Rather, both sources are saying that knowledge constitutes a a subset of ones beliefs. — Relativist

Well that's a rather different claim, isn't it? "X is Y" is not the same as "Some X is Y." Philosophical discussion requires linguistic precision. That sort of conflation, over and over, is unphilosophical.

I provided the definition from the Blackwell Dictionary of Western Philosophy that categorically states that knowledge is belief — Relativist

No, your source did not say that knowledge is belief. Go back and have another look.

(belief that is adequately justified and true) — Relativist

Neither did it say that knowledge is belief that is adequately justified and true. You keep playing these word games where you equivocate and stretch the meanings of words, omit certain semantic ranges, inaccurately portray what a source says, etc. That sort of tinkering causes a lot problems when precision is needed.

But my original point holds: saying that "I know X" is a statement about belief is like saying "I baked a loaf of bread" is a statement about yeast. Equivocation is occurring.

I'll give two examples:
I. :My name is Fred.

I believe this to be true, and I have strong justification to believe it (it's the name on my birth certificate, the name my friends and family have always called me, and the first name on a variety of legal documents). — Relativist

So your argument here is, "I believe X is true and I have strong justification to believe it, therefore it is true [or, therefore I know it]." But why do you think those two conditions are sufficient? Those conditions obviously fail to generate knowledge in certain circumstances. And this idea of "strong" or "adequate" justification is not even in keeping with that broad sort of Gettier epistemology. It looks like a subset, something like probabilistic internalism.

But again, rather than falling into the rabbit hole of contemporary epistemology, my claim is that the traditional epistemic opinion is that knowledge is possible - that I can know and know that I know certain things. I don't see how you would be able to accept such a view.

We could look at the three Gettier conditions:

1. X is believed
2. The agent is justified
3. X is true

On your approach where everything is reduced to belief, we get something like this:

1. I believe X
2. I believe that I am justified (or "adequately" justified)
3. I believe that X is true

Yours is far from the Gettier model. You have three beliefs; the Gettier model does not. And no one thinks these three beliefs of yours generate knowledge. The Gettier model requires more than just belief, which is why your belief-reductionism is incompatible with it.

Now I think this form of skepticism is becoming common, so it's understandable in certain ways. My point is that it is a significant deviation from traditional epistemology. If one locks the subject within their own beliefs, then knowledge is impossible. This presumably includes even probabilistic knowledge.

It's easy to see how the two often become mixed together though. I think this is especially actue in metaethics, where empiricsts epistemic presuppositions essentially amount to metaphysical presuppositions. "Examine the sense data; there are no values (or universals, or facts about meaning, etc.) to be found." — Count Timothy von Icarus

Yes, and I think 'value' fails to be a neutral word here given the way contemporary philosophy is prone to the verb (subjective) form of the word. The idea is that the act of valuing is made, not found, and is therefore ephemeral. So perhaps the first shift is to move from the act of valuing to the recognition of value; from deeming worthwhile to recognizing intrinsic worth. There is an indoctrination into the idea that one should never speak about what has intrinsic value or worth. One must be shaken out of that doctrinal slumber. ...The word 'good' is not as easy to subjectivize.

Admittedly, you can believe in both (see the catholic church). However, I think that they have different motivations for their belief. The "god of the parish" addresses the human tendency towards religion (fraternity, moral certainty, explanations and relief, etc.) while the philosophical god was a way to justify that tendency and/or the product of metaphysical investigations. That doesn't discount the philosophical god in any factual way, but it is nevertheless important to acknowledge. After all, even if a deistic god is entirely plausible, it does not mean that the god of the parish is (hence my point that conflating the two might be subconsciously beneficial to organized religion). On its own, a philosophical god would very likely seem soulless to most church goers — finarfin

I suppose I would argue that there is a continuum between the two, in much the same way that a child will begin to refine its understanding as it grows and matures. There is a difference between the layman's and the theologian's understanding of God, but I don't see them to be in conflict. I don't see that they believe in two different Gods.

By analogical predication, I mean when one predicates a property of a thing by way of an analogy that is in no way meant to be taken as one and the same (viz., univocally) or completely different (viz., equivocally): — Bob Ross

Okay. Interesting article. :up:

I think it is important when specifically speaking of God to use analogical predication; because God's nature is not known to us as He is in Himself but, rather, is known to us by way of analogy to His effects. He is known from what He is not that He produces and not what He is.

God’s true nature is not apparent to us, as it is in-itself, exactly because He is never afforded to our senses (nor could He be) and is always the necessary precondition, as Being itself, for all things sensed. — Bob Ross

Fair enough. That seems like a good account.

(Sorry, I sort of forget where I was going with this. :blush:)

However, this is not incompatible with the ‘strong natural theism’ I expounded: the central thesis merely claims that we can know through reason applied to the natural world around us about God’s nature—it could be equally true that God could expedite the process by just telling us. — Bob Ross

Okay.

I will say that knowing God through reason applied to the ordinary world is stronger and richer than if God were to reveal it to us; because epistemically it would be much less certain with Divine Revelation and it comes with many other disadvantages (such as requiring faith, tradition, etc.) unless we are talking about God supernaturally infusing us with immanent knowledge. — Bob Ross

Sure, and Aquinas would agree that knowledge by sight is more satisfying than knowledge by faith.

You said, "I know X is not a statement of belief". Well, it IS a statement of belief in standard philosophical discourse. — Relativist

I don't think so, because it is a statement of knowledge, and knowledge is not belief. It entails a belief, but it is not a statement of belief. If I say to you, "I baked you a loaf of bread," this is not a statement about yeast. It is a statement about bread, and bread includes yeast, but it is not a statement about yeast. You are trying to make belief central in an inappropriate way, and part of that is your idea that "I know X" is a statement of belief.

I think you are required to reject all of traditional epistemology, because traditional epistemology presupposes the possibility of knowledge and you reject (or else redefine) the possibility of knowledge. For traditional epistemology, there is a form of certainty that is not merely subjective attitude and which pertains to knowledge. For you, there is no form of certainty that is not merely subjective attitude.

We're still dealing with beliefs — Relativist

When we are talking about knowledge we are not really dealing with beliefs. Belief is a vacuous aspect of knowledge. There is no need to "deal with" what is vacuous.

Our colloquial way of speaking is vague, and implies distinctions that are not real. An opinion is a belief. — Relativist

Here's an argument to show how you are equivocating: <Knowledge is a belief; Opinion is a belief; Therefore, knowledge and opinion are the same thing>. Do you agree that this is an unsound argument? Playing fast and loose with words like 'knowledge', 'belief', and 'opinion' leads to these epistemological confusions.

A TRUTH is a statement that corresponds to some aspect of reality. Of course there are truths. Truth is what we all want to have in our possession. The issue is: how do we assess whether of not some statement is true? A justification is a reason to believe the statement is true. Some justifications are better than others. If it's derived from deductive reasoning, you're on very solid ground (although you're still dependent on the premises being true). The point I've been making is that we rarely use deduction; more often we use abduction - it's an imperfect guide to truth, but it's usually the best we can do. — Relativist

If you think there are truths then can you give an example of a truth?

You made no points that go to the central point. — apokrisis

Apparently we disagree on what the central point is, but @Count Timothy von Icarus' objections seem quite strong, and I don't see that they have been answered. I was trying to highlight those unanswered objections.

And that is if wisdom and cleverness are cognitive processes, then how does that relate to the evolved structure of brains and nervous systems? If one isn’t minded to treat these things as gifts given by God to humans, but instead naturally evolved traits, then how does one make sense of their evolutionary continuity with mammalian neurobiology?

Brains in general are good in the sense that they put animals in a functional relation with their worlds. And brains work generally by applying the structural logic of dichotomies and hierarchies - the Peircean triad that is the cycle of reasoning. Abduction-deduction-induction. This understanding of the world by dialectical analysis - dissolving it into some structure of generals and particulars - is just what we see in every aspect of neuroanatomy. Frontal lobes for planning and motor control, back of the brain for sensory processing. Left brain for focal processing, right brain for global background or contextual awareness. Mid brain for emitting habitual responses in quick learnt and automatic fashion, higher brain for taking time to pause and analyse and so develop answers when faced by novelty. — apokrisis

I noticed that line in posts such as this one:

Sure. But the brain doing all this is the same brain with the same cognitive structure. So the only difference is that playing chess is a highly constrained and artificial task – thus good for extracting the story of what is going on in a controlled setting. And then cleverness~wisdom is this standard brain trajectory applied to our lives in their most general and uncontrolled settings – the lives we live as social creatures interacting with the perils and opportunities of a complex physical environment. — apokrisis

I think that once this manner of reasoning is explicated it will evidence significant weaknesses. For example, one inference you are relying on is, "X and Y are both cognitive processes, therefore the only difference [is one of degree]." On that sort of reasoning everything that the brain does is separated only by degree, including cleverness, wisdom, mathematics, love, dancing, sports, sleeping, etc. Then you add in the premise that you have some sort of exhaustive knowledge of the brain, and at that point most all of human existence is explained by recourse to this (highly exaggerated) account of the brain or neurology. Even beyond the problem of the reductive anthropology, the weaknesses and limitations of the premises are significant. The notions that one has exhaustive knowledge of the brain and that all human activity is reducible to the "cognitive" concept are implausible. Human life is complex and variegated, and unless one's understanding of the brain or of cognition is equally complex and variegated, the reduction of the former to the latter will be an artificial systematizing and pigeonholing. It looks like a classic conflation of part with whole (i.e. brain/cognition with human life).

This is why I claimed that wisdom requires acknowledging antinomies, and not collapsing everything into a single one-dimensional category. A simplistic theory must be sacrificed for the sake of the facts, and if a theory cannot acknowledge the fact that cleverness and wisdom are qualitatively different, then so much the worse for the theory. A "theory of everything" would be great if it actually saved the appearances.

What survives this test of time becomes the weight of mental habits that leaves us as well optimised as organisms as we can be. At least within whatever physical and social environment in which we must co-exist.

Anyway, my point here is that I’m not pulling positions out my arse. I have a metaphysics. I speak for a natural world that is organised by its natural rationality. — apokrisis

Sure, and there is a certain plausibility to your account. There are analogies and continuities between cleverness and wisdom, and also between other cognitive phenomena.

But I accord a high place to philology and linguistics, and I don't see that your account really reckons with the semantics of a word like wisdom. For example, you seem to think that wisdom is a kind of habitual and unconscious know-how that is embodied in aged and mature systems. Yet I would say that while the elderly person is wise, the elderly sage is wiser, where the sage is someone who understands the whole and its principles not only practically but also speculatively. They are the one who can explain why and how to act well rather than simply acting well out of habit. And if the one who has more than habit is wiser than the one who has only habit, then wisdom is not properly identified with habit. ...Neither do I think it is true that this "more than habit" is simple cleverness. But the key point here is that I begin with the question, "What does wisdom mean?," whereas you seem to begin with the question, "How does wisdom fit into my unified brain/cognitive system?" In the end I think you've basically written wisdom out of existence in favor of a somewhat different concept that is more acceptable to your system.

And brains work generally by applying the structural logic of dichotomies and hierarchies - the Peircean triad that is the cycle of reasoning. Abduction-deduction-induction. This understanding of the world by dialectical analysis - dissolving it into some structure of generals and particulars - is just what we see in every aspect of neuroanatomy. Frontal lobes for planning and motor control, back of the brain for sensory processing. Left brain for focal processing, right brain for global background or contextual awareness. Mid brain for emitting habitual responses in quick learnt and automatic fashion, higher brain for taking time to pause and analyse and so develop answers when faced by novelty. — apokrisis

Anthropology is almost certainly a central issue here. A physicalist, brain-centered anthropology will color one's conclusions, as will one's criteria. For example, if one thinks the relevant human phenomena are planning, motor control, sensory processing, focal processing, global background, habitual response, and analysis, then one simply decides what part of their Ur-explanation—in this case the brain—relates to each of these data points and they have arrived at their totalizing explanation. But the deduction is not from the brain; the deduction is from a set of "exhaustive" human activities. The brain is the intermediary for those activities deemed relevant.

I could be mistaken but you and Count Timothy von Icarus have your own metaphysical tradition. The one where we are all God’s special creation. Made imperfectly in His perfect image. Ect. You will view cleverness and wisdom within that mental framework.

And I instead have a different grounding point of view. The grand unifying perspective on Nature as a semiotic enterprise. The Universe as the growth of reason, material being as a structure of inveterate habit.

The problem becomes the God story is well known to me as it is just the general Western institution - impossible to avoid as part of collective culture. But my position seems to be poorly understood by you. — apokrisis

I see the two stories as one of a unified theory and one of "appearances," and I don't think the unified theory saves the appearances. In another sphere you would be the one positing that mind and matter are differentiated by degree and not by quality, and I would be the one positing that mind and matter are separated by quality and not by degree. You would achieve a "unifying perspective" and I would achieve a saving of the appearances. The irony here is that your totalizing approach is more Platonic and my antinomic approach is more Aristotelian (and that Peirce had rather significant affinities with Plato).

I'm not quite sure how God comes into it, except perhaps that I am more comfortable with antinomies given that an infinite and incomprehensible unifier is already in place. You perhaps require more explicit and comprehensible unification in your metaphysical theory. Put differently, I believe that reality is unified in a way that I know I cannot ultimately fully understand, whereas you must know how reality is unified. For you the human mind is at the top of the ontological and intellectual hierarchy, and because of this a totalizing (human) theory seems fitting to you.

While science does appear to push the other story that is the natural philosophy viewpoint, it does this only in the watered down guise of Darwinian evolution and Newtonian mechanics. It is not the full-blooded response that is the holism of Aristotlean systems science and Peircean semiotics. — apokrisis

The other oddity here is that you keep assuming that Aristotle and Peirce had nothing to do with God. That seems untrue, even if the specifics become complicated.

But that alternative metaphysics does exist. And it sets the terms which would count as a critique of anything I’ve said. — apokrisis

Internal critiques are not the only critiques. The more interesting critique is one that does not accept all of your own premises.

Instead, this thread has generally lapsed back to transcendental metaphysics where wisdom is just some mystical notion of The Good. Or what God would will in his own perfect image. Cleverness then gets to sit at the elbow of evil. A meretricious tool of the Devil as we have been warned ever since Adam and Eve. — apokrisis

No, I don't think that is right. The God story may not be as well known to you as you suppose. For instance, Jesus commands us to be "as wise/shrewd/cunning/subtle as serpents," which is a clear reference to that "meretricious tool of the Devil." For another example, the Antichrist is seen as a kind of faux copy of the Christ, and one which will be exceedingly persuasive. If good and bad are right and left then it would be hard to imagine how bad could mimic good so effectively. Wisdom is that which can discern the subtle but significant difference.

-

I am certainly interested in folk actually setting out their ontological commitments. And talk of "good and bad" could mean adaptively optimal and its privation, or transcendently perfect and its privation. — apokrisis

But what is the difference between the "adaptively optimal" and the "transcendently perfect"?

Or I could say that any action can be judged as an adaptive optimisation that is so generally effective it can be relied on as a regular unthinking habit, and so "having an end in mind" becomes not even some particular thing that is in mind, but is instead made the flesh and blood of what I am about.

So clever thinking is aimed at the novel. Wisdom has already assimilated what is generally "the good" as just its general orientation to the world.

And wisdom can't "know precisely which ends are actually good". That is an appeal to transcendent truths that float above the real world. It can only, in the usual fallible and pragmatic fashion, keep testing, keep exploring, by being alert to its own failings and getting out the clever thinking to figure a better world model out.

So again, I highlight the quick way you leap to a transcendent framing of what wisdom could even be as a psychological trait. There is a perfection out there waiting for the wise. Whereas I stay rooted in the pragmatic world where we are moved only by our failures of prediction.

We can propose general ends that we ought to try to achieve. Then see if they do lead us some place that seems better. And that in itself is the pursuit of an adaptive life balance rather than some idealised final perfection. — apokrisis

I don't find your eschewing of an end convincing. himself seemed happy with the idea that his theory was teleological. Your account seems to be ordered to survival or homeostasis or thermodynamic equilibrium or something of the like. If that is the highest end and wisdom is the highest virtue, then wisdom is ordered to it. To be moved by prediction or failures thereof also implies an end. It hasn't been avoided. Prediction is not aimless, nor is the act of recognizing a prediction's failure.

So as soon as someone like yourself tries to frame things as a false dichotomy – the type where there is the bad choice of being good or bad – then I try to reframe it as a true systems dichotomy. One that sets up the win~win of a complementary pair of oppositions. — apokrisis

Again, you don't seem to understand the view you attempt to critique. For instance:

So if I turn left, I can fix that by turning right. Or if I turn away from the good towards the bad, then I can turn back towards the good again. — apokrisis

Good and bad are simply nothing like left and right, and this is because left is not the privation of right. The privation theory presupposes the win~win insofar as the privation presupposes goodness. It seems that all of us acknowledge that we do not find ourselves in a "win-win" scenario such that no movement towards an end is required. Again, how does the difference between an "adaptive" privation and a "transcendent" privation ultimately cash out? Both are asymmetric, both are hierarchical, etc. Both approaches are actually found in religious thought and even in Christian thought.

Beyond that, to use Platonic theism as the foil to Aristotelian Peircianism is odd, given that Aristotelianism was passed on to Peirce precisely by (scholastic) theists.

So at the level of social psychology, that cashes out as the general systems principle of stable social systems being organised as a functional balance between local competition and global cooperation. Another way of saying that any physical system is some fruitful or rational balance of its global constraints and its local degrees of freedom. — apokrisis

This is a pretty standard view among all religions and developed traditions, namely the importance of balance. That which Peirce has synthesized should not be opposed to his thought.

Neither energy is inherently good or bad. It is the matching of the dynamical balance to some context of possibilities. Any immature social endeavour needs to burn a lot of clever ideas. Any mature social endeavour need to preserve the balance of those ideas that made for the best collective habit. — apokrisis

Throughout there seems to be a kind of equivocation, where you eschew the terms "good" and "bad" by claiming that an optimal mixture of both is what is needed, but then you don't seem to notice that what is actually good on that account is the optimal mixture. Don't you agree that the optimal mixture or balance is good, and that the ordering is bad to the extent that it deviates from this optimal balance? This is why I think @Count Timothy von Icarus' objection cuts deeper than you realize, for it applies also at this new level of good-as-balance. If I am right and you have your own conception of what is good and what is bad, then acknowledging this would help put us on the same page and would help us appreciate a common criterion.

For example, if balance is good, then cleverness is good because it achieves balance at a local and circumscribed level, whereas wisdom is good because it achieves balance at a global and less circumscribed level. Yet on my account, one reason wisdom is better is because it presupposes a knowledge and appreciation for the same local balance that cleverness cannot unfocus from.

You can always use Peirce's religiosity against me. But I already agree. He wasn't of a time or place where he could easily have escaped religious indoctrination. — apokrisis

But at this point you're really not appealing to Peirce any more. You're disagreeing with him and hoping that he would agree with your disagreement in hindsight.

The idea here is that I am not convinced that your dichotomies between transcendent and adaptive, or between religious and scientific, really hold up.


Edit: It seems that a large part of what you are doing is disagreeing with some view that you find erroneous. I don't really understand the thing you are opposing. Perhaps it would be helpful if you set out that view clearly.

Most christian churches continue to parade around these two very different ideas of god. In parishes and in the scripture, god is personalist, but in religious scholarship, he is a metaphysical necessity. People don't go to church for metaphysics, but if you dedicate your entire life to one religion, I suppose it's inevitable that you search for more intellectual justifications. Ironically enough, in doing so they create a deity that nobody would really care about, because it is so detached from their parishoners' beliefs and needs. — finarfin

I think you're dealing in a lot of false dichotomies and historical inaccuracies. In every community there will be more and less rigorous presentations of the life, whether intellectual or otherwise. That doesn't mean, for example, that the intellectual who believes that God is immutable suddenly stops believing that God is personal, nor does it mean that the non-intellectual who believes that God is personal is barred from believing that God is immutable.

Does theological precision come "later" as an "addition"? Yes and no. All natural developments come later, but they are always present in what came before. The myth you are espousing always struggles to identify an actual moment when the "addition" occurred, because there is always an antecedent that the neat theory ignored. Heck, Christians were originally deemed atheists in large part because they had more in common with philosophical groups than ancient religious groups.

This is an interesting conversation between @Count Timothy von Icarus and @apokrisis. The difference seems to revolve around this:

But why would we use two words if we could do with just the one? My argument is that they are both basically the same thing, but then also completely different in terms of scale. — apokrisis

I guess I am questioning if they are generally understood to be the same thing. "Intelligence," as commonly used, tends to be viewed procedurally (i.e., as discursive ratio) or even computationally. Wisdom by contrast tends to deal with ultimate ends. An IQ test is supposed to measure intelligence, but it's unclear to me if it says much of anything about a grasp of ends (at least directly). So, I suppose my question is if "intelligence" covers the (ultimate) desirability of ends. — Count Timothy von Icarus

I am going to use @apokrisis' word "cleverness" rather than intelligence, e.g.:

From a neurocognitive viewpoint, I would say the most useful definition is to oppose wisdom and cleverness. They relate to each other as the general and the specific. Or in brain terms, wisdom is accumulated useful habits and smartness is focused attention on a novel problem.

So wisdom comes with age and cleverness with youth. Being wise means hardly having to think about what is generally best while being smart is being able to leap to a particular answer. — apokrisis

I mostly think @Count Timothy von Icarus is right. I don't think wisdom and cleverness are the same thing, or are qualitatively similar, or are "two ends of some spectrum of possibilities," or are like the black-white spectrum. I think this post of Count's gets at the nub:

Right, so wisdom isn't equivalent with what appears to be wise or is said to be wise by others. In this case, the individuals, and perhaps the society, are unwise. So then wisdom isn't just any intellectual habit, but rather a certain type of intellectual habit.

...

The question is if those ends are truly (rather than merely apparently) desirable though. If one does not distinguish between good and bad ends (wise and unwise ends) then it would seem that wisdom is just "whatever habits just so happen to emerge," or "whatever is currently said to be wise." — Count Timothy von Icarus

@apokrisis' approach to wisdom is to contrast it with cleverness and to identify it with habit. It seems to me that Count has correctly identified the difference between cleverness and wisdom (i.e. means-based rationality vs ends-based living). I think the more central difficulty is the fact that wisdom is normative. As Count says, some things are wise and some things are not wise. More pointedly, some habits are wise and some habits are unwise, and therefore pointing to habit doesn't help us locate wisdom.

There was a curious statement that @apokrisis made that bears highlighting, and helps get at this point:

So how do you build a wise society? Allow the creation of social institutions to flourish. Allow wise habits to take up a permanent presence. — apokrisis

I'm not sure this says much at all, but it would be nice to know the answer to the question posed. A social institution is a kind of societal habit, and like individual habits, societal habits don't equate to wisdom. This is because some habits are wise and some habits are unwise, both individually and societally. Perhaps @apokrisis is implying that by allowing lots of social institutions to flourish the best ones will endure whereas the lesser ones will wither, and we will eventually inherit the best?

We might agree in saying that wisdom is the habit which allows us to flourish most completely, but this too differentiates it from cleverness. One can be clever at just about anything, but not so with wisdom. For example, one can be a clever chess player, but one cannot be a wise chess player. No one talks about someone who is wise qua chess. Similarly, one can be a clever pool player but not a wise pool player. I think there is an analogy between cleverness and wisdom, but I wouldn't say more than that.

These would be proper unities of opposites. Things that are the complementary bounds of what is possible in the way that the triadic structure of a hierarchy is formed by the scale difference which is to be divided as completely as possible by a local and global bound.

This is a deep aspect of metaphysical argument that most never get. But you only have to consider the metaphysical dichotomies that have always seemed the most fundamental. Like chance~necessity, discrete~continuous, part~whole, integrated~differentiated, atom~void, matter~form, and so on. Each of these pairs seem to join two things that are as completely unalike as can be imagined in some basic way, and yet they then complement each other as they thus frame all the intermediate states that could arise in between.

Think of black and white as the complete lack of brightness and its equally total presence. Each is the other's negation. Black is zero white, and white is zero black. But then between these two bounding extremes arises any possible number of shades of grey. You can have a grey that is a 1% drip of black in a 99% pot of white. Or a 50/50 mix. Or whatever balance of the two extremes you care to put a number on.

So a useful metaphysical dichotomy comes with a hierarchy of scale in transparent fashion. Complementary limits on being are set. Then everything that actually exists is some gradation – a particular balance – in between. — apokrisis

This is interesting, but does any of it apply to your cleverness~wisdom "dichotomy"? I think the ideas you are laying out here are useful, but I don't see how it bears on this discussion. Maybe you did not mean to apply it to the cleverness~wisdom contrast, but I think it helps point up why that contrast has only limited mileage.

But note too that good~bad is just as fundamental a dichotomy as those you have identified, and yet you give it rather short shrift.

The categories that make sense are the ones that make sense of all the intermediate cases as being placed at some relative position inbetween the extremes.

...

Everything can be made relative in a pragmatically flexible fashion. — apokrisis

I would say that the coincidentia oppositorum is much more than two relativizing poles, both within the same tidy genus. The Platonic tradition of evil as privation was quite familiar with the age-old idea of dueling powers of Good and Evil, and it is odd to claim that, "Metaphysically, this level of discussion hasn't got us very far." The reason the step was made was because the dyadic level hadn't gotten us very far. Should we go back?

A true instance of the concidentia oppositorum would say, for example, that monism and dualism are both true in their own way, and both bound up one in the other. The privation theory is a deeper reckoning with that deeper coincidentia. Lesser oppositions seem less interesting (e.g. black-white, quantitative relativizing, totalizing spectrums, etc.). The coincidentia oppositorum really begins when we run up against an anomalous juxtaposition: an antinomy. I would say that the wise person is someone who acknowledges and lives with such paradox, and that this is qualitatively different from the clever person. Cleverness, being linear and one-dimensional, has nothing to do with such things.

Still, I think Count's point holds:

Wisdom always sounds like a good thing to have. But really, it is just some set of habits that have evolved within a society's own game of life. — apokrisis

If one does not distinguish between good and bad ends (wise and unwise ends) then it would seem that wisdom is just "whatever habits just so happen to emerge," or "whatever is currently said to be wise." — Count Timothy von Icarus

Wisdom doesn't just sound like a good thing to have. It is a good thing to have. Are you really saying otherwise? I think someone might say that wisdom does not exist, but I don't think an English speaker could say that wisdom is not necessarily a good thing to have. If someone's system prevented them from accepting anything as good or bad, then I suppose they would have to say that wisdom does not exist. And I don't think putting the word "relatively" in front of "good or bad" helps. Contrariwise, if one accepts the existence of wisdom, then they must be willing to say what sets it apart from other things (habits): they must be able to say why it is good.

But among monotheistic religions, the philosophical god conceived by scholars of the church were much later additions to a traditionally personalist god. Ever since then... — finarfin

When do you theorize that the "addition" began?

I'm using the terms more precisely- using definitions that dovetail epistemology (dealing with beliefs and their justification) and psychology (what a belief IS to a person). — Relativist

But if you are saying that everything is believed and nothing is known, then I don't find that to be epistemologically precise. According to standard epistemology some things are known and some things are merely believed, and belief is a necessary but insufficient condition for knowledge. It feels as if you've created a non-standard semantics where there is only belief and never knowledge; where "certain" and "certainty" always denote subjectivity or an attitude and never knowledge; where there are only opinions and never facts, etc.

It's a statement of belief* by whoever formulated it — Relativist

But it's not. That's the whole point of the article and the distinction. If it were a statement of belief then "certainty" and "certitude" would be identical. But they're not. "X is certain," is not a statement of belief, just as, "I know X," is not a statement of belief. You seem to be making a move where you say, "They only think its certain, or they only think they know it. Really they don't, because certitude is always an attitude and knowledge doesn't really exist." That looks like a tendentious move to me. It also undermines the basic idea that we can know things as simple as, "This object in front of me is either a tree or else it is not a tree."

Perhaps you're thinking, "it would be true even if no one had formulated it". But what exactly would you be referring to as the "it" that is true? The statement? Does the statement exist independently of human minds? Do all possible statements have some sort of independent existence? In my opinion, statements only exist in minds. — Relativist

I think that's fine, but I don't think it follows either that statements are not about anything more than minds (nominalism), or that minds never know truth. At a very simple level, the way we linguistically distinguish facts from opinions highlights the way that facts are not subjective in the way that opinions are subjective, and that they exist all the same. That is: there really are facts (truths), and they really are something different than opinions. If everything returns to attitude, then it seems that there is nothing other than opinion.

I see two interesting questions, here. One is whether the sort of "probabilism" that you are proposing is coherent, given that it eschews knowledge. It may be that probabilism without knowledge is like branches without a trunk.

The other question has to do with the modern move where the subject is cut off from reality by fiat of premise. For example, if we can never get beyond our attitudes and make truth- and knowledge-claims that are not merely belief- or attitude-claims, then of course a kind of Cartesian skepticism will obtain. If every knowledge-claim is rewritten as a matter of the subject's attitude or nominalistic beliefs, then realism has been denied a hearing.

(I will be offline for a number of days, but will return. Thanks for the good conversation. :up:)

No, not all unproveable truths. I was being careless in my wording. More precisely: most of our rational, acquired beliefs are IBEs. (My objective had only been to contrast this with the notion that our beliefs are somehow proven deductively; in most cases - IBEs are the best we can do, and that's perfectly fine). — Relativist

Okay thanks, that makes sense (although I may come back to this dichotomy between deduction and abduction).

I do hold that we have some beliefs that are not underdetermined. The belief that the object before me is a tree or not a tree is not underdetermined. Properly basic beliefs (e.g. there is a world external to ourselves) aren't underdetermined, because they aren't determined through reasoning at all- so the term seems inapplicable (however, arguably- they are determined by the environment that produced us. This aspect is what makes them properly basic - a variation of Alvan Plantinga's reformed epistemology). — Relativist

Okay, so you are saying that some beliefs are determined and are therefore not undetermined, such as the belief about the object before you; and that "properly basic" beliefs are neither determined nor undetermined. It seems that by "determined" you mean something like "deduced," and that this is why a "properly basic" belief is not determined. The same would presumably hold for foundational beliefs in general.

I understand the semantic distinction, but are the attitudes actually distinct? (Remember that I suggested certainty is an attitude). Some may insist there is a parallel distinction of attitude, but I'm not convinced. — Relativist

My point here is that certainty need not be an attitude, and is not always an attitude in English. When someone says, "They certainly do," they are not expressing an attitude. See for example <this entry> from Grammarist, where they point to feeling (certitude) vs factuality (certainty).

This seems similar to someone believing a proposition to be true vs the proposition actually being true. All we can ever do is to make a judgement: there is no oracle to inform us that our judgement is correct. One or more people may examine the reasoning and concur, but this only elevates a subjective judgement to an intersubjective one. Similar with the feeling of certainty: it's subjective, and so is the analysis that leads to the feeling. When we're certain of something, we believe we've arrived at objective truth - that's what it means to be certain. — Relativist

I think you are still running roughshod over the difference. There is a difference between believing a proposition to be true vs the proposition actually being true, and this is tracked by the fact that people are saying different things when they say, "I believe it is true," and, "It is true." Similarly, when you say, "That's what it means to be certain," what you are saying is, "That's what it means [for someone] to be certain." But again, "certain" is not always predicated of persons. It is very often predicated of propositions. For example, from the Grammarist entry, "It’s a near certainty that the 17-member nation eurozone won’t survive in its current form." This is not a predication about an attitude or a subjective state.

Now one could stipulate that "certain" or "certainty" is always subjective, or always a matter or attitudes, or always person-indexed, but that's not actually how we use the word in English. Sometimes it pertains to an "attitude" and sometimes it doesn't.

Because of the exclusion problem and related problems, pretty much all the discussion of mental to mental causality in that space that I have seen actually centers around mental to physical causation (generally on the idea that, if a mental state m1 brings about another, m2, such a change is thought to also necessarily involve a physical state transition from p1 to p2). — Count Timothy von Icarus

It would seem that the idea of "mental to mental causation" requires a physicalist paradigm, insofar as one is thinking in terms of isolated mental events and such thinking is inherently mechanistic and materialistic. Apart from a physicalist paradigm the study of "mental to mental causation" is actually called logic, but it is about thinking and not about material mental events. It seems highly misleading to speak about mental events apart from agents and minds, as if they were physical atoms bouncing around and interacting with each other.

Under this view, we cannot achieve repayment of our sins on our own; but God has to freely choose to save us by sacrificing Himself. Salvation here is referring to the restoration of the sinner into the proper order of creation. — Bob Ross

Okay, understood. :up:

Sounds good. Here’s some differences and you can choose what you want us to discuss.

Stereotypical Christianity vs. “Bobism”

1. One must accept Christ in order to be saved; whereas one must sufficiently act in accord with God to be saved.

2. Justice is retributive; whereas justice is restorative.

3. The Great Sacrifice is freely chosen in a way where it could have been otherwise; The Great Sacrifice is a necessity of God’s freedom.

3. The Trinity, the good life, the path to salvation, etc. is revealed; all of those are naturally determinable.

4. Humans are the most loved by God; Persons of pure form are the most loved by God.

5. Unrepentant sinners go to eternal hell (viz., the lake of fire where there will be gnashing of teeth and great weeping); unrepentant sinners go to an indefinite hell that punishes them appropriately to get them to realize that their sins are bad until they repent.

6. The animal kingdom largely is ordered towards what is perfectly good (e.g., the lion eating the zebra is not bad); the animal kingdom is largely polluted with evil due to the Great Fall.

7. Humans caused the Great Fall; a person which existed prior to most if not all of evolution caused the Great Fall.

8. God can and has committed (retributively) just punishments without giving mercy; whereas God has to synthesize (Restorative) Justice and Mercy.

Etc. — Bob Ross

Okay, interesting. It looks like there are misunderstandings at various places. We can come back to these topics, but rather than getting into those I think a good starting point might be analogy. This is something that is more fundamental and might be more interesting to others.

In your document you say things like this:

When we say God is all-powerful, all-knowing, all-present, etc. we are speaking analogically and not univocally. — Strong Natural Theism, by Bob Ross

What do you mean by this, and why do you hold that we are (or should be) speaking analogically and not univocally when we say such things?

-

Let's also take up your 3:

3. The Trinity, the good life, the path to salvation, etc. is revealed; all of those are naturally determinable. — Bob Ross

Here are two quotes from Aquinas:

Objection 2. Further, the Divine Law should have come to man's assistance where human reason fails him: as is evident in regard to things that are of faith, which are above reason. But man's reason seems to suffice for the moral precepts. Therefore the moral precepts do not belong to the Old Law, which is a Divine law.

Reply to Objection 2. It was fitting that the Divine law should come to man's assistance not only in those things for which reason is insufficient, but also in those things in which human reason may happen to be impeded. Now human reason could not go astray in the abstract, as to the universal principles of the natural law; but through being habituated to sin, it became obscured in the point of things to be done in detail. But with regard to the other moral precepts, which are like conclusions drawn from the universal principles of the natural law, the reason of many men went astray, to the extend of judging to be lawful, things that are evil in themselves. Hence there was need for the authority of the Divine law to rescue man from both these defects. Thus among the articles of faith not only are those things set forth to which reason cannot reach, such as the Trinity of the Godhead; but also those to which right reason can attain, such as the Unity of the Godhead; in order to remove the manifold errors to which reason is liable. — Aquinas, ST I-II.99.2 - Whether the Old Law contains moral precepts?

For some matters connected with human actions are so evident, that after very little consideration one is able at once to approve or disapprove of them by means of these general first principles: while some matters cannot be the subject of judgment without much consideration of the various circumstances, which all are not competent to do carefully, but only those who are wise: just as it is not possible for all to consider the particular conclusions of sciences, but only for those who are versed in philosophy... — Aquinas ST I-II.100.1 - Whether all the moral precepts of the Old Law belong to the law of nature?

Aquinas' idea here is that God will give moral instruction via divine revelation even in some cases where the moral instruction could be known without the divine revelation. This is because the instruction is helpful both on account of our sinful and ignorant state, and because only the few have the time or intelligence to understand the proper moral road. Or in other words, even though the moral life is accessible to natural reason, only a tiny percentage of people would ever be capable of such knowledge. The absence of revelation on this score would seem to result in a kind of elitism, where only the select few are able to know the moral way forward.

I think what you are really contending, which to me begs the question, is whether or not God has the authority to take innocent life; and this just loops back to our original point of contention. — Bob Ross

I think it has more to do with the metaphysics of death, as noted in my last.

That’s an interesting point. I am going to have to think about that one and get back to you.

My prima facie response would be that the world is fallen due to sin, and that sin is what causally is responsible for our mortality. Without “evil of persons”, there would be no mortality. That seems like the only viable rejoinder. — Bob Ross

Sure, and that's a pretty common Christian response. But if someone is focused on individual guilt, then Original Sin will not satisfy them. Someone focused on individual guilt would insist that only one who has personally sinned is able to die.

Unfortunately, it's almost inevitable now that Al will become in the near future THE general authority. So, thinking will no longer be a practical necessity. We could even draw a logical line from human laziness to a situation where people simply plug their "personality" into a mobile AI, stick it on themselves, and allow it to do all their conversing for them. — Baden

I very much agree.

All we can do is be the change we want to see. — Baden

Okay, fair. Still, I want to say that the canons for reasoning that we have developed as a species are reliable and recognizable. What is at stake now is a particular kind of appeal to authority: appeal to LLM. Our canons include sound principles for determining when an appeal to authority is permissible and when it is not, but such principles will be challenged by the advent of AI.

TPF already has a precedent for disallowing or at least discouraging certain sources for appeals to authority, particularly sources which are deemed morally inappropriate . I would suggest that it is at least possible to establish a precedent for discouraging the "appeal to LLM" move, especially given the soft and flexible nature of TPF rules. And perhaps the current rule already does this to some extent.

(More specifically, I would say that our canons for reasoning generally require that the inferential steps used to reach a conclusion be made publicly available. A post which leverages an LLM in a way that is consistent with this principle would not be beyond the pale, given that such a post would not merely be appealing to the LLM as a blind authority. Yet a post which relies on an LLM in a way that is "blind" and inconsistent with this principle would be beyond the pale.)

I don't think ALL beliefs are IBEs:
-We have some basic, intrinsic beliefs, that aren't inferred. Example: the instinctual belief in a world external to ourselves.
We also accept some things uncritically (no one's perf ect). — Relativist

Okay good, so let's look at this quote of yours:

I've been treating "underdetermined" as any belief that is not provably true (i.e. determined=necessarily true). Under this extreme definition, nearly every belief we have is underdetermined...

Most of our beliefs are not provably true, so I have labelled them IBEs. — Relativist

In that last sentence you seem to equate "not provably true"/undetermined with "IBE." Now you are implying that something that is not provably true might not be an IBE if it is not inferred. Do you stand by your decision to label beliefs that are not provably true IBEs?

The more central question can be restated with your claim, "Under this extreme definition, nearly every belief we have is underdetermined." The "nearly" makes me think that some beliefs are not underdetermined, but I'm not sure if you really hold that.

Re: certainty- that's an attitude, and it may or may not be justified. — Relativist

In English "certitude" connotes subjectivity, whereas "certain" and "certainty" need not. When I said, "premises which are foundational and certain," I was using 'certain' in this objective sense, which is quite common. For example, you that some beliefs follow necessarily from other beliefs/facts. I might ask, "But do they really follow necessarily?" You might answer, "They certainly do." Your answer would not mean, "I have a high degree of certainty or a high degree of certitude that they do follow necessarily." It would mean, "They objectively follow necessarily."

Now if you want to try to find a different word than "certain" to describe the phenomenon in question, you can do that. I think certain is actually the correct word, given that it couples the knower and the known in the proper way needed to speak about first principles.

Justification doesn't require deductive proof. Consider your example "this entity before me is either a tree or it is not a tree." Solipsism is logically possible, so that there actually isn't something before you. We can justifiably feel certain despite the logical possibility we're wrong. — Relativist

Well the same problem crops up here. What is certain and a feeling of certainty are not the same thing, just as justification and a feeling of justification are not the same thing. One's being justified and one's deeming themselves justified are two different things.

An adherence to merely syllogistic logic might explain some of the difficulties had hereabouts. — Banno

It has many ways of dealing with many placed predicates and relations. The ancients and medievals did not lack a notion of polyadic properties. Indeed the core sign relation for language, supposition, and epistemic relations are all triadic. — Count Timothy von Icarus

Gyula Klima recently made available his contribution to the The Cambridge Companion to Medieval Logic, "Consequence." It offers a helpful remedy to the historically ignorant opinion that Medievals did not study non-syllogistic forms of logic.

Good question. We have beliefs that follow necessarily from other beliefs/facts, so they're provable in that sense. It seems inescapable that we depend on some foundational beliefs. So nothing can be proven without some sort of epistemological foundation. What are your thoughts? — Relativist

That seems right to me. In an Aristotelian sense we would speak of demonstrative arguments and non-demonstrative arguments, where demonstrative arguments have premises which are foundational and certain, whereas non-demonstrative arguments have premises which are non-foundational (and therefore also not certain). We could also apply that distinction to the inferences rather than the premises if we are not counting an inference as a premise.

So when you said:

Most of our beliefs are not provably true, so I have labelled them IBEs. — Relativist

...I guessed that this meant that some of our beliefs are provably true, and are not IBEs. If that guess is correct, then apparently you must hold that some foundations are certain. If that guess is wrong, then it would seem that you hold that all beliefs are (unprovable) IBEs. Do you disagree with any of that?

Now for Aristotle one certain foundation that we are capable of having is the principle of non-contradiction, and therefore an example of a provable conclusion would be, "This entity before me is either a tree or it is not a tree."

If some people do things for no reason then your approach works. But no one does things for no reason. No one fails deliberately. — Leontiskos

...And what's interesting here is that the foil that many desire would be highly problematic. If people really did things for no reason, then it would not be possible to convince them or anyone else that things should not be done for no reason. This is because in order to persuade someone to act differently, you supply them with reasons to change, and someone who acts for no reason is immune to such persuasion.

This is the paradox that so few seem to understand, and it applies to all forms of evil/error/sin. It is part of the mysterium iniquitatis.

No, that's just one example of Evil and not all examples. — Barkon

My point is that that example highlights the difficulty with your whole conception. If some people do things for no reason then your approach works. But no one does things for no reason. No one fails deliberately.

If you want to think about it differently, every time two people disagree over what to do, they are disagreeing over what should be valued. They both think that the other person is acting in a sub-optimal or "evil" manner. Neither one is acting for no reason or failing deliberately.

Of course, one can make a case for the existence of malice, but it requires philosophical work.

This is no different than having your friend do your homework for you. If he explains you the topic, you read the book, you understand it, you do the assignment, you're fine. If he does it for you, then you cheated, and no one likes a cheater. — Hanover

AI is result-oriented. Intellectual development, and particularly philosophical intellectual development, is process-oriented. If you just want to post the "right" answer, you are doing things wrong. — Baden

I'd say that what is inevitably going to happen (and is already beginning to happen on TPF), is that folks are going to appeal to LLMs as indisputable authorities. "You say X but my almighty LLM says ~X, therefore you are wrong." This will occur explicitly and also in various implicit ways.

Because this is an appeal to an LLM it doesn't directly contravene the rule. Nevertheless, I would argue that it is still remarkably contrary to the spirit of philosophy. It is that look-up-the-infallible-answer routine, which is quite foreign to philosophy (and is itself based on an extremely dubious epistemology).

I hope TPF will discourage this "look up the infallible LLM answer" approach, especially as it becomes more prevalent. The risk of such an approach is that humans become interpreters for AI, where they get all their ideas from AI but then rewrite the ideas in their own voice. Such a result would be tantamount to the same outcome that the current rule wishes to avoid.

(NB: The very fact that so many do not understand why a philosophy forum is intrinsically incompatible with AI-generated posts demonstrates how crucially important administrators and moderators are.)

Such as by taking a break mid sentence with no good reason, to add an insult, for all readers and who you're talking to, to decipher. It’s a bailing (like from a skateboard) with all your intention being channeled into a maleficent activity. — Barkon

I think the trick is to say what is meant by "a maleficent activity," which goes hand in hand with your idea of doing something for "no good reason." So the counterargument is as follows:

1. Evil is doing something for no good reason
2. No one does things for no good reason
3. Therefore, Evil does not exist

Or else:

4. Evil is deliberate failure
5. No one engages in deliberate failure
6. Therefore, Evil does not exist

(See also my thread, Beyond the Pale.)

Underdetermination is the theory that theories are not determined by the evidence, but rather are chosen in order to organize the evidence, and in some way are a selective pressure on which evidence is relevant to consider. — Moliere

This sounds to me a bit like post hoc rationalization, as if one is going to decide on a theory and then allow their theory to be "a selective pressure on which evidence is relevant to consider."

The difficulty here is that you seem to be redefining "theory" to be something that precedes rather than follows after evidence, and such is a very strange redefinition. For example, on this redefinition someone might say, "I have a theory...," and this statement would be indistinguishable from, "I have a prejudice..." The basic problem is that 'theory' and 'prejudice' do not mean the same thing. We distinguish between reasoning and post hoc rationalization, and yet your definition seems to have made such a distinction impossible. It seems to have made impossible a distinction between "following the evidence where it leads," and, "engaging in selection bias in favor of some a priori theory."

---

Now I'll go this far: If underdetermination, as a theory, leads us to be unable to differentiate between science and pseudo-science, and we believe there is such a thing as pseudo-science (I do), then we're in a pickle. — Moliere

I think this is one of the places where the problems become more apparent. For example, if underdetermination requires that there be multiple possible and inadjudicable theory-candidates, and nevertheless pseudoscientific theories do not belong to this set of viable candidates, then there must be some real way to separate out the wheat from the chaff. Even if one thinks this is possible they have already abandoned full-throated underdetermination in favor of an underdetermination that is nevertheless determinate vis-a-vis determining which theories are scientific and which are pseudoscience. They are doing something akin to "stance underdetermination," which is a species of a, "Underdetermined subset theory." I.e., "Within this specific subset a quasi-global underdeterminacy holds, but apart from that subset it does not hold." All of these theories struggle mightily to say how or where the specific subset ends and the complement-set begins. The task is so difficult that few such proponents even really attempt to answer that challenge.

- Okay, thanks for that. Makes sense.

Most of our beliefs are not provably true, so I have labelled them IBEs. — Relativist

So would you say that some of our beliefs are provably true?
(I would say that, but I am just verifying that you would also say such a thing.)

What I Ask of You

This position is no where near complete; and I would appreciate it, though, if people could engage with me on this position and its claims to help further or kill the ideas in it.

For those that are interested, <here's a link to the document I am writing>. — Bob Ross

This is an interesting endeavor, Bob Ross. :up:

I think the most fruitful things to pursue would be those things where you disagree with traditional Christians, in particular over whether some doctrine is accessible through natural reason (i.e. apart from revelation).

With that in mind, this seems like the most difficult thesis:

5. It provides a perfect synthesis of justice and mercy that necessitates the practical and reasonable acquisition of salvation; — Bob Ross

The difficulty here is that "salvation" is often understood as a Christian term, and in that context it is not something we can achieve on our own power. Supposing you are not using the term in that way, I would want to know how you are using the term. (Nevertheless, I have not looked at your document in any detail.)

Advantages (Over Mainstream Religion)

This strong natural theistic view is immune to:

1. Issues with historicity;
2. Having to depend on historical, Divine Revelation for morality;
3. Having to depend on the passing of tradition onto the next generation;
4. Requiring to accept the writings or reject the whole theory of all the religious scriptures passed down as canon (in whichever religion we are talking about);
5. Having to depend on faith (viz., trust in an authority to verify, at least in part, its position); and
6. Having to accept the Divinity of any given person in order to be saved (such as in Christianity). — Bob Ross

I think 's observation is insightful, as usual. For example, if we have a non-Deistic God who interacts with creation, then it is very intuitive to move into the idea that God has spoken and men have listened (i.e. faith). If God is interacting (and speaking) but these interactions have no special import, then the question arises of why God is bothering to interact. The marriage between Deism and Christianity seems fraught.

Anyway, I hope to have a closer look at your document in the near future.

I see your point, that by labelling X and IBE, underdetermination may not apply. Labeling it the explanation would be underdetermined. — Relativist

Yes, that's right.

But I suggest that in the real world, we operate on beliefs, which are often formed by inferring to the best explanation from the facts at hand (background beliefs will unavoidably affect the analysis). — Relativist

Well, do I believe that every one of my beliefs is "the explanation," or do I believe that some of my beliefs are "the best explanation"? I think we believe that some of our beliefs are only IBEs, and therefore we believe that some of our beliefs are more than IBEs.

Even if we were perfect at this, the resulting beliefs would still be "underdetermined", but ideally they will be our best explanation for the set of information we have. — Relativist

I would basically argue that some theory which is believed to be underdetermined is not believed. So if I think there are only two theories to account for a body of evidence and that both are exactly 50% likely to be true, then I psychologically cannot believe one over the other.

So I think we would need to get more precise on what we mean by "underdetermined." For example, why do you think "the resulting beliefs would still be 'underdetermined'"? Does that mean that the person might change their mind when they reconsider the evidence from a different point of view? If so, then I would say that that possibility to change one's mind (and one's ratio or angle of perspective) is different from one's belief being underdetermined. On Aquinas' view, that form of 'underdetermination' is essential for free will. Apparently it is possible to read the complement of "underdetermination" as fatalism or determinism.

So, we don't "resolve underdetermination tout court," rather, we resolve some specifically pernicious instances of its application. And then, when it comes to scientific theories, the problem of underdetermination is less concerning because our knowledge isn't just a sort of statistical model, which if radically altered, has "remade the world." When we shift paradigms, it isn't that the old world of trees, fire, stars, and sound is revealed to be illusory, and a new socially constructed world has taken its place. We are still dealing with the same actualities as apprehended through new conceptual means. And crucially, while there might be many ways to correctly describe something, these will be isomorphic. When underdetermination becomes more pernicious is when it denies this isomorphism, such that scientific findings become "sociology all the way down" or "power struggles (will to power) all the way down." — Count Timothy von Icarus

Yes, I think that is a good elaboration. :up:

Hence, if we do not like the skeptical conclusions, we should take a look at the epistemic starting points that lead to them.

Indeed, if an epistemology leads to skepticism, that might be a good indication it is inadequate. — Count Timothy von Icarus

Right, and not to get ahead of things, but it is this crucial move that is especially interesting (and is also seen in thinkers like Nathan Jacobs). We eventually come to this point where one must decide whether they prefer the skeptical premises even at the expense of the absurd conclusions. Your "good indication" sums up the complexity of this, because this approach is not demonstrative. That's not necessarily a problem, and perhaps there is no strictly demonstrative alternative, but it is worth noting how the inference at this crucial juncture is rather sui generis (and could even perhaps be construed as coherentist, depending on one's appraisal of the reductio and reductio arguments in general).

To me, that is an insane decision that makes no sense at all. — Athena

Why do you think it's insane? It seems eminently reasonable to me. In fact I can't imagine a real philosophy forum that did not incorporate such a rule. It seems that all of them have.

Because it's a forum for people to talk with other people. — Outlander

Yep. :up: :up:

I'm sort of saying "Well, what if the radical conclusions are true, after all? Maybe it's the realist philosophy of science which is wrong, then" — Moliere

Sure, and I want to see arguments for and against underdetermination, for and against realism. It makes no difference whether Aristotle or Aquinas or Aladdin are the ones who made the good arguments. Focusing on individuals at the expense of the arguments is no help, especially at the very beginning of a thread.

So let's look at your arguments:

Underdetermination is the theory that theories are not determined by the evidence, but rather are chosen in order to organize the evidence, and in some way are a selective pressure on which evidence is relevant to consider. — Moliere

Okay, that is an interesting definition. :up:

1-4 are observations of human beings attempting to generate knowledge which fit with this belief -- basically an IBE, or really just a set of reasons for why I think underdetermination is a good default position. I.e. I don't have a deep quandary with denying causation as a metaphysical reality. That's because causation isn't real but how we decide to organize some body of knowledge.

Closer, or does that just read as more of the same to you? — Moliere

No, I think this is all quite helpful. We now have alternative definitions, arguments, considerations, objections, etc. :up:

(I will come back to this when I have more time. I was mostly trying to expend some effort to try to keep the thread focused on the central theses and the arguments).

That empiricism and academic skepticism died out, in part perhaps because of these arguments, is why St. Thomas doesn't have them as major contenders to rebut in his epoch. — Count Timothy von Icarus

That seems likely. :up:

I am not sure about the rhetorical strategy of continually expressing perplexity about the doctrine you are expounding on or its use by people you are criticizing. I think though that in this case it actually suggests a real confusion it probably doesn't mean to imply. The argument for why form in the intellect (the intellect's move from potency to actuality) cannot be unrelated to its causes comes from the idea that: a. every move from potency to act has a cause in some prior actuality; b. causes cannot be wholly unrelated (i.e. arbitrarily related) to their effects (completely equivocal agents) or else they wouldn't be causes in the first place and what we'd actually have is a spontaneous move from potency to act. Form is just that which makes anything actual to effect anything at all, so form is, in one sense, always present in all causes (granted there are analogical agents). Arguing for this doesn't require question begging and presupposing the doctrine, it requires upstream premises (I see now that Klima appears to have hit on this in more detail). — Count Timothy von Icarus

I think this is good. I don't mean to derail the thread with those papers, but they are related to these central theses of your OP:

1. Things do not happen “for no reason at all.” Things/events have causes. If something is contingent, if it has only potential existence, then some prior actuality must bring it into being. It will not simply snap into being of itself. Our experiences are contingent, thus they must be caused by something that is prior to them.

2. Being is intelligible, and to be is to be intelligible. Every being is something in particular. That is, it has a form, an actuality, that is determinant of what it is (as well as the potential to change, explained by matter). This actuality determines how a thing interacts with everything else, including our sense organs and our intellects. If this was not the case, interactions would be essentially uncaused, and then there would be no reason for them to be one way and not any other (i.e. random). — Count Timothy von Icarus

I'd say that if people want to object to the OP then this is a good place to begin.

At play is the classic clash of metaphysics-first vs epistemology-first paradigms, and it's fairly hard to find a rope such that both sides can grab on and start tugging in different directions. This is actually why I think folks like @Moliere are ultimately tempted to take the shortcut of relativizing Aristotle or Aquinas.

So at the birds-eye level, we have something like:

A. If (1) and (2), then underdetermination is false
B. (1) and (2)
C. Therefore, Underdetermination is false

...that's at least the argument coming from your vantage point. There are arguments for ~C coming from other vantage points above.

Broadly speaking, an argument from underdetermination is one that attempts to show that available evidence is insufficient to determine which of several competing theories is true. That is, many different theories might be able to explain the same evidence, hence any move to choose between theories must be “underdetermined,” i.e., not determined by the evidence. Within the class of such arguments, there are many that go a step further. These will often purport to show that for any body of evidence, there will always be an infinite number of different explanations that are consistent with that evidence. — Count Timothy von Icarus

Regarding the definition of underdetermination, we seem to have at least three options:

• U1. In this particular circumstance, the available evidence is insufficient to determine which of several competing theories is true
• U2. For every body of evidence, there will always be an infinite number of different explanations that are consistent with the evidence
• U3. For every circumstance, the available evidence will be insufficient to determine which of several competing theories is true

I think everyone agrees that (U1) does occur. (U2) may be a point of contention, yet (U3) is probably the point of contention that the average opponent would be more comfortable defending. So perhaps (U3) helps narrow the thesis in question, and if so, then I still think the arguments you have offered are decisive.

If we accept abductive reasoning (inference to best explanation on available evidence - IBE) as leading to rational beliefs, is there really a problem? Such beliefs will, of course, be undertermined but that just means they don't comprise knowledge (in the strict sense).

Epistemology should be of practical use in the world, and in the real world we are nearly always deriving conclusions from limited information. IBEs are the practical ideal. — Relativist

This is a really interesting objection. Is an IBE underdetermined? Remember that the conclusion is not, "X is the explanation," but rather, "X is the best explanation." I actually don't see why underdetermination would need to attend IBEs.

A significant part of this thread will turn on what exactly is meant by "underdetermined."

Is it enough to say

"Modern philosophy has problems. These medieval thinkers didn't have these problems. This is because modern philosophy invented this problem for itself by stripping out all the thoughts which earlier thinkers relied upon in making such inferences. Therefore, we should adopt these earlier approaches, given the incredible progress knowledge has made -- there is a disconnect between ability, and these supposed modern problems that we can pass over by reading the older solutions" ?

Does that demonstrate having read the OP? — Moliere

No, not really. No mention of underdetermintion or realism. You're basically assuming that the OP is about something that it doesn't claim to be about, hence the ad hominem nature. The OP is about underdetermination and realism. That's the core.

My thinking is with respect to underdetermination and its value -- what I read were some solutions to underdetermination based on a generalization of a few select authors rather than what I might say in favor of underdetermination, for instance. So I wanted some sort of reason why these are even appealing at all? — Moliere

So you think Hume, Wittgenstein, Quine, Sextus Empiricus, etc., offer poor arguments for underdetermination? That's intelligible. What is your alternative argument for underdetermination?

For myself I don't feel a deep need to argue for underdetermination because to me it explains why we go through all the hoops we do in making scientific inferences -- we don't just see the object as it is, we frequently make mistakes, and go about looking for reasons to justify our first beliefs while discounting possibilities not on the basis of evidence, but because they do not fit. This is inescapable for any productive thought at all -- but it has the result that we only have a tentative grasp of the whole. — Moliere

Okay, well that's a good start for an argument for underdetermination. :up:

I would want to actually look at some of these premises you are alluding to. For example:

1. We don't just see the object as it is
2. We frequently make mistakes
3. We frequently go about looking for reasons to justify our first beliefs
4. We have only a tentative grasp of the whole
5. Therefore, Underdetermination explains why we go through all the hoops we do in making scientific inferences

I don't see how (5) follows from your premises. Here is something you might want to revisit regarding premises like 1, 2, or 4:

This does not imply that we come to know everything about the actuality of the form. Indeed, we will never know everything about any sort of thing. As Aquinas’ famously put it: “all the efforts of the human intellect cannot exhaust the essence of a single fly.” Nonetheless we know what a fly is. We understand it. It is this phenomenological experience of understanding that is the key datum which epistemology is supposed to explain. — Count Timothy von Icarus

This is something I thought while reading MacIntyre. Yes, I see what you're saying, but like Heidegger you're sort of inventing a whole mindset that is "pre-modern", and justifying it with many quotes -- but at the end of the day if you haven't spoken to people from the pre-modern era then, my brother in christ, you cannot make claims about how pre-modern people think no matter how many texts you read from that era.

It elucidates how we think, but it may not be the panacea of problems contemporary philosophy faces.

It looks soothing -- but ultimately when someone says that if we go back to some ancient or medieval thinker as the person who saw it all I think that we're kind of fibbing to ourselves. — Moliere

You don't seem to be engaging the OP at all.

We're attempting to reconstruct the thoughts of people we can't talk to, yes. — Moliere

Such is philosophy. You do the same thing with the philosophers you appeal to and interpret.

There is lots of substance in the OP. Why not address that substance instead of trying to undercut it with ad hominem gesturing towards Aristotle or Aquinas? Count spent a fair amount of time on this. I would want to honor that.

I want to see some responses that show evidence that the OP was actually read. Your post doesn't manage that. It could be recycled for any Aristotelian-Thomistic OP, regardless of content. Therefore if one reads your post they will not be given any insight into the content of the OP, given that your post in no way reflects the content of the OP. They will only be able to infer that the OP involves the thought of Aristotle and Aquinas.

This is a wonderful essay, eminently relevant. Its work in clearing away canards cannot be overestimated. Its research and accuracy are commendable. It is long yet worthwhile and readable.

Yet if an epistemology results in our having to affirm conclusions that seem prima facie absurd, and if further, it seems to lead towards radical skepticism and epistemological nihilism, or an ever branching fragmentation of disparate “skeptical solutions” and new “anti-realisms,” that might be a good indication that it is simply a bad epistemology. — Count Timothy von Icarus

I recently listened to Nathan Jacobs' podcast on realism and nominalism, which I thought gave a good overview of the territory. I started but have not finished his follow-up podcast, "The Case for Realism," in which he argues for realism and explains why he abandoned nominalism for realism. So far it has been good, and has tracked some of the same points you are making.

Knowledge of trees, an understanding of what a tree is, comes from the presence of this form in our intellect after it has been abstracted from the senses. — Count Timothy von Icarus

There is a good exchange on this point between Robert Pasnau and Gyula Klima, where Pasnau takes up skepticism arguendo against Aristotle and Klima responds.

The result is that the underdetermination of sheer prediction becomes unanswerable, and skepticism reigns.* — Count Timothy von Icarus

I would want to add that the realism quandary is also internal to "predictionism." The one who predicts is attempting to predict ad unum (towards the one, actual, future outcome). Without that future-oriented determinacy—whether actual or theoretical—the "predictionist" cannot function.

I am looking forward to following this thread. I think it will be especially hard to keep it on-topic given that it touches on so many neuralgic subjects which could lead us far afield of the OP.

Edit: with Superman we could also avoid belief and still get an apparent error with "Clark Kent appears on the Daily Planet payroll." — Count Timothy von Icarus

Right, or:

On your reasoning, we can disprove the thesis simply by noting that Superman wears a cape whereas Kent does not. — Leontiskos

I'm sympathetic to most of what you have been saying. But this contradiction can easily be resolved. "Superman" and "Clark Kent" are both names for the same person - but each name is assigned to a different persona. This is not particularly strange - pen names, professional names, character names (Barry Humphries, for example), regal names, baptismal names, adoptive names, married names, aliases of all sorts. — Ludwig V

Well, if the personas have different properties then you have solved the "puzzle."

As it is being trained to complete massive amounts of texts, the model comes to develop latent representations (encoded as the values of billions of contextual embedding stored in the hidden neural network layers) of the beliefs of the authors of the text as well as the features of the human world that those authors are talking about. At some stage, the model comes to be able to accurately impersonate, say, both a misinformed Moon landing hoax theorist and a well informed NASA engineer/historian. However, in order to be able to successfully impersonate both of those people, the model must be able to build a representation of the state of the world that better reflects the knowledge of the engineer than it does the beliefs of the conspiracy theorist. The reason for this is that the beliefs of the conspiracy theorist are more easily predictable in light of the actual facts (known by the engineer/historian) and the additional assumption that they are misguided and misinformed in specific ways than the other way around. In other words, the well informed engineer/historian would be more capable of impersonating a Moon landing hoax theorist in a play than the other way around. He/she would sound plausible to conspiracy theorists in the audience. The opposite isn't true. The misinformed theorists would do a poor job of stating the reasons why we can trust that Americans really landed on the Moon. So, the simple algorithms that trains the model for impersonating proponents of various competing paradigms enable it to highlight the flaws of one paradigm in light of another one. When the model is being fine-tuned, it may be rewarded for favoring some paradigms over others (mainstream medicine over alternative medicines, say) but it retains the latent ability to criticize consensual opinions in the light of heterodox ones and, through suitable prompting, the user can elicit the exercise of those capabilities by the post-trained model. — Pierre-Normand

Thank you again: that is very helpful. As someone who has pondered that general phenomenon, your account makes a lot of sense.

It's interesting that among humans there is another factor which seems to allow the conspiracy theorist to be better informed about the scientific orthodoxy than the layman is informed about the conspiracy theories. This is presumably because the conspiracy theorist more often faces objections to his views (and thus forms counter-arguments), whereas the layman who accepts the reigning orthodoxy will not face objections as often, and therefore will not form counter-arguments and self-reflect on his own reasoning as often. This is perhaps even more obvious when it comes to ideological minorities than conspiracy theorists per se.

My guess is that—supposing this phenomenon does not affect LLMs—the reason it does not affect LLMs is because the LLM has the "time" and "effort" available to expend on the conspiracy theorist, whereas the layman does not. (This gets into the "fairly difficult question" you reference below, namely the manner in which democratic thinking diverges from correct thinking.)

There is both low-level continuity and high-level shift in telos. At the low level, the telos remains accurate next-token prediction, or, more accurately, autoregressive selection. At the high level, there occurs a shift from aimless reproduction of patterns in the training data to, as GPT-5 puts it "assistant policy with H/H/A (helpful/harmless/accurate) goals". How the sense that the model develops of what constitute an accurate response, and of how accuracy is better tracked by some consensual opinions and not others (and sometimes is better tracked by particular minority opinions) is a fairly difficult question. But I think it's an epistemological question that humans also are faced with, and LLMs merely inherit it. — Pierre-Normand

Indeed. Thank you. :up:

I'd suggest that the sheer instrumentality of the "new science" is a major culprit here. It leads to a sort of pride. It's a particularly pernicious pride in that it often masquerades as epistemic humility. Its epistemic bracketing is often an explicit turn towards the creature and the good of the creature without reference to the creator, as if the one could be cut off from the other. "Professing themselves to be wise, they became fools," and exchanged a holistic view for a diabolical process that cuts apart and makes it so that "reason is and ought to be the slave of the passions." — Count Timothy von Icarus

And what's interesting to me is the way that philosophical and cultural degradation is often very subtle, especially at its inception. For example, it is quite difficult to pinpoint where this "proceduralizing" of reason began, even though we can see it fully flowered in the modern period.

Then beginning where we are now, medicinal movement in the proper direction poses the same sort of question. People and especially cultures cannot do a 180° reversal in a day, and usually the reordering must be done via a multitude of small and subtle shifts or re-orderings. It's remarkably difficult for a rationalistic mindset to yield even the smallest concessions (and thus re-orderings) to a more holistic paradigm. It's almost as if the rationalistic context must be abandoned for a time, in much the same way that someone who has developed bad habits of gait should just go swimming for a few hours in an attempt to forget and reset the whole realm of walking.

Merely syllogistic logic cannot deal with modal or other intensional contexts. It treats identity as just another predication. That's one of the reasons it's not much used anymore. — Banno

You're floundering in your continual ignorance of history and philosophy, and you still haven't answered the question at hand. Ironically, the problem with your own view is that it treats identity as just another predication, failing to think through the equivocation between self-identity and other-identity.

Leibniz' whole point was that if you have two things with all the same properties, then you don't have two things. You were mistaken and there is only one thing after all. Thus the "=" on your definition is by definition not a two-place relation. Instead it is a reflexive relation where the object is identical to itself, and where we have mistaken a single object for two different objects. — Leontiskos