I don't know why you're asking that question.

So... you're referencing an outside "official" source? So it IS okay to do that for this conversation then? Please clarify that for me - are outside sources relevant?

Disagreemnts about how words are defined and used CAN'T be settled withohut reference to outside sources. Words are socially constructed - if everyone tomorrow decided that they're going to use the word "watermelon" to refer to headphones, then... that's what it refers to, from that point on.

When you say "If you deny that standard meaning, then you are denying the general principle of linguistic semantics", that cant be settled by you and I without reference to outside sources. YOU don't define the word "therefore" for everyone else, YOU don't define the "standard" for everyone else, and neither do I.

The "standard meaning" of a term can only be confirmed or denied by references to outside sources. That's what "standard" kinda means - it's a popularity contest, essentially. How am I supposed to prove something's popular without being able to point you to any evidence of its popularity?

YOU said he's using it in the non-standard way, so perhaps you can show me by example - how can you prove that his use is non-standard, without referencing outside sources?

double post

Right, so like I said, I've opposed many points, which of my oppositions are you interested in at the moment?

Is it about the word 'therefore'? Is it about denying the antecedent?

I have opposed many points of yours, I just want to make sure I understand which one you mean right now.

which point specifically? The point about the chronology of therefore?

language is an institution. You said he's going against the standard use of the word - referencing sources that use the words in the way he described is EXACTLY the sort of thing that's pertinent to settle the issue

I could invent my own sentence with "therefore" but without reference to an institution, you're just as likely to say "you just made that sentence up and it's stupid". If I reference an institution, that counter doesn't hold.

References to institutions are there to make it clear that the things I'm saying aren't just invented in my own head. If you had a reference to an institution for denying the Antecedent, for example, that would signal to me that you didn't invent it in your own head, but that a slew of respectable thinkers share your view.

I have. I've explained everything. Happy to explain it again without reference to institutions.

I'm not asking you to argue with me, I'm asking you not to straw man what Fire said. Instead of finding yet a new way to cop out, you might say something like "you're right, the quote in my post is not what he said, my mistake". If there's anything resembling intellectual integrity in there, I believe you can do it

"I am wet, therefore I swim." doesn't make sense — Corvus

Read the first line of his post again, and see the strawman you created.

I swim, therefore I am wet. — Fire Ologist

No need to invent your own quotes

I don't think souls add anything to the conversation at all, because souls, if they exist, still evolve over time in a semi-predictable way, they apparently share the same direction of flow of time as the physical world, and thus they are still either deterministic or maybe have a bit of randomness sprinkled in.

Which leaves us the same place we were before souls were introduced to the conversation: either we exist in a deterministic system, or we exist in a system that's partially rule-based and partially random. That's true with or without souls.

You said people can't be culpable if determinism is true, which makes me think that you think that people can be culpable maybe if determinism isn't true - which to me reads like "people can be culpable if there's some randomness".

This is what I'm trying to explore - can randomness add culpability? Full disclosure, I do not believe it can.

Therefore it has implications of chronology and cause and effect transformation for the antecedent being the past, or cause, and the descendant to imply the result, consequence and effect.

If you deny that standard meaning, then you are denying the general principle of linguistic semantics.  And that is what you have done to mislead the argument and further present the nonsense. — Corvus

I'm pleased that this is being spelled out explicitly. I can assure you, most people on this forum don't share your view on this, most philosophers in general don't, most logicians don't. "Therefore" doesn't have the chronological relationship you think it has - it CAN flow in that direction, but the chronology can flow in the other direction as well.

https://www.csus.edu/indiv/m/mcvickerb/problem_solving/logic/simple_logic_form.htm#:~:text=The%20first%20example&text=All%20rainy%20days%20(A)%20are,a%20cloudy%20day%20(B).

The two top examples on this page from California State University show a reversed chronology, where A therefore B involves a B that happened before A. (The second example might be debatable, the first less so)

Bylaw is not denying basic language or logic, you are.

What's the alternative to determinism to you? Is it just some degree of randomness sprinkled in? Like some visions of quantum mechanics suggest?

I don't know, I wouldn't describe myself as a "hard determinist". What do you think the implications are?

I don't take it for granted that determinism means you shouldn't hold someone culpable. That's because the alternative to determinism, to me, seems to be randomness, and I don't think randomness can add culpability

how is it different?

If I ask the question, "Who should we as a society hold culpable", then it what way is that different from the question "Who is actually culpable?"

I guess I'm not understanding exactly what "actual culpability" is here, if it's different from that. Those two questions seem like they always have the same answer, to me.

Does it have meaning if the universe has genuine randomness?

Moral culpability really, as far as I can see, takes two forms:

Internal culpability, which is to say feelings of responsibility and obligation to behave correctly, feelings of guilt or shame to not behave incorrectly, all of the things inside of you that make you want to behave in a moral way.

External culpability, which means people holding you accountable for what you do (usually in the form of negative consequences for undesirable behaviour).

So "who is morally culpable?" could be asked from both perspectives. A lion would not feel guilty for eating a human child, so they lion is clearly not culpable in the internal sense (though there may be other things in a lions life that it does feel culpable for, for all I know).

But I think the op means mostly in the second sense, and can be rephrased as "who should we add a society hold to be morally culpable?" Is that right?

I am not qualified to confirm or debate with you if Jesus called himself God in his lifetime, or confirm what most biblical textual scholars would think about that statement. I do know that Bart Ehrman writes a lot, and included in those writings are his reasons for thinking what he thinks. Before you take a conspiratorial view, I would urge you first to try to understand why he thinks what he thinks, if you care to.

I think that if you want to read Bart Ehrman's thoughts on the Bible or Jesus, you should do so *not with the understanding that he's going to tell you the unambiguous truth about Jesus*, but instead that he's going to *tell you some interesting perspective on Jesus, based on connections you maybe hadn't considered before*.

Bart Ehrman isn't communicating this stuff as the be-all end-all truth, he is studying the texts deeply, in the original Greek often enough, to find out intereting things to question or to say. Some of his evidence for his ideas is undoubtedly going to be flimsy. It's an invitation to question certain things and look for evidence in interesting ways - if you don't want to accept that invitation, because that party doesn't seem very fun to you, then... don't. You don't have to go to that party, reject the invitation.

He says interesting things, he finds interesting lines of skepticism, interesting sequences of evidence for speculative ideas - if that sort of thing doesn't interest you, that's okay.

Ehrman is one of the top biblical scholars (biblical historians?) and he tows pretty mainline, well-researched positions so I don't think his views are particularly controversial or should be treated as prima facie wrong. I think it's possible that his views are being misrepresented here.

Really? I am familiar with him largely through his name being synonymous with a sort of liberal "debunking" of the Scriptures. — Count Timothy von Icarus

There's 2 Bart Ehrmans. There's the Bart Ehrman that literally writes textbooks that people who study Christianity in respected universities frequently read, and then there's the Bart Ehrman that writes books for the public about the Bible and about jesus from a slightly more speculative (but still evidence and reason based) perspective.

The latter Bart Ehrman and the former Bart Ehrman share all the same beliefs, the latter one is just a little more liberal about which beliefs of his he's willing to publish.

I don't actually think you're a twat. Believe it or not, people disagreeing with me isn't inherently something that bothers me. I didn't fall out with corvus because he disagreed with me. If you're a bit of a twat, it's only because it took me so much effort to get you to answer a completely pertinent question - I like clarity and open honesty in these conversations. That really matters to me.

I don't know that I NEED an absolute foundation anyway. I don't agree with the cogito because I NEED to agree with the cogito. I agree with it because I read it and it resonates as truthful. Descartes ran a thought experiment where he doubted everything he could doubt, and then struggled to doubt two final things: he thinks, and he exists. He could doubt physical reality, he could doubt the existence of other minds, he could doubt the existence of gods or dogs or whatever, but if he doubted thought, the wall he hits is that that doubt is a thought...

I don't NEED to be 100% certain of cogito. I would be content being 99.99...% certain of cogito (or less, if there was a reason to be less).

Perhaps it's an intuition, but it's a unique intuition because there are multiple layers of reflexivity in it. It's a self referential intuition, because it's an intuition about the very things that allow you to have intuitions. It's a thought about thought itself. It's existence questioning it's own existence. It gives it a very different flavour from most other institutions. It feels that way to me.

That was an honest answer: I don't know. — Banno

That's not really what you said though, is it?. Anyway, I'll take the belated honest answer given here, you don't know. Wonderful.

I don't necessarily think there is more than intuition there. Maybe it is just intuition. It's an intuition that it seems most philosophers share, including even Corvus believe it or not.

Do you think I shouldn't be 100% sure because it's an intuition?

That's not open and honest. That's just being silly.

You're allowed to say something like "I think you must exist to think, but I'm not 100% certain of that". You can put some caveats on your answer. It's okay. I just want you to be open and honest about it.

I've answered that — Banno

I missed it. What's the answer? I don't think it's loaded, I think it's just completely pertinent. I've answered a number of questions from you, you won't answer one from me? I'm being honest and open about my thoughts, because quite frankly what's the point of being here if I'm not? I am open to having my mind changed, but only by someone open and honest about their thoughts.

Do you think it's possible to think without existing?

I'm asking you what you think. I've asked you this before but you keep finding ways not to answer. What do you think? Do you think it's possible to think without existing?

yeah, sure.

Do you think it's possible for you to think if you don't exist?

I don't have anything unique to say on the topic. To think, one must exist. It's pretty intuitive.

I'm afraid what's happened is you've read Descartes flowery language and have taken it for granted that translating exactly what he said into symbolic logic is the right way to talk about the logic of his idea.

He's speaking poetically. He is writing succinctly, and with brevity, for aesthetics sake.

There are a few different ways of translating his poetic and flowery slogan into a syllogism. You haven't engaged with those.

it isn't the argument. It's a premise. The full argument spelled out is here

https://www.umsu.de/trees/#((p~5q)~1p)~5q

I can't distinguish between that and "p implies q is invalid". What are you saying if you're not saying that?

https://web.stanford.edu/~bobonich/terms.concepts/valid.sound.html#:~:text=Valid%3A%20an%20argument%20is%20valid,argument%20that%20is%20not%20valid.

Valid: an argument is valid if and only if it is necessary that if all of the premises are true, then the conclusion is true; if all the premises are true, then the conclusion must be true; it is impossible that all the premises are true and the conclusion is false.
Invalid: an argument that is not valid. We can test for invalidity by assuming that all the premises are true and seeing whether it is still possible for the conclusion to be false. If this is possible, the argument is invalid.

Validity and invalidity apply only to arguments, not statements. For our purposes, it is just nonsense to call a statement valid or invalid. True and false apply only to statements, not arguments.

https://www.umsu.de/trees/#((p~5q)~1p)~5q

That's the fully drawn out argument - not just the premise, the argument.

That means, arguments that take p implies q as a premise can be valid. It's not inherently invalid.

So you really think all arguments that take p implies q as a premise are invalid?

Modus ponens and modus Tollens are the most simple proofs in symbolic logic. Each one takes "p implies q" as a premise. If "p implies q" is generally invalid, then modus ponens and modus Tollens would be invalid.

If you really believe that all p implies q statements are inherently invalid, because to you p implies q is not a tautology, then you're absolutely in disagreement with the majority of users of symbolic logic, including professors who teach logic and writers of logic textbooks.

P implies q is a standard part of countless symbolic logic proofs, and its presence as a premise doesn't make an argument invalid to anybody except apparently you.

That's not what invalid means. Invalid doesn't just mean "there's some way to make this premise false"

Validity is a property of a whole argument, not an individual premise.

you're not using the word "valid" correctly in that post. p implies q is a premise. It's not valid or invalid on its own, it's a premise.

You can disagree with the premise. "Invalid" wouldn't be the word you use to describe a premise you disagree with though. The word would be "false" - "this premise is false".