopenhauer1

It would be cool if everyone could be looked at as individuals. But it's also true that some people have challenges where others have privilege, you know?

For the dominant group, it is more seemingly free willed — schopenhauer1

Is it? Are they better at taking responsibility for their actions?

I think you can take any behavior and analyze it out for influences from the most poignantly personal all the way out to the nature of life.

One thing I remember from time to time is the comment from a friend who was listening to me explaining race relations. He said "You know you're just trying to understand yourself.". I was stunned, but I knew it was true.

Quite overwhelmingly, professional philosophers are in favour of abortion on demand in the first trimester. — Banno

Intellectuals advise, but they rarely govern.

The assignment of the truth-value is done by judgment, — Srap Tasmaner

If you're a realist, you wouldn't say truth is "assigned.". You would just say some propositions are true and some are false. Some have never been expressed and some probably never will be.

But saying it has a right to live because it has human DNA isn't really any less arbirtray than saying a child has a right to live after birth, but not before. — Echarmion

So you're admitting that the dividing line is arbitrary?

Alisha was slightly pregnant, slightly wrong to abort it, slightly grieved, and overjoyed to get in with her life.

Abortion is nothing like infanticide or child sacrifice. — Michael

But one of the challenges the pro-choice advocate faces is explaining the dividing line between killable and not-killable. When and how does that transition take place?

Excuses. The failure of the USA to correct the decline of its democratic institutions is a global tragedy. — Banno

But we never had a nuclear war. That's a win!

Given that this is around sixty percent of your population, why is it that they do not have "the power"?

Or is yours a failed democracy. — Banno

It takes a lot of energy to amend the Constitution. That's as it should be.

Have a look down the page from Pew Research linked above. Opposition to abortion is overwhelmingly from white evangelical protestant republican conservatives. — Banno

They gang together, yes. That's how democracy works. An issue is powerful to the extent it gets people to put aside their differences and join forces. Republicans have been pretty good at that for several decades. These days, not so much.

The issue is now decided at the state level. After years of supporting Roe V Wade, I finally came around to realizing that was the wrong way to do it. When pro-choice people have enough power to create an amendment, then it will be a federal issue. Maybe in a couple of generations.

There are plenty of cysts in the female reproductive system. A fetus is just another one of those. And if a cyst doesn’t resolve on its own, we remove them. That’s just rationality at work. — NOS4A2

I think there might be a cyst in your skull. :razz:

Seriously? So you have given up on rationality. — Banno

Rationality is a matter of fashion.

See you on the ramparts. — Banno

Do you even own a weapon of any kind?