Well, why do we have (secular) law? — jorndoe

Law is mostly a tool for creating states, and if you don't live in an era of massive deregulation, it keeps your banking system from crashing the global economy and causing global devastation. If you do live in an era of deregulation.. note the value of law.

Why wouldn't suppressing an impulse to punch my boss be authentic anyway? — jorndoe

It probably would be if you waited to check your authenticity after counting to ten.

A degree of empathy can likely be cultivated — jorndoe

Can it?

Perhaps a more interesting question is then: how do we learn, understand and rationalize morals and moral behavior, as social matters? — jorndoe

It depends on your society. Traditionally, across most cultures, morality is not a social issue. It has something to do with things like the destination of your soul after death or your status in your next incarnation, etc.

How do you think about it?

Why do you think this is self-evidently the right thing to say? — apokrisis

It was a question

I experience morality viscerally. I work in healthcare and occasionally cause people pain. To do that I have to overcome resistance in my own body. I recognize that not everybody is like that.

A history of social conditioning? — apokrisis

Social conditioning is probably about as good at creating monsters as it is fostering care. I'm sure you know that from experience.

What is acceptable as a ground for morals anyway (if anything)? — jorndoe

Why not let your behavior come naturally? Be authentic. If that means being a freakin' psycho- killer...well, morals probably weren't going to help you there anyway.

Love and do what you will.

Not even a little shrine to Astarte? OK.

True. But if you and I did happen to disagree about what it means, there's no way to resolve the conflict (assuming we have equal linguistic competence). So giving up a real speaker means that though we may be able to discern a meaning, there's no such thing as the meaning.

Nevertheless, we know perfectly well what it means, in virtue of knowing how to speak English — The Great Whatever

With speech, meaning can change depending on which word is emphasized, whether the ending trails up or down in frequency, by the facial expressions of the speaker. Where there's a known speaker, a commentator can spin the expression this way or that.

With randomly generated text, there's none of that. It looks to me like possible meanings would abound.

That's a good answer. And your stance on the mind/body divide? Are they also interdependent?

Thanks!

I suppose I lean towards empiricism. I'm a simple peasant and I like evidence that can be cut and dried. Rationalism is probably way over my head. — Bitter Crank

Me as well. The conclusions of good research seem concrete to me in a way that elegant rational projects don't.. although I occasionally find I have a lot of respect for people who do put their eggs in a rationalist basket.

So what about the place divinity holds in your views? Or perhaps maybe the question should be: are you a physicalist? I think in some ways it might end up being the same question.

Strictly speaking, the sorts of things he is talking about do not exist at all. — TheWillowOfDarkness

Are you a physicalist? My original theory was supposed to match-up rationalists and empiricists with beliefs about divinity, but it's not working out so far.

So how about you? What do you think of

1. Scientific theories which are intellectually satisfying, but can't be proven experimentally, and

2. Research, the conclusion of which defies reason.

OK. Thanks!

OK. You're saying there are things which exist, but which have no location. Right?

Existence contains non-physical elements — Agustino

How is that different from saying that non-physical things exist?

The universe, for me, consists of physics, and stuff amenable to physical investigation. Existence is larger than just this however. — Agustino

Could you expand on this? I'm not quite understanding.

Cool, thanks! This question might seem to be coming out of left field, but it's related to stuff I've been pondering lately. Does God or divinity play a role in your thinking about the universe?

And what about research whose conclusion defies what makes the most sense to you? How would you handle that?

Both - we can clearly know both through reason, and through experience. — Agustino

Could you accept a scientific theory whose conclusions can't be verified experimentally, but which is satisfying by virtue of the number of loose ends it ties up?

Does math have anything to do with the world outside of the mind?

But to avoid confirmation bias, we usually take people out of the investigation altogether, don't we? Double-blind studies and such?

Is it really possible for a person to overcome, transcend, negate... whatever you'd call it.. their own biases?

So why did Leibniz say that any entity whose essence is extension is not a substance? He believed that bodily entities (for Descartes: extended substance) are always aggregates. Being able to be divided into parts, the parts are also divisible, and so on ad infinitum.

So whence true unities? Leibniz thought that the nature of aggregates presupposes true unities. And true unities alone qualify as substance. Arnaud accused him of simply stipulating a peculiar definition of substance, so we have the reasoning Leibniz offered:

"To cut the point short, I hold as an axiom the following proposition which is a statement of identity which varies only in the placing of the emphasis: nothing is truly one being if it is not truly one being. It has always been held that one and being are reciprocal things. -WF 124

So Leibniz, being of a rationalist tradition, is doing ontology by following apriori knowledge. There are aggregates and unities because these categories are residents of the mind. Only unities qualify as substance because by the LONC, a being can't be a crowd.

It's not that Leibniz was totally unconscious of the pending questions about proceeding in this way. All roads come back to God, for him. What's peculiar to him about human substance is that a human reflects the mind of God. So humans have direct access to Truth via rationality (not that there are any guarantees that Truth will be seen accurately, but the possibility is there.). In this way, regarding certain topics, there is no distinction between subjective and objective truth.

Everything we perceive is filtered through subjectivity. So, no matter how objective we want to become, there will always remain a remnant of subjectivity — saw038

So here's another usage of "objective," and I think it's a fairly common one: people can be objective. What exactly does it mean for a person to be objective?

I hear ya. But I think that's making use of the fact that "truth" can mean true statement.

I saw the full moon this morning. It was in the external world above the holly tree. Did you see it?

We need a context of personality and worldly relevance. — Hoo

"Jesus saith unto him, I am the way, the truth, and the life: no man cometh unto the Father, but by me." -- John 14:6.

You mean like that?

Thinking more about this. If reason/rationality is a necessary part of "the bones" of what it takes to make a good, charitable, say objective interpretation, I don't think that entails that the perspective itself needs to be rational, good or charitable since I think all perspectives are normative and norms are not necessarily rational, good or charitable. Interpretation is methodological, not epistemic (perhaps). — Cavacava

I agree. I don't think "objective" means good or charitable.

It was a dark and stormy night.

This, coming without quotes at the beginning of a story, is an expression of objectivity. The narrator seems to see the whole world as if from floating on high. An image that comes to mind is a map. A map is the world with an x-y axis laid over it. The mind rambles through this artificial landscape in a way flesh and blood can't. At the moment true statements made from this vantage point are identified as the standard of reality.... a little Nietzsche has entered the scene. A metaphor has been presented as Truth, and somehow that switcheroo is escaping awareness.

So perhaps truth is one, but that can't be proven on the basis of multiple perspectives, since while translations between perspectives, may possible, they do may not necessarily convey with the same meaning, since they are interpreted using different presuppositions. — Cavacava

My thoughts about this are a little like a cat round-up because of an issue having to do with Slavic languages and Homeric Greek. In both cases, there something that comes into relief when a comparison is made to a contemporary western outlook. Sort of like... what we call the psyche is turned inside out. The concept of motive is backward. The world animates the individual. The world is responsible and the protagonist is a marshmallow in a stream.

I'm not sure if a story told in one mode is translatable into the other, exactly. Maybe the reader never is neutral. Translation is actually a matter of metamorphosis of the reader, not the content. To understand you is to become you.

Truth and falsity simply function as binary values within this abstract set of rules. They do not have any pragmatic significance. Where they gain their significance is when you plug them into some linguistic practice that makes use of these binary values for various ends. — The Great Whatever

Being visually inclined, I notice that there's something vaguely circular about this utterance. It's an assertion about the genesis of signficance. You're telling how the significance of "true" emerges from the act of assertion. On the one hand, it appears that you're inviting us to stand and witness the kindling of Pinocchio taking on life, but Pinocchio must already be a real boy before, or at least at in the midst of his transformation.

This is vaguely along the lines of what Frege pointed out about any attempt to tell a story about truth. Frege concluded that truth is an unanalyzable concept. It's too basic to figure as a character in a story. It's part of the very mechanics of story-tellling and rule-making.

It occurs to me that time is the stumbling block about this... that utterances are events that take place in time and space, but the content of an utterance can be about time and space themselves and can have an eternal character. You don't understand P unless you understand that if it's true, it's eternally true. Where this is denied, there's some equivocation going on.

For me it was quite a head change to abandon the notion that truth was singular. We inherit a physical world that we mostly agree on (beds, food, cars, faces) and then construct a layer on top of this world that is under-determined by practical life. — Hoo

I get that. I was reading some Jung a while back and he was going on and on about some crap. As I read, it occurred to me that he was a product of his times. And then somewhat abruptly, Jung dropped out of his philosophizing and basically stated that he was a product of his times. Holy shit. He knew.

My fascination with culture and history is related to that... wanting to see myself by seeing how I'm a product of my time. Maybe you and I are fundamentally doing the same thing, just in different ways.

so reason is necessarily our shared perspectives. — Cavacava

Yes. Reason is the bones of objectivity.

On this less, truth and utility are just about the same — Hoo

My diagnosis is borderline truth skepticism. Particularly suitable for LSD excursions... but it's probably multi-functional.

But I think we drag the correspondence theory's massive utility away from its strong intersection with utility into the abstract realm (along with PSR and LEM) — Hoo

Frege demolished correspondence theory. That's what a fair amount of 20th Century AP is about... trying to come up with a response. I see it being tied to some fairly seismic issues related to disintegration of religion and the rise of materialism. It's not about philosophers trying to take over the role of the dictionary.

Couldn't it be that it's just a matter of different frames of reference which translate one to the other? Standing on earth, we see the sun rise. From a spot high up, we'd see that the earth spins. The same event is being witnessed, so there's only one truth.

Hanover did his Banno impression. That was mine. :)

and thus also seems to rule out compatibilism altogether, since "it takes two to tango", so to speak. — John

This is also the issue with Spinoza: unity. Descartes can be interpreted as offering the indubitable statement of duality: cogito ergo sum. Of course, indubitability is a sure sign that we're just mapping out the contours of mind.. identifying what we're bound to think.

No matter what consensus philosophers achieve (which probably won't be much), we all have to get out and the world in the jungle of varying uses and mostly live there. Moreover, it's unlikely that philosophers are going to tame this varying use with their expertly determined 'correct' use. So to me there's a certain futility in the enterprise — Hoo

How do you see this tying into issues to do with truth? What is your theory of truth, btw?

Maybe the unit of meaning is not the sentence or the paragraph but all of human history. Maybe zooming in on individual words as if they are legos can only take us so far (not worthless, but not enough). — Hoo

You're talking about meaning holism. I see it's advantages, but I think it also has its weaknesses. Maybe meaning partakes of both holism and atomism (I don't mean molecularism... I don't see that working.)

Could you say more about that? It's interesting to me because I usually think of objective as a kind of narrative. It confuses me a little when it's used in other ways.

my starting point would be that arriving at truth would have to be the result of a process - an epistemic process — apokrisis

So you see truth as a destination, as opposed to a property of statements?

Sounds right to me.

Yep. I'm becoming fascinated with how Leibniz sort of sets the stage for Kant and Schopenhauer.

I like Searle's explanation. He does argue for free will, and he makes a lot of sense to me. It seems we can't help but think in terms of our responsibility. I love his story about someone going into a restaurant and saying to the waiter, "I'll just wait and see what the universe determines that I'll eat." — anonymous66

:)